Nina listens for the heartbeat

...and writes from the body

What I'm teaching is how to write from the body. If you generate sound and rhythm, that's what the body feels. So you're creating at the sentence level a reality that cannot be denied. I'm feeling it, versus just a bland sentence that's only conveying information or moving the story along. It's a profound difference.

-Nina Schuyler, author, professor

In a parallel universe, author Nina Schuyler is a cardiac surgeon, resuscitating hearts and restoring life. Whether she’s dissecting stunning sentences to uncover what makes them pulse with vitality or recognizing the urgent heartbeat of our planet, Nina attunes herself to the primordial rhythms of aliveness. Through her skillful, passionate expertise, she rallies us to hear them too.

Much like the heavy weight of chronic illness, the enormity of environmental issues can silence our hearts and minds, lulling us into despair. Yet, in countless conversations with those bravely navigating uncertainty, I’ve learned that confronting our fears with emotional honesty can reveal a resilience that shines even in darkness. Nina Schuyler is one of those luminous souls. She recognizes the power of storytelling to convey the urgency of our time, artfully weaving her love for the planet with beautiful language and empowering her students and readers to take hopeful, courageous action.

Her recent collection, In This Ravishing World, which won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature, filled my heart with an overwhelming sense of possibility. Nina’s characters, including our sentient Earth, embody both the weight of despair and the buoyancy of hope, refusing to yield to the shadows of hopelessness. In a masterful dance of narrative, she intertwines disparate lives, revealing their universal struggles—whether it’s the environmentalist sinking in sorrow, the architect seeking escape for his family, or the innocent youth who can’t turn away.

Nina offers more than just a mirror to our harsh reality; she creates a sanctuary where helplessness and hope, hurt and healing, coexist in harmony. If there ever was a call to rally our energy and plant seeds of promise for the future, In This Ravishing World is that clarion call. Through her weekly dissections of delicious prose in Stunning Sentences and her teachings at Stanford Continuing Studies, Nina leads her students—and me—into a dance with language, bringing it back into the body, where our interconnectedness with each other and the Earth becomes a rhythm that is alive and vibrant.

I feel completely indebted to the evolutionary track that began 4.5 billion years ago after meticulously going through it and understanding all that life had to go through to get to us. And it completely changed me and I'm heartbroken. But I'm angry and I'm trying to be risk-taking and courageous to do what I can.

Note: Huge apologies. I’m a doofus. Right out of the gates Nina corrected my pronunciation and I failed to hear it and then she graciously went along with it. So please, whenever I say Neena, please hear Nina with a long “I” and visualize a large dunce cap on my head.

Kimberly

Nina, I'm so happy to see you here and spend some time with you this morning.

NIna

Thank you so much for inviting me. This is such an honor and it's been such a pleasure interacting with you on Substack and getting to know you and reading your writing and your Substack. This little community is forming, right?

Kimberly

Yeah, it's a beautiful community. And then one of the reasons why I do this is to introduce some of my beloved favorite writers to my circle because I'm finding that while we are very connected, there's still some silos and it's like, gosh, everybody needs to know about Nina now.

NIna

It's so cool. It's just such a good adventure and a good venture heading out and connecting everybody. It makes me want to think of what I can do to help create more cohesion in this area.

Kimberly

Yeah, well, I actually, speaking of cohesion, you are, we were just speaking right before we started recording about this genre, which doesn't maybe even exist, but I'm to, we're calling it climate literature. And you are integrating a lot of different voices, including Earth's voice in your most recent (and you call it a collection of stories, I call it a novel because it feels like all the stories were connected and to me they all lived together). I want to get into this book with you especially because I feel like you are planting seeds of optimism and hope in a genre, like you said is largely apocalyptic. And as we know here on Substack we all learn from stories. And through those stories, we learn to empathize with one another. And I feel like those are the seeds that we need to plant in order to save this planet and create a sense of cohesion with one another.

NIna

I kind of like I told you I stumbled into this so-called climate literature area and I led it with passion. That's how I write. Like what am I excited about? What do I want to explore? What matters? You know, human beings do things that matter and that's what makes us unique. So that's a very, I study a lot of philosophy, that's a very Heideggerian term that the human needs things to matter. And so that to me, that's the lead, not reading the market or, “Oh I want to write climate literature,” all of that. But I am completely not in the realm of apocalyptic climate literature. I personally do not find it helpful. I think the human spirit could only take so much despair and disaster and just hopelessness.

