Nature/Science Writing – A Motley Vision

Love of Nature Nature of Love Month on Wilderness Interface Zone

During February, Wilderness Interface Zone is launching its traditional month-long celebration of love and the natural world, Love of Nature Nature of Love Month.

To that end, we’re issuing an open call for nature-themed, love-laced writing and visual arts: original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the subject of love while referencing nature, even if lightly. By the same token, we’re interested in nature writing raveled up with themes of love.

If you’ve written artsy Valentine wishes to someone beloved–or perhaps created a video Valentine or made a live reading of a sonnet or lyric poem that’s original to you–or if you’ve written a short essay avowing your love for people, critters, or spaces that make you feel alive, please consider sending it to WIZ. Click here for submissions guidelines.

We hope you’ll join our month-long celebration combining two of the most potent natural forces on the face of the planet: love and language.

Part 2: You Say You Want a Creavolution? Well, You Know…

William_Blake,_The_Temptation_and_Fall_of_Eve — William Blake’s The Temptation and Fall of Eve

Part 1, wherein I muse upon the similarities between Darwinism and creationism, may be found here. In Part 2, I muse some more.

And yet . . . and yet. The longer I lived, the more I recognized that I had a tendency to settle into patterns of thought and behavior and into known, comfortable surroundings and not budge unless some act of God demonstrated to me that I could not survive–psychologically, at least–dramatic changes in conditions unless something gave. What had to give? Me. I needed to take another step outside my comfort zone and adapt to the new stresses on the old habitat. Based on my own desires for peace and quiet, I came to suspect that, barring a radical change in that Everlasting God whose power made and sustained Eden, the first breeding pair of hominids would likely have stayed in their garden stasis forever, all innocence and naked ignorance. Our own continued, expressed wishes for a return to the Peaceable Kingdom confirm how deeply that environment still interests us. So I suspect that had not some serpent of change appeared in paradise and coiled itself around Eve, triggering a sudden shift in direction for mankind and precipitating all that “sweat of the brow” stuff, leading to the production of copious offspring capable of adapting to environments down through the generations, we might still be who we were–whatever that may have been.

Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist, linguist and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, sees the Old Testament as a “celebration” of the kind of commonplace yet horrifying (to modern sensibilities) violence that characterized mankind’s behavior during early stages of its social evolution. Continue reading “Part 2: You Say You Want a Creavolution? Well, You Know…”

Part 1: You Say You Want a Creavolution? Well, You Know …

This two-part post is from a chapter titled “Gardens” in my book Crossfire Canyon, under construction. I haven’t posted on AMV for a while and thought I’d run this out there.

As a reliable account of the origin of life on Earth, the Old Testament story of the Garden of Eden may itself stand only a hair’s breadth from being cast out of the paradise of credence. “It didn’t happen, couldn’t have happened that way,” scientists say as they pronounce the Eden story indefensible. Over the last century and a half, they have promoted science-based and evidence-supported stories to supplant the Creation Story: narrative strains of Darwinism and neo-Darwinism, the yet-developing evolutionary tale.

The degree of interchangeability between the two storylines could be framed as a boxing match between contraries–Creationism v. Darwinism–with each side claiming to have landed multiple knock-out punches. Or perhaps, given both sides’ claims to Higher Truth, the contention is more like a jousting tournament. Despite the pageant’s being over a hundred-and-fifty years old, sterling knights on either side continue to try to unhorse each other, resulting, at times, in such heated language as to lay the nobility of both sides open to doubt. Rampant name-calling and disrespecting of persons abound, along with the dusting-off-of-feet on each other’s narrative grounds. Continue reading “Part 1: You Say You Want a Creavolution? Well, You Know …”

Wilderness Interface Zone: Call for submissions

Wilderness Interface Zone is issuing a call for nature-themed prose: creative nonfiction or environmental nonfiction, eco-criticism, interviews, hybrid literary forms, and short fiction, including novel excepts, that reflect on your relationship to the natural world, wherever you engage it.

We’re especially interested in writing that demonstrates the need for and effects of what I call “green language””“rhetorical prowess that taps into the fertile realm of language’s most vital energies. One of WIZ’s foremost goals is to advocate for better behavior in the teeming yet at-risk environment of human language.

Please consider sending your work to Wilderness Interface Zone. Before submitting your writing, please read our About and Submissions pages.

AND poets, please continue sending your poetry. WIZ loves poetry!

ALSO, in the past,WIZ has launched its Spring Poetry Runoff, an annual, themed poetry competition celebrating spring’s highly anticipated arrival. This year, Jonathon and I have chosen not to run the Runoff. We’ll bring it back in 2014 in new and improved form. But we will host an informal spring fling featuring poetry and prose that revels in the arrival of warmer and brighter days, the annual emergence of life, and onset of spring migrations that change life’s scenery.

Spring arrives early on March 20. Feel free to add a streamer to WIZ’s literary maypole. Even if your poem, essay, short story or novel excerpt merely mentions spring and nature, please consider submitting it to the festivities.

Call for submissions: LONNOL Month on WIZ

Got messages of deep feeling you’d like to send someone, or maybe to the world at large? Starting February 1st, Wilderness Interface Zone will launch its traditional month-long celebration of love and the natural world, Love of Nature Nature of Love Month.

We’re issuing a call for nature-themed love stuff: original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the subject of love while making references to nature. We’ll take the other side of the coin of affection, too: We’ll publish work about nature spun up with themes of love.

