Price: $12 + $2s/h continental US
Check payable to:
Jane Wodening
1410 Quince St.
Denver, CO 80220Copyright by Jane Wodening 2000
Published by Baksun/Grackle Books of Colorado
Introduction by Merrill Gilfillan
FIRST PRESENCE by Jane Wodening "In the beginning, I was alone and there was the wind brushing the buffalo grasses and jerking creosote bushes around. I was content.
But then, some several creosote bushes over, I saw a lumpy darkness lumbering slowly through the buffalo grasses.
I rose to my feet. I'm not sure what I thought it was at first but when I walked toward it tentatively, I soon deciphered it - it was a desert tortoise of considerable size.
I moved very slowly. I tried to project a kindly image, gentle vibrations. The tortoise was huge, bigger by far than a man's head - perhaps the size of a steering wheel in circumference but then the thickness raised the top of it about a foot above the ground.
I got quite close and the tortoise seemed to stop moving in confusion. "Hey now, there now," I said, as I crouched to get down to his level.
And the eyes looked at me in a sort of horror. The claws seemed clumsy, ineffective; they didn't grasp the ground but only scrabbled and shoved him along. The shell was grand - sinfully, I wanted it for a salad bowl or a guitar. The desert tortoise is an endangered species and I had all the salad bowls and guitars I needed.
The eyes looked at me and I saw that it was I that was exotic.
He was primordial and he looked at me out of the days before our days and I found myself now kneeling at his side in some kind of penance." -- title story, "First Presence" "Jane's writing is everyday and familial, and somehow vaguely, comfortingly familiar in its unassuming first-person-with-shadow." -- Merrill Gilfillan, in the Introduction."In winter, Jane climbs into her cabin outside Nederland, Colorado, by way of a Dutch door, after snowshoeing four miles from her car. She reports the snowpack to the Weather Service and chats over amateur radio. She's one of the last great Morse code tappers." -- Peter Warshall, "Whole Earth""...most moving, elegant and heartful. Written in straightforward and lovely prose, it strikes me that this tale of a woman's growing relationship with a she-bear in the mountains above Boulder is a work of non-fiction masquerading as fiction....Fiction or non-fiction, 'The Bear' is a great story, quietly beautiful and full of wisdom." -- Clay Evans, "The Camera""The narration moves in clean, simple prose, through the daily activities that fill one's life, all the while weaving another level of the story -- the expansive sense of a universal activity." -- John Kellow, "Boulder Planet"