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“Taking Place”: Writing the Physical World

If you live in a place—any place, city or country—long enough and deeply enough you can learn anything, the dynamics and inter-connections that exist in every community, be it plant, human, or animal—you can learn what a writer needs to know.

—GRETEL EHRLICH

I am writing about the first place I remember living, casting around for a way to write about it that fits in with what I’ve learned is acceptable in the literature of place. Elizabeth, New Jersey: people who know the city shudder and mention the rows of smokestacks craning along the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. I spent my early years there, and along with a rickety shore bungalow, it’s the place I have the most visceral childhood attachment to. But when I think of the writing of childhood place, I think of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, with the majestic beauty of pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg; of Annie Dillard’s wooded rambles in An American Childhood. How do you write about a vacant lot glinting with glass, where I spent many ecstatic hours as a child, a cemetery where my brother and I played? It was as scary and luminous a childhood as any other. Does place matter only when it carries its own transcendent beauty? How do you memorialize the seemingly unbeautiful?

After many false starts, I begin writing about my early home by reflecting on the city’s name. “Elizabeth,” I write, “had a Queen’s name. Every land’s an extension of the monarch’s body, a great green I Am of the royal person, and Elizabeth’s city showed she’d been gone a long time. It was gassy and bad-smelling as any dead woman.”

The Elizabeth of the city, I learned much later, was not Queen Elizabeth, as I’d thought, but some other woman. No matter. It was what I believed at the time of writing, and what I believed, for some reason, as a child. The interest of the place was not in its beauty, its own transcendent qualities, but the way it bounced off my life and the lives of those around me: the character it became.

—SUZANNE

Start Looking

Where are you reading this book? Put it down for a second and look around you; take into account what is both inside and outside the space you’re in. In your mind, run over the significance of this place. Are you somewhere that has meaning for you because it is the place you grew up or because it is not? Does this place represent freedom or responsibility? Is it someplace temporary for you or permanent? When you force yourself to look around carefully and openly, do you thrill to the natural beauty or respond to its urban excitement? Or are you somewhere now you feel you could never call home?

Our responses to place are some of the most complex we’ll ever experience. Our sense of visual beauty, our psychological drive for comfort and familiarity in our environment, and our complex responses to loaded concepts such as “nature” and “home” embed place with layers of significance. Although fiction writers typically have the importance of location and setting driven into them, it is easy for nonfiction writers to forget that they, too, must be situated physically. We find that an essayist with a wonderful story to tell—a story, say, of a magician father, or a troubled sibling—will typically leave out the vital backdrop of the story: a small town, a gritty city, or a town in which the family’s story unfolds against a background of open-mindedness, or misunderstanding.

Where We’re Writing From

We, Brenda and Suzanne, landed—through various tracks—in the smallish city of Bellingham, Washington, under a volcano called Mount Baker that is presently giving off steam from under-earth vents called fumaroles. On the one hand, our lives are peaceful. We teach classes, write, attend a film or concert now and then, and work on this book. On the other hand, every few years the mountain issues this fleecy reminder that it has more control than we ever give it credit for. Under its crust is enough molten rock to turn our lives into something else entirely.

Environments tend to function as informing elements that we take for granted and edit out of our stories until they act up. We who live here may notice that people become quieter and more lethargic during our gray, rainy winter months, bursting back into exuberant life when the sun returns. Nevertheless, it takes a certain amount of awareness to relate the way our lives unfold to the fact that we live here, in the maritime Northwest, rather than somewhere else. Locating your nonfiction is essential—in the words of writer Sarah Van Arsdale, setting is “the very particular time and place that acts as a kind of beaker in which the story can heat, bubble, and blend.”

Setting Scenes: Place as Character

Would Jane Eyre have been the same book without her tale unfolding against the backdrop of Thornfield, that gabled mansion with its nests of crows? Would Huckleberry Finn’s adventures have had the same resonance without the silvery roil of the Mississippi River? Your own story needs the same depth of field. One useful way to judge your own scene-setting is to think of place as a character unto itself. In the excerpt from the essay “Elizabeth” at the start of this chapter, the city takes on the character of a woman: an aging, decayed figure against which the children’s exploits take on an incongruous irony.

In E. B. White’s essay “Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street,” the author is attempting to move out of a New York City apartment that becomes its own mulish and willful character. He describes the place as “mournful” and in need of coaxing to allow him to move out, as in this passage:

For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. . . . During September I kept hoping that some morning, as by magic, all books, pictures, records, chairs, beds, curtains, lamps, china, glass, utensils, keepsakes would drain away from around my feet, like the outgoing tide, leaving me standing silent on a bare beach.

In spite of White’s claim that his New York possessions are inanimate, they become characterized as animate and moving—mournful, restless as a tide, yet refusing to leave. His careful itemization of the types of material things he owns only makes their resistance feel more overwhelming.

