About the Book
A poet and her husband have been trying to make a baby. But while undergoing fertility treatments in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season, Jo reconsiders raising a child in a time of climate crisis. When her artist ex-girlfriend, who has always had an uncanny connection to nature, re-enters her life, Jo struggles to navigate the transformations in her relationships and realities.
Miranda Schmidt's lyrical debut novel blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, human and nonhuman, reality and magic. A tale of queer love, new motherhood, and ecological interconnectedness, Leafskin interrogates how we create, and what we become, in a time of environmental devastation.
About the Author :
Miranda Schmidt (they/she) is a writer living in Portland, Oregon whose work circles around the folkloric, the familial, queer magic, and the more-than-human world. Their writing has appeared in Triquarterly, Orion, Electric Literature, Catapult, and more. She has received support from the Lambda Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Writers and Bread Loaf Environmental Conference and taught creative writing at the Portland Book Festival, the Loft, the University of Washington, and Portland Community College. Miranda is a current PhD candidate at Bath Spa University and received their MFA from the University of Washington.
Review :
"In Leafskin, Miranda Schmidt's remarkable first novel, short chapters as lyrical as prose poems weave and twine to probe what it means to make something grow in this time of climate destruction: a tree, a marriage, a poem, a painting, a friendship, a child. By developing the fluidity of our most important relationships, those between the human and natural worlds, between reality and myth, and between genders and even in the presence of ice storms, heat domes, and wildfires, it's possible for the characters-and us-to find connection, creativity, and rebirth."
--Maya Sonenberg, author of Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters
"Miranda Schmidt's novel Leafskin and the fictional family that inhabits these pages live in the same world we all occupy at this precise moment, whether it is our own personal story or the stories embedded in every news feed-climate crisis, IVF treatments, and even wildfires. What makes this novel so powerful is the fictional fabric of the narrative that weaves a lyrical and sensory-driven voice that take the reality of today's news and delivers it not from a bully pulpit, but with every prick of a needle, with each breath of smoke, with the embrace of those who love. Below the treetops, the world is called the forest's understory. In Leafskin, we find ourselves to be that understory."
--Shawn Wong, author of American Knees
"Rippling with glimpses of folklore and mystery, Leafskin calls our attention to the gravity of extreme weather events-with an admirable lightness and strangeness of touch. Schmidt's protagonist Jo is a sensitive, anxious but determined heroine-and through her eyes we see how much goes into the making of a child. A fresh, intricately-written and dreamlike novel about love, creativity and the natural world."
--Jane Borodale, author of The Book of Fires and The Knot
"Grounded in the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, Leafskin creates an imaginative space where the factual and the fantastic, the political and the personal, technological procedures and mythical beings meet, merge, conflict, and conspire. In the shadow of a near future all too imaginable where the impact of climate change threatens our survival, this lyrical novel supplies the rarest of rewards, a hopeful ending."
--David Bosworth, author of Living in Language
