To appreciate Air Liners you want to be in a bedroom at an intimate moment, and if you have the gift of spotting invisible creatures, you’ll see an amazing display.
You’ll see something like a greenish-blue, translucent, spherical sculpture, composed of tangled legs, elbows, knees, rising and falling trunks, hands shuttling everywhere on long arms, fanning hair, arched necks, curled feet, and glinting rows of teeth. Although made by only one couple, the sphere is crowded with lots of faces—sprouting from a shoulder, lined up in rows down a flank, or staring out of a buttock, blurring from one intense expression into another, eyes popping open, sparkling, melting, or fiercely shut. The limbs and members of the sphere look hollow, and the blue-green light seems to shape them out of the air, glowing and fading. Erotic acts in which the bodies join happen in visual overlaps, so that the fingers of one body are visible between the hips of the other, locked mouths surround a forked-looking tongue, and the female belly sits atop a telescope. These varied, blue-green, hollow forms of the act of love surround the solid human bodies that produce them, which are scarcely discernible except as a dark core around which the sphere shines and coruscates, like tubes of blown glass continually emerging around a hidden mouth.
—from “Air Liners” (Unstuck #1)
Sharona Muir is the author of three books, including, most recently, The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives. Her poetry and prose have been published in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Stand, The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University.
Interview by Janalyn Guo
UNSTUCK: I loved your story “Air Liners” in the first issue of Unstuck and really enjoyed your recent pieces published with the Kenyon Review and Michigan Quarterly Review—all of which are part of a larger collection, yes?
SHARONA MUIR: The story in Unstuck is part of a larger bestiary called Naked Men, Naked Women, Invisible Beasts: Tales of the Animals that Go Unseen Among Us. Most of what I do involves posthumanist thinking: people, animals, and nature.
UNSTUCK: The tales from your bestiary are rooted in the life sciences; they use scientific language and seemingly factual details. I would love to hear more about how you conceived your particular bestiary project.
SHARONA MUIR: So here’s a Medieval bestiary. [Holds up a book.*] There’s a family of lions: a mama lion, a dad lion, and a lion cub. What the bestiary tells us is that lion cubs are born dead, and the mother guards them for three days, and then the father comes and breathes into their nostrils, at which point they revive. And then this author writes, “And thus the Lord revived his son Jesus Christ after three days.” There are a couple of things we learn from the antique bestiary. 1) You didn't learn biology from medieval bestiaries, but 2) I think to a medieval person this would have been very meaningful, because it would have said that out there—in the vast forests of the earth where there were terrifying beasts—those beasts were somehow connected to you, spiritually and poetically, and they were part of the way you understood the world; they were part of the Christ story and that meant that animals had a kind of wisdom that helped you live your life.
And I think that this is what bestiaries are for. Personally, I think that everybody, now and going all the way back to the cave paintings, wants to feel that animals have a kind of wisdom, and that there are messages in that wisdom for us. That's why I really wanted to write a contemporary bestiary. I think that every age needs one.
The important thing is that medieval bestiaries were all about human beings; they were anthropocentric. You can tell from this story that it's not about lions. It's about human faith and belief. On the other hand, it's charming; it's a lovely story and there are very charming imaginary animals in medieval bestiaries. In my bestiary I wanted to keep that aspect: our poetic and spiritual connection to animals as if they have wisdom for us. But I also wanted to introduce the reality of the animals, the animal as the other. I wanted to be able to speak for the other. I wanted the animal to really be there and not just be some reflection of me. So that's why there are a lot of biological facts involved.
UNSTUCK: The people are integrated with these imaginary creatures; there’s this lovely coexistence.
SHARONA MUIR: So here’s something: It began as a game. I decided that I was going to make imaginary animals. I’ve always loved animal stories and stories about animals in biology. I thought: I’ll make them invisible; that way, everyone knows they’re imaginary. But I wanted to base them in scientific facts. That was for posthumanist reasons (I’ll go into this later). So I began inventing imaginary animals with a little bit of real science in them and I went to my scientist friends and asked, “Is this fact true?” and “What about this creature that I’ve invented around this fact?” And they would always say, “There is something like this!” I would go back and sweat my neurons trying to come up with something really good—and then they’d say again, “Yes yes, there’s something like this.” Finally I came up with the creature of the Golden Egg, which lives on cold nuclear fusion—and I’m thinking: come on, nuclear fusion! So I went to my biologist friends and said, “Here’s the creature,” and they said, “Well, in principle, it is not impossible for there to be such a creature.”
