I returned from Toronto inspired by the confluence of infrastructure, public art, nature, and play at The Lassonde Art Trail in Biidaasige Park, at the newly reconstructed mouth of the Don River. One of the art pieces in this trail is LODESTAR, by my friend Lisa Hirmer.

I was happy to return to my collaboration with Lisa Hirmer as part of her “Careful Infrastructure for Reassembled Lands” at the Toronto Waterfront, which I write about in Governing Bodies.

Madhur Anand would refer to this image of our sign alongside me holding my book with an image of the same sign, as “mise en abyme,” a theme in her novel, To Place A Rabbit. We had a great night in Toronto, where I closed by reading a chapter in my book called “Collaboratory,” about an environmental conference linking arts and science that Madhur had invited me to in 2022. Perhaps another example of mise en abyme. It was fun circling the many contours of our books.

I am thrilled to welcome Madhur to Queens at Kew & Willow on September 30, 2026 (Scroll down for details) where we will be once again in conversation.

September is brimming with events and so many beautiful confluences. I am excited to kick it off by visiting the home of my press, Milkweed Editions, in Minneapolis.

See below for this exciting fall lineup. I would love to see you and your peeps. Please share.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Wednesday September 2, 2026 at OPEN BOOK, Minneapolis, MN, 6 PM.

Milkweed Books & SEWA-AIFW Presents: Artist Talk with Nigar Alam and Sruthi Narayanan RSVP

Friday September 18 2026, Saint John’s in the Village, NY, 7:30 PM

WildLine immersive concert: Still Here/ Three Free. RSVP

I stumbled upon this upcoming concert that happens to be inspired in part by Governing Bodies!

How wild is this?

“…One of the inspirations for the Still Here | Three concerts is Sangamithra Iyer’s tender memoir, Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed. She is a hydro and soils engineer by training, interested in possibilities. Soil, water, family, revolutionary politics, and our animal industrial complexes are interweaving characters, oscillating between joy and harm…”

“Flute, cello, piano music grooves in an immersive environment, filled with handmade wild creatures for audience interaction and play

In this third installment of the Still Here concert series, WildLine celebrates all kinds of ungovernable bodies - of all species - and the ways in which we are “still here”. Our installation artist Yiseul LeMieux is creating an immersive environment filled with handmade wild creatures for audience interaction and play, in collaboration with WildLine’s flute, cello and piano trio (Tessa Brinckman, Chris Gross and David Friend).”

Tuesday September 22, 2026, 7 pm.

Afterword Bookshop, NYC with Linnea Ryshke and Mia MacDonald RSVP

I will be celebrating the launch of Linnea Ryshke’s book Afield, about which I wrote:

“In this remarkable lyrical reckoning, Linnea Ryshke guides us through Rumi’s liminal field between wrongdoing and rightdoing. Adeptly structuring the book into four innovative shapes: a track, a box, a mark, and a ring, Ryshke, as poet and artist, becomes an embodied witness to reindeer herding, alligator cognitive research, wild boar management, and the monitoring of migratory birds. Afield ethically troubles the human acts of studying, managing, and saving our fellow animals, and movingly urges us towards more tender ways of knowing and being.”

We will be joined by Mia Macdonald of Brighter Green. I’m thrilled to have this event in the East Village, which holds a special place in my book and my life, at this very cool new bookshop:

“Afterword Bookshop is an independent bookstore located a few quiet yards off the Bowery in Manhattan’s East Village. A self-described “temple to old media,” Afterword was opened in December 2025 by two best friends and booksellers looking to build a new kind of store from old-fashioned principles, namely community, curiosity, and the proverbial human touch.

The selection is wide but personal: fiction, art, poetry, philosophy, and a growing kids’ section, curated on the principle that every title on the shelf should earn its place. Each book has been carefully chosen—including plenty of deep cuts, authors, and publishers you might not find anywhere else. The shelves reflect a strong commitment to artistic exploration, independent publishing, and social justice, with an irreverent point of view that is unmistakably their own.”

Thursday, September 24, 2026 | 3–5 PM

CLIMATE WEEK AT NYU

ENTANGLED: WRITING ANIMALS IN A WARMING WORLD RSVP

The climate crisis is also a crisis of relationships. What do we owe our fellow creatures who share this warming world? How do we think about animals as beings with their own histories and claims on the future?

Linnea Ryshke, author of Afield, and Sangamithra Iyer, author of Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed, grapple with multi-species encounters and futures in an era of climate crisis. They’ll be in conversation with Mia MacDonald,adjunct professor of environmental studies at NYU and executive director of Brighter Green.

Join us for a discussion on writing across species lines — how attention, empathy, and story can guide us toward more compassionate ways of being.

Jamieson Conference Room, 6^th floor, Goddard Hall, 79 Washington Square East

Co-sponsored by Brighter Green and the Culture and Animals Foundation, as part of NYC Climate Week.

Wednesday September 30, 2026, Kew & Willow Books, Queens, NY 7 pm.

In conversation with Madhur Anand to celebrate the paperback release of To Place a Rabbit. RSVP

I am always excited to be in conversation with Madhur Anand, who is a brilliant scientist, poet, memoirist and novelist. I’m happy to host her here in Queens. Please join us! Read my review of her masterful memoir: This Red Line Goes Straight to your Heart and our conversation in Gloria Steinem’s living room.

Friday October 2, 2026, Hunter College, NY, 6:30 PM (Note new date!)

“Writing with and like Water,” with NYCH20

RSVP. Order copy of Governing Bodies with 10% Discount from Kew and Willow for pick up at the event.

STAY CONNECTED

Please reach out if you are interested in inviting me to speak or talk to your class, college, or organization. For media and publicity inquiries, please reach out to my wonderful publicist, Morgan LaRocca.

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

Subscribe now

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“Coincidences like these propelled me forward in life.”

This is a line from Madhur Anand’s brilliant and clever novel To Place a Rabbit. (We are doing a joint book event in Toronto on 8/21 —details down below!) When I first read those words, I recognized them as something intrinsic to my writing and research practice. I pay attention when multiple sources point me toward a particular subject. These coincidences I call confluences. Madhur calls them synchronicity.

Recently this happened to me with the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

Back in April, I was in Boston with Wan, who was running the marathon, and we met our old friend Mitra, for pre-marathon dinner at My Thai Vegan Cafe.

Mitra Abbaspour is the curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Harvard Museum, and over dinner she had mentioned the work of Leonora Carrington, who in addition to being a surrealist artist, was also a writer. At the time, I was unfamiliar with Carrington, and I was interested in learning more. After dinner, Mitra texted me a link to Carrington’s autobiographical work Down Below with the note, “A beautiful place to begin.”

I immediately requested a copy at my research room at the New York Public Library, while I still had access, and texted Mitra,“Yesterday I had to return all the books that I had on my shelves for the past 6 years.” These books kept me company while I was writing Governing Bodies. I cleared out my shelves, laid all the books on the table, and bid them farewell and fareforward. “It was emotional,” I wrote. “But now I am inviting Carrington to the party.”

I wasn’t able to spend time with Down Below before heading to Paris in May on the way to the More than Human (MOTH) Life Conference in London. David Naimon (who I was delighted to be in conversation with on his podcast Between the Covers), wrote me saying “I don’t know if you are a Leonora Carrington fan but if you are there is an exhibition of her work while you are in Paris.”

Coincidences like these propelled me forward in life.

Carrington was famous, but was new to me, and within a few weeks I was being guided towards her from different spheres in my life, but was also finding connections between these spheres. (I know Mitra through our mutual friend Tova who lives in Portland, and who came to my Portland book event with David back in January.) I texted Mitra that I navigated so much of my own research by these moments of connection and synchronicity.

One afternoon in Paris, after mandatory visit to vegan boulangerie Land and Monkeys, I made my way on foot to the Musée du Luxembourg.

Walking through the streets of Paris, I stopped to take picture of street trees, bird feeders, rain gardens, storm drains, skinny catch basins, and recycling vestibules, as I do.

I arrived at the Musée du Luxembourg and picked up my audio guide, a remote control like device on which you punch in the number of a painting, and then hold it up to your ear, like a phone. (Or perhaps it was like holding the hearing trumpet in Carrington’s novel, I had yet to discover).

Of course what drew me to her work were the portrayal of animals, the feeding of animals (vs. feeding on animals), and the extraordinary mythical hybrid creatures. I used my translator app on the exhibit text which read:

“Long before the word existed, Carrington wove an ecofeminist mythology where the earth, animals, and women coexist on the margins of patriarchal structures.”

My curiosity about her only increased and I became obsessed. Mitra had warned me “Seeing her work in person is life altering!! ✨✨✨”

I was very curious about Carrington’s philosophy and ethics around animals, and wondered about any vegetarian leanings. Mitra had pointed me to the Carrington scholar Susan Aberth, author of Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art, as someone who would have the answers to my questions.

Susan and I just began a very lovely exchange on Carrington and animal rights, and she sent me her brilliant essay “Animal Kingdom” included as part of Magical Tales, an exhibit on Carrington’s work in 2018. I wish I had this essay as my companion walking through the museum in Paris, like a hearing trumpet piping in Susan Aberth’s insights. On animals, Aberth notes Carrington claimed, "I was born loving them,” and she traces how animals have moved through her work over time.

“During the last decades of her life in particular, it was the plight of animals in our increasingly fragile world ecosystems that consistently aroused her political outrage and caused her considerable heartbreak.”

She further notes:

“The casual way in which humans, animals, hybrids, ghosts and mythical beings populate the same space and seamlessly interact with each other lies at the heart of her strategy to radically upend the normative.”

In her correspondence with me she also shared that Carrington “had many animal companions, her favorite being siamese cats and dogs that were abandoned at the Mexico City airport.”

Back to Paris, the night of my museum adventures, I stayed up to prepare for the MOTH Conference by reading the papers of my fellow attendees. I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Carrington referenced in the work of another literary animal, Erika Kielsgard who was creating an epistolary tarot deck written to a crocodile in Burundi: Dear Gustav: An Ecological Tarot. I found this in Kielsgard’s deck:

“There is a bronze sculpture in Mexico City by Leonora Carrington. In her painting, a crocodile paddles a crocodile for a canoe full of five little crocodiles through the cosmos. Their eyes strike with lightning from a new moon. The eye of the crocodile can burn holes in the sun.”

Coincidences like these propelled me forward in life!

Her sculpture and painting of the same subject was featured in a Google doodle in Carrington’s honor posthumously.

Susan Aberth closes her “Animal Kingdom” essay discussing this sculpture:

“Perhaps no work by Carrington better illustrates her gleeful mixture of nursery room humor with poignant social content than her bronze sculpture How Doth the Little Crocodile…beneath its playful and charming surface there is something fragile and melancholy about these figures.”

Aberth links this sculpture with Carrington’s experiences learning about the Lacandon Mayan who traveled along rivers in dug out canoes, and who faced ecological and cultural collapse due to deforestation and modernization.

“A staunch ecological activist, Carrington’s concerns of Mexico’s threatened ecosystems is perhaps a subtle underlying theme for this sculpture, especially considering the fact the her work always has multiple meanings,” Aberth writes.

In addition to her visual art, I became even more curious about Leonora Carrington as a literary animal, and ordered her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, which was waiting for me when I returned to New York.

I was instantly charmed by Carrington’s narrator, Marian Leatherby, a 92-year-old woman who eschews meat and lives with her cats, a hen, some flies, and “a plant called maguey,” in her son’s home.

“Mashed vegetables, chocolate and bread dipped in warm water make the base of my simple diet. I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway.”

Things start to go awry, when Marian’s son and her daughter-in-law send her to a senior home for women, cutting her off from her best friend Carmella and her animal friends. Marian reminded me of Janina, the narrator of Olga Tokarczuk’s Don’t Drive your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, in that she’s a friend to animals, clever, almost invisible and underestimated. (Tokarczuk penned the afterword to my edition).

What differentiates Marian from Tokarczuk’s protagonist and some of the other herbivorous heroines I’ve written about before (JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Han Kang’s vegetarian, Yeong-hye), is she has a best friend who is a lifeline.

