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fiction nature writing

Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre

Michelle nijhuis thinks it’s time for some new perspectives.

If there were a contest for Most Hated Genre, nature writing would surely take top honors. Other candidates—romance, say—have their detractors, but are stoutly defended by both practitioners and fans. When it comes to nature writing, though, no one seems to hate container and contents more than nature writers themselves.

“‘Nature writing’ has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse,” the essayist Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2015. When David Gessner, in his book Sick of Nature , imagined a party attended by his fellow nature writers, he described a thoroughgoing dud: “As usual with this crowd, there’s a whole lot of listening and observing going on, not a lot of merriment.”

Critics, for their part, have dismissed the genre as a “solidly bourgeois form of escapism,” with nature writers indulging in a “literature of consolation” and “fiddling while the agrochemicals burn.” Nature writers and their work are variously portrayed, fairly and not, as misanthropic, condescending, and plain embarrassing. Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay “Against Nature,” enumerated nature writing’s “painfully limited set of responses” to its subject in scathing all caps: “REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.”

Oates, apparently, was not consoled.

The persistence of nature writing as a genre has more to do with publishers than with writers. Labels can usefully lash books together, giving each a better chance of staying afloat in a flooded marketplace, but they can also reinforce established stereotypes, limiting those who work within a genre and excluding those who fall outside its definition. As Oates suggested, there are countless ways to think and write about what we call “nature,” many of them urgent. But nature writing, as defined by publishers and historical precedent, ignores all but a few.

The nature-writing genre emerged in the late 1700s, during the peculiar moment when nature, as Europeans and North American intellectuals saw it, was no longer fearfully mysterious but not yet endangered. The scientific classification of species had brought some apparent order to undomesticated landscapes, allowing writers such as William Bartram, a botanist who traveled through the American South shortly before the Revolutionary War, to perceive not a tangle of flora and fauna but “an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing.”

Such “appreciative aesthetic responses to a scientific view of nature,” as the writer and naturalist David Rains Wallace once described them, were products not only of their time and place but their culture and class. Scientific views of nature are not the only possible views, of course, and as many anthropologists and linguists have pointed out, the concept of “nature” as a collection of objects, separate from but subservient to humans, is also far from universal.

In the 19th century, many of the thinkers we now call nature writers took some exception to the genre’s original project. While Ralph Waldo Emerson famously saw human transcendence as the primary purpose of the non-human world, his rebellious protégé Henry David Thoreau was more interested in other forms of life for their own sake, and more willing to get his literal and metaphorical boots muddy. John Muir, though notoriously dismissive of the human history of the Sierra Nevada , had unusually egalitarian ideas about other species, considering even lizards, squirrels, and gnats to be fellow occupants of the planet.

As I learned while researching my book Beloved Beasts , a history of the modern conservation movement, the rise of the science of ecology in the early 20th century made it ever clearer that the boundaries between humans and “nature” were more linguistic and cultural than physical. Rachel Carson, who cited Thoreau as one of her primary influences, further expanded the nature-writing genre by tying the fate of other species to the fate of human bodies.

Any genre can only stretch so far, though, and the limitations of nature writing are inscribed in its very name. Nature writing still tends to treat its subject as “an infinite variety of animated scenes,” and while the genre’s membership and approaches have diversified somewhat in recent years, its prizewinners resemble its founders : mostly white, mostly male, and mostly from wealthy countries. The poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie calls them Lone Enraptured Males .

Meanwhile, writers in every genre and discipline are wrestling with the relationship between humans and the rest of life, recognizing that while writing about other species is often about wonder and uplift, it is also, inevitably, about survival—the survival of all species, including our own. Amitav Ghosh, whose novels often follow the connections among species and habitats—humans and snakes, tigers and dolphins, land and sea—recently published The Nutmeg’s Curse , his second book-length essay about the literature, history, and politics of climate change. (The first was The Great Derangement , published in 2016.)

Science-fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer returns again and again to the unstable boundaries between humans and other species, most recently in his novel Hummingbird Salamander . Margaret Atwood, a dedicated birdwatcher, wrote that the sight of red-necked crakes “scuttling about in the underbrush” in northern Australia inspired her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy . Historians such as Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the author of As Long as Grass Grows , and Nick Estes, the author of Our History Is The Future , document the damage done to Indigenous cultures and all species by centuries of capitalism and colonialism. These and many other works acknowledge that humans are both observers of and participants in the network of life on earth—and that our roles, while often destructive, can be constructive, too.

Today, the nature-writing genre reminds me of the climate-change beat in journalism: the stakes and scope of the job have magnified to the point that the label is arguably worse than useless, misrepresenting the work as narrower than it is and restricting its potential audience. The state of “nature,” like the state of the global climate, can no longer be appreciated from a distance, and its literature can no longer be confined to a single shelf. If we must give it a label, I say we call it survival writing. Or, better yet, writing.

 __________________________________

Beloved Beasts Michelle Nijhuis

Michelle Nijhuis’s book Beloved Beasts is available through W.W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 2022.

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Michelle Nijhuis

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What is Nature Writing?

Definition and Examples

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Nature writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrator 's encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject.

"In critical practice," says Michael P. Branch, "the term 'nature writing' has usually been reserved for a brand of nature representation that is deemed literary, written in the speculative personal voice , and presented in the form of the nonfiction essay . Such nature writing is frequently pastoral or romantic in its philosophical assumptions, tends to be modern or even ecological in its sensibility, and is often in service to an explicit or implicit preservationist agenda" ("Before Nature Writing," in Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism , ed. by K. Armbruster and K.R. Wallace, 2001).

Examples of Nature Writing:

  • At the Turn of the Year, by William Sharp
  • The Battle of the Ants, by Henry David Thoreau
  • Hours of Spring, by Richard Jefferies
  • The House-Martin, by Gilbert White
  • In Mammoth Cave, by John Burroughs
  • An Island Garden, by Celia Thaxter
  • January in the Sussex Woods, by Richard Jefferies
  • The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin
  • Migration, by Barry Lopez
  • The Passenger Pigeon, by John James Audubon
  • Rural Hours, by Susan Fenimore Cooper
  • Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, by Henry David Thoreau

Observations:

  • "Gilbert White established the pastoral dimension of nature writing in the late 18th century and remains the patron saint of English nature writing. Henry David Thoreau was an equally crucial figure in mid-19th century America . . .. "The second half of the 19th century saw the origins of what we today call the environmental movement. Two of its most influential American voices were John Muir and John Burroughs , literary sons of Thoreau, though hardly twins. . . . "In the early 20th century the activist voice and prophetic anger of nature writers who saw, in Muir's words, that 'the money changers were in the temple' continued to grow. Building upon the principles of scientific ecology that were being developed in the 1930s and 1940s, Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold sought to create a literature in which appreciation of nature's wholeness would lead to ethical principles and social programs. "Today, nature writing in America flourishes as never before. Nonfiction may well be the most vital form of current American literature, and a notable proportion of the best writers of nonfiction practice nature writing." (J. Elder and R. Finch, Introduction, The Norton Book of Nature Writing . Norton, 2002)

"Human Writing . . . in Nature"

  • "By cordoning nature off as something separate from ourselves and by writing about it that way, we kill both the  genre and a part of ourselves. The best writing in this genre is not really 'nature writing' anyway but human writing that just happens to take place in nature. And the reason we are still talking about [Thoreau's] Walden 150 years later is as much for the personal story as the pastoral one: a single human being, wrestling mightily with himself, trying to figure out how best to live during his brief time on earth, and, not least of all, a human being who has the nerve, talent, and raw ambition to put that wrestling match on display on the printed page. The human spilling over into the wild, the wild informing the human; the two always intermingling. There's something to celebrate." (David Gessner, "Sick of Nature." The Boston Globe , Aug. 1, 2004)

Confessions of a Nature Writer

  • "I do not believe that the solution to the world's ills is a return to some previous age of mankind. But I do doubt that any solution is possible unless we think of ourselves in the context of living nature "Perhaps that suggests an answer to the question what a 'nature writer' is. He is not a sentimentalist who says that 'nature never did betray the heart that loved her.' Neither is he simply a scientist classifying animals or reporting on the behavior of birds just because certain facts can be ascertained. He is a writer whose subject is the natural context of human life, a man who tries to communicate his observations and his thoughts in the presence of nature as part of his attempt to make himself more aware of that context. 'Nature writing' is nothing really new. It has always existed in literature. But it has tended in the course of the last century to become specialized partly because so much writing that is not specifically 'nature writing' does not present the natural context at all; because so many novels and so many treatises describe man as an economic unit, a political unit, or as a member of some social class but not as a living creature surrounded by other living things." (Joseph Wood Krutch, "Some Unsentimental Confessions of a Nature Writer." New York Herald Tribune Book Review , 1952)
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We're Living Through A Golden Age Of Nature Writing

Digital fatigue and environmental disaster have, paradoxically, lead to a resurgence of books on the power and meaning of the great outdoors. Here are some of the best

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Nature writing - in which the beauty of the natural world is used as way of exploring inner turmoil - has enjoyed something of a commercial and critical renaissance in recent years. It's not hard to see why. Our obsession with technology has started to feel more like a trap, making the the great outdoors seem like an appealing balm. Meanwhile the encroaching disaster of climate change is forcing us to reevaluate our relationship with nature, and maybe even stop taking it for granted.

These memoirs or stories of intellectual reckoning, set against sweeping skies, meandering rivers and foreboding forests, are the best recent examples from a genre having a moment in the sun. Whether you're looking for guidance at a moment of crisis, or to get lost in evocative explorations of meadows and riverbanks, crack a spine and be transported.

To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing

Text, Font, Book cover,

At a moment of personal crisis in her own life, British writer Olivia Laing walks the length of the river Ouse, the stretch of water where more than sixty years ago Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Over the course of a week walking from source to the sea she traces the memories of the writer's life that lurk beneath the surface of the water, and in turn grapples with her own ghosts.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Bird, Bird of prey, Peregrine falcon, Falcon, Beak, Hawk, Poster, Falconiformes,

You might recognise the striking cover from seeing it dotted around tube carriages and airport terminals a few years ago. This award-winning book tells of how, in a moment of grief after her father's death, Macdonald spent £800 on a goshawk and tried to train it. Released in the same year as Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with The Feathers, it begun a trend of books which look to animals and nature for answers on life and death.

Out of the Woods by Luke Turner

Poster, Font, Text, Book cover, Graphic design, Illustration, Advertising, Novel, Graphics,

The Quietus co-founder Luke Turner's debut novel opens in the wreckage of a relationship as he comes to terms with being bisexual. Against the backdrop of the Epping Forest, which Turner has grown up in the shadow of, Out Of The Woods fuses the history of the forest with the winding paths and dead-ends of Turner's own life. In doing so it achieves that tricky balance of feeling both deeply personal and totally universal.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

Water, Text, Sky, Ocean, Font, Book cover, Poster, Electric blue, World,

One of the most popular examples of the new nature trend, Liptrot's book finds her returning to her hometown of Orkney as alcoholism threatens to engulf her life. By swimming and walking the sparsely populated island, its patterns of rebirth are a symbol of perseverance and growth. In coming home she finds a way back to herself.

Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey through Britain by Roger Deakin

Text, Book cover, Font, Graphic design,

Water is both a mysterious and unknowable entity and a soothing tonic in Deakin's book about swimming through the British Isles. From the water he gains what he calls a "'frog's eye view" of the country, after incidents like being stopped and held by water bailiffs in Winchester and mistaken for a suicide on Camber sands. This fresh perspective from water also offers a reflection of his own life.

Feral by George Monbiot

Text, Poster, Book cover,

Distressed at capitalism and meaninglessness of life in modern cities, environmentalist George Monbiot retreats to rural Wales. The result of is a compelling case for the peace to be found from a simpler life and the solace that can be found in nature. A book that will have you longing to escape the rat race in favour of gulping some fresh air.

Nature Cure by Richard Mabey

Natural landscape, Grassland, Text, Sky, Natural environment, Book cover, Prairie, Ecoregion, Plain, Poster,

One the country's foremost nature writers, this book marked a departure for Richard Mabey who moved to a new part of the country following a bout of depression. There he renegotiates his longstanding relationship with the outdoors. The result is a book that sings with the restorative joys of nature.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Text, Sky, Font, Book cover, Turquoise, Poster, Ocean, Sea, Cloud, Novel,

Solnit is mesmerising when writing on anything, be it Trump's election or mansplaning. This collection of essays is no different and finds a common theme in moments of uncertainty and change. In one standout, she ponders the fate of tortoises, threading together a memory of riding one in a zoo with their modern fate in our crumbling environment. Throughout, history, nature and Solnit's memories collide to create something meditative and stirring.

