The Arctic Play Portal

Voice as Chorus

An author channels and weaves influences and inspirations, some deliberately, many subconsciously. And a text can travel through spaces and times, and among a variety of readers with needs and leanings that may be different than what the author had in mind.

In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes asks readers to consider to whom they ascribe the voice of a text. Calling attention to the habit of looking for the “truth” or meaning of texts in the people who write them, he offers: “the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture” (53). For Barthes, readers, not the Author (metaphorically killed and then resurrected by Barthes as the “Scriptor”), are the crucial sites for meaning-making. He is advocating for an understanding of text as a script unbound by any singular viewpoint, interpretation, or stated or presumed authorial intention—which isn’t to say that a text can mean anything, but that it holds so much. It is to say that a text should destabilize the myth of the exceptional (or any) individual and hold the tangle of the overlapping, intersecting.

I think of Merced de Papel in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper—a character who is an anthropomorphized book, always shedding and accumulating newsprint, receipts, the pages of novels, the pen-marks of lovers. I think of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Clouds in Each Paper”—his articulation of the inter-being of paper, cloud, sun, the logger, the paper mill, the logger’s food, the logger’s father and mother. Thousands of sources, intersecting and corresponding. We live in multiple, enmeshed systems, and they are always in motion, coming and going, assembling and disassembling. Text records, is companion to, and is part of these vibrations and churnings. The abstractions it contains are networked and re-networked with multiple materialities.

It was with these thoughts in mind, as well as my commitment to teaching and learning, that I collaborated with The 3rd Thing and the generous humans who have leant their voices to create this portal. It is a resource for readers who want to consider different approaches and angles to Arctic Play and its themes, references, and echoes, and it also supports and encourages enmeshed and collaborative making and meaning-making practices. The prompts, reading lists, and questions offer ways to expand the assemblage and widen the stage. The audio contributions aren’t meant to suggest a “right” way to express or listen to the poems. Instead, they invite you to consider how the poems’ meanings are rendered through different interpretive choices and technologies, as well as to bring into focus which strategies you summon to navigate them: Which fabric of quotations? Which chorus of people, rock, ice, air, bird carcass, indifferent fox, plastic, paper? Which clouds in each paper?

Mita Mahato’s Arctic Play unfolds a critical observation of the multitude ways colonialism has spurred compounding impacts of individualism, compartmentalization, extraction, and commodification, while pointing to actionable ways to choose connection and collective impact.

In reading Arctic Play, I felt Mahato’s invitation to reflect on how we as readers might purposefully re-connect to self, community, and the natural world all while surrendering to the idea that we aren’t merely observers or bystanders but rather, actors in the whole of life’s ecosystem. Today, humans are commonly conditioned to believe that we are separate from nature when we are a part of nature, connected through seen and unseen relationships and interdependence on each other, energy, water, air, light, and soil.  In each page of Arctic Play is an unfurling from a tightly wound tension into expanse and interconnection.

These concepts of interconnectivity, interdependence, empathy, resilience are building blocks for achieving climate and environmental justice and continue to be practiced by Indigenous peoples across the globe. To ameliorate the cumulative impacts caused by colonialism, racial, economic and environmental injustice, it is critical to learn about each other, our histories, our current stories, and how institutions have made and make decisions to influence systemic change.  The impacts that we experience today because of climate change can be traced back to human-caused actions, reinforced by institutions making large scale systemic shifts on the planet. A warming planet, melting glaciers and snowpack, increased forest fires, hotter summers, toxics leeching into the ocean and freshwater can be traced back to extraction of fossil fuels, combustion of fracked gas in our homes, overdependence on single occupancy vehicles, land use decisions, overproduction of plastics, use of pesticides, fast fashion, and more.

Reflection Questions

1. In Arctic Play, Mita Mahato plays with form, bending and breaking it, and then reinterpreting form in playful ways spurring re-invention. What would it look like for you to break form and expand your connection to self? To your community? To the natural world?

2. What do you think are the drivers for climate change and environmental injustice? How can we apply the Environmental Justice Principles and the Jemez Principles for Organizing to work across difference to curb climate change and address the impacts of it for overburdened* communities?

