Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent is to maintain a punchy counter against the algorithms and to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.

12 Things I Found in August:

1. Rockwell. I just flew to Ladakh, India, for a project I’m excited to share soon, and flights are a time for me to catch up on films. Luckily, or not so luckily, there were nine flights. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (trailer) was a standout weirdo dystopian adventure starring the great Sam Rockwell. Back to the Future meets Ready Player One meets Everything Everywhere All At Once.

2. Fascism. I just preordered Astra Taylor and Naomi Klein’s forthcoming book, End Times Fascism, out 9/15/26, and they just gave a wonderful Substack Live today that I rewatched and loved. Top notch thinkers, activists, pattern trackers. Follow Astra and Naomi on Substack.

3. Transgender. Read this exquisite, piercing article in The Atlantic from the voice of Julia Curlee, the CIA officer who was fired last March for being transgender. Such a honest, raw, clear-eyed look into the Trump administration’s dispensability of certain humans, no matter their qualifications.

4. Arendt. I’m a huge fan of Hannah Arendt—wrote about her book On Revolution in The Way Around—though reading her often feels as though my brain is having to go to the gym and lift heavy. There’s a new biography of her that’s out, and The New Yorker ran a lovely review of her three-dimensionality and her life in America.

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5. Manosphere. The Emerald Podcast has come a long way, and Joshua Schrei really nailed this latest on De-Mythologizing the Manosphere, on uncontrolled, unrestrained power. Unfiltered cameos by Tyson Yunkaporta are always welcome.
   

6. Grind. I’ve had the same Porlex Japanese stainless steel coffee hand grinder for decades, and finally updated my system to a new Timemore Chestnut C5. Nothing brings me more joy in the morning than a uniform grind (rawr) for the morning cup. Near effortless. So elegant. Worth every penny.

7. Gibson. I’ve been a big fan of the late Poet Laureate of Colorado, Andrea Gibson, for years, and had heard about the documentary film about their final years and months, Come See Me in the Good Light. I wasn’t prepared to be crying in my airplane dinner while watching this one at 35,000 feet. A must-watch. Try not to weep, I dare you. Then, I double-dare you to go write a poem that brings one person joy.

8. Leki. OK, late to the game on Leki poles, but a packrat ate through the rubber on my Black Diamond Carbon-Zs so I thought it a good time to see what all the hype was about. They live up to the buzz. Ultra-lightweight. Easy to pack. The hand holsters aren’t nearly as tedious as you think, plus they helped keep my Raynaud's warm at 16,000 feet in the Himalaya recently. Bonus. I went for the LEKI Ultratrail FX.One Superlite.

   

9. Art & Ecology. While traveling through Ladakh, India, earlier this month (again, more stories forthcoming), I was deeply moved by the sa biennial happening there, a super impressive land arts and ecology installation. I was fortunate to interview the executive director for an upcoming article, and was blown away by their approach and humility. “The world’s highest regenerative art biennale.”

10. Sicily. On my favorite literary podcast, Between the Covers, David Naimon recently interviewed the great Valeria Luiselli about her new novel, Beginning Middle End, which I’m just cracking the spine now (thanks to beloved, Erin, for the tip!) Everything this woman writes is gold, and this new book is set in Sicily, home to my namesake, and to a deep experience of walking across the island earlier this year.

11. Shafak. For a brilliant conversation between two masterful writers, Elif Shafak and dear friend Robert Macfarlane, check out the How I Write’s latest contribution. These two in dialogue was a special treat for anyone, writer or not.

    

12. Uncaged. I’ve just finished I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and must tell you: This is a high-quality piece of work, a staggering world to be dropped into, into a cage of forty women, into a bunker underground, watched by soldiers. It’s disorienting, breathtaking, gorgeous, and worth all the hype. Mandorla 200 forthcoming.

Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent is to maintain a punchy counter against the algorithms and to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.

1. HERON PISS. Mike Foote is a professional North Face athlete from Missoula, Montana, a race director of The Rut Mountain Runs – one of the largest mountain foot race weekends in the country – a close friend, and one of the best humans I know. He’s also a terrific writer. We’re in a super-secret “bad fiction writing cult,” too (just outed us). In my competitive ultrarunning days I looked up to Foote as one of the best in the business, and always knew him to be an incredibly deep feeler, thinker, and community visionary, but his new essay recently published on the Dirtbag Diaries (18 minutes) made me weep. When people hear me say that running needs better writers, this is the kind of story I’m looking for. Humble, woven, personal, funny. My mother’s celebration of life is this weekend, and Mike’s decision to really go there about his dad’s life and death, his own struggles with mental health as an endurance athlete and father, and, yes, drinking great blue heron piss. So good. (Mike and I are now fellow Dirtbag Diaries alumni; twelve years ago I recorded a short about a protest I organized in Mexico to stop a gold mine.)
   

2. ZOMBIES. This tip comes from dear friend and artist Brendan Leonard. I was in my local credit union bank the other day and was surprised to hear Halloween by The Misfits playing on the radio. It reminded me of a previous younger self covering Misfits, Exploited, Circle Jerks, and Crass as drummer for a (very bad) punk band in high school. After telling Brendan this on a very long, very ridiculous run together a few months ago (short film forthcoming, stay tuned) he sent me a playlist of acoustic covers of Astro Zombies by The Misfits. Nothing is better on the Internet than this, promise.
   

3. DORITOS. Speaking of Brendan Leonard, he recently invited me to be a guest on his wonderfully hilarious podcast, Five Favorite Things. He has guests on to discuss “five books, movies, music, art, and other creative works that have helped shape their lives.” It’s only half-serious. Items for me included David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, Japanese-style woodcut prints by Tom Killion, and, of course, Salsa Verde Doritos. (It’s a story that includes climbing Mount Hood with Robert Macfarlane a few months ago and eating these chips together afterward and saying something really dumb out loud in the presence of one of the best living writers. Take a listen.)
   
   

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4. GRIEF. Prentis Hemphill is a writer, teacher, and embodiment therapist, and their podcast, Becoming the People, is in steady rotation these days. They are clear-eyed grounded conversations about the real shit, and I found their recent conversation with Francis Weller – grief therapist, writer, facilitator – particularly poignant, as they’d both just lost family members within weeks of the recording. I’ve read all of Weller’s work and listened to a fair amount of interviews with him, but this might be his best. I was late to the game on The Wild Edge of Sorrow, but it’s a non-negotiable must-read for….everyone.
   

5. KLEIN. Subtack nearly broke the day Naomi Klein entered the chat. One of the best thinkers alive in the complicated times we’re in is now running a Substack and I implore you to follow along. I first read Klein thanks to my college roommate and visionary Nate Bacon, who had No Logo on our shelf. I’m now a Klein completist and have recommended her on multiple twelve things roundups. Her forthcoming book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor, out 9/15, will make a huge splash I promise. If you’re new to her work, I’d recommend starting with The Shock Doctrine, then This Changes Everything, and then her latest, Doppleganger.
   

6. ICELAND. My fiancé, Erin Hilgendorf, brought to attention this exquisite Icelandic drama-comedy film, The Love That Remains (trailer). It follows an artist and her family as she navigates divorce, capitalism, loss, and motherhood. The film is raw, perfectly paced, funny, and simultaneously heart-breaking/heart-mending. The director, Hlynur Pálmason, was the mastermind behind Godland, which I really enjoyed, though it was the last film my mother and I ever watched together, and she wasn’t a huge fan. “Nicky, what was that? Stupid dark!”
   

   
   

7. BISON. Last night I had the following ingredients available: ground bison meat, sweet potatoes, chard and kale from the garden. This summer taco bison salad with potatoes recipe (this one, too) met every mark, and will be an easy bowl I’ll be throwing together for company more often. Protein-rich, dark leafy greens from, like, fifteen feet away, and local meat, if you’re into that kind of thing.
   

8. SUN HOODY. I’ve been training for a very large, very remote expedition next month that I can’t wait to share more about, mainly by walking up and down and around steep places and high country for hours this past month with a heavy backpack, and it’s been categorically hot every outing. Luckily, I have Patagonia’s Capilene Cool Sun Hoody that’s keeping me protected from hours under the sun. It’s a garment with an incredible amount of versatility, to be used in hot climates and also cooler alpine exposure. I toggle back and forth with Outdoor Research’s Echo sun hoody and love both equally.
   

9. O’KEEFE. Another Hilgendorf recommendation here, but this Georgia O’Keefe documentary, The Brightness of Light (trailer) really drops you into this complex and strong-willed artist and woman. When I lived in New Mexico, I visited Ghost Ranch and knew a bit about her life and work, but this documentary offered such texture to her life in New York City, her husband Alfred Stieglitz (who I didn’t know looks exactly like Carl Jung), and so much more. We’ve toggled this kind of film while working our way through Ken Burns’s PBS documentary on Thoreau, which is also highly recommended. (Oh, and, of course, the fifth and final season of The Bear. RIP.)
   

10. BROMANCE. So much has been written recently about the “Male Loneliness Epidemic,” and the “Anti-Social Century” which I find fascinating, but the recent article in The New Yorker, “The Lost Art of the Bromance,” (thanks for the tip, Trevien Stanger, with whom I have a deep bromance) digs deeper into the shallowness of attempts to heal this cultural wound, and, therefore, having it bleed all over the place. I love how the writer incorporates the reboot of Jackass as a way in. A takeaway for me: it’s the quality and depth of connection that’s key, that men being with men doesn’t just mean to train or to “life hack” our way to happiness or play video games together, but it’s a longer burn than that. It’s offline time with intimacy, not centered on doing and more on being that’s the true lever of transformation. (This echoes a bit of a wonderful conversation on the optimization paradox with Cal Newport.)

11. SEDARIS. I’ll admit: I haven’t actually read a ton of David Sedaris, but in his promotion for his new book, I’ve been transfixed by his brain, how he thinks, how he tells stories, his audacity and subversion and confidence. For writing nerds, this “How I Write: Lessons from Decades of Writing” episode gets into the weeds and is wonderful. The Wild Card episode is also hilarious. (I think it’s this interview where he goes off on how much he hates when people say “perfect,” in emails and in the world. Perfect!)
    
    

    

    
    

12. MESSAGE. Book 143 of 200 on the Mandorla 200 is The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2024). I’ve been waiting patiently for this one in paperback and could only find it at the library in large print, which is its own interesting reading flow state. I’ll follow Coates’s brain anywhere it goes, especially when it steps into Palestine, into the ghosts of the Jim Crow south, and into Dakar. Here’s my 200-word microdistillation:

You dream of destruction, don’t you.

You dream of uranium shimmer, black soot, oil drip, gas flare, stock prices soaring, cortisol soaring, eagles soaring, waking to piles of Diet Coke cans after having never once awakened to songs of canyon wren, not a huff of public land, never considered the Commons, what something shared by all feels like in your blood.

But you fancy your blood as different. Private property. Royal. Divine.

I saw your recent executive orders to cut Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments by 90%. Three million acres.

Here’s another stat: Three of four Utahns support protecting these lands; it’s about the same nationally.

Three consecutive years I’ve been traveling to these lands, walking a few hundred miles in and around them. (Turns out they’re highly walkable.)

Now I’m a knucklehead and know little about how these deserts actually work, but I have had enough bivy mornings there to know that what you’re up to is more than simple violence. It’s feeding the dream of yours, showing your tourniquet, circulation cut to anything real and sacred—disavowing your own sanctity.

Listen to Silko. She summons you in her poem, “[Long time ago]”:

“They will kill things they fear…they will fear what they find / They fear the people / They will kill what they fear…set in motion now, set in motion…whirling, whirling, whirling, whirling.”

We defend Grand Staircase/Bear’s Ears not because they’re places to play or because some leftist script said so but because:

a) this is stolen land, and

b) this is a direct affront to the body by you, unimaginative, disembodied thugs with Manifest Destiny tattooed on your lips, white-knuckling torches to burn everything in your path.

What burns is a fear of yourself, for what’s been forgotten, severed ancestors and severed relationships with living gods. In this fear, you find others to reinforce your disenchantment.

You dance poorly.

So know that every time I see these headlines I think of that open-pit in your sternum, the one you can’t see because it’s taken the shape of forfeiture—of the magic, the beauty, the shared intelligence right in front of you and within you. You’ve chosen to forfeit grace.

Three Actions:

1. Read an update from the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coaliton.

2. Support SUWA.

3. Follow Nick Estes and the Red Scare for proper historical, political, and ecological context of the moment.
   
   
   

“Summits are never where we think they are.”

In The Way Around, I remember writing this sentence.

I remember being quite fond of it.

As my book celebrates its first birthday today, if I’ve learned anything at all, it’s that putting a book into the world isn’t what you think it is, either.

An early mentor, the great Janisse Ray, told me in 2014, and I’m paraphrasing: “Publishing an article or essay will change some of how you write; publishing a book will reorder your life.”

This is truth.

The world, my perceptions and relations and potential pathways of inquiry, opportunities and foreclosures, so much of the past several years have been quite literally shaped by saying yes to this project, yes to this curiosity. It’s been wild, euphoric, exhausting, and everything in between.

Marking its one year birthday this morning, I sat quietly at my desk with my copy of The Way Around to my right. I stared at it a long while, ran circles around the cover with my finger before mapping out some of the most potent moments along the way, and major takeaways, which you’ll find below.

But before I do: thank you. Thank you for supporting this vision in whatever way you have. Spoiler alert, but the biggest takeaway I keep coming back to is this: Books are never an enterprise of the sole individual, never grown in isolation, never some heroic and solitary endeavor completed on its own (though, sure, spending a fair amount of agonizing time alone is definitely part of the deal.)

Books are hand-stitched by relations. Each one on your shelf is a million arms reaching out for help, for guidance, a living attempt of intellectual grace hungry for the whole and packaged up in stacked pages that whisper: no one gets out of here alive without leaning on others.

It’s liberating to release the cultural and economic delusion of sole propriety, that all of this curiosity and expression comes from nowhere but the self. Perhaps this is obvious, but pausing to let that in a layer deeper—whether you’re a writer or not—can be wildly instructive.

Highlights from One Year of The Way Around

OK, there have been innumerable moments of revelation and awe along the path so far. Here are six:

• Kickoff Event with Robert Macfarlane. The first time I ever saw my book on the shelf, for sale, was next to Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane. I’ve gushed far too much about how formative his work has been for me over the past decade, but to have been asked to be in conversation with him in front of a sold-out live audience in Minneapolis, to celebrate his new stunning work and connect his dots with mine—which hadn’t even officially been published—was an evening of profound anxiety and eventual joy that I’ll never forget.
  