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Nature » Nature Writing

Amy liptrot chooses the best of nature writing.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

Amy Liptrot , whose bestselling memoir The Outrun won the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing, talks to Five Books about her favourite writing about landscape—and how her immersion in island life helped her recover from alcoholism.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard

The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - Findings by Kathleen Jamie

Findings by Kathleen Jamie

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life by George Monbiot

Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing - The Orkney Book of Birds by Tim Dean and Tracy Hall

The Orkney Book of Birds by Tim Dean and Tracy Hall

fiction nature writing

1 Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell

2 the drowned world by j. g. ballard, 3 findings by kathleen jamie, 4 feral: rewilding the land, the sea, and human life by george monbiot, 5 the orkney book of birds by tim dean and tracy hall.

Your bestselling first book, The Outrun, follows your story of recovery from alcoholism in Orkney, it’s a blend of memoir and nature writing: a very visceral sort of nature writing. The phrase ‘the nature cure’ springs to mind—is that something you believe in?

Rather than it being a philosophy I set out with, it was more something that I came to see the truth of through my own experiences. If the book is quite visceral, it’s because it was written at the same time as I was going through it, often from daily diaries that I keep. It’s set mainly during the time I lived on the small island of Papay and that’s also when I was writing the book.

This time in the wee house on the island was where I had the space to figure out what was going on with myself, how I’d ended up with an alcohol problem and in rehab and all that but also what helped me out of that was getting to know the island, the people and the culture and the coastline and the birds and the changes of the sea. I think often what I found most rewarding was not just, you know, going out for a walk, but time when I was actually in the landscape either immersing myself physically, by swimming in the sea, through the winter, or doing something like building the drystone walls. Going back to the same place as it changes through the seasons and physically linking myself to the land in some sort of way could be more rewarding and I could gain a deeper understanding of the place, and myself.

“I was doing more and better writing than I had done when I was pissed…that was helping me to keep sober”

While all that stuff has helped me—learning about the birds, connecting myself to something bigger than just me—while I am interested in that, what I’m specifically interested in is writing about the birds, and the place, and the fact that I had struck upon a great new source of material and was doing more and better writing than I had done when I was pissed…that was helping me to keep sober. So I was writing about the place and getting sober but that writing itself was keeping me sober and helping me with my recovery as well.

When you read other people writing about nature, or wild swimming, or other focuses of your own work, what do you look for, what do you admire?

I suppose I look for people that have more knowledge than me, who’ve done their research or…it’s a combination of both first-hand experience, often expressed in an unusual or poetic way, but I think that has to be combined with background research.

I also like it when somebody describes something that I have seen myself, but they’re able to do it in a better way than what I could have come up with—that recognition, I’ve seen that too! That’s true! And I’m glad that someone else has noticed it, or that they’ve corroborated my experience. That can be satisfying.

That reminds me of why I like reading film reviews, I often prefer to read them after I’ve seen the film, to get that sense of ‘yes! That’s it, that’s why that worked.’ Once I remember seeing you tweet that you’d learned as much from music criticism as you had from other nature books, do you still feel that?

Yes. I was actually a little nervous about doing this interview because there are lots of experts in the particular field of ecological writing, which I’m certainly not. Growing up I wasn’t a keen young ornithologist, or naturalist, although I was a keen reader but the books that I read as a kid were, you know, about boarding schools and babysitters and stuff far away from Orkney. Then, when I was a teenager and a student, I liked cities and rock’n’roll and angst, and I started writing a little for the music and style press.

“I was a keen reader but the books that I read as a kid were about boarding schools and babysitters”

And I think that was what formed me as a writer. I realised recently that when it’s come to me writing about the natural world, I think I’ve taken some of the things that I learnt through music journalism and magazine and fanzine writing, which often has a certain poise and wit or  a sense of the absurd detail, and enjoys slightly odd, fringe type characters—then applying that to looking at island life, or bird life.

Speaking of fringe characters, maybe that brings us to your first book choice: Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. Maxwell himself was a rather complicated character, but his book was just so captivating and gorgeous.

It’s a cult book that I had been aware of but never read, until my mum recommended it to me recently. I’ve actually read a kind of spin off book about it, Island of Dreams, by Dan Boothby, a chap who lived more recently on the island under the Skye bridge which Maxwell had owned. I did an event with him last year. So I was aware of the captivation Maxwell had held over a generation of young naturalists, often kind of loner type men, I think.

Particularly the first half of the book is just wonderful. He’s this aristocrat that just manages to acquire the lease on this lighthouse keeper’s house, and the sense of place that he evokes…he’s a brilliant writer. I got that recognition I mentioned before, of things that I myself have experienced in Orkney. He talks about the eider ducks and their mating calls: I’ve heard that! Or just the effects of the wind and the sea on the west coast of Scotland. That really struck something deep in me.

You can just imagine it—he’s very good with physical detail and how they descend the hill to the house, which is surrounded on three sides by sea, the ‘ring of bright water’.

It has a wonderful sense of freedom, perhaps because he’s doing something that people dream of. Living alongside an otter—laying aside whether or not someone should try to have an otter as a pet—it’s the dream isn’t it?

Yes, he’s retreated to this isolated place, where—although he gets a lot of help from people—he’s sort of alone, in the natural world, which is very appealing. As I think I discovered myself when I wrote about being on Papay, readers seem to relate to that, and it has a relationship to another book I thought about choosing, Walden, the archetype of this lone person in a small place in the countryside.

“The book is very of its time, it wouldn’t get published or written today”

But like Henry David Thoreau, Maxwell is…Well, the book can be read as a psychological portrait of a somewhat damaged person, actually. He’s from this privileged background and has, perhaps, problems with other human beings. That makes this lifestyle—and as it happens in the second half of the book, the relationship he has with his pet otters—attractive to him. It’s a weird portrait really. He’s brilliant, and funny, on the behaviour of the otters and how they differ from other kinds of pets. They’re not meant to be pets really. The book is very of its time, it wouldn’t get published or written today, I don’t think—someone taking wild animals from the Middle East and attempting to tame them with all the chaos that it causes and taking on local lads to help him out. But there’s something very idealistic about this world that he creates.

There’s a wonderful section when he takes the otter on the sleeper train and puts him in the sink, where he splashes around merrily.

Yes and the guard comes in in the morning and the otter’s actually in bed next to him, lying on its back with its hands over the cover and the guard says, ‘Would that be tea for one or two, sir?’

He’s a special and unusual guy who’d probably have been infuriating to deal with. He gets live eels sent up daily from London for the otters at great expense, huge amounts of money are spent on his outlandish plans—but you’re rooting for him, really, to be able to carry this off.

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Then there’s this fantastic coincidence—after his first otter dies, is killed by a local person, which is heartrending, he’s desperately searching for a new otter and one just happens to turn up. Somebody hoping to find someone to take on their otter happens to walk by when he’s having lunch in a local hotel. You’re delighted, as delighted as he is when you read it.

The rural idyll Maxwell creates is so different to the world of your second book, JG Ballard’s The Drowned World. Here, instead of a paean to the pristine environment, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic catastrophe. What made you pick this?

Well, I think it’s a good example of using the natural world in fiction, and dystopian fiction, and I like the way that it uses the natural world, animals, and they are threatening and dangerous and strange rather than a source of solace or escape. They are the opposite. It was ahead of its time, it could almost be seen as a novel about climate change: ‘de-evolution’ is the word used.

Ballard is a master of the surreal but revealing detail, often using plants and animals. I remember one section in High Rise, a bit that stuck with me, was a seagull picking a diamante from a pair of sunglasses abandoned at the top of a building. And in The Drowned World, he has what was London, now flooded, and all these hotels now silted up where only the top floors are still accessible. And when it’s drained there are all these sea creatures—giant anemones and starfish and kelp—in Leicester Square, and dinghies stranded on traffic islands. This idea of the familiar being made strange and awful is part of what creates his distinctive, and highly influential, atmosphere.

The main character is almost perversely attracted to this new, ruined, world.

Kerans, the main character, the biologist—when the other people are retreating further towards the poles where it’s cooler, he’s going deeper in towards the equator…into the heart of darkness…A lot of Ballard’s books are about dark psychological stuff. But I can relate to being attracted to some of the more brutal elements of nature. I chose to go and live on a small Orkney island during winters rather than summers, when most people would choose the opposite. The big winds and the wild seas that sometimes cause damage are appealing to me, in their power and inhospitability.

Is there something in you that is drawing you back there? Or was it a time of your life when you needed it, when it suited you?

I think there are two parts of me. The island lass and the city dweller. I think I tend towards one extreme or the other, either inner city or outer isle for me—although, currently, I’m living in small-town Yorkshire which is a completely different environment. But I think these kinds of places, that are quite tough, quite sensory, appeal to me.

Absolutely. In Orkney, you were working for the RSPB looking for corncrakes. Kathleen Jamie, in your third book, Findings, has an essay about corncrakes. Was that something you came across before, or after?

Good question! I was writing a series of columns for Caught by the River, a nature writing website, and I think I’d already done the first four and my friend Morag said to me, ‘Have you read any Kathleen Jamie?’ and directed me towards Findings, which I just gulped up. It was interesting to discover that she was operating in some of the same territory that I was trying to—in an extremely skillful and much more developed way. And a little bit of me was like: ‘Damn you Jamie! Back off!’

“I spent two summers being out every night, looking and listening for corncrakes”

But I’ve gone back and looked at this book recently, and realised how influential she has been on me—just by showing what can be done with the nature essay. I think she’s wonderful. She’s a poet, which you can just see in her work, in her tight descriptions. She describes the weather in Orkney as there being ‘frequent scraps of rainbow,’ which is just right. So yes, it wasn’t like I read Jamie’s stuff and thought I’d go and do something similar, but during the writing of The Outrun, I came across her near the beginning.

The first time I came across your writing was an essay for Aeon , “The Corncrake Wife”. Perhaps it’s the quest element, the idea of these corncrakes being so tricky to find, that makes them so compelling to read about.

Yes—I spent two summers being out every night, looking and listening for corncrakes, and I only ever saw one of them. They almost became a sort of phantom, or symbol, or a way of allowing me to see the island as much as find the bird. There’s a lot of mythology and theory associated with them. It was something that I randomly applied for, got the job, and working for the RSPB opened a lot of doors for me. That was the beginning of my deeper interest in the natural world and realising, through writing and also through reading people like Jamie, that it was something that I could write about.

I’ve given this book to a number of people and recommended it to more. She’s a poet, but she’s also a realist—she talks about details of modern-day Scottish life, the people that she meets, and a little bit about her own daily life: she has to be back to pick the kids up from school, things like that. And she’s just really smart, in terms of the research that she does and sometimes, not in a too heavy handed way, but the way she relates it to wider ecological issues.

“They almost became a sort of phantom, or symbol, or a way of allowing me to see the island as much as find the bird”

The title essay, “Findings”, is about beach-combing and the things that she finds. I like how she describes, on the same poetic level, the gannet skull that she finds but also the unusual plastic objects she finds washed up, which is obviously about the pollution of the seas. Her tone is really well judged and her beautiful, clear-eyed descriptions show the reality of what’s going on on the coastlines.

I think she’s fantastic and a worthy winner of the Saltire Book Prize last year.

And a very different style to George Monbiot, next, with Feral. Is it accurate to describe him as a polemicist? He comes from a very different direction.

This is a bold and radical book, which introduced me to several new ideas and changed the way I look at the countryside in quite a challenging way. As you say, it’s different to Jamie in that he’s unafraid of stating his opinions. The book broadly is about this idea of ‘re-wilding,’ which was a new idea to me. A really exciting one, I found it. All the stuff about the return of large predators and the effects that the loss of the top predators has had on the landscape was really eye-opening, and also—particularly as a sheep-farmer’s daughter—it was quite difficult to read some of his opinions. Because he hates sheep. Or rather, he hates the effect that sheep have had on the uplands of this country.

He describes sheep farming as ‘having done more damage to the living systems of this country than either climate change or industrial pollution.’

Yes! Which is a really radical idea. But I think he might be right.

