Into the Wild With 25 Women Writers

This article dropped earlier in the month, but it's still very much worth a read. At Outside, Kathryn Aalto lists 25 women writers whose work encounters nature, i.e. the wild. And among those 25 writers are many poets (of course!). Aalto sets up the list, explaining, "Women who write about the wild cannot be easily labeled. They are conservationists, scientists, and explorers; historians, poets, and novelists; ramblers, scholars, and spiritual seekers. They are hard to pin down but for their willingness to be 'unladylike,' to question, and to seek." We'll take a look at two poets on the list, but highly encourage you to head to Outside and read on before heading into the wild, yourself, this weekend. First up, Alison Hawthorne Deming:

Descended from the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alison Hawthorne Deming is a rare interdisciplinary cross-thinker: a poet who writes about science. From the miniscule to the stellar, she explores science, the physical world, and poetry with exquisite observations and memorable juxtapositions. With seven volumes of poetry and five collections of essays, there is no one best place to begin exploring her work, though the essay “Science and Poetry: A View from the Divide” is a good one. As the title suggests, it coalesces Deming’s thinking about the creative process and shared language of the two disciplines. Also good: Writing the Sacred into the Real (2001), in which she writes passionately about the importance of nature writing in reconnecting people to the natural world and enhancing our spiritual lives, and her most recent work, Stairway to Heaven (2016), a collection of poems reflecting on the loss of her mother and brother.

And moving on, we find Camille T. Dungy:

“I am never not thinking about nature,” Camille T. Dungy wrote in an email, “because I don’t understand a way we can be honest about who we are without understanding that we are nature.” A professor at Colorado State University, Dungy has written four poetry collections and edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009). This widely influential anthology features nearly 200 poems, from 18th-century slave Phillis Wheatley to recent poet laureate Rita Dove. It challenges the notion that the tradition of nature writing has been solely grounded in the pastoral or wild landscapes of America and Europe. The voices within the collection show nature as a devastating legacy of slavery, with people forced to work the land; at the same time, portraits emerge of writers who saw nature as a source of hope, with seeds of survival. Dungy’s poetry is vivid, personal, and lucid and stays with you long after you close the book. The poem “Trophic Cascade” appears to be about a changing ecosystem after the introduction of wolves to Yellowstone, but the last lines deliver a curveball: “All this life born from one hungry animal, this whole, new landscape, the course of the river changed, I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.” Her debut collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History,was published in June.

Twenty-three more writers to learn about, over at Outside.