  

  

• Circuminterviewed for the LA Review of Books. The book’s been featured on the morning news, in People Magazine, Adventure Journal, Hippocampus, Trails Magazine, and others, but when Miyo McGinn reached out asking if I’d like to circumambulate Green Lake in Seattle and be interviewed, in motion, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, I was ecstatic. Miyo was a former colleague at Outside and an extraordinary mind, and our conversation was the best I’d had about the book. Plus, moving and talking and thinking with such a beautiful brain was just the best.

• Powell’s Books with Gregory Gourdet and Family. Gregory Gourdet is a Haitian-American chef, a three-time James Beard winner, ultrarunner, and dear friend. I’d known him for over a decade before asking if he’d join me on stage for my tour stop at Powell’s Book, in Portland, Oregon. (A day after an evening in Seattle with Ben Gibbard, a memory tied for first.) I assumed Gourdet would be busy, assumed he’d have a kitchen to run that night, that he was in Paris or New York City launching some new collab with Versace or something, but he texted me back in minutes: “Yes, I’d love to!” A wild confluence of things happened that evening: Several family members drove up to Portland from California. Seeing my name on the Powell’s marquee made me feel like I was on drugs. Following the reading, we sat in my cousin’s backyard in SE Portland, drinking tall boys in a circle under soft bulbs of light surrounded by my father, stepmom, aunts, cousins, and partner. I was in full bliss, only to be topped the following evening when I coordinated a meal with the publisher and marketing director of Milkweed Editions, and their wives, at Gourdet’s award-winning restaurant, Kann, to celebrate. Milkweed’s publisher, Daniel Slager, the man who acquired my manuscript in 2019, leaned over to me and said: “You order. We trust you,” to which I leaned over to the server and said: “We’ll take one of everything.”
  
  

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• A Visit from Mom. I was with my mother in Palo Alto, California, the day her hardcover copies of the book (she’d bought several) arrived in the mail. First, I scolded her for buying them; if anyone didn’t need to spend money on this damn book it was this woman. (The book is dedicated to her.) Second, as I was preparing her coffee in the kitchen, I heard her rip through the packaging and everything turned silent for several minutes as she read the first pages. Nothing for minutes. Then, finally, this: “Nicky, I never knew you were this deep!”
  
  My mother died three months ago. In her flagging health last year, she still made it to San Francisco, for my reading at Green Apple Books alongside my bestie-to-be, Josh Jackson (VIDEO), a highlight of friendship because of the book. (See? All relations.) When I arrived at the venue for soundcheck, Mom was already there, front row, smiling with a scarf around her neck and her oddly discolored front tooth and her unending love. We went out for food afterward with my brother and niece and others, and it might have been the best night of my life.
  
  In her final minutes, ten months later, I’d whisper in her ear at the hospital:
  
  “Love you, Ma. You can let go now. You are the mountain.”
  

  

• Awards. I never expected any award for this book, never expected to receive glowing support for its contents and shape, never thought it’d feel so affirming to receive awards like the Reading the West and Library of Congress/Humanities MT Great Reads, Great Places Awards.
  
  More than affirming, these feel notable because it builds trust in my own curiosity, that it’s worth listening and following and being patient with creative and ambitious urges, that when an image or an idea jumps on your back and doesn’t let go, digs its claws into your neck, you better listen, better keep walking.
  
  Being shortlisted for Reading the West alongside Mark Sundeen (The Unsettlers, Delusions & Grandeur), and Philip Connors (Fire Season, The Mountain Knows the Mountain) was humbling. Their careers extend well beyond mine, and I’ve looked to them for guidance for years, so these accolades are nothing if not shared.

• Releasing the Paperback! After several rounds of updates and cover art conversations, I’m thrilled to announce that The Way Around will be available in paperback on October 6! Milkweed Editions was excited to brighten up the cover and update the subtitle to invite a more buoyant and broad appeal across audience and genre. It’s exciting to see it change in optical texture and see what that does for its reach.
  
  Pre-orders are available now, and we’re currently scheming a two-week tour in Montana, Oregon, California, Utah, and Colorado for the first two weeks of October.
  

Five Things I’ve Learned After a Year of The Way Around

1. The Surface Area of the Self Is Shifty. One thing that’s been fascinating is the ongoing, unfurling, unending stress-test of the ego when putting something like a book—or I’m guessing a record, an art show, anything expressive—into the public sphere. Crediting my therapist here in the lead-up to the publication, when she said that, by publishing a book you’re voluntarily expanding the surface area of the self that makes contact with the world, and that’ll bring with it all sorts of interesting and challenging encounters—more contact, more critique, more praise, more vulnerable side doors and Shanghai tunnels to trap and corner and boost you and, perhaps most interestingly, respond with . . . indifference.
   
   One year in, I’ve grown a kind of baleen, a filtration system around the self, where any praise or criticism or indifference meets a bouncer at the door who asks: Is this helpful? Are you feeling overly identified with the critic, the praise, the silence? How is this instructive and decentering, or how is it inviting more solipsism and narrowing? Tending with caution to what you let in and what you let go is not unlike an emotional blubber I’ve built this past year.
   

2. You Let the Book Lead. The Way Around has been knocking around in my imagination for ten years, several of those years in earnest as a book project. So much of that experience has felt solitary, a minefield of doubt and revelation, promise and defeat. I lit the manuscript on fire once. Maybe twice.
   
   One of the most amazing things, now that the book is a year old, is that the final expression has become itself a calling card, a point of departure to begin new conversations with people and with the world. My friend and fellow Milkweed author, Scott Chaskey, said to me on a podcast interview: “Now, it’s time for the book to lead.”
   
   And perhaps this book has been leading the whole time. Now that it’s in the world, gulping oxygen and reaching to surprising corners of the world (here’s an updated list of events, interviews, and podcasts), what comes back in these exchanges feels animate, alive, and not entirely my own. Summoning Percival Everett’s Mama Bear School of Art philosophy here—once he publishes a book, he thinks to himself: OK, little guy. Go find your way. Don’t come back to Momma. It’s your path now.
   
   

   

   
   

3. Grow Thick and Thin Skin. In my limited experience, publishing a book requires simultaneous callusing and porosity, and with that comes an intimate opportunity to better develop my relationship with the self: passing through gauntlets of aforementioned praise and also getting the shit kicked out of you. I told myself I wouldn’t read reviews of the book. I failed. I’ve read every one of them. Several times. I promised never to encourage readers to leave Amazon reviews because, well, Fuck Bezos and his rockets, but I’ve checked in on them regularly. Goodreads, too.
   
   It’s a strange and small thing, this longing for validation and acceptance. But I think a year on I’ve learned to hold it all lightly, to notice when the focus on receptivity carves into my focus and creative drive. Because confidence and durability is required to continue making lasting work, too. I suppose the invitation is this: What are the conditions and habits to nurture that’ll position us to continue making work, each day, continue the practice and stay inspired, enraged, in love, embodied, and radically generous? This is the only rubric that matters.
   

4. Publishing Is Polytemporal. To have taken the better half of a decade to publish this 180-page book feels, at times, embarrassing. It’s short. Only three parts. Not that hard, right? What I’ve shared along the way at readings is that the original manuscript was nearly double in length—not uncommon for many authors.
   
   What’s been wild is to work on something for so long that both yourself and your craft are constantly changing, upgrading, evolving, alongside the ever-unfolding world. And that makes for this polytemporal rubix cube moving target. It’s like shooting clay pigeons but you’re starting with a slingshot, then handed a pellet gun, then a pistol, and a rifle, all while the clay is being lobbed in every direction at once from shifting machines.
   
   A year on, I can still get behind most all of the writing and the ideas and shape of its narrative. That was a function of ruthless revision and cutting, asking myself: Would I be happy with this sentence in twenty years? Editing for the long game, for perennial bounty, not annual pyrotechnics, felt critical—albeit crazy-making. That’s not to say there aren’t things in there I wouldn’t change, or that I’d add, but the house was built to last.
   

5. Audiences Are On Their Own Timeline. When you publish your first book, or anything for that matter, you oddly expect people to either read the thing immediately or not at all—which is entirely a math problem, as you’d spent unreasonable hours, days, and years on the thing so the least people could do in respect would be to drop everything and read it, right? Wrong.
   
   That’s not how literature works. In fact, one of the most enjoyable parts about the process has been receiving notes from readers just now finding it and having their own experiences. Seems obvious, but what a gift to have something that crawls around and slithers into the minds and hearts of others on its own time, in perpetuity, that someone at a certain time in their life might decide: Hey, I’ll try this book out. I’ll see what it does for me.
   
   Here’s the sappy lesson: You never know how your expression, your actions, your generosity will affect another, how it’ll be metabolized and when. So you continue down the path, continue trusting the impulses. You listen. Poke stuff. Bathe in curiosity, tenderized by the generosity and risk-taking of others’ expressions and make it fuel for your own contribution.
   
   “You never let go of the thread.”

Final Thoughts . . .

I’m thrilled. It’s been a lot of ground to traverse. I’ve never felt equally more proud of what I’ve done and more insecure and sensitive than this past year.

Putting a book together is so much bigger than a book. It’s commitment on steroids. It’s an endurance event, a long dark night of the soul and squeezing out the other end caring for sentences more than anything else, though you’ve privately given up a million times. It’s daily conversations with yourself about priorities, about what matters, about what you’re here for.

Why you, why now?

By the end of last year’s 20-plus stop hardcover tour, I ended up in Murphys, California, where I grew up, a small town in the Sierra foothills in California, in front of family and friends—about fifty in attendance. My AP English teacher was there. My middle school teacher, too. My father stood next to a family friend who’d recently lost her own son in a head-on collision.

Here, I remember feeling more myself than ever in my life, speaking not from a place of expectation but fully owning the creative act, the idiosyncratic urges I placed here in this book. I spoke to its deepest longing without apology. Not for what my high school teacher knew me to be. Not for what my father expected to hear from his son after all these years. Not for what I thought this crowd could or couldn’t handle. I spoke with compassion for self and for the audience and for this impossibly complex world, guided by what I scribbled in the margins of my notes:

“Sincere Motivation.”
“Trust your voice.”
“Slow down.”

Thank you, everyone, for helping me walk into and around those three things, to be motivated by integrity, to trust one’s creative shape, and therefore the world—to be patient in the shaping.

To Deepen:

1. Preorder the paperback version: Milkweed, Bookshop.org, or your local indie.

2. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Jasmine Dialogues. (Helps me tremendously keep doing this thing.)

3. Support Milkweed Editions with a donation, or become a sustaining member.

Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent is to maintain a punchy counter to the algorithms and amplify the beautiful work of others on my own terms. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.

1. ANIMAL. I met the author Amy Irvine two years ago when she was the Kittredge Visiting writer at the University of Montana, and instantly hit it off. We’ve since shared several meals and long chats about our respective manuscripts, and I consider her both a mentor and friend. Irvine was one of the first to blurb The Way Around, while offering some really important feedback late in the game. That’s why I can’t be more excited to read her forthcoming book, Almost Animal, to be published November 10, by Spiegel & Grau. Pre-order yours. (You’re welcome.)

2. THELONIOUS. I keep on staring at the biography of the jazz pianist titan Thelonious Monk on my shelf, but haven’t yet committed to it. I have, though, been listening to Brilliant Corners (1957) a lot recently. It’s considered by many to be his best, but not without trouble. Apparently its production was a nightmare, with Thelonious being difficult to work with, and the saxophonist nearly experiencing a mental breakdown in the process of recording.

3. BADLANDS. Kevin Morby’s latest, Little Wide Open, is a gem of a record. Morby is someone I’ve enjoyed for years but somehow lost track of. (Apparently he’s also an avid runner.) Anyway, the first track on this new album, “Badlands,” is an absolute banger.
   

4. KLARA. When I worked at Orion Magazine (2017-2022), I had been texting with the editor-in-chief at the time, Sumanth Prabhaker, about books, and asked where I should start with reading Kazuo Ishiguro. He didn’t reply for some time, unlike him. But then, 20 minutes later, I got a knock on my door. Sumanth had driven to my house with several copies of Ishiguro and said: “We need to talk.” He was a Ishiguro completist and proceeded to describe every novel in detail. I’m now several deep, and really enjoyed his latest, Klara and the Sun (2021), which I just learned has been adapted into a film (to arrive in October), and the trailer was just released. Also, it looks like Ishiguro’s working on a “spy caper” of a novel set on a train, and to be published next year. Verified genius.

5. ORION. I just returned from a week as teaching faculty at the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop at the Omega Institute, two hours north of New York City. I’m biased, as I’ve had a longstanding relationship with this magazine for 15 years, but I can say that this was such a powerful and important in-person offering for the world, a congregation of around 70 brilliant participants, several teachers, and supportive staff. Morning workshops, afternoon craft panels, and evening readings, all set in a wonderfully forested campus. Every faculty member floored me with their words, their books and readings and genius. Find their books and read them all: Isle McElroy, Roger Reeves, Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Erica Berry, Michael Kleber-Diggs, and Maria Pinto.) Put the workshop on your radar for next year.

   
   

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6. HYPERLIGHT. On previous desert rambles, friend and multidisciplinary artist Forest Woodward would pull out from his Hyperlight pack a series of packing pods, and I thought them a fine idea for organizing gear. I’ve used versions of these before while traveling or backpacking and thought them sort of unnecessary, but Hyperlight’s packing pods are just so wonderful, essentially weightless, made with 100% waterproof Dyneema. They bring me disproportionate amounts of joy (I have both a 9L and 12L), and I also use them for front-country traveling. I also own the roll-top food bag, which also performs precisely how you need it.

7. SILKO. At the beginning of this month, I joined the great Robert Macfarlane for some mountain time around Mount Hood, during his recent visit to the U.S. (We shared an event with Milkweed exactly one year ago, to celebrate his book, Is a River Alive? and the incoming publication of my own.) We ran, climbed, wandered through old growth, ate Salsa Verde Doritos, talked shop: a million books, writing projects, etc. It was a dream of mine to spend time with such a big influence on my work. One reference thrown around that stuck to my ribs was the poem, “Long Time Ago,” by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), one of the great Indigenous voices of our time. I’d never read this poem, only Ceremony and The Delicacy of Strength and Lace, and it flattened me. Must-read. (I also was forwarded a PDF of her critique of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island, “An Old-Fashioned Indian Attack in Two Parts,” which was . . . sobering.)

8. MACH. The other day, I realized I hadn’t purchased a new road running shoe in over a year, as I’d been blessed with all sorts of review pairs showing up on my doorstep, thanks to my previous job as senior editor at Trail Runner/Outside Run. I’d only run in HOKA road shoes for my Boston marathon experience, but wanted their lightest, non-carbon-plated option to try, and that’s the new Mach 7. My feet have been loving this daily trainer: 8 ounces, nothing overbuilt, smooth and snappy with moderate bounce. I wouldn’t race in these, but they’re the weekday workhorse that’ll see several hundred miles. The trail version for Hoka would be the Zinal, which might be my favorite in the HOKA lineup, though minimal.

