“[I hope writers] see and show the world as it really is, beyond the prison of the self, and what it really feels like to be alive in this place and moment.” —Christopher Brown
On Wednesday, November 5, Christopher Brown will teach “Writing the Natural World: A 21st Century Reboot.” In this class, students will learn fresh perspectives on how to approach the presence and emotional power of nature, utilizing fun tools to better serve the unique voice of their work.
Christopher Brown is the author of A Natural History of Empty Lots, a “genre-defying work of nature writing, literary nonfiction, and memoir that explores what happens when nature and the city intersect,” the climate fiction novel Tropic of Kansas (a finalist for the 2018 John W. Campbell Award), Rule of Capture, Failed State (nominated for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award), and the popular urban nature newsletter Field Notes. He lives in Austin with his family, in the edgeland woods between the river and the factories.
Here’s what Christopher had to share with us:
Who are your earliest influences? What people and books made you a writer?
Christopher Brown: I was weaned on the sort of weird stuff a mall-going American kid could get their hands on in the 1970s, when far-out points of view bled into the mainstream. The gateway drugs were pulp: tales of fantasy realms, alien planets, suburban portals, and urban legends that were really variants of landscape writing. I was lucky to have some great English teachers all through secondary school who were free to assign whatever they thought was cool, from safe but inspiring choices like Walker Percy and Doris Lessing to trippier texts like Carlos Castaneda’s tales of peyote-induced sorcery and Fritjof Capra’s mash-ups of modern physics and mysticism. As a high school senior I took an especially influential class with a teacher who really turned us on to the potential of nature writing, in the age when writers like Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard were inventing the modern genre. In college I got excited by punkier stylists like J.G. Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, Joan Didion, William Gibson, and Hunter S. Thompson (who I got to party with while interviewing him for my college newspaper), and it was reading Neuromancer that made me think I wanted to write that kind of work. I see now, counterintuitively, how much of what I connected with in that work was rooted in connection with the land, and that essentiality of nature as part of any great writing is part of what I hope to explore in the class.
What writing challenges have you faced? What have these challenges taught you about your process?
CB: The most important challenge has been learning how to navigate the confines of genre and established narrative forms to get to where you are able to write (and publish) the work that you really want to make. For those of us who don’t come up through university creative writing programs, the journey can involve a lot of side trips and dead ends, but in time I’ve learned that one’s most intuitive experiments are usually where the best artistic and professional outcomes germinate. I went from writing cool but plotless slipstream shorts to publishing a series of intense dystopian novels that were a little too literary for genre readers and too genre for literary readers, and then (with Field Notes and A Natural History of Empty Lots) made a pretty radical pivot into a mash-up of nature writing, creative nonfiction, and memoir I had been incubating all along, between the lines—one of those successes born of failure that life is full of but sometimes can be hard to see.
From your perspective, what’s the most rewarding part about being a writer?
CB: The artistic payoff of hard work, which feels almost musical when you can manage an optimal balance between the improvisational jazz of fresh, energetic prose, and the chiseled quality that comes from continuous deep revision.
Who do you write for?
CB: Myself, for friends I’ve never met, and sometimes for the foxes that live in the drainage ditch behind the factory next door.
What do you hope writers will learn from your course?
CB: How to see and show the world as it really is, beyond the prison of the self, and what it really feels like to be alive in this place and moment.
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Thanks, Christopher!
Click here to learn more about Christopher’s upcoming class.
