At the End of the Sabbatical
Calliphaea
Spring 2020 seems an epoch ago. A threshold was crossed around that time when, even if unknowable then, everything eventually changed for everyone somehow—some forever—from a pandemic the effects of which no one could have foretold. People lost contact, lost each other, lost jobs, lost loved ones and just plain lost. Others lost their good health to lingering effects of a disease that seemed conjured from a nightmarish fantasy of a lunatic. For me, the change was both immediate and gradual. Courts across Connecticut were closed and the small civil litigation firm I worked at for most of my legal career simply could not keep me on. What I thought would be a layoff of a few weeks with a return to the office turned into 54 weeks of unemployment and a new job with legal aid. During that forced sabbatical, I took the opportunity ratchet up my obsession landscape photography, having dove head long into it a couple of years earlier. I also embraced the niche my photographic practice had found in the near field, immersing myself in landscape photography in and around the Pioneer Valley, by edict from a virus.
During those weeks and months, I spent countless hours of “wheel time” visiting areas while scouting and shooting locations all over the area. I immersed myself in the study of photography, taking online tutorials, visiting innumerable photographers’ websites perusing portfolios and reading, reading, reading anything I could find about the art and craft of photography of all genres. Bruce Barnbaum and Michael Freeman were devoured. Guy Tal’s crisp essays with their philosophical bent appetizers and aperitifs, whetting the appetite to dive deeper, contemplate more and engage more thoughtfully. Joe Cornish, Charlie Waite, David Ward and Eddie Ephraums serving up veritable buffet including the toothsome delight, Developing Vision & Style: A Landscape Photography Masterclass. Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography: From 1839 to the present, of course, a staple and centerpiece. And Paul Hill and Thomas Joshua Cooper’s chef-d'oeuvre Dialogue with Photography providing after dinner conversation well into the night.
I immersed myself in the geological history of the Valley with the help of Professor Richard D. Little’s Dinosaurs, Dunes, and Drifting Continents, learning, among so many other things, that the Pioneer Valley is located on an ancient rift valley created when Pangea broke apart starting about 200 million years ago. I poured over the classic Our Trees How to Know Them: Photographs from Nature by Arthur I. Emerson and the aptly named and prolific Clarence M. Weed, ancient, dried leaves pressed between the pages by some long ago owner. Doubling down on trees, A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America by naturalist and writer Donald Culross Peattie became a boon companion during my forced sabbatical, though I admit I feel like I know less and less about the flora with each excursion in the Pioneer Valley.
Light Lifting Required
I became adept at using web based weather forecasting tools to try to predict the light and conditions I could expect—or hoped to, anyway, when out in the field—finding one Maine photographer, Colin Zwirner, who took such attempts to new heights. I used the internet to scout virtually the locations I wanted to photograph, discovering little by way of other images on social media but using tools like Google Earth, among others, to uncover the way light would fall in a particular area at a particular time of day throughout the seasons.
Mainly, I made exposures over that time. Thousands of exposures. I estimate that during that time, counting all the things I did associated with developing my photographic understanding, ability and craft, I accomplished nearly a third of the vaunted 10,000 hours necessary to acquire some sort of expertise—my wifie a witness and, if at times unwilling, participant and sounding board to all I learned and engaged with. Looking back, the pressure and anxiety of that period of time, when much of the world was closed off, funneled me toward a near obsession with that small fraction of what was left to me—outdoor photography. But even going out in nature was impacted by the pandemic. Here in Massachusetts, people were encouraged to get outdoors as a “great way to clear your mind, reduce stress, and enjoy the unfolding” seasons. That resulted in an incredible influx of people in locations that I had usually shared with two or three other people or had completely to myself before the pandemic. This included Cranberry Pond, a location I had visited regularly since 2018, first to learn how to properly expose an image before a once in a lifetime trip to Maui, then simply for its immense beauty in a relatively diminutive package. A place I usually had shared with more tail-slapping beavers than people on any given day. But during much of 2020, I could not even find a parking spot in the small dirt lot next to the boat launch. It was clear that I wouldn’t be making any images there with to the scores of people kayaking, fishing for lake trout or just hiking the trails that lead to Mt. Toby. The result for me was an expansion of my scouting areas eventually leading me to make a series of images in the bottomlands that flank the Connecticut River and its tributaries—murky, dank places made no more inviting to most by the confinement from the pandemic.
