The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Rebecca Solnit
March 4, 2026 at 03:30PM
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit urges readers to cultivate their own relationships with the unknown. “That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go,” she writes. Just as there is an art to locating yourself in time and space, “there’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering.” The job of the artist, she writes, is to “get you out into that dark sea.”
Time and again, across more than two-dozen books—among them, atlases, bestiaries, biographies, criticism, and histories—that’s just where Solnit has taken us. We are never left adrift: Solnit is concerned with recalibrating our understanding of the world we share, trueing our own navigation systems. Of her latest, The Beginning Comes After the End, she writes, “Think of it as a map on which you can fill in missing details and trace your routes against mine or clarify your vision by disagreeing with mine.”
Solnit once told an interviewer she was “interested in broad patterns that connect things together,” adding, “I think that sometimes you need to see the world in the broadest way, and that the truth and meaning lie in different areas and across genres and lives and stories, not within one.” She resists the limitations of a question’s framing, as you’ll read below, and that seems fitting. Her work reminds us that borders and boundaries are often imaginary, and should be crossed. How else would we reach that dark sea?
Where did you grow up?
A lot of places: born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but we moved to New Mexico the next month, and then to Lima, Peru, the first place where I have memories, and then a couple of years in Cincinnati. I was still under 5 when we arrived in the Bay Area, which was the first place where I was old enough to have adventures beyond the yard, so the first landscape I was firmly rooted in—and still am—is here in San Francisco.
What places feel like home?
The Bay Area and northern New Mexico, where I spend a lot of time, but also the beautiful feeling of returning to something or someone familiar and beloved and to a condition of ease and security can give that sense we call “being at home.” So my friends Marina and Sam, among others, are home; Ocean Beach on San Francisco’s western edge is home; some bookstores and museums and trails are home; parts of the High Sierra, Pyramid Lake, and the desert Southwest are home in that broader sense.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
I’m against the “one thing” framework. I’m a braid of a thousand threads of ideas and experiences and oppressions and opportunities and transformations.
What is your favorite time of day?
The photographers I’ve worked with, especially Richard Misrach, made me love the magic hour, the time around sunrise and sunset when the light and the color of the sky are most mutable and magical, when shadows are rapidly growing longer or shorter, when the sky is all kinds of amazing colors, when you’re in the twice-daily liminal.
What are you really good at?
Fact-checking. Birthday cakes. Remembering obscure scraps of information prompted by the conversation at hand (even if I can’t remember essential things that I should, like appointments and the names of anyone I haven’t gotten to know really well). Long walks. Longer sentences.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
One of the curious things about the responses to my 2020 memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence is that no one, so far as I saw, remarked on a crucial thing that happens in the opening pages: A Black World War II veteran who’d grown up as a sharecropper in Oklahoma made it possible (by deceiving the owners) for me to inhabit the beautiful, light-filled studio apartment in the building he managed, and in which I lived from 1981 to 2006. Thank you, Mr. James V. Young (1920-1989).
In a book that is also about the violence and malice of men that I experienced, this act of kindness, this generosity, seemed significant, or so I thought. That rent-controlled apartment had a lot to do with my being able to go freelance and write for a living for a bunch of years when I was making very little money. I wrote of it in that book, “I lived there so long the little apartment and I grew into each other. In the beginning I had hardly anything in it, and it felt vast, and at the end it was overstuffed with books and with many boxes of papers under the bed, and it felt cramped. In memory it seems as lustrous as a chambered nautilus’s mother-of-pearl shell, as though I was a hermit crab who had crawled into a particularly glamorous shelter, until, as hermit crabs do, I outgrew it.”
Describe your favorite meal.
Picnic, ideal weather in the shade, beloveds, no meat wasps, some birdsong, big vistas, shadows of clouds moving across the landscape. The menu is less important, because (contrary to the Uber Eats-Burrito Theory of Life) a meal can be not just flavored fuel ingestion; it’s a pause to savor many things.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
Yes, which is the answer to so many either-or questions. Sounds of nature—middle of the night rain on windows, cars sloshing through puddles, wind in trees, summer thunderstorms, cellos, soaring voices in song.
Where do you do your best thinking?
Everywhere and anywhere that I’m not in an overwhelming experience, but I still need to learn to write down good ideas and phrases and perspectives that emerge in non-laptop-holding moments and stop pretending that I will reliably remember them.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
When I was 17, I moved to Paris on my own, and also became financially independent, as in my parents were not interested in doing anything for their college sophomore. (After a GED and a year at community college, I’d scraped together tuition from various sources and enrolled in the American College in Paris, as my cautious way of starting afresh far away.) To be in a place where no one was there to insist on their confining version of who I was and could be, to finally get an education commensurate with my appetite to learn and understand, to find the sense of deep time that seemed missing in the California I grew up in, to learn to inhabit and explore a great city . . . That’s when my life began as my own to make.
Where do you like to read?
Absolutely everywhere. There are bookshelves in every room of my home except the bathroom, and I often squirrel away small books as emergency reading to be carried in purses and backpacks, for buses, trains, and waiting rooms.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
Well, speaking of rabbits, I finally read the marvelous wildlife memoir (is that a genre?) Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton and it sent me off into a bit of research on our American jackrabbits, who I’ve seen dancing in the dawn in the high desert and eaten a bite of once when I was part of the Western Shoshone Defense Project, and at a feast a matriarch suddenly picked up a .22 rifle, took out a jackrabbit, and had it skinned and grilled and served in no time at all, though I love jackrabbits—and let this sentence be a rabbithole that readers just went down from Wales in the COVID-19 pandemic to Nevada in the 1990s. Though maybe those hares in the dawn were boxing, because George Orwell describes “hares having boxing matches in the young corn.” But maybe our North American jackrabbits have different cultural styles than European hares?
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
I’m a huge fan of how The New Republic and Talking Points Memo are keeping tabs on what’s happening in the USA right now, but also the London Review of Books is the one print periodical I read almost religiously, and I read it for contemporary news and reviews but also relish pieces like this one on the materials of medieval books and what the lapis lazuli pigment on the teeth of the skeletal remains of a 12th-century nun can tell us.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
Barry Lopez’s “A Scary Abundance of Water,” his extraordinary essay from 2002 about growing up in the San Fernando Valley both exulting in the freedom to roam the beautiful open spaces and barely surviving the trauma of being a child rape victim who was not believed. More recently, Laurie Penny wrote “No, I Will Not Debate You,” in 2018, a brilliant case against engaging with monsters, idiots, and bad-faith opportunists. (But one of the sad things about reading online is that everything blurs together, as opposed to holding a glossy magazine with this format and font versus a grainy newspaper with a distinct layout and typography.)
What was the last book you read?
I often don’t either find fiction that I want to read or time to read for pleasure beyond the informational hypervigilance of trying to understand the moment and write my own work responding to current politics, but after reading Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife on a plane I managed to read Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots on the regional train to and from a family get-together last weekend. I’m excited to start reading an advance copy of Rowan Hooper’s Togetherness: Symbiosis and the Hidden Story of Life’s Greatest Creations, out in the UK in a few months and August in the US.
Sometimes I get invited to share what I’m reading by publications that want recent books readers can chase down, and I’m reading either stuff that is not yet in print to blurb it or or something ancient or technical. Once when I was asked that, I was writing A Paradise Built in Hell, for which I was reading Her Majesty’s Stationery’s Office report on the blitz, not exactly what people pick up from their local bookshop.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
I think the essay that became the 2004 book Hope in the Dark; it first emerged as an essay, the first one I did online, that went viral in the spring of 2003, in the shadow of the war on Iraq. It marked a major shift in my own thinking and writing and it had an impact on some other peoples’ thinking too. It came out of both the case for hope I’d come to understand as a student of history and follower and sometimes participant in current events, and a sense that I could and should speak more directly to the inner life of politics, the feelings and beliefs and values that shape our response (or lack thereof).
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Let go, pay attention to something else, come back when I’m ready.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Ah so many! I read poetry to get my prose from getting too flattened out, in tone and ambition. Rilke, Ross Gay, Ocean Vuong, Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich. But inspiration for me often comes from the sense of suddenly seeing a pattern that connects things in a new or compelling way, so one small fact or new event can make the stuff I’m always collecting suddenly fall into place as a new constellation of relationships and meanings. While reading, talking, wandering . . .
What words do you overuse?
“Lovely,” and you can’t stop me.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
That’s a secret.
What superpower would you like to have?
Well, I used to dream about flying all the time.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
Birds and beings with antlers . . .
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
My life since I have gone freelance in 1989 has been an endless succession of free solitary hours, too many of which I squander on the internet, partly because of the current crises and the informational hypervigilance that comes with them. The rest—talking to friends, reading, wandering in cities and hillsides, pottering about . . . Well, sort-of-free hours, because I’ve been almost continuously on deadline since 1989, too, so my life is a lot like a student’s life, with forever a paper due.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe Mohammed bin Salman, to be opened, carefully, with precautions, in the year 3026.
What does your writing space look like?
Every room in the house except my bathroom. I have a little drop-leaf desk in the back room where the sun hits, plus the main desk in the main room, but do more in the armchairs in that room, and also sometimes write in bed. But also, writing is mostly thinking and researching and revising, and that happens everywhere, which is why I like to distinguish writing down, which involves typing, from writing, which involves everything.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including The Beginning Comes After the End, Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, and A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. A regular contributor to the Guardian newspaper, she writes a newsletter called Meditations in An Emergency and serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act, the US organization for climate activists over sixty. She is, from kindergarten to graduate school, a product of the California public education system.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/03/04/questionnaire-rebecca-solnit/
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