So what I felt like I was writing about is every character in response to what is going on right now. I'm not looking in the future like, what's there going to be in 2050? That's not where it is for me. It's like looking at my response, my emotional response, and then imagining into other people, character’s emotional response. And trying to put a mirror in front of the reader, like, okay, this myriad spectrum of emotional response to the world today where I see you, and do you see yourself in this story and these stories and let's start talking about it. Conversation is the fertile field for things to change. So if I can, I've been doing book clubs and talking, gathering with people to talk about the emotional, the psychological response to climate change and what's going on. And it's been so helpful and healthy to start the conversation versus just carry on without talking about it.

Kimberly

And the emotional response, like you kept coming back to, that is the present moment. And that's, I think, what's so overlooked in these conversations. It's solution-based or apocalyptic-based. But the emotion is right at the heart of where the seeds are planted, where the action must begin. And the emotions are heavy.

NIna

Yeah, yeah, they really are. And I come back, Bill McKibbin says, he keeps saying, “Stop being an individual, join an organization.” And I think that part of that is to, we talked about building cohesion and community, it's part of that. Like you're not alone in this. And if we gather, we can be a force because those in power, gas and oil, are not going to willingly give up power. So that's where consumers, citizens have to unite and say, we're a force too. I'm not just a little individual here, you know, changing my light bulbs and that's the end of it. So I come back to that, like maybe the book, you know, when I talk about In This Ravishing World with groups and at book readings and everything, a community does start to form in the conversation that happens after—after I talk about it, after I read. It's like, “Well, I'm doing this, you know, a pollinator garden.” “I got my neighbor to plant one and we're going to do a whole neighborhood of that kind of gardening.” So all of a sudden we find these ideas and solutions and also “I'm sad.” “I can't believe this is happening.” “What are my children going to inherit?” So that comes up too. But we can hold it. We can build the container for it versus “I'm alone in my room and I am so filled with existential dread of what's coming.”

Kimberly

Absolutely. I love your passion for this and I love that we just jumped right into this. I want to back up a little bit because I want to introduce sort of how I was introduced to you. I'm just I'm kind of bubbling with your passion though right now. It's like I just want to continue talking about In This Ravishing World, your book.

But that said I actually fell in love with you when I discovered Stunning Sentences. And this is one of your offerings on Substack where, and you wrote two bestselling books, I believe, along the same theme. And essentially, to let our listeners know, you just excavate the hows and the whys of delicious prose. And I wanna know, back up, where did your passion for dissecting this style in writing, where did that originate?

NIna

Well, as a young reader, and I'm thinking 11 or 12, I started writing down sentences that excited me. I found old journals. So way back, way back then, I was drawn to language and sentences that did something different. Now, back then, I couldn't articulate why. And then even now, putting what feels like the ineffable into language is a little difficult. But it was like I’d read something even back then that had a different rhythm, a different sound, a different structure, syntactical structure, and it woke me up. It's like, I've never seen this before. Or the other thing that would happen is that I felt my interior world was in some way captured in that sentence. And it put into language, it articulated for that 12 year old me what I couldn't say, but there it was and I'd write it down because I wanted to keep it. Like, Oh that's it. That's what I'm feeling. And the sentence is shaking that feeling inside of me. So there was a pairing in a way of reality and—language is the representation of reality—but that gap seemed to close with a really great sentence.

Kimberly

So was almost like it was mirroring some sort of emotional mirroring that you were needing in your life, but you were finding that through sentences.

NIna

I was. And I continued with it. But then, you know, I had taught for years at the University of San Francisco in the MFA program. And they said, “Here, do you want to teach this class Style and Fiction?” And that was about 17 years ago. And so I was just starting out. I earned my MFA, but no one had taught at that level, the precise, you know, diction, syntax, imagery, sound, rhythm and breaking down all the elements of style, imagery, schemes and tropes. So I kind of went in and taught myself all of it and read as much as I could to figure out grammar and figure out not just grammar because I want, I am fascinated by what grammar can do in terms of generate meaning and sound. So what I'm teaching, I think myself first and then students at the university and now on Substack is how to write from the body. If you generate sound and rhythm, that's what the body feels. So you're creating at the sentence level a real reality, a reality that cannot be denied. Like I'm feeling it, I'm feeling it. Versus just a bland sentence that's just conveying information or moving the story along. It's a profound difference.

We want to speak not just to the brain, but just to the entire body to feel the rhythm. I've read developmentally from zero to the age of seven months, we listen to rhythm. You know, we're hearing the rhythms of it. And that's really what we're focused on in terms of language. And then after about that time, developmentally, we look at precise or feel the precise sound. But the body is first reacting. If you think of when you're in the womb or whatever, it's first the rhythm and sound. That's how language is coming in.

Kimberly

Yeah, and we think of the body sensing, but in a way what you're saying is that the body, it's more than sensing, it understands. It's pre-verbal.