How does that feel, coming from a sheep-farming family?

Well, I guess there might be some differences  between the Scottish islands and the uplands of Wales, in that they weren’t really wooded places in the first place. But I think I’m open to looking at the way that agriculture is very protected, sometimes, and it’s difficult to criticise. Perhaps we should be looking at new ways of using the land, and diversifying what landowners and farmers do.

My dad is an organic farmer, which is slightly less intensive and slightly more varied, and has a lower impact on the land, but after reading Monbiot, I do look out, even in Orkney, and see the ‘green deserts’ he describes, the monocultures of grassland for beef.

“After reading Monbiot, I do look out even in Orkney and see the ‘green deserts’ he describes”

However, I put Monbiot in a category with two American writers I love, Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit, in that he’s an outspoken writer on conservation and the environment, but he does offer some mitigations and some ways forward: in his ideas about re-wilding, and talking about localisation and how landowners can diversify or be more creative about how the land is used and the species that can possibly be introduced. So while it is very challenging and difficult, there are also some exciting ideas and suggested ways forward that could provide some blueprint.

He uses very emotive language, phrases like ‘sheep-wrecked’—do you think that is necessary to shock people, almost, to make people look afresh at landscapes, the way you described?

I think that’s his style, and I commend it and quite admire it, really. It might not make his ideas palatable to a broader audience, including some farmers who might just dismiss it, but I think there’s absolutely a place for what he’s saying. Some people might think he’s too strong, or he’s not allowing a place for looking at how small farmers, who are small business owners, might just be doing what they need to do to survive, and how it’s been in their families for generations. But no, I don’t think he’s too dramatic, the natural world is in crisis.

Let’s move on to your last book, the illustrated Orkney Book of Birds. You say you’ve learnt a great deal from this book. Why would you recommend it?

I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, just to people who are in or visiting Orkney. It’s a little masterpiece of local knowledge and research, presented extremely readably. It’s a guidebook, and over the last few years, as a novice birdwatcher in Orkney, it’s the nature book I return to the most. Unlike the Collins bird guide, it only includes the species found in Orkney, which is different to what you find in other places, and includes lovely details such as the Orcadian dialect names for all the different birds: puffins are ‘tammie norries’, and lapwings are ‘teeicks’.

“In Orkney, puffins are ‘tammie norries’, and lapwings are ‘teeicks”

It also includes their specific local locations, the different islands or habitats they are found on, their numbers and how they have increased or declined over the years, looking at data from local surveys. Then it often has specific, almost poetic, facts, like how there was a starling roost on the Kirkwall lifeboat, or that most farms in Orkney tend to have a pair of pied wagtails. It really helped me to appreciate my local patch. The birds I’m now most knowledgable on are the seabirds and the farmland birds that you get in Orkney.

And as well as the text, which is fabulously researched and written by Tim Dean, there are also the illustrations by Tracy Hall, which are beautiful. What I particularly like is that they are shown in their specific Orkney locations where they are found, you can see identifiable buildings and coastlines. I think the corncrakes are on the island of Egilsay, which has been a place that has encouraged them. I love this book.

Having moved to Yorkshire, do you feel you’ve had to learn a whole new population of birds and wildlife?

Well, I’m just starting off! I was out for a walk yesterday and I saw some grey wagtails, a bird we don’t get in Orkney. There are so many species down here that you don’t get in Orkney. I hear  tawny owls, hooting at night, which feels very exotic to me, as the only owls we have in Orkney are the short-eared owls, which are silent. So I’ve been learning a new landscape. But I can’t help comparing it—I keep saying ‘oh, we don’t get that at home!’ I do feel like Orkney is my heartland, my local patch, and I can see myself returning there at some point. I’m just having an interlude here in Yorkshire. The islands are really…particularly the curlews and oystercatchers and the gannets and the tysties [black guillemots] are the birds that speak most to my heart, that I grew up with and got to know deeply over the years that I lived there.

It’s something that is dyed in you, almost. What you said there reminded me of Nan Shepard, and the way she was always going in and out of the same hills over years and decades, how rich those layers of experience can become. It’s all imbued with this history of yourself.

Yes. Although I said that I wasn’t a birdwatcher when I was a kid, I grew up on a farm so I was aware of the birds, and knew their names and their calls were already in me. I think it was there all along, I just avoided admitting it for a long time. So it’s been very rewarding to study it all and write about it more closely.

April 13, 2017

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Amy Liptrot

Amy Liptrot

Amy Liptrot's first book, The Outrun was a Sunday Times bestselling title and winner of the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing. It was also shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize, for the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and was recently announced as in the running for narrative non-fiction book of the year at the British Book Awards.

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Cool Green Science

Stories of The Nature Conservancy

Novels for Nature Lovers

Fiction lovers take heart, you can have your great novel and nature too. Here are eight of our favorite picks.

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Here’s a pet peeve when reading a serious novel: the story goes into great detail on the woodgrain of the furniture, the clothing brands the characters wear, what music is playing in the background. But step outside, and birds appear that would not be found within 1,500 miles of the novel’s location.

Serious fiction has become inextricably associated with urbanity. And many novelists seemingly don’t even try to get nature right.

But there are fictions writers out there who write well, and passionately, about the natural world.  Sometimes, we’d argue, their stories capture the essence of a place better than any non-fiction work ever could.

So here are eight of our favorites. Many of them are written by novelists who are also scientists or science writers, and they all get the details of wildlife and wild places right. We hope you enjoy them, and welcome your own picks in the comments section.

By Cormac McCarthy

fiction nature writing

A Pulitzer Prize winner, The Road tells the story of a father and son making their way across a United States now devoid of life, save for scattered bands of other people. Some of whom are cannibals.

Yeah, it’s bleak. But as with other McCarthy novels, the landscape plays a central role, and a yearning for nature – now lost – fills its pages. I used a passage as the epigraph for my own book on fishing; it’s one of the best descriptions of wild brook trout and the places they live. McCarthy gets his details right. He doesn’t waste a word.  It is not surprising that he is now coaching scientists on how to write better journal articles . (MM)

The White Bone

By Barbara Gowdy

fiction nature writing

Mud and her elephant herd wander through a drought-stricken landscape, past the mutilated bodies of their kind. The rains are late, the dry land unfamiliar, and even memory itself begins to disintegrate. They search for the white bone, a mythical sacred object that will guide the elephants to a safe place, where water flows and the poachers cannot reach them. 

Written from the perspective of a young female elephant, The White Bone is a masterpiece of imagination and cross-species empathy. Barbara Gowdy offers a window into the pain, suffering, and cultural collapse that African elephants are currently experiencing. The story may be fiction, but the heartbreak is real. (JEH)

The Breeding Season

By Amanda Neihaus

fiction nature writing

This story follows an Australian couple, Elise and Dan, as they attempt to reconnect in the wake of their baby’s death. Elise, an ecologist, punishes herself with grueling fieldwork trapping small mammals. Dan, a writer, grapples with his literary legacy and family trauma. 

Though the obvious tragedy has already passed, another storm builds in the distance as the novel unfolds.  Neihaus’s writing balances on the knife-edge between prose and poetry, with small phrases so beautiful that they catch you off-guard. 

Though a work of fiction, her writing is founded in science. Neihaus is a trained ecologist who studies the reproduction of northern quolls, small Australian marsupials who quite literally copulate themselves to death. But she’s also a passionate science communicator who wants to reach a wider audience and use fiction to explore the intersection between sex and death, between art and science, and the complex power of human love. The result is dark, raw, and stunning. (JEH)

When the Killing’s Done

By TC Boyle

fiction nature writing

This novel is based loosely (very loosely) on a real conservation project in which The Nature Conservancy played a role: the removal of invasive pigs from California’s Channel Islands to allow the recovery of native wildlife. The plot centers on a national park biologist committed to recovering endemic island foxes and an animal rightist who wants to stop the killing of pigs at any cost.

The removal of invasive mammals often ignites passions and politics, and it provides rich grounds for a novelist of T.C. Boyle’s skill. He amps up the drama and violence, but also deftly shows the competing worldviews about the natural world and what species belong there. Fox biologists, pig killers, pig savers, ranchers and more converge in a tale of human values. Boyle raises often-difficult questions about the definition of “invasive” species. Many decisions are often based more on human values than on science. But the philosophy is just the background for a thrilling novel involving over-the-top personalities. (MM)

The Overstory

By Richard Powers

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This Pulitzer-winning novel tells the story of nine strangers —  connected by the power of trees — who join across time and space to fight against an environmental catastrophe. 

An artist inherits a hundred years of portraits of the same American chestnut. A scientist with a hearing disability discovers that trees communicate with one another. A soldier fighting in the Vietnam War is saved when he falls from his aircraft into the bows of a banyan tree. A computer programmer sees a relationship between the genetic sequences of trees and his programming code. 

Powers weaves together their stories — and the stories of the trees — across history and landscape, “in concentric rings of interlocking fables.” He manages to write about environmental catastrophe without veering into the gratuitously dystopian, and the novel is packed full of fascinating information about trees. (JEH)

Where the Crawdads Sing

By Delia Owens

fiction nature writing

I’ve reviewed this book previously . But it’s worth mentioning again, because it’s a great novel that’s filled with excellent nature writing. It begins with a young woman living a semi-feral existence in coastal North Carolina. There is murder and romance and vivid characters. But there’s also wildlife and ecology and nature observation. Field guide illustrations play a central role throughout the story.

I’m heartened to see this book dominating various bestseller lists for the past year. It deserves it. And Delia Owens is pitch perfect in both capturing the spirit of a “swamp girl” and detailing the natural world that informs this girl’s world. Owens is a wildlife biologist who spent years with her husband in a remote tent, where they studied lions in very trying conditions (as detailed in their excellent book, Cry of the Kalahari ). If you love nature writing, or just a good mystery, you won’t want this one to end. (MM)

Tiger Country

By Stephen Bodio

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I read Stephen Bodio’s memoir Querencia more than 25 years ago. It was one of those books that expanded my world, with beautiful writing on topics that mattered to me. In my lifetime of book obsession, it remains my favorite. Bodio is known as a nature and outdoor writer, but he has read everything. His writing is informed by history, the classics, ranching culture, evolutionary biology and more.

In his first novel, he turns his attention to rewilding: the idea of bringing large predators back to landscapes where they’ve been eliminated. This is a love song to his beloved New Mexico, and involves a covert and illegal operation to bring back grizzly bears, jaguars and other large beasts to the Southwest. This is one of the more unusual takes on rewilding I’ve read (and I’ve read just about everything printed on the topic). There are not easy heroes or villains. There are stunning animals, domestic and wild. The protagonists eat and drink and discuss art and shoot things. The writing takes my breath away. Read this, then read everything else Bodio has written. (MM)

Go Down, Moses

By William Faulkner

fiction nature writing

Yes, Faulkner. 

Years ago, one of us spent an inordinate amount of time in college studying how classic southern writers incorporate nature into their stories. Faulkner is a master — weaving the southern landscape into his prose to the point that the land takes on a primal energy of its own, alongside the hunters and dogs that move through the gloomy woods and impenetrable stands of sugarcane.

If you read Faulkner in school and felt intimidated or overwhelmed, don’t worry. Go Down, Moses is less of a novel and more a collection of intertwined short stories. It’s still Faulkner, but it’s manageable. Fans of this book should also check out Faulkner’s Big Woods , another short story collection with more hunting stories. (JEH)

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21 comments

Jim Harrison’s novels all deserve consideration, as he gets his natural history right, but “True North” may capture best the full essence of place, both in the tragic destruction of it by humans and the redemption it still provides. Set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the protagonist struggles to come to terms with his family’s legacy of despoilment even as he seeks solace, love (with women and a dog), and truth in the North Woods. A minor character in the story shows up in a subsequent novel “Returning to the Earth” that provides insight into Native American attitudes towards nature while addressing the theme of death. The human relationship to nature is complex and troubled and Harrison explains well both the good and the bad.

Hi Tom, Thanks for writing. I am a big fan of Jim Harrison and I had several of his novels for consideration on this list. We just didn’t have space for all our favorites. I will definitely include him on a future list. I love his non-fiction, too. Matt

You missed all of Barbara Kingsolver’s novels!

