Poetry Prose and Other Words
by Ken Ingham
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Oh My Gaia
Query Letter
Dear Agent,
This is the story of Gaia's resurrection from an obscure earth goddess to full partner with God the Father, as told through the lives of two young scientists who become entangled by their common interest in birds.
Maggie Dalena Wetmore is a child of color with two moms; one provides the eggs. the other provides the womb. The father, anonymous, provides the color. His sperm is mixed in vitro with the eggs. The begotten embryos are screened for sex, and a female selected for implantation. The resulting baby is born on a beach in California, where, as a child, she developes a quasi-magical connection to shore birds, especially gulls. Eventually she moves to Maryland and lives with her grandparents while studying deep ecology at the fictional Joanna Hopper Institute for Environmentalism. She learns about the Gaia hypothesis and becomes enamored with the notion of earth as a living organism.
Jesús Taquiri Alexander, nicknamed Chuy, is a birding prodigy from Amazonian Ecuador. He is born ceserian to a mestiza named Carla, a devout Catholic who claims to have never had sex, and she can prove it. Her gynecologist vouches that her hymen is still intact. She believes that God is the father of her son. Chuy is skeptical but never completely sheds the haunting, unsettling suspicion that Carla might be right. His avian acumen is noticed by Professor Brinkley, an ornithologist who visits the Wildlife Center owned and operated by the indigenous Kishwa family of Chuy’s grandmother. Brinkley entices Chuy to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca.
Maggie and Chuy meet online and gradually fall in love without actually meeting or even seeing pictures of each other. When Chuy graduates and returns to Ecuador, Maggie fears she may lose him. In the ultimate version of a blind date, she shows up with a tour group at the Wildlife Center where he now works as a guide. They become engaged after falling out of a hammock. They reconnect in California and car-camp their way back to Maryland, birding along the way. They hear on NPR about a contest for a free wedding, offered by the Reverend Doctor ZZ, a former history teacher at Maggie’s high school, who has authored a sensational book entitled Holy Matrimony: The Marriage of Gaia to God. He is seeking a couple to stand in for the two deities in what becomes a widely anticipated global event. Maggie and Chuy win the contest and, after a year of preparation and publicity, including live interviews with the nuptial couple, the wedding takes place on the beach where Maggie was born. The ceremony, live-streamed around the world, launches a new era of gender equality based on reverence for the living planet, Gaia. Future graphs plotting the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere are expected to display a prominent downward inflection beginning in the year of her resurrection.
I, the author, am a biochemist deeply concerned about climate change and species extinction. I have self-published a book of eco-poetry and an autobiography (see www.nethingham.org). The attachment of Gaia’s name to a controversial scientific hypothesis about global warming changed my life by reviving a spiritual metaphor with the potential to inspire universal respect for the living planet. My goal in writing this novel was to bring Gaia’s message to a larger audience. Thank you, dear Agent, for agreeing to ‘peek inside’.
Sincerely yours,
Ken Ingham