How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries

By

I had the extreme pleasure of speaking with David Haskell yesterday about this book, in advance of an interview for . He’s hilarious and brilliant and full of hope for the world. His most recent book about flowers is all those things too.

It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect: A Memoir

By

If you haven’t heard of Gaelynn Lea or listened to her Tiny Desk Concert, go do those things right now. I met Gaelynn when we interviewed her for Constant Wonder [find that interview here].

Gaelynn made such an impression on me: I have never met someone who was so fully themselves. I’m not sure how else to describe her utter unflappability, grace, creativity, and heart. You can find a zillion influencers who are telling you to be yourself and love who you are and on and on — skip them and head over to Gaelynn who is actually doing those things. And doing them in a way that makes you feel like you could too.

Her memoir is the story of how she made her way to the violin and where her music has taken her, all while weaving in the reality of being in a wheelchair. It would be a great bookclub pick.

Olive Kitteridge

By Elizabeth Strout

I know I’m about twenty years late to the Elizabeth Strout party, but at least I didn’t miss it.

Olive Kitteridge is now one of my favorite characters in fiction. This book is a series of connected short stories about a town in Maine, and Olive shows up as a character in each story, though most of the stories center on a character other than Olive herself.

Strout is a brilliant writer, and these stories are both lyrical and beautiful while delivering some serious gut punches, a little reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor. This book will stay with me for a long time.

Share

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

If you want to catch up with the first installment/explanation, check out this post:

Today I give you a post from April 2007. My baby boy was almost four months old. My husband at the time was halfway through dental school. Nobody was getting much sleep. I was working part-time reading student essays and wiping spit up the rest of the time.

Can you imagine snow in April? It sounds lovely, honestly. We’re in thedriest, hottest, longest, largest drought in 1,200 years in Utah right now — I would give anything for days and days and weeks and months of snow.

But back to Cleveland me — we never did move to Nevada: the promised job evaporated, like so many things do. But I remember being so worried that it would work out and there I would be: the heat, the dust, the casinos. It seemed so bleak — so utterly not what I wanted. But I guess twenty-eight year old me had no idea how sideways everything could really get.

At least a good cannoli is always good, no matter the weather.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

I woke with — Remember The Radishes — on my tongue like it was some sort of chant or witch-like ward, but even repeating it in the mirror, there was only myself as a creature of storm — and a feeling of the way watermelons would burst in the bombing of Krasnodar.

Share

Subscribe now

Note: I lived in Krasnodar in late 2001. I think the current war is senseless. I’m not on Putin’s side, but every time a place where I lived, a place where I loved, is bombed in Russia, I feel broken for the good, decent people who have no interest in the war either. Same goes for Ukraine.

Oh I did.

But I also did some digital archaeology with my dad and found my old blogspot — Squeeze the Universe — along with its hundreds and hundreds of posts written between 2007-2015.

I thought I’d skim a few from the beginning, just to remember what I was writing, and instead I basically fell in. Reading my essays until my eyes were red and raw — like stumbling across a forgotten hope chest. Finding myself ten years ago, seeing her face to face, word to word, was better than unicorns.

In case that comparison feels suspect, you should know that I have significant memory loss from my years as a young mother. Maybe someday I’ll tell you why, but for now, just know that reading these blog posts felt like stepping back into some skin I accidentally left behind.

It’s stuff worth reading. And so, that’s what the Hope Chest will be here on Large Hope: Weekly (ish), I’m going to reach in, pull one of those old essays out, and set it here exactly as it was — typos, tangents, weird obsessions, non-existent capital letters and all. Then I’ll sit down next to my past self, like an old friend over gelato, and tell her what I think now.

Not to correct her.

Just to say:

Look what you already knew.

Look how far you’d already come.

Let me introduce you to the Jes of ten years ago with her first blog post, written just a few months after having her first baby, graduating with an MA in English, and moving across the country. Living far away from the Colorado mountains she grew up in, trying to make sense of this new phase of life.

though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

I read this and I see magnolia trees everywhere. Their petals in the wind like pink dappled snow. Bursts of dogwood. Peonies, leaning to the ground, heavy with beauty and perfume.

I grew up in the west, and moved back several years ago — the absolute abundance of willing flowers and trees and bushes in the midwest still surprises me. Out here, we coax buds from the rocks and crevices into blinding sun. But in Ohio, the blossoms covered the windshields of cars and you could see little girls carrying umbrellas to catch them.

The whole world is still alive, still gasping (with delight, with pain). Still waiting for all of us to notice.

Share

Subscribe now

“It” doesn’t even have to be one specific thing — just the general all-around-you feeling that you’re not getting it, doing it, or being it.

This feeling has been sitting on my chest today and creeping up into my throat. I think I’ve disappointed someone, but I don’t know who. I’ve failed it, somehow, but not sure in what way.

I’ve tried different methods of escape:

• Watching A Woman of Substance

• Eating a blackened shrimp taco

• Throwing out all the old food in the fridge

• Driving to the pharmacy

• Pulling a bunch of bindweed while it rained, briefly

It feels like bindweed, this feeling. That it can find you wherever you are, sprout three new vines from severed roots. Creep into every crevice. Knot itself around anything it pleases.

