Bright Stars, Dark Trees, Clear Water: Nature Writing from North of the Border

by Wayne Grady (Compiler)

This marvelous anthology provides the best collection of North American nature writing. This is a vast canvas, from Pehr Kalm’s “Travels in North America” (1753) to Gretel Ehrlich’s moving essay about her encounters with seals in the frozen wastelands of the Arctic Circle (1992). It combines pieces by well-known and much beloved writers (Audubon, Seton, Mowat, Thoreau, Matthiessen, and Peterson among them) with lesser known texts by writers whose work will come as revelations.
Here is a geographic diversity that ranges from Henry Beston’s lyrical description of bird life on the St. Lawrence to Barry Lopez’s account of Banks Island in the Arctic. These are writers who all felt the call of the wild, and who wrote about their experiences with passion for the land, compassion for its inhabitants, and a genuine sense of wonder―and often humor―that make for hours of fascinating reading.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature

368 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 1998

About the author

Wayne Grady is the award-winning author of Emancipation Day, a novel of denial and identity. He has also written such works of science and nature as The Bone Museum, Bringing Back the Dodo, The Quiet Limit of the World, and The Great Lakes, which won a National Outdoor Book Award in the U.S. With his wife, novelist Merilyn Simonds, he co-authored Breakfast at the Exit Café: Travels Through America. And with David Suzuki he co-wrote the international bestseller Tree: A Life Story.

He has also translated fourteen works of fiction from the French, by such authors as Antonine Maillet, Yves Beauchemin, and Danny Laferrière. In 1989, he won the Governor General’s Award for his translation of Maillet’s On the Eighth Day. His most recent translation is of Louis Hamelin’s October 1970, published by House of Anansi Press in 2013.

Grady teaches creative writing in the optional-residency MFA program at the University of British Columbia. He and Merilyn Simonds live in the country north of Kingston, Ontario.