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An author’s experiment to see what grows

Paula Whyman will discuss "Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop" at New Dominion Bookshop on January 11. Supplied photo.

In Bad Naturalist: One Woman’s Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop, Paula Whyman recounts her attempts to restore the ecosystem of a mountain that she and her husband bought. “I’ve been working on the mountain restoration for nearly four years now, since we bought the land in early 2021,” says Whyman. “I started work on the book several months after I started the meadow project.” 

Situated near the Rappahannock River at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the land will feel familiar to local readers through Whyman’s descriptions of towering white oaks, black cherry trees, Albemarle pippins, and blackberries, as well as kudzu, autumn olive, and trees of heaven. It’s a place full of butterflies and bumblebees but also ticks and wasps. 

But, how does one buy a mountain? After decades in the D.C. suburbs, Whyman and her husband decided to retire to the country. So they shopped around and bought the mountain much as anyone would buy any real estate. Their 200-plus acres of land encompass a roughly 1,400-foot mountain, full of neglected farmland and pastures, overgrown meadows, and forests along its slopes. 

A different book might have interrogated the privilege of being able to buy a mountain or the potentially colonial impulse to do so, but Whyman eschews this in favor of meditating on what it means to own the land at all. “It still feels to me like a ridiculous and foreign concept, to own something like a mountaintop,” writes Whyman. “Where does such ownership begin and end? Do I own the soil and the rocks and the mosses? The toads by the pond, and the dung beetles, too?” These are questions she continues to chew on throughout the book.  

Laying the groundwork for her land conservation and restoration project, Whyman writes, “I was driven by the particular goal of establishing a native meadow wherever we ended up—a neat, organized, narrowly defined project.” However, she is quickly disabused of the idea that this is a simple undertaking or one that she will have control over—or indeed one that will even involve planting a meadow. 

Indeed, Whyman recruits a laundry list of experts, from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Smithsonian’s Virginia Working Landscapes program, and the Virginia Department of Forestry, to independent arborists and restoration contractors as well as a wildlife biologist and a forester. She hopes that these professionals will help her select the “correct” way to rehabilitate the land she has purchased. Along the way, Whyman gains valuable perspectives and ultimately discovers that there is not one right way to proceed, but countless considerations and perspectives to weave together. She also learns about the risks of disturbing an ecosystem, the hard way—unintentionally creating opportunities for chaos to flourish as she attempts to fix a variety of aspects of the land, from erosion to invasive plants. As she gains this firsthand experience, the tone of the book changes, from at times inelegant self-deprecating humor to a more thoughtful approach, reflecting on lessons learned. 

Supplied photo.

As much as Bad Naturalist is a tale of Whyman’s efforts to improve the land, it is also a personal chronicle that brings attention to, and vocabulary for, her new surroundings. She invites the reader to join her in learning the names of unfamiliar native flora and fauna throughout the book, from broomsedge and spotted knapweed to purple panic grass and grasshopper sparrows. “The more I paid attention to what was right around me, the more interested and curious I became, and the more I could see how every creature and plant are connected,” recalls Whyman. “There are so many of these interconnections, I’ll never run out of new ones to discover, and that to me is inspiring.” She also digs into invasive plant legislation in Virginia: Indigenous practices of intentional burning to support healthy ecosystems, carbon sequestration, and habitat fragmentation, among other research topics to build her knowledge as a budding conservationist.  

“My advice to aspiring conservationists or naturalists would be to start by looking closely at the natural world wherever you find yourself, and see what you’re drawn to, where your passion lies,” says Whyman. “If it’s birds, start watching them, and you’ll notice things you might not have noticed before. Maybe try to find out what one thing you could do, one thing you could plant, to attract more birds where you live. Maybe there’s a park where you live that could use some TLC, and volunteers for such an effort might be welcome.”

As for her own mountain and the TLC needed there, Whyman reflects, “I wanted the book to read like a well-shaped story, and that required some discipline [but] … nature doesn’t stop, of course; the mountain keeps changing.” Indeed, she has two new conservation and land stewardship projects underway. “I now have two American kestrel nest boxes in the meadow, thanks to the folks at the Grassland Bird Initiative,” says Whyman. “They are studying kestrels to try and increase the population and to find out what’s behind their decline in this area. So, this winter, I’m keeping an eye out for kestrels that might be scoping out those boxes for nesting in the spring. I’m also waiting for a prescribed burn on two large fields that I have not burned before. It will be a big experiment to see what grows there afterwards.”

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Arts Culture

Six books I didn’t read in 2024

Don’t turn the page on these great reads that were published over the past year. Supplied photos.

Earlier this fall, I had COVID and, among its other health impacts, one bears mentioning here: For a time, I lost the ability to read. That is, I couldn’t read anything longer than a sentence without losing the rest of the day to a blinding headache. As a fervid reader, this was crushing. I spent a lot of time sleeping and then staring at a stack of books, wondering if I would ever read them. It got a bit maudlin. I’m now back in the world of readers and, to celebrate, here is a list of books from 2024 that I hope to read soon.

