Writing About Nature

A Creative Guide, Revised Edition.

John A. Murray

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780826330857
• eBook ISBN: 9780826330864
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Originally published by the Sierra Club in 1995, this handbook has already helped thousands of aspiring writers, scholars, and students share their experiences with nature and the outdoors. Using exercises and examples, John Murray covers genres, techniques, and publication issues. He uses examples from such masters as Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry David Thoreau. Also included are recommended readings, a directory of creative writing programs, professional organizations for writers, and a directory of environmental organizations. This revised edition includes a new chapter on nature writing and environmental activism.

Nature is our grandest and oldest home, older than language, grander than consciousness. John Murray knows that in his bones, and he shares his knowledge generously with anyone who opens this book. Whether you write about the earth for publication or only for deepening your perceptions, you will find keen-eyed guidance here. - Scott Russell Sanders, author of Staying Put

Chapter One

The Journal

When [Thoreau began], in October of 1837, to keep a journal, the quarry and substance of much of his best work, we begin to see the whole man as we follow the crowded, highly charged, and rapidly evolving inner life that accompanies the busy outer life and reveals the thoughts behind the eyes of the familiar photographs.

—Robert D. Richardson, Jr.,
Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

In the autumn of 1988 the editors of Antaeus, a noted literary periodical, devoted their issue of some 424 pages to “Journals, Notebooks & Diaries.” Among the writers included were Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Tess Gallagher, Donald Hall, Rick Bass, Jim Harrison, Ed Hoagland, Joyce Carol Oates, and then-Governor Bill Clinton. The stature and diversity of those featured tells us something. Journals are often utilized by successful writers and thinkers as a means of organizing experience, reflecting on life, and generating material for essays and books. Many nature writers—William Byrd, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, to name just a few—have maintained journals on a regular basis. Nature writers may rely on journals more consistently than novelists and poets because of the necessity of describing long-term processes of nature, such as seasonal or environmental changes, in great detail, and of carefully recording outdoor excursions for articles and essays. Those American writers who have not been journal writers have often used extended letters in much the same way as journals; Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway (both accomplished writers about nature in such works, respectively, as Roughing It and the Green Hills of Africa) are representative of this group. The important thing, it seems to me, is not whether you keep journals, but, rather, whether you have regular mechanisms—extended letters, telephone calls to close friends, visits with confidantes, daily meditation, free-writing exercises—that enable you to comprehensively process events as they occur. But let us focus in this section on journals, which provide one of the most common means of chronicling and interpreting personal history.

The words journal and journey share an identical root and common history. Both came into the English language as a result of the Norman victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. For the next three hundred years French was the chief language of government, religion, and learning in England. The French word journie, which meant a day’s work or a day’s travel, was one of the many words that became incorporated into English at that time. (Journie had earlier evolved through the Italian giornata from the Latin diurnata, which meant a day or the length of a day.) The word journal, originally spelled jurnal or journenal, sprang into being alongside the older word journey and referred to the record of a day’s work or a day’s travel. By the time of Shakespeare the word journal pretty much had the meaning it has today—a diary of the day’s events. Each day of life is a journey in the sense that we travel from the private world of the home to the public arena of work, from the past to the present, from the world of sleep to the world of consciousness, from birth a bit closer to death. The journal offers the writer a moment of rest in that journey, a sort of roadside inn along the highway. Here intellect and imagination are alone with the blank page and composition can proceed with an honesty and informality often precluded in more public forms of expression. As a result, several important benefits can accrue: First, by writing with unscrutinized candor and directness on a particular subject, a person can often find ways to write more effectively on the same theme elsewhere. Second, the journal, as a sort of unflinching mirror, can remind the author of the importance of eliminating self-deception and half-truths in thought and writing. Third, the journal can serve as a brainstorming mechanism to explore new topics, modes of thought or types of writing that otherwise would remain undiscovered or unexamined. Fourth, the journal can provide a means for effecting a catharsis on subjects too personal for publication even among friends and family.

Any discussion of journal writing among nature writers must begin with Henry David Thoreau. It has been estimated that his journals, which span his intellectual life from 1837 (age 20) to his death in 1862 (age 44), contain over one million words. As the epigraph by Robert Richardson indicates, the journals formed an intrinsic component in Thoreau’s complicated writing process. From the journals came the earliest drafts of such influential works as “Civil Disobedience,” “John Brown’s Body” and Walden. When the journals were finally published in 1906, they greatly increased Thoreau’s stature, not to mention that of the then-fledging discipline of American literature. Thoreau used journals for a variety of purposes, from serious discourse on such subjects as the Mexican War to bits of whimsy such as anecdotes, jokes, and gossip. The vast majority of journal entries are concerned with describing nature, whether it is on the micro-scale of insect life under rocks or on the macro-scale of the dispersal of seeds through the forest over a period of generations. The most studied portion of the journals have been those from the two years (mid 1845–mid 1847) Thoreau spent at Walden while recovering from the tragic death of his brother John to tetanus in January 1842. The Walden sojourn was from the outset a liberating experience, both from grief and from the constraints of “civilized” life, as in this passage selected almost at random from that period (March 26, 1846):

