🍃Reciprocity: the interview

6 questions for Nina Schulyer

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

“I hope my book rouses readers’ empathy for the natural world--so much overflowing care. And from that, an amazing bloom of desire to act, get involved, and help change the looming apocalyptic future.” ~ Nina Schuyler

Today, I’m delighted to bring you a special edition of Reciprocity, celebrating the release of Nina Schuyler’s new story collection, In This Ravishing World, published on July 2, 2024. You’ll find the familiar six questions, plus a few bonus ones.

I first encountered Nina via her marvelous Substack, Stunning Sentences, a weekly place to admire, fall in love with, moon over a published stunning sentence, and then learn how to make one of your own. For paid subscribers, Nina holds a monthly Zoom gathering to feast on a bunch of stunning sentences, and everyone writes sentences, turning one of these beauties into the seed of a story. (Note to self: get in on this, ASAP!)

In This Ravishing World won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Her novel, Afterword, was published May 2023 and won the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary. It also won the PenCraft Seasonal Book Award for Literary-Science Fiction. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies and The Writing Salon.

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Why are you drawn to nature writing?

You can trace a long thread of nature all the way to the beginning. My young girl legs running in tall grass, through forests of Douglas fir, or penduluming on a tire swing. The scene is Tacoma, Washington, next to a deep, crater-made lake where I spent beautiful, countless hours swimming, hunting for minnows, diving off the dock, sailing a Sunfish, and reading on a paddleboat. We had three dogs, two cats, a rabbit, and our black lab swam with us always. Rain or rain (only a little sunshine), I rode my bike everywhere, and in the forest, we built a fort out of branches, and down the hill, blackberry bushes handed us gobs of berries, and crickets told us important things in the empty lot.

I moved to Northern California for college and found a long stretch of summery days, so I ran in yellow hills and rode my bike in the hills, all without a raincoat. When I graduated, I moved to New York City for a finance job, and, in that concrete, chaotic jungle, I was the strange bird who walked to work every day through Central Park in hiking boots. Thank god I was transferred to San Francisco and found the South End Rowing Club, swimming in 60-degree water, a beautiful wake-up ice-shock to the body.

All of this is to say nature is woven through at the cellular level.

After one of the many California wildfires—I can’t remember which one (too many!)--and scrounging for hours to find an N95 mask (before the pandemic) so my young son could play basketball, which he passionately loves, despite the smoke, despite the orange sky and ash falling from the sky, I wept. Despair is cold. Despair sends you to bed. I managed to reach out to my scientist friend, who is on the front lines of the climate crisis every single day. Act, she said. Do something.

I joined an environmental organization and sent weekly postcards to state and federal representatives about specific climate-related legislation. I volunteered at another environmental organization. It wasn’t enough, so I began to write, story after story, inventing characters who found themselves confronting the climate crisis, the hardest thing humanity has ever faced.

An environmental economist who spent her entire life fighting for the planet sinks into despair. A tech CEO frantically tries to find a place to escape where climate change is not invited. A young boy is determined to bring the natural world to his bleak urban neighborhood. More and more, and then, when Governor Gavin Newsom said, “Nature is talking,” my imagination jumped into hyper-drive: what is it saying? What does Nature want us to hear? And Nature became part of the collection.

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

IN THIS RAVISHING WORLD is my sixth book (including two craft books), but it’s the first one that has led interviewers to ask: After reading your book, what do you hope readers do?

When this question was first posed, an inner earthquake rattled me because it went against my training and my teaching. In my MFA program, I learned Chekhov is god. In a letter he wrote to an aspiring writer, he said it’s

“not the business of the artist to solve narrowly specialized questions.”

The writer is like a judge, submitting the case fairly to the jury and letting

“the jury do the deciding, each according to its own judgment.”

These words are branded on my brain, and as a creative writing professor, I have repeated these adages to students for many years. This lineage might be why Lee Isaac Chung, the director of the new movie “Twister,” said in a recent Guardian article,

“I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like it is putting forward a message.”²

Add to this Milan Kundera’s view about fiction:

“A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions… The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.”

Inherent in these comments is that the book should do no more than provoke the reader to ask questions and come to an independent conclusion.

