Samantha Jones (she/her) is an earth scientist, writer, and copyeditor based in Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Her words appear in THIS, Grain, CV2, Room, GeoHumanities, and elsewhere. She is an alumna of the Banff Centre Spring Writers Retreat and the Iceland Writers Retreat, and is a PhD Candidate in Geography at the University of Calgary where she studies carbon cycling in the Arctic. Her visual poetry chapbook, Site Orientation, is available from the Blasted Tree and her debut full-length collection, Attic Rain, will be published by NeWest Press in 2024. Find Sam here.

Elena Johnson: EVENT published two poems from your Advancing Air series in our most recent issue, one of which is included above. These poems caught my attention because of their subject matter – severe weather events, climate change, and how humans respond to these – and because of their visual element. How did this series come about? And what is the source or context of the visual symbols in the poems, or what do they represent?  

Samantha Jones: Thank you to the editorial team for publishing the poems, and thank you for these thoughtful questions. The visual elements in the poems are weather map symbols. More specifically, “Advancing Air V” features a cold front (line with triangles) and a warm front (line with semicircles), and “Advancing Air VI” features a warm front. When I started working on the Advancing Air series, I was interested in how I could incorporate symbols and map elements into poetry to build metaphors and layer meaning. I’m interested in personification of natural phenomena and how as beings and systems we are similar or different. I like the idea of an inseparable person and event, as we can change the world around us and the surrounding world leaves none of us unchanged. 

EJ: You’re an earth scientist, currently working on a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary, studying inorganic carbon cycling in rivers and in the coastal Arctic Ocean. Do you travel to the Arctic each summer? How much time do you spend there, and what do your days consist of? What’s involved in your fieldwork, and in your research projects, overall? 

SJ: I travelled to the Arctic in 2017, 2018, and 2019 for a total of about 80 days of fieldwork spread across four visits. The sites I visited are around Iqaluktuuttiaq (the Hamlet of Cambridge Bay) on Victoria Island in Nunavut. I work as part of a team of students and researchers in Dr. Brent Else’s lab, and we regularly help each other complete our fieldwork degree components. 

The release of greenhouse gases from the landscape is particularly dynamic during the spring melt season, so my research emphasizes that time of year in addition to visiting during mid- to late-summer when there is no snow or ice on the landscape or ocean. My dissertation examines seasonal variations in the exchange of carbon dioxide and methane between the river water and the atmosphere, and the amounts of these gases dissolved in the river that are delivered to the coastal ocean downstream. 

A typical day would include calibrating and preparing equipment to measure properties like temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen in the water, as well as collecting water samples to bring back to our lab (or to send to collaborator labs) where we can measure dissolved inorganic carbon (i.e., CO₂ and related compounds) and dissolved methane concentrations. 

Depending on the time of year, we travel by snowmobile or ATV, and of course I, and our other team members from the south, rely on local expertise and support to navigate safely and to design and complete our research. 

EJ: In addition to the Advancing Air series, you’ve previously written poems based on Bow River flood data, published in GeoHumanities, and your poem entitled “Ocean Acidification” was published on the Watch Your Head website. Are you working on any other science-based poetry projects at the moment? 

SJ: Most of my creative energy is being directed towards book edits at the moment. However, I am tinkering with a few smaller projects, including an exploration of living with chronic pain that is braided with ornithological knowledge. It might be a while before I get to dedicate some serious time to that idea though. I also have some more OCD poetry in the works, which I don’t consider to be science poetry in an explicit sense, but it does heavily draw on the way that my science knowledge influences how I perceive and navigate spaces and places. 

EJ: How do poetry and science overlap and/or intersect, for you, both in a general sense and in your daily life as an earth scientist and geographer? 

SJ: One of the big lessons my creative work teaches me is slowness. Poetry allows me to linger and reflect, but at the same time, it also helps me practice the art of capturing visceral first impressions. These two ends of the spectrum can also inform how I understand scientific information, whether it’s the big picture or detailed analyses. I believe being a poet strengthens my ability to make connections, to choose language to express ideas with intention, and to be an astute observer. No matter the subject, my knowledge of the natural world tends to enter my poetry, so I’m excited to see the exchange become a two-way flow that also influences how I work as a scientist. 