I’ve been trying to teach my muscles to let go, but they don’t want to. A lifetime of fear, I guess, and they’re holding so tight to my bones. I am captive.

So I sat today in the backyard, watching these sprouts. I planted thousands of seeds at the wrong time of year, in the wrong kind of soil, and watched the mourning dove root around and take the tastiest ones home to his perch for lunch.

And yet, they’re growing. This little minuscule forest of green. Their green heads are curling upwards. Their leaves spring apart. They are alive, even though I did everything wrong.

And I suppose that means there’s a metaphor somewhere in that chip bark and peat. I’m not here to pretend that I know it or can write it. Just that I feel, sitting next to those seeds, some truth only a quarter inch high, that gets brighter in the sun.

Share

Subscribe now

After assembling said bookcases, I realized that I had an extra bookcase box. Trying to be a responsible citizen, I contacted IKEA via online chat.

I think our chat might prove the existence of aliens or the AI takeover of customer service or my inability to communicate. Mostly though, it’s funny.

Share

Subscribe now

Here are the books I gave up on, in no particular order:

The Searcher by Tana French

I started listening to this one on Libby and I really enjoyed the narrator. Seriously, he should get a trophy — switching between tough Chicago police detective and Irish and Scottish and whatever dialect necessary like he was a native everywhere.

I don’t know why this story didn’t catch me, but it just didn’t. I got nearly halfway through and realized that the characters didn’t matter to me. I know lots of people love this series, so please tell me if I was too quick to throw it all in.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Here’s the thing, I adore the 2019 film adaptation of this book and saw it before I knew it was based on a book. Just figured out this movie was not popular with the people. Obviously, I either have a girl crush on Cate Blanchett, or the movie just hit me in the right place at the right time.

On to the book.

The book is a series of emails and documents — almost epistolary, but a little bit not. I already have a chip on my shoulder about epistolary novels.1 And it turned out that I was not thrilled to encounter this story through emails. So I turned the book back in, and decided I’ll rewatch the movie.

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

I just finished Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd (super!) and was so intrigued by her description of writing The Book of Longings that I decided to try it out.

My main beef: it’s a story about the wife of Jesus (such an interesting premise) but Jesus is the flattest character ever — like Kidd was relying on readers knowing the bible and just filling in the bits. I don’t know — it felt like such a missed opportunity to really put more of a person onto the skeleton. So, like any way too hot person in the summer, I just gave up.

Current Bookstack

Library book on my bedside table: The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s been on bedside table forever. It’s been giving me nightmares, so I keep reading Braiding Sweetgrass instead. I might be stalled on page 52 the rest of my life.

Audiobook on my Libby app: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. This book is gorgeous and devastating and hilarious and I will finish it.

Share

Subscribe now

The notebook full of unknown words in The House of the Seven Gables was my first commonplace book1, though I had no idea such a thing had a name at the time. It was a place where I kept words and their definitions. My notebooks later became a place where I copied out passages from my reading that struck me either for their content or construction, or both.

Maybe you’ve heard of a commonplace book before. Your English teacher might have assigned one in junior high or you stumbled across the idea on Reddit on a rainy night. Or maybe you haven’t encountered it at all — which is fine, because the definitions are as many and varied as the number of subreddits devoted to the subject.

Since stumbling across my grandmother’s commonplace book this week, they’ve been on my mind. I’m here to offer you my version: what I keep, why I keep it, and how it’s formed my writing life.

What I Keep in My Commonplace Book

My commonplace book isn’t a journal or a quote book. It’s my reading memory. When I study in the morning, it’s right next to me, and I keep it on my desk as I’m working to refer to, and add to, throughout the day.

If you flip through my current book, you’d find:

• Passages I’ve copied out that moved me for their beauty or truth or both — a practice I’ve kept since childhood

• To-do lists

• Ideas generated from reading

• A one-sentence (or even one-phrase) description of my morning

• Things that make no sense

Honestly though, I’m not sure I can explain it without showing you an example.

Below is a page from my current commonplace book that I picked to show you because it had the word “underwear” for no apparent reason.

Let’s take a little tour of the page.

1. I use the Moleskine Pro Notebook. (Moleskine does not pay me to say that, but I wouldn’t mind if they did.) This notebook pleases me in several ways. It has a date at the top, along with a separate top section. I think business people might use that section to write an executive summary of a meeting or something. I use it to write a phrase about the morning.

2. Below that is the main section of the page which I use to copy out passages from the books I’m reading — usually a little philosophy or theory, a little scripture, a little poetry.

3. Usually, but not on this specific page for some reason, I give myself the task of writing a couple of sentences that connect the passages I’ve copied out. This exercise keeps me synthesizing what I’m reading in new ways, since I can’t spend my whole life in grad school. (So they say.)