The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky by Josh Galarza

Josh Galarza is a Richmond-based writer and educator who’s currently completing his MFA in creative writing. His debut novel, The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky, was selected as a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, among other notable recognition. Accolades aside, I love a heartwarming YA novel and this one explores themes of mental health, grief, and body dysmorphia with empathy, quirkiness, and comics—and presumably a big handful of the titular chips in all their tongue-tingling glory.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
by Sofia Samatar 

Sofia Samatar is a Roop Distinguished Professor of English at JMU and I look forward to reading everything that she writes. Her work is wide-ranging in genre, including speculative fiction, nonfiction about the craft of writing, memoir and family history, and more. Plus, her books offer interesting structural forms, lyrical prose, and deeply imaginative worldbuilding. She’s also prolific—this is just one of her two new titles this year. Like so much of the science fiction I enjoy, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain offers starships, transformative journeys, and a vision of the shared liberation that can come through collective action.

Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia

Before he passed away in 2023, David Golumbia taught at VCU and, before that, at UVA, where I had the good fortune of being his student. Intellectually rigorous and passionate about his work and the community it made possible, he left us this new, posthumous book that examines the right-wing legal and economic underpinnings of digital technology and how the early promise of the internet helped foster present-day fascism in global politics. Informed by expansive research as well as his experience as a software developer, this book argues that we have to understand where things went wrong before we can develop more egalitarian technological futures. 

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
by Camille Dungy 

This fall, Camille Dungy was the UVA Creative Writing Program’s Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and gave a reading of her work. She is a poet and prose writer whose work often examines intersections between race, gender, the environment, history, and family. Among other honors, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the Library of Virginia Literary Award. Her latest book, Soil, shares her experience as a Black gardener and mother in a predominantly white town, examining how homogeneity harms our ecosystems and ourselves, while also interrogating how we relate to ideas of home. 

The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy 

Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author, musician, and podcaster. Her community preparedness podcast, Live Like the World is Dying, is a mainstay for me, and her previous work includes short stories and novels that are darkly funny speculative fiction, bordering on horror at times. She gave a reading at The Beautiful Idea in September for her latest, The Sapling Cage, which is the first in a trilogy. This book promises to be more high fantasy than what I’ve read from her in the past, combining witchcraft, monsters, and magic in an epic, queer coming-of-age story that also tackles questions of power, identity, and gender. No notes. 

Aster of Ceremonies by JJJJJerome Ellis 

JJJJJerome Ellis is a self-described “disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters” who gave a performance of their work in October as the Rea Writer in Poetry at UVA. Their latest book, Aster of Ceremonies, is a poetic healing ritual, an invocation of ancestors, and a deft examination of race and collective belonging, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to take their freedom. Though I am typically a paperback reader, this audiobook is read and performed by Ellis, and I am ecstatic for the chance to listen while holding a hard copy in my hands, creating a harmonic resonance through his words.

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A conversation around Black loss with author Jennifer C. Nash

Publicity photo.

As a writer and theorist, Jennifer C. Nash’s work is deeply connected to political and emotional realities of Black feminism, inviting readers to probe the space between theory and embodiment. She is the Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of four books. Nash spoke to us about her latest, How We Write Now: Living With Black Feminist Theory. 

Jennifer C. Nash will discuss her work, and the prominent place of the photograph in contemporary Black feminist writing, on November 19 in UVA’s Bryan Hall.
Publicity photo.

C-VILLE Weekly: In your new book, you focus attention on Black loss in the age of Black Lives Matter, working to “disrupt prevailing conceptions of loss” by exploring slow loss through the work of Black feminist writers as well as your mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. As a Black woman who has spent your academic career immersed in Black feminist theory, did writing this lead to any disruptions or experimentation within your work? 

JCN: If in my earlier book I was trying to think about how often we saw politicians (especially on the left) reference a Black maternal health “crisis,” and how often we saw them turn to Black mothers as symbols of grief and pain, my new work wants to think about how the voice of contemporary Black feminist theory, one that is preoccupied with loss, is always thinking about loss through maternal figures. Sometimes this is about mother metaphors—the loss of motherlands, mother tongues—and sometimes it’s about mothers and foremothers.

In many ways, [this] project was born out of the subtitle: Living with Black Feminist Theory. I have lived with Black feminist theory for the entirety of my academic career, returning to books and articles not just as sources or evidence, but as resources and tools for living. That’s why I wanted How We Write Now to try on—or inhabit—the voice I argue has come to be so central to contemporary Black feminist writing. 

For me, the personal voice, the beautiful voice, that I take on in the book is one that moves me toward grief rather than treating grief as something to escape, to recover from, to get over. It is a voice that emphasizes that doing justice to loss requires offering it companionship, staying with it. It is a voice that insists that there’s no such thing as being “too close” to what we study, especially when it comes to loss. In a moment where so much writing on loss is about moving on, getting beyond, transcending, I am drawn to the ethics of a project that insists that we sit with loss, stay with it.

There is a tenderness and intimacy in this book that’s different from your past work. How did you conceptualize the risks of undertaking this?

It is definitely the case that writing about the people you are closest to is a risky endeavor, particularly when the writing discloses that which they might refuse. My mother, for example, would certainly contest her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, even as she has now lost many of the words she could have mobilized earlier to refuse the label of “dementia.” But it is also the case that my father finds a certain kind of freedom in seeing our story represented on the page. It has allowed him a way of talking to his friends about something that feels unbearable to name. 

