“Essays help me draw a deeper breath”: An Interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil
by Blake Kinnett and Zainab Omaki
Prairie Schooner Assistant Nonfiction Editors Blake Kinnett and Zainab Omaki recently spoke to Aimee Nezhukumatathil about essay writing. Nezhukumatathil is the author of two essay collections: Bite by Bite and the New York Times bestselling World of Wonders. She is also the author of four collections of poetry including Oceanic and Lucky Fish. Nezhukumatathil is the guest judge for our 2025 Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest. Click here for full guidelines on how to submit.
Blake Kinnett & Zainab Omaki: In past interviews, you’ve mentioned that one of the things you’d most like to be remembered for is wonderment, a quality that comes through strongly in your essays in both your reverence for the natural world and the joy you take in it. Given that climate anxiety drives much of contemporary writing, how would you encourage writers to cultivate wonder while also confronting the real challenges facing the world?
Aimee Nezhukumatathil: I love this question—the easy answer is, as Walt Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes…” We can hold many emotions at once as that’s how most of us live. On any given day fear, anxiety, wonder, awe, grief, anger, happiness swirl in my brain. I wish more people would distrust anyone (or anything, like advertising or the media) that pushes us to only have one emotion, and you guessed it—it’s usually fear. And I’m always hesitant to tell writers WHAT or HOW to write, but rather, I like to pose a question and that is simply, What brings you awe? First, because I’m always genuinely moved and interested in what gets people’s hearts thumping, what they get geeked out about, but secondly—I feel like so much good and positive action stems from love and wonder. None of this is meant to deflect or deny that so many of us also feel rage, fear, anxiety too. For example, it is no secret that I adore fireflies. I am much more moved to write about them because of this adoration than when I worry about their dwindling numbers. Usually when the latter happens, I find it difficult to write. So if this happens to anyone else, I’d encourage them to focus on what they are curious about and start small. I think if you start coming from a place of wonder it can be contagious and then the reader might be in a place to be more receptive to any other directions you decide to take them in. But I almost always start with wonder or love. And don’t forget about the five senses. Knock us back to that time you first smelled a dried sand dollar when you were nine. Let us feel the bits of sand tap out of the lunules and into the palm of your hand.
BK & ZO: As a poet, imagery is one of your primary tools for communication. In your essays—particularly your past column in The Toast and in World of Wonders—you also work with literal images. How has engaging with these literal images influenced or shaped your approach to metaphorical imagery, if at all?
AN: I grew up reading a bunch of highly scientific nature books (and still do, for fun!) but something in those books made me always want to make metaphors or find a way to make that nature literacy applicable to my life. Honestly, being Asian American in the 70s and 80s and not really seeing myself reflected in books or in pop culture, TV, or movies made me feel like I had more of a kinship with the outdoors. I may not always be thinking about that—in fact I almost never do when I’m drafting a piece… but in revision I’m always trying to imagine talking to a loved one or best friend and how to make what I want to say interesting to them.
BK & ZO: What foundational lesson would you most like to impart to nature writers, and to nonfiction writers more broadly?
AN: I would say be observant. Carry something to write with, and if at all possible, try to draft with your hand as opposed to a laptop. There’s a different slowness to taking in the world when you do it that way, and I think there’s actually been studies about that too. I would also try to imagine someone that you are writing to… for me it’s my loved ones or best friend. And stay curious! Don’t just read about one thing—Mother Nature is the best writer of all! So take time to learn (and listen and observe) from her.
BK & ZO: Social justice appears to be an integral part of your work. How would you describe the relationship between social justice and nature writing in your practice?
AN: It is the most natural thing in the world to be interconnected to the flora and fauna around you. I just don’t understand (or want to know) a world where you don’t have an element of care and concern for your fellow inhabitants of the planet. It IS a big deal when we lose a bird species, or it becomes too hot to grow food, or people get killed because they have a different skin color/religion/sexual orientation than you. Frankly I’m bored to tears with writing and writers who don’t understand this most basic of human concepts. It’s 2025, not 1955 after all, ha ha!
BK & ZO: Is there a difference in your writing process when it comes to writing poetry versus writing essays? What are those processes like for you?
AN: Poetry will always be my first love (but I have a dual MFA in poetry and creative non-fiction) but quite simply, I started to resent the line break. It seemed ugly to me for a spell. When I was writing especially about these plants and animals that literally make me swoon, I needed more space—something like an unspooling or unfurling of language that I didn’t want interrupted with a linebreak’s tension. And I also was interested in a kind of rising action and the small fall that can happen when building full and robust sentences (as opposed to lines) that I don’t ever think about when drafting a poem. For more than twenty-five years, my poems have criss-crossed the threads of race, gender, and belonging, so that wasn’t something that was new to me in the essay except for the fact that I didn’t have to alter my word choice when faced with a line break. I can breathe in both genres, but essays help me draw a deeper breath.
BK & ZO: Finally, what are you looking for in an essay? What kind of writing truly bowls you over?
AN: As someone who has taught nature writing for decades, I suggest to my students for any genre: Be as specific as you can. Here in Mississippi where I live, I want to know the names of everything I plant: aster, wax mallow, and the difference between bee balm and bee blossom. Knowing names correctly is everything; it’s a key to connection and tenderness and a turn to kindness. Maybe if you know that swallowtail butterflies nibble pipe vine plants, you wouldn’t be so quick to mow it on the side of the highway. Or maybe if you knew that indigo buntings (which are bluer than a Mississippi summer sky), and not just ‘some birds’ hang around a place called Sky Lake, you wouldn’t dump garbage in their home. I adore writing that surprises me, teaches me something I didn’t know before I read the essay, and makes me feel like I’ve traveled without ever leaving my chair.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year and named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She also wrote four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. With the poet Ross Gay, she co-authored the chapbook Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. Nezhukumatathil is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program where she received the faculty’s Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award.
Blake Kinnett (they/them) received their undergraduate degree in English from Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, their M.F.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and are working toward a Ph.D. in English here at UNL. Their specializations are in creative writing with an emphasis on fiction writing, queer monstrosities as represented in media, and representations of mental illness as depicted in popular culture.
Zainab A. Omaki is a Ph.D. student in English, specialising in Creative Writing (fiction). She has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she was the recipient of the Miles Morland African Writers Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Transition Magazine, Passages North, The Rumpus, and other spaces. She was a 2020/2021 fellow at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, where she worked on a novel.