Finalist for the 2022 ASLE Book Award in Creative Writing

Sign Here If You Exist explores states of being and states of mind, from the existence of God to sense of place to adoptive motherhood. In it, Jill Sisson Quinn examines how these states both disorient and anchor us as she treks through forests, along shorelines and into lakes and rivers as well as through memories and into scientific literature.Each essay hinges on an unlikely pairing—parasitic wasps and the afterlife, or salamanders and parenthood—in which each element casts the other in unexpectedly rich light. Quinn joins the tradition of writers such as Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Eula Biss to deliver essays that radiate from the junction of science and imagination, observation and introspection, and research and reflection.

Jill Sisson Quinn is the author of Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscapeand in the Lifespan. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Natural History,Magazine and have been selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing2011 and Best American Essays2016. She has received numerous awards, including the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, a John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, and a Rona Jaffe ward.

 

Contents

Acknowledgments

Sign Here If You Exist

The Myth of Home

Metamorphic

Think Like a Mountain

Enskyment

Trespassers

Big Night

Begetting

Seeking Resemblance

Winner of the 2019 The Ohio State University Press "The Journal" Non/Fiction Prize