I also know that the risk of not speaking is far greater—it felt important to me, urgent even, to document this moment, both the moment where Black feminists are collectively developing a voice to name loss, and the moment in which my mother becomes more unfamiliar to me, and the world becomes more unfamiliar to her. As I note in the book, I think the ethical grappling with the risks of disclosure, with what it means to tell stories that implicate the people you hold dearest, is actually very much at the heart of the Black feminist project I am interested in.

How did you work to avoid systems
that “peddle in Black grief” as you wrote this book?

I think the grief markets that have sprung up around Black grief have multiplied in the Black Lives Matter era. Samaria Rice—Tamir Rice’s mother—warned us about the costs of “hustling Black death.” Indeed, a lot of folks have profited from Black death—bestsellers have been born, talking heads have made careers. And I say that not to be cynical—Black death needs to be named and discussed and diagnosed. But we also have to recognize that there are new markets around that very death. 

I wrote a book that I argue is about Black loss that has none of the characteristics of the Black loss stories that proliferate in the present. This is not a book about a Black boy or man being murdered by the police, nor is it about the anticipated loss of my Black (male) child. It is not a book about the forms of violence that are regularized and anticipated, the state-sanctioned theft of Black children that ends with non-indictments and non-convictions. I am trying to lay claim to the frame of Black loss to think—not about the spectacular and expected death of Black children—but about the slow, endured, and quiet deterioration my mother experiences. I want to think about what it might mean to develop a frame of Black loss that can make room for her and the deterioration of her brain. In that sense, I think the story I want to tell is necessarily outside of the grief economies that I want to name and problematize.

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Exploring communal ways of healing 

Stecopoulos will discuss "Dreaming in the Fault Zone" with poet Brian Teare on Friday, October 18, at New Dominion Bookshop. Supplied photo.

“Outside of biomedicine, relationships lie at the core of healing—between people and their ancestors, between microcosm and macrocosm, between qualities and elements,” writes Eleni Stecopoulos in her new book, Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing. A poet, essayist, editor, critic, and UVA MFA alumna, Stecopoulos’ previous books include Visceral Poetics, a work of criticism and memoir, and Armies of Compassion, a poetry collection. 

Dreaming in the Fault Zone is a deeply researched and heady collection of essays on illness and healing, written through the dual lenses of family history and personal chronic health conditions. Stecopoulos writes, “For twenty years I’ve contended with immune reactions to substances in both natural and built environments, assigned the diagnostic code of ‘environmental hypersensitivity.’” It is seemingly, in part, this diagnosis that sends her on the path that eventually leads to this book.

The author dedicates an especially effective essay in the book to a defense of sensitivity, noting, “Sensitivity is suspect to a masculinist society that mandates constant productivity and disembodiment.” Also countering that assumption by exploring how, simultaneously, “sensitivity signifies an exception that might be assigned value as social power, sacred dispensation, or creative gift.” It is in the space of this type of paradox or cultural clash that Stecopoulos is the most riveting. She draws influences and cites widely, from Asklepios, the Greek god of medicine, to Freud and Jungian analyst C. A. Meier, as well as modernist poet H.D. and feminist writer Silvia Federici, among countless other physicians, therapists, and historians. 

It is also in this space outside of Western, masculinist, capitalistic norms that she seeks alternatives for healing her own body. Stecopoulos writes, “My refusal came after living an extroverted life under capitalism, forced to compete when I did not want, to ignore my body’s needs and boundaries, to override my sensitivity to the point of damage.” As for so many others, it took pushing beyond her own limits to seek out new ways of healing as well as more connected ways of living in community. “You’re a person because of, and with, others,” she writes.

Her examination of and experiences with some of these alternative forms of healing shapes much of the book. “All over the world there were realities that contradicted the pathological strictures of health I knew,” writes Stecopoulos. Through lyrical passages that incorporate verse and mythology, the book offers a survey of healing approaches used throughout time and across the globe, cataloging practices used by Kazakh shamans and healers in Bali, Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Egypt, Greece, China, and elsewhere. “Sacred or secular, secret or shared, many medicines exist and people are healed by them,” she writes. Later adding that, “It is possible to learn from the methods of other cultures without viewing them as precursors or simplifying them into alternatives that provide escape from the ills of the West.” 

Her examples tend to meander through these realms, mapping therapeutic landscapes, geo-mythologies, and geographies of healing, including spaces such as thermal baths, caves, natural springs, and other sacred spots. Alongside this, Stecopoulos offers insights into dream work and interpretation, rituals of purification, the laying on of hands, psychic surgery, somatics, remote acupuncture, and other methods of healing that are ultimately collective even as they appear to focus on an individual body. She also examines the healing properties of poetry, dance, music, theater, and experimental film, highlighting the idea that, like these artforms, medicine is a social practice. Considering the therapeutic properties of literature, specifically, she writes, “Words processed in the brain are felt in other organs.”

Eleni Stecopoulos’ “Dreaming in the Fault Zone.” Supplied photo.

The COVID-19 pandemic is unapologetically woven throughout Dreaming in the Fault Zone as something that has changed and continues to change the patterns of society and our ideas of health and healing. She also grapples with immigration, incarceration, decolonization, ableism, medical racism, capitalism, and ecofascism, and does not shy away from documenting her own psychoanalysis and hypnotherapy as she navigates chronic illness, pain, and grief. 

