Mapping the Artist: Sharon Hawley

Sharon Hawley with Kathabela Wilson at Bolton Hall Museum, Tujunga, Village Poets Reading Sept 28, 2014

An interview with Sharon Hawley, Poet/Adventurer from a longtime Pasadena family.

By Kathabela Wilson

She is known for her unusual travels; riding her bike solo across the US, searching out the coldest (and hottest) places and wild geography, while writing poems and photographing along the way. Sharon recently left for a month-long solo adventure in the Mojave desert.

A telescope on the poet

Sharon Howley at Red Door Caltech Poetry Workshop.

You are known as an adventurer. What have been your adventures and why? How does this widen your world, influence your work, and how do you share it?

My world is huge and it is tiny. I am dragged by inner forces to wild places because I can’t find peace at home for long. Others find peace in places close by, and so do I, but I see ants in the kitchen and get antsy for truly “unhumanized” places. Try my current blog, where you can follow my solitude on the Mojave desert, among cacti and dry rocky peaks, and scroll down to the list of adventures at the bottom to see where compulsion has led.

A microscope on the poet

Sharon hiking near Dunsmuir, CA.

What are the interior qualities of your creative life, what makes you a writer and a photographer?

As John Muir, Henry Thoreau, and Robert Frost wrote passionately about nature and wilderness, almost as the very basis for their existence, I too come alive in wild places where no human life is near. People have said that my writing livens when it’s based on the secluded places I go. While I’ve been a loner since puberty, just now at this ripe and withering age, I see a calling clear, a place beyond misty hills to settle in. I go there and write about it.

To visit a mountain like San Gorgonio, almost without exception, is to feel its essence internally and metaphorically, a compulsion to symbolize it and write as if it were something personal. In my blogs you see pictures and descriptions of things experienced. Almost out of necessity, I find inferences to human situations not directly related to the scene presented.  On the surface of poems you see a distant mountain, a rock beside a stream, or some  far and secluded object, which most of you will never visit. If you do, I feel happy and gratified to have led you there. But if you also see a glimmer behind my mask, to a place where someone, unlike most of you, less gregarious and more fond of wild things, breathes and meditates, then I feel like the bridge builder and communicator I fantasize being.

Mapping the poet

Sharon Hawley

How does the place where you live, Pasadena, color and influence your poetry?

My great grandfather came to Pasadena in 1885, and my family has lived here ever since. Born here, schooled here, I left for college and career, and then to explore the wild. I returned to write about schools as they were in the fifties, smog in the seventies, and now about hikes to Mt. Wilson and San Gorgonio Mountain. Pasadena was my cradle and now it’s my retirement village.

Surveying the Poet

Sharon, a cross-country ski adventurer, loves the cold.

What has been your career and how has it affected your writing?

As a tomboy and adventurer from before high school, I selected a degree in Forestry. Those classes in ecology, logging, and forest tourism have led to opinions on land use that affect my writing. Last year’s shutdown of the national parks, for example, angered me into protesting.  My colleagues from college did that, and I felt compelled to strike verbal blows against them.  Likewise the current shutdown of “non-profitable” California state parks, draws my ire through writing.

I changed careers in midlife and took up land surveying and planning for civil engineers. That change has tickled a strong sense of logic that has always besieged me. To explore a unity between logic and art, I have take up poetry.

________________________________________________________