When I was a boy, each Sunday, my father would take my brothers and me into the woods. Sometimes we hated it, of course. But I learned to love it eventually. We became great observers of the changing seasons. You must realize that each big or small city in Norway is surrounded by forests or mountains or the sea. There is no escaping nature.

So, when some reviewers suggest that I use the forest or the sea (as in To Siberia) as symbols, that is not so. It is simply there. I never consciously used a symbol in my life. What I really do not want to do when I write is what the romantics did, and that is to infuse the human soul into nature. You know, the sky is crying and all that stuff. I think it is the other way around. Nature seeps into us, changing the way we observe life. Humankind tries to avoid this, of course, by destroying nature.

~ Per Petterson

The chainsaw is a Jonesred. Not that I think Jonesred is the best brand, but they only use Jonesreds round here and the man I bought it from at the machine workshop in the village said they wouldn’t touch any other make if I brought him a broken chain and wanted it repaired. It’s not a new saw, but it has been overhauled recently and has a brand new chain, and the man seemed quite determined. So Jonesred rules here. And Volvo. I have never seen so many Volvos in one place; from the latest luxury models to old Amazons, more of the latter than the former, and I saw an old PV model, too, in front of the post office, in 1999. That ought to tell me something about this place, but I’m not sure what, except that we are quite close to Sweden, and to inexpensive spare parts. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

~ Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

I’m not actually that interested in wildlife or having encounters with wild animals. I am interested in how language constructs nature and how the stories we tell about nature — whether this be in the vein of “frontier gothic” or the ol’ chestnut — create patterns of meaning in which we position ourselves as humans in relationship to the wild. I’m not sure exactly what this position is. I think it shifts quite a bit according to our purposes in telling stories — the first poem of Bear Stories, let’s say, in comparison with one of the later poems is a good example of what I mean about shifting positions.

~ J’Lyn Chapman @ Bookslut

Konik couldn’t stand the wild rabbits.

He didn’t talk to Eira about it. But if he had tried, he would have said that they were riotous and godless, that they were also perhaps in some inexplicable way dangerous. Who could say for certain that rabbits would never grow fangs and claws? He’d heard the wild rabbits hissing like lynxes; they’d probably start howling like wolves next.

~ Torgny Lindgren, Light

Providing a unique opportunity to become lost, this vast open terrain of the prairies gives any explorer few landmarks to aid in orientating oneself. The diverse hidden beauties inherent within this landscape are not truly appreciated until properly experienced in such a way. For this reason we tend to created personalized maps so that we can comprehend the various environments that surround us. Whether it is a physical map or one fixed in memory, traces of our journeys are recorded so that we may find our way back and forth between thoughts and destinations.

@ Prairiescape

Sometimes when I fall asleep I have a dream
…that I have turned into a fluffy dandelion

~ An Owl’s Dream (via hermitlabs)

The Imagination & Place Press seeks poetry, fiction, essays, and images for the first book in a new series to be published annually. This first book will be titled, “Imagination & Place: An Anthology”. We encourage writers and artists to think, feel, dream, and imagine place in complex and innovative ways.

Out by the swimming hole, a wooded hill bulged in the distance, and we always talked about going there one day, trekking through fields under hobo clouds that rode the west wind. But we only splashed about in the creek, sending the frogs and shiners scurrying amid pulsing blotches of sunlight, and then we sat on the bank, our flesh turned to Braille by the icy water.

You’d warm slowly as the sun reached through the trees to fling gold coins on the creek and the birds carried on their endless discussions in the branches. Perhaps a garden snake would slip through the grass beside you like the thread you had pulled from your sweater the other day. Once, when it was only two of us at the swimming hole, a butterfly floated by on a leaf that had curled up at the edges like a hand holding its delicate rider. It was almost something from the Oz book my mother had read to me. We didn’t know then that they were our best days flowing away.

~ Bruce Henricksen, excerpt from After the Floods

MCC: It’s tempting to assume that work incorporating technology and science would be somehow about science. But that’s not necessarily the case here. Could you speak about how you use your work to reveal something about human beings, or human nature?

Karl: I would argue that my work is, in part, about science, but that the scientific focus is secondary to the more “traditional” preoccupations with character and story. I have found science (and pseudoscience) to be a fertile subject area, since the everyday work of science gives rise to surprisingly rich palette of emotions and conflicts — the stuff of fiction. The clichéd view of science is that it’s cold, analytical work performed by cold, analytical individuals. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

@ ArtSake

Although thousands of people drove that road, I had never seen anyone stop and admire these gardens, and I doubted that the dead man did either. We are all so caught up in the struggles we get into on the way to the lives we dream of, and the dead man was probably just a little farther down that road than the rest of us. Maybe he had lost a good woman, a good job, or a good friend, or maybe he’d never had them. Or maybe it was bad chemicals, of internal or external origin, that pushed him over the edge.

But maybe he was just suffering from the same regret we’ve all known at one point or another, when life hasn’t lived up to our expectations. Only his was worse, and perhaps his life lacked the sweet little mitigations that get most of us through our days: bandy-legged fawns on the lawn, a sweet song you hum looking out on a parking lot with a cigarette in your hand, peach-colored flowers against gray-green rock, the company of friends, children, and animals, and the terse exclamations of your fellows, which let you know you are the only one who suffers. Everything suffers. Everything has joy. In purgatory you still have a chance; the final judgment on you and everything else has not yet been rendered. So if people are doing something wrong, refuse to cooperate; if the music’s too sad, for God’s sake change the station or turn the radio off. Stop before the bridge. Get out. Walk down the road. Sniff the air, and if it smells good, breathe deep.

~ Jordan Fisher Smith, Nature Noir