Words Matter (omit useless ones)

June 15, 2026 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Omit Needless Words quote from Strunk & White

Most everywhere profs and teachers are submitting grades and students are scattering. I like to be contrarian. I’ve left Cape Cod and returned to the mountain that is Sewanee, Tennessee for another round—my seventh—of teaching creative nonfiction to a fine group of curious, crafty individuals at the School of Letters. It is here in the cool of the Cumberland Plateau that we can revel in this fact: words matter.

I was struck by this fact (again) when I finally watched the film H is for Hawk, the adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s sublime book of the same title. It was quiet and powerful in a way, I suppose, but being a story about interiority, about the collapsing struggle of grief and loss and depression, it just didn’t translate to the screen for this viewer. There was a contrived friend I don’t recall from the book that seemed like a set up for explanations, and it completely eliminated the second storyline that follows the complicated story of falconer T.H. White training his own hawk, as she is.

Man's hand removing falconry hood from a bird of prey

Words matter. They can do so much to capture the heartbeat of human experience. I liked the movie, but I love the book. Have read it multiple times. Taught it. I use one passage to show how a writer can stop time and then breathe into it. Let it expand and take hold of us just by the careful decisions about pacing and word choice. When to let sentences tumble together and when to make them stop suddenly, iridescent and catching the light of experience. In the movie, she meets the gyrfalcon she wants to train for falconry. The scene is…fine. On the page, well, here, take a moment and read it, out loud, to revel in the sound of it, the way the images sear themselves into your mind’s eye:

Then he knelt on the concrete, untied a hinge on the smaller box and squinted into its dark interior. A sudden thump of feathered shoulders, and the box shook as if someone had punched it, hard, from within. “She’s got her hood off,” he said, and frowned. That light, leather hood was to keep the hawk from fearful sites. Like us.

Another hinge untied. Concentration. Infinite caution. Daylight irrigating the box. Scratching talents, another thump. And another. Thump. The air turned syrupy, slow, flecked with dust. The last few seconds before a battle. And with the last bow pulled free, he reached inside, and amidst a whirring, chaotic clatter of wings and feet and talons and a high-pitched twittering and it’s all happening at once, the man pulls an enormous, enormous hawk out of the box and in a strange coincidence of world and deed a great flood of sunlight drenches us, and everything is brilliance and fury. The hawk’s wings, barred and beating, the sharp fingers of her dark tipped primaries cutting the air, her feathers raised like the scattered quills of a fretful porpentine. Two enormous eyes. My heart jumps sideways. She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary. Something bright and distant, like gold falling through water. A broken marionette of wings, legs and light-splashed feathers. She is wearing jesses, and the man holds them. For one awful, long moment, she is hanging head-downward, wings open, like a turkey in a butcher’s shop, only her head is turned right-way-up and she is seeing more than she has ever seen before in her whole short life. Her world was an aviary no larger than a living room. Then it was a box. But now is this; and she can see everything. the point-source glitter on the waves, a diving cormorant a hundred yards out; pigment flakes under wax on the lines of parked cars; far hills and the heather on them and miles and miles of sky where the sun spreads on dust and water and illegible things moving in it that are white scraps of gulls. Everything startling and newstamped upon her entirely astonished brain.

Man with falcon on his arm, its wings extended

Oh, yes. YES. In class this summer, I shaped the syllabus around the 250th anniversary of this construct we call our nation, and the twentieth anniversary of the School of Letters, and we’re reading everything from Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates to One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El-Akkad and Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl, but also wildly diverse (in every sense) writers from Henry Adams to Elissa Washuta to Jeff Sharlet. Wonderful, powerful words. May we never stop reading and writing to understand our place in the world.

And from the Department of Good News…

…Mine…

Lots of goodness is still happening with the new graphic novel, A Better World Is Possible, including an opinion piece I wrote for TIME on Earth Day, an interview with Bookstr, and a bunch of podcasts, some still in the works. There are new events, too, that you can find out about on the site. But two coming up quick…
If you (or someone you know) is in New Orleans this Saturday, June 20, come on over to Melba’s to get a Po’boy and snag a free copy of the book and ask me anything you like! High noon.
And then on Saturday, June 27, I’ll be in conversation with my friend, fab author, and fellow Sewanee faculty Jamie Quatro at Pennington’s Books in Chattanooga. Here are all the deets:
Back in May, Stories from a Warming World was a Moth-like storytelling event at CitySpace in Boston with my fellow BU MISI fellows. I took listeners to North Dakota, and other took them to New Orleans and California and Long Island Sound, each story echoing off the others. You can watch the whole event here:
And then I was back at CitySpace for the WBUR Festival to share the stage with the incredible singer-songwriter, and friend, Mark Erelli, bringing together songs from his new album Spring Green and my words and Danica’s images from the graphic novel. It was a plan we hatched last fall and it was such a joy to see it come to be.

