{"id":996,"date":"2026-09-05T13:13:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T13:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=996"},"modified":"2026-09-05T13:13:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T13:13:00","slug":"how-a-creative-mind-lives-in-nature-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=996","title":{"rendered":"How a Creative Mind Lives in Nature"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The first time I killed a deer, my uncle field-dressed it for me. He showed me how to press the tip of the knife into the animal\u2019s soft belly hard enough to push through the skin and fascia but not so hard that it pierced an organ and made a mess. He sliced from the pelvis to the base of the rib cage. He reached in past his elbows to pull out the viscera. They lay bluish and steaming on the soil. Next time, he said, it was up to me.<\/p>\n

Read more How a Creative Mind Lives In Nature<\/a><\/p>\n

The year was 2006. I was in Jacobson, Minnesota. My friends had all read Michael Pollan\u2019s The Omnivore\u2019s Dilemma<\/em>. I got the gist: Most of the food in the grocery store is made from corn. \u201cFree-range chicken\u201d is a lie. We are alienated from what we eat but don\u2019t have to be.<\/p>\n

I was 23. If I was going to eat meat, I thought, I should know what it felt like to kill an animal. I decided to join the rural side of my family for the annual deer hunt. My grandpa gave me one of his rifles and taught me to shoot. He gave me a knife to gut with. I thought I would do this annually: stock my freezer with venison.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t shot a deer in 20 years. My grandpa\u2019s gun is moldering in the crawl space beneath my house. I lost the knife.<\/p>\n

It might be closer to the truth to say I hunted deer for a woman. Jaclyne was a wilderness guide with a big laugh who wore Carhartt and stood several inches taller than me. In northern Minnesota, we taught kids to identify trees and read tracks in the snow. She pulsed with esprit de corps. On weekends, she organized cross-country-skiing expeditions for the staff of the outdoor education center we worked for. We would sit midday in some distant silent wood and start a fire and drink whiskey and eat sandwiches. Once, we skied into the wilderness and built a quinzee (a snow hut) on a frozen lake and slept in it\u2014or tried to. If we don\u2019t die from hypothermia<\/em>, I thought, it will cave in and we\u2019ll be asphyxiated<\/em>. I was in love.<\/p>\n

In October, while the tamaracks blazed gold, we carried shotguns and stepped quietly through the woods, alert for grouse. We waded into bogs and foraged cranberries. With gifted wild rice from nearby lakes; we had dinner. But a grouse isn\u2019t much for two hungry people. So I thought: I should kill a deer<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Come summer, I followed Jaclyne\u2019s lead and became a wilderness guide. Each May, wealthy kids streamed in from the country\u2019s outdoorsy colleges like Bowdoin and St. John\u2019s, the University of Montana, and the University of Puget Sound to lead trips for Twin Cities youth. An essay by the scholar William Cronon, \u201cThe Trouble With Wilderness,\u201d which argues that \u201cwilderness\u201d is man-made by regulations and fantasies and the expulsion of Indigenous peoples, circulated in the camp like samizdat, photocopied and stapled and passed from hand to hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trouble With Wilderness\u201d was published in the inaugural issue of Environmental History<\/em> in January 1996 and has since been cited by scholars more than 7,500 times. In it, Cronon says that \u201cwe see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires\u201d when we look at the wilderness: the sublime and the frontier. The sublime is the divine other, the sense of God, however secularized, that makes us feel small. The frontier is the edge of civilization where we test our grit, are rejuvenated through a healthful primitivism, and feel big. However intoxicating the wilderness is\u2014and Cronon does not deny its power\u2014it is \u201cinsidious,\u201d he writes, and represents a \u201cflight from history.\u201d Wilderness serves the soothing pretensions of wealthy urbanites. The environmental movement must instead recognize the porousness of the wild in every human cranny, in our cities and our backyards.<\/p>\n

We read this, then paddled into the wilderness. As for me, each time a group I led arrived at a campsite, I tried to teach them, young teens, the trees\u2014ash, birch, cedar, fir, maple, pine, or spruce. I pointed out the remnants of ramps in the water from the logging era; noted the Ojibwe who lived here then and before. I said this was our home, if only for a night. We were in history! They just wanted to know if we would see a moose.<\/p>\n

After the summer, Jaclyne and I bought one-way tickets to Buenos Aires: We wanted to hike new trails, see the Southern Cross. We bused to Tierra del Fuego, then worked our way up the Patagonian Andes. When we ran out of money, we moved to Mendoza and taught English. I was so bad at it that I was fired. When we heard about a farm that took volunteers in exchange for room and board, Jaclyne suggested we go.<\/p>\n

