In the old tales, humans come together with animals and plants, mountains and rivers, rain and sky. The wood nymph, Daphne, turns into a laurel tree to escape the pursuit of a god. Seal women slough off their selkie skins to live on land for a time. Some traditions even tell of the first humans being made from trees. Folklore has a way of muddling binaries. In the traditional stories of selkies, mermaids, helpful animals, talking trees, and shapeshifters, our supposed divisions between humans and nature blur and we find we are far from alone in our sentience.
In my book, Leafskin, I used folklore and folkloric ways of thinking to bridge divisions between human and nature. My poet protagonist experiences a unique kinship with trees. Her embodied sense of this merging waxes and wanes as she experiences fertility treatments, childbirth, nursing, and different forms of love and art-making, all while living through our era of ecological destruction. Alongside the trees, a selkie story runs beneath the book, carried by the main character’s ex-girlfriend, an artist. I wondered what would happen if I brought the motifs of trees and waves, land and water, together. How could a selkie story change if it were unapologetically queer and feminist? What if a woman didn’t have to give up herself, her autonomy, her art, for motherhood? What is made in the liminal spaces where land and water, folklore and contemporary realism, art and parenting, come together? In Leafskin, I wrote toward these uncanny mergings, finding a strange multifaceted story full of the lore that I love.
Folklore has long preoccupied my reading and deeply influenced my writing. There are so many works that would fit into this category and this list makes just a tiny fraction of the work: contemporary novels that draw on folklore and folkloric thinking to explore our ecological interconnectedness.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Returning home from an exploratory submarine mission gone awry, a woman begins to turn into a sea creature. This tale of a self melting away is partly told through the eyes of the woman’s wife, mourning her spouse while attempting to care for her, haunted by the relationship that was and is no more. It’s an intensely grieving novel, occurring mostly in small enclosed spaces (an apartment, a submarine). We are presented with both the present narrative of transformation and a journal kept on the submarine mission. Both narratives bring us through fantastical moments, spaces where realism slides away, revealing something far wilder and far more mysterious beneath. An uncanny and gently brutal book, this novel moves between perspectives and times, spiraling out a tale of loss and transformation.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
A woman stops eating meat and becomes the focus of her extended family’s concern, lust, and violence. As she seems to recede further away from humanity, increasingly drawn to plants and plant behavior, she elicits more and more intense fascination and horror from those around her. Told in three parts from three points of view, the novel circles Yeong-hye, but only allows us small glimpses of her perspective in the tiny moments when she shares it with others. In the end, we are left with the trees and Yeong-hye’s desire to join them through life or death or some space between. A gorgeously terrifying novel, written by 2024’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, The Vegetarian circles the madness of consumption, domination, and the impossible contradictions of our human condition.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
What if a mother started turning into a dog? The question at the center of this novel expands to wonder about our animal natures and the wilds we unleash in ourselves and the world through motherhood. Set in the suburbs, Nightbitch follows its title character, a mother who has set aside her art for parenting, through this hilarious and terrifying premise as she explores the lore of magical, shapeshifting women. It plays with the notions of the artist, the mother, the wife, and all the many selves the woman at its center must be and become in our world. Now a movie starring Amy Adams, the book holds an unsettling sense of the uncanny at its heart.
Antelope Woman by Louise Erdrich
A re-envisioning of Erdrich’s lauded novel The Antelope Wife, this book tells the multigenerational story of families, Ojibwe and white, contending with the ramifications of violence through time. Rooted in indigenous stories, Antelope Women frequently brings its human characters together with other species in uncanny ways. Dogs suckle at human breasts and narrate human stories. Antelope tend to lone human children. Just as the humans of the story connect and entwine, so do the nonhuman, creating a rich tapestry of interconnected lives. In the foreword to Antelope Woman, Erdrich writes about how she wrote this book with the sky itself: “The Great Plains sky is a source of ideas for me, a touchstone of greatness and familiarity. The sky is a geographical family relative.”
Sift by Alissa Hattman
Two women move through an apocalyptic landscape ravaged by climate change in a vehicle that shifts its shape. Through memories and the present moment, they are drawn into the landscape, transforming, moving across it, becoming a part of it. This novel exists in a space of hybridity. Moss grows from foreheads. People become multiple, become mountain. The story is interspersed with short focused sections meditating on plants and animals. Fragmented and poetic, Sift brings us into the mystery of a journey where the internal and external, and the human and more-than-human, merge.
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky
A human woman, after an affair with an owl, gives birth to a baby who is both human and very much something else. Tensions arise over differing interpretations of reality, as the woman believes her baby to be half owl and the rest of the world treats the child as monstrous. The woman attempts to foster the wildness in her child while her husband and his family pursue increasingly inhumane attempts to “fix” the owl-baby. As the mother makes space for her child’s owl-ness, she finds her own art and perspective growing to harmonize with the nonhuman world. She hears the complex harmonies of birds, allows wood shrews to nest in her cello and cultivates rodents in her house to feed her baby. This is a book that does not flinch from the violence of the animal world or the violence of the human world’s attempts to repress the animal around and within ourselves.
Orkney by Amy Sackville
Told from the perspective of an aging professor who just married his young student, this novel follows the student’s slow disappearance over the course of the honeymoon in the haunting Orkney Islands. These islands are full of selkie tales and the student is drawn, again and again, to the water. The unreliability of the narrator, a man enamored with the tragic heroines and love objects of 19th-century literature, adds to the strangeness of a book that plays with the natures of art and realities. By leaning into this perspective, Orkney becomes a critique of the kind of selkie/magical woman story that holds the woman as a receptacle for male fantasy. As we watch the professor’s young wife’s uncanny connection to the landscape, we are consistently reminded that we are watching her through his skewed perspective.
We Were Witches by Ariel Gore
A young mother pursues witchcraft, feminism, her queer identity, a college degree, and her own narrative. This autobiographical novel rewrites fairy tales and finds its protagonist in conversation with women who turn into animals. These shapeshifting moments hold fascinating interactions, conversations that move fluidly, like the book itself, between the theoretical and the practical, the realistic and fantastical realms. Set in the 90s, this book captures a particular moment in time and feminism that feels as urgent today as it was three decades back.
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