ABOUT THIS BOOK

Touching This Leviathan asks how we might come to know the unknowable—in this case, whales, animals so large yet so elusive, revealing just a sliver of back, a glimpse of a fluke, or a split-second breach before diving away.

Whale books often sit within disciplinary silos. Touching This Leviathan starts a conversation among them. Drawing on biology, theology, natural history, literature, and writing studies, Peter Wayne Moe offers a deep dive into the alluring and impalpable mysteries of Earth’s largest mammal.

Entertaining, thought-provoking, and swimming with intelligence and wit, Touching is Leviathan is creative nonfiction that gestures toward science and literary criticism as it invites readers into the belly of the whale.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Peter Wayne Moe is an assistant professor of English and oversees the writing program at Seattle Pacific University, where, in the summer of 2020, he led 158 volunteers in hanging a whale skeleton in the school’s science building.
peterwaynemoe.com

REVIEWS

“Moe’s book is an obsessive act of poetry and reclamation out of memory and fact, a referential reverie. It is highly imagined and imaginative, as digressive as Melville’s great opus, yet condensed into these few intense pages. It speaks of faith and spirituality and blasphemy and dissent. It is as brilliant on writing as it is on whales: the saying of them, their naming, their presence and absence. Skeletal, pathologised, sensual, mythologised, it lies very close indeed to the whale, to the whaleness of the whale. And like Moby-Dick, I would read it all over again.”
—Philip Hoare, author of The Whale

“Touching This Leviathan is one of my favorite pieces of writing that I’ve read all season. This lyric work yields a map of a singular consciousness—a mind at work that stands in for the minds of many.” —Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

“Touching This Leviathan is many books at once—a book of fatherhood, a book of faith, a book of teaching, a praxis of rhetoric, a ceto-bibliophile’s catalog of whaling arcana, a guide to the allure and disgust of flensing, and the list could easily go on. But this undefinable something is itself part of the book’s deep charm, evidence of what it is to live in search of the mysteries one is also next to.” —Dan Beachy-Quick, author of A Whaler’s Dictionary

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

On Method

One. Knowing Beans

Two. From a Distance

Interlude. Sightings

Three. A Heap of Stones

Four. An Inheritance

Interlude. Extracts

Five. Within

Six. To Flense

On Advocacy

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited