Rabbit rabbit! For the past couple of years, I’ve closed each month by posting a photograph to my Instagram story of the books I read that month. Sometimes I make individual slides for certain books, offering a pithy take for those who would like to know a bit more about the title. The monthly slides are gathered in a “highlight reel” on my Instagram profile, which has proved a useful archive on multiple occasions (wanting to count how many books in translation I read, how many contemporary versus older books, if there are, indeed, any white male novelists born after 1985 who interest me…).

This month, I thought I’d start to share this monthly list with my newsletter followers, too. I’m grateful for the subscriptions on here, would like to have a way to engage with you all more, and also would like to write a little more about the books I read than Instagram slides allow for. So, without further ado, here is the month’s bounty:

Independent People by Halldór Laxness

I first heard about this novel because my ex-partner had a copy, and I found my own copy in a little free library a couple of years ago. But I wasn’t prompted to read it until I taught a class on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo at the continuing education center here last year and began to read secondary literature and critical essays about Rulfo. I was surprised to see Laxness among the authors that Rulfo pointed to as influential. It’s always good to be wary of taking artists at their word, but from the very first pages, Independent People reminded me of Pedro Páramo. It’s set in a valley that is rumored to be haunted, and at the same time has a lot to do with changes in land tenure in Iceland in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The protagonist, Bjartur of Summerhouses, has worked his way out of servitude and become the owner of this haunted croft, which he renames from Winterhouses to Summerhouses out of his characteristic stubbornness. (In this way the novel also reminded me of Widow’s Bay: a man lives in a haunted place but insists on denying it to pursue his ambitions.) It follows Bjartur thorugh good times and bad times, through raising a family, and through the dramatic changes brought to Iceland by World War I. I found the landscape descriptions and the way that sheep, birds, and other non-human creatures act and communicate very moving. Here’s an example:

The sun shone on the pale, withered grass of winter, on the swollen brook, on the thawing marshes redolent of growth and decay. Somewhere in the warm breeze the golden plover was piping its shy vernal notes, for the first friends of the heath had flown home from the south. The garrulous redshank would follow the shepherd home almost to the door, feeling that it simply must tell him this amusing story, of which it never grew tried: he, he, he, he, he, he, he.

I am tempted to become a sheep farmer, but short of that, I look forward to re-reading this novel in the future.

Freely Espousing by James Schuyler

A few months ago, I read A Day Like Any Other, a new biography of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan. Schuyler had come recommended to me years earlier by a friend who kept his work on his bedside table, which felt like the highest possible recommendation—poetry you need to have with you constantly. Schuyler’s circle of friends was remarkable: he spent a summer in Italy with W.H. Auden and was Frank O’Hara’s roommate for a time. What struck me most in the biography, however, was that even during periods of profound mental illness, Schuyler had the capacity to look out the window and compose a poem about the beauty of the world. You can already see this in Freely Espousing, the first collection in his collected poems, from 1969; he talks about cold fronts and different types of snow, seaweed and spruces. The title of the biography gets its name from the poem “February,” which is also in this collection. In the middle of the poem, Schuyler writes:

The green leaves of the tulips on my desk

like grass light on flesh,

and a green-copper steeple

and streaks of cloud beginning to glow

I can’t get over

how it all works together

The poem eventually concludes, “It’s a day like any other.”

Роза (Rose) by Oksana Vasyakina

I was a Russian major in college, and after years of barely using the language, when I heard about Oksana Vasyakina’s first novel, Рана (Wound), back in 2021, I decided to revive my skills to read it. Wound was the first of an autofictional trilogy, followed by Steppe and now Rose. (The first two have already come out in English from Catapult, translated by Elina Alter, and Rose just became available for pre-order!) Last year, a friend managed to get me a physical copy of Steppe from Russia, but it was a truly heroic planes-trains-automobiles-geopolitical intrigue journey and so this year I read Rose samizdat-style, from a printed PDF.

Rose is about Vasyakina’s aunt Svetlana, who died of Tuberculosis. In contrast to the first two books in the trilogy, which are road novels, nearly the entirety of this one takes place in the cramped apartments in Siberia where Vasyakina spent her childhood. The lives that the books describe can be deeply bleak, but I can’t recommend Vasyakina’s work enough: it’s a rare combination of making lives that are rarely seen in novels into literature, and a novel whose author’s voracious reading and exhaustive literary knowledge shows beautifully.

La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado

La Gente was published by the Colorado Historical Society in 1998 and brings together 11 articles and first-person accounts about Hispanic life in New Mexico and Colorado from 1800 to the present. Some of it feels dated, especially its somewhat uncomplicated recourse to Indigeneity, but mainly it showcases a mode of regional scholarship that doesn’t exist in exactly this form anymore, bringing together regional professors, public historians, and testimonios of old-timers who represent the history under consideration. Plus, there are two chapters about sugar beets.

To the River by Olivia Laing

I read this book because I was curious about what had been the debut of Laing’s very distinguished, always erudite, career. The book follows Laing on a walk down the River Ouse, which flows through Laing’s home region and is also the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned. I loved the mixture of travelogue, nature writing, history, and cultural criticism. You can see the seeds of Laing’s more recent writing about art, literature, and gardening in her interests and her precise vocabulary. The vocabulary and syntax are also distinctly British, reminding me that even my native tongue can feel new and estranged: “A haze had fallen ahead of me, dimming the fields and turning the air almost to gauze. The light fell through the altocumulus of a mackerel sky, each scale thickly whorled and pale as spun sugar.” I don’t want to give it back to the library!

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin, translated by Bonnie Hue

One of my reading projects during the past couple of years has been a study of short queer novels. Much of queer narrative seems to take the form of the short novel (~180-240 pages), but that vehicle can contain an infinitude of types of stories and life experiences. I started listening to Notes of a Crocodile as an audiobook and soon realized that I needed to see and read the book. It’s narrated by a young female student in 1980s Taipei who is coming into an understanding of her own sexuality alongside a few friends who are on their own, similar, tortuous journeys. They don’t have access to our contemporary vocabulary of queerness and desire, and indeed don’t feel free to say much aloud at all—but what they manage to utter can be both profound and wry. The way Qiu Miaojin captures these tacit affinities between friends is a beautiful feat.

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell

This was a re-read for me; I read it for the first time shortly after it came out in 2020. Cleanness might in some ways be the opposite end of the queer narrative spectrum from Notes of a Crocodile. It’s similarly a short work of fiction (whether it’s a novel or short story collection seems to be in the eye of the beholder), and what impresses me about it is the precision which with chemistry and sex are captured, as well as the musicality of Greenwell’s sentences, which make sex acts that might go beyond the limits of many readers’ experiences and desires into meaningful fonts of human connection, for example: “I pressed farther into him, drawn forward by what he had said and by my own pleasure, which was exquisite; I had never fucked anyone bare before, there was a heat and silkenness in it I had never felt.”

Those are things I knew to expect, because they are what Greenwell is famous for, but something that I had forgotten about and that pleased me to read was that over the course of the book, the narrator is slowly coming into an attraction to rootedness, and conceiving of what a rooted (gay) life might look like. “I looked at him for a long time before going back to my book. They could make a whole life, I thought, surprised to think it, these moments that filled me up with sweetness, that had changed the texture of existence for me. I had never thought anything like it before.” One of the things I described in my own book was how in considering a queer (and childless) life, I observed slightly older queer friends, trying to see how they found meaning in their lives. My conclusion look a lot like these, but come from the opposite direction, fleeing the prefabricated meaningful life of heterosexual family life.

Thanks for reading! If you read any of these books (or have read any of them), please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts.

Best,

Caroline

P.S. Mark your calendars with these upcoming events!

August 27—Sunny’s Book Truck, Yuma AZ, 6pm

August 29—Planta Libre, Mexicali, BC

September 3—In conversation with writer Kimon de Greef at Desierto Books for the Tucson launch of his new book The Ego Trip.

