Writer ~ Naturalist ~ Song Crafter
My prose, poetry, and songs arise at the intersection between ecology and art.
I believe we are all artists.
I believe we are all artists.
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I'm excited to announce
from
Torrey House Press
from
Torrey House Press
BLACK DIAMONDS
A Childhood Colored by Coal
by Catherine Young
In 1855, the landscape painter George Inness began work on his commissioned painting The Lackawanna Valley. A century later, a girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania, looks out over her coal-strewn homeland wishing for beauty and wondering where the artist had stood with his canvas.
The interplay between the two stories is at the heart of Catherine Young’s memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored By Coal. Young invites readers into a world now vanished, but which lingers in shimmering portraits. A lyric work of environmental history, Black Diamonds gives voice to the birthplace of the industrial revolution in North America and the consequences for the people and the forgotten valley that once powered the nation.
September 2023 | Nonfiction | 9781948814836 | 288 pp | $17.95
https://www.torreyhouse.org/black-diamonds
A Childhood Colored by Coal
by Catherine Young
In 1855, the landscape painter George Inness began work on his commissioned painting The Lackawanna Valley. A century later, a girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania, looks out over her coal-strewn homeland wishing for beauty and wondering where the artist had stood with his canvas.
The interplay between the two stories is at the heart of Catherine Young’s memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored By Coal. Young invites readers into a world now vanished, but which lingers in shimmering portraits. A lyric work of environmental history, Black Diamonds gives voice to the birthplace of the industrial revolution in North America and the consequences for the people and the forgotten valley that once powered the nation.
September 2023 | Nonfiction | 9781948814836 | 288 pp | $17.95
https://www.torreyhouse.org/black-diamonds
Listen to the conversation with Jean Feraca in September 2023:
https://www.crowdcast.io/c/black-diamonds
https://www.crowdcast.io/c/black-diamonds
Praise for Black Diamonds
“In vivid scenes, Catherine Young brings us into the simultaneously tender and terrifying Lackawanna Valley, the region where American industrialism began. Doilies decorate bureaus, acid rain falls, and boys grow into miners. Throughout, Young’s revealing sentences sculpt a region shaped by coal, joining many of us—beneficiaries of the industry—that are biting the hand that fed us.”
—TAYLOR BRORBY, author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
“Catherine Young’s Black Diamonds is a fascinating, imperative recollection of her early years growing up in a fossil fuel economy. But it’s much more than that: it’s a history of the working subclass in America and how scraping by, by scraping coal from the ground, shaped not only the American fortune but also landscapes, communities, and families—and rarely for the better. It’s a tale both strange and all too common, tragic and trenchant. Ultimately, it’s a tale told only as Catherine Young could tell it—beautifully, with rich detail and warmth, from a place of memory and love and escape. I have never been to Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley, nor done more than pass through the blackened and burning mountains and valleys of Appalachian coal country. With Black Diamonds, however, I now have an intimacy with the region and its industry I could not have expected, one I continue to think about since finishing the book, and for that I am grateful. You will be, too, once you read this important book.”
—SIMMONS BUNTIN, Editor-in-Chief, Terrain.org, author of Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places
“With Young’s remarkable gift for description, she depicts the cost of the Pennsylvania coal boom to the land and the families who mined it with a loving honesty and a lyricism that will honor the Lackawanna Valley and its people for a long time to come.”
—NATALIE S. HARNETT, author of The Hollow Ground, winner of the Appalachian Book of the Year Award and the John Gardner Book Award
“I read Catherine Young’s vivid and moving memoir of her days in the Lackawanna Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania with a growing sense of excitement. Young is a poet of superb gifts, and those gifts come into operation here, informing her prose at every turn. Black Diamonds is a book to treasure, so full of stories, rich in memory and landscape, written in a style that has, for me, almost an hallucinatory feeling. She takes us back to a unique time and place, and we don’t want to leave the page. This is a book to read and read again.”
