This essay by Isabel Marlens connects the Confluence Lab’s Stories of Fire project and the “Big Burn” collection in the University of Idaho Library’s Special Collections & Archives.
![Forest Fire, 1910 - Wallace [1910]](https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/fire-lines/objects/im-11.jpg)
The goal of the Confluence Lab is to take an interdisciplinary, humanities-based approach to environmental issues impacting communities in the rural Northwest. An archive has many purposes, but one is to keep the past alive so that it may be allowed explain the present, and influence the future.
The essay introduces threads from the archival material, alongside Indigenous fire knowledge, ideas from Western science—both historical and current—literature, psychology, and history in an effort to understand the lasting effects of 1910’s Great Fire on the landscapes of the Northwest.
The Author. Isabel Marlens studied literature and ecology & evolutionary biology at Bennington College before going on to work in the nonprofit world, in the arenas of habitat restoration, regenerative agriculture, and economic localization for community and ecological renewal. She is currently an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction writing at the University of Idaho.
The Project. Fire Lines was written by Isabel Marlens as an MFA internship project in 2022/23 with support from Leah Hampton (Environmental Humanities and Creative Writing Fellow in Residence at the Confluence Lab) and Evan Peter Williamson (Co-Director of the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning). The web site was built using a customized CollectionBuilder template with features to support a multimodal essay weaving the presentation writing and archival objects together.