Hello, everyone! And a special welcome to new subscribers. You’re in the right place for essays on architecture, teaching, or encounters with the sublime; and bi-monthly interviews with nature writers. To celebrate tomorrow’s Summer Solstice, I’ll publish the final issue of NatureStack, my occasional journal of Substack’s best nature writing. And I’m cooking up a fun limited series to experiment with poetry. . . stay tuned.
Wherever you are on this path — if you’re brimming with wonder or weary with grief — you belong here. Treat yourself and dive into my novel from the beginning. . . here’s the T.O.C.
Today’s audio has a faint rhythmic undertone starting at about 12 min. That’s my dog Brody obsessively panting under the desk because he’s terrified of thunderstorms.
For a short behind-the-scenes on this chapter, check this footnote.1
⬅️ Previous chapter
Mid-October 2009
Mid-morning on the day of her meeting with the dean, Grace returns with coffee from the faculty lounge to find Ned and Barbara yucking it up like a pair of old friends.
“The Bodyguard is genius and Music Box will always be meh.” Barbara is saying.
Ned’s hands are raised in surrender. “No argument here. ‘90s pop queens are not my thing. My daughter is into what she calls oldies. Just trying to keep up.”
Barbara laughs. “Oh, thanks. Now I’m vintage.”
Grace sets a mug of black coffee beside Barbara’s laptop. “They’re out of real cream.”
Barbara frowns. “Still? Well, thanks for not using the fake crap.”
“I know my customers.” Grace sips her coffee, which is somehow both bitter and weak. “Hi, Ned. We’re up to our eyeballs here—”
“Not to mention your Big Meeting With the Dean,” Barbara sings.
“Oh?” Ned cocks his head like a Golden Retriever. “Sounds serious.”
“It’s not.” At least she hopes not. His admin was cagey about the agenda.
Barbara sings again: “It’s interview season.”
Grace brushes past Ned’s quizzical look to set her coffee down and open her laptop.
“There’s a search for a tenure-track position,” Barbara says.
Ned perches his butt on the bench nearest to Grace. “And the dean has good news for you?”
Grace rolls her eyes. “For a journalist, you’re surprisingly naïve about the way the world works.”
He smiles. “I came to see if you’re up for an early lunch. Or maybe just a quick walk?”
Grace shakes her head. “I wish.”
“It’s a gorgeous day. Get some fresh air, Grace. I’ll hold down the fort.”
Grace tries for a glare, but Barbara’s good cheer is irresistible. “What the hell,” she says to Ned. “You caught me at a good time. I’m . . . waiting for a colleague at Penn State to send me some data from . . . a related study to. . . benchmark my—”
Barbara snickers from behind her laptop. “Grace. It’s really okay to take a break now and then.”
Grace and Ned stop by the faculty lounge on the way out. “There’s a lemon-iced Bundt cake today, not bad.” She slices a piece and bites into it standing at the counter. “The women on staff bring this stuff in. Berry muffins, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, fudge.” She points to a glass bowl in which ribbons of hard candy gleam bright with lemon, tangerine, cherry, and blueberry stripes. “I’ve never seen that empty,” she says around the cake in her mouth.
“Who makes candy from scratch when you can buy a whole bag of it for ninety-nine cents at the Dollar Store?” Ned asks.
“Exactly.” When Grace first arrived, the dean’s assistant invited her to join their baking group. She declined. As far as she knows, none of her male colleagues were invited.
“Do you ever bring treats?” Ned asks.
She snorts a laugh. “Do you bring treats to your office? Oh, wait, don’t answer that.”
He smiles. “They love my pumpkin muffins, but Hélène likes to make cupcakes. Her raspberry truffle—”
“Sorry I asked.”
Grace leads him across the parking lot to step over a low fence. “Follow me.” She climbs down the eroding bank. They settle on a fallen log beside the stream to watch the water rustle a corn chip bag. Leaves collect upstream of a crumpled Pepsi can. A beer bottle clink-rolls against a rock.
“People are such slobs,” she says.
“It’s the storm grates,” Ned says. “The bars are spaced wide, so they don’t clog up with debris and flood the streets. Saves the DPW having to clean them out.”
“Brilliant design, so the grates eat bicycle tires, swallow Starbucks cups, and shit out candy wrappers.” She leans down to pluck a bit of brown plastic from the water at their feet and smooths it out on her knee. “Snickers, yum. My favorite.”
Ned stretches out his legs and crosses his feet. “I wonder how the stream feels about all this trash.”
Maybe coming here was a mistake. Grace feels the need to apologize to the stream or at least pull out all the trash she can see. Self-consciousness nudges a reminder of when Ned and her mother caught her whispering to the starlings. Their intrusion made her squirm. Judgment or fondness, it didn’t matter.