*Note: From Revised Code of Washington (RCW) 70A.02.010: “Overburdened community” means a geographic area where vulnerable populations face combined, multiple environmental harms and health impacts, and includes, but is not limited to, highly impacted communities as defined in RCW  19.405.020.

3. In Act 2 of Arctic Play, the characters participate in a service event to remove trash from the shoreline, artifacts of our dependance on fossil fuels and evidence of a “single-use” culture. What could it look like for you to step into your own power to influence choice on an individual level? On an organizational level? On a systemic level?

4. One strategy that cities like the City of Seattle are employing to foster community connectedness or social cohesion is the development of resilience hubs. These are trusted, community-serving facilities that support communities in everyday life and before, during, and after an emergency. When this strategy is applied with a lens of climate adaptation and resilience, these facilities can support critical climate strategies such as decarbonization and clean energy, green roofs, gray water systems, increased tree canopy cover and habitat for pollinators, urban farms and local food production, first aid and first responder training, cooling features to protect from extreme heat, culturally responsive programming, and more. What might you like to see in a resilience hub that can support your community’s connectedness while addressing the impacts of climate change?

5. In Arctic Play, Mahato ends the book with a sonnet, a love poem to the polar bear. In Manuel Muñoz’s interview of poet Sandra Cisneros, Cisneros posits,

What if one of the great loves of your life has four feet and a tail and a snout? What if it’s a little parrot with green feathers? Or what if it’s this incredible morning glory? All of these things send us love, and sometimes we’re just looking for love in all the wrong places. I feel so nurtured and so loved now that I stopped expecting a human being to be the one. And so, now there are so many ones in my life that I feel like crying sometimes from just being overjoyed and saying, Wow, so much love in the universe. 

What loved one would you dedicate your sonnet to? Why? Try writing your own sonnet! 

Recommended Reading

This recommended reading list highlights just a few writers and written pieces that connect with place and ancestral wisdom to make connections between empathy, connectedness and justice, while drawing inspiration from the natural world to guide us towards collective impact for the many-humans and more-than-human beings alike.


1. “The Beautiful Unforeseen,” by Sandra Cisneros, in Orion Magazine Autumn 2022
2. “Encounters with Spirit: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros,” by Sandra Cisneros and Manuel Muñoz, in Orion Magazine Autumn 2022, .
3. “[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way]” by Juan Felipe Herrerain, in Half of the World in Light, New and Selected Poems
4. The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty First Century, by Grace Lee Boggs,  Scott Kurashige, Foreword by Danny Glover
5. Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown
6. Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing, Developed for a meeting hosted by Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ), Jemez, New Mexico, December 1996
7. Environmental Justice Principles, Developed and adopted by Delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held on October 24-27, 1991, in Washington DC
8. “To Labor for the Hive,” by Jamie Liu, in Grist
9. “From fiction to reality: How resilience hubs could help people weather disasters — and build community,” by Claire Elise Thompson, in Grist

 Playlist Inspired by Arctic Play


The unfurling and expansion to connection and interweaving of Arctic Play became a visceral feeling for me. I was compelled to create a playlist of songs that embodied for me that feeling of loosening, breaking form, taking up space and intertwining. What would your playlist look like?

1. Everything in Its Right Place Radiohead
2. Lineas Sávila
3. Another World Antony and the Johnsons & ANOHNI
4. Points of Light Pillars and Tongues
5. Dust and Water Antony and the Johnsons & ANOHNI
6. Movement 6 Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders featuring London Symphony Orchestra
7. Spirit Moves in an Arc Mark Trecka
8. Spiritual Eternal Alice Coltrane
9. Home WILLOW & Jon Batiste
10. When You’re Smiling Weyes Blood
11. Sea of Love Cat Power

Apple Music Link

Spotify Link

About Lylianna Allala

Lylianna Allala is the Climate Justice Director at the City of Seattle’s Office of Sustainability and Environment. In her role, Lylianna is responsible for collaborating across city departments, with regional governments, national and international climate coalitions and with local community-based organizations to develop and implement climate and environmental justice policies and programs such as Seattle’s Green New Deal and Seattle’s Equity and Environment Initiative. She joined the City of Seattle in 2019 after serving as a policy advisor and outreach lead on environmental, energy, and climate related issues for U.S. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. Prior to transitioning to the public sector, Lylianna spent time as a restoration ecologist, building back country trails for the U.S Forest Service and traveling the country facilitating leadership development programs for environmental and social change leaders.

