Silvers Foundation Grant for “Night-Shining”

I am insanely grateful to the Silvers Foundation for a grant supporting my essay-in-progress “Night Shining.” The third in a trilogy on war, weather and climate, the essay will be in Granta. The first “The Rainmaker’s Flood” was set in my town and on my land, drawing on ice and snow and snowmaking as a Cold War weapon. It wove Johannes Kepler, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cats Cradle and a flood over the Catskills caused by that weapon. The essay was a finalist for Notting Hill Editions’ Essay Prize and ran in Harper’s. The next “Rain Like Cotton” set outside Albany was about climate collapse 13,000 years ago, seeing it as a harbinger for today. Published first by BOMB, it was included in Best American Essays in 2018. This last one asks questions of place and politics, time and responsibility as it examines the work of the two scientists whose technology flooded my village. Bernard Vonnegut went on to try and blow holes in clouds with lasers for Star Wars and his colleague Vincent Schaefer campaigned to get leaded fuel banned.