The New Year began with a new short story of mine coming out in BOMB, edited by Raluca Albu and featured the wild, surreal artwork of beloved Emma Caster-Dudzick.

A few months later, I taught a creative writing workshop for UNC - Wilmington and celebrated the Lunar New Year in Chinatown.

The next month, I read again in the East Village from an essay I had come out with Sunday Salon on how difficult it’s been for me to learn to receive, though sometimes the answer seems to be as clear as what one of my dearest friends tells me on the regular: “you deserve it all,” “just be in the womb.”

Okay.

I try. I begin to step back into the light. I let it feel good, and when it doesn’t I stay and ask myself why. I realize there are old forms I can no longer hold, old ways I can no longer be.

A colleague-turned-friend was in town at the start of April. I did many of the touristy things I often forget about the longer I live in NYC, reminding me of the magic I live within and often close my eyes to. How they traveled across continents and oceans just to be here for a few days. Both single, we talked about how the longer life goes on, the harder it can be to let someone in. How, like a subway car, there are less and less seats available as the train moves forward.

“Someone can still get on,” they said, laughing. “You just got to squish.”

As we say goodbye, they leave me with flowers, an early birthday present. “I hope you will let yourself open,” they say. I watch for days as the tulips remind me how.

A few days later, I turn 34 and go to a nu disco party with friends, one of whom gives me a bracelet with a simple suggestion: bloom.

If I can’t show up in the way I want to, I tend to not show up at all, which I think means what I need now is a looser form, one that can hold me as I feel into my new shape, a form that leaves room for irregular petals and leaves. I want to let whatever wants to come forward, what is ready to bloom, to do so. I want to get out of my own way.

So, for now, what I’ve done is unlock the archive here (no more paywalls!) and stripped away the Conversations With Animals-as-podcast framing. It feels like that was the project that landed me in this space after a fateful meeting with the extremely kind and patient who encouraged me to bring Conversations With Animals over to the platform and generously helped me get everything up and running, but as I look forward into all the other projects I want to share with the world, I think it’s time to reimagine what this space could be. I think it’s time to reimagine what I could be, don’t you?

“Isn't it reasonable to assume that, projecting early human life into the far-distant future may not be the disaster movie we have come to love, but a reconfiguration of what we are here for? To lessen suffering, to tell the truth, raise the bar? To stand one remove from timeliness, like an artist encouraging reflection, stoking imagination, mindful of the long haul and putting his or her own life on the line, to imagine work in a world worthy of life?”

- Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

I spent today reminding myself this dream didn’t happen—starting as I stretched in the cold water of my morning shower, worried I might be late for my new position. The one that would change everything. How many times have I felt that I’d finally found the thing that would?

I had this irritation that I didn’t really have the right outfit on me—my closet now split between my apartment in the city and my mom’s house upstate as I am back and forth so much these days. I scold myself for letting resentment creep up at the ways I am pulled—shouldn’t I be grateful to have so much I belong to that I am forced to stretch myself? I want to be doing good work in the world and sometimes it isn’t always clear that I am.

I wonder at times if maybe this period, with all the grief it carries, wraps around itself a kind of gift. Would I really be a better writer if I could go to all the events, do all the things, have endless time to myself to worry and wonder and read? It sounds magical, and when I descend to my desk I could, and sometimes do, stay there for days—breaking only for food, the gym, walking my dog, family matters. Lately it’s taken me longer to drop in. I wonder if it’s because I haven’t had lulls, empty spaces, time to saturate myself in enough art outside of my own. My creative hours are so precious I want it to go all into what I am creating. But having to carry so much I hadn’t expected over the past few years—what shape does it make of me? What does it do to the work I can’t see, other than when I blame it for fracturing it—fracturing my attention, fracturing my time, fracturing me…these are selfish thoughts I tell myself. Who is that I want to be?

There’s a memory I return to at times, often enough I eventually turned the fragments into a poem a few years ago that never did find its home with a journal so I figured I would share it myself with you today. Maybe you will be able to read it in the full collection one day soon. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I think I’ll keep this archival post free. Will be playing around with this pattern and our subscription model for the fall, but all to say…here is an ode to waking up to our own patterns. At least I think. That’s what it was for me.

I’ve wanted to write since I created my first book in fifth grade. I wish I could remember what it was about only that I bound it and illustrated the pages. I’ve wanted to write since my mother and I would craft stories at night with the same protagonist, crafting her saga together. Since my dad got sick and I tried understanding what he left behind in the words he had written, made a life from. Since I had a journal where I wrote chapters of a ragtag novel about a friend group trying to get to Party City so they could plan a funeral. Since I wrote a short story about a cat at ten that was accused of plagiarism given my age. Since I started a secret LiveJournal in my teens only one friend had a link to—I performed the identity of a man in lower Manhattan running a Mexican restaurant and his lonely observations of his shop and the city. What purpose did they serve other than to give my hours meaning? Because my heart wanted to? It wasn’t a means of survival in terms of being compensated, but it was in terms of imagining my life connected to others. That there was more to the world, and my world, than my father dying. Than feeling excluded at school, feeling rejected in many ways by the world’s love. I could create something beautiful. I could speak.

The first time I ever said these words aloud: I want to write, to strangers, to people who hadn’t known me outside of my original context was deep in the Utah wildlands. I was on mile twenty of over a hundred. 18 years old. I hadn’t really dealt with the grief of my father’s illness or other traumas I’d suffered—mostly I’d been partying them away, smoking, doing whatever felt cool and available to me to pass time in our small town.

