Beware in the Nature Reserve....! Mari Howard
Speckled Wood “As writers, as a group, readers of this blog take words and their meanings seriously." Life in the world beyond books, blogs, and articles, however, demonstrates that large numbers of people don’t. Take the heading ‘NATURE RESERVE’ on a notice: is this a place set aside to provide a safe and suitable habitat for wildlife, native plants, trees, maybe a wetland area? A location where a handful of rare species have been seen to hang out? Even the slow worms in our 7-hectare local nature reserve are counted to make sure they are doing okay. Or is it, as a runner recently put it, ‘just a place for everyone, and dog-walking…’ As fiction writers, we’re in the business of creating both environment and inhabitants, which will include inhabitants who don’t think like ourselves, and environments we’d find strange, hostile, uncanny, as well as beautiful, welcoming, or exciting. Possibly more often than not these environments will indeed be in the negative, at least for...