What is Wilderment?

A series of letters, essays, and interviews, a knot in the web of ideas, questions, and conversations that inspire me, and a place where literature listens and speaks to the biosphere.

Welcome, friend. I’m Sarah Rose Nordgren, a poet, writer, teacher, and cultural organizer, Founding Director of the School for Living Futures, and Emerging Poets Feature Editor at 32 Poems.

My nonfiction book, Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal, was published in February 2024 by Essay Press. I’ve also written three books of poetry: Best Bones and Darwin’s Mother (University of Pittsburgh Press) and The Creation Museum (Harbor Editions). My writing tends to probe the intersections between feminism, the natural world, science, spirituality, and what it means to be human.

I grew up in the forests of North Carolina’s Piedmont region in the small city of Durham, the traditional lands of the Saponi, Occaneechi, and Tuscarora tribes, and have lived in Galway, Ireland, Westchester County, New York, Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Cincinnati, Ohio, mostly following academic jobs and poetry fellowships. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, I abruptly left my career in academia when my partner and I moved our little family back to Durham to be closer to extended family and close friends. Since then, we’ve been developing a suburban family compound, living nextdoor to my parents with a shared garden and compost bin, and a well-traveled pathway between our wooded back yards.

Here on Substack, I’m sharing the questions and ideas that excite me, interviews with climate changemakers from across disciplines, notes from my writing life, and thoughts on the books, stories, and poems that serve as candles in the dark. Permeating this space is a curiosity about ways we can live purposefully during The Great Turning (in the words of Joanna Macy) and how, in the words of Donna Haraway, we can live out our task “to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”

This is also, of course, an emergent space, and we’ll learn more together about what it needs to be and what it can become. You can subscribe to receive Wilderment in your inbox. Right now, all of the content is available to free subscribers, but you can upgrade to a paid subscription to support my work and interact with others who are interested in piecing together the shining fragments of the ruins into something new.