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Jenna Devany Waters

Writer. Mother. Activist. Wanderer.
Master list-maker; minor revolutionary.
She/Her.

Piles of Books

Home: Welcome

Recent Essays

A cluster of pale pink cherry blossoms and dark pink buds

"On Wandering, Cherry Trees, Mother's Day, and Rot"

Terrain.org

"More than 40,000 ornamental cherry trees grace the walking paths of New York City. Yet somehow I had lived 30 years without knowing a single thing about them."

a halved peach laying on a neutral-toned surface

"Peaches and Preservation"

Orion Magazine

"In the summer of 2021, I strapped my two small children into the car and drove twelve hundred miles through hurricane rains and clouds of wildfire ash to can peaches with a woman I was terrified of falling in love with."

tree trunk with many rings and fissures

Alaska Quarterly Review

"There are many things which might cause a tree to become hollow. These wounds are not always apparent to a casual observer. Sometimes a tree looks dead but is in fact thriving. Sometimes, it seems as magical as a fantasia, but inside it is infected; destabilized; succumbing to rot."

Mother Tiger reclining and staring at the camera, with her cub on her back

"The Wisdom of No Escape"

Under the Sun

"Outside your window, sirens crest and fall. Later you will speak of waves and surges, overflows and inundations. You will give the virus the language of water while the oceans rise around you, lapping at your calves. Time will add context. But this is before."

Seagull with its beak held wide open against a blue background

"A Passed-Down Story"

The Citron Review

"This is just a story of a story, a version of the version my mother told to me. Later I learned the term disassociation. Then: I was a deer, a fish, a burrowing owl. I had so many tricks of transformation."

jellyfish floating in black water with tentacles streaming

"Testimony from the Church of First Kisses"

JMWW

"What I remember most are not her words but the heat of them, the way her voice would drop and grow huskier, the way she would slow down her speech so each word sat poised like an entire world on her lips."

loose tea buds next to metal strainer

"Navigating Loss, with Tea and Empathy"

MUTHA Magazine

"My eyes track the changed landscape as I follow my daughter to the kitchen, surveying the rooms as if assessing damages after a storm. One table lamp down in the living room; three furniture dollies gone from the hall; the espresso machine and milk frother unmoored, carried off on the retreating waters of my failed marriage."

evergreen branch with frost

"Winter Solstice: Teaching My Kids To Greet The Darkness And Invite In The Light"

Your Tango

"As the last streaks of a light dip below the windowpane, we take turns cutting squares from the flattened dough, twirling them between our palms into a hundred miniature globes. Each ball is wrapped around a single wish, spoken aloud in turn, then dipped in butter, sugar, and cinnamon, before it is at last tossed into the pan."

Work

Home: Contact

Wild Side West Bio PIc.jpg

Jenna Devany Waters is a queer writer, teacher, and single mother extraordinaire. After 12 years of deadlifting strollers down subway staircases in Manhattan, she has recently relocated to a 120-year-old farmhouse in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest, where her nearest neighbors are cows, corvids and coyotes.

Her essays have appeared in Orion, Terrain.org, Alaska Quarterly Review, Under the Sun, and elsewhere, and have been selected for notable mention in both Best American Essays and Best American Science and Nature Writing.

She is currently at work on a memoir about divorce, motherhood, and her 10,000 mile rebound road trip to the last remaining lesbian bars in America.

Contact

devanywaters@gmail.com

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