Hi, I'm Willow Belden, and you're listening to Out There.

This is a podcast about the outdoors, from your window box and garden, to the fields on the edge of town, to the forests, prairies, seashores, and wilderness.

On the show, we explore our relationship with nature, through stories, interviews, essays, and even some fiction. We travel around the

U.S. and the world with tales of love and heartbreak, passion and adversity, desperation,

and triumph. When you think of the outdoors, what comes to mind?

Mountains, rivers, seashores, places that seem wild and untouched?

If that sounds familiar, you're not alone.

But there's more to the outdoors than wilderness.

On today's episode, writer Jessica Gross shares an essay called The Wilds of Urbia.

Her story takes us from upstate New York to the streets of Manhattan

and shows how a simple exercise can enrich your appreciation for the world around you. Several years ago, the writer Katie Roofy, a professor of mine, interviewed another writer named Janet Malcolm, who happens to be one of my idols.

After one of Royfe's visits, the ever-stute Malcolm sent her a snappy little email.

She wrote, I want to talk about that moment in our meeting at my apartment last week.

When I left the room to find a book and suggested that while I was away, you might want to take notes about the living room for the descriptive opening of this interview.

Earlier, you had made the distinction between writers for whom the physical world is significant

and writers for whom it scarcely exists who live in the world of ideas.

You are clearly one of the latter.

You obediently took out a notebook and gave me a rather

stricken look as if I had asked you to do something faintly embarrassing. I think of this email often,

and this distinction between writers who carefully observe the physical world and those more

alive to the world of ideas. I, like Royfe, often find myself

gripped by ideas, emotions, personalities, and interactions above the sensory details of the

...