Tag Archives: nature

Everything feels rather dire right now, from the awful clown show of American politics, to the terror of a burning planet, so I’ve again been finding solace in the natural world. I saw a Scarlet Tanager flitting through the tree canopy the other day, and after hearing its eerie, echoing song at the top of the ridge, I finally caught a glimpse of a Hermit Thrush. We have been eating oyster mushrooms and chanterelles that I foraged in the woods, as well as copious greens from our garden. And sunsets by the pond have been spectacular.

I just handed in the copy edited manuscript of my novel, The Burning Heart of the World, which will be published on April 1, 2025 by Red Hen Press, and can now be pre-ordered from Bookshop.org. A publisher decides how many copies to print in part based on the number of preorders, so ordering the book ahead is a good way to support an author, including yours truly. I have started scheduling events for April in Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit. If you want me to come to a bookstore (or a community center) near you, let me know. I will also be available for in-person and virtual reading group visits.

Also on the literary front, I was disappointed to read a terrible story about much admired and lauded fiction writer Alice Munro, but I loved this interview in Mizna with poet Chase Berggrun.

Last month my elder child Noah’s debut feature film, Summer Solstice, opened for limited runs in New York and Los Angeles. It received a rave review and was a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times review was also excellent. Noah did a number of interviews, among them one in Variety, one in Filmmaker, and another in Film Stage.

As Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza grinds into its tenth month, a small bright spot was the fact that Armenia recognized the Palestinian state. Mary Turfah’s piece Running Amok, about the horrific images Israeli soldiers are posting from Gaza and what they mean about Zionism past and present, was a tough read in the Baffler. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote a bracing piece about The Collapse of Zionism in the New Left Review. Some of my new organizer friends were involved in a Gaza protest during New York City’s Pride parade. I have started working with a new mentee in Gaza through We Are Not Numbers—a collaboration made difficult by the intermittent and poor Internet access Nadera has in Shujaya. I hope to be able to share one of her essays soon.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’re keeping cool.

It is a great relief that winter is over—I find that the parade of spring flowers makes everything slightly more bearable. April is National Poetry Month, and I can recommend Two of Haya Abu Nasser’s beautiful and moving new poems, which posted on The Evergreen Review this week. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Mosab Abu Toha’s poem “The Moon” was stunning, and I was bowled over by Ibrahim Nasrallah’s “Palestinian.”

Thanks to everyone who has donated to Haya’s brother Ahmed’s fundraiser, his cousin was able to register him at the Cairo travel office. Now we wait for his name to appear on the Gaza crossing list. We are not far from reaching our goal so that his upcoming medical, educational, and living expenses will be covered, and it would be a great help if you could share the GoFundMe link with people who might donate. I will keep you updated on how things develop.

My spouse James was quoted in a Variety article about Jewish creatives signing a letter in support of filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, whose speech at the Oscars caused a stir. James also signed another letter by Jewish Columbia faculty members rejecting the weaponization of claims of anti-Semitism.

A hybrid documentary short film entitled “The Script”, which was co-directed by our progeny Noah Schamus, is up on The New Yorker. And their debut feature Summer Solstice was picked up for distribution by Cartilage Films, and will be opening in New York City in mid-June.

I recently learned from Red Hen Press that the official publication date for my new novel, The Burning Heart of the World, will be April 1, 2025. We already have a beautiful cover featuring a digital collage by Mariam Tamrazyan, but the publicist recommended that I not share it publicly until six months before the launch. This novel about Armenians in Beirut has been a long time coming, and I’m very much looking forward to sharing it with you.

Nancy Kricorian

I woke up this morning with these words reverberating in my head.

When we humans are gone, having pulverized each other and made the planet uninhabitable for our kind, this lichen will still be growing on its rock in the forest, thinking, Finally we can live in peace.

When I shared these words with my friend the mycologist, she said, “Knowing the fungi will inherit the earth brings me peace.”

Nancy Kricorian

As a child I went to a Pioneer Girls Christian camp starting in the summer after fifth grade through the summer after my senior year in high school. The now defunct New England Camp Cherith was on Lake Bunganut in Alfred, Maine. It was on the camp’s 130 wooded acres that I had my first experiences with hiking and camping and was taught how to build a campfire and to cook a tin foil dinner. When I was a counselor in training, we were required to learn the names of five trees, five wildflowers, five birds, five rocks, and five constellations. In the Nature Cabin, I pored over field guides, and at night the other C.I.T.s and I would lie on our backs on the mown hill staring up at the stars. I had always loved our large yard and garden in Watertown, turning up the marble steppingstones to look at the insects underneath or resting my cheek on the soft moss between the peach tree and the hedge of lilacs. Now I came to love the broader canvas of the camp’s forest, lakeshore, and rolling hills.

When I was a student in Columbia’s Graduate Writing Division in the 1980’s, Arizona poet Richard Shelton, who passed at the end of last year, came to deliver a Master Class. He had a warm and relaxed charm, and he read us a few of his poems that were full of details about the Sonoran Desert. He told us, “If you don’t know the name of a thing, you can’t fully see it.” He described the way that people unfamiliar with the desert would experience it as an empty space, but if you studied it the way he had, learning the names of the plants, the animals, the insects, and even the stones, you would understand its fullness. These words have reverberated in my head for decades now, and when I walk through the forest behind our Columbia County house, I recite the names of what I recognize—the wildflowers, the trees, the birds, and mushrooms. But I feel overwhelmed wondering about the names I don’t yet know for the ferns, the mosses, lichens, and grasses on the forest floor. As the poet Maxine Kumin put it, “Our ground time here will be brief,” and I wish I had begun this concerted study much earlier.

For the conclusion of my Beirut novel (no news yet—I promise as soon as there is anything to tell, I’ll send out a flare), I wrote a folk tale called “The Girl Who Talked with Birds.” I started birdwatching ten years ago as part of the research for this novel, which has avian imagery woven throughout the narrative, but also as an extension of my engagement with the natural world. The protagonist of the folk tale, a girl named Sosi, thinks to herself:

Sosi understood that each living thing had a name, and she wanted to learn what to call each flower, grass, and insect. Her mother knew many of the names, and her grandmother knew even more, but neither of them knew them all. In response to Sosi’s incessant questions, her grandmother said, ‘The Creator made them, and only the Creator knows the name of each and every one.’

Writing a novel is a way of creating a world, and, because of my interest in history and need for historical accuracy, of recreating a world, filling it with people, places, events, sounds, textures, and smells that are at once invented and rooted in lived reality. I want the reader to open the book and to be transported into the world that the characters inhabit. And the more I know about this beautiful, resilient, and fragile planet on which we live and the people and other creatures who roam its precincts, the truer this fictional world can be.

P.S. Our adult child Noah Schamus has a film premiering at the Provincetown Film Festival this weekend. Watch the trailer here. This nuanced, funny, and moving film is mom approved (I’m the mom, of course, but I’m relatively objective, having told Noah in elementary school that they gave the second-best performance in the school production of Romeo and Juliet). I’ll send out news about where you can see Summer Solstice when it’s made more widely available.

Nancy Kricorian

It’s not quite spring, but the crocuses have bloomed, and the daffodils are starting to show their sunny faces. It always feels like a small miracle to me when winter recedes and the trees start to bud, and this year’s flowers that bloom in a predictable series have lifted my mood.

We are packing up our apartment so the walls can be painted and the floors refinished—this hasn’t been done since we moved in eighteen years ago. I’m in a chaos of boxes with walls sadly denuded of all paintings, photos, and posters, and we will be decamping to Los Angeles for two weeks while the work is done. James is on the Writers Guild negotiating committee—their contract expires on May 1—and while we are in L.A., he will be in a hotel conference room from 9 to 5 every day trying to hammer out a deal. I plan to be working on an essay entitled “His Driving Life” about my father’s relationship to motor vehicles, starting with the Lincoln Market delivery truck that he drove at the age of nine when he could barely see over the steering wheel.

Our daughter Djuna, who as a second-year law student at NYU is working with the Racial Justice Clinic, learned two weeks ago that her first client has been granted parole. Upon hearing this wonderful news, I sent Djuna this quotation from prison abolitionist, organizer, writer, and librarian Mariame Kaba:

“I’ve said this to younger organizers and will repeat it here. To be involved in helping to free someone from the clutches of death making institutions is a profound and life altering experience. It’s a miracle. Make sure you take that in and then continue to fight for others. People say ‘well look at all of the effort it took to get one person out.’ And my response is ‘YES and it’s worth all of the effort. Keep going.’”

Djuna and her friend Will visited David twice a month at Fishkill Prison to help him prepare for his parole hearing, and they are now raising funds for him in advance of his imminent release.

