Monthly Update: June 2025
Intro
At long last, the school year is over. I have been squirreling books away for the last two months, waiting for summer to read them. Some I buy, some I find for free, some I check out from the various libraries in my life. I have come upon a new idea, a new research pursuit, one that (as always) blooms in more fields than I am able to visit.
I really enjoyed teaching The Sentence this past quarter. I read texts I probably would never have read otherwise, writers who spend too much time thinking about grammar and syntax, sharing their wisdom with those of us who need to spend more time thinking about grammar and syntax. You can read my last post, “A Blessing for Writers” for more about my experience teaching the class.
My fiction writing has blossomed since the March MFA residency. Particularly my short stories. I realized I have scores of stories, written or started, neatly organized on my computer. I wrote them and never returned to them. Many of them I forgot I’d written. I’ve selected several of them to revise, see what happens. I’m enjoying revision more than I thought I would.
A week and a half ago was our firstborn son’s birthday. Emerson would have been 9 years old, just finishing up third grade. In the past two years, we’ve met so many parents who have a child the same age as Emerson. It saddens us that we do not get to see what his friendships would have been like. Last year around Emerson’s birthday, I wrote a post about grief milestones. I encourage you to read it and remember Emerson with us (even if you never knew him).
Below is a bit of what I’ve been reading the last two months.
What I’ve Been Reading (April and May)
Fiction
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
The important headline is that I finally finished Don Quixote. 943 pages! I read the 2003 translation by Edith Grossman. I will write more about Don Quixote soon, but for now, just know that I recommend you read it, too! Take your time. A chapter a day is a good pace.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
Robinson’s novel explores through narrative—following a handful of characters—what it would take to overhaul the world’s systems and attitudes in order to (1) adapt to, and (2) reduce our contribution to global warming. Climate change will cause more and more disasters and problems in the decades to come, and this story asks, “What if we stopped talking about it, arguing about it, and did something about it?” The book is not naive, not utopian. There is resistance from government and business leaders, from banks. There are assassinations, terrorist acts, rogue nations and corporations. There are devastating disasters, economic recessions, mass migrations. At the end, the characters don’t “solve” climate change. But they make progress, and there is hope. This book would pair well with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What If We Get It Right?, a series of interviews and essays about climate solutions.
Erica Bauermeister, No Two Persons
This is a novel-in-stories connected by a book called Theo. Each story explores how a different character interacts with the book. In the first story, we follow the author as she comes to write the book. The second story is about an assistant editor at a publishing house who reads it and recommends it for publication. An artist hates the idea of reading this novel, and so destroys it and makes art from the pages. A new widower finds comfort in reading what his wife read. A student has to read it for class. An interesting premise for a book: how can one story affect several different people?
Alexander Freed, Star Wars: Rise of the Empire: The Mask of Fear
This novel, the first of a new trilogy, fills an important gap between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. While James Luceno’s novels Tarkin and Catalyst follow Imperial characters as they consolidate power and build the Death Star, the Rise of the Empire trilogy will follow the leaders of the inchoate rebellion—and reveal their differences. The three main characters are Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Guerrera. The book was timed to release just before Andor season 2 aired, and the connections between the novel and the show are many.
Speaking of Andor season 2, if you are a Star Wars fan and haven’t seen the show, I highly recommend it. It is some of the best storytelling and character development in Star Wars. Like Rogue One, there is plenty of action, but there is a lot of politics, too: in the Senate, in the ISB (Imperial Security Bureau), among the rebellion’s leaders and factions, and in the events that unfold on various worlds. In season 2, the planet of Ghorman (like Naboo in The Phantom Menace) becomes the center of slowly escalating political, economic, and military conflict.
One interesting way to watch Star Wars: start with Andor, seasons 1 & 2, then watch Rogue One, then watch A New Hope. When you watch Andor, the Force is rarely mentioned, and a supposed Force healer in season 2 is treated as a quack. In Rogue One, you meet the Guardians of the Whills on Jedha (or what’s left of them). While they do seem to get lucky when they invoke the Force, they also seem a bit odd. So then, when you get to A New Hope and meet Old Ben Kenobi, you can be as skeptical as Han Solo, believing that the Force is nothing more than hokey religion.
Non-Fiction
Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
As the title suggests, this book upends our assumptions about animal intelligence. Can humans design tests that truly indicate how smart animals are? Must we measure animal intelligence by comparing their capabilities to what humans can do? This book is a helpful antidote to the common claim that animals are “dumb brutes” or act “only by instinct.”
Peter Moe, Touching This Leviathan
A book ostensibly about whales. But Moe dives deeper, exploring the question of how we write about the unknown, what is beyond language’s capability to describe. We can say “whale” easily enough, but we have a hard time actually recognizing the size and mystery of whales. Perhaps it’s not just whales, Moe suggests. It’s anything we attempt to put into words. Grief. Theology. Life. Death. Joy. These are realities which frustrate language. And yet we make the attempt anyway. Because in words, in language, we can discover new understanding.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
For those who’ve read Braiding Sweetgrass, this book feels like an expansion of the chapter called “The Gift of Strawberries.” The Serviceberry is one long essay on gift economies, reciprocity with the earth, and responsibility within communities to care for one another. It’s a great book to start with if you’ve never read Kimmerer before. It’s accessible, hopeful, and encouraging.
Poetry
Layli Long Soldier, Whereas
A collection that explores the relationship between language and life, between flesh and word, between broken treaties and suppressed culture and people. In the final section, Long Soldier’s poems take the form of “whereas” statements in legal documents. Because the US broke its treaties with native people time and again, because native children were forced into boarding schools and forced to abandon their culture, Long Soldier now laments what has been lost—her language, her traditions, her people’s connection to their ancestral lands.
