Jessica White

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Q&A with Jessica White

Image accessed from www.jessicawhite.com.au.

Tell us a little about yourself - whatever you think is important to know! 

I have been severely-to-profoundly deaf since I was four, when I contracted bacterial meningitis. I grew up in a remote farming community in northern New South Wales, Australia and I found that reading was easier than trying to communicate with people, so I immersed myself in books. Reading led to writing, which helped me to process the frustrations of being a deaf person in a hearing world. I don’t think I would have become a writer were it not for my deafness.

Growing up on a farm with a mother who is an avid gardener, and being able to wander off into the bush when I wanted, informed my relationship to the natural world – I have always had plants in my life, even though I am not brilliant at taking care of them. I am also very aware of my environment not so much through sound (although I can hear birds because of their high pitches), but touch – for example, the feel of wind on my skin - and smell. The smell of gum trees just after it has rained is one of the loveliest things on earth.

How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice? How have they changed your relationship with the natural world? 

New Brighton Beach, copyright Jessica White

When the pandemic started to gather pace, I was on a writing fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich. I felt completely unmoored from my partner and family and it was very stressful getting home, particularly when I arrived at the airport and found that Qantas had cancelled my flight. It took me three days to get home safely to quarantine, to my parents’ holiday house on the coast. When the quarantine finished, I found that the beach was a balm, and I tried to walk there most days. I also noticed the stillness, because there were few cars and no one was allowed out except for essential activities (Australia had some very strict lockdowns). I think that if I hadn’t had the water, sand, birds and wind to sustain me, I would have gone crazy. 

My brain stopped for a couple of months from the trauma, but once it got going again I continued working hard throughout the year – for some reason I had a huge number of deadlines – so my writing practice didn’t change that much. Part of me is glad that I was busy, but another part wishes I had slowed down with the rest of the world.

Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?

As a deaf person, I have often stood on the edges of conversations, looking in but not hearing much, and so I have often felt adrift or cast out. I therefore identify with minorities who have historically been, or continue to be, excluded from the mainstream. This influences my interest in the way the natural world is represented, and in the relationships that minority groups have with nature, for example disabled people, or those who grow up in urban environments and don’t have the opportunity to get out into the bush. I am very concerned about the extinction and climate crisis, and everything that I write revolves around exploring this in some way.

Tell us about the piece you submitted for the OSGF blog.  What inspired you to write this piece, and what do you hope readers take away from it? 

I have been working on From the Miniature to the Momentous, my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843), for twenty years, and it seems to me that Georgiana’s obsession with the Nuytsia floribunda is akin to my obsession with writing about her life and how the flora of south-west Western Australia shaped it. South-west Western Australia is a biodiversity hotspot, which means it contains very high levels of plants that are found nowhere else on earth, which are also highly threatened. Learning about those plants has heightened my awareness of the preciousness of biodiversity and what humans stand to lose if the plants disappear. I don’t just mean physically, through the collapse of ecosystems, but psychically, as I don’t think many people realise how important green spaces are to their mental health.

So I hope that people, after reading my piece, will understand what it means to be completely consumed with the natural world, and also to become aware of what they will lose of themselves if it goes.

Georgiana Molloy, 1805-1843. Public domain. Although copyright has expired, photographic plate attribution reads "Reproduced by permission of Mrs V.M.R Bunbury, 'Marybrook'"

What creative projects are you currently working on?  

I’m still working on this ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy, Western Australia’s first non-Indigenous female scientist. With any luck it will be finished next year! I am also constantly writing essays, both academic and creative nonfiction, and hope to get back to a half-finished novel about deep time and climate change very soon.

What are you reading right now?  

Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron, a gorgeous, fantastical work about charismatic animals and what humans will do to possess them. 

What is your favorite plant? 

Argh, this is such a tough question! My mother has gardened for as long as I’ve been alive, and many of my favourites come from my childhood: jasmine, freesia and jonquils for a start. I love innumerable Australian natives: wattle (signaling the end of winter), kangaroo paw, blue leschenaultia and waratahs. Also proteas, peonies and hydrangeas … I shall stop there.

Is there anything else you’d like to share? 

