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.

The newsletter is moving back about a week each month until the end of the year due to timing with Earth Day and family visits.

World eco-fiction spotlight

This month I talked with local author Tiffany Morris about her books, particularly her most recent novel Green Fuse Burning, “a transformative Indigenous eco-horror novella from [a] Mi’kmaw writer". I thoroughly enjoy Tiffany's poignant prose as she weaves planetary ecological horror with Mi'kmaw intergenerational grief in a story about an artist completing a residency in a cabin in a strange swamp forest.

From Tiffany:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

-JRR Tolkien, "The Riddle of Strider"
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Welcome!

This past week, three things happened that reminded me of the quote above. The phrase "All that glitters is not gold" stretches back to the 12th or 13th century and has been repeated often in song and story. Last weekend, we went to Halifax's Neptune Theatre to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, starring Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan (Pippin Took and Merry Brandybuck, hobbits from Lord of the Rings). So I had Shakespeare and Tolkien on my mind. Then that night I decided to get an album for my husband for Valentine's Day and sat down to think about a good experience to share. In the wee hours of the morning, I'd decided on Led Zeppelin IV, which has "Stairway to Heaven". So, three things came together: Shakespeare who wrote the line in The Merchant of Venice; Led Zep, whose song "Stairway to Heaven" has the line, "There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold"; and of course Tolkien.

Dragonfly has a small update between regular newsletters, but I think everyone will be happy to read it! I was happy to play a tiny part in spreading the word about Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate fiction contest from Grist. Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress. Read all 12 stories in the 2024 collection. Two of these stories are syndicated at Dragonfly.eco. You can also read my interview with Grist's Climate Fiction Creative Manager, Tory Stephens.

Stories at Dragonfly:

Cabbage Koora: A Prognostic Autobiography by Sanjana Sekhar. Across generations and a changing world, an Indian family preserves its traditions through food, dance, and connection.

There are so many sources of dismal news, so many depressing scientific developments; I think it’s crucial to look for a light in the darkness, to emphasize that we as a species still have a chance to chart a course to a better future rather than a dystopia.

-John Kixmiller on writing and performing Protectors of the Wood

Happy new year

Welcome to a new year and a new newsletter! I run Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores wild worlds and words, rewilding the novel, and genres dealing with ecological and climate changes. As many might guess, there's a lot of books within these genres that seem hopeless and dystopian, but equally there's many novels with redemption arcs, marginal voices as heroes, decolonization, solarpunk (and other punks), Indigenous and other futurisms, alternative histories and reimagining, and more that look toward a better world we can make possible. It might not seem possible to always change the tide, but it is hard to change anything if we are gloomy and uninspired. Stories can motivate us to do something, to look up. I have always drawn my inspiration from The Flight of the Hummingbird - a Quechen story.

Two versions of reality can exist at the same time, at least in the quantum world. In the non-quantum world, the mirror of truth becomes smoky. As the LA Times said, “Dualities pervade nature…This doesn’t mean that ‘everything is relative,’ or that there’s no objective reality.” We have become increasingly so divisive over perspective beliefs, whether or not they are based in objective reality. I stand strong in my beliefs, because they are based on science, but I sill like to hope they we can “all get along”. To do this, I root for what makes us happy together—commonalities, not division. I also dislike stereotypes, because they fail to recognize healthy diversity among people of different religions, ethnicity, age groups, skin colors, sexual orientations, genders, and places—and they prescribe inaccurate assumptions, leading to hatred and removals of basic rights and freedoms for perceived differences. I realized long ago that the commonalities we share can be simple: food, music, memories, stories. These things, I think, can bring about empathy, peace, open-mindedness, and downright civility, which is sorely missing right now. When I think of a strong message for my December newsletter, it is to celebrate our commonalities, help those in need, become empathetic and open-minded, and give peace a chance.

Eco-fiction is a genre of stories that are usually based on objective truths: climate change, for instance, which is a fact on the ground with plenty of data that proves it’s happening. Eco-fiction also embraces a multitude of other observable facts, from plastic-ravaged oceans, endangered and extinct species, effects of colonization on historical and modern day people and lands, dangers of chemicals in our food chain (water, soil, air), and so much more. It’s a science-based genre but is still fiction and thus imaginative, taking place not just on Earth but in fantastical, magical, weird, or technologically altered worlds, which provide analogies and critical self-examination. The genre lends to horror and the weird, just as well, because what’s actually happening in our world is horrible and weird and sometimes we don’t know how to make sense of it. And ecological fiction is wholly inclusive. The stories provide literary ecosystems, wherein human nature and “other” nature are not opposite parts of the story but must cohabitate. Many genres are evolving due to multiple ways of telling these stories: speculative, Indigenous, cultural, water stories, crime, children’s and YA fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird, romance, historical, magical realist, and so much more. New genres have evolved that may rely heavily on the ecological, including solarpunk, lunarpunk, tidal punk, hopepunk, and a variety of beautiful futurisms, which take power over the stolen past of a people and imagine alternate realities or better futures that the people—rather than colonial powers—lead: Africanfuturism, Taínofuturism, Indigenous futurism, Métis futurism, and many others.