—JAY PARINI, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter
“In vivid scenes, Catherine Young brings us into the simultaneously tender and terrifying Lackawanna Valley, the region where American industrialism began. Doilies decorate bureaus, acid rain falls, and boys grow into miners. Throughout, Young’s revealing sentences sculpt a region shaped by coal, joining many of us—beneficiaries of the industry—that are biting the hand that fed us.”
—TAYLOR BRORBY, author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
“Catherine Young’s Black Diamonds is a fascinating, imperative recollection of her early years growing up in a fossil fuel economy. But it’s much more than that: it’s a history of the working subclass in America and how scraping by, by scraping coal from the ground, shaped not only the American fortune but also landscapes, communities, and families—and rarely for the better. It’s a tale both strange and all too common, tragic and trenchant. Ultimately, it’s a tale told only as Catherine Young could tell it—beautifully, with rich detail and warmth, from a place of memory and love and escape. I have never been to Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna Valley, nor done more than pass through the blackened and burning mountains and valleys of Appalachian coal country. With Black Diamonds, however, I now have an intimacy with the region and its industry I could not have expected, one I continue to think about since finishing the book, and for that I am grateful. You will be, too, once you read this important book.”
—SIMMONS BUNTIN, Editor-in-Chief, Terrain.org, author of Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places
“With Young’s remarkable gift for description, she depicts the cost of the Pennsylvania coal boom to the land and the families who mined it with a loving honesty and a lyricism that will honor the Lackawanna Valley and its people for a long time to come.”
—NATALIE S. HARNETT, author of The Hollow Ground, winner of the Appalachian Book of the Year Award and the John Gardner Book Award
“I read Catherine Young’s vivid and moving memoir of her days in the Lackawanna Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania with a growing sense of excitement. Young is a poet of superb gifts, and those gifts come into operation here, informing her prose at every turn. Black Diamonds is a book to treasure, so full of stories, rich in memory and landscape, written in a style that has, for me, almost an hallucinatory feeling. She takes us back to a unique time and place, and we don’t want to leave the page. This is a book to read and read again.”
—JAY PARINI, author of Borges and Me: An Encounter
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Geosmin
"Part almanac, part field guide, and all love song,
these poems are baskets of earth-words...
These deep-time poems make me heady with love"
-Janisse Ray, author of Red Lanterns
and Wild Spectacle
these poems are baskets of earth-words...
These deep-time poems make me heady with love"
-Janisse Ray, author of Red Lanterns
and Wild Spectacle
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Catherine Young - JUNE 2022 - Dickinson Poetry Series
reading from Geosmin Click here: https://youtu.be/ZFd_r9EaPTk
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Catherine Young - JUNE 2022 - Dickinson Poetry Series
reading from Geosmin Click here: https://youtu.be/ZFd_r9EaPTk
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*Geosmin received the Silver Medal in the Midwest Book Awards*
Geosmin
a celebration of this shimmering Earth
Hardcover 102 pages
Ask me to mail a copy to you: $25 + $5.00 shipping
*Is there a library you'd like to donate Geosmin to?*
a celebration of this shimmering Earth
Hardcover 102 pages
Ask me to mail a copy to you: $25 + $5.00 shipping
*Is there a library you'd like to donate Geosmin to?*
sample poem
At a Loss
There is no word
for this waking wonder of day
that never ends, even in dark
where the creek lets out as endless line
its liquid canon
a song that goes on
through the facies
whether rock
or not.
If we take down these hills,
crush and slam frac sand deep against shale
there is no word to tell
how these lands shone with corn,
with bone of mastodon
or crystalline stone,
and once rolled as waves in ocean.
When I wake
I have no word
for the shifting soil
singing beneath
the soles of my feet −
even Thanks seems so fleet.
I have only the words spoken
before sunrise −
before migizi has flown:
Good Morning.
Migizi is the Anishinaabemowin word for bald eagle. Migizi flies at dawn
to see if humans remember to greet the day so that the world may continue.
At a Loss
There is no word
for this waking wonder of day
that never ends, even in dark
where the creek lets out as endless line
its liquid canon
a song that goes on
through the facies
whether rock
or not.