Finca el Peregrino was a permaculture farm an hour south of Mendoza in the Uco Valley. It was run by a couple in their 60s and their adult children, who had left Mendoza because the children were allergy-ridden and ill, and they wanted to live as vegans, which was difficult to do in Argentina. The farm they bought was mostly an apple orchard; they were carving out space for vegetables. They were poor. They lived the first few years with a tarp for a roof. Their oven was wood-burning, as was the water heater. Their scrappiness was a marvel: After they built a roof, they laid the tarp over a pit, channeling hot air up to a tall box with mesh shelves; the rising air dehydrated fruit. They built natural structures\u2014seed banks, compost toilets, barracks for volunteers\u2014with scavenged materials. One morning, we went out in the pickup and harvested hundreds of young, supple poplars from the roadside with machetes. These we wove around thicker trunks to make walls for the barracks. We filled the wide parts of the weave with glass bottles, then built up the walls with adobe we had stomped into the right consistency.<\/p>\n

It was, as farming famously is, hard work. We planted; we weeded. We sorted apples for farmers markets. The irrigation system was rudimentary: Municipal water flowed downhill through the farm weekly. We built a system of earthen dams that channeled the water through the rows and watched the water reach the end of one row, then spill over a dam and start the next. At day\u2019s end, we ate a communal dinner. I played chess with Ignacio, the patriarch, and two other volunteers, Antoine from France and Bertrand from Belgium.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take me long to realize that I was bad at farming. I was slow at physically demanding labor. The family dubbed me \u201ccreative\u201d and found tasks better suited to my temperament, like basic gardening before dawn and feeding the horses during siesta.<\/p>\n

I woke very early to water the vegetables nearest the house before the pipes ran dry. In turn, I took a lengthy siesta in the orchard under peach and plum blossoms. I drank mate from a gourd and wrote the only story I ever wrote in Spanish. It was about misrecognition: A little onion plant falls in love with the guy who waters her until she dies, after which he eats her. It was something of a rewrite of my first successful story, \u201cA Day in the Life of My Mother\u2019s Pickle,\u201d which I wrote at age 8. In that one, after my mother eats the pickle, she explodes. I\u2019m working on a new one from the perspective of a hot dog.<\/p>\n

After writing, I went to the farm\u2019s horses, El Capit\u00e1n and Pupe. It was up to me to move them to fresh pasture. El Capit\u00e1n was tame, but Pupe was wild. Three times I found a torn rope where she should have been. She loved El Capit\u00e1n. Eventually, he would scream for her\u2014a violent, horrible sound\u2014and she would return and submit to my tying her up again.<\/p>\n

It took a couple of years more, but I finally ended up in grad school. It was clear that Jaclyne was on a different path. We split up. She became a farmer. She still is.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a common enough fantasy: Leave the poisoned world behind. Start a bakery or a caf\u00e9. Join a commune. We have genres: georgic, pastoral, tradwife. The fantasy of leaving the city for a rural life of healthful work close to nature gained power a couple of centuries ago as a reaction against industrial capitalism. We call that Romanticism: Wordsworth, Thoreau, Rousseau.<\/p>\n

Hothouse Bloom<\/em>\u2014the debut novel by Austyn Wohlers, published in 2025\u2014tests the limits of this fantasy. Its protagonist, Anna, wants to shed her subjectivity and forget her own name. She goes to nature not to restore herself but rather to \u201clive as the extension of something insentient, inhuman, serene.\u201d She is pushing 30 when her grandfather bequeaths her a permaculture farm, mostly an apple orchard. The coincidence startled me as I read the novel 20 years after my time at Finca el Peregrino.<\/p>\n

Read more A New Theory of John Roberts\u2019s Jurisprudence<\/a><\/p>\n

For me, farming was too distant from the life of the mind to be satisfying, but that\u2019s what draws Anna: \u201cShe was looking for a certain absolute stillness of psyche.\u201d She wants to live in \u201cthe perfect present.\u201d She chases \u201cthe paradise of nonthought.\u201d She abstracts the names of animals \u201cinto sounds, pure sounds, so that their callingnotes were nonsymbolic and nonreferential.\u201d She is in pursuit of a purity that can only, in fact, be achieved in death. Then, she thinks, she will be happy. Wohlers tells us little about the life that Anna left behind: a boyfriend, attempts at painting. \u201cExperiments in love, generosity, art, work, friendship: they\u2019d all exacerbated things.\u201d Now she wanders the orchard practicing becoming a creature of pure perception and no cognition.<\/p>\n

