Maybe the fire in my lashes is a reflection of that. Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy. Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere? Listen to me or not, it hardly matters. I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish. I’m just chattering.
— Mary Oliver, read by Nell Gehrke
Those springs are dry, that earth is dead. I looked back, not forward, into death. Forgiving rains dissolve me, and I come still disobedient, still happy, home.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
A contribution for the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River and Anthropocene River Campus: The Human Delta public programmes at Tulane University, New Orleans. The group at Kendall Cram Lecture Hall was entreated by analytical, scientific, literary and media-poetic visions of the Mississippi's meandering path(s), derived from a year of site-specific fieldworks and a ten-week journey down the length of the river and a prelude to an intensive week of seminars and field trips into the "Human Delta."
Femininity, Fecundity & Flow highlights visions of feminist ecology, and appreciations thereof, through the poetry of Ursula K. Le Guin, the work of Shanai Matteson on waters and waterways as places where of discard, and rivers as things that young women in mid-West U.S. high school cultures are often thrown into. Imagining what it might be like to commune with a river, instead of them being places of dejection and expelling, we asked what if being in connection with river waters could be — not just a right — but a passage of prestige? What if, rejoining with the matrilineal flows of waterways was recognized as a badge of honour? Solidarity with that of which we are a part, and which is part of us?