Catherine Young

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

BIO:
Catherine Young is a disabled writer and performing artist whose work is infused with a keen sense of place. She is author of the literary memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal and the ecopoetry collection Geosmin (recipient of Midwest Book Award). Her poetry appears internationally and nationally in literary journals and has been published as broadsides for Fermentation Fest Farm Art / Dtour Passwords and Madison Metro Buslines . Catherine’s work includes collaborative creation of Wisconfluence for MidWay Atlas and “Dear Sky, Dear Blue Planet,” AGU22 Earth Day video poem. She served as commissioned poet for Faville Grove Sanctuary. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. With artist Stephanie Motz, she created the freely distributed broadside “Invocation: Call It Home” to celebrate place and encourage ekphrasis. Catherine has been honored as a Wisconsin Poet Laureate Finalist.

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 workshops for the Wisconsin Academy, UW- Continuing Studies and art centers. Currently she produces the weekly Landward podcast and the Landward Poetry Project, and she offers mentoring and editing services.

Catherine lives with her family in Wisconsin where she is totally in love with meandering streams. She holds concern for water and deeply believes in the use of story and art as tools for transforming the world. More at:  catherineyoungwriter.com podcasts: https://wdrt.org/landward/

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.