What I've Been Reading: Early April 2022

 Books about liberation, wilderness, and fear

This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley

Arthur Riley is truly a prophet of our day. This book, her debut, is a stunning series of meditations around various themes such as truth-telling, bodies and embodiment, liberation, religion, God, doubt, illness, trauma, healing, and more. Her writing is full of vivid metaphor, weaving together imagination, memories, and poetry to explore these themes through the lens of her life, experience, and understanding of love. It's challenging and comforting all at once, and I'll definitely be reading it again.

If you're a Christian, I also highly recommend her page Black Liturgies on Facebook or Instagram, where she writes liturgy, prayers, and breath meditations. Her writing has been super important to me the past couple years in processing the trauma of the global pandemic.

(TW for stories about child molestation and abuse, which are part of her family history.)

Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World by Kathryn Aalto

This collection of profiles of women nature writers is fascinating to read. Aalto's writing style is lyrical and personal, switching back and forth between stories and biographical information about the women, quotes from their most famous works, and her own impressions and personal connections to their work. The profiles include many authors I know and love, such as Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer— and many more I'd never heard of before. If you're interested in nature writing (particularly if you're fed up with the male-centric narratives common to the genre), this is worth checking out not just for the profiles but for the book recommendations!

Fear and Other Uninvited Guests: Tackling the Anxiety, Fear, and Shame That Keep Us From Optimal Living and Loving by Harriet Lerner (Looks like it was also published under the title "The Dance of Fear")

Lerner's book The Dance of Anger helped me a lot, so I decided to pick up this book dealing with fear in all its facets. In her straightforward, story-focused style, she analyzes different kinds of fear, anxiety, and shame, what they might be telling us, and different ways that we can healthily respond to them. I'm still trying to parse out my reaction to the book, which was, ironically, anxiety— but even taking that into consideration, I'd still recommend it.

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