Catherine Young

CONTACT:
Email: catherineyoungwriter@gmail.com
Website: http://www.catherineyoungwriter.com/
Podcasts: https://wdrt.org/landward/

BIO:
Catherine Young is a writer and performing artist whose work is infused with a keen sense of place. She is author of the poetry collection Geosmin. Her writing has been published in the anthologies Essential Voices: A Covid 19 Anthology, The Driftless Reader, Contours, Permanent Vacation II: Eighteen Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks, and Imagination and Place: Cartography. Her prose and ecopoetry appears internationally and nationally in literary journals including About Place, Ascent, Minding Nature, Cold Mountain, River Heron, Fourth River, Literary Mama, and Wisconsin Review among others. Her poetry has been published as broadsides for Fermentation Fest Farm Art / Dtour Passwords and Madison Metro Buslines and appeared in Cricket. Catherine’s writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. Her full-length memoir Black Diamonds, Blue Flames was long listed for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a short memoir piece was a semi-finalist for Hippocampus’ Remember in November contest, and her poetry received an Honorable Mention for the Hal Prize.

Catherine worked as a national park ranger, farmer, educator, and mother before completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She holds degrees in Environmental Science, Physical Geography, and Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Catherine has led writing workshop for the Wisconsin Academy, UW- Continuing Studies and art centers. Currently, she offers mentoring and editing services, and she records the weekly Landward podcast for WDRT Community Radio in Viroqua.

Rooted in farm life, Catherine lives with her family in Wisconsin's Driftless Area. Her writings and podcasts are available at catherineyoungwriter.com/

PUBLICATIONS:
Geosmin, poems, published by and available for sale at Water’s Edge Press, 2022

Poetry

A Parallelogram

consists of two lines equidistant.
We are spectator and observed, reflected
in each other's eyes. When you wake, I sleep beneath
skies charted in an ever-expanding universe
on a globe of lines and crossings,
and I wonder what grid I must cross to reach you
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria – or at which degree of longing
your heart beats. The world is divided,
the sky, a satellite net of impulses. But stars
still shine like diamonds. I could tell you that winter here
is cold and gray, and you could say that sand is brown – but it's not.
In each crystal of silica
or frozen drop of water: prisms lie within. We are composed
of rainbows arching across horizons, reaching 
beyond rectangles and maps.

Come to my desert. We could wait for melt,
share cups of mint tea, and recall:
all lines are imaginary – all geometry, all plans,
just ideas. Look instead

to the trees. Like rivers, like our capillaries,
they root and branch, knitting the heart
of light and dark into curves
of longing.

Barn Elegiac

Ninety years of squab in the cupola,
mud fonts fashioned by swallows line the beams.
Halters, tines of hand-set rakes
hold the dust of decades.
Scattered straw carries the memories
of long-dead horses buried with the calves.

In brighter days, gambrels and glory adorned oaken boards
coated with red oxide and rye paint. This barn
withstood storms, tethered strength and shelter
with pulse of heifers, Percherons' muscle and mind,
meadow-sweet breath of Golden Guernseys,
filled milk cans, felines prancing along rafters,
all the unnamable creatures of the ever composting.
The beings of this barn warmed its walls; their breaths
infused each beam and board,
and like invisible integument, kept it upright

until,
one snowy night, freed of the living warmth
of even one dung beetle,
down, it comes –  
chestnut timbers prostrate beneath
corrugated roof, cedar shakes. 

In the end, after the fall,
the scavenged red-painted boards, aged and faded,
are gathered, cut, and hammered
to a vacationer's bedroom wall.