Marian’s best friend Carmella is wild, eccentric, and full of heart and assumed to be inspired by Carrington’s dear friend Remedios Varo. (I loved this post about Varo’s Vampiros vegetarianos!) It is Carmella who gifts Marian a trumpet to amplify her hearing.

“Carmella has a very pleasant life and is really very intellectual. She reads books through an elegant lorgnette and hardly ever mumbles to herself as I do. She also knits very clever jumpers but her real pleasure in life is writing letters. Carmella writes letters all over the world to people she has never met and signs them with all sorts of romantic names, never her own. Carmella despises anonymous letters, and of course they would be impractical as who could answer a letter with no name at all signed at the end? These wonderful letters fly off, in a celestial way, by airmail, in Carmella’s delicate handwriting. No one ever replies. This is the really incomprehensible side of humanity, people never have time for anything.”

Carmella dispenses wisdom like:

“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.”

She is the kind of friend who will take care of Marian’s cats, when her family ships her off, and will dream up wild plans to rescue her from this institution via “termite engineering.” Carmella writes amazing letters indeed.

“Do study the enclosed plans carefully and reply by return of post. I enclose two pesetas that you could use to bribe somebody to smuggle the letter out of the Institution. I would also need the drawing of the entire layout which you could do in secret. You draw it as if you were hovering above in a helicopter, not as an ordinary watercolour. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I won a helicopter in a crossword puzzle competition? There is not much hope though I am afraid, as they never give such practical prizes.

Do not give up hope entirely in spite of the horror of your situation. I am mobilizing all my mental capacities to obtain your unconditional freedom.

Ever most affectionately, Carmella”

I wish Olga Tokarczuk’s Janina, JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and Han Kang’s Yeong-hye could have had a great friend like Carmella. How might their lives have been different if they were buoyed by such love?

I was curious about Carrington’s own philosophy around meat and animals. When I finally sat down with Down Below in the library, it opened with the moment Max Ernst, her lover and a creative collaborator at the time, was taken away to a concentration camp in 1940, while they were living together in France. Her body’s response to the violence of this time was vomiting and eschewing meat:

“ I had realised the injustice of society, I wanted first of all to cleanse myself, then go beyond its brutal ineptitude. My stomach was the seat of that society, but also the place in which I was united with all the elements of the earth. It was the mirror of the earth, the reflection of which is just as real as the person reflected. That mirror—my stomach—had to be rid of the thick layers of filth (the accepted formulas) in order to properly, clearly, and faithfully reflect the earth; and when I say “the earth,” I mean of course all the earths, stars, suns in the sky and on the earth, as well as all the stars, suns, and earths of the microbes solar system. For three weeks I ate very sparingly, carefully eschewing meat, and drank wine and alcohol, feeding on potatoes and salad, at the rate perhaps of two potatoes a day.”

I finished The Hearing Trumpet this summer in NYC full of heat waves, wildfire smoke, and flash floods. Written in the 1950s and published in the 1970s, The Hearing Trumpet anticipated climate catastrophe. In Carrington’s novel, this is accompanied with a reckoning of our relationships with our fellow animals:

“Deer, pumas and even monkeys had come from the mountains and wandered about in the region looking for food. We did not consider hunting them. The New Ice Age should not be initiated with the slaughter of our fellow beings.”

This brings me back to a scene in Madhur’s To Place A Rabbit. Two former lovers meet for a meal. They discuss what is the most important thing, “in the end.” One muses it is human relationships. The other posits it is not human relationships with other humans, “but human relationships with the environment, with other species, with air, water, forests, birds, and so on.”

One orders sardines, the other veal. “Together, these were the greediest of all options on the menu and we were immediately punished.” Neither can finish. They agree on the following:

“We will no longer be eating other animals in the end.”

Discussing coincidences like these also propels me forward in life!

I am looking forward to chatting about synchronicity with Madhur Anand as we celebrate the paperback of To Place a Rabbit along side the Canada launch of Governing Bodies on August 21, which happens to be my birthday. So if you are in Toronto or know anyone who is, I would love to celebrate with you and your friends/family. We will have vegan cake.

ICYMI: Mahdur and I in conversation in Gloria Steinem’s Living Room.

UPCOMING EVENTS

August 21, 2026 with Madhur Anand at Ben Mcnally Books, Toronto, 5-7 PM. RSVP

Wednesday September 2, 2026 at Milkweed Books, Minneapolis, MN with Nigar Alam and Sruthi Narayanan RSVP

Friday September 18, 2026 6:30 P.M. at Hunter College, NYC with NYCH20

RSVP

Tuesday September 22, 2026, 7 pm. Afterword Bookshop, NYC with Linnea Ryshke and Mia MacDonald

Thursday, September 24, 2026 | 3–5 PM

CLIMATE WEEK AT NYU

ENTANGLED: WRITING ANIMALS IN A WARMING WORLD

RSVP

The climate crisis is also a crisis of relationships. What do we owe our fellow creatures who share this warming world? How do we think about animals as beings with their own histories and claims on the future?

Linnea Ryshke, author of Afield, and Sangamithra Iyer, author of Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed, grapple with multi-species encounters and futures in an era of climate crisis. They’ll be in conversation with Mia MacDonald, adjunct professor of environmental studies at NYU and executive director of Brighter Green.

Join us for a discussion on writing across species lines — how attention, empathy, and story can guide us toward more compassionate ways of being.

Jamieson Conference Room, 6^th floor, Goddard Hall, 79 Washington Square East

Co-sponsored by Brighter Green and the Culture and Animals Foundation, as part of NYC Climate Week.

STAY CONNECTED

Please reach out if you are interested in inviting me to speak or talk to your class, college, or organization. For media and publicity inquiries, please reach out to my wonderful publicist, Morgan LaRocca.

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

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My poem “Infrequently Asked Questions about the Spotted Lanternfly” was aired on Morning Edition back in April for their Poetry Month series, “Good Neighbor.” Here’s the audio, courtesy of WNYC, New York Public Radio.

This poem is also featured on Literary Cherry where I am featured poet #14!

Governing Bodies News and Notes:

I am honored that Governing Bodies and Milkweed Editions were selected as the winners of Community of Literary Magazines and Presses [CLMP] Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction.

The CLMP Firecracker Awards for Independently Published Literature are given annually to celebrate the books and magazines that make a significant contribution to our literary culture and the publishers that strive to introduce important voices to readers far and wide.

I am so grateful for the judges, Neema Avashia, Neesha Powell-Ingabire , and Riley Rennhack, for their lovely citation:

Here is a recording of the awards ceremony. It was a beautiful and emotional evening. Please check out all the finalists and winners and their brilliant books, and support the amazing presses that publish them. Bookshop Link.

INTERVIEWS

“Losing Our Cruelty”- Interview by Parul Kapur in Los Angeles Review of Books

“SANGAMITHRA IYER’S DEBUT memoir, Governing Bodies (2025), is structured like a watershed. Wide-ranging, poetic, and composed over a couple of decades, the narrative is enriched by time, reflection, and many divergent streams of thought, weaving connections between ecological and familial loss, legacies of compassion and activism, and Iyer’s own work as a civil engineer and advocate for animal liberation. The memoir coalesces around her vision of protecting vulnerable species and waterways.”- Parul Kapur

A Confluence in Gloria Steinem’s Living Room with Madhur Anand

Excited to invite you all into the room where it happened, as an edited transcript is now available here.

“I consider this a gift of a book in many ways. I have been working for many years at the intersection of art, science, and creativity. Your book is a gift to those of us who are seeking a new path, a new way to live, a new way forward— something that, for whatever reason, does not fit the status quo, the norms, the monopolies, the singleton ways, the specialization, the professionalization of everything. And at that confluence is art and science.”- Madhur Anand (Photo below by Gia McKenna)

RECENT APPEARANCES

In May, it was beyond lovely to be in conversation with María Ospina (Only a Little While Here) Kate Zambreno (Animal Stories) and Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature) on “The Lives of Animals” Panel at Pen World Voices Festival in NYC. Photos by Wan Park.

I am so grateful for Rachel Kramer Brussel for including me in her epic Personal Story Telling Summit: Open Secrets Live along with Athena Dixon, Sari Botton, Joseph Lee, and Sarah Hartshorne. What a nourishing event! I was honored to speak about memoir and my late mentor, Louise DeSalvo, who viewed “memoir as a corrective to history.” I spoke about doing a “generosity pass” on my work. With each revision, moving towards more vulnerability and generosity. More Photos by Wan Park.

In April, I was so happy to return to the Bay Area for this amazing confluence with Shruti Swamy and Vijaya Nagarajan, and am delighted by this audience member’s portrait of us.

I also presented at the More than Human (MOTH) Festival of Ideas Conference in London on the literary animal strategies I employed in Governing Bodies.

I adapted some of my talks/readings from this tour into a bonus audio segment for the Our Hen House podcast, which drops Monday June 29, for their flock members.

Wan has been compiling his photos from book tour here.

STAY TUNED

My fall schedule is being finalized. More dates and details soon.

STAY CONNECTED

Please reach out if you are interested in inviting me to speak or talk to your class or organization. For media and publicity inquiries, please reach out to my wonderful publicist, Morgan LaRocca.

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra Iyer

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I heard from WNYC that they are hoping to air my poem, “Infrequently Asked Questions about the Spotted Lanternfly” on Monday April 27, 2026 at 8:19 am. Tune in if you can to 93.9 FM.

If you are in NYC, come join me Friday May 1, 2026 at 6pm at the PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL, for this panel: “The Lives of Animals” at The Center, 208 W 13th St, New York, NY 10011.

Info and RSVP here.

I have been making my way through my fellow literary animal panelists’ works, and I am excited for our books to be in conversation.

MORE EVENTS:

Saturday May 2, 2026 2:30 PM at Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia: I am thrilled to be participating in this Open Secrets Magazine Live Personal Storytelling Summit with so many fabulous storytellers. Tickets here

May 6, 2026 5:30 PM Sanaga Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center Benefit, NYC. Info and Tickets here:

I wrote in Governing Bodies about volunteering at a chimp sanctuary at the confluence of the Sanaga and Yong rivers in Cameroon. Come support this wonderful organization doing amazing work at the benefit in NYC and meet the founder Dr. Sheri Speede. Pictured below, my small smalls, Niete, Gwen, and Emma circa 2002.

May 14, 2026 London 10:30 AM, More Than Human (MOTH) Festival of Ideas and Conference.

I’ll be presenting on my paper, “The Literary Animal: Exploring Artistic Choices and more than human agency in Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed”

REVIEWS

FoodPrint Alicia Kennedy writes about my book in her article, “What if we imagined the fates of humans and animals as interconnected?”

“In ‘Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed,’ engineer, animal activist and writer Sangamithra Iyer stakes her claim in what could be understood as a new wave of ecofeminism, which originally came to prominence in the 1970s.”

Hippocampus Magazine review by Amy Roost

“If I were to use one word to describe Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed (Milkweed Editions, November 2025), it would be tender. Tender as the eyes that witness suffering. Tender as the body that must bear the burden of suffering. Tender as the soul that attempts to alchemize what the eyes see and body know into a kindness we can live by.”

Eco Lit Books review by Midge Raymond

“Lovingly researched and beautifully written, with wit, compassion, and reverence for animals and our environments, Governing Bodies is a riveting and inspiring book for anyone who hopes to connect more deeply with the world we share with so many other beings.”

Mittal South Asia Institute, Harvard University reviewed by Saravanan Thangarajan

“This memoir resonates on historical, ecological, and deeply human frequencies. Iyer writes at the intersection of ethics, ecology, and ancestry, and what emerges is not simply a book but a living organism of narrative.”

STAY CONNECTED

Please reach out if you are interested in inviting me to speak or talk to your class, college, or organization. For media and publicity inquiries, please reach out to my wonderful publicist, Morgan LaRocca.

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra Iyer

Subscribe now

Spring is springing. NYC has thawed. Glass eels are migrating from the Sargasso Sea. Here are my upcoming spring events, starting this weekend. I am grateful to be able to gather at these beautiful confluences.

Sunday March 29, 2026 3 pm ET VINE Book Club (Virtual) Register here.