NIna

What I’ve had students do, Okay, so stand behind a closed door and just listen to the sound on the other side of the door. Like, so you can't really understand the words, just like, what is it? Is it harsh? “Stop, stop doing it. Don't do it again.” Those are a lot of plosives coming in. These are sounds that explode from the mouth. So “Don't,” you know, the “Ds” and the “Ts” and the “Ps” and the “Bs.”

That's very different than, “Let's sit down and read a story and snuggle together in the bed.” So there's a flowing motion, right? And it's soft. So how are you going to capture that? So I'm going back to trying to pair or merge the pre-verbal and the verbal so that we remember the oral quality of language that the body is responding to, not just “Oh I got more information in my brain so the story can move along.”

Kimberly

You're making me think of Ocean... have you read any of Ocean Vuong's work? Top number one favorite book. Somewhere right here and I'm gonna destroy the title because I have a terrible memory but something…

NIna

Once We Are Briefly Gorgeous, [On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous] or something. Well, anytime a poet moves into prose, I'm excited. Because they are training the ear. That's where they spend their time. And parsing out just, you know, five words. What's the rhythm? Is that iambic? Is that didactic? Is, you know, it's just like, What is the rhythm there? What's the sound?

Kimberly

Well, and also because his first language was Vietnamese, from my understanding, a lot of, you know, there's this... words don't necessarily, from one language, convey the same thing in another language. And so he was trying to use English to convey something slightly different. And so actually even the translation, the actual cognitive translation was more metaphorical.

It had more, it almost had a little synesthesia to it. And that was just so thrilling to me. So, okay, what's your, what was one of your favorite books? I mean, I know you probably have some favorite books now, but going back to that 12 year old, do you remember?

NIna

Well, no, because this is what I did. You know, I have a 13 year old son, so I've watched his evolution as a reader. So at some point they say, okay, stop reading children's books and move to chapter books. So I did that. But then I leapfrogged, I found them in the library. They were all the classics in big print. So at a really young age, I was reading all the classics—

Jane Eyre and Mark Twain, I don't know what I was doing but I would get these—they were like eight by ten inch books because the words were huge and they were thick. I read all the classics again in fifth or sixth grade because I didn’t remember any of them, but I was so drawn to the language that kind of elevated what I wanted to do as a writer, eventually. We can talk about that, becoming a writer took me a long time. But to sink into that prose that wasn't chapter book with simple sentences for the most part or a compound sentence now and then, but these intricate ways of writing. It was just beautiful, so I just leapfrogged.

Now looking back, watching my son and reading with him, I've always loved Roald Dahl. Just his language and the playfulness of it. And he plays with sound, you know, just like making up words and just so fun. And then later in life, I couldn't believe it when I read Virginia Woolf and what she could do with a sentence. It defied everything the English teachers taught me. It's like, what?

Kimberly

So let me read a sentence. And now I'm embarrassed to read a sentence because you're listening for the rhythm and I'm probably going to totally ruin it. But I want to hear what you hear. This is actually from one of your recent posts from Stunning Sentences. And it's through Faulkner's Absalom. Absalom, am I pronouncing that correctly? So you, and this is one of the sentences you dissected.

He writes,

This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all.

NIna

Wow. Wow. I hear so much. So first of all, compression. There's so much happening in this sentence. I think this took me a while to dissect it. I walked around the block, dissected it again, walked around the block. It probably took me two hours of just feeling it, going through it. What else am I feeling about this? That's a that's a big starting point. What am I feeling?

So this declaration, This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen, it's almost like a solemn statement. And you know, it's like, and already I feel the dead, you know, This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen, just kind of choppiness and again, solemn. And This Niobe, then she transforms. It's like, wait a minute, now she's a statue? You know, I looked it up, I didn't know what it was, it's a stone statue that's always crying tears, but this Ellen did not have tears. So that image comes in, it's like, okay, she's so full of grief, but she can't even cry? Because she’s so overwhelmed with it. Then, as Faulkner likes to do, I feel like I've sunk to the bottom, because these are all past perfect—who had conceived, who had moved but without life. So here I am, This was the mother and suddenly I'm what Virginia Woolf calls tunneling. I'm going into the deep past. So the present is merging in a way with the deep past, because it's all in one sentence. And Faulkner is famous for saying, you know, the past is, I'm gonna butcher this, but “The past is always with us.” And so in this one sentence, it's like, yes, it is, absolutely.

