Sometimes books find you when you need them most. This July, Jarod Anderson’s Something in the Woods Loves You was that book for me. The poetry in its language and message was exactly what I needed.
The book is part memoir, part essay, part nature writing. The author, born and raised in Ohio, is struggling with severe depression. He’s a scholar with a solid career trajectory and a loving wife, but depression is winning. He feels broken. He feels like a burden. The story is his journey back to magic. It walks us through his rediscovery, via nature, of his own power of meaning-making, which is crucial to autonomy, empowerment, and joy—the tools by which we can combat depression.
I’ve loved Anderson’s poetry for a long time. I want to call it gritty-whimsy? Or maybe lovely-rot-core? His writing in this book has that same spirit: it’s gentle, accessible, and soothing . . . but also unflinching. It’s the kind of careful self-examination that makes memoirs worth it.
With graceful clarity, Anderson lays out ideas I’ve been struggling to put into words for about three or four years now. I remember in 2022, during an interview about a poem I’d written, I was reaching for these ideas, wrestling with my hazy vision of what I sensed but couldn’t figure out how to say. Finding them here, laid out so plainly, felt like coming home. It felt like peace. It felt like being seen.
I don’t really go in for the Earth-mother vibe. I love a good rock, but I’m no naturalist. I think my love for nature, and my anxiety over climate change, is a little more . . . pragmatic? A little more abstract?
In short, I believe nature is crucial to self-expression. To “meaning making.” Protecting nature is important for lots of reasons, but this is the one that lives in my chest. It’s the one that gives my poetry a pulse.
I’ve never been great at saying what I’m feeling.
Half the time, it’s like it takes three business days for me to actually feel what I’m feeling. A social interaction happens. Then, once I’m alone, mentally replaying the interaction, it hits me: What that person said hurt my feelings. Why did I respond like it didn’t? Or, hey, that situation made me uncomfortable. Why didn’t I say so?
Because my emotions are often sort of “en route,” I’m afraid I tend to intellectualize my feelings instead of feeling them. Worse, sometimes everything I kind of neglected to feel can drop at once, striking like emotion-lightning on a random Tuesday.
Compounding it all is that I struggle to communicate feelings in “normal” words. “Sad” might be the right building. But it’s not the right room, let alone the specific brick I need to point out. And if I can’t be precise, I don’t feel like explaining at all.
The only pathway I’ve found to putting feelings into words with precision is poetry. And always, always, when I write poetry, there is nature.
My poetry leans more sci-fi than Anderson’s. I’m in space a lot. Up in the stars, scooting through nebulas. Probably all that childhood Star Trek consumption. But the oomph of each poem—at least, of any poems I consider any good—is where the woods sneaks in.
Anderson’s emphasis that you can’t “do the woods wrong” struck an arrow through my heart. For a long time, I’ve felt like I don’t have a right to draw on nature as an artist. I grew up in Kentucky, with the woods behind our big brick house. But it was the suburbs.
I played near the woods, not in them. I was only ever adjacent to nature, a tourist.
- I remember visiting a school friend once whose family cared for horses. We snuck back to the barn and went riding through the woods one day. But I got clotheslined off the horse by a branch. Twice.
- I remember a horseback nature tour in what must’ve been North Carolina. The guide announced that local gators had a taste for kids in red t-shirts, so until my mom informed me he’d been joking, I was petrified because I was a kid in a red t-shirt. The added adrenaline rush made the woods seem denser, the greens darker and more ominous. I loved it. But it was a guided tour. Just a vacation thing. Something my parents bought, not an adventure I sought out on my own.
- I remember stomping through the woods in Michigan, hanging out on our dock, playing in the tall weeds. But the “woods” here was really more of a copse of trees near the local golf course. And the field of weeds was just that, and we never strayed far. We never actually got in the lake either, just dipped our toes in the water.
- I remember kayaking to an island with my family to spend the night there in tents. Our guide had the same first name as me, which I took to signify my own survival skill capacity. The next morning, I woke up early and restarted the campfire by myself. It’s been a long time since I felt pride like that. But it was only one night, and again, we went with a guide.
This sense that I’m “not allowed” to draw on nature imagery has only gotten worse as I’ve moved farther and farther from home—from Kentucky all the way to Lima, Peru. Saying goodbye to our childhood home, now sold, didn’t help either.
I’m a city girl now. I have no survival skills. I can’t identify birds or whittle or actually ride horses or start a campfire by myself. So do I “deserve” nature? Surely not. Not because of a handful of excursions as a kid. What business do I have drawing on woodsy imagery like some kind of country girl? What a poser.
But listening to Anderson’s book, I found myself remembering . . . more.
