Plainfield resident Sequana Skye once saw the Great Brook in Plainfield as inspiration for storytelling.
Whether writing poetry, taking photos or dreaming up stage plays, Skye said the babbling brook, which ran alongside her apartment’s deck, created a sanctuary for creativity every day since she moved to the central Vermont town last summer.
Now, Skye sees the Great Brook as a source of destruction.
She heard tumbling rocks and debris “shake the earth” beside her first-floor apartment as she watched the Great Brook swell on July 10. She packed a bag with necessities — a toothbrush, underwear, and food for her dog, Georgia, and her cat, Chihiro — and evacuated with her pets.
She returned the next morning to her apartment smothered in silt. It was even trapped in the refrigerator and piled up in the bathtub, she said. All of her notebooks, including four she filled with wisdom and thoughts for each of her grandchildren, were caked in mud and completely unsalvageable.
“So I’m starting over,” she said. “I guess that’s what you do with art.”
Like Skye, many of Vermont’s artists and writers are grappling with the aftermath of this summer’s floods and the increased likelihood of future flooding.
Many creators have lost physical materials, such as books, art supplies and studio spaces. Some feel lost as they navigate a new kind of connection with the natural world. Others are rethinking how traditional arts venues and community events must evolve to meet the demands of a changing climate.
It all adds up to influence creative expression, said Bianca Stone, Vermont’s recently appointed poet laureate. More and more, she said, she’s seeing fear of the unknown future — and the anger and sorrow that come with the loss of former realities — as themes that seep into Vermonters’ work.
“Even if it’s not the main element of the story or the narrative, it’s the darker undercurrent of so much artistic expression right now,” she said. “There’s this literal cloud hanging over us that could break at any minute.”
‘Strength to deal with the reality’
Throughout history, Stone said, poetry and other forms of creative writing have served as a way to not only document natural phenomena, but also attempt to make sense of and give meaning to them.
“The poem isn’t there to offer concrete steps to follow. But I think it can offer comfort, so we can look at things that are hard to look at — we can bear them together — and I think that that gives us the strength to deal with the reality,” Stone said.
Visual art serves a similar purpose, said Rachel Moore, executive director of The Current, a contemporary art center in Stowe. Natural disasters often lead to “visceral” emotional reactions, such as intense sadness and fear, and art can help people unpack those feelings, she said.
“What art does that’s very unique is it allows us to sit with these emotions and identify them, rather than turn away from them,” she said.
That’s especially true at The Current’s “Climate Imprints” exhibit, which is on display until October, Moore said. The artwork comes from creators of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York — often called the “Little United Nations” because it includes artists from more than 60 countries, according to The Current’s gallery guidebook.
Each piece makes a statement about climate change, Moore said, whether commenting on how it affects people, how it damages the environment or what causes it. The overarching theme is the impact of voluntary and involuntary climate migration on people across the globe, she said — a topic that is all too real for some Vermonters who are considering moving away from their flood-damaged towns.
“It’s so present and tangible. There’s an immediate connection now, where there wasn’t before,” Moore said about the exhibit, which was installed in June, just before floods revisited Vermont twice in July. All she hopes, she said, is that viewers can use the art to know they’re not alone in their climate anxieties.
Art as activism
Moore said that, while artists have been calling attention to environmental issues for years, she sees drastic statements and more urgency in art now that natural disasters are increasingly making the predicted effects of climate change a reality. In recent years, she’s observed more artists, including those in Vermont, experimenting with how to best communicate that urgency, she said.
“Art can be a loud activism. It can also be a quiet awareness,” Moore said. “It all works in its own way. You just have to find what speaks to you.”
Art doesn’t have to be in a gallery to make a statement. For many Vermont creatives, summer festivals, farmers markets and other community events are the main platform for sharing and selling artwork.
But floods have introduced new challenges to those artistic spaces, too, said Eliza West, an organizer of the upcoming Queer Arts Festival in Plainfield. The town’s recreation field, where the festival is set to take place, is surrounded on three sides by water — the Great Brook, Winooski River and Plainfield’s temporary water pipeline — making flooding a constant fear for organizers and vendors.
Simply putting on the event then becomes its own form of activism, West said.
“We’re here, and we’re doing this — creating a space for joy and healing — and that’s a reason to celebrate,” she said.
As questions regarding future flooding grow, West said, it’s important to give artists the opportunity to do what they do best: offer creative solutions that break the mold.
“Art envisions a different, better future,” she said. “That’s a key job of artists — to conceive possibilities of what our world could be like without the templates we hold ourselves to.”
In her own art, West sought to help Vermonters put words to the feeling of anxiety generated by repeated flooding events. Her “Trauma Ramen” cartoon breaks down the experiences of grief and trauma with humor — comparing them to instant noodles that can be brought to life when water is added.
Stone said she hopes that more Vermonters can learn to use poetry in a similar way — as an outlet for expressing complicated feelings and having empathy for others’ situations. Through her work at the Ruth Stone House — a Goshen-based nonprofit that promotes poetry education — she works to make poetry an accessible artform.
Named after Stone’s late grandmother, former Vermont poet laureate Ruth Stone, the organization hosts workshops, open houses and reading events for poets of all experience levels. The nonprofit also runs a podcast and a literary magazine.
But all you really need to use poetry as an outlet is a notebook and a pen, Stone said: “Just surrender yourself to writing without any expectations about it having to mean anything or make sense.”
Checking out poetry collections from your local library or bookstore is another avenue for processing flood trauma through creative writing, she said. It can all help to get one step closer to understanding your relationship with the natural world and the future of a flood-prone Vermont.
“It’s so overwhelming to deal with things like flooding. It’s literally a flooding of emotions that comes with it, right, and you feel like you’re drowning,” Stone said. “So turning inward to express what’s inside and then getting it out onto the page, in art or words, is one way to find meaning in all of this.”
Meanwhile, Skye of Plainfield has found safe temporary housing but still feels “stuck.” She said she needs more time to heal before she can process the flooding through written words or visual art. When she’s ready, Skye plans to compile community members’ flood stories into a script for a stage play.
“The trauma doesn’t go away. It just settles in your body until you’re ready to let it go,” she said. “But stories hold us together. We just have to remember that.”
