During a self-made writer’s retreat in Indiana’s Brown County State Park last summer, I visited a local artists’ gallery. There, I saw a painting entitled, “Disappearing Fence Line,” by plein air artist Nancy Maxwell. The title conjured memories of my great grandfather’s fieldstone fence on his farm in the Pocono Mountains. Before I knew it, I was not writing an ekphrastic poem describing Maxwell’s piece but rather a response to my childhood memory. I remembered hikes in the meadows with my great grandfather, a gentleman farmer whom I adored, and his praise of his fence, which faithfully had served its pragmatic purpose. As I wrote the poem, other writers’ ideologies and language seeped it: Frost’s “Mending Wall” and Hopkins’s, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” I began to see the fence anew, through a lens of natural flow and yes, Heraclitean fire I know to be true in my own life, my own journey of faith.

A Best of the Net and eight-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Julie L. Moore is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Full Worm Moon, which won a 2018 Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and received honorable mention for the Conference on Christianity and Literature's 2018 Book of the Year Award. Widely published, Moore’s writing has won several other awards, including Fare Forward’s 2024 poetry competition.

W: julielmoore.com