Writings
Coming soon… Elementals
series editors: Gavin Van Horn and Bruce Jennings; poetry editors: Nickole Brown and Craig Santos Perez
volume editors: Earth, Hannah Eisler Burnett and Kristi Leora Gansworth; Air, Daegan Miller; Water, Ingrid Stefanovic; Fire, Stephanie Krzywonos; An Elemental Life, John Hausdoerffer
From the Center for Humans and Nature, publisher of the award-winning anthology series Kinship, comes a new anthology series: Elementals, a five-volume collection of essays, poetry, and stories that illuminate the dynamic relationships between people and place, human and nonhuman life, mind and the material world, and the living energies that make all life possible. Inspired by these powerful categories, the five-volume Elementals series asks: What can the vital forces of earth, air, water, and fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world?
Sneak preview! Read Gavin’s essay contribution to the series, “Go Light.”
Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations
Edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer
Center for Humans and Nature Press
A five-volume set of essays, poetry, and interviews on the topic of kinship, with an unbelievable collective of contributors from around the world. The volumes share a kincentric ecology of stories: evocative accounts about the generative and entangled more-than-human communities in which we are embedded, from the cosmic to the microcosmic.
Kinship homepage at the Center for Humans and Nature
Book Discussion events hosted by Point Reyes Books: Series Launch, Vol. 1 “Planet,” Vol. 2 “Place,” Vol. 3 “Partners,” Vol. 4 “Persons,” and Vol. 5 “Practice”.
“At a time when the human is no longer tenable as a category unto itself, we will need the prophetic voices of these poets, philosophers, mothers, fathers, scientists, thinkers, public intellectuals, artists, and awestruck fugitives to kindle a politics of humility, to help us fall down to earth from our gilded perches, to help us stray from the threatening familiarity of our own image. It is time to meet the others we imagined we left behind: this constellation of stars will guide us.”
The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds
University of Chicago Press
The Way of Coyote is a work of creative nonfiction that highlights various urban animals and they ways in which they can expand our care for and understandings of place. One way to describe the book: Lao-Tzu (legendary author of the Tao Te Ching), Aldo Leopold (legendary ecologist), and the quintessential urban trickster, Coyote, meet for drinks, then go hiking and reeling through Chicago's streets, forest preserves, and shorelines in search of an urban land ethic.
“Van Horn reminds us that urban is not the same as absence of nature. He writes with great beauty and dignity about how we might better align ourselves with the natural world and establish urban habitats where a diversity of wildlife can flourish.”
Wildness: Relations of People and Place
Edited by Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer
The relative wild—degrees of wild relatedness across landscapes and depth of wild kinship in place—set the tone for each contributor’s exploratory journey into what wildness is, what it could be, and how it might be recovered in our lives. The essays in this volume navigate a path that scans from the ground up, telling stories about real people in real places, across the landscape continuum, from formally designated wilderness areas to densely populated urban neighborhoods. In all these landscape types, there is wildness to be found and wildness to which we are linked by mutual responsibility, and stories that provide models for living-with and becoming-more.
Read a sample chapter | Listen to an interview on the Edge Effects podcast
“[Wildness is] a great book that examines the ideas of wildness in wilderness, in rural areas, and in urban areas. It looks at wildness from the Euro-American perspective but also from other cultures and nationalities. It really explores and explodes the ideas of what wildness is, how it functions, why we need it, and how we can cultivate it in our lives. A dynamic group of voices sharing their views and love for wildness.”
“[Wildness] deserves a place on the shelf with the finest environmental literature of the day.”
City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness
Edited by Gavin Van Horn and Dave Aftandilian
We usually think of cities as the domain of humans—yet we are just one of thousands of species who calls the urban landscape home. City Creatures is rooted in Chicago’s landscape, but nature lovers from cities around the globe will discover a wealth of urban animal encounters that will open their senses to new worlds that have been there all along. The powerful combination of insightful narratives, numinous poetry, and full-color art throughout the book invites readers to see the city—and the creatures who share it with us—in an entirely new light.
Read a sample chapter, "Tickling the Bellies of the Buffalo" | Watch an interview on WTTW (PBS)
“This book sets a fantastic banquet for anyone interested in Chicago’s natural and cultural diversity —from people who are new to the city to long-term residents who think they’ve seen it all.”
“Coyotism”
“Parting advice: / Attend / to the Old Ways. / Move / with nose / close to ground. Dig beneath / pavement. Be faithful / to life. / Arch that spine of yours / every so often and call / to the moon. I’ll be nearby—always— / curl of a smile on my lips.”
“Breathing Trees”
The Learned Pig
“If you want to communicate within a forest, though, you’ll find words slipping away. To understand is to stand under, preferably in an understory, under the tutelage of stories older than the human venture to tell them. In the understory, the assembled words of human stories begin to fragment, to go back to the humus from which they emerged. We might resort to poetry, an inward feeling scrambling to find purchase, pushing past explanation and gripping a sensation. Then, even the poetic words are gone. Inhale.”
“How Dare you, Joy HarJo” and “Coyote ponders the end of a world”
two poems for Sky Island Journal
“In brutal winters
when they are most needed,
good stories grow like question marks
lilting bean stems in cups”
“waxwings and wonder”
The Art of Everyone
“I stared at this glistening, vibrating tree for—I’m not sure, five seconds, twenty seconds, a minute?—and then…the tree exploded.
Blew apart into a thousand golden fragments.”
“Kin You Keep”
Emergence Magazine
“There are only a few singing stones, a few pieces of sea glass from the tides, to carry with you. One is shaped like gratitude, one glistens with light and shadow, one is so smooth it touches you when you touch it. These are kin you keep—and birdsong is probably the only timepiece you need. “
“The Cool Red Eye of Chicago”
Zoomorphic 4
"Ever since I moved to Chicago, I’ve been pondering the question of whether there is a single animal that best captures the essence of this city. Can an animal incarnate a place?..."
Photo: Jimmy Thomas, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
“Knowing Maggie”
Red Savina Review, Nominated for a "Best of the Net" Award
"I don’t know you, magpie. I know your corvid cousins. I discovered a valuable lesson some time ago: follow the crows, that’s where the action is. (When for reasons of their own, they aren’t following you.) I am guessing the same is true of you, Maggie. Can I call you that? No, you’re right—too familiar, not yet..."
“The Senseless Barrier between Science and Art”
Aldo Leopold Foundation
"Humans are storytellers. They are also storydwellers..."
D&R Canal towpath outside Princeton, Nick Babladelis, some rights reserved CC BY NC
“Walking Stories”
EcoTheo Review
"In the beginning … was the story. Before the word was the Word, before there were buildings, before there were high priests, before there were commandments, before there was writing itself, there was story. The rocks in the landscape, the creatures that dwelt nearby, the lights puncturing the vaulted dome of sky, the paths amidst them—these were the mnemonics of story, offering a living cartography of relationship..."
City Creatures Essays
Center for Humans and Nature