I’m working on a new creative nonfiction book project (to be published by Wolsak & Wynn in Fall 2023). It’s my first foray into nature writing and memoir. Here’s a little taste:
Like the garden-building Mughals who arrived in the Indian subcontinent from the Central Asian Plains, I was a newcomer to the land in which I was to tend my first garden. This land turned out to be a quarter-of-an-acre plot (one might say, little more than a flower bed or a water feature in the Mughals’ iconic gardens), in the city of Waterloo. My husband Ronaldo Garcia and I moved here from Montreal, where we lived a distinctly urban life on the top floor of a triplex, our own green thumbs applied only to tropical houseplants. Our move from Québec to Ontario was necessarily a more modest migration than the uprooting we had experienced as young adults—his family having immigrated to Canada from Guatemala, and my family having lived in several countries before our arrival here—but our interprovincial migration is proving to be no less of an education, especially for novice gardeners eager to put down roots, a seemingly natural antidote to our multiple uprootings.
(You can read the full essay at The New Quarterly, Issue 162, Spring 2022.)