Corinda, We simply didn’t have space for all the great novels with nature in them, but you are right, Barbara Kingsolver deserves to have at least a novel on this list. Thanks for writing. Matt

Thanks for your piece – all of these books are going on my night table!!! My suggestion is ‘Lab Girl‘ by Hope Jahren. Amazing writing that fires you up about plants, the wonders of botany, and the excitement of being a scientist. A memoir rather than a novel, but a great story.

Erin, Thanks for writing and for your suggestion. I have not read Lab Girl yet but have heard several recommendations. I will check it out! Cheers, Matt

I suggest books by the following authors: – Edward Abbey -Tony Hillerman -Jim Harrison -Randy Wayne White ( his Doc Ford novels) -Carl Hiaasen (yes, they are slapstick, but still have an appreciation for the natural environment!) Thanks!

Hi Gary, Thanks for your suggestions. I have read all these authors and have enjoyed their work. Great picks!

Last summer, I read a series of books written by Paul Doiran. The main character is a game warden named Mike Bowditch. The stories take place in Maine, and the author includes enjoyable descriptions of nature in his settings. The first book in the series is The Poacher’s Son. The series was among my favorite mysteries.

Hi Diane, Thanks for writing. I am a fan of Paul Doiron’s mysteries, too. In fact, I wrote about the Mike Bowditch series in a blog about mystery novels for nature lovers: https://blog.nature.org/2019/04/01/mystery-novel-picks-for-nature-lovers/

If you like Doiron’s novels, you may also enjoy the others I mention.

Here’s a few more:

Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Greenwood by Michael Christie

The Trees by Ali Shaw

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (non-fiction but full of stories)

Great suggestions. Thanks for sharing.

Great suggestions! Some of these are waiting patiently on my “books to read” list – Justine

Great post! It really made me think and take note of my own favorites-whether the nature described was in the background or forefront of the tale-accuracy and detail of surroundings make such a difference and add to that fulfilled feeling I get at the end of a good book! Three favorites where nature was at the forefront and was so perfectly detailed I felt as if I could see, hear, and smell everything the authors described, were The Voyage of the Turtle, The Hidden Life of Trees, and Braiding Sweetgrass. All three authors have mastered imagery and storytelling in a way that make you feel as if you’re sitting on their back porch listening to them recount their lives and ruminations about topics very diverse from each other, but near and dear to my heart! If you haven’t read them, check them out!

Barbara Kingslover’s novels. She is from Kentucky – a biologist.

‘Eucalyptus’ by Murray Bail. A medieval quest story set in modern Australia, that is a tribute to all Eucalypts.

Any Barbara Kingsolver novel!

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July 7, 2021

Story type: TNC Science Brief

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Country files: nature writers on the books that inspired them

Robert Macfarlane, Helen Macdonald, Kathleen Jamie and other contemporary writers choose the books that made them fall in love with the natural world

  • Robert Macfarlane: ‘Britain’s wild places are vital to our imaginations’

Helen Macdonald The Goshawk by TH White (1951)

TH White’s tragic and beautiful memoir of his attempts to train a young goshawk in 1936 is a story that works in counterpoint to my own in H Is for Hawk , and it still tugs at my heart. It wasn’t just a literary inspiration. Deep down it fuelled my own compulsion to train a goshawk after my father’s sudden death. When I read it as a child I understood that it was about a man running to a hawk to escape from something. Back then I didn’t know anything about White’s violent, loveless childhood, nor his struggles with his sexuality. I didn’t know why he was running. But I knew he was hurting. And when my father died and I was hurting too, some part of me remembered that a goshawk was something to run away to.

You don’t have to unconditionally love a book for it to inspire you. The Goshawk is a painful read, and I still find White’s relationship with his hawk very difficult to bear. But it helped me to think more clearly about how we unconsciously use nature as a mirror of ourselves, and how suffering is so often brought about not through evil, but through carelessness and ignorance. Despite his capacity for great joy and love for many things, including the natural world, White was never given the tools to know how to properly love or care for things, including himself.

Helen Macdonald

His confiding authorial voice is in large part what also makes The Goshawk a magnificent read, and it was this that motivated me to move away from the objective, authoritative tone of much writing about nature to try to write a book that was more reflexive, made up of voices that were not always full of certainty, that were sometimes contradictory, not always obviously my own. Because, ultimately, White’s honesty about his relationship to the English landscape and his hawk, however distressing and often self-deceiving, was the book’s greatest inspiration to me. Laying bare the grounds of our emotional attachments to the natural world – or our lack of them – is of crucial importance in our age of ecological disaster. The Goshawk is a touchstone in this regard: a work that spurs one to think deeply about why and how we assign value to things that are not us.

Helen Macdonald is the author of H Is for Hawk (Vintage Classics).

Robert Macfarlane The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

Robert Macfarlane walks along ancient pathways in the Chilterns.

There isn’t much of what you might call nature left in Cormac McCarthy’s best-known novel. There isn’t much of anything, really: just asphalt, ash, shattered buildings and the inevitable, indestructible shopping trolley. Organic life has all but vanished. Even the colour green has gone extinct. Language is burnt back to a rubble of grunts and fillers: uh-uh, OK, yeah. This is “nature writing” at its asymptote, with only the act of utterance keeping it from pure black zero.

McCarthy might seem a cussed choice, then, as the most inspirational writer of place that I know. But there it is. His bleakness is bracing. And his earlier novels are ornate where The Road is minimalist. I’ve read them all several times (except Suttree , which beats me still). For years I kept a notebook titled “CM” into which I copied phrases and paragraphs from his novels: “All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert.” I watched what he did with commas, or their absence: “As they went down the valley in the new fell dark basking nighthawks rose from the dust in the road before them with wild wings and eyes red as jewels in the headlights.” I admired his treatment of poverty and labour, and how he scourged sentimentalism but refused to banish beauty: “This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.”

McCarthy’s novels are filled with watchers and hunters, from the Indian scouts of Blood Meridian through the wolf-trackers of the Border Trilogy , to the father in The Road , “glassing” the terrain ahead of him with binoculars, knowing that under such circumstances foresight is fate. His characters read landscapes intently, because their life or the life of another often depends on that scrutiny. They excel in hard, sharp sentences of seeing.

But his characters also channel thoughts and visions that far exceed their terms of perception. McCarthy carries out audacious acts of cantilever, extending his sentences with clause after clause until they are cranked out over nothingness: “Toward early morning he woke, sat up quickly and looked about him. It was still dark and the fire had long since died, still dark and quiet with that silence that seems to be of itself listening, an astral quiet where planets collide soundlessly, beyond the auricular dimension altogether.” Such passages are written with a pen of iron dipped in Old Testament ink, and they trace out a cosmic baroque. They are not to everyone’s taste, but they are to mine.

McCarthy’s great subjects are the brute indifference of matter and the brute indifference of people: “I’ve seen the meanness of humans till I don’t know why god ain’t put out the sun and gone away.” He shows us that writing about “nature” – whatever on earth we mean by that word – can help us see the shadows as well as the light.

Robert Macfarlane’s most recent book Landmarks is out in paperback from Penguin next week.

Mark Cocker The Journal, 1837-1861 by Henry David Thoreau

Bracket fungi on a tree at Lydford Gorge, Devon.

This is the largest single-volume edition of the diary that Thoreau kept for nearly a quarter of a century until the year before his death in 1862, aged just 44. Even so, it covers only 10% of the original 7,000-page and 2m-word document.

I have a relationship to it unlike any other book, my copy being littered with annotations and a private index for key passages. I think of it more like a living organism, a quality Thoreau himself noted of his own favourite texts. A “truly good book”, he wrote, “is something as wildly natural and primitive … as a fungus or a lichen”. With the exception of field guides that I use outdoors, The Journal is the only book that I have laminated to protect it from constant wear, and I see it as a kind of field guide for life.

Its inspiration is to both the naturalist and the author, occupations that are integrally linked through Thoreau’s astonishing powers of observation. He could stand so still that animals would mistake him for a part of the landscape, climbing upon him to feed or perch. Eyewitnesses in his native Concord described how they would find him, Socrates-like, completely absorbed in some act of contemplation. At the end of day he would be in exactly the same place as when first spotted, and still watching.

Thoreau recognised the deep links between this quality of seeing and his art. In an 1852 entry he describes how he had two notebooks, one for poetry and another for commonplace facts, but he acknowledged the difficulty in keeping them separate, because “the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry”.

He was equally alive to the manner in which physical engagement with the natural world (work, walking, exertion etc) had a direct impact on one’s prose. “I find incessant labour with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, the best method to remove palaver out of one’s style,” he wrote. Instead of palaver, what you get in Thoreau is always robust, precise and fundamentally true. In our age when the substance of nature writing has often been supplanted by style, The Journal seems all the more important.

Although it is pre-eminently about Thoreau’s observations of wild nature, for me this New England diary is also a powerfully political work. And it means much – more even, perhaps? – to someone from the Old World, where land is almost never land, but property. The Old English see place and the living animals and plants upon it through a dense layer of other processes that are about ownership, control, class, money. They impose a deadening gauze over our senses and our sense of place like a cataract over the eye. Thoreau writes not about ownership, but about belonging. To read him is to be liberated from all that stuff and to recover the republican and democratic greatness of our connection to the whole of life.

Mark Cocker is the author of Crow Country (Vintage Classics).

Stephen Moss Adventure Lit Their Star by Kenneth Allsop (1949)

Ringed plover

Not many novels have a bird – or in the case of Adventure Lit Their Star , a pair of birds – as their hero. Little ringed plovers are small, slender waders with a black face-mask and conspicuous yellow eye-ring. At first sight they may not seem very special. But for me they are, as they were for the nature writer Kenneth Allsop.

Little ringed plovers colonised Britain either side of the second world war. But they didn’t nest on some remote mountain or offshore island, or under the protection of a nature reserve. Instead, they chose what Allsop memorably dubbed “the messy limbo that is neither town nor country” – the west London suburbs where I grew up.

Allsop, who later found fame as a campaigning Fleet Street journalist and face of TV current affairs, wrote Adventure Lit Their Star when he was a cub reporter in the late 1940s. Not surprisingly, given his own wartime experiences, the story revolves around a young RAF pilot recovering from TB. He joins forces with two young lads to foil the attentions of a dastardly egg-collector, who is intent on stealing the eggs of these very rare birds.

The book was published in 1949, but after good reviews and a literary prize for its author it was soon forgotten. I stumbled across it as a teenager in the early 1970s, and was instantly captivated. The opening chapter is a tour de force of nature writing, rarely matched before or since. Allsop traces the night-time flight made by hordes of migrating birds as they cross the Channel, on the last leg of their epic journey back to Britain from Africa. In a brilliant and original twist, he imagines them as squadrons of aeroplanes returning home from a nocturnal sortie.

Soon after reading the book, I found my own little ringed plovers, in the vast concrete amphitheatre of a reservoir being built a stone’s throw from where the novel is set, on the outskirts of London. As I watched these birds flying around the digging machines – they nest on bare gravel, so that their eggs and chicks are camouflaged against predators – I could really appreciate the way Allsop described their behaviour. This was a man who spent time watching wild creatures, and understood what made them tick.

Later, I read his collected Daily Mail columns, In the Country . The book was so full of wisdom and insight that I forced myself to read it as slowly as possible, so as not to reach the end. Another reason I was reluctant to finish was that I knew that, soon after the book was published, the author took his own life. He was just 53 – younger than I am now.

Yet I cannot be too sad when I think of Allsop; for his wonderful writings have inspired not just me, but a host of other nature writers and environmentalists. He makes us want to continue fighting for the wildlife and places he cared for so much, and about which he wrote with such effortless charm.

Stephen Moss’s latest book, Wild Kingdom: Bringing Back Britain’s Wildlife , is out now (Square Peg).

Tim Dee The Redstart by John Buxton (1950)

Common redstart

The common redstart is the most beautiful bird I know. Not every birdwatcher would agree, but surely none think badly of this bright-painted little chat. They are always good to see. Males (in spring, this very day across Britain) have ash-grey backs, brick-red fronts, soot-black throats and, above their friendly round faces (their eyes are like living blackcurrants), a pearl-coloured fringe that floodlights the whole bird. Females are drabber, having work to do beyond looking dreamy, but they share the redstart’s best and defining feature with their mates. They cannot see it themselves but both carry behind them a warm red tail. Every second, as if counting time, they tremble or quiver or flirt these feathers and they pulse with various toasted orangey-reds.