Lylianna is a co-creator of The Growing Old Project, a podcast that explores what Seattle might look like in 50 years for humans and trees to grow old together. She serves on the board of Short Run Arts & Comix Festival and is a trustee for Washington’s chapter of The Nature Conservancy. In 2023, she was listed as a Grist 50 Fixer, an annual list of leaders driving fresh solutions to our planet’s biggest problems. She is currently participating in the Obama Foundation’s Leaders USA Program and working on completion of a certificate in Climate Change & Public Health from Yale University.

Connect with Lylianna

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/Lylianna
• Email: Lylianna.Allala@seattle.gov

Photo credit: Lylianna Allala’s photo taken by Nia Martin

Exploring how Mita Mahato uses comics in Arctic Play

Introduction

The publisher calls Arctic Play “a drama, a dirge, an expedition log, a series of poetic experiments, a comic book.” This last descriptor is an intriguing choice; Arctic Play is very different from what most of us probably imagine when we hear the words “comic book.” But close observation reveals that key elements, or building blocks, of comics, are at the very heart of this work.

This exercise will guide readers in exploring how Mita Mahato has experimented with the comics form, and how her choices might affect what readers think, feel, or even hear as they move through the pages. I’m suggesting that readers focus in on a few elements of comics for this exercise (more details and examples below):

• Division of content into panels or other discrete units
• Combination of text and image
• Repetition of text and/or image, exactly or with variation
• Creation of an auditory experience for the reader

Steps

1. Select a page or spread

You can do this exercise with any page or spread (a spread is two facing pages, and comics creators like Mahato are intentional in choosing which pages are together in a spread). If you’re looking for suggestions, these are three selections that lend themselves particularly well to this exercise: there are many layers and details to notice with close observation, and comics elements can be clearly identified.

• From Act One: “The 30 passengers are” or “Rocks are”
• From Act Two: “Scene iii,” the first two pages
• From Act Three: “Wonder how I spurn,” both pages in the spread

2. Make a close observation

We’ll start by setting aside the focus on comics elements and simply looking. Set a timer for five minutes. Look carefully at your selection for the entire time, resisting the urge to look away. Don’t take notes; you’ll have a chance to do this in the next step. Keep looking, even if you think you’ve seen every part of the image. Keep an eye out for details, colours or textures that you didn’t notice at first. It can also be productive to pay attention to how it feels to look at one thing for this extended length of time; for most people it will be unusual and perhaps even uncomfortable. Complex pages like “The 30 passengers are” should occupy your attention easily for five minutes, once you get past the restlessness that can come with such focused looking.

3. Make notes

Make notes about anything that you noticed during the observation, especially things that surprised you. For example, maybe you saw more and more colours the more you looked, or noticed patterns that weren’t obvious at first glance. Maybe you noticed a small image or detail in the corner of a page that you were sure wasn’t there when you first looked. For example, a reader might not see each face or partial face in “The 30 passengers are” without this kind of close observation. Or you may have started off looking at the two pages in “Wonder how I spurn” as completely separate, but as the observation continued, you might have begun to notice more and more connections between the two.

4. Identify and explore how the author uses elements of the comics form

Now, look at your selection again. Focus on the ways in which Mahato has used elements from comics, and note their effect or impact. This might include:

• Content split up into panels or other discrete units: Note how many units there are, whether they are arranged in a regular or irregular grid, how the content in the units varies or repeats. Are there patterns or rhythms created by the ways in which content is divided and arranged?
• Text and images engaging with each other: Are there places where text contrasts with or complicates images (or vice versa)? How does the placement or treatment of text affect its meaning? Are there places where the lines between text and image blur – for example, in “Wonder how I spurn,” on the second page, are “INK” and “KIN” words only, or could they also be considered images because of how they look and how they interact with the rest of the page?
• Repetition of text and/or image: Notice places where text and/or image are repeated exactly or with variation. Think about why Mahato might have chosen to repeat these elements and what impact it creates for readers.
• The creation of an auditory experience: Consider: How does the division and arrangement of text and image sound inside your head? How might you read these pages out loud? How has the author intentionally arranged text and image to create a particular rhythm, volume or tone? Might another reader hear the page in a similar way? Does colour have a role? How about speech balloons?

