Several decades ago, Alice Derry and Fred Sharpe began a project to write text for drawings of native plants he had inked over many years. They hardly knew each other when they began, and although they both tried to make the partnership work, they eventually realized that both their lifestyles and their goals for the writing were too far apart to continue. More years passed. Having already done so much writing and in the intervening time, having learned a lot more about native plants, Alice approached Fred when she retired from teaching and asked if she could use the plates to do her own writing. He was free of course to find another writer to use the plates his way. He said yes.
The result so far are three booklets which focus on native plants on the Olympic Peninsula, where Derry hikes and learns. The booklets are entitled “Plants and Art” and although they never want to desert science, the emphasis is on how the drawings have inspired Derry’s imagination. Certainly, that could never have happened if the drawings themselves had not been highly imaginative. Issues of social justice accompany much of Derry’s thinking, and those issues crept into the booklets as well. Members of Native Nations have lived on this land since it was land, and their knowledge of their flora was and is thorough, especially in the use of plants for medicine. Derry hopes to correct the sometime assumption that this knowledge was only part of the past. Tribal pharmacopeias are alive and well today.
These booklets are Derry’s first foray into serious essay writing. She has been a poet most of her life, with six full collections and three chapbooks published, most recently Asking, poems mourning her husband, Bruce who died in 2014 (MoonPath Press 2022). Raymond Carver chose her first book of poems for the King County Arts poetry contest in 1985 and helped establish her connections with him and Tess Gallagher. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals, and she has read throughout the Northwest. During her thirty years at Peninsula College, she co-sponsored and curated the Foothills Writers Series, bringing many well-known writers to our rural area. Currently, she and Kate Reavey, of Peninsula College, facilitate a poetry workshop for area members of tribal Nations. With no formal background in botany, Derry has continued to study and learn, especially as a member of Washington’s native plant society. At their gatherings, she has studied plants in many regions of Washington.
Fred Sharpe earned his PhD at Simon Fraser University, where his principal area of research was the social biology of cooperative foraging humpback whale groups.
Dr. Sharpe’s research has received international recognition, and he was awarded the Fairfield Award for Innovative Marine Mammal Research, and the Society for Marine Mammology Award for Excellence in Scientific Communication. He earned the Science Teaching Award in Biology at Simon Fraser University.
Sharpe is also a naturalist in the classical tradition. He is co-author and illustrator of various books including Wild Plants of the San Juan Islands, Birds of the San Juan Islands, and Songbirds of the Olympic Peninsula.
Please join us each Thursday at 12:35 pm in the Little Theater on the Port Angeles campus of Peninsula College, or via livestream on Zoom (Meeting ID: 881 8437 0617). Studium Generale is made possible through generous contributions to the Peninsula College Foundation. For more information, please contact Kate Reavey at kreavey@pencol.edu or (360) 417-6268.