9. AWARD. I found out earlier this month that The Way Around won the Reading the West Book Award! I can’t be more humbled, excited, and proud. Hundreds of books were in the running, and the shortlist was filled with authors I adore and have read for years, so, for anyone who voted, supported, shared the book, thank you. This will help so many other readers find the book, and continue to support me in making future work. I’ve also been officially selected as the Humanities Montana/Library of Congress’ Great Books from Great Places selection, and One Book Montana, which means this fall I’ll be traveling around the state to libraries and representing literary culture for the region. This will be corresponding with my paperback launch in October, and several tour stops in Montana, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and California. More soon, but thank you, endlessly.
   

   

10. WHITNEY. New York City is one of my favorite cities on Earth, full stop. Though admittedly not much of a city person, I do love getting good concentrated macro-doses of these large cultural hubs when I can. So much stimulation, so much input, so many expressions zinging left and right. My recent travels to Italy included a few 10-15-mile days walking Rome and absorbing all of it unfolding, and after teaching for Orion upstate, I gave myself one night alone in NYC to eat unbelievable food, run 10 miles on the Hudson, and spend time at the Whitney Museum. The Biennial is open now, with highlights that included a textiled rendering of a coastal redwood tree by artist and endurance runner Malcolm Peacock, who combines running with braiding and acts of Black communion. Also, a Basquiat took my breath away, a pencil sketch by Lee Bontecou, and “She Must Be a Matriarch” by Navajo artist Anna Tsouhlarakis, whose installation was a reclaimed twist on the colonizer image of the Native American man slumped over on a horse.

11. THOREAU. I don’t get overly excited about Ken Burns, like most, but was thrilled when someone recommended I watch his latest on the life and work of Henry David Thoreau, available on PBS. It’s been a way to transition softly into the evening, firing up an episode. With guest appearances by Solnit (who wrote about the laundry controversy for Orion), Michael Pollan (who I’m listening to right now, his latest, A World Appears), and other literary scholars, it’s quite stunning, the production, with all sorts of small nuggets I’d either forgotten about or didn’t know.
    

12. SELAH. Here’s my 142nd book on the Mandorla 200, Selah by the great Nigerian-born writer and philosopher Bayo Akomolafe. This book is a mind-bending collection of short micro-essays that can be summoned at any time, for the language, for the entrancing reminders of our porosity, our rejection of anything certain or final. To really get a sense of Bayo’s mind, I’d suggest his Between the Covers interview with David Naimon. OK, here are my 200 words…
    

    

    
    Certainty is a known toxin, convenience a charade of ever having arrived, ever having fashioned an answer that’s final, sturdy, shelf-stable. Our location might indeed be far stranger and more interesting than that, more spilling-in-from-the-periphery than we could ever imagine. Divest from arrivals and insist on intertidal becomings, bodies less object and more subject, fugitive expressions all comings and goings and bleeding into themselves, contaminate-inoculate-pierce-and-be-pierced from every angle. Transformation is plural, an inside job, to be approached from a posture of honorable complicity, not rejection from without but from within this imperfect world, within the predatory, metabolic mess and joy of it all. These times call for a politics of multispecies, multidimensional, multitemporal collision, flows of bewilderment and unsure footing but welcome and buoyant. This is corporeal poetry: earth a verb, bodies as verbs, hypertrophy and decay at once, shadow-boxing definitions of self that defy simple boxes. Nothing is ever finished, so let creativity and faith invite us into new greyscaled loyalties, new blurring ecologies, new surrender. Beware of rejecting filth as non-self, the profane, the crude, the monster. We are also monsters. But we’re love, too, and transformation is love and love is a hyphen and never a period. Live as hyphen.

Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent is to maintain a punchy counter against the algorithms and to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.

12 Things I Found This Month

1. SIRĀT. This 2025 indie film is set in Morocco, where a father and his son are traveling by minivan looking for their daughter/sister, who has gone missing amid the desert rave/party scene. What ensues is a descent into the depths of mystery and surrender. The movie’s been circulating because of its starkness, but also because of its score, which, when paired with the ever-ominous landscapes, delivers.

   
   

   
   

2. ANTHROPOCENE. One of my dear friends and exceptional essayist Daegan Miller just wrote another zinger for LitHub about the work of “the world’s most pessimistic climate writer,” Roy Scranton. Here’s a line:
   
   “Learning to die in the Anthropocene never meant giving up or giving in; it always meant something much more rigorous, much more difficult: learning how to let this brutal world, this realm and the culture it sustains, go.”
   
   Anything Miller writes is worth your time, your eyeballs, your consideration. Fact: He gave me one of the most formative early edits of The Way Around. (He’s also a sub-3 marathoner. We once set up a mile race, just the two of us, and he destroyed me.)
   

3. TRAVERSAL. Maria Popova has always been an intellectual-writerly hero of mine, reading her from the Brain Pickings days to, now, The Marginalian, and the recent release of her book, Traversal, which I’m only starting to get through. There have been a few interviews published with her, but I found this one on the podcast, How I Write, to be insightful and sharp, even subversive.

   
   

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4. ZADIE. This month, Zadie Smith gave a lecture at the Academy of Arts and Letters (might need a subscription), and a version of that speech, “Art for Our Sakes,” was printed in this month’s New York Review of Books. I love their print version, even though they’re oversized and have a funny waxy feel that’s hard to roll and fold.
   
   “That convenience should be the highest aspiration of human existence happens to be one of the many uninterrogated assumptions of capitalist ideology,” Smith says. “When we convince ourselves that art, too, must take the shortest route to its effects, then we’ve submitted to that ideology.”
   

5. LENTILS. Picking from several jars of lentils, a bunch of mint and spring greens, along with greek yogurt and tahini, this dish started out as a side and quickly became a main. High recommendation for a protein-rich vegetarian meal that’s easy and gorgeous and refreshing. If anyone has a go-to lentil recipe, drop in the comments. Always on the hunt.
   

6. IRAN. With all that’s going on in Iran right now—along with just about every corner of the planet—it seems a fitting time to queue up The Seed of the Sacred Fig (NYT gift article), by Mohammad Rasoulof. A psychological drama set in Tehran, the film follows a family whose father becomes a judge/executioner in Iran’s theocratic Revolutionary Court, and, as protests and government backlash percolate, so does paranoia and mistrust at every level. One of the best films I’ve watched this year, no question. Just hold on.
   

7. AWARD. The Way Around has been shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award! This book has traveled far and wide, and I’m proud of it, and winning this award would help it reach even more readers. It’s sponsored by the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, which is another way of saying it’s administered by a bunch of badass independent book-loving folk committed to literacy and the imagination in the West. After 226 nominated books, The Way Around is one of five in the memoir/biography category, beside a few authors I’ve admired for years, friend Mark Sundeen (I recommend The Unsettlers to everyone), Philip Connors (Fire Season is delicious). Vote by May 31 (that’s in four days, so maybe now? Takes 10 seconds.) Also, The Way Around was chosen as Humanities Montana’s “Great Books from Great Places” in partnership with the Library of Congress, and One Book Montana. I’ll be traveling the state this fall to libraries meeting with book clubs and communities, and the book will be represented in D.C. later this year at the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival. Last thing: Milkweed has reimagined the book cover for an October paperback release, with some additional tour dates being conjured up. More soon.
   

8. BLM. Speaking of book tours, last year I spoke in our 20 events, and one of my most meaningful evenings was partnering up with the great Josh Jackson (newsletter here), author of The Enduring Wild, photographer, artist, and fervent public lands advocate. That evening downtown San Francisco at Green Apple, with my late mother in the front row, was one I’ll never forget, and our friendship has only blossomed from there. Jackson recently had a stunning piece published in the Guardian/RE:PUBLIC (RE:PUBLIC being a wonderful new-ish platform launched by former editor in chief of Outside, when I was there, Chris Keyes) about the intersection of the current housing crisis and how public lands are absorbing that pinch, how communities are finding refuge and community in these places, and the complexities thereof. Check out this podcast interview with Josh and another dear friend, Carina Lyall, on Becoming Nature.
   

   

   
   

9. COOGLER. My monthly roundups are never fully complete without a Talk Easy plug, but between my mother passing and a two-week trip to Sicily, there’s just been a lot of movement and emotional intensity. On a recent walk, however, I did adore this convo between Sam Fragoso and Ryan Coogler, director of multi-award-winning Sinners. (He also directed Black Panther, Creed, and others.) Loved everything about his style, his humility, his dedication to the work and the people. I’ll also plug, while I’m here, Fragoso’s more recent conversation with Michelle Obama, who I find walks and talks with striking integrity, wow.
   

10. POETA. Films about writers and the writing life always snag me, and I devoured this film Un Poeta (2025), a Cannes Grand Jury Selection about the descending, depressing swirl of a Colombian poet trying to relive his past accolades while being t-boned at every juncture. It’s a dark comedy, diving into the case for art for art’s sake (see Zadie Smith’s essay above), devotion, identity attachment, and more. So good. So raw. So uncomfy.
    
    

    
    

11. JANJI. Dear friend Brendan Leonard (SEMIRAD) and I ran 33+ miles last week as part of a larger project he’s working on, which I won’t divulge yet here, but I can say it did include questionable nutritional choices, a large mountain circumnavigation in the Missoula Valley, cheek-cramping laughter, and one of the single-most gorgeous days on foot in my home turf. I ran exclusively in Janji gear and came home chafe-free, unstinky, and (sort of) looking like it never happened. TTech Cap, the Run All Day Tee, and the AFO Middle Shorts are gear that keeps delivering the goods.

    

    
    

12. BOWLES. My 141st book (70% complete!) on the Mandorla 200 was a novel that had been sitting on my shelf for far too long. The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles (1949), is sort of like a pre-Beat fever dream version of The Sun Also Rises, but set in North Africa. I read it while traveling through Sicily and found it to be a perfect and haunting pairing while being abroad as an American, estranged from his own country and ancestry.
    
    OK, I’ll wrap with my 200-word micro-distillation:
    

The desert doesn’t owe us epiphany. Travelers drifting in from overcivilized and overpadded parts of the world seek bone-bleached truth to swab their psychic decks and scream confessions into the dune. In the end—it’s just a desert, beautiful and cruel and impersonal and held by old cultures burnished by austerity to survive. Eclipse the elemental thud here and she will eat us alive. To drift into such foreign lands as a visitor with entitled scripts of safety, where some dome of national identity permits us to move and act as gods, that crumbles in the face of inhospitable dryness, desert sky not a mother’s blanket but an unending mystery pocked with star and thorn piercing skin to remind us of a mortal veil far closer and thinner than we think. The desert is no game, no fictional backdrop for hero calisthenics. Deserts expose, yawn, consume. They wait for the necessary process to unfold. Quiet witness. No charades to save us when we’ve befouled our own ecos, our own unrepenting souls. Cosplaying exile here becomes a scrum with absolute night, where the conspiring of white-hot dryland and its black-ink sky cousin thus becomes clear—respect the dark.

Normally, every last Wednesday of the month I offer a maximalist list of a dozen best writing, music, recipes, gear, podcasts, and art discovered all month. (Here’s a link to previous lists so far.)

But this month threw a major screwball.

On April 1, I woke up without a mother.

Denise Carter Triolo died on March 31, around noon, at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California. I was there for all of it, several days before and after she crossed over. I was able to lock eyes, hold hands for hours, comb her hair, tell her how much I loved her.

It was, without question, the most intense week of my life.

I’m going to hold most of the details of my experience close for now, but thought that, this month, instead of offering my usual bounty of creative and cultural foraging, I’d share with you 12 things about my mother I learned, or was reminded of, during this process.

A version of this was posted on social media last week, which somehow the algorithms picked up, and I’m now receiving hundreds of comments daily from people from all over—empty-nesters, mainly women, some bots?—who are expressing their condolences and sharing their own losses.

At first, I was disgusted at Zuckerberg’s techo-monsters for exploiting my grief to optimize for eyeballs—we die, but attention capitalism lives on—but then I thought:

Why not have collective grief go viral? If something on these insidious platforms must tickle the algos, it might as well be a tribute to a rebel tennis player who used Facebook only to send me DMs of singing frogs and napping cats and dogs in sweaters.

You win, Ma.

OK, here are 12 things I learned, found, or remembered about my beautiful, complicated, and soulful mother, Denise Carter Triolo (1950 – 2026), this month. (Here’s the official obituary.)

Thanks for being here. And for all your notes and calls and flowers and food and texts. It’s been absolutely overwhelming and heartwarming, in every sense.

12 Things I Found (About Mom) in April

1. KIDNAPPED. Denise Triolo was once kidnapped as an infant, stolen from her carriage set on the side of a public tennis court in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, while her parents, my grandparents, were too busy playing a match. The city’s entire police force allegedly scoured the area and found her, hours later, unharmed, alive, and left in a bathroom stall.
   

2. WIMBLEDON. Mom was a mischief, a rebel, an unapologetic feeler, a world-class tennis star who made it to Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and who fought for equal representation for women alongside Billie Jean King and who once beat Chris Evert in a match. (Last week, the Women’s Tennis Association put this amazing tribute out on their channels.)
   

3. DRESS. While cleaning her home the day after her death, I found a white dress hanging in a closet full of junk. The dress was custom-made for her during her Wimbledon years by Ted Tinling, the “foremost designer of tennis dresses of the 20th century,” a flamboyant fashion czar from Britain who once said that my mother was one of his all-time favorite models. I’ve been stewing on a creative project on the significance of white garments across time and culture, in myth, literature, and fashion, white clothing as an act of violence, submission, Manifest Destiny and American Progress and Emily Dickinson’s white dress era and Native boarding school assimilation and matrimony and “purity.” It’s all a wild tangle, but seeing Mom’s most prized tennis dress was a nod that I’m onto something. More soon. (Add any references or ideas that come up in the comments, will you?)

   The Jasmine Dialogues is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

4. GUT. God, she loved her shrimp louie salads and Filet-o-Fish sandwiches from McDonald’s. She made a legendary spaghetti sauce that’s left stains on an off-brand Le Creuset, and she loved to eat breakfast for dinner. Omelets. Tots. Frogs in a pond. Preferred 1% milk in her coffee. Her chicken divan recipe is something none of us have been able to replicate.
   

5. SOUNDTRACK. She had a thing for Hozier, Trevor Hall, Hootie and the Blowfish, the Reality Bites soundtrack. I have distinct memories of her listening to Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill in her Isuzu Trooper paired with smells of cigarette smoke and a bag of fish sandwiches from McDonald’s wedged in the center console.
   

