Feral Child in the Chaos Garden

My book comes out tomorrow (!!!)

Hi, friends! An extra big hello and thank you to anyone who’s subscribed since I last posted. I don’t post often. The entirety of the past year, between pregnancy and finishing the book and childbirth/postpartum/infancy and the leadup to the book’s release, has left me with far less time than I would’ve liked to ramble about plants and my feelings here with you. I’m hoping that will change come August!

Because I have a bad habit of burying the lede, I’ll start here: my memoir, Wildfire Days: A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West, comes out TOMORROW—Tuesday, June 17th. I’m so excited! And anxious. And thrilled and eyes-welling-with-ambiguous-bigness emotional. And overwhelmed! You get the idea.

I have a lot of feelings, but considering the book is already on shelves in most Barnes & Noble stores around the country (lol - a part of me loves this rogue spirit from corporate employees), there’s no taking it back. The book will step out in public, and I’ll just have to surf whatever waves it brings to my shores.

If you want to buy the book, you can use this page from my publisher, get it from bookshop.org, find it anywhere books are sold (your local indie bookstore is great!), or request it from your library. If you’d like to learn more, here’s a review in the Los Angeles Times, an excerpt and a Q&A in Newsweek, another Q&A in the LA Times Books newsletter, a podcast episode from the show Living Planet, and my absolute favorite review, from Shelf Awareness. That lady just *got* me; I emailed her and was like thank you, I love you.

You can also hear me on NPR’s “Here & Now” on June 23 (eeeee!!! dreams!), and on “Morning Edition” from Santa Monica’s local NPR affiliate, KCRW, on June 17…and a bunch of other radio and podcast appearances, the exact air dates of which are unclear to me! If you’re in San Francisco or Portland, I’ll be appearing on local TV as I come through town (so cool! But also…yikes. I am having to blowdry my hairs kind of a LOT, you guys).

Lastly, here is my tour schedule. A real book tour! Dreams come true—although you know I’ve written about how hard it can be to accept reality when they do. If you’re in any number of California cities, Oregon, or central Texas, I’d love to see you!

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, what I really need to tell you about is my garden.

Despite having an infant and a book tour this summer, I insisted that we get cedar raised beds for the backyard. A fool’s errand? Perhaps. But Ed assisted (with minimal eye rolling and kvetching that we’d produce a single $300 tomato), and we filled a couple 6x2-foot beds with good soil. Our yard overlooks a semi-obscured slice of the Sacramento River, and we positioned the garden in that sightline. It’s nice.

Back in April, I started growing a few things from seed on the kitchen table: zucchini and cucumbers and jalapeños; pumpkins and cantaloupe; and flowers I hoped were heat-tolerant, including sunflowers, blue flax, calendula, and Texas bluebonnet.

Almost immediately, the zucchini and cukes germinated, sprouted, and began to bolt. I panicked, put them in the ground hastily, didn’t realize that cucumbers are sensitive to root disturbance, and killed all but one zucchini.

Everything else went in the ground a few weeks later, and I did a second round of cucumbers & summer squash from seed and supplemented with nursery-bought seedlings of tomato and strawberry. Long story short: everything was small, so I grossly underestimated how much it would grow, and guys, I planted WAY too much.

Now I have a chaos garden.

Whoopsie.

My first zucchini is a monster with leaves the size of…dinner plates? No, serving platters for entire roast turkeys. It’s already produced some fruit, which is cool, but it’s also refusing to grow vertically up the stake I was trying to train it to, and it’s shading out everything around it. In turn, the sunflowers are shading out the strawberries so the fruit won’t ripen. My mint is overtaking my cosmos. The tomato plant has gone buck wild, its sprawl almost predatory; it’s trying to feed-me-Seymour the jalapeños and calendula. The cucumber plants have grown into each other in a knot of yellow flowers, crawling up the fence (as intended), and over the salvia (not intended). It’s a goddamn mess.

The thing is, I don’t have much time—and I have exactly zero soil space—to fuck around with it and try to fix my mistake by pruning, transplanting, and rearranging. So all I can do is water, keep things alive in the heat, and harvest whatever arrives.

All I can do, in other words, is let it be. I can sit back and watch. So that’s what we do: Story and I go out every morning—early, because we hit our first 105-degree day in Redding already. I wear the baby in a front carrier, hand water everything with a wand, and frequently catch her with a fistful of flowers jammed in her mouth, a crumpled blossom already halfway down her throat as I’m saying no no no and prying the leaves from her soft, plump little fist.

We have been blessed with a headstrong, happy, feral baby who screeches like an overjoyed pterodactyl, plays by herself for 40 minutes at a time just chasing a ball across the floor, and is thrilled if she can get her hands into the dog’s water bowl.

So here we are, me and my wild child, watching our wild garden. None of it—baby, plants—can be controlled, or even more than loosely managed. You have to let it do its thing. And guess what? It’s beautiful.

Our first cherry tomatoes! A fun lil’ orange variety.

You know I’m gonna make this a heavy-handed metaphor now. Here goes…

Publishing a book is not so different. Once you’ve signed off on the final round of copyedits, so much of what follows is out of your hands, though of course you can hustle to try to amplify whatever publicity work your press is doing. And you can accept—or decline—the opportunities that come your way (I say yes to practically everything, because I figure you only have a first book come out the one time).

But you cannot control the bottom line, the outcome. Whether people buy your book, whether they like it, whether they tell their friends about it, whether you get decent reviews and media attention…this is beyond your grasp. As it should be! Other people get to decide for themselves what to enjoy.

If you’re very fortunate—and I have been extraordinarily so, thus far—the seeds you planted will bolt, and suddenly you have five-to-seven radio interviews a day during pub week. It’s tempting to see this abundance as a stressor or a curse, because you’re going to be terribly busy and tired for a while, especially with a baby; it’s chaos.

But the garden is filled with riotous calendula, and the world is filled with kind people asking thoughtful questions about the book, and what it was like to be a woman on a hotshot crew, and how we can confront our crisis of climate and fire.

It is so lucky and beautiful. I have to let it be, and harvest whatever appears.

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I haven’t been reading or listening to much lately, but I loved loved loved this recent post from my now-good-friend River Selby. They have a wildland firefighting memoir coming out in August, and we decided to be friends instead of competitors, and it has been the biggest joy. We are agreed: having a book is great, but making a new, true friend is even better. I strongly suggest you preorder their book, HOTSHOT; it’s gorgeous and smart and brave.

Of course, this country is (still) a hot mess swiftly becoming an Atwood novel—mostly a subject for another time, except to say that I was heartened by the number of protests over the weekend, including the biggest I’ve ever seen here in Redding. My favorite posters included “nobody is illegal on stolen land” and “I only bow to King Salmon” (the latter seen on the streets of Portland, via Cheryl Strayed).

I’m reading Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season, which has absolutely gorgeous prose and stunning revelations about fire, the body, self and nature, the concept of wilderness…she’s just dropping little intelligence bombs every other page. And I’m about a paragraph into Emma Pattee’s Tilt and can tell it will be fabulous. I’m doing events with both of these writers, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Well, I hear the baby waking, so that’s my time.

Be well, water your garden, and don’t worry if it turns into a tangled disaster. I’m right there with you.

Love,

Kelly