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By Andrew Gottlieb, January 1, 2012 11:21 am

The Way of the Woods: Journeys Through American Forests

By Linda Underhill

Oregon State University Press, 2009

Reviewed by Derek Sheffield

In The Way of the Woods, Linda Underhill is an engaging, widely informed guide who leads us through various American forests from Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains to Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. As we follow her through old-growth hemlock and sequoia, she enlarges our journey by drawing on poetry (Dickinson, Keats, Neruda, Basho, cummings), philosophy and religion (Buddha, Odin, Chief Seattle, Thich Nhat Hanh, Plato, Christianity, Lao Tzu, Druid), history (Native Americans, colonists, explorers), and science and natural history (Thoreau, Leopold, Carson, Muir).

All this lore becomes part of Underhill’s invitation to get your legs out from under the desk and into the woods. In a style that is accessible and, at times, lyrical, the spiritual walks hand in hand with the pragmatic. In “Ode to Autumn,” for example, she waxes poetic about the colors and scents of leaves, but also takes a realistic look at the problem of deer over-browsing our forests where hunting is part of the solution. Just as we learn that trees were sacred to Odin, we become acquainted with some wonderful ecological terms such as subnivian space and scuzz.

As we follow Underhill from forest to forest, meeting some lively, modern-day druids along the way, we hear the stories of some of our nation’s iconic trees. They are stories of sweetness, and they are stories of struggle. In one essay, we are persuaded that, like wine grapes, the sugar maples and their delicious sap possess their own terroir, and then, in the next, we learn of the decimation of old-growth eastern hemlock due to its susceptibility to the invasive woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae). Other stories include the western red cedar, Sitka spruce, and sequoia.

One question that Underhill poses is, Do we need a new story? After all, the Quinault and Sumerians had stories and beliefs that underscored the sacred importance of their respective cedar trees. If we had such a mythology, would we act to preserve rather than destroy? Maybe science will give us this story.

One question I have is, Where is Big Pharma on the eco-front? Underhill tells us that these companies have recently “gone to the forests of Madagascar to study the rosy periwinkle, a tropical shrub that produces two substances found to be effective in treating Hodgkin’s disease and childhood leukemia.” Shouldn’t Pfizer and other pharmaceutical corporations be the superfund for preservation efforts? Wouldn’t that make their industry sustainable? Their profit, like people and just about everything else, depends on the diversity of flora in our forests.

Maybe what I appreciate most in this marvelous collection is Underhill’s ability to write about the spiritual without sounding sappy (sorry, couldn’t help it) or too detached. This collection is an ode to being in the woods. When she’s in the woods, she says she’s “connected to the joy of being alive” and she feels as if she’s “inside the mind of the universe.” I know exactly what she means. It’s “like being in love.” Truly trees are our first and last cathedrals. Underhill has been inside some of the anthropogenic ones—Notre Dame, St. Peter’s Basilica, and St. Paul’s—but she says that “none of them compares with the beauty and majesty of a forest, where the trees are alive and reaching for the sky, where the light is always changing, where wind, rain, fire, and ice are all celebrants in the daily liturgy of life on planet Earth.”

