Field Guide to the Art of Looking courtesy photo
~ story by Bob Gustin
Michele Pollock’ s new book of poems and photographs is an intimate celebration of Brown County’ s beauty, often overlooked as we go about our daily lives.
Pollock has a bachelor’ s degree in chemical engineering, an MFA in Creative Writing, and is best known for her intricate stitched paper creations and hand-bound books. Somehow, she combines her scientific training, poetic expression, and artistic skills in“ Field Guide to the Art of Looking: a year wandering the Brown County woods,” just published by her own Lost Lake Studio Press.
A fourth-grade teacher inspired her love of poetry, and she has been writing since. Defining poetry as“ the best words in the best order,” Pollock writes in free verse, which usually does not rhyme, but strives for the essence of language. She loves the sound of the English language, the rhythm of the words.
Pollock and her husband, Dan, live on Lost Lake in northern Brown County, and Michele walked the woods for years without really noticing the beauty around her. And she took photos mainly to serve as patterns she would later turn into her stitched paper art. One day about two years ago, she noticed an odd seed pod on one of her walks, and struggled to find out what it was. That sparked an effort to learn more, and suddenly she was carrying a camera.
Her new daily practice combines walking with looking and picture-taking, which becomes meditative, she said,“ healing, refreshing, calming.” It has been good for her mental and physical health.
“ I visit the same spots day after day and know specific trees. I have favorite fallen logs.” Or, as one of her poems puts it:“ I am a new explorer of this old woods, A wide-eyed disciple of the wild …” She joined Facebook groups on native plants and Indiana mushrooms and quickly found out that if she couldn’ t identify them, someone else could.
38 Our Brown County • March / April 2019