Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape (Kent State University Press, 2019) by ASLE member Deborah Fleming has won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. From the judges’ citation:
In a field of writers eloquent about the pathologies of selfhood and modern life, Deborah Fleming’s Resurrection of the Wild stood apart. It is a collection of essays about the nature and natural history of her native Ohio: on its indigenous inhabitants and their fate; on the settlers who displaced them, or who, like John Chapman—’Johnny Appleseed’—tried to protect their way of life; on the early ecologists, like Aldo Leopold and Louis Bromfield, who raised an unheeded alarm against the ‘desecration’ of the land by industry and development. Towards the end of the book, Fleming writes: ‘Like careless children who waste their inheritance, we do not deserve the planet we have been given.’
Fleming’s Ohio is a template for that planet, and her essays explore the zoology, botany, and anthropology of her home ground with astonishing specificity and Thoreauvian passion. Hummingbirds peck on her window if she is late serving up the nectar. The depredations of fracking and strip mining are described like the torture of body. We meet the Amish in all their admirable, clannish, and cagey variations. The seasons come alive and then slumber. In places, this is an elegy: ‘The earth has made us what we are, sustains us, and will take us back again when we have seen our share of passing seasons.’ Elsewhere, it is joyful and hopeful: ‘We need only look around to see that nature is trying to show us the gate that will lead us back inside.’ Fleming’s work holds a key to that gate.
The judges for this award were Jelani Cobb, Daniel Menaker, and Judith Thurman. The award is given to “a writer whose collection of individual essays, published in 2019, is an expansion of their exceptional body of work focusing on the essay as an art form” and comes with a $10,000 prize.
Fleming’s book is an impassioned call for recognizing and preserving the ecological wonders of the Allegheny plateau. Although America’s most dramatic locations are frequently celebrated for their natural beauty, far less has been written about Ohio’s beautiful and unique environment. In this collection of 14 interrelated essays, Fleming blends her decades of experience as a caretaker of rural Ohio’s verdant environment with additional scientific and literary research. These lyrical meditations trace Fleming’s relationship with the state and its natural beauty, while simultaneously spotlighting its “unparalleled exploitation” by those seeking to abuse the land’s resources for profit.
Deborah Fleming is an equestrian, mountain climber and organic gardener who writes poetry, fiction, essays and works for scholarship. The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies and Ashland University, she is honored to have won such an esteemed award.
About PEN America – PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. The organization champions the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Their mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.