“The VINE Book Club meets monthly to discuss books of interest to animal advocates who work within an ecological awareness of the linkages between animal exploitation and other forms of injustice.”

Monday March 30, 2026 7 pm Astoria Bookshop, NY Register Here

I’ve been reading Catharina Coenen’s brilliant book Unexploded Ordnance, and I am so excited to discuss the expansiveness and power of memoir with her. Join us for a conversation with our dear friend and writer Lisa Freedman.

Wednesday April 1, 2026 12:30 PM-1:30 PM ET SUNY Stony Brook AAPI Celebration Keynote: On Confluences and Connections. More info here:

Monday April 13, 2026, 6:30 pm, PT San Francisco, CA, The Ruby

So thrilled to be back in Bay Area for this:

The River Connects Us: Sangamithra Iyer, Vijaya Nagarajan and Shruti Swamy in conversation.

The work of the featured writers holds a keen interest in the interwoven lives of plants, humans, and animals, an attention to the sacred, and explorations of ancestral knowledge. They will speak about the complexities of writing memoir and the shared concerns of their work. An intimate, joyful conversation between South Asian women writers not to be missed. Free and open to the public, RSVP required.

Register for address

Friday May 1, 2026 6pm, PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL, NYC, “The Lives of Animals: The False Divide Between Humans and Non-Human “ Info here:

Humans are animals who do not think they are animals. How did we grow blind to the astonishing gifts of our kind? Sangamithra Iyer’s new book, Governing Bodies: A Memoir, a Confluence, a Watershed, reckons lyrically with the ways bodies—human, animal, water—are controlled and liberated. In her novel, Only a Little While Here (tr. Heather Cleary), Colombian author María Ospina celebrates animals’ often-overlooked status as witnesses of our shared world, training our attention on the lives of five creatures, including a migratory songbird dazzled by city lights. Kate Zambreno’sAnimal Stories chronicles the deep strangeness of the zoo and considers the work of, among others, John Berger and Franz Kafka in a series of essays exploring mortality, alienation, boredom, and surveillance.

In conversation with Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishan (Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature), these authors will challenge the arbitrary borders between the human and non-human worlds.

This is a free event, but registration is required.

Saturday May 2, 2026 2:30 PM Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia

Open Secrets Magazine Live Summit, New York City, TICKETS

May 6, 2026 5:30 PM Sanaga Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center Benefit, NYC. Info and Tickets here:

While I am not speaking at this event, I wrote in Governing Bodies about volunteering at this chimp sanctuary at the confluence of the Sanaga and Yong rivers in Cameroon. My first published article in Satya was about this place. If you are in NYC, come support this wonderful organization doing amazing work.

May 14-16, London, More Than Human (MOTH) Conference NYU LONDON

I will be presenting on “The Literary Animal: Exploring Artistic Choices and more than human agency in Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed”

STAY CONNECTED

Please reach out if you are interested in inviting me to speak or talk to your class or organization. For media and publicity inquiries, please reach out to my wonderful publicist, Morgan LaRocca.

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra Iyer

Author, Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed

“[An] evocative and whip-smart memoir . . . Governing Bodies provides a crucial voice in a time of increasing peril.”—Booklist, starred review

ICYMI: Listen to David Naimon interview me on his brilliant podcast Between the Covers with surprise guests—Megha Majumdar, Shruti Swamy, Beth Gould and JoAnn Balingit.

I have spent the past few months touring with my debut book, Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed. One of the greatest delights has been seeing all the streams in the book—animals, engineering, activism, writing, water, and more— come together with each audience forming a unique watershed. Before book tour, one of my conversation partners, Sunu Chandy, shared with me a Poets and Writers article, “Collective Effervescence: How to Elevate a Book Event to a Gathering With Purpose,” written by Nancy Reddy. I took one of these suggestions to my book readings, giving the audience time to “turn and talk” to one another before the Q&A. When we would regroup, the energy in the room changed, people were more relaxed and comfortable, and the resulting discussions were warm and generous. I loved how strangers found meaningful points of connection in just a couple minutes.

One area of discussion in many of the events was how to bring arts and science together both on the page and in life, and there was a growing realization that these disciplines are more connected than we have been led to believe. Madhur Anand and I had an amazing discussion in Gloria Steinem’s living room on these confluences. (Do check out Madhur’s brilliant books This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, To Place a Rabbit, Parasitic Oscillations and A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes). I will share more soon about our wonderful talking circle that was part of Defne Egbo’s Between the Lines Literary Salon. Photo below by Gia McKenna:

I also wanted to share a few more books sitting on this nexus of science and art (and animals), that have been keeping me (and Asta) company.

Creature Needs: Writers Respond the Science of Animal Conservation edited by Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Talent, includes creative writing inspired by scientific articles related to the needs of animals (air, food, water, shelter, room to move, and each other).

As Christopher Kondrich notes in the introduction:

We need to be able to behold, in poetry and prose, the wonder of the living world while also having the humility to behold the shadow of human cruelties we have cast with equal vividness, lyricism, and clarity. We need science-informed literature in order to write work that speaks to the moment so that we might rectify the problems the moment entails. This is the gift that every contributor in this book has given us.

The contributors are wonderful, and two of my favorites—David Naimon and Thalia Field— are going to be in conversation with Anne de Marcken in a virtual webinar this Saturday February 14, 2026 3-5pm PST to discuss their work in this anthology. Register here for “A Creature Needs Conversation.”

I also just finished reading Marybeth Holleman’s gorgeous novel, Bloom Again. We meet Elyse, an artist in Alaska, and Astrid, a paleobotanist in North Carolina, and experience how climate change brings their lives and their work together. Polar bears, dogs and trees are also characters. Holleman’s prose is lush and her descriptions of place and landscapes are stunning. The book captures what eco-grief feels like, but also the anti-dote— action in both science and art. And as one of her characters says, “It’s all the same-same, the science and the art. The trees and rocks and water and people.”

One thing I have been discussing on book tour is my interest in other languages that hold much ecological knowledge. I write about the ecological grammar in ancient Tamil poetry in Governing Bodies. I loved the discussion around language in Marginlands by Arati Kumar-Rao. She writes of a dessert people who only get forty cloudy days a year, and have the same number of words for different types of clouds. Is this knowledge considered science or poetry? She goes on to talk about what is at stake when we lose languages:

“When we lose an evocative lexicon, when we forget the organic words and their import, we lose what Barry Lopez calls the ‘voice of memory over the land’. When this happens—and it’s happening throughout—the land risks losing its defenders, its most passionate advocates.”

NOT INFERNO

At these various book gatherings, another important area of discussion has been how we respond to this moment of tremendous state cruelty and violence. I often return to these lines at the end of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities for their enduring wisdom, and shared them with an audience in San Francisco at Green Apple Books (who in turn bought all the store copies of Invisible Cities).

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

GOVERNING BODIES NEWS

Between the Covers Podcast with David Naimon

I had the deep pleasure of speaking to literary treasure, David Naimon, for his brilliant podcast Between the Covers. Come hang out with us for a couple of hours and listen here. There were also wonderful surprise guests who asked such wonderful and insightful questions. Thank you JoAnn Balingit, Shruti Swamy, Beth Gould, and Megha Majumdar!

“When I tell you a story about my body, I cannot separate it from a story about water. And a story about water is also a story about family. And a story about family is rooted in the earth…,” opens Sangamithra Iyer’s Governing Bodies. What does it mean for a memoir to assume the elusive, ever-changing shape of water, to be the story of family but where the notion of family crosses the boundaries of blood, culture, nation and even species? Governing Bodies, as the Whiting judges said in their citation, is “a subtle, meditative exploration on grief and nonviolence, an international and intergenerational voyage through shared histories and a consideration of what we owe to each other and the natural world.”

Orion Magazine Reading Recommendations

“In her Whiting Award-winning memoir, civil engineer and immigrants’ daughter Sangamithra Iyer offers a subtle but passionate exploration into family, ecology, personal and planetary grief, and the legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and speciesism. In braiding the story of her freedom-fighting grandfather with her own experiences as an activist and engineer, Iyer meanders, like a river, with purpose and grace.”

Full Stop Magazine

Samara Skolnik wrote a very thoughtful review:

“One of the book’s strengths is how it carefully recounts exposure to ideas that accumulate into belief and eventually into action”

“..it is clear that Iyer is not in the business of using animals to serve human needs, even on the page. Instead, she is equating the oppression of animal bodies to the oppression of human ones. We are not the only ones who feel, or who desire to be free. Iyer, in her sprawling consideration of her experiences and influences, urges us to believe that if there is something singular about us, it is not so much that we are human, but that we can choose to be humane.

Wizard of Claws

Elise Myslinkski interviewed me for this wonderful discussion about memoir and writing for animals.

“The first time I heard of Sangamithra Iyer, I knew she was one of my people. The way she talks of writing, of animals, and of the power of literature to change the way people think about animals speaks directly to my soul.”

UPCOMING EVENTS

Monday February 16, 2026 3:15pm-4:15 pm (Virtual) Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture (Virtual) Register for Free Tickets Panel: Literary Mutations and Generative Partnerships with Valerie Witte, Jhani Randhawa, Maw Shein Win, and me! Zoom Link.

Thursday February 19, 2026 7 pm Books that Changed my life Festival , New York, NY More info here. Panel: Lilly Dancinger, Samantha Mann, and Sangamithra Iyer, moderated by Aly Tadros.

Sunday March 29, 2026 3 pm EST VINE Book Club (Virtual) Register here.

Wednesday April 1, 2026 12:30 PM-1:30 PM SUNY Stony Brook AAPI Celebration Keynote: On Confluences and Connections. More info here:

PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL-– Details TBD New York City. (Animal themed panel with Kate Zambrino, Maria Ospina and me!)

Saturday May 2, 2026 2:30 PM Symphony Space Leonard Nimoy Thalia Open Secrets Magazine Live Summit, New York City TICKETS Panelists: Sari Botton, Athena Dixon, Sangamithra Iyer, Joseph Lee, Sarah Hartshorne Moderator: Blaise Allyson Kearsley

May 14-16, London, More Than Human (MOTH) Festival of Ideas, Details TBD NYU London

STAY CONNECTED

Please reach out if you are interested in inviting me to speak or talk to your class or organization. For media and publicity inquiries, please reach out to my wonderful publicist: Morgan LaRocca

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

“The impulse to write a book appears to run like a fever through those of us who’ve lived with apes,” declares Rosemary Cooke, the narrator of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We are all Completely Beside Ourselves. Rosemary goes on to list those who came before her: “The Ape and the Child is about the Kellogs. Next of Kin is about Washoe. Viki is The Ape in Our House. The Chimp Who Would be Human is Nim.”

I’m no stranger to the genre of primate memoir. Jane Goodall’s In The Shadow of Man, was the one that likely inspired many others that followed. I read Roger Fouts’ Next of Kin in college, which had an introduction by Goodall. That led me to learn American Sign Language and spend a summer with Washoe, Moja, Tatu, Dar and Loulis at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute in Ellensburg Washington. There, I was then introduced to the work of others who spent their lives with our fellow primates and expanded the literary canon. Like Fowler’s narrator Rosemary, “…I checked out every book, I could find on [Leaky’s] girls ‑Jane Goodall (Chimps), Dian Fossey (gorillas), and Birute Galdikas (orangutans).” I read Bill Weber and Amy Vedder’s, In the Kingdom of Gorillas, before a trip to Rwanda. Robert Sapolsky’s A Primate’s Memoir, drew me in with the fabulous opening lines:

“I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.”

I have been thinking a lot of these books and literary animal lineages after learning that our beloved Jane Goodall, has ascended to ancestor. In my early 20s when I was exploring this primate memoir canon, I was searching for cues on how I might lead my own life and pursue my own animal dreams.

There was a passage from Robert Sapolsky’s memoir that stayed with me:

Every primatologist I know is losing that battle, whether their animals are being done in by habitat destruction or conflict with farmers or poaching or novel human disease or shit-brained government officials bent on harassment and maliciousness. The full-time primatologists I know always remind me of stories I read of Ishi, the last member of a particular Indian tribe, a person whose mother tongue was a dead language. Or they make me think of someone whose unlikely job would be to collect snowflakes, to rush into a warm room and observe the unique pattern under a microscope before it melts and is never seen again.

