Heart’s Home

For many years now, Orion Magazine has been a guiding light for me as both reader and writer, so I’m especially grateful for the opportunity its editors gave Alexis Adams and myself to have an extended conversation about borders, belonging, rivers, forests, ecological grief, resistance and love. Called Heart’s Home, this conversation grew out of finally meeting Alexis in Albania’s Narta lagoon in the Vjosa Delta last year. Although we’d been great admirers of each other’s writing before then, spending time together in person alongside a river spanning Greece and Albania centred our understanding of the connections between places, people and wild species, while firmly anchoring our friendship in a landscape shaped by the ceaseless movements of water.

In time, the topic of our conversation naturally flowed to other places too, from the threatened Narta lagoon and the theoretically protected but fragile Vjosa River and its stunning, turquoise tributary known as the Shushica to the old-growth forests of Montana and the ancient Prespa lakes in northern Greece where a large part of my latest book, Lifelines, is set. And along the way, we talked about the importance of stories, the rich cultures of wild species, the threats to biodiversity hotspots, and what happened to a drowning elephant in an Indian river one day when a man’s heart couldn’t take it anymore. As we exchanged questions and answers through the digital ether, we gradually began to learn that the heart’s home can be a pretty big place when we choose it to be. The full conversation on Orion’s website can be read here.