Sheltering: Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Knows a Lot About Plants and Poisons
On this episode of Sheltering, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight speaks with Maris Kreizman about her new novel, Hex, the story of a botanist’s love for her boss and the complicated relationships that surround each of them. Knight talks about the relief of writing a book that “has nothing to do with her personally,” and the nerdy joy of having her six characters’ relationships form a hexagon (Hex, get it?). She also reminisces on her and her husband’s choreographed wedding dance and the blessing of owning a chicken in quarantine—three fresh eggs a day! Knight’s local bookstore is The Toadstool in New Hampshire; please order Hex through them if possible (they’re offering free media mail shipping).
From the episode:
Maris Kreizman: Tell me how you know so much about plants and poisons—I felt like you had so many Scrabble words in your book!
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight: You know Maris I am really terrible at Scrabble, so so bad. Well, I was in voluntary isolation when I wrote this book—I moved to Hudson, New York, and didn’t leave my apartment for nine months (I was able to go to the grocery store in those days, but that’s about the only place I went). That was when I really sat down and learned about plants. It wasn’t something I knew about before—the idea had started in a rose garden I had worked at seven years ago where there were all these plants I couldn’t identify and I didn’t know if they were poisonous or not. I really didn’t know what I could mess with or not. And I started thinking, How did mankind ever know? What they could touch, what they could eat, what would nourish them, what would harm them… And that started to look so much like human relationships: how do I know whether this beautiful person is going to tangle my insides, give me the nutrients I need to thrive? Who can say?
And so I started to put these things together—and I really had to learn a lot in order to give the botany its fair share. Because I can riff on love issues pretty fluently, but botany I’m a beginner with. So I really spent that time, that solitary time, learning about contemporary chemical processes with planting and also the history of how we learned to deal with these plants in the first place.
