WORK
Surfacing (Jamie)
Jamie's 2019 essay collection — the book in which what emerges from the ground becomes both literal subject and emblem of cognitive and cultural work.
Surfacing (2019) is Jamie's third major essay collection and her most thematically integrated. Its essays attend to objects and memories emerging from transformed conditions — archaeological sites revealed by melting permafrost in the Yukon, Neolithic settlements surfacing from Orkney's eroding coasts, personal memories surfacing from her own past. The collection's organizing figure is the bog or permafrost as a preserver that only yields what it holds when conditions change. The book's relevance to the Kathleen Jamie — On AI volume is direct: the peat bog as archive, the geology of slow preservation, and the question of what changes when the conditions of preservation are altered — all receive their fullest treatment here.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book engages climate change without becoming polemic. Its method is observational: Jamie visits sites where climate-driven transformation is making visible what has long been hidden, and records what she sees. The resulting essays carry more urgency than her previous work without sacrificing its patience.
The Yukon essays, developed through