Comments (0)

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.

Comments (0)

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.

Comments (0)

By Simmons Buntin, December 1, 2011 1:40 am

The editors of Terrain.org are delighted to announce our nominees for the 2012 Pushcart Prize and Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology:

Poetry

• “Exchange of Azalea and Quail” by Karen Holmberg, Issue No. 28
• “Renunciation” by Christopher Locke, Issue No. 27

Nonfiction

• “Faith in a Forgotten Place” by Julian Hoffman, Issue No. 28
• “Winter Flood” by Ana Maria Spagna, Issue No. 27

Fiction

• “Song of the Turkey Vulture” by GE Tallant, Issue No. 28
• “Under the Reservoir” by Anna Laird Barto, Issue No. 27

As always, selecting our total of six allowed submissions is difficult among all of the work we are honored to published in two issues per year. We thank these nominees and all of our contributors for making Terrain.org such a wonderful and important place-based journal!

Comments (0)

By Andrew Gottlieb, November 3, 2011 8:26 pm

Cabin Fever: a Suburban Father’s Search for the Wild

By Tom Montgomery Fate

Beacon Press, 2011

Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

I grew up a few miles from Walden Pond, the site of Thoreau’s famous cabin, his experiment in deliberate living. It’s a favorite location. I swam in the pond growing up, I got poison ivy from its woods, I skipped school with friends to lounge on its beaches, and later, older, I hiked around it often, alone, visiting the cabin site, pondering Thoreau’s time there, wishing myself to a solitary place with my own cabin in the woods.

Tom Montgomery Fate has written a memoir about his own life and his attempts to populate just that sort of cabin, and this memoir is a direct descendent of Thoreau’s own Walden, a book that Thoreau himself would appreciate, I’m sure. I grew fond fast of this book, and it’s hard not to. Fate is a man who brings coyotes and cougars to the page in a thoughtful, beautiful prose that’s readable, lyrical, and begs the reader to slow down and take their time. The book is a wide, deep river, best observed with a cup of coffee as the sun’s coming up over the ridge and the night’s crickets have given way to the scratching and calls of the morning’s towhees.

“I have a large bowl of lake glass on my desk. When my writing goes poorly, I pick up a piece—touch a story of loss, of transformation—and imagine the cold, deep re-remembering of the lake, the constant journey of glass back to sand.” This, from an essay about time’s passage, the transformation from child to parent, and the randomness of lake glass.

Sawyer, Michigan is home to 50 acres of land that Fate shares with friends, a community of owners. It’s on this land that he spent two years building a small cabin. But Fate lives two hours away in Chicago with his wife and three children, and his life is busy with all the usual demands. Teaching, grading, family-living, bill-paying, writing: how does one balance this with a deliberate life in the woods, let alone any sense of solitude?

However, this memoir is more than a man alone in a cabin dreaming of blackberries. This is a series of essays that explore life and death, family and solitude, growing, learning, and living. And doing so while recognizing our need to survive at the collisions of environments as Fate calls them. For we misconstrue the world when we try to imagine ourselves pursuing Thoreau’s experiment: going to one place and existing in solitude. Fate’s premise: “…we always live in between—forever teetering on the rusted fulcrum of our wondrous but uncertain lives.”

We see Fate walking the woods around the cabin, ducking brush, hiking to the river, watching herons nest, ants carrying a fly back to their underground home. We see him write by candlelight, lose cell phone reception, drift off to sleep in a sleeping bag, watch the rain fall outside the cabin.

But we also see Fate stuck at home. Chapter three begins in Chicago after a weekend trip to the cabin has been canceled. Fate’s wife is working and his son Bennett has a fever. There’s a broken faucet, and Fate turns this all into an essay about his revelation of himself as a father now appreciating his time with his son. “Maybe it’s because I’m now almost exactly between my son and my father—forty years older than Bennett and forty years younger than my dad—that these small moments seem sacred.”