Amen to that.

~~~

Derek Sheffield’s A Revised Account of the West (2008) won the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award. His poems have appeared in Orion, Wilderness, Poetry, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and The Georgia Review. He lives on the east slope of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and teaches writing and literature at Wenatchee Valley College, including Northwest Nature Writing, a team-taught learning community that blends biology and writing.

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By Andrew Gottlieb, December 18, 2011 11:30 pm

The Way of Natural History

Edited by Thomas Lowe Fleischner

Trinity University Press, 2011

Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

Thomas Lowe Fleischner has delivered a gem of a little book in this collection of 21 essays and one poem. It’s a slim, well-designed book, even a pleasure to look at, and the cover photo — a pond, a pathway of large, worn stones, leading from the bottom of the photo to the top, the stones partially submerged in the algae-covered water and leading to land — much in the way of a peaceful Zen garden, suggests the focus of much of the content: mindful walking, contemplation of the wild and its inhabitants, the long generous path that nature and natural history offers when one’s eyes and mind are open.

I once asked a poet friend, a woman who’s a naturalist by day-job, how she got to be that way. In the sense of, I’d like to be a naturalist, too, and she simply said, with only the slightest wry humor, I think you just go outside and look at stuff.

So how did Natural History come to seem so complicated? Or dry and boring, the idea of dusty log books, text books, scientists sitting in the woods or in boring laboratories staring at plant cells through microscopes? Maybe it’s the word History. We don’t call it Natural Science but Natural History. In the engineering wing, we say Computer Science, but in the field, staring at a grasshopper or a hummingbird or a weasel, we call it Natural History.

Strange. The title Naturalist seems much more alive, and that’s what this book is filled with: essays by authors with varying backgrounds—ecologists, professors, poets, activists, biologists, conservationists, even a musician—all of whom are naturalists in the true sense of the word. And that’s what their writing addresses: what is natural history? What does it mean to be a Naturalist? And why is this more crucial now than ever before?

What makes this book a pleasure to read is that it’s not simply a collection of pieces telling stories about experiences in the woods. The coyote I saw. The forest I visited. These writers take it a step further, linking the natural world to important elements of humanity, to what we gain or lose — patience, peacefulness, connection, relatedness — via the process. I looked forward to reading Jane Hirshfield’s essay: but her’s is the poem that opens the collection. “The Supple Deer” sets the stage. Jane watches a deer leap between the pales of a tall fence. Her jealously is the focal point of the poem—not of the deer, but of the fence. “To be that porous, to have such largeness pass through me.”

This is the experience of the world the naturalist is lucky to get. To be surrounded by the natural world, to feel submersed in a pool of awe, to feel joy, to gain understanding of something larger than us. Fleischner’s own introductory essay links Natural History to Buddhism and meditation, setting the stage for the revelation that meditation and the practice of a naturalist are kin. “Natural history is a practice of intentional, focused attentiveness and receptivity to the more-than-human world, guided by honesty and accuracy,” he tells us. “Our attention is precious, and what we choose to focus it on has enormous consequences.” What Fleischner’s getting at is that natural history is not just valuable but crucial. The more our society becomes urban-dense, over-populated, economically-strained and technology-focused, the less we can see the wild around us. Fleischner’s book is about the third or fourth book I’ve read in the last six months or so discussing students and their disassociation with nature. Fleischner cites Richard Louv’s term “nature deficit disorder” and recalls Thich Nhat Hanh’s point that we “become the bad television programs that we watch.” We are what we watch.

These writers watch the wild. John Tallmedge’s piece of memoir takes a historical look at how he became a naturalist, someone his daughter claims is “crazy about nature.” He cites Darwin, Muir, Thoreau, Robinson Jeffers. It’s a good essay early in the collection putting natural history in context of its development, its forefathers. Robert McFarlane takes a fascinating overnight hike into the frigid winter cold in England’s Cumbrian mountains. At the end of the cold, solitary trip, we see that the “…sun was now full in the eastern sky, and in the west was the ghost of the moon, so that they lay opposed to each other above the white mountains: the sun burning orange, the moon its cold copy.” McFarlane too reminds us that “we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.”

Yet natural history doesn’t have to happen in the woods but can be found in one’s backyard. Charles Goodrich takes us to his garden to see aphids, mantises, ladybugs. Goodrich echoes other writers in showing that natural history can teach us the relatedness of all beings, understanding our link to the ecology of our world. Laura Sewall deepens this, in her essay showing how and what we watch determines our understanding of the world and the way we live. “Unless we commonly perceive the interdependent reality within which we are all embedded, we will never get ourselves out of the ecological mess we are in,” she says. Our attention leads to pattern recognition in the world, the realization of interdependence.

What these writers are pointing to are the patterns and relatedness underlying all things; for example, a predator-prey relationship: if we remove all the wolves, the deer over-populate and eat and make extinct certain kinds of flora. Kathleen Dean Moore makes us aware of bears in Alaska, her ability to live safely but warily among them. Cristina Eisenberg takes us close to wolves and her study of their effect on their territory in Glacier National Park.

Three of these essays derive from the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, and the Long Term Ecological Research project happening there co-led by the previously-mentioned writers, Charles Goodrich and Kathleen Dean Moore. A project bringing writers to the woods to log their observations, the scope is 200 years, and observation is the key element. Alison Hawthorne Deming and Scott Russell Sanders show us northern spotted owls, rotting logs, shelf fungi, Douglas firs, all while they contemplate the place and consequences of humans in the world.

As with any collection, there are stronger and weaker pieces. Paul Dayton’s essay feels more unfocused, and is lazy with the words ‘as’ and ‘eventually,’ overused here as attempted indicators of time or simultaneity. This is a weakness of grammatical structure and variety, though, not one of his understanding of the worlds of ecology or natural history. Richard Thompson’s piece feels randomly added-in, the simplest in terms of message or contribution.  

