Natalie Rose Richardson on Birdwatching and Attention

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

In this week’s essay, Natalie Rose Richardson begins to experience a quality of attention that birdwatching can cultivate. Learning from Chicago historian Sherry Williams, who has piloted programs exploring the relationship between bird migration and the Great Migration, and J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and poet whose work engages confluences of race, place, and nature, Natalie follows a migration path from Chicago to South Carolina that brings the practice of birdwatching together with her own layered history. In landscapes both new and familiar, she shows us what’s possible when we bear witness with eyes wide open.

Read this essay.

________________________________

Listen to the rest of this story on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.

Natalie Rose Richardson was born in New York City to a long line of border-crossers and proud people of blended heritage. Her poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, Brevity, Orion Magazine, Arts & Letters, The London Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She has received awards, residencies, or fellowships from Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Foundation, The Newberry Library, The Luminarts Foundation, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the National Student Poets Program, among others. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize and a Best New Poets nominee.