Double Down with Nevada Humanities

By Jesse James Ziegler
Nevada Poetry Society Challenge Poem for March 2024
♾️

There aren’t enough hours in the day
Not enough moments in a life
Reflect 

Surrender to the obvious
Humbly plead your case to the wind
Lean in

Moments shared widen across time
Elongating experience
To feel

When the bees swarm
around the lavender
you gently shush them

as you carefully part
the branches to free
the dried stalks, still

fragrant when their day
is done.

By Petit Monstre

Odyssey of the artist, a blank canvas is where you started 

picked up a pen and the begin was actually the end of the old you, 

dearly departed. 

Now we have gathered here today not to lay rest to the soul but to set it free, strap on your seatbelt, things might get a lil unsettling. 

By Dustin Howard

Reno has been my adopted home for six years now, and in those six years, I’ve developed a true love for the beauty of the untamed West and the drama of the natural landscapes around us. The history of our state, and indeed, our country, is a brutal one. We are born from war–even Nevada’s state motto, “Battle Born,” acknowledges this provenance.

By Courtney Cliften

The smell of wet dirt and onions from the Perry Farm
constricts the entire town with undistributed wealth,
masks the crystal, chemical-mixture stink
from tiny apartments chalked throughout the streets.
Children ride bikes down Main street
to buried jars of coins saved for hot summer days…

By Donald M. Scott

In April MGM+/Amazon Studio will begin filming a mini-series version of George R. Stewart’s ecological novel, Earth Abides—a milestone in the rediscovery of the pioneering ecological author who was inspired by Nevada.

By Sally Denton

A year ago, I returned home to Nevada after many years in New Mexico. I came to Reno seeking answers to a serious health issue, and I found the medical specialists who helped save my life. I am a third-generation Nevadan born in Elko, raised in Boulder City, and educated at the University of Nevada, Reno.

By Ann M. Wolfe

My colleague Pamela Chadwick and I were approaching Middlegate, headed east on Highway 50 to visit an artist in eastern Nevada. For at least a few years at this point, we had been immersed in research for the exhibition that would become Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada. Suddenly, Pam yelled, “Stop!” There it was, just north of the highway: Fairview Peak. The mountain was immediately recognizable as the one in Dixon’s 1935 painting, Elements of Nevada.

By Hue Chen

Back in 2022, I got to meet Richard and Astrid, members of the Esmeralda High Desert Institute (EHDI) in Goldfield, Nevada. Astrid and I met online when I blurted out on a Nevada Arts Council discussion panel about how it’s important to just start making the community spaces you want to exist here in Nevada, even if you don’t know what you’re doing.

By Candace Garlock

Dear Friend,

I feel like I can call you my friend since you are reading this short letter that is now in your computer. As my friend, you will connect to my story of living in that “other” land, that space of illness that we all venture into during our lives; some for a short time, but for many it’s a permanent address.

By Jeannie Hua

When you google “Lunar New Year,” you would see that for 2024, it’s February 10, when the first new moon of the lunar calendar year reveals itself to us. This is the Year of the Dragon based on the 12-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac.

Por Genevy Machuca

Hola a todos, mi nombre es Genevy Machuca y estoy encantada de compartirles el emocionante inicio de mi viaje de pasantía con Nevada Humanities. Como estudiante de primer año en la Universidad de Nevada, Reno, estudiando dos carreras, una en periodismo televisivo y la otra en español, mi camino hacia esta increíble oportunidad comenzó con una pasión por la poesía y hablar en público.

By Emilee Wirshing

you may have noticed something missing,
an inventory of your guest rooms will tell you
someone kept a souvenir
and while your kind,
no-questions-asked policy
of covering the shipping
on the bronze stamped diamond tags
is often an invitation to return them…
my grandfather had no intention
of giving back your keys;

By JM Huck

Ekphrasis is creative writing inspired by artwork. There are many entry points to this type of writing; I wrote about a few of them in a recent Ekphrastic Writing Challenge. It took three visits before I could write this ekphrastic poem on one of the artworks at the Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum in Las Vegas.

By Shaun T. Griffin

Floating the Yangtze Shallows, Still as Rice—

one oar tipping the water to shore,
and Wang Wei lays a reed across the bow
like the heron, quiet overhead.

No thing can stop such flight—the poet
in his boat—a single tremor
on the water.  This is how the smoke