The Wild Ethics of Maternal Presence has returned. The first printing vanished more quickly than I expected and sold out, so a second print was done and orders are open once again.
The Wild Ethics of Maternal Presence is Book IV in Dancing in the Backwoods, a now six-book series that shares certain terrain with anti-civilization thought, green anarchism, ferality, et the long critique of domestication, yet emerged through a rather different atmosphere. Une autre sensibilité. Une autre cadence.
I had not picked up Backwoods Journal, nor John Zerzan’s Against Civilization, Henri Zisly, nor even Michel Serres in quite some time. What I did return to, the aforementioned, along with dearest vincent, Bellamy, and a handful of others, reminded me that my own perspective breathes in very different air. Not because the questions are different, but because the emphasis is. The instincts are. The textures are.
The divergence had been there for years. Long before I ever thought of writing these books. Part of it emerged from nearly thirty years spent mothering wild things. Children, certainly, but also animals, friendships, gardens, houses filled with movement, contradiction, laughter, departures, returns, et conversations across three continents that wandered long past midnight. Nearly thirty years spent accompanying lives as they unfolded into themselves. Not directing, correcting, or managing, but accompanying. Observing. Participating. Living inside the peculiar climate that forms whenever lives intermingle long enough to mark one another. C’est une drôle d’école, tout de même.
My own path, my own view, is neither critique nor variation, but a personal cosmology born less from theory than from decades spent inhabiting a particular form of life. One concerned with taste, discernment, intimacy, distance, sovereignty, embodiment, gesture, disappearance, and the subtle ways living impress on one another outside the
languages of management, morality et social obligation.
These books share a terrain with anti-civilization thought, yet arrive there by a different path entirely. Through kitchens rather than manifestos. Through bedrooms, gardens, friendships, births, departures, bodies, and the long consequences of sustained intimacy. Experience before theory, atmosphere before conclusion, une certaine proximité before abstraction. The questions may sometimes be similar, but to me, the sensibility is not.
Birth. Proximity. The strange density that accumulates after decades of shared life, when many lives have quietly altered one another simply by remaining in orbit…
Rather than approaching motherhood as role, virtue, sacrifice, or destiny, these writings begin from a simpler observation: long before values are explained, lessons delivered, or identities assumed, lives are already impressing themselves upon one another through exposure. Through rhythm. Through repeated contact. Through the climate created by familiarity.
The is not a book about parenthood, motherhood, at least not in the conventional sense. It is about what prolonged nearness does to living beings. The subtle transmissions that occur through exposure. Through shared rhythms. Through the accumulations left behind when lives remain entangled for years.
Moving through parenthood without sentimentality and relation without obligation, Wild Ethics follows those transmissions as they pass between bodies sharing a life. What emerges is neither pédagogie nor inheritance, but a feral ethic of proximity, a way of accompanying one another without domination, disappearance, or performance. Curiously enough, these ways of being feel no less urgent now than when I first began circling them.
Across the books sections, presence becomes contact, and contact becomes consequence. What survives is not a lesson. It is a trace carried forward without intention. Une résonance.
The book offers no model, no program, and certainly no redemption. It is an exploration of sovereign nearness, living transmission, and the strange ways lives continue shaping one another long after explanation has failed.
I am delighted to see readers finding this constellation. The first printings have now disappeared one by one, and each volume returns in a larger second print run as the series continues to wander outward, doucement, à sa manière.
Orders for The Wild Ethics of Maternal Presence are open once again:
