The Girl with Antlers

© Ansel’s sister, photograph taken by their father, Ken Elkins, 1989.

In the summer of 2024, I interviewed a few creative individuals with the hope of starting a new project—a printed journal. However, it turned out to be more challenging than I had anticipated, mainly due to time constraints. Rather than losing those valuable conversations, I decided to post some of the interviews on the website. Many of them were introspective and personal, while others felt like thoughtful reflections on art and craftsmanship. I connected the responses and transformed them into personal essays, which I found deeply inspiring and wanted to share them with you.

By Ansel Elkins

In the summer, green anoles climb everywhere—over the rock walls, around the exterior of our little A-frame cottage, and all over the back deck. They unfurl their bright red dewlaps to call for mates. Summer nights are alive with singing tree frogs, cicadas, and katydids, and are magical with fireflies rising into the darkness. There are beautiful ribbon snakes, but also rattlesnakes and cottonmouths that we were always on the lookout for. My sister and I grew up playing in breathtakingly cold creeks. The sweet taste of those creeks and opening my eyes underwater to see gorgeous spangles of light across flat golden-brown rocks are part of my spirit. The landscape is very much alive where I come from.

I grew up in Talladega County, Northeast Alabama, specifically on three acres on Chinnabee Lane, named for Chief Chinnabee, a Muscogee chief who lived there. Storytelling has always been central to my life. Both my parents were journalists: my mother a writer and my father a photojournalist. They’d talk to strangers and pull together stories from conversations about their lives. They showed me that I could be an artist or a writer. When I was a teenager, I lived for poetry and would sunbathe with my iguana beneath a fig tree in Tallahassee, Florida, where we lived, and read Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, Federico García Lorca, Hart Crane, and Essex Hemphill.

I was very daydreamy, and still am. Part of that was daydreaming my way out of Alabama and the deep South. As much as I was steeped in that land, there seemed to be a depressing stasis to living there as a young woman. I needed to escape. I feel like part of me always had to leave, and it was in leaving (and returning, and leaving again) that I became a poet. It’s beloved to me, and it’s also an elegy.

Alabama and the South—Mississippi, Georgia, and Arkansas—left the biggest impact on my writing. Since I’ve lived for seven years in the Kentucky Bluegrass, this and the beautiful southeastern Appalachian Mountains have most shaped me. Additionally, coastal Connecticut and Long Island Sound, where my husband grew up and where we spend our summers, have become an indelible part of me. The harbor sounds at night—the bell buoys and the foghorn—have shaped my writing. There’s an old lighthouse that we walk to at night to glimpse the Milky Way. Even if it’s just a moth’s wing smudge of it, I feel anchored knowing I can see even a fraction of it.

We traveled all across Alabama because my father was a photojournalist, and I went with him on assignments to places like river baptisms and the immediate aftermath of tornadoes. I come from poor places in Alabama, but those places are so rich in wild beauty. That verdant wilderness is what I’m steeped in. It’s also what is being lost to urban sprawl, swallowed up in the bland terror of suburbs and highways and gas stations that kill everything original and beautiful. In a nearby town where my father lived, they destroyed a 1,500-year-old sacred Native American mound to use as fill dirt to build a shopping complex. The excavator is the most depressing piece of machinery.

A year ago, I was with my son at the springs where we live in Lexington, Kentucky, and two young boys were complaining that they were bored. One said, “I don’t like nature. Nature is boring. I’d rather play video games.” I told him, “But you are nature.” Our capitalist patriarchal society tells us that we are separate from nature, that we must dominate nature, and it’s important to reject that thinking.

Recently, after reading Johan Eklöf’s “The Darkness Manifesto”, I’ve been learning more about the importance of dark skies and the damaging effects of artificial lights at night. I’m currently working on night poems that meditate on the importance of darkness, which is being erased by our frenzy to light up everything. These newer poems come from an effort to savor darkness and cultivate our relationship with stars, which is very much at risk since nearly 99% of the U.S. and Europe live under light-polluted skies. To me, this disconnection from the stars, the inability to view the Milky Way, causes a deep spiritual crisis, and being disconnected from nature seems to contribute to societal agitation and a social rift.

