I.
“Do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man’s mad desire become his god?”
- Virgil, Aeneid IX (translated by Fagles)⠀
II.
“The sparks that warmed me, the seeds of my ardor,
were from the holy fire—the same that gave
more than a thousand poets light and flame.
I speak of the Aeneid; when I wrote
verse, it was mother to me, it was nurse;
my work, without it, would not weigh an ounce.
And to have lived on Earth when Virgil lived—
for that I would extend by one more year
the time I owe before exile’s end.”
- Dante, Purgatorio XXI, Lines 97-102, spoken by Statius (translated by Mandelbaum)
III.
“’All this is like a trout kept in a spring
or maggots sown in wounds—
another life that cleans our element.
We are earthworms of the earth, and all that
has gone through us will be our trace.’
He turned on his heel when he was saying this
and headed up the road at the same hard pace.”
- Heaney, Station Island, Canto II, lines spoken by William Carleton (1794-1869, author of The Lough Derg Pilgrim)
IV.
“Who makes my life? I feel that someone is ordering me around and fating me. As if someone were creating me. But I am also free and don’t obey orders.”
- Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life
V.
“Was there anything in the world,” wonders Ralph Fawcett in Jean Stafford’s 1947 novel The Mountain Lion, “that did not make you think of something else?”
PROJECT DESCRIPTION (From a current WIP grant - 3/1/2025)
Earthworms of the Earth is a photo book project that explores the impact of poetry upon fate by tracing the lives and works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Seamus Heaney, and the shared concerns that connect them.
Through extensive research of their poems, slow travel through significant geographic locations, and a methodology that prioritizes attentiveness, curiosity, and engagement, I aim to express the ways art acts as a catalyst for determining the destinies of communities, countries, and individuals, including myself. The collection of photographs and ephemera illuminates bonds between my life, the poems and poets, and the people, places, and things that they’ve shaped; it builds a web illustrating paths of becoming that find their shared origin in ancient narrative.
The project began in late 2022 when I became deeply interested in pilgrimage, moved by its adherents and my initial readings of Dante's The Divine Comedy and Seamus Heaney's Station Island. I love literature, and photography and writing are my two primary modes of artistic expression, so I felt the best way to answer my questions about pilgrimage was to engage in a long-term photographic project. The work began with close readings of the texts, after which I decided to put myself through the physical experience and photograph the entirety of my 2023 journey, spending two months in Europe, walking half of Il Cammino di Dante in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna and participating in the 1500-year-old Lough Derg pilgrimage on Station Island in Ireland.
As a lifelong (and current) agnostic, the question I was most interested in was whether the motions of pilgrimage could generate faith in a non-believer; one could simplify it by saying I was, "looking for god." When the answer to my question seemed to be in my case a clear 'no,' I felt frustrated, and perhaps a little like my endeavour had been frivolous. But when I shifted my focus slightly, I became completely absorbed by other questions that probed at the source of my urges: What is it that drives pilgrims? What force propels one to undertake that specific type of journey? Or any journey? I felt, and still feel, that my personal answer—stories—is universal. And I saw that there was a thread running from humanity's earliest recorded poems to my Dublin hotel room ennui.
To make my 2020 monograph Two Rivers, I recreated dreams and memories in order to try to understand how I'd got where I was. When I finished, I saw that an infinity of known and unknown phenomena, not random but mysterious and without motive or inherent meaning, had shaped my life. Earthworms of the Earth builds on this idea—that our destinies are irrevocably contingent and connected—by shining a light on specific and investigable phenomena (poetry) as it relates to both my fate and the fates of the individuals, communities, and countries touched by the poems and poets that have touched me.
Without The Odyssey and The Iliad, there would be no Aeneid; without the Aeneid there would be no Divine Comedy; without The Divine Comedy there would be no Station Island; and without all of them I would not be working on Earthworms of the Earth. But also, without The Iliad and The Odyssey, Greek thought may be radically different; without the Aeneid, Roman identity would be radically different; and without The Divine Comedy, humanity loses an original vision of the afterlife that has profoundly influenced everything from theology to pop culture. Station Island's middle section—about Seamus Heaney's Lough Derg pilgrimage and his inner turmoil regarding his obligations and guilt as an ex-pat Northern Irish Catholic poet during The Troubles—provides a nuanced understanding of one way to be an artist amid calamity, which is unfortunately never not topical. These examples are mostly broad in scope—Heaney's is notably personal—but of course it stands to reason that individuals cannot help but be affected by the movement of their countries and communities.
