Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

This 2025 novel is vividly told through the voices of its characters. The Salt family, Dominic (a widower) and his 3 children, son Raff (eighteen), daughter Fen (seventeen), and son Orly, (nine) are the last people on Shearwater Island, a dot in the southern ocean halfway between Australia and Antarctica. They’ve been here seven years – Orly remembers no other home. Though the weather is harsh, the island supports an abundance of plant and animal life. A seed bank repository has been built here, to save for replanting by survivors after climate apocalypse has devastated the planet. 

But sea level is rising rapidly, the seed vault built into permafrost is warming, and the family labor to save what seeds they can. A scientific group made lists prioritizing those to be salvaged, but by the time this novel opens, only the Salt family remain. A ship will come collect them and what seeds they’ve been able to remove from the drowning vault – but that arrival is weeks away and they have no communications. Their radio tower was sabotaged by someone on the island, so the ship crew have no notion of what has occurred. Down to their last rations – food, fresh water, fuel, dying batteries – the Salts live a spartan existence filled with hard work and awful secrets. 

Into their lives, then, comes a woman from the wreckage of a small boat whose pilot died. Fen, living in a boathouse at the beach surrounded by seals and penguins, sees the flotsam, swims out, and pulls in Rowan, who should be dead but insists on surviving. How her arrival catalyzes each family member’s griefs, and how their love changes her, drive the story. 

It’s well-told, unfolding a bit at a time, grounding readers then shifting deeper. Chapters are short, alternating voices; through them we mourn not only the humans but the planet they love. These seeds have been selected for human survival – but what about Earth's co-inhabitants, plants and animals? Do they have no right to a future we have jeopardized? Young Orly, a savant, feels deeply how that question must be answered. And Rowan brings creativity, skill and determination to this haunted place, where the first human population slaughtered colossal numbers of seals and penguins, rendering their carcasses for oil till there were none left, then abandoning the rusty barrels piled at the scene of their enterprise. 

Tragedies and secrets whisper to every character – so much of themselves is buried on this storm-whipped island, the reader wonders what leaving will do to them. McConaghy puts us into frigid water, fierce wind, constant hunger, and the human drive to finish what tasks we are set. Partner to their love of Shearwater is dread of what returning to society will mean – and in what threatened place it will make any sense to start over.

Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I took my time reading the essays in this 2013 book by enrolled member of Citizen Potawatomi Nation, PhD botanist, Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology at SUNY, founder and director of Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, Robin Wall Kimmerer. In addition to these credentials she is a mother, and student of traditional ways of living with Earth and its creatures. 

She writes beautifully, and she writes of the truths we ignore at our peril: that we are part of nature, that we thrive with our co-inhabitants and suffer when we do them harm. “We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgement of the rest of the earth’s beings.” 

She says, “In order to live, I must consume. That’s the way the world works, the exchange of a life for a life, the endless cycling between my body and the body of the world… How do we consume that does justice to the lives that we take?” 

“Collectively, the Indigenous canon of principles and practices that govern the exchange of life for life is known as the Honorable Harvest… I am a student of this way of thinking, not a scholar. As a human being who cannot photosynthesize, I must struggle to participate in the Honorable Harvest. So I lean in close to watch and listen to those who are far wiser than I am.“ 

In a later essay, she observes, “The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack. Had we not worked waist-deep in the swamp, had we not followed muskrat trails and rubbed ourselves with soothing slime, had we never made a spruce root basket or eaten cattail pancakes, would [her students] even be debating what gifts they could offer in return? In learning reciprocity, the hands can lead the heart.” 

This book is an avenue into a way of thinking whose time is urgently at hand. If we do not soon learn to live with earth and its creatures – plants, animals, rocks, streams and all – as partners, we will die alongside them. Earth itself will continue, but as a host for life, may go dormant for an age. We don’t have to do this, to our home and to ourselves. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a wise woman – read, listen, and heed her words.

LaRose, a novel by Louise Erdrich

This 2016 novel is a masterful landscape of the human heart, shattered by grief, rage, and jealousy, healed by generations of LaRoses. In brief, it’s the story of a tragedy – a man sees a big buck on his land and shoots it – except what he kills is his neighbor’s young son. Landreaux Iron is Ojibwe, his neighbor Peter Ravich is white. In this rural area they live closest. Their wives are half-sisters who are wickedly hateful to each other. 

Landreaux decides that the traditional way of repairing such damage is to give his youngest son, LaRose, to the Raviches. The repercussions of this decision are deep and wide. LaRose, however, handed over at the age of six, talks to the ancestors, and finds ways to move both families toward healing. In his lineage he is the fifth LaRose (so far), the first being a girl sold by her drunken mother to a trapper/ trader in exchange for booze, in the 1870s. 