For classes or reading groups

This exercise can easily be adapted for a class or group of readers. The selection of pages can be organized in various ways: each participant can examine the same page, each can choose a different page, or small groups or pairs can study a page together.

After the close observation, participants can share their observations in pairs or small groups. There are lots of different ways to do this. Those who observed the same page could be grouped together, and participants could compare their notes and identify differences and similarities. Groups could be formed in which each participant has studied a different page, and each could teach the rest of the group about their page. Or, participants could start out by meeting with others who studied the same page, and then split into mixed groups, bringing not only their own observations but also others’.

A wrap-up discussion at the end of the session can be a chance to identify ideas or questions that participants are taking away from the session. These may include:

• A new understanding of how many ways there are to stretch and push comics
• Observations about the connections between comics and poetry
• Ideas for applying Mahato’s approach in their own creative work
• Questions about the techniques and materials that Mahato used to create Arctic Play
• Thoughts about what it’s like to observe the same image for an extended period of time

Recommended Reading

For great examples of very close readings of comics:

How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden: This book uses one Nancy strip as a foundation for explaining multiple elements of comics structure.

Strip Panel Naked: YouTube channel of comics scholar and letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou. Short videos with sharp, clear explanations of how comics work. 

For more about comics poetry:

Secret Labor: sketching the connection between poetry and comics, by Hillary Chute

“Why I make poetry comics”, by Bianca Stone

For insights into Arctic Play and Mita Mahato’s approach to comics:

“Arctic Play: A Conversation with Mita Mahato and Michelle Peñaloza”  Bellingham Review 

“Loud with Invention: An Interview with Mita Mahato”  Shenandoah Review

“The Poetry of Comics: A Conversation with Collage Artist Mita Mahato” Catapult

About Sarah Leavitt

Sarah Leavitt is the author of the graphic memoir Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me, and the award-winning historical/speculative graphic novel Agnes, Murderess. A feature-length animation based on Tangles is currently in production, with the script co-written by Sarah. Sarah’s newest book is Something Not Nothing, a collection of short experimental comics about grief and loss following the death of her partner. Sarah is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, where she has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate comics classes since 2012.

Connect with Sarah

• Sarah’s website: www.sarahleavitt.com
• Sarah on Instagram: @sarah_leav
• Order Something Not Nothing from your independent bookstore or from the publisher, Arsenal Pulp

Photo Credit: Sarah Leavitt’s photo taken by Jackie Dives

Arctic Play takes us to (and takes me, personally, back to) the frozen north. But—unlike the Arctic so enduringly Romanticized and reified by a Western gaze—Mahato shows us how this frozen place is made up of far more than ice. An unsolved sum of its multiple parts, the work skillfully approximates the multiplicity of a landscape that is subject to the dramatic flux and flow of temperature and light, a changeability that makes the world—water, animal, rock, mud, plastic—shift beneath fin, foot, and paw.

My suggested reading pairings below aim to pull out three of the many strands from this elegant project. The first text highlights how non-Western (or, “scientific”) knowledges read and see the Arctic landscape (Hastrup), and is paired with a playful spatial analysis of “utopia”: a construction as pervasive as the Romantic ideal of the frozen north (Marin). The second duo emphasizes how ice as a material has confounded scientific systems of knowing and understanding the inanimate world, and how thinking with ice can challenge such ways of seeing the world (Yip, Simonetti). And the third expands on the vibrant possibilities—illustrated with such deftness by Mahato—of thinking and acting with more-than-humans when grappling with our expansive, complex, and ever-changing environments (Raffles, Demuth). 

