Paul Bogard grew up hearing common loon calls at his family’s cabin in northern Minnesota. He loved the magical calls and missed them when the loons left the state in the winter.
He decided to start recording the various types of calls—on a cassette tape—to carry them with him through the cold, dark months.
“The one that they’re most known for is called the wail, and it's just this long, drawn out call that oftentimes will happen on calm summer nights in the dark,” Bogard said.
It’s a sound Bogard hopes his young daughter grows up hearing.
Bogard dedicated an anthology he created about the word and feeling of solastalgia to his daughter with these words: “So that you know we loved this world.”
Solastalgia, in simple terms, is the feeling of being homesick. Change has been present throughout this season of Grounding, and many guests have likely felt some type of solastalgia—whether it's for disappearing glaciers and animals or changing seasons. In the last episode of this season, MTPR Host and Producer Lauren Korn interviews Bogard about his anthology, and Grounding Host Sarah Aronson and Korn talk about their solastalgia for their hometowns.
Oh, and they finally get to that four-letter word: hope.
In this episode:
Paul Bogard is the author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His most recent works include Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World and the children’s book What if Night? He is currently at work on How to See the Sky: the Newest Science, the Oldest Questions, and Why They Matter for Life, to be published by HarperCollins in 2027. Paul is an associate professor of English at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, where he teaches environmental literature and writing.
Lauren Korn holds an M.A. in poetry from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, where she was the recipient of the Tom Riesterer Memorial Prize and the Angela Ludan Levine Memorial Book Prize. A former bookseller and the former director of the Montana Book Festival, she is now an arts & culture producer at Montana Public Radio and the host of its literary conversation radio program and podcast, The Write Question, as well as its children’s picture book spin-off, Picture Book Picnic. She is a 2025-2026 Dear Butte Resident, a 2022 Fishtrap Fellow, as well as a graduate of the 2017 Tin House Summer Workshop and the 2016 Juniper Summer Writing Institute, where she attended as a Writer of Promise.
