By Lorraine Boissoneault

The first few months of 2025 have felt interminable, new horrors turning monotonous because they come at such a breakneck pace. It’s hard, some days, to see the U.S. as anything other than its worst actors, who arrest people off the street and break up families and threaten peaceful protestors. Then I read A. Kendra Greene’s new essay collection, No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity, and it was such a welcome balm. Greene explores the malleability of language, engaging a deep playfulness that illustrates just how many mysteries are left in the world. From a cat named “The Universe” to a giant ground sloth dressed in different costumes throughout the year, the book is full of delight and surprises. Reading it made me smile, laugh, and gasp aloud. What’s more, it’s beautifully illustrated–or should I say illuminated–like Medieval bestiaries. Talking to Greene was as delightful as reading her book, and left me with renewed enthusiasm for finding the beautiful whimsy in life alongside the heartache. 

Lorraine Boissoneault: I am so excited to talk about your book because I really loved it. There were some of the essays where I couldn’t stop thinking, how did she do this? One of the lines that you have at the very end of your book is that ‘fiction is a manner of likeness and essay is a manner of trying,’ What were you trying to do with the whole collection? 

A. Kendra Greene: So many things all at once! I think that’s part of the essay but also part of making a book. You are playing six different games or a dozen or two dozen all at once, and that’s why the really good work matters to us, because there’s always something that resonates at different points in coming to it. I know I was trying to think about bestiaries, this medieval form of text and image, of grappling with the important powerful forces that we can’t see through and the things that we can. But I don’t think I was prepared for everything that the bestiary could hold. As I researched them more, I learned they aren’t just animals. Trees and rocks are fair game, as well as all of these ways of looking at the natural world and supernatural world too. It’s so hard to keep the material and the immaterial from weaving in and out of each other. 

Your thoughts on bestiaries anticipates one of my questions. I was trying to puzzle out how you grouped essays into disparate chunks. They’re not named in the table of contents as part one, part two, part three, anything like that, but you do see breaks between the chunks. How did you organize them? 

It took so much doing. There are so many pieces and so many little conversations that they need to have. Formally it does harken back to the old bestiaries, which in their most traditional forms have four sections, almost always starting with animals, almost always the lion, then birds, almost always with an eagle, and then moving on to serpents and sea monsters. So I think there are still some echoes of the original three act structure I imagined for it. Encounters with concepts, how language changes everything, and what does it mean when you realize that you are also embodying, that you are a vessel too. 

Reading these made me very curious about your writing process too. For the piece called “The One,” there’s a lost rental car and it ends up in monotremes. How do you combine such unusual elements into a cohesive whole? 

Partly, I think it’s what we do all the time. That is how we make meaning, that is how we make our lives, like a bower bird taking this and this and this and this and this, until it accumulates and it accretes and it becomes something. I wait constantly for NPR to give me a story about the new research on how synapses work for punning and I think there’s gotta be a whole neural pathway set up for connections, right? We love a pattern. So I think it’s one of the primary ways of making meaning. And sometimes it’s purposeful but a lot of times it’s observation. 

This is a book that I noticed pretty early on had a particular sort of affinity for twinning and mirroring and doubling. Words and objects and ideas would just keep popping up again and again and almost always in pairs, like they were calling out to each other. 

That definitely feels very present. One of the other essays that I really enjoyed was “Welcoming the Universe In.” It took me a few paragraphs before I figured out what was happening, because it is playing with this idea of something small and compact – a cat – versus something huge that is infinite and unfathomable. How often do you think about how we live at the intersection between the two of them? 

Constantly. I am constantly surprised we don’t spend more time thinking about it and grappling with it. I think we constantly overestimate rather than underestimate our own ability to imagine. I know I personally almost immediately forget how to dress for the weather if it changes 24 degrees. What sticks, and how to ask questions about what’s beyond what we already know, how to go looking for the things that we don’t already know, how to ask for, it seems like it should be one of our fundamental preoccupations. 

Agreed. Which is maybe why the book resonated with me so much. You’ve talked a little about the element of the bestiary and what that brings into the book, and I read that you have a degree in book arts, which feels very apparent because the book is so full of imagery. Honestly, please give me more illustrated longform books, I want more illustrations in my books, just always. Give me more illustrations. 

We have centuries and centuries and centuries of them, why would we stop now? 