Another bright note is that the anthology WE ARE ALL ARMENIAN has just gone back for another print run because the sales of the first edition have been so strong. This week the anthology was included in a New York Times roundup of newly published books. Columbia’s Armenian Center is hosting a panel discussion on April 3—the anthology’s editor Aram Mrjoian will be in conversation with contributors Chris Bohjalian, Scout Tufankjian, Hrag Vartanian, and yours truly. If you’re in the New York area, it would be lovely to see you there.

Nancy Kricorian

Winter is upon us, and there are far fewer mushrooms to in the woods now than there were in the late spring, summer, and autumn, but there are still fungi to find. The other day I came across a fallen oak branch that was covered in Amber Jelly Roll (Exidia Crenata), which is apparently edible, although the taste is described as bland. Today when I walked on the trails in the woods I saw lots of polypores and a few other types of mushrooms. I love the common names—Turkey Tail, False Turkey Tail, Violet-Toothed Polypore, Birch Polypore, Tinder Polypore, Artist’s Conk, Crowded Parchment, and Witch’s Butter, to name a few that I noted on my foray. I’ve started trying to learn the Latin names as well, but that is a long-term project. 

I’ve recently joined a new social media platform called Project Mushroom that was started by people who are committed to fighting for social justice and to addressing climate catastrophe. I am  hoping for a viable alternative to Twitter, which is now owned by a petty and volatile right-wing billionaire. Project Mushroom is an “instance” on the Mastodon federated network, and instead of tweets the posts are called “toots,” although I hear this term is fading out because it’s a little silly and we’re just going to call them posts. What we refer to as retweets on Twitter are called boosts on Mastodon. It’s still a little lonely over there—no other Armenians, few of my organizer friends, and almost nobody I knew before I arrived. If you want an invitation to join, let me know and I’ll send you one.

It’s interesting how ubiquitous mushrooms are these days: mushrooms are to be studied, to be foraged and eaten, to be made into medicinals, to be used as metaphors for human relationships and grassroots organizing. Last year I read and loved Merlin Sheldrake’s highly entertaining Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. After reading the book I was even more enamored of mushrooms and all their amazing properties and possibilities. I perceived the forest differently, aware of the underground mycelial networks connecting the trees, as well as the dependencies between the trees and the fungi. I thought about the way that fungi decayed organic matter to make room for new life.

I love a passage from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark using mushrooms to think about how political change occurs. She says, “After a rain, mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a vast underground fungus that remains invisible and unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork—or underground work—often laid the foundation.”

Instead of perceiving ourselves as separate individuals, what if we understood ourselves to be created in and through our human networks? I notice in my psychotherapy sessions I often start with a report about how everyone in my life is doing—my kids, my spouse, my mother, my sister, her kids, my friends—because my well-being is entwined with theirs. I’m also reminded of one of the most inspiring slogans from Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign: “Are you willing to fight for that person you don’t know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” What if that kind of solidarity is not about selflessness, but is grounded in an understanding that we are all connected and if others are suffering we ourselves can’t be truly whole?

Wishing you and yours a festive and sweet holiday season.

Nancy Kricorian

As we enter the third year of the pandemic, this winter feels dark and long, and the spring seems far away. As usual, I look for solace in the natural world and also in my continuing study of the Armenian language. Below is a short piece that I wrote about a recent snowy morning. My Western Armenian teacher Sosy Mishoyan corrected my mistakes, but as time goes by I’m making fewer of them.

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Սփոփանք

Անցեալ գիշեր ձիւն տեղաց, իսկ այս առտուն ճերմակ վերմակը ամբողջ մարգը կը ծածկէ։ Վերարկուս ու կօշիկներս կը հագնիմ եւ գլխարկս ու ձեռնոցներս կը դնեմ։ Շատ պաղ է, բայց` շատ գեղեցիկ։

Լճակին շուրջ կը պտտիմ։ Երկինքին մէջ երկու բազէ կը սաւառնի, իսկ մացառին մէջ պզտիկ թռչուններ սերմ ու հատապտուղ կը փնտռեն։ Յանկարծ ոտքերուս մօտէն դաշտամուկ մը կը վազէ ու կը մտնէ պզտիկ ձիւնէ փապուղիին մէջ։

Ձիւնը նորէն կը սկսի թափիլ։ Աշխարհը ճերմակ եւ լուռ է։

Նենսի Գրիգորեան

Յունուար 2022

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Nancy Kricorian