6. HEALER. My mother once saved a man’s life who had a purple grape stuck in his throat. Heimlich. She forced my brother and me to watch the movie Gandhi (over three hours) when we were very young and cared bone-deep for hippos and zebras, inoculated with a love for wildness after an impressionable trip to South Africa, on tour playing tennis and offered a two-week private guided trip to Kruger National Park, to study predator-prey relations. (One of my favorite scenes in my book, The Way Around, was her stories from that trip, which included watching a zebra get killed accidentally and a colt running endlessly in circles around her mother. Haunts me still.)
   

7. NICKY. Mom, along with her older sister, are the only two humans in the world that can call me this.
   
   

   

   
   

8. ECLECTIC. Denise Triolo was one of the people I knew who subscribed to both The New Yorker and People and read them both front-to-back. I’d call her on Monday and she’d be reading Infinite Jest, and, by Thursday, she’d pivot to some romantic airport trash novel. Her favorite book: The Magus, by John Fowles. (It’s a doorstop, but I read the whole thing in a fever dream during my first round with COVID. So good. So disturbing.)
   

9. WILD. She adored remote cabins and sun-filled meadows and was known to eat all the gorp on day one of backpacking trips. I see her now, in our family’s cherry-red Subaru, head out the window, surrounded by pine and granite and in love with the place, the smell, and perhaps, for once, herself.
   

10. PREPARED. When cleaning out her home the day before she died, I found a very large knife under her mattress, blade open, on the side where she slept. I remember she’d told me about it, but it startled me at first. Though my mother was loyal to a life of non-violence, she was also a sucker for shitty crime shows and serial killer narratives, which didn’t help her with feelings of safety and occasional paranoia.
    

11. COVID. When the pandemic struck, I started to call my mother every day. COPD and asthma made her a poster child for a pandemic casualty. “Hi Nicky,” was her greeting every time. (Again, nobody else.) She survived. I made it a ritual and kept calling every day for six years, until last week, when I watched the pulse on her neck fade to nothing.
    

12. PRESENCE. To say I’m devastated that she’s gone is too small. Turns out grief is a feral thing, comes and tackles you and pins you to the ground when you least expect it. I am, however, convinced that my mother’s mischief has already found new forms, in hues of unencumbered things—full moon, buttercup, earthquake, wolf teeth. Who knows. “Not knowing is most intimate.” I’ll keep looking for her in these liberated places, keep attending because the only thing I can say after moving through the hardest week of my life is this:
    
    Presence is everything. Presence is prayer. Presence is the whole game.

(Note about the title: This was inspired by friend, writer, and Fact & Fiction bookseller Christopher Densmore, after sharing a stage with him at a recent reading and listening to his essay about his mother, who’d passed, and her affinity for hummingbirds, forthcoming in Camas.)

Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent is to maintain a punchy counter against the algorithms and to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far. (Credit for this month’s title is from friend and contemplative ecologist, Noah Sokol.)

12 Things I Found This Month

1. KLEIN. I first read No Logo (1999) by Naomi Klein in 2004, and have, I think, read most everything since. It was refreshing to see her on Ezra Klein last week discussing Doppelganger, which came out over two years ago. (I still think The Shock Doctrine was Klein at her best; Doppelganger is also a must-read. Ezra talks too much in this one—shocker—but it made me excited for her upcoming book End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor, out in September.
   

2. EMPIRE. Speaking of Naomi Klein, on the aforementioned podcast she’d recommended Empire of AI, a deeply reported New York Times bestselling book by Karen Hao (that I haven’t yet read), and I was able to find a recent live conversation between the two in front of a nearly 1,000-person audience in Vancouver, BC., sponsored by UBC’s Center for Climate Justice. It’s well worth the 90-minute watch, to connect dots between AI, imperial patterns of conquest, and climate futures.
   
   

   
   

3. SINNERS. I don’t ever watch the Academy Awards, but before they happened I was able to see Sinners and, though I’m such a softie when it comes to horror/vampire/gore, this movie categorically rocked my world. The scene just before the night gets real, where everyone’s dancing to music that bends time and ancestors and future ones begin to weave in and out of the frame, is a cinematic triumph I won’t easily forget. This movie haunted me in the best way, just as Hamnet was a proper haunting, too, watched back-to-back. (Crazy, crazy art, too.) Michael B. Jordan is everything. (And yo, Saul Williams!)

4. CONGEE. I’ve long been a congee evangelist, but this bipolar spring of heat and cold requires an Instapot of this age-old Chinese porridge to keep things steady. Cheap and easy to make, the magic comes by way of toppings: radish, a custardy hard boiled egg, caramelized onions and mushrooms, generous dollops of chile crisp, a handful of finely shredded greens and you’re laughing.

5. COLTRANE. While preparing that pot of congee last week, I placed this wild John Coltrane track on repeat as it conspired so perfectly with the meal, the times—inner turned outer. The album, “Kulu Se Mama” (1967), would be Coltrane’s last that he’d released in his lifetime. He died six months after it came out, at age 40—that number makes me feel things—of liver failure, potentially due to hepatitis and complications from heroin use. Coltrane and Thelonious Monk continue to battle for most-played artists, and Monk’s biography remains on my shortlist, too, though it’s a bit of a doorstop.

6. BAYO. I know this guy’s name gets thrown around a lot in New Age-eco-intellectual circles, but Báyò Akómoláfé remains one of the most fascinating thinkers and philosophers of our time, and this Between the Covers interview was a highlight of my year—it left my head spinning. To really try and offer a pithy take on all that it traverses makes my palms sweaty, so I’ll say just give it a listen and hold on tight. Literature and story, pursuit and intimacy in a time of monsters, staying inside the mess in order to transmute it, AI, etc. It’s also welcoming his latest book, Selah. (I had the honor of sharing bylines with Bayo in a collection of essays on air with the Center for Humans & Nature.)

7. GISÈLE. I was on my way to reading a book review or something in The New Yorker and saw Rachel Aviv’s byline and am always drawn into her work, so started in on this long (so long, why so long) feature on Gisèle Pelicot and France’s most high-profile rape scandal, and an hour later was left stunned at all I’d learned, disgusted by the depths of patriarchal violence but heartened by Pelicot’s radical fortitude throughout. I had only vaguely tracked this story as it weaved through so many other international news catastrophes, but holy.

8. RIPTIDES. Dear friend and frontman for Death Cab for Cutie just released the first single, “Riptides,” from their forthcoming 11th (!!!) studio album, I Built You a Tower, arriving June 5. (Anti-Records). I’ve listened to it exactly 85,000 times now and the word on the street is it’s a very strong, very emotionally charged record. (Would you expect any less?) Also, here’s a 6-minute film Ben and I put together a decade ago about my brief stint training him for an ultra while touring with The Postal Service. Craziest job ever. (Apparently wardrobe failed to advise me not to wear flannel-on-flannel.)
   

9. SUR. I’ve finally broken ground on a feature about my time in Antarctica in December 2024. It’s an unwieldy 10,000-world beast meant to be half the size. I’ve been throwing everything at wall to see what sticks. One highlight: finding a wonderful short story by Ursula K. Le Guin about Antarctica, published in 1982, called, “Sur.” It’s essentially a feminist re-imagining of an all-female, South American bid for the South Pole. The slower I read, the more I picked up on all sorts of easter eggs Le Guin places in this story, which only makes me love the short story form more. (Everyone’s sick of hearing me drone on about Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.)

10. FREEZEOUT. I’ve gone ahead and made it an annual pilgrimage now, taking a visit to Montana’s Freezeout Lake to watch as a total over a quarter million snow geese, tundra and trumpeter swans take refuge at a series of lakes a few hours northeast of Missoula, before taking flight in chunks of thousands each morning at sunup for a few weeks. One particular liftoff brought me to unexpected tears, something I didn’t know I needed, something about the resilience of it all, the stubborn pattern of cycles coming back again and again despite the violence of a warming climate and an administration only throwing fuel on the fire, the shallowing ponds from drought, the megafire. Awe feels so necessary right now.

11. E.S.T. Another experimental jazz find (I know, everyone’s talking about Flea’s new jazz album, which I hope is as incredible as his short film. The guy can dance), is the Esbjörn Svensson Trio (E.S.T), a Swedish jazz band. By far the best album in my view is Leucocyte (2008), and “Premonition I. Earth” was the song that really got me hooked.

12. ASSATA. This month’s reading Mandorla 200 entries were just exquisite. Four books in March: I Could Walk Forever by Krissy Kludt, Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen, and, here, Assata (1999) by Assata Shakur.
    
    Shakur was an activist and member of the Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army—also godmother to Tupac Shakur. After being wrongfully sentenced to prison for killing a cop in New Jersey, she ends up escaping and seeking asylum in Cuba, where she was the first woman on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, until passing a few years ago. Here’s a short clip of her reading a letter to the Pope. It’s a raw, nothing-held-back look into the 1960s and 70s, how police brutality and overt racism continues on. Here’s my 200-word micro-distillation on Assata, the 140th book:

Anything revolutionary begins with self-respect, says Assata, a revolution of the I located from within intersectional folds of the we, that it’s pledging to see with unshut eyes, to peel calluses you’ve grown to accept the warm blanket of empire, ambient racism and violation at every play. To embody this is to first notice self-hatred as a central strategy, colonial divide-and-conquer to keep the focus off what’s actually true and onto interior quibbling. Liberation requires us to unshatter. It requires collective awakening, not self-help wellness hacks but to feel and feel again how prisons make slavery legal, how “peace-keeping” police are militant to the teeth, how the legal system leans toward protecting the status quo. Divestment from oppressive systems begins by finding self-determination not ending with the self but by a fire started from within the cage to illuminate sightlines of noncompliance, not because my lefty script says so but because its urgency burns too hot from within and that I have enough respect for my body, and for other warm-blooded vectors of future liberation, to go on any other way. Walk with such integrity and the world salutes.

• The Book: Assata (1987)

• The Author: Assata Shakur

• The Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books

• The Tip: | Mason Parker

1. Love Story.

The first time I saw Orion magazine was in Portland, Oregon. May 2012. New Renaissance Bookshop. 23rd and Pettygrove.

I was newly in love and everything seemed in bloom and I’d been writing consistently for a few years but had zero work published, zero formal training, and zero ambitions of becoming a full-time writer or editor.

On the magazine rack (remember those?) were several offerings, but one cover grabbed my neck: a joyous, feral hairball nest above the words, “The End of Civilization” and “My Summer with Fish Parts.”

This wasn’t some astronomy rag about far-off nebulas, or a New Age quarterly. This was Orion, “America’s Finest Environmental Magazine.”

In those pages, I found home. I found an intellectual beat and an aesthetic sophistication that turned ecological and cultural complexity into a grace I hadn’t yet seen. It printed poetry I actually liked beside visual art from the edge, while offering ways to act, to feel, to rage.

Orion seemed to organize its writing and art into something whole, something symphonic, not intended merely to inform but to move, move, move us — truth and fecundity made irresistible. I found it oxygenated, a refuge, something spacious and subversive and beautiful.

This moment changed everything.

I’d go on to pursue a Master’s of Science in environmental studies (creative nonfiction) at the University of Montana, become Camas magazine editor-in-chief—Orion’s younger Rocky Mountain cousin—and attend the Breadloaf Environmental Writing Conference, where I met then editor-in-chief, Chip Blake, only to give him an arrogant earful about how I could help improve the magazine.

Orion remained a lodestar. After applying for any job at the magazine they’d post, positions I was fully unqualified for, they finally offered me part-time work helping with the website — probably just to shut me up — which evolved into a full-time role as Orion’s first-ever digital strategist. I moved my life to western Massachusetts and held that post for three years until being offered a senior editorial role at Trail Runner/Outside.

2. Hot Take.

I’m sharing all this because not for applause but to roadmap just how much investment I’ve felt over the years to better understand and support the urgency of stories: stories that make us feel something, stories that don’t quite conform, stories of the underrepresented — vital experimental narratives beautifully rendered.

OK, here’s my hot take: Orion is the finest ad-free print magazine in the world in service to an enduring and fiercely just planet.

Jesmyn Ward, Margaret Atwood, Hanif Abdurraqib, alongside a deep legacy of writers and artists: Barry Lopez, bell hooks, Terry Tempest Williams, Joy Harjo, Layli Long Soldier, Brian Doyle, Ada Limon. I’m missing dozens of others.

Where else can you find all this? Nowhere.

3. Invitation.

I’ve been invited to teach this summer at the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop, June 14-19, 2026, at the Omega Institute in New York. It’s two hours north of the city and totally accessible via train. I’ll be with some of my favorite voices:

• Hannah dela Cruz Abrams

• Erica Berry

• Michael Kleber-Diggs

• Maria Pinto

• Roger Reeves

• Isla McElroy

Let’s workshop together. Let’s talk about art and artifice together. Let’s look into the unknowable parts or awkwardly try and spell God in 65,000 different ways or just stop and bathe in silence and listen for questing ticks.

Let’s see what writes us.

Early bird deadline is this weekend, March 15. Share with your people who might be interested? Cool.

Additional Updates:

• Writing the Wild Writers’ Retreat: Aldo Leopold Foundation, Baraboo, WI. On June 5-6, 2026, I’ll be helping facilitate a writing retreat for the wonderful folks at Writing the Wild. Registration is open. More on this soon.
  

• Paperback Preorder. The Way Around is coming to paperback! I’m working with Milkweed to finalize updates for the book, slated for October 6, 2026. The book’s been longlisted for the Reading the West Award, and was recently featured on the Writers Who Run podcast (watch or read). I haven’t solicited my community for leaving online reviews for the book (Amazon, Goodreads, etc.) but I know that’s a way others might find it, so . . . consider it?
  

• In-Person Events. I have several exciting announcements for upcoming live readings at the Please, Poetry Library in Missoula (April), and helping in-person to celebrate new stunning poetry collections by Krissy Kludt (June, Madison, WI) and Jolene Brink (October, Missoula, MT).

Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent is to maintain a punchy counter against the algorithms and to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.

12 Things I Found This Month

1. DEATH. I’m currently in the San Francisco Bay Area, tending to my mother who took a catastrophic fall a few days ago and has a punctured lung, dislocated shoulder, and all sorts of other troubling health concerns. It’s going to be a long road to recovery of her, someone who I love immensely. (I write about her in The Way Around; the book’s dedicated to her.) This recent Atmos podcast episode, hosted by editor-in-chief Willow Defebaugh, is with death doula, Alua Arthur, and I found the conversation helpful, illuminating, and refreshing as we all consider aging, decay, and how mortality is exactly what makes life worth living, an enduring source for compassion and radical presencing. (I’d originall found Arthur on this episode of 10% Happier.) At one point, Defebaugh quotes Richard Powers, who says: “Death is the greatest invention of life, because it keeps itself going,” to which I stopped in my tracks.
   