So to say to these people who didn’t know me, to whom I could be anyone, that I wanted to write, was a claim that I hadn’t known I needed to make, to recognize something deep within myself that was coming all along. And so during the next few weeks of walking along the trails, I would do just that: I wrote. Fragments of song lyrics, little poems, scenes, mostly messy scrawls on life, love, and desire. This sadness I struggled to name. This desire to be better. What it was I was learning out there in the woods all by myself.

One night we set up camp and all we could decide as a group was that the energy felt off—a collective intuition that where we had chosen to rest was all wrong. A few nights before a mountain lion and her cub had passed by our sleeping heads, an unknowable pardon, and perhaps we were heightened to the quiet dangers that might rock us from the beauty we savored during the bright days. Maybe we argued that we needed to be closer to a water source, or that there wasn’t enough wood to start our fire, but regardless of the reason we gave we all agreed to find new places for our beds.

Within thirty minutes, a boulder shot down the edge of the mountain and rolled over where our bodies had been stretched minutes before. We didn’t talk about it much. We kind of knew. We listened. We trusted.

We moved.

J

Starting at the end of September and continuing until the end of the year, I will be re-releasing all CWA podcast episodes from the past three seasons, which includes a talk with award-winning filmmaker Elizabeth Lo, racehorse rehabilitator CJ Wilson, and many, many more favorites. Season four of the podcast will launch this winter and you can expect episodes with a breakout novelist, a National Geographic journalist, international animal rights activists, and collaborations with other animal podcasts—stay tuned :).

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you: How are your final weeks of summer? Any notable animal encounters? What is on your mind as we head into the final quarter of the year?

Behind-the-scenes, I am reflecting on my time away from teaching—time spent studying in The Netherlands, starting a garden on my building’s rooftop, wondering about passive versus active rewilding, eating vegan croissants in Paris, taking cold showers and deep breathing, retreating to Upstate New York, honoring friendship’s loving gaze, being with the difficulties and pleasures of family, and discovering lessons of surrender during life’s transitions. I’ll be sharing some of these writings with you over the coming months including some beautiful photographs, films, and stories from Holland.

A friend encouraged me to finally start The Overstory and I am deep in its web at the moment. I’ll leave you with a short passage from an early section:

Adam salvages a bit of wood from the men who come to grind out the stump. He takes it into the basement, planes it down, and engraves it with his woodburning kit. He finds the words in a book: A tree is a passage between earth and sky.

With love,

Juliana

P.S. The climate justice meditation and yoga series I co-facilitate with , Connie, Siggi, and Sheila, is coming on its final summer session this Thursday. In NYC and looking for affordable ways to gather in contemplative community? We’d love to welcome you! Register here or sign up at the door (no one is turned away for lack of funds).

While the newsletter goes on a rest, there will new podcast episodes released over the next few weeks as spring blooms into summer. You can expect conversations with a lawyer collaborating with NYC to make infrastructure more creature-friendly, a sociologist examining the true impact of meat-free menus, a pet psychic, and more!

Listen to “Multi-species liberation movements with Dr. Kris Hill & Dr. Thomas Aiello” here!

Please make sure you subscribe and rate CWA on Spotify or Apple (or wherever you like to get your podcasts) to get notified when a new episode is out!

For today, this conversation is an invitation to consider the means and methods of protest movements, the reclamation of animal imagery, the entwinement of how racialized thinking and animal lives, and the radical idea that collective liberation necessitates a multi-species imagination.

Dr. Kris Hill holds a PhD in Anthrozoology. Since 2019, she authored or co-authored 15 peer-reviewed papers that are accepted or in print, have a further three under review, and two more in preparation. Amongst others, she has published in Society & Animals (SOAN), Anthrozoös, and Animal Studies Journal (ASJ). In 2023 she established the Cat Academic Think Tank (e-CATT), a cross-disciplinary group of academics whose interests are related to domestic cats (Felis catus) or small wild cat species. 

Dr. Thomas Aiello is a professor of history, Africana studies, and anthrozoology. He received his first PhD from the University of Arkansas in 2007 and his second from the University of Exeter in 2021. The bulk of his courses relate to all measures of African American history, from early slavery to Black Power, and all aspects of animal studies. His research interests are broader, covering twentieth century United States cultural and intellectual history, twentieth century African American cultural and intellectual history in a variety of different settings, and animal studies, critical animal studies, and anthrozoology.

Have a wonderful summer all and I’ll see you on the other side :).

Much love,

Juliana

The film is intentional in its framing to center people whose lives are intertwined with chickens whether as household pets, nuisance rooster neighbors, or small farm families who slaughter their birds for food.

At times the framing worked for me—the film felt sincere, grounded in the way people whose lives are touched by chickens beyond the supermarket shelf were at the heart of the story rather than “experts.” This choice empowers the individual to observe their relationships with chickens on their own terms.

At other times, I wondered if the film was normalizing bird-as-food narratives. So, I was excited to share my thoughts with Rebecca, below, and to hear her perspective as someone who spends her days with such a familiar, but under-known bird. You can watch along with us here.

Rebecca van Laer is the author of How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022) and the forthcoming memoir Cat (Object Lessons/Bloomsbury). She lives in the Hudson Valley with two cats and five chickens.

Since some of the moments in the film felt to me Grey Gardens-esque in their framing, I started to wonder about that framing–why do you think Karin Estrada for instance is shown as the only subject who has a chicken as a pet? What does her portrayal do to the viewer’s perception of those who might want to protect chickens’ lives?

I think how you view this partially depends on how you define a “pet”—are animals who we extract labor and resources from exempt from being pets? The answer very well might be yes. At the same time, Janet Bonney’s relationship with her chickens mirrors my own (assuming she doesn’t slaughter them, although that’s unclear). My uncle once referred to chickens as “pets with benefits,” and I think there’s something accurate about that, although which “benefit” is primary—eggs or intimacy/joy—will vary between chicken owners.

