September 27, 2024
“Woman in the Woods,” published in The Bitter Southerner, made this week’s Top 5 list at Longreads.
Amid a scene of spring flowers, amid vibrant color and promise, a woman lays dead of blunt force trauma. This is how Holly Haworth introduces us to 22-year-old Lakin Riley, who was murdered and discovered in a wooded area in Athens, Georgia, in early 2024. The juxtaposition in the opening paragraph between natural beauty and a horrific, needless death stopped me short. Riley’s story is just the beginning; Haworth litanizes several women of varying ages found dead in forested areas across America—all victims of violence, nearly all murdered by men. As a naturalist Haworth is drawn to the patterns she notices in the woods. Recognizing that during her walks she could very easily stumble on the body of a murdered woman is a particularly sobering observation. “As I foraged murders like a terrible, bitter fruit that is always in season, and collected them onto the page, it was clear that women found dead in the woods are all part of an ecology of gendered violence,” she writes. As she considers what it means to be a woman in the woods—a place where she sought refuge from the men and boys in her life who exerted “verbal, psychological, sexual, and physical violence” against her—she knows she has less to fear from venomous snakes, bears, and mountain lions than from encountering a man, a different kind of predator altogether.
Big thanks to Longreads for reading my work.