When Krystal Martin started surveying her neighbors in the southwest Mississippi town of Gloster about the impact of a local wood pellet manufacturing facility, she was focused on air quality. The facility has been fined multiple times for exceeding emissions limits, and Martin was worried about her neighbors’ health. From respiratory issues to eye and skin irritation, just about everyone in the town of almost 900 people felt some impact.

But air quality wasn’t the only concern. “You hear some people talk about the dust,” Martin says. “Some people said they were impacted by a lot of sound.” 

Noise is just a part of life there, she says. Loud 18-wheeler trucks drive along the country roads every couple minutes. Machinery and loudspeakers echo out from the plant across the two-mile-wide town. But it wasn’t until Martin’s organization, the Greater Greener Gloster Project, partnered with Brown University epidemiological researcher Erica Walker that Martin began to understand the constant cacophony not just as an annoyance, but as another factor contributing to residents’ health.

“We knew it was a problem. People talked about it being a problem,” says Martin. “But we didn’t know it was noise pollution.”

Walker leads the Community Noise Lab, a research initiative that explores the intersections between noise and health. The connection between loud sounds and health extends far beyond hearing loss. Research is finding noise exposure has  implications for cardiovascular and cognitive health. Yet, unlike other environmental stressors, noise has not been a major factor in community planning.

Research efforts like Walker’s are deepening our understanding of how noise permeates lives, arming communities with information to better plan for their health and their future. 

“I want to empower citizens to be able to negotiate what comes into their communities, and negotiate thinking about noise as one of those things,” Walker says.

Sound plays a central role in how humans interact with the world, explains Walker. From a young age, kids learn about the importance of hearing as one of the five senses.  

“We’ve legislated, regulated, discussed all of these other senses, but noise is the one that we kind of left out,” says Walker.

Now, research is showing just how grave exposure to noise can be. Noise can trigger a stress response, the same system that signals when our bodies are in danger. It has been linked to issues like hypertension, heightened risk of heart disease and impaired cognitive functioning. It can cause sleep issues and contribute to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression.

There’s a history, Walker notes, of “putting loud things” like highways, airports and industrial facilities “in communities that don’t have the power to fight back.” People of color and lower-income communities tend to be at highest risk. 

While the health consequences of noise are becoming clearer, understanding of just how much noise is in people’s lives and communities remains hazy.

In the European Union, a leader in recognizing noise as a health threat, member countries have mapped sound from roadways, rail traffic, airports and industry. Awareness in the US is lagging, according to University of Michigan professor of environmental health sciences Rick Neitzel. The US has two main national resources — one from the federal Department of Transportation tracking transportation noise, the other from the National Park Service. However, there aren’t good resources tracking noise exposure in other aspects of daily life.

But Neitzel sees awareness growing.

“I think people are starting to wake up and realize this isn’t just a nuisance,” says Neitzel. “It’s not just a necessary byproduct of modern life. It’s actually bad for us.”

In Gloster, high school and community college students regularly reposition air quality and noise monitors around town. 

They’re helping collect data as part of Walker’s ongoing research on the health effects of wood pellet manufacturing. The industry exploded in the US South to accommodate EU demand for fossil fuel alternatives, and has particularly impacted majority-Black, low-income communities.

Walker approaches noise as interconnected with other environmental factors, like air and water quality. Instead of prioritizing noise over the concerns of locals, Walker monitors a range of factors, including sound. Ultimately, research leaves residents with a package of data that can inform their planning and negotiations.

That set of data can spur change, as Walker saw in Boston. Neighbors of Fenway Park, home of the Red Sox, were rattled by concerts the stadium hosted in the off-season. When Walker collected data around the neighborhood, she not only found very high decibels of noise during concerts, but also low-frequency reverberations that particularly impacted closest neighbors.

Initially, interactions with Fenway Park were contentious, she recalls. But, over time, the venue became more receptive to the community’s concerns. The park invested in its own noise monitoring equipment, she says, and has continued to use her metrics to collect data.

“They see the importance of that, and the community really appreciates being heard,” Walker says. 

