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Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner is a naturalist, writer and artist based in Seattle. She is the author of THE NATURALIST AT HOME: Projects for Discovering the Hidden World Around Us and NATURE OBSCURA: A City’s Hidden Natural World from Mountaineers Books, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and Pacific Northwest Book Awards. She writes articles about natural history and has bylines in Crosscut, Popular Science, National Wildlife Magazine and others. On the side she writes fiction.

But the insect-world is altogether a world of goblins and fairies: creatures with organs of which we cannot discover the use, and senses of which we cannot imagine the nature; creatures with myriads of eyes, or with eyes in their backs, or with eyes moving about at the ends of trunks and horns; creatures with ears in their legs and bellies, or with brains in their waists! If some of them happen to have voices outside of their bodies instead of inside, the fact ought not to surprise anybody.

Lafcadio Hearn

Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy-swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness; --but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilised their paradise,-- substituting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous, that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed.

Lafcadio Hearn - Insect Literature