About This Book
Are we not nature? Fourteen unforgettable short stories provoke, illuminate, and startle as they explore our perception of nature and the conflict between wildness and civilization within each of us. In a time of increasing recognition of the consequences of the destruction of forests and wetlands, the pillaging of the seas, and the toxicity of industry, we are experiencing profound uncertainty about our relationship with the earth. These stellar short stories by writers such as Barry Lopez, Margaret Atwood, E. L. Doctorow, Rick Bass, Chris Offutt, and others plumb the mystery-as only fiction can-of nature within us and the world of nature that surrounds us. We are nature, in spite of our machines, our plastics, and our artificial ingredients. Yet what do we make of our own nature? Our own wildness? And how do we explain the paradox of our urge to both exploit and protect wilderness? From E.L. Doctorow's shattering tale, Willi, is which a young boy witnesses adults transformed into animals by the frenzy of sexual lust, to Rick Bass's Swamp Boy, where his young hero is hounded by a pack of boys incensed by his solitary communion with the wild, to Margaret Atwood's wickedly funny story, My Life as a Bat, or Kent Meyer's soulful ballad of love regained, The Heart of the Sky, these memorable stories articulate our deep need for wilderness and the indelible role nature plays in our psychological and spiritual well-being. Whether set in the jungles of Guyana or a vacant city lot, these compelling short works...remind us how important it is to go where the wild things are. (O Magazine) In spite of our machines, our plastics, and our artificial ingredients, we are as much a part of nature as any other animal, editor Donna Seaman writes in the thoughtful introduction to her new anthology of short stories, In Our Nature. Contemporary life, with its emphasis on technology, illuminates how we are moving away from the natural world at the speed of light. Our modern lives are conducted primarily in dense urban living conditions, traffic jams and windowless offices. Day-to-day contact with the wild is not an option for many. According to Seaman, such deprivation causes emotional and spiritual malaise in men and women. Our big brains may have gifted us with advanced technology, but the wellspring of what makes us human is much more than intelligence. We are animals — pure and simple — despite our preference for tall, decaf, nonfat lattes over water, or leisurely grocery shopping over hunting. We need to feed our senses with sunshine and wind, night and rain, hills, trees, and flowing water, Seaman writes. In Our Nature is a remarkable collection of stories about wildness, consistently strong and fascinating, with great variety in the voices represented. Writers anthologized include E.L. Doctorow, Rick DeMarinis, Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Rick Bass and Linda Hogan, among many gifted others. The 14 contributors are not famous for being overtly environmental writers. They write about wildness because they write about human nature, Seaman explains. Their stories . . . share an intensity of feeling and implicit questioning of our perception of ourselves as the planet's dominant species. Seaman's attraction to these stories rests in her personal interest in the [i]ndelible moments of pure sensuous awareness, those times when the conscious intellect is able to shut itself down, and the human being is permitted a glimpse of the world as perhaps experienced by animals, or by our earliest ancestors who didn't have the words or books or abstract theories to respond to the mysteries of nature. One spring day I walked in the meadow . . . and I imagined the earth's soul lifting to the warmth of the sun and mingling me in some divine embrace, Doctorow writes in his story Willi. His child narrator continues, caught momentarily in the cradle of a near-religious experience: I was resonant with the hum of the universe, I was made indistinguishable from the world in a great bonding of natural revelation. But the same comforting, sunny day will expose young Willi to a more raw side of nature: procreation at its most impersonal — pure sex drive. The youngster catches sight of his mother making love with his tutor. The betrayal and the brute spectacle of the adults engaged in sex horrifies and angers Willi. The boy knows that telling his father what he has seen will destroy the arranged marriage between his young mother and far older father, a figure who represents for Willi all of the order in the world. Bass' splendid story Swamp Boy offers its own rendition of a wilding. The victim this time is a school boy, hunted down and tormented by a group of his classmates. Swamp Boy, friendless, fat, wearing thick spectacles, loves to wander through the woods down to a pond called Hidden Lake, where he catches frogs and tadpoles with his little net and jar. The boys follow him into the woods, hogtie him in the trees, spy
