Colorado Public Radio recently announced a new short-form podcast, Terra Firma, which pairs reflections on nature with soundscapes gathered in wild places. The podcast features the stories of CMarie Fuhrman, a Colorado-born Indigenous poet and writer and the director of Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing poetry concentration, with outdoor sounds collected on public lands by sound recordist Jacob Job.
Terra Firma
Episodes of Terra Firma are just five to 10 minutes long and are intended to provide listeners with a brief escape into nature and mindfulness. The show’s goal is to make the restorative power of nature accessible to podcast listeners.
Fuhrman has also been busy working as the co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, which was released on March 1, 2023, from Mountaineers Books. Cascadia Field Guide brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide.
A True Visionary
This unique book contains 13 ecological communities, from tidewater glacier to shrub-steppe, and 128 beings, from geoduck to Cassia crossbill, offering any reader, local or visitor, a new way of connecting – with heart, mind, and body – to place. Robin Wall Kimmerer promotes the work by saying, “Have you ever been so filled up with the wonder of a place that it wants to spill out as a song? Well, here is the songbook … A gift in reciprocity for the gifts of the land.”
Western’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing Program Director Dr. Tyson Hausdoerffer praised Fuhrman’s work, commenting that “CMarie Fuhrman is a true visionary whose work draws on multiple disciplines and traditions: poetry, nature writing, ecology, and ethics, to name just a few. Terra Firma and Cascadia Field Guide are just the latest examples of the brilliant interdisciplinary work she has been doing. The Graduate Program in Creative Writing is proud of her achievements and thrilled at how she inspires students across the program.”
While Fuhrman directs and teaches within the poetry concentration in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western, she also serves as the associate director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing and teaches in the nature writing concentration.
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