Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World
by Kathryn Aalto
Timber Press, 2020. $24.95
Reviewed by Darcie ABBENE
Kathryn Aalto begins Writing Wild by evoking the words of three literary titans, Terry Tempest Williams, Willa Cather, and Emily Dickinson. The chronological span of these women is indicative of the one that encapsulates the 25 writers the collection gives voice to. Williams posits, in her quiet and lovely tenor, “Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.” The essays in Writing Wild also look at what connects us and how that connection relates to the wild. This book exquisitely blends literary review and biography with Aalto’s own stories.
Each chapter begins with a gorgeous illustration of each writer by Gisela Goppel and includes a quote from the writer’s work highlighted in the essay. Assumedly, because the choices for inclusion in this collection must have been difficult, Aalto ends each writer’s chapter with a few suggestions for more reading and for this the reader is grateful. After Rachel Carson’s chapter, Aalto lists more writers who focus on fighting pollution. Writers of environmental justice are listed at the end of the Carolyn Finney essay and a list of classic garden writers concludes the section devoted to Vita Sackville-West. In the case of Mary Austin and Leslie Marmon Silko, Aalto lists the many other titles that make up the body of these writers’ works.
Aalto weaves her own adventures in the wild with those of the women whose writing and lives she commemorates. In the chapter devoted to Nan Shepherd, a Scottish mountaineer, Aalto travels to the Cairngorm mountains in eastern Scotland to go “stravaiging,” the Scottish term for wandering. Sometimes she directly engages with the writers as when she interviews Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses, about the relationship between the animal world, wildness, and performance. When looking at the work of Elizabeth Rush, Aalto connects the changes of the Anthropocene discussed in Rush’s work to her own close experiences of the same—specifically the fires that devastated her brother’s home in Northern California. Aalto details the tradition of the Victorian mudlark, “who scavenged through mud on the tidal River Thames for anything of value to sell” (168) likening it to her own literary excavations in the Cambridge University Library where she discovered This Weird Estate, a collection by Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie. The parallels Aalto makes between the works and lives of these writers and her own contribute to the timelessness of each woman’s work.
One of the best essays in the collection is the one focused on Dorothy Wordsworth, the lesser known sister of William Wordsworth. Aalto journeys to the Wasdale valley, nestled in England’s Lake District and popular with the Lake Poets, William and friends. Aalto spends considerable biographical detail to Dorothy who stood next to her brother taking in a majestic scene—daffodils filling the countryside—that William would later immortalize in his poem, “Daffodils.” What many might not know is that Dorothy was also a writer and she too celebrated the scene in her own writing, The Grasmere Journals. “I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the win that below upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay and ever glancing ever changing,” Dorothy writes though it was her brother’s poem “Daffodils” that came to symbolize the work of the Romantics. Aalto observes, “How this came to be reveals much about what has changed from the Wordsworths’ time to now” (21).
The essay on Dorothy Wordsworth is the first in the book and this seems a very deliberate choice. It demands of the reader, what other stories of wildness and wilderness must we pay close ear to? Aalto’s selection of writers honors these “trailblazers” who “defy broad categorization beyond their grit to sidestep any pesky No Trespassing signs in their way” (16). Aalto honors the reader as well in a blessing at the end of her introduction, “May they inspire you to do the same. Be bold. Dive deep. Map your own way with new coordinates. Whether you take a suitcase, backpack, or handkerchief knapsack, remember a notebook—and don’t forget pencil” (16).
Darcie Abbene has work in Tupelo Quarterly, Whitefish Review, Parhelion Literature, and Teachers and Writers Magazine. She writes book reviews for Necessary Fiction, Split Rock Review, and Kirkus Reviews. Darcie is the managing and nonfiction editor at the Green Mountains Review and an editorial consultant at Write By Night and the School Library Journal. She is working on a collection of essays about teaching writing.