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A River Runs Again Orion Book Award finalist

October 14, 2016 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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Orion Magazine just announced its annual Book Award finalists and A River Runs Again was on the list! Could I be in better company? I think not. Sy Montgomery’s Soul of an Octopus, Summer Brennan’s The Oyster War, and Helen Macdonald’s wildly acclaimed H is for Hawk.

Thank you, Orion. When I lived in NYC, I used to go to the annual Orion Book Award events at the Cynthia Reeves Gallery way over on the West Side in Chelsea and would fawn over the authors, the chance to meet them and get books signed, but more importantly, to get inspired. Seems that it worked. Just to have made the list is the greatest of honors.

The winner will be announced Monday.

UPDATE: Huge congrats to Sy Montgomery for winning the award!

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, awards, News Tagged With: A River Runs Again, awards, New York City

matt power: in memoriam

March 10, 2016 By meerasub

Photo I took of Matt Power as we roamed through NYC in the blizzard of February 2006

 

I wrote this almost two years ago, and read it at Matt’s Vermont memorial. I think I’m ready to post it.

“Did you water the plants?”

The g-chats would come from Asia, South America, Africa. I would sigh and smile and type back in that too abrupt chat shorthand. “Yup” and then we’d bounce to some other topic, often dirt-or-word related. Matt Power could be both singularly obsessed and as scattered as the visas in his passport. Did he know that I cared as much about the plants’ survival – the striated leaves of the spider plant in the bay window of the parlor and the abundance of the vegetable-berry-herb-opium poppy garden of the summer – as he did? If I wasn’t on my own travels, I was babying the babies too, giving them water as they soaked up the south sun, all of us awaiting his next return to Hawthorne Street. I lived there with Matt and Jess for five years, from the first day when we sat on the bare floor in the bare limestone (“It’s not a brownstone,” Matt would correct.) eating takeout, as a cast of characters came and went, until I left too. Did he know I loved the plants? Did he know, we all asked last week, when news of his death in Uganda arrived, how much we loved him?

We often step into each other’s lives in quiet, non-monumental ways. [Read more…]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Brooklyn, journalism, Matthew Power, New York City

the age of loneliness

September 16, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

“Ten years ago, I went into the woods I loved to decide whether or not to leave them….”

Ian Davis, Deliberations, 2015. Acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 in. © Ian Davis. Courtesy the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects, New York.

Ian Davis, Deliberations, 2015. Acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 in. © Ian Davis. Courtesy the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks and Projects, New York.

The brilliant magazine Guernica just came out with a special issue on the Boundaries of Nature. I think about this a lot, perhaps too much. And when the editors approached me about contributing I’d just returned from a trip to my old beloved forest in Oregon, and to a gathering of EcoModernists in Sausalito, and still my mind spun back to clutching falcons in New York City. All wove together into this essay. Thanks, Guernica.

Read it here.

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: boundaries, EcoModernism, Guernica, journalism, Nature, New York City, Oregon, rewinding

wnyc: bringing India back from the brink

September 12, 2015 By meerasub Leave a Comment

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It was with great delight that I entered into the studios of WNYC on Varick Street to sit down and talk with Arun Venugopal, who was guest hosting the Leonard Lopate Show. We talked about the costs of the Green Revolution, of Hindu priests who asked, “What is your duty?” to a farming family considering going organic, of holy waters. Our conversation ended too quickly, and I didn’t quite get to elaborate on my answer to his last question, about the direction PM Modi is taking the country. I said Modi has a choice. What I felt like I didn’t make clear enough is that he can develop India at the expense of the environment, the direction he seems to be heading now, or choose to tap into the exploding number of opportunities to develop in a more sustainable way, providing a model for the world. I’m rooting for the latter, and met the people in India who hope so too.

Listen to the full interview here.

Filed Under: A River Runs Again, elemental india, journalism, News Tagged With: A River Runs Again, book tour, Elemental India, india, New York City, organic farming, pesticides, radio, religion

the city & the sea

April 9, 2014 By meerasub

2013.04.27Orion-484

Last year I went to NYC six months after Hurricane Sandy had struck to look at recovery (and retreat) efforts and to explore the issue of coastal infrastructure in a time of changing climate. Here’s an excerpt from the start of the piece, published in the March/April issue of Orion magazine:

ONCE UPON A TIME, about 2 million years ago, the Pleistocene era locked up the world’s water in glaciers miles thick. Then, it warmed. It was about ten thousand years ago when the water of the melting glaciers was released to reshape the world into the coastlines we now associate with modern-day maps.

