Poet Nan Seymour reflects on the Great Salt Lake

Western mountains reflection at Great Salt Lake near Stansbury Island. Photo: TownLift // Kevin Cody

PARK CITY, Utah — Nan Seymour is a Great Salt Lake celebrant, creator of River Writing and award-winning poet. She has been working to protect the Great Salt Lake for years. On July 12 at 6 p.m. she joins Parkite Rebecca Brenner for an evening of poetry, conversation, and community connection. Kimball Art Center in Park City is hosting this event as part of their current exhibit.

Nan Seymour keeps encouraging people to help the Great Salt Lake

“My writing and organizing is still centered on replenishing our sacred lake,” says Nan Seymour. “Most of the poems I will read Saturday are part of a collection entitled ‘come, said the lake’, poems written during my last five years of keeping vigil for Great Salt Lake.”

As the poet-in-residence on Antelope Island, Nan led day-and-night vigils on behalf of the imperiled Great Salt Lake throughout the 2022 and 2023 Utah State legislative sessions. She received a Mayor’s Artist Award from Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall in the summer of 2023.

“There is not yet a saline sea which has been saved. Even Mono Lake, supported by an exemplary movement, is stabilized but not yet restored. We must look to those who have freed rivers—broken-hearted, ordinary folks who keep showing up. Recently, for the first time in over a century, chinook and coho salmon have returned to the Klamath River which was restored under Yurok tribal leadership,” writes Seymour. She encourages everyone to participate in When Waves Return.

Discover writing as a tool to deep dive into reality and feelings

“My highest hope is that participants will leave feeling more in love with beyond human life, more deeply connected to the sentient, singing world,” says Nan Seymour.

She lives and works on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Ute, Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone Peoples. In 2015 Seymour created the River Writing workshops. Seymour and Brenner will discuss how their creative work connects them to the living world, their ancestors, and current movements. There will be time for questions and space for audience reflections.

Nan Seymour’s newly published irreplaceable: a collective praise poem for Great Salt Lake is a community prayer for the replenishment of an ecosystem on a precipice.