Everything’s Okay, Nothing’s Bad Here: Patrick Wensink in Conversation with Kevin Maloney and Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney
Unlike the dinosaurs, whose extinction was the result of a single cataclysmic event, humans are courting our own extinction with significantly less flair. While the results of our warming planet are catastrophic—more deadly storms, famine, disease, etc.—the increase is incremental. Many writers and scientists have used the example of the frog in a pot of boiling water… you don’t recognize the problem until you’re already being cooked alive.
In his new environmental memoir The Great Black Swamp: Toxic Algae, Toxic Relationships, and the Most Interesting Place in America that Nobody’s Ever Heard Of (Belt Publishing), Patrick Wensink addresses this issue head-on, focusing on a lesser-known but startlingly vivid example of human-generated climate change: bright-green toxic algae.
The book opens on Lake Erie. More specifically, the toxic algae which bloomed bright green across Lake Erie like, causing a poisonous phenomenon which nearly killed 400,000 Ohioans. From there, Wensink tells a fascinating story of the algae’s origins that unfolds like a detective novel as we get closer and closer to the bloom’s source. Along the way, we learn about green slime, a swamp full of wolves, the author’s preoccupation with Nirvana, and the unraveling of his own marriage.
The result is a near-impossible feat: Wensink has turned a complex, scientific issue with roots in Midwest history and industrial agriculture into a compelling, wildly readable page-turner. We (Kevin and Ryan-Ashley) spoke with Wensink via Google Meet from bed while still in our pajamas.
Kevin / When I was reading The Great Black Swamp, one line that really jumped out at me was: “This place is unique for its absolute lack of uniqueness.” You write about how you were rejected as a kid in Northwest Ohio—how people there prized normalcy while you were this weirdo. But over the course of the book, it seems like you come to love and almost defend this part of Ohio. Did your views of Northwest Ohio change over time? Did they change over the course of writing this book?
Patrick / While you were talking there, I thought of the dynamics in a sibling relationship. I can criticize you and I can give you shit if I’m your brother, but if anybody else does, I’m gonna step in and defend you. My relationship with Northwest Ohio feels a lot like that.
We didn’t have record stores and nobody else was into the things that I was into, and so I got picked on. Over the course of writing this book, though, and thinking more deeply about my home and its history and my history with it, I realize that it’s all those things that made me the person that I am now. And I like me now. And so there’s a part of me that plays this sort of sliding doors game of like, well, if all those things hadn’t happened who would I be? I have a real appreciation for the oddity and the hard times and the complexity that I had to deal with growing up there. And I don’t think I fully understood it and embraced it until I was writing this book.
This book took five years to write and over the course of that time, I had a lot of life changes, which I mention in the book—my marriage fell apart and I started a new career as a teacher. The process was very reflective of my being able to take a step back and think more about who I am and where I come from and why it’s all important. And, you know, I think a lot of us probably have a complicated relationship with our homes. I have a complicated relationship with my home, and that’s a good thing.
Ryan-Ashley / I love when a book about a niche topic seems to take an autoethnographic approach, and I’m drawn to that framework because it makes topics feel personally relatable which might otherwise feel inaccessible. While reading, I thought about my own relationship with changing landscapes, of agriculture-polluted farmland … and I think this is one of the reasons that it is more accessible than it might at first seem to somebody who thinks this is a book about a swamp. Because it’s a book about something else.
P / Yeah, I think that was part of realizing that my personal story had a place. These are the kinds of stories I like, the ones with human grounding. I’m not very good at reading academic texts. Even though I had to read stacks and stacks of them for this book, I didn’t want The Great Black Swamp to feel like an academic book, and I didn’t want it to feel like a piece of a straight-ahead, just-the-facts journalism, either. I wanted it to have humanity.
