I was extremely happy when Ken Hada featured Once Upon a Tar Creek poems in his Sunday Poems podcast. Ken is an excellent Oklahoma poet, teacher, and Scissortail Creative Writing Festival organizer. He was instrumental in connecting me to Paul Bowers, editor-publisher of Turning Plow Press, and I will be forever grateful to both these men.
Please take a listen to Episode 141 Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices by Wisconsin ecology poet Maryann Hurtt and read by Ken Hada.
It’s time for a new and revised website. Where do I even start? COVID has so uprooted our lives but also has made me savor even more both the mundane and the exhilarating times of my life. Two years ago, I spent time in Vietnam and flew back in time to celebrate my father’s 100th and my 70th birthdays.
A year and half later, he left this life as the birds outside his bedroom window chattered a commotion then left just as suddenly when he took his last breath. My brother took down the feeders then gave them to two of his exercise class friends. I will forever be grateful for a man who taught me about “awe.”
I’m excited to announce that Turning Plow Press has published Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices. My book takes place in Oklahoma where both my grandmother and great grandmother worked at the Quapaw Indian Agency when Oklahoma was still Indian Territory, my grandfather worked in the lead and zinc mines, and my mother grew up.
The water in Tar Creek is orange and the area has been called the “worst environmental disaster no one has heard of.” The book is part eco-poetry, part memoir, part history. Twenty years of researching, wandering, and listening to hundreds of stories made the book finally possible.
