What Wildness Is This
What Wildness Is This
Women Write about the Southwest
Winner, WILLA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, 2008
How do women experience the vast, arid, rugged land of the American Southwest? The Story Circle Network, a national organization dedicated to helping women write about their lives, posed this question, and nearly three hundred women responded with original pieces of writing that told true and meaningful stories of their personal experiences of the land. From this deep reservoir of writing—as well as from previously published work by writers including Joy Harjo, Denise Chávez, Diane Ackerman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldua, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barbara Kingsolver—the editors of this book have drawn nearly a hundred pieces that witness both to the ever-changing, ever-mysterious life of the natural world and to the vivid, creative, evolving lives of women interacting with it.
Through prose, poetry, creative nonfiction, and memoir, the women in this anthology explore both the outer landscape of the Southwest and their own inner landscapes as women living on the land—the congruence of where they are and who they are. The editors have grouped the writings around eight evocative themes:
- The way we live on the land
- Our journeys through the land
- Nature in cities
- Nature at risk
- Nature that sustains us
- Our memories of the land
- Our kinship with the animal world
- What we leave on the land when we are gone
From the Gulf Coast of Texas to the Pacific Coast of California, and from the southern borderlands to the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, these intimate portraits of women's lives on the land powerfully demonstrate that nature writing is no longer the exclusive domain of men, that women bring unique and transformative perspectives to this genre.
What Wildness Is This is a fitting tribute to the rugged complexity of the Southwest from the pens of a diverse group of women writers.
Susan Wittig Albert is the founder and past president of the Story Circle Network. She lives near Austin, Texas. Susan Hanson teaches in the English Department at Texas State University-San Marcos. Jan Epton Seale is a poet and fiction writer in McAllen, Texas. Paula Stallings Yost, founder of LifeSketches/Heirloom Memoirs, is a personal historian and publisher in Yantis, Texas, near Dallas.
- Foreword by Kathleen Dean Moore
- Editor's Note by Susan Wittig Albert
- A Land Full of Stories
- Laura Girardeau, Easter, Picacho Peak
- Cindy Bellinger, This Land on My Face
- Gloria Vando, HE 2-104: A True Planetary Nebula in the Making
- Linda Hogan, Dwellings
- Joanne Smith, Seasons of a Hermit
- Jan Seale, Palapa
- Luci Tapahonso, A Song for the Direction of North
- Luci Tapahonso, Tsaile April Nights
- Judith Ann Isaacs, The Land's Song
- Donna Marie Miller, Mexican Sunflowers
- Ann Woodin, Spring in the Desert
- Ann Zwinger, First Snowfall
- Geographies: Journey Notes
- Sandra Lynn, Geographies
- Susan Hanson, The Act of Attention
- Judith Strasser, Contemplating Quantum Mechanics One Morning at the Rio Grande Gorge
- Judith Strasser, Yom Kippur Fast in Taos
- Susan Zwinger, Coming of Age in the Grand Canyon
- Linda Elizabeth Peterson, Into the Escalante
- Patricia Wellingham-Jones, On the Lip of the Rio Grande Gorge
- Linda Joy Myers, Songs of the Plains
- Mary E. Young, View from a Hot Air Balloon
- Liza Porter, She Could
- Susan J. Tweit, Riding the River Home
- Denise Chávez, Four Meditations on the Colorado River
- Lianne Elizabeth Mercer, Sunrise
- Diane Ackerman, Working on the Tequesquite
- Pat Ellis Taylor, Indian Hot Springs
- Laura Girardeau, Natural Bridges
- Nancy Mairs, Writing West
- Mary Sojourner, Closing
- Home Address: The Nature of Urban Life
- Naomi Shihab Nye, Home Address
- Judith E. Bowen, Mowing
- Sandra S. Smith, Madrugadora/Early Riser
- SueEllen Campbell, The World Is a Nest
- Connie Spittler, One Scarlet Penstemon
- Pat Mora, Voces del Jardín
- Lisa Shirah-Hiers, Spinning Water into Gold
- Sybil Estess, Sunset on the Bayou
- Leslie Marmon Silko, The People and the Land ARE Inseparable
- Janice Emily Bowers, A Full Life in a Small Place
- Jan Jarboe Russell, Into the Woods
- Earth Is an Island: Nature at Risk
- Ceiridwen Terrill, Islands
- Margo Tamez, My Mother Returns to Calaboz
- Nancy Ellis Taylor, Condor Country/New Year's Eve
- Julia Gibson, Coyote Mountain
- Carol Coffee Reposa, In Parida Cave
- Hallie Crawford Stillwell, Drought
- Nancy Linnon, Surviving: What the Desert Teaches Me
- Gloria Anzaldúa, El Retorno
- Patricia Wellingham-Jones, Sacrifice to Progress
- P. J. Pierce, The Pond
- The Sustaining Land
- Teresa Jordan, Sustenance
- Joan Shaddox Isom, Gathering at the River
- Margo Tamez, The Collection
- Sandra Ramos O'Briant, Chile Tales: The Green Addiction
- Sandra Lynn, Poem in Which I Give You a Canyon
- Patricia Nordyke Pando, Dumplings Come to Town
- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Wish List
- Wendy Rose, Lost Copper
- Ellen Meloy, Think Not of a Tectonic Plate but of a Sumptuous Feast
- The Key Is in Remembering: Growing Up on the Land
- Paula Gunn Allen, The Trick Is Consciousness
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie
- Davi Walders, Jewish Oil Brat
- Davi Walders, Big Spring, Fifty Years After
- Janie Fried, Okarche, 1961
- Mary Bryan Stafford, Blowout
- Rebecca Balcárcel, Crepe Myrtles
- Jackie Woolley, Belonging Place
- Leslie Marmon Silko, "Not You," He Said
- Joyce Sequichie Hifler, The Hills of Summer
- Paula Stallings Yost, Mercury Risin'
- Eagle Inside Us
- Joy Harjo, Eagle Poem
- Kathleen Dean Moore, Alamo Canyon Creek
- Margo Tamez, On the Wing
- Margo Tamez, Hummingbirds Compete for the Tobacco Tree
- Marie Unini, The Raven
- Joy Harjo, Fishing
- Penelope Moffet, Leavening
- Terry Tempest Williams, Water
- Pattiann Rogers, A Passing
- Ellen Meloy, My Animal Life
- Penelope Moffet, Presence
- Kelly Tighe, Snake
- Carol Fox, Working Cattle
- Pattiann Rogers, Knot
- Nancy Owen Nelson, Coyote Love Music
- Sybil Estess, Mastodon Teeth
- Alison Hawthorne Deming, Monarchs
- Alison Hawthorne Deming, Sleep, Monarchs, rising and falling
- What We Leave Behind
- Joy Kennedy, What We Leave Behind
- Susan Cummins Miller, The Bone-Man's Apprentice
- Kathryn Wilder, Stones and Jawbones
- Beth Paulson, Ashes
- Lisa Swanstrom, Land of the Gaping Mouths
- Lianne Elizabeth Mercer, Lament at Dusk
- Erica Olsen, Trail Guide
- Deborah K. Wilson, Light on the Water
- Sharman Apt Russell, When the Land Was Young
- Barbara Kingsolver, Not Long Ago
- Lianne Elizabeth Mercer, How to Climb
- Acknowledgments
- About the Contributors
- About the Editors
- About the Story Circle Network
- Permissions Credits
