Nature, Possession, Death, Divinity, the Sublime, Transcendentalism, and Transformation exist in my work as kin. To know one is to know all the others. I believe that they are necessary ideas if we hope to change our relationship with the environment into one of mutual respect and personhood. Dark as these things may seem, they inform my work through experience. Confronting the shifting darkness, making an effort to understand it, and sometimes walking straight into it, leads to a life of environmental stewardship through and understanding of one’s small humanness beside the vast power of Nature. 

              In Environmental Education, we learn that one of the best ways to make environmental stewards out of people is to get them to fall in love with the place they are, to develop a deep sense of belonging and understanding of that land. I am a born and bred Rhode Islander, and I feel a familial bond with this land. My work is heavily influenced by New England, because I want people to fall in love with it as deeply as I have. New England happens to be the birthplace of American Transcendentalism, an understanding of Nature to be overwhelmingly powerful and supernatural. In the Transcendentalists’ view, Nature has the inherent ability to stir up feelings of the Sublime, a phenomenon I would describe as witnessing power so great and terrible that one’s overwhelming emotions simmer into awe. One can experience the Sublime anywhere, at the top of a skyscraper or on a train platform, but the Transcendentalists (and myself) found its truest power in Nature. Experiencing the Sublime brings one closer to communion with Nature, often experienced as Divinity or a mustering up of the soul. It is a stirring feeling difficult to replicate, yet it is the feeling I am constantly trying to capture.

              I find that media that is not trying to hammer environmentalism into the heads of its audience is often the most effective. When I read about Bilbo Baggins living in the Shire, I feel a deep itch to start a garden and build a strong community. Worlds that feel good to steep ourselves in make us want to be better members of our own. This type of indirect influence is formative. Artists have unique opportunities to create entire universes of this longing. I have lived a life collecting the “fragments I will shore against my ruin”, as T.S. Eliot put it, in the form of powerful art, stories, music, and film. These fragments inform me as an advocate for the environment. Whether or not, like The Hobbit, that was their explicit purpose, my motivations in life have been shaped by them. This is the lens with which I understand the purpose of my work. 

              The themes of Death, Divinity, Possession, and Transformation present themselves in my work in no uncertain terms. I am drawn to them because I find they crystallize themselves together in Nature through the supernatural lens of the Sublime. Though we may think of them as fantastical, they exist alongside us in our realities and our fictions, and resisting their power is harming us. As a society, we have transitioned away from the uncomfortable feelings of Transcendentalism and more towards the cozy pastoral pittances of Romanticism. American Romanticism, born of manifest destiny and the extermination of Indigenous peoples, posed nature as a healing refuge and an unblemished paradise bathed in light. Of course, it can be, and I would be a fool to rail against the flowery language I myself use and have cherished for so long. Do not take my cynicism to say that I do not appreciate or subscribe to the many wisdoms of the Romantics, though I may question the colonial motivations in which their words are rooted. What I mean to say is that to make progress on environmental issues, we must allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable, even terrified, to steel ourselves for the battle ahead. There is a time for Romanticism, when we are thriving alongside Nature and can let our guards down. That time is not now. We should be afraid. 

              Nature is complicated and deadly, which is why I write horror. I am drawn into the darkness; there is a knowing comfort there. What happens to me is not up to me. I am entirely helpless to Death. It is a change all beings must face. Therein lies the terror of Transformation. To be unable to stop a change in oneself, of one’s skin, transmuting from sense to senseless. It is a transformation countless members of the natural world know well, but one humans scarcely know. 

              But I know it. Shedding skin and becoming something new is beautiful and horrible, monstrous or freeing, or both. The process itself— disgusting, clawing, grasping. I would not call it rebirth. I am Transgender, though I would not call it that either. I write about creatures who have little control over the transformation they are experiencing, who are possessed by some supernatural force, turn away from those who love them and expect swift death. They do not recieve it. They turn monstrous and continue to love and be loved, continue to yearn. I write stories of hallucination and Possesion, of beasts in the mind clawing their way out through the skin, of those who drift, feel everything, and do not feel at all. Then I place these stories in Nature, in New England. There is sorrow on these shores I know needs telling. 

              I do not posit that every moment in nature is horrible and supernatural. I like to sit on the riverbank that runs to the marsh and observe the turtles dunk themselves in and out of the shining water. The herons stand guard over the skillful mink fishermen. The lives that plants and animals weave are inherently artistic. Something I find alluring about these moments is that here there is death. Not violent death in the ways we imagine it, but a peaceful, purposeful rot. Everything is recycled into the marsh and the gift of life meant nothing after all. It is healing to know that it meant nothing. This knowledge lightens the load. I await my peaceful rot in the marsh knowing the others I love, the turtle and the heron and the mink, will rot and be recycled there too. 

              I am wont to give animal characters human-like characteristics, or to give human-like characters animal characteristics, in much the same way as we skip stones or otherwise throw rocks into the water. We want to move and unmoving body in some way, in an innate desire to change and mark that we were here. But our mark to make is already determined— it is the bones we will leave in the marsh, not the pebbles we throw. Roland Barthes, in describing what makes a good photograph, said it must contain punctum, or “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” The Sublime is a shock to the senses, like getting pricked with a pin. The wound is inherently painful, but it is what makes the whole picture meaningful. Without the wound, the world is colorless. 

I do not believe in a life after death, and that gives me great purpose. I will not see all the worlds’ wonders before I die. That is by design. Wonder is the gap left by the unknown and the wonderer decides whether it is great or terrible. I choose both, and I rather think more people should. Cowering fear does not serve me. I seek communion with nature, pure nature, which demands I give over the power my species has falsely usurped. I do not mean to say that a fear of Nature equals respect. Nature is not maligned against us and that is exactly the source of the fascination— it has no morals. It does exactly what it will. 

              Re-learning the Sublime can help us deal with climate grief, and other greifs we experience in life. When we allow ourselves to experience such overwhelming emotions in a powerful natural setting, we practice something akin to exposure therapy. We acknowledge sorrow in a marsh filled with sorrow. We cave in with greif on a cliffface that can speak that language, and eventually we are a little less alone. The marsh continues to grow and thrive, though there is sorrow there. The waves continue to crash on the cliff and cling its same saltwater to that on our eyelashes. We feel, and we “stagger onward rejoicing”. (W.H. Auden, Atlantis)

              At the end of the Sublime is a discovery of Divinity. I am not particularly religious, but I understand religious feelings and I draw on such symbols. In my work, the Divine and Sublime are the very same. Is a church the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea? Is it an earthworm squirming in the palm of your hand? Do we not worship the osprey as we watch her build her nest? Do we not pray to the moon? We create what is sacred, what is occult, what is knowing and powerful, through our ideas and behaviors. These are, of course, influenced by the media we consume, the fragments we shore against our ruin. 

              Oscar Wilde wrote his great work De Profundis while imprisoned. His romantic and sexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas came to light, and he was sentenced to two years of hard labor, much of which he spent in solitary confinement. De Profundis became his penultimate work. After he was released from prison, he was outcast from society and died soon thereafter. The very end of De Profundis reads as such:

               “Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.” 

              This is the kind of comfort I find in the dark night of the woods, the kind that binds me like kin there and knows me well. None may track me to my hurt. Like a wounded animal I must take my refuge somewhere. I believe that many other people seek this refuge and are still looking. I know a place that I can share.

 

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Work Cited

Auden, W H. “Atlantis by W H Auden.” All Poetry, allpoetry.com. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Vintage Publishing, 2020.

Cronon, William. “Cronon: The Trouble with Wilderness.” JSTOR, 2013.

Dungy, Camille T. “Is All Writing Environmental Writing? - The Georgia Review.” The Georgia Review - Quarterly Since 1947, 7 Feb. 2019.

Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land | The Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation, 2020.

Wilde, Oscar. “De Profundis.” Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.