The quote is by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and the whole thing goes: “There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the dialect of moss on stone—an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yang.”
- From Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

Winter is coming

Will I ever tire of this Game of Thrones meme? Probably not. I am a summer child, too, I’m sure. At the end of our warm weather recently, I sat outside one evening, wine in hand, looking over the garden, thinking, “I don’t want summer to end.” I am still picking celery and have more potatoes to dig for, but most of the garden is done.

October is usually the month I do a spooky newsletter, exploring sporror, horror memes and mythology, or eco-weird fiction. But this year I’ll go off the path some. The world itself is increasingly frightening enough. My call to action this month is to create or find the positive and support those things. Keep yourself, your family, and your community safe. Like Joan Baez said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” I agree. It’s helpful to be aware of what’s happening in the world today but also to balance what you read and see; weigh awareness of the bad with the good parts of the human race. Fall into the good fight rather than into rage bait and misinformation. Recognize that pain often gives birth to things that change us for the better, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes.

Antidotes

The quote is by Adrian Bell, from his book Corduroy. Despite the summer drought, we somehow managed to bring in a small bounty this summer, thanks to plenty of sunshine, meticulous work in the garden, and drip-hose watering. I’ve picked so many green beans (scarlet runners, pole, bush, and leather britches), and there’s still a ton growing. Since mid-July, I’ve collected about a three pounds a week, so 25+ pounds and counting. Two tomato plants have yielded constant fruit, enough for chili, tomato bisque, freshly sliced tomatoes, and fried green tomatoes.

It’s almost apple-pickin’ time; we’ll wait a couple weeks so we can make fresh apple cider, apple butter, and strudel for an OktoberFest party we’re hosting when some family comes to visit (along with some friends and neighbors). We’re seeing the last of the tomatoes now. We managed to grow four healthy and big butternut squashes—still ripening on the vine—as well as two large pumpkins, several baby pumpkins I might turn into dried gourds like my mamaw did, and a ton of potatoes, whose leaves are just starting to dry out. Also are fresh rosemary, mint, thyme, dill, chives, and cilantro. The last turnips are getting larger, and I’ve enjoyed a few turnip meals this summer, the way my mother and mamaw made them: sliced and fried in fat with onions. The turnip and mustard greens were a treat from earlier summer, and they’re mostly done in the garden.

A quote from Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife is, “If the whole world was burning, why not face it with a beer in your hand, unafraid?”

Last month I explored water in fiction. This month I’ll look more closely at the lack of it. We’ve had drought since June in Nova Scotia. An 8,000-hectare wildfire grows about an hour west of us in the beautiful Annapolis Valley, where we recently hit up some farmer’s markets. Winds from Hurricane Erin over the weekend fanned the flames but did not provide rain. Fortunately, in the east coast area, we finally had our first substantial summer rain yesterday, but our grass and trees are stressed, dry, and brittle. Woods are closed, we haven’t mowed the meadow in weeks, and it’s the first summer we haven’t had a bonfire due to a burn ban. I face our burning by working to raise awareness of climate change, even as I try to stay unafraid and positive. Do I face the burning world with a beer? Maybe a glass of red wine or a settling down at the end of the day listening to cricket songs.

When kayaking recently, I found myself serenely navigating to the center of a lake. It was a hot day, and at the beach were sunbathers and picnics, at the pier were fishermen, and beyond the beach, was a little league baseball game. But here I wrapped myself in solitude. My partner and I are new at kayaking but have a lot of experience rafting and canoeing. That day on the lake, and a week before—dipping into the warm waters of Northumberland Strait—I recalled how much of my life has been in water.

Last summer, visiting family, I spent hours in the pool every day, lounging, swimming, immersed. I grew up in the Midwest, where I canoed and white-water rafted, or in the Chicago area, where I spent languorous afternoons at the Lake Michigan dunes, body-surfing, closing my eyes and dreaming while floating in the water. We spent summers at friends’ lake cottages, water-skiing, swimming, and drifting around in pontoon boats. In California, I tried to surf but never got very good at it, so I just body-surfed, swam, and boogie-boarded. In Oahu my husband and I stayed in the non-touristy area east of the North Shore, and our rusted cottage was on a private beach, so we spent hours in the water, just being.

There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future.

Welcome to June’s newsletter

The quote above is from the film Sinners, a mesmerizing story that makes you pick up the guitar, strum a few chords, and wish you could really play. We’re going to veer off the path a little this month because my recommended film in June, though influenced by the natural world around it, doesn’t really fall into ecofiction or any single genre—but as a colleague Rachel said, “I wouldn't not say it's ecofiction? At least in the sense that the environment, and our relationship to it, plays a role.” What I would say is that the story is so powerful that if more people produced, wrote, and directed films like Ryan Coogler just did with Sinners, we might be inspired to do something better for our world than what we’re doing now—something better for the people and the planet.