But you’re very right that Karin Estrada is the only documentary subject who keeps a rooster in her home, treating him the way one might treat a pampered puppy. I think what you’re getting at is that her affection is quirky to the point of potentially inappropriate. Watching her give Cotton a bath and blowdry him, I asked outloud, “is that good for chickens?” The answer is pretty much “no”—chickens bathe in dust, not with water and soap. So while I think the documentary broadly seeks to show that chickens have greater intelligence and more complex inner and social lives than most people assume, it walks a delicate line in implying that caring for chickens too much verges into the “unnatural,” indeed perhaps suggesting that those who want to protect chickens lives’ are on some level irrational.

At the same time, it’s helpful to me to ask what it would really look like to protect chicken’s lives. In my years of living with chickens, I have come to love them, and in the process become more outraged at the system of industrial agriculture that they are inextricably a part of. It’s odd to live with this contradiction—to give my flock the best life possible, and at the same time not know what liberation would look like for their species, so bred and altered to our purposes. Karin Estrada at least provides an example, even if it seems silly on its face.

I was fascinated by the way the public rallied around the lives of chickens who were saved (or did the saving) in these sorts of phenomenal or “exceptional” ways. For instance, the beheaded chicken who lived for months after or the chicken who survived being frozen in a storm and was brought back to life through CPR getting newspaper headlines. Why are these individual lives seen as more valuable in a country that slaughters billions of chickens a year?

There is so much done to keep the reality of industrial agriculture under wraps. I think it would horrify people if they saw what went on—horrify them to some extent. Yet there might still be that psychic disconnect between what happens there, in these far-away warehouses, and what they’re doing when they order a fried chicken sandwich.

I think it is maybe something the documentary is grappling with. The realities of mass agriculture are depicted in a few scenes, but we certainly don’t see the chickens at the bottom of the tower covered in the shit from all those above. We don’t see slaughter. And the way that we receive statistical information is not via voice-over (as we do in many other parts of the film) but through text on the screen. This makes the truths harder and colder, so different from the intimate individual tales we hear.

It is so hard for people to care about things in the abstract. This is a problem of art, of fiction writing: we so often find ourselves telling stories about individuals to shine light on collective and structural problems. Because this is the level on which we first and most easily experience affection and love, it’s easier to tell stories this way, and to connect with them. So it doesn’t surprise me that many chicken-eating people can connect with a single chicken, a heroic chicken. The harder parter is getting that connection to spread, to encompass the greater species.

While some of the ethics of industrial agriculture are raised in the film, and certainly the sheer volume of chickens consumed brings forward how many lives are taken by this system, the film’s title seems to assert the role of chickens in American lives as farmed animals as the “natural history.” Is the film suggesting the state of affairs as natural? Why do you think that is?

It’s definitely an interesting title for a film that’s looking at something so specific—mass agriculture and a handful of chicken custodians in the US, without anything about the 10,000 year history of domestication, much less the life of jungle birds before we interfered in their evolution. It is really not a history, and then there’s the fact that many of the stories that it tells are told through these very funny (to me) reenactments rather than using real documentary footage. There is something that is, on the surface, so clearly artificial, that reading most generously, I hope the film is actually saying the opposite—that there is nothing natural at all about the ways to we have come to coexist with, exploit, and relate to chickens.

What have you learned about the lives and habits of chickens as you coexist with them? Did watching this film alter or inform your choice to choose this lifestyle?

My dad has kept chickens for a long time, and when we first got chickens, I will admit I was more interested in their function on my sort of miniature/aspiring homestead than I was interested in them as individual creatures. They eat food scraps; they make eggs; I’m a lacto-ovotarian with a lot of food that needs composting. It all seemed very practical. So my dad brought me a cat-carrier with four chickens in it.

The first thing most people say when I tell them I have chickens is something like “they’re so dumb.” This is basically propoganda. Chickens are not dumb; they’re about as smart as dogs. They have very complex social hierarchies. The first thing I learned is that a pecking order is a real thing. Our top chicken, Bertha, got into the coop the first evening and ruthlessly pecked everyone else as they came in. Within days, they’d established a hierarchy, and each chicken began to show her unique personality and perform her function within the flock. All day long, I hear their coos and clucks as they talk to each other.

Because I’ve developed individual relationships with chickens now, it’s that much harder for me to stomach the system they’re part of. I would love to have a very friendly pet chicken like Cotton, but in most cases, that means raising chicks. And when you buy chicks, even sexed chicks that are supposed to be female, you might get a rooster. We don’t have space for one, but I wouldn’t want to kill him. The local animal rescues are bursting with unwanted roosters. So I’ve decided we’ll stick to rescuing unwanted adult chickens (which we’ve done once so far).

Any favorite chicken stories?

Our top chicken, Bertha, passed away last year. (We brought out a chicken vet; it seems Bertha ingested a foreign object, and as much as we love our girls, chicken surgery is not in the budget.) Her second-in-command, Cali, has taken over as top chicken. While Bertha ruled through violence, Cali has asserted dominance mostly through posturing. No one challenges her, but she’s honestly bad at her job. Bertha could always get the flock to follow her out of danger or after treats, so it was easy to get the chickens in and out of their run. Cali really isn’t interested in the job of ruling—only in the perks like eating first and getting the best perch. Cali is a very relatable queen, and it goes to show how unique the social organism of the flock is.

Tune in to my conversation with Dr. Morrison, evolutionary biologist and professor, on how feathers are formed and what processes lead to each expression of color.

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A few weeks ago my students found an injured bird outside of our classroom at NYU and we used my hat and scarf to get them to the Wild Bird Fund. This time of year there are lots of fledglings to be found, even a nest of them right by my mom’s front door when I visited for Mother’s Day.

