I somehow didn’t post this essay that I wrote based on my time as artist in residence at the Isles of Shoals. Published by the wonderful nature-writing magazine Terrain.org, it centers on a necropsy of a seal pup that died from entanglement in ‘ghost gear,’ or a lost fishing net. With the seal’s body as …
Read more “The Reaper of the Sea”
I have some thrilling news, which is that my middle-grade novel, THE MONARCHS OF WINGHAVEN, will be published by Walker Books US in the spring of 2022: I’m so happy to have this opportunity to put a book into the world about a theme dear to my heart: a young person’s bond with nature. As …
Read more “The Monarchs of Winghaven”
Nature journals have been on my mind lately. Really, they’re always on my mind. The practice of nature journaling has been with me since I first started bird-watching at 12 years old. I’d go outdoors with a notebook, binoculars and a Rite in the Rain pen or pencil in tow. Then I’d take notes and …
Despite wintry weather chewing at my edges I’ve spent plenty of time outdoors roaming the Pioneer Valley in the last few months. In late January, UMass geoscientist Julie Brigham-Grette took me for a McPhee-style gander through regional geology: Right now, we’re turning down a squelchy, pitted dirt road in the back fields of Sunderland. Minutes …
Read more “Roaming the Valley – ancient lakes, frogs, and sand volcanoes”
This summer, I had the extraordinary opportunity to spend June as artist in residence at the Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island, one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire. As the first poet they’d had in the position, I spent many hours wandering the sea-washed granite outcrops, peering …
Read more “The Isles of Shoals – Poems”
I’ve been slow to post my latest columns for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, so here’s a slug of them. Unsurprisingly, they all center on a similar theme – the way our world is heating, burning, every day hotter to the touch and to the thought. It’s burning in real ways, like my article on the …
I sit on a hotel’s tile balcony, halfway to my destination. The midday sun lies hot on stucco walls and tile roofs. Between the buildings I see a sliver of sea; across the bay, a spine of green-sided mountains cuts the sky. Around me gulls call. All colors here are bright, clear, and strong: white …
Read more “In Search of Vincent van Gogh”
In my latest article for The Daily Hampshire Gazette, I contemplated the perspectives of indigenous communities on our relationship to land, partly in preparation for an author event on the same theme at the Forbes Library. Two summers ago, I visited the grasslands of southwestern Brazil. I stayed at a fazenda, a farm property offering …
Read more “The land through native eyes”
As the sugar and red maples finally turn from green to shades of red, peach, orange and yellow here where I sit writing beside the river, it feels like a good time to share my fears for them as New England’s loved and iconic tree in this new ecological future we are both living and …
Read more “Sugar maples’ uncertain future”