EAST SYRACUSE MINOA — A former East Syracuse Minoa Central High School teacher recently released a collection of poems for pre-sale that gives, as she says, a “gentle warning” about the direction our Earth is heading.
With her newest work published by Finishing Line Press, titled “When Mine Canaries Stop Singing,” Nancy Avery Dafoe hopes to communicate the dangers of not paying proper attention to the changing climate, a disregard she said has led to a “looming crisis” on our planet.
Before writing any of the poems in her collection, Dafoe found that this cause for concern was crossing her mind more and more, but over time she also noticed that bringing up such issues of the environment would frequently be politicized and met with pushback around the country.
“I thought to myself there’s gotta be another way to approach this other than what ends up often in angry debates and accusations and people saying climate change is a hoax,” Dafoe said. “I didn’t want to go down that route—I just don’t think it’s productive. Instead let’s look at the Earth and us and our connection and start thinking about what we can do.”
She said she wanted to start with fundamental points people could come to greater agreement on, like a love for the planet we live on, before moving outward from that common-ground foundation into recognizing more specific climate-related issues worldwide and how best to address them. As her collection of 30-plus poems goes on, it grapples with the losses of entire species in a relatively short span of time, how to reduce one’s carbon footprint, the sped-up warmth of the planet, and an increase in the intensification and number of hurricanes in certain parts of the world.
Dafoe began writing what would end up being the first poem included in the collection after stumbling upon a beaver dam near her home hamlet of Little York, located about 30 miles south of Syracuse.
“I was just fascinated, so I pulled my car over and I stopped,” she said. “I was just amazed at these creatures’ industry, and it all started to flow from there. Being observant in the natural world led to another poem and another poem, and then I did some research about various plants, animals and insects that are in trouble in addition to humans.”
Dafoe said the collection, which she worked on over a period of about a year, is a book readers will find “beautiful” in its lyrical wording and “very readable” even if their stances differ from hers and they don’t engage with the argument being presented.
The title, “When Mine Canaries Stop Singing,” is a reference to a time when that sentinel species was commonly used in coal mines to detect the presence of carbon monoxide, a method that saw those birds succumb to the toxicity faster than the workers.
“If the oxygen was disappearing from the mines, they had to get the miners out quickly, and one of the ways they did that was to bring in canaries—if the canaries died, they basically said, ‘We’ve gotta get the men out,'” Dafoe said.
Dafoe was an educator in the ESM school district for 16 years prior to retiring from full-time teaching in 2016. At the high school on Fremont Road, she taught courses ranging from creative writing and journalism to advanced placement English, mostly for grades 10 through 12.
She went on to teach for roughly a year and a half at Tompkins Cortland Community College and she has led numerous writing workshops since her time at ESM, but she spends the majority of her days now pursuing her own career as an author.
Dafoe said her students played a significant role in encouraging her writing, and she credited them in the pages of her debut book “Breaking Open the Box: A Guide for Creative Techniques to Improve Academic Writing and Generate Critical Thinking,” which was released in 2013.
“When you’re teaching, yes, you’re imparting ideas and wisdom and facts, but you’re also learning yourself the whole time, and that’s one of the things I loved about teaching,” Dafoe said. “I always felt I was getting a great deal from the whole experience with my students as much as I was giving.”
She said teachers who write on a regular basis themselves come to intrinsically know the struggles and steps of the writing process firsthand. She said that familiarity lends itself to guiding students’ progress and makes it easier to pass along lessons.
“When Mine Canaries Stop Singing” is Dafoe’s 14th published book and her fourth poetry collection. All 14 of her works have been released through independent publishers, and this is one of several through Finishing Line Press.
Dafoe is also the author of “The House Was Quiet, But the Mind Was Anxious,” a collection of poems centering on how to live with and through grief; a meditative memoir about her late son called “Unstuck in Time,” which won the Director’s Choice for 2023 Book of the Year from the Human Relations Indie Book Awards; “An Iceberg in Paradise,” which reflects on her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease; and a realistic fiction novel that won an Indie Books first-place gold award in 2023 “Socrates Is Dead Again,” about the act of writing and what it means to be a writer.
Dafoe, who also won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom national competition’s poetry award in 2016, is a member of the Central New York Branch of the National League of American Pen Women, and she is a founding member of the new group Being Female: Art as Empowerment. She also writes a prose blog having to do with literature and culture, and she writes across all genres, though she said poetry tends to be her “go-to.”
For more, visit www.nancydafoebooks.com or www.finishinglinepress.com.
