John Caddy
Encyclopedia
Life
John Caddy grew up in Hibbing, MinnesotaHibbing, Minnesota
Hibbing is a city in Saint Louis County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 16,361 at the 2010 census. The city was built on the rich iron ore of the Mesabi Iron Range. At the edge of town is the largest open-pit iron mine in the world. U.S...
. His great-grandfather, Tom Caddy, was a Mine Captain, from Cornwall
Cornwall
Cornwall is a unitary authority and ceremonial county of England, within the United Kingdom. It is bordered to the north and west by the Celtic Sea, to the south by the English Channel, and to the east by the county of Devon, over the River Tamar. Cornwall has a population of , and covers an area of...
.
He taught at the University High School at the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
.
He founded Sundog Center, in northern Minnesota, and founded the Minnesota's Poets in the Schools Program (now COMPAS).
He lives in Forest Lake, Minnesota
Forest Lake, Minnesota
Forest Lake is a city in Washington County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 18,375 at the 2010 census. It is located on Minnesota's 94th largest lake .Interstate 35 and U.S...
.
John Caddy’s upbringing in northern Minnesota was nature-saturated, and as a teacher and poet his work has ever reflected these beginnings. Early in his adult career he founded Sundog, a residential center for environmental education near Bemidji in northern Minnesota. During this period, he also founded Minnesota Poets in the Schools and began an extensive career as a teacher of writing, working with students ranging from kindergarten through graduate school. For his teaching, Caddy received the 1997 Sally Ordway Irving Award for Arts Education.
Caddy has long used poetry and other art forms in his environmental teaching, and in the mid-1990s, he began his Self Expressing Earth project. Among other things, SEE offered immensely successful workshops for teaching artists, naturalists and classroom teachers. These were week-long events, taught in residential environmental ed camps. They were not just about art and the environment, they were deep, experiential immersions in both, and it is said that these weeks were life-changing for many of the participants.
Shortly before establishing his SEE program, Caddy had suffered a stroke, and he is now hemiplegic, paralyzed on his left side. In his own words: “In 1994 I suffered a stroke, and was elated to find myself alive, somewhat sensible, and still capable of making poems.... [When I] came home to the land, I was freshly amazed by beauty; in my absence, green had learned a thousand new names.... After stroke therapy, I decided to spend the rest of my allotted time writing and sharing poems of celebration and helping people recover their intuitive connections with Earth.”
Self Expressing Earth has evolved into a new environmental teaching project Caddy calls Morning Earth. Originally sponsored by Hamline University’s Center for Global Environmental Education, Morning Earth is, among other things, a web site of over 400 pages that Caddy describes as “an antidote to environmental despair, a resource toward ecoliteracy for teachers of students of all ages, and for everyone interested in the confluence of ecology and the arts.” Perhaps the most striking aspect of Morning Earth is the five-day-a-week combination of a nature photo and a short ecologically literate poem, taken and written each day by Caddy working from his home in the Minnesota woods. This pairing is sent out each morning to some 1,500 subscribers many of whom are classroom teachers. Thousands of these photo-poems are available on the web site which now receives more than a million hits a month.
Awards
- 2005 Minnesota State Arts grant
- 2002 Bard of the Cornish Gorseth
- 1997 Sally Ordway Irving Award for Arts Education
- 1991 Minnesota Book Awards Past Winner
- 1990 Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner