Customer Reviews

The Wet Collection

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This is a wonderful collection of essays, each looking at something different, but always finding the unusual in the usual. Occasionally the writing is almost poetic, but it is always strong and clear. A wonderful book to read straight through or to dip into from time to time.

The Wet Collection is a memoir anthology of essays drawn from the life experience of author Joni Tevis, and combined with her thoughts on natural history, ancient texts, folk heroes, and found objects. Part memoir, part literature, part measured opinion, and part research, The Wet Collection touches upon Tevis' adventures ranging from her summer spent working as a cemetery salesman to having to dress up as a beaver while serving the duty of a park ranger to the simple hardship of coping with homesickness. An atmospheric and deeply introspective tour of life, thought, and womanhood. "Maybe scraps are all we've ever had; threads of mycelium working through forest duff, a woman made from a crumb of clay. These fragments I have shared, these pieces I have squirreled away. I have wished for sharper ears to hear the rasp of wasp chewing wood into paper, to hear water pumping through the arteries of thin-barked beech trees. Have wished for a body more sensitive, to feel the slow swelling of yeasty lava that lifts the mountain a little more every day. Sometimes I swear I can feel the earth rising, bearing me up."

Sometimes you come upon a book and discover that it rocks. This is one of those times. The Wet Collection is quirky and beautiful and funny and solemn. The writing here is wonderful and the stories are compelling. This is a fantastic book--and one I'm so pleased to own.

Tevis weaves the familiar and the unexpected to create a fascinating collection of essays. Drawing on personal experience, intriguing historical background, and the wonders of the natural world, her writing often blurs the boundaries between prose and poetry. Intellectual inquiry and the human experience intersect to both intrigue and touch the reader. I highly recommend this book.

The writing in this collection is truly stunning. The book is made up of a series of essays that touch on a wide variety of subjects: natural history, history history, art and art making, geology, bible stories, personal and family history. What ties it all together is the writer's very idiosyncratic voice. You have the feeling of being in the company of someone who looks at the world very closely and sees things in totally unique and surprising ways.

This is nonfiction, but Tevis is not afraid to imagine herself into the experiences of all kinds of people, including her own grandparents, bibilical characharters, and a lone female homesteader farming near desert land in turn of the century Central Oregon. There are also some very funny moments, especially in the long essay about Tevis' summer job as a cemetery plot salesperson.

What really stands out is the writing. In my favorite essay, Tevis describes her grandfather, who worked another man's land all his life as having a deeper claim on that land than ownership: "And now I'll say that land was his, never mind whose name was inked on the deed. He signed his contract with nail-heads hammered flush..."

The writing is so good you will want to read slowly, and return to it, the way you would a book of poetry.

Joni Tevis is writer of relics. Her keen capacity to capture the depth of her ancestry, her past, the land, the animals and the history of all her travels makes her writing simultaneously nostalgic and new. She finds the family history of human to earth to animal. There is a great sense of unity as she speaks of the relics and legends of our day the past ones. It is rejuvenating to feel the connective tissue with past family, jars of animals long since bottled, beaches and all around us.

The Wet Collection is a beautiful compilation of essays that poignantly tell a beautiful history. She is somehow able to weave a thread through her life and all the beauties around her. Her connection to the land is gentle but brave. She powerfully articulates her respect and love for all the places and people with whom she connects.

The subtlety with which Tevis captures science, art, history, literature is astounding. The natural and every day world is the fabric with which she sews unique and bold patterns that her readers can see, smell, taste, and feel. Her work is so accessible and yet its intricacies bring a new found beauty and richness to all who open the pages of The Wet Collection. It doesn't stay on my bookshelf because I read it each night. It is that good. Don't miss out on a remarkable collection of essays that have never left me disappointed or unsatisfied. It is well worth you money, time, and energy. It will leave you better that it found you.