When I read those lines many many moons ago, I thought, ‘I don’t want to document a disappearance, I want to prevent one.’

I kept seeking opportunities to contribute. One of my greatest honors, was taking care of orphaned chimpanzees in the forests of Cameroon. (To learn more about the Sanaga Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, read Sheri Speede’s memoir Kindred Beings).

This led me to writing my first published piece for Satya Magazine, a NYC based activist magazine that connected the dots between animal advocacy, environmentalism and social justice.

In 2005, I had the pleasure of meeting Jane Goodall, when she was on tour for her book, Harvest of Hope, which I reviewed for Satya. At her book signing in Union Square, I gave her a copy of the latest Satya and one of our t-shirts designed by Claudette Silver. The shirt had an image of a cow with a fork through her and the words: “It’s alright, as long as I don’t think about it.”

Jane took a moment to read the shirt text with a sense of agreement, and said she loved it. At the time, she was on a mission to make sure people do think about it. Harvest for Hope was dedicated to the “billions of animals who live in torment each year,” and Jane would talk about her own awakening to their suffering:

“When I saw meat on my plate, from that moment on, I should think of pain—fear—death.”

Going back to Fowler’s novel, We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, I often return to this passage from Lowell, our narrator Rosemary’s brother, who becomes an animal activist. He tells his sister:

“`The world runs,’ Lowell said, `on the fuel of this endless fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.’”

When I think of Jane Goodall’s 300 days a year on the road as a devoted animal advocate, I feel a variation of this statement is also true: She’s the one they love, so she’s the one that can make them look.

When she passed last week, my phone started buzzing with messages with so many animal friends mourning the news about our beloved elder. Her reach was vast and her descendents are many. I revisited my copy of In the Shadow of Man, gifted to me by my friend Rachel, and looked again for cues and direction. Jane offered them:

“Together, we can make this a better world.”

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra Iyer,

Author of Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed.

Book News and Updates

Read Q&A about my book.

Upcoming Events

Join me this fall for a series of readings and conversations celebrating Governing Bodies.

New York City:

November 4, 2025 – Kew and Willow Books 81-63 Lefferts Blvd, Kew Gardens, NY 11415 7:00 PM EST Join me for a reading and discussion of Governing Bodies at my beloved Queens bookstore with Minal Hajratwala.

November 13, 2025 – Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) New York, NY 7:00 PM EST An evening of reading and conversation hosted by AAWW with Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.

November 21, 2025 – New York Public Library – Vartan Gregorian Center Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Room 216 476 5th Ave, New York, NY 10018 2:00 PM EST A special reading and discussion hosted by the NYPL’s Center for Research in the Humanities. Registration opens soon. Read my essay on my research at the NYPL: “On Catenas, Confluences, and Tethers“

Washington, D.C.:

November 17, 2025 – Bol-Coop Washington D.C. 7:00 PM EST A conversation around the philosophies and process behind Governing Bodies with my brilliant writing partner Leslie Tucker.

November 18, 2025 – Lost City Books 2467 18th St NW, Washington, DC 20009 7:00 PM EST In conversation with Sunu Chandy. A lively evening of literature and dialogue. RSVP

Boston:

November 19, 2025 – Porter Square Books 50 Liberty Drive, Boston, MA 02210 7:00 PM EST In conversation with E.B. Bartels. exploring grief, animals, writing nonfiction and more. RSVP (NOTE BOSTON LOCATION not Cambridge)

West Coast and more:

I hope to see you in 2026. Stay Tuned.

PRAISE FOR GOVERNING BODIES

“[An] evocative and whip-smart memoir . . . Governing Bodies provides a crucial voice in a time of increasing peril.”—Booklist, starred review

“Iyer traces her passion for conservation and animal rights activism back two generations in this beautiful debut memoir. . . .This singular personal history edifies as much as it charms.”—Publishers Weekly

“Sangamithra Iyer writes with the kind of intelligence and attention that makes you lean in, asking how we might live in this aching world with more care, more kinship, and more courage. Governing Bodies beautifully guides us with the lyrical grace of someone who knows the liberation and legacy of what magic can happen when you combine the language of water and the weight of memory.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders

“A civil engineer makes a connection with her grandfather and father over the shared work they did in watershed protection and water infrastructure projects, braiding with the history of her family stories of animals and natural landscapes from around the world. From Burma to Cameroon, from India to New York, Sangamithra Iyer builds from autobiographical fragments a beautiful song of connection, which includes all living things, not only her family, but the animals and rivers she writes about, and ultimately all of us as well, the readers, held in communion. It’s a remarkable book that blends the modes of memoir, journalism, essay, and cultural commentary with the lyrical sweep and rhythm of poetry to paint a vivid picture of both the natural world and the life of a family.”—Kazim Ali, author of Northern Light

“Governing Bodies encourages us to love generously and attentively all that thrives in the world—primates and hens, rivers and soil—and to heed the continuity between human and planetary bodies. A radiant book of reflections that will stay with me.”—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning

“Through memory, research, imagination, and profound love for the human and more than human world, Sangamithra Iyer has not so much written a book as created a utopia inside its pages. Governing Bodies is the work of a mind as agile as water, with many surprising streams feeding into the shining whole. This book does what the best books do: It helps me live.”—Shruti Swamy, author of The Archer

“This project brims with loveliness; Iyer writes about family and ecology and the legacy of colonialism with enduring insight and gentle, heartbreaking passion. She delivers a subtle, meditative exploration on grief and nonviolence, an international and intergenerational voyage through shared histories and a consideration of what we owe to each other and the natural world.”—Whiting Grant jury

STAY CONNECTED

Please reach out if you are interested in inviting me to speak or talk to your class or organization.

For Media and Publicity Inquiries, please reach out to my wonderful publicist,

Morgan LaRocca at morgan_larocca@milkweeed.org

Share

There is so much I want to share with you. My book Governing Bodies: A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed will be published this November from Milkweed Editions and is available for pre-order now.

A beautifully rendered debut memoir of family, legacy, conservation, the natural world—and those who inhabit it.

As a civil engineer, Sangamithra Iyer knows about resilience from studying soils and water. As an animal rights activist, she advocates for a revolution in how we value and relate to other species. And as the child of immigrants from India, she searches for submerged histories.

Animated by a series of questions—How do we disentangle ourselves from systems of harm? Is it possible to grasp the scale of planetary sorrow and emerge with truth and love as our guides, rather than despair? What is the relationship between individual action and systemic change?—this memoir takes the form of three meandering rivers, each written as a letter. Addressing the first of them to her grandfather, Iyer assembles the story of a man who embraced Gandhi’s philosophy and went to work developing wells in Tamil Nadu. In a second letter, addressed to her father, she explores their shared interest in cultivating compassion for all beings. And then in a final letter, addressed to readers, she braids these explorations of her familial past with her own experiences as a woman of color and citizen of the world, always seeking ways to move beyond resignation and restore flow.

A lyrical story of lineages and an urgently needed reckoning with the ways bodies are both controlled and liberated, Governing Bodies is a timeless work with profoundly timely relevance.

I am thrilled by this gorgeous cover designed by Mary Austin Speaker, and overjoyed that my brilliant niece Lavanya Manickam designed beautiful interior elements that are so meaningful to me. I can’t wait for you to see them.

I’m currently in the middle of proofing typeset pages, and it’s been a moving and an emotional experience to see how so many labors over many years have come together like this.

I am excited to be in conversation with other literary animals and curate conversations with The Literary Animal Project. I also welcome the opportunity to speak with classes and groups. I will share more details in the coming months.

More soon,

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

I have been thinking about the ways we create and share space with our fellow animals in life and on the page.

Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of attending the Animal and Vegan Advocacy Conference, in Alexandria Virginia. I was on a panel moderated by Martin Rowe, Executive Director of the Culture and Animals Foundation (CAF) with fellow CAF grantees, Kittie Mae Morris and Allison Argo.

Kittie Mae is a brilliant dancer whose piece “Blue” was inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned. (How cool is that?) Allison Argo has built an extraordinary career making films about animals including chimpanzees, elephants and farm animals. Her current film: Forever Home, documents Piedmont Farm Animal Refuge in North Carolina, which not only creates space for rescued farm animals, but asks and answers the question: What does animal-centered design look like?

The next day, Lenore Braford, from Piedmont Farm Animal Refuge was on another panel, spoke more about animal-centered design.

Unlike factory farms which are designed around industry profit, this farm refuge looks to incorporate what makes animals thrive, so they can not only be safe but feel safe.

I returned from the conference to my work in bringing nature-based solutions to urban stormwater planning. How our practices here, incorporate plantings to support wildlife habitat, how our designs can include features like turtle basking stations and perches for Osprey, and how our restored waterways allow the return of so many species.

How can we think about these principles of animal-centered design in art?

I return to Shaunak Sen’s brilliant and poetic film, All That Breathes, which follows two brothers, Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, who live in Delhi and tend to injured kites, who fall from the sky every day due to heat and pollution. The film opens capturing the voices of the city’s animals— insects crawling, dogs barking, rats squealing, mosquitoes buzzing, pigeons cooing, goats bleating, chickens clucking— alongside the rumbling engines and car horns. “Humanity is now their natural environment, ” one of the brother’s reflects. “Song birds sing at a higher pitch to communicate over traffic noise,” he says. “Every life form adjusts to the city now.”

It was their mother who instilled in them “One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes.” Shanauk Sen described these brothers as “Philosophers of the Urban,” and the film is filled with their attuned insights:

“You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics. Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air.” 

A Community of Air

I’ve been thinking about both this community of air and animal-centered design, while reading the opening chapter of Kyoko Mori’s Cat and Bird, a “memoir in animals.”

Mori lives in Washington D.C, where migratory swifts pass through. She notes one major threat is “the difficulty of finding a place to sleep during their fall migration.” She explains:

“ The old trees in whose hollows they once rested as they traveled south in enormous flocks are long gone. The first houses with chimneys that replaced the forests have been torn down as well. New houses built in their place have chimneys with ceramic interiors too slippery for the birds feet, which leaves old buildings, like my brownstone in the nation's capital, as their only roosting sites.”

But many buildings cover their chimneys to keep birds out or turn on their heat too early in the fall, which will roast these birds. Kyoko Mori finds a way to allow her building to become a safe resting spot for the swifts:

“The easiest way for me to ensure that our chimney stayed open and the boiler got turned on only after the birds were gone (and turned off before they came back-though in smaller numbers-in late April or early May) was to be in charge of making and carrying our the building's heating policy, so I volunteered to be on our co-op's board of directors and stayed on as president to protect the swifts..”

As she notes in her prologue: “I have to believe that from our shelter on the ground, I can help keep their wings beating.”

Other Literary Animal News

An abridged version of my conversation with Parul Kapur on her novel Inside The Mirror (which was just long-listed for both the Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize AND the New American Voices Prize!!) was published in World Literature Today: “All Art Is History”: A Conversation with Parul Kapur”

Parul and I spoke at Yu and Me Books and enjoyed an amazing meal at Bodhi Vegan afterwards. I want to share with you a literary animal question I asked her that night:

SI: I'm interested in how animals are portrayed on the page. I’m always reading through that lens and paying attention to animal details. Though not the focus of this book, you do pay attention to the lives of animals. I am curious how you were thinking about bringing animals into this story.

PK: What really strikes me and breaks my heart in India is the stray dogs. You can't help but see them wherever you go. They're very sweet, very gentle. And there's one I describe in the book that is in an awful condition— he's suffering but not dead—with mange and other things. That was a dog I had seen on the street. My parents had a house in India they would sometimes go to and I saw that dog around there. He made such an impression on me. The suffering of those poor innocent animals—they're very vulnerable—was a metaphor for the larger suffering in the society… The society had been impoverished by British rule, then there had been the cataclysm of Partition. So many millions of people left homeless. There was an incredible amount of suffering.

What I’ve been reading:

My dear readers, I am working on more literary animal programming about the ways we create and make space for animals especially in the urban context and with a changing climate. Stay tuned. I’d also love to hear from you and how you are thinking about these things in life and on the page.

