A brief biography, as relates to The End of the World
When I was a child, as we do, I knew that divinity lives in all things. That within the natural world, all wisdom can be found. I was a lonely child, an only child growing up in a very small town, but if I walked out into the forest, I found I was not alone. I spoke to the spirit omnipresent there, who could hold all my sorrow and my joy. And they, in turn, spoke to me. I would lie in the grass and listen to a hum whose meaning I could not yet translate into human language, but which my body understood. And when my life felt overwhelming, I would stand on a granite boulder set down by some glacier in another epoch and I’d open my arms to the four directions; I would say to the world, “I am yours.” Without knowing all that such a promise meant, I was ready to live my life by it.
Years later, when I was a student, I knew climate change was the most important issue of our time. In high school, a study of the science convinced me. In college, I began to understand the politics preventing appropriate action. Shy as I was, I joined my college’s activist group. From its periphery, I observed the early work of women and men who have since become movement leaders. And I wondered if I should do what they did, devote my life to direct action. But when I tried, I found I was made for something different. I understood I would have to go my own way, to apprentice myself to the craft of writing fiction, trusting that one day that skill would allow me to be of service to the cause.
When I fell in love, years again after that, I knew I would follow the feeling wherever it lead. I trusted completely in the signs and symbols I saw appearing all around me, was certain that every one of them meant we were meant for one another. So certain that, when he withdrew his affection, the man who’d inspired these feelings and this faith, I couldn’t believe it was over. I knew if I followed the signs a little farther, they would reunite us. So, when I found a giant old atlas set out on a stoop in Brooklyn, I opened it to a random page and placed my finger down, where it landed on Manteo, at town I’d never heard of at the heart of North Carolina’s crescent of barrier islands. Without questioning, I packed my bags and drove there—to the Outer Banks—where I fell fast in love with the mythology of the place, which still lives in my imagination like a legend.
But I didn’t find the man I loved there. And then I had to admit it was over. Then I was heartbroken. Then, I didn’t know anything. Desperate, I decided to try something new. To be a journalist, why not? One of my aunts had joined a volunteer group of small mammal rehabilitators, an organization of women who took in the injured and the orphaned, nursed them back to health or until they were old enough, and then released them back into the wild. I had never interviewed anyone, never written reportage of any kind, but I asked my aunt if I could stay with her and give the thing a shot. Which is how I stumbled into one of the most significant experiences of my life. Because, those women saved me. They welcomed me into their homes, never questioning my credentials. They trusted me with their stories. Gave me purpose when I had none. I returned from that journey transformed. But I couldn’t find a home for the essay I wrote, though I tried for years and years. And so, ever since, it has felt like an unfulfilled promise, to make a work worthy of their remarkable hearts.
These are the most obvious reasons that, in the spring of 2017, the story of The End of the World came to me, fairly fully formed. A story I have kept in my back pocket ever since, waiting for the right time to tell it. That time is now, and so I do. Tell it to honor the women of Wildlife Welfare who trusted me with their stories. Tell it to make something of the love that left me bereft but gave me the Outer Banks. Tell it to make sense of what it means to exist in an age of climate change. Tell it, above all, to evince that divinity I felt all around me in my youth. To try, at least, to do these things.
For links to my published work you can visit my website HERE.