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.

This Earth Day, I celebrate stories about our natural habitats. While The Shadow of the Wind isn’t as ecological as most books posted here, its setting is bleak, exploring aspects of post-WW2 Spain's nature and culture. It's a love story, and it inspires us to remember our most potent stories and memories—which are sometimes lost in old libraries or forgotten due to cultural amnesia or revisionist history, from historical genocide to the saving grace of vaccinations, which had once eradicated deadly diseases (now making a comeback).

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World eco-fiction spotlight: interview with Isaac Yuen, on Hayao Miyazaki

I’m happy to reunite with a colleague from Vancouver days, Isaac Yuen, to celebrate Earth Day 2025. I first met Isaac nearly a decade ago when we participated in an Earth Day climate change and storytelling panel at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. In 2019 we met again with other writers at a Coqutilam, BC, Western Sky Books event called Earth Day: Writers Respond. Isaac has run Ekostories for 13 years; it’s a site of essays connecting nature, culture, and self.

This Earth Day I focus on celebrating a commitment to stories and the power of stories about nature, climate, ecology, and our connection to Earth. We tell our own stories but also spotlight major artists whose commitment to storytelling inspires and informs our work and has transformed many others around the world. One of these artists—Japanese filmmaker, manga artist, and animator Hayao Miyazaki—has been working as an artist for longer than either Yuen or I have been alive. I’ve always wanted to do a spotlight on him but mostly turned to Isaac’s website to learn more. Isaac is an essayist and story author. This spotlight focuses on Miyazaki but also covers some of Isaac’s work, including his books, such as Utter, Earth—a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders.

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Want to support Dragonfly.eco? We don't ask for donations or funding, and all newsletter content is free to subscribers, but you can support us by buying our ecologically themed ebooks, which I sell independently, without distribution, at Dragonfly Publishing.

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Book of the month: Happy Land, Dolen Perkins-Valdez

I recently received my copy of Happy Land (Penguin Random House, 2025), by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. It's yet another book I've eased into, devouring pages of a story about Nikki who reunites with her grandmother–Mother Rita–to learn the story of Nikki's great-great-great-grandmother Luella, who was once the Queen of Happy Land. Inspired by a true story and set in North Carolina, this novel fictionalizes a real refuge once settled by freed Black Americans. The novel is historically rich and deserves to be read and heard (just like books in The Shadow of the Wind), environmentally inspirational as land management and natural resources are practiced sustainably, and rich with Appalachian history and landscapes that I miss.

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Indie Corner spotlight: An Orchid in My Belly Button by Katy Wimhurst

I have a lot of Indie Corner features on the go right now, and I'm trying to space them out a month apart. The newest interview is with Katy Wimhurst, author of An Orchid in My Belly Button (Elsewhere Press, 2025). From the interview:

An Orchid in My Belly Button is a short story collection that includes magical realist, surrealist, climate fiction, and dystopian stories. I didn’t set out to write a collection but when I put it together, it seemed obvious to organise it around themes of nature and the environment because so many stories I write are inspired by those. The climate crisis is something I am preoccupied by, yet there is so much apathy and ignorance about it in our society. I see fiction as a way of addressing some of the issues in a way that engages and isn’t preachy — despite bleak themes, I try to inject quirky imagery and wry humour to make the stories engaging to read. Several tales in the book examine the climate crisis in a metaphorical or speculative way...

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Rewilding our Stories (Discord)

Please remember that if you want to have a more interactive experience and chat with authors, artists, podcasters, scientists, gamers, and others working in the broad genre of eco-fiction, please join the Rewidling our Stories Discord. We have a 2025 book club, complete with DIY choices among environmental fiction and nonfiction, which is also tied to a Storygraph challenge and a buddy system if you want to join others in reading. Currently, a few are reading Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series.

The Discord also has an area for self-promotion (if you have introduced yourself and been promoted to the Rewilder rank), icebreaker chats, book suggestions, writer chat, solarpunk talk, and a new section on sustainable and ethical publishing and distribution. We're pretty chill, but there are a few guidelines to follow in order for us to maintain a friendly space with no hate, rudeness, discrimination, and anti-science and bad-faith narratives.

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Flashback

I used to write a monthly Discover feature at Dragonfly. I think this dates back to 2015 or so. I stopped doing that when I started writing monthly newsletters, which now have a monthly book (film, game, etc.). This Discover section still exists at Dragonfly. You can check out some interesting fiction I found in the old days as well as my old library, built partially with wine crates I fashioned together and stained.

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Resources

In case you’ve missed these exciting resources, including newest books at Dragonfly.eco, check ‘em out!

• LinkTree: Find out more about me.

• Dragonfly Publishing: My own micro-press.

• Rewilding Our Stories: A Discord community where you can find resources, reading, and writing fun in fiction that relates strongly to nature and environment.

• I finally created a new playlist of “Nature, climate, and environmental songs”. Click here for part 1 (very long!) and here for the new part 2.

• Book recommendations: a growing list of recs.

• Eco/climate genres: They’re all over the place, and here’s an expanding compendium.

• Inspiring and informative author quotes from Dragonfly’s interviews.

• List of ecologically focused games.

• List of eco/climate films and documentaries.

• Eco-fiction links and resources.

• Book database: Database of over 1,100 book posts at Dragonfly.eco.

• Turning the Tide: The Youngest Generation: Fiction aimed toward children, teens, and young adults.

• Indie Corner: The occasional highlight of authors who publish independently.

• Artists & Climate Change. This site is no longer being updated but still has a wealth of info. I was a core writer for their team, and I’m both honored and grateful. Look for my “Wild Authors” series there.

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Copyright 2025 Mary Woodbury