Participation Type
Reading
Session Title
Session 5.06 Readings and Performance
Presentation #1 Title
Depredation
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
I will read from my creative nonfiction essay, "Depredation." The essay is part of a collection-in-progress, in which I rewrite labs from my father's Environmental Biology lab manuals as literary essays. The essays draw on labs written during his 35 year university career, using the form and content of the manuals as departure points into essays that address fatherhood, Appalachia, the metaphor of science, and family heritage. This particular essay focuses on a crop damage lab. I use that lab as a metaphor to explore and consider the "aesthetic economic" loss associated with natural gas drilling on the family farm in Northern Appalachia, addressing also the geologic history of the Appalachian Mountains, the depositions of organic materials that formed the gas, a re-application of Silas House’s urging to consider environmental devastation as a cultural loss, and notions of surface versus subsurface rights. The essay also addresses the recent question of the ethics of my current employer – a college in Northwest Pennsylvania – leasing undisturbed woodland for Utica Shale exploration.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Matthew Ferrence is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Allegheny College. His essays have been published widely in American literary magazines, and a book of cultural criticism -- All-American Redneck: Variations on an Icon, from James Fenimore Cooper to the Dixie Chicks -- will be appearing in Spring 2014 from the University of Tennessee Press.
Depredation
Harris Hall 234
I will read from my creative nonfiction essay, "Depredation." The essay is part of a collection-in-progress, in which I rewrite labs from my father's Environmental Biology lab manuals as literary essays. The essays draw on labs written during his 35 year university career, using the form and content of the manuals as departure points into essays that address fatherhood, Appalachia, the metaphor of science, and family heritage. This particular essay focuses on a crop damage lab. I use that lab as a metaphor to explore and consider the "aesthetic economic" loss associated with natural gas drilling on the family farm in Northern Appalachia, addressing also the geologic history of the Appalachian Mountains, the depositions of organic materials that formed the gas, a re-application of Silas House’s urging to consider environmental devastation as a cultural loss, and notions of surface versus subsurface rights. The essay also addresses the recent question of the ethics of my current employer – a college in Northwest Pennsylvania – leasing undisturbed woodland for Utica Shale exploration.