These specifics are shared in service to the author’s larger argument against toxic individualism and Western concepts of medicine and cures. She writes this section of verse early in the book:

“Healing is not

an accomplishment. victory.
the antithesis of illness. 

Healing cannot

undo the disaster. reverse time.” 

Stecopoulos is careful to distinguish between healing and cures, holding space for non-Western approaches that can be informed more broadly by the world we live in. “The plant speaking to the shaman is also empirical data,” she writes. Specifically, she positions healing as a continuum that is as nonlinear and collective as human life, in contrast to the idea of cures as an ableist construct that is unrealistically focused on eradicating illness and restoring a pre-illness self. The latter is often the primary focus of Western medicine, but Stecopoulos argues it is this steadfast focus on cures and quantitative data that ultimately harms many of the potential opportunities we have for the slower processes of holistic healing and building community. “Treating people requires, ultimately, treating the structures that form their person, tone their immune system, impoverish their gut flora, teach their nervous system a restricted set of responses,” she writes. 

An enthralling, existential endeavor, Dreaming in the Fault Zone is notable in its range and the depth of humanity and community conveyed through the author’s examinations of the most universal experiences we share: illness and healing. As Stecopoulos writes, “Healing is not an attempt to change history but an ongoing practice endemic to life. Healing is our condition.”

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Poet CAConrad falls in love with a new world

CAConrad will read from Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return on September 7 at New Dominion Bookshop. Supplied photo.

As a poet, CAConrad is cosmic, their work unrestrained by the page, poems existing as art objects, ecological elegies, ancient technologies. In 2022, they received the PEN Josephine Miles Award for Poetry as well as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. We recently interviewed them about their new collection of poems, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return.

C-VILLE Weekly: This collection is more hopeful when compared to your previous. Given the fact that you began writing this book during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, describe how you cultivate hope in your work and how this has changed over the course of your career. 

CAConrad: My previous book focused on extinct animals, and when I finished writing it, I realized that I needed to fall in love with the world all over again, but as it is, not as it was. I began writing my new book, Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return, in Seattle, working with crows, who visited me daily during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown for nuts, fruit, and crackers. One of the crows started to bring me gifts, and the new book has a photo of the gifts. 

I also worked with coyotes in Joshua Tree, rats and pigeons in Rome, Italy, and squirrels and woodchucks in Massachusetts; animals thriving in our very polluted human world. COVID-19 made me think of the many loved ones who died of AIDS, and those memories find their way into the poems, but yes, there is much love in this new book. It is a beautiful world, and with whatever time I have left, I want to immerse myself in its beauty.

What went into your decisions about the form and structure of the poems in this new collection?

I don’t decide; I surrender. For thousands of years, poets and other artists have told us how they worked with spirits and ghosts, also known as muses. I believe they are real, and they whisper my lines of poetry into my ears. Whenever we think we are being ‘intuitive,’ it is because we are listening to our spirit guides. 

From 1975 to 2005, my poems were almost exclusively on the left margin, but when I began using (Soma)tic poetry rituals in 2005, I would feel like throwing up when finishing the poem on the page. I would walk away from it and feel better, but when I returned, I felt like vomiting again. Soon enough, I began “intuitively” moving the lines off of the left margin, and I no longer felt sick, and from that day forward, I surrendered to the process. We work together better with our spirits when we acknowledge their presence. Frankly, I love not knowing what the poems will look like.

You write that the title of the new book “comes from a poem, and the poem comes from a dream.” Describe the role of dreams and other mysterious forces—like numerology—in your life and your writing.

If we look at the number 9, we see its force moving up the stem and circulating in the crown. 9 represents realization or epiphany. All numbers multiplied into 9 heal back into 9, for instance, 2×9=18, and 1+8=9. 3×9=27, and 2+7=9, so it goes: 45, 54, 63, 72, etc. I always write with the number 9, and Listen to the Golden Boomerang was supposed to have 72 poems. Before handing in the manuscript to my publisher, I discovered that I had accidentally written 73 poems, so I tore one and fed its pieces to other poems. The night after doing this, I had a dream that I came home to find some of my new poems having sex on my bed, and when they saw me, they were angry and began shooting letters at me like bullets or arrows. The following day, when I woke, I realized that the poems having sex on my bed were the ones I fed the pieces of the extra poem to. This message was upsetting as if the torn poem was angry, but there are 72 poems in the book.

You’ve also had your poetry shared through public art installations in Greece as well as in galleries and museums around the world. When you think of the multiple ways that people might engage with your work, is there a shared aspect of what you hope they’ll experience through it?

I’m very grateful to have my poems published and also to have them installed in galleries as art. After my event for the New Dominion Bookshop, I will drive to Tucson, where I will install my newest show at [the Museum of Contemporary Art]. I trust the audience, so I never think about their experience. I overwrote my poems when I was younger because I wanted to be sure the reader understood exactly what I meant, and I’m grateful that I soon realized how impossible that was. 

Each human being is unique because our experiences cultivate us and shape the lens through which we view the world, meaning no one will ever understand exactly what I mean in my poems. Once I realized this, it was liberating! I no longer had to think about the audience because I could trust them to understand my poems on their terms. A thousand different people reading one of my poems will translate it into a thousand new poems, which is a beautiful gift back to the poet.

