Update: Julie’s essay, “Where the Rose Gentian Grows,” appears in Whole Terrain’s new volume, ‘Boundaries.’ Whole Terrain is available for purchase online at Writing Nature Marketplace. Our original interview with Julie is reposted below.
By Hanna Wheeler
Julie Zickefoose is one of the lucky few who are gutsy enough to make a living— and a difference— by doing something they love.
She spends most of each day walking, observing, sketching and painting the inhabitants of 80-acre nature sanctuary in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio. Her glowing watercolors and personal essays reflect careful attention and joy.
“You can reach a lot of people through writing and art,” she said. “The world is made up of so many moving parts. If I can give somebody a deeper connection to what they’re seeing outside the window, that’s a good day’s work.”
Julie always knew she wanted to be an illustrator and wanted to work in conservation. What she didn’t know was how to combine the two. After working for a non-profit for a number of years, she decided to quit and give it a go as a freelance artist.
“I realized that if I was going to starve, I might as well starve on my own rather than letting some nonprofit starve me,” she said. “I house-sat for people. I moved 10 times in one year. I lived very simply and pursued the study of nature. I’m so glad that I did that instead of saying, ‘I need to rent an apartment and get a car.’”
Julie travels around the country giving lectures on birding, painting and writing. She has a regular column in Bird Watchers Digest and her commentary airs on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.
Julie attributes her narrative gift to her father. “Listening to him, I figured out how to construct a story,” she said.
Her father also instilled in her a love of nature. The youngest of five, Julie spent her childhood following him around the yard. “My dad grew up on a farm in Iowa. He was a real outdoors guy and great gardener,” she said.
Julie taught herself to be an artist. She was always sketching as a child. While attending Harvard for biological anthropology, she took some drawing classes. But her painting, she said, is still a “work in progress.”
“Most of what I know comes from taking books out of the library. I look at what other people do. Surprisingly enough, it’s a pretty good way to learn,” she said.
Julie is both poetic and scientific. During the interview, she described her home as “the rumpled part of Ohio,” but then switched to scientific mode, saying, “The forest is overwhelmingly oak and hickory with very little native evergreen.” Then, back to poetry, with, “This time of year is an unrelieved gray.”
When she first moved to Ohio from coastal Connecticut, she wasn’t sure she would like it. But when she saw Ohio’s wildflowers, she realized she could stay. “I enjoy living in a place that people don’t normally give any thought to. I like living in a place that has all these incredible natural wonders. That’s really all I need,” she said.
In the upcoming “Boundaries” issue of Whole Terrain, Julie writes about a rare Ohio wildflower and finding common ground with her Appalachian neighbors.
“It’s taken me time to fit into this community and carve out a place in it,” she said. Now, her neighbors come to the local tavern to see her play with her band, and compliment her on her radio and blog pieces. “There’s a lady down the holler who reads my blog on dial-up. She does dishes and laundry while it downloads. I have more readers in Ohio than in any state in the nation. I like that,” said Julie.
Julie especially appreciates her avian neighbors. “They’re my TV. They’re incredible birds and we’re so blessed to have them,” she said.
Julie urges nature enthusiasts to get to know birds as individuals. “It’s the same birds every year. I know which bluebirds lay white eggs, which are aggressive, which are passive. I know when one of the birds I know well goes missing and is replaced by another individual. Get out and work with them enough to get a feeling for their individual behaviors,” she said.
Julie has studied the consciousness of birds almost her whole life with sometimes comical and sometimes touching results.
She described once hanging an umbrella beneath a barn swallow nest in her garage to save them from a landlord fed up with bird droppings on his car. Hating the umbrella, the birds dive-bombed Julie each time she walked through the garage. But one day, Julie saw a five-foot black rat snack sliding across the rafters towards the baby birds. Climbing a ladder, she plucked the writhing snake from the rafter with a stick, lowered it into a pillowcase and took it away. “I think I invented a new phobia,” she joked. “Ophidostepnophobia. It’s the fear of being up on a ladder with a snake over your head.”The barn swallows were completely silent the whole time, and they never attacked her again. “There’s so much more going on in the minds of birds than anyone realizes,” Julie concluded.
This anecdote and others will be in Julie’s upcoming book due out in the spring of 2012. The book, which Julie describes as an “illuminated memoir,” focuses on different birds that have come into her life. Its working title is Bird Woman and the publisher is Houghton Mifflin.
Julie’s enthusiasm for birds and the natural world is infectious. And her story inspires us all to pursue what we love. “I think people are of most use to society when they do what they’re best at,” she said. “It’s a disservice to yourself not to do that.”
Julie Zickefoose is a widely published natural history writer and artist. Educated at Harvard University in biology and art, she worked for six years as a field biologist for The Nature Conservancy before turning to a freelance art career. Her observations on the natural history and behavior of birds stem from more than three decades of experience in the field.
