Katharine Whitcomb Remarks on Hazards and the Ring of Fire

Hazards & Creative Expression

Our central theme -- poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and art about geophysical hazards – might seem to pair strange bedfellows. Hazards themselves invite science writing. Don’t we need “the facts” about danger? Of course we look to scientists for information, but we yearn for ways to share our experiences.

In the evocative pieces collected in Ring of Fire: A Geospatial Anthology, you will notice a vocabulary of our human fear—fear that reveals itself in the speakers’ lists of emergency actions, instructions for evacuation, attempts of measurement, and acknowledgment of technology’s failure in the face of natural disaster.

Beyond the Richter Scale readings and stress measurements are transformations. These poems explicate fear and grief in the face of danger, certainly, but also allow the voices of the dead to speak in the imagination, invite great metaphors for clarity, scope, and scale, and evoke the language the earth might embody. The reader is drawn beyond statistics and into the conversation we have our whole lives with our planet and our place in it.

The creative work in Ring of Fire: A Geospatial Anthology ranges in setting from southern California to points along the fault line all the way up to Alaska. We look forward to the addition of pieces from other locations in the “Ring of Fire.”