Teens at the Museum of Science in Boston interviewed me (and Jocelyn Poste, who’s an educator associate at the museum) this spring as part of their YES Enrichment Career Explorations. The resulting short videos are to help teens expand their awareness of STEM-related careers. I wish I’d had something like this when I was in high school! Here are three of the videos:

I have a behind-the-scenes look at the process of creating A Better World Is Possible in the SEJournal.
Smashpages had a nice write up associated with a Picture + Panel event I did with graphic novelist Katy Doughty, moderated by WBUR environmental correspondent Barbara Moran. It was fun talking about both the end of, and the bettering of, the world!
For the German speakers out there, my New Yorker piece on the tentative recovery of the vulture population in Nepal was reprinted in the European Reader’s Digest in German. Have a look here.
{Welp. After that roundup, now I know why I haven’t had the time to write a Substack for the last two months….}

And the good news of others…

Each spring I get to join a wonderful crew of writers and editors to select the next Matthew Power Literary Award winner. Or, rather, winners! This year, $15,000 went to the powerhouse journalist Danielle Mackey, who will be continuing her investigations into the complicated relationship between the United States and El Salvador. Runner-up Michael Adno will receive $7,500 to pursue a story of a botanic mystery in the Pacific Ocean. Can’t wait to see what these two produce. And if you’re a narrative journalist wanting to pursue a deep dive, keep this award on your radar. Applications go live in the winter.
Unvaccinated Under God by Kira Ganga Kieffer, who was our fearless assistant for the RESP fellowship, got a shout out in The New Yorker, which describes it as a, “concise and lucid history, grounded in the observation that anti-vaxxers are poorly understood in part because vaccine proponents shame skeptics as aberrant.” Kira instead explores the deep roots of vaccine hesitancy through the lens of religious belief as a way to move toward greater understanding.
Congrats to the talented writer Lavinia Spalding, who also happens to be my delightful sis-in-law, who once again edited the The Best Women’s Travel Writing. Volume 13. Cheers to all the storytellers in this latest edition.
Cheers also to fellow Sewanee faculty Rebecca Gayle Howell’s new book Erase Genesis. Here we are in conversation about it at Orion. Another Sewanee poetry prof and the leader of the new Hellbender Gathering of Poets, Nickole Brown, just signed a book deal with Timber Press for a book on cicadas. Could not be in better hands.
BU MISI fellow, photographer Julia Cumes has a new site up featuring her incredible work and a book in the works.

Journalists & writer friends, take note…

Sneaking up fast, but there’s still time to apply to the the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference, which takes place Tuesday, June 23 to Friday, June 26 at Bemidji State University.
Orion is offering an online writing workshop, Bel Canto: Writing the Lyric Essay, with Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams that includes generative writing prompts and a chance to workshop one full-length lyric essay. Deadline: June 20
Journalists in Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan or Madagascar looking to report on biodiversity or nature-based solutions should apply for Earth Journalism Network story grants of up to 1,800 EUR. Deadline: June 30
And for those in SE Asia, Mongabay is offering a Southeast Asia Ocean Reporting Fellowship. Deadline: June 25
Do you have a screenplay idea that incorporates climate change themes? NRDC and partners are offering a fellowship that grants $20,000 each to three writers to support development. Deadline: December 4
The Pulitzer Center is now accepting applications for its initiative focused on climate change and its effects on workers and work. Apply here.
Center for Health Journalism is offering journalists an opportunity to transform their reporting by training them to “interview the data” as if it were a human source with its Data Fellowship. Deadline: July 22
SEJ’s Energy Reporting 101 for Environmental Journalists webinar this Wednesday, June 12. 1-2 p.m. ET. Register here.
And I got to join Meaghan Parker and Ethan Bakuli for an Uproot Project event about how to “Get that Bag,” a webinar all about how to find and apply to the grants and fellowships that, unfortunately, are key to making a career in journalism work. Here’s a recording of the event:

I’m reading…

There was so little time for pleasure reading this spring but I did listen, as I moved from her to there and back again, to the audio book of Kiran Desai’s new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It deserved all the praise it got. The incredible thick description, not being afraid to take up the page, and so perfectly capturing the best and worst of the two countries and cultures I know best: America and India. Highly recommend.

