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It’s hard to imagine my life without my little secretary, my little dominatrix, my little double-Scorpio calico, Narnia, who just turned 18 this Halloween—and developed a fatal condition involving severe anemia. I had to let her go. Fierce from the start, she came into my life in an odd and unexpected way: in December 2005, my then-hairdresser told me her cat had a litter of kittens on Halloween, 2005. Her conservative Christian family believed the kittens must have been demonic—and this little white calico with a black eye mask—the most threatening of the litter, to them, so I raced over in my 1986 Volvo, with a carrier, and rescued the white puffball the size of a tennis ball out of a shoe box in their garage near MDI, Maine. That was New Year’s Eve, 2005, and I named her Narnia—because she was almost all white except for a few caramel & black markings like a character out of CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. We lived on MDI until the next fall when we moved to southern Maine. Eventually, I bought my house at Nixie’s Vale in 2009, and she reined over the yard and woods as Queen Narnia. She certainly had a feisty, mischievous and magical personality!
In fact, it was Narnia’s first forays into the woods of Raymond that inspired me to name our new home “Nixie’s Vale.” As we explored the ferns and moss, and she crept along the stone wall, it felt like a magical wood, right out of Chronicles of Narnia or Tennyson. 🌿
Over the years, Narnia inspired poems, beheaded small rodents, climbed trees and haunted the woodpile. She surveyed our yard at Nixie’s Vale, 2009-2022, and monitored the various chipmunk holes. On sunny afternoons, she liked to roll in the dirt driveway and sprawl in sunshine across the hood of my car or in a sunny patch of grass by the lilac tree. Inside, or on the deck, Narnia never strayed far from my desk while I worked, wrote, studied and read. Sometimes she edited my papers by sprawling on top of them and crumpling the edges, smudging ink. Usually she kept me company sitting on my lap while I read or typed on my laptop, especially in winter-time as I wrote by the woodstove. In the summer, she liked to hang out on the deck under my chair in the shade, or in the shade of the big beautiful maple tree, which she occasionally climbed, just to prove she could. Of course, sometimes this got pretty dramatic. I never called the fire department to come rescue her because she always figured out how to get down on her own.
Maybe it had something to do with her Halloween birth, or double-Scorpio purrsonality~~ but she preferred when we read Gothic novels, or thrillers. She kept me safe when we watched ghost stories and old Hitchcock films on TV. (We loved “Haunting of Hill House” and reading Shirley Jackson stories!) If a mouse dared enter the house, Narnia and Sophie-Bea, my late dachshund-pointer, hunted the foolish vermin. Narnia had a funny habit of dropping dead mice on my bed, pillow or beside my bed—out of some kind of dark show of affection, she assured me! She’d purrrrr in my ear and chatter about her fresh kill and look, there it was on my pillow! How nice! 😖😬🙈😕
In 2019, she helped me plan my first trip to Ireland. She curled up with me as I read Sharon Blackie’s book, If Women Rose Rooted, and travel guides—and then sprawled across the map of Ireland in an arc pointing to West Cork. She knew me well.
Narnia
Occasionally, she followed the red fox across the yard into the woods—but she always came back with a story, chattering and chirping about her adventures. Her longtime beau, Macho-Man, was buried there, at Nixie’s Vale, and I have to believe they find each other in the animal spirit world now. (He died at age 18 in early 2015.) Like any Scorpio, she was extraordinary and beautiful—truly striking but didn’t like to pose for the camera. No portrait really does justice to her beauty, or intelligence, or how in tune she was with me, intuitively. I will miss her unbearably.
One of the few helpful aspects of social distancing and self-isolation during this horrible time of the COVID-19 has been taking the time, in solitude, to read, write, organize, create, sketch, and to revisit old favorite hobbies, and passions, like art. Back in March, when my university transitioned to online courses, and my state governor issued a Stay-at-Home order, I felt reasonably “ok” with that, since I felt it was a good time to focus on my graduate study, which requires a lot of reading and writing. Last fall, two of my faculty advisors asked me a difficult philosophical question about why researching the topics I’d proposed was important to me–personally--and my answers then seemed flaky, e.g. “I am Lady of the Lake!” So, I have been thinking about how to answer those questions. It seems like I should be prepared to answer thoughtfully.
In May, I received Honorable Mention for my poem, “My Glacial Erratic,” in the 2020 Fish Poetry Prize, judged and selected by former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. My poem will appear in the 2020 Fish Anthology, coming out later this summer. (That’s with Fish Publishing, which holds a number of writing contests each year, based in Ireland.) Since then, I’ve written new poetry, and started drawing images that go with my poetry, and some of it is inspired by recent coursework. Selkies, mermaids, the Irish merrow, bog-women, the Lady of the Lake, and other supernatural female figures in literature (Romanticism as well as other periods, particularly Gothic literature and Arthurian lit) have captured my imagination.
Enter art journaling. To work through some of my ideas, I’ve returned to art journaling, which is something that I used to do as a teenager, and in my early 20s. It’s now summer, and I’m still self-isolating, and spending a great deal of time at home, on my own, creating. I’ve started working in a blank canvas art journal (Jane Davenport’s supplies). One thing that art journaling allows is for storytelling and concept mapping.
It never occurred to me to use my art (and poetry) to think critically about my proposed research, or to answer philosophical questions about my interdisciplinary research. I’d been approaching it methodically, seriously–with critical annotations, a working bibliography, term papers as building blocks, outlines. Now I’m approaching it differently, and I’ve got images of mermaids, selkies, bog-women, and memories of Ireland in my head.
Part of that’s influenced by the research I did on Traditional Ecological Knowledge of seaweed harvesting in Ireland for a term paper. Part of it’s inspired by a Celtic Studies class I’m taking led by Dr. Sharon Blackie. I read her book, Foxfire, Wolfskin, and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women (September Publishing, 2019) which I loved.
There’s something very liberating about making art. And it’s a good exercise to pick up a different tool–any tool–whether it’s a paint brush or fountain pen–but a physical tool, one that can be held in the hand to transmit ideas from the mind to the page. I love color. I’ve always responded emotionally to color. As a kid, the gift of a set of colored pens delighted me more than dolls or toys. I made art consistently throughout my teens, twenties, and early 30s but then paused while I focused on other projects (teaching, writing and editing, and founding a coalition–didn’t leave much time for art-making.) I still love art supplies and colored pens. Recently, I’ve become quite smitten with art supplies by Jane Davenport, an Australian artist and designer, known as an “Artomologist,” a play on her nature photography, and particularly her love for ladybugs, and other insects. I’ve also really enjoyed her books, such as Marvelous Mermaids. Jane Davenport has a series of art tutorials on Youtube, and I’ve really enjoyed rediscovering my love for making art, partly inspired by her wonderful books, tutorials, and using some of her supplies. The “Mermaid Markers” are some of my favorite supplies, a water-reactive brush pen, like a watercolor alternative, that’s been fun to use. But my absolute favorite thing of hers is the fountain pen, an INKredible pen.
Twenty years ago, I filled a portfolio while taking a watercolor painting class at College of the Atlantic. Prior to that, I was a writing-art double major (or English major, art minor) at St. Lawrence University, where I studied art and art history quite seriously. For at least ten years, from high school through college, at four different schools, I loved making art. I incorporated art visuals into my poetry projects and liked making books. Then, in 2004, while in grad school at COA, I was living in a small cottage with a 15-year-old water heater, which leaked badly, flooding my little home, and saturating all of my possessions. My draft master’s thesis, which I’d meticulously organized into piles and chapters, along with my notes and data on my living room floor, floated in ankle-deep water on a soggy shag carpet. Even my old Dell laptop was submerged. One of the fatal losses that really crushed me at the time, three full art portfolios containing all of my art from more than four years in studio art classes–drawings, paintings, photography, self-portraits, watercolors, some of which I’d planned to frame someday (when not working on my master’s thesis). All of my art disintegrated. It was so shocking and sad, I focused on other things, like completing my master’s degree, and moved forward with other projects, and left my ruined art and love for making art, in the past. I still sketched with pastels and colored pencils, and used graphics design in my work…but I took a break from painting (a hiatus?) that seemed to last years.
