Response 1: Honesty in Nature Writing

To an extent I begin this course like Joyce Carol Oates in Against Nature, with some skepticism about nature writing as a genre, as well as doubts about how I'll be able to write within it. I’ve read beautiful, moving works of nature writing, but, like Oates, I tend to get annoyed when what I read seems too reverent or idealized or contrived. I find it interesting that she refers to Thoreau’s work as fiction two times within her short essay. She calls Walden, “that most artfully composed of prose fictions,” and writes about her “resistance to ‘Nature-writing’ as a genre, except when it is brilliantly fictionalized in the service of a writer’s individual vision – Thoreau’s books and Journal, of course…”

The idea of Thoreau’s nonfiction nature writing as fiction, of his journal as fiction, leads me to consider the issue of honesty in nature writing, and several of this week’s readings address this point. I am particularly interested in the relationship between honesty and journaling - or in this case blogging, which is like a public journal, and contains all of the paradoxes inherent in that idea.

In The Journal, Murray writes, “Readers instinctively trust writers who are honest, as we see in the journal excerpts from both Hawthorne and Ehrlich.” But aren’t readers likely to perceive a journal excerpt as somehow inherently “honest”? Later Murray draws a contrast between Byrd’s “private journals” and his “more formal journals” that became a book. Especially in the case of writers’ journals, I often wonder how “private” they actually are – well-known writers must know their “private” journals run the risk of being published someday. But I suppose a better question is: Is a private journal inherently more honest than a public one? Perhaps the whole endeavor of writing for an audience has to assume that honesty is as possible in public forms of discourse as it is in private. In this class, I hope to explore ways to achieve deeper honesty in my writing, while at the same time respecting the parts of myself and my life which I am currently not comfortable with sharing. Up until now that has been the greatest challenge nonfiction – actually all writing, even my own private journal – has given me.

I like the way that Barry Lopez addresses honesty and truth in Landscape and Narrative. He notes, “In the aboriginal literature I am familiar with, the first distinction made among narratives is to separate the authentic from the inauthentic.” And he defines lying in this way: “For a storyteller to insist on relationships that do not exist is to lie. Lying is the opposite of story.” According to Lopez, to lie is to shape the landscape around us to suit our storytelling needs - and this is what Oates accuses Thoreau of doing. The way to achieve authenticity, Lopez writes, is to allow the landscape to tell its own story in our writing: “Because of the intricate, complex nature of the land, it is not always possible for a storyteller to grasp what is contained in a story. The intent of the storyteller, then, must be to evoke, honestly, some single aspect of all that the land contains.” As I write for this class, I will attempt to allow that principle to guide me.

Against Nature gave me some ideas as to how I might personally approach and connect with the natural world – by which I mean non-concrete outdoor spaces, I must define my terms carefully after reading Pattiann Rogers – in my own writing. The essay opened with Oates in a moment of acute awareness of her mortality – an attack of tachycardia. The relationship between fear (especially fear of death) and nature resonates with me, and I hope to explore it further. That is part of why I chose a writing place inside a cemetery where death can't be ignored – though neither can the abundance of life that inhabits it. On the way to and from “my” clearing the other day I saw deer and groundhogs and geese and turkeys and innumerable birds and plants I can’t yet name. I want to write against that backdrop of life and death, and I hope that if I can evoke an aspect of it honestly, like Lopez suggests, the result will be an authentic story.