This past Friday, I was having coquito with a friend when a fledging flew into the cafe and landed on my arm.

They’d hit the wall before finding us, so we decided it was best to take them uptown, too…and so we got them into a box to the rescuers.

For this month’s archival dig, I’ll be sharing three poems, a series called “Three Johnny Carson poems” that were published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2021. Two as they were originally published (below), featuring birds, and the third behind the paywall. You can get a trial, subscribe, or go to the original publisher here to read all three together. Enjoy! :)

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I was drowsy, stuffed with the series of vegan dinner rolls that were set before me in five hour intervals over the past 26 hours. I’d been lucky—on my flight from Seoul to I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport, I found myself in a row of empty seats which I quickly turned into a bed and slept a solid few hours for the first time since I left New York.

It was the longest flight I’d ever taken, and I was equally excited as I was nervous. Since the end of last year, I’ve felt like I’ve been in a waiting room, poking my head into the hallway every now and then to make sure I’m in the right place. The answer I often receive is yes, just keep sitting. It’ll only be a moment more.

I don’t mean this is a passive way. If you know me, you know not doing is not a habit I need to break. I have multiple projects going, and if I’m not creating I don’t feel like I’m me. I’ve stopped framing this like it’s a personality trait that needs improving and now embrace this as, simply, my creativity.

But quiet, empty time is essential to that very process.

I looked to the other side of my hotel room in a hazy state, having asked to receive a symbol to guide me on my time abroad. When I got close enough to see what it was that was drawing me over, I found a dragonfly. Hello, I said, mourning the creature while also being grateful for their arrival. Thank you for guiding me.

Over the next few days, the dragonfly kept coming to me in unexpected places. From treats shared with friends to tarot pulls after meditation sessions, I felt the flutter of dragonfly at my side.

Whether it’s the Norse goddess Freyja to Irish myths of the small creature being helpful fairies in disguise to those native to the Southeast Asian terrain I was traveling who see dragonflies as symbols of a blessed rice field, I’m not the first to encounter the insect and feel a sense of transformation, luck, and possibility.

Is it so bad to believe everything in life has meaning? That we are as in conversation with the universe as we allow ourselves to be?

A childhood friend—my first playdate—was staying with me the past few days and after dinner, over tea, we acknowledged the loudness of the unknown before us. But the next day, returning to the idea, we raised the question: What if it’s better than we can even imagine? How good could it get?

There are reasons to believe the future might be worse than what we have now—the existential threat of the climate crisis not being the only global threat confronting us, or the recent arrests of students and colleagues for peaceful demonstrations, or the many other ways it feels like an impenetrable REALLY? looms over much of life, but I can’t help to lean into the bit of lightness I feel when I begin to imagine, or notice, or attend to, the fantastical moments of collaboration already underway.

This week in my writing class at one of the many universities calling for a rightful divestment from genocide, we studied Danez Smith’s “dream where every black person is standing by the ocean” and Traci Brimhall’s “A Prelude to a Revolution.” We spoke together about the way fantasy and the surreal constructs both literal and metaphorical portals in these poems, and so in our psyche, and so in our life. When the boy rises from the ocean from spit in Smith’s poem, a restoration occurs. When the guards are on fire in Brimhall’s piece, a revolution begins.

But fledging from a dream incubated into full realization takes care, protection, and…resources.

During my final days in Bali, I walked with a friend through a rainstorm in Ubud. We hadn’t brought umbrellas, and she hadn’t packed a poncho like me, so we ducked into the first open structure we saw which turned out to be a small hostel. One of the workers offered her his poncho, and we continued down the road to our destination: the Eco Petulu Bird Sanctuary and Cafe. Here fallen baby egrets are taken in to recover during the spring and summer mating season until they can be released in the fall.

Dragonflies spend most of their life as a nymph underwater—they exist here without wings and go unseen as they move through this stage, familiar only to fellow underwater creatures. When they emerge, usually after about four years of living in this way, they scale a plant to emerge to the surface. Their skin sheds. They live a few months of life like this—in flight, often looking for a mate (which, I learned, can occur mid-flight, forming the shape of a heart).

But that whole time spent in the murk, did they sense what was coming? How do they know when it’s time to break free?

Watch the video of us talking above or tune in through one of our podcast hosts:

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While it’s funny to me I now make my living as a professor, I actually didn’t want to go to college myself. The idea that some institution was going to “shape” me was not appealing. I already knew the places I learned the most about myself: the wild.

And I also knew how I would feel the most challenged—not through advanced academic classes, but hiking over 100 miles in less than a month and living out of what I could carry on my back.

My family reasoned with me that finding a group to go with would be a good compromise, and I secretly agreed. So, that’s what I did.

On one of our solo nights, I woke to mountain lion prints (mother and baby) by my open-air campsite. I was both in awe and terror. They’d spared me, but they’d seen me.

Years later, living now in Philadelphia, single for the first time in my 20s, I imagined myself back into the moment. The desert, lions scouting strayed humans. This time, I invented a woman who’d left her partner and apartment and modern life behind out of a self-inflicted exile. In the story, she wrestles with her own violent impulses and struggles to understand that sometimes resistance, physical resistance, is necessary. That sometimes that shame comes from those afraid for you to recognize, and wield, your power.

I was lucky to have a friend a few months after I finished the piece to call me to say they were putting together a new issue of their magazine, Pink Monkey Magazine, on monsters and were curious if I had anything for the theme. Hm, I thought. I just might.

What followed was a few rounds of edits with the super talented Sam Schieren and Max Cea, and personalized illustrations and collage work by Emma Caster-Dudzick.