Now, coming back to the interviewer’s question, I do have an answer: I hope my book rouses readers’ empathy for the natural world--so much overflowing care. And from that, an amazing bloom of desire to act, get involved, and help change the looming apocalyptic future. Is this a judge-like response? No.

I’m still grappling with this. In my book, I don’t overtly say, Take action, dear reader. Nine characters, plus Nature, grapple with this most pressing problem in a mad whirl of human desire and motivation. So maybe there is, after all, a flavor of judge-quality. Or maybe I’ve misinterpreted Chekhov and Kundera. Then again, if you are writing about what is rapidly becoming a climate catastrophe, is the judicial attitude relevant? Are we in a post-Chekhov world? Post-genre, beyond it all?

I was jazzed to see “nature’s voice” opening your collection.

I know you recently wrote in your newsletter about giving nature a voice and included a link to Conservation International’s series, “Nature is Speaking.” (which I didn’t know about, which I found awful and, as you noted, mean-spirited and punitive and violent).³

I anthropomorphized nature, meaning I gave Nature literal human traits and behaviors. I wrote many many pages, trying to hear Nature’s voice. At first, it was so angry. Humans have done such damage; the data is staggering, heartbreaking, excruciating, and mind-numbingly terrible. Weeks of Nature spewing, but at some point, I remembered Nature wants humans to listen, and yelling at someone rarely works. And, of course—which the Conservation Series forgot—we are nature and beings in the world. I tried again and someone in my writer’s group said it was too poetic; it read like nature poetry. I tried again and remembered Nature has a very different sense of time and temporal vision. It’s been around for billions of years and knows far more than we do. We are a blip in Deep Time. I ultimately excavated a voice (I hope) with a full spectrum of emotion: Nature pleads, rages, pities, luxuriates in beauty, in joy, struggles to understand humans, on and on. Nature has empathy for all the human characters because Nature, too, has experienced similar emotions and understands suffering.

Here's a bit of Nature speaking from my book:

“We’re enmeshed, we always have been, tightly knitted together whether you like it or not. Our lots are cast together, and as things have become more urgent, we’ve become even more entangled, fine threads connecting us, billions of them. I’m not sure what to do because the alarm bell is ringing. Do you hear it? I know the sound waves are in your frequency.”

Why and how did you employ animism, anthropomorphism, and/or personification in your book?

In a recent Guardian article, Rebecca Solnit said every crisis is, in part, a crisis of storytelling.

“This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change.”⁴  

What is hemming in stories?

By the late 19th century, Realism had become the dominant literary aesthetic in reaction to Romanticism, which valued nature, and, as a result, their writing, especially the Romantic poets, contained plentiful personification--giving human qualities or abilities to an inanimate object or abstraction. Then came realism, which coincided with the rise of science, technology, capitalism, and empire-building. It was also when human activity began significantly changing the earth’s atmosphere, writes Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.⁵ By focusing on the human, serious literature turned the gaze away from the destruction of the nonhuman and the planet.

Let me say something about science. Science bans anthropomorphism and adheres to objective reality, that which can be measured and observed. We’ve learned a lot this way, but the cost has been a separation of humans from the other-than-human world, which has been objectified. When something is turned into an object, it’s a quick slippery slope to turning it into a resource, and deep meaning is stripped away because meaning comes from relationships.

When the technique of anthropomorphism manages to shatter the stranglehold of realism, the excitement is palpable. Enchantment rushes in, a sense that we are not alone because everything formally considered dead (i.e., an object) is alive and sentient and intelligent. Remember Richard Power’s The Overstory? He wove in the research by Professor of Forest Ecology Suzanne Simard, who discovered that trees are talking to each other, taking care of each other. When readers refer to that book, their eyes brighten and they always say, you know, the trees are talking!

Remember the 1970 record Songs of the Humpback Whale? That small word "songs"—was that what woke the human heart? Katy Payne, a scientist and musician, deliberately chose this word, inviting anthropomorphism into the title to encourage human empathy. It worked! The record became a multiplatinum hit and is still the bestselling natural history record ever. Most importantly, the record galvanized public support for banning industrial whaling and using whale oil for lipstick and engine transmissions.

In 1972, participants at the UN Conference on the Human Environment adopted a 10-year moratorium on commercial whaling, and the International Whaling Commission followed suit in 1982.

