For Plainfield resident Sequana Skye, the Great Brook in Plainfield once served as inspiration for her stories.
Whether she’s writing poetry, taking photographs or dreaming up plays, Skye says the babbling brook that runs alongside her apartment’s patio has been an oasis of creativity for her every day since moving to the central Vermont town last summer.
Now Skye views the Great Brook as a source of destruction.
On July 10, as she watched the Great Brook swell, she heard falling rocks and debris “shaking the earth” next to her first-floor apartment. She packed a bag with essentials – a toothbrush, underwear and food for her dog, Georgia, and cat, Chihiro – and evacuated with her pets.
When she returned the next morning, her apartment was covered in mud. Even the refrigerator was covered in mud and piled up in the bathtub, she said. All of her notebooks, including four that she had filled with words of wisdom and thoughts for each of her grandchildren, were caked with mud and completely beyond repair.
“So I’m starting over again,” she said. “I guess that’s what you do with art.”
Like Skye, many artists and writers in Vermont are grappling with the aftermath of this summer’s floods and the increased likelihood of future floods.
Many artists have lost physical materials such as books, art supplies and studio space. Some feel lost while finding a new way to connect with nature. Others are thinking about how traditional arts venues and community events must evolve to meet the demands of a changing climate.
All of this influences creative expression, says Bianca Stone, Vermont’s recently named poet laureate. She’s increasingly seeing the fear of the unknown future – and the anger and grief that come with the loss of previous reality – as themes seeping into Vermonters’ work.
“Even if it’s not the main element of the story or narrative, it’s the darker undercurrent of so much artistic expression right now,” she said. “There’s literally this cloud hanging over us that could break at any moment.”
“Strength to deal with reality”
Throughout history, Stone says, poetry and other forms of creative writing have served not only to document natural phenomena but also to try to understand and make sense of them.
“The poem is not meant to suggest concrete steps to follow. But I think it can provide comfort so that we can look at things that are hard to bear – we can bear them together – and I think that gives us the strength to deal with reality,” Stone said.
Visual art serves a similar purpose, says Rachel Moore, executive director of The Current, a contemporary arts center in Stowe. Natural disasters often lead to “visceral” emotional reactions such as deep grief and fear, and art can help people process those feelings, she says.
“The unique thing about art is that it allows us to confront and identify these emotions rather than turning away from them,” she said.
That’s especially true of The Current’s “Climate Imprints” exhibition, which runs through October, Moore said. The artwork is by artists from the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York — often called a “Little United Nations” because it includes artists from more than 60 countries, according to The Current’s gallery guide.
Each piece is a statement about climate change, Moore said, whether it’s a commentary on how it affects people, how it harms the environment or what causes it. The overarching theme is the impact of voluntary and involuntary climate migration on people around the world, she said – an issue that’s all too real for some Vermonters considering moving from their flood-hit towns.
“It’s so present and tangible. There’s an immediate connection now that there wasn’t before,” Moore said of the exhibit, which was installed in June, just before flooding hit Vermont again twice in July. She just hopes that through the art, viewers can see that they’re not alone in their climate fears, she said.
Art as activism
Moore said that while artists have been drawing attention to environmental issues for years, she’s seeing more dramatic statements and urgency in art now as natural disasters make the predicted impacts of climate change increasingly a reality. In recent years, she’s seen more artists, including Vermont-based ones, experiment with how best to communicate that urgency, she said.
“Art can be loud activism. But it can also be quiet awareness,” Moore said. “Everything works in its own way. You just have to find what speaks to you.”
Art doesn’t have to be displayed in a gallery to make a statement. For many Vermont creatives, summer festivals, farmers markets and other community events are the primary platform for sharing and selling artwork.
But flooding has also created new challenges for these art spaces, says Eliza West, an organizer of Plainfield’s upcoming Queer Arts Festival. The city’s sports field where the festival will be held is surrounded by water on three sides — the Great Brook, the Winooski River and Plainfield’s makeshift water main — making flooding a constant fear for organizers and vendors.
Simply holding the event then becomes a form of activism in itself, West said.
“We are here and we are doing this – we are creating a space for joy and healing – and that is a cause for celebration,” she said.
With questions about future flooding growing, it’s important to give artists the opportunity to do what they do best: offer creative solutions that go off the beaten path, West said.
“Art imagines a different, better future,” she said. “That’s a central task of artists – to imagine possibilities of what our world might look like without the templates we hold ourselves to.”
Through her own art, West wanted to help Vermonters put into words the feelings of fear caused by repeated flooding. Her cartoon “Trauma Ramen” processes the experiences of grief and trauma with humor – she compares them to instant noodles that can be brought to life by adding water.
Stone said she hopes more Vermonters can learn to use poetry in a similar way — as an outlet to express complicated feelings and show empathy for others’ situations. Through her work at the Ruth Stone House — a Goshen-based nonprofit that promotes poetry instruction — she works to make poetry an accessible art form.
Named after Stone’s late grandmother, former Vermont poet Ruth Stone, the organization hosts workshops, open houses and readings for poets of all levels. The nonprofit also runs a podcast and a literary magazine.
But to use poetry as an outlet, all you really need is a notebook and a pen, says Stone: “Just surrender to writing without expecting it to mean anything or make sense.”
Borrowing poetry books from the local library or bookstore is another way to process flood trauma through creative writing, she said, all of which can help take a step closer to understanding one’s own relationship with nature and the future of flood-prone Vermont.
“It’s so overwhelming to deal with things like flooding. There’s literally an overflow of emotions that comes with it and you feel like you’re drowning,” Stone said. “Turning inward to express what’s inside you and then putting it on paper, in art or words, is a way to find meaning in all of that.”
Skye, of Plainfield, has since found safe transitional housing but still feels “stuck.” She says she needs more time to heal before she can process the flooding through written words or visual art. When she’s ready, Skye plans to compile community members’ stories into a script for a play.
“The trauma doesn’t go away. It just sits in your body until you’re ready to let it go,” she said. “But stories keep us together. We just have to remember them.”