4. On the right side of the page is my favorite column.
   What is it for?
   Who knows?
   Anything!
   Lists or tasks or notes
   or weird doodles or questions
   or things that make no sense!

I can see why this system has worked so well for me the last ten years or so — especially after my recent ADHD diagnosis. It’s organized but not too organized — and I have a space for the random thoughts I’m always having — like “underwear” and “indigenous flute music.” These righthand column notes are not always intelligible or meaningful when I return to them, and that doesn’t bother me in the least — in fact, sometimes it leads to the most interesting connections of all.

I learned just today that a true commonplace book has headings to organize the information. It’s not something I’ve ever done, but I do often transcribe my commonplace books onto the computer and put the passages and ideas into categories at that point, so don’t come after me.

My only commonplace regret is that I cannot draw — I feel like my commonplace book would truly benefit from bug diagrams and sketches of my garden, but I am relegated to the use of words only.

Why I Keep a Commonplace Book

• Writing with a pen on paper keeps something I’ve read or thought in my brain like nothing else. I often can’t pull a quote of the air, but my brain easily remembers where it is in my commonplace book. I’ve tried keeping it on the computer for ease of automated search, but without fail, my brain has no idea what’s on the computer but can recall what books I’ve read and recorded in my notebook.

• I am convinced that copying out beautiful passages for my whole life has made me a better writer. When I’m working on something of my own, I don’t knowingly copy any other writer’s sentences, but they are in my head, and because they are in my head, my head comes up with better things. My brain isn’t predictive, it’s surprising!

• Personal opinion, but the best writing makes connections between things that are exciting and new — that is, the “things” themselves aren’t new, but the connections are. By reading different types of texts across genres and subjects and then challenging myself to connect them, I come up with ideas that surprise me every time. And that’s the true joy of writing.

• My commonplace books are not just a history of what I’ve read, but a history of how I think. Going back through my old books is so delightful, not only because I am reminded of things I’ve forgotten, but also because I can see the evolution of my own way of thinking. I can see that I’ve grown, gained more perspective, and developed more interesting ways of connecting ideas.

• Often, I will flip back through my book and see a sentence I wrote about the morning, like this one from September 2025, “Apparently I cannot praise the sky enough — but it was a marvel,” and it becomes part of a poem or essay. In this case, that line is part of a poem that’s forthcoming in Literature and Belief. (Woo hoo!)

My Grama’s Commonplace Book

My maternal step-grandmother kept a commonplace book embellished with stickers and stamps and typed on a typewriter. It fascinated me when I visited — she was a true lifelong scholar who always kept notes on what she read.

When I was a teenager, my grandpa sent me a Xerox of the entire book and asked me to typeset it on the computer so that he could print a copy for all of the grandchildren. For some reason, I never did the typesetting and probably owe apologies to all my cousins who don’t have a copy, but I ran across that three-ring binder of copied pages last night. Reading it cover to cover wasn’t like reading a journal of daily dos and so forth, it was like being with my grandmother again and seeing her brain work.

Here’s a snippet of my grama’s thinking:

What’s Commonplace Today

This morning I wrote at the top of my page: “getting small, so you can feel big,” a line from Constant Wonder’s Hank Lentfer episode that we recently finished. I know what Hank Lentfer meant by it, but the truly great thing about my commonplace book is that I get to spend time thinking about what I mean when I write it. And it might take me weeks or months of reading to connect that idea with another idea with another idea and see the magic of the bees (see Seneca) come together to make something altogether otherworldly and beyond my individual capacity.

I initially started this substack as place to put my commonplace book notes (you can find a few of those posts here and here and here), because I would often call my sister to discuss what I was reading and thinking, and those were such tremendous and expanding conversations. It seemed like such a cool idea to put my commonplace book out there for other people’s reactions and ideas. I still like that idea and maybe wandered away from it too quickly.

Share

Subscribe now

I gathered data, made some Facebook posts, signed some petitions, talked to friends. I got enraged, disappointed, sad, exhausted. I tried so hard to talk only using facts, to take each person’s opinion with equanimity, to truly understand the people who are on the other side of the issue from me.

Then someone on the internet called me “bovine excretia.” I think he meant “excreta,” but I didn’t confirm.

I’ve been listening to Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd. I don’t normally pick up craft books unless they’re being assigned in a class, but I’ve loved the way she presents her writing process — and the way she makes it feel like the source of the universe is available to anyone.

The thing that stuck in my mind after finishing the book was the chapter on dreams. I’m just delighted beyond words that Sue Monk Kidd finds answers in dreams.

Because I’m sitting over here with dreams that are usually an endless panic where I can’t open my eyes and I’m trying to convince everyone in my family to buy cactuses.

But Sue Monk Kidd truly finds answers in her dreams!

I decided to keep a notebook by my bed to write down whatever brilliant thoughts would come to me in the night.

And come they did!

For three nights in a row, I woke up singing:

“Vocalize … harmonize … jazzercise.”

Complete with jazz hands at the end.

And so I offer — to the universe and to the guy that thinks calling strangers names on the internet is cool — this answer:

Vocalize. Harmonize. Jazzercise.