I was so disappointed that I couldn’t get to Oak Spring Garden, but still very grateful that I could connect with my fellow attendees remotely and through their writing. I think OSGF’s project of giving writers a space to think and craft their work in a beautiful location is a wonderful one, and I really hope to make it across the Atlantic for a visit one day.

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Learn more about Jessica and her work here.

Rachel Heng

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Q&A With Rachel Heng

Tell us a little about yourself - whatever you think is important to know! 

That’s a strangely difficult question to answer. I was born and raised in Singapore, and I live in Austin, Texas today with my husband and two cats. I came to writing relatively late (maybe relatively early, depending on where you’re standing!) in life—I wrote my first short story in my mid-twenties, and haven’t looked back since.

How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice? How have they changed your relationship with the natural world? 

It’s definitely slowed things down. I’ve been mostly working on my second novel during the past year, and I’d thought having more concentrated time at home would mean I’d finish it more quickly, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Progress has been slow and winding, but on the plus side, I hope I’ve deepened some of the ideas and characters in the book in a way that I might not have, without the enforced solitude. As for my relationship with the natural world, living in Austin we’re very fortunate to have outdoor space and sunny weather most of the year, so I spent lots of time on the porch, and walking the trails and greenbelts we have around the city. Coming from tropical Singapore, I’ve always thought of Texas as a somewhat dry, arid place, but I’ve been surprised how lush parts of it can be, how similar the vegetation sometimes is to that I grew up with.

Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?

I’m very inspired by large, invisible systems, the natural world being one of them. My first novel dealt with the intersection of capitalism with healthcare and the commodification of human life, while my second book is about urban development, ecological loss and communal memory in post-Independence Singapore. On the surface those feel like vastly different subjects but I think what connects them is their interest in the large systems and global movements that shape the lives of individuals. Much of my work is quite research-heavy—I love reading books about history or geography, talking to social scientists, digging into archives and oral histories. 

Tell us about “The Remembers”, the piece you submitted for the OSGF blog.  What inspired you to write this piece, and what do you hope readers take away from it? 

This story was commissioned by the wonderful McSweeney’s Quarterly, as part of their special climate fiction issue in response to the UN’s 2018 climate change report. They paired us up with experts from the National Resource Defense Council to imagine stories set 40 years in the future, in locations all around the world. I worked with the flooding expert Robert Moore to come up with my story ‘The Rememberers’, in which a future Singapore grapples with the implications of life behind a seawall and attempts ever more outlandish solutions to save the country from rising sea levels. In the story, we follow a daughter trying to stall the progress of her mother’s dementia. It’s a story about climate change, but to me it’s also a story about collective and individual memory, and how we value that, how far we’re willing to go to preserve that, what memory can do in the face of what seems like crushing, impending defeat. 

What creative projects are you currently working on?  

I’m currently working on revising my second novel, The Great Reclamation, which will be published by Riverhead Books in 2022. I’m also working on new short stories, and hope to work on a story collection one day!

What are you reading right now?  

Grace Paley’s The Collected Stories and Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being. 

What is your favorite plant? 

The banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis). We have lots of old, sweepingly beautiful ones in Singapore.

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Learn more about Rachel and her work here.

Images courtesy of Rachel Heng.

Jenna van de Ruit

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Q&A With Jenna van de Ruit

Tell us a little about yourself - whatever you think is important to know!

I’m from and live in Zimbabwe, in a treehouse. I decided that if there’s a constant in my life, it  may as well be a treehouse.  

How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice? How have they  changed your relationship with the natural world?  

I’ve been struck by how much of my interaction with people in this time—and hence effect on  others—is through language. It’s encouraged me to explore not just how I write, but how I  speak, and to treat language as something with more body.  

When COVID hit, I was writing about how to approach the climate crisis with the possibilities of  being—generosity, connectedness, presence—that research shows is possible amidst disaster.  Like many people, the stillness of this time has allowed me to notice things I wouldn’t have,  such as feel the daily rhythms of a kingfisher or legavaan or bagworm.  

Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work? 

I’ve been interested in events that give us glimpses into who we can become. In Zimbabwe, for  me, that was the coup in 2017, when people gathered on the streets, and Cyclone Idai in 2019,  when civilians across the country mobilised before INGOs. How do we remember those  glimpses in ways that are useful? How do we learn to have these moments more often, in  smaller times?  