I knew it was going to be hard to make farming and algae and ditches sexy and interesting, and the writing process reminded me of when my kid was little. I would, you know, add spinach into his spaghetti sauce because I had to trick him into eating his vitamins. And while I’m not trying to not trick people, I decided to weave the more serious bits together with stories both about me being little weirdo as a kid, and, you know, really personal, vulnerable stuff. And hopefully that services to humanize my journey as well, because I respond to that kind of stuff. Whenever I see an author who’s brave, admitting their faults and showing you their hard times, I’m like, tell me more.
R-A / I really was drawn in by the way you consistently anthropomorphize the swamp and the natural environment. You bring into focus the period where people were trying to legislate the personhood of corporations, drawing a parallel between that and the fight for swamp personhood, and I’m curious about our specific relationship to nature. First, how you feel about the personhood and rights of nature, and, second, were the scientists you spoke with more sterile toward and removed from their subjects, or more personal?
P / The scientists I talked to were so enthusiastic and so smart and so willing to share. I noticed that they shared a really interesting commonality, many of them anthropomorphizing the environment when they talked about it. They would refer to trees as babies or old guys, and I thought that was really charming.
One scientist, when showing me different samples of algae, said, “This guy is not very toxic, but this guy is really toxic.” They had a way of making these feel like living breathing entities with individual personalities. And I think that added to their enthusiasm and their ability to make these things feel real. It worked on me that way, at least—the samples didn’t just feel like specimens in a box, they were like living, breathing characters.
I kind of took that spirit and applied it to the swamp itself. Probably because one thing I discovered while researching was that there’s a real lack of characters throughout the history of the swamp. And in creative nonfiction, just like in a novel, you need characters and scenes to really make something like historical writing come to life. But it was a swamp the size of Connecticut where nobody lived until the 1890s, and there were just a very few pioneer records. So I needed to write the swamp with the same craft that I would a living breathing human being.
For over a hundred years after the first people tried to settle the swamp, the swamp fought back. People would try to build a road, but then the road would wash out and the horses would get stuck in pits. They’d try to buy coffins, but the graves would flood, pushing the coffins back up to the surface. They built train tracks through the swamp, but it just swallowed them whole. So it did feel like a character, like it was in a good versus evil battle, relentlessly fighting back.
K / How did it feel as a non-scientist, telling a fairly complex scientific story, talking to a lot of scientists who are extremely nuanced experts in their field? How did it feel coming in as an outsider? Did your confidence grow over time?
P / I would not dare call myself an expert, but my confidence definitely grew over time. I was recently interviewed by some radio stations, and the DJs were talking to me as if I was a scientific expert and I was like, oh, I’m not very comfortable in this position. I’m a layman, and I’m pretty clear about that in the book. I think I mentioned that the last time I took a science class was like 1998, and I got a C plus in it. But I’m hopefully turning these deficits of mine into a positive. Instead of saying, I shouldn’t be the one to write the story, I’m like, Oh, I’m exactly the person to write this story, because the writing involves learning. And now I can maybe bring people along with me who also don’t know the science, making the information more accessible to them as well.
I’ve written a lot of fiction, but I’ve also published a lot of nonfiction. I’ve written for the New York Times and Esquire, Oxford American—a bunch of really nice outlets—and my favorite and best pieces of journalism are always written as an outsider, just trying to figure out something really, really unique. And so I kind of like being a dumb-dumb. I like being the one who doesn’t know what’s going on. I find that to be a really powerful position as a nonfiction writer, because you can then seek out people who know so much more than you.
It took me a long time to lose my inhibition around ignorance. For a long time, I thought ‘not knowing’ was something to downplay. But then, as I got older and more experienced, I realized that I love being a student; being a beginner gives me the perspective to make heads and tails of something as complicated as ecological disaster even when I don’t know anything. Hopefully that also enables me to put it into language that makes sense for other folks who, like me, aren’t scientists either.
R-A / The word “normal” shows up in the book 76 times, and this amplifies the way that the desire for homogeneity is in direct opposition to what is natural. I think it’s a very Western, very American, thing to want everything to fit ‘just right.’
