Nominated for a National Magazine Award, our second print issue features Hilton Als on Prince's Eyes, How Adderall Changed America, Sex with Neanderthals, New Fiction by Isle McElroy, Ordering Elements, and more.

 memorably opens with a scene of feral vulnerability: I love you—the words, Maggie Nelson writes, “come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had 

 by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? 

 you asked, then stuck around for an answer.”

A few days later she sends Harry Dodge—of the aforementioned you, an artist and Nelson’s now long-term partner—a passage from Roland Barthes comparing the Argo, whose parts are replaced while the ship’s name remains the same, to the nature of love’s expression over time. By mid-book, Nelson is pregnant and Dodge is taking T and getting top surgery. About their changing bodies, she writes, “On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”

With its shrewd integration of memoir and theory, maternity and queerness, since its publication in 2015 

 has brought new life and new audiences to autotheory—a term used since the ’90s to describe work, with early innovations in women of color feminist writing, that combines autobiography and embodied subjectivity with theory and philosophy. Nelson's book feels exemplary while defying classification. 

 tells the story of many forms of love, wrestled with and renewed with hot abandon and scrupulousness. In her writing before and since, Nelson has taken up subjects as specific and wide-ranging as the color blue, freedom, love, cruelty, chronic pain, and profusion with her distinctive sensibility: a thoroughness of thought that seeks to see beyond the options first presented, often leading her and her readers to different, more interesting questions.

With creative precision, poetry (how she came up) meets form (how she creates the container each book calls for). Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that “the test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say.” Nelson’s various, and very different, projects are a testament to this observation, and to another made by her teacher Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “In every language the loveliest question / is, You can say that?” Describing the nominative of the theory she helped pioneer, Sedgwick called queer “a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, 

. Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” A “perpetual excitement,” Nelson adds, like the Argo; like love naming itself, again and again.

Nelson meets this difficult flux unlike any other. Her friend and teacher Wayne Koestenbaum has described her style as “bathing in the light that comes from irresolvability.” Or, as Nelson puts it in 

, relating Barthes and Sedgwick, hers is a presence to writing and thinking that “demands an attentiveness—a relentlessness, even—whose very rigor tips it into ardor.”

Lucy McKeon

—how does it feel for the book to be a decade old? It’s been so influential in conversations about autotheory (you’ve said you stole the term from Paul B. Preciado’s 

), genre, and formal experimentation. It’s become a classic in queer and feminist circles. I wonder how you feel 10 years and many books later about this important work of yours.

Maggie Nelson

In some ways 10 years doesn’t feel like that long, though it is a while. I think I probably don’t see its influence as much as people on the outside do. What you just described, I was like, 

. I think I don’t quite know that exactly, but I know the tremendous unexpected journey that the whole thing took me on. It was my ninth book, or something like that. I was happy enough going along publishing books, so I wasn’t really thinking that this book would be any different in terms of its reception in the world. I’m really grateful.

With any book, you do the best you can do with the project you’ve set for yourself, and then either it has a greater sum of its parts or it doesn’t. And it’s been super happy-making to be like, 

Wow, I don’t think all of this would be happening if the book weren’t somehow greater than the sum of its parts

. I’ve recently had conversations about its international reach, doing book events in other countries, seeing translations, and hearing stories of passages read at weddings. That it’s been meaningful to other people—it’s something I never imagined.

When I think about the moment that the book was written compared to the political moment we’re in right now, that’s super dismal. I don’t know what you could say was expected or unexpected, but certainly it’s not the queer conversation, 

What will we do when we get all these rights and we lose our pervy hearts?

I did want to ask about that, the moment of writing versus now. In the book you and Harry get married just as Prop 8 passes, and in 2015, the year it came out, the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal nationwide. 

 famously troubles the line between the so-called radical and the so-called normative, and, as you say, we’re in a very different moment now. But it still feels as important to trouble that line, if maybe for some different reasons and some similar ones but in a different context.

There’s a kind of normcore reading of the book that could be like, 

Oh, we’re just like you, we’re making family and experiencing love and care, why can’t we all live together?

 But I think that to me, both when I wrote it and today, I see a different discourse. Which is what someone like Judith Butler has been reminding us all along—that it’s not any particular identities that we’re necessarily fighting for, but it’s against the forces that would discipline and punish people for wanting to live their lives however they choose to live them. Whether that means the life of a householder or a radical childless queer. The book’s last line, which ends with something like, “ablaze with our care, its ongoing song”—that care and that song are so fungible. In that sense, it doesn’t feel to me outmoded in the least.

Maybe it’s the feeling that this refusal to discipline difference is even more important when codifying identity seems like the main event, whether in opposition or protection. You mention Butler. The work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, so present throughout the book, also feels relevant.

I think all the time about what Eve would’ve thought about this moment we’re in, especially because she was facing the very oppressive right-wing of the AIDS era and of the discipline and vitriol that met queer studies at its inception. She wrote really eloquently about all that [in her collection 

, especially her essay “Queer and Now"]. I think people my age have been thinking a lot about that time and what habits or strategies we can learn from it, what we’re facing now and how it feels different. Rather than the kind of homicidal neglect of that era, now there’s more of a sadistic reaching into the communities themselves, or the zealots they have going through all the different language used in gender studies departments. I’m like, 

Wow, you guys know more about this field than I do

Your writing is rightly praised for its precision, but it’s also often so funny. There are humorous moments in 

, which is better known for its other qualities. In 

 earlier this year, the narrator relays her dreams:

“I see a text this person has sent him—it’s very touchy-feely, jargon-filled—I think it’s beneath him.
Yet it’s so different from me, I can see its allure.
H says something about her ability to brainstorm. And I think to myself, I will never 'brainstorm,' I’ll keep my ideas private until the last minute, I will never be what you desire.”

This makes me laugh and internally cringe (with recognition?) in part because it holds within it such a range of complex feelings, and I wanted to ask how you think about humor in your writing, and even specifically in writing about love and sex.

Well, that’s really nice. I try to amuse myself. And I was also interested, especially in 

 where I’m writing about chronic pain, in a tone or a sound that was not melancholic through and through, but that actually had the theater of the absurd attending to it.

I had a lot of fun writing that book and working with my dreams. Part of what I liked about it is that I might wake up feeling really sad, like, 

I’ll never brainstorm. I’ll never be what you want

. And then when I would look back on the file later, all my dreams just struck me as idiotically funny. In part it’s transparency, their anxieties and the details.

