Authorpreneur Dashboard – Donna Venna
Surviving Nature
Biographies & Memoirs
She had an itinerary for everything. The jungle didn't care.
When a hyper-organised Australian uproots her predictable life to follow love to French Guiana, she expects an adventure. Instead, she gets a four-year crash course in survival. What was meant to be a romantic new chapter quickly dissolves into a roof that leaks like bad luck, moths that fire toxic darts, and a bureaucratic landscape more treacherous than the swamp.
As the chaos threatens to overwhelm her—and a bone-shattering tropical disease pushes her to the brink—Donna accepts a job at an isolated scientific research station deep within the Amazon rainforest. Marooned in a world where nothing is cushioned and nothing is convenient, the real test begins.
To survive, she must wage a hilarious turf war against the local wildlife, find sanctuary beneath the canopy of a magnificent old tree, and learn that the wilderness is not a playground for her personal enlightenment but a living, breathing ecosystem that refuses to move at her speed.
Witty, candid, and rich with the absurdities of life in the wild, Surviving Nature is a travel and nature memoir about what happens when the world refuses to cooperate with your plans. For anyone who has ever felt out of place, it offers a different way of looking at wild places—and the unexpected possibilities of finding home.
Book Bubbles from Surviving Nature
How Lost Is Lost? Just Another Tuesday
For twelve months, I scanned the green wall across the valley waiting for one tree to flower. When Coeden finally dropped her leaves and exploded into gold, I set off alone through the creek and up the ridge before the blossoms disappeared. The rainforest does not care about human milestones, and Coeden certainly didn't roll out a welcome mat, especially once biting ants found my forearm. But sitting under a drift of yellow petals in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing until lunchtime, I felt completely at home in the wild.
Enter at Your Own Risk
Signing an indemnity waiver at the dock was probably my cue to turn back. Instead, I marched straight into a restricted Amazonian research camp where the howler monkeys sound like Mongolian throat singers and the French scientists take breakfast with dry biscottes far too seriously. Things went downhill the moment I was sent back to camp alone with a two-way radio and a map I could barely read. Halfway down the trail, I met a camouflaged pit viper coiled in the leaf litter. It showed zero interest in moving, leaving me to bush-bash a trembling detour and sprint back to camp looking like I had picked a fight with the rainforest and lost.
Flying to the Amazon Without a Guidebook
Before I left Brisbane for French Guiana, my travel doctor jabbed me with a needle, wished me luck, and said he hoped I came home. He conspicuously left out the word safe. In this first chapter, I discover why. Follow me as I trade my neatly printed itinerary for a reggae-fuelled flight from Paris, a sweltering taxi ride past Cayenne’s strangler figs and armed gendarmes, and a motel room where two geckos are locked in a territorial scream-off by the door. I’d flown halfway around the world without a guidebook for a new boyfriend named Frank, only to realise the jungle had already swallowed my plans whole.
Surviving Nature
Biographies & Memoirs
She had an itinerary for everything. The jungle didn't care.
When a hyper-organised Australian uproots her predictable life to follow love to French Guiana, she expects an adventure. Instead, she gets a four-year crash course in survival. What was meant to be a romantic new chapter quickly dissolves into a roof that leaks like bad luck, moths that fire toxic darts, and a bureaucratic landscape more treacherous than the swamp.
As the chaos threatens to overwhelm her—and a bone-shattering tropical disease pushes her to the brink—Donna accepts a job at an isolated scientific research station deep within the Amazon rainforest. Marooned in a world where nothing is cushioned and nothing is convenient, the real test begins.
To survive, she must wage a hilarious turf war against the local wildlife, find sanctuary beneath the canopy of a magnificent old tree, and learn that the wilderness is not a playground for her personal enlightenment but a living, breathing ecosystem that refuses to move at her speed.
Witty, candid, and rich with the absurdities of life in the wild, Surviving Nature is a travel and nature memoir about what happens when the world refuses to cooperate with your plans. For anyone who has ever felt out of place, it offers a different way of looking at wild places—and the unexpected possibilities of finding home.
Book Bubbles from Surviving Nature
