pclarion: Two powerful teams — SoHi and Homer — faced each other in prep softball action Wednesday http://t.co/X2X5TRGejp

Convicted ex-Enron Corp. CEO Jeffrey Skilling's more than 24-year prison sentence for his role in the once mighty energy giant's collapse could be reduced by as many as 10 years if a federal judge approves an agreement reached Wednesday between prosecutors and defense attorneys.

PBS says its fall schedule will include a variety of specials marking President John F. Kennedy's death 50 years ago.

The Boston Athletic Association sold out its first event since last month's marathon bombings in 13 hours Wednesday as 6,500 runners filled the field to support the organization and the victims of the attack on its flagship race.

Homeground.  That’s the word bobbing around in my mind this morning, rising and sinking like a stick in a tiderip, nudging me. It’s the word and concept that began a three-hour 49 Writers-sponsored workshop I led in Kodiak last Sunday.  Looking out my window past the bare birch trees to the west, toward Kodiak, I remember the hop and skip the distance seemed between Homer and the archipelago as I flew there on a Dash 8.  From the mainland mountains, hop to the Barrens, hop to Shuyak, and you’re there.  A boat journey is another story.  The fetch down Cook Inlet is enormous, the currents, treacherous.  The north wind’s track across that expanse was dramatic, from my vantage, like a huge feathered wing.  Wind, a relentless force that defines our coastal lives, bigger than us, “push of the world,” as the musician David Grimes calls it, writ in plain language on the inlet. 

Writer Sara Loewen met me at the airport twenty minutes later.  For Sara and her husband, Kodiak Island is homeground, birth place, and I could feel it.  Homeground.  Island archipelago large enough to be a state.  Part treeless, flat, part mountainous, snow-covered, part indented by deep intrusions of saltwater, part gentle, part wild.  “Teach me how to live here,” I said to the workshop participants sitting around the table with me at the Wildlife Refuge the next day.  And then we all began writing.
Homeground.  What is it for the migrating crane?  The brown bear?  The gray whale?  Can you have more than one?  In the workshop, we considered the idea that we write out of an inner soil made up of the places that have formed and shaped us.  Our language.  Our way of seeing.  Geologically, the people sitting around that table in Kodiak were, for the most part, conglomerates.  Place, when we consider it this way, brings up conflicted responses.  A few people were still feeling their way into Kodiak, testing their hearts against the questions:  Do I belong?  Is this home?  Do I recognize myself in this landscape?  Does this place speak my language?  A couple were dead-certain:  I was born here.  This is home.  Or:  I’ve lived here forty years.  This is home.  I could see it in their faces, this solidity.  This hard place, this windy, foggy, rainy, difficult, gorgeous place:  it’s mine.  I belong to it.  It knows me.  And then the strange surprise.  One person in the workshop was, like me, a longtime Alaskan with roots half a world a way, in Latvia.  We’d both been born to refugee parents, displaced persons, people who saw themselves as lifelong exiles.  Wrenched from their homes, our parents had settled in America with reluctance, waiting for the chance to go back home.  Eventually, the adopted, temporary home laid its claim on their lives.  Today,  my mother says she’s more American than Latvian.  My parents never went back, even when it was safe.  Perhaps this man and I had been driven by our parents’ sense of displacement to lay claim to a homeground ourselves.  When I first came to Alaska, that recognition hit hard; it felt like a matter of life and death.  I’m home.   But my homeground, that’s another story.
I am certain that the way we write has something to do with our complicated relationship to place.  Our inner creative ground reflects the weather and tectonic forces we’ve known as strongly as the terrains of Kodiak reflect the story of wind, glacier, earthquake and rain.  We are a story of layered dirt, a collection of rocks.  While we were writing the afternoon away in the workshop, up the hill, at hoe, Sara’s young sons were doing their own geological explorations of homeground.  With their father, Pete, they were chipping away at a big, gray, quartz-riddled rock on the kitchen table, using a hammer and chisel.  Imbedded in the rock were fossilized shells.  They’d found the rock at a special place on the island.  “Kodiak is amazing,” said Pete, holding the rock steady while Liam tap-tapped away.  Said the man born and raised in that place.  Homeground written all over his hands and face and the easy way he moved through in and out of the house.  No question of where do I belong troubling his eyes.
Back at the workshop, after identifying the components of our homeground, we took blank sheets of paper and wrote “word hoards,” on one sheet, words associated with our childhood homeground, and on the other, words associated with the place we live now.  We mined the words not just out of landscape, but also out of our bodies at work, our hands and bare feet in the dirt, out in the weather.  Here are some words from my childhood homeground, a little western NY town called Silver Creek:  heat lightning   lake effect   snow drift   crayfish   grackle   starling   vineyard   tractor   pesticide   quince   shale   snow plow   floodplain
And then we tied word to self.  I am from yellow crate of picked grapes pesticide stenched chalk-dusted squeezed through a sieve to make grape juice I drank iced down in September heat.
Homeground is not about nostalgia.  Homeground is gritty, real.  Our bodies carry the traces down the years.  Our writing and speaking reflects the rhythms and nature of the terrain.  I used to think my hometown irrelevant to me, backward, depressed, provincial, pedestrian, boring, plain, dull, dirty, forgotten, lost.  Now I think it is imbedded, like those fossil snails Luke, Liam and Pete freed with their careful tapping.  Sassafrass   floodplain   trillium   creek  
Teach me how to live here.  I still remember an image shared by a workshop participant in Nome, years ago.  One day, during break-up, she watched a chair drift by her window, riding on a slab of ice.  And that’s what told her it was break-up.  I can see that chair in all its detail when I close my eyes.
As writers, homeground is what we conjure, not simply through story, but through language, rhythm, the internalized ecology, geology, geography, meteorolopy of place.  Take poet Charles Wright, whose childhood homeground is North Carolina and Tennessee.  This is a fragment from his incredible poem “Dog Creek Mainline:”  Dog Creek:  cat track and bird splay,/Spindrift and windfall; woodrot;/Odor of muscadine, the blue creep/Of kingsnake and copperhead;/Nightweed; frog spit and floating heart,/Backwash and snag pool:  Dog Creek.  The poet David St. John wrote this description of Wright’s language in the preface to his collected poems:  “Knotty, rhythmically muscular, alliterative, yet still highly imagistic and visual, Wright’s poetry took on a beautiful rasping quality.”  Rasp of fish crow.  Fizz of frazil ice.  Wind-shush of grassy treeless half of island.  Creak of moose tread on forty-below snow.
Places matter.  And the places we inhabit speak in specific languages.  Our lives matter.  We are the keepers of the hidden, endangered language of places, known only through intimacy, through carrying what Charles Wright calls the “hard freight” of our lives across ice, through mud, up steep cutbanks.  We are the keepers of stories no one else can tell.  To retrieve them takes what Adrienne Rich called “a severer form of listening.”
Whenever I travel to teach in Alaska, I try to listen as well as talk, to keep my eyes open.  In answer to my question Teach me how to live here answers come, images that become part of my own homeground.  A wooden chair perched on slab ice drifting past a window.  A small blonde boy tapping at a rock with a hammer and nail.  A 40 year resident of Kodiak standing by a stream emptying into the ocean, talking about midsummer in Latvia.  The look on the face of a Coast Guard wife who knows she’ll be leaving soon.
In the introduction to Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, Barry Lopez writes: “What many of us are hopeful of now, it seems, is being able to gain – or regain – a sense of allegiance with our chosen places, and along with that a sense of affirmation with our neighbors that the place we’ve chosen is beautiful, subtle, profound, worthy of our lives.”  The people I met last weekend on Kodiak embodied that.  So I’ll end this May Day blog right here, right now, this place, Homer, my mid-life homeground, which has changed my inner soil in ways I can’t even fathom:  white-fronted goose   small-craft advisory   stinging nettle   erosion   slough   spit   mudflat   breeze   cloudbank   float plane   varied thrush   dust.  I am from these.
What are you from?