2. GODS. One of the few daily emails I read every day is The Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day. They’re (mainly) bangers, and they start my day off with expert songlines of verse. I have a whole shelf in my reading nook dedicated to poetry, at eye level with my meditation cushion (i.e. where Monkey Mind decides to jump around like a feral beast most mornings). This poem, “I Imagine the Gods,” by Jack Gilbert, really caught my attention: “Let me fall / in love one last time, I beg them. / Teach me mortality, frighten me / into the present.”
   

3. RED. I can’t stop recommending Nick Estes’s book, Our History Is the Future, especially this year, the tenth anniversary of Standing Rock, which was a moment in a long history of Indigenous resistance. (I wrote this piece for Terrain.org after organizing a supply run there in 2016.) Estes’s Substack is wonderful, as well as the podcast, The Red Nation. I found his episode on Manifest Destiny required listening, too, which I listened the same week the Big Sky Film Festival was in town in Missoula – such a crazy wonderful festival – where I caught the film “Ni-Naadamaadiz: Red Power Rising,” about Canada’s own armed occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora, Ontario, in the 1974.
   
   

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4. GEESE. Not to be confused with Goose, another band I’ve grown to love despite my strange hesitation to lean fully into Phishy jammy stuff. I feel like I’m seeing Geese, the phenom Brooklyn-based rock band, everywhere these days, so forgive me if I’m just now singing their praises for you. A friend whose taste I value sent me their most recent record, and I listened the whole way through, several times, and was promptly stunned by its fullness, its risk-taking, its liberated sound. Try my fave track, “Bow Down,” “Long Island City Here,” or, perhaps appropriate for the impending season, “Taxes.”
   

5. HANIF. I’ve read several memorable essays from the great Hanif Abdurraqib — recently he’s come up after enjoying him as guest editor for Orion’s episode on the natural rhythms of hiphop, and being a creative advisor for this stunning podcast on Fela Kuti – but I hadn’t yet read They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, which had been staring at me on the shelf for months. I’m currently halfway through a reading-listening hybrid (listening to the audio book, narrated by Abdurraqib with off-script tee-ups before most essays, is a joy) and his writing on pop punk, revenge fantasy, and male loneliness had me stunned and seen in my adolescence. My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday . . . you get it. Now maybe I can move on from this month’s obsession with how good AFI’s Sing the Sorrow record was (the band at their best, though Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes might be their punkiest best). Abdurraqib: one of the best essayists of our time.
   

6. ORION. Speaking of Orion, last week I wrote a little ditty on IG about my 15-year-old love affair with the magazine, and how I’d ended up working for them for five years. I still get behind the statement that they are the best nonprofit, ad-free print magazine in the world dedicated to celebrating and defending a just and viable planet. This summer I’ll be teaching a nonfiction workshop at their annual in-person event, June 14-19, alongside a crazy-talented lineup of authors. Omega Institute. Rhinebeck, New York. Accessible by train from the city. Reasonably priced, especially if you jump on scholarships (due 3/1) and early bird pricing (3/15). Come play? (Here are some articles I’ve worked on with them.)
   

   

   
   

7. SPRINGSTEEN. There’s no better compliment than someone telling you that your mannerisms sometimes resemble those of Jeremy Allen White. (If anything, I think it’s the nose we share.) Though not necessarily a Springsteen evangelist, the new biopic of Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, was a knockout, especially in a genre that’s so hard to do well. (Straight Outta Compton was another that I totally loved.) White delivered the goods, again, as anyone who knows me knows I adore The Bear. Humble. Committed to the craft. A student of authentic emotion. Care for the story. Svelte AF. All of it’s there in this film.
   

8. SALMON. I’ve been really excited about the work we’ve been up to at Magic Canoe this past year — a bioregional storytelling platform focused on Indigenous values and sovereignty, regenerative economies and ecologies, and wild salmon. We’re currently helping promote the first-ever IMAX film following the impossible journey of wild Pacific salmon, which they only recently launched a trailer. Friend and Radiolab host Lulu Miller also recommended this film about salmon, “Wild Summon,” which I found disturbingly wonderful, and have plugged in a previous roundup. Related teaser: Last week I interviewed Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree) about her forthcoming book, When the Forest Breathes, and found Simard humble and committed to the real work. Look for my interview on Magic Canoe next month around pub day (3/31), and pre-order your copy.
   

9. DIG. Jacobin’s podcast The Dig gets a lot of airtime on my podcast consumption these past years, and this recent two-part interview, “Breaking the Machine with Peter Linebaugh,” and “The Commons” really nailed it. I’ve written a bit on rewilding and the privatization of the commons, and Linebaugh traverses a ton of history to situate us in these times. The Dig’s interviews are always deeply researched, which makes me grieve the recent loss of Michael Silverblatt (Bookworm) and celebrate in-depth interviewers like Talk Easy’s Sam Fragoso and Between the Cover’s David Naimon.
   

10. MERRELL. This behemoth of an outdoor company usually isn’t known for offering the top-shelf best in trail running performance, but they recently sent me their latest offering, the Agility Peak 6, which have become a welcome addition to the lineup. No hiccups. No extra bells or whistles. Feels like you could put 1,000 miles on them and they’d hold up. Nine ounces. They arrived around the same time my pair of new Speedgoat 7s arrived, and I find myself reaching more for the Merrells. (Somehow the Speedgoat’s cut runs small now?) I still think NNormal’s Kjereg 2s are my best trail shoe of the last several months.
    

11. AI. The breakneck hot takes and think pieces coming out about AI is truly overwhelming, and I’m far from smart enough to know where we’re going with all this — no one does, I’d argue — but I do know that Tristan Harris is probably one of the most lucid metabolizers and communicators for a popular audience. Peep his 15-minute TED talk, then terrify yourself with the newly released trailer for this forthcoming documentary on AI, out next month. For the best in longform, check out this piece in The New Yorker, “What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know Either,” by Gideon Lewis-Krauss (Fact: I was on this guy before The New Yorker was, with his book, A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, which I referenced a ton to organize my own memoir.)
    

12. MANDORLA. This month, I’ve made a record four entries (!) for the Mandorla 200: Our History Is the Future, The Sound Atlas, A Darker Wilderness, and here, below, Overburden, a most exquisite new book of poetry by a dear friend and brilliant voice, Jolene Brink, out now.
    
    Here’s my 200-word micro-distillation:

The deliverance of it all. The letter being sent, the mail being received, a child’s arrival amid viral flames of the day. Nothing will ever be the same. No way to put it back, no way to reverse the futures now surfacing. Look around: these are landscapes built entirely on memory, on passionate love and second chances, dead ones and live ones early to the party and intent on staying late, impatient futures excavated in order to tend to and to be with, to care for. What’s the song of the day when each day is sheer accumulation, layers of belonging? The opacity! The immensity! Playful ghosts wedged between rock and glittered bounty. Dig. Stay awake as we travel through these layers together, the multiple truths, falling in love using the same damn eyes that weep for joy and for loss, the dead placed on moss altars like a sword that tried. This world rotates without end, doesn’t stop, decay and newborn awe both reliable fuel sources. It will not stop, so reach for it. Reach for the dead in order to live. Reach for what’s beneath, just don’t forget to offer what love you’ve found back to the Earth, to another—now.

• The Book: Overburden

• The Author: Jolene Brink

• The Publisher: Texas Tech University Press

• The Tip: Jolene Brink

Last December, while visiting my mother in Palo Alto, California, I found a ripped envelope titled in red ink and an official President of the United States seal that said:

The Unspoken Speech of John F. Kennedy
November 22, 1963

The nondescript dossier wedged between faded family photos and a People magazine, Prince Henry on the cover, but inside the envelope was a 2,590-word speech that the 46-year-old president was en route to deliver in Dallas, Texas, the day he was shot, twice: once in the upper back and exiting through the throat, and, another, spaced six seconds apart—the killer shot—through the right side of the head.

In 30 minutes, the 35^th president of the United States was pronounced dead.

That morning, Kennedy had woken up in the Hotel Texas, Fort Worth, to an All-American breakfast: eggs (soft-boiled, five minutes); bacon (crisp), toast (orange marmalade); coffee (hot milk; never cream).

He was in Texas campaigning for re-election, making inroads with the state’s divided Democratic Party. It was an unusually warm day in Dallas, high 60s, warm enough for JFK to order the plexiglass bubble be removed, a protective measure typically snapped onto his midnight blue 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible with its rear-hinged “suicide” doors.

Inside the speech’s cover, I read the words aloud, “Privately Printed for Stanley Marcus.” Marcus had founded the Neiman Marcus retailer dynasty based in Dallas, valued after its recent 2024 sale to Saks Global for a modest $2.7 billion.

On the days leading up to Kennedy’s death, Marcus warned him about growing political turmoil in Dallas—a historically racist and violent city, sometimes called, “The City of Hate.” In the 1920s, one in three eligible men were members of the KKK, the highest density of membership per capita than anywhere in the nation.

Marcus’s concerns were valid, but disregarded.

After flying to Dallas that morning, plans were simple: motorcade through the city to a luncheon where 2,500 folks awaited his arrival—business leaders, politicians, and others, including many from the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest.

Including my grandparents.

Grandpa was a director of fundraising for the Research Center and they were invited to welcome the president that day. Suddenly, childhood memories gurgled forth: them, three gins deep, recounting the horror and disbelief of the day, how anxious they were to meet the president, how luncheon guests were actually the last to know of his assassination as news circulated faster on national television, how they hung their framed invitation to the event on our family cabin’s musty stairwell next to stacks of Reader’s Digests, the ones I’d read only for the section, “Drama in Real Life.”

The country was stunned.

This was, in fact, drama in real life.

All this explained why my mother had the speech in the first place.

I sat down next to her as she watched the evening news, Trump’s latest theatrics flashing across the television, reinforcing him with the visibility he so desperately seeks, and me, curious what JFK was concerned about all those years ago.

Here’s what I learned from the dead president, which, on this day, feels far more alive and hopeful and compassionate than our current, alive one:

First, the 1963 speech wasn’t written by him, but rather by a group of speechwriters. Second, after some throat-clearing pleasantries and thank-you’s at the top, the speech went on to outline the U.S. strategy for maintaining global leadership in the newly minted nuclear age of the Cold War.

“In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.”

I pivoted back to the television, where Trump droned on about denying Epstein, about ICE, which had already begun its raid on Minneapolis, “Operation Metro Surge,” behind the veil of Somali fraud schemes, that would lead to two other assassinations of U.S. citizens: Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Retracing this sentence with my index finger—“those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem”—I realized I’d been holding my breath for a full minute.

JFK’s language was a conflicting balm. It was true, as outlined in the following pages, that at that time the U.S. had too many nuclear firepower for anyone to fuck with, nearly 30,000 nuclear warheads. (Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle was published several months prior. Ice-Nine, baby.)

You could sense a rhetorical insecurity in the writing, too, shadowed by the Bay of Pigs disaster, but nuclear power wasn’t enough, he wrote. We need more tactical methods, too—he uses the word “tactical” five times, a frictionless tech bro buzzword these days—to win hearts and minds abroad.

As written, to flump communism we must befriend and arm neighbors to resist these unsavory regimes. It’s our mission, he would say, to promote freedom (i.e. free markets) in the world, and we must therefore have the CIA flood libraries and schools in Latin America and around the world with American books and shortwave radio shows.

Soft-boiled diplomacy. Soft-boiled empire.

“Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.”

When I reach the last page of the speech, there’s a yellow post-it note my mother had written on with wobbly handwriting:

Just then, Trump came on the news to announce his decision to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Trump-Kennedy Center, and signs were being foisted upon the exterior walls. After being constructed to memorialize JFK’s legacy in 1971, Trump promptly replaced the Board and wasted no time defacing property with his own megalomaniac graffiti.

The president’s distaste for the arts is clear, calling for the elimination of the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities in FY 2026. This move triggered two dozen production company boycotts of the Kennedy Center and a catastrophic drop in ticket sales. The Trump administration quickly announced it would close the Center for renovations over the next two years.

How artful.

“I’m not ripping it down,” Trump told reporters. “I’ll be using the steel. So we’re using the structure, we’re using some of the marble, and some of the marble comes down.”

But it’s the end of JFKs speech that really haunts me, written but never said—though in 2018, a team of sound engineers used 831 audio and video samples of the president’s prior speeches to reconstruct the 20-minute delivery in his own voice.

Here it is:

“We in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of ‘peace on earth, good will toward men.’ That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: ‘except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’”

On this day, Dead President’s Day, you might listen to the recreated JFK speech above, or read the full transcript here, or find yourself held in the embrace of public lands currently on the chopping block.

For me, I spent all morning listening to Bob Dylan on repeat, who, in 2020, wrote his longest-ever recorded song, about the loss of JFK, “Murder Most Foul,” clocking in at 17 minutes.

It leaves me breathless every time. I’ll leave a few lyrics below, for you. For us.

President Kennedy was a-ridin’ high
Good day to be livin’ and a good day to die

Better not show your faces after the sun goes down
I’m in the red-light district, like a cop on the beat
Livin’ in a nightmare on Elm Street

[Note: Elm Street was the fateful turn from Dealey Plaza in Dallas that required Kennedy’s motorcade to slow down enough for Lee Harvey Oswald to take his shot, which inspired Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and an emergent haunt of suburban America psyche, its “loss of innocence.”]

Don’t ask what your country can do for you
Cash on the barrelhead, money to burn
Dealey Plaza, make a left-hand turn
I’m goin’ down to the crossroads, gonna flag a ride
The place where faith, hope, and charity died

Freedom, oh freedom, freedom over me
I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free

We’re officially ⅔ the way home, people.

Our History Is the Future by Nick Estes (Haymarket, 2024) rises to the top of the list at a perfect time, having just spent last week in Portland, Oregon, for the winter convention of Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI).

The Indigenous water protector resistance at Standing Rock erupted ten years ago this year. Estes, a member of the Kul Wicasa (Lower Brule Sioux), charts in this extraordinarily clear-eyed historical account of the moment, that #NODAPL came from a much longer and deeper context of accumulated Indigenous resistance on this continent.

The encampment — for which I spent the better half of a week there, delivering supplies and writing about — was far from a flash-in-the-pan protest, but rather a culmination of an enduring tradition of First Peoples expressing their sovereignty, a word I’ve been using with frequency these days as current managing editor of Magic Canoe, but hadn’t really, truly understood what that meant until now.

Anyway, this book? Required reading.

Estes is a historian by trade (and a Substacker and podcaster. Queue up his episode on Manifest Destiny, which I’ll be listening to again and again), someone who deftly kneads time to expand the colonized context for the moment we’re living in, what it means to pattern-recognize settler-colonialism, and honoring the lived endurance of Native self-determination in the face of past, present, and future violation on behalf of the State.

OK, here are my 200 words….