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Jane Alison’s new novel explores modernist feud

Jane Alison will celebrate the release of her novel, "Villa E," on August 30 at New Dominion Bookshop. Publicity photo.

Jane Alison’s new book, Villa E, is an ecstatic examination of artistic obsession and self-embodiment, inspiration and legacy, memory and aging. The story revolves around Villa E-1027—the real-life modernist villa on the French Riviera created by architect-designer Eileen Gray—and the irreconcilably problematic relationship it created between Gray and the notorious architect, Le Corbusier. We recently interviewed Alison, a creative writing professor at the University of Virginia, about the new book. 

C-VILLE: How did you encounter the story of Villa E-1027, and which aspects of the story first grabbed you? 

JA: I learned of the story almost 20 years ago … when I was living in Germany with my then-husband, a professor of urban design. He attended a lecture about Gray’s villa and … the story intrigued me at once: Corb’s outrageous vandalism and theft of Eileen’s house, of course; the strangely indeterminate sexual undertones of his actions; Corb painting her walls naked, like a cave painter; the dark perfection of his swimming to his death in the cove below the house. 

An early image that turned out to be one of those intuitive kernels: Corb (called Le G in the novel) poised on the beach, about to swim that final day, observing his own footprint, and how that spoke to the swath of his ambition: leaving a mark in matter.

Your work consistently engages the mechanics of human desire and Villa E is no exception. What challenges did you encounter in getting under the skin of both characters?

Le G’s lusts, earthiness, and bombasticism made him pure pleasure to write. I wanted to be in his body and feel it as he guzzled cold wine and mussels, did sweaty old-man push-ups. … Eileen was harder because she had an aloofness and refused to wallow in herself. But her love of the senses, of being a human with a body alive to every atom of the world that might flow through: This is where I began to find her.

Describe your research and what it was like to spend time at the restored Villa E-1027. 

The compound of Eileen’s villa and Corb’s cabin is now a protected World Heritage Site, but it wasn’t when I began research in the early 2000s; I could simply walk into Corb’s cabin, while the villa was closed for renovations. By the time I did get inside the villa, I was well-steeped not only in photos and drawings of it, but in the many scenes I’d already written there in those early drafts. So it felt not-quite real, looking at the actual place through veils of other versions. 

Research itself had been extensive and leisurely: Reading bios and critical studies of both, as well as their works and letters; visiting as many of Corb’s buildings as I could; peering through a gate to try to see Eileen’s second house; looking at their furniture, paintings, collages, objects. Because of that primary image of Corb painting naked, I also researched cave-painting and visited some caves. One I did not visit but wish I could have is the underwater cave of Cosquer, not too far from the villa.

There are refrains throughout the book, from mantras of each character to sections that consider the roots of human expression. What led you to incorporate these interludes?

Cave-painting was central from the start, as was the idea of leaving a mark in matter. Among the wonderful aspects of the Cosquer Cave is that the people who painted there not only blew pigment around their hands to leave prints but also pressed their hands into the very soft stone high up. This is so exciting, pressing your hand into liquid, living stone. And it turns out that most of the hands that left marks in the cave belonged to girls and women. I wanted to dance from that earliest instance of pressing oneself into the natural world to other instances in the same area—the Ligurian Coast down into Italy—over several thousand years. So I included other refrains: ancient people pressing cockle shells into pottery; a man terracing the slopes; an Etruscan tomb painting of a boy diving into the sea.

In the time you were working on this novel, you also published Meander, Spiral, Explode. How would you describe the cross-saturation that occurred as you were researching and writing these books?

This novel took a long time to write because I could not find the right form or angle. So I threw the project out in about 2012. In the meantime I had to write a short nonfiction novel, where the main motions occur in the narrator’s mind, to get me thinking more about consciousness in this project; and then Meander, Spiral, Explode, to discover the form that had been lurking in my drafts all along: a spiral. The novel focuses on the last week of Corb’s life and everything we can know … comes from his jagged, unwilling memories and Eileen’s obsessive memories. I think that this kind of remembering can feel like spiraling, and in fact both Eileen’s villa and Corb’s cabin are structured by spirals. So the novel finally found its form as something like a double helix, with alternating sections between the two characters, as they wind around each other and wind into the past.

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Writerly family produces another author

Charlottesville’s Henry Alexander Wiencek, pictured with his parents, captures an ephemeral period of historical significance in his debut "Oil Cities: The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930." Supplied photo.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—or, in this case, the trees. Henry Alexander Wiencek has followed in the footsteps of his parents, Charlottesville writers and historians Donna Lucey and Henry Wiencek, with his own book, Oil Cities: The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930, published by the University of Texas Press in May.

The younger Wiencek, 38, was more interested in fiction than nonfiction while in high school at Tandem Friends. “In fact, I found history boring, but as I got older, I realized I have the same bug for it as my folks,” he says in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where he lives.

Among his father’s books are The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White and Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves. Lucey’s books include Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas and Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age.

Wiencek was doing research for his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin when he ran across documents about how Standard Oil was building pipelines “through the swamp” in segregated northern Louisiana in the early decades of the 20th century.