John Clare, best of all bird poets, knew redstarts as firetails. Their tail also lends the bird its common name. In Middle English stert means tail. Linnaeus and later taxonomists were bewitched by the same and alighted on Phoenicurus phoenicurus for the bird’s scientific name, meaning red-tail red-tail, as if its mobile brilliance summoned both observation and appreciation. Add to this, the salve of the bird’s silverily song that sounds (to me) like a glance of sunshine on a rainy path, and their migratory lifestyle that takes them from among the dusty feet of dung-coloured camels in the Sahel of central Africa (where I saw them last winter) to the salad-fresh oak woods of the hanging combes of western Britain (where, on Exmoor, I saw them last week); and I hope I might find some followers for my best bird.

For the most beautiful bird, the most beautiful bird book I know. Its author is dead, it is long out of print, its science is superseded by more recent ornithological studies, but John Buxton’s The Redstart from 1950, a slim and sketchy New Naturalist monograph, has ignited most of my bird bonfires since I read it in Bristol Central Library as a neophyte birder fresh in from a fleeting encounter with a migrant firetail. Buxton’s book taught me a lot about how the birds live and what they do. It also showed me a way to think about birds and a way to write about them. Captured by the Germans early in the second world war, Buxton was an amateur bird man, a poet and a literature don. He started watching a pair of redstarts that flew through the wire to breed in the grounds of the Bavarian camp in which he was held prisoner. He ended up recruiting other captives as co-observers, securing paper and pencils from his captors, and watching the two birds for 850 hours over three months in the spring of 1943. His book is written with a clear-eyed understanding born of these efforts but it is also something altogether other. The birds’ modest but assertive commitment to their own purpose, and their free flights through the wire, oblivious to the “skeletal multitude” of men, operated on Buxton such that he wrote, undercover as an ornithologist, a book about the limits of knowing and the value of this, and the impossibility of total capture, and the great boon of loving a bird beyond the pages we might write about it or the names we might call it.

Tim Dee is the author of The Running Sky and Four Fields .

Melissa Harrison A Black Fox Running by Brian Carter (1981)

Dartmoor National Park

This book by the Devon author, artist and columnist Brian Carter probably had a greater influence on my development as a writer than any other. It was published in 1981 and I read it – or rather, it was read to me – in 1982, when I was seven. I must have reread it a dozen times or more since then. Eventually the pages fell out of my paperback so I tracked down a first-edition hardback, which, rather pleasingly, arrived signed.

My mum had a beautiful reading voice, and every night before bed she led us through Tolkien , Alison Uttley , Laurie Lee , Lark Rise to Candleford , the Miss Read books and many others; but it was the Devon writers, Henry Williamson and Carter, who had the greatest effect on me. We spent our summer holidays on Dartmoor, so these were places I knew intimately, and loved; to hear them given such luminosity and significance left me longing to do the same one day.

There’s no getting away from the fact that A Black Fox Running is about talking foxes. New readers should know, too, that these foxes approve of fox-hunting: it is, to them, “the good death” (snares, spades, gas and gins being other options). It is also quite mystical: one fox has visions, there is a benevolent vulpine deity, and some passages are steeped in the kind of fuzzy, pantheistic spirituality that would usually make me wince.

And yet it rises effortlessly above these potential hazards; the quality of the writing and the depth and clarity of Carter’s imagination turning it into something almost inexpressibly beautiful. His vision of Dartmoor as a complex living ecosystem is extraordinary; he seems to be able to hold everything in his mind at once, from a fox kennelled under bracken in the lee of a dry-stone wall, to an old poacher rumpling the ears of his half-mad dog, to a feather lost by a buzzard drifting down to dimple the surface of a stream – all of it, human and non-human, happening at once and with equal significance. His prose slips subtly from lyrical description to earthy humour, its rhythms sunk deep into my DNA as something to aim for, if never achieve.

Carter died last year, having contributed to every edition of West Country newspaper the Herald Express since the early 1980s. Long before I ever put pen to paper, even in secret, I wrote to him care of his publisher; I hope it reached him, although he didn’t reply. Amid the letter’s embarrassing effusiveness is this: “There is a muscular, unsentimental quality to the language – a combination of sparseness and rich description, and a sense, at all times, of the bigger landscape and the movement of the seasons behind the vivid, small details – which has become, for me, the epitome of nature writing, perhaps of descriptive writing itself, and something I would give anything to be able to capture myself one day.”

Melissa Harrison is the author of Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (Faber).

Kathleen Jamie Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard (1982)

Kathleen Jamie

Question: can there be a nature writing, in prose, that honours the natural world, but which is also great writing? It seems not. It would seem that, for great literature, “nature” is not enough. There has to be some transformation, a novelistic approach.

However, the minute we start with the novelistic approach, then the natural world is lost. “Nature” again becomes a mere backdrop to human actions, however well observed, and whatever we are writing ceases to be “nature writing”. This is a problem nature writers, as writers, must grapple with. Nature writing matters, but by definition can’t be great literature. Tough.

But we can go to the poets. I love those poets who can do the acute natural observation then carry it onto the page in transformed, imaginative works which seem to synthesise the two (nature and imagination ) without relegating the “nature” to a backdrop. Even before we had the notion of “ecopoetics” we had DH Lawrence , James Wright , Norman MacCaig , Alice Oswald , among many others. But for prose?

I can’t remember how I discovered the short pieces of Barry Lopez and, especially, Annie Dillard . Dillard’s collection Teaching a Stone to Talk was a revelation. “Living as Weasels” is a flight of only 1,500 words. The horrifying “The Deer at Providentia” not much more. “Eclipse” is genius, again a few thousand words. That’s how “nature” is encountered by most of us, who can’t spend a year crawling in bushes, who have to get home of a night to make the kids’ fish fingers. Short encounter, short form. The UK seemed to have abandoned it, but the essay was alive and well in the US.

Seriously liberating was Dillard’s note: “This is not a collection of occasional pieces, such as a writer brings out to supplement his real work; instead this is my real work, such as it is.”

So there was the solution, and it was to do with form not content. Get in, say what you have to say, get out. Admit you are a sensory, thinking being. Do some serious noticing. There is no such thing as “objectivity”.

Thank you Annie Dillard.

Kathleen Jamie is the author of Sightlines (Sort of Books).

Sean Borodale Joseph Beuys: Coyote by Caroline Tisdall (1976)

Joseph Beuys’s I Like American and America Likes Me

In May of 1974, German artist Joseph Beuys made one of his most important artworks, I Like America and America Likes Me . Wrapped head to foot in dark felt he was conveyed by ambulance on a stretcher from Kennedy airport in New York to the René Block Gallery. Thus “insulated from America”, for seven days Beuys inhabited the gallery space with a wild coyote, partitioned from visitors by a chain-link fence. Caroline Tisdall ’s photographs in her book Coyote record: “long, calm, concentrated, almost silent days of dialogue between two representatives of two species together in the same space for the first time … it came to mark an area of freedom for the protagonists, ambiguously caging the spectators.”

Beuys was greatly influenced by educationist Rudolf Steiner, who in the 1920s foresaw the catastrophic collapse of bee populations within the context of intensive mechanised farming. “You’ll begin to understand the life of bees,” wrote Steiner in Bees: Nine Lectures on Bees (1923), “once you’re clear about the fact that the bee lives as if it were in an atmosphere pervaded thoroughly by love … Perhaps you noticed something about the entire nature of beekeeping, something, I would say, of the nature of an enigma.” Steiner’s environmental politics were at the root of Beuys’s democratic ideas for inclusive participation in creativity. Beuys founded his Political Party for Animals, stood for the German Green party and planted 7,000 oak trees across the city of Kassel. Art, for Beuys, was “the sole, revolutionary force capable of transforming the earth, humanity, the social order”.

Beuys’s crossing of boundaries between two species, for me, shares affinities with beekeeping: the gallery, the hive’s wooden box; the interventions at the hive; Beuys’s prompting of the coyote into new patterns of behaviour. Insulated from the world at large, concentrated into the flight range of a colony of bees, my notes for my book Bee Journal accumulated as a counterspirit to everything I read of gaiacide: nature as the site of crisis. By containing his encounter with America to time spent with a coyote, Beuys insulated himself in an acutely observed dialogue.

The coyote performance and Steiner’s lectures inform my own questions around art practice and the environment. “You should not believe for even a moment that whatever exists somewhere in nature is without certain powers,” Steiner reflected. The line of my walk between the house and the hive over two years grew resonant; its physical wearing of a path, the visible evidence of purposefulness.

Sean Borodale is the author of Bee Journal (Vintage Classics).

Dave Goulson Three Singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell (1954)

Gerald Durrell with lemurs at Jersey zoo, now Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

When I was about eight years old my dad gave me a copy of Three Singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell, and I was instantly hooked. It describes an expedition to Africa to capture rare animals for zoos. I couldn’t believe that anyone could make a living by doing something that was so exciting. I soon devoured it, and then all of his other books, but I was particularly captivated by his descriptions of his idyllic-sounding childhood on the island of Corfu in the 1930s in My Family and Other Animals . He describes his excursions in search of turtles, mantises, snakes and all manner of other exotic-sounding creatures, precursors to his zoo-collecting days. He even had a pet donkey that went with him everywhere, festooned in bundles of jam jars tied together with string to transport home his finds. The beasts he captured all ended up inhabiting his bedroom, loosely contained in a series of home-made cages and tanks, or escaping to wreak havoc on the nerves of his long-suffering mother.

I tried to model my own life on his childhood adventures. I grew up in rural Shropshire where the wildlife was comparatively mundane. Despite my best efforts I could not persuade my parents to buy me a donkey so I had to settle for a bicycle, but otherwise I did my best to emulate Durrell. My bedroom was filled with fish tanks and home-made cages containing newts, caterpillars, sticklebacks and a toad named Norman. For a while I even had a pet magpie that followed me around.

When Durrell grew up he made his expeditions all over the world in search of elusive animals, and eventually set up his own zoo on Jersey to contain them. Obviously catching rare animals for zoos is no longer acceptable or desirable, so I had to modify my original plan of continuing in Durrell’s footsteps. Instead, I have been lucky enough to make a living as a scientist, studying the ecology and behaviour of rare creatures in the wild, sometimes travelling around the world to find them. My speciality is bees rather than the larger beasts that Durrell captured; small but vitally important creatures that help to put food on our plates and do their best to ensure that the world is full of flowers. I focus on bumblebees, thecolourful, furry and endearingly clumsy relatives of the domestic honeybee. Bees don’t really lend themselves to living in a zoo, so instead I bought a farm in France and converted it into a nature reserve, awash with flowers and alive with the buzzing of bees and the scampering, rustling and chirping of a myriad of other creatures.

Sitting outside on a summer’s evening, I often wonder how different my life might have been if my dad hadn’t given me that first book.

David Goulson is the author of A Sting in the Tale (Vintage Classics).

  • Science and nature books
  • Cormac McCarthy

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Donna L. Long

The earth is good., nature writing themes and expanding your journaling.

nature journal page 27 may 2009 about violets

Nature writing is about the environment, the care and respect of the land, living with beings that share the land with us and the spiritual aspects of existing in a living universe.

The natural history genre written in English has a long history in North America. From the late 1600s and early 1700s to the present day, written works celebrating the land have found a ready audience. The lush abundance of the American continents and the wise management of land by indigenous Americans enthralled the European newcomers. Even if at the time the Europeans didn’t understand the wisdom, knowledge and sacrifice if took to keep a land abundant and healthy.

In This Incomparable Land , Thomas J. Lyon categorizes the genre into a wide range of themes and styles:

  • field guides and professional papers
  • natural history essays
  • escape: from cities and towns, solitude and back country living
  • travel and adventure
  • humanity’s role in the environment (see Land Ethics and Sustainable Living )
  • and I add fiction

Nature writing is how we can express not just what we see or hear, but how we feel. How we feel about events, the weather, our mood, and so on. What we write doesn’t have to be thousands of words, sometimes a few sentences are enough.

These themes are not neat. An field guide can have elements of the personal experience of the writer. A essay on land ethics can contain a ramble. A theme can have elements of other themes within it.

Eastern Bluebird perched on birdhouse

The Natural History Essay

With the exception of field guides and professional papers, nature writing is most often published in the form of the personal natural history essay. Henry David Thoreau is considered the originator of the form. The essay often consists of natural history information and personal and philosophical ideas in response to the natural world.

