Them Stars (Why Them Stars?)

Notes on ecological fiction, books, plants, place, kinship & making home on an earth on fire.

Sometime in the early 80s my grandmother visited an archive in Colorado & found a poem called “Them Stars,” written by an anonymous cowboy. My grandmother was a folksinger, and set the song to music, and I spent countless hours of my childhood listening to her sing this song which began: Them Stars how often I’d lie on the prairie and watch them go spinning around…

Now I’m a writer and teacher and mother living downhill from the farmhouse in Vermont where my grandmother lived and sang and recorded music for sixty years. I write books that are place-based and wildly ecological (filled with flora & fauna, reciprocity, the de-centering of the human), I grow plants and flowers, I build spaces for people to gather.

I want to help us all learn to live well (myself included) in a world that is rapidly shifting.

I also read obsessively and promiscuously, and because I live on a rural mountainside in Vermont (have chosen place over career), I find myself wanting to talk about the books I read more often than I’m able. I want to share what I’ve loved, what inspires me. I want to talk about what I’ve learned from them, what they made me think about, and why. In other words, I want to share Them Stars with you.

Who am I?

My name is Robin Marie MacArthur. I’m the author of Half Wild: Stories, and the novel Heart Spring Mountain. Both were published by Ecco/Harper Collins, have been translated into French by the incredible France Camus, and published by Albin Michel in France. Both were finalists for the New England Book Award, and Half Wild won the Pen/New England Award for fiction in 2016. My essays have been published and shared in Orion Magazine, Lit Hub, Hunger Mountain, NPR, and elsewhere. I teach in the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, The Governor’s Institute for the Arts (Vermont), and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writer’s Conference, and Orion Magazine. In 2019 I founded Word House, a fledgling literary arts space in Southern Vermont.

How often will I post?

I make no promises. I hope to post at least monthly, at most once a week. Inspiration—it’s mercurial!

Thank you for reading. Sign up if you want to read more. It’s a gift to share this space with you. Truly.

You can also find me at my website, on Twitter at @robinmacarthur and on Instagram at @robinmariemacarthur.