Green Fondo Berkshires 2026

Steve and I are joining Team Eco.Cyclers for a Climate Ride fundraiser. We’ll be riding fifty miles in two days (!) to raise money for positive climate solutions. I don’t take money for this Substack, but if you’d like to donate, you can do so here. No amount too small. Or large. 🚴🏼 🚴🏼 🚴🏼

Coda

To be in the woods of the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee is to hear one of my favorite sounds, the song of the wood thrush. Did you know that, like many birds, the wood thrush uses an organ called the syrinx to produce sound, but the cool thing is that the syrinx has two independent sides, each controlled by its own set of muscles. They can produce two sounds simultaneously. Press play and close your eyes….

The Lady at the Entrance: On American belonging and possibility

July 6, 2025 By meerasub Leave a Comment

My dad reaches for words more than he used to. A few years ago, we met regularly on Zoom so I could interview him about his life. I’d given him homework on our third meeting: tell me about places that have been meaningful to you. He arrived to our fourth meeting ready with notes.

“The first places of importance, of significance,” he began, “is the lady at the entrance.”

“Wait, what does that mean?” I asked, not willing to let a single ambiguity linger.

“The freedom… What do you call that?”

Ah, I realized, drawing on the telepathy between father and daughter. The Statue of Liberty. I liked his name better. The lady at the entrance. When he arrived to New York City, with his cardboard suitcase in 1959, three weeks and a day after he left India, he didn’t go through immigration on Ellis Island, closed a handful of years earlier. But he did arrive into New York Harbor. He saw the copper-clad woman with her upheld torch standing on her wee island on the edge of an immense continent that was all possibility.

What do those of us born here see? What did I see, on our visits to the city from nearby New Jersey, where I was born? From a tour boat, with visiting relatives, when I saw the image above, that my Dad snapped? A statue I took for granted. Inert, yet eternal. I believed, as that kid, that the level of the water at her island’s perimeter that would always be static. But my faith that she’d always be standing there, greeting newcomers, was already beginning to fray.

Later generations of my Indian family have come, too. I’ve never talked about the lady at the entrance with a favorite cousin who came in the 1990s. Instead, we’d repeat lines from Eddie Murphy, who plays an African prince in Coming to America:

Good morning, my neighbors! (he cries from his fire escape in Queens)

Hey, fuck you! (shouts back a neighbor)

After the 2016 election, I traveled around America asking those in conservative communities who have faced climate impacts (floods, droughts, failed harvests), about their perceptions of climate change for an Inside Climate News nine-part series (and an Orion piece that feels positively wishful now).

I only touched on it briefly in the pieces but multiple times, die-hard Republicans shared stories about how much they depended on their immigrant employees. They could not—no matter the pay—find local (read White) people both capable and willing to do the work that needed doing. In Georgia, that meant pruning peach trees and stacking up the limbs into massive piles in the mid-summer heat. The locals, I was told, didn’t last ‘til noon. In Texas, that meant getting on a shrimp boat that would be at sea for the next two months. The locals, I was told, showed up for departure drunk. The folks I talked to didn’t want to go on the record. But as business men, they knew who was a good worker. Some were in the country legally. Many, I imagine, were not. It saddened them that that their (White) neighbors didn’t want the work. But the reality was that they didn’t.

ICE deportations and detentions are at record levels, sweeps targeting the places people go looking for daywork—7-Elevens and Home Depots. Crackdowns in places that have been established as sanctuary cities. Good morning, my neighbors! Some arrests are made by men in plainclothes, setting the stage where anyone can impersonate an officer, can decide the fate of another, can disappear another human being. Hey! Fuck you!

Where is the lady at the entrance? Where is the recognition of who is actually doing the labor in this country, below the burning sun that beats on the agricultural fields of the Central Valley, behind the restaurant’s swinging kitchen doors and the swinging hammers clutched on rooftops?

I’m still harboring a crush on Spain, meanwhile, which is welcoming immigrants. (I get there are limitations to which immigrants, but still….) El País ran a report in 2022: “A day without immigrants,” recognizing their roles in agriculture, construction, healthcare. Recognizing that “without them, Spain simply would not function.”

No such recognition here from the powers that be. These days, it’s not just my Dad who’s struggling as they reach for words.

Upcoming…

On a lighter note…mushroom! Join Orion and the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN) on July 17 (2-3pm ET) to celebrate Orion’s Summer 2025 issue, The Future Is Fungi. I’ll be in conversation with FERN editor Theodore Ross and the wonderful writer Erica Berry, talking about our pieces (here & here). Register here.