Week of September 7 (day TBA)—Fort Worth, TX with Recluse Books

September 19—Western National Parks Association, Oro Valley, AZ (just north of Tucson!), 1pm

October 2—University of Arizona geography department colloquium

October 21—University of California–Berkeley geography department colloquium

Two Montana events coming in November!

I hope you are all staying cool in this too-hot-everywhere summer. I’m writing to share two small updates. First, tomorrow evening I will be discussing Salt Lakes in conversation with River Selby, author of Hotshot: A Life on Fire, in a virtual event hosted by Oakland’s Womb House books. If you haven’t been able to join me for an in-person event—or even if you have!—I would love to see you there.

Both River’s book and my book are hybrid memoirs mixing research about a nature-related topic with personal narratives. While the climate issues we focus on are both very relevant right now, as wildfire smoke has sent Chicago and Toronto air pollution to off-the-charts levels and Great Salt Lake, currently just 32.7% full, careens closer and closer to a record low, we plan to focus tomorrow’s conversation on writing: how we researched our books, how they evolved in the process, how we balanced personal and reported elements. We will welcome audience questions and comments. Register here!

Join us!

Second, on the topic of Great Salt Lake, I recently published an article in the New York Review of Books Online titled “Putting the Lake to Work.” In 2024, when I spent time in Utah conducting research in the archives of Brigham Young University and the University of Utah, I found something strange and unexpected: again and again, from the 1930s to the 1980s, state leaders in Utah had made plans to deliberately shrink Great Salt Lake.

At the time, conspiracy theories about the lake’s decline had started to come out of the woodwork. One Reddit user blamed the Mormon Church, saying the institution would “be proud of draining the lake” if it brought its leaders closer to Donald Trump; another blamed the governor, writing, “Heard Spencer Cox is secretly hoping the Great Salt Lake dries up so we can have more land for alfalfa farming.” (Cox grew up and still resides on a farm that grows “mostly alfalfa,” the crop that uses 70% of the state’s water while providing just 0.2% of its GDP and therefore is largely blamed for the Great Salt Lake’s crisis.) Still another pointed to politically powerful housing developers, writing, “the legislature will deny there is arsenic in the dried up lake bed and zone it for residential/business use. Hell, I’m sure some of them are already salivating at the thought of it.”

I was working on the first chapter of my book, which shows how the disappearance of Great Salt Lake is not the result of as anyone’s deliberate decision-making but the result of exhausted ideologies that continue to govern Western water policy leading to overuse. While the archival materials didn’t dispute that argument—the plans never came to fruition, despite recurring with startling regularity—it fascinated me to learn that there was a historic grain of truth to the idea that state leaders had wanted to get rid of the lake. They had wanted to turn the eastern bays of the lake into freshwater reservoirs for irrigation, but each time were thwarted by the reality that with so much water being diverted upstream, there was not enough water reaching the lake to make that feasible. Read more here.

On another note, I want to share that I’m open to taking on private clients for editing this fall. This is something that I haven’t done for the last three years, as I was busy with my book and other reporting. Here are a few of the types of projects I welcome:

• Academic work—dissertations, articles, dissertation-to-book shifts

• Presenting scholarly work for the general public

• Creative nonfiction—essays, book drafts, or the thorniest of them all, book proposals.

I have experience with academic, news media, and little-magazine publishing processes, and from 2021-2024 was an editor at Zócalo Public Square, which specializes in the link between the two: working with academic writers on short essays for the general public. I charge by the hour and work efficiently. If you have a project that needs help getting to the next level, I would love to chat.

Finally, if you weren’t able to make it to a Salt Lakes event this spring, you’ll have a few opportunities this fall! On August 27, I’ll be at Sunny’s Book Truck in Yuma, AZ; on October 2, I’ll be speaking at the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development, and the Environment; and on October 21 I’ll be at the University of California–Berkeley Geography colloquium. I’m pinning down dates for additional talks in Tucson, Mexicali, Dallas, and Montana. More on all of those to come, but please pencil me in if you’re in any of those areas!