She hopes the stream can feel her thoughts of regret. I’m sorry for these intrusions, Stream. Your business is flow, is movement, is tadpoles and algae. Dragonflies, darters, and duckweed. Look how amazing you are, the lovechild of hydrogen and oxygen. You don’t give a fuck about all this trivial trash. Keep streaming on.
“What would you say to this stream?” Ned’s voice is quiet and curious. Tempting. She’s about to answer when he whispers, “You, Stream, musician of trash. Composer, conductor, sculptor. Make the best of it.” And louder, finding his voice. “You don’t pause, stutter or stop. When that kid threw the beer bottle in, maybe you said, let’s have some fun with this. Rhythm section. Rock on, Stream. Flow your defiance past all this apathy.”
Grace’s eyes feel hot. She blinks and blinks to clear them. “Are you mocking me?” but she knows from the catch in his voice he isn’t.
He shakes his head no. “Wanted to see how it feels.”
“And?”
He breathes out. Shuffles his position, resets his legs. Takes another breath. “To be honest, it was . . . weird. Awkward. Silly. I don’t know. Like a kid playing pretend.”
She nods, struck that this is the one thing she carries from childhood intact, untouched. A precious secret. “It’s . . . not a rational thing. It comes from . . .”
“The heart?”
A chill runs through her. She leans into him. “Yeah.”
He puts his arm around her shoulder. Light. Undemanding. “I knew your heart was in there somewhere.”
Grace enjoys the feel of his arm, its weight, the solidity of his torso beside hers. She rests her head on him. Her tension drains into the stream’s gurgle. She’s been anxious about the meeting with the dean, but it’s nothing she can’t handle.
Ned pulls away to stand. Offers his hand to Grace. “I gotta get back. Thanks for the hang.”
Without thought, she says, “I’m glad you came by.”
“Really? I wasn’t sure at first.”
She rests her forehead lightly on his chest. Hint of pine needles and smoke in his jacket. The stream murmurs. Birds sing, squirrels rustle, a plane’s distant drone, a siren’s wail. A bus rumbles. Their breathing steadies with the ever-present song of the stream.
She sighs. “This is nice.”
“It is, isn’t it?” He steps back, lifts her chin, meets her eyes. “I’d wish you good luck at your meeting, but you don’t need it.”
“Thanks.”
“I mean it. You’re a helluva catch, Grace. They’d be crazy not to sign you.”
She smiles. “Maybe I should sign you—as my agent.”
“Excellent idea. I’ll get you the big bucks. Endorsement deals like the pros. Nike? Lululemon? Or maybe Royal Farms. Their fried chicken is surprisingly good.”
She laughs, pictures the United Energy Holdings poster of her as their science mascot. “If you only knew.” Has he seen it? Oh, god, she hopes not.
His hazel eyes hold her gaze. Flecks of green glint gold in the dappled light. All she hears now is the stream, the birds, and their breath.
He touches her bottom lip. “Would it be okay if I kissed you?”
She smiles. “No one has ever asked me that. Feels like a Jane Austen novel.”
“I didn’t peg you for a novel reader.”
“Busted.”
He leans down to press his lips to hers. Soft, warm, lingering.
And then it’s over or, more accurately, she cuts it short, feeling trapped as a piece of trash under a rock and he stumbles backwards like a schoolboy caught littering and she lurches into him and he embraces her and she grips him hard and they laugh gentle joy into the stream’s symphony.
The dean is a geoclimatologist who studies the coupling of ice sheets and aerosols in climate models. He’s not much taller than Grace and twice her weight, with gray salting his ample hair, bushy brows and beard. In retirement, he could take over for Santa Claus. If the North Pole isn’t under water by then.
“Dr. Evans. Grace. Thanks for coming. Sit.” He closes the door and motions her to a small round table. Part of his campaign to seem approachable and egalitarian.
“Good news,” she says. “My paper was accepted to the AGS Conference.”
“I heard.” He opens a manila folder, selects the top page, closes the folder. “Barbara told me. You’re doing good work, both of you.”
Barbara told him? When?
He holds out the United Energy ad. The expression on his face—
“I told you about that,” she says. “You signed off.”
He raises his brows and shakes his head. “My recollection, you said they would issue a press release—”
“I never said that. I said, their PR people—”
He holds up a hand. “Old history. This . . . endorsement is everywhere. People keep sending them to me. There’s growing concern that your work is compromised, Grace.”
With few exceptions, her colleagues do not show concern. They’re a pack of cutthroat gladiators. They have unlimited time for research and good friends at prestigious journals to publish their findings. They have nothing to be concerned about.
