“A radicle reaching for a home in the earth”: collaborative nature writing
Warm invitation to our upcoming event with Jessica J. Lee and Nina Mingya Powles at Spore Initiative in Berlin-Neukölln on May 10, 2025.
more...: nature writing
Latitudes of Longing
When a book can make you look up at the sky once in a while, pause, draw in your breath, and gaze at the rustling leaves of the tree outside your window, what does it mean? That it is not gripping enough, or rather I believe that it wants everything around you to grip you completely.
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Dispersals
Jessica J. Lee’s third book, Dispersals, On Plants, Borders and Belonging, consists of fourteen personal essays about plants crossing borders and putting down roots in new places. Lee chooses several trees, shrubs and algae, which hold meaning in her own life, to engage with their history and journeys into different parts of the world. In doing so, she questions under what circumstances species are considered either cosmopolitan or invasive.
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Small Bodies of Water
In her collection of essays, we move with Powles between London, where she currently lives, Shanghai, China and Aotearoa-New Zealand. She talks about growing up in Wellington with the constant fear of a major earthquake, how she prepares her own tofu during the coronavirus lockdown, and her connection to the kōwhai tree.
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Uprooting – From the Caribbean to the Countryside
Marchelle Farrell’s Nature Memoir Uprooting – From the Caribbean to the Countryside is an emotional search for a place to put down roots. She didn’t expect this place to be a small village in Somerset.
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Undrowned
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs is one of the strangest books I have read recently – and I mean that in an extremely positive way. I admit I had to get into it first, but then this unusual way of talking about dolphins, whales, seals and co. in connection with Black experiences won me over.
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The way through the woods
Regardless of whether you’ve ever been mushroom picking or not, if you read Long Litt Woon’s The way through the woods: Overcoming grief through nature, you are sure to develop a fascination for it.
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Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism: When Land Remembers
Ecocriticism is a concept with an interdisciplinary approach that emerged in the United States to examine the different ways in which people imagine human relationships to nature and the environment, and how they portray it in books, films and works of art. Escpecially in combination with postcolonialism, ecocriticism offers incredible potential for analysis.
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World of Wonders
In her recently published essay volume World of Wonders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil frames moments in her life that have shaped her, with anecdotes about animals and plants. In this way, she conveys how wondrous and impressive flora and fauna can be, and how much they have to teach.
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Ode to the Dandelion
An original essay for our Green Library series on writing nature and the environment.
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