Poet Rebecca Dunham visited the Living Writers Series class on Nov. 26 as part of the Fresh Water Initiative on campus, where she talked about her creative process and advice for students on writing about depressing material.

Dunham spoke on her most recent poetry collection, “Cold Pastoral,” for an audience of students and visitors at 3 p.m. in the Marano Campus Center auditorium. Her book was introduced to the class for the Fresh Water Initiative, a campus-wide effort dedicated to the study and awareness of fresh water projects locally and throughout the world.

In her presentation, Dunham explored possible answers to the question of an artist’s role in an environmental crisis, along with the role she chose of research and documentary poetry.

“She does not look away,” said Laura Donnelly, professor of the Living Writers Series class. “She does not document from a distance. Instead, she meets with and listens to and carries forth the voices of the people and places most effected.”

“Cold Pastoral” is a collection of poems tackling environmental themes, mostly centered around the BP oil spill in April 2010. The spill remains the largest accidental oil spill in history, and Dunham said it was the first photo that came out of the disaster that drew her to her research project.

“It was almost beautiful, the way that it looked,” Dunham said. “I think that’s what first grabbed my attention, how awful it was that this disaster could also seem so beautiful.”

She said she had not known anything about what went into the project and subsequent disaster before she started researching it.

“I had no idea about the difficulty and the scale of what was involved in this deep well drilling out in the ocean,” Dunham said. “[They were] going almost as far down as Mount Everest is up. Until I read that, I was having trouble capturing the scale of this.”

Because of the vast amount of research she had to comb through and the nature of the disaster she was documenting, Dunham said she had to make a lot of hard decisions on what to include.

“It’s a tough balance,” Dunham said. “Once you have all of this information, there’s so much material, and taking that and selecting what you’re going to use in the poem is hard because you end up leaving almost everything out.”

Dunham used her experience from researching the topic to add emotion to what was at first largely fact-based writing. Because she is usually a lyrical poet, she said she wanted to make her poems have a lyrical tone while being factually accurate. This also meant a lot of attention to personal stories, which she said made her poems stronger.

“The more that I did research, the more I realized how intertwined the human effect and the natural world, how much they go together, which seems like an obvious thing to say, but I was surprised at how much the human stories kept pulling me in,” Dunham said.

Incorporating personal stories was part of what she saw as bringing to light what much of the news cycle had stopped talking about, including the lives of the survivors of the Deepwater Horizon explosion that triggered the BP oil spill.

“The only thing worse than the disaster itself is what happens when the world decides it’s over, all fixed,” Dunham wrote in her book. “It’s a fact any survivor knows.”

The blending of the facts and emotional elements is what makes Dunham distinctive, Donnelly said, which is why she wanted to bring Dunham to the Living Writers Series for the Fresh Water Initiative.

“I think her work’s doing something unique in that it is both very research-based and very artistic,” Donnelly said. “While she is a poet, so she’s firmly in the arts, she’s using strategies. She’s making nods to different disciplines.”

Dunham’s presentation style of mostly reading her poems and explaining the creative process behind them was notably different from the styles of other presenters brought to the class – a distinction appreciated by senior psychology major Taylor Earle.

“I like how she read a bunch of her poems because other writers had presentations that weren’t really about the book that we read,” Earle said.

With such a strong environmental message in her writing, Dunham said she wants students and readers of her book to be aware of the scope of these problems and find their own ways to spark positive change to improve the world today.

“I certainly hope that, if somebody read the collection, that they would feel compelled to at least be very, very concerned about what’s happening with the environment,” Dunham said. “One of the things I would hope people took from it was an awareness that we have to see what’s happening.”

Photo by Ben Grieco | The Oswegonian