OK, I had to try it. I must say, I wish this were my life!
The Archivist of Vanishing Landscapes
The first book was a memoir—half-travelogue, half-political reflection—about your time in Russia. You hadn’t planned to write it. It had started as a journal, notes scribbled in the margins of grant proposals, memories that wouldn’t leave you alone. A Moscow publisher picked it up after a former student of yours, now a literary agent, insisted you submit it. The book found an audience among scholars, expats, and people searching for a world that no longer existed.
By the time your second book came out—The Rivers Remember—you had carved out a life where writing was no longer a side project. This time, the subject was environmental loss: a sweeping narrative of the rivers of Siberia, the Black Sea’s vanishing coastline, the wetlands of your childhood in Florida. You wove together history, folklore, and science, tracing the stories of landscapes that had disappeared. Critics called it “lyrical,” “haunting,” “a lament for what we fail to protect.” It won an award you hadn’t even applied for.
At book readings, people asked what was next. You had no idea. You lived out of a backpack half the year, traveling between archives, remote conservation sites, and interviews with the last keepers of endangered traditions. But then, in a dim-lit café in Tbilisi, you met an old man who changed everything.
He had been a forest ranger once, responsible for a stretch of ancient oaks that had stood since the time of the Mongols. Now, only a handful of them remained, marked for removal by a new highway project. He carried a notebook filled with stories—folk beliefs about the trees, whispered warnings passed down through generations. “When the last tree falls,” he told you, “something older than us will leave the earth forever.”
That became your next book—The Last Witnesses, a collection of vanishing landscapes and the people who remembered them. By then, your work had become something else entirely: part activism, part cultural preservation, part storytelling. Universities invited you to speak. Documentarians asked for your expertise. A foundation reached out with funding, no strings attached, asking only that you keep writing.
One morning, years later, you sat by a river in a place you never thought you’d live, watching the mist rise over a valley untouched by roads. You realized you had spent your life not just writing about loss, but saving what could still be saved. And that, you decided, was enough.