But then we get this nice, beautiful rhythm, even though it's despairing and full of sorrow, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieve but without weeping. So you hear the rhythm, right? but without life, but without weeping. So it's like, this little wave happens there, because the echo, the echo. And then we have the balance, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation. So the balance there of twos, tranquil, unwitting desolation. But he varies it a little bit. And then this was brilliant. I'd never written a sentence like this. So we have a correlative conjunction, two of them. Faulkner loves the not but, or not also—not as if she had—and then we have either or. So another correlative conjunction in the middle of it. So he builds these envelopes, I like to think of them as envelopes, these correlative conjunctions, like I'm going to pack this stuff in the envelope, not as if she had either outlived the others or—so we have the either or—had died first, but—so here comes the other part of the correlative conjunction—as if she had never lived at all. And it's just such a finality to it. It's like, my God, we went through all this life conceiving, living, know, living without weeping. And then, but she never lived at all. So a great build at the end. It's like, my God, this is it? She's been dead the whole time. So it was just so amazing.

Kimberly

It's thrilling to have you dissect. I've always loved English and I always loved grammar and all those things I geeked out on, but nobody ever shared this sort of deep excavation that you do and the passion for it. I hear you now and I feel the passion, but I even read that passion in your posts every week. And I'm imagining there's a part of you that loves sharing it because obviously you do but that means is there a point where you just felt like it was overflowing in you and you had to teach others what you were feeling?

NIna

Well, mean, backing up, I've taught 17 years in the classroom, and the class would be 20, it's a popular class, like 20, 25 people in there.

And I felt like it was a big, it was a 15-week class, a big orchestra, because I'd have them bring in their favorite sentences. So let's say I started with 25 sentences from students, choose a sentence that you, that you've read and you wish you wrote, because then I get their passion in the room. Like, “Oh I love this sentence.” And then I use it. So okay, we're going to use, you know, Jane's sentence this week and take it apart. And then we're reading texts at the same time.

So I assigned poetry and fiction and we take sentences, and we're working on those sentences. It just felt this orchestra of style coming in and voices coming in and creativity coming in. And then I had finished a 10 week class for Stanford like that. And we were having so much fun and everyone was so excited. I didn’t want to stop. And that's when the Substack started, because I was so into it and everybody was so into it.

I thought, maybe someone else would like this. It was just a passion thing. We were having fun, maybe someone else will think this is fun. I don't know. Maybe this is really geeky, you know, I had no idea. It's just like, let's try it.

Kimberly

This passion is something that I think people don't even know they have for language until you plant these seeds for them. I imagine you see that happen in students where it's like, okay, I'm learning these things. And then all of sudden like, Wow. It’s like music in a way.

I want to ask you, are you a musician?

NIna

Yeah. Believe it or not, I'm not, I was thinking about this because like how do I hear so much? For years, in addition to writing and teaching writing and creative writing, I teach fitness classes and there's always music.

So I taught, I put myself through law school by teaching nine fitness classes a week. And at college I taught it as a moneymaker, you know, just like, but I loved it too. So I was constantly listening or hearing and moving to the beat.

Kimberly

I was a ballerina for years and to me, so I was raised on classical music and my, in fact, also my mother would always play classical music in the morning before breakfast. And it was just something that would be on the classic radio station in the corner of the kitchen. And there even, and I had taken piano lessons and Suzuki method and all of that music was somewhat a part of my life, but mostly through dance.

And for me, when I read your sentence excavations, I feel like a dancer again. I feel my body respond. I actually want to move. And even hearing you read this Faulkner sentence and the little fragments in there, it is such a natural part of being human to feel that rhythm.

Typically we can, we think about conveying a message and we're just, it's just that. It's just a message and nothing more. When you, going back to the very beginning of our conversation, you talked about humans wanting something to matter. And I think what you're doing is that you're bringing meaning into our language which is a deeper meaning into our language that connects us.

NIna

Yeah, and it's also, think, now that you said it that way, I just finished a fascinating book, How to Be Animal, it's nonfiction, by Melanie Challenger. And for so long, we have not wanted to be animal, which has led to the devastation of a lot of ecological systems, thinking that we’re better than animals, we’re exceptional, therefore we’re not animals. And yet, we are. We have evolved from, if you look at you know, over the course of deep time, we've evolved from animal and we still are. And part of it is the body, right? You know, the intellectuals would rather just stay in the brain and not feel the body, in part, I think, because the body will die. I think there's that anger too because there's a deterioration of the body. I wish I wasn't a body, but we are, you know, we are embodied. So to bring language back into the body and want you to move and want you to feel it and experience it like a music even at the prose level is so exciting for me and to teach other students or whoever wants to learn like there's a whole other way to write from the body.

Kimberly

Yeah, from the body. I was just thinking about last night, what I'm writing an essay right now called “In Defense of Fog” and not just the external fog, but fog, even my brain fog and these different states of forgetfulness. They're always a little bit of it, just an exercise for me. And I was trying to imagine being an earthworm last night as I was falling asleep. And, and similar to what you were saying, this experiencing and this understanding of life before, I don't want to cut my head off, but imagining that the understanding is enough just by what my body is absorbing from the loamy soil. It was, it actually put me to sleep. It was quite soothing.