Places to Observe in Your Nature Journal

The ramble ian essay in which the author goes on a walk, usually close-to-home, and writes about the pleasures of being outdoors, the feel of place, and closely observes the happenings of plants and animals.

Essays of Experience

In this type of essays the writer shares their experience walking, building, living in a place. An example is Thoreau building his cabin in Walden , or Henry Beston beachcombing in The Outermost House .

Travel and Adventure

These essays focus on the excitement of danger, novelty of the new, and discovery of new places. Imagine if you stayed in a camp deep in a rainforest, and you wrote about it.

Working a farm, being outdoors, caring for land, plants, and animals has its’ own beauty. As a person works with the land a deep satisfaction and affection for the land can be developed and shared through writing.

Humanity’s Role in the Land

This topic takes up the topics of land ethics, philosophy, religion, economics, and human relations to our world and each other. How are we to live on planet Earth? The genre often issues challenges and calls to environmental activism, like in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring .

Not just nonfiction but fiction too has focused on the land and the wider universe. The land herself, is often a character in a story and shapes people and events.

Sleeping Robin chick on the eaves of my front porch

The Elements of Nature Writing

Descriptive passages.

The genre is distinguished by descriptive passages, interwoven with scientific facts. There is an art to reading scientific articles and elegantly incorporating the information into an essay. It is very pleasing when it is done well.This writing form is called creative nonfiction.

Descriptive passages describe time and place and what is experienced by the senses. In reading a natural history essay, the reader has a sense of actually being there. Of being able to see, smell and feel the place in their mind’s eye.

The Nature Journal

The nature journal is an important piece of equipment for the writer. The nature journal often serves as a place to record thoughts, feelings and facts. A journal can provide a rich source material for further work. From the journal, full-blown essays, articles, op-ed pieces and stories are written.

Hawk Mountain - overlooking the mountains on the Piedmont Plateau

Nature Writing Journal Prompts

  • Write a field guide page. Choose a plant or animal and draw them using arrows to point out important identification marks. Are there differences between male and female? Juvenile and adult?
  • Write and experience essay. Have you built a outbuilding or layed out a garden? What was the experience like of being outdoors? Was the shine shining? Were your hands freezing cold?
  • Write a ramble. Take a walk in a familiar place, close to home or work. Try to describe that place using the four of the five senses of sight, sound, feel and smell. Be careful of tasting.
  • Write of an escape from city or suburbs. Have you visited rural or remote areas lately? How was it different from the built up artificial environments of city and suburbs.I could write about driving fast along deserted country roads and the sense of freedom I felt.
  • Or do you live in rural or remote areas. What does it feel like to visit city and towns?
  • Write of travel and adventure. Have you climbed mountains or hiked backcountry trails. I could write of my adventure of climbing Hawk Mountain or walking along a stream in the Smoky Mountains. If you haven’t had adventure maybe its time to go on one.
  • Farm Life has its own rhythms. I grew up going to my grandparents farms and market gardens. I feed chickens and hogs. I loved the smell of new hay. I loved being outdoors. Share your farm experiences.
  • Land Ethics essays help to clarify who you think you are and your responsibility to the land. I write about land ethics often on this blog. Who do you think you are?

See my booklet  Nature Journal Prompts (pdf) for more inspiration.

More on Nature Writing

Start a Nature Blog

Nature Journal Writing Prompts

Writing and Blogging Tips: A No Nonsense Guide

What is a Naturalist? (journal prompt)

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Article contents

American nature writing.

  • John Elder John Elder Departments of English and American Literature and Environmental Studies (Emeritus), Middlebury College
  • https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.552
  • Published online: 26 September 2017
  • This version: 30 October 2019
  • Previous version

Nature has, like love, been an essential topic for authors in every language and every literary form. The first thing to acknowledge about the term nature writing is that it conventionally refers to a distinctive category of nonfiction, not to the entire spectrum of literature about the natural world. The present survey is further restricted to American nature writing, though the genre has also developed in many other countries. The American lineage of nature writing has been especially influenced by the work of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), who combined journal-based descriptions of the New England landscape and knowledgeable appreciation of science with lyrical prose, receptiveness to nature’s human and transcendent meanings, and a highly personal voice.

Thoreau’s own orientation to solitude, wildness, and the music of nature has also been complemented, however, and in some cases forcefully challenged, by subsequent writers focusing on urban landscapes; environmental justice; the impact of gender, class, and race on our visions of nature; environmental justice; food and agriculture; and material culture. Many literary scholars also now prefer to consider nature writing under the multi-genre and international rubric of “environmental literature.” Nevertheless, this particular form remains a vital model for integrating imaginative literature with close observation of natural phenomena. Today’s writers continue to find, with Thoreau, that books “with earth adhering to their roots” may blossom in the human spirit, revitalizing individual lives even as they also address the urgent environmental and cultural challenges we now confront.

  • nature writing
  • natural history
  • environmental literature
  • environmental studies
  • conservation
  • edge effect
  • ecofeminism
  • ecocriticism
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Aldo Leopold
  • Rachel Carson
  • Leslie Marmon Silko

Updated in this version

New title; summary and keywords added; works list updated; text expanded to include discussion of In One Person (2012).

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Writing about nature

Advice for aspiring nature writers: what does it mean to write about nature, place and the environment?

Today we are sharing some advice for aspiring nature writers. What does it mean to write about nature, place and the environment?

Lots of books which can be described as ‘nature writing’ are works of hybrid non-fiction – they build layers and do more than one thing, using nature as a lens to explore other themes or aspects of life. We love books which combine different landscapes, ideas and personal narratives.

Nature writing should connect in some way with the natural world. You can write about nature in non-fiction or in fiction, but, in some way, demonstrate your awareness, your noticing, how attuned you are, how you pay attention to the world around you.

We asked some literary agents: What piece of advice would you give to an aspiring nature writer? Here’s what they had to say.

  • Kirsty McLachlan of Morgan Green Creatives: Read widely – books that are being published now and those that have become the touchstones of nature writing. And get noticed – place your work with online mags/sites. Enter competitions! Write through your own lens. Kirsty recommends Little Toller’s site, The Clearing .
  • James Macdonald Lockhart of Antony Harwood Agency: Read as much as you can. Read eclectically (not just nature writing!). Write what you know, what you care about, what moves and inspires you. Approach the genre freely, disobediently, creatively, instinctively.
  • Laura Macdougall of United Agents: The advice I’d give to any aspiring writer: read, read, read. Think about what you want to say and why you want to say it (why should we be reading this book by you and not someone else?), i.e., why your book is necessary.
  • Sarah Williams of the Sophie Hicks Agency: Nature is surprising, confident and can feel utterly magical – your writing should be the same.

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“The land knows you, even when you are lost.” ― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Whether you live in an urban area or in the countryside, this workshop aims to get you out of your head and into nature. We will write about the natural world, yes, but also our place in it and how we can protect our home for generations to come. We will use examples of writing across various genres, from poetry and essayettes to novel excerpts and feature articles, from authors such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, Rachel Carson, Natalie Diaz, and Helen Macdonald.

In class we will discuss different ways of looking at and interacting with the outside world, techniques for writing about nature, and what constitutes nature writing. Each week there will be a new nature writing assignment that will require you to, in some way, leave your home (even if it is simply sticking your head out the window) and share your findings with the group. This class is both interactive and active and will include research, observation, and contemplation. It’s also a chance for you to have some time to come home to yourself in the great outdoors, or, if you prefer, to build community with your friends and family as you rediscover place.

This course is open to all writers of any genre who are interested in writing about nature. Prior workshop experience is not necessary, but all members of the class must come to class prepared to discuss the readings, be willing to share their own writing and nature writing, and be generous in their responses to their peers’ work.

Dana’s teaching is fun and light-hearted. If you’ve been working on an idea or are stuck in your writing process, I highly recommend you take her class. —Jeanette Rodriquez

Weekly Zoom Schedule

We will meet weekly on Saturdays at 1:00 P.M. U.S. Eastern Time.

Nature Writing Course Objectives

By the end of this 6-week class, students will:

  • Have a strong sense of what nature writing can be, and how you can craft your own style to work with or against what has come before.
  • Understand the many shapes nature writing can take, and how nature writing is about feeling, emotions, and above all else, stories.
  • Discuss and contemplate questions such as: How do I interact with the natural world around me? Who is Indigenous to this land and is that reflected in the way my town/city is organized? How can I honor and protect the flora, fauna, and original people of the place I call home?
  • Write and revise several pieces of original nature writing content and learn where and how to publish them, if so desired.
  • Above all, we’ll explore and bloom as a writing community and have fun all the while.

Nature Writing Course Outline

1. what the heck is nature writing.

We’ll look at several examples across various genres to begin to see how wide the world of nature writing is and discover how integral the environment has been on writers, and vice versa. We will also brainstorm, free write, and lay down roots for our first pieces, and you’ll be given your first nature writing assignment to be completed outside of class.

After our nature writing check in (did you find a new plant? Notice something you hadn’t before? Get inspired by bird song?), we’ll use model texts that focus on flora to serve as inspiration in the form of either the epistolary, ode, memoir, or hybrid dealing with our local flora. You’ll become an intrepid researcher and botanist, and also get your second nature writing assignment.

After our nature writing check in and optional sharing (what was your favorite flower? Did you have an emotional connection to any flora you came across?), we’ll use model texts that focus on fauna to serve as inspiration in the form of either micro fiction or micro memoir. Whether you want to tell a true story or make one up is completely up to you, and you’ll also get your third nature writing assignment.

After our nature writing check in and optional sharing (is there an animal you misunderstood and now feel differently about? What animals are endangered in your state?), we’ll discuss and look at the role of humans within the natural world, and how respect for our indigenous people goes hand in hand with respect for the land. We’ll also discuss how and why stories are one of the most powerful tools of change, and we’ll work on writing our own centered around the theme of union and wholeness within the natural world, and what connection and well-being looks, smells, sounds, feels, and tastes like. You’ll also get your fourth nature writing assignment.

5. Putting it All Together

After our nature writing check in and optional sharing (are there any stories that affected you as a child that centered around the natural world? Did you find one from another culture? Make one up you can share with your own kids?), we’ll return to our notes and writing over the last month and choose a piece for revision and/or expansion. Time will be spent editing and examining our subject matter, narrative, word choice, messages, and more. Additionally, over the next week, you’ll be tasked with reworking this piece in order to share it out loud during the last class. Feedback will be given, and I will provide tips on how to do so in a constructive and positive manner.

6. Blooming & Sharing

In our last class we will share our work out loud and offer brief feedback to each other, and discuss how we have discovered, or rediscovered, the importance of nature and developing a healthy relationship with our kin. Time will also be spent discussing how to submit your work to literary magazines/journals/newspapers, if you are so inclined, and options for expanding shorter pieces into a series, collection, or book.

Why Take a Nature Writing Course with Writers.com?

  • We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
  • Small groups keep our online writing classes lively and intimate.
  • Work through your weekly written lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
  • Share and discuss your work with classmates in a supportive class environment.
  • Award-winning instructor Dana De Greff will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

Student Feedback for Dana De Greff:

I loved taking Dana De Greff’s ‘The Shape of a Novel’ course at Books & Books. In just four classes, I managed to finish the outline for a novel idea I’ve had stewing in my mind for years. Her writing prompts were productive and inspired me to start writing pages from day one. Her workshops are incredibly nurturing, too. She offers a space where writers can feel comfortable sharing their work and her feedback is always constructive and helpful. I would take more classes with her in a heartbeat! Patricia Garcia

I have attended two workshops with Dana. The first helped me to focus on a topic for a novel. The second has resulted in a structure and 5,000+ words. Dana is knowledgeable, perceptive, and, as a writer, brings her experience to the group. She is well informed and often suggests novels that we should be aware of as inputs to our writing. All of us in the current workshop we are attending would be happy to continue to work with her. That’s the best compliment. Charles Wendel

Dana's approach to teaching is fun and light-hearted and allows for creativity and exploration. If you've been working on an idea or are stuck in your writing process, I highly recommend you take one of her classes or use her coaching services.  Jeanette Rodriguez

Dana provided resources that helped encourage and organize my writing. She was flexible and really catered to the individual needs of each participant. She was always encouraging and open-minded. Aside from her being an amazing teacher and supporter, the class is also great because it introduces you to other gifted writers. I met so many unique and wonderful people who inspired me with their writing as well as their experiences and their own challenges putting pen to paper. It was the first time I had felt creative in a while. I only wish the class had lasted longer! The structure really helped me set goals and keep up with my writing. I recommend her courses for anyone who has any interest in writing. It was a special experience that I was happy to be a part of. Jordana Cutajar

fiction nature writing

About Dana De Greff

Dana De Greff holds a Masters in Fine Arts in fiction from the University of Miami. She has taught Creative Writing classes at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Miami, Miami Arts Charter, Books & Books, The Loft Literary Center, The Writing Barn, and Austin Bat Cave.

