Leafskin is a novel about creation. It’s a rhythmic novel, incorporating poetry and holding a lyrical heart. The novel is folkloric, with undercurrents of shapeshifting stories. It’s about birth and artistry, about how we create, and what we become, in our time of environmental destruction. And, at heart, Leafskin is a love story. There are the human love stories, yes, but the love in this novel moves across species as a creative force that connects us all to each other and to our shared world.
As I wrote this novel, I was in the midst of my own struggles to find my creative center as a parent and a writer, to figure out how to raise a child in the midst of environmental devastation and all the uncertainty of the historic moment that has found us. I wrote Leafskin in the dark of the very early mornings before my family woke and on solitary walks in the forested parks of my city, following murmurs in my mind and listening to just the right songs.
Each of these songs is a doorway into some aspect of the book. They hold emotional spaces, character mindsets, themes, and atmospheres. I invite you to walk through them to explore the many different shapes of Leafskin.
King by Florence and the Machine
Florence and the Machine released her album, Dance Fever, while I was writing Leafskin and, in the first single, King, I found an anthem for my main character and her struggles to find space for motherhood, poetry, and her own uncanny experience of the world. The lines A woman is a changeling, always shifting shape. /Just when you think you’ve got it figured out something new begins to take capture, for me, a very particular kind of embodied experience that I wanted to convey for Jo. There are so many tales of women’s forms being mutable: stories of selkies shedding their skins to make human families on land, the myth of Daphne turning into a tree to escape the pursuit of a god. These stories open spaces of liminality where land and ocean meet, where human and plant become one. These are the spaces I wrote Leafskin into.
Nineteen by Tegan and Sara
There’s a flashback section in Leafskin that follows Jo in college when she met both her human loves– Ness, her artist college girlfriend, and Liam, her eventual husband. This song, the waves of its sound crashing over the words, I was yours right? I was yours right? so intimately convey the intensity of, I want to say young love, but what I mean is a very particular feeling of youthful helplessness that can come with love at any age. The sweeping up of one’s self in another. The fear, and the very real possibility, of being left alone in that unmooring. It’s the risk of any collaboration and any creation, the danger of giving yourself over to it so fully that you become lost. The balance tilts, and you find yourself alone, solitary in a tumbled bed, abandoned by the muses, holding a pen that’s run dry.
I Follow Rivers by Marika Hackman
While writing the middle of Leafskin, I played Marika Hackman’s Deaf Heat EP on a loop. These were the notes and rhythms of Jo and Ness’s relationship, and, particularly, of their artistic collaborations. Jo and Ness both create in similar spaces where art and nature and desire meet in magic. When they join together, merging Jo’s poetry and Ness’s paintings, they reach something entirely new to them both. Even now, every time I listen to this EP, I hear the echoes of these two in it. Follow Rivers in particular, is full of such haunted longing–You’re my river running high./Run deep, run wild./I follow, I follow you, / deep sea, baby, I follow you–like the tug of a river itself. The eventual child that Jo will believe was, in part, conceived through her generative connection with Ness, is named for this body of water that rushes, flowing to deep sea.
Sublime by New Here
It’s just such a great break up song, isn’t it? The wish for more time, the being left behind in the wanting. And I’m glad I could be what you needed for a time/ but I’ll be goddamned because I wish I had more time. That terrible feeling of still being in the midst of something that has ended. In Leafskin, there are moments of leaving where one character remains in the feeling of together while another has vanished from it. Times end abruptly. Eras shift without warning. Connections sever. And someone gets left in the longing.
Where Did the Sun Go? by Lor
There’s an eclipse at the center of Leafskin. I wrote this fictional eclipse thinking of my own experience of seeing the total solar eclipse near where I live in Oregon in 2017. In writing the eclipse of the novel, I tried to convey the feeling I had of the world ending and also of this intensely inhuman love, impossible to personify, in the celestial meeting of the sun and moon. It was terrifying and beautiful. Everything fell quiet and dark. And I wondered, if I did not know to expect it, what I would think. Because even knowing what to expect, I felt a deep embodied fear and wonder. Don’t look up./I think we made the sun cry. Everything–the quieting birds and frogs, the darkening sky, the people watching from our blankets in the field–felt very interconnected and very alone, very small and very vast, all at once. I felt outside my human self for a moment. I felt the edge of something far beyond me.
