2017 Artists-in-Residence

 

Susan Campbell

Susan Campbell moved to Fairbanks, Alaska twenty-seven years ago and found home. She has backpacked and paddled thousands of miles across the far north, including multiple traverses of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the western Brooks Range, and the northern coastal plain.

Those wilderness adventures, along with excursions in the boreal forest around her home, inspire her work. Her poetry has appeared in poetry Alaskawomen:Top of the World, Ice Floe II, Alaska Quarterly Review, and in a specially commissioned work for the Alaska Chamber Singers.

After 30 dynamic years, she recently retired from teaching elementary school. The following works are all by Susan Campbell of Fairbanks Alaska, written in December 2017.

Litany for Denali in Four Seasons

Spring

When winter’s hard knot relaxes and taiga, tundra, mountains all sigh with its release.
Each ridge, gully, and gravelly bank feel spring’s tender palm brush away the cold, the dark.

When snow begins to melt, trickles off the frozen ground and the sound of water is a surprise.
Soft at first, then louder, louder as breakup begins and braided rivers clamor, “Open. Open.”

When sun douses the sky with light, an invitation birds recognize: Come. Come now.
And they do— millions cross hemispheres, wide expanses of the Pacific. Head North. Home.

When golden eagles arrive, first to trace the sky with their amorous acrobatics. Next, the
welcome warbles of ruby-crowned kinglets, the rapid trills of varied thrushes. Then, all the rest.

When pasque flowers bloom on Mt. Healy and patches of green peak out from under months
of snow. Roots reach for water. Buds swell. What has been contained anticipates release.

When sap rises into patient branches. Spruce trees sprout bright new needles while tiny buds on
aspen, birch, and poplar listen to what the sun is offering, remember what to do— burst into green.

When a mountain becomes a destination. Climbers face Denali’s ragged ice falls, granite walls,
the Kahiltna and Muldrow Glaciers— so many triumphs and sorrows, stories embedded in ice.

When bears emerge with cubs, and caribou head to calving grounds. Sheep and wolves,
hares and lynx, moose and fox all give birth. New life pushes the long tunnel of darkness away.

When, after months of wondering if you’ll ever be warm again, you feel the thrum of each green leaf,
each prodigal bird, each new pup and calf, kit and lamb. All of them whispering, “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
Summer
When sunlight suffuses every hour and we feel its extravagance, how it implores each stalk
and stem, leaf and flower, tree and shrub to grow. Hurry. Flourish in this ephemeral brightness.

When wildflowers blossom, clothe every ridge and slope with their delicate profusion:
fireweed, larkspur, gentian, saxifrage, poppy, dryas, rosebay, lupine, bluebell, forget-me-not.

When birds fledge, abandon nests laced in branches, eyries perched on cliff faces, grassy
cups tucked in tussocks. Myriad wingbeats fill the sky, revel in summer’s earnest light.

When grizzlies amble, unhurried, through Sable Pass, up and down gullies, grow fat
gulping soapberries and blueberries, their glossy coats smudged from constant feasting.

When shrinking snowfields reveal arrow points and bone tools icebound for thousands of years,
artifacts used by ingenious hunters— Athabascans, the First People to roam this tangled landscape.

When a ninety-two mile road between Riley Creek and Kantishna becomes a bus corridor crossing
taiga, tundra, braided rivers, alpine passes— deeper into Denali’s wilderness, closer to The Mountain.

When visitors stare out bus windows, hope to see bulky brown bodies in thickets, flashes
of antlers across creek beds, white specks on rocky outcrops, grey shapes ghosting hillsides.

When you shout, “Stop!”, and the bus driver stops so forty pairs of eyes can look. Look harder.
See for the first time a grizzly, a caribou, a Dall sheep, a moose, or if you’re lucky, a wolf.

When Denali offers an invitation: You have left your crowded cities, there is room for you here.
Be still. Listen. Pay attention. Let this vastness embrace you. Abandon yourself to astonishment.
Autumn
When the exuberance of summer is dampened by shorter days as sunlight slants lower
into the valleys— a time of restlessness, a time to prepare for the cold and dark to come.

When temperatures fall and plants surrender summer’s verdant green for shades of autumn:
scarlet bearberries, auburn dwarf birch, saffron-russet willows, the tundra awash in crimson.

When stillness shawls the sky above Wonder Lake as scores of songbirds, shorebirds, and waterfowl
suddenly depart, disperse south to every continent, their inner voices whispering, “Go. Go now.”

When birch and aspen acquiesce, release each leaf from its anchor-hold, so many at once—
a million tiny boats drifting away, one after another, their golden lives slipping to the forest floor.

