In his work as a writer and editor of fiction, nonfiction, film, criticism, and journalism, Nathaniel Popkin explores memory and loss, urban and historical change, architectural palimpsests, ecological grief, and the struggle for the democratic ideal. His latest work, a personal and philosophical book-length essay, To Reach The Spring: From Complicity to Consciousness in the Age of Eco-Crisis, was published in December 2020. The book is an urgent and deeply felt call to face our complicity in the earth’s destruction.
Béa Urbanowski-Womer: I saw this kind of fascination in your work with both urban and natural ecology, and how those things intersect. Can you talk about that—where does that fascination come from?
Nathaniel Popkin: It’s a great question. Where does it come from? I don’t really know. I can tell you that when I was growing up in the suburbs, that my whole family was connected to Trenton, New Jersey. My father’s office was there. My grandfather’s business had been there until it went out of business. My grandparents lived there while I was growing up, on both sides, so I spent a lot of time there. The narrative of that city was very present. There, I learned that you can lose something. There was always a tremendous sense of loss. Of course, it’s a complicated thing… we’re talking about a whole lot of issues regarding race,economics, politics, social justice, and identity also… The place that had been remembered, that my parents grew up in, that their parents sort of flourished in, was gone—but not totally gone. Everything just changed. It was a very strange thing to live with something that was dying, but it wasn’t really dying—It’s changing. That’s a topic I tackled in my first book. That was my introduction to being aware that places which we give meaning to, that those meanings can change, and what we think about a place, the way we perceive it, but what it brings to us and how we relate to it absolutely is always changing.
There is this other instinct to freeze it. In my view it exists so it’s part of what we do, because we want to live in the world we used to live in, but in fact the reality of everything is about change. And then the second thing since you talked about Nature, too is a very local story—which is my connection to the Delaware river which I have lived along all my life. I swam in it, I’ve been drinking water from it for 52 years. It’s part of me right? Then in different phases of my life. I’ve done outright activism, which I have many complicated thoughts about. I don’t think I’ve really intentionally tried to use my literary work for that purpose but things happen. You know you sort of want to give your work meaning over and beyond what anyone else will give to it. It’s kind of like a sense of control.
BU: Have you found your writing will end up carrying you in another direction than you originally intended?
NP: It might. Though there are three books, nonfiction books, that I wrote which are explicitly making a case or presenting an idea. One was The Possible City which came out in 2008, then To Reach The Spring which came out in 2020, and the third is a book I co-edited, Who Will Speak For America. These were all meant to frame for the reader ways of thinking or seeing something that I hoped were new ways.
BU: You have this quote that I quite like from an Instagram post, which is “thinking about how a formally industrial city retains and reimagines its mechanical DNA.” Is this something that you could expand upon because this concept of change seems to be carried in a lot of your work?
NP: Yeah—I was in the city of Nantes, on the west coast of France, which is on the Atlantic Ocean. It was a ship-building city, a very industrial city, and most or all of that mechanism is gone. I was struck by the way it was taking that history, using that history, and thinking about it. It was reimagining that history in public in a very specific way which is to create mechanical animals. In that picture there’s a giant elephant and the workshop is open to the public in an old ship-building or sort of factory area. That would be very familiar to anyone in Philadelphia. Ha, really it was just a coy way of saying “You don’t have to tear down you can reimagine.” It reminds me of one of the things I’ve done over the years which is to think about Philadelphia history. We have a tendency here to erase things that make us feel bad. I think we feel bad about a lot of things, and one of those was the loss of the very creative industrial life of the city. Everyone was involved in production, so many people, and spent the entirety of their days making stuff. Some things for industry, but an awful lot of things that regular people would have in their homes. The personal and human scale of production. You wouldn’t really understand that and you would not encounter that history if you came here. You might notice that there are a lot of factories that maybe have apartments in them or something like that but there’s no way to understand the absurd level of material culture that was produced here. So I noticed in Nantes that they were kind of playing with that idea.
BU: I noticed in a lot of your photographs of people, the majority seem to be featuring people going about everyday life, the reality of their work and crafts. You seem to be interested in the world of industry and how people and their cities are inherently linked.
NP: You’ve hit it. I really seek that deep connection, I seek it when I go somewhere, when I walk around anywhere. What I’m thinking about is that connection between the people I’m seeing and the milieu that they’re in. I mean literally you hit it—I was just on the L train and it’s a very particular kind of space. It’s pretty small for a subway and everyone is kind of melded into that space so I was just thinking about this concept earlier. A lot of those photographs you mentioned were taken in much older cityscapes, streets, warehouses, stores, workshops, in old places. Old places where people are still keeping a tradition or a craft going and just going about their lives. So what that’s about is seeing the person in their own thoughts, in their own head, within the space that they’re in. That urban space that was created by somebody else a very long time ago and that they’re inhabiting now.
BU: So it’s all about that history and shared space that sort of connects people through time.
NP: Exactly. It’s connecting people through time—we are connected by that process. Yes, we are connected by our mothers and fathers and grandparents and so on, but also through the way that the spaces we inhabit are passed down to us. I came up with this concept which I call ‘Living in Ruins’ which is to say, for example, this room that we’re sitting in probably wasn’t always intended to be what it is now. It might have been, but it’s likely it was adapted over and over to be something else or used differently to fit the needs of whoever used it. I used to teach in this room and when I did the podium was over on the other side of the room. I used it there just because that’s where it was. I adapted that from somebody else—It’s the way we use space. We tend to think ‘the world revolves around me.’ We invent our own context for living. It’s all about ‘my house, my car, my yard’. ‘It’s MINE’. No…that’s totally ludicrous.
