Elizabeth Herron
Treasurer and Director, Telos Project

http://www.sonoma.edu/users/h/herronel/

• Professor of Arts and Humanities, SSU—Creative writing, contemplation and creative process, literature and arts exploration, ecology and the humanities
• Published author of prose and poetry
• Psychotherapist - MA 1968, CA State licensed Marriage and Family Therapist

Elizabeth Carothers Herron – Bio

I was about four years old when I happened to be standing on the couch, which was just inside the living room window, early one evening when the temperature dropped precipitously. I watched in wonder as the season’s first frost formed feathers of ice on the darkening glass. Shadows danced on the wall around the window from the blaze in the fireplace behind me, and I was aware of my mother in the kitchen where the light burned brightly. All the while the frost unfurled in layers of white ferns on the glass, I watched spellbound. In those moments, I established a life-long pattern of straddling two worlds: the world of domestic action – light, warmth, food and human relationships and another world -- one of mystery, silence and revelation. The essence of who I am, as both a writer and a person, is rooted in that experience of surprising grace.

I did not mention this experience to anyone until many years later. When I did, to my surprise, I found that very few people have actually seen frost form. My witnessing was apparently rather rare, and only now do I have words for what I always I felt about it – that I had received both a calling and a blessing. Although I have looked carefully at frost many a winter since, never again have I been able to witness it come into being. Still, I have held to that original perception of the magic of nature in my calling as a poet.

Even my preoccupation with giving voice to the disregarded goes back to those earliest years. I recall realizing that the flowers needed tending and that others might not hear them ask for water. The truth is that I tend to over-water and have nearly drowned more than one houseplant, the latest of which was a lovely white orchid. While it is in harmony with my character to want to protect the earth and its wild inhabitants, my commitment to eco-activism developed after the infamous Dunsmuir Spill of 1991, when thousands of gallons of herbicide bled into the Sacramento River from a derailed Southern Pacific tanker car, killing untold numbers of wild trout along with everything else in or near the river.

I often feel the liminality of my personal life is echoed in my living at a point of enormous change on the planet. In the sixth age of extinction and the first induced by humans, so many species are perishing that I sometimes think all the large mammals will be gone from the earth before I am. Working with Telos gives me an opportunity to join with others who want to protect and preserve the natural systems life depends upon – our air, our water, our soil. In Telos’ efforts toward sustainability, the Climate Protection Campaign in particular has accomplished astonishing things here in Sonoma County (see www.skymetrics.com); and I feel privileged to be able to support that effort.

I think of the creatures roaming the earth – the great bears of North America, the Siberian tigers of Eurasia, the African elephants, the whales traveling our oceans – who need so much more than our rapacious reaping and reproduction leave for them, and I feel a great sorrow. It is in serving that my sorrow is eased, and so I am grateful for the opportunity to serve on the Telos Board of Directors. Because I believe that joy is the Spirit’s home, I am also gratful for the fellowship and good cheer of our meetings.

I have lived most of my life in Sonoma County, where I currently make my home in a small town west of the urban center of Santa Rosa. Teaching at Sonoma State University has supported my work as a writer and given me the opportunity to develop in more extraverted ways through the demands of the classroom. I teach Humanities 200, Ecological Living, which introduces students to a vision of themselves as part of the earth rather than separate from it; and in the spring I teach classes in creative writing and creative process.

My current writing centers around completion of a collection of essays about the human relationship to the natural world and a book-length poem, The Poet’s House, written in participation with sculptor, Bruce Johnson, for his Poetry House project (see www.formandenergy.com). Sundry grants and residencies have supported my work. My writings have been published in several books and as separate pieces in various literary and academic journals and magazines. I read my poems occasionally on campuses, in galleries, at conferences, in libraries and bookstores, and for gatherings of friends. ehsalmon@earthlink.net will get your email to me. I live in the Atascadero watershed with Samba and Jagger (aka Pretzel), two lively little felines.

Published works include Desire Being Full of Distances (Calliopea Press),Inside the World, an audio cassette (Thursday Nights),While the Distance Widens, short fiction (Floating Island), and a chapbook of poems, The Stones the Dark Earth (Harlequin Ink). New poems and sections of my current collection of essays have appeared in Wild Duck Review, Revision, Northern Lights and Orion. My chapbook, Language for the Wild, was printed by Hillside Press of San Francisco for an exhibit at the Quicksilver Mine Company gallery in the fall of 2001. I have received San Francisco's Small Press Traffic award for poetry and Sonoma County Foundation's Grants to Individual Artists, (co-funded by the National Endowment for the Arts). For copies of my books, please contact me at the email address above.
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