Trudy Dittmar was born and raised in New Jersey farm country. In addition to holding an MA in English literature from the University of Chicago, she is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in writing and the founder and former director of a writing program at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Pushcart XXI, Georgia Review, and Orion. She divides her time between her family home in New Jersey and her cabin in Wyoming.
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Fauna and Flora, Earth and SkyBrushes with Nature's WisdomFrom"Cows, Arrogance, the Natures of Things"
In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky:Brushes with Nature's Wisdom -
Fauna and Flora, Earth and SkyBrushes with Nature's WisdomFrom"Cache"
I found the deer not long before I got his first call, the first Sunday in October. Before that it had been just letters, since I’d met him back in June. It was mid-week preceding his call, Wednesday or Thursday. I’d been hiking back along the Wildcat Creek, and just as it was coming on twilight I found the body, cached. It was all but covered with a heap of spruce cone scales, but I saw a tawny bit of it, and I bent down and touched it and it was a fresh-cached deer.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky:Brushes with Nature's Wisdom -
Fauna and Flora, Earth and SkyBrushes with Nature's WisdomFrom"Cache"
The porcupine lay there on her back, as if looking up at us. One foreleg lay across her breast and the other was curled by the side of her face. It did seem, in fact, that she wore a parka of guard hairs, yellow around her body. A shining hood of them circling her face. Her hind feet curled toward the earth, the golden hairs curving over them like little fur boots.
Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press
Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky:Brushes with Nature's Wisdom
“[Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky] is, in fact, the most intelligent, thoughtful, original, challenging, and highly entertaining work of nature writing since Barry Lopez’s Artic Dreams . . . It is her broad scope of contemplation, combined with her fiercely beautiful and detailed renderings of passion, natural and human, that give Trudy Dittmar’s first but fully mature book its remarkable originality and considerable power.” —Robert Finch, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Honest self-scrutiny is irresistible, especially when told with a knack for diction of place, as this author demonstrates on every page. She is both of the landscape and an informed observer of it, willing to examine her conflicts between the experiences that play in her imagination and the scientific knowledge she’s gleaned through training and reading.”—The Bloomsbury Review [on Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky]
“Trudy Dittmar is an elegant stylist and an acute observer. She's read everything there is to read about the physics of rainbows, the habits of the porcupine, the winter survival skills of the moose and the orbits of the planets, but even her learning is outdistanced by her patient powers of looking, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting. Her originality arises out of this patience. And, magically, she is able to read into and out of the rich, endangered natural world an Emersonian understanding of self. This is at once the most objective and subjective book I have ever read.” —Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story [on Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky]