Jeff Vandermeer and the Creative Nature of Nature

Nature is Jeff Vandermeer’s best friend. That doesn’t mean it can’t also be his main inspiration for some seriously creepy stuff. The setting of his hit novel Annihilation is based on St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge, practically in his backyard of Tallahassee. It has everything—eagles, deer, alligators, dolphins that may or may not have human eyes. And most importantly, people interacting with them. Seeing an eagle might not be inherently scary, but if you’re unused to the outdoors and get startled, you will be getting the fright of your life!

St. Mark's

        Vandermeer loves to play off the connection between humans and nature—we need to our environment nice and healthy to make it through climate change. It also needs us to not mess it up. As we have very much NOT been doing. Even that aside, though, we need nature because nature is cool. Sure, it may tear your face off whether you take a wrong step or do everything right, but that spontaneity is part of its magnetism. And in the Southern Reach series (of which Annihilation is the first book), there is a whole agency dedicated to unravelling the mysteries of this contradiction—it certainly doesn’t help that the plot of land in question is augmented by some weird supernatural-who-knows-what. In the end, though there are no neat answers: the remaining characters, through experiencing its perils, have to learn to accept it for what it is at face-value (hence the title of the third book, Acceptance).

Taking it as it comes is another facet of Vandermeer’s creative process: he often has storms of prolific writing, then not at all. He’s just learned to deal with that, and make do in the meantime. Those periods often provide plenty of fuel, though: the iconic wall writing from Annihilation literally appeared to him in a fever dream and spawned the entire novel from there. Coincidentally, that’s what reading his books feel like—being on cold medicine whilst stranded in a ditch. In a good way!

He hallucinated almost ALL of this text

            

        You'll notice that I haven’t shown an author photo yet. That is because I needed this to be the first and last picture of Jeff Vandermeer you see. This isn’t an author photo or anything, but he just posts things like this sometimes. It cries out to be seen.

Evil.

 

Interviews of Note:

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/can-jeff-vandermeer-save-us-from-extinction

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/interview-jeff-vandermeer/

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vandermeer_interview_2014/