In Gloster, Mississippi, Walker’s study found that noise levels were up to 10 decibels higher, or twice as loud, as a similar community without a biomass plant. Simply having this data available gives residents more power to negotiate terms of operations with industries, she explains: “A lot of the noise issues we have in our country have been uninformed planning, uninformed responses to things.”

“You can take everything that I’ve done with this and say, ‘No, we still want the plant,’” Walker says. “I’m happy because that’s an informed response.”

While awareness of the connections between health and noise is rising, there’s no one, straightforward path to address the problem. 

Responses to noise tend to be enacted at the local or municipal level, explains Neitzel. Paris has sought to crack down on traffic noise with radars that pinpoint excessively loud vehicles, issuing fines to offenders. Though Neitzel isn’t aware of research on the technology, he says intuitively it makes sense that reducing loud cars will help. 

Several European cities have lowered speed limits, leading to reduced traffic noise. When Zurich reduced speed on some streets from 50 kilometers per hour to 30 kilometers per hour (about 30 to 19 miles per hour), noise levels dropped, and residents self-reported less annoyance and sleep disturbance.  

One change under way, Neitzel says, is the expanding fleet of electric vehicles, which he says are quieter than combustion engines in slow, urban environments. Another approach to highway noise is roadside barriers, which can reduce noise by up to 10 decibels.  

Ultimately, Neitzel sees systemic approaches to planning as most likely to make a lasting impact, like expanding public transit and reducing vehicles on the road. He points to congestion pricing, an approach to curbing traffic and air pollution in cities by charging drivers at busy times of day. Cities that have enacted it also see traffic noise levels drop.

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“It’s not like the city is going to get quieter overnight,” Neitzel says, “but I think those things have a much bigger chance of making a bigger impact over the long haul.” 

For Walker, community involvement is the key to improving noise pollution. Addressing noise in a way that is equitable is a challenge. Within communities, noise complaints are sometimes wielded to target aspects of a neighborhood seen as “undesirable.” 

“Noise can be a power thing,” she says. “It could be used to silence people, silence practices, silence the acoustical culture of a community.”

In Gloster, the din of the wood pellet facility can still be heard around the clock. “It’s mentally draining,” says Martin. “It’s mentally stressful.”

But now, Martin says, the community recognizes noise as a health factor along with the other air and water quality concerns. Armed with data showing the extent of the problem, she believes Gloster residents are well-positioned to push to curb the cacophony.

“The people in the community, we should not hear that 24 hours, seven days a week,” says Martin. “Maybe we can now influence policies.”

The post The Curative Power of Quieter Cities appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

After a year of quiet labour, we are launching our new image-forward PDR sister-site!

At the Authors Guild Foundation’s third-annual WIT: Words, Ideas, and Thinkers Literary Festival in the Berkshires this September, acclaimed author Jamaica Kincaid spoke with journalist and editor Sandra Guzmán about her latest work, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, illustrated by the artist Kara Walker. Their conversation wove threads of colonialism, botany, and personal history, revealing how gardens tell stories of power, possession, and survival.

This is an edited version of their conversation.

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Sandra Guzmán: You tend to your garden beds like they are children, and the work must be grueling. Tell us how this love affair with flowers and plants and gardening began.

Jamaica Kincaid: I certainly didn’t grow up with the garden I now have. A garden traditionally echoes the Edenic design, where the river flows through it and divides it into a quadrant, which is traditional throughout many cultures, certainly cultures in what we now call the Middle East.

My garden has two parts to it: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. I’ve interpreted the Tree of Life to mean agriculture and the Tree of Knowledge to mean horticulture. It’s almost invariably true that garden culture establishes itself once you have enough to eat, after you have a lot of food, and you’ve stored up the grains, and you get wealthy, and then you begin to grow things for their own sake, just because they’re beautiful.

I think I became attached to growing things because of my mother, who grew things in Antigua, but only particular things. If she tasted something and liked it, she would inevitably take the seed and grow it, and it grew, and then it grew to such prosperity—bigger than usual—and then she’d have a whole series of quarrels with the plant because it had done things she hadn’t told it to do.

One vivid example is a soursop tree she grew close to the house. When she tasted a passion fruit, liked it, and grew it near the soursop tree, it ran up so vigorously that it weakened the tree. Red ants made their home in the soursop tree and began to weaken it, then came into the house and formed a nest. She got so annoyed at the soursop tree that she set it on fire and burned it to the ground. She was always doing things like that.

