Leafskin

by Miranda Schmidt

A poet and her husband have been trying to make a baby. But while undergoing fertility treatments in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season, Jo reconsiders raising a child in a time of climate crisis. When her artist ex-girlfriend, who has always had an uncanny connection to nature, re-enters her life, Jo struggles to navigate the transformations in her relationships and realities.



Miranda Schmidt's lyrical debut novel blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose, human and nonhuman, reality and magic. A tale of queer love, new motherhood, and ecological interconnectedness, Leafskin interrogates how we create, and what we become, in a time of environmental devastation.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Literary Fiction

Kindle Edition

Published March 25, 2025

About the author

Miranda Schmidt’s work circles the folkloric, the familial, queer magic, and the more-than-human world. Their debut novel, Leafskin, is forthcoming from Stillhouse Press in March 2025 and their writing has appeared in Triquarterly, Orion, Electric Literature, Catapult, and more. She has studied at the University of Washington MFA Program, Bath Spa University PhD program, the Lambda Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Writers, the Bread Loaf Environmental Conference, and the Tin House Workshop. Miranda has taught creative writing at the Portland Book Festival, the Loft, the University of Washington, and Portland Community College. Their ongoing newsletter and teaching project, Writing Toward Nature, explores methods for bringing the more-than-human more deeply into our writing craft. Miranda was born in the Bay Area, grew up in Illinois, lived in London, New York, and Seattle, and now calls Portland, Oregon home.

Reviews

[Renee Godding · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Jo moves through a world that is doubled, the unreal and the real mapping over each other. Leafwhisper moonsong raintap and the waiting for the phantom feelings of kicks that she knows will come soon. She carries layers of secrets inside her.”

Leafskin is a musing, folkloric magical realist novel about love, family and our relationship with the changing natural landscape around us. Although I loved quite a few elements of this novel, I really struggled to enjoy it as a whole.

What I loved:
Our story follows Jo, a young woman undergoing fertility treatments with her husband Liam in the midst of a harrowing wildfire season. As she’s pondering whether or not it is the right choice to raise a child in the midst of an environmental crisis, an ex-girlfriend re-enters her life and helps her redefine her ideas about connection to nature.
My favourite part of the novel by far is its use of language and writing-style. Both our narrator Jo and the author share a profession as poets, lending an almost hybrid quality to their writing that is somewhere between poetry and prose. Just listen to gems like this one:

“Welcome to the ghost forest, Ness said. Jo had never heard the term before, had never seen anything like these petrified arboreal memories. The tidepools caught their reflections and sunk them all down like doubles, sylvan twins above and below.”

It’s a perfect example of style matching content, that elevates both to a higher level.

The novel investigates relationships, parenthood, queerness and the way those intersect with nature. The views of our protagonist (and the author?) are a little outside the mainstream, which might polarize readers, but is always a perspective worth sharing and exploring. In short: it’ll either resonate with you, or it won’t. For me it didn’t: more on that in the next section.

What I didn’t love:
When you strip away the lyricism, much of the plot boils down to a love-triangle between Jo and her boyfriend Liam, and her (ex-)girlfriend Ness. Specifically the sapphic side of this triangle, including Ness as a character, is heavily romanticized. Their connection is presented as almost preternatural and mystical (which I never felt) and is used to justify continuous cheating and emotional abuse of the boyfriend.
Slight spoilers ahead, because I want to explain why this bothered me so much.

Jo rekindles her sexual relationship with Ness whilst still actively trying for a baby with Liam. Mind you, this is not an open relationship, and Liam is not aware or okay with this. Meanwhile, Ness is revealed to have a series of sexual partners all at the same time, even though Jo thinks the two of them are exclusive. She justifies this by saying that “people like us (referring to artists) don’t claim to own each other like that”… The amount of red flags in this dynamic is staggering, and somehow we’re supposed to support this.
Then, things get even worse. Jo falls pregnant and becomes convinced that the baby is somehow Ness’s instead of Liams. This is obviously incredibly hurtful to Liam, who’s doing everything a good dad should be doing, and yet is put aside in his wife’s mind for a woman who’s not even in their kids life. I don’t know if this represents the authors view, but the romanticization of this toxic relationship, to the point of including the child in it at the end, really put me off of the characters and the story.

Similarly, there’s an aspect of mythologizing a disability (syndactyly in both Ness and Jo’s son) that didn’t feel right to me. Own-voices authors have drawn parallels between the Selkie- and mermaid-mythology and limb-differences before, to great success. Here, it just felt like it was an aesthetic choice to somehow mythologize a disability as a symbol of a closer connection to nature. As a disabled person myself, it gave me the ick.

Overall, I’m giving it 2.5 stars, rounded down due to the strong issues I personally had with the content. Your mileage may vary and I encourage everyone to form their own opinions on personal topics like this.

Many thanks to Stillhouse Press for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

[reid · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would have loved this book in college when poetry and art seemed like a way out of reality but really were a liberal arts school social capital grab. Reminded me of Laura, Jamie, and Mercedes and all the “real” artists I couldn’t quite get close to. Also gay

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as part of my effort to read as many books by local (Portland, Oregon) authors as I could this year. I quite liked it. The layered interplay between the love triangle (which isn't really a love triangle), the relationship between the main character and the environment/state of the world, the push/pull of the different versions of herself, and how they ultimately culminate in a literal (and figurative) child is something I quite enjoyed.

Although the book did feel more PNW than Portland-specific, the anxieties and past and present of the main characters felt very much like many people I've come to know and love locally.

If I had one small complaint, it's that there doesn't seem to be as much examination of the main character's college partner as something put on a pedestal, as opposed to the real person that takes years to know and understand, someone who would likely have that fantasy image of her shattered a bit. But maybe that not happening was a subversion, which is part of what made the story special.

Highly recommend.

EDIT- One thing I forgot to mention: this book really shines when the main character is expressing her point of view through poetry, or through the poetic descriptors and unique formats of certain chapters. That, more than anything, kept me coming back to it.

[Sarah Tollok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Metaphor and reality, prose and poetry, all intertwine like tree roots in Miranda Schmidt's Leafskin.

Themes like global climate change, infidelity and infertility all ebb and flow like the tides. No destruction is final. Sometimes it's the opening, the beginning, of something else. Although I didn't always agree with the choices and perspectives of the characters, they were each true to themselves. Among all the speculative imagery and poetry, each character was rooted in real humanity.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. I read it over one weekend, I could not put it down. There is so much visual poetry, intertwined with a compelling story and characters and place. I will be recommending this magical book to friends and family and my book club!

[Valerie Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was hauntingly beautiful. A vision of the world as it could be in all its horror and its love.

[Ted and her books · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this one, I loved the story, the short poetic chapters, and the writing was absolutely beautiful and transported me right into the story. I imagined myself standing next to the sequoia, I felt calm while reading this. I enjoyed the characters, Jo, Niam and even Ness.