THE UNDERSTORY
A GATHERING PLACE FOR WILD READERS
So many books, so little time? Tell me about it, let’s read together.
The Understory is a free seasonal book club rooted in ecological imagination. Literature, science, spirituality, philosophy. We read the kind of books that crack something open and remind you that you are not separate from nature. You are nature: dreaming, mycorrhizal, animal, entangled.
Each season we gather around a book and let the conversation go wherever it must. Like a meander through the woods with no single path. A compost heap for ideas where nothing is wasted.
We are drawn here by the same longing for kinship with the more-than-human world, for new* and very old ways of being and relating, for a story that holds us all.
*Much of what gets lauded as "new" ecological thinking in white Western writing around reciprocity, kinship with the more-than-human, animism, land as teacher is Indigenous knowledge that was suppressed through colonialism. We hold that.
WE BEGIN HERE -
OUR FIRST READ
We Are Nature Defending Itself
This is the book that started it all for me. A short but fierce, tender, many-voiced thing — part manifesto, part poem, part grief, part call. It felt like the beginning of something. Let's begin it together. From neo-animism to revolutionary biology, insurrectionary writings and radical art history Isabelle and Jay share their journey like a new ecological myth. I have a PDF version of this book to send to everyone who signs up!
We will gather on Monday 15th June at 18:00 CET
free, seasonally, open to all