It’s always been about the land. And with the land, the water, and with the water, kin relations tended to, respected as one, in humble posture. To see another as familiar, to share a sense of value as fellow sovereign, self-determining agents entangled in co-liberation. Settler-colonialism arrives with a different story; it stays, a past-to-present force that masters two-faced communication, loyal to the forever expansion. Frontier psychosis. Indigenous sovereignty has always been at odds with this colonizer schism: world as stranger, alien wilderness meant to re-educate and dominate and flood away any agency threatening “forward” motion, extracting anything to feed market growth—fur, timber, gold, oil, flesh, attention—shareholder interests, industrial needs, digital feudalism. Indigenous sovereignty has resisted such Manifest Violence from the start, and now, 2026, ten years since Standing Rock, still not as domestic subjects but as sovereign Nations committed to protecting the sanctity of bodies: water bodies, human and non-human bodies. “What proliferates in the absence of empire?” Systems of participation and agency held accountable by our ancestors. That’s what. Ways of organizing that honor place, that stand against machine overharvest, that look far beyond the Self and back again through eyes of the future, eyes of collective abundance.

• The Book: Our History Is the Future

• The Author: Nick Estes

• The Publisher: Haymarket Books (2024)

• The Tip: The Shop at MATTER (Denver, CO)

Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent is to maintain a punchy counter against the algorithms and to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.

12 Things I Found This Month

1. MOLA. In 2014, I spent the better half of a month crossing the Tibetan plateau alongside Ian Baker and a group of 16 others to circumambulate Mount Kailash. The account sets up the first round in The Way Around, and the landscape still haunts me, taunts me, finds me in dreams and in certain aspects of mountain shadow. This film, Mola, found me in tears by the end. It’s a simple conceit: a Tibetan woman living in Switzerland takes care of her mother, a 100-year-old Buddhist nun in exile whose final wish is to die in Tibet, a place she hasn’t been able to return. A must-watch. Available on Kanopy (please tell me you’re into Kanopy.)

2. LAMB. Look around your kitchen. All you see is ground lamb, butternut squash, one bouquet of kale, and onions. What do you do for an upcoming gathering? What. Do. You. Do. Stew, of course. This spiced ground lamb stew recipe (we added extra stuff but a great point of departure) was fifty times better than I could have imagined. If you’re not a fan of lamb, this is a banger place to start.
   

3. STRIKE. Being devastated and enraged and frankly stunned by the events in Minneapolis, I was deeply moved by Friday’s citywide general strike (and got leads from friends in MN that MIRAC and UNIDOS MN are two trusted places to donate if you can), and that estimates of 50,000 took to the streets. (Note: temperatures that morning were -20F.) Curious about the history of U.S. general strikes — this was the first of its kind in the U.S in 80 years — I found this piece in Jacobin on the history of general strikes in the U.S. to be helpful. Jacobin’s podcast, The Dig, is in regular rotation, too.

4. ARENDT. Speaking of encroaching fascism, a recent PBS documentary, Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny, on the life of German-born author and philosopher Hannah Arendt, was eerie and salient, in many ways, to the current rumblings of the day. I’ve always been supremely moved and challenged by Arendt’s work and writing style, her intellect always nutritious. On Revolution (1963) was referenced in my book, and I’m currently working my way through The Human Condition (1958), considered by Arendt-completist friends to be her best.
   

5. TITANIUM. With some upcoming long walks in wild places, I’ve been keen to upgrade backcountry cookware, and Snow Peak’s Ti-Single 450 Cup and Trek 700 Titanium were two new companion pieces that will streamline an already light walking system. I’m far too late to the Japanese ultralight aesthetic, but after exhaustive research, these Japanese-made campwares can’t be better designed.
   

6. SEEDS. Last fall, I had the joy of facilitating an evening writing workshop for Writing the Wild, hosted by Krissy Kludt and Drew Lanham (a great short film, “A Mystical Ornithology,” on Drew for Emergence, recently.) This winter, I’m joining as a student for a very special three-part series with Rowen White, “Echoing the Land’s Language: Writing into Kinship with Place.” White is a Mohawk (Kanienʼkehá:ka) seed-keeper and storyteller, and her Substack is one of the few newsletters I never skip. Also, a bump for you to consider engaging with Writing the Wild’s many offerings — they’re exquisitely done.

   

7. DECAF. Hear me out. I’m three weeks into a caffeine-free experiment and it’s going . . . well. (I wrote about it, sort of, here, which turned out to be the most-read Jasmine Dialogues dispatch yet. Apparently, people FEEL THINGS about their drugs.) As someone who’s roasted coffee and who’s traveled to four continents to visit coffee farms, it’s been incredibly instructive and, strangely, far smoother than I expected. Better sleep is the clearest gain here. Also, less of an energetic rollercoaster. Anyway, the process of decaffeinating coffee can be nasty so I nerded out on the matter and it’s all about Swiss Water Process. (100% chemical-free. Here’s a 2-minute video on how it’s done.) Three best decafs I’ve found that use this method: Doma, Verve, and (perhaps the winner), Sightglass.
   

8. BERRY. The other night I woke up at 3 a.m. to the booming sound of Wendell Berry’s voice from downstairs and it was perhaps the most terrifying moment I’ve had in years. Turns out, my monitor had somehow turned itself on and re-played a YouTube interview of the legendary farmer-poet. It wasn’t entirely unusual because a) I’m an absolute lover of Wendell Berry, especially when he talks about shooting drones out of the sky with a shotgun, and b) I’d just watched the keynote lecture by author Paul Kingsnorth at The Berry Center. Kingnorth is all over the map for me right now, but I remain curious about his creative, political, ecological, and more recently, spiritual insights. Worth the watch.
   

9. ICE. There’s a metric ton of media being thrown at us by the half-second about ICE, immigration, etc. and I certainly haven’t traversed the entire landscape of moving narratives coming out of Minneapolis, but I was deeply touched by this first-hand account, “Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis,” by Charles Homans, paired with exceptional photography by Philip Montgomery. (Gift article.)
   

10. KLAMATH. Anything Ben Goldfarb touches turns to gold, and his latest essay, “A River Reborn,” in Emergence about the Klamath Dam removal was expertly done. (I actually listened to it and was fully engrossed.) It shared a few flavor notes with “A Small King,” which I wrote for them last year, but with some striking photography and deep reporting. Beavers, road ecology, unfucking rivers — Goldfarb’s on it.
    

11. 100. The New Yorker comes hot and fast each week and I can often only read a few features at best. (I do love their app and recommend it.) I’m loyally subscribed for more than a decade now, and this documentary on the 100th anniversary of the magazine (Netflix; trailer here) was catnip for someone who works in publishing, and has obviously daydreamed of one day finding my name in its pages. Regardless, anyone will find this deep dive in The New Yorker’s history, present status, and future outlooks to be really compelling.

    

12. JEMISIN. Here’s the 132nd Mandorla 200 book on “ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times,” and its 200-word micro-distillation. So many people recommended N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season to me, and I just now found my way to it. First-ever Black woman to win the Hugo, and first-ever author to win three consecutive Hugo Awards for the Broken Earth Trilogy. I’ve never traveled through a protagonist’s body, down into a planet’s tectonic underworld and back so powerfully on the page.

    
    I’ll leave you with this seed packet . . .
    

A rupture in the psychic supercontinent. Molten rip, lava spew. Whatever stitched this whole world together is being forgotten in an urgency to survive. And who’s called to keep pre-existing systems of power from unraveling? The oppressed. Tell me about the collective nervous system of such a place and I’ll show you structures of hegemony continuing to traffic in fear, always bracing for impact atop ancient flows of heat and geo-violence underfoot. This is a combustive place, this earthen psyche. Volatile. Are you surprised to find a place so responsive? Planets are gods and know nothing of stasis. Oppression sustains when we name another subhuman, utility only to maintain a stillness, a status quo. Earth used to birth and kill life in steady rotation—nothing personal—but now humans arrive with drills and take without replenishment and plunge until the gods are cracked open and now, now seasons move off-kilter. So hold on. Keep the stitches from popping. Hold it together, despite smoke coming in through the vents, and remember it’s workers who will tend and who mend this superstructure, who wield true power to move mountains, to endure the endless rounds of apocalypse, to survive. We are tectonic, too.

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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Random House, 2022) by George Saunders.

This book now sits firmly on the shelf alongside my best “craft” go-to books. (I use quotes because these are all so much more than just writing books):

• Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life

• Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir

• Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard

• Stephen Buhner’s Ensouling Language

Leave any of your craft book tips in the comments?

OK, here’s my 200-word micro-distillation for you….

What makes a story? Something transforms. Kinesis, too, movement and escalation and a narrowing and deepening of stakes for the reader to lose herself in some highly organized system of grace that blurs Self and Other in order to feel something. Revision, sacred responsibility, each sentence asking: What’s the purpose? Is this sentence true to you? Is this life you lead…true? Does it make you feel anything? If there’s no charge, no energy, no causality for what happens next, let it go. Let go of every psychic darling you hide behind and aim for something simpler and more vulnerable. Hacksaw to the bone, guided by specificity, to transfer something heated and sexy and unusual about what it means to remain fully human in this voluptuous and violent world. Revision honors the relationship with a deep and lasting care for the Other, not wasting their time in conforming untruths but offering an idiosyncratic signature as best you can. Intense, direct, honest. With such urgent sincerity, framing the right questions over an obsession with answers, trust in your intuition builds and something real flops out and you both shuffle a little closer to the center of things. In trust, something transforms.

• The Book: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (2022)

• The Author: George Saunders

• The Publisher: Random House

• The Tip: Shakespeare & Co.

1. ICE agents are still terrorizing American civilians at a rate that should terrify anyone. ICE more than doubled their size since last year, helped by an unprecedented budget of $75 billion. (That pencils out to ~$1.44 billion shuttled to ICE-specific ops in the seven days since I’ve stopped drinking coffee.) There are at least five Indigenous members, Lakota and Ojibwe, currently being detained by ICE in Minnesota. Let that in.
   

2. We are still living in empire, still existing within an upgraded colonial framework that is alive and well and perhaps even more transparent in its blatant take—that the gloves are off, that little to no international involvement by the U.S. is now to be confused with peacemaking or democracy-expansion or freedom because this is all clearly, simply, business, all power, all dicks dunked in oil.
   

3. Corporations are still aiming for the bottom, as they always have. Nestlé, in the 1970s, tracking the overwhelming profits from the quickly globalizing addiction to coffee, saw that Japan was the next promising frontier for future consumers. But Japan’s tea-drinking palate was far too entrenched—for, like, over 1,200 years—so you know what Nestlé did? They hired a French child psychoanalyst and developed a coffee-flavored Kit Kat and started targeting Japanese youth in hopes that this would indoctrinate Japanese coffee drinkers from their earliest years. Kit Kat, Nestlé thought, sounded a helluva lot like Kitto Katsu, which, in Japanese, means: “Surely Win.” Now, 70% of Japan drinks coffee, a market valued as high as $38 billion. Surely, they won.
   

4. I am still in a deep love affair with Northern harriers, as they still fly low in the north hills where I live, still keeping things quiet, slow, patient—that tight tail, that little white rump patch, that coffee-colored streaking, all drifting and angling in response to the recycling winds of the day. This miracle of aviation, of grace, still happens, day in and day out, empire or no, caffeine or no.
   
   

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5. Trump is still not drinking coffee. God, he loves his Diet Coke, loves the little (big, bigger, biggest!) button installed on his desk that he hits upwards of 12 times a day to have an assistant bring him his drug of choice.
   

6. Diet Coke is still awful. In 2014, Diet Coke ran a slogan that went like this: “You’re On,” but it was often poorly placed around the word, “Coke,” on billboards and ads, which read: “You’re On Coke.” They were promptly decommissioned. Surely lose.
   

7. There is still an ongoing, active genocide-in-progress unfolding in Palestine right now. And now. And now. More than 100 children have been killed since the ceasefire in October. Since the ceasefire. If that got lost somehow in the shuffle, here’s your decaffeinated reminder. Here we are. Here it is.
   

8. Greenland, like Venezuela, still wishes to remain a sovereign nation, despite the United States pressuring them for ceding their buttressed geopolitical position and for accessing oil and rare-earth minerals and for further tourism and business opportunities made increasingly accessible as the Arctic melts.
   

9. The world is still on fire after seven days but my caffeine headache only lasted 1.5 days, which I chalk up to a win, the result of three things: eating healthier, glugging water, and having exactly 65,000 other concerning domestic and international outrages to metabolize that are far more overwhelming and urgent than any life hack, but also, whatever tweaks you can make to stay focused, grounded, and truth-seeking on these matters, during these times, I say: You’re on.
   

10. God, I still love the bitterness of coffee, though, not coffee-engineered Kit Kats but that acrid and tantalizing profile of burnt drugs filtered through paper to light all these hungry and frizzled nerve endings on fire. What a time to be alive. On decaf.

Quick note at the top: I need to first acknowledge that, with ICE murdering citizens in broad daylight, with the recent turn to imperial power grabs on multiple continents, with egregious climate agreement reversals, this is not the time stick my head in the sand with book talk. I’m outraged. I’m sickened. And the only thing I can do at this particular moment is continue to think critically, create beauty, speak truth, and refuse king-of-the-mountain hegemony at all costs, which is what I’m attempting to do here. - NT

“GO TO THE WRITING CENTER.”

This was what my International Relations professor, Dr. Graeme Auton, wrote in all caps, in red ink, on the back of my first term paper as a 17-year-old freshman at The University of Redlands, in Southern California, in 2001.

I froze. Totally paralyzed.

Up until that moment, I’d flipped through the six-page paper he’d handed me and was feeling damn proud of myself. No edits. No slashes or comments. Nothing.

Aced it, I thought. That was, until I saw his note. My paper was so poorly written, the professor couldn’t even grade it.

“GO TO THE WRITING CENTER.”

So, on that day, I did. I went to the Writing Center. And now, nearly 25 years later, there’s a small part of me that feels as though I’ve been going to the Writing Center every day since, partly to prove that man wrong but also to prove to myself that I know how to write, and, that if I cannot, I will learn.

I will stay with it as long as I have to. A hungry-stubborn-enduro-literary-badger, I will eat a thousand books and I will listen to the song of each word digesting in my guts and I will write a million of my own shitty words and then I will listen, I will listen to their sounds and I will learn to love them all, I will learn how to communicate, to connect, to flip myself inside out using all requisite tools, all tact, all brevity and heart. I will learn my own damn song.

Today, six months after my first book, The Way Around, was published with Milkweed Editions, I’m thinking of Professor Auton. I nearly thanked him in my book’s acknowledgements. Why? For his sacred negligence. For his honesty.

Professor Auton, thank you. I went to The Writing Center.

Six Months: The Path So Far

On July 6, 2025, The Way Around was born. On this day, I hosted a book launch at Missoula, Montana’s Public Library – voted the world’s best in 2022 – where 75 others joined me in welcoming this project to the world, hosted by Chris Dombrowski.

