ABSTRACT
At the 2011 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) annual conference held in Lawrence, Kansas, Juan Carlos Galeano gave a plenary reading of poems from his chapbook, Amazonia (2012). Many of these poems playfully represent tales about “transformational beings” he heard while growing up in Colombia, near the Caquetá River, in the Amazon basin region. While his father and other community members were building houses, bridges, and furniture from the trees being felled in the rainforest, he was continually running away to hang “out in canoes with Indigenous kids and shermen” who would talk about trees, animals, and sh “in such a sentient realm” (Fernandez 2015, n.p.). In interviews about those experiences, Galeano has said he could feel the “spirits in the air, in the trees, in the water, everywhere” (Fernandez 2015, n.p.). For over a decade now, he has been traveling back to the rivers and forests of the Amazon basin where he grew up. As a professor of Spanish at Florida State University, he oversees a student language immersion and service-learning program. In addition to overseeing this program, he continues to listen and record “oral narratives from shermen, hunters, loggers and small town dwellers” (Fernandez 2015, n.p.). He has collected many of these stories, together with his own explanatory notes, in Folktales of the Amazon (2009).
