plants as subjects, plants as informants: in conversation with myriam gurba pt. 2
photo by Geoff Cordner
Myriam Gurba is a writer and activist. Her first book, the short story collection Dahlia Season, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. O, the Oprah Magazine ranked her true-crime memoir Mean as one of the “Best LGBTQ Books of All Time.” Her recent essay collection “Creep: Accusations and Confessions” was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award for Criticism, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, and Paris Review. Her new book, “Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings,” was published by Timber Press in October 2025.
In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, and part study of place. The reader is invited to commune with California with Gurba as their guide, ushered through a compendium of anecdotes, reminiscences, utterances, lists, incantations, newspaper articles, and other ephemera.