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“The fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood is deeply encoded in the dominant Western DNA of what it means to be a woman in the woods,” observes Erica Berry, the Oregon Book Award winning author of Wolfish, in her recent Sitka keynote talk.
Enroll now for Erica Berry's one-day writing workshop, "Permission to Write: Experiments in Prose" at Sitka on July 12.
“For months when I told people that I… was traveling around the west alone to research wolves, they would make quips about Little Red Riding Hood. ‘Be careful in the woods,’ they’d joke. ‘Don’t get murdered, ha-ha.’”
As she speaks, Berry shows archival illustrations of Red Riding Hood encountering the wolf in the forest, the kind of fine line pen and ink drawings I loved to study as a girl, imagining a future career as a picture book illustrator. It’s been a year, I note to myself, since I last put my full creative energy into drawing when I took a Sitka workshop with Nora Sherwood.
2023 illustration workshop with Nora Sherwood, who will teach an Intimate Mushroom Portraits workshop this year.
Describing a particular illustration, Berry notes, “…she is stopping to look at flowers and squirrels, and that’s where the wolf comes… I don’t want the moral to be that the girl should not follow her curious gaze. I really want her to be able to pause for every plant she loves.”
Since her talk, I find myself returning to Berry’s alternative moral, reflecting on how my own curiosity about nature and my fears about being alone in the natural world intertwine, and how the anxieties we convey to young people about artmaking and engaging our creative selves can follow us into adulthood, including into Sitka’s studios.
As the Sitka team prepares campus for the start of workshop season this week, I am interested in how often the ways we think and speak about artmaking are shadowed by insecurities and fears. We talk about “creating safe spaces for self-expression” and “artistic risk-taking,” as if there is something inherently dangerous about the creative process. Nervous about what wild marks we might make, we caution ourselves, "Be careful sketching in the woods."
1st time Sitka Instructor Shelby Lynn's basket on opening week of workshop season 2024
As the 2023-2024 school year completes, I am in awe of Sitka’s youth program team, who served 2,000 rural preschool through 8th grade kids with monthly art and ecology-inspired education. As our workshop season begins, I am grateful for Sitka’s instructors and team who create such unapologetically creative learning environments and opportunities for exploration all summer long. If fears about not being good enough to take a nature journaling, jewelry making or weaving workshop for the first time have gripped you in the past, I hope you find inspiration in Berry’s insights and Program Director Maria Elting's update in this newsletter. You will discover over 100 opportunities to try something new in Sitka’s 2024 workshop catalog.
With gratitude for this all-ages learning community where we pause for every plant we love,
Alison Dennis
Executive Director