The change from foul weather to fair, from dark, sluggish hours to serene, elastic ones, is a memorable crisis which all things proclaim. The change from foulness to serenity is instantaneous. Suddenly an influx of light, though it was late, filled my room. I looked out and saw that the pond was already calm and full of hope as on a summer evening, though the ice was dissolved but yesterday. There seemed to be some intelligence in the pond which responded to the unseen serenity in a distant horizon. I heard a robin in the distance—the first I had heard this spring—repeating the assurance. The green pitch [pine] suddenly looked brighter and more erect, as if now entirely washed and cleansed by the rain. I knew it would not rain any more. A serene summer-evening sky seemed darkly reflected in the pond, though the clear sky was nowhere visible overhead. It was no longer the end of a season, but the beginning.

One can vividly see in this excerpt how the outer landscape of Walden Pond has become a metaphor for the inner transformations that were occurring in the psyche of the twenty-nine year old naturalist, as the desolate “winter” of grief is replaced by the fertile “spring” of healing.

Journals are important not only for the critical insights they provide scholars but also for the way in which they enlarge our perception and enjoyment of the writer’s we love. In their journals writers are seen to be as ordinary human beings like you and me, and this makes them, their writing and their age more accessible. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, wrote this lively description of Thoreau in his journal on Labor Day, 1842:

Mr. Thorow dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character—a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior . . . He was educated, I believe, at Cambridge, and formerly kept school in this town [Concord]; but for two or three years back, he has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respect the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood . . . he seldom walks over a ploughed field without picking up an arrow-point, a spear-head, or other relic . . . as if [the Indian] spirits willed him to be the inheritor of their simple wealth . . .

In the same journal entry Hawthorne describes a rather sad situation later that evening as the impecunious Thoreau begged Hawthorne, a man of relative affluence, to buy his hand-made boat “The Musketaquid” (the same boat on which Thoreau and his brother John had floated the Concord River). By reading Hawthorne’s account, and those of Emerson and other members of Thoreau’s milieu, we are able to form an image of the writer that both complements and contrasts that found in his own writing.

Similarly, we have Gretel Ehrlich (The Solace of Open Spaces), in the issue of Antaeus already mentioned, providing us with an unusual look at fellow nature writer Ed Hoagland, who has been called “the Thoreau of our time” and who teaches writing at Bennington College in Vermont. She and Hoagland somehow wind up walking through the annual Greenwich Village Halloween parade in the spring of 1985. Hoagland “is dressed like a fox” and he and Ehrlich “stop midavenue and howl.” They are treated to a spectacle of “undulating dragons, twenty-foot-high puppets, [and] dancing skeletons.” Each participant in the bacchanal carries a corn stalk as their “pledge of allegiance to maize.” While drifting west of Washington Square the two nature writers come upon a “6'8" transvestite dressed in a girl’s cheerleading suit [twirling] a baton” and marching to a John Philip Sousa song blasting from a cassette player. Needless to say, this sort of material is not found in the nature essays of either Ehrlich or Hoagland and is refreshing both in its humor and in its verisimilitude. Readers instinctively trust writers who are honest, as we see in the journal excerpts from both Hawthorne and Ehrlich.

Rick Bass, another writer represented in the Antaeus issue, published a portion of his journals in a 1991 book entitled Winter: Notes from Montana. The book chronicles his new life on a ranch in northwestern Montana from September 13 (“the first overcast day”) to March 14 (“I won’t be leaving this valley”). Like Thoreau, Bass struggles with how best to lead that doubly enriched “border life” mid-way between the city and the country:

I have to go into town today and shop, do errands, sign papers. If only I could shed that other life, the going-into-town life, like a Cicada, pulling free from a tightening, drying, constraining old shell, a molt. But an old one always seems to grow back. A driving snowstorm, big flakes blowing past, crashing into the woods, swirling in the meadows. They are the currency of winter, and I am the richest man in the world. (January 20)

Above all, the book is a meditation, even a revel, on winter with a purpose and tone somewhat similar to that found in Thoreau’s well-known essay “A Winter Walk.” The advantage that Bass has in the journal format is that he has no need to artificially compress an expansive subject to fit a literary structure, but can follow the season at his leisure, noting changes as they occur day by day, hour by hour:

I’m from the South, will always be from the South. I’ll never get used to snow—how slowly it comes down, how the world seems to slow down, how time slows, how age and sin and everything is buried. I don’t mind the cold. The beauty is worth it. It’s dark now, and still snowing. An inch, two inches, on the ground, on the car, on the trees, everything. If anything needed doing before the snow came, it should have been done yesterday. It’s going to be strange falling asleep tonight, knowing that snow is landing on the roof. It’s here. We’re here. Nobody’s leaving. (November 16)

