Art Stroll Through Port Angeles Fine Arts Center’s Webster Woods Sculpture Garden
Last week I had the opportunity to stroll the more accessible, gradual gravel path in Webster Woods, which offers a dramatic view toward the Strait. I encountered some beautiful large works in the open air exhibit.
Among them was my 2025 Poetry in the Park placard, “Varied Ixoreus Thrush,” as part of “Summer Music.” You may listen to my reading of this poem on the PAFAC website.
Photographs by Laura E. Garrard.
Moth Cathedral by Heather Dawn Sparks.A Seat in the Trees by Jennifer Kapnek
The Chroma Zone by Jennifer Kapnek
A rock providing intelligent prose! When asking, “Who am I, What Should I do?,” perhaps we look to what we love!
Finishing Line Press will publish my first chapbook with presales beginning November 24, 2025! Get ready to reserve your copy for a March 2026 release.
Book Synopsis
Laura E. Garrard received a call that many of us fear. She thought she was a healthy person with an injury, and instead she harbored a rare blood cancer called multiple myeloma. In her poetry chapbook, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, Garrard’s lyricism and vivid narratives illuminate living in the “narrow exception of movement” during a time of acute uncertainty. Readers journey with the author and her body through grief, surrender and recovery to plant their hands in earth, swim with dolphins, and run with the salmon. Garrard’s free-spoken style and vulnerable honesty invite readers into her desperation, determination, entreaty and joy. She asks, “What is a human without honor?” Her poignant observations demonstrate how we live and die, simultaneously, and that the present moment is the sweet spot of survival. Garrard’s poetry asks us to destigmatize death and disease in a culture that reveres youth and health, so that we all may live fully. As cancer permeates our communities like never before, this collection is a gift of renewal.
Photo by Pete Will.
Garrard is a Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist in Bellevue Literary Review’s John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry. Her work also appears in TulipTree Review, Amethyst Review, The Madrona Project, Silver Birch, and others. She writes a cancer poetry series, Poetry That Fits, for Penn Medicine’s OncoLink.org.
Endorsements
Laura E. Garrard’s poems are courageous compass-settings for navigating a place of balance and bodily, emotional and spiritual contending. She is fighting a life threatening cancer in language both nuanced and frontal. “Living is precious / The trick is / Not wanting it too much / Not calling death closer.” I finished the book feeling greatly uplifted. Its cargo is a true teaching of how to live daily on the shifting edge of our own mortality and that of those we love.
—Tess Gallagher, author of Is, Is Not
In her chapbook poetry collection, Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death, the first line of Laura E. Garrard’s poem, “Humbled,” reads I am cleaved by lightning. Garrard navigates a world of illness, the inherent fears of death that are overcome by an instinct for survival, the gripping complexities within the process of healing. The experiences of these poems by Laura E. Garrard reveal that for every corridor of grief there are as many rooms of sustaining light, and that is very human, that’s being much alive.
—Gary Copeland Lilley, poet and author of Raven on the Moaners’ Bench and The Bushman’s Medicine Show
Kudos to Laura E. Garrard for writing honest poems that question the familiar trope of vanquishing cancer, asking: “Why fight against / Death as if it were a foe?” Instead, Garrard listens to her body with compassion, embarking on a journey to bring her life into balance and find that “sweet spot of flow called letting go.” These vivid, sensory poems take us along as she swims in the wake of spotted dolphins, sees messages in barn swallows at play, and listens to alders at the edge of the lake where she finds peace. In the end, we arrive at her epiphany with gratitude for her hard-earned wisdom: “The closer we are to the glass door of death / The freer we are to cornerstone live.”
—Holly J. Hughes, author of Passings, winner of an American Book Award
Sienna satin waves roll through dusk, Clean expectations of what’s next, Unknowing heartens my hold, Fall wind unfastens the shoulds, Driftwood carves its own art.
I will receive purpose like a loving child, Tune and pick that old guitar As an eager beginner, Promise the cloud-frothing pastels I will paint them yet in watercolor.
Light dims my stiffened hands home Among wafts of camp spaghetti, Damp leaves, frost coming, and pine. Gentle I go past tree-huddled teens In black T-shirts, jeans and goosebumps.
I’m far from that age but recall Their vast empty calling cards And loose anticipation With a hint of driving rain. I will find my youth again.
Copyright 2024 Laura E. Garrard All photography by Laura E. Garrard
Solstice Psalm
The long night says become still, prepare. Oh how I fight being held, like a squirmy child, lips tight, head turned from sticky cherry syrup offered on a spoon from mother’s hand. I try too hard to heal myself when I need to fall like sleep into god’s keep, the arms of an ancient wood.
The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center and Olympic Peninsula Authors selected this poem of mine for their “Under the Canopy” 2023 Poetry in the Park outdoor exhibit in Webster Woods.
All photographs by Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2023.
The actual tree I lean against and call “Charlie.”
Artist credits for Webster Woods sculptures (top to bottom, left to right): Brandon Zebold, “Offering;” David Eisenhour, “Watershed Notes;” Micajah Bienvenu, “Pi a la Mode;” Steve Jensen, “Suspended Canoe Adrift;” Community Nature Weaving from Summertide 2023 with assistance from MarySue French; Steve Belz, “Sky Gazer;” Laura E. Garrard, “Butterflies Flurry While I Recline on ‘Sky Gazer’.”
My poetry and photography will exhibit in the show “Nature” at the Center for the Arts Theater Gallery and Glenwood Lobby in Jackson Hole, Wyoming: April 19-June 14. My photograph appears on the exhibit book cover as well. For more information, link to the Center for the Arts Event Page. Join me in celebrating one of the included poems, “The Forest.”
The Forest
We smell your freshness
Taste your salt
Until our skin
Lets you in
I am bound by your beauty
To be bolder, truer
Than the sum
Of my tomorrows
By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021
Feb. 5, 2021
9×7″ Print on Wood, “The Forest,” By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021
Top photo and below photos by Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021
I sigh
Sitting on a tree
Someday is here
By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021
March 15, 2021
[Photo Top: "Sitting on a Tree;" Below Left: "Thinking Log;" Below Right: "Rainforest Window;" By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021]
“Sitting Inside a Cedar, 1 & 2,” by Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021.
Ever get
To sit
Inside a tree?
By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021
March 18, 2021
In each woman
Is the womb of the world
Ripe for tears
Ready for mud
Renewing us all
Vigor, sanctity, and child
Larger than her own life
Potential beyond measure
Creativity awaits her dawn
To dredge deep
Hear her welling up
By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021
Jan. 22, 2021
[Top Photo: "Spring in Olympic"; Middle Image: 16x20" Pen & Ink on Paper, "Woman to Child"; and Below Sideshow Photos; all by Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021]
Poetry In Time 