Because one laugh, one smile, one clear note, one community in song, one group of people in leotards, is enough to inject a little kindness and joy back into the world.

From the land of my dreams, to yours — let’s make every place a place where anyone can find a little harmony and a little hope.

Share

Subscribe now

It’s not a town on most people’s list of must-see places, but, let me explain my raging love for this place.

It has roots in Colorado, where I had a charmed childhood, spending hours after school on my pink and purple Huffy bike endlessly exploring — watching birds and bugs and streams. Heading for a certain copse of trees and pretending I was in Terabithia with my loyal Keeshond. I learned to ride horses, fly over jumps, look forward to the smell of oats mixed with oil. I didn’t have to pretend to be a mountain girl by wearing a lot of Patagonia: I was a girl and I was in the mountains. The mountains raised me.

When I left home to attend college in Provo — my first introduction to the place was the mountains, they jut straight up without any preamble, but their peace had a familiar homecoming. If my studies got overwhelming, I headed for the hills, just like back home. Usually Provo Canyon, but sometimes the back road around Utah Lake to watch the pelicans.

Life rolled on, I married, left the west for Cleveland then Ann Arbor, Michigan, followed by San Antonio and Alexandria, Virginia.

I found little wild refuges in each place, but I missed the mountains with a fierceness that I’m not sure how to describe. It’s that itch in your soul you just can’t reach, where you know something is off, but you can’t fix it, can’t satisfy it.

When I had a chance to move back west, I turned in notice and packed up in two weeks. Could not get here fast enough.

I live close enough to Rock Canyon to head there every morning. The sun slides out from behind the peak, glancing off the top of nearby Mt. Timpanogos. I brush my fingers along the rocks, hear the calls of the world waking. The mountains are prayer, they are divinity made corporeal.

I spent childhood summers up Provo Canyon, college nights and weekends, and now the canyon is the conduit from the mess of life to the peace of wild things, as Wendell Berry writes.

I want to call Provo Canyon one of my heart’s arteries, but you might think me dramatic. If anything, it would be understatement.

That said, let’s turn back to the title of this piece.

What do I do when a place I love like part of my body, part of my family, part of my ability to stay sane on earth, is threatened?

I don’t know!

And that’s what’s happening!

Recently, our local officials in Provo announced The Vesper Amphitheater Project. (I think I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s constantly on my mind right now.) This is a 20,000 seat amphitheater that would sit at the mouth of Provo Canyon. And while I get personal about this canyon, I think it’s worth confronting this project no matter where you live, because, more than likely, there’s something like this slated for a wild place near you.

I’m devastated by this Vesper Project and how enthusiastic my local officials are about it.

I’m huge live music fan, but this is the wrong place for a mega-amphitheater, hotel, and shopping complex. There is only one road in and out of Provo Canyon, and it’s miles from a freeway. All I can see from this project is loss. Losing birds, plants, insects to pavement. Losing the sounds of the earth to traffic. Losing the access to the Uintahs for the weekend because of the difficulty getting through the canyon.

I’m not calling myself any kind of expert on gravel pits or city planning or amphitheaters, but I am calling myself a person who loves the canyon. This project (which is much more moveable and scalable than a canyon) is not the right thing for the single road from Provo to the wild spaces to the east. Any time I think about it, I get sick to my stomach. I get depressed for me and my kids and all the kids and people in this area who won’t be able to get to the mountains when they need to.

I just finished Hank Lentfer’s memoir Faith of Cranes this week. I think he wrote it for me. He chronicles his devastation at the devastation of the natural places around him and across the world to his arrival at a kind of equilibrium, realizing that the most important thing he can do is love the places that mean something to him.

Here are my eight attempts to grope for hope in times like these: where the people we’ve elected to protect not just the city, but the natural world that interweaves and surrounds it, put profit over any other consideration. (A phenomenon that certainly isn’t limited to my beloved canyon.) Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for this inspiration:

1. Is the world going to be eclipsed by the gears of the Industrial Revolution that remain hell-bent on processing beauty into a money-making venture?
   What can I do when the wild places around me are threatened by commercial development without regard environmental impact?

2. A lot gets buried underneath pavement.
   How do we notice and love what’s already there before deciding it should be a hotel?

3. “I [Hank Lentfer] have been motivated, like so many people, by what Scott Russell Sanders calls the ‘bite of conscience.’ But what happens when the cries swell beyond our ability to respond? How do we keep from being buried by a swelling sense of failure?”1
   Or what happens when the people we elect to steward the earth can no longer hear the bite of conscience?

4. Insanity often passes for progress.

5. How do you live a life so that joy remains when all else fades?2

6. “Hope, however feeble its foundation, bespeaks allegiance to every unlikely beauty that remains on earth.” — David James Duncan

7. “The only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist, is by giving little or no thought to things such as saving the planet, achieving world peace, or stopping neocon greed. Great things seem undoable things. Small things, lovingly done, are always within our reach.”
   — David James Duncan

8. So, dear Mayor Judkins, the Provo City Planning Commission, the Provo City Council, Vesper Project Planners, here’s my question: Are you pushing for the Vesper Amphitheater out of love? Love for this place, for Provo Canyon, for the mountains and the countless living things that call that place home?
   If you feel like this is a project born of love, can you show me what you love?
   I have a feeling that the things you love most about this project are money, money, development, and cash.
   Why do you want your legacy in office to be the development of a natural Provo treasure?

