Still unsure of what we are after?

Below are a few online and publicly available readings that encompass and exemplify the kind of storytelling we hope to foster and generate at TESS. Our Bookshop.org page also hosts book recommendations that also feel relevant, with links to purchase those books from independent bookstores.

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“While my poppy could still walk and drive the streets, he hacked, driving people home from ShopRite and other grocery stores in and around Germantown, Philadelphia. This was when Philly was black on all sides.” From Jayson Maurice Porter’s “Fish Hacks” Distillations Magazine, from the Science History Institute (Jayson was an inaugural TESS participant)

“In time, people would come to suggest that there was about these enterprises an element of hauteur. A professor of law at Tulane University, for example, would assign it third place in the annals of arrogance. His name was Oliver Houck. ‘The greatest arrogance was the stealing of the sun,’ he said. ‘The second greatest arrogance is running rivers backwards. The their-greatest arrogance is trying to hold the Mississippi in place.’”
From John McPhee’s “Atchafalaya” The New Yorker

“More than 25,000 indigenous Liberian laborers worked under a foreign white management staff, made up of roughly 160 botanists, foresters, plant pathologists, engineers, chemists, and accountants, almost three-quarters of whom were American.”
From Gregg Mitman’s “The Human Price of American Rubber” Distillations Magazine, The Science History Institute (Greg was an inaugural TESS participant)

“It’s been a long time since I’ve passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right.”
Exerpted from Adania Shibli’s book, Minor Detail in Literary Hub

“The parking lot is either a longtime encampment for car-dwelling folk, or an ad hoc way station for refugees from the epic fires engulfing Paradise and the neighboring areas of Butte County. Or both.”
From Jaime Cortez’s “Dystopia and Shame: On the Road with California’s Climate Migrants” Freeman’s

“Material culture and industrial infrastructure carry the history of their making. What happens when their residues enter the body? Do they transfer that history to us?”
From Rebecca Altman’s “Upriver” Orion (Rebecca is a TESS collaborator)

“Having “memory” is just one of the many ways scientists refer to glaciers in terms that make them seem alive. They also “crawl” and have “toes”; when they break off at the ablation edge, they are said to have “calved.” They are born and die—the latter at increasing rates, especially during “the great thaw” of the past twenty years.” From Lacy M. Johnson’s, “How to Mourn a Glacier” The New Yorker  (Lacy is a TESS collaborator)

“I cannot really imagine what it would be like to read with visual images. It’s strange to me that, at the opening of this essay, you might have visualized me reading as a child when I can’t see it myself. Like many aphantasics, I also lack imagery in other senses: I cannot recall scents, tastes, or tactile sensations.” From Jemma Rowan Deer’s, “Reading in the Dark” Orion

“Beneath every city, it’s underground twin. Its dark heart; its churning guts. This is no metaphor: I’m talking about the sewer system.”
From Lina Mounzer’s “Waste Away” The Baffler

”There is a kind of story about the Arctic that you’ve probably encountered if you’ve been alive in the English-speaking world in the last century: a white man—almost always—goes north, where he is tested and finds something.”
From Bathsheba Demuth’s “Living in the Bones” Emergence (Bathsheba is a co-founder of TESS and a TESS collaborator)

“I am the mother of Black children in America. It’s not possible for me to consider the threats posed to birds without also considering the threats posed to us.”
From Emily Raboteau’s, “Spark Bird” Orion  (Emily is a TESS collaborator)