Sharon White

My writing is an integral part of who I am. I hope to connect with both the human and the natural world through my work. In the past, most of my fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has been an exploration of the confluence of the inner personal world with the outer landscape of other voices. My new work in nonfiction is an examination of the layers of history in Philadelphia gardens. This book examines nature in Philadelphia through the history of gardens and my experience as a gardener. I show the powerful connection of the city to the natural world, something that is often overlooked. I also examine the various gardeners and naturalists, such as the Bartram family and Mary Gibson Henry, who have enriched the landscape in Philadelphia through their work.

Sharon White is the author of Field Notes, A Geography of Mourning, a memoir, and Bone House, a collection of poetry. Field Notes was awarded Honorable Mention for the Julia Ward Howe Prize from the Boston Authors Club. Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies including House Beautiful, Yankee, Appalachia, and The North American Review. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Colorado Council on the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Artist-in-Residence Program in Rocky Mountain National Park, and others. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.
 

The pipes are frozen this morning. I'm up before the light trying to thaw them and this early morning work has made me think of other things. How long grief lasts, how the earth always extends as far as you want it from where you are. How my geography stretches out and seems expansive here where I can see basins and ranges moving.

Each morning I find my way back to the day before and hope that I haven't lost ground. Each day I remember who I am after months of concentrating on each step.

Here in Kelly, Wyoming the cottonwoods bristle out in uneven branches to this pure winter cold. Dried sage shoots out and buds. The tracks of elk and moose lead to the river. I can count the elements that surround me. Snow piles up around the slim stems of wheat-colored flowers.

Last summer, a year after my husband's death, when I was riding a bus across the island of Skye in Scotland, I thought about how one pain often cancels a first. Loneliness and cold can take away the sharpness of grief. The landscape there, the green bare hills and one house painted white here and there, one woman running to the bus, and the ocean moving under me could all extend the edge of my mind to the world.

The silence here seems to come from a long, long time ago. You hear it in the light, in the wind twisted tree, in the river washing over green stones, in the prints of rabbits, in the castellated mountains rising to the north. It stretches out all along the basin and comes into my heart where I sit watching the morning. Each word sheds days, the sentence reaches into months and the page extends tracing backwards into the disorder of syllables.

- from Field Notes, A Geography of Mourning, Hazelden Press, 2002