Going up against demons was Randall’s work. Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now?... “You did right,” [Randall told Landreaux] at last, “the elders… knew the history. Who killed the mother of the first [LaRose], Mink, and what she could do. Then her daughter, her granddaughter, the next one, and Emmaline’s mom. Evil tried to catch them all. They fought demons, outwitted them, flew… People think that what medicine people did in the past is magic. But it was not magic. Beyond ordinary understanding now. But not magic.” 

Erdrich has a genius for letting a sly adjective say everything: “Also in Landreaux’s past there were the buzzers, bed checks, whistles, bells, divided trays, measured days of boarding school. There was an unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence.” 

and 

“Landreaux should not have imagined it was over… A man’s heart, shriveled raisin, prune of loneliness, burnt clam, understood what it was to lose out on love. And lose to a lying liar. Romeo bet his livid black heart could burst Landreaux’s baggy heart sack.” 

and 

“Peter felt the heavy sadiron of his heart lurch. He waited but it was stuck on the wrong side of his chest.” "Ah, god, please, Emmaline." 

"I can’t stand it anymore," she said. “It was never supposed to go on forever, was it?” 

Her characters, assaulted by a system that wants them all dead, persist. But amid the misery she gives us moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity, as when the nurse’s aide/ addict who steals pills from the senior home, mixes them for an evening’s high and spends several days incapacitated with raging intestinal misery, complaining to his bathroom walls that those old ladies poisoned him.

David Ansen at 48th Denver Film Fest

Coffee and Conversation with David Ansen at the 48th Denver Film Fest  (Full disclosure – David Ansen is mi esposo’s cousin)

Longtime film critic (notably 30 years at Newsweek) and member of the board of film festivals (New York, Los Angeles, Palm Springs), David Ansen conversed animatedly with mentee Matthew Campbell, Artistic Director of Denver Film Festival. Topics ranged from Ansen’s youth in movie-adjacent LA, where his father worked at MGM making two-reelers, to his two years in a Huerfano County, Colorado dome commune (along with Larry Laszlo, Denver celebrity photographer), to a stint in Boston at The Real Paper, a film critic incubator. 

He talked about how important magazines once were for reviews of new releases, and that early on he had the freedom to write about rising filmmakers like Werner Herzog, before the editorial staff grew stricter about focusing on big studio releases. Now, he observed, the focus of reviewers is speed – they can’t think for a few days (or even weeks) about their views of a film. Instead, the prize goes to whomever is first to post. Our fragmented media landscape has also created subcultures with vastly different tastes, from the Marvel-verse to quiet international films and documentaries that will never circulate beyond a small dedicated audience. 

He mentioned that snark is now taboo. Knowing his fellow critics, he said he can tell when they’re straining to make anodyne remarks in lieu of their true opinions. Also, he said the rise of social media and instantaneous exposure have changed how open interview subjects dare to be. He shared an anecdote about a well-known director in the early 1990s – they met in the director’s hotel room, where coke was spread on a table (none offered to Ansen). After he concluded the interview and left, the director followed him into the hall to request that he not mention the woman who’d been snorting coke with him. The coke, who cares? The woman, no, please say nothing. He said that would never happen today. 

He also distinguished between city-based film festivals and industry-based ones: the industry festivals (Cannes, Sundance, Toronto) are much bigger, and focus on getting distribution for new releases. City festivals like Denver’s are film-centric: organizers and attendees are interested in seeing and talking about movies, not selling them to someone else. Campbell noted that while many city festivals have been shrinking since Covid, Denver’s is thriving. Ansen speculated that people enjoy the openness of mid-sized festivals, where they can strike up conversations with those around them, and share the discovery and delight of seeing films that will never have mass distribution. Ansen spoke briefly about Cannes, saying the audiences are very feisty, readily booing, and sometimes destroying the prospects of movies they don’t like. 

Ansen estimated he’s seen around 14,000 movies (he's maintained a list!) which for many years didn’t include what he saw on TV. Now he does stream some, but prefers the big screen, particularly for older films which were made for movie houses. At 80, Ansen is sharp and funny – we could have listened for hours more as he and Campbell chatted.

"Listers" - a documentary by Owen and Quentin Reiser

Owen and Quentin Reiser, 20-something brothers, don't know much about birds - they can identify a few distinctive species, and beyond that "a lot of little brown birds" - but they decide on a whim to participate in what birders call a Big Year – a calendar year in which they identify & document sightings or songs of as many birds as possible. Big Years can be local, regional, continental – the one they get in on is the lower-48 of the US. Their Big Year is 2024. They made "Listers" about the experience.

Let’s start with some definitions: a “birdwatcher” is a person who enjoys observing birds – hearing them, noting their activities and preferred habitats. A “birder” is a person whose obsession with building their Life List of unique sightings sometimes comes to the exclusion of interest in the birds themselves. Anyone doing a Big Year is a birder. It’s highly competitive. The app: E-Bird, from the Audubon Society, has changed the way Big Years operate. Instead of relying on word-of-mouth or lucky sightings, birders use E-Bird to report & document their sightings and figure out where they can bag the rarer birds, all so they can get a higher count. This leads to crowds. I am reminded of watching 5-year-olds play soccer, running in a pack up and down the field as near the ball as they can get. 

