Exquisite Fantastic: Meredith Purvis

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Contributor 2: Meredith Purvis, November 16, 2019

Campfires and Canyons

“You’re doing it wrong, dissecting the bird, trying to find the song.” ~John Craigie, Dissect the Bird

Sometimes I feel like we are small, eclipsed by a world of incredible scale. Our edges blur, atoms and impulses pinging into and across one another. Our hearts and lungs and feet are full of birds. They sing our souls. My heart is elastic. It contracts to fill a campfire spark and expands to fill canyons. We are shaped by elements, within and without; changing and changed. We are enormity. Carbon. Hydrogen. Knit together like feathers on a wing. We soar.

a travelogue prose poem written on a journey from baltimore to missouri, las vegas, the grand canyon, bryce canyon, zion national park. and back again.

Title: Campfires and Canyons

Meredith’s Inspiration:  Gina’s painting / America’s spaces both man-made and natural / National Parks, especially Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon / The way you blend into nature when you sit around a campfire.

I created this poem while wandering westward. It’s a travelogue but also a mini exquisite corpse of its own — each day I wrote a new line in as much isolation as I could, although still innately aware of what had come before. I challenged myself to not only take inspiration from the incredible painting Gina created, which is full of the stuff of life and the whisper of bird wings, but also the scenery I was passing through, which included my parent’s farm in rural Missouri, Caesers Palace in Las Vegas, and the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks.

See the work that inspired Meredith here.

Meredith Purvis is a writer, a book artist, and a traveler. Her heart and her writing are happiest when they’re exploring.