Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Lord Byron brought nature writing into vogue. They lent their voices to the world around them: mighty seas, vast deserts, and carefree clouds. However, their poems confined these seas and clouds by interpreting them in human terms. In this month’s Third Thursday, “Writing the Natural World,” Christopher Brown discusses how to write about nature without subjecting or exploiting it.
Christopher Brown’s book, A Natural History of Empty Lots, illuminates the intersection of nature and cities. Before beginning his Substack newsletter, Field Notes, Brown used Tumblr to share his photographs and writings on the natural world. This account evolved into micro essays with photographs, which provided a new, literarily interesting medium for observation. By adapting the format of his findings in tandem with evolving media platforms, Brown has reached a large following of people interested in the interactions between cities and wilderness.
Humans rarely encounter nature without subjecting it to their own needs and purposes. As a lawyer, Brown addresses peoples’ propensity to think of land in terms of property. He recalls how his Property Law class demonstrated the intellectual and philosophical justifications that humans use to possess nature. While describing nature, writers should be alert to human tendencies of imposing constructed frameworks on nature.
Brown acknowledges the difficulty of writing about nature without subjecting it to human limitations. To discuss nature, writers often attempt to fit the world into their own concepts and language. Although Brown attempts to capture the porousness of boundaries between the natural and urban worlds, words inherently straightjacket organic life. However, Brown points out that naming the world alienates people from nature. To combat language’s attempts to colonize nature, Brown avoids anthropomorphic writing. He seeks to look at nature and allow it to change the way that he perceives the world. Through nature writing, Brown escapes the “total preoccupation that contemporary literature, especially fiction, has with the human self, with human interiority.”
Attending to the wilderness that infiltrates, or even thrives, in urban spaces allows for wonder. By looking at the world unfolding around the concrete and glass boxes, Brown attests that people will gain access to the portal that authors often seek through writing.
While researching, Brown draws from a variety of sources. As a nature writer not institutionally educated in the sciences, he encourages writers that they can become self-made experts. Among other things, Brown uses travel journals, field guides, period pieces, and google scholar to investigate flora and fauna.
In A Natural History of Empty Lots, Brown draws on his background writing speculative fiction to navigate an expansive timeline. By dedicating time to the ritual of spending time in nature, Brown has been able to access deep time— “a sense of the long now.” Plants and animals pre-dated humans, and encountering their fossils informs the scope of human life. The wildflowers currently blooming in the southern U.S. remind inhabitants of how recently the wild native ecosystems were erased. Brown says that glimpses into the past can give insight into different futures. Attending to nature, especially the life that disrupts urban monoliths, gives us a sense of our place in time. For instance, by walking down a waterway in central Texas, one would likely find fossilized shells of cretaceous bivalves. Brown discusses how encountering these relics in the midst of everyday life transforms his conception of the present moment.
In his writing process, Brown locates himself in “the now.” While on expeditions, Brown carries a pocket notebook and sometimes a digital or film camera. He hesitates to interrupt the present moment in order to capture it, and for the most part he records notes upon returning home. Rather than speaking for nature in his writing, Brown seeks to listen to and observe the life around him.
If you would like to listen to and observe more writers, join The Writers’ League for April Third Thursday: “Small But Mighty: Poetry, Flash, and Short Fiction.”