Emilie Lygren
Emilie Lygren (she/her or they/them) is a poet, educator, and facilitator. She joined our MFA this Spring ‘22 as a poetry student and already has two books to her name. Her poetry collection, What We Were Born For, published by Blue Light Press, was recently chosen by poet Naomi Shihab Nye as one of the Young People's Poet Laureate book picks on behalf of the Poetry Foundation. She also wrote How to Teach Nature Journaling together with John Muir Laws.. Below an interview conducted by Aliyah Warwick, our English department administrator, who is a student in our MFA as well.
Q: Where are you from originally?
A: Carmel Valley, California
Q: Where do you live now?
A: San Rafael, California.
Q: What drew you to MIU's MFA in Creative Writing Program?
A: I have considered pursuing an MFA for many years, but none of the programs I looked into felt quite right. All of that changed when I read about MIU’s MFA in Creative Writing. I love that MIU’s MFA program begins with courses that invite students to reflect on their creative processes and relationships with writing, then shifts to classes that focus on how students want to show up in the world as writers and teachers, including classes on bedrock practical topics such as teaching writing, networking, and engaging with social media. This tending to the inner and outer world, the private and public aspects of being a writer felt unique in the landscape of MFA programs. Additionally, MIU’s emphasis on encouraging collaboration rather than competition among its students felt essential to me. I wanted to attend an MFA Program that would nurture and support me, challenge and affirm me as a writer, that would surround me with a curious and committed cohort of fellow students. I am so grateful to have found all that and more at MIU.
Q: What kind of writing do you enjoy most?
A: I have always loved writing and reading poetry. I love how far a poem can travel in just a few short lines, how reading a poem can change or shift my mood immediately, how writing poetry allows me to relate to sticky challenges or complex ideas from a place of flexibility and curiosity.
Q: What is your creative philosophy?
A: I don’t have a creative philosophy so much as a creative approach. For me, writing requires a quiet mind, and being outside is the primary way I bring myself into relationship with quiet. When I walk or sit alone for long enough, I’m able to sink into a place of deep noticing, of careful attention. My mind slows and wanders. The field of my perspective opens. The landscape sings with surprises. Soon, ideas for poems take root everywhere. Nynke Passi (the wonderful director of MIU’s MFA program) refers to this state of mind as “drifting.” In today’s busy world it can be hard to defend my drifting time, and this is a balance I am continuing to work and reflect on constantly.
Q: What is your favorite part of the MFA program so far?
A: My fellow students! They are all phenomenal, thoughtful, fun people who carry so much wisdom. And the community. The faculty have done an amazing job at nurturing a supportive community of writers. I am so grateful to be a part of the program, and I already feel my writing practice deepening significantly.
Young People’s Poet Laureate Book Pick
What We Were Born For by Emilie Lygren
Picked by Naomi Shihab Nye, February 2022
In this marvelous, compact, first volume of poems by Emilie Lygren, a California outdoor educator who has developed outdoor science curricula for youth (the BEETLES project at the Lawrence Hall of Science) and worked as a life coach and mentor for teens, a kitchen manager, and a barista, readers find a world shimmering in beauty and possibility. Whether contemplating the daily news or rivers or mothers or circles of students really discovering the outdoors for the first time, Lygren’s poems shimmer with revelation. There is a simplicity of being in every act and day that abides and sustains all people. Soil, a fly, shadows, the ways of planting seeds—Lygren writes about her father’s tools in a poem that has made me cry so many times since first hearing it years ago in a Tassajara wilderness workshop and then seeing it years later on a page. What tools do people really need? How do people keep constructing lives they might live honorably, together? How do people keep being born to new wonder the longer they live? Lygren is a meditative poet with immense social energy: her lines inspire people to become better. They also encourage thinking of poems that may have been missed. Everyone is richer than they think they are. Give this book to people you love as well as yourself. You can find the original text here.
Emilie shares: “This poem published in issue 21 of the Wild Roof Journal. It’s a fantastic literary magazine and the rest of the writing and art in this issue is really worth checking out. This poem was born on a river many years ago but took a long time to revise. There were so many places I could have taken the metaphor; eventually, I just stopped tinkering and put the poem out in the world. Anyone else head in claws-first sometimes?”
—
Insights from Arthropods
by Emilie Lygren
Sometimes all it takes
is another living thing
to ease judgment on myself.
Sometimes it’s
a crawdad
crawling across
slick white granite
next to a river.
Velvet body and jointed legs
skittering on shining rock
above a crushing waterfall.
I can see where
it will struggle,
where the sides
are too steep to climb.
The swift current,
the easy route one foot over.
How often I act like
I know what’s coming.
Pretend the future
is a language
I know how to speak,
but still, move forward
wary and scared:
just in case, I’ll head in claws-first.
What if, like the crawdad
I trusted this tiny inch of sight
was enough to go on,
tried to remember that’s
all I’ve ever had.
https://wildroofjournal.com/issue-21-gallery-1/
Read After days of deep grief – A Poem by Emilie Lygren on Poetry Breakfast.
After days of deep grief
the air feels like ocean.
But no amount of swimming lessons
readied you for this fall beyond sight.
You try to leave the house
without ripping open.
Walk the dog.
Send mail.
But everything is a trip wire
reminder of what has been lost.
The broccoli––
what you coaxed him towards as a child.
An orange–– he ate so many.
Model airplanes and finger paints.
His favorite kind of bread
lines up in neat rows
at the grocery store.
One whole row
has been removed.
At the back of the shelf,
bread bags fall into one another,
barely propped up,
shaped around emptiness.
Your hand will never stop reaching
toward what he loved.
The empty row will never be refilled.
A space you’ll keep stumbling over
with heart and eyes.
Hands that want
to busy themselves,
send a letter,
twist over
and over
on the heavy shore.
About the Author:
Emilie Lygren is a nonbinary poet and outdoor educator whose work emerges from intersections between scientific observation and poetic wonder. Her first book of poetry, What We Were Born For, was chosen by the Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s February 2022 Book Pick. Emilie lives in California, where she wonders about oaks and teaches poetry in local classrooms. Find Emilie on Instagram (@emlygren) or at her website (emilielygren.com).
