FORESTS IN HER MIND

a newsletter from Sam Wilket

I recently saw Come See Me In The Good Light, a documentary about poets and partners Andrea Gibson and Meghan Falley, coming to terms with Gibson’s terminal cancer diagnosis.

In a sold-out theatre on a Sunday afternoon, this film made family out of a hundred strangers. Together in the darkness, we cackled with laughter and dabbed at tears with scratchy napkins. It was a powerful way to experience this story of profound joy and profound grief, brilliantly told.

That same weekend, I was also reading the book I’m recommending today: Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

It felt like the film and the novel were echoing each other. Especially one of Andrea’s poems, Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps, which says in part:

My every pore reached out like a hand / pointing to the first unsinkable lotus in the bayou / of the universe. I'd never felt anything like it.

I’m holding tight to these works of art, to remind myself that living fully means opening up to feel joy and grief and gratitude and boredom and hope and disappointment and everything in between.

- Sam

May 13, 2025

Recommending:

A rare combination of literary and science fiction that captured me in its orbit, and wouldn’t let me go.

Orbital (2023)

by Samantha Harvey

In this gorgeous, contemplative novel, we join six astronauts on a space station orbiting Earth and live alongside them for one 24 hour day–an arbitrary length of time in space, a tether to the planet they left behind.

As the sun rises and sets and rises again on the Earth below, a total of 16 times, the astronauts go about their single day, speaking to their families, conducting experiments, preparing meals. Their thoughts and interactions swing from deeply philosophical to wildly ordinary.

Harvey’s writing made me feel like I was orbiting the Earth along with the crew: each rotation around the planet is a chapter filled with tremendous awe, complex human connections, and surprising monotony.

“They cling to their twenty-four hour clock because it’s all the feeble little time-bound body knows–sleep and bowels and all that is leashed to it.

But the mind goes free within the first week. The mind is a dayless freak zone, surfing earth’s hurtling horizon.

Day is here, and then they see night come upon them like the shadow of a cloud racing over a wheat field. Forty-five minutes later here comes day again, stampeding across the Pacific.

Nothing is what they thought it was.”

from Orbital by Samantha Harvey

This newsletter has 189 goosebumps. Forward it to someone you're in awe of.

FORESTS IN HER MIND

a newsletter from Sam Wilket

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