Gratitude

My heart is full right now. Maybe it’s just the simple things in life that make moments meaningful and bright: becoming immersed in the sunshine patterning through the John Boy Waltonesque lace curtains behind my writing desk, overcoming the fear of disposing of mice that we trap under our bathtub (not sure how they get in), enjoying the ambience and warmth from fire in the wood stove that we use to heat our house, wearing warm socks, being aware of the ever-present beauty and danger of the natural world—even in our meadow—and gazing upon the unimaginable and distant light from dead stars on cold, clear nights.

I’ve been watching the television series “Alone”, despite not liking most reality television. I’m not a fearful prepper or a survivalist. But I’ve always found the deepest connection with nature. “Alone” is different as far as reality tv goes. Ten contestants, who are experienced survivalists, trackers, hunters, anglers, foragers, herbalists, etc. carry provided cameras to document living completely alone in a selected area, miles apart from any other person on the show. They have strict rules and limitations of what they can take and what they can do. The episodes I’ve watched so far have taken place on northwestern Vancouver Island, Patagonia, and Mongolia. Having been to Vancouver Island and other remote places in British Columbia (though not as remote as where the show takes place), I find myself missing the tall cedars and hemlocks and magical mountains.

I like the show for its peoples’ resilience and insights. But what I like the most is how they overcome fear of big predators, how they adapt their knowledge of building shelters and finding food to actual survival, and how they enjoy the stunning beauty of nature around them. The show has made me rethink my own fears, like how, when I tried to learn to surf once, I never really got over my fear of the ocean or how I’m squeamish about dead mice, or live mice for that matter. When I used to trail-run in British Columbia, and after a few encounters with black bears (from a distance only) and one spooky feeling in a forest that had signs warning of a cougar in the area, I slowly became more afraid of running alone and haven’t gotten back into trail-running or even hiking without others. I’m looking into BOW Nova Scotia, though it seems to just have 1-2 retreats a year and the fall one in September was canceled due to Hurricane Lee. Other things: do more foraging. Our meadow alone is a rich place for berries, plants, and someday nuts from trees we planted. I’ve also done lots of archery in the past but am out of practice and want to get back into it.

Of myths and memes

Last October, I took a dive into weird fiction. This year I want to look at strange things like memes that evolve into frightening myths. Don’t get me wrong. Autumn is about as beautiful as they come, as far as seasons go. It’s at once yellow, brown, and blue, a low sun painting meadows with haunting orange light. Leaves slowly sail downward, like small birds gently gliding to the ground. But there’s also the inevitable darker side: shorter days, longer nights, a chilly bite in the air, the first frost, celebrations of saints and the dead, and glowing faces of carved pumpkins.

I want to talk some about memes and mythology. While cultural memetics can be analogized with biological evolution, memes existing in the host of a mind don’t have to be factual to spread. The virus can be folklore to some and absolute truth to others. The meme’s replication, or mimicry, can die out or spread widely. It’s the latter that is something to fathom as you are alone on a rain-splattered night, sitting by the fire with shadows forming odd shapes on the wall, wind moaning outside. And before I go much further, this does relate to eco-fiction, because authors create new myths in our warming and increasingly absurd world. An article from The Conversation gives one example, in which Robbie Arnott’s Limberlost captures the mythological and empirical orientations of the novel’s characters and shows how these perspectives influence the story and potentially its readers. New myths in eco-fiction (and art) is something I will get into in a future newsletter. This month I’ll plant the seed.

Thanks to readers

I’ve been getting more new subscribers than usual lately, and I appreciate ya’ll. I’m still around on some social media but have ceased using it except for rarely—I prefer direct and personal communication (family and group chats, phone calls, get-togethers, emails, a writers Discord, etc.), so however you are finding me, thanks for reading. This newsletter covers eco-fiction in various kinds of media, including novels, anthologies, graphic novels, films, and games. You can find out more here. As I wrote at Impakter, the genre is made up of fictional tales that reflect important connections, dependencies, and interactions between people and their natural environments. I continue to be immersed into how we tell stories about our changing world, in an ecological sense—though many more facets are inherently connected. Our human story is in there too, which adds layers of weird, tragic, mysterious, imaginative, and beautiful complexity.

Writer call-out

Rewilding Our Stories has a new writer call-out. The second contribution call is for personal narratives, ranging from 500-2,000 words, about any climate-related disasters you’ve experienced. This exercise is ongoing indefinitely and has no deadline. Submissions will appear at the site once they’re approved. All submissions must be free of typos and engaging, and may be subject to editing. Because this site is voluntary, no monetary payments will be made. You may send a brief biography with social media, and links to your piece will be shared on the companion Discord.