When urgency consumes each hour: red squirrels stash spruce cones, chickadees cache seeds,
pikas cram rock clefts with mouthfuls of grass— a final scramble before the first snow falls.

When animals that stay must get ready: ermine and snowshoe hares slowly shift into
winter’s white pelage, ptarmigan exchange summer’s mottled camouflage for snowy plumage.

When the primordial press toward life becomes competition: moose thrash willows, Dall rams
clash and collide, caribou kick and charge— a frantic push for dominance, a wild persistence.

When some ancient inkling stirs in sandhill cranes and long skeins rise over the Toklat,
head south through the mountains, drag the last scraps of warmth away with them.

When you feel a yearning to join them, a desire to be lifted from everything cold and dark,
a longing to be where you know you belong, cradled in the warmth and forgiveness of home.
Winter
When each day is defined by twenty hours of darkness as Earth tilts farther from the
sun in this season of moonlight and starlight, lavender dusk. Such scant illumination.

When cold augers in, seeps into Denali’s valleys, settles over the Savage and Sanctuary,
coats every spruce bough in frosty rime, all the while whispering, “Hush. Hush. Hush.”

When you relearn the vocabulary of snow, its lace-like loveliness, its gusting sheets of white.
Each flurry, drift, and storm adding layer upon layer to the immense muffled silence.

When ice embellishes every surface: blankets of hoar frost feather the ground,
sleeves of filagree dress barren branches, cornices curl over Wickersham’s Wall.

When existence is reduced to essentials: conserve, endure. Arctic ground squirrels know this
hard resilience— hibernate all winter nearly frozen in frigid burrows, hearts barely beating.

When bears curl into dark closets of fitful sleep, suckle and nuzzle newborn cubs,
dream of berries blossoming in spring, the taste of sunlight on their tongues.

When you read stories etched in snow: Owl pinions punctuate voles’ meandering cursive.
Lynx rewrite hares’ zig-zag trails. Moose plod hungry sentences through belly-deep drifts.

When temperatures fall below freezing. Farther, farther still. You bundle yourself in wool and
down, aware of your heart’s desire for warmth, your precarious tether to life this far north.

When aurora ripples over the mountains, a luminous green fire, and you feel how small you
are as Earth turns through this long darkness, always, again and again, toward spring’s light.

The 1910 Sourdough Expedition: An Improbable Ascent of Denali

“They have done this allegedly impossible thing
solely with the desire to prove to themselves and
a small group of their friends that there is more
endurance and perseverance in the men of the
North than there is in the men of the South.”
— W.F. Thompson, Fairbanks Daily News Miner, June 5, 1910

It begins with a barroom boast in Billy McPhee’s saloon.

“Tom Lloyd, you’re too old and too fat to make it up The Mountain.”
“For two cents I’ll do it alone to prove you wrong.”

McPhee wagers $5000, says somebody will get to the top by the
Fourth of July, warns that a fistful of “easterners” are sure to try.
Fueled by disgust that “classy outsiders keep coming
to Alaska to climb our mountains,” Tom schemes to
prove the mettle of men of the North.
Smart enough to know he’ll need help, he rouses
three other miners, sourdoughs like himself.
They dare to do what has never been done.
Climb to the roof of North America, stand on top of Denali.

No mountaineering experience, no ropes, no climbing gear,
instead they carry spunk, stubborn resolve,
the obstinate optimism of prospectors.
They cobble an “outfit” from their mining claims:
canvas tent, sheet-iron stove, shovel, two copper
teapots, thermometer, one watch, snowshoes,
an ax from the wood pile, a barometer (soon lost in the snow).
Some gear they make themselves: flimsy crampons to
lash on rubber-soled shoepacs, steel-hooked pike poles
to avert catastrophe crossing crevasses.
A weighty addition: one fourteen foot spruce pole and
an American flag to plant on the summit.
Proof—to be seen with a telescope from McPhee’s saloon,
one hundred fifty miles away. An absurd notion.

Fueled by bacon and beans, dried fruit and camp bread,
canned butter and caribou, four men with a dog team
abandon reason for ambition.
Trudge through temperatures to 30 below,
lug loads of gear and food higher and higher up Muldrow Glacier.
Stash it, go back for more.
Back down to scrub brush and spruce to cut wood for the stove,
their precarious link to survival— water and warmth.

