Diane R. Wiener interviewed Naomi Ortiz for Wordgathering.
WG: Naomi, thanks so much for agreeing to be interviewed for Wordgathering. I’m excited and grateful for the opportunity to be in company with you during this conversation. For readers who are perhaps not familiar with the ecojustice framework, can you please contextualize this framework and its ethic of care as you engage both in your new book, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice?
NO: Diane, thank you so much for this invitation! It’s always such a joy to be in conversation with you.
On the surface, environmental justice and disability justice can seem at odds. The environmental movement is often asking us to think about how we can do with less. Yet, how that evolves is sometimes a rigid take on something like single use plastics, always being 100% a bad thing, where many disabled folks rely on single use plastics to function. Disability requires nuance to be included in the overall conversation. In my poem Ode to Plastic Cups, I share, “As disabled person/ independence is precarious/ daily life and reason/ constructed upon a wobbly set of Crip hacks/ get me from, can’t to good enough/ Where is my place in zero waste?”
I think about the ways that disabled people survive in a world that doesn’t consider us. Our survival isn’t easy and yet we offer tremendous examples of how creativity, slowing down, and grappling with contradictory needs can actually work in real life.
In my first non-fiction book, Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice, I was really curious about how self-care could be a response to toxic aspects of community organizing work and nonprofit culture. Not in a way where one withdraws, replenishes, and then goes back in. But in a way where the nature of how we do this work is challenged. Most of us are existing in a state of overwhelm. It’s hard to be creative when we don’t have capacity. When I think about what it is going to take for collective liberation, within social justice and within environmental sustainability, creativity is an essential piece of this.
One key component of self-care is being aware of what exists in terms of support that’s outside of people. For me, that support comes from land, specifically the Sonoran Desert, the mountains, the soil. I have some lovely friends and loved ones, but many of them are also at capacity and aren’t always able to provide support in the way I need. I get that care from place. Yet, I’ve been noticing changes as the desert gets drier, and hotter. The land is changing. As I observed these changes, I got really stuck in trying to figure out how to love place as a disabled person who can’t do a lot of the practical “environmental justice” work. Things like hiking out and picking invasive grasses, for example. I wanted to figure out how to love place and to be in relationship with it as these changes are unfolding. To evolve into the land not just supporting me, but by my also supporting the land. Grounded in my fear and despair, as well as that question of how to support, is where I generated the work for Rituals for Climate Change. Disabled people have to be part of reimagining a more sustainable society, in balance with what the earth has the capacity to provide.
WG: Thank you, Naomi.
Your reflections on and assertions about changing landscapes, these landscapes finding expression in your writing and arts–and changing landscapes in the world as a physical space–are all so powerful. I’d love to learn more about your beautiful, Truth-to-Power words: “Disabled people have to be part of reimagining a more sustainable society, in balance with what the earth has the capacity to provide.”
What are some ways that you are currently engaging (or perhaps with which you have connected recently or in the past) “to figure out how to love place”?
NO: That is the question isn’t it! The desert has been such a place of refuge for me growing up. To notice changes, in such a relatively quick timeframe as the Sonoran Desert gets drier and hotter with climate change, is really distressing. I honestly found myself not wanting to be in relationship with place. Wanting to push away and ignore what was happening because I didn’t know what to do and it brought up all this grief.
At one point, I realized that if I truly am in relationship with this place then I needed to go and ask the desert what it needs. The essays in Rituals for Climate Change are a series of conversations I have with the land. In the first conversation, which happens in Ceremony Is Movement, I do most of the talking and sit there pretty much all day waiting for some concrete answers. I express how as a disabled person I feel at such a loss to do the things that need to be done in a practical sense. Finally, I kind of wear myself out and actually get in a place where I am listening, and one of the things the desert tells me to do to is to, love harder.
“Love harder… I am elated! I can do love.
The breeze picks up and joins me in my deep sigh of relief.
Leaving through the settling darkness, I feel so grateful to be heard and answered. An answer that is appropriate to me and what I can do. My heart sings and I hum along as I watch the road for mule deer, javelinas, and coyotes. Driving through the darkening silhouettes against the fading sky, I start really thinking about it.
