About
What is a Wilderness Interface Zone?
In resource management parlance, a Wilderness Interface Zone or Urban/Wilderness Interface Area is a transition zone at the edge of a wilderness area where native wildland plants and animals mesh with people, their domesticated animals, and human activities and creations—buildings, streets, gardens, etc.
Officially, a “wilderness area” is an area Congress designates as wilderness by virtue of that area’s meeting criteria established in the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Unofficially, wilderness can be any place in nature where humans live with some degree of interaction with wild species and natural landscapes or where people sally forth to enjoy contact with the natural beauties of the earth.
Metaphorically, a WIZ could be any point or area of interaction where the well-thought-over and the unimagined mix it up.
About A Motley Vision’s designated Wilderness Interface Zone:
Wilderness Interface Zone at A Motley Vision is a blog designed to help develop, inspire, and promote literary nature and science writing in the Mormon writing community. WIZ’s intent is to open a frontier in Mormon arts, demonstrating in the process that it’s okay to write nature literature (it really is). WIZ features criticism and theory; interviews; original writing, including excerpts, creative nonfiction, poetry, hybrid literary forms, and fiction; odds and ends such as field notes; and news and commentary on events related to nature writing.
Secondarily, WIZ aspires to provide an interface area for other kinds of nature artists to discuss or call attention to their work or post news on shows or other opportunities.
It is our wildest hope that not only Mormon artists but also writers who are not Mormon but are interested in nature writing will find WIZ a vibrant literary ecotone.