One of the most prolific journal-keepers of recent memory was Edward Abbey, who began maintaining a personal record in 1946 and made his last entry less than two weeks before his death in 1989. Today you can study these approximately half million words in the Abbey Papers at the Special Collections Library at the University of Arizona, Tucson. They comprise 12.1 linear feet and consist of thirty manuscript boxes (a biographer’s dream collection). Colorado nature writer David Petersen (Racks, Among the Aspen) edited these journals down to about 125,000 words and published them in 1994 as Confessions of a Barbarian: Pages from the Journals of Edward Abbey. In an article he published in the scholarly journal Western American Literature in May 1993, Petersen described how many of Abbey’s most celebrated essays were essentially taken “whole cloth” from the journals, such as the novella-length essay “Down the River” in Abbey’s book Desert Solitaire. According to Petersen, one of the most striking changes evident in the journals was Abbey’s gradual but steady shift from youthful “romantic idealism” to “a pragmatic, defensive, sometimes even cynical carapace.” This is somewhat reminiscent of the change scholars have often noticed in several of the key writers of the Romantic period, most notably William Wordsworth, who began his adult life embracing the French Revolution and ended it as a curmudgeonly poet laureate. Petersen refused to edit the journals in order to “improve” or “clean up” Abbey’s “image” because

to do so, to cater to the morality censors who dogged him in life, would be to betray both Ed and his often-stated dedication to candidness in journals. White-washing would also defeat what I perceive as a most important purpose for the publication of Confessions—to allow us better to know and understand the intriguing complexities of this man Edward Abbey. A stylistically standardized and politically morally socially philosophically ‘correct’ Edward Abbey would be—well, no Edward Abbey at all, eh?”

Again, the highest obligation of the writer, or the editor, is to the truth.

Many years ago I took the required graduate seminar in Colonial Literature from Bob Richardson at the University of Denver. Most of the readings were dreadfully boring. Cotton Mather expounding upon man’s sinfulness. Michael Wiggleworth philosophizing in his cheerful poem “The Day of Doom.” Jonathan Edwards speculating about supernature. Midway through the course Professor Richardson assigned the journals of Samuel Sewall, best known for publishing the first antislavery tract in America, and the “secret diary” of William Byrd, who wrote America’s first nature book in 1728 (History of the Dividing Line). Only then did the period come to life for the class, and not just because we read with amusement as Samuel Sewall doggedly pursued the widow Katherine Winthrop and William Byrd “rogered” his wife (a euphemism for intercourse). The journals placed the authors in a social, and human, context which was not present in their published writing and which was vital to understanding their larger intellectual contributions to American life. In Byrd’s case the private journals were particularly important because they balanced the more formal journals that comprised his History of the Dividing Line (in 1728 he was dispatched to settle a border dispute between Virginia and North Carolina and assiduously kept a journal of the trip). Byrd was the first Euroamerican savant to venture into the western wilderness, and return with a description, in journal form, of what he had seen. A new language began to emerge in these wilderness journals—as lean and muscular, as vital and alive, as full of unexpected bounties as the land itself—and it is in this prose that we begin to see the distinctive American voice, the voice of Twain and later of Hemingway, first emerge:

Not far from our quarters one of them picked up a pair of elk’s horns, not very large, and discovered the track of the elk that had shed them. It was rare to find any tokens of those animals so far to the south, because they keep commonly to the northward of thirty-seven degrees, as the buffaloes, for the most part, confine themselves to the southward of that latitude. The elk is full as big as a horse and of the deer kind. The stags only have horns and those exceedingly large and spreading. Their color is something lighter than that of the red deer and their flesh tougher. Their swiftest speed is a large trot, and in that motion they turn their horns back upon their necks and cock their noses aloft in the air. Nature has taught them attitude to save their antlers from being entangled in the thickets, which they always retire to. They are very shy and have the sense of smelling so exquisite that they wind a man at a great distance. For this reason they are seldom seen but when the air is moist, in which case their smell is not so nice. They commonly herd together, and the Indians say if one of the drove happen by some wound to be disabled from making his escape, the rest will forsake their fears to defend their friend, which they will do with great obstinacy till they are killed upon the spot. Though, otherwise, they are so alarmed at the sight of a man that to avoid him they will sometimes throw themselves down very high precipices into the river. (October 26, 1728)

Practice Exercises

1. Write a journal that covers one season of the year in the manner of Rick Bass’s Winter: Notes from Montana. Either begin on the equinox or solstice and proceed daily through that entire quarter of the year, noting the changes that occur as nature moves ineluctably through the circle of time.

2. Take a trip and assiduously record all of your impressions in a journal. Remember to focus as much on human nature—your inner life and the interplay of your companions—as much as on wild nature. Bear in mind that every ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Revised Preface to the 2003 Edition
• Chapter One: The Journal
• Chapter Two: The Essay
• Chapter Three: The Writing Process
• Chapter Four: The Opening
• Chapter Five: The Closing
• Chapter Six: Word Pictures
• Chapter Seven: Figurative Language
• Chapter Eight: Character and Dialogue
• Chapter Nine: Story-Telling
• Chapter Ten: Style
• Chapter Eleven: Fiction and Poetry
• Chapter Twelve: Revision
• Chapter Thirteen: Research
• Chapter Fourteen: Workshopping
• Chapter Fifteen: Publication
• Chapter Sixteen: Nature Writing and Environmental Activism
• Appendix:
• Index: