The Orion Blog

Defending Tim DeChristopher

January 24, 2012, by Patrick Shea

When attorney Patrick Shea watched a U.S. Marshal handcuff his client, Tim DeChristopher, his emotions boiled over. “It’s tragic,” he writes in this special piece for Orion‘s blog, “that when we need our best and brightest to work on seemingly intractable problems…we put them in prison.” Read more about Tim in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion, and join Patrick Shea and others to discuss the future of civil disobedience during Orion‘s next live web event. Register here.

Representing Tim DeChristopher was no easy task. As a client, he was often smarter than his defense team—and he did not want to hear about the legal and procedural niceties of a federal criminal case. He wanted to tell his story to a jury of his peers.

Tim’s trial began on my sixty-third birthday. During the jury’s eleven-hour deliberation, they struggled with their desire to find Tim innocent—but were fearful, according to one juror, that Judge Dee Benson would punish them if they reached such a verdict. I believe that if Tim and his defense team had been able to articulate his intent and the necessity of quick action on climate change, the jury would have reached a different verdict. After all, Tim’s actions were driven in part by the necessity of stopping climate change.

Instead, my birthday gift was to witness a miscarriage of justice, fairness, and what I believed America stood for.

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Bookshelf: Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories

January 20, 2012, by Melinda Moustakis

Melinda Moustakis is the author of the short story collection Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, reviewed in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion. We asked Melinda a few questions about the relationship between her stories’ characters and the Alaskan landscape.

When I first started writing fiction, I spent a lot of time describing the settings of stories, and, often, the setting was more vivid and interesting and alive than any of the humans inhabiting the piece. Bear Down, Bear North is subtitled “Alaska Stories” because I wanted readers to know where the stories were set—because Alaska is as much a character as any of the humans in the book.

There’s a line in the story “The Mannequin in Soldotna” that reads, “What is the sound of a river?” I often ask myself, What is the sound of a place? What does Alaska sound like to me—in dialogue, on the page, in those still moments? A character has a voice; a landscape can have a voice. These things are all intimately connected, and when I find each element difficult to parse out, I know I’m getting something right.

I just taught The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, edited by Ben Marcus, and in the preface, he breaks down the definition of plot. One definition is the literal, a “small piece of ground,” and another is the setting or “space in which a story occurs,” a plot of land where characters live and events happen. I found this very useful in thinking about place. Plot is a piece of land, a place. Plot is place. And I like to think that characters are place as well.

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The Place Where I Write: David Roderick

January 18, 2012, by David Roderick

On occasions when the muse deigns to visit me, I’m usually catty-cornered and nursing a latte at the Green Bean in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s the only café in town that could survive if situated in one of the world-class caffeinated cities like Seattle or San Francisco. I’m drawn to the Green Bean because of the quality free-trade beans, but also because there’s a southern mellowness to the atmosphere, and because the baristas are friendly and sport garish tattoos on every square inch of their arms, and because I can go wireless for free all day. The clientele is business/slacker, black/white, old/young. Bohemian is hard to find in this city. I’m more fauxhemian, but the Green Bean is the only place downtown where it’s maybe normal for a gawky, bald dude to lumber through the door every morning and wrestle with poems in the corner.

Right now I’m studying the scene from that very corner. The layout is narrow but deep. Gouges and scuffs mar the wide-board floor. There isn’t a wobbly table or chair in the joint. A white stamped-tin ceiling stares down at me when I beckon the heavens for inspiration. In years past this place might have been a salon or refectory; it might have been a pool hall, a bookstore, a gastro pub.

The physical feature that appeals to me most, more than the walls’ assemblage of hack paintings and photographs that try too hard to speak, are the walls themselves. Algae-green, they’re pocked with a gazillion screw and nail holes, some of which are so big I could stick my finger inside and sample the plaster. Collectively they remind me of avian bore-holes or simply eyes. That no one has attempted to spackle and sand and paint over them charms me. I guess I like inhabiting a space that feels well-used, that flaunts its own history. Most of my attempts at poetry are ephemeral, a palimpsest of hammered errors. When I’m lucky enough to feel the awesome, buzzy, caffeinated sensation I get when I’m (as athletes like to say) in the zone, and my poem’s voice and tone are calibrated and the lines flow easy, even those successes are buttressed, I know, by all of my past failures. Most days I can’t close out a poem. Some days I can’t even begin one.