If we take down these hills,
crush and slam frac sand deep against shale
there is no word to tell
how these lands shone with corn,
with bone of mastodon
or crystalline stone,
and once rolled as waves in ocean.
When I wake
I have no word
for the shifting soil
singing beneath
the soles of my feet −
even Thanks seems so fleet.
I have only the words spoken
before sunrise −
before migizi has flown:
Good Morning.
Migizi is the Anishinaabemowin word for bald eagle. Migizi flies at dawn
to see if humans remember to greet the day so that the world may continue.
* * * * *
Catherine Young celebrates land in such a wholehearted way that she nearly becomes the fir tree,
“sheathed in resinous green, pulling at the sky / drinking sun."
One might purchase Geosmin simply for its rich and varied vocabulary.
Joyce Sutphen, author of Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems
“ Catherine Young bears witness to the soil, the water and sky, and the amazing richness
of a landscape and soulscape that is at once painfully beautiful and alluring and,
at the same time, in sad decline.This is “the real America,” she says,
“a place / where everyone can freely play together as everything crumbles.”
Young is, I think, a fresh and invaluable voice in American poetry,
her linguistic strength vivid in each poem in this pristine collection.
She’s the real thing, and I celebrate her and Geosmin.”
Jay Parini, author of NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, 1975-2015
Worlds within worlds unfold, ambered in words, as we follow her wanderings on the land.
We roam through a year of change, in the Driftless region, and explore the workings of memory.
Young’s Geosmin envelopes us in the sense texture of a region, and distills its perfume.
Petra Kuppers, author of Gut Botany
In the tradition of Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, and Louise Glück, these poems
honor rural life and the earth itself, poems concerned with the soil, with water,
with the changing seasons, and with language. In short, they grapple
with what it means to be human and one part of this fragile and natural world.
Christopher Chambers, editor of Midwest Review
Please support my work by purchasing
a book directly from me.
Contact me at:
** catherineyoungwriter@gmail.com **
Or support your favorite independent bookstore
Ask them to order ISBN 978-1-952526-09-1
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I am pleased to share these published essays
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I am pleased to share these published essays
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"Smoke" in About Place Journal : Geographies of Justice
In September 2020 we received news of West Coast wildfires.
In the Midwest two thousand miles away, skies became white with ash .
For me, the skies brought memories of an earlier time in my life.
Read here:
https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/geographies-of-justice/the-unravelling/catherine-young/
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Photo by Kathryn Meyer
The Crystalline Bed of St. Peter
Catherine Young
Still Point Art Quarterly Spring 2021
Issue 41 My Deep Love of Place
Is it strange to say I am in love with the bedrock where I live?
I am smitten with the layers of limestone and sandstone that line these Wisconsin hills, and to my eyes, these hills are the loveliest of golden layer cakes...
Read here: http://catherineyoungwriter.weebly.com/the-crystalline-bed-of-st-peter.html
Listen here:
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* My memoir piece "In That River I Saw Him Again" was selected as a Semifinalist
in the Hippocampus 2020 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction
Read here:
https://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2020/11/in-that-river-i-saw-him-again-by-catherine-young/
in the Hippocampus 2020 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction
Read here:
https://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2020/11/in-that-river-i-saw-him-again-by-catherine-young/
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Zoom singing? Yes!!
Life is better when we sing together,
so come get your collective dose of musical joy!
~~~ Come SING! ~~~~
Zoom with me into
Quarantunes Singalong
online
See the Song Crafter Page of this website for more details.
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THANK YOU
for helping me move
INVOCATION poster poem out in the world.
for helping me move
INVOCATION poster poem out in the world.
Support this 11 x 17 inch poem poster with a donation.
Frame it for your wall or place it out in your neighborhood.
Help me send INVOCATION poem poster
across Wisconsin as public art.
Living and working on the land in Wisconsin for 40 years,
I haveexperienced grace and catastrophe, both.
This poem, INVOCATION: CALL IT HOME*
was seeded during the flooding of 2007-2008, when I realized
how so many of us cannot leave these waters, this land.