She is the author of Alterations (winner of the 2018 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series published by Seven Kitchens Press), recipient of the 2018 Lillian E. Smith Writer-in-Service Award, and the 2017-2018 Literary Artist-in-Residence at the Deering Estate. She has been accepted or awarded scholarships from Tent: Creative Writing, the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, The Key West Literary Seminar, the Lemon Tree House Residency in Tuscany, and Hedgebrook.

Her work appears in Cosmonauts Avenue, Jabberwock Review, PANK, Origins Journal, Philadelphia Stories , and Gulf Stream Magazine , among others. Most recently, she’s the recipient of a 2021 Pushcart Prize Nomination for her story “Storms,” published in the Winter 2020 Issue of Jabberwock Review and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 Key West Literary Seminar's Marianne Russo Award for her novel-in-progress, EVERYDAY MYSTICISM . She is represented by Writers House.

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Anthology Nature Writing Competition

First prize of €500 and the winning entry published in anthology magazine. entries are now invited.

The Anthology Nature Writing Competition is created to celebrate the beauty of the natural world, inspire literary excellence and encourage Anthology ’s readers to explore the great outdoors. Whether it’s the wonder of life right in your own garden, an encounter with wildlife, the serenity of a forest, a reflection on environmental challenges, or the healing power of nature, we welcome your stories.

The Anthology Nature Writing Competition is open to original and previously unpublished works in the English language by writers of any nationality, living anywhere in the world. Essays entered must not exceed a maximum of 1,500 words. Writers can submit as many entries as they wish. Each submission will require a separate entry form and is subject to a separate entry fee.

It is not a requirement, but is advisable to refer to  Anthology  magazine or purchase a copy before submitting your work, so that you can see the type of material we publish. Subscriptions and single copies are available to purchase through our  online shop .

The winner will receive a €500  and the chance to see their work published in a future issue of  Anthology .

Submission deadlines and entry fees

Final Deadline: 30 September 2024

  • Very   early bird fee – €10 : November 2023 – February 2024
  • Early bird fee  – €12:  March – May 2024
  • Standard fee – €15:  June – September 2024

How to enter

Click the button below to access the entry form. Fill in your details, upload your entry and complete the payment before clicking ‘submit’. Please refer to the Terms and Conditions below for competition rules.

Terms and conditions

  • To enter the Anthology Nature Writing Competition, submit an original, previously unpublished work, written in English with a maximum of 1,500 words.
  • There is no limit to the number of entries you can submit. Each submission will require a separate entry form and will be subject to a separate entry fee.
  • There is no age limit.
  • In order to minimise administrative costs and maintain affordable fees, please note that entry fees are non-refundable.
  • Submissions will be judged on their emotional impact, creativity, and the ability to captivate the reader. 
  • Once selected, the winner will be contacted by email or telephone.
  • Copyright remains with the author but  Anthology  reserves the right to be the first to publish or arrange a broadcast of selected works. 

KEEP READING

Anthology personal memoir competition, anthology travel writing competition, anthology short story competition, anthology flash fiction competition, anthology art competition, anthology poetry competition, anthology photography competition, 10 foolproof tips for painting a room in white .

“Nature Is Literally Our Larger Context”

The cedar waxwing is the glutton of songbirds, known for stuffing itself—even to the point of incapacity—with fruit. In “The Cherry Birds,” Kateri Kosek traces the path of a 1908 act “relating to the protection of fruit from the cedar waxwing” through the Vermont state legislature and, more broadly, considers the value humans assign to the species with which we share our space.

Writing about birds is not new to Kosek; her essay “Killing Starlings”—about a seasonal job that required her to kill invasive species—appeared in Creative Nonfiction #40 in 2011. Her poetry and essays have also appeared in Orion , Terrain.org , and Catamaran , and she teaches college English and mentors students in the MFA program at Western Connecticut State University. “The Cherry Birds” is the winner of the $1,000 Best Essay prize for Creative Nonfiction #69: “Intoxication.”

CNF: The research for your prize-winning essay “The Cherry Birds” began when you saw a cedar waxwing killed by your housemate’s cat. You write, “But before the waxwing fluttered away and flopped to the ground, before I turned away and went inside so as not to see the cat finish it off, we stood there in the driveway guiltily admiring the finer points of its plumage.” What about that moment inspired you? Did you know right away that you would write about these birds?

Kosek: Well, it’s always exciting to see a bird that up close, and a waxwing isn’t a bird that comes to feeders, that you spend a lot of time looking at. It was beautiful, which becomes a key premise in the essay, but mostly I was struck by the tenuousness of the moment, how fragile yet tenacious the bird was, fighting for its life. I did write about it immediately, though not with any sense of the essay you see before you, or of how waxwings specifically would figure into it. At first, the poor waxwing worked metaphorically for how I was feeling at the time. Two essays I had read also colored the incident. One was “Les Oiseaux,” Angela Pelster’s very short lyric essay that opens her book Limber, in which a huge flock of waxwings descends on her yard in the winter and devours the berries off the trees, both magically and destructively (my epigraph). And Leslie Jamison’s essay “In Defense of Saccharin(e)” grappled with notions of sweetness and indulgence and included a passage about birds that were, I think, drunk on berries and banging into windows. So I was kind of stuck on the idea of gorging on sweetness even though it may do us in. I forget why, exactly, but at some point perhaps a few months later I did a search on waxwings. I kept coming across that story of the Vermont senators in 1908, which set the course for the essay. But I am first indebted to my housemate and her cat.

CNF: This essay takes a historical and personal approach to the story of the cedar waxwing. How did you organize your research? Did you find that there was some research that had to be left out?

Kosek: This is by far the most “researchy” piece I’ve written. I definitely tried to represent everything that I found (there were lots of examples to choose from), but it’s possible I could have kept looking. Most everything I used was available online. Perhaps somewhere out there, obtainable through more old-fashioned research, is an old newspaper article that would illuminate what happened when the bill to exterminate waxwings came before those senators. Not having found that, I just worked that gap into the essay.

So, similar to leaving things out was deciding when to stop combing through the research and just write the essay already. As a poet I tend to prefer a limited amount of material, when I can see everything on a page and just tinker with it. This amount of research was a little overwhelming. The sources were kind of slippery and finding them was haphazard. Luckily the legislative journals from Vermont in 1908 were digitized on a Vermont government website. Where I found those, all sorts of supplemental government-issued writings popped up, such as old agricultural bulletins. Several of those happened to contain extensive guides to different bird species, based on the research into their diets to prove that they were (mostly) helpful to farmers. But there was a lot of overlap with variation, and sometimes it was hard to tell what something was and when it was written. Submitting for this theme —intoxication—was actually very helpful. I had thought about the essay thematically for a long time, but the deadline forced me to stop staring at potentially endless amounts of material and select enough to make a narrative.

CNF: Did anything in your research surprise you?

Kosek: Some attitudes toward ecology and environmental protection were more progressive than I might have expected for the early twentieth century. I was surprised to find the origins of the “keep cats indoors” campaigns; apparently, some states even wanted to license cats. A State Fish and Game Commissioner report, after establishing how helpful birds were for agriculture, crunched some numbers about how many might get killed by cats and ended, “Those who are really bird lovers and want to have birds nesting close to the house should try the experiment of dispensing with the family cat for one summer and note the increase in bird life about the garden.” Another article was about how we shouldn’t dismiss the “lower animals,” for they can do us much good—insects keeping other insects in check, for instance. It contained the delightful sentence, “Even such a humble animal as the common garden toad deserves our sympathy and encouragement.” And I was surprised at how popular bird-watching was, to the point of newspapers running lists of the new bird species seen migrating through the locale. That was one branch of this essay I didn’t initially plan on, but searching for the phrase “cedar waxwing” in old newspapers turned up a lot of lists like that, as well as some funny items, like an Audubon-sponsored ball to which guests wore outfits that mimicked the plumage of a certain bird, and then everyone had to guess the birds … maybe something someone should bring back?

CNF: Both of the essays that you’ve published in Creative Nonfiction are about birds. What attracts you to writing about nature?

Kosek: Well, I’ve been a birder since I was a little girl. I certainly didn’t share such a questionable hobby with my peers growing up, but the more I wrote, the more I decided to claim and tap into that rather unique area of knowledge. Nature in general has always anchored me, so it seems to follow that it also anchors most of my writing. It also embodies mystery, which is important for my writing. I’ve always written more personal things too, but often in the slightly veiled form of poetry, where nature may exist symbolically. In prose, recapturing extended dialogue and scenes intimidates me. I’m more comfortable describing exterior elements—birds and landscapes and my movements in them—and they also provide that bigger picture that’s necessary for creative nonfiction to avoid falling in on itself. Nature is literally our larger context. The backdrop of the natural world can prevent writing from being too purely confessional. Where I live, in a river valley in western Massachusetts, surrounded by mountains, hiking on the Appalachian Trail regularly, it’s hard for me not to notice nature on a daily basis.

CNF: How does your background in science overlap or feed into your writing?

Kosek: Actually, somewhere in cellular biology lab my freshman year of college, I abandoned wanting to be a scientist, and went in the direction of literature and writing. I wouldn’t have made a very good scientist, because I can’t read science without being struck by the poetic implications of it. So, you could say I “use” science to render it lyrically. But I’m also very interested in what it has to say. The poetry I’ve written in the last few years has a strong environmental consciousness to it, though it’s also very personal. I weave in various effects of climate change, the disruption of weather patterns, my longing for snow in the winter. We can’t afford to ignore science these days. But art and imagination are important vehicles for it.

That first essay that appeared in CNF, “Killing Starlings” (Issue #40/Winter 2011), I wrote after a seasonal job teaching environmental education, and the scientific principle that says invasive species = bad was at the heart of that piece, but of course it’s more complicated than that. After that essay, I noticed that I was fascinated with the larger concept of how we ascribe value to other species, particularly birds—which ones we as a culture cherish or ignore, which we deem okay to hunt, or despise, and how those biases change if one is a birdwatcher. So science certainly plays a role in that discussion.

CNF: The passage that describes the cedar waxwings drunk on fermented berries made me laugh out loud. Did you start writing knowing that humor would be an important element, or is that something that developed as you wrote?

Kosek: No, I definitely started in a more poignant mindset, but the more I read, the more I found the writings about birds in the early twentieth century to be inherently humorous, and I suppose I wanted to convey some of that. The very notion of passing moral judgment on birds based on their habits or diets, all of which we now view objectively through the lens of science, is endlessly amusing. (Though I’m not against anthropomorphizing the natural world to a certain degree. If we don’t see ourselves in nature, we risk distancing ourselves from it.)

I’m also pretty aware that writing focused on the natural world carries a stereotype of reverence and awe—and, often, boredom for the reader—so I suppose humor is one element that works against that. Most writers who write about nature these days find something that erodes that stereotype. It’s also worth mentioning that although I had a draft and many notes, I rewrote this essay with the theme of “intoxication” in mind, so perhaps I was drawn to the many facets of the word, one being the humorous connotation. But from the start I was captivated by the fervor with which these birds can gorge themselves, so “intoxication” seemed fitting—also the way their beauty can intoxicate us, or the way we need to let ourselves be intoxicated by the natural world if we hope to protect it.

CNF: Your essay ends with a lovely but tragic description of “Albatross chicks on Pacific islands, crammed to the throat not with insects, but with bright bits of plastic” and “stunned, jeweled bodies of warblers piled below a skyscraper.” What would you like the reader to take away from these final paragraphs? Do you believe that writers also have an obligation to be advocates?

Kosek: Ideally, yes, but being an advocate could take so many different forms, I wouldn’t presume to tell anybody what to do, writers or readers. Of course—using that example—don’t throw your plastic in the street, but I’m not sure a reader in America can greatly impact the problem of plastic in the ocean, which stems mostly from six or so nations on the other side of the world. It is easier, though, to put decals on our big glass doors so birds don’t fly into them. So sure, there are measures we can all take, but mainly I just hope readers are at the very least more aware and attuned to something the essay touches on after reading it—maybe the birds themselves, or maybe the current administration’s regular attempts to roll back laws that protect endangered species and environmental regulations. 