Check out the new Writing Nature site, which is being developed in affiliation with over 150 writers, painters, photographers, musicians and other artists in the Writing Nature community. Their work explores and promotes sense of place and environmental themes. Individuals in the Writing Nature community have created long-running annual and semi-annual retreats at Camp Glen Brook in Marlborough NH, the Baca Campus in Crestone CO and the Blue River gathering at Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene OR. They also publish an annual journal entitled ‘Writing Nature’ and have worked collaboratively with a number of organizations such as the Rocky Mountain Land Library, the Natural History Network, and Orion Society as well as Whole Terrain.
The initial feature on the site, the Writing Nature Marketplace has been created to help promote the works of members and affiliate organizations of the network through consignment sales. Volumes of Whole Terrainare now available through the Marketplace.
Julia Shipley grows 50 percent of her diet in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Photo by Hanna Wheeler
If chores were a car trip, instead of a process from one end of the barn to another, from full udder to empty, we’d be in Montreal by the time the milked cows were let out to pasture, the machines were rinsed, and the last toss of sawdust sighed to the clean barn floor. It’s dark when we start, but light by the end, as if milking made the morning. –excerpt from the poem “A Process” by Julia Shipley
Julia Shipley is a farmer and a writer in the small community of Craftsbury in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. “Process” is a featured theme in her writing as well as in her life. Leaving suburban Philadelphia to apprentice on farms and then buy her own farm was a process. Earning her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature and then really honing her writing craft at the Vermont Studio and publishing her work was a process. Through these processes, she realized her twin dreams and became part of a long legacy of writer-farmers in Vermont.
Shipley says there is a connection between her two crafts. “I find there’s a reciprocity. In some ways, the discipline of farming has taught me the discipline of writing.”
She says jotting down ideas in her journal is like planting seeds. Selecting some of those ideas for a fuller piece is like transplanting the healthiest seedlings. She nurtures, weeds and prunes her writing and her crops. The final product is something she can share, a pesto or a poem.
Spending all day only writing at a computer or all day only performing repetitive farm tasks can be “tedious,” Shipley said. “I need both.”
She lives in the right place for doing both. Shipley says that Vermont has more writers and more farmers per capita than any other state. Her article about Vermont’s farmer-writer legacy is featured in the latest issue of Vermont’s Local Banquet.
Some of those Vermont farmer-writers include Helen and Scott Nearing, Elliott Merrick and, of course, Robert Frost. A common theme in all of their work includes celebration of rural living, simplicity, and connection to the land. “We could use that advice today,” said Shipley. “It’s not obsolete.”
Julia Shipley reads from her chapbook, Herd. Photo courtesy writingonthefarm.com
Shipley sees her dual lifestyle as an almost patriotic duty. “The Jeffersonian Ideal is somebody who is both a farmer and a writer,” said Shipley. “President Jefferson had this belief that this country should be filled with gentlemen farmers, with people who are learned, who are using their intellects for democracy… but also using their muscles and their bodies to produce their food and have a connection to land.”
Shipley has served as the Director of Writing Studies and Faculty in Sustainable Agriculture at Sterling College, where the motto is Working hands, Working minds. Now she is a newspaper columnist and a freelance writer. Her chapbook, Herd, was published by Sheltering Pines Press and her poems and essays have been published in Alimentum,Hunger Mountain, Small Farmers Journal, Vermont Life, Vermont’s Local Banquet and Whole Terrain. She runs a writer’s retreat and facilitates writing workshops for elementary students and elders.
Much of Shipley’s writing takes the form of “braided essays.” When asked about the term, Shipley grabbed one of the ubiquitous pieces of twine in the barn to demonstrate. She teased apart a frayed end to show that rope is really a bunch of individual strands that form something new. Like rope, her life and her writing braid together things that one might not normally connect.
“I started writing essays that bring disparate things together,” she said. “A braided essay does the work of mending divisions that we’ve become used to between this and that. It does a little of repair work like this twine does. Akin to the life I’m trying to build,” she said.
Shipley farms six acres of fruits and vegetables. Usually, she also has sheep, dairy cows, and poultry, though this season she’s livestock-free due to some fencing improvements she has to make. Shipley said her goal isn’t to make all of her income from farming alone, but to grow at least 50 percent of her diet.
Even though she’s following in the shoes of Vermont’s farmer-writers, her own farming looks a little different. Before she had land of her own, she had to improvise. Her desire to farm became something of a town effort. In the parking lot for her apartment building, she turned a child’s playhouse into a chicken coop. She raised vegetables behind the coffee shop, raised milk calves behind the doctor’s office, grew potatoes at the studio. “What’s so beautiful about Vermont is the community really catches you,” she said.
Finally, she found property of her own. She compares her farm to a story, saying, “We’re just out of the first chapter.” In it, there are different characters including “not just human neighbors but animal neighbors” and a fantastical setting including a river that “swerves like a drunk through this town.”
