SwampFire
About Organizers
Dawn Burns, the founder of SwampFire, is guided by a vision of community for artists and writers, a vision of support and encouragement for individual creative expression.
She and co-organizer/ webmaster Mary Catherine Harper work with venue hosts like Steve Smith and Bonnie Jo Campbell each year to provide space for a summertime retreat from the restless, demanding world . . . a weekend to rest, to clear the head, to reenergize the creative spirit of SwampFire participants.
Dawn Burns
I am a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction, a collector of Beautiful Things, a watcher of sunrises, a connector of people, and an all-around creative. I am fascinated and driven by people’s stories and passions, and by life’s particularities and peculiarities. In everything I do, my desire is always to go deeper in some unexpected way, to observe from the corner of my eye and follow where my eye/mind/heart wanders in service of the story that needs to be told.
I am thoroughly Midwestern, having lived my whole life in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, where I currently reside as an assistant professor in Michigan State University’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures department. In my dreams I am ever returning to the old farmhouse at the corner of U.S. Highway 30 and county road 450 West in Hanna, Indiana, where I grew into myself. To the soundtrack of traffic carrying travelers east to west and west to east, I hunted fall mushrooms in the woods down the lane from my house, and in this way found stillness and wonder in an always moving world.
SwampFire, a space of generous and generative community, is my soul. I am thankful for all who share themselves in this space with me and Mary Catherine Harper, who has faithfully journeyed alongside me from the start.
See dawnburns42.com, for samples of my work and more, including details of my latest book A Green Glow on the Horizon: Tales from the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors (2026).
Mary Catherine Harper
I am a poet, memoirist, and visual eco-artist who has learned to listen to trees and ghosts, for there are plenty of both where I now live, at the confluence of the Auglaize and Maumee rivers in Ohio. Originally from the drylands of Southwest Kansas—near the edge of the Rockies and the expanse of the Four Corners desert—I feel most alive when the summer heat mirages up against the sky and the basalt fissures of El Malpais invite me into the underland, where other realms of existence flow into each other. I’ve also found a portal into other ways of existing on the Atlantic shore, where I lived for three months at the Fine Arts Work Center of Cape Cod in 2019.
My poetry, flash memoir, and art work have been honed in these environments, and also through the support of fellow SwampFire artists and writers, who provide inspiration during the annual retreat and monthly Zoom workshops. See marycatherineharper.org for samples of my work, my list of publications, and info about my academic career.
