It’s All Wind
By Martin Fulmer
I’m Martin Fulmer from Goodwell, Oklahoma, here for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read.
When I picked up Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, I remember wondering how anyone could write an entire book about the wind. It seemed like an impossible subject. Wind is everywhere, but it’s easy to think of it as background—the thing that bends the trees while you’re paying attention to something else. Somehow, Lyall Watson convinced me otherwise.
I’ve lived in two places that seem to have very little in common. I grew up along the South Carolina coast, where sandpaper winds carry the memory of hurricanes. These days I live in the Oklahoma Panhandle, where there are mornings when the wind arrives before the sun and evenings when it never seems to stop. The longer I stayed with Watson’s book, the more those two places began to feel connected.
When I step outside here on a bright Oklahoma afternoon, I sometimes remember Myrtle Beach. Not because the landscape looks the same. It doesn’t. One place is surf and marsh grass. The other is wide-open fields and shortgrass prairie. Still, on sunny days when the wind blows, I know both winds carry sand, both can sting your face if you walk into them. They have the same roughness, the same insistence. They are forever moving the earth. I had not really thought about that before.
Watson writes about wind as if it’s a living presence in the world more than weather. It is a force that shapes coastlines, deserts, forests, migration, even imagination. By the time I reached the end of the book, I found myself paying attention to things I’d stopped seeing years ago: the rustling cottonwood leaves, the dust lifting from a county road, the grass that bends in waves long before the air reaches where I’m standing. The wind had been performing all along. I just wasn’t paying attention.
As a writer, that struck me. I’ve always been drawn to places that seem to remember. My stories and songs usually begin with a landscape before they find their people. Maybe that’s because places keep their own kind of history. The dunes at Myrtle Beach, the plains around Goodwell, even the white gypsum sands of southern New Mexico are all being rewritten by the same invisible hand. Wind uncovers footprints and fossils. Wind likewise buries them. Wind carries one thing away so something older can emerge. Maybe that’s why a whole book about the wind doesn’t seem strange anymore.
I wonder what other ordinary things I’ve overlooked simply because they’ve always been there? The wind asks nothing of us, but when you notice it, it becomes difficult to think of it as empty air. Wind becomes part of every place ever called home.
I started Heaven’s Breath thinking there couldn’t possibly be enough to say about the wind.
I finished it realizing there was more to notice than I’d ever imagined.
I’m Martin Fulmer from Goodwell, Oklahoma, for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read.
Martin Fulmer is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Oklahoma Panhandle State University. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Story Quarterly, Burrow Press Review, Story South, and other literary journals. He lives and works in Oklahoma with his dogs, Rose and Hector.
