A Barnes & Noble Summer Discover Pick
"Morrow's language is rich and sensuous, for she thinks like a poet." — Publishers Weekly
"Willowy and beguiling." — Kirkus Reviews
Susan Brind Morrow's Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World is a startlingly original ode to the natural world as well as a meditation on the beauty of a place she has always called home — New York State. It is also an intimate portrait of two of Morrow's dearest friends, a trapper and a beekeeper, whose devotion to the wilds of the Finger Lakes region is matched only by hers. A story that transcends place, it is a rumination on our ties to and experiences with the world around us.
As Morrow tells us, the Finger Lakes region has a "strangely dense history." Her upstate Eden gave rise to Mormonism, spiritualism, women's rights, abolitionism, the origin of American fortunes in the fur trade, and the scientific advancement of agriculture. She is a consummate storyteller, taking us from the history of William Smith's spiritualist beginnings, to apple orchards ripe with fruit, to a lab where you can sample raspberry, strawberry, peach, or plum wine, to hives where thirty thousand bees work feverishly to keep their queen happy and the honey flowing.
As a classicist and a linguist, Morrow sees beyond the place itself into the timeless relationship between language and nature. Her passions, paired with an innate desire to understand and experience the world around us, provide a rich and distinctive narrative. In the tradition of American nature writing, Wolves and Honey is an elegant tapestry, weaving together literary, personal, and scientific musings. It is a rare and gifted writer who can translate her intense knowledge of a subject so compellingly that readers will wish that they too could dip their feet into the deep green waters of Seneca Lake or roam the hills and valleys to see a slope of trees turning a pinkish gold in the waning light of day.
Wolves and Honey will delight armchair travelers, naturalists, and historians alike as it illuminates the rich past and quiet beauty of upstate New York. Morrow's writing provides a new lens through which we can understand our sometimes neglected but always profound relationship to the natural world.
Susan Brind Morrow is a classicist, linguist, and translator of ancient Egyptian folklore and mythology as well as of contemporary Arabic poetry. She is the author of The Names of Things, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir.
A Conversation with Susan Brind Morrow
Q) What is this book about?
A) This book came in large part out of notebooks I kept in the mid-1980s. I had had this experience of being out in the Libyan desert for an extended period of time on an archeological survey. There is something in a place like that that is beyond the human world. It is a kind of stillness. And after you've experienced it, you lose interest in . . . the kind of noise that surrounds us, the representational world of, say, television, and are after something else, something real. You have a craving for that stillness. When I was growing up there were deaths in my family, and I had to make sense out of them. And that is essentially what the book is about. Wolves and Honey is a classic oxymoron, which is explained by one of the first words in the book, lukoskordon, which in Greek means "torn by wolves." The word was used as an epithet for bees, because in antiquity it was believed that bees arose from corpses. This is the Old Testament riddle of Samson: "Out of the killer came what is sweet"; out of being torn apart comes sweetness. There is an underlying sweetness that is akin to stillness.
The book addresses and answers a series of questions:
Why is the sky blue?
What is a mermaid singing?
Why is the apple taboo?
What is sweetness?
What survives death?
Q) Why write about the Finger Lakes?
A) The Finger Lakes region of New York State is a place where all these questions are present. In the personal sense, I lived in the Finger Lakes until I was in my mid-teens, and my parents still live in the house I grew up in there. It was a place marked by tragedy for my family, so I can say that I never thought of it as a benign landscape. But I always had this vivid remembered sense of childhood days around the lake and of being immersed in nature. My mother made sure that we knew, and shared her reverence for, the woods, the night sky. My parents both came out of the pre-World War II era, and their values were not the values of modern American consumerism. My mother's family was hit very hard by the Depression, and we really got it at an early age that you can lose everything and that what is of value are things you can't buy. You memorize poetry, and it's always with you; it can't be taken away. In the same way, a familiarity with nature will open to you a world of treasure and insight wherever you go. My brother David was a natural outdoorsman, and it was only after I went away to school in New York that I realized how rare a person that is. Some people just know, in the most casual way, where everything is. I always say to myself, "Find the living thing." Well, those are the people who know where to find it.