BU: On the opposite side I wanted to touch on the recent times of sudden and intense disconnection and sort of alienation from the world we’ve all experienced because of COVID-19. I also wanted to touch on your book To Reach The Spring and hear about your mentality while writing it. How did that forced personal immersion shape your creative process?
NP: The book was written from sorrow. Actually, it was written mostly before the pandemic about the sorrow at what we’re all doing to the planet. I know it’s not an original concept, but to me what I wanted to interrogate was how we deal with the fact that we are complicit in it. Because in my mind it was weighing on me heavily, this thing that was so big I couldn’t really do anything about it, and that I also knew I was a part of. That took me to a very strange psychological space. The pandemic hit when I was doing the final edit and so I added the prologue reflecting on trying to understand what our individual and collective responsibility was around COVID… I was trying to find a way to draw the reader in and by considering the very immediate thing of COVID as a way of getting deeper into how we think about complicity in what is undoubtedly an ecological crisis. We have vastly interfered with the natural cycles and once that begins it quickly unravels. We’ve tipped the balance and we’ve never tipped it this far in human history and so quickly which is sort of what happened in a sense with COVID. It absolutely did disconnect us; it created a very strange rift. I was really feeling that disconnection and a disconnection in the progression of my life. It was like a chunk removed from the timeline of my life and it’s a very bizarre feeling.
BU: Then through all this lack of connection, how do we start to find it again? How do you find it? Is it through your writing, or whatever inspires you, or your art? What carries you through?
NP: I spent a lot of time taking very close-up pictures of flowers with a macro lens. It enables me to get really close to very small things. That’s an example of a way to connect. Looking really closely at the smaller things that are visible to us with the human eye. I could get really close to it and see things I had never seen—never noticed before. The other way is just like this: really talking to people and getting into conversation. One thing I wrote was this article about a restaurant in Center City, which is an Indian restaurant that had a buffet. I used to go there at least once a week. It was the kind of place you’d see just about every kind of person in Philadelphia visiting. It was always full and the owner was always around talking to people, the food was very good, it was super cheap. It was part of my week, it was a treat for me, a sort of weekly relaxation to just fill my plate and look around and listen to all these people. You got bus drivers, street sweepers, college professors, business people, students, you name it. Then it was gone. It closed immediately when COVID began and still hasn’t reopened though there is a sign that says reopening soon. That loss was such a disconnect for me and I wondered while writing the article whether that shared very democratic feeling would re-emerge in the city.
BU: And now do you find that? The re-emergence of that feeling?
NP: Yeah, honestly I find it amazing that it seems things have kind of gone back to how they were. Though there is much more stratification. The extremes of poverty and drug addiction and violence only increased. There’s disenfranchisement and cynicism that really grew and so all that is a lot worse. But on a walk through a park yesterday evening in South Philly, I saw so many people, again all sorts of different people. Same story. One thing I have noticed though is that post-COVID there are a lot more kids and more dogs. That’s really nice…You see these little kids and they’re now in this shared space, they are now encountering things and learning. It’s all part of them now and they will change it and it will change them.
BU: Continuing along with that thought I’d like to hear more about your connections with the world in relation to your own identity. You said you feel very connected to the Delaware River for example. You’ve also done a lot of traveling to places like France, Catalonia, Chile, etc. How have your experiences traveling and experiencing the world led you to this point in life where you seek those deep connections? Where does your identity lie within all that and how much does it mean to you?
NP: It probably means everything. It’s a really great question because it’s so complicated. We travel, I think, because of two contradictory instincts. One is to see something entirely new, see how other people live, encounter new ‘weird’ foods, find whatever it is we’re looking for. We go to explore and when you do that you feel really alive. Those days when you’re traveling, it’s the most remarkable thing. It’s funny, though, that when we’re doing that we’re also seeking ourselves, and we’re seeing ourselves in where we are. I was in Mexico and an artist residency this January and February, and I was learning to think about that sort of negotiation with the ‘other.’ So you’re in their world. You encounter them, they encounter you. Do you try to label them? Do you say “Oh, that’s that kind of person?’ Do you put a cliche on them? Do you have an expectation for their type of behavior, or what they’re going to say, or what they do? Do you come at that with fear or anxiety? Or do you fetishize their difference to you? If you’re doing all of those things, you’re not seeing them. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that space of really encountering the other person in a way that doesn’t try to claim them. Instead, really it’s about being able to see them and be at ease with the, maybe, discomfort of the interaction.
BU: That sort of ease with discomfort seems to be on display in a lot of your work. You mentioned that feeling in relation to your experience of being an activist and some complicated thoughts you carry with you about it. That complication and conflict seems again to be another fascination for you. You enjoy that discomfort and it inspires your work. Do you find all that to be true?
NP: Totally. I mean I would say that discomfort, some form of discomfort, is really the origin of all art. If we were always comfortable, well we might be inspired to make beautiful things. I could see that, absolutely. But it’s the discomfort with something that really eats at you and obsesses you until you transform that discomfort into something else. That’s when you get a work of art. Art that really speaks to you personally so therefore it has the potential to feel universal. Because we’re all the same.
To learn more about the author, visit his website.
Béa Urbanowski-Womer (she/he/they) is a 3rd year student at Drexel University pursuing a BS in everything and anything that interests them (General Studies). He is currently invested in learning about work being done in museums of natural history to blend his backgrounds in the arts and STEM into one realm. Béa enjoys writing sci-fi and fantasy stories, exploring music unknown to her, and playing videogames in her free time. They hope to one day live in a self-sustaining off grid homestead.