ATELIER VISIT WITH WRITER ANN STINSON: Atelier Visits take you into the creative workspaces of artists we admire. We're asking writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers to bring you right inside their respective ateliers and share a bit about their process, their creative preoccupations, whatever is on their minds lately. It's an opportunity to spend a little while with various brilliant people who are busy doing good imaginative, artistic work. They'll speak to us directly about what life and creativity is like for them.
Ann Stinson is the author of the memoir The Ground at My Feet: Sustaining a Family and a Forest (Oregon State University Press, 2021). In this visit, she takes us outside, amid the trees of her family's forest in southwest Washington. In her writing, Stinson veers away from the narcissistic conventions of contemporary memoir to give us a book that is brilliantly capacious in spirit and form. Deeply personal, attuned to the big issues, and yet lastingly artful, The Ground at My Feet is an emotionally resonant family portrait and also a deliciously complex journey through time, strata, and culture. It's a nature book for the jaded urbanite, a grief report for the saccharine-allergic, and an account of transformational forest stewardship imbued with reverence and realism.
Mentioned in this episode: the Cowlitz River; Mt. Rainier; the Columbia River; Douglas Firs; saw-whet owl; the stories of the forest; Richard Powers's book The Overstory; tree stumps and tree rings; the Cowlitz tribe; being alive to the possibilities of the future and the past; understanding the past anew; Thas-e-muth; Simon Plamondon; the literary utility of coat pockets; Rite in the Rain notebook; walking a trail for 50 years; Himalayan Blackberry; losing oneself to one's work; listening to the land.
Music: "Walking in Forests" by Ben Winwood; "Godnattsaga" by Beneath the Mountain; "Empty Beaches" by Paper Planes (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist)