I HAVE BEEN utterly, phenomenally, mind-bendingly lucky in this life.
Early on as an author and a nature writer I got to meet and become friends with icons like these two. Do you recognize them?
Peter Matthiessen is in the middle, Richard Nelson on the right. We're on a Forgotten Language Tour on Sanibel Island, organized by Peter Corcoran & Jim Wohlpart of Florida Gulf Coast University, I think, and sponsored by Orion Magazine. Now both Peter and Nels have crossed over to the other side, and the world is worse for it. They were gigantic humans.
The Tours
In the Forgotten Language Tours, a university would sponsor 3-5 nature writers to come to campus. By day we’d visit classes, and by evening we’d give public readings. It was a barnstorming of the country by writers whose subjects were nature, wildness, and place.
The writers would be different for each tour, but some folks went out often—Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Pattiann Rogers, Richard Nelson, Robert Michael Pyle, Gary Nabhan, Bill McKibben, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Scott Russell Sanders. I was along for 4 or 5 of the tours.
Some of the best readings I’ve ever heard happened on those tours. (In a post about giving a great reading I mentioned this.)
“Forgotten Language” comes from the poem “Witness” by W.S. Merwin. This is from his 1998 collection, The Rain in the Trees, a book an old boyfriend loaned me that I have never returned and probably never will.
Witness
I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language
Kinship
In the early days of the American nature writing movement—late 80s and early 90s—there was enormous camaraderie. It was more than amity. It was actual affection.
That's because this was yet a marginal literature and so few of us were devoting our lives to it.
Things are very different now, and better in many ways. For example, there are exponentially more of us. When I taught my American Nature Writing Masterclass last fall, a 12-week course, over 30 people signed up. Many had already published essays and even books. They were in the course to practice writing, learn craft, publish more, and become friends with other nature writers.
Some of them were from other countries, where the nature-writing movement isn’t as developed as it is in the U.S. For example, my last collection of essays, Wild Spectacle, also published in Italy. There was not even a shelf in the bookstores for nature writing.
My friend Vicki often Zooms with me from Canada. She doesn’t have other nature writers where she lives. She sits with us in the U.S. as the Canadian nature writing movement grows.
Today in America at least we nature writers have a more diverse, more feminist, more spread-out, more representative world. Getting published in the big magazines and in New York is much easier, because everybody understands that no story is bigger than the environmental story.
But there's nothing like that early companionship and support and feeling that you're doing good and important work, on the front lines of something great. You look around and you remember those folks, because they helped you get through some hard times (broke, overlooked, marginalized). Sometimes those folks were all you had, professionally. You knew they had your back when the rest of the world, especially the capitalists, did not.
How I Got In
It was a league. I was lucky enough to get admitted as a young woman. This happened because of two reasons.
One, I seriously began writing a book when I was about 30 and it was published when I was 37. This meant I was younger than most women who publish their first book, which takes longer in general because we women have more of the caregiving, homemaking, and housekeeping to do. I got admitted because I did the great work more than I did the daily work.
There's another reason I got admitted into the early league. My first book is an environmental memoir, pretty evenly divided between my weird childhood (memoir) and the longleaf pine ecosystem (environment). When my first agent was shopping this book around NYC, a number of publishers asked if I'd take out the nature half. If it were just a memoir, they said, they would publish it.
And I said no. Not just no but hell no.
When you make a choice like that—a statement like that—it means something.
I have been a nature writer 150 percent from the very beginning. It's a mission, it's a passion, it's a flaming romance, it's my service to the world, it's my calling. Everything I've ever written, in one way or another, is a valentine to the earth.
How Can This Help You?
Turn yourself into a person who is mind-bendingly lucky.
Quit saying “I’m unlucky.” Start saying “I’m lucky.”
Remember, however, that luck comes to the brave.
Quit complaining. Just do the work that might make a difference in other people’s lives and in your life.
Show up. Get lucky.
Going Farther
If this post interests you, you'll like my new book on the craft of writing, Craft & Current. It is available as a preorder on my website. We’ll start shipping books by July 15.
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Also I'm teaching the American Nature Writing Masterclass again in the fall, starting early September. Get in there if you want it.
Thank you for being a trail blazer for us! I love visiting bookstores and have a rating system for them. My rating system includes several markers, including the quality of their nature writing section. I am susprised how many book stores still do not have one but also delighted at how many do! The bookstores that have a quality nature section get my highest ratings. 🏆
Thank you for being a trail-blazing hero for nature and nature writers everywhere!!! Luv this piece!