A few thoughts on process...

Ohio has always been my home. I've done a fair amount of travel, but I've never lived outside of northeast Ohio. This place is home. It's where the people and things I know and love exist. It is comfort. Have I always loved Ohio? Love for a place is a strange idea. I love the people. I love the communities that have been built here. I love my family. I love my friends. I love my house. But do I love Ohio? I don't know if that's something I would have said a year ago.

In 2023, I had the chance to hear Adrian Matejka on book tour, and he said that when he's writing a poem, something needs to surprise him. It was something that I already knew in my bones, but I had never verbalized it or thought about it in that exact way, in those exact words. When I sit down knowing exactly where the poem is going and what it's going to say, it might end up being an okay poem, but it is never a good poem. The good poems, the best poems, start with me expecting it to take one route, and then the poem taking me on a completely different journey. Poets know that the best poems are written when the poem, not the poet, is in control.

So when Dee Fairweather reached out to Mary Defer and me about her idea for Ohio Reclaimed, I immediately said yes, but I didn't know what about Ohio could still surprise me. I expected to do a lot of research, learn a lot of history about these sites, but I wasn't sure that I would be able to connect on a more creative level with the subject matter.

While discussing how to approach the project, we started planning trips to visit the sites that would be the focus of the project. Seeing something in person gives details that I wouldn't be able to scoop up from doing some research or looking at old photos, and again, I expected to have to rely heavily on those details to make the poems good enough. I didn't think I'd find anything surprising.

Then we made our first site visits, and everything changed for me.

Yes, I met history. Yes, I met interesting facts.

But almost immediately, I met something surprising: hope.

And that was something I could wrap a poem around. Not just one, but a dozen of them.

Those of us who live in Ohio know that we're blessed with our county, state, and national parks. Our parks are something I know I've taken for granted, but we have so many wonderful wild or semi-wild spaces. But despite spending a decent amount of time in and around them for my entire life (see: Ohio has always been my home), I never looked at them from this angle before--an angle from which I saw hope.

A number of the places we visited had been some kind of industrial operation, places that, within living memory, had been devoid of trees or any other green growth, but now sat in the middle of a reforested, thriving area. Without, and sometimes with, the help of people, the earth can recover, life can recover. The work of Ohio Reclaimed is this beautiful illustration of the way that damage, mistakes, harm that we inflict, whether intentionally or not, can be healed, can be recovered.

It renewed my sense of wonder in a place I thought I knew so well. It made me fall in love with Ohio. The voice in most of the poems from Ohio Reclaimed is named as Nature, but the more I think about it, I wonder if maybe it isn't Ohio herself, speaking through these poems, talking to us, showing us our faults, correcting, fixing, healing.

I'm going to be honest: these last few weeks have not been an easy time to live in Ohio. I've felt so much disappointment, disillusionment, and hurt over certain outcomes. In the aftermath, I've seen some people saying very seriously that they're going to leave the state, move somewhere they feel safer, encouraging others not to come here, not to visit, not to vacation or spend money here.

I won't be leaving. This is my home, and always has been, and it feels that way just as much now as it has ever been. Regardless of what the numbers look like on paper, there is so much about Ohio to be loved. Despite things that go wrong, despite the people in the statehouse making decisions I wish they wouldn't make, Ohio is still my home. And I love it. This place with so many of the people I love, this place that has so much promise, this place that deliberately, stubbornly heals itself over and over. This place that rather than destroy us, is willing to give us another chance to do the right thing. Another chance, and another chance, and another chance. She's the parent who won't give up on us.

I'm not saying there's no work involved. We don't get to sit back and let Ohio just fix everything on her own. It took concerted effort to reforest these areas, to learn what once was and put it back to rights in a thoughtful and true way. But it can be done. All is not lost. It never is. There is hope. And it starts with love.

Peace.
T


 "Ohio Reclaimed: What Once Was" is still on view at Summit Artspace (140 E Market St, Akron, OH) through December 14th! See the art, read and listen to the poems. Chapbooks of the poems in the show are EXCLUSIVELY available for purchase only at Summit Artspace through the run of the show. Pick up your copy while you're there.