EJ: Do you find the fieldwork itself to be creatively inspiring? And does creativity come into play in your academic research?

SJ: Fieldwork, and travel in general, are very inspiring, although I haven’t been doing much of either lately due to COVID, among other things. Being in the field and travelling are such sensory experiences – smells, sights, and tastes might become nuclei for poems. I have written poetry that is directly related to my fieldwork; two poems and an accompanying essay are published in the March 2022 issue of Arctic and are free to access online. 

In 2021, I attended the Banff Centre Spring Writers Retreat online, and I found myself drawn to the Bow River for inspiration, as well as for its connection to Banff, which is located on the Bow River upstream of Calgary. This is where I started writing “05BH004 (1915–2019),” the poem later published in GeoHumanities and generated from river flood data recorded at the Water Office of Canada gauging station, 05BH004. In this case, the water was an agent of connection, inspiration, and constraint for my creative practice. 

My poetry and science work are starting to become more intertwined, and I hope the trend will continue. I enjoy working at the intersection of science and art and borrow from my creative toolkit whenever I can in my research life. 

After the poem “Ocean Acidification” was published by Watch Your Head, it was developed into a multimedia clip with science and policy partners and was featured in the Virtual Ocean Pavilion at COP26. The journey with this poem was a turning point for me in realizing the hunger for poetry, and other art, within the sciences. I left that experience thinking, wow, I might actually be able to bring these two parts of my life together to make something awesome that other folks are interested in. 

EJ: Have you always been a poet/writer, alongside your scientific work? Did your focus or creative practice shift specifically to poetry – as opposed to other genres or artforms – at a certain point? 

SJ: I’ve always loved literature and dreamed of having my own book in bookstores and libraries. I got serious about this dream approximately ten years ago and completed the Creative Writing Certificate through Continuing Education at the University of Calgary. I thought I would write a novel (maybe one day still), but I joke that my settings must be stuck on export to poem. With poetry, I like that I can work on smaller projects like individual poems or series of poems, and that I can move between subjects and themes. I started getting serious about reading poetry around the same time, and as I discovered how vast and diverse poetry can be, I realized that it was the home I had been searching for. 

EJ: Your first poetry collection, Attic Rain, will be published by NeWest Press in the fall of 2024. Congratulations! Can you tell me a bit about this collection? Does it include the Advancing Air series, or other science-based poems? Do some of the poems contain visual elements?

SJ: Thank you! Attic Rain is about my experience living with OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). The Advancing Air poems are not included, but there are poems with visual elements and poems that follow defined forms – some forms that will be familiar, as well as poems that follow sets of constraints that I established to reinforce the content. I don’t consider it to be science-poetry in the same way as some of my other poems, but I think my science mind reveals itself throughout the collection via imagery, subject matter, and language choices. Extreme weather is something that triggers my OCD and related anxiety, and there are poems in the collection that express that connection. 

EJ: What have you been reading lately? And what’s been inspiring you – in your writing, thinking, academic research, or other aspects of your life? 

SJ: I’m always reading too many things at once! I’m one of those people that always has a stack of books on the go at any given time as well as a few audiobooks loaded up for listening. Two recent poetry reads that blew me away were Bottom Rail on Top by D.M. Bradford for its concise power and Gravitas/Poèmes Deep by Amy Berkowitz, translated by Daphné B. and Marie Frankland, for bringing the often silenced female graduate student voice to the forefront. Earlier in the year I read the novel Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew, and I’ve been recommending it to everyone ever since. In September, I attended (virtually) the Extinction, Endangerment, and Environmental Storytelling symposium hosted by the Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger, Norway. I am still riding a wave of inspiration from the unique, interdisciplinary presentations and discussions that were delivered at the event, and have been increasingly looking to the humanities to make sense of my role as a scientist, creative, and citizen. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Elena Johnson is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a collection of poems set at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. She holds degrees in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, and has worked as a field ecology researcher. She is a co-editor of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2021).