What Is the Work of a Writer in a Wounded World?

You will find your calling at the intersection of your great joy and the world's great need, says Kathleen Dean Moore, quoting Buechner. Let us work not from anger, frustration, or guilt, Moore suggests, but through our own deep joy.

Author, environmental philosopher, teacher and speaker Moore spends a great deal of time in her deep joy — the wild places of the world. Moore's essays explore cultural and spiritual connections to wild, remote, ancient places, and call for a new worldview deeply rooted in the natural world.

Wild Comfort, Moore's best-selling latest release, describes a series of solitary excursions — through ancient forests, wild rivers, remote deserts, and windswept islands — she undertakes while grieving the deaths of loved ones. Wild Comfort is a stunning collection of carefully observed moments—tracking otters on the beach, cooking breakfast in the desert, canoeing in a snow squall, wading among migrating salmon in the dark—and also a profound meditation on the healing power of nature. In the wonder of the rush of water over rocks, in the joy over the sight of a cougar, Moore finds the solace that comes from connection to the natural world, and from that astonishingly intimate connection arise hope and courage, healing and gratitude.

Moore is a prominent figure among contemporary literary naturalists. Her kaleidoscopically beautiful prose evokes the deeper meaning of nature in our lives. "The Earth holds every possibility inside it," Moore writes, "and the mystery of transformation, one thing to another. This is the wildest comfort."

"I believe that the natural world — the world we prod and pollute and irradiate and pave — is sacred," writes K.D. Moore...." If this is the way the world is — mysterious, beautiful, contingent, wonderful — then this is how I ought to act in the world — with gratitude, with caring, with joy, and with a profound sense of responsibility for its thriving."

Moore frequently speaks on the theme: "What is the work of a writer in a wounded world?" Her answer is, in part, the new ethic she proposes in Pine Island Paradox. "It's an ethic built on caring for people and caring for places," says Moore, "and on the intricate and beautiful ways that love for places and love for people nurture each other and sustain us all."

Praise for Wild Comfort

""Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer whose senses, heart, generosity, and intellect open in every direction. This book, filled with knowledge of the natural and human worlds, is a superb naturalist's handbook. It is also a praise book: an illuminated manuscript whose life overspills its own borders. In its grounded wisdoms, humility, curiosity, and in the kaleidoscope beauty of its descriptions, Wild Comfort reminds how to see, how to sing; how to welcome, with equal gravity and grace, whatever asks entrance into our lives. It is destined to become a classic." — Jane Hirshfield

"Wild Comfort is a richly poetic book, tipsy with life, and Moore a wonderful guide to the wilderness and our own wildness. It's a book brimming with wonder, sorrow, happiness, and the intricate designs of nature that can surprise and sustain us all."-Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wife

"In spite of grieving over the death of friends, the extinction of species, and the tattering of Earth's web, she finds comfort in natural and human creations, in symphonies and snakes, in science and stars, in the beauty constantly upwelling from the mystery we call life. This book itself is such a consoling creation, a cause for gratitude and joy." — Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Private History of Awe

About the Author

Kathleen Dean Moore, winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Oregon Book Award, is author or editor of ten books. Her work has appeared in Orion, Audubon, Discover, The Sun, and the New York Times Magazine, as well as in academic journals such as Conservation Biology and the Journal of Forestry. Her books include Riverwalking, set on Oregon's wild rivers; Holdfast, whose meditations on tenacity and mobility are inspired by kelp forests and the rocky intertidal; and The Pine Island Paradox, which proposes an ethic based on the kinship of all being.

Moore is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and University Writer Laureate at Oregon State University. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Orion Society and for the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. Moore is the founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, working to bring together the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the analytic clarity of philosophy, and the emotional power of the written word to re-imagine our relation to the natural world.

Moore, mother of two grown children, lives with her husband in Corvallis, Oregon. She writes in the WaterShed, a tiny writers' studio designed by Moore's architect-daughter; water collected from the WaterShed's roof pours into a trough where deer come to drink.

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