Joni Tevis is a naturalist with a unique gift for the personal stories surrounding artifacts and places. The Wet Collection is a thoughtful examination of the common elements that surround all of us, and stitches them together--using Tevis' own metaphor--to make something strikingly beautiful.
One of the most poignant stories in the collection centers on Tevis' experience working as a "pre-need" and "at-need" salesman for a cemetery. A woman selling plots at a cemetery finds herself in peoples' lives at their most vulnerable points, and her experience with that produces powerful reflections on her mortality and her ability--or inability--to confront death on a personal level every day.
"The Rain Follows the Plow" is a good example of a technique Tevis uses often: she follows the story of a woman unknown to history, interspersing it with tales of her own life that strike a parallel in surprising ways. By the end of the essay, the reader not only understands Tevis' connection to the unknown woman, but has made several connections to his or her own life.
Tevis employs imagery from nature and connects it to herself in intensely personal ways. Her themes range from the trivial--insects, car trips, shoes--to the profound--Biblical allusions, family relationships, and the meaning of home. Her collection of short essays will delight anyone with an appreciation for the natural world, especially those who have made plants, insects, and animals a careful study throughout their lives, as Tevis herself has done. Though this is her first book, Tevis displays a command of language that will have me waiting anxiously for her next publication.

The Wet Collection is remarkable.

In the title essay of the book Joni Tevis artfully establishes the premise for the collection. As she explains what is found in the basement of the natural history museum the phrase "parts taken without a whole" (pg. 6) helps the reader to understand that the essays stand as a part, but they are complete when joined in this collection. Each essay is very unique in its plot and also in the emotion that the essay conveys. However, each essay builds upon the last and at the end of the book there was a sense of satisfaction as if all the essays were placed where they would make the most impact. The progression of the combined essays creates a unique effect for the collection as a whole. Although most of the essays were published previously in other sources, reading through the book gives the reader a sense that the essays were written just for this book.

One of the most interesting things about The Wet Collection is the unusual style in which each essay is written. Joni Tevis arranges her words in a way that is meant to be spoken. When read through, the book is impressive, but when read aloud the essays become melodic, almost hypnotizing.

One of my favorite lines in the book was in the essay, "The Rain Follows the Plow" when the author reflects, "a constellation of events brought me to this place. What will I do with this hour?" (pg. 77) A common theme running through this book was the hope that comes with change. Whether through a personal experience of the author or exploring a historical figure, each essay shows how a character is able to succeed although they are placed in undesirable circumstances. The individual essays, for me, were wrapped into a book that encouraged the reader to hope and move forward even when challenges are present.

Joni Tevis is an excellent example of a hidden gem of a writer. Her short passages of creative non-fiction hold so much depth and perception it is no mystery why I am unraveled mindfully by her mysteriously inclusive reinterpretations. I fell down her wonderful rediscovery of the rabbit hole with her travels amongst commonplace states of mind and America that I did not know as she does. It is worlds Tevis is creating, miraging, masquerading as simple passages of literature. Yet whilst reading I levitate where she manipulates me to imagine deeper; fuller. The odd jobs she describes take on a wonder that gripped me and shook me to lyrical. She combines science, poetry, philosophy, and innovation so effortlessly, blinking would render reconsideration instead of missing out. The lay(wo)man needs moments of reflection to properly draw in her creativity. When you do inhale with intent though, Tevis does not disappoint. Her writing style has an effervescence and flexible that I did not find the transition from circus playgrounds to the not-too-sweetly sentimental assumptions of her unborn children to be jarring. She is a master of lingering for just the right amount of artfully incandescent stringing of words and omitting what goes unsaid equally craftily.

I had the great opportunity of hearing this sprite woman read selections from her collection of wet when she came to my university. She was at ease and in her element in front of ruddy-faced and captivated college students such as myself. Her reading is one I will not soon forget, especially when possessing her beautifully original masterpiece "The Wet Collection" inked with her nomenclature. I will treasure this book as much as the experiences it has stretched me to earning.

This is a beautiful book. Everyone should buy it. And then they should buy it for their friends, family, and people they don't know but surround them. Thought provoking, lyrical, and well-crafted. It shines as literature but is not heavy-handed. I loved it.