Seaweeding: An Immersion
The kelp forests off the North American west coast are dying. Since the Blob (marine heatwave) of 2014-16, many of the lush coastal forests have not recovered. And yet, off my home coast of Southern California, the giant kelp has rebounded, is vibrant, alive, for now. This book dives deep and tangles with the life of kelp forests, its past and its future, the ways we’ve engaged with seaweed, and what we may learn from our deep immersion and love for our fragile home places. As an ocean swimmer and freediver, I trace the seasonal rhythms of the giant kelp forest while considering how to translate love for a place into something more than elegy. Drawing on the seaweeding practices of nineteenth-century naturalists, many of them women who lovingly compiled their herbaria, this book is a seaweed collection for our Anthropocene times.
Everything We Lose: Reckoning with Athletic Girlhood
[Swimmer Girl with Butterfly, c. 1991]
Everything We Lose is a researched memoir about falling in love, failing, quitting, and returning, but on different terms, to something I was almost good enough in, and about the grief of that almost. I was a nationally-ranked competitive swimmer, then it all fell apart when I was 17. I quit and didn’t reckon with any of it, what it had all meant. Years later, when my grandmother died, I inherited my family’s athletic archive, with all its obsessive records of my grandfather’s and my mother’s elite athletic careers in the Soviet Union. My book is my much overdue excavation of my family’s tangled up athletic past and my own athletic girlhood. Structured around the phases of the freestyle stroke (catch, pull, finish, recovery), Everything We Lose tells stories about sports running like blood through a family; the trauma of immigration and the refuge of sports; the particular gendered experience of athletic girlhood and the athletic mother-daughter bond; wanting so badly to be great but being first only good, then not good enough; and athletic experience as a deeply sensory way to dwell in our warming, damaged, wild world. Ultimately, Everything We Lose is a bittersweet love letter to swimming, family, and home.
“I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”