On page 218, you write about carrying on like nothing abnormal is happening, and that made me think about how, even after the EPA reached out warning that the water system was at risk, nothing was done. I’m assuming that it was the desire for normalcy, stasis, that led to this inaction, but I’m sure there are lots of reasons.
I’m curious about the tension you might feel about the idea of normalcy given the destruction of the landscape and given your own history with feeling like you were sort of having to choose between nurturing the things in yourself that made you different, and cutting them out so you could be normal, fit in, suffer less. You were weird. The swamp was weird. People wanted to change you, and they also wanted to change the swamp.
P / Yeah, people really tried hard to de-weird the swamp, and this is exactly the sort of contrast I was trying to create. I didn’t come out of the gate knowing that it was going to do these kinds of things; it was more of an evolution, and I leaned in as I saw the parallels to my own life becoming apparent.
I started this book intending it to be a straight piece of journalism about the history of the swamp and about the toxic algae. It was only when my personal life started really getting complicated and sad that I took a step back, and it dawned on me that so many similarities were at play.
I was always really excited about the book, but it really took on a new life for me and became invigorating when I saw that the decisions I had made in my own life in order to try and be normal, to maybe have normal relationships, and to suppress the abnormal parts of my personality, were so strikingly similar to not just Northwest Ohio and Lake Erie in particular, but the environmental picture in general. For example, we all know global warming is happening and yet we have been suppressing the knowledge and implications of that for decades in hopes that everything will just end up okay.
I know lots of people are are pushing hard and fighting for change, but I think that the overwhelming perspective is, like, “Ehhhh, we’ll worry about it later. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” That mentality was so much of my own personality as well. Everything’s okay, everything’s okay, nothing’s bad here. I realized that this is such a human reaction and also a very Midwestern thing, because once I moved away from the Midwest, I saw a lot of people with healthier relationships to their feelings and to the world around them than me. Had I not moved away and had these opportunities, I don’t think I would have ever seen that in myself. So I’m lucky in that regard.
But it really wasn’t until a much later that I started identifying the parallels and recognized the need to put more of myself in the book. I had gotten bad advice early on to cut myself completely out of it. I was told that that the book was not about me. But I didn’t like that book. I wasn’t excited by that book. And the more I put myself into it, the more I thought, this, this is a book only I could write. And I like that.
K / Yeah, and it seems kind of like there’s this personal rewilding happening. A process of allowing for your own complexity, and nuance to surface.
P / Exactly. That’s 100% what I was seeing and feeling and hoping that people would take away when reading the book.
R-A / You’ve talked about how it was your curiosity and vulnerability which allowed you to write this book, a book which hinges on the accurate representation of scientific and ecological data and history which you didn’t already have the expertise to accurately illustrate. This feels like an important thing to think about in our current cultural moment.
In this moment, younger generations especially are being taught that as long as you sound like an expert, you don’t have to do the work of becoming one. There’s a pervasiveness narrative that you’re just supposed to naturally have ‘it’ all figured out and not need to ask questions. But this really creates a lot of divisiveness because when everybody is coming to the table with the posture of, I know, I know, I know …
P / … I’m an expert …
R-A / …yes! Then there’s like very little opportunity or reason to come together and just like discuss and wonder and posit.
Do you find that your students are able to be vulnerably curious? Were the experts you talked to surprised by your willingness to be vulnerable and curious and say things like, “I don’t know?”
P / It’s funny you ask about students, because I’m teaching creative nonfiction this semester, and a focus is on making them comfortable with not knowing things and using that comfort and self-knowledge as fuel to learn more. This practice is not natural, especially in the academic world, because these students are either used to writing term papers that have to be an exact length with a specific number of paragraphs that adhere to a particular structure. It’s not common for someone to come along and say, yeah, I don’t know.
