Leading up to the writing of The Flowering Wand in the fall and winter of 2020, I experienced something I labeled in retrospect as the Hungry Caterpillar phase of my creative process. Book binging. Without knowing why I was doing what I was doing, compelled by some subperceptual appetite for transformation, I began to consume massive amounts of books and information, following the breadcrumbs of one bibliography to the next book. I’m a big reader and truly believe that if you want to write, you must read. Read good books and bad books. Both teach you. In fact, bad books are often even more instructive as they make us more aware of craft and how important it is. Read the genre you want to enter so that you can honor and respond to its ancestors and elders. I love literary fiction and trashy romances. I love dry theory, sprawling histories, biographies, memoirs, and medieval romances written in Middle English. But if I have any sort of intuition, it’s the biblio-appetitus that kicks in every couple of seasons, narrowing my palette to very specific flavors. Leading up to the Flowering Wand I read and reread every book on mythology and ecology I could get my hands on. My focus narrowed and narrowed until I realized mid-January that I was primarily reading about fungi and Dionysus. I didn’t understand what this reading-binge was leading up to until it began to overflow into the online essays that would become The Flowering Wand.
I primarily read non-fiction for the two years that encompassed the writing of The Flowering Wand and the essays that would lay the groundwork for The Body Is a Doorway. Looking back, I see that I was building a compost heap of ideas that ultimately decayed and re-articulated into the soil of my own books. But as these books were sent off to my publishers and I struggled with poor health and depression, I sought out fictional stories again. I needed to lose myself in other people, other worlds to interrupt my “terminal uniqueness” that had me feeling cursed by the universe. First my appetite widened and then it…regressed into rereading the books that had formed me many years prior. I went back to Herbert’s Dune. The Mary Stewart books about Merlin. Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Octavia Butler. I reread Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Then all my favorite Anne Rice books. Somewhere around my revisiting of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander in 2023, it clicked in – my new biblio-appetitus. Romance and fantasy.
What followed was my hungriest caterpillar season on record. I consumed over 200 fantasy and romantasy books in the space of under six months. I read good books and bad books. Self-published books. Fanfiction. I read everything.
By the time I sat down and started to write my own romantic fantasy – one that I’d initially assumed I wouldn’t attempt to write for many years – I was not wholly surprised. My desire for comfort and love and storytelling had also been an unconscious Genre Bootcamp. I was now well aware of the styles and story-shapes I enjoyed, the tropes I read for, the cliches and narrative pitfalls of which I wanted to be wary. I’d been reading like a horny teenager. But I’d also been unintentionally doing the research I’d need to pull off the work I most wanted to write.
I’m between fiction projects currently, reassessing how I navigate publishing, sitting on three books. There’s another non-fiction book brewing, essays accumulating that all have common themes, but in the last six months I’ve noticed my biblio-appetitus kicking in and narrowing its focus.
I seem to be reading primarily about collapse, civilization and its symbiont: empire. This, of course is not news and given the current state of the world it feels perhaps timely. In some ways I’m always writing and reading about these themes. The Madonna Secret was concerned with the Roman Empire and how religion responds to extractive, commercialized agricultural states. The Flowering Wand was very specifically concerned with the rise of dominator cultures and mythologems in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The Body Is a Doorway wanted (tried, maybe failed) to interrupt modernity’s human monologue. In many ways that memoir is very concerned with collapse. It looked at the collapsing, decaying body not as a ruin but as soil for growing new stories.
Some new project is threatening. I have a murky sense of what it may be. And I’m willing to be wrong. But I am beginning to assemble my compost heap. I’m going to share some of the recent books I’ve read that I feel like fit into this concern with Collapsology while also including some of the greats that have shaped me.
1. Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp.
This is the single most comprehensive book on Collapse I’ve read. It covers much of the same ground as Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything with the ecological research and sensibility and sobriety I often felt lacking in Dawn. I wasn’t surprised to realize that Kemp is inspired and informed by the work of James C. Scott who I consider to be one of best thinkers on civilization and agriculture.