I have not done any creative writing lately, which is weird. But weird is the news of the day. Our spring began with a drought caused by low precipitation over the winter. By late May, as we had my mother-in-law visiting and were getting ready to visit my family in the states, wildfires began burning just south of us. The same night the wind shifted north, and ash began falling, we had to take our 17-year-old cat to the pet emergency hospital because he suddenly couldn’t walk. Turns out he had saddle thrombosis and had to be put down—our sweet, goofy, loving cat that we got as a gift to ourselves for our wedding, the cat we’d raised for so long. We cried together in the parking lot, numbly drove home to realize the wildfires had not come our way, and rushed the next day to visit my family, which was a very hot but fun-filled trip where my best memory was wading in a creek with my family. The day after our return, my father-in-law and his partner came to visit. We did puzzles on the farm table, had a bonfire, took our first trip to the Annapolis valley of rich, fertile beauty, and hiked along a beach for hours. Our visitors left, and then came the rains. And by rains, I mean floods, which killed four people and blocked parking lots and roads. We could not go to town due to flooded roads but felt we lucked out compared to many. Our friend’s 35 beehives washed away while he developed a new pond on his property. Since that time, we’ve had more rain events, including another coming this weekend. The continued weird thing is that this rain is not normal, and neither are the extreme thunderstorms, something we had not experienced so far in our four years on the east coast. So, creative writing? I guess I need to sort my thoughts. This is the first time I’ve written publicly about our storms, our losses, our sense of strangeness.

All the beautiful bean plants I planted after the wildfire, but before the floods, grew tall and lush. Yet, there are no beans at all. I’m not sure if it’s a pollination issue or is due to heat waves and/or too much rain. This morning we picked up eight pounds of beans grown in the local valley by Wolfville’s farmer’s coop. That’s a start in case the garden beans never come out. I lament the loss of people, plant, and animal life as well as homes and roads.

To a lesser degree, like Ali Smith noted in her novel Autumn—about only 100 harvests left in Britain—the slower attrition of climate change continues to disrupt seasons, which, if we live by them, also changes the rituals of our days. Without beans, how can I make shucky beans for holiday meals this fall and winter? With so much drought and new fire hazards, how can we celebrate summers, which builds ties with friends and neighbors, without bonfires on starry evenings? With increasing floods and storms, how can we maintain our shelters so our structures don’t rot? With so much rain corrupting roads, how do we get anywhere? So, this seems to be the most I’ve written about my personal life for a while. I’m behind on the backyard wildlife posts and journal blogging. There’s a certain numbness and grief, I guess.

The above quote is by a writing friend who passed away. This month I’d like to acknowledge three people I’ve worked with who have sailed that boat to the west, each leaving behind a huge legacy. One is John Atcheson, whose quote in the newsletter byline is from a bear story he told me once, which ended up in an interview where we discussed his great novel A Being Darkly Wise. John died in a car accident in January 2020. My long-time friend Michael Rothenberg passed away in November 2023 after a struggle with cancer. We had worked together for decades, and last summer I reviewed his most recent book of poetry, In Memory of a Banyan Tree. A month after Michael’s death, poet and Wisconsin democrat Tom Hibbard passed away. We had worked together nearly as long as I knew Michael. I published excerpts of his poetry to Dragonfly occasionally and a few years ago published his poetry chapbook, The Sacred River of Consciousness (now out of print). It’s hard to say goodbye, especially when you don’t get to because of the sudden nature of tragedy and happenstance.

Each of these writers made an impact on me, and they imbued their stories with the power, awe, and even fear of the wilderness around us. The bear story John told me, and the novel he wrote, remind me of deep summer and the twilight zones we enter at midnight when a campfire licks our faces and a billion stars hang above and the bourbon has flowed, enlivened with fresh mint from the meadow. I like these times with friends and family during the deep summer time, but knowing that that they can flicker out at any given moment also gives way to the notion that we should appreciate them always.

July spotlight

Michelle Obama is the second person I’ve known of who likens long-time friends to her kitchen table. Author Barbara Raskin also wrote so much about her kitchen table that I wanted to someday get something like it—imperfect, chipped, coffee-ringed, and a place for conversations throughout the years—a place where friends laugh, cry, have epiphanies, change diapers, drink coffee, drink wine, discuss politics, and eat feasts or even just pick at crumbs while reflecting on the mundane. I bought an old farmhouse table when moving to Nova Scotia. Of course, I’ve not been here my whole life, but intimately remember other such tables: my mother’s antique table handed down to her from my father’s Aunt Evelyn, my mamaw’s table where three or four families would crowd around the huntboard in the background, on which steamed a buffet of Appalachian food, my Aunt Helen’s little table where us kids always sat, the breakfast nook on Johnson Avenue, my best friend Amy’s fold-out kitchen table near where her siblings, and even me (like a part of the family), had our heights etched into the doorway’s wood, growing higher every year. It’s also where we tried our first beer.