Sending good wishes to all!

Caroline

I’m writing to you once again from an airport—this time I’m on my way to Oregon for events in Corvallis (tomorrow 4/16) and Portland (Friday 4/17). But I’m writing to share a different article that came out recently, a review of the SFMOMA show Ground Rules by photographer Alejandro Cartagena that recently appeared in the Nation. For those of you in the Bay Area, the show is on view through this Sunday 4/19, and I highly recommend going.

I had wanted to write about the work of Cartagena and a few other photographers from the north of Mexico for several years because they reminded me of the New Topographics, the artists like Robert Adams who captured the suburbanization of the American West in the 1970s. But he’s most famous for the frequently viral series “Carpoolers,” for which he spent a year photographing a highway from a pedestrian bridge, capturing laborers riding in the bed of trucks on their way to work.

What I found unique about Cartagena’s approach is this combination of landscape and portraiture—he shows both the recent changes to Mexico’s built environment and the new rhythms of life that they have engendered. Though he captures the landscapes that Adams and others seemed to decry in their work, his portraits don’t impose an Edward Hopper-style anomie on the residents of Mexico’s far-flung, poorly connected exurbs, but show a great deal of solidarity and empathy with their subjects.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the piece:

Finally, I’m gratified to share that the story I recently shared with this mailing list, about the disappearance of a DNA database crucial to migrant identification in the US-Mexico borderlands, was published today in Spanish by the Mexican magazine Nexos. I hope that this will enable it to reach many more people for whom it contains important information.

If any of you are in Oregon, please come say hi tomorrow or Friday!

Best,

Caroline

I’m writing you from the midst of my Salt Lakes tour—it’s 6:37 am in Sky Harbor Airport—to share a new investigation, co-published by The Border Chronicle and High Country News, that I have been working on with a colleague for many months.

Read here!

Those of you who have followed my work for some time know that since 2017, I have been reporting on the issue of migrant deaths in the Arizona and Texas borderlands: observing exhumations conducted by Operation Identification, charting the transformation of the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner to respond to migrant death, making a deep dive into the religious roots of Tucson humanitarians, and investigating flaws in Texas’ death-investigation system.

During much of this time, it appeared that the infrastructure for identification was functioning well in Arizona, while Texas’s system still had gaps. But a year ago, my colleague Gabb Schivone and I started to hear about problems at the Tucson-based Colibrí Center for Human Rights, which operated a database of DNA samples from family members of missing migrants that was used to identify remains recovered in the borderlands.

After a change in leadership and an announced merger with the Undocumented Migration Project, the DNA database’s managers had been fired. Then, in October 2024, Colibrí’s forensic partners along the border had lost access to the database. Open cases were stalled entirely.

We set out to find out: What happened to the database? Who has responsibility for it now, and what is the possibility of it being brought back?

Gabb and I were proud to work with the Border Chronicle and High Country News on this story, two publications doing incredible regional journalism. (A translation into Spanish is forthcoming.) I highly recommend subscribing to and supporting these publications—they provide crucial regional reporting on limited resources, and you might discover that they provide the coverage you feel is missing from other outlets.

Read here!

Thank you for reading and hope to catch some of you while I’m on the road during the next few weeks!

Caroline

A brief note with some exciting news to share—I’m taking Salt Lakes on tour! This spring, you’ll be able to catch me in the following cities:

Here are links to the individual event details. Note that some require tickets!

March 14-15—Tucson Festival of Books

March 18—New York City

March 24—Berkeley

March 26—Denver

March 28—Tucson (*Book event is at Antigone, but please also join for an afterparty at Slow Body brewery starting at 6:30!)

March 30—Phoenix

March 31—Salt Lake City

April 2—Philadelphia

April 10—Las Vegas

April 16—Corvallis—details coming soon

April 17—Portland

If you don’t see your city or if you’re part of an organization or university that might be interested in sponsoring an event sometime in the future, feel free to drop me a line!

