Five Female Authors Writing Nuanced Nature

This month, I’m honored to be the Writer in Residence at the Arthurdale Heritage Center, where I’ll be teaching a workshop titled “More Than a Backdrop, Writing Place as a Lived Experience.” I’ve taught a workshop on this many times (some of you may have taken it with me!) and I feel like it is the foundation of what I believe about place and noticing:

• honing in on concrete details instead of trying to explain

• embodied writing as a response to place

• being intentional about what and how we include place on the page

If I had to say when these notions of writing place began to form for me, and I think it started around the time I first read Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek made me think about the world, and writing, in a completely different light. Dillard had been introduced to me as a nature writer, but she was so unlike the cannon of nature writers I had known at the time (Thoreau, Muir, Carson). She allowed me to see her self in her writing and to see how that self was being affected by the place around her.

Since then, nature writing has changed and blown up into a mesmerizing and complex genre. While I call myself a place-based writer, not a nature-writer, I do see nature writing as where a lot of my beliefs about place originated.

So this month, I’d like to highlight a few works that show the elements of writing place—concrete details, embodied writing, and intentionality—really well. These happen to be memoirs in which place/nature is the major focus, much more than plot or character.

Camille Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (2024). Dungy writes about diversifying her garden in her predominantly white neighborhood, a whole parallel to the issues she is able to touch on while sharing details like how deep to plant the crocus bulbs, or the plumage of pine siskins.

Trudy Dittmar, Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky (2003). Dittmar’s observations and concrete details are precise and the way she connects her reflections of self to these details is so revealing.

Kathleen Moore, Wild Comfort (2010). Moore does such an amazing job of showing us how place and emotions are interconnected, how place-based writing can reveal interiority in such unusual ways.

Aimee Nezhukumatahil, World of Wonders (2024). I reviewed this book for the Colorado Review when it came out (you can read it here). Nezhukumatahil is a poet and you can tell by her crisp, clear prose.

Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows (2023). I love the structure of this work, which is comprised of 52 essays divided into the four seasons. I love that these are bite-sized take-aways with a big punch.

I’ll continue with a related theme for next month with reading recommendations that show the relationship between place and identity.

Stay tuned and happy reading!