Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, by Heather Swan
Penn State University Press | May 2024 | 184 pages
There is a certain pleasure in finding a book in which form and content complement one another naturally. Part of this pleasure comes from witnessing the bravery inherent in an author who chooses to write with her intuition and tenets rather than towards genre expectations. Heather Swan accomplishes this in her newest book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection.
Swan—a poet, nonfiction author, and lecturer—has created an eclectic environmental work. This book is Swan’s second addition to Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures, a series from Penn State University Press. Swan’s first work in this series, Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field, is a collection of personal essays about people working to protect and rehabilitate bee populations and habitats around the world. To introduce us to this complex political ecology, Swan blends lyrical nonfiction, field notes, and illustrations. She employs this inventive, welcoming form again in Where the Grass Still Sings, although this time she has opened her scope of study to include many kinds of insects.
In her introduction, Swan argues that insects have been “exempted from our circle of care,” even though they are a crucial class of animals that face intense pressures from ecosystem degradation and loss. Insects are disappearing, along with their habitats, without much fanfare or concern. This is the problem, Swan contends; this book is Swan’s response.
Where the Grass Still Sings has elements of travelogue, poetry anthology, environmental essay, and personal history alongside a curated selection of pen and ink drawings and images of taxidermy sculptures, metal sculptures, paintings, and fabric collage. The work is organized into chapters; between each chapter is a themed gallery presenting the insect-focused work of a visual artist. Swan’s warm prose contextualizes the art with a mix of poetry, theory, science, and personal experience.
In the Introduction Gallery, Swan showcases Jennifer Angus’s work—intricate and mesmerizing patterns created with the dead bodies of moths, grasshoppers, and other insects. Swan writes that Angus pushes the viewer to see insects in ways that break expectation. “She creates exhibits that intend to unsettle the viewer. By setting up a tension between beauty and disgust, or sometimes fear, she challenges audiences to move past revulsion toward a curiosity that could lead to respect for insects—and possibly care.”
The chapters stitch together Swan’s own insect-related explorations and discoveries from her travels to a museum in California, Wisconsin bogs and farm country, the American South, forests in Ecuador, and a mountainside in Colombia. These chapters introduce the reader to people doing intensive, place-based conservation work, people “who are supporting ecosystems, and who have become insect advocates in our precarious moment.”
As Swan asks her readers to expand their circle of care, she has expanded the circle of voices within her own book. We hear from poets, artists, farmers, biologists, land stewards, naturalists, and many others. She presents communal experience as a tool for survival in the midst of ecological peril, “Mosaic thinking has become the way I survive.”
She borrows the term interbeing from honey bee expert Michael Thiele, who borrowed it from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn. Interbeing, in far too short a definition, is the recognition and lived understanding of the interconnection and interdependence of all beings. Swan’s stated purpose is to “bring to light the stories of people who have deeply inspired me, who are living this idea of interbeing.”
Purpose and form are wonderfully entangled in Where the Grass Still Sings. Swan has organized a collage of voices. In doing so she has written interbeing into the structure of her book.
Interbeing asks us to consider existence beyond the self, beyond our species. Like all worthwhile projects, this idea begins with imagination. What could it mean to consider the intelligence of millennia of lives reaching and losing equilibrium in your rivers and on your skin? In this imagined space hierarchy falls apart. A caddis fly, a wolf, and a person lean on one another indirectly, and dominating a landscape means losing the relationships that support and define us.
Swan’s mosaic thinking is one way to begin thinking like an ecosystem. She takes us with her as she collects stories of interdependence from wildly varied geographies. She turns her tender, observant eye on insects so that we might see them as essential to themselves and to all else.
Where the Grass Still Sings exhibits many ways we can give a damn about insect life. It reminds us that all manners of caring matter, can make a difference. In our climate, the familiar environmental call to care more might feel burdensome to those who could reply, “I do care.” Swan’s inventive form, open-hearted tone, and specific focus might help an overwhelmed reader imagine new ways of caring, of developing myriad forms of hope. Swan wants the reader to reawaken to the magic inherent in healthy ecosystems. After all her travels, she ends her book back home in Wisconsin, witnessing fireflies float out of field grass while crickets rub their legs together in a choir of hums. Bugs like stars, bugs that sing—there are small miracles still with us.
Read poetry by Heather Swan originally appearing in Terrain.org.
Grace Butler is a fiction writer from Waterbury Center, Vermont. She recently completed an MFA in Fiction at the University of Montana. She holds a BFA in Environmental Humanities from Whitman College (2018), where she was a Sherwood Scholar. She is currently at work on her first novel, which is set in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Header photo by Square Frog, courtesy Pixabay.
