Terrain.org Podcast

In this episode, Terrain.org podcast editor Tamara Dean talks with author Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi about his book, The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard, which was published in August 2026 by Riverhead Books.

Kullu Suryawanshi is an ecologist and conservationist who has spent almost two decades studying snow leopards in the wild. He is a fellow of the British Ecological Society, the director of the India program of the Snow Leopard Trust, and a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation. He is a CIFAR fellow and National Geographic Explorer and was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He lives in Bangalore, India, with his wife and daughter.

The Ghost of the Mountains presents the amazing story of Suryawanshi's decades with snow leopards in their mountain habitats. The book weaves science and adventure with reflections on the role of this big cat in the human imagination through time and place.

Music: "Natural Murmur" by Heron Splinter.

In this episode of the Terrain.org Podcast, our nonfiction editors Elizabeth Dodd, Achilles Seastrom, Jennie Case, and Eric Aldrich discuss how they became editors, the submissions they long to discover, and which types of essays are and aren’t a good fit for the journal. They also describe how editing has affected their own writing and reveal where else they look for impressive new environmental literature.

Elizabeth Dodd was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Athens, Ohio. For over two decades she has lived in eastern Kansas in the Flint Hills region, where she is an award-winning professor of creative writing and literature at Kansas State University. She has team-taught courses with scientists, philosophers, and historians and she has led students on field trips in conjunction with their readings in environmental literature. Elizabeth is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her newest book, Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2012.

Achilles Fergus Seastrom (he/him) is a trans writer, editor, and artist from the Midwest. He’s a 2023-2024 Hogrefe Fellow at Iowa State University, where he’s currently pursuing his MFA. He also works as a freelance journalist and reads fiction for the science fiction magazine James Gunn’s Ad Astra.

Jennie Case's writing explores issues related to place, environment, home, family, and motherhood. Her work has appeared in journals such as Orion, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is the recipient of a Bread Loaf Bakeless Scholarship and Stone Canoe‘s 2014 Allen and Nirelle Galson Prize in Fiction. She is the author of three books: the essay collection We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood; a memoir, Sawbill: A Search for Place; and the hybrid work, The Carework Project: Reckoning with Love, Labor, and the Living World. She is also editing a collection on trauma-informed pedagogy.

Eric Aldrich is a writer from Tucson, Arizona. You can find his work in DIAGRAM, BorderLore, and Deep Wild, among others. He teaches English at Pima Community College and serves on the board of directors for Sky Island Alliance, an environmental conservation organization. His YouTube channel, Lo Fi Outdoors, features trail camera footage of desert animals.

In this episode, authors Kerri Schlottman and Caroline Tracey talk about salt lakes, ecological collapse, empathy, environmental justice, and storytelling.

Caroline Tracey’s debut, Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, published by W.W. Norton in March 2026, has received extraordinary praise, including a review in The New York Times Book Review noting its “visceral clarity and geologic intimacy.” Her environmental writing for The New Yorker, Guernica, and High Country News makes her a leading literary voice grappling with the transformations of the American Southwest.

Kerri Schlottman’s novel, Daytime Moon, published by Unnamed Press in May 2026, weaves themes of hydrofeminism, empathy, and collapse into a story about how bodies and communities absorb environmental and emotional depletion, and is set at the Salton Sea, a picturesque site of ecological collapse.

In this episode, Tamara Dean talks with Tara Lohan, longtime environmental journalist and author of Undammed: Freeing Rivers and Bringing Communities to Life, published by Island Press in 2025. Undammed describes how we've attempted to control the path and flow of nearly every major river in the U.S. It reveals the consequences for the integrity of animal and plant life as well as soil, water, and air quality. Tamara and Tara discuss dam removal projects across the country and how people and ecosystems are transformed by returning rivers to their free-flowing state.

Music: "Liftoff" by Nature Connection.

Image: Elwha River, Washington after the removal of two dams, courtesy of Tara Lohan

In this episode, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, translator of the poems of Najwan Darwish in the new book from Yale University Press, No One Will Know You Tomorrow, talks with Terrain.org reviews editor Renata Golden.

