Video: Charles recorded his poem, "Who Are You Rooting For?" for The Nature of Isolation series, hosted by The Spring Creek Project.
Featured Prose:
"Fathering the Night" (first published in The Sun) "Carrying the baby horizontally across my chest like a football usually calms him, and often puts him to sleep. But not tonight. He’s still crying, cycling through his whole repertoire: the screechy fear cry; the lower, throaty demand cry; the pitiable gasping interspersed with slobbery whimpers..." READ MORE
"Home Birth" (first published in The Sun) "I’m sitting at the kitchen table, staring into the gaps between the planks of the wood floor. I went to great lengths to cinch those boards tight when I laid them, but the tongue-and-groove pine shrank. Now, if I got down on my hands and knees and peered into one of those gaps, I would see a veritable ecosystem..." READ MORE
"Remodeling the Hovel" (first published in The Sun) "I dig another nailhead out of the old siding with the cat’s-paw, slip a crowbar around it, and then draw the 16d sinker out. The squawk of the nail letting go jangles my nerves. If an unwelcome memory wanted to announce itself with a noise, the cry of a rusty nail would do the job..." READ MORE
Featured Poetry:
Listen to Hank Green read Charles' poem "A Lecture on Aphids" on Ars Poetic
"Unclogging a Drain during the Impeachment Trial" on New Verse News
"Not an Omen" on Verse Daily
Audio:
Listen to Garrison Keillor reading Charles' poems on The Writers' Almanac
*Cabbage Moths
*Vacuuming Spiders
*Truck Garden
*Evening Star
*Wild Geese
*A Lecture on Aphids
Video:
Charles reading "Garden Noir" from his book, GOING TO SEED
Selected Publications
Charles was lead editor, with Kathleen Dean Moore and Fred Swanson, of the volume In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens, which includes essays and poems by Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stafford, Robert Michael Pyle, Robin Kimmerer and others.
Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest
Edited by Charles Goodrich, Frederick J. Swanson, and Nathaniel Brodie, University of Washington Press
This anthology--which includes work by some of the nation's most accomplished writers, including Sandra Alcosser, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Jane Hirshfield, Linda Hogan, Freeman House, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robert Michael Pyle, Pattiann Rogers, and Scott Russell Sanders--grows out of the work of the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program and showcases the insights of the program's thoughtful and important encounters among writers, scientists, and place. These vivid essays, poems, and field notes convey a landscape of moss-draped trees, patchwork clear-cuts, stream-swept gravel bars, and hillsides scoured by fire, and also bring forward the ambiguities and paradoxes of conflicting human values and their implications for the ecosystem.
"To learn one place in the world may be the beginning of learning our place in the world. Like the old-growth forest where they were written, these wonderfully thoughtful descriptions, essays, poems, and meditations offer rich and vigorous variety, exquisite detail, and broad vistas of time and possibility.— Ursula K. Le Guin
“There are many ways to see and experience a forest and this diversity is beautifully represented in this collection of poems, essays, and observations by a diverse array of artists who participated in a long-term reflections program at the H. J. Andrews Experimental. In my nearly 60 years of studying the forests of Andrews, I remain humbled by their magnificence - and now by the deep, fresh insights of the many writers represented in this book." -- Jerry F. Franklin
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The Ecopoetry Anthology, a remarkable collection edited by Ann Fisher-Worth and Laura-Gray Street (Trinity University Press, 2013) includes Charles' "Millennial Spring" a prose piece with embedded haiku-like poems modeled on the Japanese haibun. The introduction by Robert Hass is an insightful overview. Click here for more info about this cool book.