Yours for the Animals,
Sangamithra

My Dear Literary Animals,

Last month, I attended a talk called "American Han," by the brilliant writer and thinker, E.J. Koh. She began by introducing the concept of han:

"Han, a so-called untranslatable Korean word, is often described as the feeling of sorrow from oppression, from an atrocity experienced by a people, a nation, a feeling which is inherited, multigenerational, accumulated, suppressed, a feeling which causes dizziness, heart palpitations, a feeling which can cause immense stress on the body, and even become fuel for transforming social justice."

Koh then attempted her own definition and translation:

“The way I define han, and the closest I can get to that space, is defining han as a gap. The gap between the moment of atrocity and the possibility of reparation…specific to Korea, but not limited to Korea.”

In Koh’s lecture, she talked about bridging han to other languages and cultures. Her articulation of this gap between atrocity and repair and the potential expansiveness of han was of great interest to me as a literary animal. In the discussion period after the talk, I shared my own meditations on different kinds of sorrow. I am interested in this language for the sorrow we all collectively carry living amongst so much planetary pain. As a literary animal, I am looking for where this “gap between atrocity and repair”—this “suffering,” that Koh speaks about, “that breaks us that need not break us”—appears in literature.

A Catalog of Sorrows

Consider Olga Tokarczuk’s narrator in Drive your Plough over the Bones of the Dead:

“Sorrow, I felt great sorrow, an endless sense of mourning for every dead Animal. One period of grief is followed by another, so I am in constant mourning.”

Is this state of constant mourning what drives the subject in Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian? She clears her fridge of all dead animals and explains, “I had a dream.” (“...Long bamboo sticks strung with great blood-red gashes of meat, blood still dripping down. Try to push past but the meat, there’s no end to the meat, and no exit. Blood in my mouth, blood-soaked clothes sucked onto my skin…”). Kang portrays a woman who moves more and more away from the human body and all the violence it is capable of.

I notice how this theme reappears in Kang’s novel, Human Acts, about the Gwangju Massacre in Korea. We are introduced to a character named Eun-sook, who along with her friends, care for the dead as they wait to be claimed by their families. We meet her again years later and wonder about the lasting bodily toll of bearing witness to such a violent event.

“You know I don’t like meat,” Eun-sook tells her boss who treats her to a meal.

“It wasn’t so much eating meat that Eun-sook disliked,” Kang writes, “what really turned her stomach was watching it cook on the hot plate. When the blood and juices rose to the surface, she had to look away. When fish was being griddled with the head still attached. That moment when moisture formed on the frozen eyeballs as they thawed in the pan, when a watery fluid flecked with gray scum dribbled out of its gaping mouth, that moment when it always seemed to her as though the dead fish was trying to say something. She always had to avert her eyes.”

When Han Kang was in New York in 2019, I asked her about this reaction to animal flesh that appear in both these novels. She told me, ‘I, too am like this,’ and that she had a similar reaction—that part was very biographical.

The “Vegetarian” in Kang’s novel is completely misunderstood by her family and viewed as a threat. Similarly, in J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a novelist delivers a series of lectures on the lives of animals, which makes her audience and her family uncomfortable. Her son comes around to ask her why she’s become so “intense about the animal business.”

“When I think of the words,” Costello says, “they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.”

Coetzee captures the loneliness of being attune to a suffering that is widely ignored. Or perhaps as Koh frames it— “suffering that is avoidable and is not avoided.”

Where else do we find the language of this kind of sorrow?

Remember the animal activist Lowell in Karen Joy Fowler’s We are All Completely Besides Ourselves:

“‘The world runs,’ Lowell said, ‘on the fuel of this endless fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.’”

And the narrator of Tishani Doshi’s novel Small Days and Nights wrestles with what we might call disenfranchised grief when the stray dogs she cares for are poisoned:

“Because they're a pack of wild things, the expectation is that wild things might happen to them, such as being poisoned en masse. Vik had said something to the effect of the numbers being under control now. Even Rohini, who proclaimed to be a canine freak, was only really interested in her two Poms. It feels silly to talk about grief, but I haven't been able to sleep, and when I drove down here I cried most of the way. I am angry too, because there is such easy acceptance of death. The cheapness of it. Those beautiful animals gone. And we chatter here about things I don't comprehend but am somehow part of.”

With and Without Sorrow

Koh’s novel, The Liberators, has a striking cover—white doves among red flames. In it, she shares the story of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Doves “were released as a symbol of world peace,” but many “landed on the ring of the Olympic cauldron.” Koh’s narrator reflects:

“The doves were a memory that had to be erased—a memory that had to be forgotten in our soft, closed palms. So few would recall the lighting of the Olympic cauldron where the doves burned alive.”

And what about those who did recall?

In the Q&A after Koh’s talk, she mentioned that she’s often accused of having so little han for someone who writes only about han. “The people who want to not write about han and erase han have so much han,” she said. “I think something happened toward the end of my research, where if let’s say han is a gap, I am, in some ways while researching, closing that gap, not just for myself, but maybe for people who come across this research."

As a literary animal, this is a very powerful thing to realize—that confronting and remembering sorrow can lessen or transform it. I am reminded of my namesake Sangamithra’s father, King Ashoka, whose name means “without sorrow.” But it was only by being “with sorrow,” and confronting his complicity in war, that he was transformed into a King of peace and an advocate for other beings.

This leads to a different question that Koh also posed: “Who am I without han? Who am I without sorrow?” I think also about the Bhakti poet Ravidas who dreamed of “Begumpura,”- the city without sorrow. The sorrowless city would be free of caste, and he too would be transformed—“a tanner now set free.”

Earth’s Han

I was curious if Koh came across any writings on han through an ecological lens. She said she has a much longer talk, where she discusses the bombs the U.S. dropped during the Pacific campaign and beyond.

“You could see much of that damage from satellite. You could see the Earth and you could actually see the pockmarks, you could see a sort of visual han… That's a question I come to… does the Earth have han?”

My dear readers, where do you see the Earth’s han right now? What possibilities do we hold when we name it? And how might we close that gap between atrocity and repair by giving language to it?

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

News and Links

• More about E.J. Koh

• Literary Animal Bookshop.org page for this post

• ICYMI-You can listen to and watch our event on Whales here. Also I was on the Our Hen House Podcast.

• For those in New York, on Tuesday March 26 at 6 pm. I’ll be in conversation with the beautiful writer Parul Kapur on her extraordinary novel, Inside the Mirror, a gripping story of twin sisters navigating their desire to become artists in the aftermath of Partition in 1950s India. Hosted by Yu and Me Books and AAWW.

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Welcome to the first episode of The Literary Animal Project Podcast. This episode is a live video recording of an event that took place in partnership with Kew & Willow Books on December 12, 2023 with this pod of literary animal luminaries: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Rajiv Mohabir, and Shruti Swamy.

In “An Evening on Whales,” we discuss umwelt, cultural loss, resilience, communication and poetry in whales, and how we portray them on the page. There was so much brilliance and wonderful insights from these panelists, and I am excited to share this with all of you.

Here are a few snippets:

Rajiv Mohabir on hearing whale song for the first time in the waters around Hawaii:

I was in the water, and they were shooting through my body with their sounds and songs, which was a kind of magic… And from then…I was captivated. I wanted to know all the stories, all our human stories. I wanted to know our scientific stories. I wanted to know our cultural stories. I wanted to know our sacred stories. I also had to consider what it meant to then be a poet, taking a human translation and then translating my own kind of worldview or umwelt actually, into what that means.”

Talia Kolluri on the importance of portraying animal joy on the page:

We as a modern culture are often moved by suffering. But wouldn't it be wonderful if we didn't wait until something was suffering before we started to care? I love the idea of prioritizing depictions of joy and thriving because it shows what's possible. I think it will be a great, wonderful development to see in the arts.

Shruti Swamy on communication and cultural loss:

“What are the ways that we are in community and in communication with whales right now?

“I feel curious in cultural capacity…how have these whale cultures made sense of what they've gone through and what they've survived and what are they passing on?

Links and Resources

Like Water In Water: Dispatches from A Sub-Sub Librarian in preparation of this Whale Event.

Kew & Willow Books Whale Event Page— Buy books here!

• What We Fed to The Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

• Whale Aria by Rajiv Mohabir

• “Blue Whale Transmissions” Audio Story by Shruti Swamy

Whale Library Referenced by Panelists:

• Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs

• Hunt by Jessical Cuello

• How To Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication by Tom Mustill

• Whale Song (Object Lessons) by Margaret Grebowicz

• When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu and Translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville

• Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

• War of the Whales by Joshua Horwitz

• Wild Blue Media by Melody Jue

• An Immense World, by Ed Yong

• Undrowned by Alexis-Pauline Gumbs

Whale Song Recordings

• Song Lines: Songs of East Australian Humpback

• Songs of the Humpback Whale

Other News

I was recently on the Our Hen House Podcast talking about The Literary Animal Project. You can listen here. Members of the Our Hen House Flock have access to bonus material, including me reading some excerpts from my forthcoming book.

Guest Bios

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House 2022), was a finalist for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Fiction; was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the 2023 Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection; and was selected as a 2023 ALA RUSA Notable Book. Her short fiction has been published in Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, and others. 

A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband and two cats.

Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023), Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. He is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body, and a novel, The Archer. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Elizabeth George Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Council, and Vassar College, and is a 2024 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature. Shruti’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeny's, AFAR Magazine, and the New York Times, and twice won the O. Henry. Her introduction to Ursula K Le Guin’s masterpiece Always Coming Home appears in the novel’s 2023 reissue, and her story "Blue Whale Transmissions" is included in the Audible Original anthology The Other Animals. 
She is a Kundiman Fiction Fellow, and lives in San Francisco.

Sangamithra Iyer (moderator) is the founder of The Literary Animal Project, for which she was awarded a grant from the Culture and Animals Foundation. She is the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and a Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship at the New York Public Library for her first book forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.

Yours for the Animals,

Sangamithra

The Literary Animal Project

A habitat for curated conversations, questions and writing about the ways animal lives are portrayed on the page, and how we forge a more just and compassionate multi-species world.

First, a reminder to join Kew & Willow books and The Literary Animal Project for a virtual reading and discussion about reading and writing about magnificent whales with this pod of literary luminaries: Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Rajiv Mohabir, and Shruti Swamy. RSVP HERE.

Please purchase copies of their books at Kew & Willow.

I want to kick off our whale discussion here.

Before that memorable first line, “Call me Ishmael,” in Moby Dick, Herman Melville collects and presents “Extracts,” 81 whale related epigraphs, “Supplied by a Sub-Sub Librarian”

Who are Sub-Sub librarians? Melville explains:

“…that hopeless , sallow tribe …with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless!”

I would like to take a moment to express my gratitude for all the Sub-Subs gathering and arranging moments in literature for us to think about together. I delight in being your literary animal Sub-Sub.

Earlier this year, Shruti Swamy, and I started writing letters to each other, sharing bits about our days and what we’ve been reading and thinking about. I had told her I was on a “whale kick.” Whales and whale stories kept arriving, even when I wasn’t seeking them out. (“What you seek seeks you,” my friend Leslie reminds me, invoking Rumi). Whales showed up in K-dramas (Hello- Extraordinary Attorney Woo!), on the climate drama Extrapolations (Ep. 2 Whalefall), in discussions about the use of artificial intelligence.

They’ve been showing up on beaches. They have been striking boats. In this essay, Alexis-Pauline Gumbs, author of Undrowned, which I wrote about previously, asks us to imagine these acts as their embodied collective protests.

Closer to home, Humpback whales and dolphins have been returning to the waters around New York City. This is due in part to improvements in water quality and environmental legislation (The Marine Mammal Protection Act, Endangered Species Act (Happy 50^th Birthday to you!) and Clean Water Act).

On our anniversary this year, my husband I took our nieces and nephew on a trip with Gotham Whale, New York City’s whale research and advocacy organization. Within minutes of leaving Sheepshead Bay, we were graced with the presence of Whale 321, a new immigrant to New York who has traveled here for the first time to feed. We cherished each breach, those several impressive seconds witnessing a whale body soar and return, waving that gorgeous unique fluke on the way down. (Photo below by Wan Park).