What this has to do with ecological fiction is that Michelle Obama also talks about the light we carry, which has a lot to do with kitchen tables and the love she finds around her. It’s a light that exists despite pain and fear, and, to me, this same light is what we need to share in our stories. Yes, things are bleak. Yes, there’s a lot of ruinous people, with power and control, who spread disinformation and buy media so they can further promote hate, and, yes, there’s people who hurt us individually too. We all experience it, some way more than others. But when we share stories, we have to “go high” and rise above the darkness. Our novel’s characters don’t have to be perfect, but they can be courageous. We shouldn’t scare everyone into powerlessness, but show that the action to climb out of terror brings about fearlessness and inspires hope that we can strive toward a better world for all. Cautionary tales are fine and well, but rather than gratuitously lingering in the suffering, we need to tell that truth and then overcome. Because we can.

The balance is that for each hateful act, there’s also something kinder, and I am not trying to be too mushy when I say that kitchen tables are places we share both love and pain with our friends. Friends come and go, but the memories stand.

Saturday night I waited until the black flies went to bed in the grass, or whatever they do, and then slid out the front porch door with a bottle of wine and a mug. My new pink jasmine’s perfume wafted through the screen from the sun room, peepers sang purposefully from down at the lake like they’ve been doing since March, and the on-and-off rain and clouds floated away as the stars came out one by one. I called my mom, and we had a long talk about the old days, about my mamaw and papaw (her parents) from their eastern Kentucky holler. They’ve long passed away, but if I could spend one day with them, I would jump into it arms wide open. This feeling represents a sense of ongoing nostalgia, solastalgia, and, yet, appreciation.

Book of the Month and World Eco-fiction World Spotlight

In 2015 I had a great talk with M Jackson. We explored disappearing things. She was a National Geographic Student Expedition leader at that time, and her nonfiction book While Glaciers Slept had just come out. Seven years later, it’s my book of the month! We had a great talk about the book, about life, about things and people gone, like her parents who had died and glaciers that were disappearing. I felt like I’d met a good friend, even though we wouldn’t talk again until just recently. In our conversation back then, despite the unimaginable losses when experiencing death, we both understood that optimism in life is a necessary thing, a sweet thing, even. She said:

Earth Day

Earth Day is never one day for me. It is every day. And every year I say the same thing. But it’s become a tradition to do a project on Earth Day. Last year, for instance, we erected a bat box in our meadow in order to provide a roost for bats as well as to reduce mosquitos. Bats in Nova Scotia have been declining in population due to white-nose syndrome, which affects little brown bats, as well as habitat loss. If you want to learn more, my interview with bat specialist Karen Vanderwolf is in Ecology Action Centre’s spring issue.

Well, the bat roost we built on a 15-foot pole last Earth Day is no longer there. Despite a great base with cement and the pole extending a few feet into the ground, the whole thing snapped and fell over during Hurricane Fiona last fall. This year, our project is to build a new roost on a stronger and wider wooden pole, with a pully system so that we can easily check for bats. We found out that the previous roost did not attract bats but possibly wasps. According to Karen, it can take a couple years for bats to find home-made roosts like ours.

Welcome to Dragonfly News, where you can find out what’s going on in the world of eco-fiction.

Dragonfly’s News

Some cool news is that Dragonfly.eco’s database finally hit over 1,000 books! The stories are all wild. They represent a diversity of places and voices from around the world that reflect upon or imagine how we connect with our natural environment. Sometimes that connection is lost due to colonization and industry. Sometimes it’s found due to new experiences and rewilding.

I began walking and hiking in the past two weeks, and though this activity spawns a lot of creativity, it also brings out something else akin to madness. You can read more about my walking challenge on my blog. Since I wrote the blog, we’re almost to Lake Superior and I’ve walked about 150,000 steps since March 6 (four days to go in the challenge). I had one day off due to a sore back.

Welcome to Dragonfly News’s February newsletter, a place to explore new—and sometimes classic—content in the world of eco-fiction, a broad and diverse genre whose storytelling relies on the natural world.

I posted last year that a redesign might be coming soon at Dragonfly.eco but that I wasn’t sure about drastic changes all at once. Changes will happen in small steps, but I recently created a new header in Canva that combines a couple breathtaking images that capture the mood and aesthetic illustrating what Dragonfly.eco is all about.

Another piece of exciting news is that we’re going to celebrate our 1,000 book post very soon. I’m at 996 right now! It’s taken over ten years to get this far.

Welcome to Dragonfly’s first newsletter of 2023, and thanks for continuing to read. Each month, this newsletter shares an overview of what’s new in the world of ecofiction, a broad and diverse mode of storytelling that reveals our connections with various aspects of the natural world. I run Dragonfly.eco, which turned ten last year and which celebrates and explores such fiction.

