About Elizabeth…
Elizabeth C. Herron writes poetry and articles on art and ecology, the importance of natural systems and biodiversity in the well-being of all life. Her collection of poems, Insistent Grace, reflects these concerns. Her latest book, In the Cities of Sleep, centers on the ramifications of climate change. Both books are available from Fernwood Press.
Elizabeth is Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, 2022 to 2024
For an interview with Elizabeth:
https://ybca.org/elizabeth-herron/
About In the Cities of Sleep, award winning poet, Greg Mahrer, writes, “In this haunting and passionate collection Herron reminds us that we are “out of season”, caught as we are in this fateful sweep of time . . . .”
“I was taken out (or In) to the vastness of space, to experience the entire piece of our universe as one connected whole . . . . mystical and personal at the same time.” Ann Hancock, co-founder and former Executive Director of The Climate Center
Poet Arwa Alsamarae writes, “This collection is beautifully and devastatingly written— a sliver of hope its final gift.”
“. . . she paints the page with paradox, she calls us to listen to the heartbeat of the world, our home.” Katherine Kassouf Cummings, Center for Humans and Nature, co-editor What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be?
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About Insistent Grace, poet and historical ecologist Arthur Dawson writes, “Like deep breaths drawn effortlessly in, the poems and images of Insistent Grace are satisfying to the core. Filled with the aromas of salt fog, summer grass, redwood creeks, eucalyptus, and bay, they weave together the human and the more-than-human worlds in a stunning intersection.”
Insistent Grace and In the Cities of Sleep are both available from Fernwood Press.
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After attending the University of Hawaii, Elizabeth earned a Masters in Counseling at San Francisco State University. She studied the origin of aesthetic behavior, and received a PhD in Psychology from the University for Integrative Learning, a fleeting distance-learning program founded by graduates of the Harvard School of Education. She joined the Counseling Center at Sonoma State University and subsequently moved to a faculty position, teaching Creative Writing, Creativity and Contemplative Practice, and Ecological Identity. “Whether facilitating dream groups, studying, teaching, or gathering hawthorn berries and windfall apples, writing has always been my life.”
Born in Illinois and raised in Hawaii, Elizabeth settled in the Atascadero Watershed, west of the Laguna de Santa Rosa, and south of the Russian River, in 1991, the year of the Dunsmuir Spill. After traveling north to bear witness to the aftermath of the spill, she committed a decade of her work to the study of wild trout and salmon and threats to their survival. That work led her to the climate crisis, and her recent writing includes a manuscript of poems centered on climate as well as a chapbook of “poems from the post-post world.”
August 25, 2022, 7:11AM
Elizabeth Herron, Sonoma County’s new poet laureate, would rather talk about the “Being Brave Poetry Project” than talk about herself. That’s understandable. Over the past half century during which she has been writing and performing poetry – she’s a brilliant performance poet—she has not made herself the center of attention. Still, as the new poet laureate, she’s now in the eye of the public and so she has agreed to talk about herself for The Gazette. In the process of revealing aspects of her life, her past and her present, she wanders forward and backward in time, changes directions, but always keeps her focus on poets and poetry.
Born in Chicago, she moved around a great deal with her family and experienced upheavals until she, her siblings and their parents settled in Hawaii where she was outdoors more often than indoors and where most of her family lives today. “Mother Nature was always my source of security and comfort,” she says. Her parents introduced her to the poetry of Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Lewis Carroll. “The sounds, the rhythms and the music of the language caught me,” she says.
After she graduated from high school, Herron attended the University of Hawaii, and, after moving to San Francisco, she earned an M.A. at San Francisco State University. Later, she studied biopoetics, focusing on empathy and the origins of aesthetic behavior. She received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University for Integrative Learning, a distance learning program founded by graduates of the Harvard School of Education.
Her life and her work changed decisively when she traveled across the Golden Gate Bridge, settled in Sonoma County and discovered Sonoma Mountain and the Sonoma Coast, two landscapes to which she feels deeply connected. “Sonoma County has always been a hotbed of poets,” she says. “That’s a big reason I ended up here.” Sonoma’s seasons touched her deeply and affected her writing. They still do. “Usually I write very little during the summer, which is such an extroverted time,” she says. “I write more when people are out less. Now, I miss the rain terribly and the long drought makes me avoid the creeks because it’s so sad to see them dry.”
For years, Herron taught at Sonoma State University, wrote and published poetry and fiction and kept her eyes on environmental disasters and global climate change. “The vastness of The Exxon Valdez oil spill, which occurred in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on Mar. 24, 1989, freaked me out,” she says.
Then two years later came the Southern Pacific train accident at Dunsmuir, Calif. when railroad tank cars spilled 19,000 gallons of the soil fumigant metam sodium into the Sacramento River. More than one million fish were killed, thousands of trees died along a 41-mile stretch of the river and dozens of citizens showed up at local hospitals with a variety of illnesses. “I knew I had to go up there and bear witness,” Herron says. “Everything that had once been alive along the Sacramento, between Dunsmuir and Lake Shasta, was wiped out. I wrote about what I saw: lifeless water, dead fish, seared trees and dead animals feeding off the dead fish. For over a decade after that my work focused on wild fish and watershed health.”
Then soon afterward, the Society for Conservation Biology (founded by E. O Wilson) released a statement that said climate warming was the greatest threat to all species. “That shifted my attention again,” Herron says. “If wasn’t just wild fish. All species were at risk because of global climate change.”
Decades later, Herron continues to monitor environmental disasters, and keeps an eye on global and local climate change. These days, she writes what might be called “contemporary nature poetry.” She thinks that poetry, perhaps more than ever before in recent times, has a lot to say to readers and environmentalists. “Somehow poetry among all the arts has caught the attention of the public,” she says. “Amanda Gorman, rap, and poetry from the ground up have given people the sense that verse isn’t just for the literati, isn’t just for academics. There’s a healthy interest in the way that language can speak to our own experiences.”
In her new role as poet laureate, Herron would like to seize the time, and offer workshops in the “Being Brave Poetry Project.” “I’m thinking I can get folks to write about how they see courage,” she says. “Courage at every level, from risking failure to admiration of courage in people like Ukraine’s Volodomyr Zalensky and Cassidy Hutchinson testifying before the Jan. 6 hearings.” She adds, “Or maybe the poem is about the failure to be courageous. We need more conversations about values.”
Meanwhile, she’s courageously aiming to publish two complete chapbooks that are collections of what she calls “persona poems” that she likes very much and that she also describes as “step-children.” They have not yet found homes. As always, Herron is hopeful. “The biggest positive shift I see now is in the valuation of indigenous science. All too often, in the history of American culture and American literature there wasn’t a place for native American writers. But now the public is reading differently, and writers with the wisdom of generations are finding a place at the table.”
Now, too, Herron has a place in Sonoma County at the table for poetry and courage. It’s a place she will use wisely to expand our conversations about values, about writing and about the landscape we call home.
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Jonah Raskin has lived in Sonoma County since 1976. He is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University where he taught English and media law for 30 years, and a freelance writer, the author of numerous books and articles including two detective novels and several books of poetry. Email Jonah Raskin at jonah.raskin@sonoma.edu.
In the Cities of Sleep
New from Fernwood Press…