Tag: Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices

Uncategorized

Chikaskia Literary Festival

admin

Chikaskia Literary Festival and Tar Creek update

I will be a featured reader at the Chikaskia Literary Festival (Northern Oklahoma College) on October 8, 2021 and will be reading from my new book Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices. Am anxious to share the creek’s stories and hope to communicate that although I have written about a specific place, it is a universal story.

LEAD (Local Environmental Action Demanded) Agency in Miami, Oklahoma recently worked hard to obtain an ordinance to grant citizens the right to clean water and a healthy Tar Creek. Over six hundred people signed the petition though not enough signatures were obtained to bring it to the floor of City Council. LEAD folks have been advocates for over twenty years for clean Tar Creek water.

WATER IS LIFE!

News

Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices featured on Sunday Poems with Ken Hada

Maryann Hurtt

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.

News

Once Upon a Tar Creek: Mining for Voices published by Turning Plow Press

Maryann Hurtt

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.