NIna

Yeah. wow. Well, so much of language is pre-verbal or out of the verbal. And that's something that's fascinating as well, is to capture the gesture or the expression or where your character's standing in a room because so much language is communicated non-verbally. So if you're an earthworm stuck in the dark, it's all going to be sensate data coming in. No language. So what are you feeling?

Kimberly

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It was very good for my nervous system, I have to say. think I'll return to the earthworm state many times. The darkness, for sure, and the muffled sound, and then imagine the fog above the earth that was a heavy blanket. All of it was just, you know, in our overstimulated world, it was quite a nice place to be.

NIna

Wow, and not claustrophobic. I think I’d get claustrophobic under the earth.

Kimberly

No, I was always the little girl in the smallest room, I liked the small spaces. So yeah, for me, big spaces and too many choices are overwhelming for my brain.

So we're kind of already talking about this, but I have a question for you in way you've already said what you're sort of hoping to awaken in your readers and writers and I want to know a little bit more about that but then how this might change how one lives because this clearly isn't just about changing how one writes.

NIna

No, it isn't. Well we nodded to writing for the body and the musicality and the rhythm, so feeling that and trying to bring, close the gap between representational, which is language, and reality, which is how, you know, how you're experiencing things, to try to close that gap so that the sentence can mimic it as much as possible so that you're writing sure yes for understanding but also the body has an aesthetic moment or you pleasure reading it. I love Elaine Scarry she writes On Beauty and Being Just, I'm going to read a little something:

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.

I love that.

And this is also from her book,

But beauty quickens, it adrenalizes, it makes the heart beat faster, it makes life more vivid, animated, living worth living.

So we, I think as a culture, we tend to degrade or downplay the aesthetic life, but there's so much pleasure. I know during the pandemic, I would walk around and hunt out things that would give me awe and that were beautiful. I live in a more rural area and there's a lot of it. So that became a salvation, like she's saying, it saves us. But I think we can do that at the language level too.

You know, you'll get, What beautiful prose, What gorgeous writing or whatever. That's the aesthetic life. That's pleasure. And we need it. It shouldn't be secondary. It's part of the human spirit that needs it. So to be able to help writers create like that and give readers that for a moment of like, Oh this was just so beautiful. And the whole body relaxes and there's intense pleasure.

Now like you said, this is to write a sentence like this and do this practice is close paying attention. That's what it is, a life practice. Right now I'm teaching for a Stanford Reading—it should be As a Writer but it's Like a Writer. And I'm taking apart entire stories and kind of doing the same thing. So this is how close of a reader you need to be to essentially get the writer's education. This is all part of the writer's education and part of the practice of paying attention.

You know, how one word can change everything.

Kimberly

Yeah. And in that paying attention, beauty is revealed often. And like you, when you were little Nina at 11, 12 years old, you were not just experiencing beauty, it was mirroring something inside of you. So perhaps in a way, beauty, paying attention and discovering this beauty also helps us discover our own beauty and sacredness.

NIna

It does. mean, back then I'd write the sentence down so I wouldn't forget it in my 11-year-old handwriting. It was almost like, somebody, something out there understands the interior space of me and it's valuable enough they wrote it down, therefore it's valid. These little steps that I think I went through, like validation, and it exists, it's not ephemeral, there it is on the page. Yes, I exist. And this is of value to have this feeling, this experience.

Kimberly

What a bright young woman you were. I mean, obviously now you have grown into even more, but so perceptive as a young girl to be discovering this about the world and about yourself. I applaud her.

So let's circle back since we started this conversation with your incredible book, In This Ravishing World, and it won a W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature so there they are, it is a genre, and we did talk a little bit about your intent for writing this but let's dive in a little bit more is there anything else that you want to say about how this came about for you?

NIna

Two other things. So I have friends that are in the ecological sphere and scientists and they kept telling me facts, basic facts are not working. We need stories. And what they were saying is that facts speak to the mind, right? I can tell you the CO2 level is now this and it used to be this. Stories speak to the heart. They move. They move. You know, we find this in the Bible with parables. We find this in politics, the little anecdotes they tell, they're trying to emotionally move people from one path to another. So when I heard that, it's like, and during the pandemic, it's like, okay, okay, I'll try to write something about what's happening now. Because again, like I said, during the pandemic, I kept heading outside and hiking hills and more hills. And I'd take my 13 year old, well, he was younger then, but we'd go hiking all the time.