I’ve spent the last few years focusing inwards, in meditation and periods of renunciation. I try to  draw on experienced truths rather than stories. Recently I’ve attempted to push this further:  What does language look like beyond narrative? How do we approach language as experience?  When is image enough?  

Tell us about the pieces you submitted for the OSGF blog. What inspired you to write this  piece, and what do you hope readers take away from it?  

When I think of humans’ connection to the natural world, I think first of the meeting point  between them. Where is it and what does it look like? How do we create it? I hope the poems  invite readers to be playful and permeable.  

What creative projects are you currently working on?  

A collage of place. I’m exploring the area I left and returned to, from its plants and critters to how  people praise in the rocky hills, and questions around how land can be shared and relinquished.  I keep finishing a book, Collecting Wings, about learning to give up hope.  And I’m drawn to smaller works and experiments in poetry.  

What are you reading right now?  

Vesper Flights (Helen Macdonald) and Beating the Graves (Tsitsi Ella Jaji).  

What is your favorite plant?  

I love grasses. If I had to choose one, maybe red-top grass (Melinis nerviglumis), whose  seeds are covered in soft maroon.  

Is there anything else you’d like to share? 

Just thanks.

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Images courtesy of Jenna van de Ruit

Manjula Martin

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Q&A With Manjula Martin

Tell us a little about yourself - whatever you think is important to know! 

I once jumped a train. 

How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice? How have they changed your relationship with the natural world? 

I live in the woods in California, so for me the past year has been about cascading disasters: pandemic, fire, late-stage capitalism. In my life and work I’ve been reckoning with what it’s like to be a human who lives on this planet at a time when our ability to do so is increasingly limited, and it’s mostly our fault. 

Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?

Everything I’ve ever read, anything I’ve yet to read, everything, everything! 

Tell us about “Dawn Patrol,” the piece you submitted for the OSGF blog.  What inspired you to write this piece, and what do you hope readers take away from it? 

The piece was inspired by my dad, who is the hardest working writer and gardener I know, and who truly loves the work. 

What creative projects are you currently working on?  

I’m currently in the weeds of a new draft of my first novel, and I’m also beginning research for what will be a nonfiction book. Both projects generally concern California, the natural world, and the body. 

What are you reading right now?  

Spring by Ali Smith 

“The Descent of Alette” by Alice Notley (re-reading)

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Roadside Geography of Northern and Central California by David Alt and Donald W. Hyndman

The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo (which will be published in April 2021)

What is your favorite plant? 

That’s a horrible choice to have to make! I swear allegiance to the largest and one of the longest-lived plants on Earth, a tree I’ve known well since childhood: Sequoia sempervirens, the Coast Redwood.

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Learn more about Manjula and her work here.

Images courtesy of Manjula Martin. “Calling the Sun” print copyright © 2019 by Stephanie Zeiler Martin.

Phoebe McIlwain Bright

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Q&A With Phoebe McIlwain Bright

Tell us a little about yourself - whatever you think is important to know! 

I hold an MFA from the University of Oregon. I enjoy picking thimbleberries, gathering morels, and watching ouzels pop out of rivers in surprising places. And I’ve always been pulled in by stories. As a kid, I was an avid reader and fascinated by listening to adults talk and tell tales among themselves. Now that I’m an adult, the awe of being caught up in a story still hasn’t gone away.

How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice? How have they changed your relationship with the natural world? 

Staying at home during the pandemic has made my writing practice more consistent. And it’s made me realize how important writing is to me -- how I need the meaning and questions it poses.

The past year has also made me even more grateful for the natural world. I’ve been heartened by how an appreciation for nature seems to be moving into a place of shared, national focus. Not that people didn’t already value nature, but there seems to be a growing recognition of the need to do a better job of protecting it.

Historically, what ideas, issues, and subject matter(s) have inspired your work?

My relationship with the natural world, living in a rural community, and my own experiences as a woman all feed into my writing. I also studied Behavioral Biology in college, and four years of focusing on that topic probably influences my writing in more ways than I realize.

