What’s PLANTCRAFT?

From writer, interviewer, and audio storyteller Amirio Freeman, and indebted to the garden-centric literature of Jamaica Kincaid, PLANTCRAFT is a slow newsletter about people and the plants they love.

In each monthly missive, or broadcast—as in a transmission, as in a method of sowing—readers will find long-form interviews with artists, activists, thinkers, and more about one botanical being that has shaped their lives.

Why PLANTCRAFT?

The alchemy, or plantcraft, of our vegetal kin has always made human life possible. As professor Teresa Castro reminds us, plants “are the great mediators of our world, transforming solar energy into living matter, producing an oxygen-rich atmosphere.”

Our bond with plants also runs deeper than the material plane.

The beauty of plant life has long bewitched humans, making vegetation a perfect muse for our creative expressions and reliable shorthand for our affection. Emerging notions of plant intelligence and sentience have stoked our existential anxieties, destabilizing rigid ideas of what it means to be alive and human. Botanical life intersects with every part of human life—sex, sexuality, gender, race, power, politics, money, art, culture, science, spirituality, ethics.

PLANTCRAFT aims to bring all dimensions of human-plant intimacy to the surface, and archive the ways human and plant trajectories are movingly entangled.

Especially as the ledger of climate atrocities grows, locating the vegetal in the human feels imperative. PLANTCRAFT is a call to remember our relationship and responsibility to plants and is an invitation to consider what plants can teach us about being better Earthlings.

About Amirio Freeman

Amirio Freeman (any pronouns) is a writer, interviewer, and audio storyteller who explores the relationship between humans and our beyond-human kin through a Black, queer lens. Amirio is from coastal Virginia and currently resides in Philadelphia, PA. You can find more of their work at amiriofreeman.com.