CHAPTER FOUR

Writing Environments

So much of what we have discussed in these chapters about creative nonfiction is about personal memories and experiences. Even if you’re conducting research about far-flung people and events, you may still feel an instinct to make your essays about yourself. Another way to learn more about who we are, however, is to consider where we are. You can call it nature writing, landscape writing, environmental writing, or even ecological writing. Regardless, the natural non-human world has much to offer the writer of creative nonfiction. Though you might need to adjust your expectations if you live in an urban space, you are still embedded in the world of natural forces and processes that are available to us all: heat, cold, rain, wind, snow, not to mention the sun, the stars, the moon, the earth beneath your feet, even if it’s buried under concrete. Within civilization is the wild. Within culture is nature. The greatest trick that culture ever played is the denial of our inevitable immersion in nature.

There is a long tradition of nonfiction writing about the non-human natural world in the United States. We may as well mark its modern beginning in the 1840s with the Transcendentalists, namely the work of Henry David Thoreau, which was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Transcendentalists represent the American flourishing of the ideas of European Romanticism, and if you’ve grown up in the United States, you are heir to these ideas. In his essay “Nature,” Emerson lays out some foundational ideas that helped to define the principles of modern nature writing, including developing “an original relation to the universe.” In other words, he argues that we should have direct contact with the world, observing with our own senses rather than relying on the interpretation or distillation from others. In one of the most famous passages from that essay, Emerson describes the sublime feeling that comes from being immersed in the wilderness:

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

One way to understand Emerson’s somewhat mystical description is to consider it a radical shift in his point of view. In our everyday lives, we see the world through a naturally anthropocentric point of view. That is, we center human needs and interests first and foremost, taking into account other the perspective of organisms (or entire ecosystems) secondarily (if at all). When his “mean egotism vanishes,” he shifts to an ecocentric point of view, identifying with the natural world around him and becoming “part or particle of God.”

Thoreau echoes Emerson’s phrasing in his essay “Walking,” arguing that we should “regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” Similarly, he advocates for immersion in wilderness, even if it is difficult to shift the human point of view: “But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” To have an experience worthy of the grand American tradition of the nature writing, you must be completely in your senses, leaving worldly affairs at the entrance to the woods.  

Exercise: Take A Hike  

While it is not necessary to go on a grand wilderness adventure to write well about an environment, it is sometimes easier to become Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball” or “part and parcel of Nature” if you are able to travel to a wilderness area of some kind uninhabited by humans. If you’re in a city, that might mean strolling through a park in a city or walking alongside a river. For this exercise, choose a wild place to visit and take a walk, leaving behind writing implements and trying to remain “in your senses.” Avoiding thinking about the world outside of this place right now. You may not experience “immortal beauty,” but when you return to your desk, describe what you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched, as well as how this place made you feel emotionally or spiritually.

The Literature of Place

In his essay “Ice,” Neil Mathison makes a case for the centrality of place in defining who we are. “Does place shape how we see the world?” he asks.

Having grown up in the Puget Sound country, and having returned to live here much of my adult life, I like to believe that our geography shaped me and shaped my neighbors: the uplift of mountains signifying a world that always transforms to something new; the tidal refreshing of our bays and estuaries reminding us that so much in the world is renewable; the ice caps glistening on our mountaintops cautioning us that even on the hottest days we live in a world of season.

Instead of using the term “nature writing,” another way to frame such work is calling it the literature of place. Doing so invites writing about any place at all, wild, rural, urban, or otherwise. Even so, the literature of place is still heir to the tradition of nature writing described above. In his essay “A Literature of Place,” Barry Lopez, longtime North American Review Contributing Editor, meditated on this mode of writing “about geography as a shaping force, not a subject,” as necessary for human happiness.

Over time I have come to think of these three qualities—paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place—as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you're intimate with a place, a place with whose history you're familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you're there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.