SG: Is gardening similar to writing for you?

JK: In my case, it isn’t. But there are many gardeners who would disagree with me altogether, though many of them have written books, and they’re really good writers. They’re second in terms of good writing only to mountaineers.

Mountaineers are the best writers—if you read the account of a conquest of a mountain by one of these crazy people who climb mountains, you cannot believe how good the writing is. Second are people who are gardeners, or people who go looking for plants—plant hunters, they used to be called.

When I began to garden, I gardened with simple things like marigolds and annuals. And I wondered: Where does the marigold come from? I was somehow reading the history of Mexico and Peru by William Prescott. He has a very beautiful description of Montezuma’s gardens. The marigold comes from Mexico, as do a lot of things that you think of every day, that you can now buy at the store for 10 cents.

I can’t help myself when I see something and wonder where it comes from. If you were Freud, you’d say, “Well, obviously you’re a narcissist. You’re wondering where you come from,” which is true. I often wonder where I come from, not only from our common ancestry but also from the very idea of origin itself.

SG: You have said that gardening is a kind of colonization. Can you explore this?

JK: Plants colonize themselves. They find a place that is good for them, and they grow. They colonize that area. But what we do is extend the actual act of colonizing and subjugating people to the world of plants.

If you look at an English landscape, they destroyed their landscape. They have no forests. I once was walking around, not far from where (Heywood ?) Hardy lived, and almost fell into the road because the trees that were supposed to be a forest just ended, and if I kept walking, I would have fallen into traffic.

Sugarcane isn’t natural to the West Indies. It comes from New Guinea and maybe somewhere else. Cotton is a very interesting plant. It tends to naturalize itself around the equator. Of course, you can grow it in Ukraine also, which incidentally brings me to the point that the national flower of Ukraine is the sunflower, and the sunflower is native to Arizona.

The English Garden was the first real colonization of plants because, having destroyed their own landscape, they began gardening with flowers. The English Garden [idea] of just putting flowers in the way we do [now] was new. If you look at gardening, it goes to an Italian garden. It’s all laid out and has five steps to it, but none of them are really about flowers. It was the English who brought flowers into that thing called the garden that we now do.

The British Empire, more than any other European power, drew its wealth from the vegetable kingdom. Perhaps the French would be second. The Spanish, who were always interested in the mineral kingdom, were always looking for gold and glittery things.

And then I wondered about that and one day, I was reading The Gallic War by Julius Caesar and realized that the mines for the Roman Empire were in the Iberian Peninsula. So, I wondered if that memory had an influence on the Spanish conquests of the rest of the world [due to the search] for minerals.

Of course, the Dutch had nothing but grasses, so they went to Afghanistan and all over the world and took other people’s bulbs. Do you know there isn’t one bulb you can find that originates from Holland? They come from the rest of the world.

SG: I understood that at one point, the tulip was currency, and the black tulip was the most prized and expensive.

JK: I don’t think there is a species of tulip that’s black. There is a species of lily that’s black. It’s in the Dolomites. The tulip is very vulnerable to something that will make it do all sorts of funny things, but it doesn’t reproduce. Some viruses will make it have streaks, but its children won’t have the streaks. So, somebody would have a beautiful tulip and sell it for their family’s fortune. And then the ones to come weren’t like that.

I make another connection to the introduction of grasses in gardens. They were introduced by a Dutchman named Piet Oudolf, and I hope I meet him soon. I want to ask him if he became obsessed with grasses because he had no flowers. The Dutch tulip is, by the way, native to Spain, not Holland.

SG: Let’s talk about the breadfruit entry in your encyclopedia and its connection to colonial history.

JK: Plants in a garden can tell you a lot about history. Captain Cook—and Captain Cook’s journey is probably the second-most important exploration, whatever you want to call it, after Columbus—supposedly went to that part of the world, Tahiti, in the South Pacific, to observe the transit of Venus. The transit of Venus is when Venus passes in front of the moon every two hundred and twenty years, and then it does it again twenty years later, and then it doesn’t do it for another two hundred and twenty years.