Fate is an activist, a man who looks at the land around him and is dismayed by what he sees. And he’s aware of the facts behind the problems. “The reason for corn feeding is economic: corn-fed cattle reach slaughter weight in a little over a year, while grass-fed cattle require four to five years.” But these essays don’t focus on the factual minutiae. Fate wants us to know the rivers are polluted, and that antibiotic use in corn-fed cattle is a problem, but his way of relating his concerns turns always inward, and facts becomes links in meditations and revelations for the author, for the specifics of his world. These are not pedantic, but expansive, pieces, essays that bloom. How do his children read the world? How does his wife survive her illness? How does the author cope with a friend’s death? How do we exist and find contentment in moments of adult life that span joy and sorrow?

There’s humor here, too. “Trimming Trees,” an essay about an almost-disastrous do-it-yourself episode that involves an underpowered chainsaw, large trees, a power-line, and an eager amateur handyman, is funny—laugh-out-loud funny in places—and anyone who’s taken on an outdoor project too great for their skill-set will appreciate the honesty and humor of the author, even as he comes close to electrocuting himself. Fate is a handyman. He’s built a cabin for goodness sake, but he’s a handyman who reveals to us his own learning in the lumberyard. It’s not Fate telling us that he’s a beginner or an expert, but both at once, in different ways. One can build a cabin and misjudge a job. The appeal of these essays: Fate is honest about his humanity, his successes, his failures.

Thoreau’s writing arcs these essays, both in epigraphs and as quoted insertions, and it feels an appropriate anchor. Fate as a modernized Thoreau. The same issues, but different times, different technologies, different facts. The scenery has changed, but the concerns of a human in the world have stayed very much the same. Discovering the deliberate, careful and hopefully contented life amid chaos, confusion, hypocrisy, and sadness.

Fate teaches us this, that “…sauntering is all there really is, and the best sentences we will ever read or write or live only lead us deeper into the woods, into a place where keys and credit cards don’t matter, a place where we once belonged, and still long to be.”

~~~

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

Comments (0)

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!

Comments (0)

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

Comments (0)

By Andrew Gottlieb, May 7, 2011 2:16 pm

What’s Gotten into Us?: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World

by McKay Jenkins
Random House, 2011
Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

McKay Jenkins new book is the Fast Food Nation of the toxic chemical world, and he’s written an eye-opening, scary, and potentially impactful text. He’s broken the book into chapters with titles including The Body, The Home, The Tap, The Lawn, and The Big Box Store, and this is a clue to the content: Jenkins is educating readers about chemical dangers lurking in the most common of places: your basement, your kitchen, your water, your green lawn, your favorite mall.

Importantly, Jenkins reveals that the chemicals corporations have been developing and selling in past decades—polyvinyl chloride (PVC), petrochemicals (think: thousands of consumer products like plastics, cosmetics, food storage containers) flame retardents, pesticides and herbicides (think: 2,4-D or 2,4-dicholorphenoxyacetic acid)—hundreds of which are unregulated and commonly in use today,  have the ability to migrate into our bodies, accumulating in potentially disruptive, carcinogenic, and/or lethal amounts.

Jenkins worries not about the single exposure to a chemical but a lifetime’s accumulation, and his research points out potential links to increases in cancer, autism and other diseases. As Jenkins indicates in his prologue: “most of the tens of thousands of chemicals used commercially have been around…far too short a time for researchers to figure out…what impact they might have on our health.”

Jenkins’s own health scare prompted this book. Doctors cut a benign tumor out of his hip. Prior to surgery, he was asked all kinds of questions about his prior chemical exposure, making him realize that we have only a vague understanding of the links between most toxic chemicals and the health consequences.

The political ramifications are that change only occurs at the corporate level when populations of people get scared about what’s in their or their children’s bodies. Thyroid & hormone disruption, autism, cancer: a sixty year old may shrug, but when a mid-thirties new mother finds out that her breast milk may contain flame retardants, lead, phthalates, or other toxic chemicals, all of which may have the potential to disrupt a child’s hormonal, reproductive or other bodily system, she listens. And can adjust spending habits, spending money on organic or other products free from toxic chemicals. As Jenkins points out, corporations worry less about federal regulations: for many chemicals, regulation is nonexistant, and lobbyists in Washington can deter most changes. But losing consumers and revenue is a different story.

This is a scary book, but not without optimism and suggestions for change. After Sweden prohibited PBDE’s (polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or flame retardant compounds) in late 1999, levels in Swedish breast milk dropped 30 percent in immediate years following. The book’s appendix is a solid resource of ideas, how-tos, and names or URLs to companies selling healthy non-toxic products. Change is possible, Jenkins tells us.

Jenkins’s research is impressive: the notes alone for the book are a healthy 50+ pages. My only quibble is the text could use an indicator to tell the reader when to refer to a reference in the notes section. None exist in this edition.

It’s a small quibble. If you have any interest in your body, your house, your physical enviroment, and the potential for toxic chemicals moving between the two, get a copy of this book now.

