Laura Marris and I in conversation about intimacy in the landscape, hummingbirds, time, serving in the fire department and my dreaming of being Amish in BOMB

Laura Marris and I talking about intimacy in the landscape, hummingbirds, time, my serving in the fire department and my dreaming of growing up to be Amish in BOMB. Which is a joy and honor! (I’ve been reading BOMB since I was in my 20s). Read more here or from Laura’s beautiful introduction:

The first time the essayist Jennifer Kabat emailed me, it was 2022 and she was watching a hummingbird she had named George 2. “Can we talk about intimacy with the landscapes around us?” she wrote. I’d admired her essay “The White Deer,” about weeds and Buffalo’s Silo City, but I soon learned that Kabat is also a historian of New York’s Catskills region, a rescuer of road salamanders, and an astute observer of wild plants who is as comfortable describing the brief bloom of a bottle gentian as she is the vast flooding of a reservoir. She has an uncanny ability to unveil the layered histories of place, coaxing the past into the present through the local landscape in a way that attends to tensions and contradictions between centuries and species, not as something to untangle or resolve but rather as a form of abundance. Reading her nonfiction is like dipping a knotted rope into a body of water to take a sounding, and each layer saturates and immerses you beyond what you thought to expect.