Bogs are big right now. Fashion designers are dipping couture in peat; memes on Instagram offer help choosing your bog witch name. Internationally bestselling authors are (figuratively) mining wetlands for inspiration.
The bog and its cousins the swamp and marsh have always occupied a certain niche in popular culture, but more recently these landscapes are enjoying broader appeal. I think it has to do with the mystique of these spaces. In a world riven by democratic backsliding and polluted with AI slop, there’s something seductive about the idea of retreating to a wild, unnavigable place where no one can follow you—because you’ll be submerged up to your eyeballs.
While I cannot in good conscience recommend actually climbing into a bog, I have done a lot of bog-related reading in the last few years. Since my novel Bog Queen came out (and is now out in paperback), I’ve been unable to leave bogs behind, and I haven’t had to, because I found myself in the midst of a boggy literature boom. The books below will satisfy your bog witch cravings, while also reminding you of the real-world importance of bogs as bulwarks against climate change, cradles of biodiversity, and keepers of ancestral memory.
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Fen, Bog, and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis by Annie Proulx
Do you want to learn the difference between a fen, a bog, and a swamp? Do you want to learn it from Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Proulx, the expert in evoking landscapes from Newfoundland to Wyoming? If so, prepare yourself: Proulx, as she enters her ninth decade, is none too pleased with the way humans have stewarded the world’s wetlands. May her rage and disappointment inspire you.
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister
An eerie fable that seems to take place across and outside of time, The Bog Wife is already a classic of the modern bog-core genre. This story of a West Virginia family with a very unusual tradition has notes of Edward Gorey and Rebecca, but Chronister creates a world all her own, its mossy darkness illuminated by flashes of humor.
North by Seamus Heaney
This collection contains four of Heaney’s famous bog poems, inspired by Iron Age bodies preserved in Irish peat (and by the work of archaeologist P.V. Glob). I have a complicated relationship to these poems; I don’t actually love “Bog Queen,” which inspired my book’s title. I do, however, like “The Grauballe Man,” with its evocative simile and metaphor: “As if he had been poured/ in tar, he lies/ on a pillow of turf/ and seems to weep/ the black river of himself.”
Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
If, after immersing yourself in bogs, you find yourself wanting to learn more about swamps and other wetlands, look no further than Forest Euphoria. In this love letter to the landscapes of New York state, Kaishian reveals the kaleidoscopic complexity of gender and sexuality in the plant, fungal, and animal worlds. Forest Euphoria contains invaluable advice on how to sit in nature; it also has some mind-blowing facts about eels.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
In Cusk’s first novel after the blockbuster Outline trilogy, a woman invites an artist to stay at her home on a marsh, and things unravel from there. This book is somewhat divisive among Cusk-heads. I, however, love it, not least for its setting on the watery edge of the world.
On the Swamp: Fighting for Indigenous Environmental Justice by Ryan Emanuel
A Lumbee hydrologist and professor at Duke University, Emanuel charts the history of Robeson County, North Carolina, through its waters and wetlands. The watery ecosystems of the county are home to the Indigenous Lumbee people, and inextricably tied to their identity, Emanuel writes—yet they are under constant threat from factory farming, petroleum extraction, and unscrupulous development and excavation. Writing about Iron Age bog bodies made me think a lot about the ethics of archaeological work on human burial sites; Emanuel’s accounts of Lumbee burial mounds laid waste by settler researchers is a reminder that scientific advancement has served, too often, as an excuse for the theft and destruction of Indigenous remains.
Bog Myrtle by Sid Sharp
A picture book for bog fans of all ages, Bog Myrtle follows two sisters with very different approaches to nature and life. When Beatrice, the nice sister, knits a magical sweater from spider silk, the two embark on an adventure with surprising lessons on conservation and labor relations. The story is elevated by its weird and lovely illustrations of spiders on strike, forest creatures both natural and supernatural, and a bog that is always, always watching.
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Bog Queen by Anna North is now available in paperback from Bloomsbury Publishing.