Three Haines artists were recently recognized by the Rasmuson Foundation, which announced its Individual Artist awardees earlier this month.
Shannon Kelly Donahue took home one of the $10,000 awards, which will help fund her work on a personal memoir that involves travel to Ireland. Andrea Nelson was another awardee. She’s building a collection of sculptural taxidermy to shed light on the northern fur trade.
Writer, biologist and part-time resident Caroline Van Hemert also took home an award. She recently finished sailing the Northwest Passage with her family, and the trip is among the adventures that will inform her new memoir, titled “Upwellings.” The book is about finding hope and joy in the natural world amid climate change and environmental collapse.
Van Hemert sat down with KHNS to talk about the $10,000 award and the project it will help fund.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Caroline Van Hemert: I’m working on a book project right now. So that’s what the Rasmuson specifically is helping to support. And it’s a combination of artist time, and I’ll be using some of my funds for some specific travel, hopefully doing a little bit more in Southeast Alaska, not too far from home. And then maybe make a trip up to the Arctic as well.
Avery Ellfeldt: You said the award is supporting specifically your new book. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? What’s it called? What’s the focus, and where are you at in that process right now?
CVH: It’s tentatively titled Upwellings, which actually comes from a moment when I was sitting at our cabin on Lynn Canal and looking out and watching a bunch of gulls beat up wind on a day probably very similar to what is happening now, with some fierce north winds, and trying to understand what they were doing and why they were doing it. And that led me into lots of other questions about the exceptions and extensions to the natural world that often get overlooked. And so the book is a memoir, but it’s kind of a collection of both home-based and travel-based pieces, really, each of them starting with a specific encounter with a wild species that then helps me contemplate bigger questions about climate change and also our relationship to the natural world.
AE: In the Rasmuson blurb about your award specifically, it says you’ll work on your memoir to confront the “collapse” you’ve observed by way of wildlife health research. Could you tell me a little bit more about that – what they might mean by collapse?
CVH: In terms of collapse, I’m referring to some of the ecological and environmental situations that have been unfolding. And I think it’s an alternative, again, to that, that narrative of gloom. We are so inundated with, you know, the story of the end of the world as we know it, which is not entirely untrue. But I think trying to draw on examples from the natural world of existing creativity and solutions and things that we don’t always think about when we look outside and see these massive changes.
AE: Has there been an example of collapse or change or shift that you’ve experienced and that’s made a large impact on you, or that you think has been particularly compelling or jarring to observe?
CVH: Where we live on Lynn Canal is very close to the Davidson Glacier. Anyone who spent any time in or around Haines knows that feature and knows how rapidly it’s changing. So it’s hard not to look at things like that and feel sort of the overwhelm of how rapidly our landscape is shifting.
Sometimes there’s a sense that you can almost run from the bad news by going to the places that we love. But I think this book has come about in part because there isn’t really a running from those experiences so much as trying to figure out, how do you grapple with them? And what are some of the ways that we can both acknowledge the state of change, but gather the joy and the wonder that I think ultimately motivates all of us to think differently, and maybe live differently, in a larger collective way.
