🍃Reciprocity: the interview

6 questions for Antonia Malchik

Nature writer, n. A person who delights in paying attention, being astonished, and telling about it.¹

“I want to remind people that loving the places where we live is necessary. These places need our love, care, and attention far more than the daily news cycle ever will.” ~ Antonia Malchik

“I've attached a photo of a place I love -- it's in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana, where I'd spent 6 days camping last summer with the trail crew I was on. We were soaked to the core for 24 hours of straight rain but that rainbow on the last morning made it worthwhile!”

My inbox is full of treasure in the form of lovingly observed writing about place, encounters both wild and gentle, imaginative kinship and renewed reciprocity. These thoughtful, talented writers kindled in me the desire to learn more about them. So I invited them to answer six questions, which I’m delighted to share with you in this new feature. While I’m on travel, these will be a weekly feature. After that they’ll appear on the first Thursday of the month.²

Today’s guest, Antonia Malchik, writes essays about science, nature, environment, and language for Aeon, The Atlantic, Orion, High Country News, and many other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, is about the past and future of walking’s role in our shared humanity. She is currently working on No Trespassing, a book about ownership, private property, and the theft of the commons past, present, and future. She lives in northwest Montana.

On the Commons explores ownership and its inevitable injustices. It looks at the thefts of physical commons—land, water, air, knowledge—in tandem with human rights throughout history, and the little-known stories of people working right now to reclaim stolen commons and rebuild lifeways shaped by ethics of kinship and caregiving rather than ownership and domination. It's about love for this world and being human in the middle of systems that often make such "being" difficult.

Antonia’s writing drew me in from the first for its beauty, honesty and emotional engagement. I hope you enjoy her interview as much as I do. 

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Why are you drawn to nature writing?

For me, all writing is in some way nature writing. I started out 20-plus years ago as a travel writer, and was always most interested in the "character of place" aspect of travel writing. What makes a place "itself"? I didn't think of myself as a nature writer at the time, but instinctively focused on local plants, the feel of the air, the topography, the landscape, and the ways in which local people related to their place -- and, especially, the ways in which that relationship could be traced back through the centuries, if not millennia. Growing up in Montana and spending most of my time among the forests, mountains, rivers, and lakes, the idea that "we are nature" was instilled in me from my earliest memories, even if it was never articulated. I can't write about being human without nature being an integral part of everything humans do, even (or maybe especially!) when we're unaware of it.

How does writing about nature affect you, in your work or personal life?

It hones my attention. I don't see that ever changing. There's always more to learn. Just this morning a friend mentioned to me, in passing, how differently fallen lodgepole pine versus fallen Douglas Fir trees will affect a forest ecosystem because of their different moisture content. I'd never noticed those differences, even though I've spent most of my life in these woods, and it was so interesting! Last year I took workshops in wildlife tracking, botany, macroinvertebrates, and so on, to get my Montana Master Naturalist certification, which for me is about the joy of learning and giving more and more of my attention to this incredible world, both in my life and in my writing. I don't really need to get any of it "right"; I just want to be better acquainted with the life I live among, enough to give all of these lives, from caddisflies to braided rivers to pronghorn herds to bluebirds, the respect they deserve. To relate to them as the kin they are.

While outside, have you ever experienced feeling small, lost or in danger? 

Almost never. One time my spouse and I were hiking on the Isle of Barra in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. I was 6 months pregnant and needed to stop near the top of a mountain. He wandered further. I sat on a rock and watched the sea. After being alone for a little while, I had a sudden, inexplicable panic attack. I'm blaming that on pregnancy hormones because I'd never before or since minded being alone while outside!

What’s a favorite memory of nature from your childhood?

That's really hard. I spent most of my life outdoors. My family had little income, and all of our off time, such as it was, was spent hiking, fishing, and camping. My abiding memory is that the sleeping bag I had throughout childhood smelled of cat pee. But the smell of pine, fir, and spruce trees feels embedded in me. Every hike now evokes a memory, even if it's just a fleeting sense. A lot of my favorite memories are simply of being in our yard smelling the lilac bushes, or lying under the enormous crabapple tree when it was in bloom and noisy with bee activity. One standout memory is camping out on the prairie when I was 11, watching a full Moon rise, so huge and golden it felt like I was standing on another world.

What do you hope for, for your writing? 

I want to remind people that loving the places where we live is necessary. These places need our love, care, and attention far more than the daily news cycle ever will. And that humans have shaped societies absent of commodification, oppression, and excessive extraction (capitalist or otherwise) many times throughout our histories. The dominant culture tricks us into thinking that living in reciprocity and kinship with the rest of the living world is a relic of some bygone era, but the potential of believing otherwise is enormous. I want my writing to connect people with life and even their own bodies -- this was much of my goal with my book A Walking Life, a reminder that we are embodied beings -- and bring as many people as possible into awareness that it's possible to live differently. Figuring out how to share "the commons" large and small is something humans have done many times in many places. We can do so again. To do so is not a fantasy. It's vital.

A writer or other creative artist who makes you hopeful for humanity and Earth.

Chris La Tray

(who writes the newsletter

An Irritable Métis

) never fails to inspire me, whether it's through his writing or our years of friendship. He has a fierce heart and keeps it open to the world he loves, even when it hurts, and I adore that about him. I recently became acquainted with the poetry of Charles Finn through his book On a Benediction of Wind, and reading it while away by myself at an off-grid cabin was a profound experience. I'm a huge fan of good science fiction and fantasy and the ways in which they reflect humans' ideas about ourselves and our potential. Writers like N.K. Jemisin, Waubgeshig Rice, Sofia Samatar, and many more (Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction was one of my favorite reads last year) keep me mindful that human creativity and ingenuity is just as easily applied to repairing our relationship with the rest of life, as it is to rupturing it. 

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What did you enjoy most about this interview? If you’d like to learn about other Substack nature writers, please consider becoming a free or upgrading to paid subscriber. From now until the Autumnal Equinox, I’ll be donating 30% of paid subscriptions to Indigenous Environmental Network, which I was happy to hear about from

Maia Duerr

. Through a variety of alliances, they’ve been promoting environmental and economic justice issues for over twenty years.

If you enjoyed this post, a lovely ❤️ keeps me going. Another way to show love is to share this post with others by restacking it on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!

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For more inspired nature writing and artwork from the best of Substack, check out the articles in NatureStack journal.

1. thanks, Mary Oliver

2. Since I received so many inspiring responses to my initial call, both August and September will feature two interviews.