Kathryn Nuernberger on Her Lyric Essay Collection HELD
In her new book Held: Essays in Belonging (Sarabande), Professor Kathryn Nuernberger describes driving out of a city determined to see a firefly, just to know that they still exist in a time of uncontrolled wildfires and their long tails of smoke. Earlier in the collection, the poet and essayist writes about the artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante, and their participatory project to invent new words for emotions arising amid mass extinctions and habitat destruction. “Solastalgia,” for example: feeling homesick for a home environment altered utterly by global warming. Words for the new reality of loss.
“As someone who writes about climate change,” Nuernberger says, “I often feel as if the purpose of my essays is to name these kinds of global and entangled griefs that can feel as if they exist beyond the reach of feelings we have names for.”
Held, notes Brevity Magazine, is “a rare blending of the lyric essay with compelling scientific narrative.” The book is structured in short chapters, each spotlighting a mutually beneficial relationship between, say, insects and plants, birds and animals, crustaceans and windflowers. The descriptions of symbiotic mutualisms are interwoven with personal and historical stories. The defining language Nuernberger finds in her third essay collection is not in single words but in the entanglement of richly human narratives and fantastic facts. In these juxtapositions, a space is made that feels like being held: in grief, yes, but also in possibility.
Or, as Nuernberger says, “The impossibility I’m trying to write into is the one where I and others have enough hope in the future to believe we could and do belong to each other and to the earth that sustains us.”
What was the spark that led to Held?
I was invited to write a poem that would be made into a short animated film for the True/False documentary film festival in Columbia, Missouri. The theme of that year’s festival was “Host/Guest,” and they gave me a long list of symbiotic mutualisms and asked me to pick one. I picked the whistling thorn acacia tree/cocktail ant symbiosis. This is an astonishing partnership—the ants bite into the thorns on the acacia tree, creating a gall that swells up to be the perfect size for their nest. The acacia tree begins to secrete tree sap into the gall to feed the ants. It seems like a big win for the ants and a big sacrifice of energy for the tree. But, when herbivores like giraffes or elephants come and begin eating the tree, the tree can send pheromone signals to the ants via that nectar. And the ants swarm out of these galls to attack the herbivores.
Every relationship on that list was equally amazing. So I began starting my mornings writing about the symbioses on that list and then, when those were exhausted, researching to find even more examples of mutualisms. At some point I realized I was writing a book about this newfound obsession.
Would you talk more about nature's partnerships, or mutualisms?
In a biology class you will learn there are three kinds of mutualism—symbiotic mutualism is when both creatures flourish as a result of their entanglement; commensalism is when one creature benefits from the relationship and the other is not harmed by it; parasitism is when one creature thrives while the other creature suffers or dies from the relationship. I learned while researching the relationship between the yucca and its pollinator, the yucca moth, that many symbiotic mutualisms began as parasitic relationships, and the parasite had to evolve in a way that would benefit the host. Because if the host species dies out, the parasite soon follows.
My favorite example of this relentless movement towards collaboration is found in our own cells. In the early days of life on this planet, a single-celled algae absorbed a bacteria. Normally the bacteria would destroy the cell or vice versa. But this time, and time and time again after, the bacteria evolved to become an energy center in the cell, what we call the mitochondria, creating a more sustainable relationship that benefits both parties.
In writing Held, were there surprising moments that impacted its final shape?
Early on in the writing of this book, I received a grant to go to the Arctic Circle on a ship that hosts residencies for artists, writers, and scientists. But the trip was delayed for three years by COVID. A week before we finally left, I learned that I was unexpectedly pregnant with twins, who were barely a month along. On the plane to Oslo, I began bleeding and thought I’d had another miscarriage. Carrying such a heavy grief with me as I hiked up and down melting glaciers and drifted through warming arctic waters also gave me a different way of understanding and framing the questions I was asking about what it means to be entangled in each other. Living in close quarters with so many brilliant artists and scientists who were also recovering from pandemic-era losses compounded that line of thought. Three weeks later, when we returned to shore, I went to a clinic and learned I had not had a miscarriage, which was a great joy, but only deepened my questions about what it means to have hope for the future when we are surrounded by so much loss.
What was a craft decision you made for Held?
I spent a lot of time hanging out with scientists, who are extremely careful not to anthropomorphize non-human beings. I decided to try to do this too, in the hopes that it would make me more effective in understanding and describing the rich worlds of other creatures. Around the time I was resisting applying human metaphors to non-human experiences, I was also part of some conversations among literary scholars about how metaphor is problematic in other ways. I was noticing how often metaphors that compare traumas one group of people is experiencing to the trauma another group of people is experiencing don’t seem to create empathy or understanding, rather they seem to create a profound sense of erasure or dismissal for at least one of those groups. I wondered what would happen if I insisted on resisting metaphor altogether.
It was an interesting and productive experience for me. In general, I found myself able to write with greater precision and insight about other creatures and people if I refused to compare them to myself. I had to ask more questions and pay more attention to their various circumstances and experiences.
But the loss of metaphor did start to make my own inner emotional world feel smaller. I realized that because we are all connected to each other, I missed zoomorphic comparisons. I know a starfish is not like me, and understanding how that is true makes me really see a starfish. But to say I am nothing like a starfish left me feeling like I had no language at all to capture the parts of my body and spirit that exist a little bit beyond what language can express. Sure, I’m not very much like a starfish, but metaphor gets me closer to describing a particular way of tingling in the water that no word in English can convey.
Often in these essays I put a story from my life beside a story about a mutualism. I don’t intend for these to match up in the form of an extended metaphor. Rather, I intend for the proximity between the two stories to put readers in a particular frame of mind that allows them to experience both situations differently, because of the ways they rub up against each other.
