Issue 61 — "The Shift Is Real and It Persists"
A Conversation with Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books
Dear Reader,
I am just back from a family wedding in Northern California that provided the opportunity to spend a few days in and around Pt. Reyes National Seashore. After years of severe drought, the rains of this past winter have turned the hills into the lushest shades of green, and wildflowers are blooming in carpets and clouds everywhere you look.
This trip also gave me the chance to make a ritual pilgrimage to Point Reyes books and also the opportunity to spend a little time with Stephen Sparks who in the lightly-edited interview below generously shares his thoughts on the state of the eco-literary ecosystem and dishes out some pretty sharp new green reading recs.
Thanks to Stephen and I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Stephens Sparks is the leading environmental bookseller in the United States, the co-owner with his wife Molly Parent, of Point Reyes Books and a valued friend of The Chariot. As you’ll read Stephen has seen a big shift in the thinking on climate and equity in recent years and a real hunger from his customers for great writing that brings the two together.
Stephen and I sat down at a picnic table on a sunny April day in a small park just down the street from the bookstore in Point Reyes station and started chatting away . . .
Stephen We have an event today with Erin Sharkey for her new anthology, A Darker Wilderness.
Nicie Yes! I’ll be attending online. That’s the next book I'm hoping to write something about, so it works out really well.
Stephen And I think she just did an event with Katie Holten who has a new edition of The Language of Trees.
Nicie The Language of Trees! Just this week my daughter asked me, What do you want for your birthday? and I was like “Get me that book!” She makes a typeface for trees!
Stephen Did you ever see the other edition of it?
Nicie No.
Stephen We sold about four hundred copies of the previous edition, but it was brought out by this German publisher under the title About Trees and we had it in the store for years until until it the print run sold out. Between Green Apple and here, I've certainly sold more copies than anyone else and then, Craig at Tin House wrote to me and said “This book has your fingerprints all over it. What's the deal?” And so I sent them our old display copy. That was just last fall. They really pushed it through to publication.
Nicie Cool. I just wanted to say thank you so much for making some time to hang for a minute. As I was thinking about our conversation, one of Ed Koren’s (Rest in Pen and Ink, Ed.) cartoons was making its way around Twitter. I don't know if you've seen it. It shows the the potter sitting in front of his shop with all his pots behind him and it says: ARTISANAL above the storefront. And then next to him there's a little sign that says ARTISAN. And I was thinking about craft and the craft of bookselling in addition to the craft of writing. And I was wondering about that lineage in bookselling and how it goes back, who would be your mentors and what lineage do you associate yourself with as a bookseller.
Stephen Well, it's funny. I mean, I was thinking a lot about that as well, the sort of the craft of it and the creative act of bookselling beyond being something transactional — that it's an expression, right? Like if you walk into a bookstore and there are the books, and we have a great staff and, you know, it's obviously collaborative in that way that expands. But it is also the space itself, the arrangement of things. People are entering your mind or entering someone's mind. A Booksellers' Mind.
Nicie Totally.
Stephen Which I find really interesting. But to answer that, Paul Yamazaki at City Lights has been a huge influence. He's one of the great, sweet, most generous people. I got to know him when I was at Green Apple along with Kevin Ryan, who's one of the owners of Green Apple when I started there. I also worked at a little boardwalk bookstore in New Jersey where I grew up. When I was in college there I was bookselling, I just kind of fell into it.
Then I moved to San Francisco, sort of sight unseen in 2007. I got a job at Green Apple right away and so like the cultivated my this understanding of bookselling there. Yeah. And then met Paul a few years after that and Paul is just really generous. I mean really when we told him we were buying the store, he pulled out this old binder from the ABA of, you know, kind of like best practices and cost of goods things. I mean, this binder was from the early eighties, that he had just saved, you know, and he gave it to us. Mollie and I had dinner at Zoetrope with him. He is that model of a bookseller who is connected to the world in other ways, and he really expanded my idea and sense of what it could mean, you know, even in the space, even if you don't get to see everybody every time they come into the store or yeah, host events, but you're making those connections in other ways is is really important and valuable lessons from.
Nicie And we slag on it all the time but e-commerce and social media have made new things possible in terms of that community, which certainly feels like a real vibe.
Stephen Yeah, I mean, I thought about that all the time through the pandemic. You know, the store's footprint has expanded so greatly because of all the virtual events we've done and the way people are just kind of because you find, you know, people find their bookstore, right? People shop with us from all over the country, even the world. We get people asking us for ideas all the time, you know, because it's they feel a connection to the place and to the bookstore and what the bookstore stands for.
