Written by Kate J. Reed, Illustrator, and Tim Greenup, Poet in the Winter 2026 issue of Lilac City Local magazine
Olaf, the comic relief snowman from Disney’s Frozen, has a theory about humankind’s paradoxical relationship to technology, seeing it as “both our savior and our doom.” We tend to agree. If not for modern medicine, both of us— your dear co-authors—would be long dead. A sad prospect (for us, anyway). At the same time, over the last decade or so, our access to all the answers, ever, has felt less awe-inspiring and more boring. Perhaps you agree. Social media, internet research, and new-fangled phenomena like ChatGPT and Gemini have blurred from possibility to noise.
Last year, we realized that Googling every small curiosity that popped into our minds (e.g., “Does botox affect life expectancy?”) had become more impulse than choice. What’s worse, we were often unsatisfied, overwhelmed, or distracted by the results and unable to hold onto any coherent answers. So I (the Kate half of this authorship) came up with a project: instead of Googling all my curiosities, I began recording my “wonders” and using them to inspire a series of illustrations. I named the project Wonder Killer after a Tig Notoro bit about cell phones.
Our whole family has gotten into this. The kids—we have a seven and eleven year old—ask as many questions as they ever have about, for example, whether or not chickens have belly buttons, but we resist the temptation to find immediate answers and instead speculate freely, make (un)educated guesses, and together occupy a space of wonder.
We’ve found that, when done right, wonder promotes connection. We recently taught a poetry workshop at the Liberty Park Library to encourage others to use their curiosity for creative exploration. We brought up a question someone had shared with me on Instagram: Can you eat the inside of an aloe plant? I’d already done some library research and found warnings not to. But we—all of us at the workshop— didn’t know why. We did know, collectively, you can buy edible aloe. So how do we put those two pieces of information together?
Then someone offered up a story about how their friend who works in an emergency room often encounters kids having allergic reactions when at-home aloe plants are used on cuts and scrapes. After more collective wondering, someone else offered up the golden nugget: what makes the inside poisonous and prone to causing allergic reactions is latex; you have to separate the latex out, then it’s safe to ingest. And THEN we started wondering, “Wait, is latex naturally occurring?” A good portion of us thought it was synthetic.
It felt a bit like shared magic: which is what the Wonder Killer project has brought us this past year. What makes the magic possible is a group dedication to occupying a space of not knowing—which is slightly uncomfortable when you know we probably have the answer just a few clicks away. And although we’ve found that answers normally come to us eventually, we’ve found “answers” were maybe not what we were looking for in the first place.
Here’s another question that popped up organically in the workshop: Where was the poet William Stafford from? We started to talk about what we know about him and his work, but before we got very far, someone looked up the answer on their phone. And we all went, “Ohhh.” And the conversation ended. Like someone had thrown water on a flicker before it got a chance to really burn.