The book comes out of the time after David's death, when I had been wandering around alone for a couple of years with these notebooks, and I came back to this familiar place and fell into wonderful friendships with Bob Kime, who was a local hunter and a beekeeper, and Gary Lynch, who was a trapper. They were family friends, people I had known for a long time. They were older, but to me they became very much a continuation of my relationship with my brother. They were people who, just instinctively, knew so much. And they both died tragically. Part of my motivation in pulling the book out of these notebooks was to remember them.
In a historical sense it is interesting to write about the Finger Lakes because it is a forgotten, economically depressed area, and yet it is a place where the best strains in American life developed: freedom of religion, abolition, women's rights. This was the territory of the Underground Railroad, of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. What is not generally known is that spiritualism, a global religious movement that, like Mormonism, came out of the Finger Lakes in the nineteenth century, involved the same people who were in the reform movements.
Another aspect of the Finger Lakes is the land itself. The richness of the soil and the presence of water, part of the major inland corridor for bird migration, has made the area the home of a great scientific agricultural think tank. This is where the language of bees was figured out, along with the control of insect populations without pesticides, the development of major commercial crops, and even the initial work on the discovery of RNA. The people we knew when I was growing up were involved in this kind of scientific research. So in the Finger Lakes you have this remarkable conjunction of science, nature, and religion.
Q) Why do Greek and Latin figure in your writing about upstate New York?
A) As a teenager — as a student — I was completely immersed in classical poetry. Catullus, Alcman, Pindar, and Lucretius were vivid presences in my life. I saw that their work, far from being archaic or even dated, is as clear and alive today as it was two thousand years ago. And I always have the impulse to pass on what they gave to me, the purity of their perception, which has the quality of truth throughout and so is applicable everywhere. It is only the inadequacy of translation that makes them seem "ancient" and obscure.
Q) Why do you write memoir?
A) I don't really know what memoir means. Walden, Out of Africa — are these memoirs? Are they "nonfiction"? I think people write because they have to; it is one way to organize the chaos of life. And it is usually my first impulse when I am in any kind of distress. The only thing useful in writing is clarity. You are trying to capture something ephemeral, something alive. To me it is like painting — if you do it badly there's nothing there. You are trying to resonate with the living thing, and the ever-present question is "Does it work?" Has a tactile sense of the living thing, the living person, been captured on the page?
Praise for Wolves and Honey
"In this lyrical memoir, Morrow muses on New York State's Finger Lake region . . . Morrow's language is rich and sensuous, for she thinks like a poet." — Publishers Weekly
"A sudden, loss-tinged memoir of upstate New York's Finger Lakes region . . . Willowy and beguiling." — Kirkus Reviews
"One seeks for words worthy of the authenticity and intimacy of this beautiful book. It is a treasury of perceptions, tender and unsparing, of our planetary existence; a sensual affinity with all that grows, flourishes, and dies — conveyed in a clear voice unlike any other." — Shirley Hazzard
Praise for The Names of Things
"What Morrow's book offers the reader is what Egypt offered her: a counterbalance to our modern consumer culture . . . Morrow's The Names of Things, with its perceptive, rhythmic prose, is a gift." — Annette Kobak, New York Times Book Review
"A painter's eye for color and a good traveler's knack of finding, and adroitly describing, engaging people . . . The sights, sounds, and sensibility are unique and magical." — Atlantic Monthly
"Captivating, lyrical . . . Of the many books I've read this year, Susan Brind Morrow's is the one which has moved, delighted, and inspired me the most." — Common Reader
"Simply and eloquently — magic." — Baltimore Sun "Editor's Choice"
"The Names of Things is a very rare book, shimmering with spiritual insight, meticulous observation, copious erudition, and luminous prose. It is a book seemingly capable of anything — especially miracles." — Globe and Mail
"One stunning observation after another; Morrow executes wonderful modulations of tone and rhythm, evoking the sweep of sand and star, the flow of time." — Booklist
"From a lifetime of combining the study of nature and a fascination with language emerges the beautiful story of Morrow's journey — both physical and spiritual — from her childhood in rural New York to the magnificent deserts of Egypt and Sudan . . . But more than simply a diarist, Morrow becomes a part of her desert milieu, in a region where women have had little freedom. This work imparts a quality not unlike the writing of Isak Dinesen or Jane Goodall." — Library Journal
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