The coda to that is that we don’t know what’s out there. There could be creatures that live off cold nuclear fusion; we just haven’t found them. No matter what, I would always be at Mother Nature’s feet sweeping around her big toe. I could never imagine anything that is as good as what she’s done.
UNSTUCK: Ah, this leads me to my next question. One of my biggest curiosities while reading your work was all of your scientific knowledge. I’d love to hear about your engagement with the life sciences. Where did this interest originate for you? And who were your influences?
SHARONA MUIR: It began with my father who was a freelance inventor. He created the first remote-controlled cardiac catheter in 1969; he actually made it in his basement. He was quite an extraordinary man. But the reason that he was an influence to me for the life sciences was that he was in love with animals and nature, a biomimic before we had the term “biomimicry,” and was always looking toward nature and animals for solutions. He designed some hypodermic needles for minimal clotting, and the way that he did this was by looking at snakes, the way that their fangs are constructed. He was always telling me stories about anything from molecules to snakes to turtles, and it was very magical for me as a little girl growing up with that. That was the first thing.
Right now I live on a nature preserve. We’re surrounded by a quarter mile of trees all around and live on a patch of rock that none of the farmers can farm. There’s a forest here; some of it is old growth—some of the trees are 400 or 500 years old—and then there’s some younger growth. And a lot of animals and birds come through here. I am surrounded by critters, and I get to know some of them over the course of a season. For instance, I got to know the screech owl who is very intense about defending her babies. I could go on and on.
In terms of literary influences, mainly Italo Calvino. I take his books everywhere with me. He was also a child of biologists. Also, John McPhee and his book Annals of the Former World. His editors were leery of him writing a 600-page book about the mantle of the earth but he did it anyway, and it was a great inspiration to me. In fact, my story “The Golden Egg” that was in the Kenyon Review is dedicated to him because it’s almost a miniaturized version of the technique that he used in Annals of the Former World. At Princeton, he actually has his office in the Geology building.
I have to mention Pliny the Elder. I love his bestiary. It shows you all the antique stuff that people thought about the world because it was before science. You feel a kind of personal connection to him when you’re reading it. You feel his personality through that book, and it’s a very engaging wide-eyed personality.
UNSTUCK: Something that I’ve really admired about people who pay really close attention to nature is how they know (or are invested in knowing) all the names for things, trees and birds. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to be able to do. How do you go about learning all the names for the plant and animal life around you?
SHARONA MUIR: I live in Ohio in the farmlands, and a lot of that is thanks to living here for a long time. I’ve been in this house for 12 years. Part of it is that I don’t have the distraction of the city. I also have a husband who grew up in the woods and can tell me, “That’s a hickory, that’s a phoebe,” etc. I was very proud of myself when I saw something orange and black go by and realized it was a Blackburnian Warbler, a male—that’s when I realized I’d come of age. So it’s really a matter of keeping your eyes open, and having field guides and people around you that do a lot of observation. One of the interesting things about the community I live in is that people are focused on the wildlife around them. Down the road from us is a big marsh, and every year Tundra Swans come there from the Arctic, thousands and thousands of them. Everybody knows about the swans. There are some Snowy Owls that come by every so often. Everybody knows about the Snowy Owls. There’s a lot of gossip about the birds. It’s a very different culture from an urban culture.
UNSTUCK: Could you talk a little bit about posthumanism? What’s at the center of this kind of thinking?
SHARONA MUIR: Basically, long story short, for the last 2,500 years, western philosophy and religion established a premise that human beings were superior to animals and were above and separate from the natural world altogether. Posthumanism basically takes that keystone in the arch of our philosophical tradition and says it’s wrong. We’re not superior to or distinct from the other animals. We’re one of the other animals and we’re connected to the whole natural system. We’re not apart or special in any way, and our distinctive gifts, cognitive abilities and so forth, are species abilities, just the way bats have echolocation and bees have their particular talents for dancing and the mathematics that they do.
This is a huge development because it takes out this keystone and puts something else in there. What posthumanism puts back in the arch comes out of many many disciplines. It comes out of philosophy. It comes out of sciences like ethology and animal behavior and neuroscience. It comes out of the humanities. It says we are animals among animals, so we need to rethink our thinking in terms of these parameters. It’s a fundamentally different approach. The best way to explain posthumanism in my book is to tell you the epigraph. It goes like this: Animal life is mindful. The mind’s life is animal. That’s a posthumanist epigraph.