So, in late 2023 I continued reading and researching the aforementioned poems and critical texts adjacent to them. In 2024, with all this in mind, I spent three more months in Europe photographing for the project, this time focusing on locations from The Iliad and The Aeneid, travelling via foot, car, bus, train, and boat through Türkiye, Greece, Albania, and Italy. My methodology is to immerse myself in the poems before, during, and after these trips, and pay attention to the way they shape what I'm noticing as I spend many hours each day walking and photographing—essentially, I am letting the poems shape my vision of the world, and then noticing exactly how when I return home to process and scan the film. The collected photographs together create a vision of reality sculpted by poetry. And, outside of myself, it has also become clear how deeply the poems have shaped infrastructure and identity in the places they were written. The places shaped the poets who shaped the poems, which have since re-shaped the places.
In 2025 I plan to visit and photograph Virgil's birthplace (Mantua), walk the other side of Il Cammino di Dante (Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna), and spend more time in Rome, which factors heavily into The Divine Comedy and the destiny of which is foretold in The Aeneid. I will also participate in the Return2Ithaca residency in Ithaca, Greece, which is where the latter half of The Odyssey takes place. In 2026, I'll make a final project trip to Northern Ireland to photograph the birth and resting place of Seamus Heaney. Once the photographs are made, I plan to compile the work as a book and conceptualize a way to show it in galleries.
3/18/25 ADDENDUM:
Recent conversations have made me wonder about a couple things. My girlfriend posed the question: "What would this look like, now, if you simply sequenced and edited it? How would you imagine it coming together?" Though I am always thinking of this a little, I started wondering—because someone else asked whether it was necessary to involve Seamus Heaney—whether the project is reaching a natural end, and how I would deal with it if that was indeed the case. Heaney isn't totally arbitrary to the project, but it was simply that Station Island found me and not another poem influenced by the other three poets that he ended up part of this. (And of course because I find that poem cycle so moving). Homer, of course, has influenced every poet since Homer. To limit myself to Homer, Virgil, and Dante would certainly make things tidier (and also keep the poets to those known by single names!).
Since I started work on Earthworms of the Earth, I also began a move back to my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba from Canada's east coast after 10 years away—a move prompted by love that disrupted more than a few of my own entrenched narratives. In my travels through Canada and back and forth between different kinds and definitions of homes, I've been attempting to photograph the same way I have been in Europe, and it has been an ongoing debate with myself whether to include that material among the European work. After all, every one of the poems wrestle with concepts of home, arrival, and departure. I believe my initial feelings about keeping my personal life at a remove from the project were misguided.
But because this is the situation—I am finally back/arriving for the first time at home after a decade away—I am thinking my parallel journey may be providing an end to this particular journey. Wanting to leave home less, or in a different way, will shape the work I make going forward. And if I were to cut Heaney out of things, it would likely mean finishing the travel-dependent photo-making part of the project this year. To bring the home part of this timespan into the work would likely be the last thing I do for it.
Finally, maybe that's all it is—a long trip, with the lines drawn clear.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I currently see the project as concerning itself mainly with a few ideas:
1 - The power of art (and, more specifically, narrative) to influence the fates of individuals, communities, and countries
2 - The gift of poetry to create a quality of attention that helps one understand reality in a more granular, relational way (and, hopefully, photography's ability to interpret and express that gift)
3 - The ethics of journey and the obligations of the individual to home, family, community, country, planet
4 - Concepts of home
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last thought: While I do think that the personal side of this gives the project emotional heft, investigating the influence of the poems on communities, countries, tourism, heritage, etc. also provides a small glimpse into just how powerful (and in many cases, dangerous or damaging) narrative can be. For better or worse, Rome owes its legacy and reputation to its founding epic, the Aeneid; the Divine Comedy makes the case for the Roman Empire's god-granted supremacy. Ethically, Station Island benefits from centuries of thought, but it still deals with (and doesn't necessarily resolve) questions about the artist's political obligations. Obligation is a theme common to all the poems, and one that is close to my heart and mind as well—the very idea of journey necessarily raises questions about obligation to home, family, community, and country.