By Deborah Emin, Lehigh Valley Group
Poets like to name the known world. Lists of words become free-form poems that make the reader sit up and reach, not just for the dictionary, but in the case of nature writers, for the encyclopedias of plants and animals. As a poet and a nature writer, Janisse Ray has become a poet of the wild as well as an advocate for that which we are in danger of losing soon.
In her new book, a collection of essays called Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans, Ray has set out to put together a travelogue of what it is like to be in the wild from a variety of experiences she has had over the course of many years. In trying to review such a book, I thought the best approach was to look at one essay that challenged me the most.
I took this approach because as an armchair traveler, I cannot go and snorkel with manatees or become an ecotourist in the Four Corners of Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. I can’t jump on a plane and visit Belize or Costa Rica. All of my work, as the reader/reviewer, must be from the comfort of my own home while at the same time trying to find the essay that makes me the most excited as well as uncomfortable.
That double bind in life, which is what Ray describes in this collection, creates that tension which will cause the reader to transcend what she has read and carry it within herself.
So, I went with Ray to Sitka, Alaska. I met the people she met and adventured with them on the waters and land. I feared as she did that I would capsize. Like many people who love adventure stories as well as food, the essay “The Dinner Party” became a long moment when a good deal of what I think about on a daily basis (farming, food, hunting, ethics, capitalism) came clashing against what a different group of people think about on a daily basis (food, hunting, nature, beauty, survival). In this vegan heart, I looked and took in a very different way to be.
But what is this wild that these friends and colleagues of Ray’s experience and that she is creating in this essay as well as in the other essays in the book? What does it mean to be in the wild or to notice the wild or to be inseparable from the wild?
How does this locked down, pandemic-living reader respond to these challenges of eating from the wild, hunting salmon, bear and deer, and the scooping up of herring eggs; the feast at the end of the essay and its fulsome platefuls of fish and meats resonate with this vegan definitely on the same page with Ray when she says, and I paraphrase, that eating is an environmental act. The story of place, community and food is an old one within the indigenous ways, studied now as guideposts toward saving what is of this Mother Earth.
Without judgement or self-consciousness, Ray shares on every page some of the most important observations a nature writer can: how finding the wildness within and without is central to being an environmental activist - a role we all need to play.
This blog was included as part of the Fall 2021 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!