Salt Lakes comes out on March 17. If you haven’t pre-ordered it but intend to buy a copy, a great way to support the book is to call or stop into your local bookstore and place an order with them. Hearing about interest in a book just a few times can make a difference in their ordering! If you prefer to order online, here’s a link to Bookshop.

Can’t wait to see some of you on the road. More soon!

Caroline

The Salt Lakes countdown is ticking—I’m excited to share the book with you one month from today! I received my finished copies of the book last week and they are even more gorgeous than I expected. I will also be sending out tour dates very soon. Keep your eyes peeled!

In the meantime, I thought I would share a reading list of unexpected appearances of salt lakes in literature from around the world. Those of you who follow me on Instagram know that I have been posting “salt lakes sightings” ranging from the cover of a Phoebe Bridgers single to the intro credits of the show Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. This list is the slightly more serious condensation of those sightings—the crème de la crème!

As many of you know, I began writing Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History after taking road trips through California and Nevada. I had been surprised to discover numerous salt lakes hidden throughout the basin-and-range region. I didn’t know why they existed, and their recurrence felt like a strange, miraculous pattern in my life.

Eventually, I learned about the geology and hydrology that create the lakes. I learned that they form when water collects at the bottom of closed basins and evaporates, leaving behind the minerals that are suspended in it. I came to understand that the desert landscapes where I tended to find myself were the same arid conditions that gave rise to the shimmering lakes.

But as I learned more, my salt lakes sightings didn’t end. Instead, I found salt lakes appearing not only on my road trips, but in the literature I was reading, too. Salt lakes have offered up their mixture of striking beauty and rich metaphorical potential to writers from Kazakhstan to Australia to Mexico. It turns out that I wasn’t alone in being drawn to them. Here are a few other writers who have been drawn to them:

Pre-order Salt Lakes!

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years [И Дольше Века Длится День] by Chingiz Aitmatov

I majored in Russian in college and happened to be reading this novel, by Kyrgyz veterinarian-turned-author Chingiz Aitmatov, during my first-ever trip to a salt lake—a road trip to the Salton Sea in 2015. It takes place over the course of a single day (hence the title), following the protagonist, Yedigei, as he treks across the steppe of Kazakhstan to bury a recently deceased friend. Amidst the reminiscences and flashbacks that populate the novel, Yedigei recalls his former profession as a fisherman at the Aral Sea, a salt lake that has lost 90% of its size since the 1960s due to cotton farming. In Yedigei’s narration, the loss of the sea parallels his growing awareness of the shortness of life.

Salt [La Sal] by Adriana Riva

Riva’s Salt is a short yet emotionally dense novel about a road trip taken by a pregnant narrator named Ema, her sister, her mother, and her mother’s sister. They are driving from Buenos Aires to the small town of Macachín, where their family initially settled after immigrating from Ukraine in the 1800s, to vist a storage unit. Each of the characters has a fraught relationship to motherhood and daughterhood. On their way back, they they make an impromptu stop at the salt lake that their family once operated as a mine. Ema is surprised to observe that her aunt adores the lake and her mother detests it. Just as the unusual salt lake landscape is what you make of it, so, she realizes, you are complicated mother-daughter relationships.

America [Amérique] by Jean Baudrillard

French philosopher Baudrillard’s 1986 travel diary seeks to understand how the United States can be at once hyper-primitive and hyper-modern: he writes that in the United States, even the most banal suburban landscapes feel like the center of the world, whereas all of Europe feels, to him, irrelevant. What surprised me was that the Great Salt Lake takes pride of place in this exploration. On page two, Baudrillard writes of Salt Lake City’s unsettling combination of “puritan obsession” and “Los Angeles modernism”—and that this human culture is paralleled by the naturally “hyperreal” Great Salt Lake.