Writing About Home

For nonfiction writers, particularly memoirists, the place of childhood has a critical importance. It is the primal map on which we plot life’s movements. It is the setting of the rich mythology that is earliest memory, the enchanted forest in which our benighted characters wander, looking for breadcrumbs and clues and facing down their demons. If you draw your earliest place of memory—a bedroom, say, or a favorite hiding place in an apartment or a yard—you will, by the highly selective and emotional process of memory, be drawing an emotional landscape of your childhood.

Maybe you remember the deep, sagging chair that attracted and frightened you because it was sacred to your father and he sank into it in the evening, angry from the day’s work. Or perhaps you remember the table where your family sat around and ate kimchi, which none of your friends ate and of which you learned to be vaguely ashamed. Maybe you recall the soft woolly smell of your covers at night or the dim blue glow of a nightlight. This is home, the place where the complex person you are came into being. And understanding the concept of home and its physical character is key to understanding the many different individuals you’ll write about in your nonfiction.

When Home Is Away

Bharati Mukherjee, an Indian-American writer, says home to her is a place she has never been and that no longer exists in a national sense. At the time of her father’s birth, his village was in India. Now it is part of Bangladesh. As do some women of Indian descent, she defines her home patrilineally, making her a citizen of an unknown place, bearing ethnic claims that no longer make any sense. In her essay “A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman,” she writes:

I was born into a class that did not live in its native language. I was born into a city that feared its future, and trained me for emigration. I attended a school run by Irish nuns, who regarded our walled-off school compound in Calcutta as a corner (forever green and tropical) of England. My “country”—called in Bengali desh, and suggesting more a homeland than a nation of which one is a citizen—I have never seen. It is the ancestral home of my father and is now in Bangladesh. Nevertheless, I speak his dialect of Bengali, and think of myself as “belonging” to Faridpur.

Later, Mukherjee writes that for her, “the all too real Manhattan [her present home] and Faridpur have merged as ‘desh.’”

For most Americans, the terms home and native are probably loaded with connotations we rarely pause to tease out. We—Brenda and Suzanne—for example, celebrate different holidays. We bake our traditional breads—challah and panettone—and mark rites of passage with chopped liver or the dried fish called baccala without much awareness of how those foods reflect what was available and affordable in our families’ countries of origin, or the poverty and threat reflected in the fact that our not-too-distant forebears came to be here. There are stories in these deeply personal, everyday connections and disconnections in American lives. (See also Chapter 2, “Writing the Family,” and Chapter 5, “The Body of Identity,” for further discussion on approaches to writing your cultural identity.)

Writing About Nature

If we think of place as character, we should add that no “character” comes with as many preconceptions as nature. Drawing energy from early writers like Thoreau, American essayists have always had a particular affinity with nature writing. This country in its present incarnation is relatively new, and created on land belonging to indigenous peoples who have been pushed to the margins and driven from their lands. The waves of immigration to these shores mean that, for many people, their country of origin—the so-called “old country”—and languages of origin are still part of daily experience. For much of its life, this country has defined itself by its wilderness, by the sense of frontier to be explored and frequently controlled.

American nature essayists such as Emerson and Thoreau were called transcendentalists because of their belief that nature would allow humans to rise above, or transcend, the limits of civilization. And even as the American wilderness vanishes, literature faces the question of what we have lost with it, along with the buffalo, sequoia, and deep old-growth forests breathing so recently out of our past.

In his classic memoir Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau’s declarations become a charge to nature writers and nature seekers for generations to come: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” American literature’s historic distrust of civilization (think of Huckleberry Finn) has created a particular reverence for nature writing in our country. Writers like Thoreau teach us that recording the experiences of the individual removed from society—one-on-one with the physical world that created him or her—provides an avenue to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

Thoreau’s approach to nature—as a way of paring life down to its essentials, finding oneself—continues in the work of writers such as Wendell Berry. Berry describes how on a hiking trip, “Today, as always when I am afoot in the woods, I feel the possibility, the reasonableness, the practicability of living in the world in a way that would enlarge rather than diminish the hope of life.”

To Berry and Thoreau, nature represents life at its most basic—life at the bone. But in the literary world, few subjects are as complex in their symbolic structure as nature. To Wordsworth, it was the ultimate muse, the “anchor of his purest thoughts.” To others, it’s simply the ultimate power.

What does nature mean to you? For those with a nature-writing bent, it’s deceptively simple to wax rhapsodic about the cathedral beauty of old-growth forests or the piercing melodies of the thrush. In other words, we tend to approach nature writing first and foremost as description. While fine description is dandy, it tends to wear thin after a while. Even if your prose about the soft rosy beauty of the alpenglow is first rate, if you don’t move beyond that, readers are likely to want to put your writing down and go see for themselves.

What holds readers in the works of writers like Berry and Thoreau is the sense of a human consciousness moving through nature, observing it, reacting to it, and ultimately being transformed by it. Thoreau’s description of his cottage at Walden Pond is instructive:

I was seated by the shore of a small pond. . . . I was so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods.

