This week we visit with Helen Whybrow at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont.

Helen Whybrow is the author of The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life (Longlisted for the National Book Award & Winner of the Vermont Book Award), A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living and Dead Reckoning: Great Adventure Writing from 1800–1900. She is also the editor of many anthologies, including Hearth: A Global Conversation on Community, Identity, and Place and Coming to Land in a Troubled World. Her writing has appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain, EatingWell, and Orion. She is a visiting professor at Middlebury College and has taught at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. She lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where she shepherds a two-hundred-acre organic farm.

BUY AND READ THE SALT STONES - Paperback and Audio release August 4th!

For more on Helen and Knoll Farm: knollfarm.org

Helen's Books on the Bed:

The Serpent of Stars by Jean Giono

IWÍGARA: The Kinship of Plants and People by Enrique Salmón

Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees by William Bryant Logan

Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater by Ronald T. Simon and Marc Estrin

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy

Matt's Gifts for Helen:

Land, Language, and Women by Julie L. Reed

On Wholeness: Anishinaabe Pathways to Embodiment and Collective Liberation by Quill Christie-Peters

Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant

This week we visit with Elisa Faison in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Elisa Faison is a writer and freelance editor living in Carrboro, North Carolina with her partner and two-year-old twins. Her debut novel SKIN CONTACT will be published on June 23, 2026. She has published stories in The Missouri Review, Electric Literature, Smokelong Quarterly, and more. Her story “Motherlove” was the recipient of the 2024 Peden Prize, awarded by The Missouri Review and judged by Rachel Yoder. Her story “Group Sex” was the third most-read story in Electric Literature in 2023. Elisa formerly worked as a bookseller at Flyleaf Books and the book reviews editor of The Carolina Quarterly. She holds a PhD in English from The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she specialized in twenty-first century climate change novels.

ORDER AND READ SKIN CONTACT!

For more on Elisa: elisafaison.com/

Elisa's Books on the Bed:

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Girlhood by Melissa Febos

The Lover by Lily King

Ulysses by James Joyce

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Matt's Gifts for Elisa:

The End of Romance by Lily Meyer

The Computer Room by Emma Ensley

Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake

This week we visit with Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross is a writer and editor based in Vancouver, the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and art criticism have appeared in BOMB, C Mag, The Ex-Puritan, Fence, Mousse, and elsewhere, as well as in the chapbooks Mayonnaise and Drawings on Yellow Paper (with Katie Lyle). By day, she works as an editor at The Capilano Review. By night, she drafts suspended scenarios and propositions. The Longest Way to Eat a Melon, her debut collection of fictions, was published by Sarabande Books in 2025. She is at work on a novel.

BUY AND READ THE LONGEST WAY TO EAT A MELON

For more on Jacquelyn: jacquelynzross.com

Jacquelyn's Books on the Bed:

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Hélène Cixous

The Importance of Being Iceland by Eileen Myles

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

lettuce lettuce please go bad by Tiziana La Melia

The Cloud Notebook by Ada Smailbegović

Matt's gifts for Jacquelyn:

Little Bird by Claudia Ulloa Donoso (translated by Lily Meyer)

Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt

Temporary by Hilary Leichter