I'm always trying to ask myself both "Who am I as an individual?" and "What are the cultural forces that have made me the person that I am?" How can I understand myself as a cultural creature as well as an individual? I'm really obsessed with that question, and always asking my students to consider it.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Categorized in : Asking Students Always Trying

There is a difference between our wisdom and nature's simplicity. That reflects the burden of a complex intelligence. A complex intelligence like ours is impotent compared to the intelligence of a monarch butterfly migrating from Canada to Mexico, or the intelligence of hummingbirds that have co-evolved with the flowers all along their migration route. That seems so simple; it just happens, it just unfolds.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

butterfly flower simple

There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One gift we as writers give to the world is to bear witness to these landscapes and species as we have experienced them.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

giving world years

I don't know much about death and the sorriest lesson I've learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone's dying.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

lessons dying comfort

It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

voice animal giving

We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it's extremely important to bear witness to what's happening.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

climate important bears

The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

environmental bleeding stuff

Bringing science into poetry is one way of acknowledging some of the richest stuff that is in my cultural moment.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

moments stuff way

You see this incredible capacity for replication in nature, survival, development, all of these things that are around us all the time in nature that just happen. By comparison, human life is really, really complicated. We're gifted animals, but we are so complicated. Nothing is easy for us, except maybe eating too much.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

survival development animal

A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's why you have to write." You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

waiting writing thinking

I am a result of what has happened on this planet - how could I find the art to say that? I can't, and yet, I am drawn to it because of the enormity of it. That seems really important.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

results important art

If you have this deep feeling of empathy for the natural world, you feel it so profoundly. It's almost a religious experience. I feel that I could never really say the depth of feeling or connection I feel to the natural world, which has made me.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

empathy religious feelings

I think you have to live inside your contradictions and find a way to accept that that's the human condition - to be forced to live in contradiction.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

contradiction way thinking

The world is going to be less biologically rich for quite some time in the future. We are always weeping that we live in such a diminished world, but we are experiencing a biologically rich world compared to what the future will look like. Bearing witness to that is a beautiful gift.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

beautiful looks world

Once you realize that human actions affect every bit of earth and sky, you realize that the environment isn't just what surrounds us - it's all one whole.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

earth action sky

Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

team self play

The countries that are the least responsible for causing climate change are paying the heaviest price.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

responsible climate country

Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

suffering challenges justice

I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. It's always deepening my understanding of the natural world.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

understanding animal world

I've been accused of darkness

Alison Hawthorne Deming

inner-light light darkness

I'm really interested in culture because it is such a powerful human force, particularly in America where we think it's all about the individual.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

powerful america thinking