The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts

Watts’s first novel is ambitious in the way of the best debuts: it’s about climate change, early womanhood, and the history of Australia. At its center is a mythical inland sea that the narrator’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, a surveyor, had set out to search for. The narrator reckons with her family’s pride contradictory forswearing of empire and pride in this ancestor in a way that felt profoundly familiar to me, a descendant of white settlers in the American West. Toward the end of the novel, Watts writes that “there are many notable dead seas of the interior,” such as the Salton Sea, Aral Sea, and Lake Victoria. As though an Easter egg, in Watts’s sophomore novel, Elegy, Southwest, her characters make a visit to the Salton Sea.

Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Magical/Realism is a collection of essays whose “Memory, A Lacuna” has the most beautiful description of the closed-basin geology that creates salt lakes that I’ve ever read. Villarreal describes Mexico’s Comarca Lagunera region where her mother and grandmother were born as “a cradle of fertile land…where the Nazas and Aguanaval Rivers break their pact with the ocean and empty fresh water into the land, flooding the expanse with wide, glassy lakes.” Villarreal describes the painstaking efforts she has made to research the history of her family and draws a connection between the words laguna and lacuna—between a closed-basin lake and a gap like that of the archives.

You Dreamed of Empires [Tu sueño imperios han sido] by Álvaro Enrigue

This novel is a fictionalized account of the day that Hernán Cortés met Moctezuma, the emperor of Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City), which was built on an island in the saline Lake Texcoco. The novel feels like an exploratory video game, following different characters to palaces, markets, swimming pools and tunnels, and bringing the ancient lake city to life in the process. The retelling is comic—the conquistadors speak in present-day Mexican slang, and ill-humored Moctezuma spends all day high on magic mushrooms—but also deeply researched. One of the sources cited in its acknowledgements section, Barbara Mundy’s The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, was also a key source for Salt Lakes.

Trash [Basura] by Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny

Trash follows the intersecting stories of three characters living in the border cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. One of them, Reyna, is a transwoman who takes on a mothering role for many of the city’s younger sex workers. “They’re scary at first, but they grow on you, they become part of your life, your best friends, your sisters, your daughters, your everything,” she instructs one woman just getting into the business (in Jadine Pluecker’s translation). Though the novel takes place at the border, it closes with the image of contemporary Lake Texcoco, now drained to allow for the growth of Mexico City. Reyna longs to return to Ecatepec, the once-agrarian, now densely urban, suburb where she grew up. “We’ll make it so the Lago de Texcoco fills up with water again,” she tells the younger character she has adopted as her daughter. “You and me, mija, we’re leaving, and over there we’ll build our own promised land.”

Steppe [Степь] by Oksana Vasyakina

Vasyakina is a contemporary Russian writer whose novels bear traces of English-language autofiction and French feminist theory, among other influences. Released in English in January 2026, Steppe is about the narrator’s relationship with her father, a long-haul trucker who died of AIDS—narrative details that are true to Vasyakina’s life. As the title suggests, the expansive steppe landscape of southern Russia is central to the book. Yet her father and his family are from the city of Astrakhan, which is located at the delta where the Volga River empties into the Caspian Sea—the largest salt lake in the world. Vasyakina closes the novel reflecting, like Yedigei in The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, on the fact that her father’s body, buried in what was once the bed of a much larger sea, is disintegrating as the sea, too, slowly shrinks toward death.

Thanks for reading, and send me any of your own salt lakes sightings!

Best,

Caroline

Pre-order Salt Lakes!

Happy New Year’s Eve! To wrap up the year, I wanted to write a quick newsletter sharing links to some of the projects I worked on this year that I’m most proud of. Since I’m a freelancer, my work doesn’t all end up in one place! So, here’s a quick list of highlights:

1. Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer’s Grant: One of the biggest factors shaping my work this year was having received a coveted Arts Writer’s grant—on my third try! Thanks to the grant, I got to spend the year writing arts criticism for the Border Chronicle, where I’m now working half-time as the environment and arts/culture reporter. Some of the highlights included photographer David Taylor’s show COMPLEX, Karima Walker’s installation Graves for the Rain, photographer Eunice Adorno’s series Las Aguas Eran Salvajes, the Tucson Museum of Art’s exhibition Living with Injury, and the Mexicali Experimental Project.