Tell us about “Tropic Cascade” the piece you submitted for the OSGF blog.  What inspired you to write this piece, and what do you hope readers take away from it? 

On an immediate level, “Trophic Cascade” was born out of encountering wolves in the wild for the first time -- and then, two days later, seeing wolves that had been killed. But it also draws on longer-term conversations and thinking about how people interact with apex predators.

How wolves change landscapes and human behaviors is a complex and dynamic topic that I’ve just scraped the surface of. But I hope that readers take away an awareness for what a truly intact ecosystem would look like where they live, and also that they’ll remember how closely related we are to other mammalian predators. We aren’t separate from the natural world; we’re part of it.

What creative projects are you currently working on?  

I have a couple essays and stories I’m working on, but my main project right now is that I’m wrapping up a novel. 

What are you reading right now?  

I’m reading Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Secret, Surprising Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.

What is your favorite plant? 

I think I have to go with western redcedar (thuja plicata). Redcedars hold an important emotional significance for me. I find them both beautiful and comforting. At every stage of their life cycles, they’re doing something interesting -- from growing in rings as saplings to having hollow centers in old age that you can crawl inside of.

Is there anything else you’d like to share? 

Just that I’m grateful for OSGF’s support. An organization that builds conversations and community around plants is vital to our health as a society.

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Images courtesy of Phoebe McIlwain Bright

Catharina Coenen

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Q&A With Catharina Coenen

Tell us a little bit about yourself - whatever you feel is important to know! 

 I didn't grow up here in the United States, I came here from Germany when I was in my early twenties. I first came in 1989 on a Fulbright grant to Oregon, and no sooner than I got here the Berlin Wall fell and it felt like the entire world changed. After my PhD work, I went back and lived in Germany for a couple of years before I took the job that I have now. Since then, I've been living in Pennsylvania for about 20 years.

The other thing that people might want to know about is that by training, I'm a biologist. My training is in botany, and within that my specialty is plant physiology, so I study how plants grow and how their growth is regulated, and also how they react to beneficial microbes in the soil. 

 Have you always been a creative writer as well as a botanist?

 My mom gave me a diary when I was six or seven, and I've kept journals ever since then. Writing has always been a way in which I figured out what I thought. It's always been an emotional regulatory mechanism for me, so if I feel upset about something, that's usually what I do, I write, and that helps me ground myself and come back to terms with where I am. 

 I never thought of publishing any of my writing until I took a creative nonfiction class on my last sabbatical. I did it originally because I thought that creative writing might be a way for students to get a better emotional connection to plants.  Most of the students that I work with are not interested in plants at all - they are interested in medicine-related fields.  I learned that if I let students write about their family history and connection to plants, childhood memories in particular, that it helped them get ready to make a connection with what they were learning. 

 So, I started writing essays in that creative nonfiction class, and then by and by I started to get into publishing. I've been doing that kind of writing for the last eight years or so. 

How have the events of the past year impacted your writing practice?

 I've written far less this past year than I used to. And that just has to do with my job - I have been teaching very little for the past three years or so, because I have started serving as the director of faculty development at our college. That job means I get to help my fellow professors figure out how to be better professors. When the pandemic hit, we had to turn online on a dime, and I had to help people figure out how to do that. There was an enormous amount of work that went on immediately but also over the summer, which is usually a time when I get to do creative work.  So, as some people were stuck at home and couldn't do their jobs, my job ramped up.  It squeezed my time for writing, and it also squeezed my mental space for writing - not just the pandemic, but also the dawning realization in this country about racial injustice and also about the threats to our democracy that we're all experiencing. I don't think I've been this glued to the news cycle since I first came to the U.S. and everything changed in Germany.

 I've also been in that brain fog that so many people talk about, where you sort of become addicted to news and exhausted by everything else. So, those were the main influences, I would say, on my writing. 

 Has the past year impacted your relationship with the natural world?  

Dog Walker by Catharina Coenen

 As soon as it became clear that I wouldn't be able to see my family, my mother got on the phone and said, "you have to get a dog."  So I did, and that's been a lifesaver, because it's means that I get out every day and that's the only time that I actually get to see people, walking with the dog. So I do spend time outdoors, but it's not like that's been ramped up as a result of the pandemic, because that's what I do anyway. 