UNSTUCK: As an observer and lover of animals, are there animals that you are particularly attached to or drawn towards?
SHARONA MUIR: That’s a lovely question. I love dogs and I wish it could be something more exotic, but I really am a dog person. I worked with the Humane Society for a year going out with their animal cruelty officers. Most of the complaints were about dogs, so I learned a lot about them. All of my dogs are rescue dogs.
But to think more seriously on your question, Doris Lessing has a phrase in one of her novels: “The flame of the personality.” It’s somewhere in the Children of Violence series. And what she means is: you can analyze people forever and write down all of their qualities and their little ways but their personality is something that is more than the sum of its parts. And you know that instantly. What fascinates me about it is that I think that all animals have it too.
Now, pet owners will tell you that all dogs are different, all cats are different, all fish are different; what really fascinates me, though, is the idea that it applies even to creatures that we don’t think of as having personalities. For instance, every time I breathe out, there’s this big surf of breath and in it there are all these itty bitty bacteria. You and I are looking right at them but we can’t see them. They’re invisible beasts, right? Each one of them has got to have a personality. Why? Because each has a unique genetic makeup (if you have DNA and you’re alive you have unique genetic makeup) and a unique itty bitty history of how it’s dealt with life and its unique circumstances, because we know those circumstances aren’t replicated exactly by any other bacteria. I don’t know how such a personality would be manifested. Maybe in its organic chemistry, in the rate in which it produces some... cellular... substance? But, it’s got to be true because structurally it’s simply true. So, I’m breathing onto millions of personalities. There’s Stu, and there’s Barbara, and there’s Michael. When you think of that and you think of birds in the air and worms in the earth—even if you’re in the city—you’re surrounded by life. And every last one of them has its little ways, its little preferences, its little things that it does differently from everything else on earth. That strikes me with a kind of astonishment of heart. To me, that’s the most remarkable thing.
UNSTUCK: That’s a wonderful response! It seems that empathy is a big part of posthumanist thinking. How do you envision the arts, literature, etc., helping out in this practice?
SHARONA MUIR: A lot of posthumanists mention the arts being involved in this kind of reevaluation of species. The sciences find out how animals flourish. To create posthumanist senses of the human self, we can look to artists. For instance: Valerie Laws and her Haik-ewes. She writes words on the backs of sheep, and the sheep move around in their pasture and create poems. And there are other examples: art being done with bioluminescent mice, genetically altered so that they glow in the dark. You can go between what we call art and nature.
UNSTUCK: Speaking of art, I have this belief that animals have a sense of aesthetics as well, of enjoying beautiful things like a well-cultivated garden. I really think this is true when I observe them moving around in the yard.
SHARONA MUIR: Yes, there’s a catbird in my yard that sings like no other catbird that I’ve ever heard. It was like a jam session, one melody after another and they are all different. There’s such a sense of joy. And speaking a little more scientifically: there are the bowerbirds. The males build bowers and put shiny blue objects in them. And the females will come survey the bowers and the male that has the shiniest blue objects arranged in the way that the female likes best is the one who gets the female.
UNSTUCK: You mentioned that you read quite a bit of nonfiction, and I’m wondering if you might share the names of some illuminating books with our Unstuck readership.
SHARONA MUIR: I’m reading a lot of scientific stuff. Right now I’m reading a book called Sex and Death in Protozoa. What else? Well, apart from E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience, which I think everyone should read, I recommend this book called Shapes, by Phillip Ball. It’s beautifully written. It’s about how patterns in nature can emerge not because anybody is striving toward them or out of natural selection, but actually because of a variety of physical and chemical contexts. For example, why do bees use hexagons in honeycombs? It’s a really inspiring and lovely book, full of wonderful pictures of shapes that occur in a galaxy in space and then again on a tiny little creature on earth.
* * *
NOTE: The book that Sharona Muir was reading from during this interview was Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford M.S. Bodley, translated and introduced by Richard Barber (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1999).
* * *
Janalyn Guo is an Assistant Editor at Unstuck. She received her MFA in fiction from Brown University and lives in Austin, where she is at work on a novel. Her fiction can be found at Tarpaulin Sky, the New Yinzer, and Digital Hamper.
