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Hannah Jones's avatar

I cheered when you listed the many interruptions and distractions you worked through to build this essay. It reminds me of something I learned about Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" photo. Lange cropped several of her children out of the photo partly for the sake of the composition, but also to make her subject more relatable to her well-off audience, who tended to have smaller families. We shouldn't have to crop the rich mess of our lives out of the picture to be considered "real" writers. I also love how you center the natural world of our backyards and neighborhoods and wild/urban edges, both in your writing and in your photographs.

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Freya Rohn's avatar

I love everything you wrote—and how Dungy is able to speak to what is so tired and always missing in nature writing. I loved this so much—“ it’s about people and place, people in place, people with place, people of place.” YES. I am also struggling with the questions i have around demands for attention, growth, and how care seems to never be a priority but a hidden margin that somehow others are supposed to tackle. What would it look like to solve all inequities with care—how simple that really is, how impossibly complicated the human created world makes it. It’s very less lonely in those feelings knowing you and so many others are also operating and thinking about and writing so beautifully on all of this. 💜

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