Dug up from the lion cave, here is your monthly peek into the archive…

THE HUNT

originally published in Pink Monkey Magazine Issue 4, 2018

Some fears are meant to be stalked quietly—from afar, ignored as you pass through them like the signs and symptoms you don’t want to see. To be big and strong when facing danger only invites more in. Like how if you honk at the buck caught in your headlights on a country road, past midnight, he’ll come bounding for the dashboard. Animals think simply in response to a challenge. Rarely do they back down as guidebooks suggest.

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It feels right to be back in the writing chair on the first break between rainstorms over the past few weeks. I got back to the country as the spring showers were starting, and I was grateful to nest inside as I slept off a heavy jet lag.

Before I left, I celebrated two beautiful new books being released into the world. One was by podcast guest Gina Chung (Green Frog) and the night before was by my friend Micaiah Johnson (Those Beyond the Wall). A dog (the one and only Radcliffe) showed up and got onstage.

They felt like the right way to say goodbye to the city for a short while as I left to meet up with two friends who were traveling in Southeast Asia.

They gracefully planned a short stay in Uluwatu and Ubud with me. I’d like to write more about our experience once I have more time to process and reflect and research all of the questions that emerged while I was there.

I was also looking forward to getting back to Conversations With Animals, having recorded several episodes before I left.

It’s difficult when traveling not to place oneself inside of a sort of hero’s journey in which you’ve embarked on a kind of adventure. Metaphorically, it might be useful to see oneself in this way, to stay open to the unknown and allow for transformations as you move in a new place. But at the same time, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to detach the colonial from this idea of “seeing a new land.” While we did our best to stay with locals or locally-owned businesses, it was a question often on our mind.

Perhaps, too, this framework is an inheritance from the lens used when entering into a story. In my conversation this month with Erin from Myth Monsters podcast, the #1 Mythology Podcast on Goodpods, she shared why she decided to shift her gaze from the hero in a classic myth to those they are “defeating,” their “monsters.”

We spoke about the way monster hunters often mistake creatures like bears or rhinos for their long-sought after kill, an example of why it’s important to pause when encountering an unknown. “To misinterpret a black bear as a monster in and of itself is horrible,” Erin shares. Why is it that a malicious story or intent is often applied to these creatures, too? Who is the true “monster” in these situations?

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The stories we tell matter, and dictate how we relate to a creature. Think of snakes. “I know for a fact snakes aren’t slimy,” she continues. But these creatures are weaponized in modern media and now we equate their slither with a slime that has nothing to do with the actual surface of their skin.

We also consider the way gender plays into these stories, especially the origin of the slurs “harpie” and “banshee” as a way to perpetuate the stereotype of a “wailing woman.”

A few nights ago, till a bit hazy from the total solar eclipse that happened to be on my birthday (!!)…

…I went to a premiere screening of Sasquatch Sunset, a film that, with a lot of humor, tries to bring us closer to what we may see as monsters, and after Jesse Eisenberg shared an anecdote about the screening. In short, he was in full costume at the side of the road in northern California as a woman jogged by, not noticing, or at least reacting to, him and the film standing at the edge of the highway. The creature so mythologized in that region of the world—potentially visible, but unremarkable in that moment. What else do we miss that is right in front of us?

A few days before the eclipse, I was leaving one of my classrooms when someone asked me if I’d like to make roses with them. I joined a group of students and faculty who were at work at a table, piecing together scented colorful boxes of flowers.

It might be as simple as that.

Saying yes to what is before us.

On Thursday night, I’ll be teaching my first class at Sixth Street Community Center thanks to at Breath Club. If you haven’t checked out her awesome community of mindful breathers—I recommend! Important details about the series (Thursdays 7 - 8pm April, May, and June):

• Sliding scale $15-25 -- no one will be turned away for lack of funds!

• SIGN UP LINK HERE

• This round's proceeds will support SSCC's CSA program

  

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On the other end was Randy Winston, the Director of Writing Programs at The Center for Fiction letting me know I had been selected as one of the fellows for that year. Within weeks, I was upstairs meeting the outgoing cohort and standing alongside my fellow…fellows.

One of the outgoing fellows was Gina Chung, a writer whose newly published novel Sea Change I was excited to discover featured the bond between a grieving child and a nonhuman animal with reverence. I was equally excited to learn she had a story collection on the way that deepened these animal themes.

Green Frog is the latest from Chung, out tomorrow with events happening around the city. The collection explores Korean American womanhood, bodies, animals, and transformation as a means of survival. It’s been named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Elle, Debutiful, The Rumpus, The Millions.

from Penguin Random House

Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. She is the author of the novel SEA CHANGE (Vintage, March 28, 2023; Picador, April 13, 2023 in the Commonwealth and in the UK on August 10, 2023), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Adult Fiction Honor, a 2023 B&N Discover Pick, and a New York Times Most Anticipated Book, and the short story collection GREEN FROG (Vintage, March 12, 2024; out in the UK/Commonwealth from Picador on June 6, 2024). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School's Creative Writing Program and a BA in literary studies from Williams College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in One Story, BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Idaho Review, The Rumpus, Pleiades, and F(r)iction, among others. Her stories have been recognized by the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, the Black Warrior Review Contest, the Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, the CRAFT Elements Contest, and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest, as well as named Longform Fiction Pick of the Week.​

Photo credit: S.M. Sukardi

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In the episode, we joke about anthropomorphizing household objects, the hope hidden in sad stories, solo dates to the museum, and nonhuman animals as essential connections in human lives. In honor of the Korean folk tale the collection is named for, this month’s doodle features a daring frog, which I hope inspires you to go for whatever it is you are after, to wonder where in your life you might need to call in some disobedience.