The woods did actually play a role in my childhood. There’s a reason there’s always nature in my poetry. Birds used to nest in the beams under our porch. I remember kneeling to press my nose against the dusty slats to peek at eggs through the cracks. I remember hunting for mock strawberries and friends sucking the nectar from honeysuckle. There were trips to apple orchards and pumpkin patches. We had a huge window in the kitchen overlooking the yard, and we’d gather for visitors. Fawns came every spring, sometimes twins, wobbling behind their mothers. Wild turkeys. Endless squirrels and chipmunks. My grandmother on my mom’s side was obsessed with cardinals; when she died, we inherited an entire hutch of red bird knickknacks.
Anderson’s stories about his grandma, who he never met but often heard about, sparked other reflections too. Red-bird grandma grew up on a multigenerational farm. But we never talked about it. The only story I recall with any clarity is that one of her many sisters once lost an eye by falling face first onto a wheat stalk. My grandma on my dad’s side also grew up rural, to my knowledge. Her dad was a grave digger. But besides that, I can’t recall a single story about her childhood, not even a gory one.
There was a lot of shame, I think. Poverty was embarrassing. There was trauma too. The grandfathers I should’ve or could’ve had, for the most part, didn’t vanish gently. I suspect my grandmothers’ childhoods weren’t carefree either.
If my grandmothers, as children, ever found any joy or serenity from being in nature, I never heard about it. In the absence of their stories, though, there’s an urge to picture something. Did my mom’s mother ever think fresh hay smelled nice? Was my dad’s mother ever amused by frog song? Did either of them ever walk in the woods just because it felt good?
Besides remembering, I also found myself realizing it doesn’t matter . . . because nature is for everybody.
Even if I hadn’t recovered all those grounding memories, I would still belong (in a metaphorical sense) in the woods. Even if I’d grown up in an apartment building in the middle of the city, never having seen trees beyond the local park, I would still “be allowed” to love trees. You don’t have to be “worthy” of nature. You already are nature.
In all this self-reflection, though, maybe the most breathtaking moment was when the book first prompted me to journal about the woodsy memories that felt, at this moment in my life, the most potent. Three came straight to mind:
- As my sisters and I watch on, my mother beheads a garden snake with hedge clippers.
- While I’m reading under our porch, I hear a soft, fleshy thwack. A mother bird has pushed one of her pink babies out of the nest onto the cement below. I can’t bring myself to check if it’s still alive.
- A baby sparrow flies in through our open window. Hopeful and charmed, I carry it back outside. It flaps over the garden wall, into some unreachable gap, where it cries all day until it finally stops.
Good grief. Why these moments? Moments that, by the meaning I’ve assigned to them, speak of my impotence, my helplessness, my uselessness? Why not the moment I started the campfire, when I felt like I could conquer the world?
If I’m being honest, I know why. It’s because they capture the worst of what my inner critic has to offer.
If I needed a reminder it’s time for a brain reset, this was it.
Mental health is a labor of self-love. That labor is never done.
Look, the majority of the time, I’m fine. But also, yeah, sometimes I have “bad-brain days.” It’s like my head is full of bees, and every bee is a thought, so I can’t focus on anything. I have grim days sometimes too. I know the sticky darkness isn’t real, because I’m loved and successful and good, but the darkness can get . . . heavy.
In the last few years, I’ve learned there are names for all this. Just knowing names exist makes dealing with it infinitely less lonely. If there are words for something, that means other people needed to invent those words, which means I’m nowhere near as weird as I feared. As much as I love the precision of poetry, I find there’s some poetry in precision too.
But between the moment somebody qualified hands me the right word and now, there’s just life. Working out and walking the dog and figuring out lunch. Editing. Writing. Calling home. Meeting new people. Trying to stay creative.
It seems like such a small thing, to whap your brain on the nose with a newspaper and say, “HEY, quit replaying that horrific bit about the snake and associate those bananaquits with playfulness instead.” But it is so desperately important to do. And not just once, but on the regular. This book was my prompt to do it again. So over the last two or three weeks, I’ve consciously sought out whimsy and decided its implications for myself:
- A moth the size of my palm hides against a palm’s trunk overlooking the sea. It represents adaptation and wisdom.
- A red-winged hawk swoops through the two huge trees below our kitchen window, clouds of panicked sparrows rise in its wake. It represents confidence.
- A grey squirrel hops to the lower branches, waiting for our friendly neighbor to leave mandarin scraps. It represents willingness to seize what the universe offers.
Why? Why notice these things? Why do they signify what I say they signify?
Because I choose to, and because I get to choose.
The magic is in the act of choosing.
Thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed this weird, rambling reflection on a book that totally stole my heart, consider checking out my newsletter. The Author-Oddity Newsletter has tons of book recs, but it also includes my thoughts on my journey and whatever I’ve read that month. You can also find my other writing, including my poetry, and my blurbs for my works in progress on my Books page.
