Amy Miller: “Earlier this week I saw an ad for a Chicago showing of the photographs of Isa Leshko, a young woman who specializes in photographing elderly rescued farm animals. Leshko has collected some of her work in her new book, Allowed to Grow Old, and the photos are some of the most moving I’ve ever seen. I was amazed—and horrified—to realize that I’d never seen an old rooster before, or an old turkey, or even an old cow; most farm animals are killed before they’re a year old. I was also struck by how noble these elderly animals look, with their grizzled beards and wrinkles and rheumy eyes. We all age in similar ways, if we’re—to use Leshko’s heartbreaking term—allowed to. For these animals, it seems old age truly is a gift. And for us humans, the photos are a reminder of where we are in our own evolutionary journey—still a long way from ethical, a long way from righteous.” (web)
Amy Miller: “Honestly, I hardly ever write in persona anymore. It used to seem like such a great way to break out of the ‘I’ rut, to take the photobombing poet out of the poem and turn the camera outward, which, incidentally, was my mother’s definition of maturity—seeing outside the self. But white writers like myself have always taken that too far, appropriating and fetishizing and diminishing people of other cultures by stepping into their shoes for a moment and pretending to understand their experience. Persona poems are at a crossroads. What viewpoints are we assuming right now that we have no right to assume?” (web)
Amy Miller: “The United Nations report released a few days ago, predicting that a million plant and animal species will soon face extinction due to human civilization—possibly causing catastrophic harm to our food and water systems—cast a pall over everything this past week. Like many, I’ve had even more thoughts than usual of mass extinctions, famine, and despair, along with a glimmer of hope that a finding this frightening may finally persuade governments to take radical actions to turn the tide. As a writer, I constantly wonder whether writing is worthwhile—I mean, will there be anyone around to read it in a few generations? I keep thinking of the line in William Stafford’s poem ‘Waiting in Line’—‘the chance / to stand on a corner and tell it goodby!'” (web)
Amy Miller: “For the past two weeks, my home in southern Oregon has been surrounded by wildfires and choked with smoke. For us, it’s nothing new; people around here know more about evacuation levels, AQIs, and smoke masks than anyone should have to, and many locals are parents of firefighters. One friend recently told me that she doesn’t worry much about her firefighter son dying by fire—it’s rare, statistically—but she constantly worries about how much smoke he breathes in. When a photo of five firefighters sleeping in a yard went viral a few days ago, symbolizing the massive Carr Fire that tore into the city of Redding, California, two hours south of us, I thought of my friend and her son. And then a video of a little girl handing out burritos to firefighters in neighboring Anderson, a staging area for the Carr Fire, also made the rounds of social media. The older I get and the more I see, the more I get choked up by firefighters and first responders. They’re all someone’s kids out there, working their asses off for us. We can never thank them enough.” (web)
Amy Miller: “Out of the horrible news of this week’s fires in Southern California came this wonderful, strangely moving video footage of an unidentified man saving a panicked rabbit from a raging fire along a roadside in La Conchita, CA. It’s hard to watch it and not think of metaphors of a world in flames and one person compelled to bravery to save just one soul, the one that’s in peril right in front of him. It brought to my mind the old adage of ‘Whoever saves a life saves the world entire,’ attributed variously to the Talmud, the Quran, and Oskar Schindler.” (web)
Amy Miller: “The news of Mike Pence’s “Billy Graham rules,” including his policy of never eating a meal alone with any woman except his wife, prompted a New Yorker article on the larger impact of gender-restrictive rules enforced in his offices. One rule is that only male assistants are allowed to work with him after hours, presumably to avoid a compromising situation. This makes me livid—if you’re that worried about being tempted to have sex with a woman who works for you, the problem isn’t her. It’s been nearly 40 years since a male boss preyed on me like that, but the experience is still an indelible part of my working life; it influences choices I make on the job every day.” (website)
Amy Miller: “On the night Hillary Clinton won Super Tuesday, I was watching her victory speech on CNN, choked up with pride and astonishment that we in the U.S. finally elected a female major-party nominee for president. The import of it, the implications, blindsided me in a strange way—I found myself obsessing over minutiae, like what we would call Bill Clinton if Hillary becomes president. I was struck by the idea that we are literally writing history. In my enthusiasm, I started typing up a Facebook quip about it, but debated and debated whether to post it, knowing that some of my other-leaning friends might attack me online, as I’ve seen happen so often lately. I decided not to post it. I felt like a coward, and a little like I was living in a police state. But I also felt like I was practicing an ancient form of self-preservation.” (website)