Heather McCabe
Livable Futures graduate student fellow 2023-2024
Creative Writing, The Ohio State University
Biography
I'm a writer and artist from South Burlington, VT. I work primarily through written nonfiction but am always extending my work outward through practices of pottery, gardening, and sustained attention to the texture of the world around me. My current project and MFA thesis, a book-length essay hesitantly titled A View from Above seeks an expansive understanding of self, the posthuman, and deep time as a means of interrogating collective experience and reconfiguring what it means to pay attention, or, what it means to love in the face of loss.
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
For me, the prospect of livable futures is indelibly tied to the livable present. I find the livable present in community spaces, my pottery class, crowds singing at concerts, the shared understanding that passes through an unexpected moment of eye contact. Every act of creation remakes the world. I find livable futures in the open spaces that cocreation reveals.
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
I'm currently reading Tommy Orange's There There, a polyvocal novel narrated by Native Americans living in Oakland, California. Recently, I reread Claudia Rankine's exploration of American racism and the afterlives of slavery, Citizen: An American Lyric. I'm also lucky to have read an early copy of Olivia Laing's newest book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of Common Paradise, which has turned my conception of gardening on its head and reignited my love for the seasons.
I've been listening to Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes' podcast Maintenance Phase and Merve Emre's The Critic and Her Publics.
What practices are sustaining you?
I've been spending more time in my body—weightlifting, doing yoga, running just before sunrise. A group of five friends and I have also begun sending weekly videos back and forth—updates from our lives, thoughts, musings, and memories. Going on walks and pointing to new buds on trees or else getting lost for a few hours in a new recipe.