Wild Things: A Geography of Grief

“These trees, these plants I have written to you about have taught me all I needed to know about your death.”

Wild Things is an account of Barbara Wansbrough's daily walks through Griffith Park, Los Angeles, after the death of her sister during the pandemic. Structured as 59 letters, one for each year of her sister's life, it functions as an extraordinary act of attention. Plants, animals, stones, and chance encounters become a language through which the dead are transformed, diffused into the living world. What emerges is neither memoir nor elegy but a sequence of letters that reimagines mourning as a practice of perception: intimate, disorienting, and quietly profound.

This Clio's conversation brings Wansbrough into dialogue with her husband, Paul Holdengräber, one of the great interlocutors of our time, for a searching exchange on grief, the limits of language, and the strange intelligence of the natural world. Why are we so unequipped to speak about death? What forms might still be adequate to loss? And what happens when we stop seeking closure and learn to dwell in continuity with the absent?

Copies of Wild Things are available for purchase in advance with your ticket.

Barbara Wansbrough was born in England and lives in California. Wild Things is her first book.

Paul Holdengräber is a curator, interviewer, and cultural interlocutor known for his long-running public conversation series. He was the founding director of LIVE at the New York Public Library, where he hosted hundreds of wide-ranging, unscripted dialogues with writers, artists, and thinkers. He currently serves as Founder and Director of Onassis Los Angeles, where he continues to stage conversations that probe the intellectual and emotional urgencies of the present.

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