The Jane Day Reader: Approaching the forest

Friday, July 11, 2014

Approaching the forest

Last week, I posted this question in a couple of different spots on Facebook:

"So I've been reading a lot of creative non-fiction books about small farms (Brian Brett's Trauma Farm and Luanne Armstrong's The Light Through the Trees being my favourites) and conservation generally (Trevor Herriot's The Road is How and J.B. MacKinnon's The Once and Future World). And I just started Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt. But I'd like something forest-y, and, failing that, something on urban nature. Got any suggestions, internets?"

And the internet provided. People recommended books I knew, books I'd heard of, and books waaay outside my usual stomping grounds.

As the suggestions came in, thick and fast, I thought it might be useful to share the lit bounty here. And then, when I saw how long it took me to cut and paste everything out, I was sure...

So here's the list, arranged roughly by subject area:

Trevor Herriot's The Road is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul
J.B. MacKinnon's The Once and Future World
Sharon Butala's The Perfection of the Morning & Wild Stone Heart
Brenda Schmidt's Flight Calls: An Apprentice on the Art of Listening
Brian Bartlett’s Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar
Iain Reid's One Bird's Choice: A Year in the Life of an Overeducated, Underemployed Twenty-Something Who Moves Back Home

Deanna Kawatski’s Wilderness Mother: The Chronicles Of a Modern Pioneer
Richard Louv's The Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder
Beth Powning's Seeds of Another Summer: Finding The Spirit of Home in Nature
R. D. Lawrence's The Place in the Forest
Roy MacGregor's A Life in the Bush: Lessons from my Father
Sigurd Olson's Songs of the North
Paul Lehmberg's In The Strong Woods: A Season Alone in the North Country
Bernd Heinrich's The Trees in My Forest
Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods

Brian Brett's Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life
Luanne Armstrong’s The Light Through the Trees: Reflections on Land and Farming
Robert Hart’s Forest Gardening: Cultivating an Edible Landscape
Rhona McAdam’s Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto
Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
Jenna Woginrich’s Made From Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life
& Barnheart: The Incurable Longing for a Farm of One's Own
Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love

John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed
Charlotte Gill's Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

Barbara Klar's The Blue Field & Cypress
Nora Gould's I see my love more clearly from a distance
Di Brandt's Now You Care
Jan Conn’s Jaguar Rain & Beauties on Mad River
Alissa York's Fauna

David George Haskell's The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature
John Waldman’s (edited collection) Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York
Charles Siebert's Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral
Jonathan Rosen’s The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature

p.s. If you're curious about the photo, I stopped by the U of M Bookstore to try to find Alissa York's Fauna after it was recommended twice. They didn't have Fauna, but they did have this title, which looked too interesting to pass up.

p.p.s. Please suggest any additional titles, if you've got a moment!

No comments:

Praise for GUSH

"GUSH is a letter to the world declaring that feminists everywhere are ready to take back the period and claim it for ourselves." —Courtney Dickson in Herizons.

"I expect GUSH will be nonetheless passed around classrooms, as well as book clubs, women’s centres, office towers and break rooms. And I hope this sharing and the conversations that no doubt ensue are not hushed and tittering. I hope teachers, counsellors, parents and partners bookmark pages, highlight passages and display the book on prominent shelves." —Katherine J. Barrett in Understorey.

"We love GUSH!"—Open Sesame Bookstore, Kitchener.

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with its
occasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"Adept and assured, Stowaways swaggers." —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press.

"The poems in this collection grapple with both the wild and the mundane, the animalistic nature of nature and relentless responsibilities of parenthood." —Mark Sampson, Free Range Reading.

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!" —Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)