And being at Point Reyes is important to people. I think when they come out here, they're feeling like they're living their best life and feeling aspirational. Oh, you know, I joke that we all of ourselves I think are very aspirational. I mean, I walk home, I leave every day with two or three books and I'm like, What am I doing? Where are these things going to go?
Nicie Well, as I like to say to my husband, you know, if you're going to have an addiction . . .
Stephen There are worse things.
Nicie Nature writing might not be the worst.
Stephen Exactly.
Nicie I think we can say it’s definitely not the most perfidious.
Stephen Yeah.
Nicie And actually this I was going to put this in later, but well, I'm thinking of it. This term “Nature Writing.” How are you feeling about that. Is that working for us? I know Robin Wall Kimmerer would like us to let go of this dualist conception of there being a thing called nature that is separate from humans and the human sphere of activity.
Stephen It is so loaded, and it speaks to that kind of writing as a genre, which I feel like is so limiting in a way. You know, like any genre label feels like it's a prison, right? And it's just too narrow. And you see I mean, I was joking with an editor friend about a blurb that says “genre bending.” And we're like, “Can we just get rid of that?:
Which is, you know, the interesting thing about tonight with Erin, this idea of expanding what it means to write about nature. Yeah, nature being urban, being in your backyard, or your alleyway, you know, because the separation of nature from our lives in our day to day lives is. I mean, that's part of the problem, right? It's led to this compartmentalization that is not actually the way the world works.
Nicie So many pieces in that book are really staying with me. But one is about protest, that protest is nature.
Stephen Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ways that it can be planted. Yes. And I feel like that ground is shifting, in a lot of ways due to Robin and the influence of Braiding Sweetgrass (see FC Issue 2). And Rob MacFarlane's writing a book about the rights of nature, and Robin's writing a book about the rights of nature, as well. So there's this, I think there is this move to sort of dismantle that distinction. Whether the publishing world ever actually lets go of the term “Nature Writing” I don’t know because, you know, publishers want to stick with what works. “It’s a hot category,” you hear that a lot, which isn't necessarily the impetus behind the way that we want to get books into people's hands.
Nicie To break down constructs that aren’t serving us and find new find new language, maybe that’s part of the work of our time.
Stephen Yes, even being able to do that in small ways here where you're like on the table that says environment. To put books that somebody is like, why is this here? And you know, this sort of expands someone's mind by thinking like even just a minor, a small thing like that in like my shift one perception, you know?
Nicie Absolutely. So I think maybe related, and I am curious . . . We know our global ecosystems are so challenged, but how is the health of the environmental writing ecosystem from your standpoint? What where do you see is going well and where do you would you see gaps?
Stephen Well, as usual, the gap is the lack of writers of color, right? I mean, that's the thing. And it's even since we took over the store and that was one of my main focus areas when we took over. I wanted to focus on this section and make it the best it can be. But also in the last few years, even that has shifted. You know, I do think prior to 2020 and the protests that you referred to after the murder of George Floyd. That summer you just watch the shift occurring and it's really interesting to see with people like Tajja Isen’s and Amy Bradys anthology, The World As We Knew It and Erin’s anthology A Darker Wilderness.
Nicie And Camille Dungy’s anthology, Black Nature (see FC Issue 46).
Stephen yes Camille Dungy, who will do a virtual event with her this summer for her new memoir, Soil. And Leah Penniman, you know, of Soul Fire Farm who co-wrote Farming While Black, because she has a new anthology of Black nature writing as well. And so the shift is happening. And my hope is that that the sort of good intentions behind that shift on the part of publishers and editors is met with by readers, which I think there is. I think there's a hunger for it.
Nicie What about the readers that you serve? Are you seeing. I mean, I feel like pandemic there was at least for some, a real turn to reading and to being outdoors that you know, you and your colleagues at Point Reyes Books were so generous in helping us all through that. What are you seeing sort of post-pandemic in terms of any new trends in your readers interests and needs?
Stephen It's interesting. I mean, I feel like that shift that did occur that year has sort of carried over, and seeing it so granularly here like in the small store where where we have conversations, which is part of the joy of it. Yeah. Can't draw big conclusions but I do feel like that shift was real and it persists. And in an ideal world it will keep changing and growing.