Monthly Book Recommendation

I’m reading Elif Shafak’s The Island of the Missing Trees, which I think just might be in my top five favorite novels ever. Partly set in Cyprus and in London, the book draws in the reader with three unique narratives, my favorite being the fig tree’s. We learn a lot about how trees communicate in this novel. But, also, I have enjoyed fiction set in Greece and surrounding islands in the past; probably the first I remember reading was John Fowles’ The Magus. Both Fowles and Shafak aptly describe the islands’ beauty and horror. In Shafak’s novel is a scene at a tavern where honeysuckle vines, chili peppers, lantern lights, a fig tree growing through the roof, a parrot, Mediterranean foods, and patrons drinking wine congregate. It’s a place where wilderness and people mingle, where young lovers find themselves, an atmospheric place I want to be. Place-writing is so important to me, but everything else about this epic novel moving around in time and space is fresh and interesting. I read for these experiences and can’t recommend this novel enough.

This newsletter is a look back at the year, and a look forward to 2023. How original, right? But this year, Dragonfly.eco celebrated its 10th birthday. I came very close to reaching 1,000 books in our database. And, though the past two years or so have seen lots of world changes, some good and some terrible, and things have gotten me down, I know, as I always have, that we cannot give up fighting the good fight. No matter how powerless and invisible we sometimes feel. No matter the monsters waiting to pounce. Good stories continue to save my faith in humanity. They help us find the strength to carry on. It’s an age-old tradition. We tell stories. Dragonfly.eco continues to promote brave tales of those who light candles in the darkness: who speak up for our natural world, who celebrate it, who lament the loss of it, who explore our place in the ever-changing Earth and its wild places. These tales help to heal our losses but also motivate more action to fix what’s left.

Recommended book of the month

Speaking of amazing stories, Tor’s Africa Risen is a new anthology edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight. I am enjoying the book vastly. I usually skip reading introductions, but not this one. It reminds us that the continent of Africa is where humanity began, and those humans were the first to make sense out of the world and tell stories about it. We have a lot to learn from the first myths and from modern, refashioned myths and stories from the geographical place of our origins. The anthology is speculative in nature, with an ideal mix of science fiction, fantasy, and eco-stories from Afrofuturistic and Africanfuturistic perspectives.

Welcome to another issue of Dragonfly’s news. The theme this month is change, of which November is a harbinger. By now, you probably get it: My life revolves around seasons. Autumn is my favorite, and I was fortunate in late October to visit family and travel through beautiful leaf changes in New England. Even more meaningful was spending time with those I love. Hanging out with people I’ve known my whole life, or theirs, I feel older, but I haven’t changed that much, not since I first fell in love with Winnie the Pooh. I still dig toasty marshmallow evenings and falling into leaves.

Monthly Book Recommendation

My niece sent me a book over the summer, and it took me a while to gather the courage to read it. Of course, once I did, I couldn’t put it down. The book is Steph Jagger’s Everything Left to Remember: My Mother, Our Memories, and a Journey Through the Rocky Mountains. With her mother’s Alzheimer’s progressing rapidly, Steph treated her to various national parks in the US. They camped, rode horses, watched the sky, hiked, fell in love with the Old Faithful geyser, and so much more. What an awe-inspiring memoir.

Lovecraft said that a weird tale “has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.” Whatever that something more is reflects art deeper than jump scares and shock gore. Instead, according to Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, editors of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Lovecraft said weird stories represented the pursuit of some indefinable and perhaps a maddeningly unreachable understanding of the world beyond the mundane, a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread” or “malign and particular suspension or defeat of…fixed laws of Nature.” In the past several years I’ve been reading stories that dig deep into the weird, especially when they deal with nature and the uncanny.

October World Eco-fiction Spotlight

It is officially my favorite time of year: pumpkin ale, deer eating all the peaches, apples falling, and golden light and colors.

Thanks for continuing to read Dragonfly.eco’s newsletter. Please be aware that our first big vacation in three years happens next month, so my goal is to put the newsletter out early, but if I can’t do it before we travel to a family reunion, I will publish it later in the month.

What’s New?

The structure of this newsletter is different this month because we’re celebrating!

10th birthday

It’s officially here. Today we turn 10. It’s been a great ride so far, starting out as a site with a small list of novels that dealt with climate change to expanding into the broader mode of storytelling called eco-fiction. Today that original list is a database with more than 950 books. Over 200 contributors have spent time chatting with us, adding their book excerpts to the Dragonfly Library, and writing reviews or articles.

Ah, deep summer! Welcome to another newsletter about fiction that’s ecologically aware, evolving, prescient. This is one of my favorite times of year, autumn being the first. Only a couple months until then, with the light of August squeezed in before the fade, reminding me of Faulkner. To learn more about the outside world I cling to, read about the etymology of bonefires, and our modern bonfires, in my Backyard Wildlife series this month. As always, you can visit Dragonfly.eco for more information about rewilded stories.