That was supposedly what the journey was for, but Cook did find many things, and his journey was an example for Thomas Jefferson when he sent (soldiers) Lewis and Clark on their expedition across the United States. Jefferson borrowed many things that Cook did. Cook took scientists and botanists—one of them was related to Greta Thunberg.

When Cook got to Tahiti, his team found that people ate this thing called breadfruit. It just grows and falls off the tree, and you can roast it and it tastes like bread if you are inclined to think it tastes like bread, or if your familiarity with bread is very limited. The planters immediately thought this would be a good thing. It grows without care.

Captain Bligh was also on that expedition—he was an incredibly unpleasant and cruel man. His ship mutinied, and they sent him off in a small boat, hoping he would die. Well, he was so bad that death refused him. So, he made another trip. It was successful, and the breadfruit got to the West Indies.

The British established a botanical garden, which was really an agricultural station—that’s the origin of the botanical garden. It’s a station for storing plants to see how they would do. They established two Botanical Gardens in St. Vincent and Jamaica. They were sending these plants, the breadfruit, to those places.

SG: Your entry about the American Elm connects deeply to American history. Could you tell us more?

JK: The North American Elm, Ulmus americana, the state tree of Massachusetts and North Dakota, because of its impressive, elegant stature, was widely used to make the new American nation appear serious and old. In our American narrative, the painter Benjamin West shows William Penn entering a treaty with the Lenape under an elm.

The treaty used the words “openness, love, and one flesh and blood.” The Lenape responded, “We will live in love with William Penn and his children while the sun, moon, and stars endure.”

William Penn is long dead, and the Lenape were dispossessed of their ancestral lands. And yet, of the fifty states, twenty-six bear the names of indigenous peoples: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

It’s one of the fun things—it’s just so amazing to me that we hated the people, and I say we because here we are. We wanted to get rid of them, but we kept their names. How can it be that twenty-six of the states are named after these people whom we were always trying to make disappear? George Washington’s career as a soldier was in killing Indians or indigenous people. That was how he was a soldier.

The American Elm is more or less extinct now, having suffered from a blight. What was left out was that the American Elm suffered from this lethal fungus and therefore made itself disappear because of the betrayal of the promise that was made under it. That is my interpretation.

SG: The name Jamaica is Arawak, isn’t it? Tell us about the power of naming.

JK: The name Jamaica is actually Arawak spelled Xamayca. Xamayca, Cuba, Borikén (Puerto Rico) and Ayiti (Haiti)—those names remained. Columbus, who was not prepared to find these things, named the other islands after things he was familiar with.

Antigua is named after a church in Spain because he discovered it on a Sunday. Saint Kitts is named after Saint Christopher because he thought in silhouette it looked like Saint Christopher the traveling saint. Dominica is named because it was a Sunday.

All this renaming was a way of possessing them in the name of Isabella. Which is why, in my naughty moments, when someone says Columbus Day, I will say, “You mean Isabella and Ferdinand Day?” Because Columbus had a rather humiliating end. At the end of his fourth voyage, he was returned to Spain as a prisoner bound at the bottom of his boat because the other ravenous people had come and taken over his claim.

The naming of things and people is an act of possession. It’s not an accident that when African countries become independent, they reclaim their names—you know, Zimbabwe was Rhodesia.

SG: What is the closest thing you do that feels like a prayer?

JK: Plant something. It’s the most spiritual feeling, closeness to something divine and worthy, when I am planting something. Every evening at around six, depending on how late or early the sun decides to disappear from my sight, I walk around, sometimes with a glass of wine, sometimes with water, sometimes with nothing at all. I just walk around the garden and look at it and look at it. Just the closest I come to prayer. Yes, I am a plant worshiper.

Of course, if you can afford a garden, which means you are rich, you are never at peace. You’re most likely thinking about how to make more money, how to kill the person who has more money than you or take it away from him or her or something like that. So, the garden is never that place of peace at all.

But there’s hope in planting. You wouldn’t do it if you didn’t have hope that it would become the thing you have in your mind. Hope, oh gosh, I would say hope is as big an ingredient as fertilizing or composting.

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To view the full conversation and discover a remarkable collection of literary dialogues from the Authors Guild’s 2024 WIT Festival, click here. You can also watch other engaging conversations between Jennifer Egan and Joseph O’Neill; Stephen Greenblatt and Emily Wilson (moderated by Meghan O’Rourke); Tony Kushner and Rachel Maddow; Sherrilyn Ifill and Ruth Simmons (moderated by Richard T. Ford); Cathy Park Hong and Sayed Kashua (moderated by Alexander Chee); Sandra Guzmán and Jamaica Kincaid; Ruth Reichl and Monique Truong (moderated by Aleksandra Crapanzano); and Marie Arana and Luis Alberto Urrea (moderated by Stephania Taladrid). These intimate dialogues bring together some of today’s most influential voices in literature, journalism, and academia. The festival is open to the public, join us in the Berkshires in fall 2025.

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An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children by Jamaica Kincaid and with illustrations by Kara Walker is available via FSG.

Can you walk me through your morning coffee ritual?

When I’m brewing just for myself or with another person, I usually go for the V60, a manual pour-over method. It’s always been my favorite home brewing technique. It doesn’t yield the most coffee, so it’s not great for impressing a crowd, but it’s perfect for small batches. I use a bleached paper filter because it doesn’t leave any extra flavors behind. I find that metal filters can sometimes give the coffee a metallic taste, which can really throw off the brew, and unbleached filters can leave a slight papery flavor. For the setup, I use a temperature-controlled gooseneck kettle and my own grinder.

Do you remember when you first had a “good” coffee?

It was in Edmonton, Alberta. A couple of friends took me to Transcend at the original Garneau location. I think I had a cappuccino or something, and everyone I was with was like, “This is the spot; this is the best coffee.” I didn’t have a frame of reference then, but it completely rewired my brain. I applied for a job there during that visit because I had just moved to Edmonton and needed work. I was hired almost on the spot.

How old were you?

18 or 19.

Would you say that was the beginning of your career?

Definitely. I had just dropped out of university and it wasn’t until I had the 60 hours of one-on-one training that things really clicked. Once I started, I realized, Wow, I’m actually really good at this. I had a strong palate, my retro-nasal senses were on point, and I picked things up quickly.

Does having a strong palate apply to anything else in your life?

Nothing professional, but I’m a big perfume guy. Some people are better tasters and some people are better smellers.

What does it mean to have a good palate?

For me, a well-developed palate can isolate the different flavors, aromas, and textures at play. This can be tricky with coffee, especially if you’re not a regular drinker or not particularly intentional about it. In North America, many people tend to prefer coffee that tastes nutty or chocolatey, whereas something like a naturally processed Ethiopian coffee is very aromatic and bold—it can hit you with flavors like blackberries and Jolly Ranchers. If you build your palate without assumptions, you can sip the coffee and ask yourself, “What else am I tasting?” Often, it’s not immediately obvious. It’s about exploring what else you can detect in the cup.

You work in coffee education. Can you explain what being a trainer entails?

I work as a management consultant and educator for Variety Coffee Roasters in New York. Specifically, for education, I’m responsible for building and executing the coffee program for their retail staff across eight cafes. I redesigned their education program, breaking it into modules. The first module is all about assessing the individual’s experience with coffee. If someone is new to coffee, it will start with a basic PowerPoint covering the fundamentals, like how coffee is a seed inside a cherry, followed by a full menu cupping. The second module focuses on milk-based drinks, including milk steaming and latte art. No one can work in the cafes until they’ve passed the milk training session. The final two modules are all about espresso dialing from scratch.

Before joining Variety, I had been working in coffee education on a consulting basis, helping small restaurants and cafes develop their own sustainable coffee programs. I designed an espresso training cheat sheet, a key part of my consulting. When I joined Variety, I adapted it to their program, and it worked so well that I eventually patented it. This method has allowed me to train people to dial in espresso to a high standard in just a few hours. When dialing espresso, I rely on instinct rather than a clear cause-and-effect process. I just know what to do, but teaching that kind of instinct to others has been one of the biggest challenges in my role as a trainer.

You started your own company recently, Hot Stuff, and you work with Nordic light roast coffee. Can you explain what constitutes a light roast and how you achieve that flavor?

A good way to compare roasts is through sugar: light roasts are like white sugar, medium roasts are like caramel, and dark roasts are like molasses. If you think of fruitier, more expressive coffees you’ve had, they’re likely light roasts. During roasting, after the drying phase and Maillard reaction, there’s a point called the first crack. The first crack is a chemical change when the green coffee stops absorbing heat, then expels it. At this stage, all the moisture is gone, and when the coffee expels the heat, it’s similar to popcorn popping. This is when the coffee’s pores open up, and the sugars inside begin to cook. Green coffee is full of sugar, gas, and oil. The oil and sugars carry the coffee’s natural flavor.

Depending on the coffee’s origin, the flavor can vary widely. African coffees tend to be fruity and tea-like. In contrast, Latin American coffees often have notes of stone fruit, nuts, caramel, and chocolate—flavors that North Americans might associate with more traditional profiles, even though all coffee originates from Ethiopia. For lighter roasts, the goal is to preserve these flavors while ensuring the sugar is developed enough to avoid grassy or underdeveloped tastes. In a light roast, you aim to stop the process just after it has developed enough to avoid those underdeveloped qualities, before the flavors begin to neutralize as the sugars cook… You need to learn how to listen to the coffee and figure out what it wants.

And you’re roasting the coffee yourself?

Yes. It’s a one-person business, but I hired a consultant to help me get started. Coffee roasting is an exclusive field, especially if you’re not a dude, so I brought in a friend who had roasted for Stumptown Roasters for years. Though I had years of specialty experience, he was the only one willing to teach me to roast.

We roast out of my workplace, Variety. I just asked the owner, “Hey, can Patrick and I rent the roastery on weekends for this project I’m working on?” and he said, “You do enough for me, just use it.” It was insanely generous because that saved me thousands and thousands of dollars. I can also store my green coffee there, which is crazy. The reason why most people don’t learn how to roast coffee is because it’s prohibitively expensive.

It feels like there’s so much of you in this project. You’ve been pursuing this since your teenage years, co-owned a café in Montréal for years, worked at Variety, and now launched this Nordic-inspired business. Given that you’re Nordic yourself, it all feels incredibly personal and reflective of who you are. Was that intentional?

I feel like with Hot Stuff, I realized I wanted to do my own thing, and I want to do it the way that I like to do it. I also want it to be less serious! I want someone to be able to walk into a cafe without being scared about asking a stupid question. I want someone trying a fruity espresso to be like, “Why does this taste like this?”

Last year, I hosted a public coffee cupping in my hometown in Saskatchewan, and a huge crowd showed up. I encouraged everyone to dive deeper into tasting coffee. By the end, people were genuinely excited about what they had learned. Even my mom joined in. One coffee was on the table with a noticeable sour defect, and she immediately picked up on it, saying, “This tastes like when a peanut starts to go a little sour.” I was amazed at how quickly she identified it. It made me realize that people inherently know how to taste; they’ve just never been given the opportunity to engage with coffee beyond its typical, commodity-focused perspective.

What do you feel you still have to learn?

I want to deepen my understanding of coffee production and agronomy because they’re incredibly fascinating. With climate change, we’re seeing significant shifts in how and where coffee is grown. Some countries are experiencing frost for the first time, leading to increased defects and challenges in production. Their coffee economies are struggling as a result. Meanwhile, other regions are seeing hotter climates that, surprisingly, are yielding more unique and exciting coffees. It’s been fascinating to observe these changes over the years. In the 11 or 12 years I’ve been in the industry, I’ve noticed how much Kenyan coffee, for example, has evolved in flavor compared to a decade ago.

At the same time, growing coffee is becoming increasingly difficult and costly, which impacts both producers and consumers. As coffee becomes more expensive, I believe it’s the roaster’s responsibility to educate consumers. It’s important to explain why their coffee costs $6—whether it’s due to climate challenges, labour conditions, or production costs—not simply because the roaster wants to charge a premium.

We also can’t ignore the fact that the coffee industry has deep roots in exploitation and slavery. As a coffee company, there’s a responsibility not just to help people enjoy coffee more but also to share the stories behind it—highlighting the producers, the struggles their countries face, and the broader context of what’s happening in the industry.

What does the future hold for Hot Stuff?

When I eventually open a brick-and-mortar roastery, my goal is to establish a program to teach people how to roast coffee, specifically aiming to support marginalized communities. The biggest challenges in learning how to roast coffee are often access-related. First, finding someone willing to teach you the craft can be difficult. As an educator, I’m passionate about filling that gap. But beyond that, sourcing and purchasing green coffee is incredibly challenging, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the process. Then there’s the question of where to store it and where to roast. My vision for the roastery is to address these hurdles and create a supportive environment where people can learn and grow.

I want to create a scholarship program based on a circular economy. The idea is to use still-fresh tasting, past-crop coffee to teach roasting. Participants—two or three at a time—would get meaningful, hands-on experience, not just a quick two-hour session. The coffee they roast would be bagged separately as “scholarship coffee” and sold at a lower price, with revenue reinvested into the program to buy more green coffee and support future participants. The goal is to make this education free and sustainable, reducing waste by repurposing coffee that might otherwise go unsold. There’s a huge demand for roasting education, especially among women and marginalized groups… I hope to create a space where aspiring roasters can learn without the financial burden or logistical challenges. We’ll see who shows up for it!

Mavis Gallant knew how to bring her characters to life – so much so that, reading her fiction, you can’t help guessing who their prototypes might have been. Sometimes plausible answers present themselves, but when it comes to seemingly autobiographical details there are no exact matches. She did work from life, but she was always able to step aside, keeping just the right distance from her subjects.

Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922. Her childhood was not happy: she was sent to a convent school aged four; her father died when she was ten; and her mother “should not have had children”, to quote one of the author’s rare public comments about her family. In 1950 she left Montreal for Paris and lived there, often travelling around Europe, until her death in 2014. Her legacy includes two novels, a play, more than 100 short stories and numerous journalistic pieces. A selection of these works has recently been reissued.

Gallant’s fiction may feature a succession of unfit parents and unwanted children, but to expect direct references to her past would be to oversimplify. Green Water, Green Sky (1959), a short, intense novel, tells the story of Flor, a young American woman trying to escape a life imposed on her by her mother, Bonnie, a needy divorcée traipsing around Europe. The heroine’s attempts at self-identification lead to madness.

Reading the book for the first time twenty years ago, I was struck by its similarity to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934); returning to it now, I am more interested in what it says about language. Stranded in Paris, Flor struggles to make sense of words: “the words she had been taught to use when, long ago, she had seen shapes and felt desires that had to be given names”. Losing oneself starts with losing one’s language. This is the root of both Flor’s tragedy and the tragicomic fate of another character, a Brit who uses language as a tool of social mobility. An embodiment of snobbery and insecurity, he is dealt with unceremoniously. Not that we care, so devastated are we by Flor’s descent into silence.

For Gallant everything started with language. Bilingual, she always wrote fiction in English, sometimes turning to French in her journalism. When I interviewed her in 2010 she talked about learning languages during her travels in Europe. I asked her if she ever translated her own work. “That would be like eating cold soup!” the eighty-eight-year-old writer laughed, sounding incredibly young.

Gallant’s child characters are often stronger than her adult ones. A memorable example of this can be found in “The Rejection” (1969; collected in The Cost of Living, 2009), an unsettling story in which a six-year-old, free from “social dishonesties”, is expected to make her own decisions. Similar motifs can be found in The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, which is organized into three parts, covering North America, southern Europe and “Paris and beyond”. In “Orphans’ Progress” (1965), a tale set in Canada, two sisters are taken away from their wayward mother. Even as little girls they “knew that sometimes she listened and sometimes could not hear”; they love her unconditionally, the way she should have loved them.

