Catherine Puckett

Catherine Puckett has published fiction in Many Mountains Moving, and nonfiction nature/creative nonfiction essays in magazines, newspapers, and literary journals. Two more recent nonfiction creative nonfiction nature essays are “Beauty and the Beast,” an essay about women, mythology, culture, and eastern diamondback rattlesnakes, which was published in the book Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature’s Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species. Another essay, “Santa Fe,” was published in 2018 in the journal Collateral.

Her educational background is in wildlife ecology, journalism, and (later) creative fiction and nonfiction writing. In science, she studied wildlife ecology, specializing in herpetology, particularly tortoises, crocodilians, and (on occasion) snakes, and has also studied alligators and crocodiles in Florida, Venezuela, and Belize. Catherine is currently working on a book of essays, a memoir.

The Language of Birds

Renata stares at the electric knifefish and eel exhibit at the New Orleans Aquarium. She thinks that if she knew there would be passion in heaven and that heaven existed, the whole thing would be easier to bear. Marital dissatisfaction, she suspects, is one of the great underlying reasons for belief in an afterlife. She grips four-year-old Noah’s hand so he can’t wander away again. Noah is quick and curious, like she was as a child, and because he is like her, she already hurts for him.
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