Nature Writing Journal

English 380: Ecolit: Reading and Writing the Landscape

Keeping a Journal

"...this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing."

Shakespeare, As You Like It

Most nature writing begins with entries in a journal. Thoreau's journals fill dozens of volumes, and out of them, long after the daily experiences had passed, he culled and cultivated the words of his books. Journal keeping is good for producing raw material for finished work, but it's also valuable in itself. The solitary communication between diarist and notebook resembles communication between observer and landscape--what John Donne in his poem, "The Extasie," called "a dialogue of one."

Get or make yourself a nice blank book for reading and writing the landscape in this class. Keep it with you often and write in it at least three times a week, dating each entry. In addition to observations and reflections, the journal can include drawings, photos, diagrams, and quotations. I'll be looking at it at least twice, so dont include material you need to keep private. I'll be grading what I see not for quality or finish, but for quantity, variety, concreteness of description, and factual richness.

Topics to write about will be suggested by the readings, the class discussion and walks. You may want to steer your journal entries toward later writing assignments--the imitation of an ecoliterary work, the critical analysis of an ecoliterary work, a descriptive essay, and a reflective and persuasive essay.

Here are some suggestions from The Sierra Club Nature Writing Handbook by John A. Murray

write a journal that covers a season, note changes in nature
take trip and record all impressions--focus on self as much as wild nature; find climax--revelation, decision, resolution, turning toward, turning away.
write journal entry in stream of consciousness mode; take object or occurrence in nature as point of departure. write till you've exhausted your theme and write more past that point
observe a proces of nature and write a journal entry recording your observations in detail. e.g. snow falling in a woods, storm building over the prairie, tide coming in
write entry chronicling a powerful childhood memory about nature...relate it to events and perspectives in your life today.
keep journal to record your response to various nature writings you have read. which are successful and which are not? Why? which authors have something to teach you and which do not? and why. how would you approach the themes differntly.

Examples of student journal entries

Update

A new alternative to keeping a journal in a book is weblogging or Blogging. It's an easy-to-use medium that has advantages over journaling: it includes pictures and even sound bites, it creates a legible and attractive format, it immediately publishes what you write and invites feedback from readers. Blogging has disadvantages as well: its formats are prepackaged, it's not private, and you cant easily (yet) take a computer with you out into the woods and record your impressions on the spot. Writing in a journal and transcribing to a blog allows you to get the best of both media. I encourage you to give it a try as a way to fulfill the journal requirement for this class. You'll find all you need to get started here:

http://www.blogger.com/start

You can check out my blog for this class at

http://www.stevenmarx.net/category/ecologs/