Words Matter (omit useless ones)

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.

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.

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:

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• 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