We are thrilled to be publishing this captivating debut essay collection by Isaac Yuen ­– a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders. Utter, Earth features odes to sloths, tributes to trilobites, and ringing endorsements for lichen. For animal lovers and readers of Brian Doyle, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Amy Leach, each essay of this one-of-a-kind collection combines joyous language, whimsical tangents, and scientific findings to remind us of and reconnect us with those to whom we are inextricably bound. Caitlin Solano recently spoke with the author for this Q&A for Booktimist.

How did some of your essays that were previously published end up coming together as a book?

I think there is a common voice running through the essays in the collection. The narrator who’s mulling over which creatures to invite to their next party is the one who’s trying to justify why sometimes it’s good to give up on dreams is also the one figuring out how to write stories with animal verbiage.

There’s an odd, rambling, flighty mind at work behind it all—a mind that is me but also not me—attempting to chart some type of internal cartography (or a menagerie, as they might put it) through a tangle of creature contacts and connections.

What inspired you to center animals in this collection?

The first piece I wrote was inspired by my time volunteering with the Beaty Biodiversity museum at the University of British Columbia. I was putting together a roving exhibit for visitors and the theme of “living fossils” came up. So into the cart went an impression of a coelacanth, a pressing of gingko leaves, a bunch of shark teeth, and as I recall, an ammonite fossil. In the process of explaining everything to kids and adults, I thought it might be interesting to try to write a story around organisms that managed to live a very long time, and to do it in a fun, accessible way. I think that then grew into the direction I wanted to take with a full-length collection.

There are an incredible number of facts about the natural world in this book. What resource materials did you use and what was your research process like?

Yes, the intention is to present a firehose of information, mostly to reflect the volume of research people have conducted to try to understand the natural world. There was a lot of journal and article reading. Science news aggregators were very helpful. For example, in one of the stylistically different essays in the collection, “A Breath in Four Parts,” almost every sentence was derived from a published paper or a presentation from a scientific conference. Yes, people have explored at length the intricacies of nasal cavities of ankylosaurs. Yes, people noticed that deep-sea coffinfish held their breath underwater and wondered why. Yes, people have tried feeding seaweed to cattle to see if that would reduce the amount of burps and farts. Putting all that into a narrative was a lot of fun.

The research process was a good reminder on how we are constantly discovering interesting things, yet there is still so much in the world that surprises. It’s like an antidote to cynical thinking. Researching also taught me to work with hunches, as often I found that following some obscure fact rattling in my head would lead to an even more interesting insight. Like, I knew mountain beavers were evolutionary oddballs but didn’t know their kidneys can’t concentrate urine. Or that Virginia possums are basically mobile garbage disposals but have a surprisingly short lifespan. Delightful stuff.

Utter, Earth is my attempt to inject some [humor]  into the nature writing genre, because I think we need more of it, as it hits a different register. And not just gallows stuff either, but light, offbeat, subversive.

Which writers would you count among your influences?

With regard to Utter, Earth, the chief ones would include Amy Leach, Brian Doyle, and Ross Gay. I like that their works offer a non-prescriptive joy. They don’t tell me to be reverential of nature. Instead they adorn and showcase what already exists, whether it be mundane or extraordinary, in bombastic, whimsical, or poignant ways. It’s less a message-driven approach and more of a new-way-of-being/seeing approach. Plus there is a spiritual dimension to their work I find captivating.

Another literary influence was Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, an editor at Harper’s who manages the Findings column. Certain pieces in Utter, Earth were shaped around a similar conceit of clipping scientific findings and juxtaposing them in interesting ways. This exercise in creation through curation (plus distillation) allowed me to shape some interesting narratives.

Of course, the dual masters of imagination, Ursula K. Le Guin and Italo Calvino, are always lurking in the background for me. Passages from Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, essays from Le Guin’s Cheek by Jowl—they can’t help but seep into my brain and the work.

What draws you to the essay form?

I love playing with structure, because whenever you have structure you can play both in its midst or at the fringes. For Utter, Earth, I wanted to veer away from the first-person personal style, because frankly, I’m a bit bored of hearing myself in that mode. So I constructed a persona that’s a little madcap and overly energetic, prone to tangents. It allowed me flexibility to play with distance and tone, depending on the piece.

I think this approach also served one of the aims of the book, which is to decenter the human (at least slightly) in order to shine the limelight on the natural world. Of course, I can never fully remove the self or the human, as I wrote it as a human and it’s intended for humans, but at least I can retreat behind the persona and point to all the creatures and go, “hey, look over there! How amazing is that?”

 As an environmental journalist and author, you’ve written about similar topics in the past. What was different about your approach for writing this book?

