(Editor's note: As part of a series about new under-the-radar writing workshops, we've asked Rex Weiner, co-founder of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop to tell our readers about the experience of this magical place. Rex tells us that a few spots are open for the January session. sdl)
Writers journeying south of the border in January for our fifth annual Todos Santos Writers Workshop will gather under the palm-thatch palapa behind our haunted hacienda for an ancient ritual: Storytelling.
The awesome array of problems that challenge creative minds await them. Point of view, voice, structure, the revision process, that bottle of tequila beckoning from the bar. And most daunting of all: finding the guts to put pen to paper.
For inspiration, our writers have only to look around them. The little fishing and farming village of Todos Santos is engaged in multiple existential struggles. Open pit gold mines up in the mountains threaten to poison the water that irrigates their fields, the water they drink. Fishermen battling foreign developers find their shores bulldozed for a boutique hotel. Barely recovered from last year’s direct hit from Hurricane Odile two years ago, battered by Hurricane Lidia just last month, this fragile oasis between desert and sea on Baja’s Pacific coast— so unique it’s been officially designated by the Mexican government as a Pueblo Magico—battles for life.
As writers and good neighbors we are compelled to respond. Our rallying point is the 27th anniversary of “The Forgotten Language,” an anthology of “Contemporary Poets and Nature,” curated by Christopher Merrill, its title taken from W.S. Merwin:
I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language
The works by ninety-three poets were assembled twenty years after the first Earth Day, in the wake of Love Canal, Bhopal, the Chernobyl meltdown and not long after the Exxon Valdez fouled the Alaskan coastline with 750 thousand barrels of crude oil. Its publishing in 1991 was, and still is, a timely reminder of what really is at stake, and how writers may “heal the split between the nonhuman and human realms of existence,” in the words of Merrill’s introduction.
Luckily enough, we’ll have Merrill joining us, escaping the Midwest this winter for Baja to inaugurate our poetry workshop. The peripatetic poet, author, translator, journalist and Director of Iowa University’s International Writing Program shuttles between book fairs in Siberia, poetry workshops in the Ukraine, literary confabs in Seoul and other far-flung corners of the globe, lately touting his widely-hailed work, “Self-Portrait With Dogwood.”
His earlier volume, “The Forgotten Language” brings strong voices to the front. They include Louise Erdrich, whose Grandpa tells her: “These are the ghosts of the tree people, moving above us, unable to take their rest.” The late poet Agha Shahid Ali counsels us that “Certain landscapes insist on fidelity.” We accompany Jim Harrison on a stroll, “Walking back on a chill morning past Kilmer’s Lake” into a landscape alive with memory.
The poems approach nature in all of its manifestations—rocks, trees, flowers, birds, water, sky—as more than metaphysical fodder. These writers go beyond allegory and metaphor to address some measure of responsibility. Nature demands action, requires passion and anger often spills out of these pages. As James Dickey, in “For The Last Wolverine,” exhorts us: “How much the timid poem needs the mindless explosion of your rage.”
Many of the poems, from A.R. Ammon’s “Dunes,” Margaret Atwood’s “Elegy for the Giant Tortoises,” and Stanley Kunitz’ “Wellfleet Whale,” to Philip Levine’s ode “To a Fish Head Found on the Beach in Malaga,” come close to Baja in spirit and tone, their authors surveying seascapes, traipsing shorelines much like ours. But none comes closer than Nathaniel Tarn’s “Journal of the Laguna de San Ignacio,” describing a remote bay just to the north of our pueblo, where he encounters “whales breathing all around us in the night,” and he sees:
The mountains rise out of the desert
way out over Baja
the whales rise out of the sea
the mountains rise out of the sea
the whales rise out of the desert
the whales are taller than the mountains
That’s exactly how it is in Todos Santos, the way it’s always been, and how it should stay. We’ll do what we can to help. “Language, like nature, is an order larger than any individual,” Merrill says in the introduction to his anthology, a few rare copies of which I obtained on Amazon, to be distributed to our workshoppers—and an essential book that deserves re-issue so that we may all re-discover the Forgotten Language with which to tell our stories.
And then, under the palapa, our writers will have their own tales to tell.
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