We Want Your Tales: On Loving and Writing the Wild

Our process is to nurture connection: with wild beings and locations; with each other, throughout traces and divides at any time when we are able to; and with the wildness inside us.
  

  
I hold a Kaufman Discipline Information to Nature of the Midwest on my nightstand. On days after I’ve walked the woods or hiked the prairie, I flip by way of, attempting to establish wild beings I’ve seen. But it surely’s onerous generally to place my sneakers on and get out the door. Days slip by with little wandering. Some evenings I learn my area information anyway, kindling my need to be exterior and develop in my information of this place.

I’m reacquainting myself with the southern Wisconsin panorama I knew in childhood and left 19 years in the past for California. It’s been a 12 months since transferring again, and I nonetheless really feel new. It takes time to make mates—human or more-than-human—and plenty of intention. Persistence and a focus are conditions to intimacy.

5 weeks in the past, I stood in a circle of writers simply 30 miles from right here, on the place the place Aldo Leopold died preventing a neighbor’s hearth. It was our first-ever Writing the Wild writers’ retreat, and we had been listening to the joyous and beneficiant Pitāēpanuhkiw Lucy Grignon share about her relationships with plant kin. Lucy is a seedkeeper, an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Nation, and a direct descendant of the Menominee Nation. At her invitation, all of us went out to spend time sitting with a plant being. “You may ask me questions,” she mentioned, “however I have no idea all the plant mates right here. I would simply let you know that individual plant hasn’t launched themself to me but.” She spoke of every plant—milkweed, bergamot, cedar—with curiosity, delight, and the form of pleasure that comes with relationship, with love.

That is what I have to domesticate, I do know: loving relationship with one wild being at a time. It’s troublesome to do in a brand new place, even one I knew as a toddler. I nonetheless pine for the Chinese language elm that sheltered my entrance porch in northern California, for the solar rising over Mt. Diablo, for the orange tree that fed me bountifully annually, for the slender salamanders who shared my yard.

That day on the retreat, we headed indoors on the Aldo Leopold Basis to debate our discoveries. We sat round a desk made from pines planted by the Leopold household. On the entrance of the room stood a clivia plant descended from one Aldo introduced from Arizona to Wisconsin a century in the past. We talked within the presence of plant beings who wove us collectively in tangible, embodied methods with those that have come earlier than us on this work of writing the wild.

I hesitate to put in writing of the second we’re in—the devastation and precarity we face every day. The threats to each wild place and being we love. The catastrophic losses we’ve already skilled. The worry or despair we should roll off the chest to rise every morning. How are we to maintain going?

Author and artist Obi Kaufmann as soon as mentioned, in response to a query about combating despair, “Go put your toes in a river.” J. Drew Lanham, my collaborator within the work of Writing the Wild, says he finds hope in a singular hen. Fowl populations are being decimated worldwide, however spend a couple of minutes with a chickadee and your spirits will elevate.

I seemed up simply now after writing that sentence and a home wren was perched on the brink of my entrance door, which I’ve thrown open for the morning air. The sprightly little being cocked a watch at me and hopped away.

Our process, it appears to me, is to nurture connection: with wild beings and locations; with each other, throughout traces and divides at any time when we are able to; and with the wildness inside us—usually dormant, numb, and contained. We nurture these connections by way of curious, compassionate consideration—and thru tales.

I’ll finish with this: We’d like your tales. Your creativity, your phrases. Probably the most clever essay by probably the most expert and famend author may not contact the thoughts and coronary heart of the individual in your life, your neighbor, who wants the elevate, problem, or inspiration of your good story. That’s my invitation to you, pricey reader. Please, put pen to paper, brush to canvas, fingers to keyboard. Inform tales round campfires and kitchen counters. Remind us why we’d like each other and the way a lot there’s on this lovely world to like.

Pen in hand, I’m on this with you.

As I wrote these last phrases simply now, my new home wren acquaintance perched on a stake exterior my door—a stake holding up a plum tree planted in hope of fruit to return—and sang.

Poet Krissy Kludt is the manager director of Writing the Wild (co-guided with J. Drew Lanham). Her debut poetry assortment, I May Stroll Without end and Know So Little, is forthcoming from Inexperienced Writers Press in Spring 2026. She lives within the Driftless area of southwestern Wisconsin.

Header photograph by Ruslan Sikunov, courtesy Pixabay. Picture of Krissy Kludt by Ryan Murray.