Rachel Richardson, ’04, explores questions like this in her latest poetry collection, Smother. Her nuanced take on our relationship to fire began first began as a project to understand the pain she felt after a friend’s death, but morphed as a response to the surge of California wildfires from 2017-21.
“As I was writing those poems, the smoke of the fires kind of kept coming in and interrupting what I was thinking about,” Richardson says.
One of her poems, “Fishbowl,” references those moments: “While over the crest of hills, smoke wafts toward us, and opening the door of our own glassed enclosure brings the smell of campfire, which is the burning of houses, hotels, and suburban trees fifty miles north. It’s an old story, a fable we’re learning to tell: another fall, another fire.”
How fire ravages the land and invokes such an upheaval by nearby communities continued to prey on Richardson’s psyche, so much so that she couldn’t help but do something about it beyond her poetry. After she finished writing Smother, she found the inaugural call for the University of Idaho Confluence Lab’s Artists-in-Fire residency, which supports artists and writers from the Pacific Northwest and adjacent regions as boots-on-the-ground participants in prescribed fire experiences.
“Instead of just living with the consequences of wildfires, I wanted to try to change the consequences of them and think about how humans live with the reality of being in a fire-prone landscape,” she says.
During the residency, she received the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s “Firefighter Type 2” crewmember wildfire training, and took part in several controlled burns.
“The crew you’re with, it becomes like family, and to focus on a collaborative goal like fighting a fire, it’s a beautiful way of working with other people,” she says.
Smother is a collection rife with poignant musings on grief and loss, both emotional and environmental. Richardson hopes her poetry reflects the fulfilling community she built while in firefighter training.
“These poems are about motherhood, caring for those you love,” Richardson says, “and the resilience of friendships, relationships, during what some might see as apocalyptic end times, with all these fires burning across the U.S.”
The Berkeley-based poet is also a writing workshop facilitator. She and her husband founded Left Margin Lit in 2016, a workshop and work-sharing space offering online and offline classes on many facets of writing, such as how to craft nature poems and completing a memorable memoir.
“We wanted to model Left Margin Lit on the intimacy and rigor of an MFA-style workshop, where members can come for continued practice, and truly this is something I would’ve loved to have when we I first got to Berkeley,” Richardson says.
Though well-versed in other writing mediums, Richardson returns to poetry its ability to distill complex emotions.
“The way that language is so precise, and way that it can crystallize a feeling or an experience, it’s clearer in poetry for me than any other form [of writing] I’ve tried,” she says.