How involved were you with that art and design process? I think some of them were your own drawings. What was that process like in conjunction with ordering the pieces and writing them? How does it all come together? 

I think it’s worth noting at least half a dozen of these essays had an incarnation in book arts before they were in this project. I made a folio of the “Costumes of the Giant Ground Sloth, A Field Guide.” Love is in the Airport was the first letter-pressed chapbook I ever made with that combination of text and image. It freed up the text that had the image, even if they were just stick figures who’d had a snack. Really simple pencil drawings could communicate the actual physicality, the fact that this had happened in the world and the prose was allowed to become as expansive and playful and metaphoric as you’ll want it to be. “Speaking of Basheis” exists as a two-and-a-half-inch high by 22-inch wide long book with plasma cut steel covers that my sister made. The actual contact print of Chloe was done by my sister-in-law at the end, and the whole text just read as one long gold-pen, hand-lettered text across like the line down the middle of the bike path, the leash, the tongue. The end paper’s like tongues, there’s an extravagant number of them. 

The University of Iowa Center for the Book gave me binding, which gave me the language of materials testing, which shaped how I make everything. And it gave me a set of ways of thinking about mark making that is always designed to incorporate in the page. I think it is astonishing that literature sits at the feet of two of the greatest traditions and technologies of humanity. That we had all of the power of the oral tradition and all of the power of the symbolic marks and that they can live together? It’s this nexus of the ways that we understand everything. Why wouldn’t we want those powers to combine? 

Yeah, it’s like the images add to the level of symbolism and interpretation that a reader can bring to the experience of going through a bestiary. I’m curious if you have a favorite among the essays, whether in the writing or how they turned out?

“The Half Story” is the last essay that I wrote for this and I’d been having so much trouble sequencing. When I wrote it I realized oh, it’s because I’m still missing a piece. And it lives in the middle of the book partly because that’s where you put a lynchpin. One of the things I especially love about it is that it can’t be illuminated. Everything else in the book has its iterations, but because of the way it explicitly discusses the rendering of the unknown, it just can’t. But in the conversations my glorious book designer, who is a poet and book artist, and lives with a letterpress machine and a turtle from Coney Island, I could tell her that no essay in the book should have the same section break conventions. And how she interpreted the text and links those transitions, the margin notes are exquisite. Only I will ever know, and you may infer because you don’t need to know the intent to understand the effect of things. The arrows that suggest being trapped, of misdirection of escape, of the dark triangle of the attic, the teeth ejected from the head. How that all comes together pleases me to no end. 

I really loved “People Lie to Giraffe.” The ending is so perfect and so poignant when Giraffe has a long goodbye, it’s also saying goodbye to everyone at the end of the book as well. It was perfect, it was a perfect note. 

Can I tell you a secret?

Mmhmm.

I originally sequenced the book so that it ended with “My Mother Greets the Inanimate.” I loved the idea that nothing would talk to you anymore and then you would flip a blank page and the book would be done and you’d be sort of heartbroken. I never feel like I get to stab the reader, and this time I did! And it seemed kind of great. But once I understood more about what the book was doing, it needed Giraffe. You need everything that leads up to it in order to take in something as weird and expansive and ambitious and personal and encompassing as “People Lie to Giraffe.” And to get to do a thing that has existed for so long among the people I love and to extend that group to my readers made a lot of sense. 

While I agree about “Giraffe,” I also love to stab the reader. It is fun. 

My favorite things in life are making my editor cry and making a particular friend injure his ribs from laughing again. 

This gets to another question I have. I feel like the book does an excellent job of drawing us to see these strange and wonderful connections. How do you encourage people, other than just reading the book, to activate that part of their minds so that they are regularly engaged in looking for strangeness and wonder in the world? 

I really am drawn to the word attention, and then the verb “to attend,” to focus, to invest, to give yourself to something. I’m thinking a lot about the ways in which curiosity might be a form of love. It feels like it’s got all of the same hallmarks and maybe because the other way around, love is a form of curiosity? But the hallmarks of being present, of being open, of being willing to take something at face value and to spend more time with it than it normally gets, right, to take something seriously that isn’t normally. It actually doesn’t take that much time because there is so much information coming at us constantly that to slow down just a little bit changes things almost immediately. The more we can approach things on their own terms and give them more time than we might otherwise have and withhold judgment. Be willing to see that there might be something to say for taking things at face value and then going beyond. 

