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Women in the Wild: True Stories of Adventure and Connection
Women in the Wild is a collection of thoughtful, insightful, and courageous adventures celebrating women in the outdoors. The stories weave a common thread of connection between the women’s lives and their experienes with the powerful forces of nature. The book offers hard-core high adventure such as climbing Everest, swimming across Lake Titicaca, and surviving a shark attack, but also looks at the softer side of Mother Nature with solitary fishing in Ireland, rescuing an injured pelican, and the simple act of giving birth. Authors span the generations, with more than forty years between the youngest and oldest, providing encounters that thrill, humble, induce awe, and remind us just how fragile our lives, and this planet, can be. The collection celebrates the many ways in which women inteact with the natural universe as prey, as protector, as hunter, as lover, and as survivor.
Join Alice Walker as she steps out her back door to connect with an ailing stallion, Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees in the forestsof the Congo, Lesley Hazelton as she flies high above the clouds, and GretelEhrlich as she is struck by lightning.
Join Alice Walker as she steps out her back door to connect with an ailing stallion, Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees in the forestsof the Congo, Lesley Hazelton as she flies high above the clouds, and GretelEhrlich as she is struck by lightning.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
May 28, 2025
3,5
'Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.'
Travelers' Tales always renew my love for traveling, those stories are about adventures and enriching your memories - let's unveil the wonders of the world! Even though I liked most of the tales, there were a few I disliked. In the end, reading is subjective. Recommended for all globetrotters!
'Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.'
Travelers' Tales always renew my love for traveling, those stories are about adventures and enriching your memories - let's unveil the wonders of the world! Even though I liked most of the tales, there were a few I disliked. In the end, reading is subjective. Recommended for all globetrotters!
December 1, 2008
An interesting collection of women writers on personal connections with nature that lends itself to browsing. My favorite selections were by Louise Erdrich, Gretel Ehrlich, and Terry Tempest Williams, but there is a wide variety to choose from.
February 5, 2024
A collection of stories written by women who wanted, and did, taste what the world and wilderness had to offer. Some of them were definitely better than others but all of them made me want to do something. Here’s to hoping my women never stop being women and never forget or lose the connection we have to the earth
October 31, 2023
I read this to honour Women’s History Month, which is October in Canada. Some of these stories/excerpts were very beautiful, thoughtful, and moving, others not so much. The ones that were 'not so much' really made this feel like an unpleasant read. There was also an unexpected amount of animal cruelty which forced me to skip several, or at least parts of several. There were many great stories, some from authors I recognized. I have listed several of my favourite quotes from a variety of different stories in this novel. I had to include more than one from Alice Walker's 'Am I Blue?'.
“I have climbed mountains in Switzerland above the timberline. But there the idea was to get to the top, to achieve the feat, to reach the pinnacle, and to enjoy the view—human beings putting themselves on top of mountains.
Not so in Iceland. There was no desire to put myself on top of anything. Rather, the need was to let the mountain speak and to open myself up. It was to meld into something much grander than the individual self and to hopefully get a clue on how the self fits into that grander scheme.”
- From ‘To Jump or Not to Jump?’ by Hannelore Hahn
“...it doesn’t matter what yesterday looked like. You got here. And this is today.”
- From ‘Climbing Mt. Everest’ by Margo Chisholm and Ray Bruce
“It didn’t seem so much that I had learned anything new, but that someone had gently reminded me of some things that I had forgotten. That I am not a spectator. That I truly love this earth and am happiest traipsing, tramping, swimming, skipping, or just lying quietly against her, feeling our hearts beat together. That I am nourished by this as surely as I am by the food I eat because we are part of the same continuum, this earth and I: matter.”
- From ‘Rocks in My Head’ by Terry Strother
Following 4 quotes from 'Am I Blue?' by Alice Walker
“I was s hocked that I had forgotten that human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember. However, the animals have not changed.”
After Blue's mate is taken away. (Blue is a horse)
“It was a look so piercing, so full of grief, a look so human, I almost laughed (I felt too sad to cry) to think that there are people who do not know that animals suffer. People like me who have forgotten, and daily forget, all that animals try to tell us. ‘Everything you do to us will happen to you; we are your teachers, as you are ours. We are one lesson’ is essentially it, I think.”
… “But most disturbing of all, in Blue’s large brown eyes was a new look, more painful than the look of despair: the look of disgust with human beings, with life; the look of hatred. And it was odd what the look of hatred did. It gave him, for the first time, the look of a beast. And what that meant was that he had put up a barrier within to protect himself from further violence; all the apples in the world wouldn’t change that fact.”
“...yes, the animals are forced to become for us merely ‘images’ of what they once so beautifully expressed. And we are used to drinking milk from containers showing ‘contented’ cows, whose real lives we want to hear nothing about, eatings eggs and drumsticks from ‘happy’ hens, and munching hamburgers advertised by bulls of integrity who seem to common their fate. As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.”
“Poverty rarely brings out the most generous human impulses, especially when it comes to environmental matters. Ask a hungry West African about the evils of deforestation, or an unemployed Oregon logger about the endangered spotted owl, and you’ll get just about the same answer: I can’t afford to think about that right now. Environmentalists must make a case, again and again, for the possibility that we can’t afford not to think about it.”
- Barbara Kingsolver, ‘High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never’
“Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.”
- Terry Tempest Williams
“I have climbed mountains in Switzerland above the timberline. But there the idea was to get to the top, to achieve the feat, to reach the pinnacle, and to enjoy the view—human beings putting themselves on top of mountains.
Not so in Iceland. There was no desire to put myself on top of anything. Rather, the need was to let the mountain speak and to open myself up. It was to meld into something much grander than the individual self and to hopefully get a clue on how the self fits into that grander scheme.”
- From ‘To Jump or Not to Jump?’ by Hannelore Hahn
“...it doesn’t matter what yesterday looked like. You got here. And this is today.”
- From ‘Climbing Mt. Everest’ by Margo Chisholm and Ray Bruce
“It didn’t seem so much that I had learned anything new, but that someone had gently reminded me of some things that I had forgotten. That I am not a spectator. That I truly love this earth and am happiest traipsing, tramping, swimming, skipping, or just lying quietly against her, feeling our hearts beat together. That I am nourished by this as surely as I am by the food I eat because we are part of the same continuum, this earth and I: matter.”
- From ‘Rocks in My Head’ by Terry Strother
Following 4 quotes from 'Am I Blue?' by Alice Walker
“I was s hocked that I had forgotten that human animals and nonhuman animals can communicate quite well; if we are brought up around animals as children we take this for granted. By the time we are adults we no longer remember. However, the animals have not changed.”
After Blue's mate is taken away. (Blue is a horse)
“It was a look so piercing, so full of grief, a look so human, I almost laughed (I felt too sad to cry) to think that there are people who do not know that animals suffer. People like me who have forgotten, and daily forget, all that animals try to tell us. ‘Everything you do to us will happen to you; we are your teachers, as you are ours. We are one lesson’ is essentially it, I think.”
… “But most disturbing of all, in Blue’s large brown eyes was a new look, more painful than the look of despair: the look of disgust with human beings, with life; the look of hatred. And it was odd what the look of hatred did. It gave him, for the first time, the look of a beast. And what that meant was that he had put up a barrier within to protect himself from further violence; all the apples in the world wouldn’t change that fact.”
“...yes, the animals are forced to become for us merely ‘images’ of what they once so beautifully expressed. And we are used to drinking milk from containers showing ‘contented’ cows, whose real lives we want to hear nothing about, eatings eggs and drumsticks from ‘happy’ hens, and munching hamburgers advertised by bulls of integrity who seem to common their fate. As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.”
“Poverty rarely brings out the most generous human impulses, especially when it comes to environmental matters. Ask a hungry West African about the evils of deforestation, or an unemployed Oregon logger about the endangered spotted owl, and you’ll get just about the same answer: I can’t afford to think about that right now. Environmentalists must make a case, again and again, for the possibility that we can’t afford not to think about it.”
- Barbara Kingsolver, ‘High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never’
“Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.”
- Terry Tempest Williams
January 27, 2016
3.5 stars. Some of these stories I liked better than others (which is always the case in a collection) and some of them made me think of things I wanted to do. Some of them reminded me of things never to try, like getting struck by lightning, climbing Mount Everest, or being eaten by a hyena, or hanggliding, or being shipwrecked at sea, or giving birth. One of the ones that will likely stick with me the longest is the story of the hike through the jungle around the Mayan ruins with a guide who really doesn't like the destruction tourism and the "modern world" have brought to his area. And I will try to never need emergency care in Wyoming, because neither the understaffed and underfunded rural hospitals nor the gung-ho macho doctors in the bigger hospitals seem to be all that good at actually treating an injured woman.
June 6, 2020
Like most short story collections some of this was good and some not so much. Overall pretty disappointing and really not for me. There was an unexpected amount of detailed animal cruelty that really turned me off from reading this. The best story was the excerpt from The Albatross which I would consider reading on it’s own before picking up this.
May 3, 2015
Library paperback
February 16, 2024
Absolutely BONKERS read.
It's a compilation of some thirty-odd anecdotes from different women traveling around the world. Many of these are unforgettable, whether you want to forget them or don't. What the heck was that about the tuna fish slaughter and the link to sexuality..?? I say again, WHAT????
The stories I remember best are the middle-aged woman who climbed part of Mount Everest (so cool!), the beautiful tale about Lovedu and a queen in Africa who collects wives (!!), the Jane Goodall excerpt, the pregnant woman (w0w), the butch who walks around the trail where those lesbians died, and the story about the hyena which I am never going to forget even though I might be better off doing so. Oh my gosh. I'm not really the type of person who likes/prefers tags when I'm reading something, I just like to dive in, but I read that story and I literally put it down at the end and thought, wow, I would have loved a Graphic Violence trigger warning. HOLY FRICK. I actually finished that story and went to the front of the book just to remind myself - just to be sure - that they are all true stories. And they are. What a haunting anecdote.
I feel terrible about that hyena. Like, you can really tell he bit her because he was going out of his mind with loneliness. he was raised all by himself, nobody, nothing to interact with. Awful what he did to her, literally bone-chilling, I mean literally, her bones were CHILLED, but I can't help but feel all twisted up about the hyena. I can't help but feel like humanity failed him.
As one would expect out of a compilation, some of these stories are better-written than others. It's a lot of excerpts, which always leaves me tantalized, like, c'mon! I wish it was more complete, you know?
But I loved reading from so many feminine perspectives in the wilderness!!!!! Would absolutely recommend!
It's a compilation of some thirty-odd anecdotes from different women traveling around the world. Many of these are unforgettable, whether you want to forget them or don't. What the heck was that about the tuna fish slaughter and the link to sexuality..?? I say again, WHAT????
The stories I remember best are the middle-aged woman who climbed part of Mount Everest (so cool!), the beautiful tale about Lovedu and a queen in Africa who collects wives (!!), the Jane Goodall excerpt, the pregnant woman (w0w), the butch who walks around the trail where those lesbians died, and the story about the hyena which I am never going to forget even though I might be better off doing so. Oh my gosh. I'm not really the type of person who likes/prefers tags when I'm reading something, I just like to dive in, but I read that story and I literally put it down at the end and thought, wow, I would have loved a Graphic Violence trigger warning. HOLY FRICK. I actually finished that story and went to the front of the book just to remind myself - just to be sure - that they are all true stories. And they are. What a haunting anecdote.
I feel terrible about that hyena. Like, you can really tell he bit her because he was going out of his mind with loneliness. he was raised all by himself, nobody, nothing to interact with. Awful what he did to her, literally bone-chilling, I mean literally, her bones were CHILLED, but I can't help but feel all twisted up about the hyena. I can't help but feel like humanity failed him.
As one would expect out of a compilation, some of these stories are better-written than others. It's a lot of excerpts, which always leaves me tantalized, like, c'mon! I wish it was more complete, you know?
But I loved reading from so many feminine perspectives in the wilderness!!!!! Would absolutely recommend!
May 7, 2024
This collection of short stories written by women travelers and nomads was certainly invigorating by nature. Many of the stories kept me on the edge of my seat. About a third of the way through however I started to realize that most of the stories were told by white American women. Not all by the end of the book. But it was the trend. I expected this book to hold more diversity in perspective, in nationality, in flavor. There were a couple stories also that followed a same trend of "I'm entitled and white, and I'm disappointed and struggling and so I'll behave like a bitch to my guides." What??!
I don't know, man. We got some Karens writing these short stories in here. But other than (maybe three) of these stories, the others were very well written and inspiring to me. I especially appreciated the amount of animal presence in these stories, the bears of the last chapter, the monkeys in Vietnam, The Pelican, Tracking Lessons, Skunk Dreams, Am I Blue, Among Chimpanzees (by none other than Jane Goodall), Lightning Strike.