You’ll see something like a greenish-blue, translucent, spherical sculpture, composed of tangled legs, elbows, knees, rising and falling trunks, hands shuttling everywhere on long arms, fanning hair, arched necks, curled feet, and glinting rows of teeth. Although made by only one couple, the sphere is crowded with lots of faces—sprouting from a shoulder, lined up in rows down a flank, or staring out of a buttock, blurring from one intense expression into another, eyes popping open, sparkling, melting, or fiercely shut. The limbs and members of the sphere look hollow, and the blue-green light seems to shape them out of the air, glowing and fading. Erotic acts in which the bodies join happen in visual overlaps, so that the fingers of one body are visible between the hips of the other, locked mouths surround a forked-looking tongue, and the female belly sits atop a telescope. These varied, blue-green, hollow forms of the act of love surround the solid human bodies that produce them, which are scarcely discernible except as a dark core around which the sphere shines and coruscates, like tubes of blown glass continually emerging around a hidden mouth.
—from “Air Liners” (Unstuck #1)
Sharona Muir is the author of three books, including, most recently, The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives. Her poetry and prose have been published in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Stand, The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University.
Interview by Janalyn Guo
UNSTUCK: I loved your story “Air Liners” in the first issue of Unstuck and really enjoyed your recent pieces published with the Kenyon Review and Michigan Quarterly Review—all of which are part of a larger collection, yes?
SHARONA MUIR: The story in Unstuck is part of a larger bestiary called Naked Men, Naked Women, Invisible Beasts: Tales of the Animals that Go Unseen Among Us. Most of what I do involves posthumanist thinking: people, animals, and nature.
UNSTUCK: The tales from your bestiary are rooted in the life sciences; they use scientific language and seemingly factual details. I would love to hear more about how you conceived your particular bestiary project.
SHARONA MUIR: So here’s a Medieval bestiary. [Holds up a book.*] There’s a family of lions: a mama lion, a dad lion, and a lion cub. What the bestiary tells us is that lion cubs are born dead, and the mother guards them for three days, and then the father comes and breathes into their nostrils, at which point they revive. And then this author writes, “And thus the Lord revived his son Jesus Christ after three days.” There are a couple of things we learn from the antique bestiary. 1) You didn't learn biology from medieval bestiaries, but 2) I think to a medieval person this would have been very meaningful, because it would have said that out there—in the vast forests of the earth where there were terrifying beasts—those beasts were somehow connected to you, spiritually and poetically, and they were part of the way you understood the world; they were part of the Christ story and that meant that animals had a kind of wisdom that helped you live your life.
And I think that this is what bestiaries are for. Personally, I think that everybody, now and going all the way back to the cave paintings, wants to feel that animals have a kind of wisdom, and that there are messages in that wisdom for us. That's why I really wanted to write a contemporary bestiary. I think that every age needs one.
The important thing is that medieval bestiaries were all about human beings; they were anthropocentric. You can tell from this story that it's not about lions. It's about human faith and belief. On the other hand, it's charming; it's a lovely story and there are very charming imaginary animals in medieval bestiaries. In my bestiary I wanted to keep that aspect: our poetic and spiritual connection to animals as if they have wisdom for us. But I also wanted to introduce the reality of the animals, the animal as the other. I wanted to be able to speak for the other. I wanted the animal to really be there and not just be some reflection of me. So that's why there are a lot of biological facts involved.
UNSTUCK: The people are integrated with these imaginary creatures; there’s this lovely coexistence.
SHARONA MUIR: So here’s something: It began as a game. I decided that I was going to make imaginary animals. I’ve always loved animal stories and stories about animals in biology. I thought: I’ll make them invisible; that way, everyone knows they’re imaginary. But I wanted to base them in scientific facts. That was for posthumanist reasons (I’ll go into this later). So I began inventing imaginary animals with a little bit of real science in them and I went to my scientist friends and asked, “Is this fact true?” and “What about this creature that I’ve invented around this fact?” And they would always say, “There is something like this!” I would go back and sweat my neurons trying to come up with something really good—and then they’d say again, “Yes yes, there’s something like this.” Finally I came up with the creature of the Golden Egg, which lives on cold nuclear fusion—and I’m thinking: come on, nuclear fusion! So I went to my biologist friends and said, “Here’s the creature,” and they said, “Well, in principle, it is not impossible for there to be such a creature.”