Secrets, what’s said and what’s not said, and how that can be both the grounds for great tragedy and also often the grounds for great comedy, is an interest of mine. What people know and don’t know about themselves or about others.

The medicalized scenarios are also encounters with who knows and doesn’t know: Does the patient know anything about herself? Does the other person know? It’s kind of funny, but also kind of tragic, because what if they do know and you don’t know? What it means to have a face, in a metaphorical and real sense, and to expose it to other people; what they can see about you and what they can’t—it’s the condition of all of our connection. And because of that, it’s also totally anxiety-producing.

Exactly. It feels like you’re describing the act of writing, too.

“I will keep my thoughts private to the last minute” is kind of a description of my writing process. It’s as if the character in the dream doesn’t know that she keeps making things public. She’s like, 

 in this text that’s not very private. You know what I mean? So again there’s this question of what she knows or doesn’t know about herself.

I think perversities can be compatible, but then perversities are not static. We all change. The book is about the thrill of finding something in the moment, but also knowing that a moment is one moment.

There are many different stories of love and care in 

—about Harry, about your stepson, about your baby and the erotics of the baby-mother relationship. About your own actual mother, as well as the “many-gendered mothers of my heart,” a kind of intellectual family whose words are interwoven with your own using Barthes-inspired marginal citations. And then, your thinking about language and expression feels like a central labor of love, too.

You’ve spoken about the kind of party you can create with a book by bringing together the voices of people you admire and love, and in 

in particular it feels almost musical or compositional, this collective subjectivity. I know you think a lot about form, and projects finding their right forms, and I’m curious what this form allowed you. I’m also particularly interested in the teacher-mentor/student-mentee relationship, which runs throughout your work—Christina Crosby being one such important and recurring figure.

I have a friend, Michael Snediker, who wrote this book called 

 that I really liked. After all this queer [theory about] shame and negative affect, I think he was taking up this question: Is it possible to find happiness interesting? That was kind of the theoretical undercurrent of 

. There are certain relationships, mother and child is one, teacher-student might be another, where there may be some kind of light shame blanket over them because it was [assumed that they were] just not interesting.

Sedgwick taught a class I took called Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology, and the family romance is obviously a nuclear family. The question of her class was, around the birth of psychoanalysis, what were some of the competing paradigms that might’ve taken hold instead? In 

, I wanted to put it all together: friends, people that you read, adopted family, blood relations. I didn’t really want it to be one or the other. This notion of the many-gendered mothers [from poet Dana Ward] was something that helped me do that. Cruising for intellectual mothers without quite knowing what I was doing. I don’t think I was looking for mommies, but I was looking for something nourishing that maybe wasn’t maternal, or at least not in a strict sense. I was interested in staging all of that in the book. With the marginal citations, I did really think of it as a party. All these people were helping me think this through. I wanted the book to have some sense of the rush of novelty, when you’re experiencing something you’ve never experienced before, like having a kid, but you're also relying on all the people who’ve thought about a lot of these things, who are there to help.

Okay. I think we need to talk about compatible perversities.

There’s of course the sex. (“You pretend to use me, make a theater of heeding only your pleasure while making sure I find mine… No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy.”) I also appreciate how you use the phrase as a kind of framework for how different peoples’ intellectual or political styles are compatible or not. It feels like a useful way of understanding something about how we meet and miss one another.

It’s funny because when you started off asking about a decade hence, one thing the book was kind of on to, but that can get lost sometimes, is this conversation about how we [both Harry and I] were aging—moving from transition or pregnancy or hormones, whatever, to putting an emphasis on change and time. All of which is to say that I think perversities can be compatible, but then perversities are not static. We all change. The book is about the thrill of finding something in the moment, but also knowing that a moment is one moment. And then, because we all contain multitudes, what next?

I’ve always been interested in Gayle Rubin and other thinkers who ask why—beyond all kinds of repressive and puritanical histories—do we respond to other people’s preferences either with repulsion or a desire to repress or reign in or make illegal? It’s very unfashionable, I know, and I kind of grappled with this in 

—I’ve heard it described in a dismissive way as the kind of pro-sex amoral lens that I grew up with and really responded to, that people now say is this libertarian ethos at its most extreme—but I still maintain, there’s much to be found in this space of using the language of compatible perversities.

, I have this one essay on the artist Matthew Barney, where I needed to go through the whole etymology of the word “perversion” and really describe what it means and how it is different from “transgression” or “subversion.”

 is your collection of conversations and essays with and about artists and writers, some of them old friends like Eileen Myles. Its title refers to Hilton Als: “Every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love.” It’s another kind of party.

Our diagnosis is similar but our perversities aren’t compatible

, about a political group that leans heavily on “comrade”-ing one another.

I think we’ve all had experiences of our perversities not being compatible with someone’s, and the kind of judgment that can rain down on that. And sometimes our perversities are compatible, but they don’t bring out the best in each other. So it’s a complicated brew.

I’m teaching a whole class on Roland Barthes this year, and I’ve been reading a lot of him in preparation. He wasn’t apolitical, but he was more analytical about politics than he was politically committed. His perversities were not compatible with bellicose language from the right or the left (Sartre and this idea of politically committed literature, the Marxist vogue and its effect on French letters). It was really not his jam. And it’s very interesting to read his analysis of that.

There’s a lot of conversation right now about what kind of new left might be born out of this insane moment. Not everyone’s styles have to be the same. What seems important is finding a container that can hold enough stylistic offshoots in a plurality so that people can feel like they’re a part of something without having to sign onto a mode of expression that feels alienating to them.

I don’t think I was looking for mommies, but I was looking for something nourishing that maybe wasn’t maternal.

And this goes back to not disciplining difference.

Totally. It’s a cliché, but we need forms of solidarity that people can feel at home being a part of. And that means we might not agree with each other. Our perversities might not always be compatible. But you have to be able to tolerate that without expelling people from the tent.

Barthes’s mantra was “pluralize, refine, continuously,” which was something that Sedgwick took up too: “pluralize and specify.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot more seriously. It is a task of writing—there’s something in the spirit of the thing that wants to be pluralized, a lot of doors for different kinds of readers to enter through, but it has to be specific to your own experience. A few years after 

Why isn’t it about this? And why isn’t it about that? And where is this experience here?