In recent years, I’ve rediscovered my love for Kettle Cove State Park (southern Maine), and I have been lucky enough to swim in that small cove over an eelgrass meadow, where I swam and toddled around as a baby more than thirty-five years ago. Recently, I swam at high tide, in the wake of the New Moon Solar Eclipse in Cancer this June.
Every time I swim there, I am flooded with sensations, poems, ideas, and epiphanies. I’m rediscovering myself. I’m reinventing myself. Below is a weird “inner self-” portrait I painted, using watercolors and real Maine eelgrass, which coiled and wrapped around my neck and arms as I swam at Kettle Cove in June.
I collected a few blades of eelgrass, which were floating in the water, and coiled around my wrists as I swam to shore. It also washes ashore along with rockweed, so it’s easy to find there. I incorporated the eelgrass into my art journal.
Now, twenty years after my watercolor class in spring 2000 at COA, I’ve picked up my paint brushes again. I’ve started making art again, almost on a daily basis, for the past month. At some point, during the process of social distancing, self-isolating at my home in the Lakes Region of Maine, I felt inspired to start sketching some drawings of symbols and seaweed as part of projects, like the one I did for Folklore and Environmental Policy class. Then, I started sketching ideas for other aspects (inspired by literary works by Romanticism-era writers like Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft) while I organized a strategy for doing my graduate research. That led to the idea of starting an art journal that’s connected to the research I’ve been doing as a student in the Interdisciplinary PhD program. I’m a poet and “ecoheroine,” researching the Eco-Gothic and Arthurian lit in a tenacious pursuit of deep Romantic ecology of wetlands. Please see more of my work at my portfolio: https://www.blueheroneditor.com/
All of these images and photos are mine. Please don’t share my images. My art is work-in-progress. Thank you!
This past summer, July 2019, I had the honor of receiving “Honorable Mention” in the annual Fish Publishing prize for poetry; one of my poems, “Capes and Daggers,” was published in the Fish Anthology 2019. Poet Billy Collins judged the poetry contest in 2019; Collins will also judge the 2020 poetry contest. This is a huge honor and I was very grateful to be included.
To learn more about Fish Publishing’s future / upcoming poetry and short story and memoir contests, visit Fish Publishing’s website. They are based in Southwest Ireland in Co. Cork. The book is also available on Amazon as a Kindle version.
In June 2019, I traveled to southwest Ireland, Co. Cork, to attend a conference at UCC, to explore nature preserves, to learn more about Ireland’s saltmarshes and intertidal zone. I participated in a traditional seaweed harvesting workshop and paddled a kayak on Lough Hyne, a rare saltwater lake. I also visited a saltmarsh in Kinsale, outside of the city of Cork. I learned a lot while I was there. Here’s a quick overview of Irish saltmarshes:
Sorry about the typo above. This is a map showing the saltmarshes along the Irish coast (2017 data from Wetland Survey Ireland.)
I visited a bird sanctuary in Kinsale. It’s a restored saltmarsh. The marsh is an artificial lagoon with restored saltmarsh habitat for conservation. This includes rare species recorded in the 2007-2008 survey (of all saltmarshes, Ireland). Notable: changes in range, increase in Borrer’s saltmarsh grass (Puccinellia fasciculata) found here. It was a windy day. The wind kept pushing my binoculars against my face as I watched egrets. 
The Adventures of Fen Fatale ~ Ecoheroine 