About
Novelist, poet, writer and teacher, Deena has been creating community with humans and more than humans through many forms for many years. She is the author of many books. including the novels: A Rain of Night Birds, La Negra y Blanca (PEN Oakland Award for Literature), The Other Hand, What Dinah Thought (reissued December 2024), Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing. Her classic writing book, Writing For Your Life, 1992, is still in print. Ruin and Beauty, New and Selected poems was published in 2009, her latest book of Poetry is The Burde of Light. Pending, 2025 is The Story That Must Not Be Told and (publication date unknown) Broken Lambs. Metzger co-edited Intimate Nature, The Bond Between Women and Animals, 1997, which pioneered the radical understanding that animals are highly intelligent and exhibit intent. She has been hosting Daré, community gathering on behalf of healing individuals, community and Earth since 1999 and has been teaching the Literature of Restoration since. 2012. She has convened ReVisioning Medicine since 2004, the gathering of medical people and medicine people to create healing practices which do no harm. The website, Literature of Restoration was established in 2023 to introduce a writing genre that inspires Earth and Spirit based cultures, sustaining all beings rather than leading to cultural dissolution and social violence. Her experiences with Elephants in the wild over twenty-five years are based on their spiritual agency and complex narrative communication. Some of that experience is chronicled in her latest novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire.
Featured Work
La Vieja: Journal of Fire
Who is La Vieja? When writer Deena Metzger first began to receive “inexplicable communications” from La Vieja, she knew very little about her. Over time it became clear that the old woman was a seer, seemingly real, but spirit-like, who had taken permanent residence in a fire lookout tower in the Sierras of California. Her watch there took on a great significance in this time of climate destruction, pandemic, and the possibility of the extinction of the natural world. There, La Vieja’s senses began to sharpen, turning toward a greater connection with the intelligence of the natural world, including the bears and the surrounding trees. Two other characters emerged from this contact: Lucas, a doctor who also loves to retreat to a little-used fire tower, and Léonie, a librarian/stonemason who has a lifelong dreaming connection to the Bears. The two meet and fall in love, and retreat to a similar forest world as their story becomes entwined with the world of La Vieja in an overlapping of realities. Part dream, part real, part memoir, Metzger’s La Vieja blurs the boundaries between human consciousness and animal consciousness, of imagination and reality, to create a “Journal of Fire,” a recording of the process of living with the constant threat of the destruction of the natural world. And yet, it finds hope by making new connections that lead us toward a liberation from human domination, toward renewal and a vision of the future where humans and the natural world are integral parts of a whole, intermingling and interdependent, where human nature and animal nature are inclusive of each other.
