June 2025 | Part1: Interview with Sarah Dupre, Co-director of the Acorn MusEcology Project

Human dams are coming down. Beavers know how to regulate water better.

Sarah has conducted choruses for many years. We first met when I joined the Occidental Community Choir in 2010. On the first day of this May, my daughter and I attended an Acorn MusEcology Project performance in the heart of Armstrong Redwoods State Reserve, Sonoma County, California. The voices were exquisitely woven, and some of the singers were very gifted instrumental players, too.
 
I asked Sarah to share how Acorn came into being.
 
In December 2019, Robin Eschner (my co-director) and I started talking about forming a new chorus. We decided to invite singers we knew and liked, and thought their voices would add something special.
 
Most of our singers were free agents. For example, Robin and I had history with Steve Abbott (I had commented on his wonderful tenor voice in the Redwoods performance– ed.) We both loved his voice, and he wanted to work with us. We didn’t ask for auditions. We just picked friends. 
 
Our first rehearsal was in January 2020, six weeks before the lockdown. Things were still simmering during COVID. We did a little singing outside.
 
In 2021, with Acorn still essentially on hiatus due to COVID restraints, Robin and I seized the opportunity to take sabbaticals out of state. Our first concert, “Wild Mercy,” was in the fall of 2022. 

We then began rehearsing for two productions, “Bell Weather,” and “Crazy, Cold, Beautiful.” In January 2023, we put on “Bell Weather”. This was inspired by the name of the lead female sheep who wears the bell and is called a bellwether. I love wordplays, as you can tell from the name of our group. 
 
“Crazy, Cold, Beautiful” included 40 singers and an orchestra of fifteen musicians. In 2014, Robin was awarded a grant from the American Composers Forum, specifically a McKnight Visiting Composers Residency in Minnesota. ‘Crazy Cold Beautiful’ was the song cycle that emerged from the winter she spent there in Minnesota, researching the life and times of John Beargrease.
 
(I was present at one of the “Crazy, Cold, Beautiful” shows. My daughter sang in that production. It tells the story of John Beargrease, an Ojibwe in Beaver Bay, on Minnesota’s North Shore, who delivered mail for over 20 years from 1880 to 1900 when a road was built around the lake. In summer, he delivered by boat, and in winter by dog sleigh. Robin went to Minnesota to research the story. Many people from Norway settled there. Robin found moving letters from that period, some of which became songs for the production. Accompanied by wonderful orchestration and Sarah’s conducting, I think it was a great achievement, and definitely a highlight of my year – ed.)

In January 2024, we performed “Side by Side.” We had planned to do it earlier, but one of our key musicians came down with COVID, and we had to adapt as a group. This experience made us stronger. We also learned that it’s great to get ready for a concert and then postpone it for another couple of months to really take it to a deeper place.
 
In 2024, we put on “Beavers”. This was our first concert centered on a single animal’s ecology, and it fulfilled part of our mission. We all became beaverphiles. People are seeing that partnering with animals gives us a better chance by watching and deferring to them. Beavers create ecological richness by sequestering water and slowing it down.
 
Human dams are coming down. Beavers know how to regulate water better. Fewer people now think that “Man should have dominion over the beasts of the field, the fish of the sea, and the birds in the air.” It’s still out there in large-scale ag, treating animals as commodities instead of living beings.
 
Robin first thought of a whole concert about beavers. I’ve always been interested in them. It was a musical challenge. How do you tell their story? By juxtaposition and editing. What do you include? What don’t you include? We had to find aspects of the beaver story that sparked us. Robin wrote several great songs, and I contributed two or three. The “Beavers” concert catalyzed a creative explosion for Robin and me.

The topic is out there. The Occidental Art & Ecology Center just got a two-million-dollar grant for reintroducing beavers and beaver education, and many of the folks who are working there on beaver projects came to our concerts.
 