Only two things get in her way: people and money. She is \u201cunsure of how to reconcile the necessity of others with her new way of being in the world.\u201d And: \u201cEven more difficult\u201d is \u201cthe necessity of commerce.\u201d A college friend asks to stay with her, and Anna says yes, thinking she will convert him to her pastoralia. He thinks she is unwell. His curiosity about things prompts her to wonder: \u201cWhy was everyone so intent on deciphering the world?\u201d She imagines nature\u2014the orchard\u2014as bifurcated from humanity, Edenic.<\/p>\n

Anna inherited the farm but has no savings and, therefore, little money. Most of her apples turn out to be blighted. She hires a pomologist to explain why. A crack in her barn\u2019s foundation costs $5,000 to fix. By the end of the novel, Anna is spending most the day at her computer, studying other farms, looking into loans. She gets sick, shits blood, goes to a clinic and then McDonald\u2019s. As confirmation of her collapse back into civilization, her food \u201csmelled great.\u201d<\/p>\n

So much for leaving the poisoned world behind. Hothouse Bloom <\/em>opens with an epigraph from the Italian Marxist Jacques Camatte: \u201cThe human being is dead and no more than a ritual of capital.\u201d Life under capitalism has become spiritually bereft. That\u2019s what Anna is fleeing. But the conclusion affirms Theodor Adorno\u2019s koan, \u201cWrong life cannot be lived rightly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost. The novel itself\u2014not the dark story it tells, but the fact that Wohlers wrote it, its existence in our world\u2014testifies to hope. Whereas Anna is a failed painter who has abjured representation in favor of direct experience, Wohlers has written a novel that brims with luxuriant specificity and rhythmic musicality. To read it is a pleasure as much physical as philosophical. Its diegetic dead end is sublated into the novel\u2019s seductive command, \u201cLive by art.\u201d Like Anna, I\u2019d found that life on a permaculture farm that was mostly an apple orchard proved to be beyond me; like Wohlers, I looked to language for a new direction.<\/p>\n

It was art that pulled me from nature. I went to graduate school to study literature. I wanted to do things like read Hothouse Bloom<\/em> and then write about it. I did not let go of nature gracefully, though. I was still working as a wilderness guide during the summers as a graduate student. I read the kids Blood Meridian<\/em> in the tent. I came to the first day of seminar in late August aggressively tanned, in a beard and Carhartt, wearing my grandpa\u2019s knife on my belt, talking about turkey hunting.<\/p>\n

But time assimilated me into academia, disciplined me into its sociolect. I learned to say things like \u201cIsn\u2019t that a little essentialist?\u201d I traded my Carhartt for skinny jeans, my knife for American Spirits. I tucked nature into a weeklong canoe trip in early August.<\/p>\n

Starting grad school in 2009 meant that I belonged to a cohort galvanized by the 2008 financial crisis to pay attention to economics. I wrote about the concept of apocalypse as the literary correlative to economic stagnation. I wrote about how the economics of publishing shapes fiction. It is catnip for me when a novel like Hothouse Bloom<\/em> opens with an epigraph from an Italian Marxist. I raise my eyebrows; my heart rate increases; my mind pounces. I notice the disjunction between what the novel says (that Romantic pretensions will be deflated and leave us at McDonald\u2019s) and what it does (aspire to aesthetic value that resists capitalist valuation).<\/p>\n

Hothouse Bloom<\/em> tore through me when I read it this year. I kept thinking about it. I read it again. The strange parallel to my life felt like it might be a key to finding meaning where meaning has eluded me. Despite my attraction to nature, I have studiously avoided writing about it, thinking about it. Ecocriticism is, for me, terra incognita.<\/p>\n

So my understanding of nature<\/em> is thin. As is the risk in my profession, one book led to another. I read Alyssa Battistoni\u2019s Free Gifts<\/em>, a work of political theory with the ambitious aim of situating nature at the heart of the logic of capitalism. She argues that so long as capitalist markets rule over us, we are compelled to devalue nature. Capitalism is a humanism, she writes, riffing off Sartre: It privileges us over nonhumans. Only humans can earn a wage. Only humans can buy and sell, expressing our preferences in the market. By their exile, nonhumans forfeit agency and influence over their fate. Nature becomes, foundationally, a free gift. It has no economic value. It is priced at $0. We do not owe the tree for the work it has done in growing an apple. We do not owe the earth for the eons it took to produce oil. Not under capitalism, at least. We simply take.<\/p>\n

