Myrtle Tree Arts Journal

Featured Artists and Contributors Voices from the Literary and Visual Arts The festival's exploration of human-plant relationships extends into the realm of words and images through the contributions of Lara Gularte, Kate Marianchild, Jessica Carew Craft, Andie Thrams, Corina del Carmel, and Susan Hayne . These and other accomplished writers, poets, and visual artists bring decades of experience exploring the intersections between environmental awareness, creative expression, and community building. Gathering of Indigenous Voices and Wisdom This year's festival promises to be an extraordinary convergence of traditional knowledge, contemporary artistry, and ecological awareness, featuring Stan Padilla, Kimberly ShiningStar Petree, Christina Almendariz, Sara Raskie and Tony Cervantes, Marcela Tayaba, Phillip Moore, Mignon Geli, Chuck Kritzon, and Nathan Kuan Salazar-Uhlmeyer . These diverse artists bring a rich tapestry of cultural perspectives and creative disciplines, from ...

RIPE AREA is a play on the term "riparia", the land adjacent to and influenced by water. The waters of the South Fork of American River tumble downstream in the crush of ice melt, rushing in currents, propelled by dam releases, and slowing along sandy flatlands. Wet, fluid fingers fan out among cattails, quietly seeping into sodden ground.  Over time, h umans have changed the river, eroded its banks, mined its tributaries, drained its meadows, and farmed its floodplains. The waters of the South Fork of the American River , for example, are contained by t hree major reservoirs and other smaller man-made reservoirs  El Dorado County. The major dams are  at  Slab Creek Reservoir built in 1967, Chili Bar Reservoir built in 1964 and Folsom Lake Reservoir built in 1955 .  Headwaters of the South Fork of the American River collect in high-altitude Lake Audrain, captured in the image I created, above, for the music and underwater sound art installation, Music for 33 Dr...

The present is just a moment in the continuous unfolding of perceptions and experiences. In meditative practice, I actively try to observe the arising and vanishing of the present to develop the skills to be in the present with deeper awareness. Similarly, the rapid passing of frames of video, the interweaving of streams of images and sounds, is for me, a way of observing an ephemeral present. "Right View" by Ameera Godwin   In this state of mind, I can start to experience a quality of "right view.": seeing what is true, and discerning how to respond, compassionately, ethically. I try to cultivate a relationship to temporality, "as an on-going purposeful effort to create one’s time and keep up one’s sensed continuity in time," as described by Estonian researcher, Kätlin Pulk . Working with digital video and using various non-narrative film approaches, my raw materials are the moving pixels with attributes like duration, speed, frequency, synchrony and as...

History is part of us even when we are unaware of it. I’d been living in and hiking around the Foothills for years without knowing much about the complex factors that shaped the history of this heavily forested area. I set out to learn more about what has brought us to the perilous wildfire conditions of the present moment. With the Caldor Fire of 2021 taking out more than 200 homes and 250,000 acres, and the increase of mega-fires across California generally, wildfire brings a strong connection to grief around the disruption of family life, the loss of generations of trees, damage to soil and wildlife, and release of masses of carbon. What historical forces might be relevant to understand where we are now? The forest holds a history that can explain our current state. Last fall I had a conversation with Tony Valdez, an energetic rock climber and passionate storyteller who worked for 37 years with the US Forest Service. Tony lent me his copy of the book by Timothy Egan, The Big Burn ....

Here in the Foothills of Northern California, the potential for wildfire is likely the most imminent and dangerous risk we experience on an ongoing basis. In El Dorado County, the Caldor Fire of 2021 left a massive footprint ecologically and socially, and like other wildfires, including last fall’s Mosquito Fire, it will continue to impact the land and people here. Numerous efforts in the county are addressing wildfire recovery and protection, and aligned with those efforts, I had an idea for public art to be woven into the fabric of awareness, care, support, and resilience, in the face of increasing wildfire and climate-related risks in the region. Walking and driving in areas of the Caldor burn scar can bring up swells of grief, shock, and sorrow, and a sense of unique beauty. I’ve marked spots on a map on my phone where the burn scar shows powerful views of change: in Sly Park and Happy Valley, over the crest of Mormon Emigrant Trail, at the bridge at Silver Fork, up the road to Wri...

The writer Robert McFarlane brilliantly expresses reflections about walking in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind. While walking, we get to know a place, but more deeply, we are shaped and changed by the landscape. Walking gives me a magical entry into place. I feel that I join with archetypal beings whose feet, hooves, boots, and paws have worn away the same ground. A walk in nature can generate a map of profound emotion, which I can experience as awe, love, grief. Like a ghost, I pass through a world of feelings and try to access the traces of other ghosts that have traveled the trail before me.  Creating the Fire/Land piece is an “art walk” to explore feelings like love and grief about landscape.  I walk to contemplate my connection to place in the face of my climate grief. I’m grieving with the forest as a biological creature that can only hold so much. It can only bounce back so far. The new USDA Forest Service report on Californi...