On writing from the roots
Insights, inquiries, and in-process work.
Last April I had the opportunity to attend a writing course with Emergence Magazine. For seven weeks I gathered with others from around the world to take up the task of “Writing Beyond Environment”. More specially, we embraced the theme of Writing from the Roots. Throughout the course I found myself researching nature writing—its emergence, contributions, and modern applications. The genre took root in the late 1700’s at a particular moment in history when “nature” was no longer feared, and had yet to be endangered. This is an interesting juxtaposition considering that slavery was booming in the antebellum south during the 17th and 18th century. At a time when ownership of land and people was a symbol of status and superiority, the early shoots of the conservation movement were starting to sprout. In the years to follow America would experience the undeniable force of slave rebellions, the abolitionist movement, and a war that eventually led to emancipation—albeit inconclusive. Freedom forever was not granted to all, and white supremacy continued, even in our relationship to the natural world.
This fall I will be participating in the second part of the course, holding the intersection between slavery, endangerment, and conservation in my mind. There is certainly more that can be said about this topic, which I hope to address in a future essay. For now I am pondering a set of questions and writings that came up during the spring session, and sharing them here with the hope that something might resonate, or be helpful in your creative pursuits. These are short snippets of thought-in-process works—thoroughly incomplete—and honest in their attempt to be just as they are. As I re-read these insights and inquiries I am also reliving their gifts, which I recognize is wholly enough. I’ve pieced these excerpts together in a chronological cadence. Where an idea or words of wisdom have been shared from guest authors, I’ve noted those.
This course helped me remember that there are so many places that long to be seen. Below you will find some of the strategies and structures that I learned on how to let your curiosity lead, and really look with reverence.
Insights from Rebecca Giggs
✳︎ Make your piece succinct and give it shape.
✳︎ Think like a photographer: adopt different points of view.
✳︎ Get curious about who you can become familiar with.
✳︎ Find an object to represent a vastness of scale (a small thing to tell a big story).
✳︎ Think about the language that attends to the environment and who has a stake in it.
Exercise: Write about an early memory
The trees called us from the wooden stoop. The stairs were warped with the weight of constant to-and-fro, bodies in motion always going somewhere. My cousins rushed with steady trunks ahead of me. I lagged behind the rest with thighs thick as mountains. I did my best to move the earth beneath my feet—pumping knees up and down, and up. After finally reaching the lush green palace my breath escaped into the lungs of the forest. Time stood still in the exchange between oxygen and carbon dioxide and the trees gave back to me what I had given, transformed. I looked up at the rustling Kelly-green leaves in awe of them dancing above our heads. The sky was bright in contrast to where we stood amidst earth and wood and our small, aching muscles were anchored into the land. We were there so long that our limbs became roots.
Insights from Charles Foster
✳︎ If you have to write it, it must be done.
✳︎ Ask yourself: Why do I write? How do I listen?
✳︎ What does it mean to grow down?
✳︎ Synesthesia is natural to children, their language is an act of understanding nature and the world.
✳︎ What of your own writing is part of a larger story?
✳︎ Shed your illusions, allow yourself to dissolve.
✳︎The whole of reality is relational that's why story is so essential.
Exercise: Write about a place that has profoundly shaped you
The depth of the Miami Valley moves like sap through the soil and into Kentucky, where my paternal ancestors called home. This place is a sliver of sanctuary, like a cool dry breeze that quells the thick damp-heat. The full capacity of terroir contained within the roots, a moisture-soaked truth. It smells like loam: earth turning into itself. Deep, warm, inviting, and tastes like a sun-ripped peach. The sweetest corn, and the drumming buzz of bees—talking in their convivial tongue, sharing theories on honey, and how to build community.
Insights from Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
✳︎ The history of a place is not a distant memory, it is alive in the present within you.
✳︎ Rivers pull the elements of the past and present into the current, turning them over and on to the earth to weave a story anew.
✳︎ When you bring a place into mind, what arises from your own life?
✳︎ What elements of yourself does a place pull forward?
Exercise: Early memory of awe using a non-verbal/pre-verbal connection with language (i.e. sound, shapes, onomatopoeia)
Fields of Fragaria stretching wide as Granny’s arms
and the hot summer sun descends in the early morning.
The heat snapping deep to the bone.
The whistling whistler whistles,
and the strawberry sweetly sings.
The beating drum of the heart patterns
lub-dub—lub-dub—lub-dub.
The rest of the symphony beings:
buzz, buzz, snip, snip, snip, snip
buzz, buzz, buzz, snip, snip, snip, snip
whuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
snap, snap, snap, tica-tica-tica,tica, tica
tica-tica-tica-tica-tica-tica-tica, tica
buzz, buzz, buzz, snip, snip, snip, snip
buzz, buzz, snip, snip, snip, snip
The crane calls,
to the sun-sizzling heat.
Wind rustling through crisp leaves
and the space in between.
Lub-dub—lub-dub—lub-dub,
the strawberry-heart sound.
Insights from Lia Purpura
✳︎ How and where do we hold the work of remembering?
✳︎ Write at the seams, write at the site of memory.
Exercise: Walk through one room or landscape in a place from your past
The configuration was a blockade of forgotten items. Large dressers, unmarked boxes, and a standing mirror, the kind that can turn on itself—upside down, right side up. It was a maze that I longed to wander through; to get lost in the emptiness of wallpaper-lined drawers. I had to squint just to make out the faded floral prints, which matched the walls with an eerie perfection. The dresser was made of sturdy wood, a testament to boundaries held inside the hearts of my ancestors who once lived there. Making my way in, I have to slide sideways through items, big and bulky in stature. I nudge my body between two freestanding closet racks in the middle of the room. There were a few items still, barley holding to wire hangers. I wonder who wore them? Was the fit loose, or the fabric a bit itchy? As I ponder my attention moves towards the bed, which is bare and stained with time, all at once. The wire frame resembling the hangers, was frail. The summer sun cast a golden dusky hue on the metal. It needed a good scrub. I’m sure it would still hold up, given some attention.
Insights from Jamie Figueroa
✳︎ How can you be in relationship to that which is yet unknown, that wants to be known?
✳︎ When you write, think about who is missing. Whose voice needs to be included?
✳︎ To see the belonging in all, it takes an act of slowing down and really seeing.
✳︎ The body must be included in the writing—make the practice a ritual.
Exercise: In my body I feel…
There is a sort of thrashing, this way and that. I feel a tiny tug into and through the understory of land. The light is fading, and the deep becomes deeper. I am here, in the place between place. In the moment before a breath. Inhaling the soft earth into my lung-like veins. I embody the dark and remember that the heart is also a miracle, a song, a voice, a sea—teaching and undoing me. What was once a knot in the pit of my stomach, is now rich and supple loam.
My final reflections
✳︎ Language can open us up, draw us in, and help to guide us through the hard and tender moments.
✳︎ How can we let go with more gratitude and grace?
✳︎ What would happen if we were given an opportunity from an early age to engage with the intersection between language and land? What new worlds might we build?
✳︎ We are a convivial, intricate, sonic kind—with saxophone lungs, beating drum heart, and scat-song mind.
✳︎ What eulogies are we writing, for ourselves, each other, and the land?
✳︎ What evidence are we leaving?
✳︎ Let us rewrite new stories that speak to our extraordinary relationship with the earth.
What I’m listening to: Te Pido from the album Caminos, by Rio Nilo.
What I’m reading: Climate Justice: Black & Native Attention as Miracle a gorgeous print publication from Loam, a collective and community focused on healing connection to the earth.
What I’m creating: I recently purchased all the necessary tools to start experimenting with linocut block prints. It is a form that came into my life when I was 22, and it feels good to circle back at—almost—40. Learning about Black Women of Print has been an abundant source of inspiration.