Female Agency and Dystopia

December 4, 2018December 4, 2018 / Laura Haugen

Dystopian-Novels When Margaret Atwood introduced The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, she called it an “antiprediction,” explaining: “If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen.” The last few years have seen a slew of laws and rulings restrict women’s sexual and reproductive rights in numerous states and anti-women measures and sentiments echoed in the highest offices of the federal government—developments that seem eerily reminiscent of the world Atwood described. Two recent novels, Red Clocks and The Power, build on the genre of The Handmaid’s Tale by reimagining the fate of female agency with the urgency of our time.

Mornings with Merwin

October 23, 2018October 23, 2018 / Laura Haugen

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W.S. Merwin loves mornings. In his more than fifty books, the former US Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize depicts morning’s beauty in mist, light, shadow, and birdsong. As Merwin captures these moments of nature’s awakening, he reveals the depths of his own awakenings too.

My latest piece on the Ploughshares blog….

Birds and the Conjuring of Grief

September 27, 2018September 27, 2018 / Laura Haugen

bird_at_dusk This week for the Ploughshares blog, I wrote about Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk and Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers. In both works I found uncanny depictions of the way grief perches in the heart. Read over at the Ploughshares blog here.

The Alchemy of Science and Storytelling

September 24, 2018 / Laura Haugen

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Hiking inside the Hoh Rainforest of Washington earlier this summer, I stopped for a moment, remembering Robin Wall Kimmerer’s descriptions of immersing herself in wilderness and taking time to listen. Gradually, my ears attuned to the fall of mist and birdsong around me. I knelt low to observe the tendrils of mosses, droplets of dew, and soft crumbles of soil spilling off glistening mushrooms. My walk among the towering ancient cedars took on new meaning after reading Braiding Sweetgrass, with Kimmerer’s words—like these ones—having seeped into me:

Here in the rainforest, I don’t want to just be a bystander to rain, passive and protected; I want to be part of the downpour, to be soaked, along with the dark humus that squishes underfoot. I wish that I could stand like a shaggy cedar with rain seeping into my bark, that water could dissolve the barrier between us. I want to feel what the cedars feel and know what they know.

Read more about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine on the Ploughshares blog.

Writing the Unknown

August 20, 2018September 24, 2018 / Laura Haugen

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Novelists, Vladimir Nabokov once said, are “more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.” Great memoirists, on the other hand, are not fully at home in the present until they navigate their way through this ooze. More on the Ploughshares blog…

The Story and the Overstory

June 27, 2018 / Laura Haugen

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I knew it was a matter of time before we would see a novel on the sentience of trees, especially since the publication two years ago of the German forester Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and the groundbreaking discoveries by Dr. Suzanne Simard and other scientists on tree behavior. Their findings show that trees communicate and share resources to help their offspring and neighbors and even pass on memories of trauma. There is still so much we don’t know about these majestic living creatures, but the possibilities are enough to pique one’s imagination.

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