What inspires your writing? 

 There are three main sources of inspiration. The first one is, I inherited a whole bunch of stories that my grandmothers told me about their lives and in particular their experiences during World War II. Those inspire a lot of my writing - that's often where it starts. I feel as though I carry those, and I have to put them somewhere,  because that's the only way that I can make them visible and reflect on the influence of those stories on my life, and how I see the world. 

 The second line of influence is probably that I've always been a reader, and I've always had a love for words, for how they feel in the mouth, and how they feel in my mind. 

 The third is probably my scientific training.  There are a lot of things that I feel very alone with - as a scientist, you can feel like there are trains of your own thoughts that nobody can connect to. Just walking around in nature with friends who are not scientists, there are things that I notice and that I think about, and I know that I'm alone with those thoughts in that moment. Writing is a way for me to allow other people to see some of that. Just like for a lot of people, my writing is a way out of my loneliness, a way of making connections and of figuring out what I think. 

Tell me about “Conneaut,” the piece you submitted for the OSGF blog.  What inspired you to write it, and what do you hope readers take away from it? 

 What inspired it is what we've talked about - me walking with my dog, through those marshes, and also being in love with words. In looking up why this place is called Conneaut Marsh, and why a whole bunch of other places around here are called Conneaut, I hit on how we don't know enough about the history of the place we live in, and how those place names are often the only thing that's left to tie us to the indigenous past of places.  It's about the only thing that we haven't erased.

 For this particular word, what fascinated me was the thing that was frustrating at first - I just want to know what it means!  There are all these different hypotheses about where it could come from and what it might mean, so there is no definite answer. But there are a lot of connections that do reflect on place. 

 The scientific part of me is a collector and a list maker, and the other part is the poet who is in love with words, so the structure of the piece became this list of things that are almost like dictionary entries, or Wikipedia entries. And there are other parts that are more like poetic musings. 

Erie National Wildlife Refuge by Catharina Coenen

What creative projects are you currently working on?  

 I'm trying to finish a few more essays, and then the plan is to publish them as a collection. Those essays are about the stories I've inherited from my family, about how they influence me now, and how that still interacts with the experience of being an immigrant to the United States. It's an attempt to take anecdotes from my family, put them in historical context, see them reflected in my present-day experience, and draw the connections between them. There's one essay about transgenerational trauma, and how we're now finding that can have a biological basis. Strangely, botany pops up in there as well, but not in the ways you might expect!  

What are you reading right now? 

I just finished Kiese Laymon's Heavy, and I'm in the middle of Brenda Miller's Listening Against the Stone, which is an essay collection. I'm also in the middle of Terry Pratchett's Long Earth, which is interesting as commentary on colonialism and people spreading across what seems to be unoccupied land. Recently I also finished Allison Stein's Road out of Winter` - that's an apocalyptic sort of thriller about a young female marijuana grower trying to escape from a freezing Appalachia.  

What is your favorite plant? 

I had a hard time with that question, because I don't know that I have a favorite! If I were to answer in terms of something that I'm obsessed with and I still have to figure out how to write about, I love Atlas Cedars. My grandfather planted one in our yard the year after I was born, and if you imagine a German backyard in the middle of a medieval town, it's entirely enclosed by houses. So this tree grew very rapidly, and by the time I left home, it was taller than our three-story house - it was enormous, and it was beautiful.

 I was fascinated with trying to write about this tree as I usually do; much of my writing is research-driven. And then you learn about all the heartbreak - this is an endangered species, its home is in the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, and climate change basically drives the elevation at which this tree can still grow up and up. Pretty soon the trees are going to run out of their climate zone, because there's no more mountain to go up. They're threatened as a species, and at the same time, individuals of that plant can get up to 2000 years old. These trees were literally around in biblical times, and they have watched us do everything that we do. So there's a deep fascination there with that tree, and I have not found the right words for it yet - I've tried a few times and failed, but eventually it's going to happen!

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Learn more about Catharina and her work here.

“Conneaut” was originally published in the Split Rock Review. Find an audio recording of the piece here, and read Catharina’s contributor spotlight here.