Something in the Woods Loves You

An inspiring blend of nature writing and memoir that explores nature’s crucial role in our emotional and mental health

Bats can hear shapes, plants can eat light, and bees can dance maps. When his life took him to a painfully dark place, the poet behind The Cryptonaturalist, Jarod K. Anderson, found comfort and redemption in these facts and the shift in perspective that comes from paying a new kind of attention to nature. 
 
Something in the Woods Loves You tells the story of the darkest stretch of a young person’s life, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of a single mushroom, Anderson has written a lyrical love letter to the natural world and given us the tools to see it all anew.

 

Cover image copyright the Artist (Tuesday Riddell), reproduced with grateful thanks to MESSUMS ORG. Photo: Steve Russell.

• "Trees are medicine, Jarod Anderson tells us in this vivid memoir, and so are great blue herons, lightning bugs, racoons, mice, bats, and all of the twenty or so wild creatures he celebrates in these pages. They cannot cure his depression, but they can ease it, for they do not judge him or shame him. As they go about their lives, free of the anxiety, ambition, and guilt that often afflict our own species, they inspire the author to imagine how he might live with less pain and more meaning. Readers may find the book a balm for their own aches."
  Scott Russell Sanders, author of The Way of Imagination
• "Something in the Woods Loves You is a marvel of a book, blending unexpected wisdom with occasional whimsy, offering vivid observations of herons, hawks, trillium, and our human search for meaning. Jarod Anderson doesn’t shy away from the pain of mental illness and depression, but his utter honesty and love of the natural world offers all of us a rich, earthy experience of hope."
  Dinty W. Moore, author of To Hell With It
• "Just as the trees make the forest, vulnerability, honesty, and hard-earned wisdom make shimmer Jarod K. Anderson’s Something in the Woods Loves You. At once both delicate and direct, irrepressible and resilient, Anderson’s memoir is a stunning debut in the genre."
  Amy Butcher, author of Mothertrucker