title: Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
author:  Barbara Hurd 
description: Swamps and bogs and their mysterious ambiguitytheir perch between liquid and solidhold a peculiar fascination for Hurd, a naturalist and poet who lives near Maryland's Finzel Swamp. Delving into these wetlands, she finds in their array of strange fauna and flora an objective correlative to the place in the mind where artistic inspiration occurs: a place of blurred borders, shifting identity, and strange odors, of rot and death, of Zen peacefulness. "To love a swamp," she writes, is to love "what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised." <br /> Copyright  2005 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Yorker/dp/B00005N7T5/"><i>The New Yorker</i></a>
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  [Begin Reading](Soul_Music_split_002.html#filepos829)
  
  Where to finish?
  
  A dark, stormy night. A coach, horses gone, plunging through the rickety,
  useless fence and dropping, tumbling into the gorge below. It doesn’t even
  strike an outcrop of rock before it hits the dried riverbed far below, and
  erupts into fragments.
  
  > Miss Butts shuffled the paperwork nervously.
  
  > Here was one from the girl aged six:
  
  ‘What We Did On our Holidays: What I did On my holidys I staid with grandad he
  has a big White hors and a garden it is al Black. We had Eg and chips.’
  
    
  
  Then the oil from the coach lamps ignites and there is a second explosion, out
  of which rolls—because there are certain conventions, even in tragedy—a
  burning wheel.
  
    
  
  And another paper, a drawing done at age seven. All in black. Miss Butts
  sniffed. It wasn’t as though the gel had only a black crayon. It was a fact
  that the Quirm College for Young Ladies had quite ex