While you’re here, I have two new articles with book recommendations. One, at Climate Cultures, is Where Waters and Fictions Meet, which originally was published in Italian at in the journal TELLŪS 2-2021 as Otto romanzi ci ricordano del nostro legame fondamentale con l’Acqua: Eight Novels Remind of us Our Crucial Connection with Water.

Early summer comes slowly to Atlantic Canada, but it is one of my favorite times of year. We’ve had a mix of rainstorms and the most pleasant sunshiny days. Read my latest Backyard Wildlife post to find out more.

Tenth Birthday

On August 13th, Dragonfly.eco turns ten! It’s hard to believe that ten years have gone by since I first began the site. So much has changed in ecologically oriented fiction since I dreamed up the concept of archiving it and raising awareness of it online, which grew into a mega-project of not just a large database but a collaborative site with guest reviewers and posts, interviews, and more as well as some outreach through social media such as Discord. Even before Dragonfly, starting in the mid-2010s, I was writing my first climate-change novel. The curiosity about this literature grew into a lifetime project, and I’m still having fun with it. Thanks to readers of the site, and this newsletter, for helping keep it alive.

It’s spring, so my energy levels have gone way up from the long, stormy winter. And yes, I’ve smelled like sweat, dirt, tomatoes, and everything else at the end of the day lately. You can read my latest Backyard Wildlife series here. I’m seriously loving this time of year, and I hope you are too.

Here’s the big news for this month: I don’t know why, because I always swore I wouldn’t do it, but I started an ecofiction subreddit. I am not a big reddit reader, though I joined a running channel a few years ago and was semi-active in it. Anyway, you’re invited to join, and if you’re fair-minded and could commit to be active, I could probably use some help with it—just a couple people as moderators, who are open-minded and have some knowledge about the diversity of genres dealing with eco-literature and climate change. I think the biggest draw to this subreddit is a megathread where you can self-promote your eco-novels, films, and other projects as well as an almost daily source of resources and news. The place is new, just about two weeks old.

The Rewilding Our Stories Discord is voting on another book to read! I think voting will close tonight. Regardless of whether or not you have time to vote, all the books look great. We’re doing something different this time; we’re going to read along with Lovis Geier—on one of the books that she’s reading anyway for her wonderful Ecofictology vlogger channel. Also, we started a new weekly question thread, which is a lot of fun, helpful, and inspiring, even. We’ve made it much easier to join the Discord recently. And, if you introduce yourself and stay active, you can be promoted to have extra perks, like posting in the self-promotion channel.

I always say that every day is Earth Day, that we need to take action every day of the year to take care of our planet. And, like Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate said, “No action or voice is too small to make a difference.” As artists, as writers, we can make a difference, not just in the art and magic we create but in everything else we do and don’t do. I’m curious to hear about what you all will be doing every day but also on Earth Day. Feel free to email me! My husband and I will be building a bat box out in our meadow to try to attract bats whose population has been reduced by 95% in Nova Scotia.

Sometimes it feels like we’re alone and powerless to fight climate change and do other actions that are good for our environment, but we aren’t alone. I think it’s great to hook into communities that you can share your ideas and actions with; sometimes they are doing most of the legwork. It seems that the general public and governments are still not thinking critically about climate change and biodiversity loss around the world. However, huge movements are fighting for our planet. Check Extinction Rebellion’s latest newsletter for examples. A survey I did a few years ago showed that even reading environmental novels increased readers’ resolve to do something good for our natural world. Check below for the types of actions that 103 participants recorded. This made me feel hopeful and inspired. These are things we can all do throughout the year. Remember, no action or voice is too small to make a difference, and the following are just a few ideas of things you can start doing if you haven’t already. Eco-fiction can lead to climate action.

Welcome to the March 2022 newsletter from Dragonfly.eco, and thanks so much for subscribing. It’s been such a weird and harrowing few years, and each day brings new tragedy, whether with the war, the climate, or the health front. I just want to send good vibes to everyone and wish you the best. I think during these strange years, we have to be resilient as possible in the face of horror but also need relief, even if just for an hour or two, a minute or two. Whether that’s love, a good meal, a funny movie, or a friend who will listen. What’s that old Irish saying?

May the winds of fortune sail you,
May you sail a gentle sea.
May it always be the other guy
who says, 'this drink's on me.'

March Book Recommendation

Welcome to our one-year newsletter anniversary. If you stuck with me this far, thank you! I just hope that this content continues to be interesting to you.

I have a new email: rewildingourstories [at] gmail. It keeps my personal email separate and the Tutanota one something I’ve decided to phase out of due to the amount of spam that comes through. So it’s the best way to reach me if you have any feedback, a submission to make to Dragonfly.eco, or even just to say hello.

