Alumni Profile

By Savannah Brantley '25

Martha Park '11 Draws Together Faith and Climate in New Book

Climate change can be a divisive and terrifying topic.

Martha Park '11 is using her writing and art to explore and celebrate the space where faith and the climate crisis connect.

In her new book of illustrated essays, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, Martha writes about the faith she grew up with in the South as the daughter of a United Methodist minister, climate change and conservation, and her experience as a mother of two young children. Combining prose and illustrations, she creates scenes of daily life in the midst of a changing climate and a polarized culture.

"A lot of my book is about religious fundamentalism and its effects on politics and on people's theology," she says. "One of the things that feels most powerful to me in the face of religious certainty is to embrace uncertainty and say, 'Are we sure about that? Is that the only way of looking at this? What are some ways that we can complicate or add texture to that belief?'"

Martha came to Ohio Wesleyan to study art and then found her path could include writing.

"I started out as a studio art major and was always taking literature classes," she says.

Former Spanish professor Conrad Kent helped her see writing as more than a pastime while she was taking his Rites of Passage course, which she says was a mixture of philosophy, creative writing, and literature, "looking at how different cultures ritualize rites of passage and ultimately how our culture has lost a lot of that sense of ritual, how we can be adrift as we go through liminal periods in our lives."

Martha says, "I think Dr. Kent could tell that I was kind of smack dab in one of those really liminal periods and couldn't find my footing. He could tell that writing was a way out for me, a way to ground myself in the midst of a rite of passage that we don't really have rituals for anymore."

After graduating, Martha earned an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University in Virginia.

Early in her career, she considered combining illustration with writing as a way to "bring in people and voices from the past and the present, along with the landscapes, in a way that would be visually cohesive. It wouldn't be an article where you're reading and then there's a black and white picture of a building. It would be more integrated. I wanted to write about something that happened 50 or 100 years ago, and explore how that's still having ramifications now, and have all of these people exist on a page together, because they are part of a long conversation."

Her comics and editorial illustrations have been published in The Guardian, Oxford American, The Bitter Southerner, and elsewhere. "Washed Away," a comic about Kentucky landslides she made with environmental journalist Austyn Gaffney, received an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News' Insight Award for Visual Journalism.

"It feels very counter-cultural to allow myself, in my own private way, not to specialize," she says. "There's all these pressures to do one thing and only do that thing. For me it's important to my interior life to resist that."

Martha and her husband, Colin Lee, live in Memphis, Tennessee, where they enjoy hiking and getting outdoors with their two young children.