Najwan Darwish has been described as one of the foremost Arabic language poets. In spare lyric verse, he testifies to the brutal and intimate traumas of war, the anguished fatigue of waking up each morning in an occupied land, and the immeasurable toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Darwish has published nine poetry books in Arabic. His works have been translated into more than 20 languages. Kareem James Abu-Zeid is a translator, poet, and teacher with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from University of California, Berkeley. No One Will Know You Tomorrow, which collects Najwan Darwish’s published and unpublished poems from 2014 to 2024, has been a finalist for numerous prizes, including the 2025 Walcott Prize for Poetry and the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Music: "Liftoff," by Nature Connection.

Photo by Nayef Hammouri, courtesy Shutterstock.

In this episode, host Tamara Dean talks with Valerie Trouet, Gretel Boswijk, and Malcolm Hughes, dendrochronologists whose stories appear in a new book, In the Circle of Ancient Trees. They describe what we can learn from earth's ancient beings; share secrets that tree rings reveal about climate, culture, and history; and indicate how such information could help us plan for future climate resilience.

Music: "Liftoff," by Nature Connection.

Illustration by Blaze Cyan excerpted from In the Circle of Ancient Trees by Valerie Trouet. Used with permission from Greystone Books.

Tamara Dean hosts the relaunch of the Terrain.org Podcast with an episode titled "The Gift of Animals," after the new poetry anthology edited by Alison Hawthorne Deming and published by Storey Publishing: The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, and Connection.

In this episode, Tamara speaks with The Gift of Animals editor and contributors Nickole Brown, Jose Hernandez Diaz, and Camille T. Dungy, asking why the anthology is necessary now, what it means to the contributors to be a part of this anthology both for the poets and for the poems, how grief and love play into our responsibilities to the animal world, and why both animals and poetry are a gift to those connected to the animal world.

Music: "Liftoff," by Nature Connection.

Illustration by Daniela Gallego excerpted from The Gift of Animals, © by Alison Hawthorne Deming. Used with permission from Storey Publishing.

In this rich and reflective conversation, Renata Golden speaks with essayist Tamara Dean about her book Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless and her decades of life in Wisconsin’s Driftless region—a landscape uniquely spared by glaciers, leaving behind steep bluffs, spring-fed streams, and hidden histories. Dean explores how engaging with the land can be both a political act and a personal reckoning, weaving together environmental care, citizen science, and the ghosts of those long erased from rural memory. From foraging groundnuts to unearthing the links between reproductive rights and white supremacy, she reveals how landscape and story are inseparable. Their dialogue is a meditation on awe, resilience, and the quiet revolutions that begin at home.

In Episode 9 of Soundscapes, we listen in on a conversation between poet and essayist Ross Gay and Terrain.org poetry editor Derek Sheffield. As Ross Gay’s biography points out: “Ross Gay is interested in joy. Ross Gay wants to understand joy. Ross Gay is curious about joy.” Ross gay, it turns out, is curious and interested in just about everything, but humble about his ability to understand it. In fact, he’s in love with not knowing, which allows for change and, yes, “flabbergastment.” Along with living the questions and inciting joy, though, Ross Gay centers what he calls, “the noticing muscle.” This muscle, when strengthened, “inclines us to care for each other in systems of distrust and brutalization.” Listen to Ross Gay and Derek Sheffield take a deep dive into the workings of poetry (“the longer I study it, the more I realize I don’t know how I’m doing this”), what it’s like to witness a bee orgy (“I don’t know shit”), and why you should consider turning toward your death (“to not consider our dying and our living the same thing is in impediment to joy”). 

Additional poetry in this episode: 

About Ross Gay
The most recent book by Ross Gay is The Book of (More) Delights (Algonquin Books, 2023), the collection that occasioned this interview. His first Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of another book of essays, Inciting Joy (Algonquin Books, 2022), and four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Read the full interview with Derek Sheffield.

What is staying power, and how can we cultivate it? This episode Terrain.org-published poetry as well as a short story set to music that explore the staying power of words and experiences. In conversation with Alan Sincic, we learn about the relationship of silence to word music and how subverting expectations can be a source of wonder that lasts for decades.

Poetry and fiction included in this episode are: