Lois Marie Harrod, Plein-Air Poetry Workshop, St. Michaels, 10 30

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY— D&R Greenway Land Trust recently installed Lois Marie Harrod’s poem, “The Spineless”, to its Scott and Hella McVay Poetry Trail. On Tuesday, October 30, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., this renowned Dodge Poet and three-time winner of a New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship, will lead a Plein-Air Poetry Workshop outdoors at D&R Greenway’s St. Michaels Farm Preserve in Hopewell. This lifelong-teacher welcomes participants of all writing levels. The group will wend its way through the bucolic property, with stops to write poems, inspired by Lois Harrod’s catalytic ‘prompts’. Event is free, but rsvp@drgreenway.org. Participants meet at the historic barn (off Princeton Avenue.) Rain plans: Same Day: Indoor Workshop at D&R Greenway Land Trust, One Preservation Place, Princeton 08540. 609-924-4646

Wear comfortable closed shoes for walking, long pants tucked into long socks, long-sleeved shirt, because of New Jersey’s tick situation. Hats and water recommended. Bring notebook and pen or pencil, and lunch.

The author of 16 poetry collections, Harrod is the winner of the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest, the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook Prize and is a five-time recipient of fellowships to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She has spent her life writing and teaching, most recently at the College of New Jersey and at Princeton Senior Resource Center’s Evergreen Forum. Widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3, her work can be read at www.loismarieharrod.org.

“I am honored and delighted to be part of the Scott and Hella McVay Poetry Trail,” Lois Harrod reveals. “I love being outside, especially walking and hiking,” Harrod continues, specifying nearby preserves on Baldpate Mountain, the Sourlands St. Michaels Farm Preserve. “I often write about something I have seen or experienced during these walks—though not immediately.”

Harrod knows people—“alas, even some poets”—who are nature-averse.” She appreciates that “D&R Greenway, and other local environmental organizations, provide antidotes to such fears.” Preservation secures “places where teachers, parents and children learn to love rather than fear this earth on which our existence depends. Only by securing places to roam and expand our earth knowledge, respect and love can we ourselves have any chance of surviving.”

The Poetry Trail was founded and is sustained by Scott and Hella McVay, who invited Lois Harrod to become the fiftieth poet. At their request, she submitted seven poems for consideration. “We liked them all. Rising to the top, for the long run, was ‘Spineless,’" say the McVays.

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D&R Greenway Land Trust, nonprofit partner with oversight of the Poetry Trail, has hosted numerous poetry walks and readings at their Johnson Education Center adjacent to the trail and Greenway Meadows Park. Linda Mead, President & CEO of D&R Greenway, speaks of inspiration for the trail. “When we preserved Greenway Meadows park in 2001, we had only an inkling of all of the ways that it would benefit the community,” Mead says. “Talking with Hella, who at the time was on D&R Greenway’s Board of Trustees, we came up with the idea for a poetry trail that brought together Hella’s love of the natural world with the McVays’ devotion to poetry” Mead continues, “Lois Harrod was a featured poet on our Poetry Walks on D&R Greenway preserves this past summer. I’m pleased to announce that she will lead an En Plein Air poetry workshop at our St. Michaels Farm Preserve this fall.”

"Lois and her husband Lee Harrod were editors and hosts on three occasions we sponsored to hear local poets on the natural world,” says Hella McVay. “We have followed Lois' career, beginning at Voorhees High School as a master teacher and poet. Indeed she was part of the initiative by the Dodge Foundation to create a major four-day biennial Poetry Festival that led to twenty seven hours on PBS reaching sixty million viewers and to elevate the teaching of poetry.”

Harrod’s poem joins the work of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Rumi/Coleman Barks, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Paul Muldoon, Jane Hirshfield, Joseph Bruchac and six U.S. Poet Laureates: Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Stanley Kunitz, Howard Nemerov, W. S. Merwin and Richard Wilbur, among many others.

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D&R GREENWAY LAND TRUST IS IN ITS 29TH YEAR of preserving and protecting natural lands, farmlands and open spaces throughout central and southern New Jersey. Through continuous preservation and stewardship -- caring for land and easements to ensure they remain protected and ecologically healthy in perpetuity -- D&R Greenway nurtures a healthier and more diverse environment for people and wild species in seven counties. Accredited by the national Land Trust Accreditation Commission, D&R Greenway’s mission is to preserve and care for land and inspire a conservation ethic, now and for the future. Since its founding in 1989, D&R Greenway has permanently preserved more than 20,000 acres, an area 20 times the size of New York City’s Central Park, including 30 miles of trails open to the public. The Johnson Education Center, a circa 1900 restored barn at One Preservation Place, Princeton, is D&R Greenway’s home. Through programs, art exhibits and related lectures, D&R Greenway inspires greater public commitment to safeguarding land.