A Posthumous Conversation with Wayfarer Rachel Carson

by Iris Graville

Nearly every issue of this journal includes interviews with wayfarers, described as those whose inner compass is ever-oriented to truth, wisdom, healing, and beauty in their own wandering. These stories of present-day writers, artists, activists, and spiritual leaders guide us in our own travels.

But what if we could time-travel to pose the burning questions of our times to wayfarers from the past? Kathleen Dean Moore did just that in her “posthumous interview” of Edward Abbey in Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (Counterpoint, 2016). Someone I’d want to converse with is Rachel Carson, an early writer about threats to the environment and author of Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

One of Carson’s early books, The Sea Around Us (Oxford University Press, 1951), serves as a biography of the sea, noted for both its science and its poetic prose. I found great inspiration from it for my essay collection, Writer in a Life V…