It also led me back to writing, something I had pursued with some seriousness if not success before a ravenously hungry time-consuming legal career. While I have done my fair share of legal writing as an attorney, somewhat keeping that particular muscle active, creative, expressive writing had faded like newsprint in the sun. During that time away from work, however, I started writing about my thoughts and experiences with my creative engagement through landscape photography—mere scribbles, really. But the seeds of the essays that have sprouted since were planted among the furrows of words jotted here and there during that time. In fact, as I was just now reviewing some old notes, I came across an outline of an essay from November, 2020, the finished product being only just published in two parts this year. And after all that time and effort, when I finally had secured a new position as the world crept from the shadow of the pandemic, I was determined to complete at least one creative project from my forced sabbatical before heading back out into the world of gainful employment.
Overreach
I decided to put together a zine, a short one comprising photographs that I had taken in those dank, river flanking areas I was drawn to during the heights of Covid lockdowns. I wrote an introductory paragraph, included several photos (all but one taken within 5 miles of my front door, the other at Cranberry Pond, about 12 miles away) and made a short PDF zine. I sent it to On Landscape, in the hope that they would invite me to submit four of the images for their “4x4 feature, which is a set of four mini landscape photography portfolios which has been submitted for publishing . . . [e]ach consist[ing] of four images related in some way.” It was a pleasant surprise when an editor from OL, suggested that I turn my short paragraph into an essay and submit it, along with a portfolio of images for publication. On October 10, 2021, Bottomlands: Luminous/Anonymous was published. An updated version of the essay will be published here next week.
All sabbaticals, by definition, come to an end, reach their finish line. It wasn’t so clear that my sabbatical from creative writing would ever come to an end when I was saddled with a career in the law. John McPhee, prolific Pulitzer Prize winning pioneer of creative non-fiction—a prose thoroughbred—has written a good deal about writing and the writing process. In his essay Editors & Publishers, he discusses the process by which a writer finds their genre, that is “what kind of writer they are” and the time and effort it takes for one to do so. McPhee counseled patience, noting that “[t]he writing impulse seeks its own level and isn’t always given a chance to find it.” He goes on, proclaiming that “[y]ou can’t make up your mind in a [Comparative Literature] class to become a Russian . . . or even an American novelist. Or a poet.” McPhee claims that “writers find out what kind of writers they are by experiment” a sentiment echoed in Philip Lopate’s caution that “No one can expect to write well who will not first take the risk of writing badly.” A risk well taken in my life.
I had spent my teens, twenties and early thirties writing in many genres. From poetry, to plays, to short stories, to essays and even to one or two reviews of rock bands for a small local zine started by a cancer survivor, all the while a dedicated journal keeper. I tried to harness any talent I had. I’d often say, I’d tried writing everything but a novel, a half-truth. I did, but those efforts never really made it to the starting gate, always doomed to perpetual nascence in the paddock. I have apparently arrived at the personal essay in part because, as Lopate states, “[t]he personal essay is a form that allows you to 'think out loud' on paper, to explore the messy, complicated, and often contradictory aspects of your own experience." Still, I do take heed of McPhee’s warning that “[i]t is easy to misjudge yourself [as a writer] and get stuck in the wrong genre.” These days, however, I do take solace in McPhee’s assertion that “writers generally need a long while to assess their own variety, to learn what kinds of writers they most suitably and effectively are.” I only hope I have spent that time well, because as McPhee concludes, “Art is where you find it. Good writing is where you find it.” My hope is that it has been found here at the end of the sabbatical.
Ferned Gulley