I cannot express how utterly disappointed, heartbroken, and disgusted I will be if this project goes through.

But, I also pledge to continue in the spirit of Hank Lentfer, no matter the outcome on this project and countless projects that will likely threaten this same space in the future, to do small acts with great love.

Who knows where those small seeds of love will plant themselves?

The story of the earth can still be a story of beauty and love, as long as the individuals who still respect wild places continue to show their love for that wild beauty.

Will you join me?

Share

Subscribe now

You’re right.

It would be better if they also brought back the way a personal pan pizza tasted in 1987 when you were 8 years old and you had spent the whole summer in one chair in the library reading books like that was the only thing you had to do.

Since I can’t actually do that, here’s the 12th best thing!

We can talk about books right here.

The Salt of the Universe

by Amy Leach

This is a collection of essays that fiddle with the idea of restraint and abandon, generosity and tight-fistedness, rigidity and improvisation. Also, pickles and prophets.

Amy’s essays have fantastic word play and wanderings. It makes me want to live inside her brain — which sounds weird, so forget I said it.

I absolutely fell in love with her writing after reading The Everybody Ensemble. It’s the kind of book I wish I had written, but I couldn’t have because it’s exactly the kind of book that only Amy Leach could write. As is The Salt of the Universe.

I got lucky earlier this year and introduced her at a reading when she came out to Utah and then got to spend lunch and the afternoon chatting with her. I have decided we’re friends. You can ask her if she feels the same way.

Amy is just a downright A+ human being. She is hilarious and insightful and well-read and earthy and nature-y and full of praise for all kinds of random things. This book is another treasure on my shelf.

This Land is Your Land

by Beverly Gage

This book feels tricky to write about. I wanted to read something festive for the US Semiquincentennial this July. I saw the subtitle, “A Road Trip Through U.S. History,” and I got super excited. A road trip through history? Yes, please!

This book handed me two major disappointments:

1. There is no road trip. At one point she does mention her car breaking down, but there is no folksy travelogue of going across country. (Even though she did!)

2. Gage said in so many interviews that this book was about accepting a country’s mixed history (the good and the bad) and moving forward with hope. But, I read the whole thing, and whatever thread of hope she felt like she left, I couldn’t find it. The whole book felt angry.

So, there you go.

Current Bookstack

Library book on my bedside table: The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo. Only a couple chapters in but so excited about this one.

Audiobook on my Libby app: The Searcher by Tana French. Only 7% in, but what a ride! Roger Clark, the narrator for this audiobook, should get about 8 and a half trophies. He’s off the charts!

Share

Subscribe now

I’ve been in this state of frozen semi-panic for a while now. Especially since the proposed mind-bogglingly massive Stratos Data Center1 just up the road from me and then a proposed 20,000 seat amphitheater2 at the mouth of the canyon in my neighborhood — which would entangle and likely block one of the only access roads from Utah County to the Uintahs.

It feels like the world is being run by developers with lots of money and little (or no) regard for the people who have to live with their decisions. I don’t want to live in a world where money means you can call the shots. Because very few of us have the billions necessary to get our way.

Luckily one of the things I did stumble across in the tangled world of the internet was this piece by Clarissa Pinkola Estes titled Do Not Lose Heart (via the lovely ).

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope.

Do not lose hope.

That last line struck. I dabble here with little essays about this and that, hoping that I’m adding more hope to the world, but I don’t think I always am.

I think hope is hard, hope is work. Hope is an effort. Especially when I have to witness the disappearance of civil discourse, basic human rights, and the rule of law. I am not always a hopeful person. But I want to be.

Again, the wisdom of Estes,

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there.

I want to live in a world that’s run by wildflowers and bees, but I am weakened by ruminations on all that is outside my reach, all that I cannot change.

But Estes has a way of framing this feeling that I found really helpful:

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

I would so like the world to tip toward an enduring good.

This morning I walked up to Rock Canyon with Howie the dog, just trying to shake all this noise from my brain.

I went slowly up the canyon, trying to notice every blooming thing, trying to light my soul. (In this case, “every blooming thing” is not a genteel sort of curse, but an actual thing I was trying to do.)

And, blooming things are incredible.

This Antelopehorn Milkweed, for instance, is incredible. What are those petals inside the other petals? How is it so many different colors?

And this Spreading Dogbane. Such a delicate pink.

I’m not sure I know all the way yet what it means to show my soul, but I’m going to try. I know that moments in the mountains: just me and the sun and the grass, fill me. Whatever light I have, I want to shine. Whatever soul sparks I have, I want to give.