In order to achieve such a “storied relationship,” Lopez suggests that we become vulnerable to a place, establishing intimacy with it. He offers more practical advice to the would-be writer of place:

my first suggestion would be to be silent. Put aside the bird book, the analytic state of mind, any compulsion to identify, and sit still. Concentrate instead on feeling a place, on deliberately using the sense of proprioception. Where in this volume of space are you situated? The space behind you is as important as what you see before you. What lies beneath you is as relevant as what stands on the far horizon. Actively use your ears to imagine the acoustical hemisphere you occupy. How does birdsong ramify here? Through what kind of air is it moving? Concentrate on smells in the belief you can smell water and stone. Use your hands to get the heft and texture of a place—the tensile strength in a willow branch, the moisture in a pinch of soil, the different nap of leaves. Open a vertical line to the place by joining the color and form of the sky to what you see out across the ground. Look away from what you want to scrutinize in order to gain a sense of its scale and proportion. Be wary of any obvious explanation for the existence of color, a movement. Cultivate a sense of complexity, the sense that another landscape exists beyond the one you can subject to analysis.  

In his essay “Landscape and Imagination,” Scott Russell Sanders echoes much of what Lopez has to teach us, emphasizing intimacy: “To be intimate with a landscape is to know its moods and contours as you would know a lover’s.” Sanders suggests that returning to a place after time away clicks this knowledge into the focus, quoting T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to make his point:  

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

To know a place, Sanders suggests, requires “an uncommon degree of attentiveness and insight. It requires one to open wide all the doors of perception. It demands an effort of imagination, by which I mean not what the Romantics meant, a projection of the self onto the world, but rather a seeing of what is already there, in the actual world. I don't claim to possess the necessary wisdom or subtlety, but I aspire to, and I work at it.” Nevertheless, Sanders notes that the land is legible if we can learn how to read it: “Like all landscapes, that of Indiana is a palimpsest, written over by centuries of human scrawls and by millenia of natural ones…. Despite our centuries of scrawling on the landscape, we can still read the deeper marks left by nature.” It may be difficult to read through the many layers of time, but the stories available to us when writing about place are inexhaustible.

At first glance, Lopez’s and Sanders’s advice might seem like a tall order, but the beauty of the literature of place is that we all have access to places every day of our lives. We are always existing in a specific place, even if it’s not a non-human, natural place. You can always deepen your understanding of specific places by incorporating further research beyond our immediate, phenomenal experiences. Taylor Brorby’s brief essay “Confluence” does just that, beginning by setting a historical scene with Lewis and Clark at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, then integrating information about their geological formation, before offering a personal moment of standing “in the sand, slowly sinking, the sun streaking over your back, staring at the meeting point—a ripple, a squiggle, nature in itself—as two western rivers merge into one.” Brorby is not simply painting a pretty picture of the landscape. He recognizes that “this gathering spot of water, contains significance. More to the point: This place contains story.” To be sure, Brorby has a personal connection to this place—and he has done his homework on its deep history—but the confluence of these two rivers also serves as a rich symbol for his life, shifting and changing over time. In his keynote speech “The River of Imagination,” delivered at the North American Review’s Writing Conference in 2019, Brorby points to the importance of reclaiming rural spaces, emphasizing the power of storytelling in an age of climate change:

The imagination is strong and it is resilient. Though the bottleneck we find ourselves in is narrow, the power of creation is great. This isn’t a silver lining to the biological catastrophe we now live in, it’s just reality. It is the work we are called to do: to envision the world as it could be, rather than the way it is. A good story can move the universe an inch.

Another essay of place that develops symbolic resonances similar to Brorby’s “Confluence” is Maya Kapoor’s “Memory Snags,” an account of hiking the Santa Catalina Mountains in southern Arizona. “I move every few years for work, school, connection,” Kapoor writes, admitting, “I don’t have an intimate read on this landscape, a deep knowledge of this place. I could easily pass through the Sonoran Desert and its mountains with no clear sense of ecology or of history.” She learns that the dead alligator junipers she finds there are “the ghosts of climate past. In the desert’s desiccating air, plants tell stories, pose riddles, with what they leave behind: saguaros with their ribs, wildflowers with their seeds, alligator junipers with their standing dead.” The landscape itself becomes a teacher: “History in tree form, confronting my assumptions from sunlit mountainside.” In the confluence of rivers and the alligator juniper snags, Brorby and Kapoor find story and develop apt symbols for understanding their places in the world.

