When award-winning poet Ruth Thompson decided to learn to channel in 2018, she wanted to deepen the intuitive connections with nature that inspired her poetry. The skeptical product of a scientific family, she did not expect the doors to fly open to a vast multitude of birds, trees, faeries, dragons, and a host of other nonphysical beings. "Quickwater Oracles," Thompson's record of their channeled conversations - expansive, uninhibited, tender, hilarious - will be published by Two Fine Crows Books in December, 2021.
Conscious channeling involves intentionally connecting and communicating with nonphysical fields of consciousness. Thompson's poetic gifts make her translations of energy communications so vivid that for the reader it is almost like experiencing them in person.
Although she began in despair at the state of the world, these messages were filled with exuberant celebration. As one of the channels says: "We say, change your spectacles to joy. To joy!"
Inspiring yet unsentimental, Quickwater Oracles can be used for daily meditation, journaling, and discussion, or read as one woman's channeling journey. Readers who loved Ross Gay's "The Book of Delights," Aimee Nezhukumatathil's "World of Wonders," and Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris's "Lost Spells" will treasure Ruth Thompson's gift of "joy-making and singing."
Author Biography:
RUTH THOMPSON is an award-winning poet. QUICKWATER ORACLES is her first collection of channels. She has published four books of poetry: Whale Fall & Black Sage, Crazing, Woman With Crows, and Here Along Cazenovia Creek. She began writing in her fifties, after freeing herself from an abusive marriage, about which she wrote in Woman With Crows. Her "fierce, gorgeous, sensual poems of earth-as-body and body-as-earth" have been praised by Stanley Plumly, Philip Terman, Irving Feldman, Frank X. Gaspar, and others. Her work has won New Millennium Writings, Harpur Palate, Chautauqua, Tupelo Quarterly, and other national awards, and has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize. Whale Fall was choreographed and performed in Hilo, Hawai'i by dancers Jenn Eng, Karen Masaki, and Colee Garr in 2018. Here Along Cazenovia Creek was choreographed and performed by revered dancer Shizuno Nasu of Japan in 2021. Ruth also performed with cellist Lee Zimmerman in Whitefish, Montana in 2019. Ruth received a BA from Stanford University and a doctorate in English from Indiana University. She has been an English professor, library administrator, book editor, and college dean in California. She lives in Ithaca, NY with her partner, anthropologist-writer Don Mitchell, where she is an editor of Saddle Road Press and teaches poetry, writing from the body, and embodied meditation. She was a contributor at AROHO women writers' retreats from 2011-2015, and has been writer in residence at Rivendell Writers' Colony, Rockvale Writers' Colony, and Walking Lightly Ranch in Montana. Along with Don Mitchell, she held the Williamson Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Eastern New Mexico University in 2019.Ruth talks about her work in a short video on her website. Poems, videos of performances, and further information can also be found at ruththompson.net.
