Winner, 2008 Willa Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction
What Wildness Is This: Women Write About the Southwest is an anthology of writings by women, celebrating their experiences in the landscapes of the Southwest. Published by the University of Texas Press, this collection illuminates the rich diversity of environments of the Southwest, as well as the extraordinary range of women’s voices and women’s experiences of the land. Both emerging and established writers are included. Order now.
How do women experience the vast, arid, rugged land of the American Southwest? Here, nearly a hundred responses reveal true and meaningful stories of women's personal experiences of the land that witness both the ever-changing, ever-mysterious life of the natural world and the vivid, creative, evolving lives of women interacting with it.
Through prose, poetry, creative nonfiction, and memoir, the women in this anthology explore both the outer landscape of the Southwest and their own inner landscapes as women living on the land—the congruence of where they are and who they are. The editors have grouped the writings around eight evocative themes:
- The way we live on the land
- Our journeys through the land
- Nature in cities
- Nature at risk
- Nature that sustains us
- Our memories of the land
- Our kinship with the animal world
- What we leave on the land when we are gone
From the Gulf Coast of Texas to the Pacific Coast of California, and from the southern borderlands to the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, these intimate portraits of women's lives on the land powerfully demonstrate that nature writing is no longer the exclusive domain of men, that women bring unique and transformative perspectives to this genre. Order now.
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