Bio – Clare Follmann

Clare, M.E.S., is a writer, environmentalist, bibliophile, tea-leaf reader, and gardener located in Olympia, Washington. Her work engages with themes of landscape and sense of home, language, philosophy, political theory, story-telling, and the occult.

She has enjoyed spending lots of her time playing with story–she’s worked in bookstores for the better part of a decade, and she’s been a writer and storyteller all her life. She loves poking holes in dominant or obsolete narratives and strives to both listen to and help uplift the voices and stories that have been too often cast aside, particularly the cries from our living world that is suffering under our consumptive society. Her work focuses on finding and planting the literal and figurative seeds that will help support a post-capitalist society that prioritizes people and planet.

She has published articles and prose in Oak Journal, Innersleeve, and Elderly Mag, and was the artist-in-residence at Sou’Wester in the spring of 2020.

Education and Experience

An M.E.S. graduate from Evergreen State College, her thesis, The Art of Arguing Science: A Critique of Scientific Rhetoric through the Invasive Species Narrative, explores both inaccessible language and misleading militaristic rhetoric used in the scientific narrative of invasive species. In the summer of 2019, she was a guest speaker at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources to share and engage with the work from her thesis.

Clare received her B.A. in Philosophy and Literature from Sarah Lawrence College. Her essay The Walls of the Mind House was nominated for the 2013 Spencer Barnett Memorial Prize for Excellence in Latin American Studies, and her essay Two Tales of One City was nominated for the 2013 Lipkin Prize in the Humanities.

For six years, Clare worked as a manager, events coordinator, bookseller, and book-buyer at two independent bookstores in Olympia, WA. Now, Clare works alongside herbalist Elise Krohn and GRuB’s Tend, Gather and Grow team to help research, design, and edit a series of curricula of 80+ lessons for educating youth and teachers on Indigenous plant knowledge. She is also GRuB‘s Grant Coordinator.