This page was created by Alison Morgan. The last update was by students at Xavier University.
Artist Statement: Harrison Lioce
The first goal of Harrison’s piece was to send the reader the wonderful place of the Grand Canyon by illustrating its beauty through words. Harrison drew a little inspiration from Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Bryson recalls and describes his experience on the Appalachian Trail in this piece of nature, and Harrison can remember how much it inspired him to want to go and experience the trail for himself. Harrison’s goal was to recall his trip to the Canyon and have the readers place themselves there, much like Bryson did for him with the trail. Furthermore, Harrison wanted to relay how much this trip did for his appreciation of nature, and perhaps increase the reader’s at the same time. Part of being “green” requires you to have a deep appreciation for nature. It’s that respect for nature that drives people to act on improving and preserving the environment, and his goal with this piece was to have the reader recognize or develop that appreciation for nature. Harrison’s experience at the Grand Canyon helped him find his, and whether readers read it and visualize themselves in a canyon or a place that’s special to them due to experiences of their own, Harrison wants his piece to allow the reader to find their appreciation for nature. He tries to do this by including some descriptive writing, while pointing out some of his own observations along the way. This way Harrison could provide the reader with imagery of the landscape while giving them his thought process on the trip, and while also allowing them to do some critical thinking for themselves.
The second goal of Harrison’s piece was to require the reader to do just a little bit of critical thinking in regard to the state of our environment. When Harrison thinks of “green” literature, he often thinks of dire pieces of writing that try and foreshadow the future of an industrialized society, or pieces that attempt to scare the reader by guessing what our world might come to. He finds these techniques to be rather ineffective, and instead went with a much more optimistic approach. While Harrison asks the reader to recognize that much of the world’s nature has been deteriorated, he points out that we are starting to move in the right direction when it comes to “fixing” the environment. There’s no sense in blaming generations of the past. Pointing fingers playing the blame game isn’t going to get us anywhere fast, but Harrison believes that we have a bright future to look forward to. As he point out in his piece, the rate that new technologies are being developed to help correct the damage we’ve done to the environment at such a fast rate it’s hard to keep up with all of it. Furthermore, the “green” movement has become a major trend, and is recruiting millennials at an extremely fast rate. Even here on his tiny little campus in Southwest Ohio, Harrison notices people canvassing for different environmental campaigns every day. Harrison says “we are moving in the right direction, and I hope that my piece helps readers recognize that, at least a little bit, and can even motivate them to contribute in some way, shape, or form to the movement as well.”