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I’ve finally started Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead after a writing friend suggested the book to me, and I love the precious narrator asking even the police chief for his astrological details so she can interpret the roots of his cruel behavior. That poetry, the story of a chart, is something I’ve been drawn to my whole life.

There is also a delightful passage of her welcoming her neighbor’s dog into her home as a guest, just as concerned with not having food for them as she would for any other passerby.

I was trying to explain Pisces season to a colleague recently and felt myself just gesturing to the torrential rain covering the city around us. Later, I noticed Hozier’s new music video, him reading underwater, sets the tone perfectly. The colors, the mood, the normalcy of life in an atypical setting…yes.

As I considered what from the archive to share this month, I tried to feel into this sense of fantasy and sense of being washed over. I remembered a publishing call a friend sent to me years ago for an environmental justice magazine, and deciding for the first time to write for a specific submission call. I’d always worked the other way—dream first, then send. But I welcomed flipping my process upside down.

What was on my mind at that moment was a dream I had then of being a professional screenwriter, but felt conflicted by the extreme consumption that goes into the film industry, and my competing call to connect to ecology through my writing. What came to me was a character enlisted as a pilot to clean the air with a dubious climate technology, playfully called Sky Suck.

Months later, the piece was accepted, and Reckoning sent me my first check for a short story.

You can read the re-print of the story below:

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In The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander writes, “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand,” which to me feels like a call to embrace simultaneity, an idea echoed in a Maya Angelou quote I keep near my desk: “And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth.”

To grow, to move, to change, you put something on the line. Those who never grow up, who stay static, often remain in that superficial experience of life.

This month, the Howl is embracing the nature of both holding and being held, and comes at a perfect moment as I am rereading Ross Gay’s Be Holding with my students this week. Later today, we are going to practice looking at our looking at The International Center of Photography. As I went through the text again, I had the meta-experience of him writing about being on the Metro-North as I took the line home.

I had the experience this weekend of being at a protest with my friends, and noticing, as we already knew, that we were being watched high up from the top of the buildings around us by the police. The way most radical gathering is surveilled.

But there was also the beauty of the mass pod of umbrellas, the way we kept each other shielded and dry.

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A week ago, I woke in Philadelphia for the first time in five years. It was a trip I’d dreamed of—months before I woke imagining that the F train went from my Grand Street stop all the way to my old neighborhood. I stayed on the extra way, then got vegan donuts and walked around Washington Square Park and South Street. Which, last week, I did.

I set the intention to just be led during my time there, following my intuitive pulls as I moved through the miles that made up years of my life. They were important years, ones where I discovered my most urgent questions, watched them shift into new questions, fell in and out of love several times, made and lost friendships, bought my first appliances, which were used to make hummus and vegan mac & cheese for friends. Wrote and read thousands of pages. Taught my first university classes, and eventually quit my first university job.

I also adopted Ziggy, who bounced along the blocks as though they were any others. His nose was at work, the stories he was following likely much longer and deeper than my own as his 300 million olfactory receptors in his thumb-sized nose identified scent information that would be gibberish to me. Eventually, he asked to be lifted and I tucked him into my backpack where he slept as I continued on my ten mile journey around my former home.

I’d been getting frustrated as the trip wore on, the shops that had once welcomed dogs now shuttering them out. This includes some local parks, large areas of grass now strictly “pet-free.”

Dirt. In a city. Restricted from animals.

I get it, some people have allergies. Some people are rightly afraid of dogs. Maybe parents want a guarantee that their kids will be away from unpredictable canines. Sure. But…the whole park?

Service dog-only policies have taken over the city, making Philadelphia now (according to The Philadelphia Inquirer) one of the worst cities in the country for pet owners. The familiar sanitation argument is used as I browse the pro-policy threads online, arguments which obviously fall apart when considering the 1) ability to accommodate for service dogs 2) the alarmist reasoning that dog owners will let their pet run loose through the kitchen and other diner’s areas 3) washing your hands, a habit I hope most diners have in 2024, will eliminate whatever bacteria might be transferred to a diner from a dog on the other side of the room that they have not pet 4) that the very meat, eggs, and dairy many places are serving have a far more likely risk of poisoning customers than fully vaccinated pets, but I didn’t make these arguments. I left, and went to Good Karma, the cafe next to my old building that kept bowls of water on their steps and bins full of treats at the register. No faux-delineation of species was required to enter here—and so after our warm-up, I took Ziggy next door to see if he would remember our old building.

That night, I sat at the bar alone, unwilling to find out if one of my favorite vegan spots would kick out Ziggy, and got a rose hibiscus agua fresca while I waited for my nachos. I kept feeling as I do now, like the narrator of an essay, looking back on my former selves—the 20-something who trusted that some miraculous moment would find her whenever she set foot outside of her home. And how often they did come to greet her, these stunning revelations, signs, conversations, people, synchronicities. How everyday rarities were often enough for her. How they would inspire another week of crafting and teaching.

On Thursday, I went to a cacao ceremony with two friends and my departing message from the facilitator was to embody the energy of an empty vessel, to be like a rose, to soften. I saw one of my yoga teachers for a healing the day after and she gave me a bouquet of roses, pointing to the petals as she said, “it looks as though they are giving, but they are actually receiving.”

Outside on my walk home, the sky vibrated with the color of the flowers I carried, like the whole earth was echoing this message: be given to.

I slept the past two nights with the roses at my side, and this morning let them light up my writing area as I worked. I was thinking again about the public science project NASA is launching on April 8th (my birthday!) during a total solar eclipse to see how ecosystems respond to the sudden darkness. When explaining why they’d like to use the public, NASA reps said that “the general public is best suited for this type of project because the general public is everywhere.”

