American Nature Writing 2000: A Celebration of Women Writers ed. by John Murray (review)

B o o k R eviews 127 Oklahoma. The talented and zany John Nichols contributes a comic extrava­ ganza, full of madness, joy, and good sense. Rebecca Solnit and Lisa Gerber ponder nuclear testing, an unavoidable fact of life in the larger Southwest. The late T. H, Watkins writes of our need to think in terms of “stone time”: “Difficult as it is to know, stone time is your time, too” (345). “The longer we continue to have it the less we value it,” wrote Pedro de Castañeda de Najera, a member of Coronado’s expedition, over 450 years ago. He continues, “but after we have lost it and miss the advantages of it, we have a great pain in the heart, and we are all the time imagining and trying to find ways and means by which to get it back again” (316). As someone who watched the officially sanctioned demise of the Santa Fe River in 2000, these words of long ago leave a bittersweet taste. Gregory McNamee in his meditation on the disappeared Gila River offers words of hope: “Should rivers have rights?” I applaud the implied affirmative behind his question. Like McNamee, the authors Slovic has chosen embody much of the best hopes and the best think­ ing about the West. American N ature Writing 20 0 0 : A Celebration of Women Writers. Ed. John Murray. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000. 227 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by Christina Robertson University of Nevada, Reno A Celebration of Women Writers is a collection of eighteen essays and one set of poems by contemporary nature writers. Billed by series editor John A. Murray as “a continent-wide view of a literary landscape every bit as diverse as the geographic tenitory that is America,” this anthology does cast a wide net, the­ matically, stylistically, and regionally (4). Marybeth Holleman interrogates the “restoration” of Alaska’s Prince William Sound a decade after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Cynthia Huntington records days spent cabin-bound by a storm that buffets Cape Cod. Hiking in Grand Canyon National Park, Susan Zwinger challenges her perceptions of fear and space. From urban Seattle to the wilds of Wyoming, from rural Georgia to suburban Maryland, these pieces explore myriad relationships between people, animals, and the natural world. Murray’s introduction declares that “[Rachel] Carson remains the stan­ dard against which the careers of all other women nature writers are judged” (3). Established writers like Pattiann Rogers, whose “Surprised by the Sacred” iterates a theme common to several essays, and emerging writers like Kate Boyes, whose “Out in the Desert: Four Views of a Western Town” exposes the exploitation of the “empty” West, reflect this collection’s depth and uphold Carson’s standard. The best writing taps our capacity to be moved. Alianor True’s “Chorus,” elegizing her ancestral home in Louisiana, whose “marshy woodland . . . ripe 128 WAL 37.1 Spring 2002 with frogs” is being clear-cut, reminds us that “we can shape the histories we want to leave behind us” (62, 66). Lamenting the destruction of roosting habi­ tat in her native Maryland, Lisa Courtier’s “A Banishment of Crows” combines natural and personal history to elevate this oft-reviled bird to sacred and liter­ ary status, asking, “Why is it that we take for granted all but what we are about to lose?” (120). Further west, Trudy Dittmar’s meditation on winter and moose wagers, “The moose is as winter a creature as almost any” (19). Readers of western literature will find region and theme dramatized and challenged. Emma Brown’s “High Country,” chronicling the loss of a hiker in Wyoming, echoes one western sensibility, that “[t]o live fully, accepting the risk of . . . even death . . . is to be wild” (50). “Grizzly Bear,” Susan Marsh’s account of a man-eating Yellowstone grizzly, underscores this vision of the “wild” West, granting “[t]his was wilderness, complete with all its predators” (144). In “A Map for Hummingbirds,” Ellen Meloy asks, “What could be more Western than an endemic confusion of virtues?” (161). Her “reverse migra­ tion”— she summers in Utah, winters in Montana— illustrates the “rootlessness ” she ponders. She muses, “Everyone wants...