Falmouth Public Library is a stately building on sweet little Main Street in Falmouth, the corner of the Cape near Woods Hole, littered with PhDs and farmer’s markets and ferries bound for the islands. There was a nice turnout, and it was great to meet my doppleganger, a woman whose mother had come from India around the same time as mine and also married a fair-skinned American. Good conversations, during the Q&A, and after. A Punjabi man arrived late, straight from his English classes, and he told me about how he once worked for the water department there. “There is no good water in Punjab,” he said to me, shaking his head. “No good water.”
#ReadDifferent at Decatur Book Fest
Typewriters, music, teen tent, children’s stage, guerilla haiku, sunny skies, throngs of people (80,000 I heard), authors from every genre, and the occasional raptor overhead. It was a fine weekend for the Decatur Book Festival, celebrating its tenth year. It was great to sit down with Anna Badkhen, author of Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah, in a conversation led by writer Anjali Enjeti in the plush red-carpeted Decatur First United Methodist Chapel. We discussed being an outsider, the uniquely American phenomenon of climate change denial, how much we trust digital equipment, whether to step into our stories (or, rather, admit to doing so), and, of course, vultures.
WCAI the Point with Mindy Todd
I love WCAI, the local NPR affiliate here on the Cape & Islands. I love the way sounds surprise me on it, as it shifts from reporting on Syria to a thirty-second Sonic ID of a boy describing the revving of an engine — vroom! vroom! — or a clammer telling stories from the old days. But I especially love the soothing voice and inquisitiveness of Mindy Todd on her show The Point. So it was with great pleasure that I got to sit with her for an hour in the cool WCAI studio this morning and talk about A River Runs Again.
And then, one can’t pass up the opportunity for a popover from the Pie in the Sky bakery across the street, so I didn’t. What should come lumbering by but a massive load of oceanographic equipment from WHOI, with solar panels and whirligigs and a tremendous aura of mystery and intrigue. #Ifuckinglovescience.
kickin’ it off at Porter Square Books
A River Runs Again book tour got off to a lovely start on a sultry night in Cambridge, where — in spite of summer ending and the school year starting — a great crowd of folks came out to the fiercely independent Porter Square Books. Thanks to my friend and wonderful talented musician, Mark Erelli, for snapping a few photos.
hitting the road soon
Lots of book tour events are lining up. Check the calendar here for all updates & details.
- Wed., Sept. 2 (7:00 pm): Porter Square Books, Cambridge, MA
- Thurs., Sept. 3: WCAI The Point with Mindy Todd (Cape Cod NPR)
- Sat., Sept. 5 (11:15 am): AJC Decatur Book Festival, Atlanta GA
- Wed., Sept. 9 (7:00 pm): Falmouth Public Library, Falmouth, MA
- Thurs., Sept. 24 (7:30 pm): Wellfleet Preservation Hall, Wellfleet, Cape Cod, MA
- Wed., Sept 30 (12:30 pm): UVA Medical Center Hour, Charlottesville, VA
- Tues., Oct. 13 (3:00 pm): Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC
- Thurs., Oct. 15 (6:00 pm): NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, NYC, NY
- Sat., Oct. 17: Texas Book Festival, Austin, TX (details TBD)
- Oct. 23 – 25: Indo-American Arts Council Literary Festival, Hunter College, New York, NY (details TBD)
- Sun., Nov. 1: The Axe & Fiddle, Cottage Grove, OR
- Mon., Nov. 2 (7:30 pm): Powell’s on Hawthorne, Portland, OR
- Tues., Nov. 3 (7:00 pm): Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle, WA
- Thurs., Nov. 5 (7:00 pm): San Francisco World Affairs Council, San Francisco, CA
- Tues., Nov. 17 (6:30 pm): Sturgis Library, Barnstable, Cape Cod, MA
- Sat., Nov. 21: Miami Book Fair International, Miami, FL (details TBD)
Hope to see you. If not, there’s always this. 🙂
“filigree of cautionary & celebratory stories”
A few weeks ago, the Christian Science Monitor included A River Runs Again in its list of the Ten Best Books of August. Just today, they’ve published a lovely review of it by Peter Lewis. A close reader, he writes with eloquence and wonderful turns-of-phrase, comparing India to a Rube Goldberg contraption that’s been thrown out of whack by environmental upheaval. He writes:
Meera Subramanian’s A River Runs Again tells five tales of India at the crossroads – a filigree of cautionary and celebratory stories – voiced with dignified passion….