Today I’m having no luck, so instead I work on these paragraphs. I watch people. I absorb residual details. Ball bearings click in a cop’s sleek bike. A damned good Pandora stream hiccups from Wilco to Toad the Wet Sprocket. A freight train sounds a block away. The muse won’t visit me today, but my coffee has kick, and I know if I keep returning to this spot my fingers will eventually find a few sentences that tremble. On those occasions, rare as they are, I feel like a king.

David Roderick’s first book, Blue Colonial, won the American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize. He teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His poem “Dear Suburb” appeared in the November/December 2011 issue of Orion.

Dig Deeper

January 17, 2012, by Bill McKibben

Ever since Tim DeChristopher raised a bidder’s paddle in 2008, Bill McKibben has been by his side, helping the climate movement understand why Tim’s act of civil disobedience was so bold and so necessary. “We were moved by Tim’s sacrifice,” writes McKibben in this special reflection on Orion’s blog. Another long-time friend and confidante of Tim’s is Terry Tempest Williams, who interviewed him (“What Love Looks Like”) in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion.

It’s odd the amount a leader can accomplish without even being on the scene.

We’ve been missing Tim DeChristopher for better than six months now, ever since he was swept out of the courtroom and into the federal prison system. But he’s as big a part as ever of the fight for a working planet.

And the reason, I think, is not just that he can send inspiring e-mails and speeches out of prison (as he did before the Keystone XL oil pipeline demonstrations in the fall). It’s that he left such simple marching orders: do more. Dig deeper. Don’t be afraid. They’ve inspired his excellent organization, Peaceful Uprising, and by extension all the rest of us engaged in this work, not because he’s charismatic (though he is) or because we’re moved by his sacrifice (though we are). But because he’s right.

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The Place Where I Write: Janice N. Harrington

January 10, 2012, by Janice N. Harrington

It’s a small L-shaped room, and at the end of its longest side there’s a small alcove, roughly a yard long and yard wide. It’s the view through the alcove’s eastern window that a visitor would especially like—the magnolia’s pink and dizzy profusions in the spring, full moons caught in a hairnet of black limbs—but, best of all, on the narrow sill of the eastern window: nineteen empty blue bottles (wine, Bromo-Seltzer, exotic lotions, Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia) collected on walks, given to me by family, or purchased for a modest fee from an antique store in Hannibal, Missouri. At daybreak, the sunlight strikes the bottles and leaves blue light over the pale stucco walls, intense panes of cobalt blue like the stained glass of Chartres Cathedral.

My work station sits at the entry to the eastern alcove. Several encyclopedias and The Riverside Shakespeare hold my mouse and mouse pad. Volumes J-K, L, H, Ci to Cz, and F of the 1964 World Book Encyclopedia lift my keyboard, and another stack of books holds up the computer monitor. This arrangement allows me to stand, easing a right shoulder that is prone to crankiness. On the desk, where my computer looms, are several dog-eared collections by favorite poets, a tea cup (still holding its dregs of tea) and tea pot, flower pots filled with pens and pencils, a basket of hand fans (heat flashes), and, given pride of place, an antique tin of Prince Albert Crimp Cut Long Burning Pipe and Cigarette Tobacco, the brand my grandfather smoked. Don’t ask me why, it just has to be there when I begin working. On the stucco walls, behind my work station, hangs a collection of taped photocopies and handwritten notes: helpful grammatical advice, instructions for backing up the computer, the definition of words that I like to confuse with one another, and, on carefully folded paper, words I transcribed by hand from the movie Babette’s Feast based on a story by Isak Dinesen.

There comes a time when your eyes are opened, and we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence and receive it with gratitude. Mercy imposes no conditions. And lo! Everything we’ve chosen has been granted to us and everything we rejected has also been granted.

Janice N. Harrington’s poetry collection, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, was published in October 2011 by Boa Editions. A former librarian and professional storyteller, she now teaches at the University of Illinois. Harrington’s poem “Wild Onion” appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of Orion.