What does it actually mean to love harder?” (pg. 95/96)
Loving harder has been a coping mechanism with a lot of consequences in my life. Loving harder hasn’t always offered a positive reciprocation. In many ways I had to turn inwards and work through a lot of my own stuff in order to show up and be in relationship with this place.
I wanted to share that vulnerability with the reader. To have them accompany me as I am accompanying them in this journey of figuring out what loving harder actually means.
WG: Thank you again for your lovely and profound reflections, Naomi. I am so grateful to be in company with you and for the privilege of being someone who can be journeying as a comrade and as one of your readers and admirers.
When you think about “loving harder” and what it “actually means,” who are or have been some creative companions for you, in terms of your own experiences of accompaniment? Writers, artists, musicians…? Etc.?
NO: Diane, I feel the same! I loved learning about Golem through your work in The Golem Returns, and the way she lived alongside you in your poems.
When it comes to thinking about creative companions, I’m almost overwhelmed by this question because there are so many! I love music and often write to music, which can be a bit of a hindrance since I also use dictation software in order to write, LOL.
There’s something about leaning back into rhythms that have been passed down for generations that live in my blood, bone, and soul, when writing. I think a lot about ancestral support and stewardship within my writing process. This wisdom comes through in my dreams, through the lineages of plants and animals my ancestors lived alongside, and in the rhythm and beat expressed within music, to name a few. Whether it’s corridos, music made from a muguey violin, or Son Jarocho, I appreciate the artists who keep these rhythms alive.
One time when I was a teenager, I was wandering around a used bookstore here in town, Bookman’s, and I came across a poetry book, Out There Somewhere, by Simon Ortiz. I had to pick it up, because you know, we could be cousins. LOL. But that book changed my life. It was the first time I had ever read poetry that spoke about community, relationship with others, and place in a way that I understood. I have many, many favorite poets, but some that continue to linger and offer support in my journey are: jo reyes-boitel, Stephanie Heit, Joy Harjo, Marlin Thomas, Aura Valdes, Ofelia Zepeda, Rachel Scoggins, Camisha Jones, Aurora Levins Morales, Osimiri Sprowal, Amber McCrary, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Tanaya Winder.
Place is also a creative companion. As I write this, it is raining here in the desert. I know when I go outside later today, the lichen and moss on the side of rocks will be flushed green, the normally dry arroyos will be running, and that within a week, the ocotillos will be thick with leaves. The desert has taught me so much about embracing nourishment when it arrives—rarely on my timetable—and to show up and be present for the gift.
Poetry isn’t an answer, it’s an ever-deepening exploration of questions that I feel incredibly grateful and privileged to find my own way through, supported by words, images, and all these creative companions.
WG: Naomi, I am deeply grateful to you—on behalf of Wordgathering, and as myself—for your depth of energy, care, and connection throughout this conversation, and always. Thanks, too, for your kind words about the Golem’s and my friendship and “appearances” in poems that I’ve written and shared.
The idea or orientation—that “poetry isn’t an answer, it’s an ever-deepening exploration of questions…”—as you articulated, is a perspective that I honor and share.
Sending energy, care, and appreciation to and for you, in abundance.
(P. S. I loved and miss Bookman’s!)
View Naomi Ortiz’s presentation, Ecocrip Sensibilities: Mending, Care, and Love Affairs, on YouTube. This Spring 2022 presentation was hosted by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach (OIPO) at the Burton Blatt Institute and Wordgathering, as part of the speaker series, “(Dis)courses: Interdisciplinary Disability Dialogues.”
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About Naomi Ortiz
Naomi Ortiz (they/she) explores the cultivation of care and connection within states of stress. Reimagining our relationship with land and challenging who is an environmentalist in the Arizona U.S./Mexico borderlands, is investigated in their new collection, Rituals for Climate Change: A Crip Struggle for Ecojustice. Their non-fiction book Sustaining Spirit: Self-Care for Social Justice provides informative tools and insightful strategies for diverse communities on addressing burnout. Nominated and selected as a 2022 Disability Futures Fellow for their work to reimagine the future of arts and culture, and a Reclaiming the US/Mexico Border Narrative Grant Awardee, they emphasize interdependence and spiritual growth through their poetry, writing, facilitation, and visual art. You can find Naomi’s website at: www.NaomiOrtiz.com
About Diane R. Wiener
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.