Catharina Coenen
OSGF
Q&A With Catharina Coenen
Tell us a little bit about yourself - whatever you feel is important to know!
I didn't grow up here in the United States, I came here from Germany when I was in my early twenties. I first came in 1989 on a Fulbright grant to Oregon, and no sooner than I got here the Berlin Wall fell and it felt like the entire world changed. After my PhD work, I went back and lived in Germany for a couple of years before I took the job that I have now. Since then, I've been living in Pennsylvania for about 20 years.
The other thing that people might want to know about is that by training, I'm a biologist. My training is in botany, and within that my specialty is plant physiology, so I study how plants grow and how their growth is regulated, and also how they react to beneficial microbes in the soil.
Have you always been a creative writer as well as a botanist?
My mom gave me a diary when I was six or seven, and I've kept journals ever since then. Writing has always been a way in which I figured out what I thought. It's always been an emotional regulatory mechanism for me, so if I feel upset about something, that's usually what I do, I write, and that helps me ground myself and come back to terms with where I am.
I never thought of publishing any of my writing until I took a creative nonfiction class on my last sabbatical. I did it originally because I thought that creative writing might be a way for students to get a better emotional connection to plants. Most of the students that I work with are not interested in plants at all - they are interested in medicine-related fields. I learned that if I let students write about their family history and connection to plants, childhood memories in particular, that it helped them get ready to make a connection with what they were learning.
So, I started writing essays in that creative nonfiction class, and then by and by I started to get into publishing. I've been doing that kind of writing for the last eight years or so.
How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice?
I've written far less this past year than I used to. And that just has to do with my job - I have been teaching very little for the past three years or so, because I have started serving as the director of faculty development at our college. That job means I get to help my fellow professors figure out how to be better professors. When the pandemic hit, we had to turn online on a dime, and I had to help people figure out how to do that. There was an enormous amount of work that went on immediately but also over the summer, which is usually a time when I get to do creative work. So, as some people were stuck at home and couldn't do their jobs, my job ramped up. It squeezed my time for writing, and it also squeezed my mental space for writing - not just the pandemic, but also the dawning realization in this country about racial injustice and also about the threats to our democracy that we're all experiencing. I don't think I've been this glued to the news cycle since I first came to the U.S. and everything changed in Germany.
I've also been in that brain fog that so many people talk about, where you sort of become addicted to news and exhausted by everything else. So, those were the main influences, I would say, on my writing.
Has the past year impacted your relationship with the natural world?
Dog Walker by Catharina Coenen
As soon as it became clear that I wouldn't be able to see my family, my mother got on the phone and said, "you have to get a dog." So I did, and that's been a lifesaver, because it's means that I get out every day and that's the only time that I actually get to see people, walking with the dog. So I do spend time outdoors, but it's not like that's been ramped up as a result of the pandemic, because that's what I do anyway.
What inspires your writing?
There are three main sources of inspiration. The first one is, I inherited a whole bunch of stories that my grandmothers told me about their lives and in particular their experiences during World War II. Those inspire a lot of my writing - that's often where it starts. I feel as though I carry those, and I have to put them somewhere, because that's the only way that I can make them visible and reflect on the influence of those stories on my life, and how I see the world.
The second line of influence is probably that I've always been a reader, and I've always had a love for words, for how they feel in the mouth, and how they feel in my mind.
The third is probably my scientific training. There are a lot of things that I feel very alone with - as a scientist, you can feel like there are trains of your own thoughts that nobody can connect to. Just walking around in nature with friends who are not scientists, there are things that I notice and that I think about, and I know that I'm alone with those thoughts in that moment. Writing is a way for me to allow other people to see some of that. Just like for a lot of people, my writing is a way out of my loneliness, a way of making connections and of figuring out what I think.
Tell me about “Conneaut,” the piece you submitted for the OSGF blog. What inspired you to write it, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
What inspired it is what we've talked about - me walking with my dog, through those marshes, and also being in love with words. In looking up why this place is called Conneaut Marsh, and why a whole bunch of other places around here are called Conneaut, I hit on how we don't know enough about the history of the place we live in, and how those place names are often the only thing that's left to tie us to the indigenous past of places. It's about the only thing that we haven't erased.
For this particular word, what fascinated me was the thing that was frustrating at first - I just want to know what it means! There are all these different hypotheses about where it could come from and what it might mean, so there is no definite answer. But there are a lot of connections that do reflect on place.
The scientific part of me is a collector and a list maker, and the other part is the poet who is in love with words, so the structure of the piece became this list of things that are almost like dictionary entries, or Wikipedia entries. And there are other parts that are more like poetic musings.
Erie National Wildlife Refuge by Catharina Coenen
What creative projects are you currently working on?
I'm trying to finish a few more essays, and then the plan is to publish them as a collection. Those essays are about the stories I've inherited from my family, about how they influence me now, and how that still interacts with the experience of being an immigrant to the United States. It's an attempt to take anecdotes from my family, put them in historical context, see them reflected in my present-day experience, and draw the connections between them. There's one essay about transgenerational trauma, and how we're now finding that can have a biological basis. Strangely, botany pops up in there as well, but not in the ways you might expect!
What are you reading right now?
I just finished Kiese Laymon's Heavy, and I'm in the middle of Brenda Miller's Listening Against the Stone, which is an essay collection. I'm also in the middle of Terry Pratchett's Long Earth, which is interesting as commentary on colonialism and people spreading across what seems to be unoccupied land. Recently I also finished Allison Stein's Road out of Winter` - that's an apocalyptic sort of thriller about a young female marijuana grower trying to escape from a freezing Appalachia.
What is your favorite plant?
I had a hard time with that question, because I don't know that I have a favorite! If I were to answer in terms of something that I'm obsessed with and I still have to figure out how to write about, I love Atlas Cedars. My grandfather planted one in our yard the year after I was born, and if you imagine a German backyard in the middle of a medieval town, it's entirely enclosed by houses. So this tree grew very rapidly, and by the time I left home, it was taller than our three-story house - it was enormous, and it was beautiful.
I was fascinated with trying to write about this tree as I usually do; much of my writing is research-driven. And then you learn about all the heartbreak - this is an endangered species, its home is in the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, and climate change basically drives the elevation at which this tree can still grow up and up. Pretty soon the trees are going to run out of their climate zone, because there's no more mountain to go up. They're threatened as a species, and at the same time, individuals of that plant can get up to 2000 years old. These trees were literally around in biblical times, and they have watched us do everything that we do. So there's a deep fascination there with that tree, and I have not found the right words for it yet - I've tried a few times and failed, but eventually it's going to happen!