The general public is everywhere. The music of this line has been with me for over a week.

As I stopped a coffee shop on my block in my new neighborhood during Ziggy’s morning walk, my heart filled as one of the baristas squirmed their way to their floor with delight at seeing him entered. From their knees, they looked up at me and asked, “Can I give him a treat?” They carefully prepared him a special drink, holding up the line to play with him, laughing as he scooped up the treat.

Sometimes it’s a small moment like this that frees you. That reminds you that you are exactly where you’re meant to be. That teaches you the enchantment that accompanies a moment you choose to receive.

One of the places I was led during my time in my former city was to the waterfront and down to the Hope Fence at Penn’s Landing. I happen to have a lock on my keychain that I use when I go swimming after I lecture or to lock up my coat at the running store before I head out to circle the park with my running group. The dark blue metal is beat up from these years of use, of falling to the hard cement as I fumble with my thick gloves to turn the worn numbers.

For the final time, I put in my code, then joined this small protector to the wall, my wishes knocking against hundreds of others. Hundreds more to come, I’m sure.

For this week’s bonus doodle, I think back on my interview with two biologists on the collective movements of ants, and weave these lessons in with the ritual of a publicly cast wish. What it means, to me, to live in a city, to not just mourn in public (like we discuss in this month’s podcast) but to dream. To witness that…

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Conversations with Animals is a monthly conversation hosted by Juliana examining our interconnection with animal lives. Subscribe here: animal.julianaroth.com

#vegan #animals #grief #ritual #motherhood #memoir #ebbartels #pets #bostonwriters #climateoptimism #julianaroth #podcast

Juliana is a writer, professor, filmmaker, and performer. She formerly lived as a volunteer on an organic farm in Maine, out of a backpack in the wilderness of Utah’s La Sal Mountains, and worked for the Ecology Center. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, Irish Pages, Los Angeles Review of Books as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. A 2022-23 Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction, she currently teaches writing at NYU.

Get in touch: www.julianaroth.com

But isn’t it? To constantly bring forward a woman’s appearance, and the presumption of her naivety or innocence due to a perceived age? The desire to do so reveals more about his own desire to find value in his own age, whatever discomfort it is my presence stirs in him. This often happens at work, getting confused for a student rather than professor. Or on jobs I’ve been hired for, or for opportunities I’ve won. How old are you? How old are you? AKA, why do you have the right to be here?

Youth is something many cling to—the undying trend of ranking artists under 40 or shutting down conversations on death and dying with forced positivity. Ours is a death-phobic culture, reflected not just in the embarrassingly short bereavement leaves, but the lack of public rituals for mourning.

Grief, too, is often seen as a process reserved for the loss of other humans. While I’ve learned my grief journey for the loss of my father is lifelong, there is no end date, I often felt strange about the intense pain I felt, a similar one, when a childhood pet passed. I’ve learned over time that grief is something we experience for not only our family, pets, and the grotesque loss of animal life through farming, but for dreams. For relationships, past lives. Promises and wishes. What we’ve attached to leaves an absence when it feels as though that attachment has been broken whether through death, betrayal, breakup, or other means of separation.

“We can really learn a lot from them about the here and now,” author E.B. Bartels replies when I ask what we can learn from other animals on how best to live our lives with the knowledge of its impermenance.

This month, I speak with E.B. about her memoir Good Grief: On Loving Pets Here and Hereafter (HarperCollins), and in our conversation she shares with me her thoughts on motherhood, communal grieving, pet families, and interspecies friendships.

E.B. Bartels. (HarperCollins)

E.B. Bartels is a nonfiction writer, a former Newtonville Books bookseller, and a GrubStreet instructor, with a BA in Russian from Wellesley College and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University.

Her work has appeared in Salon, Slate, WBUR, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, The Believer, The Rumpus,  The Millions, The Toast, The Butter, and the anthology The Places We’ve Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. For Fiction Advocate, she writes the monthly columns Non-Fiction by Non-Men, in which she interviews women, trans, and non-binary people who write nonfiction, and Non-Fiction about Non-Humans, in which she interviews people who write nonfiction about animals.

In addition to writing, E.B. also works as a freelance editor, a manuscript consultant, a writing coach, a tutor, and a senior editorial writer in the communications and public affairs department at Wellesley College. She lives outside Boston with her husband, Richie, and their a chihuahua-pitbull mix (Seymour), a pair of red-footed tortoises (Terrence and Twyla), a small flock of pigeons (Bert, Lieutenant Dan, George, and Lucille), and a dozen fish (all named Milton).

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Stay present. Stay well.

With love,

Juliana

But what I also know, and what nature teaches me, is that we live in cycles. We have to trust that from the descent comes the ascent. And that without difficult knowledges and experiences we live in ignorance, unaware of our true power and most particularly the often invisible support or promise dormant in those dark times.

One of my favorite writers, and fellow Subtack-er, , captures this profound truth in her memoir Wintering. I won the book in a GoodReads contest last winter when I was in a similarly dark moment of supporting my mother through serious health issues, and it felt like a gentle nudge into remembering what I’d already known: “If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”

It would be a shame to frame a difficult moment without recognizing the power and insight it brings. Or, as Maggie Rogers puts it in her song “The Kinfe,” “The knife of insight tore its way in me / A brash collision without sympathy…Beautiful how it all pours out / After dark, after light.”

For those who are interested in the cultural history of pagan traditions, we recently celebrated Nordic holiday in early February called Imbolc. Not as heavily known as the equinoxes and solstices, this holiday marks the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox. It translates, loosely, to being in the belly of the Mother, or soon to be born back into the light of spring (which reminds me, for the second year in a row Maggie Rogers is releasing new music during my birthday week (last year it was the first solo on my birthday itself, now it’s the full album :)) which is at the start of spring).