And that was the other thing is watching my son during one of the wildfires. He loves basketball and he wanted to go play basketball, but there's all this smoke. So I rounded up a N95 mask and we went out and he lasted about 15 minutes and we had to come home. Is this the future for my child, for children, the next generation or the third generation or the seventh generation? Is this what they're getting? Is this what we’re leaving? And I don't want this to be the legacy. And I want to do something. I want to do something. So this will be it. So those were two big motivating forces. And then go out and talk about it and try to get other people to do something.

Kimberly

Yeah, and it sounds like through writing this book and then now having these conversations, it really is activating something in your readers to do something and to feel something and not numb out and dissociate from all the news, the horrors of it. One of the techniques you also used in this book is you wrote from the perspective of the earth, which was, I mean, talk about trying to create a sense of empathy in your readers. This was so, it's so beautiful to read from the perspective of the earth. And I want to know what that was like. And if you, if you had any specific exercises that you did to try to get in touch with her voice.

NIna

It's the only first person omniscient voice. Every other, the humans are a third person. But I wanted this voice first person because it's intimate, right? It's talking right to you. There's a direct kind of address to the reader. That's who the earth is talking to. In the beginning, when I first started out, it was really hard to, you know, writers crawl into the skin of the other over and over, usually other characters, but to become something that is as expansive and huge as Earth. My first attempts, I was full of anger. You know, the Earth was angry at the Homo sapien. And I said, well, no, wait a minute. It wants humans to listen. I can't be yelling. That's not what it would do.

So I had to get out of the way. And then I thought about, what is the earth feeling? Well, it's feeling sad too. It wishes it wasn't here in this spot it is in now, you know, dealing with this. And I put in there, it wishes it could be thinking about dirt and birds and trees and not, you know, the devastation or the extinction of entire species. So it has compassion and it started to be more compassionate for humans and what they're going through because it's going through something similar. And that made sense to me because we're so intertwined and we are nature. It's not one or the other. We're not in an either or. So it's like, okay, that's the right tone.

And the other big piece was thinking like, my God, it has a huge different sense of time. It's been around for 4.5 billion years. And the Homo sapien is like in that frame, like 19 seconds on this earth compared to that time frame. So it's a huge container of experiences. It's been devastated by a meteorite hitting it and it went through an ice age. So it has recovered. A lot was wiped out at those times, but it has carried on. So it would have a bigger view of things and not just be narrow viewed into just anger all the time. So those two things really helped.

Kimberly

And were you, so did a lot of this thinking happen on walks or like eyes closed? How do you, how do you sort of embody the voice of the earth?

NIna

Yeah, it was really discovery on the page. It was really just trying over and over and sometimes it would be too poetic. And then I'd say, I have to come back to colloquial language and weave that in. So my process is I don't work, you know, chronologically. I just write scenes like, this will be a fun scene to write. I'll write that today. And then I print out whatever I write at the end of the day. And at night I go through it at the sentence level, the language level. And then that's my way in the next day through language and changes on yesterday's work. And then I create, you know, I inch forward. It's like, okay, okay, this is better. Yeah, I'm liking this. I'll inch forward. I keep going. And then I print that out. So I'm revising and creating at the same time. And so that just getting that voice and I don't count—someone is always like, How long did it take you? I was like, I have no idea. I don't know. I don't track time. I don't track word count. I just track, did I write today? Did I print it out? And did I do my little “like at the language level” that makes me excited to go back the next day and write again.

Kimberly

You're almost like a shaman. I'm listening to and I'm I think like there's a there's a shamanic way that you interact with words and language and and there's an alchemy that sounds like on the page happens for you. Do you feel like you learn something new about yourself in this process? And also how about your relationship to the earth?

NIna

Yeah, well the huge thing, I mentioned it, is deep time and that's a concept from John McPhee in his book Basin and Range. It was published in 1981. So there's a chapter toward the end where the earth/nature goes back to the beginning of time and looking at the single cell micro animal to the multi cell to the plant to the tree to mammals to…

And I, after going through that, and then I had my scientist friends double check because they're really looking at fossil record to determine deep time. So it's a little fuzzy. You get kind of a big range. It's like, we're not sure where this fossil is in time, maybe 10,000 years ago, maybe 70. So they helped me kind of narrow down. But Oh my God, after I did that, it's like, how much I owe the inheritance, like what we have inherited, how much I owe the earth, how much I owe this planet for providing, it's a life planet. We have water, we have oxygen, we have sun, we have plants, we have things to eat. Like how much is owed to what came before us and how much is owed to the future. So I feel completely indebted to the evolutionary track that began 4.5 billion years ago after meticulously going through it and understanding all that life had to go through to get to us. And I just, it completely changed me and I just, I'm heartbroken, but I'm angry and I'm trying to be risk-taking and courageous to do what I can. All those things.

