We Need Your Stories: On Loving and Writing the Wild

Our task is to nurture connection: with wild beings and places; with one another, across lines and divides whenever we can; and with the wildness within us.
  

  
I keep a Kaufman Field Guide to Nature of the Midwest on my nightstand. On days when I’ve walked the woods or hiked the prairie, I flip through, trying to identify wild beings I’ve seen. But it’s hard sometimes to put my shoes on and get out the door. Days slip by with little wandering. Some evenings I read my field guide anyway, kindling my desire to be outside and grow in my knowledge of this place.

I am reacquainting myself with the southern Wisconsin landscape I knew in childhood and left 19 years ago for California. It’s been a year since moving back, and I still feel new. It takes time to make friends—human or more-than-human—and a lot of intention. Patience and attention are prerequisites to intimacy.

Five weeks ago, I stood in a circle of writers just 30 miles from here, at the place where Aldo Leopold died fighting a neighbor’s fire. It was our first-ever Writing the Wild writers’ retreat, and we were listening to the joyous and generous Pitāēpanuhkiw Lucy Grignon share about her relationships with plant relatives. Lucy is a seedkeeper, an enrolled member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Nation, and a direct descendant of the Menominee Nation. At her invitation, we all went out to spend time sitting with a plant being. “You can ask me questions,” she said, “but I do not know all of the plant friends here. I might just tell you that particular plant hasn’t introduced themself to me yet.” She spoke of each plant—milkweed, bergamot, cedar—with curiosity, delight, and the kind of joy that comes with relationship, with love.

This is what I need to cultivate, I know: loving relationship with one wild being at a time. It’s difficult to do in a new place, even one I knew as a child. I still pine for the Chinese elm that sheltered my front porch in northern California, for the sun rising over Mt. Diablo, for the orange tree that fed me bountifully each year, for the slender salamanders who shared my backyard.

That day at the retreat, we headed indoors at the Aldo Leopold Foundation to discuss our discoveries. We sat around a table made of pines planted by the Leopold family. At the front of the room stood a clivia plant descended from one Aldo brought from Arizona to Wisconsin a century ago. We talked in the presence of plant beings who wove us together in tangible, embodied ways with those who have come before us in this work of writing the wild.

I hesitate to write of the moment we are in—the devastation and precarity we face each day. The threats to every wild place and being we love. The catastrophic losses we’ve already experienced. The fear or despair we must roll off the chest to rise each morning. How are we to keep going?

Writer and artist Obi Kaufmann once said, in response to a question about combating despair, “Go put your feet in a river.” J. Drew Lanham, my collaborator in the work of Writing the Wild, says he finds hope in a singular bird. Bird populations are being decimated worldwide, but spend a few minutes with a chickadee and your spirits will lift.

I looked up just now after writing that sentence and a house wren was perched on the threshold of my front door, which I’ve thrown open for the morning air. The sprightly little being cocked an eye at me and hopped away.

Our task, it seems to me, is to nurture connection: with wild beings and places; with one another, across lines and divides whenever we can; and with the wildness within us—often dormant, numb, and contained. We nurture these connections through curious, compassionate attention—and through stories.

I’ll end with this: We need your stories. Your creativity, your words. The most artful essay by the most skilled and renowned writer might not touch the mind and heart of the person in your life, your neighbor, who needs the lift, challenge, or inspiration of your good story. That’s my invitation to you, dear reader. Please, put pen to paper, brush to canvas, fingers to keyboard. Tell stories around campfires and kitchen counters. Remind us why we need one another and how much there is in this beautiful world to love.

Pen in hand, I’m in this with you.

As I wrote those final words just now, my new house wren acquaintance perched on a stake outside my door—a stake holding up a plum tree planted in hope of fruit to come—and sang.

Poet Krissy Kludt is the executive director of Writing the Wild (co-guided with J. Drew Lanham). Her debut poetry collection, I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little, is forthcoming from Green Writers Press in Spring 2026. She lives in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.

Header photo by Ruslan Sikunov, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Krissy Kludt by Ryan Murray.