I think about 2020 out here, there was the fire in the park following that, you know, we were just closed for four months or whatever. And then, and then there was a fire as we reopened, like the sort of fraught nature of all that. I do think that shifted a lot of people's sense of like where we are and made it much more real. Yeah, not even just the fire here, but that was the year of the orange sky.
Nicie I remember saying to a friend who was dying of cancer at that time was I thought that this that the orange sky was going to change some people’s minds across the country about the reality of climate change.
Stephen Maybe it has. And in small ways I do think so. Yeah.
Nicie It's not like that's the only thing, but . . .
Stephen But I mean, if you need a more visible sign, right, I mean I remember Liam at that point. That was October of 2020, right. Yeah. Or September. Yeah. He was 18 months old and he walked out, came out of his bed in the morning and looked at the sky and he saw and he looked out the window and said, "Uh-oh" and you know I was like this is the Yes I know is exactly the response.
Nicie How weird it was, there's some like deep way we're wired to know that.
Stephen And the weird thing about that day, I remember it was like the air was fine. We went out and we had to get out of the house. We went to the farmer's market and the we're in farmer's market and yeah, I sat under that sky. The hope is that the memory of that doesn't fade because it is, you know, last year for us, at least in the Bay Area, like there weren't really any smoky days, maybe one or two, like generally. And you kind of forget, you know, like it's amazing how quickly we adapt to a situation. Yeah.
Nicie. Dave Goulson talks about that in Silent Earth (see FC Issue 37), the shifting baselines problem. If you don't think it's appropriate to have insects on your windshield, how would you know that it is a bad sign when you don't?
Stephen There's also that great book The Moth Snowstorm. It is very much about shifting baselines.
Nicie Oh, that's the magic is when somebody can take a story that's could be abstract or technical but it’s really important and then they make it super concrete and find powerful language.
OK how about we sling some book recs.
Stephen All right, Maybe we should be in the store for that. I feel like that’s the place for it.
Nicie Let’s go.
We head into the store . . .
Stephen I have been inspired recently reading The Lichen Museum, by Laurie Palmer She's a conceptual artist, who teaches at UC Santa Cruz. It's about lichen, and it's about how by paying attention to one little thing you can open up the world and embed yourself in the world more. A museum as a concept is it's everywhere. It's free is open to everyone. You can find lichen everywhere. She has pictures of the book of people looking in cracks in the sidewalk in Chicago. And yeah, and we'll do an event with her in a couple of weeks.
Stephen I am also really looking forward to the new book Stay Cool about the need for dark comedy in the environmental by Aaron Sachs, who wrote a book years ago called The Humboldt Current, which is about the beginning of the environmental movement in the U.S..
Nicie What’s this? The Nature Book: a novel?
Stephen So this is a novel with no original writing. Tom Comitta took excerpts from over 300 English language novels. And he only used descriptions of nature from those books and fashioned it into a novel. It's wild.
Nicie What? So it's like reverse erasure. It's like collage.
Stephen. Yes. He basically has no humans. It was it's just, you know, and he has a list in the back of where he got everything. He's amazing. It's just . . . the ability to think, to look beyond.
Nicie And to break form in that way. Wow.
Stephen And then I'm very interested in this anthology, Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World.
And another thing I’m reading is In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. Daisy Hildyard recently raved to me about this. I interviewed him for Bomb for his novel that came out with Melville House years ago, This is a first contact novel. It starts with this sudden appearance of a deep rift in the North Atlantic and goes from there. He approaches the environmental themes in this kind of interesting oblique way.
Nicie One I was looking your shelf talker on is this Jean Giono Hill. Have you read that?
Stephen Yes. He's amazing.
Nicie And an introduction by David Abram!
Stephen Yes. It’s worth it for for that actually.
I mean, it's very French countryside. Someone kills a lizard.
Nicie And let me guess: bad karma.
Stephen Bad things happen. Definitely. And nature is just woven throughout.
[At this point we go off on a gushing tangent about O, Caledonia by Elspeth Barker]
Nicie All right. Well, Stephen, thank you very much. Much appreciated. Great to see you.
I buy several books and am about to take some obligatory pictures when a pair of grackles flies into the store, and Stephen needs to focus on helping our non-human neighbors exit gracefully. This feels like the perfect way for the interview to end, and I clear off to go hiking.
Sending spring love and hoping you all had a worshipful Earth Month . . .
xo Nicie
This is such a rich and inspiring conversation. I'm sitting at my desk just before 6, the sky dove grey with a little gold on the horizon, and thinking about lichen, sweetgrass, fire...
So many books! Thank you, roaming Chariot!