And you say I'm shamanic, but I also have a highly analytical side to me. And so it's this weird kind of thing of like work with passion, step back, is it making sense? How is this flowing logically? What is this doing? Go back in passion, step back. So this kind of intensity and then move back diffusion. Okay, what's the big picture? What are you creating? Go back in that kind of, that expansion contraction.

Kimberly

Yeah, like a conductor of an orchestra. You have the precision of understanding every single note and nuance and also just the gestalt, the passion, the sound as a whole and how it moves you. It's like you're able to exist in both of those worlds and it seems like you fluidly move back and forth between them.

NIna

It's fun. It's really fun. And my standard is, does make me feel alive? And it does. The days I don't do this, right? I don't feel as alive.

Kimberly

I remember a quote and I remember thinking that this is such a first world quote but there's actually some truth to it and it was “Do not ask what the world needs ask what the world ask what makes you come alive because what the world truly needs is more people that have come alive,” and yes there are lots of needs as well but that aliveness is food for thought and invention and connection.

NIna

Yeah. And it gives permission when someone sees you alive—authentic whatever that means. I have problems with that word because we're in the milieu of the society and we inherit a lot of things. But it gives permission to other people to be that way. It's like, Go ahead. You don't have to deaden around me, you don’t have to push it down, you know, it's like, go ahead, feel it.

Kimberly

And I think that that leads me to this question I have, because you do carry this optimism. And in the book as well, the collection of stories, is a sense of, there's honesty for the reality of the situation and there's an optimism. And I struggle personally with that. I can get kind of like, there's a part of my brain that wants to check out. It's the same thing I was describing earlier. I'm at Costco. There's too many things going on. Something wants to shut down. And you, on the other hand, are staying present and alive through this dramatic shift we are experiencing on this planet. So what is it that is the most important to rouse this sense of hope and inspire a refusal to be indifferent.

NIna

Yeah, there's several things that I rely on and it's not that it's not that I don't turn away now and then like watching the hurricane Helena now and all the images. I can only take so much during the day.

And we get the message, take care of your body, but also take care of your mind, your mental health. It's like, okay, That's enough because I'm really starting to feel that hopelessness. So it's enough. So all my scientist friends, the moment when I'm feeling despair, I'll reach out and they’ll say, okay, do something. Just do something.

Write about it, call your legislator. I belong to two environmental groups. I work for a group called Children for Change, helping children speak up for change in the world. So whatever it is, whatever fits your schedule, your life, find something to do. And then Bill McKibben— “stop being an individual, join something” and be part of it. This movement is trying to shift the paradigm. We need alternative energy, a lot of it.

And then I just read a quote by Katherine Hayhoe, who's a climate scientist, and she's quoting St. Augustine. “Hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage. Anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not have to remain as they are.” So that coupling is really important. Yes, I don't accept what's happening. I’m not going to just be complacent and say, Oh that’s the way it is. No. But then the courage, the courage is necessary to do the action.

And then one more thing, Rebecca Solnit, I read a lot of her work. She reminds us that the future is not yet written. It isn’t. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is a body of the United Nations, whenever it’s graphing where we are in climate change—they’re the body that’s monitoring where we are in climate change—there are four graphs for the future. So what we're doing today will determine which of those four we're going to end up on in the future. So it's not set, right? So we still have, you know, these actions, you know, we're getting to the wire, but if we make some big changes now, we have a different future. So these are the things.

Finally, finally, the youth movement is as you see in the book, right? The youth movement, they're not scared. It's their future. The Sunrise Movement is doing amazing things. Youth are suing in court. There's a case in California right now suing the government and suing also oil and gas for what they've done to the planet. So the youth movement is really strong and they're committed and they're, you know, obstinate.

Kimberly

And if I were the earth, I would feel pretty excited about the youth. I mean, that to me is like, Oh my children, my children understand and my children believe in me and it almost makes me want to cry when I think about the way you ended your collection of stories with the Earth's observation, watching her children, watching the protesting humans, and suddenly feeling springtime. I mean, I just love that you even use that word because, of course, spring is a natural phenomenon for the Earth, but this is a different, deeper springtime that she experiences.

I want to read, unless you have it, because I would love for you to read it—

NIna

I don't have it, go ahead.

Kimberly

Okay, okay. She says, the earth says,

I am in the grip of this, an odd concentration. I didn't think I'd ever feel this again because I've been in tatters like a woman in a beautiful dress with pieces of her fabric ripped off one section after another. And I'm left with only a shoulder strap, a strip of fabric down my back. I admit I did some of the ripping. I let myself sink too far from the warm rays of hope. I thought she, Eleanor, (one of the characters) and I were alike, barely hanging on up to our necks in despair. But she's done something that's taken her beyond herself, out of herself.

