Gretel Ehrlich in the Times Union

Elizabeth Floyd Mair, who will introduce Gretel Ehrlich at her Writers Institute events tomorrow, 3/12, interviews Ehrlich for the Times Union.

Like Ehrlich, Elizabeth Floyd Mair spent long periods of time in Japan and is an avid reader of Japanese literature.

Q: When you went to Japan after the tsunami, how much of a plan did you have?

A: I never really have an agenda. I just knew I wanted to talk to people who had "faced the wave." I wanted to talk to fishermen, I wanted to talk to rice farmers, I wanted to talk to Buddhist priests and Shinto priests whose temples had become unofficial evacuation centers and morgues. I wanted to see how the people there worked together or not to survive, and take the temperature of the survivors.

I think you have to go with, as the Buddhists say, a "truly opened eye" — an open heart — and let the place tell you where to go. A lot of it is just you happen onto things.

Read more:  http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/In-the-aftermath-of-disaster-4337367.php#page-1

More about Ehrlich's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ehrlich_gretel13.html

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Ehrlich visit marks 2 year anniversary of Tohoku tsunami

Gretel Ehrlich, notable poet and nature writer who visits the Writers Institute tomorrow, is the author most recently of Facing the Wave (2013), an account of her travels in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Today's anniversary of the Fukushima catastrophe is being marked in the press throughout the world.

Here are a few links:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2013/0311/Two-years-after-Japan-s-nuclear-meltdown-what-happened-to-Fukushima-s-orphans

http://au.news.yahoo.com/latest/a/-/article/16337622/japan-to-mark-tsunami-anniversary/

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/11/fukushima-nuclear-cleanup-bogged-down-in-bureaucracy-could-take-decades.html

Winner of the 2010 Thoreau Prize for excellence in nature writing, Ehrlich is the author of numerous works about her explorations of diverse environments, including western China, Wyoming and—in particular—the “high Arctic.”

More on Ehrlich's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ehrlich_gretel13.html

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Gretel Ehrlich on PBS NewsHour at UAlbany Tuesday

Nature writer Gretel Ehrlich, who visits UAlbany tomorrow 3/12, speaks on the PBS NewsHour about her new book Facing the Wave (2013), an account of her travels in Japan after the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown.

"There were moments when the grief aspect of emptiness just seemed so heavy that it was falling like rain, that it was just a deluge of sorry," she said. "I met a fireman who lost his wife, his two children, his mother and his father and was just wondering why he was alive and how he was going to begin again." Her poem "Emptiness Fall" reflects on that grief:

Emptiness Falls
Beginning. Again. But how?
Tonight's perfect moon-slice means
we are half here half gone.
Down deep sea urchins fatten on corpses
and the Missing roll on amnesia's tides.
All summer the body rains sweat and
emptiness falls from the standing dead.
Cedar. Rice field. Pine.

More on the NewsHour blog:  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2013/03/friday-on-the-newshour-poet-gretel-ehrlich-revisits-japans-tsunami.html

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