Black History Month

Dear subscribers,

Welcome to a new year. Life goes on. Dreams continue. And as we struggle through hotter than normal summers, stormier winters, a pandemic, and the continuance of humanity’s selfishness and hatred, we might find ourselves more resilient than ever. One thing I can’t help but do during these times when we’re buried in snow dumps and cold, when even the idea of going out to a pub for a coldie is hindered by such things as Omicron, is to take a walk around the property and start planning for the spring. Not to ignore the beauty of the current season, for we’ve watched two winter storms come through in the last couple weeks, which into the wee hours of the morning mesmerized us with crazy wind, snow, ice, even thunder, and other powers of nature. Still, it is the time of year to start planning for the big season: what to plant, what to build, what to write. This creative process is similar to the work I do at Dragonfly.eco, which tries to find meaning in the stories we tell about our connections to natural landscapes around us and how to cope in a changing world where ecological disasters are more overwhelming each year.

Hello, and much happiness to whatever end-of-the-year thing that you celebrate! For me it is the natural world, winter solstice (at least in the northern hemisphere), the silence of the meadow at night, and the way snow falls so beautifully and hushes the rest of the world around us. I also love to hear the wildness of this time of year, the gales and howling rains and thunderstorms. When coming up with this newsletter, I thought of doing a retrospective of the year. And then I thought that, really, every year comes not with more nostalgia but solastalgia than the year before. Not to be utterly dark and grim, but if we cannot recognize the palpable pain of losing species, natural landscapes, healthy ecosystems, and all the cultural and experiential traditions that come along with these things, then we are lying to ourselves and burying inconvenient truths. The fact is, we can be courageous, fearless, and hopeful during these times, too, despite hard facts. I recently watched an emotional and great new movie called A Boy Called Christmas, wherein an aunt relates a fable to the young children in her family to get them excited by the holiday as well as to help them deal with the pain of losing their mother. Because the story she tells also has pain in it and the kids question her about how to deal with it, she replies, “Grief is the price we pay for love, and it’s worth it a million times over.” That quote explains how I also view solastalgia, which is a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change. We know climate change is not some far-future thing that will happen. It is already here. I’ve watched family nearly evacuated in British Columbia over the summer, due to wildfires, and just this fall, due to flooding that killed hundreds of people and thousands of animals. Coupled with COVID 19, another environmental disaster, I’d say that while a lot of us are still able to insulate ourselves against the worst scenarios, it is getting more impossible to do that every year.

December Book Recommendation

Hello, subscribers! Thanks so much for continuing to read the Dragonfly.eco newsletter, published in the middle of each month. Dragonfly is a place to find meaningful stories about our natural world and humanity’s connection with it. The site explores the wild, crazy, and breathtaking literary trail of eco-fiction, with a large book database, spotlights, interviews, and more. Our motto is “blowing your mind with wild words and worlds.”  This site raises awareness of the impact of, and diversity in, storytelling around the world that explores climate and ecology.

Like so many others, I’m pushing toward the end of my next novel’s first draft at NaNoWriMo, having completed the first 70K-word-goal on The Stolen Child this past summer. This 300+ page sequel to Back to the Garden is one I dreamed of four years ago when my family went to Ireland for part of the summer and I completed a trailrun atop the Cliffs of Moher. I’m excited to relive some of my experiences there and will publish this novel late next year.

Winter is coming, at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, and because of so much wind, snow, and cold where I live, I get a lot of writing done in the season. But I also like to uphold the now, celebrate it. I look out my window and see deer in the back meadow. The meadow has turned mostly brown and gray, with accents of green from spruces, yellow from golden-rods and rose leaves, red from maples, and orange from hawthorn and cherry trees. My dining room farm table has turned into a crafts station as I make gifts for the holidays, and the wood stove burns bright with golden flame. Happy November, everyone!

Speaking of L.M. Montgomery, last month we traveled to Prince Edward Island and I got to see the house the author was born in as well as the house that inspired her to write Anne of Green Gables, a favorite childhood story. That got me thinking: how many writers are strongly influenced by place? What if that place is in nature or a rural area? I think a lot of eco-fiction authors can tick that checkbox, and from the many interviews I’ve conducted, it seems to be a unanimous thing.

Speaking of interviews, I am forever grateful to all the people I’ve interviewed or who have in some way contributed to the website. See all the 114 (so far) contributors here. Their voices flesh out the content at Dragonfly.eco, so thanks to all of them.

Support Us!

I finally got a chance to go on my first vacation in two years. Our very last holiday was spent at Salt Spring Island in British Columbia: camping, hiking, and hanging out at the beach. Then we moved to the east coast of Canada and Covid hit. Things are starting to open up more, so my mother-in-law and a family friend visited us, escaping the wildfires in BC. We went to the northern part of Nova Scotia, which was like revisiting Ireland, minus any ruins. In Cape Breton were cliffs guarding the sea along the famous Cabot Trail, a Scot-Irish distillery, signs in Gaelic everywhere, stores to find tartans and things, and many hiking and beach trails. We also visited our first cèilidh, and will start doing more of those in the future. We spent some time on Prince Edward Island, which was beautiful and warm, with lots of dunes and sandy beaches. We stayed near the Anne of Green Gables sites, and they were neat to see, as that was a favorite read of mine when younger. Now that I’m back home, it’s time to get the September newsletter finished and share what’s going on in the world of fiction that deals with ecology and climate change.