   

2. Uncanny Rio Grande Valley: Also for the Border Chronicle, I spent the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 immersed in the work of fiction writer Fernando A. Flores—to me, one of the most inventive and interesting novelists working today. I also got to speak with Flores about the book in a joint interview on KJZZ (Phoenix NPR)’s The Show.

3. Can Indigenous Chileans Ever Return to their Land? I was honored to review the novel Chilco by Daniela Catrileo (trans. Jacob Edelman) for The New Republic’s August print issue. The novel engages with themes of Indigeneity, ecology, and queerness in a way at feels very close to some of the literary works coming out of North America at the moment (thinking of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s work, who I reference in the review, and Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red.)

4. Form, Object, Art: For Los Angeles Review of Books, I reviewed Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s recently translated art-and-image book The Company, which overlays a slightly modified short story by Mexican writer Ámparo Dávila onto images of a ghost town in Zacatecas, Mexico. I tried to do justice to Gerber Bicecci’s experimental style in the form of the review—you tell me if it worked!

5. A Theology of Smuggling: This year, I received the inaugural On the Brinck | Places prize, which gave me a grant to produce a work of scholarship about the Southwestern US for Places journal and to deliver a public lecture at the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture. My project aimed to develop a genealogy of contemporary humanitarian activism in the borderlands, connecting the work of groups like the Tucson Samaritans to the late-1800s Protestant missionary activity in the region, and dwelling especially on the role of Southside Presbyterian Church.

   

6. Mexico’s Amparo Reform: One of the articles I’m most proud of from my work as an environmental journalist this year is my coverage of Mexico’s amparo reform for Foreign Policy. In October, Mexico passed a reform to the Ley del Amparo, limiting the use of a key tool in environmental and human-rights fights. This largely flew under the radar of the English-language press, but it’s deeply consequential—including for some of the ongoing environmental conflicts I covered for Border Chronicle, such as the Plan Sonora, the proposed Saguaro Energía pipeline and liquid natural gas export terminal, and the proposal to build three new dams on the already impacted Río Sonora.

   

7. Data Centers: When things already felt bad, climate- and water-wise, it turns out that they could get worse. The number of data centers has skyrocketed in the last year thanks to the widespread adoption of generative AI. I covered a hyperscale data center in New Mexico and data centers’ links to New Mexico’s recently passed desalination legislation for the Border Chronicle. There’s a lot more to be researched, written, and fought for on that front.

Finally, as you all know, my book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History is available for pre-order! One great option for ordering is to use this link to the Border Chronicle’s Bookshop affiliate store—it will help my pre-order numbers while also giving a commission to my favorite employer independent regional media outlet.

Even better than that, call your local bookstore and ask them to order it for you! Hearing about a book from just three people can influence independent bookstores’ ordering.

I’ll have tour dates to share very soon, but in the meantime, you can check out this interview I did with journalist and researcher Daniel Rothberg for his newsletter Invisible Waters:

Thanks for reading and happy new year!

More in 2026,

Caroline

This weekend I came back from my annual trip to Denver’s Water World with my youngest brother and our partners to find a much-anticipated package at the doorstep of my dad’s house: my Advance Reader Copies of Salt Lakes.

ARCs, or galleys, are the first bound copies of the book. They look very similar to a paperback copy, but are very clearly marked NOT FOR SALE. They’re for authors to do a read-through to make final corrections, and for reviewers to be able to read the book, in bound form, before it is released. So, it was the first time I got to see, hold, and read Salt Lakes, which was a thrill. I’m happy to say that after reading the first three chapters curled up on the couch instead of on my computer screen, I still like the book.

The book comes out March 17, 2026, and you can now pre-order it at this link! Pre-orders are very important for authors, because they count toward first-week sales. That means that not only will you get the book at your own doorstep as soon as (or even a day before) it comes out, you’ll be helping teach the algorithms, best-seller lists, and media cycles that Salt Lakes is a book worth reading!

