Elizabeth Schultz: Poet
Rivers have always flowed through my life. From childhood, there were metaphorical rivers—streams of consciousness and rivers of memory—as well as the real rivers which flooded the downtown and which we canoed, watching out for deadheads and deer. Coming to Lawrence in 1967, I was invited to go swimming in the Kaw. Failing to check its depth, I dove from the bank and came up with the front of my bathing suit filled with the river’s silty bottom. I realized then that the river might have been the end of me, and that a river is not ever to be trifled with. I realized, too, that it was my good luck subsequently to learn how to dance sitting down in the middle of a rapidly running river.
Rivers have filled my mind as I came to teach H.D. Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimac, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Norman McClain’s A River Runs Through It at the University of Kansas, and as I rafted down the Colorado in the Grand Canyon, mused at the headwaters of the Nile in Uganda, visited the Oda in Hiroshima to which people streamed, seeking its cool waters following the nuclear bombing in 1945. Though I’ve written about lakes in my memoir (Shoreline: Seasons at the Lake), of the sea in numerous scholarly articles on Moby-Dick, and in essays about Kansas lands (The Nature of Kansas Lands), rivers have always been with me. An early short story, titled “The River,” describes the Trinity River which flows through the Hoopa Indian Reservation in northern California and has recently been re-published in a collection of short stories based on my work on the reservation, The Last White-Skin Deer.
Read Watching the Kansas River, a poem by Beth Schultz