I certainly find it easier to write than to be an advocate. It’s hard and overwhelming to keep track of every issue and make sure I’m doing something about it, but as a writer, I can follow an obsession with one particular place or bird or story and present that to readers. Of course, the hope is that art can make a difference because people need images and stories in addition to science and facts. A student of mine recently quoted a line from Words that Sing: Composing Lyrical Prose by Mary Ylvisaker: “language has the power to transform people … by adding to or altering the images in the subconscious—the place where 90% of our opinions are formed and decisions made.” I liked that scientific explanation to the sense that writing can translate to societal change.

CNF: What are you working on now?

Kosek: I plan to put together a book of essays exploring what I mentioned above regarding our various attitudes towards other species, particularly birds. One I worked on recently focuses on the Bicknell’s Thrush, a bird considered rare and prized because of its very limited mountain range. Lately, I’m drawn to braided lyric essays, because they allow me to be more of a poet while still writing essays. So that one also has some threads about me and my proclivities. I have another lyric essay about swimming that needs finishing. And a few months ago, I traveled for the second time to Poland, where my father is from, so I have a lot of material from that floating around.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024

  • Expected Oct 22, 2024

Publisher Description

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024 has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

More Books by Bill McKibben & Jaime Green

fiction nature writing

Lisa’s Substack

fiction nature writing

Books that have taught me a thing of LOVE

What does a nature writing, a literary fiction, a memoir, a science fiction and a paranormal romance book all have in common a selection of books i've read in 2024.

fiction nature writing

Like what is probably a significant amount of the UK population we started streaming One Day on Netflix, the new serialised adaptation of the book by David Nicholls. I distinctly remember reading this book, a lot of years ago as I openly proper tears streaming cried in the lunch break-out room of my then employer. In front of quite a few colleagues. I could neither help myself nor stop reading. It invoked varied responses from ‘Oh I Love that book’ to ‘Why are you crying?’ said in disgust. And it probably wasn’t the most embarrassed I have been, not even in my top fifty. So, I thought I’d share five books that I have read in 2024 that have taught me something about love.

fiction nature writing

1)      Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa. Translated from Japanese by Eric Ozawa.

When 25-year-old Takako’s boyfriend reveals he is marrying someone else, it triggers for her a journey seeking emotional refuge and healing through her eccentric uncle and his bookshop. Ultimately this was a book about love, not romantic love but a love and acceptance for family and connection, in a culturally reserved and gentle way. I enjoyed how this was written; slow paced, considered, in tune with the protagonist.

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2)      The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

Speaking of Love for a place, this is a masterpiece in nature writing. She details both the beauty and the harshness of a mountain in the Cairngorms in Scotland with such poetic prose you also can’t help but to want to explore its essential nature, to wander and know rather than head straight for the summit.

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3)       Wintering by Katherine May

This book speaks to the learning to love myself part of me. It is a meditation on retreat for self-care and repair. Learning to live cyclically in tune with the seasons and more importantly not feeling guilty for it. This book has helped me embrace rather than endure winter, hence looking a bit scruffy.

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4)      This is How you Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

A science fiction novella where Red and Blue working for opposing empires, travel back and forth in time and across universes to alter history and outwit the enemy. Garden Versus Tech. Now we are moving towards romantic love territory in my compilation but with a twist. Do they physically meet? Their messages span lifetimes, it’s poetic and creative. It expanded my sense of space and time and I’ll be honest; it is a re-read. One of the few books I will read again.

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5)      Bride by Ali Hazelwood

My final choice is a new release by Ali Hazelwood, her first foray into fantasy or maybe it’s classed as paranormal romance and wow, I enjoyed this so much.  It has everything; enemies to lovers (done well), sarcasm and wit and humour in abundance as well as her unique way to make scientific sense of a made up cross-species romance and all the mis-understandings that come with it. A healthy dose of smut which I am sure partners everywhere will be thanking her for in the coming weeks and I just like her easy writing style. So yes, it’s a good book to end on.

There we have it: literary fiction, nature writing, memoir, science fiction and paranormal romance. All read in 2024. All have taught me something about love and all in my valentine’s day special!

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Meet the 2024 Writing Freedom Fellows

By Jim Plank / February 13 2024

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IMAGES

  1. Fiction Nature Writing Prompts Task Cards by Teach Me Outside

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  2. 120 nature inspired writing prompts to help young writers thrive! If

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  3. Exploring Nature Writing: Examples and Tips for Writing About the Wild

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  4. The Norton Book of Nature Writing by Robert Finch

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  5. Nature Writing for Every Day of the Year by Jane McMorland Hunter

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  6. 'H is for Hawk' author: Must-read nature writing

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VIDEO

  1. Respect 😍

  2. FACT SHORTS WRITERS

  3. ||Fiction and Types of Fiction|| Elements of Fiction|| #avinashdadwal

  4. TOP TEN SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS NEW WAVE (USA) #sciencefictionbooks #bookrecommendations #sf

  5. 5 POETIC Science Fiction Authors

  6. New Nature Writing

COMMENTS

  1. Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre

    Science-fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer returns again and again to the unstable boundaries between humans and other species, most recently in his novel Hummingbird Salamander.

  2. Exploring Nature Writing: Examples and Tips for Writing About the Wild

    If you ask Wikipedia, it's "nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment." So, pretty much anything that describes rolling hills or migrating butterflies goes, right? Actually, most works that are considered "nature writing" today can best be classified as creative nonfiction.

  3. Nature writing

    Nature writing is nonfiction or fiction prose or poetry about the natural environment. Nature writing encompasses a wide variety of works, ranging from those that place primary emphasis on natural history facts (such as field guides) to those in which philosophical interpretation predominate. It includes natural history essays, poetry, essays ...

  4. What is Nature Writing?

    Nature writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the natural environment (or a narrator 's encounter with the natural environment) serves as the dominant subject.

  5. Reading The New Nature Writing Canon

    The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf. For some writers, writing about nature can mean writing about the ways people have written about nature. That's what Andrea Wulf did with her book The Invention of Nature, which explores the life and works of scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The subject of Wulf's ...

  6. We're Living Through A Golden Age Of Nature Writing

    Nature writing - in which the beauty of the natural world is used as way of exploring inner turmoil - has enjoyed something of a commercial and critical renaissance in recent years. It's not...

  7. The Best of Nature Writing 2019

    The best nature writing of 2019, as selected and recommended by the academic and bestselling author of Being a Beast, Charles Foster. Support Us . Search. MENU MENU. ... J. G. Ballard, the British science fiction writer and surrealist, is often credited as some kind of modern-day prophet. But what he was really doing was taking contemporary ...

  8. The 'New' Nature Writing

    It takes in poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. It fuses nature writing, travel writing, philosophy and psychology. (For specific examples, see Macfarlane's article). An interesting strand is that of the memoir writers, such as Helen McDonald's H is for Hawk, and Amy Liptrot's The Outrun. These writers have turned to nature in times of ...

  9. Nature Writing

    Nature writing, celebrating and meditating on the non-human environment and our relationship with it, has a long literary pedigree, stretching back to the 18 th century. Beginning there, Lucy Newlyn discusses William and Dorothy Wordsworth, how brother and sister influenced each other's writing and their commitment to writing about the every day and the sights and sounds of their environment.

  10. Amy Liptrot chooses the best of Nature Writing

    Amy Liptrot's first book, The Outrun was a Sunday Times bestselling title and winner of the 2016 Wainwright Prize for nature writing. It was also shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize, for the Saltire Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and was recently announced as in the running for narrative non-fiction book of the year at the British Book Awards.

  11. Novels for Nature Lovers

    A list of eight novels that capture the essence of the natural world through fiction, written by novelists who are also scientists or science writers. From The Road to Tiger Country, these books explore wildlife, wild places, and human values with passion and skill.

  12. Nature Writing Books

    Henry David Thoreau (shelved 91 times as nature-writing) avg rating 3.78 — 188,011 ratings — published 1854 Want to Read Rate this book 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World (Hardcover) by Peter Wohlleben

  13. What is nature writing?

    Different types of nature writing books can include: factual books such as field guides, natural history told through essays, poetry about the natural world, literary memoir and personal reflections. Typically, nature writing is writing about the natural environment.

  14. Country files: nature writers on the books that inspired them

    There isn't much of what you might call nature left in Cormac McCarthy's best-known novel. There isn't much of anything, really: just asphalt, ash, shattered buildings and the inevitable,...

  15. The Best Books of 2020: Nature Writing

    Patrik Svensson, Agnes Broomé. £16.99. Hardback. Out of stock. In this fascinating blend of nature writing, memoir and philosophy, Svensson explores human attempts to understand the elusive life of eels, as well as what it means to live with questions we can't answer.

  16. Nature Writing Themes and Expanding Your Journaling

    Nature Writing Themes and Expanding Your Journaling. nature journal 27 may 2009 about violets. Nature writing is about the environment, the care and respect of the land, living with beings that share the land with us and the spiritual aspects of existing in a living universe. The natural history genre written in English has a long history in ...

  17. American Nature Writing

    The American lineage of nature writing has been especially influenced by the work of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who combined journal-based descriptions of the New England landscape and knowledgeable appreciation of science with lyrical prose, receptiveness to nature's human and transcendent meanings, and a highly personal voice.

  18. Writing about nature

    Writing about nature 15 September 2021. Advice for aspiring nature writers: what does it mean to write about nature, place and the environment? ... Lots of books which can be described as 'nature writing' are works of hybrid non-fiction - they build layers and do more than one thing, using nature as a lens to explore other themes or ...

  19. In Bloom: Nature Writing Workshop

    What the Heck is Nature Writing? We'll look at several examples across various genres to begin to see how wide the world of nature writing is and discover how integral the environment has been on writers, and vice versa.

  20. How to Write Engaging Non-Fiction: Nature Writing

    Nature writing can be about cliffs, lakes, rivers, deserts, gardens, meadows, oceans, remote islands, and underwater worlds. It can be a study of the slices of nature within cities and urban spaces, whether focusing on parks or plants that we find cropping up in pavements.

  21. Nature Writing Competition

    The Anthology Nature Writing Competition is created to celebrate the beauty of the natural world, inspire literary excellence and encourage Anthology's readers to explore the great outdoors.Whether it's the wonder of life right in your own garden, an encounter with wildlife, the serenity of a forest, a reflection on environmental challenges, or the healing power of nature, we welcome your ...

  22. "Nature Is Literally Our Larger Context"

    Nature is literally our larger context. The backdrop of the natural world can prevent writing from being too purely confessional. Where I live, in a river valley in western Massachusetts, surrounded by mountains, hiking on the Appalachian Trail regularly, it's hard for me not to notice nature on a daily basis.

  23. Crafting Fiction from Personal Experience: Tell the Truth but Tell It

    This generative writing class is intended to kickstart fiction through exercises that will invite us to reach into the rich material of our own lives—and write beyond it. Each week will consist of a generative prompt, paired with a reading from authors including Chee, Duras, and Ernaux as well as James Baldwin, Sigrid Nunez, Alice Munro, and ...

  24. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024

    The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024 has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher. GENRE. Fiction & Literature. AVAILABLE . 2024. October 22 LANGUAGE. EN. English. LENGTH. 320. Pages PUBLISHER. Mariner Books. SELLER. HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS .

  25. Books that have taught me a thing of LOVE

    There we have it: literary fiction, nature writing, memoir, science fiction and paranormal romance. All read in 2024. All have taught me something about love and all in my valentine's day special! ould neither help myself nor stop reading. It invoked varied responses from 'Oh I Love that book' to 'Why are you crying?' said in disgust.

  26. Meet the 2024 Writing Freedom Fellows

    Quntos KunQuest (he/him) is an incarcerated fiction writer, artist, and songwriter from Shreveport, Louisiana. He is the author of This Life: A Novel (Agate, 2021), which was awarded a 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Debut Fiction category. Ken Lamberton (he/him) writes about the nature of the Southwest.

  27. Charlotte Lobb on Instagram: "It's been a bumper February of reading so

    3 likes, 1 comments - charlottelobb_author on February 15, 2024: "It's been a bumper February of reading so far - and all incredible NZ authors! I'm usually ..."