The coda to that is that we don’t know what’s out there. There could be creatures that live off cold nuclear fusion; we just haven’t found them. No matter what, I would always be at Mother Nature’s feet sweeping around her big toe. I could never imagine anything that is as good as what she’s done.
UNSTUCK: Ah, this leads me to my next question. One of my biggest curiosities while reading your work was all of your scientific knowledge. I’d love to hear about your engagement with the life sciences. Where did this interest originate for you? And who were your influences?
SHARONA MUIR: It began with my father who was a freelance inventor. He created the first remote-controlled cardiac catheter in 1969; he actually made it in his basement. He was quite an extraordinary man. But the reason that he was an influence to me for the life sciences was that he was in love with animals and nature, a biomimic before we had the term “biomimicry,” and was always looking toward nature and animals for solutions. He designed some hypodermic needles for minimal clotting, and the way that he did this was by looking at snakes, the way that their fangs are constructed. He was always telling me stories about anything from molecules to snakes to turtles, and it was very magical for me as a little girl growing up with that. That was the first thing.
Right now I live on a nature preserve. We’re surrounded by a quarter mile of trees all around and live on a patch of rock that none of the farmers can farm. There’s a forest here; some of it is old growth—some of the trees are 400 or 500 years old—and then there’s some younger growth. And a lot of animals and birds come through here. I am surrounded by critters, and I get to know some of them over the course of a season. For instance, I got to know the screech owl who is very intense about defending her babies. I could go on and on.
In terms of literary influences, mainly Italo Calvino. I take his books everywhere with me. He was also a child of biologists. Also, John McPhee and his book Annals of the Former World. His editors were leery of him writing a 600-page book about the mantle of the earth but he did it anyway, and it was a great inspiration to me. In fact, my story “The Golden Egg” that was in the Kenyon Review is dedicated to him because it’s almost a miniaturized version of the technique that he used in Annals of the Former World. At Princeton, he actually has his office in the Geology building.
I have to mention Pliny the Elder. I love his bestiary. It shows you all the antique stuff that people thought about the world because it was before science. You feel a kind of personal connection to him when you’re reading it. You feel his personality through that book, and it’s a very engaging wide-eyed personality.
UNSTUCK: Something that I’ve really admired about people who pay really close attention to nature is how they know (or are invested in knowing) all the names for things, trees and birds. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to be able to do. How do you go about learning all the names for the plant and animal life around you?
SHARONA MUIR: I live in Ohio in the farmlands, and a lot of that is thanks to living here for a long time. I’ve been in this house for 12 years. Part of it is that I don’t have the distraction of the city. I also have a husband who grew up in the woods and can tell me, “That’s a hickory, that’s a phoebe,” etc. I was very proud of myself when I saw something orange and black go by and realized it was a Blackburnian Warbler, a male—that’s when I realized I’d come of age. So it’s really a matter of keeping your eyes open, and having field guides and people around you that do a lot of observation. One of the interesting things about the community I live in is that people are focused on the wildlife around them. Down the road from us is a big marsh, and every year Tundra Swans come there from the Arctic, thousands and thousands of them. Everybody knows about the swans. There are some Snowy Owls that come by every so often. Everybody knows about the Snowy Owls. There’s a lot of gossip about the birds. It’s a very different culture from an urban culture.
UNSTUCK: Could you talk a little bit about posthumanism? What’s at the center of this kind of thinking?
SHARONA MUIR: Basically, long story short, for the last 2,500 years, western philosophy and religion established a premise that human beings were superior to animals and were above and separate from the natural world altogether. Posthumanism basically takes that keystone in the arch of our philosophical tradition and says it’s wrong. We’re not superior to or distinct from the other animals. We’re one of the other animals and we’re connected to the whole natural system. We’re not apart or special in any way, and our distinctive gifts, cognitive abilities and so forth, are species abilities, just the way bats have echolocation and bees have their particular talents for dancing and the mathematics that they do.
This is a huge development because it takes out this keystone and puts something else in there. What posthumanism puts back in the arch comes out of many many disciplines. It comes out of philosophy. It comes out of sciences like ethology and animal behavior and neuroscience. It comes out of the humanities. It says we are animals among animals, so we need to rethink our thinking in terms of these parameters. It’s a fundamentally different approach. The best way to explain posthumanism in my book is to tell you the epigraph. It goes like this: Animal life is mindful. The mind’s life is animal. That’s a posthumanist epigraph.
