Nederland Poet Laureate Karen Auvinen finds inspiration in the wilderness surrounding her home outside Rollinsville. Credit: Tyler Hickman
When Gilpin County resident Karen Auvinen first laid eyes on the smoking wreckage of the Caribou Village Shopping Center in Nederland after last fall’s devastating fire, the longtime mountain dweller felt a sharp flash of the familiar.
“What went through my mind was recognition. I know what this is like, and I know the shock of it,” she tells Caribou Current on a bluebird day at her home outside Rollinsville. “After my own house burned down, the carcass was on the mountain for almost three months before they could clean it up. Everything burned. Pages of my writing were blowing across the mountaintop — which is a poem I should write.”
Auvinen, who was recently appointed as Nederland’s inaugural poet laureate by the community library, knows a thing or two about processing tragedy on the page. After a blaze consumed her former cabin outside Jamestown more than 25 years ago, she molded her grief into a memoir. Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in 2019, tells the artist’s story of rebuilding amid the sublime solitude of life at elevation.
But some catastrophes transcend the ordered logic of prose. Following last year’s overnight fire in Ned, which destroyed more than 20 businesses in the town’s main artery, she found respite in an artform that holds space for the unspeakable: poetry.
“Here in the mountains, we know the double edge of flame / its benediction and its devouring / how it warms the child but burns the home,” she writes. “As the smoke thins, a ghostly gray benediction / we gather, bare of difference / hands wet with the work of tending / we too must learn to answer the question of fire / can we take its burning and rise, rise again?”
Of course, poetry doesn’t need pain to take flight. Auvinen’s daily writing practice usually begins in quiet revery, observing the flora and fauna surrounding her cabin nestled among the aspens and evergreens that have become trusted friends to the 61-year-old author and educator.
“It starts with my daily meditation, which is to write weather and birds,” she says. “I just look out the window, or I’ll go outside when it’s warm, and write what’s going on in the world. Then it leads to lines, and I think, ‘Oh, this could be poetry.’”
Finding the miraculous in the mundane is a big part of what draws Auvinen to the craft, but she says the power of written verse goes deeper than what’s on the page.
“Poetry is the thing that says there is beauty still in the world,” she says. “Its ability to tap into our emotional selves is really important, but it also deepens our connections with each other. I would love for people to realize it’s accessible to all of us.”
For Auvinen, poetry’s connective quality rhymes with the healing power of the natural world. In addition to her Writing Wild outdoor workshop series, where writers of all experience levels can develop their craft while communing with the landscape, she also publishes a Substack called A Woman’s Place Is in the Wild, featuring weekly reflections on our relationship to the environment.
“Nature is my container. Increasingly, it’s also the container for my poetry,” she says. “I might do a meditation on a raven who visited the yard this morning, but then it leads to some portal, a doorway that opens up to some other insight.”
“Because of the climate crisis, I think it’s imperative to recognize our kinship with the natural world,” she continues. “This is how we survive, by learning how to be in relationship with our environment. It’s the beginning and the end of every conversation we should be having about how we move into the future.”
While it now seems as natural to the newly minted poet laureate as the chirp of chickadees outside her kitchen window, the path to literary nirvana wasn’t always well-lit. As the child of a military servicemember, bouncing throughout the West from Nevada to California and eventually Colorado, her early life was dictated along more so-called practical terms.
“Growing up, I was told you need to get a job and you need to make money, and then you’re going to get married and have kids, and then you’ll be a good wife. That was the whole thing,” she says. “Creative writing kind of went against everything.”
It took time for Auvinen to build the courage to strike out on the path that brought her where she is today. When she first began to consider the life of a wordsmith during her undergraduate years at CU Boulder, where she now teaches film and popular culture, the idea of making herself vulnerable in front of strangers was an intimidating prospect.
“Part of me wants to say I was afraid of being seen, but I was afraid to try new things,” she recalls. “Now I’m not afraid of anything.”
Much of Auvinen’s fearlessness comes from years of mountain living, forged in fire. Picking up the pieces after the blaze that sparked her first memoir, she spent the following decades building a new life for herself among the peaks of the Front Range. But if that sounds like the familiar myth of rugged individualism, think again.
“I thought I was a loner, and I thought I was tough. I thought I didn’t need anybody,” she says. “Then the first thing that happened [after the fire] was everyone in my mountain town — some people I didn’t know, some people I didn’t like — all came together and threw me a benefit. It was just really unbelievable kindness, and that changed me.”
This experience set the groundwork for a bold vision of a better way to live our lives together. Now she hopes to carry on that legacy as poetry’s ambassador to the mountain communities that lifted her up when she needed it most.
“Community isn’t a bunch of like-minded people hanging out together,” she says. “It’s people who disagree with each other, who might fight with each other, who sometimes hate each other, but who come together because they know there’s something bigger that holds them together.”
BOOK IT: Karen Auvinen will lead multiple public events with the Nederland Community Library for National Poetry Month in April.
