Most recently, two friends have handed me books that have haunted, inspired, and lingered for me. The first is The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island by Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon. Monkman is a painter; I first saw his work a few years ago when I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia and was lucky to see a few of his huge, beautiful canvases which are both hyper real and deliciously, subversively playful. The Memoirs hold many of his paintings and also, as the title says, a history of Turtle Island that is hyper-real and deliciously, subversively playful–the exacting research that undergirds this book is incredibly powerful and for the whole read, I found myself toggling between the text and the notes in the back. Not because I wanted to verify the history that lay behind the book’s narrative, but because I was learning so much from the range of sources and moments that the book drew from.
The other is Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild, a lyric, querying, episodic memoir by an anthropologist working in eastern Russia who is mauled by a bear. Martin’s grappling with how to understand the attack, her place in the Indigenous Even community she was working and living with, her medical treatment in both Russia and home in France, and what it means to be… human, bear, a being between. I’m also reading a ton of poetry, but these books keep bubbling up for me as I go about my days. I think that, perhaps, they are laying the groundwork for some writing that has been whispering to me for a while now—a project I hope to start soon but keep feeling I have more to think about and learn about before I do. I just had a new book, SOFAR: Poems, come out in August, so having a bit of writerly quiet between books is helpful to me (and also painful!). My writerly mind is right now occupied with edits on an anthology akin to Cascadia Field Guide: Art Ecology Poetry, which I created with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield. I’m working with the lovely Ian Ramsey and Samaa Abdurraqib to create a similar volume for the region I have called home since the late 1990s: the Gulf of Maine, which stretches from Cape Cod, to Boston, to Maine, to Nova Scotia. It is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2027.