UNSTUCK: As an observer and lover of animals, are there animals that you are particularly attached to or drawn towards?
SHARONA MUIR: That’s a lovely question. I love dogs and I wish it could be something more exotic, but I really am a dog person. I worked with the Humane Society for a year going out with their animal cruelty officers. Most of the complaints were about dogs, so I learned a lot about them. All of my dogs are rescue dogs.
But to think more seriously on your question, Doris Lessing has a phrase in one of her novels: “The flame of the personality.” It’s somewhere in the Children of Violence series. And what she means is: you can analyze people forever and write down all of their qualities and their little ways but their personality is something that is more than the sum of its parts. And you know that instantly. What fascinates me about it is that I think that all animals have it too.
Now, pet owners will tell you that all dogs are different, all cats are different, all fish are different; what really fascinates me, though, is the idea that it applies even to creatures that we don’t think of as having personalities. For instance, every time I breathe out, there’s this big surf of breath and in it there are all these itty bitty bacteria. You and I are looking right at them but we can’t see them. They’re invisible beasts, right? Each one of them has got to have a personality. Why? Because each has a unique genetic makeup (if you have DNA and you’re alive you have unique genetic makeup) and a unique itty bitty history of how it’s dealt with life and its unique circumstances, because we know those circumstances aren’t replicated exactly by any other bacteria. I don’t know how such a personality would be manifested. Maybe in its organic chemistry, in the rate in which it produces some... cellular... substance? But, it’s got to be true because structurally it’s simply true. So, I’m breathing onto millions of personalities. There’s Stu, and there’s Barbara, and there’s Michael. When you think of that and you think of birds in the air and worms in the earth—even if you’re in the city—you’re surrounded by life. And every last one of them has its little ways, its little preferences, its little things that it does differently from everything else on earth. That strikes me with a kind of astonishment of heart. To me, that’s the most remarkable thing.
UNSTUCK: That’s a wonderful response! It seems that empathy is a big part of posthumanist thinking. How do you envision the arts, literature, etc., helping out in this practice?
SHARONA MUIR: A lot of posthumanists mention the arts being involved in this kind of reevaluation of species. The sciences find out how animals flourish. To create posthumanist senses of the human self, we can look to artists. For instance: Valerie Laws and her Haik-ewes. She writes words on the backs of sheep, and the sheep move around in their pasture and create poems. And there are other examples: art being done with bioluminescent mice, genetically altered so that they glow in the dark. You can go between what we call art and nature.
UNSTUCK: Speaking of art, I have this belief that animals have a sense of aesthetics as well, of enjoying beautiful things like a well-cultivated garden. I really think this is true when I observe them moving around in the yard.
SHARONA MUIR: Yes, there’s a catbird in my yard that sings like no other catbird that I’ve ever heard. It was like a jam session, one melody after another and they are all different. There’s such a sense of joy. And speaking a little more scientifically: there are the bowerbirds. The males build bowers and put shiny blue objects in them. And the females will come survey the bowers and the male that has the shiniest blue objects arranged in the way that the female likes best is the one who gets the female.
UNSTUCK: You mentioned that you read quite a bit of nonfiction, and I’m wondering if you might share the names of some illuminating books with our Unstuck readership.
SHARONA MUIR: I’m reading a lot of scientific stuff. Right now I’m reading a book called Sex and Death in Protozoa. What else? Well, apart from E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience, which I think everyone should read, I recommend this book called Shapes, by Phillip Ball. It’s beautifully written. It’s about how patterns in nature can emerge not because anybody is striving toward them or out of natural selection, but actually because of a variety of physical and chemical contexts. For example, why do bees use hexagons in honeycombs? It’s a really inspiring and lovely book, full of wonderful pictures of shapes that occur in a galaxy in space and then again on a tiny little creature on earth.
* * *
NOTE: The book that Sharona Muir was reading from during this interview was Bestiary: Being an English Version of the Bodleian Library, Oxford M.S. Bodley, translated and introduced by Richard Barber (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 1999).
* * *
Janalyn Guo is an Assistant Editor at Unstuck. She received her MFA in fiction from Brown University and lives in Austin, where she is at work on a novel. Her fiction can be found at Tarpaulin Sky, the New Yinzer, and Digital Hamper.
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