The Life and Work of Leah Naomi Green: A Taxonomy

In the poem “Venison,” Leah Naomi Green describes a deer, injured but alive on the roadside after being hit by a white Camaro. The narrator of the poem chances upon the family whose car struck the animal, who are “glad for our headlights / glad for our rifle.” Green describes the dressing of the deer, though her language renders it more intimate, an undressing. “We put her leg and buttock / on the wooden table where we / will gather her between us / to eat all year.”

Green lives with her family in a cooperative community in Rockbridge County, Virginia. The community grows much of its own food. There are two large vegetable gardens, fenced from deer. Green’s husband, Ben Eland, tends crops in a three-acre pasture — “also fenced from deer,” he says. In the pasture, there are blueberry bushes, apple and pear trees. Some of the fruit trees were wedding gifts to Green and Eland, and arrived with their roots wrapped in burlap. 

Most of the community’s land is forested with oak, hickory, beech, maple, and poplar trees, which provide firewood for heat. “And food for the deer,” says Eland. The woodland and the deer it feeds are necessary parts of the community’s livelihood. 

The poems in Green’s debut book of poetry, The More Extravagant Feast — which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the most prestigious first-book award for poets in the U.S. — are largely about a domestic life that encompasses the natural world, as if the garden and forest are as much home to Green as a bedroom or a kitchen. The action in these poems — washing plates, lighting fires in the woodstove, cutting meat — is written with affection and sensuality that transforms what could be quotidian into something hallowed.   

In the late fall and winter, Eland hunts for deer, waking before dawn on freezing mornings. He sits still in the woods, waiting. He listens to the calls of owls and the deep quiet of the dark forest. He sees sunrises he would not otherwise see. 

In the poem, “The More Extravagant Feast,” Green writes, “The buck is thawing a halo on the frosted ground / shot in our field predawn.” The narrator watches as her husband kneels over the animal, and she brings him gloves and warm water as he field-dresses the deer. Later, husband and wife hold each other’s bodies differently, freshly aware of their own fragile anatomy, which, like the buck’s, somehow contains the sacred.

“The gratitude I feel when eating venison is one of the deepest gratitudes I have felt,” says Eland. “Getting to see the animal alive, the animal dead, the animal becoming meat is a gift in itself.”

The poem “Venison” ends with the line, “a thing, alive, slowly becoming my body.” Green is attentive — in her poems, and in her life — to the way the world becomes her body, and the way her body creates worlds.

I’ve visited Green and Eland on several occasions; more than once, I have gotten lost along the way. The first time, I stopped the car in front of a lighted house where, through a large front window, I could see young people sitting on the floor eating from plates balanced on their laps. One came outside and told me I’d found a Quaker summer camp, then gave me directions. 

More recently, I drove up a steep road that ended at a beautiful wooden building with a pitched roof and a wraparound porch. It was a Buddhist monastery. I’d seen the monks before, near Green and Eland’s home, slipping between the trees in their saffron robes. 

The roads are narrow, and the woods are dense enough that I always seem to come upon Green and Eland’s house suddenly. I recognize the neatly stacked woodpile, Eland’s truck, and the baby swing suspended from a branch.  

Once, during a trip with my own family, Green and Eland’s elder daughter, June, just 3, led my daughter, Sloane, slightly older, through the community. First, the blackberry bushes along the road. Then the old shoemaking workshop, a slender structure with steep steps to the door and, within, the lingering smell of leather. Peggy’s house, with its elegant cordwood masonry walls and the persimmon tree beside it. The fish pond stocked with trout. Near one of the big gardens, June taught Sloane to hold her hand over her head to get the little bugs to stop flying around her face. The bugs followed each girl’s hand, questing for the highest point. 

June moved through the community with confidence. She knew the names of plants. She was cautious at the edge of the water without being told. I couldn’t help but notice how different it was from how Sloane navigated our neighborhood, where we did not let her walk far from us because of the traffic on the streets.

The girls had to stand on a bench to peek into the chicken boxes. There were new eggs, mucky and still warm. Then a green meadow and another pond, this one for swimming. The girls sat on the dock and used long reeds to pretend to fish. Across from the swimming pond was the house with large windows through which I’d seen the young people eating dinner.