Inexperience blinds them to danger.
Luck, their constant companion.
Undeterred by cold, they break trail to their high camp
eleven thousand feet up The Mountain, inch across
snow bridges, somehow dodge death in hidden crevasses
while their feet freeze, bleed into their socks.
For a week they “get ready for the great day”:
dig and chop, hack and notch a four thousand foot
staircase up steep ice, endless exertion on a precipitous
ridge with only a shovel and a woodsman’s ax.
On Summit Day Tom Lloyd stays behind,
provisions his friends with bags of doughnuts,
flasks of hot chocolate for the final ascent.
The three miners set out: scale their hewn ice stairs then
reach steeper ice, thinner air, the toughest climbing yet.
“Colder than hell, mitts and everything was all ice.”
Buoyed by determination, they take turns with the spruce pole,
drag it nine thousand feet higher. Finally jam it between
some rocks and raise the flag on the North Peak.
One of them pulls out a scrap of wood, their names already inscribed:
“Charlie McGonagall, Billy Taylor, Pete Anderson, April 3, 1910.”
He nails it to the pole.
Done.
They descend. A day and a half down what took a month to climb up.
Back to Kantishna to dig for gold, leathered faces etched with success.

All good— until Tom Lloyd slips away, mushes into Fairbanks toting
a grandiose tale, how he climbed both peaks, North and South.
Such boasting fuels doubt.
Two months later Billy, Pete, and Charlie make it
back to town with the hard-won truth.
Find their improbable success already dismissed.
Just another frontier tall tale.

Three years later, history turns a kind eye toward the Sourdoughs.
Walter Harper spots the absurd spruce pole on his own way to fame,
the first to stand on Denali’s true summit, the South Peak,
eight hundred fifty feet higher.
“I see the flagstaff! I see it plainly! ”
His climbing partners, Hudson Stuck and Harry Karstens, see it, too.
Their respectable voices confirm the feat: The Sourdoughs did it!
Did what they said they did.
Climbed the North Peak with the foolish idea that it was higher just
because it looked that way from where they started, thought a flag
pole there could be spotted from Fairbanks and their gold camp
so friends “would know damned well that we’d been there! ”

Do you wonder how they did it?
How four miners with no climbing skills and no particular love for
mountaineering could decipher a route still used on Denali today?
If you stay in Alaska long enough, if you look, sometimes in
unexpected places, you can still find folks who understand
words like grit, risk, resilience, stamina, luck.
Maybe you’ll be one more who will stay, carve out a life your yourself
in the North, find home in a place where a mountain calls your name.

 

Josh Evert

Josh Evert is a songwriter/composer/producer from Milwaukee, WI. He was previously the Artist-in-Residence at Homestead National Monument in Beatrice, NE and ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) in Steuben, WI.

His credits for soundtracks include Al Jazeera's Faultlines series, The Laura Flanders Show and various projects by independent filmmakers. Josh is the primary songwriter of The Fatty Acids, who put out their fourth studio album, Dogs of Entertainment, in February of 2017. He also co-founded Silver City Studios, an audio work space on Milwaukee's south side.

Listen to Josh Evert's composition, "Braided River"

Artist's Statement:

The concept for “Braided River” started at a two-week residency at Denali National Park in July of 2017.
On one of many hikes through Denali’s six million acres of wilderness, I came upon a group of trees, dead but still standing in the ground. Using a Zoom H6, I went to sample sounds from them. Expecting flat percussive elements, I was absolutely blown away by the rich tones of the branches when I "plucked" them. The mic acted like a pickup on a giant guitar string. Each branch revealed a different timbre depending on its diameter, length and structural integrity, so I took hundreds of samples. Digitizing and fine-tuning the samples, I built a chromatic midi instrument completely out of branch plucks.

Reading Carl Sagan’s "Billions and Billions" at the time was instilling in me a fear of exponential growth. This was reinforced when I met Dr. Peter Griffith of NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE), who, with his team, was studying the effects of global warming in the Arctic. An exponential growth in CO2 and methane could occur, he explained to me, as more organisms are able to survive off the ever-thawing permafrost. No one really knows what’s going to happen, but it’s a possibility. It’s important to measure these changes while they’re occurring in the Arctic, as they will not be staying in the Arctic.

I decided to try and aurally represent the idea of an exponential through repeated notes gaining in pitch and regularity. The opening of “Braided River” was born. Dr. Griffith would later explain to me that there was nothing exponential about my composition, but that this was okay, as I was sparing the listener from the unpleasantness of a true exponential (think screeching feedback from a mic too close to a speaker).

