THE SONGSTRESS–Jean Weiss, JACKSON HOLE MAGAZINE When Beth McIntosh followed family out to Jackson Hole in 1981, she didn’t plan to stay long. She was an academic. She had a career to pursue. The New England native, fresh out of Swarthmore College, had plans.
“There was a huge was between my body and my brain,” McIntosh says, explaining that her well-intentioned goals fell victim to her intuition. Most of us regard McIntosh as a mysterious lion-maned songwriter whose poems are as complex and meaningful as her adept guitar work. She's a glamorous figure, breezing back to refresh in the Hole after touring around the country, promoting her Songline, Grizzlies Walking Upright and Fire & Sage CD’s. If we’re lucky, we catch her testing out her latest songs at Dornan’s, or performing at Grand Teton Music Festival’s “Music in the Hole” concert, or when she sits in for a song with her husband and fellow musician Phil Round.
Yet those who know McIntosh well and see that she applies the same care tending her vegetable garden that she does to forming a lyric weren’t surprised when her plans took a back seat to her creative calling.
“I came of age here,” she says, “It’s not the landscape of my childhood, but it is the landscape of my art.” McIntosh has spent more time in this landscape--both literal and figurative--since the birth of her sons.
Childbearing renewed artistic fierceness and brought on The Wild Voice Project, which included the release of her CD, The Wild Ride. In collaboration with the Teton Science School, McIntosh now offers seminars and educational outreach programs about how to unlock creativity by developing a sense of place.
The workshops address the same brain and body struggle that she herself has known. “The question is, how do our natural systems inform out life and art?” she says. “And it’s unanswerable. But it is a quest.”
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