In 2011, when Gotham Whale first started documenting whales that have come to the NY bight, they identified 5 Humpback Whales. This year, their whale tail yearbook now lists 326 whales.

Though the waters are cleaner, they are not necessarily safer. The whale bodies tell us stories. There’s been an increase in shipping vessels in this region. The scrapes and scars on their tails and fins, speak of collisions with boats. Earlier this year, the NY/NJ area experienced what is called a UME- Unusual mortality event. I poured through necropsy reports: BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA INJURIES, FRACTURED SKULL, ENTANGLEMENT SCARS.

Months ago, I wrote to Shruti that I was reading Rebecca Giggs’s book Fathoms: The World In the Whale. Giggs was a great companion in thinking about whales, what we’ve done to them, and how they experience the world.

Giggs opens with a dying whale:

“A few years ago, I helped push a beached Humpback Whale back out into the sea, only to witness it return and expire under its own weight on the shoreline.”

I read Fathoms slowly, appreciating Giggs’s poetic, philosophical, and deeply researched account of “how did whales live, and how did they die? How did they encounter us?” (She is a masterful sub-sub librarian.) And Fathoms has the most amazing description of a whalefall that I have seen. Unlike the demise of a beached whale, a natural whale death in the ocean, Giggs shows us, is a remarkable ecological event:

“…a whalefall is tantamount to springtime: a fountain of life; spectacular, then squalid. A whale in the wild goes on enriching our planet, ticktocking with animate energy, long after its demise. So the death of a whale proves meaningful to a vibrant host of dependent creatures…”

I was so happy to receive Shruti’s reply to my whale mail with her own stories of reading and writing whales. She shared with me the first story she wrote after giving birth, “Blue Whale Transmissions,” which was published as an audio piece in this anthology: The Other Animals.

I found Shruti’s writing so gorgeous and vivid. Her story takes a cetacean epistolary form—a transmission from one whale to another named LOW. Shruti explores time, memory, and history through a female blue whale, who reflects on all the changes in the waters these whales have been witness to:

“I was remembering of course how it was not so long ago they hunted our people and how my mother’s mother was killed before her very eyes—how quiet she was, my mother, speaking so softly that I have the illusion that she is speaking still, even now that she is gone, and if I could just find some quiet I could hear her. I thought this thought to calm myself, to calm you too, for it was true that the world once felt like it was ending, that is, that our people and our culture would not survive, and each person who died took the library of their memories, voice, and oceanic knowledge with them; we lost so much in those terrible times, almost everything—it is very troubling about the walruses and also about the starving bears and about your cousin who choked and died. But LOW, our people have survived before. And, LOW, it is not in our nature to worry.” 

And her description of a whale birth is so beautiful:

“There, in the rough, empty waters, I birthed him: in the small light. There was all at once a great tearing flash of red, a terrible pain, and then he was out of me, pale, and shining, and tiny and whole and hungry, vibrating with life in the water. I could hear from him a thin, tiny hum, like the hum of the smallest fish, the smallest sweetest voice that described him to me, and touching him with my snout I could see his whole life bunched in him, in the smallness of his body as I brought him up to the surface to take his first breath, and took from his body a kind of vicarious pleasure as his lungs lifted with the air. How had I forgotten the feeling of this? A rhyme came back to me, one I had whispered to each of my children, and that I had learned from my mother by listening.” 

On the subject of birth, I sent Shruti a poem by Emily Jungmin Yoon that my friend JoAnn sent me. In “Time, In Whales,” Yoon writes:

“…Come spring, it will be your birthday/We will have seaweed soup, supply our blood with oxygen.

Do you know that Koreans do that, because, hundreds of years past, they saw whales eating seaweed after giving birth?”

I remember my mother-in-law making batches of Miyeok Guk (seaweed soup) for my sister-in-law after our niece was born. I loved learning about the whale origins of this tradition.

These are the kinds of tidbits Shruti and I would share, and it is through our correspondences that this idea of a Literary Animal whale event first emerged.

I wanted to discuss her writing from a whale’s POV and thought it would be fabulous for Shruti to be in conversation with Talia Lakshmi Kolluri whose masterful short story collection, What We Fed to The Manticore, I raved about previously. In Talia’s story, “The Open Ocean is An Endless Desert,” we are guided by the delightful voice of a young male in love, and the importance of song:

“Fathers are the ones that sing the songs about our world. They swim away from everyone and send low notes through the water about where the krill is, where the temperature changes, and what the surface of the floor is like. They sing songs that tell everyone when to migrate. They announce the birth of new calves, and they notify us when a whale dies. Every song begins with one whale, composing alone in a low rumble. He sends his first notes along the ocean floor until they reach the whales nearest to him. They repeat the song to the next nearest whales who repeat it again. This goes on until the song wraps the globe like a net woven with the sound of whales humming. I will be a father someday too; I hope soon. And so, I am listening carefully to how the notes are strung together in a series of unbroken threads. I am learning the old songs and planning the ones I want to add to the fabric.”

Kolluri imagines how a whale experiences a ship in these waters:

“When I wake, there is a tear in the musical network.”

What happens to whales when their songs—and everything the songs carry—are interrupted?

I am very interested in how these writers are exploring specific environmental changes from a whale’s perspective and how research informs their writings.

Shruti alerted me to the release of Rajiv Mohabir’s poetry collection Whale Aria. I was giddy with excitement because I had just finished Giggs’s chapter considering the poetry of whales. Whales, too, are literary animals:

“ [A whale’s] loudness or quietness (the next-to-ness of its projection) may also carry a connotation, making the matter of whether ‘phrases’ occur in proximity close to, or far from, the singer's body, an additional source of nuance.

Imagine if what a word denoted depended not only on how that word was spelled, how it sounded, and whether it was whispered or whether it was yelled, but also where on the page it was placed.

Don't we know that form already, reader? Don't we call it a poem?”

With enthusiasm, I reached out to Rajiv, and he shared with me his wonderful craft essay, “On Humpback Whale Song and Poetic Constraint,” (more labors of a literary sub-sub!), published in The American Poetry Review, that lays out his process of creating a whale song poem. The essay begins with Rajiv as a listener of whale song in the waters of Hawaii. “But there in the water, I heard what I could in the language of my own body.”

Rajiv’s work is populated with these kinds of questions:

“Poetry invents a listener of me, and as I write poems, I become a creator of exponential expansion of consciousness. But how to treat the song as an ephemeral, living performance by beings that are not objects? How could the form of the poem hold the ecology of this mammal as well as my own speech?”

And here, Rajiv poses a central question of The Literary Animal Project.

“So the question remains for the poet: how do you write any self: one’s own, another, or another animal?”

When we approach this literary animal work from a place of humility and generosity, like these writers do, even if we may never truly know another, we can still explore these unknowns. When we acknowledge the unknown, we also acknowledge that what is known is not the only truth—not the only way of being—and we can begin to imagine and consider other ways.

In “Humpback Vocalizations” in Whale Aria, Rajiv shares his research on whale song that informs the accompanying poetry.

He identifies a rhyme scheme in the whales:

“aaa bcb ded eff ded eff g”

“The rhyme sense in a complete song leaves the listener in a socially unfamiliar place. In fact, the g cascades, a grand departure—a kind of a sonic and poetic anti-closure asking for riff and response.”

How I love this last note as an invitation for the listener to respond.

I was reading Whale Aria, alongside Rajiv’s beautiful and poetic hybrid memoir, Antiman, and saw connections in these two works around the themes of migration, ancestral song, loss, and violence against bodies deemed “other.”

The closing poem in Whale Aria, “Why Whales are Back in New York City,” juxtaposes the return of the whales with “Now ICE beats doors/door on Liberty Avenue/to deport…” and ends with “They won’t keep us out/though they send us back.”

In Fathoms, Giggs invokes George Bataille’s line “Every animal is in the world like water in water." She adds:

“Every animal, including us. When we listen to recordings of whale song, we're eavesdropping on more than the utterances of another mammal. Our ears take in the ambience of the whale's body vis-à-vis its ocean setting; we apprehend, however subtly, the architecture of the animal's interior, the depth of the water, and the broader contours of the seafloor—all the grottos and barrens from which the whale's sounds have rebounded. Hearing whale song, we're hearing the shape of the ocean.”

When reading these works by Shruti, Talia, and Rajiv, I kept thinking about how they capture this intimate connection between the whale and the world, like water in water. I hope by hearing them read their works, which all draw from research, imagination, and great empathy, we can also hear the shape of the ocean.

Like, the whale song, I’ll leave you, dear reader, with an invitation to respond.

Please join us on 12/12: Please RSVP! Buy their books online from Kew & Willow. (They make great gifts)

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

I wanted to talk about birds today. I learned that the extraordinary animal activist, Karen Davis, passed away on November 4, 2023. (Read Martin Rowe’s tribute to her life and work here)

Davis founded United Poultry Concerns and was also a literary animal. In addition to rescuing, caring for, and advocating for chickens and turkeys, she was a prolific writer. She held a PhD in English, penned articles, essays, and reviews, and authored several books, most recently, For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation.

“The rhetoric of animal exploitation requires a counter rhetoric of animal liberation,” she writes.

What was particularly memorable to me about Davis was her campaign to the radio program, This American Life, against their annual “Poultry Slam.” Davis and her followers wrote letters telling Ira Glass that they found these stories and jokes about chickens and turkeys cruel and demeaning. Her activism prompted Glass to invite her on the show to share her side of the story. She, instead, asked him to come to her and meet her chickens.

On the segment entitled “People Who Love Chickens And Hate This American Life,” Glass meets the chickens in Davis’s care:

“Karen showed me Ella, who likes her neck stroked. And Elise, who jumps over the fence every morning and jumps back in every night. And Lois and Lambrusco, a pair who stick together all the time. And Dolores, who's sort of shy.”

Then, there is a turn.

“Here's one area where Karen Davis is completely in the right, and I and my radio staff have been absolutely wrong,” Glass admits. He realizes chickens do have personalities and “well, they can be kind of sweet.”

A few years later, Glass was on David Letterman and Letterman asked him about that “chicken lady.” Glass recounted the story of meeting Karen and her chickens. The tone in which he and Letterman spoke of “poultry activists” was very jokey and reeked of ridicule. But the story takes another turn. Glass, then says:

 “Like every time after that, I would have a chicken I would think back to her chickens and the shy ones and the outgoing ones, and I would think, ‘is this the last piece of chicken I'm going to eat ?’ And then, eventually, there was the last leg. I became a vegetarian because of that woman. She got the last laugh on me.”

As a literary animal, I think about these moments or turns in literature (and life), where such encounters with chickens or chicken people become so transformative.

I recall the late Congressman John Lewis speaking at The Cooper Union and sharing his early encounters with chickens growing up:

“I remember my first non-violent protest, before I heard of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. When my mother and father wanted to have a chicken for a meal, I didn’t cooperate. I refused to eat. I boycotted the meal.”

I was moved by an essay we published years ago in Satya, “To the Men in my Family who love Chickens” written by Kao Kalia Yang, which won Lantern Books’ Essay Contest that year. Yang, a Hmong refugee, tells the tale of her father and uncle who fled the Laotian jungles carrying with them chickens.“They had seen so many deaths. The hunger gnawed and death gnawed, but beauty kept it at bay.” They could not kill or eat their chickens, who had become their companions. Yang writes:

“I know that they had protected for as long as they could, lives that were small, that were more helpless than their own.”

I’ve been spending time this week with Karen’s book For The Birds, and she reflects on her encounters in literature and life that led to her own transformations. She introduces us to a rescued hen named Viva. “One of the most touching things about Viva was her voice. She would always talk to me with her frail ‘peep peep.’ which never got any louder and seemed to come from somewhere in the center of her body that pulsed her tail at precisely the same time,” she writes.

While Viva turned Karen into a chicken activist, Leo Tolstoy turned her into a vegetarian. Tolstoy’s essay “The First Step,” and his “grueling description of cows and lambs in the Moscow slaughterhouses,” led her to drop flesh from her diet. “I agreed with Tolstoy…. Because I had never ‘supported’ eating animals in the first place, I did not need to be persuaded one position for another; I needed only to be made aware,”she writes.