Support Us!

Our News

Happy 8th birthday to us on August 13th! Eight years ago, the website became a thing. A floundering thing washed up on a rock. And then it gradually evolved to what it is today. To celebrate, I am finishing the first draft of my new novel, The Stolen Child. Writing the prequel, Back to the Garden, heavily inspired the path to what has become Dragonfly.eco. NaNoWriMo, and the encouragement of the Rewilding Our Stories Discord, have been big motivations as I pen the new novel. Most days I write minimally 1,000 words, and the first draft is nearly complete. To celebrate this birthday, I had previously teased about publishing the third post in my Medium article series, “Around the World in 80 Books,” but the novel took precedence, along with planning for some company soon—and I am still working on the third Medium article, so stay tuned.

Speaking of Discord, it’s the perfect time to join our Rewilding Our Stories. We have an influx of new members, bringing us to over 130 now. We’ve recently taken on two additional moderators, Sara Davis, who blogs at LiterarySara.net, and Forrest Brown, who runs the Stories for Earth podcast. We’re also on the second book in our new book club, reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander. We read fairly slowly due to some of us having big reading lists because of reviews and such, but we’ll be voting on a new book soon!

Our News

Welcome to the July 2021 edition of Dragonfly.eco’s newsletter. I’ve been very busy writing the sequel to my novel Back to the Garden, a climate-change novel I began in 2009. It was first published in 2013, with a 2nd edition in 2018 to make it part of a duology. I began a NaNoWriMo challenge this spring: to write 70,000 words on the sequel, The Stolen Child, and have a first draft complete by early next year. I have hit the 50K mark, so am ahead of schedule, but that’ll give me time for the editorial stage. I hope to have it published by next fall. Anyway, that’s been keeping me busy and creative this summer, but I also have lots of other news below.

Coming soon: Our 9th birthday is August 13. Look forward to a new Medium article going around the world in 80 books. If you missed my first two, check here for the first part and here for the second. I honestly never figured I'd keep writing new articles every year or two, but so much eco-fiction is happening around the world, so why not?

Welcome to Dragonfly.eco’s monthly newsletter, a place to find news on what’s going on in the world of eco-fiction.

Our News

• Airing on YouTube, June 5, is a Cymera Festival climate writers’ talk I sat in with the awesome authors Bijal Vachharajani, Lauren James, and James Bradley.

Welcome to our fourth newsletter! This news is based upon my work at Dragonfly.eco, a place to find meaningful stories about our natural world and humanity’s connection with it. Dragonfly explores the wild, crazy, and breathtaking literary trail of eco-fiction, with a large book database, spotlights, interviews, and more. Our motto is “blowing your mind with wild words and worlds.” The site raises awareness of the impact of, and diversity in, storytelling around the world that explores climate change and related ecological themes. Fiction covering this territory is steeped in other genres, ranging from science fiction to fantasy to the weird to magical realism to Afrofuturism to Indigenious speculative fiction. You can find out more about the wonderful world of eco-fiction here.

Our News

• Dragonfly’s May World Eco-fiction spotlight is on Yaba Badoe and her new novel Wolf Light. It’s a beautiful tale of three young women, born in the wolf light, tackling environmental crises in their locales: the mountainous area of Gobi-Altai near the Gobi desert of Mongolia, the tropical forest region of Ghana in West Africa, and the stormy moors of Cornwall in England.

I don’t know about you, but here in Nova Scotia, spring has just barely arrived. We’ve noticed buds on the fruit trees and a few colt’s feet springing up in the meadow. It’s an exciting time of year, and there’s a lot of news to share!

Our News

Well, there’s a ton of news this time around! First, I want to thank a few authors and publishers for sending me their books. My reading list is big right now, but I am not complaining!

For years, readers have asked me if I had a newsletter. I was already active on Twitter and Facebook, so figured one more outlet might be overkill. Well, I’m slowing down on other social media but am not foregoing them altogether. But now I’m searching for more personal correspondences and focused, direct news about fiction reads in which the wild is integral. So, here ya go. I plan to do this monthly.

Invitation to Rewilding Our Stories Community Discord

Welcome to Dragonfly News, which covers world ecofiction in a new newsletter each month. Explore fiction about the natural world and humanity’s impacts on it—and how the diversity of this important literature is revealed in fiction around the world.

Mary Woodbury lives in Nova Scotia and runs dragonfly.eco, a site exploring ecofiction around the world.

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