By all indications, though, the shape of those coastlines is about to change.

The archipelago of New York City’s five boroughs has almost six hundred miles of littoral zone between solid ground and watery sea, a place of straits and river mouths, bays and beachy backshores. It’s also a place whose contours have been radically transformed by its citizens. A large percentage of the city’s edges were created artificially, filled in and built upon with the false confidence that land taken from the sea is permanently allocated for terrestrial use. But on October 29, 2012, the record-breaking storm surge that swept over New York City flooded fifty-one square miles of that falsely allocated land—and like a finger from a watery grave, the high-water mark traced the coastline that once was and may soon be again. The mayor’s office says that, by the 2050s, 800,000 New Yorkers will live in hundred-year flood plains, double the current number. [Read more…]

Filed Under: journalism Tagged With: adaptation, climate change, environment, infrastructure, New York City, Orion

join me at the brooklyn book festival

September 7, 2011 By Meera Leave a Comment

The Brooklyn Book Festival is the largest free literary event in New York City presenting an array of literary stars and emerging authors who represent the exciting world of literature today. Killing the Buddha will be there. Will you?

I’ll be moderating the panel, The Sacred and the Profane: A Modern Pilgrim’s Progress, featuring Buddha-killers Darcey Steinke (Easter Everywhere), Michael Muhammad Knight (The Taqwacores), and Peter Bebergal (Too Much to Dream). We’ll be exploring unorthodox approaches to faith—how we find it, how we lose it, and how we redefine it for ourselves. Sex, punk Islam, and sober psychedelia will all be on the offering table. Hope you can join us!

Sunday, September 18, 2011
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Brooklyn Borough Hall (209 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY  11201)
St. Francis Mcardle Hall


Filed Under: readings Tagged With: events, New York City

taking new york

December 14, 2009 By Meera 1 Comment

I’m standing a thousand feet above the streets of New York City, on the 86th floor observatory deck of the Empire State Building, looking for birds. It’s a few hours after sunset, and New York City naturalist Robert “Birding Bob” DeCandido is leading our small group. We can see the cityscape in every direction as the cool wind tousles our hair, but our gaze is focused up. Migrating songbirds, many of which travel by night to keep cool and avoid predators, are passing high overhead on their autumn journey. DeCandido has taught us how to differentiate the movement of small birds—“See how they flap-flap-glide?” he tells us—from the erratic motions of moths, But there is another denizen of the city’s skies that we’re all hoping to see.

A blur of a bird zips past the western flank of the building, level with the observatory. It’s too fast for a gull, too big for a songbird. Maybe a pigeon. Maybe something else. There is an excited buzz as we fumble with binoculars, unable to track the receding figure.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Worlds-Fastest-Animal-Takes-New-York.html##ixzz0ZeWMkUYW

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: New York City, peregrine falcon

Believer, Beware Launch Party – NYC

June 23, 2009 By Meera Leave a Comment

7739What do you get when a Buddhist raconteur, a junior high Jewish messiah, and a transsexual cowboy for Christ walk into a bar?

Find out at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City on June 29th when Killing the Buddha, the award-winning online magazine of god for the godless, releases its new anthology, Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith. This is the first time my writing gets pinned between the pages of a bound book. For a sneak preview, you can read the story here. In the anthology the title has transformed, as all things must, to Banana Slug Psalm.

The evening will feature an open bar, door prizes, and stories by Paul Morris of BOMB Magazine, Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K., and horse wrangler Quince Mountain.

Drawn from the website created by Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau in 2000, Believer, Beware is a collection of true confessions, skeptical testimonies, and personal revelations of religion lost, found and then lost again. Library Journal in a starred review, says Believer, Beware is “shocking, exhilarating, and never dull…. Highly recommended.” Publishers Weekly describes it as “smart, candid, and insightful…. The voices are refreshingly honest.”
Just the facts, ma’am…

Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker, New York City
When: Monday, June 29, 2009
Time: 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Cost: Free, with open bar

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: New York City

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