If you have a sweet song or sonnet you’ve written to someone beloved”“or perhaps a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for people, natural critters or spaces near and dear”“please consider sending it to WIZ. Click here for submissions guidelines.

Our fondest hopes for LONNOL Month: Putting into the currents of language flowing around the world some of the deepest, most passionate, freeze-thawingest words that we can find. And if things work out, we’ll also be running one of WIZ’s DVD giveaways, a Pre-Hays Code movie, King of the Jungle, starring loincloth-clad Buster Crabbe as Kaspa the Lion Man.

We hope you’ll join our month-long celebration combining two of the most potent natural forces on the face of the planet–love and language.

AMV’s companion blog, WIZ, is going … to do something new

Skyrockets

We’ve brought out the skyrockets (left) to announce that Wilderness Interface Zone has launched a new project we’re very excited about. It’s a year-long (maybe longer) venture designed to change WIZ’s direction and open a new frontier in environmental awareness. Come over and have a look at what we’re up to.

While Jonathon Penny and I develop and tweak this line of exploration, we’ll continue publishing readers’ poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, memoirs, photos, MP3s, etc. focused on the nature-human relationship. Our original goal of fostering a literary venue for Mormons who write about nature remains active, but we’ll frame our guidelines for submissions in somewhat different terms. As always, our intent is to open possibilities that give rise to new grounds for insight into nature, people, and one of the strongest natural forces that connects us to nature and each other: human expression. That’s right–language: an up-and-coming force of nature.

So please swing by and offer your opinions about our new bearings. We hope to make a mark on environmental studies, specially on environmental literature. Because of the project’s pioneering nature, we could use as many eyes on it as are willing to look. It’ll be an adventure, I promise. For me, it’s an adventure–a romance, if you will–that I’ve been wrapped up in for years. I’d like to share more openly with anyone who’s interested the layers of being I see in this world. Because it really is a stunning place, if you let yourself get involved.

Sunday Lit Crit Sermon: Emmeline B. Wells on the Poet’s Season

I probably should have posted this article in March, at the beginning of Spring–or the ‘Poet’s Season,’ as Wells calls it. But, on the other hand, I don’t want to focus on her argument that spring is most inspiring to poets. Instead, some of the assumptions that she makes are quite interesting.

Continue reading “Sunday Lit Crit Sermon: Emmeline B. Wells on the Poet’s Season”

Voting has begun for WIZ’s 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff

Over at AMV’s companion blog Wilderness Interface Zone, the last of the 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff poems have posted and voting to decide which one wins the 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff’s Most Popular Poem Award is open and will run through Tuesday, June 5th. All participating poets, their friends and family, and all connoisseurs of poetry–particularly, of nature poetry–are invited to help choose the 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff’s Most Popular Poem Award winner.

The poll to determine the winner of the Spring Poetry Runoff Popular Poem Award will close 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, June 5, but winners of both the popular vote and the Admin Award will be announced on or around Tuesday, June 6th. So keep an eye on WIZ to see how matters settle out. 31 poems qualified for the voting, so pop some popcorn, get out a pint of your favorite ice cream, or otherwise provision yourself for a long (but satisfying!) read. This part is important, folks: Each voter can (and should) vote for his or her three favorite poems! Instructions on how to access the poems are available in the post”“please read all instructions carefully.

To read the voting instructions and to vote, click here.

The winners of the Most Popular Poem and Admin Awards will receive their choices of Steven L. Peck’s The Scholar of Moab (Torrey House Press 2011), which recently received the AML Award for the Novel, or the stunning new anthology of Mormon poetry, Fire in the Pasture (Peculiar Pages 2011) edited by AMV’s Tyler Chadwick. Tyler also won an AML Award for his editing of this must-have collection.

So come over to WIZ and join the fun. Or at least set up a lawn chair and watch.

WIZ’s 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff Competition and Celebration is underway

RodneyLoughWaterfalls

Wilderness Interface Zone’s 2012 Spring Poetry Runoff Competition and Celebration opened its post pages for spring-themed poetry on March 26. Please come join the fun, either by submitting your best vernal verse in competition or non-competition categories or by reading and voting for your favorite poems. Prizes will be awarded for the Most Popular Poem and for an Admin Award. WIZ will also have other activities for fun and enjoyment, including its customary haiku chain and a WIZ Retro Review giveaway to interested participants of an old-timey movie, Come Next Spring–an intelligent flick about second chances.

If you’d like to add your poetry to the flow, please go here and read the rules.

Call for submissions: It’s LONNOL Month on WIZ

Love of Nature Nature of Love Month has arrived on Wilderness Interface Zone, and we’re looking to publish love abroad. Do you have a message of friendship and love you’d like to send someone? WIZ is looking for original poetry, essays, blocks of fiction, art, music (mp3s), videos or other media that address the topic of amour while making references to nature. We’ll also take the flipside: We’ll publish work about nature intertwined with themes of love. Besides original work you’re welcome to send favorite works by others that have entered public domain. So if you have a sonnet you’ve written to a wild thing of one species or another or perhaps you’ve composed a video Valentine or an essay avowing your love for a natural space near and dear, please consider sending it to WIZ. Click here for submissions guidelines.

Besides rolling out a (hopefully) plush carpet of love-art, we’ll also be running two WIZ, nature-laced, romantic DVD giveaways, Typhoon, starring Dorothy Lamour and pre-Music Man Robert Preston, and a Pre-Hays Code movie, King of the Jungle, starring scantily clad Buster Crabbe as Kaspa the Lion Man.

We hope you’ll attend the month-long celebration. Come join us at WIZ and help thaw out February.