Caddo Parish, known as “Bloody Caddo,” was part of the boom. During the Jim Crow era, it ranked second nationally in the number of lynchings, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. “That was an intersection of the old South and the new industrial economy,” Wiencek says. “I was really interested in how those two forces collided.”

He found photographs of boomtowns that have entirely vanished and wanted to know why they were so ephemeral. “It’s important to understand that people made a huge amount of money,” he says. “If it didn’t create permanent communities, where did it go?” Hint: Nearby Shreveport was a major beneficiary, while many Black residents were shut out of the boom. 

White immigrants flocked to Louisiana to work. “I was really amazed that a small corner of Louisiana that had nothing going on before 1904 managed to attract people from all over the world,” he says.

Contemporary accounts made the area seem like a “weird, scary, bad place to live,” Wiencek explains, a “landscape devastated” by oil drilling, with fires burning and oil running into creeks. He didn’t expect the fond memories found in oral histories from those who lived in the boomtowns. One remembered emerging from a lake covered in oil. “They had the attitude, ‘It’s fine, I still ate the fish in the lake,’” he recounts.

In the ensuing 100 years, it seems to Wiencek that northern Louisiana, with its large percentage of Black citizens, has reverted to what it was like in 1900: poor, sparsely populated farmlands.

In a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering in Louisiana, Wiencek’s research played a role. “The Louisiana state house created voting districts to dilute the power of Black voters in northern Louisiana,” he says. His dissertation was used to argue that the former oil fields held an important Black community that shouldn’t be broken up. The court ruled for a second Black-majority district. 

Lucey didn’t really expect her son to become a writer, especially after he saw “the crazy lives we’ve had” as writers, she says. She credits a teacher at Tandem for sparking his interest in history, and he credits an adviser at UT for her guidance and for pushing the publication of his dissertation.

Young Wiencek appreciates the advice he got from his parents, although he says he didn’t send them pages to edit. “I didn’t want to have a situation where there were too many cooks in the kitchen,” he says. But for research and tracking down resources, they were experts.

And of course they’re “bursting with pride,” says Lucey, “knowing how hard it is to write a book.”

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Arts Culture

Discovering place, family, and memory in Annie Woodford’s poetry

Poet Annie Woodford will read from her work on July 19 as part of the Charlottesville Reading Series at New Dominion Bookshop. Publicity photo.

“Poetry allows you to preserve a certain moment, a certain place. It’s giving voice to something that otherwise I would just carry around mutely,” says poet Annie Woodford, author of Where You Come From Is Gone and winner of the Weatherford Award for Best Books about Appalachia. “Then, when you think about economic systems or environmental issues, I think [poetry] becomes some sort of small act against that destruction or that lack of attentiveness to places. It’s a way of honoring people and places and hopefully elevating things that are not normally seen.”

Since her childhood in Henry County, Virginia, as well as the time she spent elsewhere in Appalachia, Woodford has borne witness as the places she calls home have been subjected to forces of globalization and capitalism that undermine local cultures and ecosystems. From the outsourcing of jobs from Bassett’s furniture industry to the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), Woodford addresses these head-on in her poetry, balancing grief over the losses with appreciation for the places and their people. 

Her poems should not be mistaken for nostalgia, though many can be read as eulogies. As one example, Woodford’s poem “In the Pipeline’s Path” is dedicated to Red Terry, a tree-sitter who lived in the canopy of a scarlet oak and maple near Bent Mountain to protest the MVP, which went into service earlier this summer despite a decade of community pushback: 

She took to her tree

because she knew she’d never see

any of this again—

the wayward field,

the water meadow filled

with late spring rain

filtering down through

karst-pocked caves

to the aquifer’s hidden well.

The way southeastern trees

turkey-call against each other

when they rub high branches

in high wind.

Her poems honor people and places, but also moments of light or sound. She doesn’t romanticize—she archives. With a focus on words as documentary, cataloging that which becomes forgotten, Woodford details regional realities that seemed immutable but have nonetheless begun to vanish. In “Quiet as It’s Kept,” amid nods to concealed carry, colony collapse, and other contemporary threats, she includes the stanza: 

“Things People Don’t Know the Names
of Any More”

Kudzu

Katydids

Chicken Hawks

Woodford’s landscapes ring true to those who know Appalachia, who have marveled at its red-tailed hawks and who have creek-walked for crawdads. Oaks, maples, vireos, serviceberries, pokeberries, aster, and catalpas all populate her work—yet these are not what could be called nature poems. Rather, Woodford’s attention to nature is inseparable from the generations of people living within these ecosystems. 

She often writes from a place of personal embodiment, deftly probing and questioning the idea of nature as separate from ourselves in poems like “Old Christmas,” from her earlier collection, “When God Was a Child:” 

Matted grass. The body flayed 

open like a milkweed pod. 

The body as muddy pasture. 

I think I was a field once 

… 

A bull lived in me. He liked to sleep. 

Herds of deer half darkness 

wavered across me. In winter

I froze. In spring I bled wet-

weather branches. Water witching. 

In addition to contemplating the personal, many of Woodford’s poems read like family scrapbooks with imperfect memories fluttering out from burst seams. In a poem titled “Ides,” she shares: 

I hear my mother struggle 

to breathe. She has COPD. 