Spring

Welcome to May in Nova Scotia, home of Dragonfly.eco, a website and news source for all things eco-fiction. My dear friends, we have finally started to experience spring. Our winters go longer than most, but the fruit trees are in full bloom in the meadow and we’ve started the hard work of re-landscaping our garden area. But, most importantly, like Margaret Wise Brown once wrote:

When the groundhog casts his shadow
And the small birds sing
And the pussywillows happen
And the sun shines warm
And when the peepers peep
Then it is Spring

The peepers sing in the evenings just as the black flies retreat to their nightly foliage. I love to sit on the balcony at twilight, after the flies go rest, and listen to the thumb-sized chorus frogs at the nearby lake. The sound of peepers is pure paradise, with clear, dark skies above soon revealing stars, constellations, and asterisms.

Welcome to the Earth Day newsletter from Dragonfly.eco, a place to explore eco-fiction from around the world. Weather is still unpredictable in Nova Scotia. Cold, wild winds gusted for hours last night. The strong uplift sounded like heavy ocean waves, making me wonder what things in our meadow had flown loose. This morning, however, the birds sang under a bright sun, as though to say we’re still here.

Please note that I apologize about the lateness of this newsletter. Buttondown has been up and down lately, and I actually started to transfer to another platform but didn’t have the greatest customer service there, so I will just stay here for now and hope for the best!

The title of this month's newsletter comes from Carlos Ruiz Zafón, author of one of my favorite books of all times, The Shadow of the Wind. The entire quote is:

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

The quote “A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships” is by Jorge Luis Borges, from Ficciones. This month I want to celebrate fictional stories, which is what I guess I do every newsletter, particularly those that are tied to natural places. How do we connect with our ecosystems, fear them, become in awe of them, lose them, love them, grieve them, and even resurrect them? I often need to turn off the world to stay sane, increasingly so these days. I can’t say that I escape to fiction, more like I move into a reality that is formed by art and exists as palpably as anything else in life. It’s wise, I think, to stay aware of what’s happening in the world—and fight for what’s right—while also allowing ourselves to embrace the profound experiences we find in art.

World eco-fiction series

Here’s something positive and beautiful for you to read: This month I talked with Aneesa Jamal, who helped to create an online portal for Earth-based and climate stories written and illustrated by Indian children and teens. There’s a lot here to soak in, and a link to read all the stories, for free, online.

It is Black History Month in the US and Canada. I try to recognize PoC authors in every newsletter due to the nature of the World Eco-fiction Spotlight, which goes around the world representing PoC/Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and culturally diverse voices in fiction. But this month I’ll focus on Black voices in literature, along with other less represented authors. I mean, we need to do this more than ever, am I right? Sometimes it takes a persistent voice, rather than a loud roar, to motivate change for the better. Roars are good too, though.

Black authors at Dragonfly

You’ll find many Black-authored fiction titles in the database, but here’s a partial list of interviews:

The above quote is by Quilty Quilterton on Bluesky. It’s something I read that made my imagination and determination soar after the US election. I smiled when reading the statement, knowing all too well that I already understand that art is the oar that guides me through dystopian rivers. Keep on keeping on, all you authors, musicians, filmmakers, painters, all you people who tell better stories. Without art, our imagination and awe begin to dwindle. We need these things to survive the upcoming years.

News for 2025

My goals at Dragonfly.eco are to explore world ecofiction and diversity in nature-based literature, give readers a wide reading sample and book recommendations, and freely promote authors. The site will be 13 in August, and I’m as an engaged, if not more, since the day I began the site. I will have a few changes this year, including:

• I won’t commit to a monthly world spotlight anymore. It might still happen, but it’s getting tougher to organize the older I get. My professional career has picked up more in the past year, and my free time is also spent doing other things, like rowing/running, reading more novels with the Rewilding our Stories Discord, and writing a new novel.

  

• For the Indie Corner, I now have a series of set questions for participating authors. They can choose 5-7 of 11 potential questions to answer. I think this will free up my time when trying to think of specific questions for each book and will give authors more of a choice of the types of things they want to talk about.

• The newsletter will have a new section titled “Flashback,” which will feature a past article or spotlight I’ve done at Dragonfly.

• I will also have a focus this year on Appalachian stories. It’s an area I have so many good memories of, and this year we are visiting again.

