Sleeping with the Lights On: The Urban Winter Crow Roost and What Happens When Nature Reaches for Us

Jeremy Hauck
February 21, 2019

In the sky over the rush-hour congestion on Manheim Pike, they take on the grandeur of a natural event, just beyond the range of dashboard and light pole, of golden arches and Coca Cola bottling plant. It was only after I began commuting to my present job that I took notice of this nightly gathering of murders (murder of murders? mass murder?) of American crows during the winter. Until then, I had always backgrounded the crows into the urban tapestry, with the squirrels and sparrows and gingko trees.

Crows over Manheim Pike, during my evening drive home

Each individual crow flies in an idiosyncratic manner, in its own space; some stop, either as individuals or in small groups, stubborn to leave certain tall trees. Others fly against the great current of wings, or obliquely to it. Some of the birds caw out while others fly in observant silence. Heads swiveling, they scan the landscape. But the shape of all of them together moves purposefully in one direction.

Last winter, I decided to check it out, to follow them. I got my family and we got in the car and we . . . we went to the mall?

Creating our own Wild Lot, or what we’ve been doing, 2018

Wild Lot
December 27, 2018

Our idea for starting a press originated about 10 years ago, when Sonja dreamed up a plan to create a writing retreat, located in some remote-but-accessible corner of the country (far enough away from it all to see the stars at night, but close enough to urban settings for access to airports, train stations, and urban/academic communities). We hadn’t even met, yet, but when we did finally meet at grad school and work together on the literary journal, the idea quickly gained traction, growing to include a publishing component, and eventually named “Wild Lot.” Although specifics of the plans have changed over the years, the goal has basically remained the same: to contribute beautiful and valuable publications and to provide an affordable and idyllic setting for fledgling and pedigreed authors and other creatives to do nothing else but focus on their craft, while allowing us to do the same.

And the Rust Shall Rule and the Dust Shall Rule: Reading/Living the Anthropocene

Jeremy Hauck
March 25, 2018

It was June, 1992. My sister and I were out of school and our grandparents took us on an epic road trip out west, to see the same places they had seen on road trips in the 1950s and 1960s. They had bought a motorhome, a Tioga, not a big one but still a proper motorhome, with its own bathroom and two beds, one of which folded back into the kitchen table by day. We set off from southwest Ohio and headed south.

First was Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, then Texarkana, Waffle Houses, KOA campgrounds, the desert, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, where the bats swarmed at dusk, the Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, McKittrick Canyon, Gila National Forest. Between hiking through caves or woods or desert during the day and playing UNO in the evening, we would hit the open road, advancing along the meticulous itinerary Grandpa had typed up. I sat up front with the road atlas—the little copilot. Between cactus, canyon, and sand dune, we would encounter the abandoned settlements of lost civilizations, even as the Anthropocene was taking flower.

The Wild Spaces of Children’s Stories

Sonja Crafts
January 25, 2018

Willy Wonka “discovers” the exit from the black and white room.

The portal — a secret opening or entrance to a fantastical world, starkly different from the ordinary world that surrounds us — is found everywhere in children’s literature and film. It serves as an escape route from the mundane, and the magic of the world beyond the portal is often underscored by the drabness or unhappiness of the real world that precedes it. Examples abound: from the claustrophobic black-and-white patterned room (and, of course, Charlie’s life of poverty) that leads toward the candy-filled wonderland in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the colorless farm scenes and harrowing tornado that brings us to Oz, and of course the foreboding old mansion that the children evacuate to during World War II that houses the magical wardrobe/secret entrance to Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Most children will instantly relate to the thrill of discovery that Charlie and Dorothy and Lucy feel when they first set foot in these wonderlands, despite the fact that this is something — entering a fantastical world through a magic passage — no one in real life can actually experience. So why is this feeling so recognizable?