Wildfires and poetry are not strangers in the publishing world but with Smother, poet Rachel Richardson has added a new element by combining her views on the challenging nature of wildfires with those of raising children.

How do we become good parents in a world that is struggling to find new ways of surviving regular, large, threatening fires?

Richardson is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT, a literary arts center in Berkeley, California. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Resident through the Confluence Lab and is now trained as an FFT2 wildland firefighter. She lives in Berkeley, half a mile from where she was born.

Wildfire Today invited her to tell us more about her inspirations for Smother, a collection of poems on wildfire, children, climate change, landscape, friends, family, rage, sorrow and more.

What inspired you to write these poems during these difficult times with wildfire?

I began writing a book about living in California, and in the Bay Area specifically, in 2017. The first things I found myself writing about were technological, actually – the way technology is changing the way we interact with each other and with nature. I’m a parent, and I saw it strongly in the experience my daughters were having growing up compared to the experiences I had had in the 80s and 90s.

But in 2017 we also started feeling major effects of the record-breaking fires that were burning in California – smoke and air pollution at levels that were new and startling. I didn’t intend to write about fire, but since I try to be receptive to the world when I write, smoke kept finding its way into my poems.

Then when Covid hit, in 2020, combined with the record-breaking Lightning Complex fires and Creek fire (together burning about 4 million acres in California) that summer, all my themes converged. It felt like the massive out-of-control burning symbolized a fundamental shift in our sense of what childhood could be, and how we could imagine a future in California. That was when I began to understand that my book was fundamentally about these two elements, fire and parenting.

What did your training as a firefighter add to your work?

Thinking about the devastation of those fires was pretty bleak, so I began to seek out more information about the causes of wildfire, hoping to change my fear of them into something more productive. I wanted to have an answer for my children about how we could live in harmony with our landscape, and I wanted to feel less terrorized by the prospect of fires’ destruction.

I enrolled in FFT2 training to learn more of the science and social components of wildfire. Then I participated in several prescribed burns with community organizations in Yolo and Trinity Counties. These experiences of making community with others interested in fire, and of burning to improve the ecology of the landscape, made me feel I could be part of the solution. Fire was not just something humans could control and direct, but it was a necessary force in the Western landscape, and a tool that could be used to benefit the land.

I am not sure what I’ll write next, but this work will have a big impact on it.

What do you know now about wildfire that you didn’t before you started writing these poems?

Fire is powerful, but not always to be feared. I am much more in awe of fire as a force in the Western landscape, and I am more motivated to find ways for humans to live better in our fire-adapted ecosystem. We can steward the land into a much more resilient state if we get right with our relationship to fire.

Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, Smother (W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), and Hundred-Year Wave (2016) and Copperhead (2011). Her poetry and prose have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review Online, at the Poetry Foundation, on The Slowdown, and elsewhere.

Rachel received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan. She also holds an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a BA in English from Dartmouth College. She has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stanford, University of San Francisco, and, most recently, as Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary’s College of California in the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Following are two exerts are from Smother:

AFTER FIRE

[This poem is about a tree-planting event at Berkeley’s Tuolumne Camp, a public family wilderness camp near Yosemite that burned in the 2013 Rim Fire.]

 The kids cradled baby trees

in their arms – plastic conical pots

with the starts of incense cedars

and ponderosas sprouting upward –

tiny shivers of needles

spurting from thin beginnings

of branch – and we trudged

up the hillside with paper packets

of nutrients, tree tea, stuffed

in our jeans pockets, to toss

into the planting holes. The rains

were coming. Everything felt lucky.

THE “I WANT” SONG

But there’s so much that I want –

for the trees not to burn, or at least

not these trees, not unless they’re far away or

beneficial to the understory. I want to stop

feeling like I’d better buy the fruit

now because maybe next year there will be

no more fruit, no more water, maybe the crops will burn

or wither or be sprayed with the chemical that kills

the bees and which studies now show

kills the bees’ children and children’s children

two bee-generations after exposure.

I want not to think about the expiration of the world.

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