Green first came to the hollow to lead backpacking trips for teenagers through the Quaker camp, which is based at the community’s property during the summer. She met Glen and Peggy Leasure, who were one of the founding families of the community. Before and after her camp work, Green gardened with them. Later, during graduate school, Green would talk to Glen and Peggy on the phone and ask them what they were planting. 

After Green finished her MFA in poetry at the University of California Irvine, she moved here, to Virginia, to write her thesis and grow food. 

“It was the most liberating thing I’d ever done,” she says. “It felt like letting go of systems that were failing me and failing my vision of the world. It felt like choosing instead to rely on systems that I knew weren’t harmful — the dirt, the seeds, the water.”

Earlier in her life, Green had been drawn to spiritual learning, through the Judaism of her family, Quakerism, the evangelical Christianity of her peers growing up in North Carolina, and, later, Buddhism. 

“Coming to live on this land,” she says, “began to make those abstract truths all so concrete, always specific and with real stakes.”

Green thinks of her relationship to the land as a commitment, not unlike a marriage. Here, she has invested herself, put down her roots, and raised up inspiration. The cardinal in her poetry is the one that bashes itself against the window of this house. The song of the wood thrush in her poetry is the one she can hear near this creek. As an academic, colleagues have suggested that her career might take her other places. 

“Good friends have suggested that there are other places I would love as much as this one,” she says. “And surely, they are right, in the same way that surely there are other people I would love. But that is not the point. The point is the marriage itself. The investment of time and knowledge and care. The things built. The relationship and understanding that only develop over time. The ocean beneath the inevitable waves.”

Eland came to the community to live with Green. He had wanted to homestead and grow his own food since he was a child; before he met Green, he had lived in two different monasteries. 

“I probably would have moved just about anywhere to be with her,” he says. Still, he adds, “It makes sense to me that the woman I wanted to be with lived here.”

“When I first arrived, it seemed Edenic,” Eland says. “Falling in love with Leah and falling in love with this place happened concurrently, and that falling-in-love experience still colors the way I feel about it. Because I have lived with Leah for all the days that I have lived here; nearly all that I see and do here is overlain with my affection for her.” 

Eland is the primary food producer for the community. Green does daily work with food, too, but she also teaches English, writing, and environmental studies at Washington and Lee University. I ask Eland if his experience of the land is different from Green’s because they do different labor, and he says, “Yes.” 

“For example, I was brush-hogging the pasture, and the tractor broke down when I was about halfway done,” he says. “We have a tractor from the 1960s that breaks down all the time.” That evening, when he and Green went for a walk, he saw the un-mowed grass and the broken-down tractor. “Leah could see the sun setting, the fireflies rising from the grass, the milkweed blossoms. And a rather picturesque tractor in a half-mowed field.”

As Eland describes his feelings about the hollow, I realize that I have only ever seen him here, on this land. I’ve seen Green at writing conferences and at readings in Charlottesville. She came to my wedding. I know that Eland works at Boxerwood Environmental Education Center and Woodland Garden, an arboretum that hosts mostly school children near Lexington, but I’ve only known him to be here.

Wild foods that Eland and Green forage in the Allegheny foothills: pawpaw, persimmon, elderberries, wineberries, blackberries, autumn olive (“a tasty invasive species,” says Eland), morels, chanterelles, oyster mushrooms, chicken of the woods, watercress, chickweed, garlic mustard, fiddlehead ferns, and wild asparagus.

Years ago, when I was visiting, Eland was surprised by a copperhead snake in the garden shed. He cut off its head with the blade of a shovel, then buried it; the snake holds its venom glands near its eyes. I watched the snake’s pink-gold body writhe in a bucket, twisting like a live electrical wire, for more than 20 minutes. 

“Should we eat it?” asked Green. 

In her poem, “Narration, Transubstantiation,” Green writes, “When we eat / what we eat is the body / of the world. / Also when we do not eat.”

