Published in June by Duluth-based Holy Cow! Press, Amy Lou Jenkins’s Every Natural Fact: Five Seasons of Open-Air Parenting has a blurb from me on the inside front cover. One of the book’s chapters was a runnerup in Rosebud‘s X. J. Kennedy Award for creative nonfiction in 2007, which I co-judged with editor Rod Clark. Here’s the blurb: “Her vivid imagery mixes a naturalist’s precision with a spiritual seeker’s poetry”—Robert Wake, author and editor of Cambridge Book Review Press and co-judge for the X. J. Kennedy Award for Nonfiction. And here’s my complete write-up on Jenkins’s piece, titled “Close to Home,” from 2007:
In “Close to Home,” writer Amy Jenkins uses the occasion of a Wisconsin nature walk with her 11-year-old son DJ to weave a meditation on the topic of death. “It is July second,” she informs us, “the date of a full moon in the month that Buddhists believe the dead return to visit the living.” Mother and son together catch sight of a majestic buck moving through the forest. (“His coat was caramel with cream trim, and scratched from shoulder to rear as if keyed by an angry hoodlum.”) They discover the remains of a decaying fox carcass. “Everything dies,” DJ remarks. Jenkins struggles to find the proper parental response: “Right here is the place where I’m supposed to have the answers, I thought.” We are deep in the woods now and Jenkins movingly shares with us that her stepfather died from prostate cancer two years previous. She and DJ nursed the old man in his final days. Suddenly the essay deepens as a testament to loss and remembrance. “The entire forest,” Jenkins writes, “is a composition of bits of organic matter that came from life feeding on death.” Her vivid imagery mixes a naturalist’s precision with a spiritual seeker’s poetry. “The woods felt so busy today,” says DJ, “like we were not alone.”
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