The Bookworm: Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

A Book Review by LeeAnna Tatum of A WILD SPECTACLE: SEEKING WONDERS IN A WORLD BEYOND HUMANS BY JANISSE RAY

Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in the World beyond Humans by Janisse Ray is a collection of essays that takes readers along for the journey into wild-ness where nature can still speak to those willing to listen.

Ray’s writing has a way of tugging the reader along with her into the moment as she recalls her own experiences and wild encounters with landscapes, ecosystems, creatures and the rare individuals who embody the wilderness environment they inhabit.

As a society, we’re losing our connection to nature and to wildness. And with that lost connection, we’re also losing the language and the vocabulary needed to capture and convey its essence. Ray does a masterful job of weaving that language into her stories, keeping alive for a little longer, the words needed to connect human thought with nature’s spirit.

Nature writing has been called a marginal literature. If culture is a set of stories we tell about life in a place and how to navigate that life, then nature writing is literature at its most essential. Its tenets are that humans are biological; that we are dependent on the earth; that places are vital to our psyches; and that humans have volumes to learn from nature.

There is something deeply reverent in nature, we’ve all felt it, and Ray not only reminds us that it is there, but inspires us to seek it out.

Some of us meditate in old-growth forests. Some of us watch birds. Some of us gaze out at a beautiful view of a lake. Some of us hunt. But the instinct is the same, I think, to understand that the earth is wild, and that we are of the earth, and also wild. Some of us are willing to feel this more strongly than others.

Through Ray’s essays, readers are invited to revel in wilderness and to journey vicariously through her intimate portrayal of some of nature’s beautifully held secrets and to feel the pain of scars inflicted through the incivility of civilization itself.

Janisse Ray

Janisse Ray is a naturalist and activist, and the author of seven books of nonfiction and poetry, including The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food, Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River, and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which won the American Book Award. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and journals, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Nautilus Book Award, and numerous other honors. Ray lives on an organic farm near Savannah, Georgia.

You can read more about Janisse in Janisse Ray, Author and Gardener: planting seeds of hope, an article published in 2019 by Southern Soil, and the Bookworm review of her book, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food.