Interview With Author Annette Naber – Pt. 1
Another Highland resident has joined the ranks of published authors, and I recently spoke to her to learn more.
“I am Annette Naber, I’m a retired clinical psychologist, and I teach nature related classes and workshops and retreats on my property in Highland, including foraging for edible and medicinal plants. And I’m also a writer and a photographer.”
“My first published book is “Seasons of a Wild Life.” It just was published at the end of October. It’s always difficult for me to say in one or two sentences what the book is about, because there’s so much in it. If I had to put it into one word, it’s probably about nature connection. But, nature connection through many different doorways – like some people connect to nature through being naturalists and observing the animals, the wildlife, the plants where they are; other people are activists, environmentalists, and that’s their strong connection to nature, defending nature; some people are connected to nature through nature deities, archetypes, symbolism, and so I’ve brought all of these ways of connecting into my book.”
She talked about how the project came together,
“Actually, writing a book has been a goal since I was in my 20s, but about four years ago, just before COVID hit, I decided to get serious about writing this book. And at first I really was writing just about living here in the Highlands, about nature, about the animals, about the plants, and then kind of extracting some of the metaphors, some of the lessons that nature teaches us. And then things started dropping in, into the book, that I decided needed to stay there, and one of those is the nature deities from around the world. And that’s sort of how our local space and experience of nature can really link up with internationally, cross culturally, the way people saw and experienced nature.”
“I mean nature forces are awesome and we are totally powerless and very, very small when a storm hits, a blizzard, a hurricane, a tsunami, and people from as far back as the Stone Age have, in their imagination, personified these powerful nature forces and turned them into deities or spirits. For example, you know, the Vikings’ Thunder God, or the West African Storm Goddess, or the Celtic Green Man, which really represented the life force in nature.”
“My chapters go from January to December, so I have 12 chapters. So each chapter has an exploration of how our ancestors, and how cultures around the world, looked at nature and imagined nature’s powers to be in the form of a personification, right?”
“ The other idea that also had to go into each chapter was, ‘How can we reduce our footprint? How can we live more lightly? How can we waste less? How can we consume less?’ So I was not shying away from the difficult issues like species extinction and global warming.”
“Another topic that was important for me to address was how much nature gives us. I mean, if you think about it, in the past, people got everything they needed from nature – their food, their drink, their medicine, their building materials, their clothing. And now, what do we do? We just go to the store and buy what we need, right? But we still take a lot from nature. So my question was an exploration of, how do we give back and how do we live in reciprocity with nature? So one of my chapters is dedicated to that as well.”
Ms. Naber will be performing a reading from her book Saturday, November 16th at Claire’s Café in Monterey at 3:00 pm, with complimentary pastries.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this story.
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