To be able to write fiction, Gallant supported herself with journalism. Her reporting career reached its peak when the events of 1968 shook Paris. Tirelessly walking around the city with her notebook, gathering material for her New Yorker articles, later included in Paris Notebooks (1986), she saw les événements as a children’s crusade. “My sympathies”, she told me in that interview, “were with the young.” Both the contents of the notebooks and the making of them are by now part of the 1968 mythology, supported by Wes Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek film The French Dispatch (2021). Gallant’s journalistic bent stemmed from her desire to side with the underdog. Deploring the brutal treatment of the protesters, she points out that “police have been beating people up for years, without the romanticism of the barricades”. As for the rank-and-file policemen, “They had been given clubs to hit with and tear bombs to throw. What were they supposed to do?” She constantly turns her attention to migrants, who are “keeping very quiet” during the unrest. “I have a queer feeling this is going to be blamed on foreigners”, she writes. And when it’s all over, she observes how “they emerge, still quiet, sweeping the streets. Nothing changed”.

Her objective stance and personal views are both manifest in “Immortal Gatito: The Gabrielle Russier case” (1971), included in Paris Notebooks. The story of a French teacher who had an affair with a sixteen-year-old student, which led to her imprisonment and suicide, is told with great skill. To “translate the … case into American terms”, Gallant paints a wide picture of French society, in which women may “have a better time of it than women in English-speaking countries”, but are still routinely discriminated against; the young are kept under strict control by their families and educational institutions; and one’s class and origins are everything. She relates the details of the case – Russier’s infatuation, her lover’s confusion, the state’s oppressive ways, the public’s ghoulish fascination with the affair – in a manner that is both compassionate and detachedly analytic.

In fiction, too, Gallant is sharply observant and totally unsentimental. Instances of this can be found in The Uncollected Stories. “With a Capital T” (1978) features Gallant’s most obviously autobiographical character, Linnet Muir, working as a newspaper reporter in Montreal. Aspiring to write “Truth with a Capital T”, she is tasked instead with writing captions: “Boy eats bun as bear looks on. Note fur on bear”. Linnet’s salary is half that of her male colleagues, so she halves her working hours to redress the balance.

The cost of living never seemed far from Gallant’s mind. “Better Times” (1960) depicts a bleak honeymoon in France: the couple ponder “this business of earning a living” while “the dispossessed” lurk in the garden. Across the border (“In Italy”, 1956), “the tattered remnants of the English colony” live “a form of life that didn’t exist”, braving “the absence of heating and of something to do”. In Geneva, the protagonist of “An Emergency Case” (1957), an English boy, thinks of home as a place where everything “costs a lot more”. And back on the French Riviera, the ageing heroine of “The Moabitess” (1957) blames her father for having left her nothing, “so that all her life she had no idea of money, of what things ought to cost”.

“Larry” (1981) looks at money through the eyes of an unscrupulous American in Paris. The French, he claims, “never remember anything except their own wars”, and “never wanted to look out”. In contrast to these platitudes are Gallant’s own reflections, already present in the articles she wrote as a young reporter, now collected in Montreal Standard Time. Spanning the years between 1944 and 1950, these pieces cover topics from jazz to care homes to existentialism. “Why Are We Canadians So Dull?” (1946) portrays a nation that keeps eyeing the rest of the world, unrequitedly. Gallant’s irony is fully in evidence when she talks of her country’s scepticism about American cultural imports: “A mind which can resist those can resist anything”.

It wasn’t to stop resisting such influences that Gallant moved to Europe. She wanted “to understand what happened here during and after the Second World War”. This is a constant motif in her early stories. In “A Report” (1966), a creepy Frenchman buys “authentic” items of Nazi uniform to wear. Some believe he “is handsomer in uniform than Himmler, whose picture hangs on the wall, but not nearly so effective as Heydrich”; what his mistresses think or feel, we can only guess. “The war will be over soon … and the Jews are taking everything”, says a character in “Its Image on the Mirror” (1964), a Canadian crook specializing in “the business of duping refugees and families who would pay anything for a roof”. As ever, the author is with those who need her most.

“Did you get what you wanted?” Mavis Gallant asked me at the end of our interview, a professional to the last. Earlier, on receiving my request, she had replied promptly, apologizing for not doing so sooner. Touching on language in her letter, she mentioned that she once used to take Russian lessons. “All that remains is, ‘The officer is smoking a cigar!’ and ‘Here comes the postman!’”, she wrote. “I have been trying for years to imagine a conversation that includes both these pieces of information.”

Anna Aslanyan is a freelance writer and translator. She is the author of a popular history of translation, Dancing on Ropes, 2021

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