If you’d like some reading material in the between now and March, here are a few articles I’ve worked on lately:

• Can Indigenous Chileans Ever Return to their Land? Review of Chilco, by Daniela Catrileo, for the New Republic

• A Generation of Injustice at Tyson Foods, Review of Death and Life of the American Worker, by Alice Driver, for the Nation

• A review of The Mexicali Experimental Project—an exhibit about an unusual and largely forgotten collaboration between Baja California’s state worker housing agency and architectural philosopher Christopher Alexander—for the Border Chronicle

Some of the books I’ve been reading lately include:

• Mariah Rigg’s Extinction Capital of the World, a collection of short stories that take place in Hawai’i. The book braids themes of home, colonial histories and the colonial present, environmental destruction, race, and queer desire. What more could you ask for?!

• Dr. Melody Glenn’s Mother of Methadone, which I had the pleasure of featuring in the Border Chronicle. Glenn is an emergency medicine doctor, and the book weaves her story of practicing addiction medicine during the current opioid crisis with that of Dr. Marie Nyswander, who deveoloped methadone maintenance treatment for heroin addiction in the 1960s.

• In honor of its centennial, I re-read The Great Gatsby, which (like many among you, no doubt) I was assigned in high school. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it—its setting, characterization, plotting, and voice all felt perfectly done.

Finally, this month I’ve been in my home city of Denver conducting archival research for an exciting new project. I’ll leave you with an image of the first serious “reading room” I ever used, whose beauty played no small part in my becoming a researcher:

More soon,

Caroline

This mailing list has been dormant since the closure of TinyLetter (RIP), but earlier this year I transferred it to Substack, a platform I’ve been using frequently this year while covering the arts and the environment for the Border Chronicle. Thanks for joining me here! I’m writing to quickly share two recent pieces of criticism, one that I wrote for the Border Chronicle and the other for the Los Angeles Review of Books. I’ve been fortunate this year to be a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers’ Grant, which enabled both of these pieces.

Tratado de Amistad/Treaty of Friendship, Ingrid Leyva and Nicole Antebi, 2024. Courtesy of the artists.

1) How Artists Rethink the Border’s Water Crisis, Border Chronicle, 5/22/2025

As you may know, the US and Mexico have been ensnared in hostilities over the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, whose waters are overseen by a 1944 treaty. During the last five years, extreme drought has limited Mexico’s ability to send its share. I wrote this article about several contemporary artists whose work—including the performance above—helps reframe the conflict and reimagine how we can relate to that border river:

The Border Chronicle

How Artists Rethink the Border's Water Crisis

Water infrastructures and the documents that oversee them carry heavy conceptual baggage. Reservoirs, dams, and canals symbolize colonial mastery over landscapes. They make grandiose promises of modernity. They are emblems of inequality and …

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a year ago · 13 likes · 5 comments · Caroline Tracey

2) Form, Art, Object, Los Angeles Review of Books, 5/27/2025

Out today! I reviewed the book The Company and wrote about the work of the Mexican “artist who writes” Verónica Gerber Bicecci. The Company is a visual novel/essay about an abandoned mine in the state of Zacatecas that was originally a gallery installation—see the image below. Gerber Bicecci’s work is heavily influenced by writers who sought to push their work beyond the fixed container of the printed page—into wall novels, Situationist-style experiments, and the “new art of making books” as theorized by writer Ulises Carrión. This means that her books’ visual elements, and even spine and binding and the container of the book itself, are as integral to the work as the written word. I find the way she pushes writing into this other dimension very inspiring. You can read on here.

Before I go, I also wanted to share that my book, Salt Lakes, will be coming out in March 2026! I’ll have a cover and a publish date to share soon, and eventually a pre-order link. In the meantime, here’s a photo I took this weekend at the southern end of southern California’s Salton Sea, where the engineering firm Kiewit is building a man-made wetland to provide freshwater habitat for birds as part of the Salton Sea Management Program. When I visited two years ago, the site had been excavated but not yet filled with water. This time, there were lots of birds. You’ll understand how the project came to be when you read the book :)

Until next time,

Caroline