She smoked her first cigarette 

at five years old & now holds

a vape pen tucked into her palm, 

her hand bent like a saint’s

as she sips its chemical sizzle. 

This is not a poem. It’s an ache.

Her mother is also a significant influence in her storytelling. “I have come to realize that my mother was a very intentional storyteller about family,” Woodford reflects. “A lot of those people are gone now, but she made sure that I heard those stories.” She adds, “I’m writing about family and stories and place, but I have really been thinking a lot about what it means to take an event or a story and write about it … Who gets to keep the stories, tell the stories, shape the stories … I’m fascinated by that.” 

A related question informing her work is about who gets to enjoy the poetry and art that is made out of daily life. In addition to her writing, Woodford has taught in community colleges for years, where she is committed to sharing the written word with students. “My dad’s a plumber and I believe that even the daughters of plumbers should encounter beautiful art,” she says. 

A lifelong reader, Woodford began writing poetry in fifth grade. “I actually have a very specific memory of writing a poem and really enjoying it,” she recalls. “Going out in nature and observing and then writing about it … I guess I’ve been doing that ever since. I was really lucky, I went to Patrick Henry Community College and had really great teachers. And then I went to Hollins and found poetry there.” Through her poems and her teaching, she shares in the collective work of attending to and holding space for beauty, humanity, and tenderness, even as—and especially because—the world around us seems to change more quickly than ever. Woodford’s work is a clear-eyed, meticulous, and unapologetic repository, excavating the precarities in our lives while invoking the wonderment of all that surrounds us. 

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Culture

Essaying our world

Nell Greenfieldboyce will discuss Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life on June 8 at New Dominion Bookshop. Supplied photo.

Nell Greenfieldboyce’s debut book, Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, delivers on the promise of its title. A carefully woven and emotionally resonant collection of creative nonfiction essays, the book is as much a cabinet of curiosities as it is a glimpse behind the curtain of motherhood in contemporary America. 

“For nearly thirty years, I have made my living by writing about science … stories that are designed to inform or delight, [but] I never planned to write about private scenes,” writes Greenfieldboyce, a science correspondent for NPR. “I kept my job as a science reporter separate from my life at home.” Roughly a decade ago, however, that began to change when Greenfieldboyce’s friend invited her to contribute a personal essay to a creative blog run by fellow science journalists. “It felt risky,” she reflects. “A reporter traditionally remains somewhat anonymous, and I had been a reporter for more than half of my life … But once I wrote that piece, I began to write about other personal experiences, too—including ones that were more fraught … I felt compelled to experiment—to essay.”

The essays in Transient and Strange were born out of this experimentation, and their meticulously crafted and graceful narrative arcs showcase Greenfieldboyce’s talents as both a researcher and a storyteller. She writes, “Despite what’s taught in school about the scientific method, much of scientific inquiry, like poetry, involves play and metaphor and idiosyncratic obsessions and just plain fiddling around with mysterious things.”

The mysteries explored within this collection include but are not limited to: tornado chasers and modern weather forecasting, Moby Dick and Cold War fears, aging parents and dial-up internet, children and trauma coping, Stephen Hawking and black holes, abortion and miscarriage, flea circuses and the Black Death, the Black Stone in Mecca and Paleolithic cave art, room tone and polycystic kidney disease, and the eugenics of genetic counseling and fertility treatments. 

In each of these explorations, Greenfieldboyce invites the reader into her life and her family, sharing captivating facts about the science behind the phenomena as well as more personal reflections. For instance, writing about a funnel weaver spider who has taken up residence in her house, she muses, “I wondered about her inner experience, what she thought as she crouched in her funnel, whether she had dreams.” 

In another essay, on doodling, the author writes, “I think of this book I am writing, the one that’s now before you, another collection of black marks on white that I made in a state of half-aware compulsion … I told a writer friend that my exploration of doodling felt unsatisfying, that this effort wasn’t coming together in a way that made sense, and he reminded me that in an essay, unlike poetry and fiction, one can just come out and explicitly state the point of the piece, the underlying thesis or message. ‘But that implies that there is a point.’” 

Indeed, Transient and Strange revels in cultivating an appreciation for layers of reality that are often overlooked or taken for granted—that could easily be mistaken as pointless. But for those who are excited by the mundane—as Greenfieldboyce writes, “Maybe you’re my favorite kind of person, the curious kind, the kind who is intrigued by this unexpected experiment”—and for those who thrill at the chance to follow someone else down countless rabbit holes, the book is a wonder. 

For Greenfieldboyce, these rabbit holes are often as akin to science fair projects as they are thought experiments. In considering meteorites, she writes, “Scientists estimate that some 5,200 tons of outer space dust reaches the surface [of Earth] each year; that’s 14 tons per day, about the weight of three ambulances, drifting invisibly down.” You or I might underline this fact on the page, store it up to share as a weird factoid at a party some day, and carry on with our lives. Greenfieldboyce takes a different approach, recounting how she filled a plastic tub with water to place on her roof in the hopes of capturing some of this space dust. She writes, “Even if I’m lucky enough to have my plastic bin positioned out there to catch one at the right time, these spheres of molten-and-then-solidified space rock typically are only a few hundredths of an inch across. A micrometeorite could fit in the valley between two fingerprint ridges. Still, I go through the water in my bin with a strong magnet, to fish out anything that might contain iron.” Failing in that approach, she collects crud from her rain gutters, sifting it and hoping for a discovery that never comes, even as her family lightly ridicules her for her ongoing efforts. But that doesn’t seem to matter much to the author­­—it’s the search that holds the excitement. 

