by Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder
September 26, 2025
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Mary Ardery is a writer and poet from Indiana. Her poetry collection Level Watch, about the time she spent working as a wilderness guide for a substance abuse treatment program, was released September 23rd, 2025.
Enjoy our conversation about the theory of wilderness-based addiction treatment, freedom, and moving back to flat land, below.
The Daily Yonder: Tell me about the time in your life this collection is based on. How’d you find yourself working as a wilderness therapy guide to women with substance use disorder? Have you struggled with addiction?
Mary Ardery: When I was 22, I took a job as a wilderness therapy guide. I was looking for something challenging and meaningful to do in between college and applying to graduate school. A friend had worked at this program for the summer, and though I didn’t have a wilderness background, he said the program was willing to teach guides everything they needed to know. So I jumped in headfirst – what I sometimes refer to as “baptism by fire in the quadriceps.” Baptism by backpacking.
The job also really interested me because my dad is in recovery. And while I’m not in recovery myself, in my younger days I did have a more tumultuous relationship with drinking. I grew up with a heightened awareness about addiction.
DY: What’s the theory behind backpacking toward sobriety? Do you believe in its effectiveness? You write in the poem “Learning Curve” about the complicated definition of consent your employer subscribed to: “In the interview to be a field guide, they’d told me / everyone chose the program voluntarily / but rehab or an orange jumpsuit didn’t sound / like much of a choice. Those from well-off families / had a different framework. Go to treatment / or no more money…“
MA: The goal of most wilderness therapy is to create a more holistic model of recovery. To offer real challenges in a safe (and beautiful!) environment so that people can grow mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
I was working with adults who were technically free to leave at any time, but in “Learning Curve” the speaker realizes that that doesn’t mean everyone wants to be there. Plus, once you’re out in the backcountry and a couple hours from the nearest town, it becomes much harder, practically speaking, to leave. I remember one client in particular reflecting on that. She’d tried at least 20 other treatment programs before arriving in wilderness therapy. When she was out in the backcountry that first week, she’d wanted to leave but felt like the logistics of leaving would be harder than staying. It was the first time she didn’t leave a program after only two or three days.
DY: What – if anything – did this time in your life teach you about free will, addiction, punishment?
MA: In the program where I worked, the hope was to avoid anything ever feeling like punishment but instead allow people to learn from “natural consequences.” If you leave the toilet paper out in the rain, you have wet toilet paper the rest of the week, etc.
When you’re out in the woods, you’re faced with constantly changing circumstances. The weather. The group dynamics. I always come back to what a field director once told me: “When in doubt, be human.”
DY: What do you think poetry is able to capture about those years of your life that narrative writing couldn’t?
MA: Poetry holds space for uncertainty, what Keats called “negative capability.” Generally speaking, I think we expect more straightforward answers from narrative writing. We are more likely to approach poetry with an understanding that we might not get quick and easy answers. I learned a lot during my time as a guide, but I also accumulated even more questions. My hope is that the narrative component of my poems gives readers something solid to hold onto, but that the image-based language of poetry creates space for readers to really consider what each poem means to them.
DY: You’re from southern Indiana – what do the mountains mean to you? Have you readjusted to flat land?
MA: I imprinted on the mountains as a teenager. When I was 17, I went to an outdoor singing camp (led by Bloomington, Indiana, composer Malcolm Dalglish) in a different mountain range – the eastern Sierra Nevada, near Yosemite. I always knew I wanted to spend time living in the mountains – a ridged horizon line inspires me more than anything else – so I was thrilled to later move to Asheville. But I’m also very close with my parents and sisters who all live here in the Midwest. Plus, of course, it’s simply home. I love the mountains. I love the flatlands. I’ve finally resigned myself to the fact that I’m probably always going to feel pulled in (at least) two directions.
DY: What are your current sources of writing inspiration? It makes a lot of sense to me that this extremely immersive and unique experience would provoke a book’s worth of poetic reflection. Where do you draw from in your everyday life?
MA: I’ve been working in the background on a book of hometown poems, kind of a coming-of-age manuscript. But most recently I’ve been working on essays from a feminist perspective that try to understand the social narratives we’re given and how they influence our paths and identities. For both of these projects, I think what keeps my attention is relationships – with ourselves, with other people, and with our communities and the world at-large.
This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.