INTRODUCING OUR NEWEST BOARD MEMBER: POET/WRITER/ALUM SCOTT EDWARD ANDERSON
MA: You recently returned to the Berkshires and are again involved in Millay Arts, but this time as our newest Board member: what prompted your decision to reach out to us?
SEA: November 2022 was the 20th Anniversary of my residency at Millay. I wrote my book, Dwelling: an ecopoem, during that month and thought it would be nice to reconnect. Plus, I now live on the other side of Harvey Mountain from Millay–I could literally throw a stone from my desk to yours; well, if I could throw a stone over a 2,000-foot mountain! It feels like I’ve returned to a locus of creativity for me and I’m thrilled to be involved in helping Millay.
MA: Needless to add, we are thrilled to have you join the Board — you are one of few alums who have served in that capacity and a local to boot — any insights on your role, expertise and Millay’s future?
SEA: I worked for much of my career in fundraising and strategic communications for the Nature Conservancy, Ashoka, and as a consultant, so that may have something to do with it! Also, as an alum, I have a special relationship with Millay and I’m not alone in having had an incredible, transformative experience here. As a storyteller, I’m hoping we can gather stories from our other alums and be able to share them to demonstrate the impact donors can have on the arts through Millay. The impact is profound! The residency has fostered many award-winning authors, artists, and composers, many of whom were working on their award winning pieces while at Millay or were inspired by their time here.
In my own experience, the book I wrote here, Dwelling, won a Nautilus Award and was an Honorable Mention for the Hopper Prize. It was taught as part of an Environmental Philosophy course at Providence College and this past September it was translated into Portuguese and published there. One of the poems was selected by John Ashbery to be on display at the Albany International Airport for Millay’s 30th Anniversary, which was quite an honor. Imagine seeing your work in red letters on big glass panels above the airport security area–amazing! This book has been on an remarkable journey and the time I had at Millay was critical to producing it.
MA: Your latest collection of poems, Wine-Dark Sea: New & Selected Poems & Translations, was published in 2022, with an absolutely gorgeous image of an artwork on the cover. Can you tell us more about that work?
SEA: As the subtitle implies, the book is a selection of poems and translations from my previous works, as well as new poems written over the past decade. The poems span thirty-five years of my writing, so it’s a bit of a summation of my poetic journey and also a signpost of future work. I had a friend who read the book–and he isn’t much of a poetry reader–who said to me there is something for everyone in this book. That was quite a statement! He then asked me to become the Ryan Observatory’s first Poet Laureate and help them bring the arts into their STEM education efforts, turning STEM into STEAM…
The art on the cover is an abstract, mixed media work by Patricia J. Finley, who lives in Colorado. It’s evocative of the book’s title without being too literal. I liked the painting so much, we bought it! The painting now hangs over our fireplace in our living room. I like to have art by friends on the covers of my books. It makes the books even more personal.
MA: You are also involved — in your free time (ha!) — with projects in the Azores, tell us more about this island paradise — the Hawaii of Europe!
I have been on an incredible journey to rediscover my roots on the Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the North Atlantic known as the Azores for the past five years or so. I knew little about my ancestral connection there growing up, certainly none of the details. My maternal grandfather, whose parents emigrated from the Azores in 1906, wanted to be an American, so he didn’t share the family history with us. He passed away in 1994, just before I got him to tell me the stories. So, I’ve had to reconstruct the family tree and history through research on the Internet and at the archives there. It was quite a process!
I had a residency on São Miguel Island with Disquiet International in 2018 and, between writing and our field trips around the island, I went digging in the archives for family documents. My ancestors go back to some of the original settlers on the island in the mid-1400s and it was an awe-inspiring experience to hold these beautiful, ancient documents in my hands, and to be able to piece together a family history that was denied to me.
I also connected with my relatives there and shared with them our family tree, at least one branch of which I’ve now traced back to 1402 in mainland Portugal. Last Spring, I installed a plaque honoring my great-grandparents in Emigrant Square, which was quite emotional, as you can imagine.
I’ve also begun translating Azorean literature and have become part of the literary community there, publishing a bilingual, book-length poem, Azorean Suite/Suite Açoriana, with a publisher on São Miguel, and receiving an award there for another book, Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances. I go back several times a year, have been a guest lecturer and teacher in the University of the Açores and in Lisbon. And am organizing a writing workshop and retreat in São Miguel in the Fall.
This October, I’ll be hosting a Writing Retreat in São Miguel!
MA: You were a resident back in 2002, can you share some of your best memories of that experience? During and of course after?
SEA: I really didn’t know what to expect when I was first driving up. I had this idea for a sequence of poems, which started out as an argument with Martin Heidegger’s essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking.” I shared a couple of the poems with my friend, the poet Alison Hawthorne Deming, who said I was writing “a phenomenology of how we live on the Earth”–imagine! No pressure… It was the first time I had an entire month to devote to my writing–I had a sabbatical from my job with the Nature Conservancy–and I really wasn’t sure how I would spend my days.
But I quickly got into a rhythm and a schedule and I had the other residents who inspired me and encouraged me–and left me alone when I needed to be! I was the only poet; we had three visual artists, a playwright, and a novelist, all of whom I’m still in touch with to varying degrees. Actually, one of the artists, Hans Van Meeuwen, became a dear friend and he supplied the art for my book Dwelling, including the cover and several illustrations inside the book. And we also have art by two other residents from that time, Lisa Hess Hesselgrave and Paul Bourgault.
While I was there, I also had a kind of spiritual experience. I was out hiking on Harvey one day and suddenly was overcome by memories of being with my Aunt Gladys in the woods as a child. She was a kind of surrogate Aunt, really, and I was her protegé. Anyway, I was struck by inspiration, ran back to my studio, and wrote 250 lines about her. After dinner, I went back to it and eventually got it down to 120 lines or so. Later, the poem was a finalist for the Robert Frost Foundation Award. When I went to dedicate the poem to Gladys and looked up her birth and death dates, I found out that I’d written the poem on what would have been her 100th birthday!
That and the fact that the only place we could get cell service was at Enda’s gravesite prove just how magical a place Millay can be!
MA: Best advice to young poets/writers?
SEA: Read, write, and tell your own story–and never give up!