There is both a real intelligence and peacefulness to this collection. It brings together concrete visions and stories from the natural world by a variety of ecological leaders, while examining the reasoning behind the critical nature of the process of what we call Natural History. It will make a reader want to get up and go for a hike or simply sit and look at some aspect of the natural world. For those who continue reading, delaying their hike, the essays will explain and deepen an understanding of why the process of natural history not only feels so good, but is important to our lives as humans in the world. As R. Edward Grumbine writes, “Natural history is a supreme antidote to abstraction; what we choose to pay attention to makes all the difference in the world.”

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook, Halflives, (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com.

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By Andrew Gottlieb, December 8, 2011 10:09 pm

Learning the Valley: Excursions into the Shenandoah Valley
By John Leland

University of South Carolina Press, 2010

Reviewed by Rachel Furey

In the preface to John Leland’s collection of essays Learning the Valley, the author states the book is “intended primarily” for his thirteen-year-old son, Edward, a dedication to the adventures the two have shared together exploring the natural wonders in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and a means through which, in coming years, his son can discover Leland’s own memories and insights to their escapades. Leland also hopes that other readers benefit from the collection, particularly that they “learn the land they live in” and come to recognize the nature that exists in their very own yards.

Given the preface, readers may expect several father and son moments to appear throughout these twenty-five short essays. However, Edward makes only rare appearances in the text and often for not more than a few lines at a time. But while those readers expecting a memoir recounting family moments may be disappointed, nearly every reader is likely to find at least one essay of interest. Leland’s book covers a wide range of topics, including natural wonders such as rock castles, man-made reminders of earlier times like rock walls, and frustrating outdoor pests, including mosquitoes. In “Flying Frass”—frass means insect poop—he urges readers to connect with the natural world in a unique manner. He suggests they try “aphid poop,” writing, “Pop it in your mouth and lick—you’re eating star spit, the sweat of gods.” Readers wouldn’t be the only ones to eat these secretions; ants feast on it as well.

None of the essays are longer than six pages, making the book a manageable read. Each essay is a tightly packed section of prose offering readers the lyrics of a memoir combined with the facts and insights of a nature or travel guide, as well as a hint of history that weighs more heavily in some essays than others. In “Poison Ivy,” readers learn how scientists have tested the plant on lab animals, that Thomas Jefferson grew poison ivy in his garden, and why some patients consumed poison ivy, making for a story that will shed new light on a plant familiar to the majority of readers.

Leland proves a patient writer, taking the same care with each sentence as he does with his son when cutting a Christmas tree: the end result has to be just right. Combining a careful eye for detail and an ear for sound, he’s able to construct vivid lines such as the one he uses to describe cedar apple rust fungus in “Cedars”: the fungus “looks like a purplish brown misshapen golf ball glued to a branch for the two years it takes to mature.”  Leland also shows adeptness for incorporating metaphor. In “Forest Communities,” he writes, “ten thousand generations of foraging squirrels, burying and forgetting their harvest, can move, if not mountains, then trees up mountains, and it is they who are thought to have wrought this slow miracle of reclothing the Appalachian Mountains.”

Although beautiful and lyrical sentences frequent the book, Leland doesn’t entirely shy away from humor. In “Sassafras,” he writes about sassafras tea and states, “What I teach my son might just poison him in ways undreamt of by the FDA.” Moments of humor include Leland’s son, such as in “Vegetable Armature”: “When he was younger, Edward and I picked the thorns off the younger locusts and licked and applied them to our foreheads, becoming rhinoceri.” And in “Flying Frass,” he writes, “while most caterpillars are content to let their loads drop where they will, one heaves its frass into the air…They call it scatapulting.” Leland captures the beauty of the valley. He also doesn’t hesitate to capture the less-than-beautiful attributes of some of the creatures that inhabit that valley.

As evidenced by his lengthy notes section, Leland’s research is thorough, serving as a sort of ballast around which to weave his sentences. Essays such as “The Natural Bridge,” in which quotes frequently appear, including the last line of the essay, may rely too heavily on research at the sacrifice of Leland’s lyrical voice; and sometimes, as a result of the amount of material packed into an essay, the ending feels strained as he tries to tie too much together at once. What often keeps the book from turning into a science lesson laced with history are Leland’s brief, and yet strategically placed, references to his son, as well as his willingness to humbly incorporate some very human moments of his own. In “Massanutten,” he mentions that he plays war games with his son, then adds, “I keep them from my cadets and colleagues, who think such daydreams inappropriate for English teachers.” In “Caves,” Leland shows a similar self-awareness combined with enthusiasm when he writes, “Every now and then I have to crawl through passages narrow enough to fool me into thinking I’m trapped, but which release me with a scrape and a twist.” His enthusiasm for the material shines particularly bright in moments such as these, moments in which the author admits to scraping through mud in order to investigate a cave, moments many readers may like to see more of.  

Ultimately, Leland’s title does begin with Learning, a clue to the layering of history and facts that he works into each of his essays, and while his own experiences with the valley are sometimes overshadowed by the rich history incorporated into the essays, he does allow readers to experience vivid moments with him, such as when he finds himself among migrating Monarchs, writing, “Looking left and right, I count one, two…and on and on and on, until I tire of being cerebral and run with the wind and the waves of butterflies and flap my arms and would fly south with them.” While readers may not so eagerly fly with each of Leland’s essays, given the wide range of topics and slight shifts in tone, most readers are bound to find at least a few essays in the collection that make them feel something like being surrounded by migrating monarchs and wanting to take flight, riding the lyrics of the prose to essay’s end.

