Katherine Larson is a Tucson-based scientist and writer. She’s worked as an ecologist and a molecular biologist, and she’s also a celebrated poet, with work in a wide range of anthologies and journals.

Earlier this year, she published her first book of essays — it’s called “Wedding of the Foxes.” The book is inspired by Larson’s work on environmental issues, but also by her close reading of Japanese female authors like Kurahashi Yumiko and Ota Yoko.

Larson told The Show the under-appreciated work of these women empowered her to write more personally, and also provided a metaphoric framework for her writing: the Japanese art of kintsugi.

Full conversation

KATHERINE LARSON: One of the ideas of kintsugi is to, it’s about repairing pottery with gold-dusted lacquer so that the repaired seams, or sometimes the entire sections, are still made visible.

And so one of the ways to do this is through something called a joint-call piece, where a piece of pottery from another pot actually gets integrated into the original pot. All of these women taught me something. I mean, they were dealing with very difficult circumstances in some ways. The death of an 8-year-old child in an accidental bathtub, drowning.

Or Ōta Yōko is a writer that’s really known for her work on atomic bomb literature. She lived through the atomic bomb and wrote in very graphic detail about the fallout of that. And so these women were sort of grappling in, in personal ways with very difficult things.

SAM DINGMAN: Was it new for you as a writer to address these difficult or more emotionally thorny subjects? In this form, in this more essayistic form, as opposed to, the poetic form. 

Do you feel like your engagement with their work changed your relationship to subjects like this? 

LARSON: Yes, I do actually, much of the work that I was looking at was, work that was in the form of short stories. I’m a creative nonfiction writer, so mostly essays and then poetry.

So I think that their form did teach me something about writing prose in a way. That was very different than what I’d done before.

DINGMAN: Not to ask you too therapeutic of a question, but how did it feel to do that? You know, I feel like a lot of times poetry can capture a feeling in a very intense way. But there’s not as much of a known as to expand it out over the course of a narrative. 

Whereas with prose, you have to sit with those feelings a little bit differently, or at least I would imagine that would be the case. 

LARSON: Yeah, I think that the other thing that it allows is, some of the topics that I was exploring were topics without resolution.

You know, I think the essayist Phillip Lopate talks about an essay as an invitation to think alongside someone, and I love that idea because it allowed me to include, you know, their writing, not just sort of in those essays, but in other places in the book. And allowed me to include quotes from other thinkers, from Donna Haraway and Gaston Bachelard.

And the essays became little collections, like sort of curated collections that had a lot more room for that kind of engagement, to allow other voices to enter and leave, you know, as opposed to poetry.

Poetry can be so distilled in some ways that it doesn’t, you don’t have that. You don’t have that kind of breathing room.

DINGMAN: I love this idea that you’re crediting to Phillip Lopate about thinking alongside the essayist. 

And it makes me want to ask you: What would you like these essays in “Wedding of the Foxes” to invite us to think about? And what do you think an essay can do that, say, publishing a scholarly article in a science journal or a poem, maybe, can’t do quite as well because you’re taking on really serious things, in this book?

LARSON: It’s actually such an important idea. I think, for me, to think about the kind of entanglement between the deeply personal and the environmental.

And so you can talk about the environmental in very concrete scientific terms. You know, the rate of extinction you can use, the percentage of land that’s been converted for food production and what that’s done to rainforest, etc. But to tie it to something that is deeply personal and deeply emotional, I think allows one to feel it as well.

I started writing it really because I had so many conversations with my graduate students, as well as colleagues, that they felt like the heaviness of the environmental crisis was just too much. It was too overwhelming, too depressing. And the response to that overwhelmed was a sense of real helplessness and a kind of apathy that was really borne up paralysis.

So, the challenge for me was to write a book that was both accurate, you know, I didn’t want to disavow the reality of ugly circumstances, but, but one that was also hopeful, that was about finding new metaphors and new ways of reframing or envisioning.

Donna Haraway has that term in her book about staying with the trouble. So part of those scenes were written in the pandemic. And so I talked about, you know, teaching my daughter, I homeschooled my daughter and son during that year and, you know, teaching her terms like, like we were studying the rainforests and teaching our terms like ecocide and that kind of thing.

And like that, like what that felt like to do.

DINGMAN: Yeah. 

LARSON: Not throwing away or not trying to disavow what we’re living through, but instead integrating it.

DINGMAN: Well, that makes me think of the kintsugi idea. 

LARSON: Right? Exactly. Because I think it, you know, it recognizes that the site of breakage is the site of lineage and of history. And even if you think about it ecologically, you know, and in a certain ecological sense, like of knowledge.

So our damaged places, ecologically bleached coral reefs or collapsing pollinator networks, they’re telling us exactly where our system is sort of stressed. The cracks are kind of these instructions if we’re willing to kind of listen.

And the idea is that kintsugi doesn’t try to return the object, the broken object, to its original state. It creates something new, something that allows for the lineage and the rupture to be highlighted and integrated even as a source of beauty.

You know, the other thing about kintsugi, too, is that it really rejects the kind of logic, this like throwaway logic of our culture that the broken thing is worthless.

DINGMAN: Right.

LARSON: And it’s discarded, right? It’s like culture of disposability that we have. And so, you know, the idea, like the damaged things. And then you can extrapolate that and, and just the damaged table or, but a damaged landscape, a damaged ecosystem, a damaged community can be just discarded. And we just move forward.

But instead that, you know, so that to think about what’s broken being made whole in a, in a very new way, which does require a lot of more interesting kinds of thinking.