Money is a factor. Some of the high-ranked birders the brothers interview can afford to fly from one region to another, stay in hotels, and hire guides, making it easier for them to get to those rarely-sighted birds. The Reisers don’t have money. They convert Owen’s 2010 Kia Sedona minivan to a vehicle they can live in, and drive 30,000 miles over the year. Cracker Barrel has a traveler-friendly parking lot policy, so they stay in plenty of those. They also pull off the road and spend nights in the middle of nowhere. In the absence of money, one must improvise – and they’re very creative, which is what makes this movie so much fun. Their only indulgence is the spotting scopes and quality cameras with huge lenses that birders must have – if you can’t prove you saw it, you can’t count it. 

For a raw-amateur film, it’s well done, with plenty of humorous visuals: a mock-up giant blister-pack of Dramamine before they board a boat (didn’t help); a little model of their Kia they drive across a US map (Minnesota again!); the birds Quentin draws. And we have tantalizing film clips of owls turning their heads, flamingos in flight, songbirds flitting through brush, Harlequin ducks. The Reisers discuss the details that positively ID this or that species. They claim no expertise, they’re just caught up in an obsession – like everyone else in this film. 

“Listers” has graphically crude moments, but if you’re old enough to read this, you’re old enough to watch it. Any fan of the work of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog will enjoy this film. It’s on You-Tube – go find it.

Match in a Haystack, a documentary by Joe Hill

This 2025 documentary serves as a companion-piece to Porcelain War, the 2024 documentary by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev about art in a time of war. Both examine the lives of Ukrainian artists whose work has been interrupted by the Russian invasion of 2022. Duty to one’s country and its culture would seem to dictate enlisting in the army and risking life and limb daily in acts of resistance – and yet, these films insist that this war is about defending Ukrainian culture against a foe who declares that Ukraine has always been part of Russia and therefore belongs in its sphere. 

And so, the long tradition of creating tiny porcelain animals and birds, painting them in exquisite detail, then firing them, is an act of cultural resistance. Likewise, Match in a Haystack shares the stories of a group of modern dancers, all women in their early 20s, who find purpose in creating and performing a work which, as choreographer Gala Pekha urges, means nothing without heart. She and Yuliia Lupita, the company's director, unite in their commitment to creating something that matters, that resonates in a war-torn country. 

When Director Joe Hill had spent about 6 months in-country, Vice, his sponsor, declared bankruptcy. He was fortunate to pull together alternate support to continue working, but finding himself in uncertainty set up an uncanny parallel with his subjects’ circumstances. 

One dancer makes a pilgrimage to the front lines to visit her sister involved in the fighting, and receives her blessing to continue what she’s doing. Another persuades her parents, whom she has scarcely seen since the war began, to attend the performance. Gala in particular drives the “girls” hard toward authenticity – the stakes are high, all of them have doubts but feel the significance of this work. A “match in a haystack” is what they intend to create - a spark that starts a larger fire.

For this dance to be worth the time and energy of rehearsing, costuming, finding a venue then hoping it will be intact when it’s time to perform, these young women must open their hearts to their country’s anguish, filter it through their movements, and mirror it back to the audience. And they do. If you believe cinema has value beyond escapist fare, you should see this film.

Round Midnight, a film by Bertrand Tavernier

This music-forward 1986 film by French director Bertrand Tavernier showcases the work of bebop musicians in New York and especially Paris, where in 1959 tenor sax maestro Dale Turner, played by Dexter Gordon but inspired by Lester Young and Bud Powell, went to live. But it is the score that takes center stage – as it should! Finally, a film where the music really matters, with the images and story woven as background through inspired edits. 

Clearly Tavernier loves jazz – he would not interrupt a song to show the daily life of an alcoholic or Francis, the young Frenchman who, obsessed with his playing, meets his idol, befriends him, and finally looks after him. The music carries the movie. Herbie Hancock, who won an Oscar for Best Score, did a wonderful job – from Round Midnight to Body and Soul, Fair Weather, Una Noche con Francis, and How Long Has This Been Going On, the songs are performed live, with the musicians alternately playing onscreen and going about their lives. 

Gordon, also nominated for an Oscar for his performance, plays as only a truly accomplished musician can – but he also spices his role with asides to young Francis – “Was I good?” he asks with a mischievous grin after cadging drinks, or escaping a hospital ward, or finally prevailing on the nightclub owner and his "minder" to pay him nightly like every other musician. And Francis grins back and agrees he was good. 

Gordon was near the end of his life when he took this role, and you can see his exhaustion and precarious health, but also his rich mastery born of a lifetime of improvising, performing, and exploring new depths in his musical expression. Tavernier reminds us – to our benefit – that the pitfalls of an artist’s life are not what’s important about them: it’s what they create.