Not Interested by Sarah Dunphy-Lelii
Editor-in-chief Jennifer A. Howard on today’s bonus flash: “Not Interested” by Sarah Dunphy-Lelii is a beautiful reminder that everything—everything in the natural world in particular—remains a subject of proper wonder in the hands of a writer who refuses to be underwhelmed. As an editor, this essay compels me to promise never to be disenchanted with heliotropism. Tell me again, tell me more, about glacier mice.
Not Interested
I read a call for pitches, from a literary journal keen on wildlife writing, and discover a longish list of topics they do not want to hear about. Please don’t send us writing on these, the editors say, enough already. On the list are glacier mice and wild hamsters, cane toads and moodjar trees and heliotropism. Also tundra lichen, and white rhinoceroses. This last I can understand. I myself have a story about a white rhinoceros, which I won’t share. Cane toads are one of those species brought in to prey on something we didn’t like and who are now an overwhelming pest themselves. But who are the throngs who want to write about lichen? Or maybe only one does (did) and that’s really the limit right there. I’ve never thought of glacier mice and suddenly like to imagine them; are they one of these touchstone species for global climate change, now become too political for beauty? Neither had I heard of permafront viruses, but holy nightmares, now I have. Polyergus rufescens ants are on the list, which seems very specific. It is a slave-making ant, unable to feed itself or take care of its own young, and thus relies on the forcefully subjugated ants of a different species to perform these tasks. The slaves are captured as infants, and outnumber their captors 5-to-1. You can see how there would be lots to say about this, both practical and metaphorical, with some rather low-hanging fruit in social politics. Apparently it’s all been said.
Giant sables I figured were some kind of overgrown mink, but they turn out to be an antelope that lives in Angola, so beloved that the country stamps them on its visas and its airplane tailfins. Still they are endangered though, maybe because they choose to eat only the delicate herbs that grow on termite mounds (which are also on the list). Males are quite aggressive but, to avoid doing any real damage, they battle each other while kneeling. Their horns are stunning, and grow five feet long. This kneeling, and the bit about the herbs, makes me take up my pen, in love. Their scientific name is hippotragus niger, which adds to their gravitas, their weighty surveyance of the vanishing grassland.
Less so the unfortunate upupa epops, which is really worth saying aloud. They don’t live in the Americas and so are new to me, with their ridiculous head crests of exactly 28 feathers, and their gorgeous wings. They were a symbol of virtue in Persia, and of the king’s sons in ancient Egypt. For Estonians they are omens of cattle death; the Torah describes them as Not Kosher. Unlike the sable they don’t hold back, and rivals both male and female can blind each other with their beaks, when things get heated. The first part of their name comes from hoopoe, which goes back a long ways, and in many language traditions, to mimic the sound they make, a gentle whoopwhoopwhoop I’ve now played many times on my computer. On the first expedition up Mt. Everest the team discovered one already there, at twenty-one thousand feet. When not at altitude, they enjoy taking sand baths.
The list goes on, of things I’ve now written about, though I was asked not to. There are maybe a lot of reasons to be on the list: if you’re popular, if you’re unpopular, if you’re too easily a metaphor, if you’re boring. You might think you’d avoided all those categories with mammal fluorescence, but you’d be wrong. Don’t write to us about fireweed or sage grouse or fences, say the nature editors. Don’t write to us about wild horses.
Sarah Dunphy-Lelii has been teaching psychology at Bard College for 16 years, working with undergraduates (in upstate New York), preschool-aged children (in her research), and wild chimpanzees (in Kibale, Uganda). Her academic writing has appeared in journals including the Journal of Cognition and Development, Folia Primatologica, and Scientific American; her creative nonfiction writing appears in Plume, The Common, Dogwood, CutBank, Unbroken, and elsewhere. Her website is sarahdunphylelii.me.