I tell my students to just start flailing about, to start pulling information in to see how they feel about it and making heads or tails of it from there. It’s disorienting, I think, for a lot of students. And every once in a while I have somebody who really latches onto it, but for the most part, it’s confusing to be told it’s okay not to know, and to fail, and to totally blow it.
Recently, I had them all work on different pieces that allowed them to follow their own interests. One student is writing about the Louvre jewel heist, but also referencing a time when her family’s house was broken into.
R-A / Autoethnography!
P / Yeah, exactly. I’m really trying to have them infuse their own lives into journalistic pieces. We did a section that was all memoir, but now I’m like, what if you put some research into this and, you know, mix it all up?
Another student is talking about using a fiber arts and knitting practice to manage mental health.
After they’ve done a round of research and maybe interviewed some people, I have them do an exercise where I say, “Okay, write down everything you know about your topic,” and that’s all they do for ten or fifteen minutes. Then, I Say, “Okay, now write everything you don’t know about the topic.” Inevitably, this is either something they haven’t thought of or something they’ve avoided, and they see the unknowns as a negative thing. I tell them that this is exactly the kind of stuff you should be exploring right now. These are the questions you should be asking.
The results vary, but when when you see somebody employing that practice in their interviews and research, that story inevitably starts to sing—it starts to take on its own voice, and it’s really exciting and interesting to see. Hopefully they feel that, but at the very least, they walk away knowing that it’s okay not to always know what’s going on, and it’s also okay to fail.
The most surprising part of the entire book writing process was when I was interviewing scientists. I talked to a lot of environmental biologists and ecologists, and in every case, I was worried that it would be intimidating as somebody who knows almost nothing about science to talk to someone with such a scientific mind. But in every case, it was delightful.
In my experience, people who are in the sciences were so enthusiastic about what they do and about their area of expertise that they just could not be happier than to tell me everything they know and to answer all my questions. They shared passionately about their slivers of the greater world and were happy to walk me through the information slowly, as if I were, you know, an alien who’s just learning the language for the first time. That was one of the best parts, I would say.
K / You were talking about teaching your students how to put themselves into their journalistic work. As a Gen Xer, I feel like I need to ask the grunge question…
P / I know exactly where this is going!
K / In a book about toxic algae and Northwest Ohio, maybe the most unexpected character to me is Kurt Cobain. You talk about how finding a Kurt Cobain biography was an important part of your youth and I’m just wondering if you could talk about where you were in the writing process when you decided this story belonged in this book? How does it relate to toxic algae?
P / I think that probably came up when I started finally seeing the parallels between ecological disasters and my own personal disasters and shortcomings. So when I was going backward and trying to untangle everything and saying, Why did Lake Erie turn bright green and almost kill an entire city of people? Like what caused that? It made me look at myself and say, What caused me to be the way I am? And the answer to that was just like the ecology—it was a complicated combination of things, like we all are: it was growing up in the country, kind of isolated and playing by myself a lot as a kid with a big imagination, but then also eventually going into the public school system and having to deal with the hierarchies and getting bullied.
Right around the beginning of the grunge era, when my mind was ready for something different, I found Michael Lazaret’s Come as You Are, a really good Nirvana biography which most people probably wouldn’t think of as being anything special. To me, though, it was really exciting and eye-opening because it was about the band and how they grew up in a small town. But it was also the way in which Kurt Cobain talked about his view of punk rock, which was all about being weird and being creative. His view was that just the act of making something makes you an artist. It makes you punk. Before that, I’d always wanted to be creative, and I always wanted to make things, but I was too self-conscious. So to see someone saying, You don’t have to have special skills, and I don’t have a special background, in a weird way, was exactly the kind of pep talk I needed, and I wasn’t getting it from anywhere else. I didn’t have a cool older brother and there weren’t any other punk rock kids at my school. So I found it in a book. And you take it where you can get it when you’re at such a volatile age, you know?
K / Yeah, and you seem to describe the black swamp itself, or whatever small parts that remain, almost like the cover of a metal album or something, connecting these images of your punk rock ethos with the wildness of the black swamp.