1

Kirsten Hastrup, “Anticipation on Thin Ice: Diagrammatic Reasoning in the High Arctic,” The Social Life of Climate Change Models (Routledge, 2012)

Louis Marin, “Narrative and Description,” in Utopics: Spatial Play (1931, trans. Robert Vollrath 1981)

2

Julianne Yip, “Sea Ice Out of Time: Reckoning with Environmental Change,” Time and Society (Vol. 31, Iss. 4, 2022)

Cristian Simonetti, “Viscosity in Matter, Life and Sociality: The Case of Glacial Ice,” Theory, Culture and Society (Vol. 39, Iss. 2, 2024)

3

Hugh Raffles, “Blubberstone,” in The Book of Unconformities: Speculations in Lost Time (2020)

Bathsheba Demuth, “Whale Fall,” in Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait  (W.W Norton & Co., 2019)

About Alexis Rider

Dr. Alexis Rider is a historian of science and the environment, and is interested in all things cryos- and geos. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Making Climate History project at the University of Cambridge. From May 2022-September 2023, she was a Past & Present Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London. Her current book project, A Melting Fossil: Seeing Ice/Making Time, examines how, since the nineteenth century, ice has been deployed by naturalists and scientists as a kind of scientific instrument to understand and construct the deep past and future of the planet. Rider is also a potter who loves all things clay-, glaze-, and kiln-related.

Connect with Alexis

• • Alexis’s website: alexisrider.com

Photo Credit: Alexis Rider’s photo courtesy of the artist

Prompt 1

In Act 1 of Arctic Play, Mita Mahato uses grid lines to play with the idea of an “anti-map”.  Create a visual poem engaging an environment that has emotional significance to you, echoing the shape and/or pathways of this place.

Prompt 2

In Act 2, Mahato writes: “We take these ghosts / millions of years old / home with us.” Take a walk outside and see what you might find — a rock, a plastic bottle, a leaf, etc. Write a poem imagining how this object/creature arrived here and what it wants to say to you.

Prompt 3

In the polar bear sonnet in Act 3, so much of the language plays with our readerly expectations, as handwriting links together words visually and words like “susurrus” are broken into two lines to emphasize “us”: “susurr/us.” In a visual poem, play with different modes of handwriting and emphasizing words within words. 

Additional Reading Suggestions

Hardly War, Don Mee Choi

Borderland Apocrpha, Anthony Cody

Prose Architectures, Renee Gladman

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Hyperboreal, Joan Naviyuk Kane

Habitat Threshold, Craig Santos Perez

About Jane Wong

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She also wrote two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, UCross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. An interdisciplinary artist as well, Jane has exhibited her poetry installations and performances at the Frye Art Museum, Richmond Art Gallery, and the Asian Art Museum. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor at Western Washington University.

Connect with Jane

• Jane’s website: https://janewongwriter.com/
• Buy Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City from the publisher, Tinhouse
• Buy How Not to Be Afraid of Everything from the publisher, Alice James Books 

Photo Credit: Jane Wong’s photo taken by Gritchelle Fallesgon

“I bring” by RM Francis

RM Francis is an artist based in Seattle working with computer-generated sound and language via recording, installation, and performance. Recent works include the installation “Hello, Bipster” at Kolonia Artystów in Gdańsk in collaboration with Viennese sound artist Jung An Tagen, and “?M Fra*,” a suite of GAN synthesis works made in collaboration with Ian M Fraser. His most recent release, pedimos un mensaje, a collection of hallucinatory duets between dictation apps and deep learning networks, was published by the Italian label Superpang.

RM Francis photo taken by Anna Breit

“The air feels” read by Mita Mahato

“The ice is” read by Mita Mahato

“12-14 walruses are” read by Isaac Yuen

Isaac Yuen’s short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Orion, Pleiades, Shenandoah, and other publications. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, he was a writer-in-residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Literature in Switzerland, a Science Meets Fiction fellow at the HWK Institute for Advanced Study in Germany, and an upcoming artist-in-residence with the La Napoule Foundation in France. His debut nature essay collection, Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World, is “a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders.”