Summerside by Marika Hackman and Frederico Albanese
I love the haunting momentum of this song, the way it feels like it’s pressing forward through a pause. As we move through time we leave behind parts of ourselves. A series of emptying rooms. As I washed away the fingerprints we left behind/I lay down and cried. There are leavings in this novel, spaces and times that characters must move on from. In the beginning, a flashback to Jo cleaning out the old apartment she shared with her husband Liam while she realizes they may not be able to have the child they’d so long been trying for. As she cleans, she mourns the life they are leaving and frets over the one they are embarking upon, one where she will undergo fertility treatments, one where she feels an intense risk of failure. I also listened to this song while I wrote a section of the novel set at Ness’s family’s cottage on the coast, a home her grandparents used to occupy that now stands empty. It’s an important place for Ness and one where the intensity of the women’s creative connection reaches an apex that unsettles them both. And then, the house, again, is left empty.
Human Behavior by Bjork
Leafskin isn’t only about the human characters. It was important to me, as I wrote the novel, to incorporate the stories of the birds and trees and water and other nonhuman beings. All these stories, human and more-than-human, shape each other. The crow and human meet in a devastating heat wave, rainwater washes through human moments on its way to the river and ocean, sequoia cones move through the hands of each character until finally taking root. The humans in this novel behave with human logic and human understanding, which is immensely limited and yet holds its own kind of enchantment. There is definitely definitely definitely no logic/ to human behavior/ but yet so, yet so irresistible. And the nonhuman characters have their own ways as well, mysterious to us, even as we try to grasp them.
Thrills by HERS/The Heart’s Outpouring
I love the way this song holds embodiment, the ocean and the human, how, in bringing them together, something that is both of them and beyond both of them, is born. All I feel is the tremor through my body,/ incessant waves beating constantly on coastlines/ My voice is the mounting storm /and I can’t not hear it. /I can’t even hear my body. In Leafskin, I tried to write embodiment, reaching for those spaces where the human and nonhuman meet in order to get at complex feelings of physicality and what comes of it. Fertility treatments, birth, nursing, sex– these highly embodied experiences that we move through, that can both root us in ourselves and move us outside of ourselves, that can both hold us in our shape and shift it–and the newness that is born, the voice that emerges from the dissonance.
Bliss by Tori Amos
What is bliss? What is happiness? How do we know when we’ve found it? Again and again, I find myself coming back to this song in particular, and Tori Amos in general, with her atmospheric soundscapes and her riddling lyrics. In Leafskin, I considered how our expectations of family, of love, of parenthood, of writerhood, can sometimes block us from recognizing our own bliss, strange and imperfect as it may be. How do we find it and even keep it in a time of perpetual devastation? Leafskin’s characters are on their ways to finding their own bliss of another kind. Like myself and so many of my loved ones, this family of characters is discovering their own queer ways of moving in this world, merging realities and making a home in the liminal.
Dancing Barefoot by Patti Smith
What to even write about a song such as this, one that feels like it articulates so much about human love and divine love and creativity and gender, in a sound that is both earthly and otherworldly. For me, it’s a song of creation and inspiration and being in the wilds of it. I’m dancing barefoot, / heading for a spin. It’s not an easy place, and not often a comforting one. It makes me think of birth, of all the different forms that can take, the terrible magic of it. There’s a pain in it and a relinquishing of control. And a cost. A journey to the underworld and a bringing back of some shadowing shard of something divine. Some strange music draws me in,/ makes me come on, like some heroine. All the characters of Leafskin find themselves in this place at one time or another. It’s a place I go to, if I’m lucky, when I write.
The Seed by Aurora
The seeds at the center of this novel are an embryo that grows to be a human child, a sequoia cone that grows to be a sapling, and the feeling of family, a collection of connected human and nonhuman beings, that grows up around them. An ecosystem. Just like the seed/ I am chasing the wonder / I unravel myself / In slow motionThis song conveys so much of what I hope we can do with our art. Just handing each other seeds. Allowing them to open inside us. It’s one of the few things I know how to do in the midst of the horrors of our destructive, self annihilating era. Tend the seeds. Let them open. And hope we can find the grounds for them to grow.