“Maybe I’ll find a meteorite, and maybe I won’t,” she reflects. “Maybe all I’ll ever do is quietly sift through a bunch of ordinary, sometimes beautiful stuff, searching for something ethereal that I’m not equipped to recognize and probably won’t ever truly understand.” In a metaphorical sense, this act of sifting is where the true magic of Transient and Strange lies. Greenfieldboyce writes to reveal the ephemeral and extraordinary nature of our world, sharpening our senses and helping us recognize novelty in the everyday.

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Arts Culture

Seasonal transitions

Two short story collections, The Goth House Experiment by SJ Sindu, and Swing Bridge from Bronwyn Hughes, immerse readers in other worlds. Supplied photos.

As the weather turns cool, curling up with a short-story collection can plunge you deep into another world in mere minutes, with a few turns of the page between other commitments and concerns. This fall, two new short-story collections by Virginia authors offer ample opportunities for reflection and escapism.

Richmond-based author SJ Sindu’s new book, The Goth House Experiment, grapples with life in our contemporary reality through tales of wild imagination and speculative fiction. Largely unconnected in terms of overly specific themes or throughlines, these are stories that examine anti-Asian and anti-LGBTQ+ violence, TikTok and the dangers of going viral, and even the perils of a writer’s ego. The book also celebrates queer joy and embraces a wry sense of humor about the state of our collective reality. In many ways, these are stories about how we cope in the face of countless catastrophes, personal and societal, and where we find community and delight.

“Wild Ale,” one of the tightest stories in the collection, exemplifies Sindu’s skillful use of dialogue and tension over the course of an unexpected narrative arc. An on-the-nose exploration of a couple’s pandemic quarantine stresses, the story revolves around a core disagreement about homebrewing in a small apartment during lockdown. Despite this, the couple’s relationship serves as a buttress against the outside world that is largely seen from balconies and cautious walks in the park. Social media and MAGA anti-maskers show up as well, and the claustrophobic tension that infuses each page is so well-written, it’s lightly triggering in the ways it captures the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sindu wraps it all up with a cheeky conclusion that provides a welcome reminder of some of the ways we came together to support our neighbors in the worst of times. It’s a story that suggests we can heal together, if only we choose to not forget.

Currently a professor at VCU, Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author who was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award with her latest novel, Blue-Skinned Gods. Her Marriage of a Thousand Lies won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for debut novels by writers within the LGBTQ+ community.

For readers of Sindu’s other work, “Miracle Boy” is perhaps the story that aligns most strongly with her novels and their explorations of belief, family, and communities of faith. The concluding story in The Goth House Experiment, it is the most somber as well. Set in Sri Lanka, this magical realist tale is about a boy who grows wings and can perform miracles, whose community begins to worship him for his abilities, and who ultimately suffers as a result. We never learn the boy’s real name since everyone calls him Peter, “the most popular Christian name in a town full of Hindus who had never even seen a Bible,” Sindu writes. It is a visceral story, full of bodies that don’t work and those that work differently than one might expect. It is a story about the lengths we’ll go to in order to be healed and what it means to be saved.

Sindu will host a free launch party for The Goth House Experiment, in conversation with Geoff Bouvier, at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond on October 17.

For readers more in the mood for realism, Bronwyn Hughes’ debut collection of short stories, Swing Bridge: Stories from Tidewater Virginia, conjures the Tidewater region through multigenerational characters and places that represent decades of accreted memories. The collection balances an at-times peripatetic nature, drawing lines between the Tidewater and the cities where people move, with its more site-specific histories like a Beatles-infused story that visits Poplar Grove, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s one-time country home in Mathews County.

Throughout, Hughes’ clear-eyed stories are accompanied by drawings by Kat Sharp, her “illustrator-spouse,” as she puts it. Sharp’s drawings are a highlight, offering detailed glimpses into the inner workings of this world that feels at once familiar and foreign to those who have not spent time in the Tidewater area. The featured art includes diagrams of the fig wasp life cycle and the creation of the Chesapeake Impact Crater, which eventually became the Chesapeake Bay.

Hughes herself is not a Tidewater native but has made her life there for the past two decades. After concluding a career in the foreign service, she completed her creative writing MFA during the pandemic and this is her debut book. Just as Sharp excels at depicting details in her drawings, Hughes is excellent at teasing out layers of reality, in the relationships between her characters and the places they inhabit, but also between past and present versions of themselves. The stories in Swing Bridge are imbued with the ache of coming to know oneself and the ups and downs that come with trying to share that self with others. 

“Fig-girl” is one story where this is especially true, featuring two characters at points of transition in their lives, attempting to navigate queerness as well as both chosen and unchosen changes while being held to expectations of others. Resonating with Sindu’s collection, Hughes’ stories meditate on the opportunities presented by community, by choosing to care for each other. 

Bronwyn Hughes will give a free talk about Swing Bridge at The Center on October 28.