I hope all my small hopes, half hopes, glimmers and glimpses, add up to large hope.

And I hope that large hope lights you.

Share

Subscribe now

I’m still a bookworm. In case that wasn’t clear already. (So is Kate.)

And what, you ask, does being a bookworm have to do with Large Hope?

Reading is my way into the minds and hearts of people who are different than me. It’s the kind of escapism that allows me to experience something I would never experience any other way and then to return to my own world more compassionate and empathetic, more hopeful and circumspect. I’ve encountered thousands of lives between the pages of books and those lives have changed me.

Knowing that I can change (that others can change) is one of the fundamental sources of hope for me.

The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell is my new author best friend who doesn’t know me.

I started with Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, and the book I’m about to wax on about, The Hand That First Held Mine, is my third in this burgeoning Maggie obsession.

My favorite one-sentence review is from NPR.org:

“O’Farrell manages to take two rather ordinary women in ordinary circumstances and create something extraordinary.”

It is an extraordinary weaving of two ordinary lives. The story is centers around two unmarried mothers. I don’t know how O’Farrell manages to write about motherhood in a way that is so detail-oriented, but also so full of compassion.

Take, for instance, this snippet from one of the characters interior monologue. She’s a new mother and goes through possible responses to the following question in her head: “How are you feeling about the whole baby thing?”

And it’s got an opening paragraph that gives me shivers every time I read it:

I’ll stop quoting from it and just let you read it.

Remarkably Bright Creatures

by Shelby Van Pelt

Did Not Finish

I recently gave up listening to Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I made it a solid six hours in, but I was having trouble relating to any of the characters and it was so complicated I had a hard time following the audio. It’s a book I could see myself trying again at some point. Or not. I have a lot of other things I want to read.

Share

Subscribe now

In case you didn’t catch the matching dresses I made for Mother’s Day, you can hop back and see those here.

On to the books!

Hum by Helen Phillips is kind of like living through your worst nightmare as a parent of young children. The story develops in a world taken over by technology — and if you’re wondering if technology can take over our children even more than it already is, Helen Phillips says yes!

Hum could have easily become a sci-fi trope, but instead it deals with the complexity of this imagined future head-on in a really humanistic way. While some sci-fi/fantasy spends hundreds of pages building a world, Phillips drops you in and lets the world just wash over you, while she focuses on the people and the relationships in a little slice of time. I was on the edge of my seat and kept doing projects so I could hear the end.

I listened to Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman right after finishing Lessons in Chemistry. Kind of a masochistic reading combination.

And I’m about to break my own rules and spoil the book, so if you haven’t read it and want to, you’ve had your warning.

Despite the heavy subject matter, I was more or less enjoying the book — right up until Eleanor Oliphant turns from a delightfully quirky unreliable narrator to a socially aware human being. I believe this happens as soon as she begins therapy. Here’s the thing: I did not buy the transition from the unreliable narrator to the reliable one. It felt like two completely different characters. And while I could believe that unreliable Eleanor suppressed memories of her mother setting her on fire and her sister dying and intense and horrific physical and sexual abuse, I could not believe that reliable Eleanor just sort of brushed herself off after all that stuff and carried on.

At least Lessons in Chemistry acknowledged the abuse and sexism. Eleanor Oliphant leaves these gaping holes in the story and in Eleanor’s personal awakening that are still distressing me. The ending was such a cheap shot. I just don’t think you can dig up that level of awful-ness, spend a few chapters in therapy, and then move on like everything’s hunky-dory. This book is one I probably should have DNF’ed, as they say.

Share

Subscribe now

The sky tells me about the evening. Her teeth are blue. And when she smiles it’s a lake full of my own face — and the face of the moon. We ride the Skyhorse, before settling in its troughs of chalk, to pull blue silk over our faces. To sleep like loons, their hushed tambourine thrumming, as it weaves through our hair.

Share

Subscribe now

Shoutout to for including me in her prompt!

Pre-order it! It’s so good! Comes to the US September 15, 2026!

Part of my job is reading a lot of books.1 (I guess I will need to gush about how delighted that makes me in another post.) And they are great books. I’m reading great books all the time. I actually try not to inundate this space with those book reviews. (Maybe I shouldn’t try not to?)

But, The Butterfly Season, was a standout for me this year, and it felt worth bringing here. Not only is it brilliantly written, with well-researched, well-thought ideas, but it is also a tender journey of moving from one way of being into a new way.

Talking with Lea this morning during her interview for , I just wanted to bottle the energy of that experience and sprinkle it on everyone I know. So engaging, sparkling, transcendent. That conversation, combined with the experience of reading her book, hit me in a really personal way.

Normally when I read nonfiction/memoir/essay, I feel like I am taking the author’s journey with them.

On the other hand, when I read poetry, I feel like I am taking my own journey, independent of the author’s.

Somehow Lea manages to fit this book into a middle space that I didn’t know existed. Reading The Butterfly Season is a poetry-like experience — true self-awakening on a very personal level — but with all the narrative and intelligence you expect from nonfiction.

I cannot wait until our Constant Wonder interview releases with Lea Korsgaard in September. She is delightful, hilarious, relatable and there’s nothing better than spending an hour talking about butterflies and the meaning of life — subscribe to Constant Wonder if you haven’t already so you can hear the interview as soon as it drops.

My Rating: Brilliant! Excellent! Love!

Genre: Nonfiction/memoir

Format: Advanced reader copy

Read it If: You love the wild world, or you want to be someone who loves the wild world. Or you’re a person feeling all kinds of feelings about who you are and what you’ve been and who you should be.

Steer Clear If: You’re looking for something plot-driven or something with actual answers to life’s biggest questions.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: Absolutely.

Share

Subscribe now

.

• “Lessons in Chemistry’s excellent experiment [is] quirky and heartwarming."

• “An irresistible buoyancy.”

• "Lessons in Chemistry is a breath of fresh air — a witty, propulsive, and refreshingly hopeful novel populated with singular characters.”

And I thought, “Cool. I’ll listen to that book while I sew a dress.”

I guess this is the moment in my life that I should reconsider my stance on not reading any sort of reviews or summaries of books before diving in because this book absolutely wrecked me. I listened like it was a highway car crash over two intense days. I was not laughing. I did not find an irresistible buoyancy. I was not heart-warmed.

(I did sew a dress.)

When the book ended, I sort of collapsed off my chair onto the floor and sobbed, loudly, for quite a while.

I don’t want to give you any spoilers, but I need to give something of a reason for my reaction. It probably isn’t everyone’s reaction — as evidenced by the quips above.

The first thing I didn’t see coming was the violence against women. It was so difficult for me to listen to that I phoned a friend to ask if I should even keep going. She told me that I should, and she is very smart. So I did keep going. But there is violence against women throughout the whole book. For anyone who has been the victim of sexual violence, it’s not a punchline.

And layered on top of that, the whole story is occurring in this remarkably sexist, misogynistic man’s world of chemistry in the 1960s. I do wonder if the sexism was supposed to be sort of over-the-top, in-your-face to make a point. Whether it was or not, I found it so deep inside my bones true to my own experience as a single mom trying to make a living for myself that it wasn’t humorous.

This book is heartbreakingly, absolutely true.

It stirred up for me the feelings that are always simmering under the surface. I try to pretend that the difficulty of being a single mom in the workforce (and in the world) isn’t the wound that it is, until something like this puts it all into sharp relief. It is truly difficult to stomach the difference between my life and a man’s life. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it — and it hurts even more to know that no one cares if I do.

So, the book wrecked me. It broke my heart. It wrung me inside-out. But it was necessary and perhaps even good for me.

I think my blurb would read more like this: “Lessons in Chemistry is a heartbreaking move through a world made to make women feel like quirky misfits, like the butt of all the jokes. Thankfully it ends with the woman wielding a large knife.”

Genre: Semi-literary fiction (?) masquerading as upmarket chic-lit

Format: Audible

Read it If: You can stomach the tough stuff long enough to get to the payoff.

Steer Clear If: You can’t take this level of misogyny or violence against women.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: No. (But, maybe?)

Share

Subscribe now

A woman commented in church yesterday that she always felt inadequate as a mother, like she wasn’t living up to some standard of perfection. Everyone in the room agreed. There was a collective chuckle as women described failed dinners, dirty houses, unwashed laundry. Even though I have plenty of those things, I couldn’t really feel like a part of that collective agreement.

I can tell you what I was more worried about as a young mom than a dirty house or an underdone pot roast:

• Affording food that the kids would eat, like cereal and cold cuts

• Working my tail off to move up from my entry-level position

• Finding childcare with people I could trust

• Pushing through the bleary exhaustion until bedtime

• Putting the kids to bed so I could work another couple of jobs

• Sleeping half-awake, afraid a child would need me or someone would break in

— And this isn’t about how my life as a mom was harder than everyone else’s. Because it’s not. It’s so useless to compare levels of difficulty (unless you’re playing Mario Kart). —

This is about how often, how very often, I felt like I was utterly failing at the part of my life that was the most important to me: Giving my kids a safe and loving home. And I think that is a feeling that most parents can relate to.

But yesterday my daughter (as she does every year), snuck into my room while I was snoring and left a note. She listed things I’ve taught her that my thirteen-year-old self couldn’t have imagined teaching anyone.

• Self-confidence

• Home repair

• Respect for herself

• How to keep dreaming

She’s my baby, almost eighteen. I’m staring down this next year, my last precious moments with her as a child. And then it turns out that she’s no child. Both my kids have had experiences that pushed them to a level of maturity that wasn’t, and still isn’t, fair.

I don’t think the world owes me any credit for who my children are.

They are so wonderfully and amazingly themselves.

The thing about being a mother is that you get to watch as these souls unfurl and spread and find themselves. And that’s what I want to celebrate. That some miracle of the universe let me be part of their lives.

Can parents mess life up for their kids? I mean, yeah.

But most parents aren’t. Most of us are trying our level best.

Most of us are remarkably adequate mothers and fathers.

And as a midlife woman, not always sure if I did something useful in the world, I think being an adequate mother is enough for me.

Share

Subscribe now

So, it’s probably no surprise to you that when I saw the acronym DNF everywhere, I thought someone intended to type DNR (do not resuscitate) and instead made a slight move south on the keyboard and got an “F.”

Turns out DNF means Did Not Finish.

I guess this book lingo has been around a while but I just hadn’t noticed. I was too busy reading.

I used to finish every book I started, but at this point of my life, I just don’t have time to keep reading things I really don’t like.

This is not the same thing as dropping a book that challenges me or makes me question myself — I like books that push me and my thinking.
These books were just bad.

And so, when it comes to lame reads, I side with Bartleby the Scrivener, and say, “I would prefer not to.”

Here are all the books this year that I’ve journeyed partway into and rather than continuing, thought to myself, I would prefer not to.

2026 DNFs to Date

My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

I hated this book. I hated the characters. I hated the writing. But I was willing to hang in there (sort of), because I had it on Audible and that always feels like an obligation. The main character, and her love interest, are absolutely insufferable and nauseously self-serving. I got to Chapter 23 of 30 and just got so annoyed and angry that I did not even care to find out how it ends. For other DNFs, I might look up a summary — but for this one — No.

Do people like this book?

Please weigh in.

Mrs. Endicott’s Splendid Adventure by Rhys Bowen

I got about halfway through before I realized that the characters were going to remain cardboard cutouts, the plot was predictable to the point of utter boredom, and the writing was vapid. I have a feeling there is a giant audience for this type of comfy, formulaic stuff, but it isn’t me.

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

This book broke my heart. I was so excited that Barnhill was writing a novel for adults that included women turning into dragons. Dragons! Her earlier novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, is one of my all time favorites: a gorgeous collection of truth and magic and growing up. But this book was so disappointing. The dragon-stuff felt coerced and contorted to fit a political statement. It isn’t so much that Barnhill has a clear point of view she wants readers to understand, but it was so didactic and so forced that I couldn’t hang with it. Apologies, Kelly. I hope that you decide to rewrite this for children because I think that would be brilliant.

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

Normally Liane Moriarty and I get along pretty well. I know what she’s going to give me, and I generally enjoy it. But I couldn’t finish this one. Violence against women is really hard for me to muscle through, and if the characters aren’t likeable, it’s just a no.

Quicksilver by Callie Hart

This is the moment where you all find out that I’m not much of a romantasy fan. Couldn’t even get through the first chapter of this one.

The Theater of War by Brian Doerries

This entire book mansplains what humanities majors learned in our first semester of college. So condescending. Nothing revolutionary here.

After all that vitriol, are we still friends?

Your turn. Tell me what you’ve thrown off your book stack this year.

Share

Subscribe now

I went to see Hamnet, the film adaptation, a few months ago.

I was absolutely floored. Emotionally wrung. Stunned. It was poetry in motion. I cannot stop thinking about it. It was the most visceral, moving portrait of motherhood I’ve ever seen.

So when I saw Hamnet on a table at the bookstore, I bought it: a.) because the cover is gorgeous and b.) because I was so curious what sort of writing had prompted the film. If the movie was poetry, did the book have that same feeling?

Happy to report that Maggie O’Farrell knows how to write a sentence. It’s the best possible combination of lyricism, compelling characters, and plot that I’ve read this year.

My Rating: 5 out of 5

Genre: Literary fiction that’s also a little bit historical fiction and sort of witchy, while also being a reader favorite.

Format: Read it book in hand every night before bed.

Read it If: You’re a sucker for a good sentence, interested in the ways history can be imagined, and have been looking for a little grace for Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife.

Steer Clear If: You get bogged down in lyrical prose or if a novel about a young child’s death would be too much.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: Yes

Ephemera: Loved The Book Club’s take on Hamnet. If you’re not one for spoilers, watch the film and read the book before listening.

And if you’re the sort of person who wants another opinion on whether or not to read Hamnet, you’ll love Proofread’s quick take. (Such a great podcast for figuring out if a book is for you in 15 minutes or less.)

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

As soon as I finished Hamnet, I scrambled to get my hands on another Maggie O’Farrell novel.

I picked up The Marriage Portrait and was not disappointed.

Admission: I think I’m about to read everything Maggie has ever written. It just hits me so right.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 (because I feel like I should stop rating every book 5?)

Genre: Historical fiction with a very generous slice of imagination.

Format: Library hardback.

Read it If: You’ve been desperate to know how Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke in Florence, died in the 1550s.

Steer Clear If: You demand historical accuracy, and you need a tidy ending. Or you physically can’t touch a book that Reese’s Book Club has recommended.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: Yes

Some Favorite Sentences from the Book:

She covers page after page with [illustrations of] children . . . Babies on the backs of their parents, babies in cradles, babies on horseback, babies taking flight on outstretched feathery wings, to mingle in the blue and skim over treetops.

Share

Subscribe now