Wild Pages

The Future of Books in a Healing World

For those discovering Story Ecology through this Earth Day fiction event, welcome to my newsletter.

“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by @Claudia Befu and @Julie Gabrielli, and supported with brilliant advice from scientists @JDTonkin and @betweentwoseas. The story you’re about to read is from this project. You can find all the stories as a special @TopInFiction Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher @EricaDrayton.

In pondering the “future of nature” prompt I asked myself how the healing and thriving of the planet might also lead to a eco-tech renaissance for books. (I also just enjoy writing about imaginary books). This brief fiction is my playful answer, and it should also give you a taste of what Story Ecology is all about. I hope you enjoy it.

[Image ID: “Wild pages” collage by the author]

WILD PAGES

The Future of Books in a Healing World

One. In the humid quiet of the biblarium Thea gently runs a hand along a new book-seedling’s nascent spine. Within the translucent membranes of the developing pages, mycelia are poised to arrange themselves into tomorrow’s words. Thea leans in close and whispers a playful thought. By morning, this will be the book’s opening sentence.

Two. In an elementary school classroom, a boy just learning to turn the strange marks on a page into words in his head turns to the first page of an illustrated book. Printed letters enlarge and resolve, sensing his wondering, uncertain gaze upon them—this is a new reader to welcome. Next to the image of a romping Golden Retriever one word in particular stands out from the others, catching the boy’s eye, awaiting recognition.

D. O. G., the boy spells out loud. Dog.

The word glows warmly, encouragingly.

Woof, says the Golden Retriever.

Three. This treatise about glaciers returning from extinction has a unique feature: if you add a few drops of water to its pages the letters become nucleation points around which ice crystals form, rising off the page in pellucid, fractal geometries of delicate prisms, columns, and needles. The growing crystals give off a whiff of deep boreal cold. They creak and whisper softly in the open air, like the northern lights.

The book allows you to not only read about ice, but also to gaze deeply into the living mystery of frozen water. The crystals hold their form until the warmth of the reader’s hands, cradling the book, causes the sharp lines and edges to blur like melting wax. The intricate faerie architectures succumb to gravity and lean in on themselves, they sag and crumple, until all at once everything collapses into sliding droplets that run into the gutter between the pages and out of sight.

The reader understands at last why the planet longs for the ice to return.

Four. Sitting on her back porch one summer night, the woman holds the tiny book in the palm of her hand. It lies there, shut, but its soft feathery pages are faintly stirring, as if any moment they will open.

At last the moon rises above the treetops, yellow and beckoning.

Go, whispers the woman.

The book trembles, unfolds itself. The pages are blank.

Suddenly they flap and flutter, like the wings of a moth, and the tiny book rises and flitters away, into the sky, towards the shining moon.

The woman quickly loses sight of the book. Her thoughts turn to the exhausting workday that is coming to an end—what she accomplished, what she didn’t. What she gave, and what she took. From there she gets lost in a bittersweet memory of her childhood, the time she stole money from her older sister’s piggy bank to buy herself a popsicle from a passing ice cream truck, her older sister who is long dead now from ovarian cancer but whom she still talks to, when she’s alone, every day.

So deeply enfolded is she in the past that she is genuinely startled to discover the book has returned. It has perched on the back of her hand and is quietly raising and lowering its paper wings as if breathing.

The woman gently takes the book in her palm again.

On the page before her is a record of the time of observation, the temperature and humidity, the lunar albedo and apparent magnitude of the moonlight on this hazy summer night. And more—traced in tiny silver lines across the page is the migration path of monarch butterflies that passed over her head unseen, linking her solitary evening to the invisible migrations that bind the healing world together.

Five. The fisher places the caught mackerel on the pages of an open book in the bottom of his boat. In the space of a few moments the paper has absorbed and mimicked the fish’s silver pattern. By dawn the next day, a poem will have formed, the letters the exact shade of malachite green of yesterday’s sea, a poem about the life of the fish. The fisher will read the poem to his wife and children by the fire after dinner. The following morning he will take the book with him to sea again, where he will carefully detach the page holding the poem, crumple it up, and cast it to the waves with a murmured thank you. The page will come apart into a rapidly dissipating cloud of nutrients, feeding the waters that have fed his family.

Six. When Sara reaches the page that tells of her father’s death, the pulse in her fingertips quickens. The temperature of her skin drops slightly and minute traces of telltale stress hormones are released onto the paper.

These subtle changes are sensed by the book, and it responds. The printed lines of text widen slightly, the letters transfigure to a muted shade of earthy brown. The formerly crisp serifs soften, like the voice of an old friend who speaks words of comfort.

Sara’s breathing slows. Out of the many scents the book is capable of synthesizing, a subtle efforvescence of spring rain rises from the binding.

Seven. The university’s most precious botanical textbook never leaves the garden reading room. Its western edge has grown chlorophyll green from decades of afternoon light. Biological science students are directed to come here at least once during a school term. They cannot check the book out. They are allowed only to sit quietly in its presence. There is much to notice and learn, if one takes the time. Page ninety-four smells perpetually of mint; page two hundred and fifty-three of worm-turned soil.

Eight. Night in the library. In the dim light, pale, nearly invisible filaments emerge from the fore-edges of three recent monographs on restoration ecology. They grope toward one another across shelves, knitting into a mesh that pulses faintly for a while like neurons and then at last retracts.

By morning, several paragraphs on urban parkland regeneration have been revised into a synthesis of new understanding that no single volume could have produced alone.

Nine. On a tenement stoop a teenager is reading. Her book’s pages catch the wind and riffle. Microscopic inky spores lift from the paper, and are carried, as weightless as thought, through the air. Some light on a discarded paperback from last century, half-hidden in a heap of trash waiting at the curb to be hauled away.

The paperback’s wood pulp pages, made cheaply without regard for the future, are badly foxed by the former world’s polluted air. The spores settle into these decaying pages and in moments delicate fungal outriders are already fanning out through these antique fibres woven by an earlier, more destructive technology. The stained, blotchy pages are repaired and healed so that once again they can be easily read and safely turned. But the rich colours of the foxing are allowed to remain—there is such beauty in these marks of age.

Overnight the recovered paperback pulses with the soft luminescence of stories waiting to be retold, of dormant wonder eager to be shared once more.

As the teenager passes by on her way to meet her friends, the book catches her eye. She plucks the rewilded paperback out of the trash heap and tucks it into her bookbag for later.

***

Thanks for reading. Here are all the participants in the Future of Story Event: @Alia Parker | @Alicia Arbe | @Annie Hendrix | @Ben Wakeman | @Brian Reindel | @𝐂𝐁 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 | @Chef Chris | @Claudia Befu | @D. A. Kelly Author | @Dan Reat | @Devon Nako | @Emily Charlotte Powell | @Johnathan Reid | @Joseph Young | @Julie Gabrielli | @Katie Brown | @Marla Lise | @<Mary L. Tabor> | @Nick Buchheit | @Nick Winney | @radicaledward | @Sarah Rose Nordgren | @Sharon Hom | @Shoni | @Stephanie Loomis | @Stephanie Sweeney | @Susan Earlam | @Thomas Wharton |