This was originally published in 2018, but I’ve been thinking about it for several reasons. First, because Catapult, the publication that ran this essay, is shuttering its delightful online magazine; second, because it was edited by the brilliant Nicole Chung, whose new book is out this week; and third, because I recently saw a venting […]
volcanoes
This is a picture of a rift in our world. It was taken June 21 at Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, in a rip called Fissure 8. What a remarkably utilitarian name for a tear in the planet. I was captivated by images like these all summer, and I forgot about them when my attention turned to […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about Ursula Le Guin since her death on January 22. Here in the Pacific Northwest, she was not only a beloved author but a beloved public figure, active in the Portland community until the very end of her long life. I’ll miss hearing her voice, and I’ll miss her sharp […]
Between two and three o’clock in the morning on June 16, 1816, during a restless night in a villa on Lake Geneva, eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had a waking dream. As the moon shone through the shutters of her room, she remembered, “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had […]
Late last month, I got to camp with a group of ecologists at the base of Mt. St. Helens, in southwestern Washington state. Some of the scientists had been studying the mountain since shortly after it erupted on May 18, 1980, and they were full of stories about the changes they’d seen over the past thirty-five […]
Snow fell on the four quarters of the world; icy winds blew from every side; the sun and the moon were hidden by storms. — Writer and folklorist Padraic Colum, citing an Icelandic legend in Orpheus: Myths of the World When you live in Iceland, you kind of expect a rough winter. But […]
People say that writing a book is something of an obsession. It has to be. Why else would you turn over your life for several years to, say, the sex life of bedbugs or the dark energy driving the universe? In our case, it was 18th-century Iceland that did us in — more specifically, a […]