Intro

“Darkness turns familiar landscapes strange, evoking awe by its very nature, in ways that meet people wherever they stand.” -Leigh Ann Henion

Welcome to December, where in the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice was on December 21, marking it the darkest day of the year, but is darkness a negative thing? Quite the opposite. I’m reading Leigh Ann Henion’s Night Magic, which celebrates her journeys into the night of Appalachia and other places where magic happens: moon gardens, synchronous fireflies, bats, bioluminescent mushrooms (foxfire), and other profoundly beautiful things.

I wish peace and love for everyone this holiday, but what I really hope for is the same among us as a human race. We can find solitude and beauty in natural places and remember the planet we were born on and try to preserve its remaining ecology. Without it, we wouldn’t be. I encourage you to get out and remind yourself of the simple things in life this holiday, of the absolute magic of the night sky, natural landscapes, and even the smallest tiny things we see in the forests, oceans, deserts, and other biomes. To me, these simple but sometimes complex things remind me to be human and have empathy and love for others.

Quote by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow

We’re in the midst of preparing a Thanksgiving dinner party for nearly twenty friends this weekend. I grew up with big reunions, whether on my dad’s side in Louisville or my mother’s in eastern Kentucky. Food, music, stories, games, and the love of nature brought us together a few times a year. The food seemed central, but before and after meals, my brothers, sister, cousins, and I would hike in the hills, explore wildflower meadows and creeks, race around the old country house in the holler, listen to our uncle play the banjo, or hang out on the front porch listening to Papaw’s stories. It’s no surprise that once I became an adult, I felt it was meaningful to carry on those traditions. The bringers of old are now gone, including my dad, an aunt and uncle, and all my grandparents, and though I can never physically revisit them or our times together, I can transmigrate their essences into the current world. It feels like they are here. Like them, I love crafting meals as much as I do dreaming up stories and putting them out there for others to read.

All these people'll live as long as you remember 'em.
-Ninny Threadgoode, Fried Green Tomatoes

The quote in the title, “We are all lichens,” is by Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. If I could make an entire newsletter consisting of quotes about fungi and their relationships to other life-forms, I would. Instead I’ll focus this spooky October newsletter on fungoid fiction. Here’s another great quote I recently read in the new novella (just out by Stelliform Press) You Will Speak for the Dead, by R.A. Busby:

I wonder what we’ll do when the permafrost thaws. When the wind begins to blow and dries the soil. When it sweeps across clusters of spores that haven’t taken a trip in the breeze since the last mammoth died.

By the way, you just inhaled some more.

I’ve long been curious about fungoid fiction (sometimes called sporror), but I haven’t read a lot so far. Ironically, two of the books I read for our Discord’s 2024 environmental reading challenge this month deal with fungi horror as well, which links to things like body horror, colonialism, and invasion or even beauty and life-affirming transformation. You’ll find a lot of liminal and wild spaces in this literature where physical or emotional transformation takes place.

The subject of this email comes from John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” We used to sing a lot of old songs on the way to visit relatives in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. We also visited Lookout Point, Ruby Falls, Rock City, and the Incline Railway, and I remember the many billboards on picturesque highways on the way to the point. Atop the point, on a clear day, you can see seven states, a magnificent view of blue-green, rolling, tree-covered hills. I also remember one day on the Blue Ridge Parkway, taking my cousin back to college after we visited her family in Chattanooga. Mom was driving, her sister (my aunt) was in the passenger seat, and a few of us kids were in the back seat, including my cousin who was older. A great fog suddenly descended while Mom navigated through the mountains, but it got so bad, none of us could see anything else in front of us or around us. Mom pulled off to the side of the highway, and we waited it out. I’ll never forget that strange but beautiful feeling of wonder as though we vanished from the world, while wispy clouds fell around us and all was hushed, even in a normally loud carload of women and girls. I’ve been to other places in western North America that had me so inspired I was just as mesmerized, but those Appalachian mountains are special, for they composed the environment from which my favorite childhood memories formed.

August’s newsletter focused a little on what home means to us, and while place is important, home also consists of people, experiences, music, food, and sometimes even possessions (I still have some paintings my grandfather framed), all of which we can re-create from the traditions of our original home, no matter how far away we go geographically. For instance, I’m hundreds of miles away from Appalachia, but right now I have garden beans drying in the bay window for shucky beans, 12 jars of southern chow-chow in the basement (made by us), 3 cords of wood stacked outside, many hikes and connections to the nature around us, and so many other traditions carried throughout the decades since young, including the get-togethers and big dinners we host that remind me of the way we did things back home. And you’re damn right that they include shucky beans and buttermilk cornbread.

