by Alice Irene Whittaker
FREEHAND BOOKS
2024/$24.95/300 pp.
Subtitled “A quest to care for myself and the earth,” Alice Whittaker’s debut, Homing, is a memoir, an exegesis of eco-practices, a call to action, a confessional and a guide. Whittaker filters her account of moving to a rural cabin in Quebec with her husband, eventually three children, and many pets, as well as her research interviews with farmers, naturalists and sustainability renegades through her own fractured narratives of perfectionism, eating disorders, injury and OCD/ADHD. The question that begins the book almost concludes it as well, a query at the core of so many inhabitants of our fragmented, toxic, fast-paced world: “What would it take me to love myself enough that I began to take care of myself?”
Whittaker serves as a witness to the beauty of life around her, celebrating its imperfections, but she struggles relentlessly to release her attachments to achievement. As a former dancer, she’s challenged by her own rigidity, a workaholicism of the flesh. Homing is a record of her quest to understand where true foundations reside: in nature, family, in connections to others also striving to shape another kind of reality. She travels far to speak to builders of straw-bale homes, those who run tool libraries, clothing recyclers and creators of fibre sheds. One of the most compelling of these encounters is with Hunter Lovins, an economist–rancher who brings hard hope to environmental conflict by showing evidence of what can be accomplished with visionary work: “We know how to solve this energy crisis,” he says, pointing to “regenerative agriculture… pulling carbon out of the air by putting it back into the soil.” Interviews are woven into Whittaker’s own journey, in which she battles with personal and maternal joys and struggles. At times her tone is intimate, as when she is “smelling the inside” of her newborn child’s sleeper, burying a placenta or “tasting the saltiness” of her son’s tears. Other times she recounts the regular (though comprehensible) return to her feelings of panic, anxiety or fear, which overwhelms any focus on case study acts of ecological transformation.
In the book Whittaker aims to enact an organic whole, encompassing her travels, work life, familial lineage, belief systems and even occasional anthropomorphized encounters with a host of animals, as when ravens “act out witchy scenes.” Written in the lyrical manner of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Annie Dillard or even Mary Oliver, Whittaker attends to natural details with adoring precision, aiming to give us a sense of connectivity and thus real dreams of a future beyond scenarios of defeat. As she propounds: “I do not want to numb myself for the apocalypse, rather I want to be awake for the revolution.”
Catherine Owen is the author of 17 books of poetry and prose.
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