I wasn’t as nervous as I’d expected because three weeks prior I’d been asked to be in conversation with one of my favorite writers of all time, Robert Macfarlane, in Minneapolis, for his tour of Is a River Alive?, one of my best books of 2025. The lead-up to this event was the single-most anxiety-provoking weeks of my career.

Turns out, Macfarlane is one of the most compassionate, self-effacing humans on Earth, and it went off better than I ever could have hoped. The sold-out event felt like a soft launch for The Way Around, as the fine folks at Milkweed had just printed copies for purchase that night.

After a remarkable conversation, I remember sitting near Macfarlane to sign books. (His line, far longer than mine.)

At one point, someone handed me an IPA.

“From Rob,” she said. I slugged it.

Since publication, what’s followed has been a whirlwind of over 20 live events, podcasts, and media requests. So, as we kick off 2026, I felt compelled to take inventory of this strange path so far, and offer a thank you to independent bookstore owners—my favorite people on Earth—to those who hosted me, and to all who came out.

The experience has been far more satisfying than I ever could have hoped.

Live Events (2025)

• 2/22: Denver, CO - Winter Institute

• 6/9: Minneapolis, MN - Evening with Robert Macfarlane

• 7/8: Missoula, MT – Official Book Launch, Missoula Public Library w/ Chris Dombrowski

• 7/12: Shoreline, WA – Ridgecrest Books

• 7/15: Vancouver, B.C. – Upstart & Crow

• 7/16: Seattle, WA – Elliot Bay Book Company w/ Benjamin Gibbard

• 7/17: Portland, OR – Powell’s Books w/ Gregory Gourdet

• 7/18: Portland, OR – Milkweed Editions meal at Gourdet’s restaurant, kann

• 7/22: Danville, CA – Rakestraw Books

• 7/23: San Francisco, CA – Green Apple Books w/ Josh Jackson (VIDEO)

• 7/24: Corte Madera, CA – Book Passage

• 7/25: Sebastopol, CA – Copperfields Books

• 7/26: Point Reyes Station, CA – Point Reyes Books w/ Stephen Sparks

• 7/30: Murphys, CA – Books on Main

• 8/9: Roscoe, MT – River Arts & Books

• 9/25: New York City, NY – Plato Gallery w/ Eleanor Mahin Thorp

• 9/28: Virtual: Earthspells Institute w/ Holly Haworth

• 10/6: Burlington, VT – St. Michael’s College w/ Trevien Stanger

• 10/9: Minneapolis, MN - Book Lover’s Ball w/ Milkweed Editions

• 11/5: Missoula, MT – Shakespeare & Co. w/ Emily Weinstein

Podcast Interviews

• 2/5: Where the Climate Things Are w/ Addie Thompson (Video)

• 8/5: The Trailhead w/ Brendan Leonard & Zoë Rom (Video)

• 9/5: Mountain & Prairie w/ Ed Roberson

• 10/30: A New Angle w/ Justin Angle

• 11/25: The Wild Lab w/ Ned Weidner

• 12/31: Nature Junkie Radio w/ Jeff Johnson

• 2026 (forthcoming):
  - Nature Revisited w/ Scott Chaskey
  - Singletrack w/ Mathias Eichler

Online Interviews and Excerpts

• 3/5: MAD Agriculture w/ Jonnah Perkins (Interview)

• 4/17: Library Journal Day of Dialog (Author Panel)

• 4/25: Longreads (Excerpt)

• 7/5: People Magazine with Lizz Shumer (Web Interview)

• 7/8: Orion Magazine: “Five Steps to Walk Away from Empire” (Web Extra)

• 7/16: New Day Northwest (Video)

• 8/31: LA Review of Books w/ Miyo McGinn (Interview)

• 10/1: Adventure Journal 38: Book Review (Print)

• 10/8: Earth Island Journal: Book Review (Online and Print)

• 1/4/26: Post and Courier, Book Review w/ Stephanie Hunt

Substack Articles & Reviews

• 2/8: Five Months: A Short Preview, Jasmine Dialogues

• 5/13: Tracing the Longer Paths of a Story, Wild Writing (Q&A)

• 6/16: Meet Your Heroes, Jasmine Dialogues

• 7/8: The Way Around is Officially Born, Jasmine Dialogues

• 7/21: All Aboard the Hero Simulation, Jasmine Dialogues

• 9/14: Book Review, Lindsey Nieves

“You Follow the Book.”

Last thing: Over the holidays, I had a wonderful conversation with farmer-poet and patron saint of the CSA movement, Scott Chaskey, for an upcoming podcast episode of Nature Revisited. Chaskey and I met at a Milkweed event in the fall, and I quickly devoured the decadent wisdom forged in his recent book, Soil & Spirit. Run, don’t walk, for your copy.

After we stopped recording, I leaned in and asked him, rather sheepishly, about his experience publishing a first book: how he’d weathered praise, criticism, and perhaps the most surprising of all—indifference.

He laughed, stroked his gorgeous beard, and said:

“Now, you just follow the book. See where it takes you.”

The reception for The Way Around has been nothing but favorable, no major blowups or trolling yet, but I’ve still found this past year to be particularly . . . prickly, as if I’m constantly bracing for a tsunami or something.

In several instances, I found myself defensive about anything remotely critical, even things totally unrelated to the book. It’s been a wild stress-test of the ego from every angle, which itself is something central to the book. A teacher in that way. In any case, Chaskey’s advice may have been the best yet:

Follow the book. Let it crawl around on its own. Let it open the way. It’s not yours alone to muscle now. Remember that. Let it lead.

What’s Next…

I have several essays, some fiction I’m playing with, and at least two ideas for book-length projects, but mainly I’m keen to rest, read, enjoy my daily writing practice again, and settle into listening to where the world tugs.

Some forthcoming excitement on the horizon: Attending ATNI (not AWP) in February, deep immersion in Utah canyon country in April, walking across Sicily in May, teaching at the Orion Environmental Writer’s Conference in June, and several other irons in fires.

Thanks for being here with me during this uncanny time, so full of breakneck loss and enduring beauty and possibility. We’re meant to be nowhere else but right here. Otherwise, we’d be there.

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Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent is to maintain a punchy counter against the algorithms and to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.

A final head’s up: I have no paywall for this newsletter and intend to never incorporate one, but I will be thanking all of my paid subscribers with a mailed gift of appreciation, in January 2026.

For those who support this work financially, holy hell: thank you. For those who wish to bump up their support from free to paid by tomorrow—you’ll be included in that gratitude gift.

I’ve got some exciting plans to deepen my writing on this platform in 2026, so more details to come. Just know that your support is felt, appreciated, and will be reciprocated. Happy new year!

12 Things I Found This Month

1. VOUDOU. Somehow during the course of this holiday block, Erin and I found ourselves considering West African mysticism. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1953) is a short black-and-white film, 52 minutes, that drops you right into the entrancing heart of Haitian voudou (or “voodoo”), originally shot by avant garde Ukrainian-born filmmaker Maya Deren. Twenty years after she died her husband compiled her work in Haiti together. It’s a raw ecstatic look into Spirit and possession through the body. Something about it left me transfixed, unsettled, moved. Deren is most famous for her short film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), considered “one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema history.”
   

2. FELA. I’m sure many will join me in this statement: Radiolab was one of my first loves in the podcast-o-sphere. I remember listening to hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich weave science communication with humor and storytelling. (Fact: In 2009, I won my first 50-mile foot race the same day Radiolab did a live show “In the Dark” in Portland, for which I had tickets, for which I drove directly from the race to the fancy-ass Schnitzer Hall, all muddy and salt-encrusted, only to have my mind blown open. I wept.) Radiolab’s current hosts, friend Lulu Miller (everyone, read Why Fish Don’t Exist) and Latif Nasser continue to hold up Radiolab’s high standards. (Don’t know where to start? “Corpse Demons,” obviously.)
   
   All that to say, when I saw folks beginning to share Abumrad’s new 12-part series on Afrobeat god Felt Kuti, I bookmarked it then moved on. Finally I dropped in and . . . holy shit. Such good reporting, production, and meaning weaving. Fela’s been in my orbit for over two decades, and I’ve always known that something about his music penetrates differently – the political meets the rhetorical use of repetition to entrance, to transmit, to galvanize. Highest recommendation. Read this solid New Yorker article for context.
   

3. SALMON. Speaking of Lulu Miller, she recently shared this most exquisite 14-minute film on social media, “Wild Summon,” that radically anthropomorphizes the life and migration of wild salmon, but somehow totally sticks the delivery. The film haunts me still, as it reminds us of the more-than-human flows of trophic endurance, shared memory, and longing for home swirling everywhere inside us and within the living world.
   
   

   
   

4. SURREALISM. You know those friends who love jam band music and nudge Phish upon you with increasing intensity? I’m sort of like that with Naomi Klein. No one’s a bigger fan of Klein than I am. No Logo. Shock Doctrine. This Changes Everything. And most recently, Doppelganger. All hits. So smart, sobering, pattern recognizing, systems appraisals. In her latest feature in Equator, Klein explores Surrealist art and its relationship and response to rising fascism over the years, and the role of art and beauty during uncanny times.
   
   A quote:
   

   “Surrealism…was profoundly romantic. For every severed limb, there was a torso replaced with a tree trunk or seashell. For every monster, a fertile mother, or a beguiling human figure with feathers or tangled leaves for hair…If the early Surrealists were determined to look evil in the eye, they also doggedly searched for its antidotes – for love, meaning and freedom. Their quest took them both inward, to the depths of their own psyches, into the realm of dreams, hallucinations and childhood innocence; and outward, to the mystery of forests, of oceans, of constellations. They were devoted to enchantment, to rapture and marvel, to the ‘convulsive’ beauty that Breton wrote of in Nadja. Most consistently, they turned towards one another, throwing themselves with abandon into the bonds of friendship – notwithstanding their legendary artistic fractures, ideological splinters, sexual betrayals and noisy excommunications.”

5. SOUP. I’ve made this very simple, very bueno vegetarian tomato soup at least four times in the last month, and I’m unafraid to continue this cadence into the new year. Its creamy texture comes not from dairy but from cannellini beans, and the subtle acidity tang sharpens the senses and warms the belly. Consider piled triangles of cheese and bread as kin for this one. (Cookie & Kate’s lentil soup and banana bread are also in high rotation.)

   
   

   The Jasmine Dialogues is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

   
   

6. DOUGHNUT. I’ve been part-time managing editor for this refreshingly hopeful relaunched bioregional storytelling platform set in “Salmon Nation,” Magic Canoe, and recently published a hybrid article/interview about the international bestselling book Doughnut Economics. The piece is all about how, several years after the book’s publication, its diagnostic model pairing social demands with ecological limits has continued to be of use for those imagining alternative economic systems, a regenerative economic tool championed by Occupy Wall Street to the Pope to the United Nations.
   

7. RIO. This 2024 Brazilian film, I’m Still Here, (2-minute trailer) is set mainly in Rio de Janeiro, in 1971, during the country’s military dictatorship. It’s a long, emotional ride that suffuses family tenderness with the reality of how quickly things can go from comfort to catastrophic, and that the suffering of not knowing, of being left in the dark, can be its own special hell realm. The conceit: a liberal-intellectual former congressman gets taken by government thugs and is never seen again, and what happens to his wife and children in his vacancy is masterwork on the screen. It’s been a while since I’d watched Roma, but these two films somehow share similar DNA.
   

8. SAUNDERS. Now I’m not sure if this book necessarily fits the theme of my reading-writing project, Mandorla 200, but I’m nearly finished with George Saunders’s book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and it’s exceeding the hype. There’s so much packed into this masterclass of pulling apart Russian short fiction. So funny, such confidence, such wisdom. A top three writing craft book for any writer’s shelf, no matter if you’re strictly nonfiction. It’s even inspiring me to revisit some (god-awful) fiction projects of mine that have gone fallow. Other go-to “craft” books: Ensouling Language by Stephen Buhner, How to Write an Autobiography by Alexander Chee, and The Writing Life by Annie Dillard.
   

   

   
   

9. PALESTINE. Access to one’s unmodified homelands is critical to belonging, to cultural and community sustenance, and in the West Bank, Israeli encampments are continuing to fracture Palestinian land, making it increasingly dangerous and more difficult to walk freely in open space. Amid the crush of reporting and ongoing violence coming from Israel’s continued attempted genocide, something about this New York Times story really pierced me (gift link).
   
   From the article:
   

   “While Palestinian hikers once walked linear routes for miles, they now — fearing attacks by settlers — often use circular routes sticking closer to their villages. … ‘We used to roam for hours,’ said Jamal Aruri, 61, a retired photographer and experienced hiker at the front of the group. ‘Now, we walk in circles.’”
   

10. WIND. Since The Way Around’s been officially out in the world for nearly six months, I’ve received a steady drip of letters and notes from readers – friends and strangers alike – who share with me how the book’s landed for them. Honestly, it’s one of the most magical parts of seeing a book through to publication. Less the affirmation and more that someone found certain gemstones of insight, or new authors they’re exploring because of a reference I’d made, or that somehow, in some small way, they now experience the world differently because of my story. I cherish every single note. Recently, I received a warm message from writer and audio producer Fil Corbitt, who is also a fellow circumambulator and put together this wonderful audio adventure about circling his home mountains outside Reno, Nevada.
    

11. BEAR. Heard, everyone’s got their own opinion of The Bear Season 4, but I just sent the whole thing in a week and loved every bit of its pacing, its writing, and its maturation. That final scene in the alley, the reveal and release of it all, the radical care strangleheld by obsession, by finally seeing through surrender what’s perhaps most important and trying to live into it. Goddamn. Season 5. Summer 2026. Catch up.
    

12. PLOW. Here’s the 130th entry and final book of 2025 on the Mandorla 200, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones). I just posted my top 5 (Mandorla) books of 2025, if you missed it, though every single book entry are the “best” books. My 200 words . . .

    

    Can you smell the cage’s metallic uniformity? Or is it more subtle, welcoming even, a peculiar shape cast of Empire where our own psychic defenses have long-accepted certain social, economic, and ecological violations so as to not feel the true weight of suffering? Note the efficiency. Note how well we buttress the reality of constant slaughter at unfathomable scale, just as ancient stars and planets whirl above to suggest patterns far older than our strange prison. Such cosmic endurance will eat us all, but that’s no excuse to keep turning against liberation, keep taming wildness, keep throwing away those unfit for Machine service. No. Look into the amber rippling of a fox. Find something familiar. Let that awaken love and rage. I struggle to feel because a sophisticated filter has been installed inside, a filter that can’t let me access the full depth of sorrow. Interrogate that filter. Smell it. Lick it. That’s the cage, the thing keeping me from myself. Then choose to ally with older forms—fang and fungi and wing and gill—a politics of freedom. To know sorrow is to know a way home, and home sets me free.

