Grafting the cactus

Abstract

Grafting the Cactus is a book-length work of creative nonfiction that explores the porous boundary between landscape and identity. This collection of personal and environmental essays begins with a cholla cactus, ripped from a landscaped yard in Colorado and left on the side of the road, then recovered and regrown. Many cacti can be grafted, meaning pieces of two different species – perhaps native to two different landscapes – will fuse together into something made up of both. Grafting becomes a structuring metaphor for the collection, and for the speaker who seeks to understand how identity can grow like the grafted cactus, informed by the places she's lived. These essays explore what it means to make home in different places, and what it means to build an identity informed by each – and how, when these landscapes that make us up are altered – by pollution, by climate change, by other human impacts – we too change.