ABOUT THE BOOK

To listen to the wild is to open ourselves not only to the language of nature but also to the depth of our animality for it is there we find hope and healing.  The Gods of Wild Things is memoir-in-flash, a collection of seventy-three individual flash essays about how I learned to listen to wild things and horses and in turn overcome depression and drug addiction.
 
My journey listening to wildness began at a young age when horses and the hollows of Appalachia were my safety nets from the chaos of the world. As I got older, I succumbed to depression and drug addiction, prevalent in Appalachia. In an attempt to get clean and find a life, I fled to California to work as a horse trainer. There, with the help of horses and nature, I found myself and my sobriety. Doing so did not come without struggles, however. There were times when breaking colts required me to break parts of myself. Eventually the business of training horses ate at my soul, so I quit. For twelve years, I didn’t get on a horse, but at the age of forty I returned to horses and the hollows of Appalachia. In that return, I found myself again.
 
This book is about coming to terms with myself through the healing medicine of horses.  It complicates what it means to be wild by finding wildness not just in alpine meadows and dark jungles but if we learn to listen, in the everyday, the mundane, and deep within ourselves just beneath the programming.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

After spending the first part of his life starting colts and training wild and "problem" horses for various ranches in Ohio, Georgia, and California, Ned Weidner transitioned into academia where he earned a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Claremont Graduate University. There he researched the cultural politics surrounding wildlife management in California.  Even as an academic, he never strayed too far from all things wild.

Currently he is a professor of English and the former chair of the English, Literature, and Creative Writing department at Mt. San Antonio College in Southern California.  He is the founder of Wildness Within, a wilderness empowerment community for men of all ages designed to connect them to their purpose through embodied nature immersions.  He is also the author of multiple academic and creative nonfiction works. You can read more of his work in Still: The Journal, The Write Launch, Configurations, Senses and the City, The Backcountry Journal, Brushfire Literary and Arts Journal, Medium, and on his personal website. His memoir, which describes his journey through addiction and depression with the help of wilderness and horses entitled, The Gods of Wild Things is currently under review. 

I am not from anywhere.  I am of the rivers. I am of the mountains. Of the hollows. The animals who have made me. I am of the horse, the dog.  I am of the wild.