I definitely feel that curiosity is related to love. Whether it’s a form of love or love is a form of curiosity. That openness and the sense of asking questions and not assuming and being curious enough to keep going and going and going even if there is no bottom to get to. 

Absolutely, it is a form of liveliness and connection and searching and seeking. And trust in encountering the unknown, which, let’s be honest, is most of everything.

Very much so. I think that’s why there is a pushback because it feels scary to acknowledge that so much is unknown, that so much is beyond rational control. And there is the desire to force things into boxes in certain ways and limit the curiosity because acknowledging it would be too overwhelming. 

I have a taxonomist’s heart. I love a system, I love the promise that we could bring reason or sense or understanding to anything. And it occurred to me at some point that it’s delicious in both ways. It’s delicious for the promise that order and understandability might be within our grasp—because it’s never going to work. It’s a model, it’s always going to rub up against its limitations. And then those contradictions, those points of failure, those inabilities to capture the complex, textured, nuanced ever changing fact of the world, it’s just as delicious, too. So both the system and its faults—the cracks in it become beautiful. 

Was there any book that you drew inspiration from for your own writing? 

For things like borrowed forms, Fowzia Karimi’s “Above Us the Milky Way.” It’s an abecedarian, and she’s the reason I think about being able to illuminate a book like mine as opposed to just illustrate it. David Searcy, the essay collection “Shame and Wonder.” I adore David and I am fascinated when I read him that I feel like he must be an influence on me even though I’ve come to be the way I am long before I ever met him or met the words on the page that are happening. “The Book of Beasts” edited by Elizabeth Morrison is so sweeping in its scope and was incredibly useful, and the way that Richard Barber gives just one bestiary translation and that it’s been published in the right size that you have a modern production that’s still thinking about the proportions and intentions of these old works. 

You’re telling fascinating and bizarre stories, but always in a way that invites the reader in. How did you develop your voice? 

Everything good in this world happens because of friction. I had noticed a while ago how important the span of registers is in my writing, in the diction in particular. I like a precise, archaic, “this is exactly the only way you can say it” word. And boy do I love vernacular and regionalism and this-is-how-I-hear-it and I-know-that-it’s-not-right-but-we’re-going-with-it-anyway. And this was the book where I realized that’s also true of syntax. That if you make everything grammatically correct, it’s off-putting. It stops being relatable. 

There was an earlier question that made me think about the old Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who says murder your darlings, and how that bit of advice morphs and shifts and gets reattributed. If it works for other writers, I won’t argue with it, but I’ve come to think of myself more as smuggling in all the darlings I can. If it matters, if it rings, there’s a reason for that. I should probably pay attention for long enough to figure out what it connects to and where its place is. 

I’m also very much of that mindset, having read perhaps too many Victorian novels at a young age that then influenced the way I developed a voice in prose.

I’ve been contemplating my relationship to “prim.” My advisor back in grad school, on the cusp of retirement from a long and storied career, I’m pretty sure with her hair pulled back in a bun looking over her glasses at me, once described my writing as “a little prim.” And it is. It is thinking about the rules and the systems and why things work and it is not afraid of the old or the formal, it is reaching for anything that it needs, and boy isn’t it amazing what unruly subject matter you can approach because of your primness, precisely because of your primness. 

It’s more of that friction. 

I’m telling you, it lets us walk, it lets us eat, it lets us know what anything feels like. 

So true. I’m curious how your essay writing influences how you move through the world. 

I think they are profoundly one and the same. I think each helps me see the other better. I remember realizing that the writing was like the running. I was just better off if I was doing it, but they both anchored and steadied and evened my keel. And I think there’s a lot of reasons why they are either parallel or maybe in fact the same. I write these ways of encountering and embodying.

A. Kendra Green is a writer and book artist. She is the author and illustrator of The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. Her work has come into being with fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, Yaddo, Dobie Paisano, and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard. She currently lives in Dallas, TX.

Lorraine Boissoneault is a Chicago-based writer who covers science, history, and human rights in her journalism, and explores more fantastical worlds in her fiction. Previously the staff history writer for Smithsonian Magazine, she now writes for a wide number of publications. Her essays and reporting have been published by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, PassBlue, Great Lakes Now, and many others. Her fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review and Catapult Magazine. Her first book, The Last Voyageurs, was a finalist for the Chicago Book of the Year Award. She is currently working on a book about chronic illness and climate change for Beacon Press, which won the Lukas Book-in-Progress Prize.