When We Talk About Animals · Law, Environment & Animals Program at Yale Law School

Ep. 47 – Poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil on writing love letters to nature

·57 min·2 clips

Aimee Nezhukumatathil describes fireflies as childhood lighthouses that turn summer memory into comfort.

1. When We Talk About Animals, Ep. 47 examines Aimee Nezhukumatathil's World of Wonders and its love letters to fireflies, cassowaries, monarch butterflies, and other organisms. 2. Hosts Viveka Morris and Jennifer Skeen interview Nezhukumatathil, a poet, University of Mississippi creative-writing professor, and poetry editor for Sierra. 3. Nezhukumatathil's core argument is that wonder and love can turn attention toward empathy, protection, and conservation more effectively than fear or guilt. 4. Her parents, a Filipina psychiatrist and a Malayali Indian doctor, moved the family through six states while teaching Aimee and her sister constellations, gardening, and local species. 5. Fireflies became symbols of outdoor childhood before cell phones, with visible flashes lasting only one or two hours despite lives of roughly two years. 6. Her sons' observations of red male cardinals and brown female cardinals opened a conversation about camouflage, race, hiding, and school lockdown drills. 7. Nezhukumatathil recalls feeling excluded from conventional nature writing and calls for outdoor literature that includes brown skin, disability, LGBTQ+ people, varied economics, and different relationships. 8. She names firefly varieties including Tiny Lucy, Heebie Jeebies, Texas Tinies, Treetop Flashers, Shadow Ghosts, and Wiggle Dancers to show how names can deepen care. 9. A monarch essay about Lake Superior imagines butterflies responding to a vanished mountain, while an unnamed awe study links natural spectacle with smaller self-descriptions and stronger community identification. 10. Best suited to readers of poetry, environmental writing, family memoir, and inclusive nature literature.

As heard by us

A thoughtful episode on how wonder for the living world can become a reason to care for it.

The episode considers how writing about animals and plants can stretch empathy, stir memory, and make the natural world feel freshly vivid. Its strongest thread is the idea behind World of Wonders: joy and melancholy can sit together, and love or wonder may move people toward…

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Press play when you need ecological hope that still admits the worry, loss, and overwhelm in the room.

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