But the free gift of nature presents an opportunity. \u201cWhen we start to wonder why an obviously valuable thing\u2014clean air or a stable climate\u2014isn\u2019t valued at all,\u201d Battistoni writes, \u201cwe might start to wonder about value itself.\u201d The free gift can act, then, as a \u201cwedge into the broader structure of capitalist valuation.\u201d If we become skeptical about capitalist valuation, we recognize that our personal choices have limited political salience. We see our unfreedom. We see the need to organize with others to insist on nature\u2019s value and to contest capitalism.<\/p>\n

Anna, in Hothouse Bloom<\/em>, fetishizes nature\u2019s exclusion from the logic of capital, its escape from any meaning at all. She commits William Cronon\u2019s all-too-human error of treating nature as the sublime and the frontier, a fount for the expression of awe and a testing ground. She fails to see what Battistoni shows: that nature is at the heart of capital, the freely taken source of material wealth. She fails to understand her unfreedom\u2014the limits of personal choices in a vicious system\u2014and her brutal education is the novel\u2019s plot. Art is Wohlers\u2019s consolation, her wedge into the broader structure of capitalist valuation.<\/p>\n

I am skeptical about the possibilities for change that Hothouse Bloom<\/em> and Free Gifts <\/em>offer: nature and art as wedges into capitalist valuation. It seems to me that nature and art are, if we look at who values them and how, spiritual sustenance for the wealthy, with little political promise. But I love these books anyway. They speak to the gap between who we are and who we might be, which, as we age, becomes the gap between who we are and who we might have been. I could have been a hunter, a farmer. I could have been a signpost, could have been a clock. Battistoni and Wohlers look hard at our challenges and refuse capitulation. They offer works of hope, however slight the chances. Every failed campaign for a better world is an ember someone might rekindle later.<\/p>\n

A tiny creek runs by my house in Atlanta. If it has a name, I don\u2019t know it. It\u2019s the occasion for an urban farm a couple of blocks northeast of me and a forest preserve a few blocks southwest. I go to one or the other most days with my dog or my kids. One day, my wife and daughter came upon a gaggle of toddlers my daughter\u2019s age playing in the creek, and my daughter joined in. I just hoped she wouldn\u2019t end up with E. coli poisoning. She was, after all, up shit creek.<\/p>\n

A student of mine, Dez Miller, wrote a dissertation about urban rivers in the cultural imagination. Miller lives nearby and investigated the local watershed. A bit downstream, after my creek joins a few others to become Intrenchment Creek, it tests positive \u201croutinely\u201d for \u201cfecal matter.\u201d Miller notes how the land on this waterway has witnessed Muscogee removal, plantation agriculture, rumors of lynchings, a prison farm, and, most recently, a political struggle to block the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, known as Stop Cop City, which lost.<\/p>\n

But Miller also acknowledges the resilience of rivers, how they persist and nurture ecosystems, networks of life. That my little shit creek still trickles through the neighborhood feels like a small miracle. Water is wild. Anyone who has paddled whitewater knows its glorious force and also its treachery. I remember once how Jaclyne, after we\u2019d made it through a river\u2019s mouth, turned in the canoe and thanked it for safe passage.<\/p>\n

Summer mornings we go, my daughter and I, and wade in the cool water. Kudzu and ferns veil us in green. The trickle flows over a log, under the road, out of the neighborhood, into Intrenchment Creek and then South River, snaking its slow way southeast across the state, river into river into river, until it pours into the Atlantic Ocean between Little Saint Simon\u2019s Island and Wolf Island among painted buntings, roseate spoonbills, and wood storks. The Bachman\u2019s warbler sang here, and though it has been thought extinct, rumors of sightings still circulate from time to time among birders who want to believe.<\/p>\n

Read more Sisterhood Was Gloria Steinem\u2019s Guiding Principle<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-weekend-read"],"yoast_head":"\nHow a Creative Mind Lives in Nature - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=996\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How a Creative Mind Lives in Nature - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=996\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-05T13:13:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"16 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=996#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=996\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"How a Creative Mind Lives in Nature\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-05T13:13:00+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=996\"},\"wordCount\":3222,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=996#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/09\\\/176410d8c71b29c3bb367cd5c9adfb09.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"The Weekend Read\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=996#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=996\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=996\",\"name\":\"How a Creative Mind Lives in Nature - 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