Her farm is also a story of a barter system that is alive and well in Vermont. “I think smaller, more agricultural towns are apt to have the wherewithal to barter,” said Shipley. For example, she worked on a friend’s farm in return for two milk calves. She raised them up, then traded one of the cows in return for a year’s supply of hay for the other cow. And so on.
Everywhere Shipley looks, she finds connections between writing and farming. Even the alphabet shows a connection between the two. She says writing and agriculture came about around the same time since farmers needed to a way track their new abundance. If you tip over the letter A, it looks like a bovine face with two horns. This is how the first letter of the ancient Semetic alphabet was written and it gave rise to the upright Greek letter A we use in the English language. “Aleph is for ox. Bet is house. Aleph bet. Alphabet. You’ve got an ox house! These disciplines are not so far apart,” said Shipley.
In fact, for Shipley, the disciplines are interwoven. It all comes back to process. “When you make something with your hands, when you bring chaos into some deliberate order, an internal process is happening at the same time,” she said.
Julia Shipley is a 2010-11 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant recipient, completing a manuscript of braided essays about small scale agriculture. As both a professional writer and subsistence farmer she’s interested in the overlap and interplay between these two fields. Read more here.
(This is Part 3 of a three-part series on climatologist, Dr. Cameron Wake. Read Part 2 here.)
Part 3: On Sustainability
Photo courtesy Dr. Cameron Wake
Dr. Cameron Wake has been heavily influenced and inspired by the University of New Hampshire’s chief sustainability officer, Tom Kelly, who leads the university’s sustainability programs. Started in 1997, the UNH sustainability program was first endowed university office of its kind in the U.S. Kelly’s multi-faceted approach to sustainability—applications in teaching, research, campus culture, operations and extension—resembles an outline for systemic change.
“It’s not about incremental change,” said Wake. “We need transformational change in the way we deal with climate, the way we deal with ecosystems and biodiversity, the way we deal with food and agriculture and the way we deal with society.”
Wake said that working with Kelly opened his eyes to why good science is important but not enough. “There’s a whole education, outreach and engagement effort that’s [also] important.”
Wake thinks that sustainability must be place-based in order for it to be truly successful. For example, the way New England defines and achieves sustainability may be different from what sustainability means to someone from the southwest.
Cameron Wake and others discuss climate change and solutions on GreenScreen.tv
“Trying to solve this problem with a cookie-cutter approach from Washington makes no sense,” Wake said. “Washington might want to do something like big cap and trade to reduce carbon emissions. . .but then how we actually figure out how to reduce our emissions, or how we adapt to more flooding or heat waves?”
“This needs to be done on a regional to local scale. The solutions are not going to be global, the solutions are going to be where people live.” Similar to the coalition of six Kansan towns, sustainability manifests most effectively when it is approached as a matter of shared goals and culture.
Wake attributes an aspect of his success to his ability to collaborate, something else he said he learned from his childhood mountaineering adventure. “It was daunting,” Wake said. “They took us from this unskilled, unknowledgeable group of kids who didn’t know each other, and by the end of the month we had climbed mountains together, we had saved each others lives, we had worked as a team, we developed all of these skills. . .We relied on each other.”
It may be just that sort of ardent collaboration–partially kindled by the dangerous terrain of icy mountains–that is required of communities in order to implement the systemic changes that Wake and his colleagues dream of and encourage.
If you gave a 250 acre farm over to a group of writers, artists, actors, musicians and filmmakers for three days, you might well get anarchy. Or you’d get an amazing festival…
September 16-18
Glen Brook’s annual Monadnock Literary & Arts Festival invites writers, artists, musicians – and participants – to celebrate the effects of place on our daily lives. Whether we live in city neighborhoods, the suburbs or exurbs, or rural landscape, our environment affects who we are: our choice of music and entertainment, our outdoor adventures and our culinary tastes, even the friends we choose. Artists and writers and visitors are invited to Glen Brook’s Marlborough, New Hampshire, campus to celebrate three days of the arts – writer discussions and readings, artist presentations, and musical performances.
This year’s writers include Alexandra Zissu, author of Planet Home and contributor to The New York Times, New Hampshire humorist Rebecca Rule, Christian McEwen, author of Wolrd Enough and Time, Rick Carey, author of Our Own Version of Iowa–and many others. Musical performances include Peter Siegel, Erica Wheeler, and New Hampshire’s own Lunch at the Dump! Featured artists include Wolf Kahn and several others. Join us for a two-day celebration of the arts!
Julie Zickefoose is one of the lucky few who are gutsy enough to make a living— and a difference— by doing something they love.
“You can reach a lot of people through writing and art,” she said. “The world is made up of so many moving parts. If I can give somebody a deeper connection to what they’re seeing outside the window, that’s a good day’s work.”
