She wasn’t completely unpacked yet in her new home on Maine’s Mount Desert Island, but Sylvia Torti broke free for early lunch on the mainland to meet with Kathryn Balteff, my mom, and me. We don’t know yet if our panel proposal on Animal Agency (in adult literary fiction) will be given a green light by the Assoc. of Writers and Writing Programs organizers for their national conference, but with 3 out of 5 of us in one place, we couldn’t pass up the chance to chat. Sylvia’s novel Cages won the Schaffner Award for Music in Literature, and publication, in 2016. Book promotion being what it is, and her life already intensely busy as Dean of the Honors College at University of Utah, Cages hasn’t reached the readership I wholeheartedly believe it warrants. A story set primarily in a science lab is unusual, and a young artist who hires on to care for the lab’s avian subjects provides entre’ to this world of intellectual jealousies and emotional shadows.

Of course the two competing scientists both hold hard to the anti-anthropomorphism requirements of their vocation as they sink scalpels into the tiny, feathered bodies of zebra finches, though one is a life-long bird lover and the other—just pretends, to win the assistant’s affections. The outsider artist represents the more obvious, but long unfashionable, view that other sentient beings have desires of their own, and probably ways of achieving them that we don’t understand despite our big brains and amazing scientific prowess.

Sylvia’s enthusiastic YES to joining the panel proposal came even as she prepared for her new job as President at the College of the Atlantic (COA) in Bar Harbor. A place with a mission that shifts our academic habits, COA is itself positive news of people for the planet. Their human ecology approach is interdisciplinary and experiential, and encourages students not just to investigate complex issues, but also to work collaboratively for positive change. Visiting with Sylvia and Kathryn, our panel moderator, got me even more excited about the August 4 workshop I’ll facilitate for Jackson Hole Writers, called Fiction Shift. Cages will be one of the examples I’m psyched to share with participants that show us ways to break free of our social programming in human superiority. Join us! https://jhwriters.org/workshops/