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
TulipTree Review‘s Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Top nominated my 2024 Merit Prize winning poem, “Hugging Alder,” for a Pushcart Prize. This honor is difficult to write about because I was quite surprised and grateful. So that you can read it easily, here is a link to a second contest I have entered it into, The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders. It will be considered for publication in an anthology published by Paloma Press of California in connection with the Kent State Wick Center and PoetsforScience.org. Originally, TulipTree published the poem in Stories That Need to be Told, 2024.
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 poem below was selected, by the Olympic Peninsula Writers through a juried submission, to appear for a year in the PAFAC New Growth outdoors exhibit in the Webster Woods sculpture garden. Following a year, it will be moved with other poems to a number of parks in Port Angeles. It’s very exciting to have been chosen! Below is a photograph of me with the installation on the day of the poetry reading.
Here is a recording of my reading:
Laura E. Garrard reading her poem “I Have to Chase That Squirrel,” June 18, 2022.
I Have to Chase That Squirrel
Start at a run from the door
And accelerate to top lope
Just as I reach the base of the Douglas fir
Even if I’m too late to catch it
My instinct must be served
You laugh and shrug
For me, it’s not just for fun
It’s my essence, my expression
My way to tell the world
What kind of dog I am
So free me to do
What I want, what I must
Responsibility, according to whom?
My number one purpose right now
Is to chase that squirrel
Even though I’m scared
I won’t succeed
I must look skyward to see
On which limb the squirrel may be
Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2022
Standing beside my New Growth poetry installation in Webster Woods, June 18, 2022. (Photograph by Michael Nordell.)
My poem perfectly installed in Webster Woods next to a Douglas fir tree at a trail hub. (Photograph by Laura E. Garrard.)
I took these photographs as spring turned into summer on the “Moments in Time Trail,” Olympic National Park. I feel they tie in nicely with the New Growth theme. (Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2022.)
I’m Already Looking Forward
As the height of golden color
Becomes baked and matted
I can already see in mind’s eye
The blooming locations of next year’s beauties
And smell the sweetness of black cottonwood resin
A mere six months to wait
Things may be so different
I don goose down and Gore-Tex
In preparation of the colder and greener moss walks
Today’s azure brightness however
Forecasts a vital turnover
From nebulous to distinctive images
Only of fertile soil building
The winter wait will create cell space
Time will combine the correct mineral and organisms
I along with garden and forest will renew
As that is what seasons and bodies do
By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2022
Oct. 31. 2021
“Winter to Summer,” By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2022
Elusive Winter Sun
Elusive winter sun
Shine through frozen limbs
And warm my chest
Bring my inflexible bones back to life
Show the way to peace
I once observed
In your summer shining
Warmth through and through
Basking in the new grass
Sleepy relaxed muscles
A dragonfly lighting
On my stillness
By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2022
Dec. 28, 2021
[Photo Gallery By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2022]
Enjoying the Calm
Today I approached the lake
And observed that she was very still.
She said, I’m thinking.
About what? I asked.
My destiny,
About where I’m going.
Ah, me too, I said.
I’d rather stay here with you.
Me too, I agreed,
This valley holds infinite beauty
And nourishes my breath and body.
She said, But if we stay here
We will not discover
What may happen
If we were to explore
Elsewhere.
I said, True,
But we can be
Here together now,
Enjoy your sparkling sunshine,
And not worry about leaving just yet.
She said the winter storms are coming-
I don’t want them to, but they will-
The waves and current
Will carry this me away.
I know, I said,
We will spend some time
And enjoy the calm.
By Laura E. Garrard
Oct. 8 2021
All photos above and below by Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021
In celebration of Poetry in Your Pocket Day, during this Poetry Month of April, I recorded myself reciting this poem (in the above video) while kayaking on Crescent Lake.
I became a drop of water one day
I floated from a cloud into a high hillside creek
And flowed downward to join a magnificent turquoise river
The river rushed into an emerald oblong lake
Where I greeted trout and merganser feet
I filled the entire lake as all drops linked together
I felt my body reach from one shore to the other
As well as separate to myself, the original droplet
After I had known fully my lake environ
I streamed out to the bay, then rougher moving sea
Joining currents stronger than me
Carrying me to other shores and other beings
I grew in knowledge, strength, and courage
Finally after a lifespan, I recognized myself again
For the water is me
Fills me
Nourishes me
And heals me
I became a drop of water one day
And through it realized the essence of all creation
By Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021
Feb. 5, 2021
[Top and Below Photos all by Laura E. Garrard, Copyright 2021]
Poetry In Time 