Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture and spirituality. In this vibrant conversation, poet and author Forrest Gander interviews Richard Powers

about his acclaimed new novel, The Overstory. Recorded in a packed barn on a Sunday

afternoon in Pointe Ray Station, the two

Pulitzer Prize-winning authors reflect on continuity, kinship, and proximity with the living world.

Advocating a radical reimagining of the novel that moves away from the centering of human characters,

power speaks of a new ethic that includes an understanding that there is no

separate thing called us, a no separate thing called wilderness.

So, we're sitting about an hour away from some redwoods of the sort that I'm betting

even Richard Powers has never seen before.

Not Sequoia Semivirans, but Sequoia Langsdorffi, huge redwoods that were petrified in ash some 3.4 million years ago

when the eruptions that formed Mount St. Helena rocked this very place.

I wanted, Richard, to give you at the beginning of this conversation, while we're still friends,

a little piece of a 3.4 million-year-old redwood, the extinct Sequoia Lansdorfi,

as a gift from your California fans and from the family that run the petrified forest in Calistoga.

You're supposed to end with this. I'm not going to be able to do this.

Oh my God.

Look at this.

I have the box with a label on it.

We can mail it back to you.

...