After the opening of the song, I allowed myself to bend the song in whichever direction it wanted to go, inspired by Denali’s iconic braided rivers. It was a bit of musical free-association with some eventual heavy digital manipulation. Thanks: NPS, Staff of Denali National Park, Timmi Oyen, Stephen Woods, Lauren Polansky, Nancy Holman, Cinnamon Dockham, Davyd Betchkal, Stephen Lias, Tim and Terri Escher, and my coworkers/supervisors for their constant support. The phrase “More circuitious … like a braided river” must also be attributed to Dr. Griffith from a conversation about how he got into his line of work.

 

Andrew Gottlieb

Andrew C. Gottlieb lives and writes in Irvine, California, and is on the editorial board of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments. His writing—often focusing on the natural world and our place in it—has appeared in many anthologies and journals including American Fiction, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, The Fly Fish Journal, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Poets & Writers, Salon.com, saltfront, and Sugar House Review.

He’s taught writing at the University of Washington, and Iowa State University, and has been writer-in-residence in a number of wilderness locations. When not writing he spends time with family or heads out fly fishing. Stop by Andrew's website to say hello!

Winter in Denali

Form is the woods ...
—Jim Harrison

Coats thicken, shaggy on caribou
and moose. Birch and aspen
shed theirs. Alaska holds still
its riches, the earth tightening its grip.
Storms tell their stories, snow
softening the edges of everything,
hemming spruce and alder,
drifting into slope after slope.
What's unseen curls warming in sleep,
breathing slowly in secret dens.
What's unseen leaves a ledger,
cuneiform grammar trailing
its language across snowed-over taiga.
The cold smells of patience.
What seems like
its only a particular slowness.
Time is not light but layers.
Your hunger is not this hunger.
Dormant, then warm, then dormant,
a lichen may thrive a thousand years

 

Faith Revell's work "Communion."

Faith Revell

New York native and artist Faith Revell lives remotely in Valdez, Alaska, a place of extremes that straddles the Chugach Mountains and the sea. Inspired by natural phenomena, human geography and movement, Revell’s abstract paintings and modern photographs exude a visceral, kinesthetic perspective on life unfolding. Revell received an MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute, College of Art and BA from Binghamton University.

She has exhibited widely on the East Coast and Midwest with her work found in private collections throughout the U.S. Revell directs the education program at the Valdez Museum and intermittently teaches fine arts at Prince William Sound College as UAA adjunct faculty. Curiosity and a love of learning are her inspiration.


Artist Statement:
"Communion," black gesso and rainfall on paper, 2017, Faith Revell

Communion is one of a series of works on paper that weds my experience in Denali National Park with naturally occurring phenomena—rain.

I hiked the tundra, walked the Toklat River bed, listened to bird song and observed light change and weather arrive. Rain fell on works in progress left out atop the picnic table behind the cabin. Water transformed the paint prompting line and mark to delicately bloom.

Denali does that to you. Awakens a quiet spirit. Pushes your boundaries. Calls you out to play, explore and experiment. It beckoned me to tap into an essential and intimate energy and new form of expression.

 

James Temte

James Temte expressed his passion for creativity in a variety of ways while growing up in Wyoming. Temte is a non-objective abstract artist residing in Anchorage Alaska. He is interested in the creative process and the balance between chaos and order.

He is a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and explores concepts relating to culture, humanity, identity and his love for nature. After leaving home for college he explored his interest in the life sciences, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology Fort Lewis College and later his master's degree in applied environmental science and technology University of Alaska Anchorage.

Artist statement:

“As artists our task is to observe. To take in our surroundings and share what we see and feel with others. I receive inspiration from personal experiences, my ancestry, emotions, and the world around me. I love the challenge of sharing my journey through manipulating material and using nonconventional tools and techniques. For me, each piece starts with a vision, location or concept, and I create from there.”

 

Stephen Wood

Stephen Wood is a composer, educator and performer with a holistic view of the world. His visionary “Inspiring Stewardship” educational workshop is receiving national interest for its fusion of music, creativity and environmental studies.

Stephen has served as a Composer in Residence for Cumberland Island National Seashore, the Okefenokee N.W.R, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, Red River Gorge Geological Area and has participated in Denali National Park’s monumental Composing in the Wilderness Field Seminar. Wood’s compositions are regularly performed by professional and student ensembles in alternative performance venues and site specific environmental locations.

He received his B.A.in Composition from Ohio State University and his M.M. in Jazz Studies from Georgia State University.

 

Jillian Youngbird

Jillian Youngbird is a hunter-gatherer, a story-teller, and a visual artist. Living between Ozarkian and Native worlds, Jillian uses found and recycled materials to create sculpture, installation and performative pieces that invite those in her environment to explore the intentions and inventions found in the communication of history, folklore and culture