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Announcement: Flooded Pine Press!

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I’m very excited. My friend Brianna Cunliffe and I are beginning to lay the groundwork for a soft open on a micro publishing house based in Durham, New Hampshire. We will be publishing essays and anthologies on transformative futures, starting from the local and regional levels. Taking inspiration from Elizabeth Rush’s Rising , we are calling our venture Flooded Pine Press . This idea was born the day after the 2024 election. I was reeling in my apartment in Venice, having cast my absentee ballot weeks before. That day I had plans to meet my dear friend Matilda, who was in town from Helsinki, and she invited me to walk the Ponte della Libertà (Freedom Bridge, an apt name for the day of mourning) that connects the mainland to Venice. The sunny distance, with cars and trains swooping past us for all three miles of our walk over open lagoon, was ritualistic for me. Helped to focus on what’s important, what was to come, in great company. We were later lounging in the sun on Campo San Lore...
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Earth sleep

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If I were the Earth asleep Laying down my mountain ridge Wanting hard to bury deep In the folds of ground-old age What do I do when stirring At the people who poke me Climb all over conferring Dig their pincers in slowly I turn over and grumble Grouse and groan I get angry Slapping out in my slumber At specks on these seabed sheets Only then do I really shout Oh my god have you no shame My rage clouds my blood gets hot Stop it — I am trying to dream Durham, New Hampshire — October 12 2024
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Sea-level rise trust: the Assemblea per la Laguna

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This short story is the second in a collection of three inspired by my master's thesis research on sea level rise narrative futures in the Venice Lagoon: talk, trust, time. Nadia: 2028 The Assemblea started last year, in 2027, as a body that runs parallel to the Autorità per la Laguna. The Autorità was meant to be the public governing body that was taking over from the monopoly that the state had given to a consortium of private firms. When the transition happened a few years back, MOSE was active. At the top of the agenda were other diffuse projects of caring for, managing, healing (whatever word works for you) the lagoon. The trouble is that the collective trauma of the MOSE project on the Venice community had left a fragmented and uncoordinated response from the public. There was absolutely no clarity, and so not even a shred of trust, around what would happen next. The national government chose a public entity to consolidate the responsibilities of maintenance and management, b...
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Sea-level rise talk: Toporagno and the flood

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This short story is the first in a collection of three inspired by my master's thesis research on sea level rise narrative futures in the Venice Lagoon: talk, trust, time. Toporagno went out one day to collect grasses from the high mound of the tidal flat. He plodded up the shallow mucky slope and skirted a pack of friar birds to reach the top where the grasses had remained dry even in the recent stormy days. From this point he could see all the places he had ever known. Across the small channel there was the neighboring salt-flat where his den-brothers lived, and beyond that lay one where the Piovanelli ducks make their nests hidden from the terrifying raptors, and in the far distance he couldn't quite discern some shoreline that he knew was there because of the gulls who come to give news from across the northern lagoon. To his other side was the humble human city, a busy thing that barely concerned the shrews and their neighbors. Only once in a while would a small rowboat pu...
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Vignette for the Fires

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He gets waved through customs, steps into his country, sees the haze. Yellow sun and jaundiced sky. It could be interpreted again as an angelic gold. His small stream of social media sirens goes straight to seeing the smoke as sign and signal. Apocalypse mixed with the warm hues of a blade runner sky. He drives two hours home. The next morning he sends a picture to friends back at university. You can see the smoke from Canada (that's how everyone was calling it, just "from Canada") and it's kinda beautiful. Terrifying, but beautiful. They respond, oh God... Hannah Arendt's past and future – two titans locked in collision at the present – are the two vectors of his reaction; he is caught between imagining what preceded the smoke and what comes after. Terror is a foolish spark. Beauty is held in action, if you and your country are not burned by the match or the aftermath. A few weeks before his flight, he had heard of the floods in the south of his adopted country. ...
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Notes on European Imaginaries of Indigineity

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Any time I mention Indigenous communities, either those near where I lived in Maine or others across the continent, to my (white) Italian friends, they'll be curious. But how many recognized groups are there? But they still exist in the United States? Meanwhile, often we're talking in my environmental anthropology classes about Indigenous realities, mostly from the Amazon region. Starting from the "ontological turn" of Vivieros de Castros and others in the 1990s, a more radical branch of academia admits to equally valid forms of living, being, and knowing as practiced among people with longstanding working relationships to everything around them. But I note two things: first, that these are still mediated relationships, for the most part. The anthropologist has learned how to be fairly non-extractive (at least in my classroom) and dedicated to collaboration, healing, and trust. This is, however, far from 'self-translation,' where Indigenous folks choose when a...
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The place where two natures meet

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NB: contains reference to art depicting suicide and body mutilation. We are not only human. Some of know that fact consciously, perhaps surprised by some tidbit science news that suggests how much of our biomass is microbes – ten-to-one, nonhuman to human, last I heard. Rarely if ever does the NONhuman scream in capital letters and strike my subconscious or, to use a less violent metaphor, lodge into my core and make itself known. That I (a human) am not fully human. A strange feat of knowing: to believe that what you believe is not altogether true. My self-referential thoughts are never quite up to the task – language breaks – what to do?  A recent art encounter shocked me into keeping company with the nonhuman. Begin narration: you walk into a dark space and see a dappled hide on the concrete floor. Edging around piles of dead plant matter, the form sharpens and you see a human torso with a horse's body. The centaur is dead as if asleep, and her limp expression is noble. Her face...
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