World eco-fiction spotlight

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” is a quote by James Baldwin. Lately, I’ve been thinking about home, which is a comforting word. This year I’ve revisited several places and people who make up the conditions that make me feel home. In each habitat—desert, mountains, lakes, a state park where our favorite hikes have happened forever, a small town I lived in my first 11 years, a larger city lived in during my teenage years, and let’s not forget the food and drinks like shucky beans, my grandfather’s famous potato salad, and Kentucky bourbon—this year has given me time to see the people, places, and food/drink that make me feel at home.

Watching the DNC this week also gives me hope about my home country—and let’s face it: I’ve lost hope often, considering its trajectory with a terrible leader in the past. I hope that changes and that we move forward, not back.

My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark
-Indigo Girls, “Prince of Darkness”

Deep summer is here, and every morning before the sun comes up, the harmonious sounds of birdsong fill the sky, slowly awakening me. The chirps and trills of northern cardinals dominate our yard and meadow, and it’s sweet to hear. Soon, the male cricket song will join in, starting in the late afternoon and going through the night. Later in the morning come the raucous screams of wise crows, no less joyous to my ears.

“My place is of the sun and this place is of the dark” are lyrics from the Indigo Girls’ “Prince of Darkness”. The sun part of it describes the places I purposely create or seek out. It doesn’t take much to find a place of the sun, even in the darkest morning when sleep is broken by hundreds of birds in our trees. “This place is of the dark” describes the larger world around me—of course not all of it bad, but the future doesn’t seem bright.

Film of the Month

June 2024 - Children still need a childhood with dirt, mud, puddles, trees, sticks, and tadpoles

June’s issue is about our past and present but also future, aka today’s children. I grew up playing in mud, puddles, trees, and with sticks and tadpoles; the quote is by author and mother Brooke Hampton. That’s how my kids grew up. And that’s what they’re teaching their toddlers to enjoy. It’s a generational thing in my family. We sweat, get dirty, and play. This experience teaches us about the world beyond walls. What’s that saying—something like: your child wouldn’t be bouncing off walls if they could get outside of them?

The other night I was talking with my sister, and she summoned a shared memory circa my junior high years, her middle-grade years. Dad took us kids white-water rafting on the Wolf River in Wisconsin, which we did often. Mom didn’t go on the raft due to our youngest brother being a baby. We got out on the water, and soon the skies darkened and a thunderstorm sprouted not too far away. We even heard tornado sirens in the distance. Back then, Dad was pretty nutty. I can still see his broad grin, belonging only to him, and hear his booming voice and laughter rising above the river rapids and rain. We stayed out on the river. He was the harbinger of joy, the teacher of play, the wild and crazy dad we miss dearly. I look back and am thankful for that childhood.

World eco-fiction spotlight

The entropy quote is by The Marigold’s author Andrew F. Sullivan, whom I interviewed in August last year. The whole quote is, “Rot is not pure entropy, it’s a repurposing and a rebuilding, in newer shapes we may not recognize beyond a foul smell.” So, welcome to what feels like an actual spring issue of Dragonfly.eco’s news. After a long winter, our temperatures finally have warmed, and after a trip to Utah and Nevada for a wedding, we came home to dandelions and early blooms, like magnolias, dogwoods, and cherry blossoms. Without decomposition, we don’t get new composition. This life cycle allows us to go on, and that, to me, is what spring symbolizes. From rot sprouts beauty and ecological necessity. The black flies are here, but the spring peepers never did their mating calls from the nearby lake this year, and it made me sad, a little empty.

World Eco-fiction Series

This month I talked with Suyi Davies Okungbowa, who wrote Lost Ark Dreaming (out today by Tordotcom!). Suyi is an award-winning author, and was born in Nigeria and lived in Lagos at one time, where the novel is set.

Welcome

Dragonfly.eco has been around nearly 11 years and began as a curated list of novels that address climate change. The site has grown ten-fold since those early days, and the focus has expanded to eco-fiction, a literary mode that explores changing ecological systems in our world and how we conserve, preserve, fight for, lose, grieve, re-imagine, and cope with the changes. The database contains nearly 1,100 titles, and the site includes around 240 contributors and 160 interviews. We’ve also expanded the site to include community discourse at the Rewilding Our Stories Discord.

Earth Day!(Books of the Month)

This Earth Day, the Rewilding Our Stories members came up with an Earth Day reading list. Some of our most active members share with you their top reads. The article also gives you some insight to our book club reads.