Creative Nonfiction Essay on a Place or Experience in Nature

We have discussed ways a variety of ways different writers define and represent places meaningful to them. Using them as models, reflect on an encounter you have had with a place, either past or present, but get in lots of details about the place--map it in words.  

Think of undertaking the kinds of exploration and analysis they do. How could you walk through this place exploring the many different and even surprising ways of seeing and knowing it. Can you get in some of the history, either natural or cultural?  One writer defines place as a “center of meaning constructed by experience.” Can you get in both the exterior landscape, the one we see, but also the interior one, the center of meaning? You might focus your attention on the sights, sounds, and smells of your place as you attempt to evoke it for your reader (someone not from your place). What metaphor or central image might be important to focus on, such as a buckeye, or yellow jackets?  

What events occurred before you knew this place that may have influenced your experience of/attitude toward it? What assumptions have colored your experience of this place? Has your relationship to this place changed over time? How? Why? Also think of the future: What do you think will ultimately happen to this place and to your relationship with it? Can you imagine a different outcome?

Your paper may take the form of a personal narrative or story, or it may be more expository in nature (get it, “in nature”). That is, you could use fictional techniques, such as a frame, or narrative structure, such as a walk, to help organize the essay. Either way, try to balance action (what happens) and description (what we see) with reflection (what it means—so what?).  Place is both a noun and verb—things take place in places. You might also have people talking, use dialogue, to demonstrate some relationship with this place.

Some other possible questions/issues to think about:

• Is it the physical environment, the human community, or some combination of both that is important to you about this place?
• Think about the ways of becoming intimate with a place that Lopez describes in “The Literature of Place” and “American Geographies.” How did you become intimate with the place you are writing about? What did you (or do you) get out of your relationship to this place?
• Have you ever felt that the place you are writing about is or could be threatened in some way? If so, how did/would you respond?
• Where do you come down on the arguments presented Daniels, as a stayer/nester or a wanderer?
• Be sure to focus. The United States is too big. So is Appalachian Mountains. A particular mountain or “holler” might be fine. “My summer vacation” might not work so well—too hard for an audience to understand the same experiences. Too hard to be critical and reflective of those experiences.  
  
  

Papers will be evaluated on how well they 1) provide good sensory details and images of that place, 2) provide some reflection on what their experiences mean in this place or what place itself means (this is the so what?), 3) use techniques of nonfiction and fiction writers: engaging an audience, writing clear and well.

Try, if you can, to use one of the writers: select a pithy quote as an epigraph or to show something, or invoke something they say to draw out a contrast.

The Ohio landscape never showed up on postcards or posters, never unfurled like tapestry in films, rarely filled even a paragraph in books. . . . The place where we learn this love, if we learn it at all, shimmers behind every new place we inhabit.

--Scott Russell Sanders, “Buckeye”

One’s native ground is the place where, since before you had words for such knowledge, you have known the smells, the seasons, the birds and beasts, the human voices, the houses, the ways of working, the lay of the land, the quality of light. . . . Even if you move to the antipodes, even if you become intimate with new landscapes, you still bear the impression of that first ground.

--Scott Russell Sanders, “After the Flood”

Muir was more given to the exhilarated attention and fervent exploration of wooing more given to rapture than to extended fidelity. “Rapture” is related etymologically to “rape,” but unlike the boomer, who rapes a place, the authentic wooer allows the place to enrapture him.

--John Daniel, “A Word in Favor of Rootlessness”

What we lose in our great exodus from the land is a rooted sense, deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions on them, and name them The Willows, or Peregrine’s Roost, or Elk Meadows, after whatever it was that got killed there.

--Barbara Kingsolver, “Knowing our Place”