ABOUT LEAFSKIN

A poet and her husband have been trying to make a baby. But while undergoing fertility treatments in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season, Jo reconsiders raising a child in a time of climate crisis. When her artist ex-girlfriend, who has always had an uncanny connection to nature, re-enters her life, Jo struggles to navigate the transformations in her relationships and realities. 

Miranda Schmidt's lyrical debut novel blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, human and nonhuman, reality and magic. A tale of queer love, new motherhood, and ecological interconnectedness, Leafskin interrogates how we create, and what we become, in a time of environmental devastation. 

PRAISE FOR LEAFSKIN

"It might sound far fetched, but I don't care: Leafskin expands our understanding of inheritance. In prose that often veers with great pleasure and abandon into poetry, Miranda Schmidt tells Jo's story through a prism queerly, challenging narrow ideas of what one person can inherit from an other—be they lover, tree, mythical creature, or element. It's into these intricate webs of relation that Leafskin settles like love, always shifting with the light, sometimes familiar, sometimes scary, sometimes unrecognizable, until we realize we've been living inside it all along." 
—Callum Angus, author of A Natural History of Transition 

“In Leafskin, Miranda Schmidt’s remarkable first novel, short chapters as lyrical as prose poems weave and twine to probe what it means to make something grow in this time of climate destruction: a tree, a marriage, a poem, a painting, a friendship, a child. By developing the fluidity of our most important relationships, those between the human and natural worlds, between reality and myth, and between genders and even in the presence of ice storms, heat domes, and wildfires, it’s possible for the characters—and us—to find connection, creativity, and rebirth.” 
—Maya Sonenberg, The S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Washington, and author of the Richard Sullivan prize-winning story collection Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters. 

"Miranda Schmidt's novel, Leafskin, and the fictional family that inhabit these pages live in the same world we all occupy at this precise moment, whether it is our own personal story or the stories embedded in every news feed--climate crisis, IVF treatments, and even wildfires.  What makes this novel so powerful is the fictional fabric of the narrative that weaves a lyrical and sensory-driven voice that take the reality of today's news and delivers it not from a bully pulpit, but with every prick of a needle, with each breath of smoke, with the embrace of those who love.  Below the tree tops, the world is called the forest's understory.  In Leafskin, we find ourselves to be that understory." 
—Shawn Wong, author of American Knees 

“Rippling with glimpses of folklore and mystery, Leafskin calls our attention to the gravity of extreme weather events – with an admirable lightness and strangeness of touch. Schmidt’s protagonist Jo is a sensitive, anxious but determined heroine – and through her eyes we see how much goes into the making of a child. A fresh, intricately-written and dreamlike novel about love, creativity and the natural world.” 
—Jane Borodale, author of The Book of Fires and The Knot 

“Grounded in the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, Miranda Schmidt's Leafskin creates an imaginative space where the factual and the fantastic, the political and the personal, technological procedures and mythical beings meet, merge, conflict, and conspire. In the shadow of a near future all too imaginable where the impact of climate change threatens our survival, this lyrical novel supplies the rarest of rewards, a hopeful ending.”

David Bosworth, University of Washington, the author of Living in Language.