My granddaughter, Mae Hildegard, was born six weeks early, just before the second “Beavers” concert. I had to tell Robin and the rest of the group that I was heading back to Lawrence, Kansas, to help my son and daughter-in-law with the new baby, for an open-ended period of time. It was bittersweet because I’m so in love with my new granddaughter, but I love Acorn, too, and Robin and I both feel like we’re building something special together. The timeline for my return to Acorn is still somewhat up in the air. It was and is very difficult to be away from Acorn, and from my Sonoma County home, community, family, and garden – all of it. My roots there are deep and wide. I wish I could be in both places at once. I call it my “one body problem.” But I’m just trying to hold it all as an ongoing exploration, and not try to force a resolution or reconciliation of this divided self; the answer has to ripen in its own time. But I will say that I’m still deeply involved with Acorn from afar, and Robin and I are still planning future steps together.
 
We then performed “Bell Weather II” last fall. We became a registered non-profit in 2023 and have now performed two concerts in the Armstrong Redwoods amphitheater. I’m leaving at a moment when we’re really getting into our stride. Our ace-in-the-hole is that Robin can take over as musical director. Yolande, our accompanist, is completely reliable and an artist herself.

There’s more about Sarah Saulsbury, Robin Eschner, and the Acorn MusEcology Project at https://acornsings.org/acorns

To learn more about beavers, there’s a delightful one-minute video of a wild beaver filmed in Wales after a 400-year absence at this link, and a 15-minute documentary on the work of beavers in the US at this one. (Thank you, Diana Badger, for sharing these!)

Ode to a Wooden Clothes Pin

Solid and explicable,
All its parts are visible.
Exemplar of economy—
A child can work it easily.

Patiently, it bides its time
Hanging from the old clothes line,
Its two halves joined and kept apart
By the hinge of its coiled wire heart.

Its duty is domestic;
Its function, quite specific—
Refinement of a single task:
To open, close, and then hold fast.

Sarah Dupres

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

A Small King: A Mystical Rewilding Along Portugal’s Rio Côa

Emergence Magazine features an account by Nicholas Triolo using wonderfully vibrant language to describe his 5-day journey. Nicholas manages to weave rewilding and Thomas Merton into his rich narration while going into the essence of what rewilding looks like.

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Poetry Zoom, Friday, June 6th, at 6:00 pm PT, 9:00 pm ET

I’m honored to share a Zoom with poets Dane Cervine and Toni Ortner on Friday, June 6th at 6 o’clock PT, put on by Bluelight at the Gallery.

Please join us. I will be reciting poems from my five books and a newer one, Spell of Rain.

Here is the Blue Light Press invitation:

You are warmly and joyfully invited to Blue Light at the Gallery 

Friday, June 6, 2025 — 6:00 pm Pacific Time 
(7 pm Mountain Time, 8 pm Central Time, 9 pm Eastern Time) 

Raphael Block, author of The Dreams We Share 
Dane Cervine, author of DEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the [Burning] World 
Toni Ortner, author of most recently The Girl in the Yellow Dress

Please join us on Zoom. RSVP to bluelightpress@aol.com to get the link. 
(If you’re already on our Email list, you will get the link.
If you want to join the mailing list, let me know.) 

About the poets:

Raphael Block has lived on three continents and resides happily in Northern California. A long-time meditator, he breathes in wonder at Earth’s and our own rhythmic ebb and flow. He is the author of five poetry books, most recently, The Dreams We Share, and produces a monthly Earth-Love Newsletter. To learn more about Raphael, please visit his website, raphaelblock.com, where you can download free poetry audiobooks and watch a National Geographic-selected five-minute documentary.

Dane Cervine‘s DEEP TRAVEL is a book of contemporary Japanese haibun reflecting recent travels through America, Europe, and Morocco. His new book, Nine Volt Nirvana, is forthcoming from Word Poetry Press. Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, and more. His work appears in The Sun, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Pedestal Magazine, and more. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. https://danecervine.typepad.com/

Toni Ortner lives in Vermont. She is the author of 33 books, most recently The Girl in the Yellow Dress by Kelsay Books. Passing Through by Deerbrook Editions and The Van Gogh Notebook by Dancing Girl Press will be published in 2025. If you want to learn more about her. Go to toniortner.com, where you can see her books and reviews and hear a recording on SoundCloud. She spends her days meditating, reading, gardening, walking, writing, and painting.