Subramanian navigates these rough waters between baneful emergencies and precarious signs of enlightened attitudes with the right degree of cautious optimism.
pub date!
It’s official. A River Runs Again is now available in bookstores across the US. (Of course, Amazon has been sending it out for weeks.) To find out which independent bookseller near you will be stocking it, check here, or call up your local library and encourage them to purchase a copy for their collection. Then you, too, can look like this man:
It will be coming out in India, as Elemental India: The Natural World at a Time of Crisis and Opportunity, soon!
found on Haul Rd
Still, always, I am enraptured. The sense memory of a peregrine falcon remains in my hands though it has been years now since I held one. But this gyrfalcon is new to my skin, new to my eyes. I think she’s a she, larger than a female peregrine, and she is dead and frozen on the table in the trailer of Lab 1 at Toolik Field Station on the North Slope of Alaska. Dalton Highway, better known as Haul Road for the semis that carry supplies back and forth between inland Fairbanks and Deadhorse on the Arctic Ocean, parallels the spine of the pipeline through this part of Alaska. On that road, the gyrfalcon most likely made contact with some vehicle passing through. Toolik people found her on the side of the road, intact, limp, just a dollop of blood at the edge of her beak. I found her in the -80 freezer, clouds of coolness pooling at my feet when Seth, the Toolik naturalist, opened the double door and found the plastic bag with her remains. He sets her out on the table. Switches on the light. He lets me hold her, the weight hefty for the hollow-boned fighter. Ice crystals glaze her beak, sweep over her eyes, cinched shut. Her tail is long, barred with bands of smoky grey and and smudged tan, the striations of feathers running on the diagonal. Her head tucks in toward one rounded shoulder, a demure pose, cozy and shy and frozen in place like the permafrost that lies below this northern land. On a piece of paper in the bag are the details: “Found on Haul Road btwn Slope Mtn & OKs culverts 7.17.2015″
Life forms larger than a mosquito are few and far between here on the halo of the earth. Ground squirrels scrambling along the tundra underfoot and the arora borealis, a different type of life force, invisible but existent overhead, masked by the eternal daylight this time of year. There is a buzz with each wolf or grizzly sighting, a coveted moment of witnessing great bigness. The ground is alive with microorganisms, and bees hover around the purple glow of fireweed blooms that are hopeful that a seed might form before the killing freeze arrives. But today there is one less gyrfalcon flying through these wide open skies. Seth slips her back into the bag and returns her to the raptor morgue.
@toolik @Mblscience #eulogy #gyrfalcon #raptor #Alaska #truestoryshort
the pluck
About 35 years ago, when most ecologists were still musing about how we’d deal with the ice age that models then showed was on its way, young scientists Gus Shaver, Terry Chapin and John Hobbie set up camp on an old abandoned airstrip at Toolik Lake on the North Slope of Alaska. Scientists tinker and so when they gazed at this wild and beautiful yet nutrient-poor place, bereft of nitrogen and phosphorous found in the temperate regions of the globe, they wondered what might happen [Read more…]
fishscape on the kuparuk river
At the Woods Hole portion of the MBL Logan Science Journalism fellowship, we worked with researcher Linda Deegan. Fishscape, one of her projects, is underway here at Toolik. She’s not here now, but I went out today with her research team as they collect data along the Kuparuk River, studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic grayling, a freshwater fish in the salmon family. The commute, via a Roberston-44 helicopter, was pretty thrilling. And, is it just me, or did the face of Jesus appear in the tundra around :30??
The ride was over much too quickly, and [Read more…]
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