Nature is a deep presence and very much alive in my poems. “Tornado” is a poem about a mother fleeing with her daughter moments before a tornado hits their house. I grew up with tornados, and every spring we’d run to the basement with candles. I remember counting the heartbeats between lightning and thunder to know how close we were to the teeth of the storm.

So much of my poetry is also about giving a voice to loneliness. The speaker in “The Girl with Antlers” lives on the margins of society, in the wild, and much of who she is comes from her imagination, the world she creates for herself. I grew up in the deep woods in Alabama, and our family of three—my single mother, my sister, and I—lived with a bunch of dogs in the woods. My mother would walk naked outside on the back deck and just look out at the woods and watch the lightning bugs rise up in the evening. I always found that to be really free, and I thought of her as a free woman: she never married and was somewhat outcast from society, a bit like Hester Prynne from “The Scarlet Letter”, because she had a baby (me, her little bastard) with a married man, and we lived on the outskirts of the community.

My mother is half-Puerto Rican, and we were the only Latina family living in our small community. My mother also taught at a historically black college, Talladega College, and although we passed as white, my mother made sure that we were always proud of our Caribbean heritage. Because my Puerto Rican grandmother wanted her eight children to pass as white in the South, she did not teach them Spanish. Since a big part of our identity in the language was erased, we had a difficult time articulating identity. We always identified as “mixed.” We certainly benefited from white privilege, but that was not our culture. Poetry allows me to give voice to the plurality within me, to the braidedness of cultures that I come from, and to dwell in the mystery of being. Writing makes me feel less alone.

I think of poetry as discovery. Poems allow me to discover something about myself or the world or my relationship to it. I think of writing a poem as unraveling or uncovering a thought or an experience. Writing a poem allows me to swim in the mystery of being alive. There are poets I adore and am always learning from, like Kimiko Hahn and Patricia Smith, who I think are among the greatest, boldest, most imaginative poets writing. And there are exciting new poets I'm reading, like Karisma Price and Raye Hendrix, who both happen to be from the South. When I'm thumbing through literary journals, there are a lot of poems that feel solipsistic and ultimately forgettable. I'm just not interested in reading a poem about a meditation on someone's feet in a bathtub. Who has time to read self-indulgent poems when the world is on fire?

We, as a species, are losing nature. There are poets who write urgently about nature and joy, like Ross Gay, and when I'm reading his poems, I'm acutely aware of how fast it's slipping away, how we are losing the natural world more every day. I remember nights driving down a little country highway with my mother and seeing hundreds of moths and insects flying into the windshield. It was always sad to see those moths spiral toward our headlights. Now my son doesn't know what that's like because there are drastically fewer insects. I think there's been a 70 percent decline in the last three decades. Elon Musk recently launched the Starship rocket, which burned 7.5 million pounds of fuel in its blast-off, destroying the eggs of nesting migratory birds and endangered turtles. I do feel it's our job as poets and artists to speak out about this, in whatever way we can. My one regret is that I work at a glacial pace. But that metaphor might not be apt ten years from now if we don't have glaciers left.

My favorite line about poetry is from Blake, who wrote: "One power alone makes the poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision." The poems I'm most drawn to are poems of imagination. And yes, that sense of wonder is crucial. Wonder that we are still here and alive in this shockingly beautiful paradise of a world—the pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan called it. We need to hold the world in our poems and in our art, and that sense of holding one another—and nonhuman species—like our lives depend on it is crucial.

Ansel Elkins is the author of Blue Yodel, winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Believer, Oxford American, Parnassus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the American Antiquarian Society, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as a "Discovery" Boston Review Prize. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Berea College.