The essay “Smoke” by Catherine Young is reaction to and experience of the wildfire ash that began to cover our Midwestern skies in the fall of 2020 against the background of having grown up in the smoke of the largest coal mining valley in the world.

Catherine Young reads 2 poems from her poetry collection Geosmin that address the loss of farming in Wisconsin’s Driftless Region. The Janus in FARMER / JANUS refers to the two-faced Roman god of beginnings, doorways, passages and endings. The farmer looking forward...

Catherine reads GATHERING ACORNS, HOARDING WORDS from her poetry collection Geosmin. In his piece, “The Word Hoard” British writer-naturalist Robert MacFarlane noted the proposed removal of words about the natural world in the children’s Oxford Dictionary—and this led...

Catherine reads 2 poems to celebrate October: Barbara Crooker’s AND NOW IT’S OCTOBER and Genevieve Taggart’s THE VAST HOUR.

The Crystalline Bed of St. Peter, Part II, by Catherine Young Smitten with the layers of limestone and sandstone that line these Wisconsin hills, these loveliest of golden layer cakes, how does one person dwelling in the Driftless Area protect the land and waters?

The Crystalline Bed of St. Peter, Part I, by Catherine Young Smitten with the layers of limestone and sandstone that line these Wisconsin hills, these loveliest of golden layer cakes, how does one person dwelling in the Driftless Area protect the land and waters?

INVOCATION: CALL IT HOME by Catherine Young is from the poetry collection Geosmin. Begun in 2007 in response to the first wave of devastating floods in our Driftless region, the poem is a way to speak what is beloved and why we stay. INVOCATION was published as a...

STIPPLED PASSING September 23, 2021 Catherine reads STIPPLED PASSING from her poetry collection Geosmin. The poem is response to the Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem PIED BEAUTY and its “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim” as well as the trout in a farm’s...