She wipes her damp palms on her jeans. “You know that’s not true.”
“Maybe, but I’m only one person. With this out there, perception is becoming reality.”
“That’s nonsense. Reality is reality. Perception is often wrong.”
He sighs and studies the ceiling long enough to count the tiles twice. Finally, he pulls more papers from his folder and sighs. “Speaking of perceptions. Your evals from spring semester.”
She forces herself to stay silent. When she first arrived, everyone said the evaluations are bullshit and nobody reads them. The dean included.
“Billingsly has industry funding,” she says. “So does Wallace, last I checked.”
He sighs. “Those are. . . They’re different.”
“How?”
“You’re deflecting. The concerns are about you. About your integrity.” He reads from the top page. “‘Dr. Evans was chronically late, an average of fourteen minutes per class. That’s 6.5 hours over the semester. By my calculations she owes me a $935 refund on my tuition.’”
Grace grips the edges of her chair. “That entitled prick. I know who that was.”
The dean adjusts his reading glasses. “He has a point. We’ve talked about this.” He shuffles through the papers. “‘She’s too political . . . Late to class . . . No concern for our mental health . . . Swears in class . . . Always late . . . Unapproachable . . . Too much homework.’” He slides the glasses down his nose to peer at her.
“Too much homework? They can’t buy their degree; they have to earn it. They’re so clueless about the world. They need to—”
“Grace, can you just tone it down? Less preaching, more teaching.”
Grace laughs. “I’m going to put that on a t-shirt and wear it to class.” She pulls one of the pages toward her and selects a pen from his brass engraved pencil cup. “What’s your size? I’ll get one for you, too.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose and shifts in his chair. He once told her that he prefers his computer models to dealing with people. “They have no confidence in you, long-term. As part of our community.”
By they does he mean the students or the colleagues? “How is this a community? With, like, two exceptions, everyone’s in it for himself. You and I both know it.” She crosses her arms, surprised she can even bend them. Every muscle in her body is solid with tension.
“I’m sorry you see it that way.”
“Come on, Ian. In sixteen months, none of the senior faculty—not one—has agreed to co-author an article or cosign a grant proposal. I’ve reached out to every single one and, nothing but crickets. Sure as hell none of them has invited me to do anything other than bring snacks to the faculty mixers.”
The dean fiddles with the papers, tapping them together till they align perfectly. His speeches and emails are full of wishful words, but Grace knows he knows she’s right. These guys feed off subservience. They came up in a strict hierarchy and now they’re at the top lording it over the underlings. The sad thing is, it doesn’t take much to break that cycle. She’s had mentors champion her work, recommend conferences and journals. And now, she does the same for Barbara.
“Grace, I admire your ambition. I do. But ambition is a double-edge sword. Your drive gets you into trouble. Your problem—”
“Oh, please do enlighten me, Ian. What is my problem?”
He sighs. “That. Right there. Your . . . aggression. I’m speaking as a friend here. Your manner is . . . off-putting.”
Her face flushes hot. “Oh, really? George hitting on undergrads isn’t off-putting?”
“That’s . . . That’s just an ugly rumor.”
“Sure, sure. What about Douglas cherry-picking data that skewed the results he needed to prove his theory about—”
He holds up a hand. “That’s a serious accusation. And it was never proven.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot.” It was never proven because the dean bottom-drawered the complaints.
“Stop, Grace. Stop. You’re acting like a cornered badger.”
Grace laughs. “I prefer vixen. That’s what you said last time.”
“Okay. Despite your . . . rough edges, you’re a good scientist, one of the best I’ve encountered.” He looks down at the papers again. “I have the interview list from the faculty search committee.” He pauses, rubs his mouth.
A wave of nausea flushes through her. The bastard, he—
“You’re not on it.” He looks up at her, betraying the barest hint of a smile he didn’t bother to suppress. “I’m as surprised as you are.”
The way he says surprised describes a birthday party not the concussive blow that renders her mind useless. Words trickle out on their own: “Who did they choose?”
“The process is ongoing. You know I can’t give details.” His eyes stray back to the paper. “I can say, there are two accomplished women on this list.” He looks up to twist the knife. “Not you, though.”
Fuck these academics and their self-important secrecy. For months, she’s assumed she would not only be interviewed but offered the position. Her fellowship ends next June. She’ll have to drag her research somewhere else and start over. At the bottom.
She sits back, fighting a wave of emotion, determined to maintain control. No way would she be one of those “hysterical women” her father mocked at NASA. He drilled into her that only the lowest sort of person cries at work.
“Their comments might be . . . instructive,” the dean says. “They did cite the course evaluations. Particularly from BioGeo 101.”