~~~

Rachel Furey is currently a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech. She is a winner of Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Fiction and Crab Orchard Review’s Charles Johnson Student Fiction Award. Her work has also appeared in Women’s Basketball Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Waccamaw Journal, Hunger Mountain, The Prose Poem Project, Sweet, and elsewhere.

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By Simmons Buntin, August 30, 2011 10:32 pm

The editors of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments are pleased to announce the winners and finalists in our 2nd Annual Contest:

Poetry
Judged by Alison Hawthorne Deming

• Winner – Rebecca Dunham for her poem in seven parts, “Morning: Joplin, MO”
• Finalist – Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé for his poem “Scholem in Forty Winged Hours”
• Finalist – Gretchen Primack for her poem “Fawn”

Of the winning poem, Alison Hawthorne Deming writes:

This poem sequence takes up the task of beginning again after the disaster of tornado and flood that hit Joplin, MO earlier this year.  Beginning requires seeing and the poem accomplishes that with acute precision and urgency as it ricochets between observation and the inward seeing of contemplation. I admire the poem’s economy and questioning in taking on the particulars of a tragedy that wounded human, plant, and creaturely communities alike. But I admire even more that the poem makes no attempt to make it all better with simplistic pieties. Rather it asks the reader to make a home in this reality–”roost, thou forsaken”– and to “let the pain remind you/ what it means to survive.”  In a world of wounds, one of poetry’s great tasks is to educate our empathy. This poem does just that at a time when empathy needs all the help it can get in the world.

Fiction
Judged by Andrew Wingfield

• Winner – G.E. Tallant for her story “Song of the Turkey Vulture”
• Finalist – Malka Davis for her story “Kenley’s Watch”
• Finalist – Erica Olsen for her story “Driveaway”
• Finalist – K.L. Barron for her story “Controlled Burn”

Of the winning story, Andrew Wingfield writes:

“Song of the Turkey Vulture” is a prose elegy to the deeply placed existence of a single woman whose small farm is the great work of her life.  Rich in details of the land and its bounty, tuned to seasonal rhythms of work and weather, this story grew up around me with the quiet majesty of a pumpkin vine.  As our small farms devolve into housing tracts, or fall prey to the factory food system, we squander not only good land, but also the habits of care that are the essence of agriculture.  Through its sharp characterizations and careful evocations of place—the sheer weight of its specifics—“Song of the Turkey Vulture” invites us to feel the gravity of our loss.  The story is mournful yet celebratory, suffused with wry humor and laced with a bitterness that’s as bracing as a mouthful of mustard greens.

