“These essays explore how climate change, political upheaval, and declining infrastructure connects us all…” -Sean Enfield

Until last week, I hadn’t been back to the National Park Service road camp at the center of several essays in Ghosts of Distant Trees since August 2021, when the collapsing road closed that section of the park to vehicle traffic. It remains a nostalgic place for me: the place from which I first connected to this region, where I met my partner Craig, and a stunning intersection of mountains, waterways, and that damn road, traveled by the bears and caribou and dump trucks that have captured my imagination. 

I could have gone sooner - plenty of people have - but I haven’t, due to things like inertia, finite time, laziness, the dog. Mostly the dog; he’s not allowed. But in 20 miles of solo walking, I gave some space to the truth that also, I’d wanted to keep certain memories or material realities undisturbed until this book was finished, that at a certain point, I had to define a narrative timeline, and stop adding new details: the near-finished bridge over the slumped road turned wide gully with a traffic cone perched diagonal in a still-moving clump of tundra below, the way the forgotten dish towel we left in the semi-abandoned government housing suddenly became sentimental (I’m not usually sentimental about towels), and the worn wooden sign at the river laying on the ground, only a splintered stick remaining loosely attached to the post, twisting on its nail in the wind like a weather vane. 

Anyway, those details are not in the book, only here, in this email. But questions of time, impermanence, and how to recognize when the temporal scope of a piece of writing serves its story have been on my mind in recent months, and likely will be for some time. 

I returned from that short trip to notifications and texts about the latest acts of violence, both chronic and acute, and in the hours that followed, I thought again of Sean Enfield’s book Holy American Burnout!, which contains some of my favorite writing on what it is to experience (is experience the right word?) mass mobilization or political violence via social media: the intersections of knowing everything and nothing, the contradictory act of virtual witness. About the shootings at a 2016 Black Lives Matter demonstration, Sean writes: 

It can be easy to for the revision-obsessed witness to hope that something deeper might emerge from casting aside the first thought, but with friends hiding in hotel lobbies, unsure if the gunfire had stopped, I just hoped everything would be alright, and so I scrolled onward, no longer in solidarity but with a fear that felt unearned. Throughout the night I wondered: might this be the face of revolution? But I left that question in my head, unposted.

As Ghosts of Distant Trees’ publication date draws near, I’m so honored that it will enter the world of books like Sean’s, and all the other writer-friends who have helped usher this book into their conversation.

Thank you so much to those who have preordered! It really does make a difference. I’m so excited to see this book in your hands.

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Recommended reading

On Craft: “Ruin Porn,” Maya Jewell Zeller 

Maya’s memoir, Raised by Ferns, is also forthcoming from Porphyry Press (preorder it too!). “Ruin Porn” was my introduction to my soon-to-be pressmate’s prose writing, and I’m so looking forward to the book.

I too have found comfort in a crumbled castle and a ghost barn, those ones that rot from the inside so the skeleton stands, useless, except as the object of a photograph—or a safe place for a girl wandering the fields to hide from the downpouring rain, the thick shapes of men walking through the fog in the near dawn. I’m drawn back to these places, these ruins, because they form the imagistic, psychological core of me, but I also don’t want them to become anyone else’s porn. Take your camera elsewhere, part of me whispers, my eyes narrowed into scopes, spit forming on my tongue.

Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Fargo Tbakhi

All the qualities of Craft, the qualities which make a “good” poem, pressured this violence—the violence of the liberal American unwilling to put their body and their peace of mind on the line, a violence which might exist fundamentally outside the boundaries the lyric can address—into disappearing. Craft success is contingent upon ethical and political failure.

Wilderness as Marketing Strategy: Joseph Whitson on the Outdoor Industry, Colonialism, and Land Back Futures, interview with Jessica DeWitt

We have seen time and again, now perhaps more than ever, that when energy, security, or profit are on the line, recreational wilderness spaces can quickly be sacrificed. The economic power and goodwill created by our love of outdoor recreation and the need for wilderness in order to recreate is a bulwark against extraction, but it also justifies continued control by the very entity threatening the land. 

Video reward: Alright, this one needs an explanation. Three years ago, I spent the month of September at the absolutely magical Storyknife Writers Retreat.* I used the time to get back into the manuscript that became Ghosts, and in revisiting a draft exploring the colors of the world around me, I wrote some short pieces on the color orange. Outside our residency cabins, a fungus I learned was called Orange Peel Mushroom grew in the gravel. It doesn’t (to my knowledge) grow in the considerably drier subarctic where I live, and I wanted to learn more about it. Through that tangent, I found this charming and really very odd foraging and cooking video. It’s long. If you’re not at least somewhat interested in foraging mushrooms, wild foods, or watching quirky strangers at home, it may not be for you. But if I haven’t already lost you, you really are in for a subtle little treat. Or at least 15 minutes of dissociating:  

Identify and cook ORANGE PEEL mushoom

*I wrote about the food at Storyknife here; orange peel mushrooms were not involved