I Sold My Book!

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Six Signs You May Want to Skip Parenthood and Become an Auntie Instead

I’m typing these words outside on a wooden deck, overlooking a garden studded with bright poppies, and planet-shaped purple alliums, with a creek burbling in the background. In the last three days I’ve spotted woodchucks, bluebirds, goldfinches, red-winged blackbirds, a woodpecker, some painted turtles sunning among yellow cow lilies as I canoed slowly across a pond, and three deer leaping across my path as I jogged down a country road.

Are you in the space to hear about someone else’s good luck today? Do you want to see my shiny penny? Do I have enough of your goodwill to tell this tale, in this ragged, breathless, broken time? Maybe I’ll just say that there’s kindness in the world, and I am grateful.

You can read one of my previous posts, instead.

Or if not…

I first sat on this deck six years ago. In 2019, my job was covering education for NPR, but I had gotten obsessed with the climate crisis. I started coming up with story ideas at the intersection of climate and education, and found there were other people being drawn to this intersection, which the arrival of a new, urgent youth climate movement had put on the global agenda.

Around that time, Project Drawdown, an influential catalogue of climate solutions, placed global girls’ education, specifically, at #6 on the list of those solutions. And they co-sponsored an event on climate and education here, at Omega Institute, in Rhinebeck, New York, to which I was invited on a press pass.

I wrote it up for NPR, quoting Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, leader of communications and engagement at Project Drawdown:

"So often, when we talk about climate, we're talking about policy and politics and science and technology. But this is so much an issue of psychology and values and ethics as well."

Our conversation stirred me, as did the one I had with

Dr. Renée Lertzman

, a pioneer in climate psychology. And the conference centered Indigenous leadership, especially Sherri Mitchell’s, in a way that was to me, at the time, revelatory. (Her book Sacred Instructions, is essential reading.)

For me those two short days were the planting of many seeds. They started to sprout in the summer of 2022 when I quit NPR to devote myself full time to these questions, issues, areas, quests: the empowerment of youth, the psychology, values and ethics of change, the forms of knowledge we need, including the knowledge of the heart, the voices that aren’t being heard enough.

I started this Substack in summer 2023 to explore these ideas and see if there was an audience for them. It was a call-and-response. Shout across the pond, see who halloos back. I interviewed Katharine a few months ago, here.

And with this and that, I got invited to come back here, to Omega, in May, with other women thinking about and working on these same themes. The offer was to have a week to “rest and create.” Just that. So I held the space open on my calendar.

And the week before I arrived, that is, last week, I got an offer from Bloomsbury for my next book.

It’s about the emotional landscape of the polycrisis. It’s about following Joanna Macy’s Spiral and the Climate Emotions Wheel. It’s about the fractal structure of justice and rightness. It’s about the Five Remembrances. It’s about enfranchising, making space, giving voice to our pain for the world.
It’s about finding joy, calm, and purpose in the moment while we navigate the terribleness all around us, without blocking it out or going numb. It’s about the enlivening, freeing power of the truth.
It’s about caring for others on a rapidly changing planet. It’s about more powerful collective action, overcoming the forces of silence, denial and paralysis to remember what we love enough to fight for. It’s about midlife, marriage, motherhood. Grief, guilt, fear, and rage. Joy, love, and curiosity.
It’s about how I started to get out of my head and into my body and my feelings, and if I, the most abstracted, overintellectualizing, reading-the-back-of-the-cereal-box little girl whose nickname in the first grade was Earth-to-Anya can do it, you can too.

As is typical with nonfiction books, what I sold was just a proposal. So I actually have to write the thing now, and do a lot of research. I have this retreat week to get started. I’m just taking a breath to marvel at the symmetry of it all. And I’m so grateful to you for being here and reading this. This wouldn’t have happened without you. I’ll continue to share updates as I go along. And if you have any questions or suggestions, the comments are open.

Link

I joined Barry Wygel on this week’s episode of the #PluggingIn podcast to talk about growing climate anxiety in kids, age-appropriate strategies to help tackle tough topics, and how we can empower the next generation to make a difference.

https://podfollow.com/1755391935/view