Margret Renkl stopped by HPPR to talk with Amarillo College’s Chris Hudson about her book, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, a collection of essays about processing grief and appreciating the natural beauty in the world around us. To listen to the full interview, click the link at the top of the page.
Renkl discussed the creation of the book and how what at first seemed to be two separate works eventually folded into one. “The book started out as two separate little piles of essays: one that concerned childhood memories that were flooding in and the immediate aftermath of my mother's death, and the other in the natural world of my own backyard, the nearby natural world in which I was taking a lot of solace from the grief of losing my mom,” Renkl said. “It was quite a little while into the process of writing this book that I realized that I wasn't writing two separate books, but I was writing one book that was about grief and about the way understanding the cycles of life and death in the natural world was helping me cope with it.”
Renkl also described her experience with grief and her views on how people can view it through different lenses. “We are an opinionated bunch of people, human beings — and it turns out that everybody has very strong views on how someone else should grieve,” she continued. “So people will tell you, when you've wallowed in your sorrow too long, that you neeRenkl’s latest book was featured as part of HPPR’s Radio Reader’s Book Clubd to, you know, buck up and get on with things. Or they'll tell you, not to your face normally, they'll speak to each other behind your back and say ‘you moved on too quickly, you got rid of your husband's clothes too soon after his loss’, or ‘you married again too soon.”
She shared how this experience shifted her own understanding of how people process pain and grief quite differently than they might expect. “Everybody has these rules and they're not spoken very clearly, but people seem to think that they are firm and fast, and I don't think they are for me,” Renkl said. “I'll be 64 soon, and I feel that my beloved dead are with me always. They don't feel lost, they feel present. I'm in conversation with them, with my memories of them, of what I know of them from their lives, and I don't think of it as something that you move past or move through. It's something you wear, not like clothes, but like a skin, and it's always with you. You're changed by it, but not necessarily for the worse.”
Renkl also highlighted her appreciation of the natural world and its healing effects on her grief journey. “I don't think that a person has to have any skill to take an immense amount of joy and pleasure in the world, this garden of Eden we were all born into,” she said. “All it requires is a willingness to be astonished, to be in a state of awe, and when you have that capacity, which everyone has, we are born with it. It's beaten out of us in grade school, normally, But if you are able to cultivate that sense of astonishment, then you have the beginnings of curiosity and the drive to learn more and to acquire the kind of knowledge you would need to have a certain kind of expertise. Not everybody is very curious to know the names of birds or the migratory patterns of butterflies, but when you start with astonishment, it's almost invariably that the next step is to investigate.”
Late Migrations was among the books in HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2025 Fall Read, so be sure to check out the many fascinating BookBytes submitted by our High Plains readers. Also, we’d like to extend a special thanks to Dr. Chris Hudson of Amarillo College for conducting this brilliant interview for our listeners.