I made this poem to remind us to
invoke and celebrate what matters to us .
*To read the text of this poem
go to the INVOCATION page of this website.*
~Many thanks to Stephanie Motz for this beautiful poster design. ~
Frame it for your wall or place it out in your neighborhood.
Help me send INVOCATION poem poster
across Wisconsin as public art.
Living and working on the land in Wisconsin for 40 years,
I haveexperienced grace and catastrophe, both.
This poem, INVOCATION: CALL IT HOME*
was seeded during the flooding of 2007-2008, when I realized
how so many of us cannot leave these waters, this land.
I made this poem to remind us to
invoke and celebrate what matters to us .
*To read the text of this poem
go to the INVOCATION page of this website.*
~Many thanks to Stephanie Motz for this beautiful poster design. ~
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Permanent Vacation II:
Eighteen Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks
...was published by Bona Fide Books in June 2018.
Within it you'll find my essay "Island Voices" about my time as a ranger on Raspberry Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
I'm very excited to be part of this collection which features two other essays about Lake Superior--another from the Apostles and one from Isle Royale.
Sadly, the publisher closed its doors in December 2018.
You can still listen to the podcast of Island Voices Here and you can find a version of the story in The Island Review:
http://theislandreview.com/content/island-voices-raspberry-island-lake-superior-lighthouse-catherine-young-memoir
If you read "Island Voices," or listen to my recording, let me know what you think.
Eighteen Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks
...was published by Bona Fide Books in June 2018.
Within it you'll find my essay "Island Voices" about my time as a ranger on Raspberry Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
I'm very excited to be part of this collection which features two other essays about Lake Superior--another from the Apostles and one from Isle Royale.
Sadly, the publisher closed its doors in December 2018.
You can still listen to the podcast of Island Voices Here and you can find a version of the story in The Island Review:
http://theislandreview.com/content/island-voices-raspberry-island-lake-superior-lighthouse-catherine-young-memoir
If you read "Island Voices," or listen to my recording, let me know what you think.
Catherine's performance of "Subtle" from
Intersections 2018: Writing from Planet Earth
April 22, 2018 Olbrich Gardens Madison, Wisconsin
VIDEO LINK TO READING AND SONG:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d89SblLP99d6juvcn1D5YK1cVnnLtsQ0
Arts + Literature Laboratory and Black Earth Institute invited me to read as one of the writers exploring the Earth and landscape
as the ultimate context for words, actions, hopes, and fears and as a local writer
opposing the Cardinal Hickory Creek transmission line and defending the Driftless Area.
http://artlitlab.org/events/intersections-2018-writing-from-planet-earth
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Catherine's Essay Water Song now part of UW Press anthology
The Driftless Reader
Go to - https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/the-future-of-water/work/catherine-young/
My essay Water Song is now part of The Driftless Reader, an anthology of over two centuries of writings about the people, land,
and history of the Driftless region.
I am excited to be part of this collection which includes writers and environmental thinkers whose work I have long admired Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Ben Logan and Laura Ingalls Wilder, among many others.
and history of the Driftless region.
I am excited to be part of this collection which includes writers and environmental thinkers whose work I have long admired Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Ben Logan and Laura Ingalls Wilder, among many others.
More than voice of our Wisconsin Driftless Area farm, the
spring creek is an artery in a water heart—alive and pulsing.
It is a twig on a water tree, and its course shapes the branch
of a trout stream called Dieter Hollow Creek, which in turn,
is part of the great water tree called the Mississippi River. In
spring, the winged ones in the sky follow the trail of water
from trunk to twig and then in fall, back again from twig
to trunk. —Catherine Young, from Water Song (2013)
The farmstead stood on a hilltop, like a castle, like the center of the
world. . . . Look in any direction and there were other ridges, with dots
of houses and barns, and the blue shadows of other ridges still beyond
them, each a whole world away from the next narrow ridge. Down
below, in the valley, was yet another world. The valleys had different
trees and animals. Even the seasons were different. —Ben Logan, from
The Land Remembers: The Story of a Farm and Its People (1975)