P / I definitely compare it to a heavy metal album because, at one point, it was It was six feet of mud, like, deep, and the tree coverage was so dense that you supposedly couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face in the middle of the day. It was filled with tons of snakes and wolves and bears, all things I didn’t know existed in Ohio, and the malaria rate that was so high at one point that it was considered the unhealthiest place in America.
All those things were pretty badass, and it was something nobody really talked about when I was a kid. I think people knew about it, but it wasn’t really celebrated.
R-A / Speaking of music, when Kevin and I were talking about the swamp a few minutes before hopping onto this call, we were talking about the density of the swamp and the wolves and I couldn’t stop thinking of the talking wolves in Lil Dicky’s music video for “Pillow Talking (feat. Brain).” Have you seen this?
P / I don’t know that one.
R-A / I strongly encourage you to watch it. It’s like 10 minutes long—more of like a short film than a music video—but it’s… It’s hilarious. And I think that you would appreciate it. I’ll send you the link. It’s also disturbing, FYI, but in the best way.
P / Yeah, send it. I can handle it.
K / I’m curious about the end of the book. In the closing chapters, you explore the concept of rewilding, the intentional reintroduction of the swamp into Northwest Ohio, and it almost seems like the book is going to end on a hopeful note. Then there’s another chapter and it’s about Elon Musk’s chainsaw and the DOGE cuts. I’m curious about how Donald Trump’s election and the complete dismantling of so many important environmental agencies changed the book. Where where you in the writing process when these things were happening, and how did it change your view of the book’s conclusion and of the future of toxic algae?
P / That’s a really, really good catch, because the tone of that chapter is a lot different. The book was pretty much done by mid-spring of 2025 when my editor came to me and said something like, I think you should probably write one more chapter. I was exhausted at that point. I’d been writing the book for five years and had poured so much of my heart and soul into it. I was ready to leave it alone, but my editor, Phoebe Moghaeri, who is really excellent at what she does, said that there was an opportunity to be topical with all the change that was happening. She sent me an article about NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) losing funding and people getting laid off specifically in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had interviewed people. She said there was too much going on politically that was relevant to the story not to write it in.
I pushed back at first, saying we didn’t know what was going to happen and that we didn’t have enough distance from it yet. And she essentially said, Yeah, but I think you’re kind of missing an opportunity to be relevant to the moment if you don’t do this.
I knew Phoebe was right. She has had really great suggestions all along and I trust her judgement on these sorts of things. So I started researching again and re-interviewed a lot of the same people I’d spoken with before to see what their take was. I think it’s valuable to show these first dominoes, and I believe there are going to be some serious repercussions from the Trump administration’s funding cuts, from firing people at the EPA and NOAA and so many other really important organizations. So while I don’t know what the ultimate outcome’s going be, I think it’s not going to be good. And it did have an eerie echo to the Reagan era in the 1980s—a period I cover in the book—where he did a similar thing. We were making huge reparative environmental strides, but then he slashed everything by eighty or ninety percent.
It was really important and really valuable to show the chain of events then, and it’s just as important now. I hope it doesn’t get worse, but I’m not optimistic and the experts that I talked to were not optimistic either.
R-A / I also think it’s so important to document what’s happening right now. There’s so much censorship—language is being removed from government websites; the digital versions of critical articles that appeared in print and online are getting edited retroactively; and ethical journalism is practically extinct. I think it’s a necessary activist move to publish what’s happening as it’s happening.
This makes me think of Rachel Carson and Silent Spring, which you mention in the book, and how important that text has been as a historical document. It’s important in part because of the ways it exposed the troubling environmental ‘management’ decisions that were causing massive ecological shifts and extinctions and I suppose the hope was that the exposure would prompt people to be like, oh fuck, like… what are we going to do? People didn’t know how bad it was going to get but they chose to take their chances and now here we are. As you know, the Lake Erie algae bloom crisis is just one of many, many examples of catastrophic disasters which threatened (and continue to threaten) public health and safety. The Flint, Michigan crisis which you mention in the book, for example. And I think we really need these records now more than ever.
