Todd Davis is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, including his most recent collection Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems (Michigan State University Press, 2024). He has edited numerous books, most recently A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia (University of Georgia Press, 2024). His poems have won many awards and appeared in notable literary publications, including American Poetry Review, Orion, North American Review, and Ecotone. He teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College and lives along southern Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Front.
Why do you write?
I suppose my love of story is at the root of why I write, followed closely by my love of the music language can create. I tend to think in story and image, not in lists or facts (although facts are very important to me). I’ve always learned best by listening to story and grasping a strong image within that story. Writing helps me to be more present to the world, to notice it in greater detail, to ask questions of it, to celebrate and praise it.
Your father was a poet and your son is one as well. Can you speak to your family tradition of expression through poetry? How do your styles compare and influence one another?
My father was a veterinarian who loved poetry. He never published a poem, but he did write some poems, mostly for my mother. He recited poetry he’d learned in school as we worked with animals. His respect and treatment of other-than-human animals has a great deal to do with my own approach to the natural world and the way I write about animals.
As for Noah, my oldest son, he’s a wonderful poet whose first book won the Wheelbarrow Prize and was published by Michigan State University Press. His second book, The Last Beast We Revel In, will be published by CavanKerry in April 2025.
My poems and Noah’s poems have close connections. We’ve been drawn to the work of some of the same poets, and the context and geography of our work shares a similar space in Appalachia along the Allegheny Front where I’ve lived the past 22 years and where Noah was raised.
Noah and I exchange drafts of poems and nonfiction with each other, getting invaluable feedback that makes our work better. I’m so grateful for our relationship and the way it has grown through our writing.
You’ve published two books in 2024. What, if anything, are you writing or editing now? What do you hope to write in the future?
Ditch Memory, my most recent book of poems, was a “new and selected” volume, a retrospective of sorts over the past 30 years of my writing. A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia was a fun editing project that brought together so many writers, artists, and scientists from the region. It was a true team effort.
As I look to the coming year, I’m finishing a prose book on fathers and sons, rooted in nature and the acts of hunting, fishing, and foraging. Northern Woodlands has published a chapter from this manuscript about an old brook trout I caught on a headwater stream near my home.
I’m also working on my next book of poems. Poetry is a daily act for me, a kind of writing I can dip into if I have thirty minutes in the morning before the workday begins. The poems I’m writing have to do with recovery and restoration, trying to understand how we can heal the damage we’ve done to the earth and to each other.
A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia introduces 70 species indigenous to the region. Which of these species do you find most fascinating?
It was so difficult to winnow the species to just 70, but we wanted representation across flora and fauna. Because of this, many of my favorites aren’t even in the book. But a brief list of some that I love:
Serviceberry for its sweet fruit and the ways it draws cedar waxwings to its branches.
Teaberry for the bright fruit in the gray months of winter and the mint it brings to my tongue.
Porcupine for their deliberate wanderings in the woods, especially the paths they mark in the snow.
Hermit thrush for its spiraling song in June.
Brook trout for their skin’s calligraphy and the array of colors.
I will end there, although each species holds its own beauty.
How has your editing influenced your writing and vice versa?
Reading is integral to my writing. Editing is a way to encounter new work or to celebrate the work of writers you admire. Editing is a lot like coaching, putting together a team, seeing how distinct voices can come together to express something a singular voice could not.
What advice do you have for new writers? For scientist looking to write poetry?
At the risk of repetition in my answers: read, read, read. Writers seek out the best writing and learn from that writing. We apprentice ourselves to the traditions and disciplines we write into and write from. I think scientists have a wonderful opportunity to translate their deep knowledge from a discipline of scientific inquiry into a work of art. This may allow for the exploration at the edges of certainty or uncertainty. Both in writing and in science, we are working at the far edges of mystery, of what we do not know yet, or know incompletely.
Describe your connection(s) to the northern forests.
I hunt and fish and forage northern forests. I walk these forests to see wildflowers blossom, to listen to birds. I thrill at the ripening of blackcap raspberries, wild strawberries and blueberries, teaberries and service berries. I never tire of seeing wild trout sip the surface during a blizzard hatch. There are three ravens on the mountain that I greet several times each week. They seem to seek me out, and our encounters are varied and often quite intimate. I look forward to the timber rattlers that lay among the talus on a south facing slope where I gather wild blueberries. And I look forward each year to the spring ephemerals, taking photos of them: foam flower, trillium, lady slippers, wild ginger, hepatica, ginseng, wood sorrel, and the list goes on and on.
What’s the best little-known nature or poetry book you’ve read?
First, a book of poems because poetry is not read widely in the United States, so most any book of poetry might go unnoticed: Robert Wrigley’s Earthly Meditations (Penguin, 2006).
Second, a book of nonfiction that helped me think about and reconsider the act of hunting: Christopher Camuto’s Hunting from Home: A Year Afield in the Blue Ridge Mountains (W.W. Norton, 2003).
Who inspires you?
The flora and fauna of my home forest, all those living beings who sustain my life and whose lives I am connected to and with.
My family—Shelly, Noah, and Nathan.
So many writers.
The memory of my parents and grandparents.
Are you reading or listening (podcasts or music) to anything great right now?
I’ve reread quite a few books the past six months. Here are few that I’ve returned to for nourishment: David James Duncan’s The Brothers K; Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine; Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude; Brady Udall’s The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass; Rick Bass’s Where the Sea Used to Be; and Margaret Renkl’s Late Migrations.