Nonfiction
Judged by Elizabeth Dodd

• Winner – Julian Hoffman for his essay “Faith in a Forgotten Place”
• Finalist – Katie Fallon for her essay “Hill of the Sacred Eagles”
• Finalist – Catherine Schmitt for her essay “New Orleans, The Gulf Coast, 2010″

Of the winning essay, Elizabeth Dodd writes:

I’ve selected “Faith in a Forgotten Place” as winner of this year’s nonfiction contest.  This piece combines terrific reporting—repeated visits to the village of Zagradec, careful inclusion of historic context—with an evocative personal response, indicating how the Prespa basin has touched the author.  “And while most of Lesser Prespa Lake exists in Greece, the great bowl of open water throws an unexpected arm around an oak-clad mountain at its southern end. The hill-slopes close in, like parallel lines running together in the distance, until only a thin finger of water touches the shore, a reed-tangled wedge belonging to Albania.” This faithful presentation of the world’s body underlies the essay’s contemplation of hopes and borders, and how eco-tourism can be an opportunity for re-inhabitation by those who are not the tourists.  Richly informative, deftly reflective, this is splendid literary journalism.

All of the winners and finalists will be published in our forthcoming issue–No. 28, “Image”–which will launch on September 19th. Additionally, winners each receive a $250 prize.

Congratulations to our winners!

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By Andrew Gottlieb, June 29, 2011 8:25 am

Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks. Volume 1: The West

Edited by Kim Wyatt and Erin Bechtol
Bona Fide Books, 2011
Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

If you’re like me, you’ve visited a number of National Parks, you’ve been enthralled by the beauty and variety presented by that great national resource, but your personal list of parks-to-see is long. What to do to ease the craving in between trips to our national parks? One answer: read about them.

Bona Fide Books, a young press out of South Lake Tahoe, has put together for a first anthology a rich collection of essays by writers who’ve not only visited our parks but have spent time working and living in them, in some cases for whole careers. Thirty-plus years. That’s the beauty of Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks. Volume 1: The West . These essays present the lives, insights, and secrets of people who’ve not only visited the parks but have experienced them from the inside. A handsomely produced volume, it’s readable, fun, and small enough to shove in a backpack.

I’ll admit: I’m biased. I had the luck to once be the writer-in-residence on Isle Royale National Park, and those three weeks gave me my own taste as a National Park Service insider. But as this anthology illustrates, one park, or one experience, is not like the other. There are stories here you won’t find in any parks guide book. The beauty and appreciation you’ll expect; the dark side of working in the parks may be a surprise.

Joseph Flannery writes about encounters with grizzly bears, secret back roads and buffalo carcasses, the differences between grizzlies and black bears, and the way Yellowstone employees pride themselves in experience: “To have a close encounter with a grizzly is to wear a sort of badge of honor around the park.” Troy Davis, a ranger and biologist at Yellowstone for nine years, tells of the management of the famous Elk Number Six, and losing sleep one night while the animal circled his cabin, bugling. “I spent more time, eyeball to eyeball, with Elk Number Six than did any other human being.” Ruth Rhodes, now a professor of English, spent three seasons working at Denali National Park, and writes of the Dash, the end of summer ritual in which park employees strip down and run three miles, naked, in the frigid midnight air of Alaska, from one bar, the Golden Spike, to another, the Chalet.

There is the beauty and the wildlife: sunsets and sunrises, lush forest, snowy wilderness, elk, bear, wolves, big horn sheep, and brook trout. The geology: mountains, petrified forest, volcanoes, canyons. The process: tents, cabins, employee housing, hiking, climbing, summiting, and river-rafting.

But there’s also the rote work, the let-down, the exhaustion of underpaid drudgery, and the drugs and alcohol, the car accidents and deaths, the dark side of the Park Service, the symptoms of young people together in isolation, working in a dream wilderness but with few other outlets. Melanie Dylan Fox talks about escape during five seasons of work in Sequoia National Park: “It’s easier to rely on the feelings alcohol and drugs evoke than it is to recapture that sense of wonder we all felt at the beginning. We keep searching for the intoxication that the forest itself once brought.” Nicole Sheets, for this essay perhaps appropriately named, writes of changing bed linens, pleating sheets and tucking edges, of being a “lowly drone.” For Sheets, the adage “leave no trace” takes an unexpected angle. “My work succeeds . . . if . . . each guest can maintain the illusion that they are the first people to ever stay in their room.”

Like all anthologies, some essays are stronger than others. The best here tell more than one story, using lyrical prose to reveal something personal. Cassandra Kircher tells of a difficult relationship with her aging father, attempting to understand his quiet, his isolation. During one of his visits while she works in Rocky Mountain National Park, “my father arranges pieces of bark with his foot like he’s playing a game, creating a whole world that is more real to him than the one he is in.” By the end of the essay, caught trout slowly dying in a bucket become a larger metaphor for the reader, for the essay’s narrator. Mary Emerick writes of escaping relationships with men, traveling from park to park, a vagrant seasonal worker with a fear of commitment to anything but her “ancient road atlas.” Janet Smith writes about working in the parks to escape feelings of inadequacy, ugliness: “living—literally—in the shadow of Half Dome equated to a better life.” This type of writing is at once painful, revealing, and gratifying.

Other national parks represented include Mount Rainier, Wrangell-St.Elias, Grand Teton, Petrified Forest, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and Yosemite. A highly recommended collection that will make you want to ditch your job and pack your gear for a nearest or favorite national park, but with a new appreciation for many of the seasonal and full-time rangers, naturalists, and workers helping maintain the incredible National Parks System that most of us will only briefly get to visit.

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook Halflives (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com

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By Claudia Broman, January 3, 2011 7:35 am

Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher
by Frederick L. Kirschenmann

Edited by Constance L. Falk
The University Press of Kentucky, 2010

Reviewed by Claudia Broman

Frederick Kirschenmann’s essay collection, informed by the likes of Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Aldo Leopold, Bill McKibben, and Barbara Kingsolver, encourages readers to develop an integrated appreciation of the land and communities on which we all depend.

Kirschenmann is a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames, Iowa, and is president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture at Pocantico Hills, New York. His essays are grouped into three sections, marking personal philosophical shifts in desire for maximum agricultural potential, optimum potential, and finally for resilient agriculture.

The first part of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher delves into the experience of farming and the lessons Kirschenmann drew from moving back to a 3,000-acre family farm in North Dakota. Upon arrival, the author worked to transition the farm from conventional methods to organic practices.

From there, the author moves readers into the implications of industrial farming and food production, culminating in a consideration of the future: alternatives to mainstream agricultural practices, focusing on renewal and resilience, and shifting to an idea of farmers and humanity being part of nature rather than separate from it.

Throughout the book, Kirschenmann shares his own journey in what he calls fostering “an ecological conscience.” Such a conscience is essential to generating a solid land ethic, is grounded in the appreciation of healthy soil, and relies on understanding relationships between environmental conditions and the experience of humanity.

Cultivating an Ecological Conscience involves a consideration of the sublime, an anticipation of what could be, and a view of long-term rather than short-term consequence. With a focus on local possibility, rather than global, Kirschenmann celebrates small- and middle-scale farmers and calls on readers to create new narratives of what agriculture is and could become.

~~~

Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, December 17, 2010 11:07 pm

As the Terrain.org editor-in-chief, there’s little that feels better than putting the finishing touches on the issue and getting the work of the publication’s many contributors out into the world. But there’s another good side to editing that has little to do with publishing.

Shura Young with her dog Toby at the Tar Pits in the 1950s.

I have to decline far more submissions than I accept (that’s not the good part). Occasionally, however, a submission is close, and if I can find the time I’ll provide critical comments on the essay, poem, or story. That doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, of course. But just the other day I received an email from the writer Shura Young that really made my day. Here it is, with her permission to reprint:

To Simmons Buntin,

In May 2007, you emailed me a page of suggestions in response to an early version of my essay, “Tar Pits.” With that encouragement, I continued two years of revising. “Tar Pits” was published in the 2009 Flyway, A Journal of Writing and Environment, and was selected as Notable in The Best American Essays 2010. Flyway recently interviewed me on their blog [read the interview here].

Although I’ve had nothing else so far that I felt would fit Terrain.org, I wanted to express appreciation for the useful feedback you took the time to give me.

Best,
Shura Young

~~~

Though I admit some envy that Flyway, a lovely print journal, got the opportunity to consider the revised essay when we didn’t, I am delighted to learn that Shura continued to work on it and that it found a home and recognition even beyond that. As an editor, it is very gratifying to know that I had a small part in the essay’s success.

