Butterflies at the Cullman Center

Nabokov’s drawing of the wings of the “Karner Blue” (P. melissa samuelis)

In 2021 – 2022 I was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, studying the library’s wonderful collection of manuscripts from both Henry David Thoreau and Vladimir Nabokov, all the while working on essays of my own about searching for butterflies and, more broadly, on questions of why we go to nature and what we look for there.