Project Description

Woman in the Woods

for The Bitter Southerner—

The week police found her dead in the woods, the woods were coming alive. It was late February, that tender time when the canopy has yet to leaf but ephemeral flowers speckle the forest floor. Under the trees, soft light pouring in: rue-anemone, round-lobed hepatica, trillium, bloodroot. And a woman’s body, dead of blunt-force trauma.

Twenty-two-year-old Laken Riley was murdered in Athens, Georgia, where I live. Her death sparked a national conversation — not about the ongoing horror of gendered violence, but about the suspect’s immigration status.

A naturalist and forager, I look for patterns. To me, the woods are an intricate tapestry in which I always try to see the bigger picture. The bloodroot that pushed through the soil and unfurled in bright, blooming patches the week of Riley’s murder grows on slopes above creeks, in rich, well-draining soil, where it’s cool at night and slower to warm in the morning. What keeps me walking in the woods is seeing how one thing is connected to another, which is also the work of being a writer. Most women who are murdered are not murdered in the woods, but after Riley was found on a trail in the woods that I often walk alone as a woman, it’s the pattern I saw as I trod through a terrible thicket of stories.

Continue reading at The Bitter Southerner… 

{photos by Rinne Allen}