~~~

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.)

Comments (0)

By Claudia Broman, January 9, 2011 1:17 pm

Naked In Eden: My Adventure and Awakening in the Australian Rainforest
by Robin Easton

Health Communications, September 2010

Reviewed by Claudia Broman

In this adventure-laden memoir, Robin Easton shares a period of her life when she traveled to Australia, in her 20-somethings, lived off the grid in a remote rainforest, and began to understand her connection to the deadly and mysterious world around her.

Easton meets and marries a native Australian and together they decide to travel to the Daintree Rainforest and live bare-bones beyond the scope of modern convenience. Sleeping in tents, on cots, in the back of a truck, and on the ground next to a crocodile-filled river, the couple slowly develop a natural rhythm and find their place among poisonous snakes, tentacled jellyfish, and paralyzing ticks.

Over the course of Naked in Eden, Easton makes observations about herself as a person, and ultimately overcomes what she calls her “autistic state.” Through regular interactions with rocks, trees, and rain, Easton tells the story of how, by developing awareness of her rainforest home, she learned to find her way as a member of what she now describes as a loving community.

Naked In Eden is accessibly written and its deep, almost mystical intensity at times, encourages readers to keep turning pages – an indication of how Easton grew mentally, physically, and spiritually, facing and embracing her rainforest fears throughout her time in the Daintree.

~~~

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

Comments (0)

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.

Comments (2)

By Joshua Foster, February 9, 2010 4:51 pm

Joshua Foster in snowy Idaho.

Terrain.org Nonfiction Editor Joshua Foster on Writing the Personal Essay

A professor from my alma mater recently invited me back to campus to discuss with his freshmen composition class the writing of personal essays. A few weeks prior, it came to my attention that the college had used an essay I’d written while there, a short two-pager called “Second Day of Sun,” as a student example in their comp textbook. A flattering and overwhelming predicament, realizing that all incoming freshmen would be reading (or, better said, assigned to read) my work.

The problem came in teaching the writing principles of personal essaying. I’d written “Second Day of Sun” inspired by a gut urge while walking to campus one melty winter day, punching out the text while at work in the basement of the Engineering building. The whole process, start to finish, took maybe two hours. I handed it in a few days later, and then sent it off to Idaho Magazine a week after that. Idaho Magazine accepted it [read essay], and the essay became my first official publication. If anything, the composition seemed like a lucky accident.

The answer came in a metaphor. Idaho in January is a frigid place—the farm fields buried in snow, the naked trees spindled and bare. On a clear morning, one can see for miles across the glistening expanse. And so I asked the students to imagine being alone, outside, on those barren fields. Perhaps they have on snowshoes, or cross-country skis. Perhaps they are barefoot. Darkness falls. Out across the plain a light can be seen. They fumble in that direction, trudging and plodding toward the beacon. Finally, they arrive. There sits a house with no front door, and a fire can be seen inside, roaring and lapping in the stone hearth. What would one do in such a situation? Easy: go in through the open door and get near the heat.

Perhaps personal writing is not that different. Any writer will attest that the blank page is looming and lonely, a tundra to track through and traverse. And that is what happens until a light is found. And then the writer needs only to do two things—at least in their initial efforts of composition—to pen the personal essay. Burst through that open door and face the flames.

Though I didn’t understand those principles while writing “Second Day of Sun,” I do now. Spare the reader the meandering quest of arriving at a subject. Instead, guide them through the opening and convey to them the emotional core, the heat of the piece, and keep them there until the only solution is to step away or combust.

~~~

Joshua Foster lives and works on his family’s potato and grain farm in southeastern Idaho. He recently earned an MFA degree in fiction and nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona. He serves as the nonfiction editor for Terrain.org: A Journal for the Built & Natural Environments.