Dene's Artist Statement

I tell stories. True ones that need to be told. Like a neighbor drowning in a freak Texas flood or a fiddler crab caught in the middle of pulling a tennis shoe into its tiny hole in the sand. Stories both tragic and comical that chronicle events as they unfold.

I tell my stories just as I think them--as poems. My words naturally move at a clip in internal rhyme, and I see them displayed in my mind as if they are already written on a screen.

I am both fascinated and obsessed with water, a situation attributed to growing up on the Gulf Coast, where hurricanes, hail, sleet, sudden downpours, and flash floods add to hellstorm of human sweat and tears, and where salt water laps or roars or pools a few steps beyond the pasture or jetty ahead. My dreams are filled with water, and I evaluate my state of mind on its imagery that comes to me in my sleep: calm and clean or stale and dank. Some people say I am haunted by water, but the truth is I am born of it. I cannot write of places I have lived or visited that are land-locked. I am truly a child of the sea.

My stories are also influenced by Ancient Greek myth, classical drama, and heroic poetry. I see life as epic and all of us potentially heroes. We have a choice, my stories say, between living a life of Odysseus or one of his foolish sailors. The worse the struggle, the faster the route to glory. It's up to us to decide which path to take.

Curlew is such a story. It is true. It's a poem. It has water. It channels a sea god, harpies, the Greek chorus, and Sophocles. And it serves to remind us that we can find strength in our frailty and our heroic nature at our moment of doom.