Miranda Cowley Heller: The urge for control is stronger than ever. We have this terrible need to own everything
- Charlotte Owen-Burge
- May 26
- 7 min read
Updated: May 29
Miranda Cowley Heller is a novelist, poet, and former HBO executive who helped shape landmark series including The Sopranos and The Wire. Her debut novel, The Paper Palace, was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and is currently being adapted for television.
Her latest work, and debut poetry collection, What the Deep Water Knows, spans fifteen years of writing, offering an intimate reflection of relationships, the passage of time, and the profound connections between humans and the natural world.
In this conversation with The Skylark, Heller reflects on childhood freedom, ecological unease, digital distractions, and the power of trees to put us in our place.
I grew up in New York and have spent most of my life in cities. But for much of the year, I live in Ojai, California, up in the mountains – a place that couldn’t be more different from the Cape Cod landscape that shaped me as a child. And yet it’s just as extraordinary in its own way.
From my home, I look out over huge, rugged mountains, where mountain lions roam – thank God for my dogs – along with bears and coyotes. It’s a vast, wild California landscape, and discovering it later in life has been a revelation.
Being in nature is extremely important to me. Trees are very important to me. The ocean, too. And the proximity of both. Where I grew up, you’d walk past a freshwater pond, up a little sandy path through a dense forest that got scrubbier and scrubbier until you suddenly emerged at the top of an incredibly high dune, looking down at the Atlantic. In winter, you could look back through the bare trees and see the pond again.
There’s something about being almost swaddled by the forest, sheltered under the trees, and then, in an instant, that joy – not fear – of looking out at the ocean. Every single time, it’s like a curtain suddenly opening on the most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen. That feeling is very much a part of who I am – those two pieces together, forest and sea, both separate and one.
One of my favourite things in the world is just lying under a tree, looking up through the leaves and the branches. I remember once doing a spirit animal quiz online – those silly ones – and realising, quite suddenly, that my spirit animal is a tree. When I imagine what feels most alive to me, it’s this enormous tree, with huge roots reaching deep into the earth, searching for something below, and still, somehow, always hoping to grow. That sense of stillness and reach is very important to me.
There’s something about lying in a meadow, or tucked between stalks of corn – anything that feels like a secret – where you become still enough to really listen. And that stillness is so critical, I think.
When it comes to my writing, I don't place nature deliberately. It's not a backdrop or a participant – it just is. I never know what the first word is going to be. I start and follow an image. Often, the first image that comes to mind is some kind of interaction with the natural world, which then, by the time I find my way through it, becomes either connective tissue or a metaphor for something – emotional life, relationships, experience, daily living.
Because of how and where I grew up, landscapes are the first place I go to in my mind. Stepping into water, imagining a foot entering the ocean – and then whatever follows, follows.
Birds, too. In The Paper Palace, the quote at the front is from Shelley’s To a Skylark, a poem that meant a great deal to me growing up. That feeling of, if I could have your voice, I would be heard; that longing.
My relationship with nature has changed through the years, in good ways and in bad. When I was a child, we lived in this very wild landscape that almost nobody knew. Where we were on the Cape is not what most people picture when they think of Cape Cod. They imagine sailboats and the Kennedys; a pristine landscape. But once you get past a certain point, it’s mostly parks – and it’s wild. Untamed.
You could only reach where we lived by a maze of unmarked dirt roads that forked and forked again. If you didn’t know your way, you got lost. Visitors always got lost. Parts of the old King’s Highway – the original road in America – still ran through it, in places so overgrown you could barely tell it was there.
We wandered everywhere. We were kids – we’d go onto other people’s land without thinking anything of it. There was this sense that the land belonged to all of us.
That’s changed. Now there are signs, names for every little road. People coming in looking for it, maps and markers everywhere. And while part of me wants people to see it, another part of me doesn't. You don't want it ruined. They talk about paving the dirt roads, and I get a little bit dog-in-the-manger about it. Not because I think it’s mine – well, maybe a little – but because it’s a sanctuary. And people who don't have respect for it can destroy it without even knowing.
Preserving landscapes, and respecting them, is so important to me. When I was a child, it was pure freedom – that wind-in-your-hair feeling – and now it's heavier somehow, but more profound.
There’s this sense that the woods aren’t safe anymore. That nature itself is something dangerous.
There’s the obvious answer for why people are losing that connection to nature: screens. If you think of human beings as natural objects, that connection has been frayed. Particularly in my country, where connection to truth itself sometimes seems lost.
The idea of someone like Thoreau writing about Walden Pond today would almost seem shocking. People think of those who go into nature as some sort of explorer now. A lot of it is to do the urbanisation of the world.
In England, you still, to an extent, have the ‘right to roam’. I’m always amazed – you can visit someone, and just step over a stile into a field, walk through someone else's land. There's this sense that walking connects you to nature.
In the States, it’s different. I love to run on little paths through the woods, but now, in winter, I have to wear a bright orange vest and clap my hands because of hunters, hidden in blinds – even though they aren’t supposed to be there. There's this sense that the woods aren’t safe anymore. That nature itself is something dangerous.
People catastrophise about it. If you go camping, you’re told to hang your food properly because of bears. When we were little, you just went camping; it wasn’t such a drama.
At a very large level, people are more afraid of interacting with nature – when actually, that’s where your feet are most connected to the earth.
I felt so proud – look at these trees! But then I thought, they’ll outlive me. They outlived everyone before me. They own us.
Before I returned to writing, I studied art history. One of the things you see across time is this deep tension between seeing nature as something ecstatic and wild, like Walt Whitman did, or as something classical Greece tried to tame and organise.
And today, the urge for control is stronger than ever. We have this terrible need to own everything. Land must be owned. Parks must be controlled. Even the whole settler idea – putting a flag in a field and saying, “this is mine” – that sense of ownership is deeply unpleasant to me.
I remember when I bought my house on the Cape, it came with these extraordinary old trees, planted in 1783, massive survivors. I felt so proud – look at these trees! But then I thought, they’ll outlive me. They outlived everyone before me. They own us.
We think we own them, but we don’t. The only real power we have is to destroy them. They grow, they endure, and they laugh at our little claims of ownership. It was humbling. Also a little depressing – realising, oh, I’m going to die, and they will live on.
I don't consciously try to weave environmental or political themes into my work, but of course they seep in. They’re part of me.
Environmental causes are deeply important to me. Global warming, the despair of seeing decisions made purely for profit. That sense of powerlessness bleeds into my writing sometimes, especially when it’s rooted in nature.
I noticed something reading back through my poetry – how often birds appear. In the old poetry I loved, the bird is always free, always soaring. But in my poems, the birds are often stuck, or nesting somewhere wrong, or flying backwards.
The hummingbird – that extraordinary creature that can fly backwards and forwards at the same speed, with purpose – resonates with me. The idea of not soaring away, but flying backwards and forwards, deliberately.
I think somehow that instinct – the power of nature, but also the helplessness within it – is embedded in my work.
There’s something about steeping yourself in life, and nature, and anguish, and happiness, and humour, that I hope will translate. I hope people reading my work will find something that speaks to them – a memory, a feeling, something honest.
Because in the end, it’s not about me. It’s about life.
This conversation took place on 23 April 2025 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.
Miranda Cowley Heller’s debut poetry collection, What the Deep Water Knows, is available to buy from 29 May 2025.
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