Greetings, bibliophiles!
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.Julie is the author of
, where she shares deep dives into architecture, literature, and the climate crisis. Her singing dog Brody also makes the occasional appearance. Julie is awesome, her substack is awesome — all I can say is that you should subscribe!Here, Julie shares with us a beautiful reflection on the book that gave her the confidence to rewrite her relationship with the wild parts of the Earth. You don’t want to miss this one!
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A while back, my ancestors chose to deny their entanglement with the living world. Instead, they made an org chart with human beings at the top and the rest of nature below us. It’s a lonely legacy, this estrangement from brown bears and beetles, clouds, crabs, herons and honeybees, humpbacks, lemurs and larkspur, monarchs and maize, oaks and uncountable others. That story of separation and superiority still dominates while the Earth burns and civility unravels.
If only we could rediscover these relationships with non-humans, we might treasure them more and stop all this ecocide. We might begin to wonder how we could ever see a tree as mere timber, a river as a turbine driver, a mountain only as minerals. What if, instead, we meet them as sacred beings, as mysteries, lifeblood, kin?
Before reading Brian Doyle’s novel, Mink River, I didn’t have a good model for how my stories might restore those lost relationships. I didn’t quite believe it was possible to conjure that long-lost intimacy using the rational tool of language.
I’ll borrow the words of the great American architect, Louis I. Kahn, to express how writing feels to me: “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and, in the end, must be unmeasurable.” I am in awe of the magic by which material things—words or bricks or dancing bodies—can be assembled to convey immaterial truths.
I read Mink River during my Fiction MFA program and was mesmerized by Doyle’s deftness with the craft of writing the unmeasurable. The narrator opens with a brilliant torrent of verbs: “so many stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves to one another and to the stories of the creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see. . .” The sentence goes on for a whole paragraph and ends with this: “But you sure can try to catch a few, yes?”
Many tellers and many listeners, and not all human? Sign me up. Sentences that go on for days with few or no commas? Yes, please! Doyle immersed me in a many-voiced, many-eared world. His omniscient narration flows from character to character as fluidly as the river at the heart of his fanciful town.
My quest to hear / imagine / write the voices of nature has been a long time coming. Remember the picture books we had as kids when animals could talk and implausible things happened as a matter of course? Why are those just for kids? I never shook the feeling that there’s more to this thing we call “reality” than we tend to notice. Salman Rushdie claims that magical realism is more real than ordinary reality, and I get what he means.
Still, I hadn’t dared to try it myself, until the mid-2010s after reading an essay by
asking why can’t fiction writers do this? We use our imaginations to inhabit other human consciousnesses all the time. Why not a tree? Or a salmon, or a river, or a raven? Though I was excited by this charge, I also wondered if it was naive of me to even try to write. How could I evoke experiences that defy language, using language?Save for human to human relationships, I wasn’t taught about reciprocity. I wasn’t taught by any tradition that understands animacy and kinship. But that doesn’t mean such strange consciousnesses aren’t possible, or real. It just means I was oblivious to them.
Doyle dares to hear and record for the reader the thoughts of a bear, a salmon, a raven. Mink River is so full of treasure, it’s difficult to find just the right quote to convey, in ecophilosopher David Abram’s words, “the magic of the real.” He begins with an omniscient, cinematic, aerial pan of the town, but within a page and a half, he attaches to an eagle swooping low to pick up a treasure, which turns out to be a piece of cardboard. He imagines the eagle as pompous and bombastic:
“I am one bad-ass flying machine, this weird flat brown bird didn’t get away from me, no sir, nothing can elude my lightning deftness in the air…” (p.12)
One of my favorite characters is this bear, who rescues a boy after a bike accident:
“She cradles the boy in her huge dark arms and rumbles uphill right through the bushes. This animal is broken, she thinks. It smells bloody. The blood makes her hungry. She remembers the ground squirrels. The word for ground squirrel in the language of bears is meat in holes.” (p.72)
Everyone in this town is open to the intimacy of animacy. During his recovery, the boy’s grandfather tells a story of walking for days to meet his guardian spirit:
“That was how I met Heron and we have been friends all these years since. I see herons all the time and whenever I meet a heron we have a good talk. A few herons just want to talk about fish and frogs but most of them have very interesting minds indeed. They have seen so many things and they forget nothing. That’s just how they are. They are very quiet. Their eyes are restless and burning. They don’t say much but when they do it is worth hearing. They say a lot of things that make you laugh if you listen carefully. That’s just how they are.” (p.112)
Fresh out of grad school as an intern architect, I discovered and embraced sustainability. It just made sense to me. Buildings and cities use a lot of materials and energy, and they disrupt local ecosystems. I was inspired by mentors who approached design holistically, seeking not only to do less harm, but to restore and repair the damage. In those days, most clients were skeptical or even apathetic. Everyone thought it would cost more to design efficient, interdependent buildings. I struggled with how to message this, how to motivate people, and wake them up.
At first, I tried gloom-n-doom warnings, flashing images of oil-slicked Alaskan seabirds and spoiled Gulf of Mexico coastlines, polar bears balancing on tiny bits of ice, New Orlineans trapped on their rooftops after Katrina. I didn’t know then that despair shuts off the creative, imaginative parts of our brain. We go into fight (denial) or flight (apathy)—neither of which are useful for paradigm-shifting, system-changing work. I would often say, We can do so much better, we know how, we have the tools—without realizing that I’d already lost 98% of my audience.
I grew restless and began to see architecture as too limiting, too beholden to the patronage of privilege and money. I felt complicit and trapped in a system, a culture that’s so disconnected from the natural world that people have stopped caring. Instead of preaching a message of efficiency and repair, I needed to get myself out there and actually connect. For a time, I left my drawing board and my computer and went to wild places in search of direct experiences with non-human beings.
A stream in the Tetons sought the vicarious experience of verticality and urged me to stand in the frigid water with arms raised high. I said yes. A triple tulip poplar in West Virginia requested I take selfies—of the tree, not of me. I said yes. An eastern box turtle near the Shenandoah invited me to gaze for an hour with my watercolors at her intricate patterned shell. I said yes.
I’d be so happy if one of my stories could motivate a reader to sit and marvel among moss in a shady patch of forest. Or maybe to befriend their local stream. After these and other encounters, I always feel calm and appreciative, in awe of the mystery of it all. I feel small and humble, modest and hopeful. All this life has been here long before me and will be here long after I’m gone. Why not enjoy and appreciate it while I’m here? Such pleasures are a powerful antidote to despair and anxiety.
In Mink River, Brian Doyle says yes to an animate, interconnected, untamable world. His craft is an endless source of lessons and inspiration to explore, engage, and conjure unmeasurable delights with words. His writing is my beloved teacher in the art of rewriting my relationship with the wild world.
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Wonderful! I was excited when BTMU hit my email this morning, and I saw it was from you, Julie! And what a terrific piece it is. I love all the beautiful connectedness here, and now I’ve added Mink River to my reading list. ♥️
Thank you, Mikey and Julie!!
Thanks for this Julie. Being in and around nature is so healing. The other day, a huge flock of blue heron's were dancing and swooping above my house. I had to stop and look to make sure I was seeing it right. Were those really Blue Heron's?? ALL of them? Together? Yes! There had to be at least 20. I still don't know what prompted the heron convention as usually they are very solo birds here on the ocean. I have never seen that many of them together before or since. I like to think they were dancing and coming together for just that moment, so I could stop and just stare up into the sky. It was magical.