Woman smiling behind a table full of books

I’m reading/listening…

My time teaching at the School of Letters in Sewanee, TN is fast coming to a close. The students and fellow faculty are all inspiring, as are those who run the program. Assistant director April Alvarez, with a team that includes one of my former students, Sam Worley, have launched The Suitcase, a podcast that tells a fascinating story of the South in the first half of the last century through the life of Ely Green, a mixed-race man. Have a listen. More episodes coming soon.
This year I have the delight of teaching with two new faculty, Dan Hornsby and Rebecca Gayle Howell. I deeply enjoyed Dan’s novel Via Negativa. And at the first faculty reading, Rebecca shared work from her new prose poem, Erase Genesis, forthcoming in November 2025. I’ll let Rebecca tell you what it is in her own words: she “made the poems by repeatedly erasing the first three chapters of Genesis (KJV), where the creation myths are told. Each time I came to the chapter again, a new poem emerged. Eventually, this accumulated into a new creation myth, one that seems to begin at climate change and centers the Earth’s vast and divine intelligence for interconnected being.” Oh, yes! This is going to be a gorgeous book, with an aching message. Here’s a peek:

mostly redacted text, only leaving words "the earth, the earth..." and more

Thanks to Michelle Nijhuis of Conservation Works for tipping me off about Boyce Upholt’s new magazine, Southlands, which aims to capture the unique land and life of Southern habitats. (I reviewed Boyce’s book The Great River for Scientific American a couple years ago.) See what Southlands is up to and pitch in if you want to help make it happen!
I also had the joy of reading writer and illustrator (and one of our RESP fellows) Martha Park’s debut book, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, a literary love song to the future, beheld with an expectant hope. Daughter of a mainline Protestant preacher, native of Memphis, Martha writes of the human experience, quite literally, from the deeply personal act of giving birth to the reported inquiry into green burials in the American South, shattering the typical glass wall that separates writing about the climate crisis and writing about faith, and she does it with humility and grace. She absolutely wowed my Creative Nonfiction class when she came to visit last week. We also had a lovely conversation that was just published on Orion.
I tore through Alison Bechdel’s new comic novel, Spent, and am savoring Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hull, a graphic memoir about her immigrant mother and grandmother. I taught the start of the it in my class and we keep returning to it again and again.
“Is nature alive?” The short answer is “Hell, yes!” but the longer answer to the question is explored in Robert Macfarlane’s new book Is a River Alive? Here’s Elizabeth Rush’s review of it: A New Concept for Fighting Climate Change.

Coda…

Sewanee environs, in various stages of life, seeding, death.

Writing this Warming World

June 26, 2024 By meerasub Leave a Comment

**Join me and four brilliant writers this fall! Registration open now! **

From climate change to climate catastrophe to existential crisis, the vocabulary of our changing planet is quickly escalating in urgency. Writers are responding. Whether you are just finding your way into this space or have been writing about the natural world for years, this class is designed to help you find the right words to meet this moment of metamorphosis. How do we bring the personal and planetary together? How do we render beauty in a world aflame? In what ways is the state of the planet changing the shape of our lives? As chroniclers of the natural world under transformation, how does our ink find the fine line between hope and despair, or should it?

Led by author and journalist Meera Subramanian, this four-week course explores writing the twinned experience of climate grief and fierce love for the planet. Conversations with guest authors Emily Raboteau, Elizabeth Rush, J. Drew Lanham, and Helen Macdonald will shed light on the unique challenges that nature writers and climate journalists face. Learn how these five exemplary writers who cross genres in the climate space today are navigating common conundrums.

We’ll look closely at the work of our guest authors to deepen our understanding of best practices in portraying the physical world as it changes. We’ll analyze craft but also make space for thornier issues such as political realities and flagging morale. We’ll discuss the use of braided essays and other structural devices that are especially useful to storytellers and journalists in this niche, and get practical about how to deepen narratives with research and reporting.

Students will get weekly writing prompts and assignments to catalyze their climate writing, giving you the tools you need to work towards a solid draft essay by the end of the course. Although we will not be workshopping, there will be ample opportunities to ask questions and share struggles and insights. Participants will also receive a suggested reading list to serve as inspiration beyond the last class, as well as a list of outlets that publish climate-related writing or that are especially interested in stories with a strong element of place or nature.

This course will take place on Zoom on Sundays, November 3-24 from 12 to 2 p.m. EST. Participants will receive a Zoom link prior to the course as well as a recording of the course afterwards. We cannot offer refunds once the course has begun. Please email [email protected] with any questions.