OK, then. For me, anthropomorphism, animism, and personification are ways fiction can address the crisis of storytelling. These techniques forge a relationship between humans and the other-than-human. What follows is a deeper connection, unfolding delight, and a newfound affinity (which Darwin pointed to long ago). What follows from that is meaning in our lives and the greater possibility of feeling responsible to act to protect our fellow creatures.

Ironically, science has recently made groundbreaking discoveries about animal sentience and intelligence. For so long, we’ve lived under the ghost of Descartes, who labeled the other-than-human mechanistic and without a soul. But now, what had been dismissed is being measured and affirmed. Using artificial intelligence and digital recorders, scientists have correlated videos of social interactions with patterns of sounds—sounds the human ear can't pick up.

It turns out, writes Karen Bakker in her book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, bats argue over food; they have individual names or "signature calls" for each other. Mother bats speak to their babies in a "motherese" language, lowering their pitch, and baby bats babble in response. Using this technological approach, scientists have similar findings for honeybees, whales, turtles, and elephants. The same thing is happening in the realm of plants.

What did you think of the essay I referenced in my post about nature’s marginalized voice?

In his essay, Paul Kingsnorth hunts for literature that animates what the West has considered inanimate.⁶ He forgot to include what’s been in the West all along, and that’s Indigenous culture and storytelling.

Among North America's indigenous tribes, animism is part of the culture and the stories. Animism views all nonhuman beings and things—animals, plants, rocks, and more—as being alive and possessing agency and free will. Animism and anthropomorphism are conceptually close: both imply the presence of life-like or human-like characteristics in nonhuman or inanimate objects. In his new short story collection, The Forgetters, Greg Sarris, Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, tells the classic style of Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok creation stories. He anthropomorphizes two crows who narrate the stories, or maybe, writes Sarris, they are twin sisters who are human.

Animism is also knitted into Indigenous languages. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about learning her native language. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she learned the Potawatomi language and discovered that 70 percent of the words are verbs. In English, only 30 percent of words are verbs. In Potawatomi, a bay is not a noun but a verb. So is a sandy beach, trees, rocks, a mountain. Once she learned this, she writes “an electric current sizzled down my arms and through my finger.” The world is alive!

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

You know, I never have. The one time I felt in danger was during one of the California wildfires because the air quality was so bad. The air quality app was brick red, screaming Hazardous! But I had to get outside, I had to hike. Less than a half mile later, the smoke burned my throat, and I imagined particulate matter pummeling my lungs despite the N95 mask. The hike turned into a sorrowful retreat.

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

My family went to the Puget Sound on warm summer days, and for endless hours, my three sisters and I played on the beach with the shore crabs. They live under most rocks and are about the size of a fingertip or half-dollar. If you hold them from the backside, they can’t pinch you. We’d build a rock circle, and that would be the house. The biggest crab was the mother, and the other crabs were her children. They’d quickly find a way to scuttle away, and we’d have to start all over again, lifting rocks, finding a new mother and her children. The crabs probably hated it, but for us, it was hours of beautiful play.

What do you hope for, for your writing?

(see above, #2)

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

I love Pedro Marzorati’s work, especially his sculpture, “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow,” located in Paris’ Montsouris Park. It appeared in 2015, coinciding with the Paris Climate Conference. Electric-blue heads of men in water, with some men up to their chin in pond water; others, only to their chests. People stopped. I was there. I saw them stop and stare, not for a second, but for minutes, and for a long time, they said nothing, as if the shock of reality had finally pierced them. Here is the power of art—a direct line, a hand to the human heart. As the shock shifted to comprehension, the little huddles of people spoke, with many expressions passing over their faces in a sort of understanding and panic. All these years later, I still remember this moment.⁷

"'where the tides ebb and flow' par Pedro Marzorati" by Fiseha Hailemichael is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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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.

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In further service to Substack’s nature writers, Rebecca curates this robust directory of nature-focused writers:

1. thanks, Mary Oliver

2. Source is here

3. Nina’s referring to a recent pair of posts, here and here.

4. Source here

5. Love, love, love this book. Highly recommend.

6. The article, in The Guardian, from 23 July 2016, 'We imagine how it feels to be a character, why can't we imagine how the land feels?' is here.

7. For more, including a video of the creation and installation of this remarkable scupture (brrr! that looks COLD! 🥶), see the artist’s website.