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By Simmons Buntin, August 24, 2010 1:56 pm

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is pleased to announce the finalists and winner of our inaugural nonfiction contest, judged by acclaimed writer, musician, composer, and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg:

• Winner: Elizabeth Dodd for “Sinuous”
• Finalist: Kelly Hayes-Raitt for “Still Alive”
• Finalist: Michael Palmer for “Kinds of Quiet”

Elizabeth Dodd beside a petroglyph in Chaco Culture National Historic Park. Photo by David Rintoul.

Here’s what Rothenberg had to say of the finalists and winner:

It has been a pleasure to read the three top entries of the nonfiction category of Terrain.org’s annual writing contest. “Still Alive” presents a haunting, gritty, honest picture of the kind of troubles and confusion the Iraq War has brought to people in the midst of it, a straight story of the kind we rarely get to hear in media-saturated America. The life of an over-caffeinated Brigham Young student in “Kinds of Quiet” who becomes a vacuum specialist is funny, dark, and painfully real in a wandering, wonderful way. But it is “Sinuous” that impresses me the most, with its movement from the direct experience of a snake-shaped petroglyph to a whole history of engagement from archeology, legend, tradition, and literature right into the moment of our attempt to look straight at an ancient image and try to make contemporary sense of it, finding the signal in the noise of history, record, and information.  It is always hard to combine writing based on raw personal experience of something mysterious and magical with all the reading we can do to offer experts’ visions of what our own encounter might actually mean. This author has combined these two elements seamlessly, so it is to this piece that I award this year’s first prize, and congratulations as well to the two fine runners-up.

Elizabeth Dodd will receive the cash prize of $250 and publication in our forthcoming issue, No. 26, with the theme of “The Signal in the Noise.” The issue launches at www.terrain.org on September 20, 2010. The issue will also include Michael Palmer’s essay.

Congratulations to Elizabeth, Michael, and Kelly Hayes-Raitt, and many thanks to those who submitted to our first contest. We had a wonderful array of essays from which to choose.

~~~

The finalists and winner of the Terrain.org inaugural contest in fiction (judged by Aurelie Sheehan) will be announced on this blog on Wednesday, and the finalists and winner of the inaugural contest in poetry (judged by Jessie Lendennie) will be announced within the next week.

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By Simmons Buntin, May 8, 2010 5:50 pm

This must be one of the original video essays. Pretty good stuff.

Abbey on NBC from Eric Temple on Vimeo.

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By Simmons Buntin, April 16, 2010 1:28 pm

Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town
by Susan Hand Shetterly
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010

By Claudia Broman

Along Maine’s coast there is a rural place where plants, animals, and people make up a community, where town flows into wild places, and where what is wild comes to town.  In Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town, Susan Hand Shetterly shares a chronology of personal essays that depict experiences in that rugged place.

What is most striking about Settled in the Wild is Shetterly’s skill in describing community.  The people and wildness around her home are depicted in ways that demonstrate a way of life; even after two readings I could not find a single instance of anthropomorphism.  While each person and each creature is given the space to be their own, these individuals also contribute to an evolving system – a holistic way of communicating and existing with one another.

Shetterly marks time through the interactions she has with others, whether living in a rustic cabin with her husband and children, discovering a cricket “bite” with her son, rehabilitating and relating to a young raven, or appreciating a dead pine in a field.  Shetterly honors her revealed past through the equal attention she pays to the beautiful and the ugly.

The care with which Settled in the Wild is written is testament to the concern Shetterly has for place.  Her essays inspire consideration of what relationships exist in our own communities, what access to wildness we have, and how compassion can better connect us to the places where we live.  The essay collection is Shetterly’s first in 20 years, and it’s well worth the time to read.

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Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.