The poem for this month’s deep dive, “Longer Than Night Anyhow,” came from a line my then-partner said off-handedly about a colleague, and I couldn’t get the music of it out of my head. I wrote the piece in one sitting at the tiny writing desk shoved in the corner of my Philadelphia bedroom. It is inspired by a Norwegian village that goes six months without sun and the cycle of plants furling and unfurling their leaves at night. I discovered what we can learn from this village, and these plants, in storing up our own sunshine, in standing strong in the tests of our own lives. In writing the piece, I asked myself: “How do we endure when the land feels vacant?”

I hope this poem helps you through a difficult period you may be in your own life, or, if you’re in the northeast, these last few weeks until spring.

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She’s a scientist, and I wanted to know if she’d seen the film Dream Scenario, which I’d gone to see a few days before. The hallucinatory experience of the film was fresh in my mind, and as someone who has tracked their dreams since childhood, unafraid to be that person to text someone if they were a character the night before, I was curious what biologists thought of the phenomenon shown in the film—an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself a dream figure imagined by people across the world, most of whom never even met him. What’s more—he was a biologist who’d studied collective behavior of ants, and ants show collective characteristics that are unique to their species. What parallels were being drawn in the filmmaking?

While there’s a lot more to the plot, and a lot I don’t want to give away, those elements were the ones I turned over with my friend. And we began to joke around about me doing an interview with biologists on their take of the film.

Well, if you know me, you know…that’s exactly what I did. She introduced me to two of her friends, Evan and Gavin, who are Buffalo-based biologists and data scientists with a special focus on behavioral ecology and social behavior. And, yes…ants.

from Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario (A24)

They were generous enough to say yes.

Over winter break, Evan and Gavin watched the film and wrote back and forth with me about the story’s scientific themes and some of the places where the characters fall short. I learned a great deal by speaking with them, and my own movie-going experience was deepened by the exchange.

But that night, weeks earlier, my friend rode her bike home, and I sat with my students in Bryant Park as we enjoyed our winter snacks in the crowd of ice skaters, shoppers, and tourists fighting for a seat. Despite the scarcity of tables, the snatching up of any chair unoccupied for more than ten seconds, a table about three feet away from us sat unused. It was as though a spell was cast over it—a bouquet of roses left on its surface. The flowers themselves remained untouched. We laughed together for the hour we sat there, marveling at how magical the roses’ appearance seemed. Each time a group got near, they abandoned their plan. At one point, a little girl nearly reached for a stem, but then quickly treated. A collective agreement had been reached, one without words: don’t touch.

That weekend, I spent hours laying on my back at the Hall of Illusions watching Chagall and Kandinsky images projected on the inside of the cathedral. I thought of the flowers from the ice rink, of the connective act of seeing a film, of the strange dance we arrive at as humans in public spaces, and that childlike wonder seems to always linger at the border, ready to pierce through.

My chat with Evan Kelemen, PhD (Researcher and Data Scientist) and Gavin M. Leighton, PhD (Professor and Researcher) starts below:

Juliana: I thought it was interesting that the film plays explicitly with Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious and makes an overt link to psychoanalytic theory with Paul running into his former girlfriend Claire and her writing about the dreams she’d been having of him. This leads to her revealing a global collective unconscious manifesting through these synchronized Paul-dreams, a possibility that is perhaps otherwise not universally accepted by scientists as being observable, but in Dream Scenario, it is. It felt to me like there were connections being made early on that the way ants operate as a collective may actually suggest how a collective unconscious is already at work, just not observable in humans in the ways scientists might like to see in order to make a claim around it.

What was really interesting to me was hearing afterward how ant colonies might mirror the way neurons operate in the human brain. I felt like the filmmakers were making a connection between the individual dreamers as ants themselves in this sort of hive-mind of reality, but I’m also not an evolutionary biologist. So, I want to begin by asking you both if there is a general perception biologists have around ants that outsiders might not be aware of? 

Gavin: I think biologists tend to regard ants as paragons of social evolution and as a group they are extremely ecologically successful. In fact, a fairly recent study suggested there were about 2.5 million ants for every person that exists on earth. Ants are found on almost every continent and extend through almost every ecosystem. Few other major animal groups can claim this sort of geographical breadth and abundance. Early on in the movie Nic Cage asks ‘who is here for the lecture on kin selection?’; kin selection is a fundamental theory in social evolution so it would make sense that someone that works on ants would be lecturing on this theory in one of their classes.

Evan: Ants can be selfish. Yes, as a collective they they can accomplish many things, but it is not altruistic. There are fitness advantages to working together. In species that can, workers will lay eggs. In response, policing has evolved where workers eat their sisters eggs who ‘cheat’. What makes them fascinating is why they work together. 

That is fascinating. Are ants a subject that is widely studied or are they as niche as they’re presented to be in the film?

Gavin: This is a tricky question. I think within the fields of ecology/evolution/behavior ants are a relatively well-studied group. As far as insect groups as a whole they are possibly the most well-studied group. However, insects are understudied compared to vertebrates if you look at overall species diversity. In other words, there are about as many ant species as bird species in the world (if I’m remembering my species diversity estimates correctly) and there have been considerably more studies on birds. So I don’t think they would be considered some niche subject within biology. 

Evan: Research in ants has broad applications. Ants do have an appeal for collective problem solving. Insights leveraged from their collective behaviors have been integrated into cyber security, navigation, and robotics. 

Are there any parallels between patterns we might observe in data that could speak to the possibility of a collective unconscious? With that, does data often show that we might all behave in similar ways, even ones that can be predicted?

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