Creative Writing and Finding Joy in Nature
January 21, 2020
In 2015, while working on my undergraduate degree in Digital Communications and Creative Writing I did an Independent Study in Nature Writing. During the class, I had substantial reading list (some of the books are listed below) that I worked my way through. However, I found that the most valuable and instructive time that I spent, while working on my independent study, was actually done outdoors in nature observing it in the area of the Merrimack River estuary lands where I lived in Amesbury, Massachusetts.
At the time I rented an apartment in a historical shipwright’s house on Pleasant Valley Road. All around the house there were woods and wetlands that are protected by the Massachusetts Division of Conservation Services. I needed only to sit at my desk to and look out the window in front of it to see bald eagles and blue herons fly across or even through the front yard.
One day returning from my frequent walks along the river I watched a sharp-shinned hawk dive from a sugar maple tree in the front yard into a yew shrub in front of my living room window (where my desk sat) and lunch on a sparrow.
Each day, I watched the river in its tidal flow, moving down river and then upriver, and I could feel the pull, back and forth, as though I were riding the tide softly floating on the blue waters. That feeling gave me the sensation of being soothed, moved, to the sea and returned, and I never needed to leave my home. Such a gift, finding joy and understanding in the act of watching nature that in doing so, I submitted myself to be one with her.
In nature I am filled with unfathomable joy. I have read her words on the winds. I have heard her words whispered to me in my sleep. There are stories that the wildlife tell me as I watch their daily movements in our shared habitat along the river’s edge. Those are just some of the stories that I strive to share with my readers.
When reading from my reading list my goal was always to study the narrative style of each of the authors, feeling out their words, asking myself how they resonated with me. Because descriptive writing speaks to me; the works I enjoyed most have been from the authors who are in my opinion more descriptive writers, such as Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, Sam Keen, Diane Ackerman, Mary Oliver, and Barbara Kingsolver.
The genre of nature writing speaks to me because nature itself speaks to me. My time spent in nature is always a joy and a form of self-directed learning as I research the landscape and wildlife around me.
Reading List
- Ackerman, Diane. Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2009.
- Finch, Robert and John Elder, The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, Inc., 1990.
- Keen, Sam. Hymns to an Unknown God. Bantam Books, 1994 .
- —. Sightings: Extraordinary Encounters with Ordinary Birds. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2007.
- Kingsolver, Barbara. Small Wonders: Essays. Harper Perennial, 2003.
- Moore, Kathleen Dean. Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature. Trumpeter, 2010.
- Oliver, Mary. West Wind. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.
- —. White Pine. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.
- Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1991.