The hollow is an ecosystem, so the foraging is reciprocated. Eland stocks the fish pond with a hundred rainbow trout. 

“We fish them out over a year or two,” he says. So do the blue herons and ospreys. Green and Eland have seen bald eagles fish out of their neighbor’s pond. “We probably also lose some to snapping turtles, too,” says Eland. 

Animals that have eaten chickens from the coop: foxes, possums, skunks, raccoons, bears, hawks, eagles, and snakes. 

“Everything wants to eat a chicken,” says Eland. “Everything.” 

The first night I spent at Green and Eland’s house, we stayed up late talking at the kitchen table. I was enamored with the place where they lived and how they lived there. There were lit candles on the table, their buttery light on our faces reflected back at us in the dark window. The cabinet doors in the kitchen opened and shut, subtly, all on their own. My expression must have revealed my awe. Green looked over her shoulder at the cabinets. 

“Just mice,” she said.

In the poem, “Field Guide to the Chaparral,” Green writes, “Chaparral needs fire / (the pinecones would not open / otherwise). Love needs lover, / whose last lover was flood.” 

When he’s working outside, Eland wears a hat with a big brim. Often, he wears work gloves. He has light hair and eyes, and a sinewy muscularity. He speaks softly, which makes you want to lean toward him when he’s speaking. 

I ask Eland if he considers himself an artist or a philosophical seeker, realizing only after I ask the question how rigidly I’ve constrained his options. 

“I guess more of a philosophical seeker?” he says. Green calls him a botanist turned woodsman.

Green met Eland right after finishing her MFA, while they were in silent retreat at a Buddhist monastery in California. Three years of studying in the affluent suburbs of Southern California and the tumultuous relationships inside her small graduate program had left Green weary. 

“I remember walking with him on his first visit here,” she says “We saw the same things on that walk. We noticed the same leaves, rocks, and sticks. It was a pleasure to look at the world with someone and somehow see the same thing.” 

Green and Eland began to fall in love through their letters after Green moved to Virginia. She says she felt her writing getting better as she had conversations with Eland that challenged her, emotionally and intellectually. 

“I could feel that all of a sudden I was writing about things that mattered, things I didn’t already understand,” she says. 

Before I met Eland, I knew Green wanted to marry him. She talked about his intelligence. “He had something like nine minors at college, including botany and linguistics,” she says. She talked about his emotional equilibrium and clarity. “He would make an excellent monk. A Zen monk we know once said of him, and I quote, ‘Ben is one calm dude.’” 

She also worried that because he’d been married before, he might not want to marry again. In the poem, “Engagement,” Green writes, “A vow is a thing I want / to know I can do.”

Eland has allowed Green to be witness to his happiness or pain, his vulnerability, and that has enlarged Green’s own capacity for feeling. In their interactions, she says, she has been able to experience emotions that she once thought of as purely abstract. The universal becomes specific. 

“Just like in poetry,” she says. 

Green and Eland got married on a mountain near their home. Peggy, one of the community founders, was their officiant and only witness. 

“Peggy was in her early 60s at the time, but she hiked up the mountain with us. A steep scramble in parts,” says Green. They said Buddhist wedding vows. Their friend Greg, a silversmith, made their rings. “We sat in his shop the day before hiking up the mountain, so that he could fit them to our fingers,” she says. “Hammer. Fit. Hammer.” A couple of months later, the couple, their families and friends, signed a Ketubah, a Jewish wedding document. 

“It’s not so much that our relationship generates poems,” says Green, “as it is that our relationship continually generates me. We generate one another. On good days, we create spaciousness and clarity around one another.”

Green emailed me the vows that she and Eland said to each other with only Peggy and a vista of green hills to hear them. The vows are about learning from each other and awakening to the world through each other. They are about honesty and open-heartedness. They are about the intertwined lives of the couple and the couple’s connections and responsibilities to the world at large. 

“I like these vows more now than I did then, even,” she says. “Every year I understand them better.”

At my own house in the city, I read the lines of Green and Eland’s vows aloud. The witness is an empty kitchen, the dishwasher humming to itself. My husband is at work, the children at school. It is a struggle to love people well, and it’s the one thing that I most want to be good at. I wonder if — when I first met Green, first read her poems — it was this shared desire that I recognized. 

