Special Report: Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2025)

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver inspired millions with her celebrations of nature, attention, and the examined life — yet she remained one of American literature's most intensely private figures. Filmmaker Sasha Waters spent years building an intimate portrait of Oliver from the inside out: sifting through thirty to forty boxes of correspondence, notebooks, and personal photographs before they entered the Library of Congress, and tracking down a long-lost video recording that captures Oliver speaking publicly for the first time about surviving childhood abuse.

Mike talks with Waters about the making of Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2026) — her path into documentary filmmaking through the school of Barbara Kopple, the subjects that have chosen her over the years, the creative problem-solving demanded by a subject who rarely allowed herself to be filmed, and what it felt like to introduce the film to a sold-out crowd of 1,100 at the Missouri Theatre during its world premiere at True/False. Waters also reflects on her parallel career as an experimental filmmaker and educator at VCU School of the Arts, and the pleasures of a good pie shake.

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World opens theatrically July 3, 2026, and airs on PBS American Masters on August 25, 2026. Find Sasha Waters online at pieshake.com and on Instagram @pieshakepictures.


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