P / These crises are happening with more frequency everywhere, which is why this book felt really relevant to me as well. The big bloom was the first newsworthy version of this, but now it’s happening with so much frequency there. It’s become almost commonplace, which again, speaks to the collecting shrugging. Everyone’s just being normal and acting like things are okay. But it’s not normal. It’s not okay. And we need to address these things.
R-A / Talking about this makes me think of the compression of time you describe when sharing the National Commission on Water Quality report from the late ‘60s: “Lake Erie had aged fifteen thousand years in the two hundred years since pioneers first settled on its shores.” That information feels simultaneously horrifying and almost too abstract to fully land, but you really brought this idea home for me with the image of you and your friends chasing the train in the late ‘80s yelling, water! water! As you said in the book, you were yelling for water because bottled water was such a novelty at the time; it wasn’t really even a part of the collective consumer consciousness. Now, just thirty-five years later, I carry a bag made out of material generated from water bottle waste. And all because of a big Evian marketing campaign, the launching of which shifted public opinion and consumer behavior in a similar way to the cartoon corn tract you wrote about.
Out of nowhere, Evian bottles showed up on a New York catwalk—part of a fashion show–and the message was that water equals good hair, good skin, beauty. The message was that people, women in particular, should carry a bottle with them wherever they go.
P / It so weirdly all ties together, but it’s not publicly acknowledged.
K / You connect the stoicism of Northwest Ohio—this sort of like, eh, we’ll be fine, everything’s fine mentality—to the way people learn about climate change and decide it’s easier to go back to normal rather than making big changes. In all the research that you did, and as an expert in Northwest Ohio mentality, do you have any thoughts on ways to shake people out of this complacency mindset or do you think this is just how people are?
P / I don’t know that I have the answer to that one. I think it probably takes firsthand experience, like something bad happening to you. But even then, who knows?
R-A / Like the locals you interviewed who recounted the toxic algae crisis as not such a big deal… the thing that stood out the most in their memory was that everybody had to drink bottled water for a few days. They very much embodied the, eh, it wasn’t so bad, mentality you’ve described.
P / This was one of the biggest surprises after of all my interviews. I figured I’d go to Toledo and people would be like, oh, it was awful, it was horrible, but nobody said that and that was when it dawned on me that this is just a mentality, a very midwest mentality. And the more I talk to my friends from out there, the more I hear feedback that this is just how midwesterners operate.
I was that way for a long time, too. It took me a while to come out of my shell. But now, I look at all the things going wrong in the world and think that if our posture really hasn’t improved and we still aren’t paying attention to climate change, then I don’t know what it will take.
K / Yeah, unfortunately. Oh, well. I guess this depressing note is as good a place as any to stop.
We want to go ahead and get this live because, I don’t know if you know this, but the New York Times is very interested in what Pool Party’s doing and it could get you some really good press.
P / Yeah, I’ve heard rumors.
Patrick Wensink is an American author and his latest book, The Great Black Swamp, is available wherever books are sold. His novel, Broken Piano for President, received increased publicity when the whiskey company Jack Daniel’s Properties sent a politely worded cease-and-desist letter to the author asking that he change the design of his book cover, which closely resembled the label on Jack Daniel’s whiskey. You can learn more about the controversy and his past work at patrickwensink.com
Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney, a conceptual artist and writer from the rural South currently living in the Pacific Northwest, has published with X-R-A-Y, Icebreakers, and Farewell Transmission, among others. Anderson takes an autoethnographic approach when excavating her personal narrative as a chronically ill queer, female, autistic, sex worker to explore ideas of temporality, grief, and precarity within our current cultural situation. She is currently writing a memoir about girlhood, illness, and belonging. You can learn more about her at ryanashleyanderson.com.
* This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are producs of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