Exercise: Going Places

The first, most important part of writing compelling essays about place is, of course, observation and description of the place itself so that readers can imagine themselves there. It’s important to write vividly and concretely about what you experience through your senses. Brorby and Kapoor remind us, however, that readers crave deeper meanings that speak to larger concepts in our lives, whether it is the confluence as a symbol for intersections and change, or the juniper snag as a ghostly symbol for climate change and our ever shifting sense of normality. Locate a place where the non-human natural world is observable. When you visit, take note of the environment around you, describing it as clearly as possible. The next part might take some time and deep reflection: focus on some element of the place you have chosen, asking yourself what larger significance it might suggest. As a way to develop a metaphor or symbol, fill in the blank. This _____ is like a _____. This tree is like a sad old man. This river is like a restless child. This dirt is like the air we breathe. It doesn’t matter. Just fill in the blanks with whatever makes sense in your mind, even if at first it might seem strange. Develop one or more of these similes into your descriptive scene, expanding and explaining the comparison as you see fit.

Exercise: Animal Magnetism

One fruitful way to approach writing about place is to observe the non-human animals residing there. Brorby’s vivid description of the paddlefish brings his essay “Confluence” to life, from its “Tiny, onyx-colored eyes lodged in its head, a heterocercal tail balances its head, and a large, paddle-shaped snout protrudes from its face. The snout is shoveled into the bottom of the silt-heavy rivers to dislodge roots, small shellfish, and anything meaty.” Even the smallest creatures can be fascinating, however, if you pay close enough attention: bugs, birds, and rodents are ubiquitous. Have you ever stopped to watch a colony of ants teeming on the sidewalk? Sparrows splashing in a puddle? Squirrels chittering in the trees? Aside from common animals you can see in your front yard, you might also venture forth into more remote areas to observe other, less commonly seen animals. Will Wellman’s essay of place “To a Great Egret” focuses on these majestic birds, which “stand over three feet tall with a long, snake-like neck and brilliant, white plumage on wings that can extend nearly six feet in width. In flight, the egret’s long s-shaped neck compresses inwards until its head merges with the body, the neck looking like a giant Adam’s apple.” Wellman writes that sometimes “the egret’s presence transforms all that surrounds it, and a deeper sense is brought to the world.” For this exercise, observe a non-domestic animal in its natural habitat, describing it, allowing its presence to transform the place. Write about what you feel after having paid such close attention to another living creature.

Other Places

In her essay “I Was From Where She Had Been From,” Jennifer Gravley explores her place in the world by describing the experience, as Lopez puts it above, of being “forgotten, cut off, abandoned” by where she is from in the American South, choosing instead to blend in with “the generic middle-class Americans I would keep trying to be.” Gravley grew to regret “my earliest self-improvement project and burned with proper shame. Here’s the truth: I will never get back what I threw away.” What she thinks she has thrown away is a storied relationship to place, which her essay ironically captures some vivid images and experiences of. Writing about where you are from, whether it’s a place you still live or are remembering from your childhood, is a familiar and rich source of material for writers of creative nonfiction. In fact, being far away from a place you had lived in earlier in your life might crystallize its significance for you.  

As mentioned above, writing good creative nonfiction about a place does not need to involve visiting the wilderness. In fact, some place writing captures the experience of living in the city. Though Tyler Dunning’s previously mentioned essay “Steel Reflections” is about a National Park, it happens to be located in the heart of a major urban area. Another good example is Richard Goodman’s essay “Arina,” which might at first seem like a portrait of a woman, but it is just as much a compelling if melancholy portrait of the “land of painters” in the pre-gentrified Soho in the summer of 1980. As you consider places to write about in your creative nonfiction, don’t forget about those that you might have a fraught relationship with, whether it’s your hometown you haven’t been back to in years, or a place you spent a short amount of time long ago. Rendering an authentic sense of a specific location honors the environments we find ourselves in, but it also grounds the reader in the world, transporting them to another place.