Mar 19, 2025 5 min read the river has roots

Tales and Two Mountains

From where I'm sitting – on a dear friend's couch in Colorado – I both can and can't see a mountain. Thick, flurrying snow obscures it from view every few minutes, catching on tall, sturdy pines, sleeving their sharp green fingers in white. But the snow paused long enough for a Steller's Jay to come up to the window, chuck-chuck-chucking at us. I've wanted to see one for years; to have one come to me like this, meeting me halfway after all the travel I've done to come to it, feels precious.

A Steller's Jay in a thick tangle of bare, snowy branches, against a backdrop of piney mountains.

Yesterday, incredibly, I was in Tucson, where the mountains looked very different.

Under a wide blue sky dotted with white clouds, silhouetted mountains and a shining ribbon of road leading to them.

The Tucson Festival of Books was an absolutely magical experience. It was my first time in Arizona, my first time encountering this specific biome, my first time seeing saguaro and barrel cacti outside of a botanical garden's arid domes. It's a landscape familiar to me from Terri Windling's The Wood Wife and Charles de Lint's short stories and Kevin Hearne's wonderful bird photography. To be there – under that sky and that light, listening to unfamiliar birds and gawking at orange trees and bougainvillea and lemon-scented gum – was extraordinary.

And that was before Daniel Lavery took me up a mountain, and Ursula Vernon took us birding.

A selfie in which Danny -- a man with a ginger beard, red sweatshirt and green baseball cap -- and I (a woman with dark hair in a side braid under a black baseball cap, wearing sunglasses and a black tank top over a red sports bra) standing in front of a saguaro-covered mountain in the background, with a mortared stone pillar behind us to the right of the photo. The sky is very blue and bright, dotted with fluffy white clouds. — Daniel Lavery and me in Sentinel Peak Park

We think it's a female vermillion flycatcher because it was flitting about with a very bright male.

I'm so used to conferences and conventions being a non-stop series of panels and hallway conversations punctuated by gasping forays towards food; it was so wonderful to find time to be in the sunshine and look at birds and trees and flowers. I felt, after a morning in Gene C. Reid Park seeing vermillion flycatchers, yellow-rumped warblers, gila woodpeckers, black-chinned hummingbirds, American wigeons and a neotropic cormorant, that I'd basically achieved the maximum amount of happiness I could house in my mortal frame, and the rest of the day was a kind of coasting from joy to joy.

But also the panels were wonderful!

A masked selfie from the Love in Spite of it All panel, angled to show the audience. — The "Love in Spite of All" panel with Rebecca Thorne and Constance Fay.

I was on two: "Worlds Adjacent" with Seanan McGuire and Alisa Alering, and "Love in Spite of All" with Constance Faye and Rebecca Thorne. Both were great fun, and generously moderated, by Annie Boustead and Jennifer Wong respectively; the first session was warm and thoughtful, the second joyfully chaotic (Rebecca meant to say "Living organism" but what came out was "Living orgasm" and we basically never recovered).

During the signing after our panel, some readers brought me hand-made treasures: a pair of book earrings, and a beautifully embroidered stuffed ornament. Then Seanan stealth-wrote me a poem about willow trees that I didn't find until after she'd left the table, and that lives in my purse now.

A photo of an embroidered ornament, showing a pattern of acorns and oak leaves in a geometric design, dotted with red beads. To the right of it is a pair of pink book-shaped earrings with gold flecks on the covers; below them is a purple post-it note on which is written the following poem. "Willows bow your heavy heads / I beg you, stop your weeping / For I have bones to bless your bed / and enchantments for your keeping / / Rivers run and magic flows / all that lives is fleeting / but just so long as willows stand / this song will keep repeating."

I had three separate signings, one after each panel and one at Stacks Book Club's tent, during which I had nothing but lovely, heart-warming interactions with excellent people. I think I signed books for a total of four hours over the weekend? I'd set out from Ottawa with freshly filled fountain pens; they're both now empty, spent entirely on inscriptions and signatures across six cities and two airports. I can only renew my thanks to the kind reader in Cincinnati who gave me a pair of gel pens perfectly coordinated to the cover of The River Has Roots; they've been excellent complements to and now replacements for my poor thirsty Platinum Plaisirs.

A pair of Platinum Plaisirs with their nibs angled towards each other, denuded to show their empty cartridges; one is stained by an orange ink called Yu-Yake, and the other by a blue ink called Kon-Peki.

I'm ensconced in the snowy wilderness now for the rest of the week, before heading to LA and then Anaheim for Wondercon. I hope to see some of you there! Also some details are emerging for UK and Canada book events, which I'll share as I have them.

Until then, I hope you're keeping well and finding ways to work towards the liberation of all.

Best,

Amal

A sunny selfie in which I’m wearing roundish sunglasses, my long dark wavy hair half up, half down, an orange sleeveless cowl-necked top, as well as earrings that dangle a black pearl rectangle and white pearl bead beneath a gold hoop, and a Parrish Relics necklace that encloses a floral tapestry image under reflective mica between two brass branches that bend to make an oval together.

More Cool River Has Roots Stuff!

Alex Brown wrote an absolutely lovely review of it for Reactor, calling it "poetic and lyrical. It reads like a fairy tale that is both true and legendary at the same time."
It debuted at number 59 on the USA Today Bestseller list, number 8 on both the Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail's Canadian Fiction lists, and number 4 on Canada's Indie list.
Adam Morgan of The Frontlist has a really nice, short interview with me and with Spencer Fuller, who did the cover design for The River Has Roots! I really loved reading about that process!
You can listen to an audio excerpt of the book here!

Signed Books

For a limited time you can get signed copies of The River Has Roots at the Tattered Cover outlets in Denver's airport, in terminals A and B!

Upcoming US events

March 30: I'll be at Wondercon! Catch me at the "We Ride at Dawn" panel on Sunday March 30, 1PM - 2PM. I'll be signing from 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM afterwards!
April 2: I'm headed to the Texas Library Association's annual conference in Dallas! Panel details to come, but there'll definitely be a signing.
April 12: I'll be at C2E2 in Chicago! You can find me on Saturday, April 12 at 1:30 PM on a panel titled "From Time Travel to Kingdoms Long Ago: How Authors Build Universes" with J. S. Dewes, John Scalzi, Kel Kade, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

Upcoming UK Events

Some of these are still in Save the Date territory, but will be firmed up soon!

April 22: I'll be at Waterstones Putney in London, in conversation with Sarah Shaffi, the wonderful person who interviewed me for Vogue Arabia! You can buy tickets here.
April 23: Forbidden Planet in London, details to come!
April 24: Waterstones Leeds, details to come!
April 25: Waterstones Argyle St. in Glasgow! You can get tickets here!

Postscripts

I was recently introduced to Tamara Masri's "Inside the House of Wisdom" and think it's a beautiful, harrowing, necessary read. I hate that it's necessary; I hate that these facts need the sophisticated dressing of fiction to be comprehended by people who need to be repeatedly convinced of Palestinian humanity, and whose own capacities for memory are so callously indifferent. I want more people to read it; I want to see it on the Hugo ballot; I want to write a great deal more about how accomplished and painful and loving it is. I think you should read it, and tell others to do so.
Just a reminder that I'll be teaching at the Banff Centre for the Arts in September, alongside Premee Mohamed and Ai Jiang! The deadline to apply for this self-directed residency is April 16.