Her mind swirls with retorts, questions, what-ifs, a maelstrom of anger and betrayal. “What about my research? You know that’s my priority, not coddling undergraduates. I’m making great strides—"
“And good for you. If it were up to me. . .” He fingers the edges of the paper. “Their notes are, you’re reckless. Compromised by industry. Clouded by ambition.” He meets her eyes. “That’s their consensus.”
Easy for him to pretend he’s on her side. “No. They’re wrong.”
“I can offer a visiting professorship on a one-year contract.”
“One year? I can’t do shit with a measly year. Especially with a full teaching load.” She silences herself before her anger does real damage. Never burn bridges. Another of her father’s life lessons.
“Best I can do, my hands are tied.”
Grace fights another wave of emotion. She’s seen men yell and curse and pound things at work. But somehow, it’s only women who inflict their emotions on coworkers.
“If you choose to move on, I’ll give you a reference.” He coughs. “So we’re clear, if I’m asked about your ties to industry, I won’t lie for you.”
“I would never ask you to lie for me. We all saw what happened last year when you did that for Anderson.” It’s a cheap shot, but he can’t have it both ways. Act like he has her back when he’s helping them twist the knife.
He closes his eyes and waves a hand. “That’s enough. Just go. Please.”
Grace returns to the sane company of the stream. Shivering in the early-autumn chill, she seeks the water’s mesmerizing embrace.
Instead, a voice intrudes. You can’t let these smallminds push you around, Grace. The grouchy thick Italian accent of Dr. Margherita Hack.
Grace is too demoralized for this woman’s judgments. “I don’t. . .”
Mixing with smallminds makes you small.
“How are you here?” Grace kicks at a crumpled Sprite bottle.
You tell me. Exhaustion? Psychotic break? Regression? You’re normally such a rational person.
Grace flops onto the cold ground. “Look where that got me.” Oh, she hates when her self-loathing flares up as self-pity. “All this striving. And nothing to show for it. Nothing. What is the point?”
I’m a physicist, not a metaphysicist.
“Don’t you ever. . . wonder?”
Of course. My curiosity has served me well. Asking what if led me to the discovery of Asteroid 8558.
She’s gonna humble brag now? “Way to work your asteroid into the conversation. Aren’t you supposed to . . . I don’t know, encourage me?
If you’re asking to be coddled, that’s not my style. I’ve always been a fighter. I thought you were a fighter too, Grace.
“I am, but this. . .” She trails off, nothing to say for herself.
You’ve given away your power, Grace. That offends me.
Barbara’s ridiculous question pops into her head. “Tell me, what’s your why, Dr. Hack?”
I live to find out about the world and the universe. What we do not understand needs to be faced.
Needs to be faced? Grace erupts in maniacal laughter. She’s spent her whole life fighting what she doesn’t understand. When she finally catches her breath and dries her tears, the only sound is the burbling water at her feet.
Upstream, plastic packaging from a case of bottled water glints in a cage of fallen branches. She struggles to her feet and in one glance takes in a chipped fifth of whiskey, a hot pink hair tie, a childless sippy cup, and a coffee carryout sleeve. She fishes a slimy yellow plastic bag from the rocks at her feet and fills it with trash in less than ten minutes.
Next chapter ➡️
Here’s a snippet of the stream near my house in Baltimore. It’s called Western Run and has a similar vibe to Stony Run, where the scene above was set.
One of the best things about reading serial fiction on Substack is the community that gathers around. This is slow reading at its best. Twice a month, everyone experiences a new chapter and gets to weigh in on what’s happening in real time. When I’ve read stories this way, whether short fiction or whole novels, the interactions with both readers and authors is one of the most enjoyable aspects.
Each season, we donate 30% of paid subscriptions to a worthy environmental cause. This season, it’s Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International. For The Earth And All Generations - Women Are Rising For Climate Justice & Community-Led Solutions. Track past and current recipients here. So far, we’ve raised $30 for this worthy organization.
For our MFA graduation ceremony, each of us was invited to give a 5-minute reading from our thesis. We celebrated everyone’s brilliant writing — poetic, darkly funny, open-hearted, satirical. Choosing one passage from a two-year project (or, in my case, a 10-year one) is a challenge! After considering my opening chapter, my closing chapter, and something in between, I decided to read Grace’s scene with the dean. I extracted the juiciest part of it and was pleased to get a few laughs. Academia, no matter the discipline, is almost too easy to satirize.
I’m learning so much about academia that I never knew! Such a cutthroat business.
What an emotionally charged chapter! I especially loved feeling some of that soft innocence under all the fire and grit. The part of her that still talks to starlings and rivers, and no doubt is the fuel underneath everything she does.