Brenda Peterson, accomplished nature writer, spoke about one of her stories Sunday night, and served it with a healthy helping of pictures of baby seals.

Peterson has written several books, all dealing with the bond between nature and humans.

“I read her latest book, and thought I should come here and hear what she had to say,” said Maggie Tillman, junior in communication studies. “Her last book was about how animals fit into her life.”

At this lecture, which was part of the Fourth Annual Symposium on Wildness, Wilderness and the Creative Imagination, she told a short story she had written for Orion magazine, a magazine focused on developing the bond between human and nature.

Throughout her story, titled “I Want To Be Left Behind,” she told the story of how she was watching baby seals with her neighbor in Seattle, and threw in several pictures of actual baby seals to complement the story.

“I enjoyed the pictures that she presented,” said Jonah Brown, graduate student-undeclared.

With each new picture of a pup, several people sighed in appreciation of how cute they were, while Peterson talked about the people who try to help seals.

“You sit with people that you would never interact with otherwise in seal-sitting,” Peterson said.

She also mentioned that some people, despite wanting to help baby seals on the beach, end up doing more harm then good, which is something the seal-sitters try to stop.

“The job is mainly to educate others about why they should stay 100 yards away,” Peterson said, referring to the danger of biting and infecting others that baby seals have. “I have videos of the seals on my iPhone that I show others, which is ironic. People prefer to watch videos of seals 50 feet away because that’s closer to them.”

After finishing her story, she shared one of her goals, which she acquired while working as an apprentice for E.B. White, author of “Charlotte’s Web.”

“A child wrote him a letter with big letters that said, ‘I love you for writing this book,'” Peterson said. “I knew that I wanted to be a writer like that.”

She then discussed a theme central to her life: dealing with fundamentalism. Her family is comprised almost entirely of Southern Baptist conservatives, and she talked a little on how she deals with a family so different from herself.

“I find that fundamentalism is defused through dialogue,” she said. “Listening goes a long way with them.”

She then went on and talked about fundamentalists in a broader spectrum, and dealt specifically with the Baptist belief of being saved by the rapture.

“That’s the paradox of the species. We love the Earth and yet we plot to leave it at the same time,” Peterson said. “It seems that that belief is born of the feeling that they’re just passing through this life, and are just waiting for the master to call them home.”