For earlier writers like Emily Dickinson and William Blake, the green world was a space of haunted opposites: life and death, innocence and experience, and the sensitivities of plants. In these essays, letters, repetitions, and experiments, Gillian Osborne draws on a poetic and scientific archive spanning from the late eighteenth century to the present to explore contemporary meanings of green as both/and: environment as ailing and vital, global and close to home. This is nature writing as reading, and homemaking, in vicinity with others.
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Osborne mines her personal life and literary research to think about change. These changes are her own: a young girl’s growth from daughter and granddaughter to wife and mother. But they are also the changes of the planet as it warms, as seasons and weather shift, as fires consume California, and as the solace of orderly narrative is thrown into the crucible of climate disruption.
Reaching the end of this collection is to reach a revised understanding about what reading and writing represent and accomplish—processes that at once become evergreen… Osborne turns green into practice, a way of life, challenging us to locate and live alongside the wildness that permeates our very roots.
I’ve called it a book about green, but really, of course, Green Green Green is a book about books—or rather, a book about reading, that magical and ordinary and mysterious and everyday thing that most of us, some of us, do so often we don’t even think about the fact that it’s happening, like breathing.
Green Green Green is a book where sentiment meets science, in the heartfelt progression of years gone by. There is something undeniably maudlin about family, seasons, and poetry, and Osborne brings this into focus with ruminations on grandparents, California droughts, ecological surveys and sonnets. She lingers on the gifts of the elderly, of books and honey
Click here to read an excerpt in Harper’s!
Green Green Green goes from global and historical ideas to ‘habitats, horticulture and histories’ to the most personal. This undoubtedly applies to most collections of essays, but Gillian Osborne goes a long way: in one of the essays, the depiction of an exchange of letters between her and essayist Juliana Chow interweaves letters that Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Abiah Root, and then also included the correspondence between Hawthorne and Melville. Emily Dickinson, who compiled her famous herbarium in 1840, is one of the starting points that Gillian Osborne returns to time and again, rereading and contextualizing her and her time, taking her gaze to the present.
Click here to read an excerpt in Literary Hub!
Click here to listen to Gillian Osborne discuss Green Green Green on Harper’s Podcast!
rob: How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Gillian: “Well, this is my first book, so—to be seen! At the same time, this book draws on and grows out of a lot of past writing—poems, a dissertation, critical essays. The difference from that work is that this book more fully embodies the way I enjoy writing most, which is to combine creative and thoughtful energies, to pay attention to form on a line or sentence-level, but also to gain momentum and expand, associate, connect. Finishing the book has allowed me to experience my writing as for others in a new way, and myself as a writer as well as someone who writes.”