“The experience of war can heighten one’s appreciation of daily life, if only because one is all too aware that it can end in an instant.”
More than any other living writer, Christopher Merrill, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, has mastered writing with power and accuracy about violence ecologies. Americans have now been at war for eighteen straight years. The US Department of Defense has a larger carbon footprint than Sweden or Denmark. Merrill’s work as a writer, thought leader, and cultural envoy, as he readily notes, exists as an eerie contrast to this prolonged state: he shows how wars, cultural and ecological disasters, can also offer moments of human hope and solidarity in the border-free ecosystems of writing and the arts.
A couple years ago I was talking to Chris about cultural and environmental life in war zones. He offered really magical ecological thoughts: on the strange beauty of ecologies even amidst the chaos of war, even amidst the fact they keep getting blown up again and again and again. It was a startling image and haunted me.
An internationally renowned poet and journalist, Chris leads a hectic existence: dipping in and out of war zones, where he collaborates on writing workshops, readings, and offers collegial support. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
Chris has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations.
I talked by phone with Chris, who spent part of 2019 piloting a mentorship program for women writers from Somalia, Italy, Mauritius, Colombia, Argentina, Kenya, South Africa, Mexico, and Botswana.
—Leslie Carol Roberts
THE BELIEVER: Your work takes you on the road on a planetary scale—how many days a year?
CHRISTOPHER MERRILL: I travel abroad on average about once a month, often to places of strategic interest—Afghanistan, Bolivia, Congo, Lebanon,...
You have reached your article limit
Sign up for a digital subscription and continue reading all new issues, plus our entire archives, for just $1.50/month.
Already a subscriber? Sign in