 I think that’s kind of a mistake, that politically invested readers or academic readers often have this imagined ur-text that could hold everything. But that’s not quite how it works. Art is specified. But I think at its best many people can find their ways in.

I wanted to return to the chapter on sex from 

 (the other chapters deal with art, drugs, and climate). There are many layers of history and thinking going on in this chapter, so those curious should read it, but for our brief purposes here, I wondered if you’d be willing to say more about your own interest in staying close to questions of subjectivity and agency, even—or especially—while considering structural or external forces.

I’m still kind of hoping that chapter on sex has its day in a different time. It feels like one of the chapters that has been most reduced to me [in responses to it]—as you say, there is a lot going on—but that didn’t surprise me. There isn’t a sexual agency some young woman’s going to find that isn’t constructed around the dangers that exist. However, the Foucauldian in me was also trying to point out throughout the book that there’s never Freedom, there are degrees of freedom.

I recently had a conversation with Shon Faye about her book 

Whatever happens with this book, I wrote a book in which a trans woman is the protagonist of her sex life story

. She’s not someone done unto, she’s not a victim of everything that happens, she is the protagonist of this story. And it kind of moves the world, but it does come at a cost. And part of the cost is you never do it totally right. And it can literally be used against you. What I was trying to get at [in the chapter] is that price—which is so hard to pay, whether or not you publish about it or just live it—is in becoming a sexual subject who’s not absented.

I don’t mean you’re responsible for everything that happens to you, a protagonist can suffer or she can be bewildered or bad things can happen. But she’s not absented by a system that wishes her no agency. And that really is meaningful to me. I was trying in that chapter to construct an archive of writers across various feminist and queer discourses who had taught me what that sounds like. But again, it’s not for everybody.

In your chapter on drugs, you draw out the tensions between choice and compulsion, particularly in literature about addiction.

I’m really interested in these questions and paradoxes about choice and compulsion and chance, maybe, as the third leg of that stool.

I follow all the debates about heteropessimism or heteronihilism. It’s interesting because, again, there’s so much going on—you read articles about these guys watching all this porn and trying to do crazy shit to their partners that they don’t want to do. But also, if you come from a sexually perverted community, reading article after article about the horrors of anal sex, the horrors of choking, you can see how easily they bleed into this kind of feminism-never-gave-us-anything-good narrative: 

Now we’re just triply unsatisfied because the workplace wasn’t good, our sex lives aren’t good

. The problem is there aren’t enough people in mainstream rags, 

 or whatever, who are willing to take on the need for—what’s Gayle Rubin’s phrase?—“benign sexual variation.” There’s no conversation that there could be a benignity to any of these practices. It really bothers me. There’s just this kind of relentless doxa of what meaning is already a given, about what’s humiliating and what’s dangerous. I read these things and I think, 

Wow, anybody who’s reading this who likes to do this or is figuring out something about what they like just feels doubly shamed now. 

And that creates more self-hatred and more taboo, and more of the things that disallow sexual subjectivity.

It’s a cliché, but we need forms of solidarity that people can feel at home being a part of. And that means we might not agree with each other. Our perversities might not always be compatible.

Adding to all the Sedgwick we’ve already discussed and that lives so lovingly in 

, at one point in the book you’re reading 

, her account in haibun—prose plus haiku—plus her therapist Shannon’s notes, of her treatment and relationship with him. I wondered about your interest in the psychoanalytic or therapeutic relationship.

The inception of my serious interest in literature had to do with psychoanalysis and the scene of reading as an invitation to the activities of both interpretation and transference. I think from the very start they were paired activities to me. Basically, as a reader, are you the analyst of the text or are you the patient of the text? Your reaction to it, the transference, is going to tell you something about yourself or about the world. That’s always been really alive for me.

In our very highly therapized age, I have a lot of curiosities and some phobias about the role the therapeutic has in a text. I’m wary because I see therapeutic language in writing that acts as a deadener. We’re in this great golden age of diagnosis. We’re in an acronym-bedazzled space. And yet we’re all noticing that the more diagnostics and acronyms are not corresponding to a better life for a lot of us. Ben Lerner has a new book coming out called 

 that takes on that gap, which I think is super interesting.

In three places I can think of in my writing, I’ve let myself have a therapist speak. In 

, I kind of rehearse my feelings about it when I get an assignment from a therapist to write a letter from my dead father (

 But then the joke was that letter ends up as a kind of climax to the book.

So many people are in a care crisis, seeking help wherever they can find it. With 

 I felt like, how California am I going to let this book get? How many acupuncturists, how many gurus? I was thinking about Hervé Guibert’s book 

. He is on a quest to not die of AIDS, and he’s talking to everybody under the sun about it. I found myself noticing that every age has its search for healers, and it sounds different at different times.

, about Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, you investigate their shared and diverging forms and technologies, and explore fame, lyric, and why people hate women who pour and pour forth with their life-art. There’s this great part where you anatomize the new disguise donned each decade by vitriol against personal art made by women—let me just quote you:

“To consider the most recent history: in the fifties, it was tasteless, inappropriate; in the sixties, it lacked rigor; in the seventies, it was too tied up with identity politics; in the eighties, it was allied with capitalist individualism; in the nineties, it marked the loss of objective truth; in the 2000s, it was neoliberal, and had something to do with the internet; I think the complaint now has to do with reality TV, auto- everything, and the left’s failure to collectivize adequately in the face of rising inequity and autocracy—but honestly, it blurs.”

If people look back at this time and see a reality TV aesthetic, they can make their analyses. I don’t mind that reading, and we are having a hell of a difficult time trying to collectivize around climate or anything else. But to make an ethical judgment from there about the lyric “I,” which has far exceeded this particular time—and whether it’s Montaigne or Nietzsche, philosophy has had an “I”—it just becomes silly. I would resist being like, 

And that’s why writing in this vein is unethical and has raised us two Celsius worldwide

. It theorizes a relationship between art and the world that I don’t think is useful.

