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4.13 AVERAGE
4.13 AVERAGE
Alison Hawthorne Deming is a brilliant writer whose work often serves as an inspiration for my own. Her prose is beyond reproach, but I give it four and not five stars because the book as a whole fell short of my expectations. For one, I expected it to be a bit more focused on the "writing" piece. I'd mistakenly put it on my bookshelf with my craft books when it clearly belongs with environmental writing. Of course, she does discuss how the four places she takes us to in each chapter influence her craft, but that piece of it seemed to arise not as the purpose of her stories but more out of the fact that she is a writer writing about her life so the writing part of her life will naturally come up. There's also just very little to the book itself. There are 140 pages in the volume, but AHD's words take up fewer than 90. I haven't read other books in the Credo series, but I assume the others are similar. My critique, then, is less of the author and more of the publisher.
Deming's prose is beautiful, and her insights occasionally profound, but the 4 essays in this book are too short to really delve as deeply as I would've liked.
When a poet turns to writing nature essays, you know you are in for a treat. Deming's essays are lyrical, slow, thoughtful, like a good poem. She writes about art and nature, spirit and nature, and stories. So much about the stories we create. Our current story is one in which we have written ourselves as outside of nature; one in which the natural world is meant to be dominated and used; one in which we like the idea of wilderness--it's pretty!--but we don't much like the actuality of it--it's scary! Demming's essays are about finding a new language to tell new stories in which we discover the sacredness of nature, replenish our spirits, and discover that we have never been, and will never be, outside of nature. These are beautiful essays full of deep wisdom.