Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals

by Linda Hogan (Editor), Deena Metzger, Brenda Peterson

Overview

“This remarkable group of women have narrated their personal experiences with animals—what they have learned and how it has transformed their lives.”—Common Boundary
 
“A celebration of compassion . . . Women are opening new ways of communicating with and understanding the animal world.”—The Seattle Times
 
Though women have long felt kinship with animals, in the past they seldom participated in the study of them. Now, as more women make animals the subject of their investigations, significant new ideas are emerging—based on the premise that animals are honored co-sharers of the earth. 
 
This unprecedented anthology features original stories, essays, meditations, and poems by a vast array of women nature writers and field scientists, including:
 
Diane Ackerman • Virginia Coyle • Gretel Ehrlich • Dian Fossey • Tess Gallagher • Jane Goodall • Temple Grandin • Susan Griffin • Joy Harjo • Barbara Kingsolver • Ursula le Guin • Denise Levertov • Linda McCarriston • Susan Chernak McElroy • Rigoberta Menchú • Cynthia Moss • Katherine Payne • Marge Piercy • Pattiann Rogers • Linda Tellington-Jones • Haunani-Kay Trask • Gillian Van Houten • Terry Tempest Williams

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780449003008
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/20/1999
Edition description:	1ST TRADE
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	289,423
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Linda Hogan, a Chicksaw poet, essayist, and novelist, worked as a volunteer in wildlife and raptor rehabilitation. In 1995 she organized a conference for tribal elders on endangered species and was part of a working group for Native input into the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act. Her lifelong area of interest has been the traditional relationship between indigenous peoples and animals. Her books include Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, Book of Medicines, and Solar Storms.
 
Deena Metzger has lived with wolves for twenty years, writing about them from her home in the Santa Monica mountains. As a poet, writer, and lay analyst, she has devoted her writing and working life to ecological and environmental concerns. Her books include Tree, What Dinah Thought, The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them, and Writing for Your Life.
 
Brenda Peterson is author if Nature and Other Mothers, Living by Water, and Sister Stories, as well as three novels. She is also an environmental writer and journalist. For the past twelve years she has been studying and encountering dolphins and other whales in the wild. Since 1993 she has covered the wild wolf—from its slaughter in Alaska to its reintroduction in Yellowstone and Olympic National Park. She has written, with Linda Hogan, a series of articles against proposed whaling in the Northwest for The Seattle Times.

Editorial Reviews

"A celebration of compassion . . . Women are opening new ways of communicating with and understanding the animal world."
—The Seattle Times

"IN THIS GROUNDBREAKING BOOK IS FOUND THE COMFORT OF READING OUR OWN HEARTS, OF FINDING OUR OWN FAMILY WITHIN THE VAST UNKNOWN OF OUR EARTHLY HOME."
—NAPRA ReView

"A SPLENDID, MULTIHUED COLLECTION . . . THESE ARE, INDEED, STORIES OF AN INTIMATE NATURE: SENSUOUS, UNSPARING, CAREFULLY MULLED, RAZOR SHARP."
—Kirkus Reviews

"A PHENOMENALLY BEAUTIFUL BOOK."
—The Woman's Journal

From the Publisher

Ranging from Native American folktales to scientific field observations, this book's stories, essays and poems (about 60% of which are original) by women about animals encompass everything from accounts of standoffs with wild bears to memoirs of personal relationships with pets. The editors note that, today, female researchers of animals abound (about 50% of primatologists are women, for example) and contend that these women's observations reveal a "new understanding," an approach and viewpoint toward animals that is different from those of their male counterparts. Seemingly less hindered by an assumption of the naturalness of male dominance and aggression, the women represented here often observe nuances in animal relationships that indicate cooperation, communication, nonprocreative sexuality and "co-dominance" or "mild and unobnoxious" female dominance. Generally, these writers (including Jane Goodall, Ursula K. Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker and the late Dian Fossey, among many others) seem more interested in nurturing, leaving alone, understanding, learning from and being healed by animals. Reading their fascinating accounts of close encounters with whales, dolphins, orangutans, bears, wolves, elephants, chimpanzees, birds and horses can, in the editors' words, help begin to "return us to a sacred relationship with the natural world."

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This book brings together stories, poems, essays, and meditations by the editors and more than 70 other prominent female nature writers and field scientists, including Gretel Ehrlich, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Terry Tempest Williams, to show how women are reestablishing their relationship with animals on a basis of respect and empathy. Wildlife researchers like Jane Goodall or Cynthia Moss integrate compassion and intuition with the data they report. Native American women explore the wisdom of tribal elders for lessons on sharing the earth with animals. Women who have nurtured or trained individual animals recount, sometimes humorously, how they learned to communicate across the species barrier. All the contributors celebrate animals as our peers on this planet; many also warn against the loneliness and silence of the wasteland we are creating as we push ever more species to the brink of extinction. This collection should appeal to young adults as well as general adult readers. Recommended for academic and public libraries.Joan S. Elbers, formerly Montgomery Coll., Rockville, Md.

Library Journal