It kind of relates to political perversities being compatible or not, or how to make movements. To have critics out there saying it’s stupid or bad that you like hearing about Taylor Swift’s love life when you’ve got millions of people, especially girls and women, loving it. I can’t remember where, but I feel like somewhere I heard Billy Joel saying something like, 

I brought my kid to the Eras Tour and I’d only ever seen this level of fandom at a Beatles concert. But back then, the girls wanted to sleep with The Beatles, whereas here they want to 

 That feels to me like a huge sea change, and brings us back to questions of autonomy. To choose that opportunity to denigrate what so many people are into—You want collectivization? Work with it, rather than just being like, 

“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”

I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk about 

, your books about your aunt’s 1969 murder, both of which are piercing and formally so interesting. And 

a favorite of mine. You’ve said that every book you write has a ghost book behind it, a sort of totem of influence or solidarity; for 

 it’s Wittgenstein (and Sei Shōnagon’s 

, it’s of course Barthes. I love this idea of the ghost book.

A few last questions in closing, just ignore any that don’t interest you: Are you writing any poetry? What are you reading or listening to? And what are you thinking about now?

Poetry, no—if it happens, it happens. With 

, it was a real pleasure to write a book that felt like it leaned more on my poetry skills—sound and details that interested me and arranging and rhythm. For some reason they just don’t have line breaks, I don’t know why.

. It’s really interesting. [On the topic of] being the protagonist in your own story, she’s going back to this sexually shaming event that happened when she was 18, that also kind of made her who she became. [She’s writing decades later] and she’s Google searching, trying to find the guy’s face. She talks about herself in the third person, asking herself, 

Who was that and what happened and how did it change me? 

She’s also revisiting her own desire. It’s a really beautiful book.

You’re reminding me of how you write, in 

, about self-interpretation as never static. How our stories about ourselves are always accommodating new experience, knowledge, insight, and understanding, for as long as a life.

Maggie Nelson is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry and prose, including 

art-cako

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

Ben Ratliff Runs the Song

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve

At some point, after he stocked the rivers with salmon and peopled the villages with descendants and in-laws, Coyote disappeared. Of course, he did not die—at least not permanently. Coyote, like the Coyote People, could not be put down forever. He would come back. Someday... probably? And we would too. At least that’s what the Coyote People believed back when we still called ourselves Coyote People.

The most common account held that Coyote would reappear in the End Times. When things came full circle, the trickster who molded the world into its Indigenous state would be there. Just to do whatever trickster shit needed to be done—make something, like a son; or break something, like the witches’ fishing weir; or steal something, like goose eggs or a wife; or invent essential ergonomic functions, like the elbow; or live a life full of damn good stories. Because how the world ends is just as important as how it begins.

Some said Coyote would reappear as a cooler version of Jesus. Cooler because if you listen to stories of his feats, Coyote resurrected way more than just once and did more to create our world than Jesus. Jesus died for our sins, and yet thereafter we were still sinners who could be damned to Hell. In the single act of liberating salmon—just one of many feats—Coyote provided over half of the Coyote People’s calories most years. While Christianity hands down eternal sentences for life mistakes, Coyote fills bellies, lives his own mistakes, and laughs about it all. According to a belief common among the Coyote People in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Coyote’s next coming would mark the renewal of the world and the return of an old and good Indian way of life.

Christians fingered Coyote as the Antichrist. Many believed the Indian way of life was the Devil’s work. That the Coyote People and our beliefs were wrongheaded, and that we would be punished for all time if we did not renounce Coyote and follow Jesus. And to make sure we did, they kidnapped our children and took them to schools where kids and even newborns were physically, psychologically, and sexually abused, assaulted, traumatized, neglected, diseased, starved, raped, and sometimes even killed.

I have come to see Coyote as creator and destroyer, messiah and Antichrist, forefather and deadbeat dad. He is the embodiment of forces greater than ourselves that drive and ride the metamorphoses of the world: of climate, geology, environment, technology, and culture. Coyote was change incarnate. And as his descendants, we carry that same power of transformation. Colonizers tried to remake us in their image or kill us—physically, legally, and culturally— countless times by countless means. But every time we came back, not as whitewashed primordial cultural goo, but as ourselves— as distinct peoples with prior and rightful claims to these lands carrying in our culture, memory, and blood the knowledge of how to live well upon them. To survive, we remade ourselves and the world around us in whatever way we could—often, and especially, by getting into trouble like Coyote, who broke that fishing weir, or my pé7e Zeke, who, amidst a genocidal apocalypse, almost single-handedly repopulated the Coyote People all up and down the Fraser River watershed; or my dad, who narrowly escaped the incinerator and many other brushes with death to bring the NoiseCat name and family back from the Land of the Dead.

In late May 1808, in this era of mass death, incipient invasion, and earth-shattering transformation, three birchbark canoes carrying a party of two dozen white men and two Indigenous translators came barreling down the Fraser River just after the spring floods, when the river was roaring in freshet. At their helm was a stubborn, barrel-chested, and heavy-browed 32-year-old Scotsman born in the colony of New York named Simon Fraser. He planned to follow the wild, unnavigable river that would eventually bear his name all the way to the Pacific. It was a preposterous mission. After he announced his intentions to the Coyote People, one of Fraser’s men fired off a swivel gun mounted on one of the canoes in an attempt to shock and awe the Natives. But the gun backfired, and the gunner was wounded. It was an appropriately slapstick entrance for this foolish voyage of discovery. Understandably, some of our ancestors went, “Coyote? Is that you?”

I have come to see Coyote as creator and destroyer, messiah and Antichrist, forefather and deadbeat dad. 

Though not all. Fraser’s identity was hotly debated. Some among the Nlaka’pamux said Fraser must be Coyote returning at the End Times. Others, like St’at’imc, said Fraser and his party were more likely cannibals. They were hungry, dangerous, and consumed many dogs. Still others, like the Coast Salish, said Fraser and his party were transformers, like the ones who shaped the world in the beginning. These ideas are reflected in the words the Coyote People use for white people. “Semé7,” the most common, comes from the root “sem,” meaning “to tell stories.” The word for Frenchman, “Stspetékwllúy,” comes from the word for narratives about tricksters, transformers, and supernatural events: tspetékwll.

Although not all Coyote People believed Fraser was Coyote, there was a common understanding, reflected in our words, that the incursions of colonists were world-changing events marking a new epoch for our people and planet. Some European explorers and historians have trumpeted these historical, linguistic, and ethnographic facts as evidence that Natives believed Europeans were gods. But that’s an arrogant Eurocentric way of looking at things. Because in our accounts, supernatural beings—especially tricksters like Coyote—were often out for themselves and up to no good even while their actions were of incredible consequence. And in all these ways, Fraser fit the bill.

Simon Fraser’s father, a Roman Catholic Scottish Highlander, settled in Mapletown, New York, in 1774. A British loyalist, the elder Fraser fought for the Crown during the American Revolution and was taken prisoner in 1777. Held in an American jail for 13 months, he died a prisoner of war. His widow lost the family farm and fled to Canada, where Simon’s modest upbringing included just two years of formal education. As a teen, Fraser went to work at the North West Company in Montreal, a fur-trading outfit increasingly manned by Scots. Fraser, a capable frontiersman and trader, was named partner by 25.

But the North West Company’s business was far from thriving. The larger Hudson’s Bay Company controlled forts and shipping ports on Hudson’s Bay, pushing the North West Company out toward the Rockies. The North West Company set up operations in the Peace River Country in what is now northwestern Alberta, where the land was rich in furs. But the overland route between Athabasca and Montreal was long and costly. To better compete, the North West Company was actively looking for alternative trading corridors and especially a navigable river route to the Pacific.

Fraser was the second Nor’Wester and Scottish explorer to visit the relatively calm upper stretch of the river that would bear his name. The first was Sir Alexander Mackenzie. When Mackenzie came through searching for a pathway to the sea, the Natives told him he shouldn’t take the river. To the south, it was impassable. (Any child raised on “Coyote and His Son” knew how dangerous our rivers and waterways could be.) And if, somehow, the river didn’t kill him, the warlike downriver Natives would.

Mackenzie listened. He followed an overland grease trail used by the Dakelh or “Carrier” Indians west. A grease trail is an Indigenous trade route so named because it was used to trade valuable, nutrient-rich oil rendered from eulachon, a sardine-like fish that spawns in and returns to river systems on the Northwest Coast. The Dakelh are called “Carrier” in English because they were a trading nation that carried grease and other goods from the coast to the interior and vice versa. Following Indigenous guidance, Mackenzie made it to the coastal territories of the Nuxalk near present-day Bella Coola, British Columbia, becoming the first European to cross the continent north of Mexico. Though Mackenzie’s route was too difficult for the North West Company’s purposes, his journey came a full 12 years before Lewis and Clark’s easier southerly crossing. The Americans reached the Pacific near present-day Portland, Oregon—a metropolis. Bella Coola, by contrast, remains a remote community reachable only via a dangerous switchbacked dirt road, small plane, or infrequent ferry. On a rock overlooking Dean Channel in Nuxalk territory, Mackenzie used a mixture of red vermillion and grease to memorialize his victory in this colonial-era space race. “Alex Mackenzie, from Canada by land, the 22nd of July, 1793.” (Take that, America.)

Unlike Mackenzie, Fraser did not listen. When he encountered the Secwépemc at Chimney Creek, the Coyote People told Fraser that if he wanted a river route to the ocean, he should leave the Fraser River and travel overland four or five days by horse to the river now known as the Thompson. From there, he could ride the gentler Thompson to an area near present-day Kamloops, British Columbia, then portage to Okanagan Lake, which feeds into the Columbia, the same river Lewis and Clark took to the Pacific. Against this advice, which he received at least twice according to his own journals, Fraser chose to travel the river that now bears his name. Though the Coyote People told him otherwise, Fraser believed the Fraser River was the Columbia. He survived the journey out of sheer luck and because, on many occasions, the Coyote People saved his ass.

The first and most helpful was the Secwépemc chief Cllecwúsem from Soda Creek, whose name means “to wear a mask” because the chief wore a face covering to protect himself from Fraser and his men. Whether this mask was a carved wooden face shield like the ones worn in ceremonial dances, a woven head covering like those donned by healers, or a precolonial KN95 has been lost to time. I suspect, however, the mask had something to do with Cllecwúsem’s spiritual power and political influence. The chief was well-loved. His brother gave Fraser a beautiful, well-dressed deer hide and beaver pelt, and asked the voyager to take care of his kin in return. While Fraser’s party canoed the Fraser Canyon rapids, losing a canoe on their first day south of Chimney Creek, Cllecwúsem rode ahead. The chief was known and respected up and down the river that fed and gave birth to the Coyote People. Through political and spiritual gravitas, Cllecwúsem negotiated safe passage for Fraser all the way through Secwépemc territory and into St’at’imc country.

The St’at’imc were far more suspicious of Fraser and his men than the Secwépemc. To this day, they still refer to Fraser’s party as “the Drifters.” One St’at’imc who met the Nor’Westers near present-day Lillooet said he had seen white men in “great canoes” on the coast before. He mimicked a naval officer, strutting with hands on hips. “This is the way they go,” Fraser quotes the St’at’imc in his journal. Others believed Fraser and his men weren’t white men at all. Since they seemed to prefer eating dogs over the plentiful Indigenous staple, salmon, they must be enemies or even cannibals in disguise. Fraser’s meeting with the St’at’imc turned heated, but the “Old Chief,” as Fraser called Cllecwúsem in his journal, held sway. This may have been because, according to oral history, Cllecwúsem’s pipe came from downriver. A pipe is a powerful spiritual and diplomatic tool. It connects the smoker’s breath to the Spirit World and was traditionally used to make agreements connecting people, villages, and nations to one another. I speculate that Cllecwúsem’s pipe signified his spiritual connection to and power within downriver St’at’imc country—commanding respect, granting him certain chiefly rights, and maybe even saving Fraser’s hide. Because despite palpable animosity, which nearly ended in violence according to Fraser’s journal, the Nor’Westers’ voyage continued.

Thus, the first treacherous leg of Fraser’s journey is actually a story of Cllecwúsem’s prowess—not Fraser’s. While it is unknown whether Cllecwúsem believed Fraser was Coyote or some other supernatural being, the chief had the forethought to talk to Fraser about building a fort at Alexandria in his territory, a long-term strategy to enrich and empower his people and himself. After Cllecwúsem departed upriver, Fraser and his men missed the “Old Chief.” “Here we are, in a strange country, surrounded with dangers, and difficulties, among numberless tribes of savages, who never saw the face of a white man,” Fraser wrote. “Our situation is critical and highly unpleasant; however we shall endeavor to make the best of it; what cannot be cured, must be endured.” Upon his return upriver, Fraser gave Cllecwúsem the finest gift he gave anyone on his voyage: a gun.

At ƛ’q’əmcín (Kumsheen), a town now known as Lytton at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers, some 1,200 people gathered to greet Fraser, who some believed was Coyote, and his party, who they saw as his helpers: Sun, Moon, Morning Star, Diver, Arrow-Armed Person, and Kokwe’la (a supernatural transformer who takes the guise of a root vegetable). Lytton is the place where the Nlaka’pamux say Coyote’s son crashed to earth after returning from the Sky World. It’s just downriver from the place where the Secwépemc say the witches’ weir stood and where geologists say there was once a great ice dam at the end of the last ice age. Because of Lytton’s centrality at the junction of two great rivers, the Nlaka’pamux consider it to be the center of the world. (I also have a great-great-great-grandmother from there.)

At the center of the world, Fraser shook hands with all 1,200 of the Coyote People gathered around. The chief from Lytton gave a long speech. He pointed to the sun, the four directions, and back at Fraser, according to the Nor’Wester’s journal. Then he brought forward his father, a blind elder, so Fraser could touch the man. The Nlaka’pamux offered the travelers a feast of salmon, berries, and roots. Fraser requested dogs for his men. After dinner, the Coyote People danced through the night, as their neighbors along the Columbia River had when they met the North West Company explorer David Thompson in 1807.

In our accounts, supernatural beings—especially tricksters like Coyote—were often out for themselves and up to no good even while their actions were of incredible consequence. And in all these ways, Fraser fit the bill.

Fraser and his party departed the next day and ran into trouble a few miles downriver when a canoe capsized and broke apart. A North West Company employee named D’Alaire, who the Nlaka’pamux remember as Moon, was carried three miles by the current before dragging himself onto the banks and up a cliff. There, after searching for hours, Fraser, or Coyote as the Nlaka’pamux say, finally found him.

After Fraser passed through the remaining territories of the Coyote People in the Fraser River Canyon and entered the delta lands of the Coast Salish, his luck turned. By then, he’d wrecked about a half-dozen canoes and probably as many pairs of shoes. Running low on supplies and trade goods, he turned to piracy.

At a village not far from where Pé7e Zeke was sent to St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in present-day Mission, British Columbia, Fraser robbed a chief of his best canoe. And for good measure, he seems also to have taken the chief captive as a human shield and prisoner diplomat for the remainder of his dash to the sea. Though the Coast Salish were wealthy and lived in enormous Big Houses— some even 1,500 feet long, 90 feet wide, and 18 feet high, hewn from cedar trees as much as 30 feet in circumference, they lived under near-constant threat from northern raiding nations like the Kwakwaka’wakw, Tlingit, and Haida. Northern raiders routinely sent fearsome war parties down the coast in huge canoes to pillage and take slaves. Some Coast Salish believed Fraser and his men were transformers. Others saw the Scotsman and his party as yet more maritime invaders. Paddling a pilfered canoe, Fraser barely made it past the village of Musqueam in present-day Vancouver before the Coast Salish turned the Nor’Westers around and pursued them back upriver until they returned the stolen vessel to its rightful owner.

By then, Fraser had other problems. Speaking on behalf of the crew, two of his men petitioned to abandon the river in favor of an overland route back home, like the one the Coyote People originally advised. According to Fraser’s own account, some even suggested they stay with the Coyote People rather than go home. “This journey did not meet the needs of the Company and will never be of any advantage to them,” wrote Jules Quesnel, Fraser’s clerk, in a letter to a friend in Montreal.

Fraser reached the coast, though he never paddled into the Strait of Georgia or the Strait of Juan de Fuca. He glimpsed the tops of the mountains on Vancouver Island but could not see the open ocean. And he never made it past the spot where the silty Fraser River water meets the blue sea. In the eyes of the North West Company, the journey was an utter failure. The Fraser River was unnavigable, just as the Coyote People had said. A latitudinal measurement taken near Musqueam confirmed another fact the Coyote People told Fraser: this river was not the Columbia.

Fraser was no triumphal explorer. He was a foolish river pirate whose obstinance almost killed him and many others. The name “Fraser River” thus commemorates the epic misadventure of a lost wanderer not so different from Coyote. Because the trickster was not just a mythological being. He was also a worldview, philosophy, storytelling style, and tradition.

For the Coyote People, the reappearance of Coyote in the guise of Fraser was ominous and profound. It meant the world was ending—because for us, it was. But it also meant that our departed ancestors and everything they carried—their names, their ways, their lands, and their worlds—were coming back. And they are. ♦

Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. 

, from which the excerpt below is drawn, is out this month from Alfred A. Knopf.  

ser-martin

The Cooler Jesus

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I have it on the highest authority that summer will never end. It might get cooler, intermittently, but it will never stop being summer. Which is of course wonderful, because summer is a bubble during which life's ordinary rules are suspended. Summer is when we don't have to get up in the morning, or even the afternoon. Summer is when nobody ever has to make eye contact. Summer is when nothing ever happened before this moment right now. Summer is when we trash the joint because whatever. Summer is when we fire guns into the air and the bullet never comes down.

All the very best countries celebrate their national holidays in summer. Summer is the season best adapted to modern commerce. When you think "Hollywood" you think "summer." Arson perpetuates summer; it makes it an action and not just a moment. In summer we think of rain as a calamity, and so does the weatherman. Summer craves fresh bodies. Summer has no consequences. Summer has children in every orphanage. Summer just walks into your house and goes straight to the refrigerator without saying hello. Summer has not spoken to the other seasons in decades. Summer cannot get served because it abjures shirts and shoes. There are open warrants out on summer.

But summer, however phlegmatic, dominates. There is no arguing or reasoning with summer. If you try to, summer just belches and everybody laughs. Summer doesn't need money because it has yours. Summer lies over the land like syrup on an ant hill. Summer wears your body like a shroud. Summer suddenly lashes out when everything is quiet. It pretends to retreat and then lashes out again. Summer knows your weaknesses, your blind spots, your unacknowledged biases, your unspoken shame. Summer pretends to love you but then burns you and runs. Your mind goes tilt whenever you try to think about summer. You try to tell people the truth about summer but no one believes you.

Summer wasn't always like this. It had a decent upbringing and a reasonable education. It lived in harmony with the other seasons, sometimes trading off bits of one another's weather. Just where it went wrong is uncertain, except that it happened in our lifetime. It was all those cars, all those drugs, all that red meat, all that money it sucked up and vaporized. Summer only remembers luxury and rage. Summer will not stop until it gets every inch of its way, and since that is impossible it will never stop. Summer will destroy everything we know and when called to account for itself summer will just belch. Summer is mindless. Summer is nothing but fun. Everybody loves summer. ♦

Lucy Sante is a Belgian-born American writer, critic, and artist whose most recent book is 

. The following piece first appeared, in different form, in 

ser-kosugi-maru

Lucy Sante: A Thousand Julys

My friend Roy has remarked that every ruin is a testament to grandeur, a monument to human pride, and a warning.

The problem is how it dries up the soil and turns trees into tinder, how it melts the ice sheets, how it creeps up on the body. Especially if you are old. Or sick. Or young. Or poor. The slow violence of it.

You can’t see the heat in the family picture we took after the ceremony. Yet our graduate is down to his shirtsleeves, having removed the tie and jacket we bought for the occasion in Italy because it was too damn hot to maintain the fashion.

Among the Ruins

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

As I walk the city, I sometimes recite the second line of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” The poem is an amulet. I use it to ward off the scourge of freeways surrounding our house in the Bronx. The Henry Hudson Parkway (NY 9A) that our boys must cross by an ugly pedestrian bridge to get to their public middle school. The Major Deegan Expressway (I-87) that turned back into a river when Hurricane Ida dumped a record seven plus inches of rain. The eight lanes of Broadway (US-9) that divide us from the greenspace of Van Cortlandt Park, where a brook now known as Tibbetts was dammed in the eighteenth century. I haven’t known this ancient little river, one of New York City’s many buried streams. By 1912 its final stretch was strangled into a culvert that led underground to the sewer.

I’ve known roads thick with traffic and loud as hell. Walking over the sewer line along Broadway under the clattering elevated 1 train—check cashing store, pawn shop, smoke shop, puddle, liquor store, dollar store, panhandler, fruit stand, puddle, laundromat, bodega, barbershop—you wouldn’t know that ours is a riparian habitat. Except, of course, for the puddles that remain after it rains. These days when it rains, it pours as if the very sky was torn. A puddle persists in a dip in the road directly in front of our house. The puddle has an attitude like, “Yo! I belong here. Do you?” A nineteenth-century map indicates that our house sits on the historic pathway of Tibbetts Brook. The brook’s absence seems sad and wrong. I live where something significant was intentionally vanished. Since discovering this, I’ve been following the ongoing restorative effort to “daylight” or unbury its water.

Daylighting Tibbetts Brook is one of the city’s most ambitious green infrastructure projects to date. It will cost $133 million to restore the waterway along a new route that won’t disturb the neighborhood’s structures, including our house. That sounds like a lot of money, but it’s a bargain compared to the high price of sewer and stormwater overflows when cloudbursts drop their heavy payloads. On dry days, four to five million gallons of freshwater flow from the brook into the sewer, ushering our filth and concentrated street runoff down to the Wards Island wastewater treatment plant. But when we get rain bombs, the volume of water is way too much for that system to process and spills unfiltered into the Harlem River, further contaminating the ecosystem, sickening all it touches. Daylighting will abate combined sewage overflow, extend greenspace, absorb heat, and relieve chronic flooding in our area’s janky, archaic drainage system, in an act of climate mitigation and as a community effort to solve a mess caused by old crimes.

When the crimes that got us into this crisis feel too much to bear and this endangered place itself—redlined, polluted, haunted—feels nearly unlivable, I recall what Mr. Rogers once told his television neighbors. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

My first encounter with the daylighting project was in the spring of 2023, when I went on a site visit with the Tibbetts Advisory Group, which included folks from the city’s Departments of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Parks & Recreation, the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance, the local community board, and Rebuild by Design, an organization that collaborates on climate resilience. The helpers. Some of them had been advocating for recovering Tibbetts Brook since the nineties when I was about as young as our children are now. We met at the terminus of a dead-end street, but there was a feeling of excitement and possibility in the air, like at the bottom of the ninth when the Yankees are about to win. I’d gone on walks of the city before, to reckon with climate change, sometimes with a companion and sometimes alone, but never in so organized a fashion, nor in a group dedicated to a solution. I felt cautiously optimistic. A representative from Bronx Climate Justice North reminded us that this was an environmental justice community with co-morbid social justice issues, that decades of disinvestment and poor urban planning had fractured and isolated the borough—which suffers the worst air and highest rates of asthma in the city—and that the Bronx was nearly destroyed by highways. Daylighting was a way for the city to do the right thing.

Before crossing a chain-link fence to survey the site, we went over the plans. About a mile of the brook would be brought back above ground from Van Cortlandt Park South to West 230th Street. It would flow alongside a newly built greenway with a ten-foot-wide bike and pedestrian path, beautified with native plants and public art under the overpasses. I was grateful to learn there would be several direct points of entry to the greenway from Broadway. My boys would no longer have to cross the busy interstate to bike to the park. But the brook would need to be piped back underground to accommodate a section of railroad tracks owned by the MTA, which are dedicated for garbage transfer and Metro-North’s Hudson line. Meaning, the residents of the NYCHA projects in that industrialized area of Marble Hill (which in 2018 had the city’s highest report of street flooding complaints to 311) wouldn’t get easy access to the greenway at all, raising the question: by whom and for whom was this venture?

Imperfect as it was, the daylighting plan was progressing. The final roadblock was the steep price of the land needed to reroute the brook above-ground. At this point in the story, the city was trying to cut a deal but the freight company that owned the real estate was acting like a crook.

We walked for several blocks along that contested property: the narrow corridor of a former railroad wedged between the Major Deegan Expressway and a string of strip malls and big box stores. Petco. Staples. Cubesmart. Target. Parking lot after parking lot over what was once marshland. Here and there the route remained marshy and thick with reeds. I noticed an abandoned shopping cart, the puddles stained red with iron oxide, the pawprints of a raccoon in the mud. It was hard to hear each other speak over the ceaseless roar of traffic. The acoustics were as god-awful as the air. All that separated us from the highway and its toxic fumes was a concrete guardrail, in some places only three feet high. I took pictures of graffiti and busted refrigerators strewn behind businesses whose basements regularly flood.

A landscape architect who lived elsewhere yelled something about how lucky we were to witness this place before it became an attraction, how when the Deegan was cut through here to continue I-87 and the train and sewer were built—and the chain stores came—each one had an easement. How easements overlap easements, so we wind up with waste space. How we were now walking somewhere between nature and not nature. How when this no-man’s-land gets remade as a public park, rail to trail—like Manhattan’s beloved Highline—new people would visit, revitalizing businesses in the vicinity. How wildlife and pollinators would share the habitat, too—the hope being to keep it wild, to enjoy the land along with other living things.

I had so many ethical questions without easy answers. It felt uncouth to ask them of a dream 30 years in the making. In any case, I doubted I could have been heard above the Deegan’s speeding cars and trucks. Unlike when walking the Highline, we weren’t lifted above the city’s bustle, but ambling directly beside the worst of its blight. Could it ever be pleasant here? Difficult to picture. Even with the brook resurrected, there would still be the sound of the road.

What does it mean to be a good steward? A good ancestor? What ought reparation, resilience, and restoration look like given the scale of the crisis at hand? The water never really went away. It still remembers where it used to be. Long ago, the Munsee Lenape called the brook Mosholu, meaning “small” or “smooth” stones. 

 I gathered several small, smooth stones in my pockets along the walk, from among the duckweed, trash, and muck. I later made a ring of them around the little shadblow tree I planted in our backyard in memory of my father. At first it was just a twig but has recently begun to grow. Eventually it will be underwater, along with our house.

As if pointing to my failure of imagination, someone from the DEP much younger than myself shouted that in due time the vehicles would all be electric, and consequently quieter. The working group went on pointing out the future features of the linear park. For example, where benches in the style of those at the 1964 World’s Fair and native trees would go: red maple, sweet gum, river birch. I wondered: how else might the park change the neighborhood? Will it invite gentrification? Will it grow too expensive to live here? Despite the ecological and economic benefits, will anyone suffer? Can daylighting outpace inundation, or will it be rendered moot by water tables that rise with the sea? If flooding catastrophes continue, what then? Would government funds be better spent moving the most disadvantaged among us out of the watershed to higher ground? Has anyone asked for the brook’s consent? Whose help is sanctioned when it comes to healing the land, and whose is rebuked?

Daylighting feels like a cause for ceremony, a chance to pay respect to the body of the ghost river that flows unseen under our feet. Better yet, to imagine the perspective of the brook. 

, an artist acquaintance and CUNY colleague who lives in the house she grew up in just a stone’s throw away in Kingsbridge Heights, on the east side of the Deegan. I’d asked her to join me on this daylighting walk and she’d politely declined, citing a dispute with park authorities that left her wary and somewhat bitter. During the pandemic, she and a band of other local, activist cis women and gender-nonbinary people of color in the North Bronx Collective devoted themselves to cleaning up Tibbett’s Tail, an overlooked park running between 234th and 238th Streets. It lays parallel to (yet invisible from) where I stood with the Tibbetts Advisory Group, imagining the daylit brook as the crown jewel of a park that does not yet exist. Tibbett’s Tail is an unwelcoming dumping ground on the wrong side of the road. It has no benches or trails and, being entirely inaccessible to the public, is overgrown with brush.

Sensitive to the disproportionate blow by COVID-19 to the Bronx, where an overflow of dead was buried in a potter’s field, Alicia and the collective rolled up their sleeves to make Tibbett's Tail a place for respite. Committed to mutual aid, land liberation, spiritual uplift, and the belief that parks are for the people, they worked hard to remediate its lead-degraded soil and nurture its medicinal flora. They partnered with a local church to use the park as a meal distribution site for the hungry. They also passed out face masks there, planned programs on healthy eating and composting, communicated their grassroots efforts to the proper advisors, including the Bronx Parks Commissioner’s office. Due to their good work, they even received funding funneled through the New York Restoration Project with which they installed raised garden beds to grow vegetables.

Helpers, I tell you. Within a few months the members of the collective succeeded in transforming the abandoned park into a vital community hub, only to find themselves shut out—the gate was literally padlocked by Parks, citing unspecific safety hazards. Getting locked out must have felt like a slap in the face. To the collective it reflected a larger pattern of intimidation, surveillance, and neglect in the city’s poor Black and brown neighborhoods, so often deficient of green. And now, having exiled those helpers, the city was powering up to bankroll this sexier thing.

Some workers in white coveralls were painting over graffiti on the back wall of BJ’s Wholesale Club, making a blank canvas for someone to tag again tomorrow—as true a metaphor for impermanence as ever there was. We are at an inflection point. A critical time for reimagining, reckoning, repair. There was a labor struggle here back when BJ’s was the Stella D’Oro Cookie factory; before that, a struggle between the Redcoats and the Patriots during the American Revolutionary War; a struggle when Dutch colonizers grabbed Indigenous people’s land. Mosholu is now the name of a parkway in the tangled road network constructed under arterial coordinator Robert Moses. Tibbetts is a bastard name for a bastardized brook, a misspelling of the last name of colonial settler George Tippett, whose loyalist descendants got kicked out of New York. It’s remarkable how many spots in the neighborhood are misnamed after this guy. The brook’s revival is the nation’s highest profile case of daylighting in a major city to date. As one neighbor said, “We got bragging rights in the Bronx.” Many of us look forward to some recovery of the watershed. At the same time, the brook is calling us to look back.

Such a poetic name for a feat of engineering: “daylighting.” It’s happening or has happened in cities all over the country and across the world. Berkeley, Boston, Detroit, St. Louis, Paris, Zurich, Sheffield, Manchester, Madrid. Adam Broadhead, senior scientist at the sustainable development firm Arup, has been researching daylighting projects worldwide. He wrote to me about the terms for daylighting in other languages. The Swiss refer to it as the sensible 

 or “stream concept.” In German, it’s the practical 

, or “deculverting,” also regularly used in Great Britain. In French, the more romantic 

, “returning to the open” of “disappeared waterways,” 

 Writer Anton Hur, who translates Korean literature into English, tells me that “restoration” is the best match of the Korean term, 복원, used for the daylighting of the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul.

Most daylighting involves restoring some or all of a previously covered river, stream, or stormwater drainage to a more natural state, but there are other ways of daylighting. Architectural restoration exposes the stream to open air while confining its channel within concrete walls. Cultural restoration celebrates a buried stream through markers or public art created to inform people of the stream’s original route, although the stream remains hidden. Now that NYC has finally cinched the land deal to unearth Tibbetts Brook, paying more than $11 million for the strip we walked, daylighting is expected to begin in late 2025. But it’s already been happening culturally for years, most prominently through

a constellation of artist and designer-led initiatives through 

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