Singer-songwriter Jess Martin and poet-naturalist Kim Hoff will host “Echoes of Nature/Echoes in Community,” a two-part performance featuring poetry and music inspired by local hikes, on Saturday, Sept. 6, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Easthampton Media in Eastworks, as part of Easthampton Art Walk.
Martin and Hoff created the content that makes up the first half of the event, “Echoes of Nature,” over the course of six hikes that they took together in Hampshire County over a yearlong period while they were dealing with the stresses of caregiving and grief. (Hoff’s mother died in January.)
“For us, the project came at a time when we were doing a lot of really heavy-duty caregiving and really needing to find comfort in nature, which is where we’ve almost always found our solace and our comfort,” Hoff said. “We wanted to share that and really focus our writing about what was inspiring us at each place, but also how we related to whether it was grieving, death, resilience, recovery from [the] emotional trauma of caregiving … We wanted to be able to put those into a form where we could then share that inspiration with others.”
“Considering the tightness of our caregiving schedule, these were places we could sort of skip out to for an hour or two,” Martin said. “They were usually on the way to one hospital or another. [Hiking] was a way for us to get these little glimmers of restoration.”
Those locations were Wolf Hill Sanctuary in Southampton, the Old Trolley Line Conservation Area in Easthampton, Sweet Alice Conservation Area in Amherst, Bradley Sanctuary in Williamsburg, Roberts Hill Conservation Area in Leeds, and Lake Wallace in Belchertown.
As part of “Echoes of Nature,” the two will share songs and poems inspired by each location as photos of the location play behind them. They’ll also talk about each hike, with a focus on accessibility – if it’s an “All Persons” trail, which caters to people with mobility issues, or if it’s reachable via public transportation.
Beyond their own need to find solace in nature during a difficult time, the two had also wanted to apply for a residency at a national park, doing a site-specific performance. First, though, they thought: why don’t we try this closer to home first?
It’s worked out well so far. At one recent performance at Northampton’s Ana Bandeira Chocolates, a woman came up to Martin and Hoff after a performance of “Echoes of Nature” and said that the show “gave her her life back,” Martin said, “because she had been not feeling well and not comfortable going out, and when she saw our program and the way we found solace in nature and that we talked about accessible hikes … she felt like, suddenly, she was encouraged to explore nature as well, and that was really special.”
“After every show, people have said, ‘You’ve made me want to go for a walk,’ ‘You’ve made me want to go for a hike,’ so we’re really seeing that, much like we wanted to happen, people are wanting to go out into nature and wanting to find peace and solace and be stewards, too, of nature,” Hoff said.
The second half of their event, “Echoes in Community,” features readings by five local poets: Carolyn Zaikowski, the current Easthampton Poet Laureate; Carolyn Cushing, the former Easthampton Poet Laureate; JuPong Lin; Isabella Gitana; and Kathryn Good-Schiff.
“Together, these artists create a shared space for reflection, restoration, and collective resilience,” a press release said.
Martin and Hoff, who are married and have been together since 1998, both share a love of nature, but they met because of a different shared passion: theater. In 1997, Hoff was part of a theater company in Boston that was producing a festival of new works written by women. Martin submitted a one-woman show.
“I remember when I was writing that piece that I submitted, I was writing it so that I would get a date,” Martin laughed. “It worked out. I was like, ‘I’m gonna write a one-woman show that is so awesome, someone’s gonna want to date me.’ And I was like, ‘Done!’”
“I chose it to be in the festival,” Hoff said, “and the rest is history!”
Still, nature became a significant part of their relationship; their honeymoon destination was the Grand Canyon. Two years later, they returned to the Grand Canyon to hike it, joined by Martin’s dad and one of his friends.
“When we were on that hike, we said, ‘Hey, does anybody know about this Appalachian Trail? Isn’t that crazy? Who would do that for months?’” Martin said. “And then it was us.”
The two saved up for about eight years before they took the time off to hike about half of the Appalachian Trail in 2008 – Georgia to West Virginia, then 100 miles in Vermont later, nearly 1,000 miles overall.
“We’ve always loved going to national parks or forested areas for our own vacations and seeing the impacts of how we can make a difference as stewards in conservation and protection of those places and helping to restore places,” Martin said. “This has always inspired me – small actions can have big changes, big impacts.”
“For me, the most important thing is for us to be able to share this passion for nature and art,” she added, “and inspire people either to simply find comfort and enjoyment in nature, or maybe find a way that their own art can be inspired by the natural world as well.”
“Echoes of Nature/Echoes in Community” is free and open to the public. For more information, visit jessmartin-music.com.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.