Camille Dungy
Excerpt from Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
This link between my artistic life and my connection with the greater-than-human world has been with me from the start, and perhaps has only grown stronger over the years. In my very first book, I made the greater than-human-world into family, and that has remained the case with all my writing since. Now, in Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, I have a chance to examine this connection even more deeply and directly. The interconnectedness that I witness in my garden is often seemingly fleeting, incidental, and yet it is crucial to my survival. To the survival of all of us. When I spot the unassuming Ridings’ Satyr butterfly in my yard, I know I’ve built an environment of welcome by cultivating the grama grass and flowering plants and bare soil that species needs. And as a writer, it is an honor to take the time to slow down and witness this miracle, the miracle of sustenance and splendor that isn’t a given and that might disappear if enough of us don’t take the time to slow down and witness and care. When we pay attention in the way that art and writing demand we pay attention, we work to build crucial spaces of welcome and connection every day.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster: May 2023). She has also written Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy’s editorial projects include Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention, and her work as poetry editor for Orion magazine. Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.