And this resurgence of hope that the earth feels and understanding that humans have the capacity to step outside of themselves. And I love how you draw this interconnectedness between the human response and the earth response and our inseparable, renewable spirit. And I'm feeling like this interconnection is, is an ultimately what you're saying it's a contract written with love at its center. I think everything that the earth has birthed, the earth and the sun, is a love story. And I want to understand or hear you say what the implications of this kind of grand love are.

NIna

Yeah, so that interconnectedness, even the realization that the earth exists, this goes against the rich western tradition inherited by Descartes and Kant that the self is sovereign. And they put the focus on the mind and consciousness. And I have to say it's a completely phenomenological reduction. So they confirmed the reality of the mind and human consciousness and what came with that is human exceptionalism and everything else was turned into an object. Including everything on this earth was an object and a hierarchy was created. Now, the indigenous population never saw it this way. Heidegger came along and said, “We are beings in the world.” That's why I continue to read him. We are intertwined with the world. To be human is to be intertwined with nature, the planet. And this involves a deep respect for the other, the planet, beings in the world, all the non-humans. And it's admiration and respect. It's what we owe, and it's our responsibility and our love. It's what makes us human.

I give myself now and then a thought experiment when I feel myself go numb. Go outside, you erase a tree, just erase it. And what do you feel? Now erase everything around you. All the plants, I'm looking at all the trees in my window, the flowers, the bushes. Imagine they're all gone. How do you feel? I mean, I feel devastated and I feel completely and utterly alone. And then I bring them back, put them back. It's like, my God, I'm so full of awe. And my humanness is back and I feel alive. I'm not alone. So that is a thought experiment I do and I, you know, my students are feeling lonely or whatever. It's like, okay, try this. To marvel, be in awe and to feel that interconnection that you aren't alone. You're in and intertwined with everything around.

Kimberly

I'm imagining doing that thought experiment myself and I would even feel like... part of me would just disappear. Like I would dissolve too. There's, and maybe some of that comes from just sort of similar to you. We both live rural and our landscape and the the livelihood around us is so much a part of who I am that I don't know who I would be if that disappeared or if I would even exist. Certainly not the I that I am now.

NIna

Right. But we are still, most people still operate with the subject-object, which is a Cartesian framework. And it's very easy to say the objects then are to be used, they’re resources for us. And it's a hierarchy. Versus, no, let's see what is really true, what's underneath that.

Kimberly

So the implications of this kind of love are that we need each other, in a way. I feel like what you're saying. I mean, we absolutely... I mean, sometimes I think, well, I'll ask you, do you think the earth needs us?

NIna

Yeah, I do. It needs us because we have so shaped it and we're so part of the earth. It needs us to take care, to love it and take care. It really does. I mean, I really hate when climate scientists say, You know, don't worry, even if humanity and all nonhumans or whatever you want to call them die, the earth will carry on. It's like, that doesn't do it for me. That's not an answer, I'm sorry.

Kimberly

That reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. Have you read that? It's just gorgeous. One of her... she, she sort of explores this relationship between the earth and humans. And for her, ultimately our responsibility as humans, other than caretaking, is gratitude. She comes back to that, that is one of the roles and it's not to be diminished. One of the roles that we have as humans is to feel gratitude for the earth, which is just what you are doing in that thought experiment.

NIna

Yeah, that is it. I mean and all we've inherited from this long line of evolution. And that piece, that section I wrote of Earth thinking about deep time, it's like, it was so excited for the Homo Sapien to come along. They were so smart, wouldn't they realize all that has been given to them and be grateful?

So the other thing I love about Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer’s indigenous language is 70% verbs, they're not nouns. It's not a bay, it's not the ocean, it's not a tree, it's to be a tree. To be the ocean, to be a bay, which means it's a verb, which means it's action, which means it has agency, which means we could learn from it. It's a completely different mind shift.

Kimberly

You're right, takes us completely out of the Cartesian object, subject-object world.

NIna

It's much more relational if you view everything as a verb.

Kimberly

You even said that about—going back to, so that's the macrocosm, and the microcosm are these little sentences—and even there, you talk about how you love sentences that are alive. So Nina, we're at hour point here. And I just think in a way, your role on this planet is to breathe life into everything and you are with me you have with me and all that you've shared and through your treasure of a book and it's quite stunning—even though that's the word of your use for you Stunning Sentences stunning—but your role on this planet is also quite stunning and I thank you for your wisdom.

NIna

Wow. Thank you. Well, thank you so much. It means a lot to me. Thank you.