Behind the Essay: Monarchs and Macheros

This spring, I was lucky to have an essay I wrote published in Broad Street, titled “A Curious Migration.” The seeds for the essay, which was in part about milkweed, came from a blog post I wrote in July 2013. The town of Macheros, mentioned in the essay, is a special place, and I thought I’d share some photos of it here. I’m a lover of monarchs, for certain, but I’m also in awe of what my friends Ellen and Joel are doing to help their town while promoting monarch habitat conservation through their nonprofit organization Butterflies and Their People. If you’d like to donate to their cause, please visit their website. The organization raises money to hire local people as arborists in the reserve, who monitor the forests and monarch colonies, as well as provide a presence meant to deter illegal logging.

Looking down upon Macheros, 2015.

View of Macheros from the roof of the inn in 2018.

I’ve visited their inn three times—in 2015, 2016, and 2018. When I first visited, the inn was one building with only a couple of rooms. Now it’s two buildings and fourteen rooms, as well as a restaurant. A new restaurant building and a swimming pool are currently under construction. Most of Joel’s family is involved in the running of the inn and restaurant, as well as the guided tours to Cerro Pelon butterfly reserve and other reserves nearby.

Sometimes when I’ve been at Ellen and Joel’s, the saint from the church, San Isidro, goes visiting from house to house, accompanied by firecrackers. You can see him being paraded below towards the center of the photo, just above the wall. Photo taken in 2018.

View from rooftop patio in 2018.

Joel in a rare moment of sitting still, 2018.

The inn when I visited in 2015.

Inn and road facing center of Macheros in 2015

Ellen and Joel in 2015.

Laurie Kincer reading "Gull," "Homage to Small Hurts," and "The Sacrifice"

Laurie Kincer is a librarian at Cuyahoga County Public Library who works on their author events team and coordinates the William N. Skirball Writers' Center at the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch.  The Writers' Center, which opened in 2015, is a welcoming space for writers in northern Ohio.  It offers free writing programs, private writing rooms, books and magazines for writers, laptop computers, and a light-filled area with comfortable furniture and a fireplace.  Laurie holds an MLIS from Kent State University and an MA in literature from Case Western Reserve University.  She grew up in the small town of Vermilion, Ohio, whose seagulls, playgrounds, and parades were aptly captured in these poems.

I met Laurie this past summer at the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Library when she was recording Cleveland-area poets reading for an archive project designed by poet Dave Lucas, who is serving as the library's inaugural William N. Skirball Writers' Center writer-in-residence. The recording studio was warm and close, but we had fun. She has all the qualities we love in a librarian—smarts, humor, friendliness, enthusiasm, and an open mind. 

When I asked Laurie if she’d be interested in recording some poems for People Who Aren’t Me Reading My Poetry, she chose these three and provided this video of gulls in Vermilion, Ohio, which I think captures well what I was trying to get at in the poem. 

Her recordings of these poems were made in the recording studio at the library, which patrons can reserve for their use. 

Video by Laurie Kincer. Photos by author.

The People Who Aren't Me Reading My Poetry Project

I do my most creative thinking in the shower (though not necessarily my most productive, since many ideas dry up after toweling off). Something about water on my head sets off sparks. Quite a few showers ago, back in May, I had an idea: what if I gathered recordings of other people—people who aren’t me—reading poems from my new book, Local Extinctions? I’m not sure why this particular idea soaked into my brain, but it did.

Sometimes after a reading, people tell me how important they think it is to hear poetry read by the author. It’s nice, that’s true, but as the author, I’m interested in how the work resonates with the audience. I’ve not a big fan of the sound of my own voice. I don’t mean that I don’t like talking; I just don’t love the way my voice clanks along when I hear it on a recording. But the world is blessed with wonderful voices—melodious and nuanced and evocative and full of character. What would it be like to hear those voices read my words?

I’m hoping this project will excite connections between people and poems, or more broadly, people and words. When you read a poem you enjoy, the words shift how you see something. In these days of easy words with tenuous meaning, poetry may remind us that language has power, both good and bad, and builds or breaks our relationships with one another. There is enough breaking out there; I’d rather build.

Thank you to the friends, family, and former strangers (now collaborators) who also thought this project would be fun and who put time and breath into it. I haven’t set out to create professional recordings in a studio (though some may be), so many of these voices will be as you’d hear them over a phone or from a computer mic or in a kitchen, which just adds layers to the experience of listening. There may also be multiple versions of poems, so you can hear what they sound like on different people.

Coming soon—the first readers!