Annie Potts’ book Chicken has made many readers and writers aware of the inner lives of chickens. Carol Giggliotti in her book The Creative Lives of Animals, notes that “Potts not only does an outstanding job at boosting ethical awareness of this ‘intelligent and passionate species’ but, as a distinguished cultural scholar, she also draws together evolutionary, historical, biological, and cultural perspectives on how humans have interacted with this bird, who is so revered and exploited.”

In the acknowledgments to her chicken rescue novel Barn 8, Deb Olin Unferth writes, “I read many articles and books while researching this book but it wasn’t until I read Chicken by Annie Potts that I was able to imagine the independent mind of the hen.”

Last week, at the Compassionate Arts Festival, I had the pleasure of listening to Unferth read one of my favorite passages from Barn 8:

“In the wild, chickens have complicated cliques and distinct voices. They talk among themselves, even before they hatch. A hen twitters and sings to her eggs and the chicks inside answer, peeping and burbling and clicking through the shells. Adult chickens have over thirty categories of conversation, each with its own web of coos and calls and clucks and struts. Chickens gossip, summon, play flirt, teach, warn, mourn, fight, praise and promise.

It is this last promise, that concerns us here.”

Unferth writes about a hen named ‘Bwwaauk’ and the grammar of her chicken promises.

In the beginning of For The Birds, another animal advocate Susan Roghair describes Davis’s relentless work, which “will not end until every chicken is freed from the jaws of mankind.” Davis meditates on the multiple meanings of this phrase, ‘freed from the jaws of mankind,” to the themes in her own life’s work.

“To begin with, there is the theme of people literally consuming chickens and other animals… there is the theme of “badmouthing” other animal species,….and the theme of who chickens and turkeys… are in and of themselves within their own worlds of experience and expression as revealed in circumstances that are as free as possible from the preconceived notions that distort our perception of them.”

Her devotion to freeing birds from our mouths, badmouthing, and preconceived notions, are chicken promises too.

I would love to hear from you, dear readers, on where you see these promises kept on the pages of literature. Where was the turn for you?

News and Links:

• Washington Post: “Karen Davis, animal rights advocate who spoke for the birds, dies at 79”

• New York Times: “Karen Davis, Who Battled for the Rights of Birds, Dies at 79”

• For The Birds: Literary Animal Bookshop Page

Upcoming Event:

Join Kew & Willow books and The Literary Animal Project for a virtual reading and discussion about thinking and writing about magnificent whales with literary luminaries, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Rajiv Mohabir, and Shruti Swamy. RSVP HERE.

Purchase your copies of their books at Kew & Willow.

More on whales next time.

Yours for the animals,
Sangu

Subscribe now

I’m looking forward to this conversation about animals in India with Naisargi Davé, Yamini Narayanan, and you!

See you on Wednesday October 25, 2023, 7 PM EDT (Virtual)

Register here.

To learn more about or purchase their books, please visit The Literary Animal Project Bookshop.org page for this event.

More info on the event in the last post:

Yours for the animals,

Sangu

P.S.
SAVE THE DATE: Tuesday December 12, 2023 7 PM EST

I’m thrilled to share that the second event for The Literary Animal Project, will be a a conversation about whales 🐳🐋! It will be virtual in partnership with my local bookstore, Kew & Willow Books, and feature this amazing pod of writers:

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Rajiv Mohabir, and Shruti Swamy!!!!

Stay tuned for details.

I am thrilled to announce the first virtual event for The Literary Animal Project: A Conversation with Dr. Naisargi Davé and Dr. Yamini Narayanan about their brilliant new books on October 25, 2023, 7 pm EDT. See details below.

Indifference: On the Praxis of Interspecies Being, by Naisargi Davé (Duke University Press)

Mother Cow Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India, by Yamini Narayanan (Stanford University Press)

Naisargi Davé’s research “concerns emergent forms of intra- and interspecies ethics, politics, and relationality in contemporary India.” Yamini Narayanan is “focused on bringing forth animals as subjects and stakeholders of our co-shared and co-produced social, ecological and political worlds. Specifically, she addresses animals as stakeholders in urban spaces, and as subjects and instruments of nationalist politics in India, and elsewhere in South Asia.”

I am excited to discuss their work as literary animals, bringing animal lives in India to the page, while challenging the forces of Hindu nationalism, casteism, and capitalism. Naisargi asks “What does Cow Protection Protect?” and Yamini poses similar questions: “What and who does cow protectionism ‘protect’—and what and who does it render vulnerable?”

Through extensive fieldwork, interviews, and reportage on every aspect of India’s dairy industry, Yamini argues in Mother Cow Mother India that “ the framing of the cow as ‘mother’ is one of human domination, wherein the cow is simultaneously commodified for dairy production, and weaponized to create a Hindu state.” She was encouraged by an animal activist named Pradeep Kumar Nath to “focus on the cows.” He tells her, “The cow has become so political that the animal has been lost. The animal is lost even though it is in full focus. The cow is an example of how totally we can lose the animal even while making the biggest issue out of it.”

In Indifference, Naisargi explores the vast world of “animalists” in India, and her experiences documenting and working alongside activists. She argues for a practice of indifference, by which she explains is “mutually existing in difference rather than being different beings seeking to grasp, gaze, admire, and master the difference of others.” She playfully adds, “Let's be honest. There is no shortage of the opposite of indifference in our world, which is the desire for difference—finding, wrangling, and utilizing it. And where has this gotten us? Anthropology? Heterosexuality? Capitalism? Empire? Friends, I think we can do better.” 

I hope to ask both of them about how they document animal resistance, what they notice and learn from animal bodies, and how they take care of their own animal bodies while doing this work. How do their scholarship, writing, and activism inform each other?

Their books are in conversation and I’m excited to bring them in conversation with you, where we can chat about bearing witness, contradictions, reading and writing animal bodies, and other literary animals who inform and inspire them. Let us explore as Naisargi does, “How might we listen through Queer Tongues?” and consider as Yamini does, “a feminist’s responsibility to tell stories…and to render ‘ungrievable’ lives ‘grievable.’”

In describing ways of being in difference, Naisargi invokes Audre Lorde’s poem “For Judith,” which ends with these lines:

“…at the watering hole/not quite together/but learning/each other’s ways”

I hope this conversation, too, can be a gathering at the watering hole where we can learn each other’s ways. 

Register here.

The Literary Animal Project Presents: At the Watering Hole

A conversation about Animals in India with Naisargi Davé and Yamini Narayanan

Wednesday October 25, 2023

7PM EDT

Further Reading:

• Excerpt from introduction to Indifference

• Excerpt from introduction to Mother Cow Mother India

• I had the pleasure of interviewing Naisargi Davé years ago for Satya’s: The Long View years ago. Here we discuss queer and animal activism in India, the distinctions between law and justice, holding multiple truths, and what Naisargi calls the “Tyranny of Consistency”:

  The Ethnography of Activism: The Satya Interview with Naisargi Davé.

• Culture and Animals Foundation interview with Filmmakers Nirupama Sarma and Gautam Sonti who are working on a film portraying a nuanced, secular and inclusive view animals rights against the backdrop of India’s current political landscape.

• The Literary Animal Project on Bookshop.org

Other literary animal news:

About Place Journal just published “The More than Human World” Issue, edited by Nickole Brown & Erin Coughlin Hollowell.

Thanks again for reading and please share widely,

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

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In my research room at the New York Public Library, which sits on top of a former water reservoir, I learn about the submerged poetry of Sangam Literature. A sangam is a confluence, and the Tamil Sangam were these assemblages of ancient poets, whose lands were twice swallowed by the sea.  The texts are stored beneath Bryant Park’s skating rink, and travel first via an underground trolley before they reach my shelf.

There, I have a copy of The Treatment of Nature in Sangam Literature by M. Varadarajan. I love reading his commentaries about how the Sangam poets convey animal joy and grief, and I write a little about them in this essay published in the Ways of Water Issue of Conjunctions.

The Sangam poets understood how animals feared human harms. “The shadow cast on the deep water by the rattan stem waving on the bund is mistaken by the valai fish for the fisherman’s angle, as the poor creature has once had [his] own bitter experience of it,” Varadarajan writes. He also describes an image of elephants encountering unfinished well pits covered with dry leaves, which they mistake for a snare placed by hunters “and with great anger fill it up.”

These elephants were the early hunt saboteurs and some of these poets, are perhaps, our fore-bearers in animal rights literature. They also have written some of the earliest climate literature from the perspectives of the non-human world, documenting what we now call eco-grief.  As I write in Conjunctions:

They wrote about the deer, who, in unbearable heat, “forgets the food of leaves and faints forlorn.” The thirsty elephant, with a raised trunk, looks “at the sky for rainy clouds.” She runs toward a mirage. Disappointed and defeated, she lies down like “a boat in a waterless river.”

Some Sangam poets authored many verses, others like the poet Vellādiyanār, have only a single verse attributed to them (or only one remains). I find it amazing, that his indelible description “like a boat in waterless river,” once written on palm leaves, eaten by white ant and worms, survived two millennia, was reprinted, translated, commented upon, and landed on my bookshelf on a library that now sits upon a waterless reservoir. 

The landscapes in Tamil Sangam literature are called thinai. In her essay, “Retrieving the Margins: Use of Thinai by Three Contemporary Tamil Women Writers,” scholar Chitra Sankaran tells us that thinai “combines geography with the rules for poetry.” Sankaran writes, “Thinai is a concept that holds the ecosystem in an integral embrace.”

Inspired by this Sangam tradition, Forrest Gander’s collection Twice Alive, includes “Sangam Acoustics,” California-thinai poems that connect emotional and ecological landscapes.

As a literary animal, I am interested in this confluence of personal and planetary grief, of inner and outer worlds, of akam (inness) and puram (outness) as the Sangam poets would say.

Here I want to spotlight a couple of books that sit in this nexus and consider how our fellow animals are also navigating these changing land (and water) scapes.

What We Fed To The Manticore: Stories by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri (Tin House)

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s short story collection What We Fed to the Manticore, is filled with such radical imagination and empathy for the inner lives of animals in an increasingly altered outer world.   Each story in this collection is narrated by a different species:  A donkey at the Gaza Zoo, a dog at a rhino park, a whale interrupted by ship noise, a polar bear and fox remembering origin stories, tigers in the Sundarbans, and an injured urban pigeon gaining her confidence to fly again, among others.  I hope to chat with Kolluri more for The Literary Animal Project on this process of writing animal perspectives.   Here, I want to highlight how she captures the layers of loss in this powerful story, “Someone Must Watch Over the Dead.”    The story is told from a vulture’s perspective:

“It is known and it is also said by almost everyone that our ancestors taught all their descendants that it was their duty, the duty of all vultures, to pick the dead clean of their flesh. To speed their transition. To accept their last gift. And so these great birds would dive from the sky, shaping the air under their wings to lift them or send them plunging to the circles of the dakhma.”

Her story is in part inspired by the news of declining vulture populations and the impact on the Parsi community’s dakhmas.

“It is also known and said by almost everyone that many of our ancestors died in that sprawling city with the dakhma on the hill. The forest was shrinking. And a sickness came. The carrion in the city carried a poison. After feeding, our ancestors felt themselves turning to stone and they were no longer able to swoop down on the rings from above. Their feathered bodies were left to rot alone. So it is thought that their transition was delayed and their souls lingered, whispering lessons to the few that remained. One or two of our remaining ancestors, or perhaps two or three, flew north until they came to rest here, where we are now. It is said, even if it is not known, that the open skies called them. Or something else.”

How does ancestral knowledge get passed down between vultures.  What happens when your ancestors have been killed en masse from performing their duty on bodies who were poisoned? For those who survive and move to new lands, what do they remember? What do they forget? Kolluri explores these questions from a young vulture’s point of view.

Her story also draws from Ed Yong’s reportage in The Atlantic about two thirds of the world’s saiga, a kind of antelope, dying in the course of a few weeks.

Our vulture narrator, is trying to learn about her roots, but her parents are no longer around. Bodily knowledge carries her to the field of fallen antelope. Kolluri imagines how this vulture, the descendent of those who survived a mass die off, processes the mass die-off of another species. When does a duty become a burden?

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (AK Press)

“How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm?” asks Alexis Pauline Gumbs in the opening of Undrowned. What follows are beautiful lyrical meditations on black feminism and a love letter to marine mammals. We join Gumbs who considers herself an apprentice marine mammal, as she ponders mutual survival lessons as oceans warm and rise. She writes with such respect for and solidarity with these vulnerable aquatic beings, and offers us a way forward based on their teachings. 

The insights and questions that populate this book are so profound.

On the extinction of the vegetarian Hydrodamalis gigas within 27 years of being “discovered.”:

“Who else could only tolerate twenty -seven years among western humans?… How do we mourn and survive the violence of being known?..What can I do to honor you, now that it is too late?

She writes about Lolita or Toki, the orca at the Miami Seaquarium, and the fight to repatriate her to the Salish Sea, and what it truly means to love orcas:

“What does it actually mean to love someone whose love leads generations?  Ecosystems shape themselves around her.  Great and small dream her at night.  What does it mean to love someone who has seen her children taken, and at the risk of capture, stayed to witness and  scream?  Who will carry around the corpse of her child until her grief has reached another stage?  Who will not pretend that her heart is not broken when it is? Do we know how to love a love that huge and unapologetic?  Could we learn that?”

Sadly, this beautiful whale died last month, before she was able to be returned home to sea.

Gumbs explores “what capitalism means on an interspecies scale,” and the direct and indirect harms of the fishing industry:

“But maybe you already know something about this. About a how a deadly system doesn't have to seem like it's targeting you directly to kill you consistently.”

This line below is my favorite lesson from all these teachings:

“And what a celebration when we realize our survival need not make us into monsters.”

Resources:

• “Into the Animal Body” by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri published by Asian American Writers Workshop: A wonderful essay that discuss process, inspirations, and urgency of imagining animal perspectives, “..to show that we are collectively suffering under the weight of the destruction that our own hands have wrought.”

• “Heat is Not a Metaphor” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Harper Baazar on the ways whale bodies are responding to and perhaps protesting increasingly dangerous waters.

• Chitra Sankaran’s “Retrieving the Margins: Use of Thinai by Three Contemporary Tamil Women Writers.”

• Poetry, Ecology, and Sangam: A talk by Forrest Gander and collaboration with Ashwini Bhat

• My “Letter to My Submerged Father,” Published in Conjuctions: Ways of Water.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for news of upcoming events and discussions with The Literary Animal Project. More soon.

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

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Over fourteen years ago, a writing mentor invited me to attend a public conversation with Eduardo Galeano at the Society of Ethical Culture in New York with him. I hadn’t expected the topic of animals to come up in the conversation, but during the Q&A, one person asked whether Galeano thought animals loved as much as humans.   Galeano paused. He was choked up at the question. He shared that he had just lost his dog—his great friend. “Yes, they do,” he replied. “They love..,” he said, trailing off for a moment, “more than humans.”

At another part of the evening, Galeano mentioned that he typically drew a pig as part of his signature in book signings. He skipped it this time because of swine flu. (It was May 2009). When asked why he chose the pig, he said he didn’t know, and then speculated: maybe it was because the pig is so humble and look at his destiny— the sausage.

I wasn’t familiar with Galeano’s works at the time of this event, but was curious if and how animals appeared in the histories he was writing. I had requested the Memory Fire trilogy from the Queens Library. Galeano’s history was alive and in present tense told in lyrical fragments comprising a larger mosaic. “I believe in memory not as a place of arrival, but as a point of departure—a catapult throwing you into present times, allowing you to imagine the future instead of accepting it,” he writes.

The third volume, Century of the Wind, arrived first in my library queue, and I started to flip through it. My hands and eyes landed on this passage, which I had immediately typed up and shared with close friends. 

1976: Liberty

Forbidden Birds

The Uruguayan political prisoners may not talk without permission, or whistle, smile, sing, walk fast, or greet other prisoners; nor may they make or receive drawings of pregnant women, couples, butterflies, stars or birds. 

One Sunday, Didasko Perez, school teacher, tortured and jailed for having ideological ideas, is visited by his daughter Milay, age five. She brings him a drawing of birds. The guards destroy it at the entrance to the jail.

On the following Sunday, Milay brings him a drawing of trees. Trees are not forbidden, and the drawing gets through. Didasko praises her work and asked about the colored circles scattered in the treetops, many small circles half-hidden among the branches: “Are they oranges? What fruit is it?”

The child puts a finger on his mouth. “Sssssshhh.”

And she whispers in his ear: “Silly. Don’t you see they’re eyes? They’re the eyes of the birds that I’ve smuggled in for you.”

When the brilliant and talented Lavanya Manickam designed this gorgeous logo for The Literary Animal Project, I texted her that “the bird reminds me of this Galeano passage,” and shared these words I still keep close with me today. 

“I love this so much,” I texted her about the logo design, “and each of the animals has special story for me.” The ant is connected to another literary animal memory. In 2011, I had come across an essay in Granta by Ahmed Errachidi called “A Handful of Walnuts,” excerpted from his memoir, The General. Errachidi was a chef who through a horrific set of circumstances, ended up detained by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay. Errachidi describes the inhumane conditions of incarceration and how he kept himself and others alive. He entertained his fellow prisoners with descriptions of imaginary feasts. The other inmates would ask `can we come back to your dining table?' “Thoughts were not restricted, even though hands and feet were shackled,” he writes.

It was the “the visitors,” though who brought hope:

“Visitors would come three times a day after every meal. They would come by the dozen, and I would wait eagerly for them. I would sit with them, thoroughly enjoying their company. I spent long hours with them, and yet did not get bored. They would come and give us hope that life had not come to a halt.”

Errachidi is referring to a community of ants:

“I secretly saved food for them in a corner. If the guards saw them they would either spray them with pesticide or crush them beneath their military boots. I would get angry, and shout at them, ‘Do not the ants have a right to life? They do not trouble you so why do you have to kill them?’ When the soldiers found out that we fed the ants, they punished us by cutting our rations. That didn't stop me from keeping ants in my cell. I observed them and studied their way of life every day.”

Errachidi watches the ants, leaves peanut shells for them and gives them droplets of sweet tea. When the guards would come, he would blow at them, signaling to disperse, so they would not be crushed by a shoe. By sharing these small intimate acts of thoughtful observation and care, Errachidi offers a radical display of peaceful coexistence, under the harshest of circumstances.

Lavanya drew the ant on the logo walking on a Kōlaṁ “Kolam is its own literary animal project,” I message her. I had been reading Vijaya Nagrajan’s book Feeding A Thousand Souls about this ritual practice. The days begin with women’s bodies bent to greet the earth. Fistfuls of rice flour pour to form flower petals, dots, and other geometrical shapes. Nagarajan tells us that these kōlaṁs have multiple purposes: to bring beauty, invite auspiciousness, and ask forgiveness to the earth goddess for walking and stepping on her. This ephemeral art is also an offering to be devoured by ants and worms and other beings—to feed a thousand souls.

I think about these passages by Galeano and Errachidi, and how they like kōlaṁ, tell multiple stories, but the animal encounter at the heart (if not the center), is what nourishes a thousand souls.

Do you have a favorite unexpected literary animal encounter?

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra

Literary Animal News and Links:

• My friend Sanjeevanee read this profile of me at the New York Public Library where I discuss my love of acknowledgments. She introduced me to the lovely Nutan Rubinson, who has a wonderful podcast The Acknowledgments focused on interviewing authors about their books and their acknowledgements. We had a great chat discussing this mutual love of acknowledgements, The Literary Animal Project, writing, invisible labors, and many other subjects, which turned into its own podcast episode. Listen here:

  

• Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary is hosting this webinar on September 19, 2023 : Surviving Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza: A story of an animal sanctuary’s fight against a deadly virus. Register in link.

• My local bookstore Kew and Willow is hosting a virtual book club on September 20, 2023 to discuss one of my favorites, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. Email them to sign up.

• EcoLit Books put together a list of Literary Outlets to Send Environmental Writing. Submit your literary animal stories! Also check out their wonderful book reviews.

• Another Books + Animals combination: September is a Read-a-thon For the Animals at Vine Sanctuary.

• The Literary Animal Project on Bookshop.org

My Dear Literary Animals,

Welcome to The Literary Animal Project, a habitat where conversations, questions and writings on animals in literature can live and thrive. We’ll explore how animal lives are portrayed on the page and spotlight writing that captures multi-species storytelling and the myriad of ways our lives are entangled. I want to thank the Culture and Animals Foundation for their support of this project.

First, let me introduce myself. I am a literary animal. As a reader, writer, and editor, I have been seen, challenged, blessed, transported, transformed, understood, held, and broken open by words.

Since you are reading this, you are likely a literary animal too. Is there a passage about animals you’ve read that has stayed with you, that you couldn’t keep to yourself, that you wanted to share with everyone you knew? A line, a paragraph a few words? What was it that struck you? Why did it stay with you? How did it change you? I have been observing, collecting and curating these kind of moments for years, and I am looking forward to sharing some of them with you.

Books and stories about our fellow animals have been my teachers and guides, setting me off on a series of adventures, informing my activism, and serving as my steady companions navigating our uncertain and often violent world. I think about a signing chimpanzee named Washoe, who I first encountered in Roger Fouts’ memoir, Next of Kin over 25 years ago. Washoe, too, was a literary animal. She invented words by combining two signs together. Consider her poetry: WATER BIRD was how she described a swan, CANDY DRINK was a watermelon, and DIRTY GOOD was her phrase for going potty. Washoe, like all of my favorite poets, had a profound understanding of grief. One of the most indelible moments of Next of Kin, was when she offered this compassionate response to a human caregiver experiencing an often invisible loss, similar to one Washoe had also experienced. Washoe replied with a finger to the eye—CRY—followed by PLEASE PERSON HUG.

Next of Kin, was a kind of “Spark Book” for me. It was Fouts’s portrayal of Washoe and her family as individuals with unique personalities, as well as his ethical reckoning with the use of animals in these scientific experiments that drew me in. It prompted these two questions that I have been carrying since: How can we learn about and from other animals without harming them? How do we repair the harm we have already caused other species?

In the years that followed, reading and writing about animals, has taken me on many literary animal journeys. I wrote my very first article, about my experiences caring for orphaned chimpanzees in the forests of Cameroon, for Satya Magazine. As I write in this Ashland Creek Press interview here:

“My entry into the world of writing about animals was when I worked for Satya Magazine …. Each month was a deep dive into a pressing planetary issue. Writing about animals became a much larger project: one that probed the intersections with environmentalism and social justice. By doing so, it evolved into a deeper exploration of how both power and compassion operate. Satya was foundational to me, as I discovered the kind of writer I wanted to be: curious, concerned, and willing to confront the complexity of the challenges we faced. My writing about animals still aims to expose multiple truths about how human actions impact the lives of other animals, but I’ve also grown increasingly interested in the role of writing to imagine other ways of being.”

I wrote an essay “Are you Willing?” for Writing for Animals, an anthology published by Ashland Creek Press. There, I share my perspectives as a reader and also as an editor for Satya: The Long View. The essay title comes from a Mary Oliver poem, “Lead,” which begins with a warning and an invitation: “Here is a story to break your heart/Are you willing?” Oliver was a literary animal, whose aim was to break open—not close— readers’ hearts to the world .

The Literary Animal Project, is an extension of this work, exploring writings that break the heart open. Here I will be in conversation with other Literary Animals to discuss animals in literature beyond symbols, mirrors and metaphors. How do we write fully about animal lives and agency? How can we center other animal perspectives? How do we create art that moves beyond reverence, toward a radical reimagining of our relationships? Join me in an ongoing discussion on the ethics and care around bearing witness to animal beauty and grief in this world.

Yours for the animals,

Sangamithra Iyer

Links:

• Sangamithra Iyer, website

• Satya Magazine: The Long View

• Culture and Animals Foundation

• The Literary Animal Project Recommendations on Bookshop.org