Sign Here If You Exist and Other Essays

by Jill Sisson Quinn

Overview

Finalist for the 2022 ASLE Book Award in Creative Writing

Sign Here If You Exist explores states of being and states of mind, from the existence of God to sense of place to adoptive motherhood. In it, Jill Sisson Quinn examines how these states both disorient and anchor us as she treks through forests, along shorelines and into lakes and rivers as well as through memories and into scientific literature.Each essay hinges on an unlikely pairing—parasitic wasps and the afterlife, or salamanders and parenthood—in which each element casts the other in unexpectedly rich light. Quinn joins the tradition of writers such as Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Eula Biss to deliver essays that radiate from the junction of science and imagination, observation and introspection, and research and reflection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814278062
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	08/28/2020
Series:	The Journal Non/Fiction Prize
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	186
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

  Jill Sisson Quinn is the author of Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscapeand in the Lifespan. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Natural History,Magazine and have been selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing2011 and Best American Essays2016. She has received numerous awards, including the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, a John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and a Rona Jaffe ward.

   

Read an Excerpt

This lake believes it is the ocean. It speaks the same language—a tongue like wind, the only word an unceasing sibilance. Ring-billed gulls search for arthropods and fish, wings bent earthward at the wrists like paper airplanes made by smart boys. Their calls split the air, which smells cleanly of decay, brackish without the salt. Low, whitecapped waves of varying lengths in multiple rows strike shore like strings of Morse code. It isn’t only the water that is unreadable. The sky scours the land for some kind of text, but the beach is covered in a sheet of sun-bleached Cladophora, algae woven by waves into one giant page. All it gives is confirmation of the rules in a childhood game: Paper covers rock, it says.

This is Lake Michigan. A crowded cedar forest, bark the color of kiwi skin shredding in long strips, opens to white dolomite bluffs. The only garbage, deflated party balloons— their once-bold foil colors now weather-muted—dot the cliff bottom. Happy Anniversary! they say to some distant individual. A chair that seems to have made its own self—legs, seat, arms, and back composed of the same angular white stones as the bluff—secures the shore.

I descend the accidental steps from our campsite, here at Wisconsin’s Rock Island State Park, following my husband. Like a single animal we track along the shore; I, the hind legs, place my boots in exactly the spot his foot has just risen from. Suddenly it seems as if the mud-brown strap of his sandal has jumped off and is slithering toward the water. “Snake!” I yell. For a moment, mid-step, he straddles the animal, which has spun around to face us. Then with a high arc he safely rejoins his feet and turns to observe. The snake is a northern water snake, not an unusual inhabitant for a lake but a stranger to the ocean. Yet even the snake seems to be part of the ruse. His brown banding is barely visible, as if he is trying to camouflage himself within himself. He has curled into the infinity symbol. I want to believe what the snake says, that this water goes on forever, but I have learned to see the snake as a warning.

The first time I camped along a Great Lakes shoreline was in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. From sandstone cliffs I stared down two hundred feet at water the green of oxi- dized copper. Lake-bottom stones, their size diminished by distance, stared back at me through the deeply transparent water like coins in a shopping-mall fountain. Water spilled through narrow nooks in the cliff tops and fell in powerful, gradually widening streams directly into Lake Superior as in the introduction to the ’80s TV show Fantasy Island. When I sent pictures and wrote about the trip to friends and fam- ily, I mistakenly called the place “Pictured Rocks National Seashore.” Where is this seashore? my friends asked. Oops— lakeshore, I retyped. I couldn’t help feeling like it was a down- grade. But more than that, I was surprised at the ease with which I, an east coaster, had made the error.

What would it be like to meet this lake on its own terms, having traveled no more than to and from its own shores— oceans, at best, a distant mythos? I wish to be indigenous to every place I visit, to see it as Earth entire. How nice it would be to shed the compulsion to compare one landscape to another, to analyze, evaluate. To simply hear what the land says. To no longer have to choose or love or hate, to let down my guard and feel the power of the sea in this Great Lake.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Sign Here If You Exist

The Myth of Home

Metamorphic

Think Like a Mountain

Enskyment

Trespassers

Big Night

Begetting

Seeking Resemblance

Editorial Reviews

[These are] beautifully detailed pieces.… A natural choice for folks who enjoy memoirs similar to Late Migrations (2019), by Margaret Renkl, and Lab Girl (2016), by Hope Jahren.”—Kathy Sexton, Booklist (starred review)
 

​“Quinn’s parallel explorations are uniformly thought-provoking, effectively connecting often unrelated themes.… Her lyrical sense of discovery and wonder may draw comparison to writers like Annie Dillard.… Engaging, insightful musings at the intersection of natural science and spiritual exploration.” —Kirkus Reviews


 

“Quinn’s gentle, profound observations, which often arise from time spent hiking on trails or watching wildlife, draw organic, convincing links between the natural world and her own life.…
Putting self and nature under the microscope, Sign Here If You Exist illuminates both.” —Rebecca Foster, Foreword Reviews
 

“With supple phrasing and nimble mind, Quinn shows us that the grit of the natural world doesn’t just evoke a philosophical spirit but embeds it. The result is that exacting descriptions and knotty conundrums are richly fused in these marvelous essays.” —Barbara Hurd, author of Listening to the Savage

“Quinn’s prose—burnished by her deep knowledge of the natural world and by the honesty and eloquence with which she shares her fears and desires—knocks me flat. Nature, she shows us, is both magnifying glass and mirror. Through wasps and rocks and salamanders, we may better know our own strange selves. Quinn plants her muck boots in no one’s footsteps.” —Mary Roach, author of Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“Quinn, like Thoreau, is an explorer and namer of things, always curious, giving equal attention to the worlds inside and outside of us. Her voice is at once poetic and scientific—exactly what we need in today’s overheated world.” —David Gessner, author of Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness

From the Publisher

2020-05-17
A nature writer reflects on existential ideas while exploring backwoods landscapes near her Wisconsin home.

In this deeply introspective collection of essays, Quinn applies her scientific knowledge to local wildlife phenomena that have inspired her to reflect on spiritual and evolutionary questions. In the title essay, one of the standouts, the author investigates the life cycle of giant ichneumon (parasitic) wasps while pondering the existence of God in relation to evolution and natural selection, questioning how either may serve the possibility or assurance of an afterlife. In “Enskyment” she focuses on the vultures that roost near her church while considering the relevancy of religious teachings and practices. Throughout, Quinn’s parallel explorations are uniformly thought-provoking, effectively connecting often unrelated themes—though “Metamorphic,” her study of rock formations in relation to the expansiveness of human sexuality, doesn’t quite hold up to the rest. Though not interconnected initially, the final few essays loosely track the author’s experiences leading up to the adoption of her son, a process that “seemed at times rather cold-blooded. Mechanical. Deliberate. Too conscious.” Quinn demonstrates a graceful prose style, and her lyrical sense of discovery and wonder may draw comparison to writers like Annie Dillard. “There is much we cannot see, in the ecosystem and in ourselves,” she writes. “Perhaps when we look both outward and inward, we need to use only the coarse focus and increase our field of view, because what at first appears blurry may be actually the truest version of a thing. We are more than the amalgam of genes and memes we imagine ourselves to be; we have pigeonholed the soldiers in the nature-nurture squabble too narrowly….We have been thinking of ourselves as persons, when we are more like the land. I see the pond; therefore, I see the muskrat. And the snapping turtle. And me.”

Engaging, insightful musings at the intersection of natural science and spiritual exploration.

Kirkus Reviews