In her poem, “Field Guide to the Chaparral,” Green writes, “There are candescent people in the world./ It will only be love/ that I love you with.”

In the poem “Week Ten: Plum,” Green writes, “My body, which has never died,/ has two hearts again today.” I had never thought about pregnant women as two-hearted, but, of course, they are. 

In the poem “Week Thirty-Eight: Mitosis,” Green describes the birth of the moon. She depicts a collision between the Earth and a smaller proto-planet, which resulted in debris being blasted into orbit that became a third celestial body: the moon. At first, the moon was very close to the Earth, gigantic in the sky. It’s an apt corollary for childbirth. It is also the first time that I’ve encountered the giant impact hypothesis. I look it up. It’s been around since the 1970s, but no one has ever talked to me about where the moon comes from.

I didn’t notice that Green was a physically small person until I was standing behind her. When she’s facing me, I notice other things: the brightness of her expressions, the contrast between her blue eyes and dark hair, the care with which she chooses her words. Her smallness makes her pregnant body appear almost impossible, a marvel. 

For Green, childbirth and nursing made her feel very much a mammal. “It became pleasantly comical to think about how we dress ourselves up and walk around on two feet,” she says. It wasn’t disagreeable for Green to feel like an animal; instead, it was another example of the interconnectedness that she seems to find everywhere.

“I am grateful to pregnancy and childbirth and motherhood for many of the same reasons I am grateful to the garden,” Green says, “for making what I might have mistaken for abstract principles, unavoidable and concrete.” She says that the idea of interbeing, as described by Thich Nhat Hanh, made spiritual sense to her, but when she was pregnant, it was her daily life; the division between her body and her child’s body was not clear. “When did my body become mine, rather than a product of the cells of my mother and father?” Green says. 

In the poem “Week Ten: Plum,” Green writes, “This body, which is two bodies/ and a thousand more in either/ direction of time—the wake of the present—/ has died ten thousand times.” The subject of birth brings up its twin, just as the sustenance provided by deer required their deaths. Yet, in Green’s book, pregnancy pairs more strongly with the fecundity of nature. The book has an undercurrent of optimism: the promise of nature to continue to grow and the belief in the future that having children engenders.  

When I was pregnant with my first child, friends asked me if I worried about creating a person who would have to live with the effects of climate change. They asked how I felt about the ethics of having a baby in a rich country where each person consumes so many resources. When I discussed these concerns with my husband, he said, “Maybe we should go live on the commune with Leah and Ben.”

A few months ago, at the breakfast table over oatmeal, June, now four, told Green that she was worried about the world getting warmer. They’d talked about it at school. “It will make the world badder,” June said, “for the animals living at the North Pole.”

Green was stunned and distressed. She’d read about exposing young children to disasters over which they have no control; it could lead to anxiety, phobias, hopelessness. She looked at Robin, who, at two, didn’t know what her older sister was referring to. 

Eland told June about a rock he’d seen, “a beautiful rock covered in moss with two little beech trees growing beside it,” and asked June if she wanted to help him find it again. The whole family put on their boots, hats, mittens and coats and walked through the woods up to a ridge behind one of the ponds. 

When June found the rock, she pressed the side of her face, the only part of her not covered, to the moss.

“Do you hear what it’s telling you?” Eland asked her.

“No,” said June. 

“It’s saying ‘Thank you for taking such good care of the earth.’”

“I don’t hear it,” said June. 

“Listen,” Eland said. “Specifically, for that.”

June listened. Then she smiled. “I hear it!” 

For the rest of the day, everything June noticed — “and it was more attention, even more than usual. She was looking for beauty,” says Green — she attributed to the rock. An intricate leaf, a stream. “She felt reconnected to the world,” Green says. “I think poetry can do this, too.” (On Eland’s parenting, Green says, “I said that he would be an excellent monk, but I think his skills and strengths are even more perfectly suited to fatherhood.”)