Matthew E. Henry, The Third Renunciation
This collection is by an SPU MFA graduate! The book is comprised of blank verse sonnets, mostly untitled, which juxtapose theological claims with their consequences: physical, political, and ideological. Each sonnet begins with either “Say” (exposing what we take for granted, or what we could take for granted) or “Maybe” (offering a new perspective). Here’s a sampler of some opening lines:
Say God is the music we strain to hear / above the cries of Rachel (Maria, / Sethe) mourning her comfortless children.
Maybe Jesus didn’t eat his spinach
Maybe Jesus needed better PR
Say prayer’s correctly rubbing God’s back / like a rabbit’s foot clutched in a pocket
Say my prayers are desperate, selfish acts.
Say the opposite of a miracle / is a miracle, and we’re just afraid / of calling things by their true names
Say Jonah was right and grace is wasted / on the unworthy
Say people ask for God until God comes.
Say we were kinder to the disciples, / extended grace for their failings. forgave / their lack of faith, their misunderstandings / of signs and Scripture.
Say Grace is a Twinkie or a cockroach— / something that never goes bad, can survive / anything the cold world throws.
Maria Popova, The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder Through Science and Poetry
What would happen if you combined science and poetry? You’d get the event, “The Universe in Verse,” begun by Maria Popova in 2017, where “stories from the history of science” are “told live onstage alongside readings of illustrative poems” (2). This book emerged from the annual event. The book is arranged into fifteen sections. After a brief narrative about a scientist and their field, there is a related poem. Some of the chapters:
The Singularity and Our Elemental Belonging (with poem by Marie Howe)
Flowers and the Birth of Ecology (with poem by Emily Dickinson)
Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Hunger to Know the Universe (with poem by Tracy K. Smith)
Trees and the Optimism of Resilience (with poem by Jane Hirshfield)
Radioactivity and the Mystery of Matter (with poem by Adrienne Rich)
The Octopus and the Unknown (with poem by Maria Popova)
This is a fun, intriguing book that shows the bridges already in existence between poetry and science.
What I’m Reading Now
George Saunders, Tenth of December (reread)
Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (reread)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (reread)
Outro
You might be wondering what new research idea I am exploring right now. I call it “Anti-Ecological Aesthetics.” Here is the basic premise: we have developed culture(s) in which the natural environment is harmed because of our commitment to certain aesthetic principles. In other words, we are more committed to aesthetic ideals than environmental health.
For example: lawns. Lawns, perfectly green and cut to a perfect, uniform length are not a natural phenomenon. Meadows in the wild are full of flowers and clover and moss which we might call “weeds” or “unhealthy” for a lawn. We pump our lawns full of chemicals and water. Why? Because we cherish the image, the ideal of a green, uniform lawn. It is an aesthetic commitment (one that has a history dating back to European nobles). Our lawn care harms our local, yard-sized environment. Sum the suburbs and campuses and sidewalk strips, and that’s ecosystem-wide, global detriment. Better to have a garden overflowing with native plants, “ugly” and “unkempt,” which promotes the flourishing of native wildlife, bettering the earth in our local area.
Another example: urban tree planting. Some dude (I need to track this down … I heard it in an audiobook, but now I can’t find the reference) in the 1940s-ish wrote a book on urban tree planting policy. In order to prevent trees from naturally sprouting up in undesired places, he recommended that city planners only plant one sex of deciduous trees. Since female trees produce and drop fruit, creating a mess on sidewalks and in parks, he wrote that male trees should be planted. Guess what? Male trees produce pollen. And without female trees to accept that pollen, it just floats around in the air and coats cars and plants and buildings and the inside of nasal cavities. Decades later, and there is a huge uptick in seasonal allergies among Americans. There are, of course, other allergen factors at play (such as increased air pollution). But this tree planting is an aesthetic commitment (to clean streets, to uniformity, to control of tree populations in cities) that has caused environmental harm (and harm to humans, too!).
I’m exploring in many different directions, hence the squirreling away of books. I’ve got books on human perceptions of nature and civilization, books on aesthetics, books on architecture (Vitruvius, anyone?), books on the human-nature relationship, books on the art-nature relationship, books on gardening and lawn care, books on conservation.
What topics am I considering? At this point, I’m trying to keep my focus strictly on the aesthetic commitments that contribute to environmental harm. But of course it’s hard to ignore the economic and political commitments as well. So here’s what I’m allowing myself: I can do some reading in those directions, tying them back to aesthetics. Some other specific phenomena I’ll be exploring:
Monoculture farming (vs. polyculture farming)
Dams (“clean” energy that damages watershed ecosystems, and can create the conditions for more, not fewer, forest fires)
Pest control (for example: beavers, whose presence in ecosystems can actually prevent or defend against wildfires)
National Parks and eco-tourism (preserving the “beautiful landscape” for people to enjoy looking at, dissecting it with roads to allow for human access)
Keeping the lights on at night (floodlights, motion-sensor lights, etc.)
The unrestrained, over-indulged desire for roads.
In case you are interested in the topic as well, here are some titles I’ve found particularly helpful or interesting so far:
Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet
Mary Reynolds, We Are the ARK: Returning Our Gardens to Their True Nature Through Acts of Restorative Kindness
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the the Teachings of Plants
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, ed. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022
Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis
If you can think of other aesthetic commitments or phenomena that override environmental wisdom, let me know. Perhaps in the future, I’ll write some posts on what I discover and bring together.
Thanks for reading!