    
    Thanks again for reading The Jasmine Dialogues. So fun, so wild, to be here with you.

    
    Here’s to a bold, true, liberated 2026. A bonus photo for those who make it to the footer. I’m still figuring out how to wear a hat correctly. . .

In February, 2018, I started a creative project called the Mandorla 200.

First, Mandorla is Italian for almond, and almond is the shape that two circles make when they overlap. A Venn Diagram of sorts, but also a shape depicted across world religions, and Jung, as a middle zone, an individuated location of nondual expression where opposites meet, blur, integrate, and find themselves swimming in some third thing.

Fancy, right?

I set off to read 200 books, closely, and look for the mandorla, then write a 200-word prose-poem-seed-packet that best expresses the signature of this individuated almond—the book’s deepest yearning. I also take (way too much) time to arrange each photo that, to my estimation, best reflects the book, and I post on social media. And now…here.

Every Mandorla selection is highly curated, already established as the best books I’ve read of the year. These aren’t reviews; if a book makes it on the Mandorla, it receives my highest vote of confidence.

The theme originally established: “200 necessary books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging for our times. 200 words or less.”

The goal was simple: to read better, to read with bigger eyes and an even bigger heart, which perhaps leads to this nerdy project’s largest offering: I tag each author, each publisher, and each “tip” who tipped me to the book. It’s become a ritualized way for me to say thanks, to celebrate good art, and to make this whole reading-writing enterprise something shared, a community, a gratitude web.

Mandorla. Italian. Seed intelligence. Gratitude web spinning. Collective learning, resource sharing. Liberation together, never alone.

Here’s Brian Eno:

A Quick Dashboard of Stats:

• 8 - # of years I’ve been doing the Mandorla 200

• 130 – total Mandorla entries to date

• ~26,000 - # words written

• 65% - to goal

• 25 – highest cadence of posting in one year (2018)

• 10 – lowest cadence of posting in one year (2021)

• 19 – # of Mandorla posts this year.

• 89 – nonfiction books (68%)

• 38 – fiction books (29%)

• 3 – poetry collections (2%)

• 12/31/26 – estimated date of finishing

• 70 – # needed to reach 200 by 12/31/26 (one book every 5.2 days)

• .005% - probability I will reach that goal

My Top 5 (Mandorla) Books in 2025

This year might have been the hardest year to settle on five books.

So much richness. So many connections, too, including what I consider the best book on highlighting the magic of BLM, The Enduring Wild, by the great Josh Jackson, The Salt Stones by friend and fellow Milkweed author, Helen Whybrow, and the late Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest.

If that doesn’t highlight a true depth of field here, I don’t know what does.

Also, I read far more books than ends up on the Mandorla, so anything on this list is a must-read. And finally, I never thought my own book would end up on the Mandorla 200 (entry 120!), but here we are.

OK, here’s what I’ve got, with each 200-word entry included. Thank you again for the support all these years. I love you.

Book 115. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

Are you practicing or posturing? Do you act from a place of ferocious compassion or self-interest? Empire thrums along on empty words while keeping its barbarism far from view to remain comfortable, but know that the difference between refusal now and refusal later, after missiles hit their targets, is the difference between a breathing child and a dead one, memorialized in four cold syllables: collateral. To condemn long after bankrolling genocide doesn’t put brain matter back into broken skulls: 14,000 Gazan children dead, one every half hour. Are we practicing resistance in the material, or are we tidy liberals too ensconced in a culture of self-worship and tepid scripts of civility—oh, poor oppressed! oh, poor children!—just as we turn away, a turning that requires us to unfeel? Every missing limb is now also a severed piece of my colonized soul. Look, rage over bombing hospitals isn’t complicated. Rage over systematic butchering isn’t complicated. What is complicated is a complete deprogramming from the insidious tang of American showmanship, theatrics of a free world, the say-one-thing-do-another, only-here-if-I-get-something-in-return scheme. So again: are we posturing or are we practicing? Is my love unconditional? Do my actions align with collective struggle, or is my bite all nub no fang?

• The Book: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025)

• The Author: Omar El Akkad

• The Publisher: Knopf

• The Tip: David Naimon, Fact & Fiction Books

Book 118. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane

A river rivers, just as you river. Throb and swerve with the milk of the world. Plunge-descend beneath all surface charades. Hold your breath and let it burn and know that this fluid breathes you alive, coauthoring some autobiography where source, self, and confluence meet at once, a remembering of the whole through porosity, through kinship, obscuring self into an “ecology of selves,” while hedging against the industrialized imagination, our creativity otherwise dimmed as puckered, half-dead units. Here is the warrior call: imagine with a river. Surrender to its blood-gush slosh into the heart of the world and let it guide you downstream and upstream and allstream, funneling toward oceanic still. But know this: river song isn’t forever song. They are dying, muted by unreliable maps pouring concrete to obscure the source. Imperial maps misunderstand that rivers are gods, that they ask now for our ears and tongues and fists. This is no intellectual exercise; hydrocurrency only currents between bodies. And our bodies tilt toward water because we, too, are water, longing for ourselves. Now: listen to the river’s enduring song. Attune to its indwelling animacy. Feel the plunder. Let it drown you. And then, from this ferocious love, this pose of riparian guardianship—flow.

• The Book: Is a River Alive? (2025)

• The Author: Robert Macfarlane

• The Publisher: Penguin Books | W.W. Norton

• The Tip: Fact & Fiction

Book 123. Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

Fern-footed pagan gods crawling everywhere, inside and out, and here you are at the crosshairs of the material and the divine, some weird nondual landscape completed by grace too kinetic for nouns. Watch: three horses canter along a rotting bridge at dawn, troughed at the bottom of an ancient lake bed cut in salt, proven light amid unproven vacancy as the Unseen fills the Seen through the interlinear hollow of things. But modernity loves to worship shiny outer solids, stuffing it all down our throats as if forever starved of an inner light. As if. The Absolute laughs, goes on dousing everything with its roaring birdsong, its sexy nerve-endingly chemically atomic in-between sizzlings, hiding there amid each exhale, amid door jams that wink though this interstitial, unnamable exchange. An ultimate wild. To live into this wholeness requires total intimacy with the particular, the firm, while bathing also in an immanence that lights everything, flowing an exchange between the two—love. Love integrated, love a surrender to this dual citizenship, love at once distinct and whole, a no-path riprapped by grace and unending collision, right there, right there in your dumb little wet heart.

• The Book: Holy the Firm (1977)

• The Author: Annie Dillard

• The Publisher: Harper Collins

• The Tip: Simon Critchley and River Arts & Books

Book 124. Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Nibi, water, fugitive. Nibi, punker-fluid body politic, collective flow demanding we stay in undying relationship with this world. Nibi subverts, resists the container, wears down rock in a patient bow to Source, grace in carrying its cyclical song to the sea and back. Snowflakes fall, sinter, bind together to form strength in collectivism; to sinter is to come home to a whole after individual descent. Where, then, might water flood away such settler-colonialist alienations, to find linear take in our own captured minds? Poisoned fish, coral bleaching, unfinning rivers, dams as song-killers, infrastructural dementia. We need water’s non-hierarchy to teach us how to resist, how to leak, how to erode structural exploitation, to irrigate patterns that are forever liminal, which is another way of saying: unconditional love, continuous rebirth, always finding ways out and in as it dreams us anew. Nibi channels beyond immediate needs, blurring time and place into some tongued flow, suggesting that we’re here to bring forth life, not destroy life, that to know water is to know the self as a generative nervous system of selves, a network always on the move, evading authority, crashing together to build new worlds of possibilities. Water, Nibi, sacred fugitive collective.

• The Book: Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead (2025)

• The Author: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

• The Publisher: Haymarket Books

• The Tip: David Naimon (Between the Covers)

Book 126. Sun House by David James Duncan

“The fragments are the song.” Life a shape destined for another to confirm some misplaced Whole, singing to its destination a cyclical homecoming through love-noted wandering of thunderous high country. Home is right here, though, shining through all things and no thing. Fragments are the song and the sun endlessly self-immolates in service to Earth’s endless birthing and how unconditional an annihilation! Full allegiance to the enduring unwriteability of it all, the unintellectual thud-joy-beauty piercing all boundaries yet requiring them. Other is a requisite to the Whole, even as a boys-with-toys culture seems intent to clobber every Other for the summit—only delusion at the top. We follow the song instead. We listen to how every fracture embodies its source: heartthrob spooning heartbreak, light spooning dark, wild-haired gods finding home in the crevices between. My body knows your body knows Ocean-Body knows the sounds of which are of home, forever blue, and the task will never not be this: find love in the divine crevices and cohabitate there, coauthor cave art, keep fire on crackle, welcome the dark while warmed by the flame, dance Sophia’s loving song of creativity into this profusive whorl of mystery. May we quiet enough to hear.

• The Book: Sun House (2023)

• The Author: David James Duncan

• The Publisher: Little Brown

• The Tip: Chris Dombrowski

To Deepen:

• Follow the Mandorla 200 on Instagram

• Subscribe to the Jasmine Dialogues where I’ll be posting these as roundups.

• Send me your best book tips of the year in the comments.

Mysticism (2024) by Simon Critchley.

I actually listened to this book earlier this year, but was so moved by it I had to get a copy, and I’m glad I did.

It’s a strange read, full of surprises, full of voice-forward wisdom that’s accessible and not overly religious or dry. Critchley is whip-smart, and funny as hell (“effing the ineffable.”) A top read this year.

Here’s my 200-word seed packet…

(129/200) To live as contradiction, paradox incarnate, bodies empty to be filled—the mystic is far more punk than we think: devotional enfleshed participation with life, a radical rejection of disenchantment, spiritual subversion through solitude and contemplative practices that endlessly court the Great Unknown as if rounding the lips of a mouth set to eat you alive, only to become the one chewing. Mystics perform not as intellectuals but in kinesthetic divestment from the Self, obliteration through ecstatic spiritual burst. Merge! Weep into pools of awe and be baffled, charging the very aquifers that quench you. Pray naked in the dark and have your curling blood simmer with “limpid intensity.” Be guided by the Song. Mystics commit every minute to side-glancing at hidden gods, each breath stripping falsehoods through “ascending negation,” to move closer and burn brighter and strike a match to the wick of the Self so that they might burn off the singular and offer light to the world as one, as love, lantern songs clanking along in the dark, forever peering into the Emptiness in order to eat it, and be happily eaten.

• The Book: Mysticism (2024)

• The Author: Simon Critchley

• The Publisher: New York Review Books

• The Tip: Erin Hilgendorf

We are in it. In the middle of it. The middle.

I don’t quite know what that even means—the middle—and I don’t think we’ll ever quite know, but I do know that we’re swirling in it right now, and so often I’m scared at how little this substrate of unknown scares me.

A fan drones in the bathroom. It’s the only sound I hear right now because outside I’m surrounded by neighbors who don’t talk much to each other. Quiet out there. One neighbor with purple hair had a fake cat in their window and recently replaced it with a sign that says:

“Empathy Isn’t a Crime.”

Seems like they’re in the middle of it, too.

Dishes are left in the sink and it feels like a luxury. To even have dishes to dirty, to clean, in a warm home with a kitchen, to even have a choice—pure decadence.

I train for a foot race as a mass extinction event races all around me and I’m somehow supposed to compartmentalize, supposed to direct any concern to wisdom texts, but old wisdom texts weren’t wrestling with planet-sized die-offs now were they. They did have plagues, attempted genocide, Inquisitions, all sorts of world-ending tyranny, so I suppose a planet on fire and this firing squad of a country is just another version of a middle.

At one point this summer, I scribbled “The Middle of the Empire,” on a stickie note and placed it below a light switch in the kitchen.

Simple orientation.

Sitting tight-hipped in the dark, I listen as a coal train changes its tracks nearby and throttles the house’s foundation. Its machinery summons Auschwitz. I try to pull all of my focus inward, try and do the opposite of hold my breath and instead hold my palm to the fat of my belly, exhaling far too loudly and mumbling into the day:

Just arrive.

Don’t try so hard to do the right thing.

You’re in the middle of it, hombre.

You’re in the middle of some unfathomable unfolding expression of multitudes, plumb in the eye of a storm that never ends, like that plane that found itself shooting unprecedented footage from the inside of a category five hurricane.

Spun stillness amid total chaos.

To say “this life is not a practice round” is overused, surely, but in this moment, this, right here, is it. This is the whole thing.

The fan.

The fake cat.

The belly fat.

The dishes.

The empire.

The coal train.

Your tugging attention.

This is it, this round of life on offer, the one we’ve found ourselves in, the one we have no promise of extension. This is the main event.

So, what’s the play? Is it to bet the barn, to make friends and influence people or follow the eightfold path or light SUVs on fire or play Bananagrams until dawn or slug all remaining malbec or become some hermitic craftsman or focus only on birdsong or become an influencer or make a sandcastle or build a boat with a white sail and depart or stay and start a business or a do-gooding nonprofit or how about a dynasty?

What is it, and, furthermore, who’s doing the asking?

What are such wily gods asking of us in this pivotal time, here in this middle place, a place where some force has pushed us here together, blowing on us like some collective ember as if to say: Now burn.

I try to understand my agency during this time, try to be productive yet contemplative, committed yet adaptable, buoyant yet firm, principled yet spontaneous. All that I am sensing is that no one knows quite what’s happening. And yet it’s compassion that keeps coming up, compassion that keeps squeezing, streaming, screaming through the cracks of time and composed wisdom as if to say:

We are brief.

We are many.

We all share certain inalienable conditions.

We are all deeply confused, while at once publicly so sure of ourselves.

We are in the middle of some wondrous and terrifying unknown, where nothing is final.

So let this fuel an unending kindness. Let this slow us down. Let this help to see the thing or the person or the gridlock, the cancelled flight, the spilled milk right in front of our noses not as some impediment to getting elsewhere, but as the actual thing.

“Everything is practice,” in this shared middle place. Everything.

Try mainlining that for one uninterrupted minute. Try living from that orientation, that everything is dying and birthing at once and we’re all white-knuckling it most of the time and there’s a reason my jaw aches most mornings these days. Then ask:

Who’s doing the clenching?

Who’s doing the dreaming?

Who’s doing the writing?

Who’s doing the asking?

To interrupt patterns of sure-footedness requires, for me, a constant interrogation of misplaced certainties, a recognition that I know nothing. I am beginning to rest in this innocence. Welcoming it. Becoming liberated by it.

It’s a fabulous place to start, because it’s from here that I see how we might end up traveling deeper, deeper into the depths of compassion, pouring and peering right into the middle, from the middle, a shared place, to say at last: how thrilling.

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