This book is so bad it killed my grandfather.

I’m kidding. Sort of.

I attempted to read an excerpt of Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls aloud as my Papi lay in a hospital bed back in April. I stopped when I realized it sort of rambled on and on and on and, well, you get the idea. A few hours later, he passed.

In the book’s defense, Papi was already heading in that direction, but I’m convinced it helped him along the way.

Some weeks later, I picked up the book again and found it a bit more interesting than I’d initially opined, and from one writer to another, I give author Billy Plant credit for self-publishing his own thoughts in book form. Even I haven’t mustered up the courage to do it.

Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls is a compilation of poems, stories and essays—some that go back as far as 2003 and others that are more recent—that deal with nature and various girls that have passed in and out of Plant’s life.

“I just always wanted something I could hold in my hand—a book of things that I wrote,” he said. “I got so many rejection letters that I decided I could just do it myself.”

He found lulu.com, a self-publishing site that could prove beneficial to other aspiring authors out there, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Plant, ironically enough, is a botanist by training (he is currently earning his master’s degree at MTSU) and has always enjoyed nature and the outdoors.

“My friend/roommate told me one day, ‘You just come out in the woods, and you catalog everything, but you don’t really experience it,’” Plant remembered.

“So I thought a lot about it, about spirituality or whatever that you can get from feeling connected with nature as opposed to just going out in it and trying to look at it from the biological standpoint.”

That, he says, is what one of his poems is about.

“It’s about feeling like you’re one with nature and one with the whole universe, as opposed to being separate from it,” he said.

In Field Biologist, Plant writes about loving Mother Earth and all represents her: “I examine the little blessings she leaves along my path:/Mushrooms, trillium, bloodroot, hickory trees/I think that there is something special in the salamander that crawls under the decaying leaves of the forest floor;”

He describes a sense of feeling “whole” and “Throwing all my field guides and training aside/The only thing I can identify is love.”

Plant began to document his self-discovery, something he found very therapeutic.

“There’s a whole message of hope in there, especially in the fall,” he said.

“A lot of things were written last fall, and I get pretty bad seasonal affective disorder, so that’s another thing I was trying to capture. When you go out in the woods and see nature, you get a message of hope. Even things that die in the winter, you know they’re going to come back again. It’s a cycle that maybe we can learn a lesson from.”

He also spoke of Virgin Falls, an essay that he describes as “a little dense, but it pretty much sums up my whole outlook on life in a lot of ways and the quest to try to stay positive and improve ourselves, but it also captures how easy it is for us to dip into the negative or revert to our old destructive habits.”

Plant’s words, both spoken and written, are (seemingly) endless streams of thought. He lists Edward Abbey and Gary Snyder as his influences, the latter of whom was applauded for similar writing styles.

His personal thoughts are very meaningful to him, but I found it difficult to follow, as I feel he has a tendency to ramble. On the other hand fans of authors like William S. Burroughs and Jean-Louis “Jack” Kerouac might find Plant’s works thought-provoking and interesting. Obviously, every story in every book ever written is perceived differently, depending on the reader.

Plant’s intentions are good—he aims to connect with readers while helping them through a self-discovery of their own.

He says, “I hope they can look in it and find things, find a message that they can relate to, maybe see stuff written out in words that they’ve felt or thought before, but never attempted to verbalize on their own. So ideally, it would be a book that people carry with them everywhere they go.”

Most importantly, Plant says he wants readers to discover a sense of hope from Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls.

“I hope that it’s a collection of thoughts that people can relate to, carry with them and maybe even get a message of hope out of it because there’s obviously some pretty dark thoughts in there,” he said. “But dark thoughts aren’t the purpose of living, they’re just one thing that adds up to character. And ultimately, even while we’re having the dark thoughts, we know there’s a message there—a light at end of tunnel, a message of hope.”

FYI
Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls is available at Hastings, amazon.com and billyplant.blogspot.com.

Billy Plant will be at a local authors event at 2 p.m. on Saturday, June 18, at Barnes & Noble at The Avenue Murfreesboro.