Camille T. Dungy on ‘Soil,’ Growth, and Gardening

Like many readers, I came to Camille T. Dungy first through her poetry, but her recent nonfiction writing has expanded my sense of her artistry. I devoured Guidebook to Relative Strangers, a memoir about race, travel, and mothering, and was thrilled to learn that Dungy is also a gardener: a woman after my own heart. In her new book, Soil, she takes her trowel to the issues of justice, wilderness, brutality, and neighborliness, and the garden that blooms through her sentences is both captivating and sobering. In our conversation, I felt lucky to pick her brain about how her concerns—for both humans and our earth—are knotted together.

Katy Simpson Smith: I had the great pleasure of reading this book in my own mother’s garden, surrounded by the first blooms of spring: tiny daffodils, blue-eyed grass, wild onions. 

You’re in spring already!? Jealous. We still have a few more weeks before we start to see