I want to say thank you.
My-- I had a good friend commit suicide Friday night,
and my cat died a week before that,
and we all know what's happening tomorrow is a fuck bath,
and so I think you could have saved my life.
So I just want to say, thanks.
And my name is Kim, and I mean it.
I'm a writer, and I always say if I touch one person's life
and make one person in this whole world
feel better than I did my job and you did that for me
tonight, so thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
You're welcome.
It's not a poetry question, but thank you so much
for that reading.
Could you talk about the community orchard
and just how it got started, and how it carries on?
It sounds so wonderful.
Yeah.
So a woman named Amy Countryman, it
was like an undergraduate project,
and she was doing research on food sovereignty and food
security and she wanted to find out precisely
like what the percentage of fruit-producing-- food
producing trees there were in Bloomington's urban canopy.
The tree's managed by the city, and it was very low,
probably less than 1%.
So she was thinking about how do we feed ourselves?
And so she sort of proposed an urban orchard,
a community orchard, and that's-- community orchards are
not unfamiliar historically, et cetera.
But anyway she wrote about that, and she
had an advisor who knew the forester at the city.
So the advisor said, well, propose this to the forester.
The forester said, well, if you get big turn, like big support,
we'll give you--
let you have an acre, and see if we can give you a little seed
money.
So she had a call out meeting, and it
was like a room like this, full like this,
Because that's Bloomington and that's
kind of how Bloomington is.
And then we started to imagine what it takes--
we didn't know how to do this.
We started to imagine what it takes to make an orchard.
All kinds of expertise, like all the levels of expertise,
some of which was just like me.
I could dig good and move a wheelbarrow real good,
and other people were like botanists and stuff.
So we broke into teams and we started working on the site,
and we started working on like plant selection
and we started doing all this stuff.
But the thing that's fascinating to me-- and we
planted an orchard in six, eight months, something like that,
but the thing that's fascinating to me
are the sort of real profound questions, conversations
we had about community.
And to me, I think I mentioned this
over dinner, but to me, the biggest question--
when you make a thing, and you make
a thing that takes all kinds of work and stuff like that,
you're constantly trying to figure out
who is your community.
That's the question of this orchard-- who's our community?
The community is the whole community.
But it's always-- it's very easy to neglect,
to sort of be blind.
We have blind spots.
But we're trying to imagine this big, totally inclusive notion
of community, doing the hard work of that, and we stumble.
But among the questions that we had and the conversations we
had that to me is so moving, it's
like do we put a lock on the gate of the orchard?
I mean, it's like thousands of hours
to make this thing, thousands of hours.
And some people are afraid people are going to like rip
up the trees or something.
These are profound questions about our community,
about how we're going to be neighbors.
So there's not a lock on the orchard.
That's to me, like some of the sort of questions that-- that's
one of the big questions that we had as a project,
as a community.
So it's a study in community.
The orchard continues on now.
The trees are getting to like their productive some of them
get into their productive years.
There's a Board.
There's tons of volunteers.
When we started, there was like a little cohort of volunteers.
Now there's tons and tons of volunteers who are really
tapped into the University, and some of the faith organizations
in town.
And we have 10 classes a year.
We have all kinds of festivals on the site.
Some people have things on site.
You can use a site for other things,
but it's a park so you can go there any time you want.
So when I say you if you're driving through Indiana,
or if you have a designation to Indiana, Indiana designation,
you can go to the Bloomington Community Orchard.
And if you go there in the summer,
you can go pick some fruit.
Does that answer your question?
That's what it is.
There's a really good website, too--
BloomingtonCommunityOrchard.org.
Yeah.
Can I ask you about this they don't
like about if you feel like you had like an aha moment
with orienting towards gratitude or if it's something
that you learned really early in life where if you--
if there was a process, if it was a big--
I mean, like this is a hard world that we're in,
and how did you orient in the way that you did
or become who you are?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't actually know the answer to that question.
I know that in my second book, toward the end of the book,
I started writing these odes that I liked
writing more than the other things I was writing,
and I liked because of what they were doing for my heart.
I realized that there are many engines at play
in making a poem, and some of the engines
are these sort of critical engines,
and some of the engines are like engines of love.
And I sort of realized that foregrounding the engines
of love makes me happy.
I love that.
There's critical love as well, and that's
sort of one of the questions of how
to sort of do that or manage that, make poems out of that.
So that's a kind of a thing.
The other thing is that I sort of was reading a lot of poems
by my friends, contemporary poems and stuff
like that, and younger writers.
And I was thinking, I mean, literally I was at a reading
and then I was working out afterwards
and I was like, someone needs to write a catalog
of unabashed gratitude.
And then so I was like, oh, I guess I'll do it.
That works.
We have time for one or two more.
I just have a quick follow-up.
What do you mean by critical of force?
Yeah, love that, when it is sort of trying to-- a love that
understands that we live in sort of--
not hard to imagine-- that we live in sort of troubled--
amidst troubles, and that corrects and imagines.
It's sort of a visionary love that
imagines as much as it sort of destroys, or maybe more
than destroys, so that critique is
implied in the sort of vision.
So the world that I want to live in implies a kind of critique.
I think.
But it's not critique that ends at critique.
It's critique that generates the life that I can live.
So that something like that, critical love.
Yeah.
Could you tell us a little about how you became a writer?
And it's pretty evident that you get a lot of your inspiration
from the places around you, but are there any people
that inspire you when you write?
Yeah, I mean, tons of-- there's tons of poets and writers
that are in my work.
I will, time to time, like look at a poem
and I'll be like, wait, that--
I completely stole that thing from so and so.
I know a lot of them that I've stolen from because I'm
proud to do that.
I have loved to do that.
But then sometimes I'll realize, oh,
I had been carrying around so-and-so's poem
in my pocket for two months.
And, oh, no wonder that looks like a Mary Ruefle poem,
or whoever else.
So other poets and other writers are really important to me.
My friends, like this sort of thing
that I see things that I see in the world like endlessly,
endlessly inspired by interactions.
There's a guy I saw as I was walking
to an Ethiopian restaurant today and there
was a guy skating in like--
first I saw him from afar, and I could
tell someone was kind of skating,
and I was like, I hope those are roller skates.
Because you don't see roller skates all the time anymore.
Sure enough, not only were they roller skates,
they were like half purple and half pink roller skates.
That person is going to show up in something I write.
That was a gift.
And that person roller skated-- as I went by and saw
where the person had roller skated,
they roller skated over this thing that
said-- what did it say?
It said, repent.
Fear God.
I love that.
That this beautiful dude was like cleaning that surface
by skating over it, like erasing it just a little bit.
Yeah.
So that's to say, yes.
All the time.
Yeah.
We'll do one last question.
There'll be time for more one-on-one.
OK.
I mostly just wanted to point out
like you're attending to so much stuff,
and say you have your orchard, and people
could drive by and not know about it,
but by attending to it you're bringing energy into the world.
And I don't know-- probably a lot
of people don't know that the University of Arizona
is also an arboretum.
Oh, cool.
They planted different trees and things
and you could go online and go on a tour
and there's some pretty nice fig trees.
You said fig trees?
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Do they ripen in September here, too, ish?
August, September.
Earlier?
Earlier.
OK.
Yeah.
Well, I mean that's like part of the thing, right.
I like, among the jobs that I have as a writer,
among the jobs that I have that I
love is that I get to sing about shit that I love,
like you just did a thing.
It's like how beautiful is that?
Super beautiful and thank you.