Green says that poetry can allow us to turn towards the world, even when the world scares us. It can connect us. When we want to numb ourselves or flee, it can reconnect, help us to move, and to act. It can tell us what to listen for. 

The Academy of American Poets asked Green to write a letter to its members, all of whom will receive a copy of her book in the mail. Green wrote about June and the rock.

I worry that I may be characterizing Green and Eland as too saintly for readers to be able to relate to them. Don’t worry: Green also gets distracted from her children by photos of them on her phone. It’s in a poem, so I have proof. 

Eland tells me that he did not actually have nine minors in college. He had four minors and a major.

They buy things from the grocery store. Salt, for example. At work, they have desks, computers, colleagues, and the internet, just like I do.

Last summer, Green met with a Buddhist priest in the Soto Zen tradition. “I was concerned that time in academia had developed in me a habit of perpetual grasping,” says Green.

She asked him if she should quit her job. “You could quit your job” he said, “but it wouldn’t stop the grasping.”

I do not experience Green as someone who is perpetually grasping, but I like that she shares her story with me, knowing that I am writing about her. 

Describing a friend is challenging; how much do my feelings for a person influence how I represent them? Entirely?

I entertain a notion that the way that Green and Eland live is not dissimilar in form from poetry. Poetry is succinct and without unnecessary embellishment. In Green and Eland’s home, there is no internet or television. Neither of them is on social media. Their kitchen holds no plastic packaging from food purchased at the grocery store. Their house is spartan, with wood floors, white walls, and a stovepipe that draws a vertical line to the angular apex of a high ceiling; the most colorful objects in the house are the canned vegetables and fruit that line the shelves in the pantry.

Poetry moves toward the essence of things. That which is vital. The food we eat. The people we love. What I admire most about Green and Eland is that they invest their attention, their energy, and their time in those things — a necessary economy to get to the heart of life.

“I feel that I’m a part of something,” says Green. “The soil, the seeds, the woods, the water. They pull my attention here.”

The ethics that Green expresses in her poetry, she also lives. And I admire it deeply, though I still live in a city, buy my food in boxes, bags, and cartons, and fill my mind with anxiety-inducing news that I read on my phone. I wonder if my children would become happier adults if they grew up in the woods, if I didn’t let them watch cartoons in the evenings. But I still let them watch cartoons, while I watch my husband make dinner, tomatoes and avocados from Mexico, fish that do not exist at my latitude. Sometimes I feel like I’m living just before the fall of Rome. 

I ask Green if she feels she has given anything up to live as she does.

“I don’t feel like I’ve given much up,” she says. “Perhaps some financial security. But what does that mean?” There is security, she says, in being so directly part of the natural system that sustains her. 

“But I see people struggling with this question of how to live as a 21st-century person,” Green says. “And I think human responsibilities are deep. I don’t think those responsibilities have to feel like weights. They can feel like joys, like responsibility in marriage and parenting can.” She doesn’t mean grin and bear it. She’s no Pollyanna. 

We all have responsibilities to take care of what takes care of us. Green tends the chickens and weeds the garden. Both she and I wake in the night when a child is sleepless.

“We are part of larger, greater-than-human systems, and all of us are constantly accepting responsibility for, and great gifts from, one another,” Green says. “And yeah, that is a lot of responsibility. It feels important that the joy of the weight comes from not bearing it all myself, and from it being as much gift as weight.”

As Green clarifies what she means, I feel like June listening for what the rock has to say. When I’m sleepless in the middle of the night, worrying about the state of the world, it’s because I’m afraid of squandering the world’s gifts. The weight I feel is tied to all these blessings, and a fear of failing to be properly responsible for them.

In her poem, “The More Extravagant Feast,” Green describes the newly shot deer and attending a Santa Claus parade in a small town with her daughter. Everyone is there. Santa has red and white fur, just as the deer does. The poem is brimming with gratitude. For the deer, the husband, the daughter, the small town, even frozen ground. I want to read it aloud every Thanksgiving, at the table before the meal, to my dearest, so we can all feel the same sensation, just for a moment. And that split-second feeling? Taking the weight and letting it be joy.