A limited number of scholarships may be available for this course; please send a brief statement outlining how and why a scholarship would impact your ability to attend to [email protected] by October 14 and we’ll get back to you by October 21.

Off Assignment’s Masters’ Series courses are unique four-session courses on in-depth writing topics that harness the perspectives and craft tactics of a lead instructor plus celebrated guest lecturers, such that participating writers gain a wealth of input while benefiting from the cohesive leadership of one renowned writer in a particular niche of nonfiction.

Climate Change as Threat (& Opportunity) Multiplier

May 26, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

My year at Princeton University is coming to a close, although the second half of the spring semester was disrupted, as everything has been, by the COVID-19 pandemic. But I still wanted to share the syllabus for the class, which includes the adaptations I made given the shifting situation. After spring break in March, we all transitioned to Zoom, and our planned trip to a local farm to learn about carbon farming had to be cancelled, but the class remained a great series of discussions, inquiries, tough questions, thoughtful answers, exciting possible solutions, and more.

Here’s the description for ENV 381, which was cross-listed in journalism and urban studies:

The US Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier,” referencing military bases inundated by sea level rise and increased global political instability from extreme weather events, especially in vulnerable countries already struggling with poor governance and impoverished populations. Likewise, among conservation biologists and urban designers, farmers and social justice activists, there is acknowledgement that perennial challenges are all exacerbated because of a rapidly warming planet for these same reasons. Every aspect of life on earth, for humans and other living creatures, is changing. This class will explore everything from the state of songbirds to the national security concerns of war hawks to agriculture to urban design to storytelling to social justice. The aim is to understand how, while climate change aggravates existing struggles, innovative climate action solutions might also help ease them.

As always, feel free to reach out to me with your suggestions or to let me know if you’ve adapted it for your own class. Here’s the full syllabus:

ENV381_SYLLABUS_ClimateChangeAsThreatMultiplier

(Cancelled) New Imaginings: Storytelling, Science & Activism

February 22, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Imagery: Jules Bartl/BBC World Service

*Due to the coronavirus/COVID-19 crisis, this event has been cancelled*

During my time at Princeton University, I have the pleasure of organizing an event, and I decided to shape it around the powerful novel The Overstory. If you’re in the Princeton area on March 26, please join me. And thanks to Jules Bartl and the BBC for letting us use this exquisite image for the event (check out the short animated film!).

More event info here.

Award-winning environmental journalist Meera Subramanian will host the discussion “New Imaginings: Storytelling, Science and Activism” featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers, author of The Overstory; Robin Wall Kimmerer, SUNY professor of environmental biology and author of Braiding Sweetgrass; and forest activist Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.

Subramanian, the 2019-20 PEI Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities, will lead a conversation exploring how the work of scientists, artists and activists come together to inspire fundamental shifts in perspective. From the underground networks that feed forests to how human activity impacts the upper atmosphere, our understanding of how the world works shapes our minds, the stories we tell, and the way we act.

This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase from Labyrinth Books.

Thu, Mar 26, 2020
4:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Princeton University, McCosh Hall, Room 10

Crossing the Climate Change Divide

October 24, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

ENV 375 class. Photo by Denise Applewhite

This fall, I’ve been leading Princeton undergraduates as we take a deep dive into the climate debate in the seminar “Crossing the Climate Change Divide.” Tom Garlinghouse from Princeton’s Office of Communications joined us to share what we’re doing. To see the full syllabus, click here. And here’s his piece:

The course is taught by award-winning journalist Meera Subramanian, who is asking students to examine what people think about climate change — whether they accept the current climate science, reject it or are simply confused by it — and why they think the way they do.

“I’d love the students to engage in the conversation around climate change with a slightly more wide-open lens about how people are thinking about this and why people are thinking about it in the ways that they do,” said Subramanian, the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environmental Humanities in the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI). She is participating in a panel titled “Breaking the Logjam” at the Princeton Environmental Forum on Oct. 25.

Subramanian wants the students to use what anthropologists call an “emic,” or “insider’s,” approach — that is, taking into account a person’s words, perceptions and beliefs as main sources of information rather than adopting a potentially more objective or “outsider’s” approach. This demands that the students consider factors such as how an individual’s ideology, religion, economic level and politics impinge on a particular topic — in this case, the climate debate.

“Humans are messy creatures,” Subramanian said. “It’s not like we’re just economic creatures or just religious creatures. We are all of those things, all at once.”

Read the rest here.