Writers Victoria Kornick and Tess Taylor join Chris to talk about their creative writing projects. The natural world, plants, farming and gardening are all centeral to Victoria and Tess's practices, and in this episode each writer explores the roots of her interests and shares a bit about the current projects bringing them joy. 

Victoria Kornick is is a writer from Virginia. Her poetry and personal essays appear in The Yale Review, American Chordata, the Nashville Review, At Length Magazine, Rattle: Poets Respond, No Tokens Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, LARB: Voluble, and The Greensboro Review. She holds an MFA from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow, and she has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Community of Writers, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Literature and Creative Writing program at the University of Southern California. Victoria lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Tess Taylor’s body of work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning. She published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World, The Forage House, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, Work & Days, and Rift Zone. She has also served as the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Her work as a cultural critic appears in in Harpers Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times. She is currently at work on two plays, one of which is a stage adaptation of her book of poems about American photographer Dorothea Lange. This fall, she’ll publish her first full length poetry anthology: Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, a collection of contemporary gardening poems, for an era of climate crisis. She lives just outside Berkeley California.