I’ve done a lot of science communication and nature writing, and I think at times things can get a bit jargon-heavy for those who are not in the know. Not just in terminology, but in assumptions that can form inadvertent barriers. Throughout the project, I tried to keep in mind why a reader might care about any of this. Sure I can bring forth arguments, like biodiversity is important, that we can’t live without nature, or I can appeal to sentiment, describing the majesty of certain creatures, how iconic they are to an ecosystem. But I know a lot of people who aren’t moved in these ways. They don’t have the context.

So instead my approach was just to build as many connections as possible. The density becomes the point, even if the journey becomes labyrinthian, because it illustrates how complex and weirdly fascinating the natural world can be. I tried to pack each essay with elements that surprise, in language, in content, in trajectory. And if the reader’s not in the mood to wade through density, they can skip to the glossary and learn just one name, one fact, one odd piece of commentary. That might be enough to pique their curiosity.

The other major difference in approach involves humor. Utter, Earth is my attempt to inject some into the nature writing genre, because I think we need more of it, as it hits a different register. And not just gallows stuff either, but light, offbeat, subversive.

The book goes into some of the history and evolution of various species. Did your research change your perspective on endangered or extinct species and nature’s ability to recover?

There’s a piece early on in the book called “102 Briefly Mentioned, Mostly Living Things”, which is just a list of the names of creatures from previous essays. It became an interesting exercise to strikethrough the names of things that were either non-living or extinct. Yet I caught myself when it came to dinosaur/ancient reptile names, because they seem to operate in this liminal space of being so dead and being so real in our collective consciousness, which was neat to think about.

For me, writing about creatures from long ago offers a certain comfort. To realize that being in the sixth extinction means that there were five prior, and really bad ones at that, with a lot of losses and a lot of close calls, but despite everything, life on Earth persisted, and we humans are probably only here because of extinctions. That feels hopeful. But at the same time, one cannot help but be confronted by a sense of permanent diminishment, in what once was and what never will be.

As for the ability of nature to recover, it’s a difficult question to answer because nature can be both resilient beyond our reckoning and much more fragile than we realize. If we think about nature, we need to hold both of those elements in mind at the same time. Relatedly, I’m thinking about one of the essays in the collection called “On Sights Unseen.” It talks about how humanity is undoubtedly the cause of much loss and destruction, yet we are also the mourners who grieve, the fighters who protect and cherish. Nothing is easy and nothing is black and white, but that’s us, that’s the world.

The book only briefly mentions how humans have impacted life on earth. Did you want readers to draw their own conclusions?

I’ve recently been researching black holes for a short story. How for a long time one couldn’t directly observe them, how we could only detect their influences on their surroundings, which is unfathomably destructive. I think Utter, Earth is akin to writing around the black hole of human impact, if that makes sense. It’s shaped by the intensity of the gravity, but for the most part resists getting sucked into it. The thing is that there are already a lot of books that do the vital job of highlighting our misdeeds. I wanted to throw a different voice into the conversation. Yes, we have bungled things badly, and of course that merits attention, but at some point, I think it’s important to say, enough about us—what about the three-toed sloth and the basking shark, the hermit crab and the tinamou?

In the end, I think I simply get a big kick thinking about how little they think about us. I hope the reader gets a laugh out of this as well. Maybe the key is to not treat this particular approach as distraction, but as rather as justification for appreciation and action.

What books are you reading now?

Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada: An wonderful exercise in writing around the unsaid.

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh: A masterful melding of natural, cultural, and personal histories on a region perpetually in flux.

Dispersals by Jessica J. Lee: An intimate collection of essays on one’s relationships with plants and how they can come to build meaning and shape identity.

This year’s Pushcart Prize Anthology: Always a treasure trove of short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

Can you say what your next project will be?

I’m currently a writer-in-residence at the Hanse-Wissenshaftskolleg (HWK) Institute of Advanced Studies, working on a short story collection tentatively titled Our Museum of the Future, which probes the lives of scientists doing science. The scenarios are mostly literary and realistic, but more often than not non-human voices pop up in significant ways.

I’m also working on a travelogue based on a recent 5,000+ mile roadtrip across Japan, but through the lens of fish and other aquatic entities—their natural histories, their cultural significances, their futures in the Anthropocene.

The third project is a collaboration with my partner Michaela Vieser tentatively titled The Atlas of Deep Sea Features. It’s an attempt to bring to the public eye the geological, ecological, and cultural histories of these little-known spaces, especially in the light of issues like deep-sea mining, where ignorance is being wielded to advance agendas of extraction.