The Woodberry Poetry Room is pleased to announce that the recipient of this year’s WPR Creative Fellowship is Gretchen Henderson for her project “Archive of Water.” She will receive a $5,000 stipend, a one-week residency at the Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and year-long access to a range of Harvard libraries and university resources during the upcoming academic year.
ABOUT THE RECIPIENT: Gretchen Ernster Henderson writes across environmental arts, cultural histories, and integrated sciences by cross-pollinating creative and critical practices. The author of five books across genres, opera libretti and art media, she has been reviewed in The New Yorker, Guardian, TLS, and Literary Review, and featured on NPR and BBC Radio. Henderson is the Spence. L. Wilson Distinguished Professor in Humanities at Rhodes College.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: The Archive of Water project “aims to poetically recognize water by countermapping hydropoetics at the Woodberry Poetry Room through a catalogue poem and improvisational score of music, along with a curated experiential WaterWalk.”
Of the project, Henderson writes:
“As readers/listeners/experiencers re-perceive the presences of water in their midst, renewed ways of knowing emerge…. Indoors and out, perceptions move from background to foreground, where the story of water can be written and rewritten but cannot be written off. Houghton (and other Harvard libraries) live in a region shaped by rising tides of bays and evolving waterways, weathers and climate change. Distinctive collections from libraries to museums evolve within landscapes as writings: writ large. Watermarks exist beyond imprints on paper; waterways imprint Earth as rivers and arroyos, lakes and dry playas. Human engagements with collections collaborate with water through Conservation/Preservation, HVAC systems, and restrooms for researchers, faculty and students, and visitors. Poetics can expand ways of ‘reading’ these literacies by listening with water: both presences and absences, outlining living shapes for future praxis.
Archive of Water is an outgrowth of my public poetry project, Dear Body of Water, in partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center, and the national coalition Poets for Science. Founded in 2023, Dear Body of Water invites postcard-sized love letters to recognize bodies of water and and brings them together into a global poem. The prompt encourages participation across backgrounds, ages, languages, and geographies. The act of collectively addressing bodies of water as living beings is not new but hopes to renew knowledges to reframe water in the climate crisis (beyond floods or droughts, rising sea levels or retreating rivers) less by fear than by care: tending to communal relations.
Dear Body of Water has grown through Tributaries (individuals) and Replenishers (groups, organizations, and colleges/universities), and the next stage will be to interconnect these across regions. Growing efforts are flowing together across watersheds, including Santa Cruz watershed (with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Indigenous Resilience Center Initiative, and the Watershed Management Group); Ohio/Cuyahoga River watershed (Kent State University’s Wick Poetry Center); California/West Valley Watershed (Montalvo Arts Center); Pennsylvania/Bear Run Watershed (Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy); Wyoming/Powder River-Tongue River watershed (Neltje Center, University of Wyoming); Washington, DC/VA/Potomac River Watershed (Georgetown University and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation); Utah/Great Salt Lake watershed (University of Utah); New Mexico/Rio Grande watershed (Leopold Writing Program); New River watershed (Appalachian State’s Turchin Center for the Visual Arts). These will soon to be featured on the to-be-launched website: WaterWays.
The Woodberry Poetry Room, situated as it is near the Charles River (Quinobequin) and the Massachusetts Bay, will be an ideal place to begin extending the project’s reach into the Northeast.
The Creative Fellowship is unique as it flows across waterways and collections, in and beyond the Poetry Room across distinctive collections at Harvard and to the Eliot House residency: all of whose histories have been largely shaped by water histories (Indigenous, colonial, regional, national, international, and many intricacies between). Archive of Water offers a poetic ‘way of seeing/seeping’ into porous spaces between collections, classifications, cataloguing, disciplines, and institutional systems as undercurrents for future research. Water enables ALL research but is rarely acknowledged as lifeblood or replenisher.
(So a saying goes: ‘Water is the enemy of collections.’) In an era shaped by the climate crisis, water is often framed by fear. Water can be re-perceived (e.g., subject, object, medium, material, collaborator, living being) to facilitate thoughtwork around reciprocity and reintegrative stewardship by growing the nature of research around the research of nature: following the lead of water.”
We look forward to welcoming Gretchen to campus and to inviting members of the community to participate in this vital project.