AHA! CONNECTS! October 1, 2023
Welcome back to AHA! Connects, celebrating AHA!’s programs and projects in the past 10 years. Today’s post celebrates Spellbound by Nature, a project created for youth and children to reconnect them with nature, inspired by the book, The Lost Words, by Robert MacFarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris. The Lost Words conjures, through visual art and poetry, 20 nature words that are no longer included in the Junior Oxford Dictionary, so that young people will learn them and bring those words back into common use. These are words like dandelion, acorn, fern…it is a beautiful book, we highly recommend it!
Spellbound by Nature offered outdoor nature-based arts workshops for youth, supported by Susie Murphy, in partnership with Antigonish County’s summer outdoor recreation programs, the People’s Place Library summer youth programs, the RK MacDonald Nursing Home and Antigonish Culture Alive. Approximately 350 children aged 3-14 participated in these workshops in the summer of 2019. The workshops reconnected youth with nature, inspiring a natural curiosity in participants.
With the arrival of the pandemic in March, 2020, AHA! transitioned this project to an online spell-kit as a free resource for parents, teachers and children seeking to become better acquainted with the outdoors and the language of nature. Time spent in nature has been shown to have a calming and healing effect, contributing to our mental and physical wellbeing. What better time to create and share this resource than during the first year of the pandemic? Edited by a volunteer community panel, the Spellbound by Nature spell-kit was published in the fall of 2020, encouraging all of us to get outside, explore nature, and to discover more about the plants, insects, and animals living in our backyards and near our communities.
Goldenrod by Noella Murphy
The Spellbound by Nature spell-kit was concocted by about 40 Nova Scotian writers and artists, conjuring some of the common words of Nova Scotia’s natural world. Artists and writers used their own creative ways to help others imagine and learn about these plants, animals and insects. Biology students and instructors from StFX University also contributed, explaining more about each organism, linking birds to their calls to help identify them by their songs, suggesting where they may be found, what they look like, what they eat, and examples of how they have informed biomimicry, the study of learning from, or mimicking, nature. This spell-kit was intended as a resource, not only to nurture creativity, but also to foster greater care for nature through deepening our connection with nature.
Nancy’s Cattail nature art
Mummichog [Fundulus Heteroclitus] By Nanci Lee and Genevieve Lehr Mummy chog killiefish water chog chub killi kelley chog guppie minnow of mud with cheek and grace The wee chog chugs In salt marsh steam, between the tides* In shoals of cold, dark ocean rise whatever the weather The wee chog chugs Burrowing, beveling muck-thick shores tough and tiny, traipsing in scores Narragansett** for crowding The wee chog chugs Eelgrass cordgrass, brackish beds warm salt, cold salt, waters fresh settling and unsettling The wee chog chugs Poor wee body takes all that we dump plastic and garbage, absorbs our gunk, they so wish for easier But the wee chog chugs To Fundy, Gaspé the Digby Neck the first little fish out to space and back Fundulus farest flung wee chog chugs *this phrase honours and riffs off of Harry Thurston, poet and naturalist whose writing has inspired the awe in us for nature **Narrangansett people are of the Algonquin nation, from what today is called Rhode Island https://soundcloud.com/nlee-7/mummichog-fundulus-heteroclitus
Piping Plover call
In the winter and spring of 2022, Spellbound by Nature was a launchpad for several writers and visual artists to offer arts-based programs in NS schools through partnerships with Arts Smarts and Writers in the Schools (WITS). Nancy Turniawan partnered with teacher Starlene Prosper at East Antigonish with about 18 students from different classes on a group project. They showcased their work at the library in August of 2022.
Artwork of East Antigonish students
The spell-kit, https://spellbound.artshealthantigonish.org/ although not still publicly available, is available by password, requested through the AHA! email.
AHA! has been exploring how to keep this beautiful resource alive and it now appears that it may be made into a book in 2024! Stay tuned….
Happy browsing – and happy conjuring!