September 2, 2024

Learning to Love the World, One Crow At a Time

Margaret Renkl on her backyard year and the Reese’s Book Club 100th Pick, The Comfort of Crows.

Learning to Love the World, One Crow At a Time

Margaret Renkl on her backyard year and the Reese's Book Club 100th Pick, The Comfort of Crows.

Once upon a time, I taught high-school students the structure of Greek tragedies, the rhyme scheme of Shakespearean sonnets, the difference between the active and passive voice of verbs. I taught them these things, and many others, because the curriculum required it. What I really wanted to teach them was how to fall in love with literature. In my early days in the classroom, I just hadn’t quite figured out how to do it.

One day, teaching one of my own favorite poems, I turned from the blackboard to see the whole class smiling. Human emotional states are nearly always contagious, and they were responding as much to my enthusiasm as to the poem itself. That’s when it dawned on me that maybe the best way to teach my students how to fall in love with literature was simply to love it in front of them.

Decades later, long after I’d left teaching to be a full-time writer, social-media companies began to exploit the contagious nature of emotions. The longer we spend online, the angrier and sadder and more worried we become. Our young people are swimming in a cauldron of anxiety, and too often we adults — caught up in it, too — have not taught them reliable ways to find hope. To find peace.

As a rural child of the 1960s, I was free to explore the nearby world of fields and woods, free to walk barefooted in muddy creeks. In the beauty of nature, I learned, I could always find peace. In nature’s predictable cycles of renewal, I could always find hope. I don’t have time anymore to take a daily walk in the woods, but I still spend part of every day sitting on my back steps, listening to the birds.

I don’t know how many other people do that anymore. In this age of extreme busy-ness, it’s easy to forget how much pleasure comes from just sitting still and listening to the birds.

Human beings did not evolve to live at the pace of life in the 21st century. Our bodies want slow down, to live at the pace of a stride, a breath, a heartbeat. We evolved to live in tune with the creatures who share our ecosystems, but now, just when we need the natural world most, we’ve forgotten that we are a part of it ourselves.

Our own distance from it is part of why nature is in so much trouble today. The twin calamities of climate change and mass extinction are at least partly related to our own failure to remember that we are creatures, too. We belong to this world as surely as any bird or any fox or any turtle or any butterfly. We need wild things, and they need us.

Our own distance from it is part of why nature is in so much trouble today. The twin calamities of climate change and mass extinction are at least partly related to our own failure to remember that we are creatures, too. We belong to this world as surely as any bird or any fox or any turtle or any butterfly. We need wild things, and they need us.

Over the years, the more concerned I became about the dire emotional and environmental consequences of our separation from nature, the more I thought back to the days when I was trying to teach my students to fall in love with literature. I began to wonder if I could I get readers to love the natural world just by loving it in front of them, too. I wrote The Comfort of Crows because I know the natural world needs our help and because I know that feeling connected to nature will make us all feel better.

Threaded throughout are memories of my rural childhood, the early days with my husband, and our own sons’ younger years. This book about the changing seasons of the natural world is also a meditation on the changing seasons of human life. Because I am kin to the bumblebees and the garter snakes and the tree frogs, and I am kin to the crows.

You are, too.

Enjoy this peaceful moment in the serene Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, the setting of Once Upon A Time In Dollywood, taking in the day with author @AshleyJordanWrites herself! ✨

Throughout the book, Eve embarks on a journey of healing and self-discovery, ultimately embracing these mantras as truths about herself. 💙
Kicking off the week on a high note by finishing Once Upon A Time In Dollywood and getting ready to hear from @AshleyJordanWrites on the latest episode of Bookmarked, the Reese’s Book Club podcast. 🎧📖

New episode drops tomorrow — and trust us, you won’t want to miss this one. Expect all the feels: romance, stepping out of your comfort zone, and the journey of writing a debut novel. We're calendaring it in! 

Listen tomorrow on the @iHeartPodcast app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you love to listen!
"I hope you will also find that there is reassurance, maybe even a promise, whether you’re coming of age or not: that your anger is righteous and just. That the endurance with which you face the world is admirable. That your vulnerability, your longing to be wanted just as you are, is worthy." — @afarolfollmuth

To girls and women everywhere, we see you. 💙
Welcome to the club, Once Upon a Time in Dollywood. 💙

📷: @therealbookhustler
"You are important and you are powerful. Just as you are, in yourself, standing alone. Don’t let anyone, and especially no man, treat you as anything less."

We're still hung up on this iconic line from Stuck Up and Stupid. A fantastic reminder that you are worthy and certainly not stupid. 🩷
This weekend’s mood: resting, recharging, and rendezvousing with every iconic and authentic version of Cate Kay. 🧖‍♀️✨
This book gives us all the fireflies (iykyk) ✨ It's just so easy to ship Eve and Jamie in Once Upon A Time in Dollywood. We’re always here for the sunshine-and-stormcloud duo that just make each other better 🌤️💙
#ad This is your sign to slow your scroll ✨

Reese’s Book Club and Gevalia have partnered to help you slow down and find your calm with the perfect tools: delicious coffee and a good book. It’s time to reclaim a moment of joy. Give yourself permission to pause and head to our link in bio to shop Gevalia coffee.
✨ HOLD DOWN ✨ on this video for all the romance vibes and prepare to swoon!

And if you fell in love with the couples in Seven Days in June, Honey & Spice, or any of these titles, we promise you'll be obsessed with Eve and Jamie in Once Upon A Time In Dollywood. 💙
Enemies-to-lovers fans unite and add Honey & Spice to your TBR! ❤️‍🔥 Why is this trope truly the best? Sound off below!

📷: @chris.reads.a.lot