Welcome back to the special edition of our Luminaries series that focuses on creative work about watersheds. Today, in part two of these watershed-focused conversations, guest host Caitlin Scarano talks with author and photographer Amy Gulick.

Amy's images and stories have been featured in Smithsonian, Audubon, National Wildlife, Sierra, and Outdoor Photographer. Her award-winning books include The Salmon Way: An Alaska State of Mind as well as Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska's Tongass Rain Forest.

Their conversation focuses on Salmon in the Trees, a luminary book for Caitlin's work and thinking about watersheds. The two talk about how this idea of "salmon in the trees" is far more than a metaphor, but an ecological reality that speaks to the interconnection so often taken for granted in our understandings of watersheds.

By homing in on the great journey of salmon in Alaska's Tongass National Forest — from freshwater streams to the sea and back again — and on salmon's connection with bears, forests, and ourselves, we gain insights into what a watershed is and how taking care of our watersheds is itself a continuous journey.

"Luminaries" is produced by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. This series invites people to share stories about writing and art that illuminates their environmental thinking or work.

Welcome to the first episode of a special four-part edition of our Luminaries series that focuses on creative work about watersheds. This special edition has been curated by Caitlin Scarano, a recipient of the 2024-25 Public Humanities Collaboratory Watershed Fellowship.

Caitlin is a writer and poet whose current project explores cultural, political, and ecological interrelationships within the Skagit River watershed, from the dams of its upper reaches out to the Salish Sea. During this four-part series, she interviews four writers and artists whose work on watersheds are luminaries for her.

Today, Caitlin speaks with author and longtime environmental journalist, Lynda Mapes. Over the course of her 27-year career as a reporter at the Seattle Times, and as the author of seven books, Lynda has earned numerous awards, including the Kavli Gold Award for Science Journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a National Outdoor Book Award, and the Washington State Book Award for nonfiction.

In her work, Lynda centers connections between people and the natural world. Following a confluence of storylines about one of the largest dam removal projects in the world on the Elwha River, Lynda connected deeply with this watershed and the people who care about it. Caitlin talks with Lynda about her reporting and writing, and the ethic of relationality behind them, that led to the book Elwha: A River Reborn.

"Luminaries" is produced by the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. This series invites people to share stories about writing and art that illuminates their environmental thinking or work.

In the final episode of "The Art of Reconnection" series, co-host Daniela Naomi Molnar speaks with poet and ceremonialist Danielle Vogel about the scope, power, and possibility of language.

Danielle is an experimental poet who is committed to an embodied, ceremonial approach to poetics and relies heavily on field research, cross-disciplinary studies, inter-species collaborations, and archives of all kinds. Her installations and site-responsive works are often extensions of her manuscripts and tend to the living archives of memory shared between bodies, languages, and landscapes. She is an associate professor at Wesleyan University and the author of several poetry collections, including A Library of Light, Edges & Fray, and Between Grammars.

Daniela and Danielle's conversation is an ode to the power of language — how the written and spoken word rings throughout the body, how it connects with extremely subtle forms of language both inside and outside our bodies, and how writing, editing, and reading become a ceremony.

Their conversation ranges from darkness to lightness, from cellular activity to glacial activity, from the personal to the collective. They celebrate the way language acts as a mediating agent between our material and immaterial worlds, allowing us to connect to and therefore mend our interior lives and our environments.

Daniela and Danielle invite us to wonder: How can language help us touch time? How do syllables and syntax carry memory in the same way a human body or a geologic body might? And how can becoming aware of the embodied nature of language help us connect across time, across lives, and across bodies?

This podcast series was produced by the Spring Creek Project, an initiative of the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University. The series was created in collaboration with The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon.