Book Club Reading Guide: Soil
Camille T. Dungy on gardening and growing
Hello,
Our next True Stories Book Club on Wednesday 15 November, 7pm UK/2pm ET/11am PT. This month, my guest will be Camille T. Dungy, who will be joining me to discuss her wonderful memoir of gardening and growing, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden.
Here’s a brief reading guide to get you up to speed. Just in case this is your first book club:
Paid subscribers can join us live online for the discussion - a link and password will be posted in the Chat.
If you can’t make it, a full replay will be available straight afterwards from the same link (or a little later in your podcast feed).
You’re welcome to send in questions for Camille - please post them in the comments. Don’t be shy; it’s always lovely to get your input!
About the book
At a superficial level, Soil is a gardening memoir, full of gorgeous descriptions of plants and getting your hands in the soil. But the garden in question is a political gesture, an act of resistance and an assertion of belonging. Camille T. Dungy’s prose uproots the staid monoculture of the suburban garden, and takes a fierce, critical look at its assumptions.
The story opens when Dungy moves to Fort Collins, Colorado, with her husband and daughter. A Black woman in a predominantly white neighbourhood, she is affronted by the planting restrictions imposed by the local community, and sets out to diversify her own garden. This opens up a stage upon which the value of diversity itself is explored, and with it the desperate need for environmental justice, and for a reappraisal of the plant knowledge held within the African diaspora.
Soil is an exceptional book with a compelling central narrative, gorgeous writing, and a real sense of radical urgency. It made me reimagine the possibility of a garden.
Listen to an audio excerpt of Soil here.
Camille talks about Soil on NPR.
Housekeeping Is Part Of The Wild World Too in The Atlantic.
About Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy often writes about history, landscape, culture, family, and desire. In addition to Soil, she is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and a Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism.
She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology. Currently, she is the poetry editor for Orion magazine and hosts Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, her further honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
Hope to see you there on 15th November!
Take care,
Katherine
**Correction** If you received this as an email, the month at the beginning is wrong! The event is on 9th November, and my relationship to time continues to be tenuous at best 🤦♀️
Thanks to Rebecca for pointing this out.
Just a heads-up, at the beginning of the post the date is given as 9 October! At the close, it’s correctly reiterated as 9 November--phew. At first I thought my phone was delivering notifications weeks late . . .