Haines writer Shannon Donahue just returned to town after a monthlong stay at the Storyknife writers’ retreat in Homer.
During that time, Donahue was awarded the Evangeline Atwood fellowship, which came with a $1,000 stipend. She also published a Chilkat Valley-based lyric poem in the latest edition of the quarterly Catamaran Literary Reader.
Donahue talked with editor Rashah McChesney about what has informed her writing and what she’s working on now.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Rashah McChesney: Your poem embraces water as a unifying, healing force—particularly in grief. What inspired this vision of water?
Shannon Donahue: I lost my partner when I was 33 years old, just a couple years after I’d moved to Haines. That was very obviously a very formative experience for me. He died in the spring and that summer I was in Haines and trying to navigate my way through this incredibly disruptive and isolating and world-shattering experience of losing my partner. I started to see my grief as an ocean within me. It was, sort of, this tempestuous force within me that I could not contain. And, as I moved through that journey, I started to see the grief in other people. I remember walking around town, being at the post office, seeing people who I didn’t even know and being able to see their grief.
I realized that even though grief can be a very isolating and individual experience, it’s also a very universal experience. I think that when we’re able to connect with other people, grief flows into each other and can be very healing. In 2020, a friend of mine’s mother was dying. As he was talking to me about his experience, I remember feeling his grief within me and my own grief came up and they were sort of the same thing, they flowed into each other.
You describe changing forms—your friend as seal, the blending of sea and sky. How does transformation figure into your literary vision?
The whole piece is about transformation on so many different levels. It’s about a transformative, joyous experience that I had with some friends, just swimming in Port Chilkoot in the middle of the night. You can step into the sea and have a transformative experience just doing that connecting with each other and with the natural world, so that’s sort of like on that very basic level.
[My friend] was a very special person. I’ve always seen her as somebody very capable of transformation. That night I had that flash of seeing her as a seal so I was trying to capture that moment. You find out as the piece goes on that she died, so it’s really a mediation of that transformation from life to death but at the same time I’m also talking about rebirth. I talk about salmon… as we see in their life cycles they go out to sea and they come back to their natal streams and reproduce and die and their bodies nurture the next generation and also the forest.
The poem vividly evokes Haines, Port Chilkoot, and estuarine life. How important is the Chilkat Valley landscape in shaping your poetic work?
I’m a very place-based writer, so my work is definitely shaped by places that are significant to me. I moved to Haines in 2010. I was just so overwhelmed by the beauty and the biodiversity here and just what a spectacular place this is after I’d already been living in Alaska for 10 years and moving around the state, looking for my home. I do write a lot about the natural world and I write about our connection to place and I think just the nature of the Chilkat Valley is something that really infuses every aspect of us living here.
How does ritual factor into your healing and creative process?
I’m really interested in ritual. I think that I see opportunity for ritual in everyday experiences, so I think that would maybe speak to that tension in the way that you are interpreting that swim. It was absolutely spontaneous, but also I don’t participate in organized religion so my understanding of ritual is less about the same type of practice happening over and over again at a specific time or place. I see opportunities for ritual every time that we are interacting with the natural world.
I think it also comes from a belief that there’s sacredness in the natural world. There’s sacredness in water. I do have sort of my own writing ritual that involves certain things, like material things that sort of inspire me and help me get into sort of a flow. Right now in my writing desk I have jars of water from three different holy wells in Ireland. Those are just to remind me of that sacredness of water. Whether it’s from a holy water feature or water in a puddle. All water is sacred.
As a writer who alternates between grant writing, op-eds, and lyric poetry, how do activism and artistry inform each other in your practice?
Getting into a career of environmental activism and advocacy — it’s a career that can take everything from you. There’s an urgency and a pressure to put everything that you have into your activism. I’ve spent the last 20 years really prioritizing my activism and advocacy work. So, at some point, I stopped writing creatively.
Over the last few years I’ve chosen to shift things and prioritize my creativity. A lot of that came from reflection during the pandemic. A lot of us were reassessing our life choices and getting back into our values. But also it came from burning out.
So I started trying to connect with that creative side and also looking to my ancestors for wisdom particularly during the pandemic when things were so frightening. I was looking back at how my ancestry had survived the famine in Ireland and the criminalization of their native language and colonization and immigration and eventually on down the line here I am.
So I started learning the Irish language and that was kind of my entry back into the world of writing. On the one hand it was prioritizing language for the sake of language and not for a utilitarian purpose. But also the Irish language is so poetic. The words themselves just have these really poetic meanings. The word of maiden translates to sky woman or the word for strawberry translates to the juice of the land. That just opened up so much in me that I had forgotten about.
I spent three months in Ireland, where my family is from… where Irish is still spoken. Prioritizing that and creating that space and physically going to reconnect with my Irish heritage just opened up the flood gates and then words started pouring out of me.
What’s next for you creatively?
My manuscript is my main priority right now. It’s a braided memoir. I’m sort of structuring it based on a braided river like the Chilkat and Klehini river systems.
There’s one thread that’s of my personal experience of grieving the loss of my partner. There’s also the thread of my experience with polar bears and Hudson Bay over the last two decades and that ecological grief. Then I also have a thread that has to do with my family heritage and Irish folklore which is about my family banshees.
A banshee is a figure in Irish folklore who is a female ancestor from another world. She’s a messenger of death. She follows certain lineages and when you hear the banshee’s cry that means somebody in the community is about to die.
My father heard the banshee when he was 5 and my grandmother was about to die. That’s a family story that I’ve always been curious about. I started doing some research, and Ireland has this amazing archive of folklore. At some point in the early 20th century every child in Ireland was given the task to talk to an elder and record those stories. A lot of it was online and I was able to find stories of my family’s banshees in the national folklore collection. That’s a thread in a memoir. That’s my biggest priority right now.
Copies of the poem can be found at catamaranliteraryreader.com. Donahue also read the piece via Zoom which can be found at storyknife.org.