Eva Saulitis' most recent book is Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas, published this January by Beacon Press.  A poetry collection, Many Ways to Say It, was published by Red Hen Press last fall.  Her homeground is comprised of Latvian sand and birch forest, western New York State farmland and beech-maple woods, and Alaskan muskeg, old growth and islet. Visit her at her www.evasaulitis.com.  

akempiresports: @AshJPeters Or mountain ridges

akempiresports: @AshJPeters stuck in juneau? Noooooooooooooooo

akempiresports: Homer tops Thunder Mountain 44-26, medium-school state football semifinal, Chris Mack concussion, Ben Jahn sick, Kyle Dille foot broke..

akempiresports: 1 p.m., TBS, National League Wild Card, St. Louis at Atlanta 4:30 p.m., TBS, American League Wild Card, Baltimore at Texas

akempiresports: Tal Norvell runs to fourth place for the Crimson Bears

akempiresports: Thunder Mountain's Maddie Hall finishes eighth for 4A

akempiresports: Thorne Bay's Taylee Nyquest has won the small school's cross country state championship in Anchorage today

akempiresports: Bird hit our jet, causing fans to miss the state venue... any newspapers out there that want to share a JDHS or TMHS photo, much love

akempiresports: Argonaut runs a similar offense that the Falcons will face when they host the first round of the playoffs against Homer the following week

akempiresports: TMHS Falcons playing Argonaut, California at TMHS on Friday at 7 p.m., senior night!!!!!!

akempiresports: JDHS Volley playing Mt. Edgecumbe tonight at JDHS at 6:15, JV at 4:30..

akempiresports: JDHS football plays West Valley at 6 p.m. on SATURDAY in Fairbanks... not Friday as schedule showed... SATURDAY

akempiresports: The Juneau Middle Schools cross country meet is at 3:30 at Sandy Beach, not 4 p.m.