Acknowledgments

I was standing in Waterstones on a grey November afternoon when I found myself caught by a phrase I'd somehow missed in previous readings of Staying with the Trouble. The light never quite committed to being light that day. I'd been browsing for what felt like twenty minutes but was probably closer to an hour, drifting between sections the way you do when you're not looking for anything particular.

The shop smelled like new paper and old radiators. Someone was playing Bon Iver quietly through speakers I couldn't see. A woman near the poetry section kept putting the same book back, picking it up again, reading the first page like she was testing water temperature.

I was thumbing through your acknowledgments when this line stopped me cold: "Cooking over many years, the compost pile of colleagues, students, and friends who have made this book possible is promiscuous, layered, and hot."

I read it three times. The word "promiscuous" applied to intellectual work made something flutter behind my ribs. Sexual and scholarly all at once.

People drifted past with their own discoveries. The woman bought the poetry book. I stood there holding you like you might explain yourself if I waited long enough.

"Promiscuous, layered, and hot."

I walked home thinking about ideas fucking with each other in the dark. Bought milk I didn't need. Checked my phone twice without reading anything. Ordered a notebook that evening—black cover, dotted pages.

I used to think ideas had clean origins. This from that, building on this. Neat genealogies. But your compost pile suggested something messier. Unexpected combinations generating heat through breakdown and regrowth happening simultaneously.

The notebook filled with compost observations over the winter. The conversation with the barista who mentioned mycelial networks while I was ordering coffee, somehow connecting to my research on digital symbiosis. The YouTube video about mushroom communication that I watched while procrastinating on a Tuesday afternoon, which ended up reshaping how I understand collaborative systems. My friend asking why I always overthink simple questions, which revealed I'd been adding complexity where none was needed.

None of it citeable. All of it necessary.

I started testing the metaphor on other people. "Academic work is like compost," I said to a friend over an editing-with-coffee-meeting. He paused mid-sip. "Hot and promiscuous?" he asked. We both started laughing.

"During the copyediting of this book, I made the difficult decision to resign from my post at Goldsmiths after three years of working with others to challenge how sexual harassment has become normalized in academic culture."

I read this line and realised acknowledgments could document resistance in real-time, not just gratitude after the fact.

Most academic acknowledgments perform completion. You performed process. Political work documented while it was still happening.

"We are chipping away, slowly, but we are chipping away!" The exclamation marks felt dangerous when I first read them. Too enthusiastic. Too much like the work actually mattered.

But then you credited Leona Lewis for "voice and inspiration" alongside university colleagues. Acknowledged pets with the same seriousness usually reserved for research assistants. "Mulka and Poppy for furry brown companionship."

Pop singers and pets. Listed without explanation next to professors and research assistants. Leona Lewis's voice somehow feeding feminist theory. Two animals participating in academic work through what you called "furry brown companionship."

I keep a list of unexpected contributors to my own thinking. The Qobuz "Discover Weekly" that suggested just the right song during a difficult paragraph. The neighbour's cat who strolls through the garden during morning writing sessions. The checkout person at bookshop who said 'Good luck with whatever you're working on' when I bought six notebooks. She doesn't know she's part of my research. But she is.

Tuesday: breakthrough about environmental simulation, stayed up until 3 AM following connections that finally made sense.

Friday: everything I wrote Tuesday looks ridiculous. Spent the morning deleting files.

Monday: found a way to combine Tuesday's insight with Friday's doubt. Something new emerging from the wreckage.

"To Jer Thorp, for the days we wrote side by side, and for the commiserations and celebrations (depending on the week)."

Depending on the week.

Those parentheses hold the entire weather system of thinking together. Some weeks commiseration. Some weeks celebration. Most weeks you don't know which one you're having until it's over.

Jer Thorp showed up for both. Stayed present while you cycled through confidence and despair and back again. Witnessed your good thinking and your terrible thinking without needing to know which was coming next.

Most people want to help during breakthrough weeks. Fewer stay for the weeks when you're convinced you understand nothing at all.

You thanked someone who didn't need your thinking to be consistent to keep thinking alongside you.

"To Katie Geminder, in whose home I wrote some of these essays; and to Robin Bierstedt and Peter Mayer, in whose home I wrote others."

Houses matter. Specific houses. Named houses. You didn't write these essays in libraries or coffee shops or university offices. You wrote them in homes that belonged to people who trusted you with their space, their quiet, their kitchen tables.

"To Sophie Smith, who is as much in this book as I am." Eight words that changed how I think about whose thinking belongs to whom.

The thrill reading this: co-present in ideas rather than just grateful for help.

Katie Geminder's house. Robin Bierstedt and Peter Mayer's house. Sophie Smith's mind. All spaces where your thinking could unfold without having to explain itself first, where ideas could develop in rooms that already trusted them to exist.

Houses teach you different things than offices do. In someone else's kitchen, you write differently. You can't hide behind institutional authority or professional distance. The essay has to earn its place next to the breakfast dishes, the mail waiting to be opened, the life being lived around your borrowed thinking.

I wrote part of this acknowledgment in a hotel room in Newcastle, fifth floor, windows facing the Tyne. The river moved past all night, dark water reflecting streetlights. I could hear the Metro crossing the bridge every few minutes, carrying people home from evening shifts.

Small thanks to the temporary space that made temporary thoughts possible.

"I thank also the rivers, forests, mountains, creatures, plants and fungi without whom I could not have written this book, who are named in its pages and who—especially the rivers—are truly its co-authors."

Co-authors. Not subjects. Not inspiration. Co-authors.

Rivers writing books. Not metaphorically. Actually writing them. Contributing sentences, shaping arguments, making editorial decisions alongside humans with typewriters.

"My watcher stands in front of me as I write these sentences. It is a wooden carving, perhaps a foot and a half high, of a waterbird: a 'brolga.'"

You were being watched while you wrote. Not by supervisors or peer reviewers. By a wooden bird from Australia that had previously watched over someone else's novel. Alexis Wright had sent it to you, and now it was fixing you with "a watchful eye which, uncannily, seemed always to be fixed upon me, wherever I stood or sat in relation to it."

The brolga reminded you "that there was a serious responsibility to the task undertaken."

Reading this during a storm, rain hitting the living room windows so hard I thought they might crack, I looked around my space. What is watching me write? The thirty plants around my reading area. The photograph of a moss-overgrown tree in Welsh rainforest on the wall. The rain-soaked garden visible through glass.

All of it witness to whatever words are trying to emerge. All of it participating in the work, whether I acknowledge it or not.

Every text in conversation with more than human voices.

Devidas Mishra told you a seven-minute story by a Cambridge pond. A song so beautiful it melted the bones of a god and turned them into running water. You carried this story through your entire book, let it reshape your understanding of how water moves through landscape and literature.

The storm outside was getting stronger as I read this. Water was streaming down the glass in patterns that looked almost deliberate. Like the house was crying or the sky was trying to write something urgent in a language I couldn't read yet.

All of it participating in whatever understanding is trying to emerge.

Image: © Victoria Mummelthei rabbitingyears