Overview

The essays that make up The Season of Birds and Stones grapple with questions of what wilderness means and how we can interact with and learn from other species. Set in some of our most stunning public lands, including Denali National Park and Preserve, Great Basin National Park, Isle Royale National Park, and Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, Renfro’s essays examine her encounters with bears, arctic ground squirrels, loons, red-winged blackbirds, moose, and wolves, as she wrestles with a range of subjects including motherhood, mental illness, grief, and darkness. Whether focusing on bears in Alaska or the darkness of the Upper Peninsula, searching for moose bones on Isle Royale, or seeking out her past self in the landscape of Great Basin, her essays are rooted in the natural world but also in storytelling—the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we tell about others, and the stories we tell about other species. Both deeply personal and meticulously researched, Renfro’s essays seek to illuminate the natural world and show its deep relevance and resonance in all of our lives.

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9780820377308

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Reviews

The Season of Birds and Stones is a fiercely ravishing book. Endlessly capacious in her curiosity, and immensely generous in her sense of presence, Yelizaveta Renfro meditates on the nature of memory, stories, and story-making as well as the ways in which nature catalyzes narratives that reflect the desires, fears, and hopes of human beings. Here, nature transcends the spectacle of the gazed-upon object and becomes the reciprocal subject that gazes back to illuminate the firefly-like flickering of the human heart. -- Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh * author of unMothered, unTongued * At its brightest moments, the most compelling arguments of the book come from its incisive reflections on the relationship between artist and the environment. Renfro interrogates the narratives we construct about the natural world and examines the interplay between our desires and perceptions—what we see versus what we think we ought to see. -- Susan Briante * author of Defacing the Monument *

Author Information

YELIZAVETA P. RENFRO is the author of Xylotheque and A Catalogue of Everythingin the World. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Terrain, Colorado Review, and other publications. Renfro has served as artist-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve, Isle Royale National Park, and Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. She lives in South Bend, Indiana, and teaches creative writing at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

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