My two favorite were "Am I Blue?" and "A Desert Affair", which strangely were back to back, but oh how I loved them.
All in all, time well spent regardless of the Karens. There are definitely some leads towards other books I want to read, women I want to research, and places I want to go next.
I don't know, man. We got some Karens writing these short stories in here. But other than (maybe three) of these stories, the others were very well written and inspiring to me. I especially appreciated the amount of animal presence in these stories, the bears of the last chapter, the monkeys in Vietnam, The Pelican, Tracking Lessons, Skunk Dreams, Am I Blue, Among Chimpanzees (by none other than Jane Goodall), Lightning Strike.
My two favorite were "Am I Blue?" and "A Desert Affair", which strangely were back to back, but oh how I loved them.
All in all, time well spent regardless of the Karens. There are definitely some leads towards other books I want to read, women I want to research, and places I want to go next.
October 14, 2025
I enjoyed most of these stories! I saw a few reviews that said they didn't feel connected with the wild, but I don't think that was the point of these stories, it was more feeling how these women immersed themselves into wild spaces and had good, bad, and exciting adventures. We should all be so lucky to get this close to nature!
I also loved reading a piece by Dr. Jane Goodall. she is so amazing!
I also loved reading a piece by Dr. Jane Goodall. she is so amazing!
April 12, 2018
The book begins slowly, crescendos into a wave of danger, excitement and survival, ending with an inspirational coda by Terry Tempest Williams. I would have preferred more of the second movement, that holds my attention best. Some of the early essays read like whining about first-world problems faced by privileged travelers.
December 28, 2020
5.5/10?
I think I liked more of these stories than I disliked, but the ones I disliked (the adventure tourism that lacked any kind of reckoning or acknowledgment) really soured the experience.
I think I liked more of these stories than I disliked, but the ones I disliked (the adventure tourism that lacked any kind of reckoning or acknowledgment) really soured the experience.
December 24, 2022
“At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.” -Annie Dillard
December 27, 2011
read in bits and pieces at the bf's mom's house. several of the stories are quite striking, and i dig the whole mystical-woman-jungle power and musings on solitude and strength and wildness. i think women are wilder creatures than men, and i mean that in a good way, so reading about women communing with nature is intriguing to me, but in a way that is hard to qualify. like i said, there's this slight air of mystical mumbo-jumbo that i rather enjoy. that being said, the collection is uneven and some of the stories are downright bo-ring.
February 25, 2016
I can't quite put my finger on why I am disappointed with this anthology. The essays were good enough. But none of them asked a question or left an impression that stayed with me, with the exception of the essay on flying. Well, here: I don't remember any of the places. I was not taken there--wherever--with the authors.
July 11, 2022
Wonderfully written and would be good for someone tougher than me!
I loved like two stories. Felt neutral about most. I know the wilderness is harsh, but there was a lot of cruelty in here that put me off. I ended this book feeling a little sick and depressed. Not the way I want to feel at the end of a read.
I loved like two stories. Felt neutral about most. I know the wilderness is harsh, but there was a lot of cruelty in here that put me off. I ended this book feeling a little sick and depressed. Not the way I want to feel at the end of a read.
July 3, 2007
I would NOT recommend this book except for 2 of the stories...one was about flying a plane and the other was about hang-gliding. The others were about fear and how it feels to be in horrible situations. I felt insulted.
January 28, 2010
This book was okay, but having been made up of short excerpts from other books, it just was not enough for me to really commit. I easily put it down and forgot about it. I did enjoy the last few stories, as they were more about adversity and strength of character.
June 18, 2012
Great short stories from lots of different women flying planes, driving jeeps, rafting, swimming, walking all over the world. I loved all the different locales, and the small moments in time described. Just right for 5-10 minutes of reading before bed.
Read
December 9, 2007Living vicariously through the lives of other really cool traveling women...
June 25, 2008
This was my "Book to read when camping"-a good choice because I could put it aside (sometimes for months) and then throw it into the backpack or duffel when I went out next.
May 29, 2012
I bought this book used because there was a kick ass inscription in it. And it sounded slightly interesting. Though there were a few good stories, I found it pretty disappointing.
March 8, 2013
I actually chose to dump this book. It's a set of short stories and as much as I want to like them, I don't. They just aren't that interesting so I'm not going to finish it.
June 10, 2013
this was soooo boring......did not have the adventures or connections that I expected from women!
July 20, 2013
Great adventures
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews