by Katie Poore “The animals are dying. Soon we will be alone here.” So begins Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations, one of the most haunting and beautiful novels I have read in years. I picked this book up on a whim, mostly because it has been categorized as “eco-fiction” by publishers and reviewers, a new sort of…

by Katie Poore I majored in English in college. This statement tends to get one of two reactions: the first is a vague and uncomprehending stare, the kind that belies complete indifference to anything literary, much less anything academically literary. The second is a furrowed brow, a slight narrowing of the eyes, and the question…

by Katie Poore Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt is a string pulled so tightly it is on the verge, always, of snapping. It is like this from the first sentence, when our protagonist Lydia Quixano Alvarez’s 8-year-old son, Luca, finds himself in a rain of bullets while he uses the bathroom. By the second page, sixteen…

by Katie Poore It feels impossible this week not to talk about George Floyd, and yet it feels as if talk has become egregiously cheap, less a mechanism for change than a means of resting in paralyses of complacency, disbelief, or comfort. When rage, grief, frustration, and loss take over communities, states, and entire countries…

by Katie Poore A few months ago, before the news had spiraled into an endless spiral of public health precautions and death tolls, I was scrolling through Instagram, thinking, as one does while scrolling through Instagram, of nothing in particular. It had been a long day, and I was eager for those ten minutes of…

by Katie Poore During a recent visit to Paris, I squeezed through the crowded bookshelves of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore, a stone’s throw from Notre Dame, whose charred heights sat masked in scaffolding just across the Seine. It has become something of a Parisian tourist hotspot, mostly because of its association with our…

by Katie Poore While waiting, shivering and jetlagged, for a train home from the Paris airport this week, I alternately stared into space and checked the train timetables. My train was an hour late. I later learned, thanks to the friendliness of a fellow traingoer, that the train had hit a deer. Waiting on the…

by Katie Poore A few weeks ago, one of my closest friends finished a thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,650-mile footpath that snakes its way from Campo, California on the Mexican border to Mansfield Park, a few miles into Canada. It follows—as the name suggests—the crests of some of the West’s grandest mountain…

by Katie Poore A few weeks ago, I journeyed up to Chamonix-Mont-Blanc during a work vacation. I went with a few friends of mine, embarking from our homes in Chambéry, France, taking a train to Annecy, and a bus to our final destination. I was outrageously tired, having stayed up until some ungodly hour of…

by Katie Poore American writer Rebecca Solnit laments that few writers have had quite as much scrutiny directed toward their laundry habits as Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau, best known for his 1854 memoir Walden. “Only Henry David Thoreau,” she claims in Orion Magazine’s article “Mysteries of Thoreau, Unsolved,” “has been tried in the popular…

by Katie Poore As a child, author and poet Annie Dillard would traipse through her neighborhood, searching for ideal places to stash pennies where others might find them. In her novel Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a meditation on the natural world surrounding her home in a rural Virginia valley, she tells us she would nestle…

by Katie Poore “How will you defend yourself?” It was one of the first questions my oldest brother asked me on the phone several months ago, along with: “Do you have a knife? Do you know how to use it? Maybe you should just buy a machete, if they sell those at REI. Do you…