Notice how Thoreau embeds his basic concept of living in nature as stripping human life bare in this very description. Not only is it beautifully poetic, but we see Walden Pond looming huge in front of him, throwing off its obscuring mists, as a kind of mirror for Thoreau’s consciousness, coming clear in nature and throwing off the layer of fog of human convention.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist, a writer, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Kimmerer tells the stories of various plants and other natural phenomena using both her traditional teachings and current scientific ones, privileging neither.

Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand. Accordingly, it is honored as one of the four sacred plants of my people. Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.

A little later in the book, Kimmerer lets us see how this ancestral knowing interweaves with her teaching:

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9:35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology—trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman’s gardens, known by some as “global ecosystems,” function.

Kimmerer argues in the book that different wisdom traditions, including science, often tell similar narratives in different ways. She calls for reciprocity and regeneration between plants and humans, and openness to learning from every source that seeks to understand ecological balance. Thoreau and Berry see nature as something to travel to, something to be attained—Kimmerer’s approach is to pay homage to all of the ways in which she and the natural world are already connected. (See also Barbara Hurd’s essay “To Keep an Ear to the Ground” in our Anthology for another example of effective nature writing.)

Writing About Animals

Of course, nature consists of more than landscape. It is also the creatures that inhabit that landscape. Diane Ackerman, a naturalist who writes nonfiction, described writing about animals this way: “Each of the animals I write about I find beguiling in and of itself, but in all honesty, there is no animal that isn’t fascinating if viewed up close and in detail.” And we humans, too, are animals, ones who find in their fellow creatures everything from a glimpse of a very different way of being in the world to a surprise kinship.

Strong writers can mine that fascination, even with animals that may not seem like what environmentalists call “charisma species,” as Jill Christman does in her essay “The Sloth.” Standing in an outdoor shower after the tragic death of her fiancé, Christman sees a three-toed sloth, “mottled and filthy . . . hung by his meat-hook claws not five feet above my head in the cecropia tree.” The sloth in all of its earthy glory is tangibly present, both deeply other from and deeply connected to the author, its presence “as slow as grief.”

Annie Dillard often notices, with deep curiosity, the animals in her environment. For example, in her essay “Living Like Weasels,” she describes a surprise encounter with this creature: the weasel she comes upon has “two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window.” Experiencing a sudden glimpse into the weasel’s mind, Dillard experiences it as “blank” and foreign. If she could be more like the weasel, she imagines, “I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive.” The encounter leads her to examine the notion of wildness, and to yearn for that kind of primal energy in her own life. The weasel draws her in through its deep difference.

Marjorie Rose Hakala, in “Jumping the Fence” (see Anthology), writes about the behavior of animals in zoos. She begins the essay with the concepts of confinement and escape, and details a story of her mother who, by making eye contact with a musk oxen, caused the animal to charge her and damage its fencing. But further in, Hakala switches tone: she presents a scene of peaceful integration between a group of penguins and the woman who feeds them.

One of the birds got harried away by its fellows, and the keeper went after it, crouched down, and fed it some pieces of fish while keeping the others away. Some of the penguins made a little noise, honking like geese or braying like donkeys, but the keeper ignored them and went about her work, peaceful and long-legged like a heron among the squat penguins. She ignored the people watching her, and we were quiet in return. . . . The zookeeper looked like she belonged in there, like she had crossed a barrier that none of us could cross.

Note in this essay how carefully the imagery unites all of the beings in this scene. These are not isolated creatures with clear borders—the penguins sound like geese and donkeys, and the zookeeper stands among them “like a heron.” Without making a heavy-handed move away from her tales of restriction and escape, one in which “a zoo animal you can’t look at is failing the most basic element of its job,” Hakala offers the possibility of human-animal connection. It is an approach that contrasts with Dillard’s celebration of the weasel’s radical difference.

Writing About the Environment

In an issue of the literary journal Granta devoted to the “new nature writing,” editors explained their subject this way: “For as long as people have been writing, they have been writing about nature. But economic migration, overpopulation, and climate change are transforming the natural world into something unfamiliar. As our conception and experience of nature changes, so too does the way we write about it.” For instance, critics have coined terms like “Superfund Gothic” to describe a natural world in which industrial chemicals interfere with the characteristics of fish and wildlife.

In “An Entrance to the Woods,” Wendell Berry goes beyond merely describing the woods or the way in which his hiking and camping experience lends perspective to his own human existence. As a nonfiction writer who is constantly pushing himself to examine with the broadest possible lens what exists at the tips of his fingers (which all good nonfiction writers do), he asks himself how he as a human being embodies the larger interaction of human and nature. It’s an interrelationship that’s become problematic in the twenty-first century, as we face global warming and the last century’s outpouring of industrial pollution.

While in the woods, Berry hears the roar of a car in the distance and writes, “That roar of the highway is the voice of the American economy; it is sounding also wherever strip mines are being cut in the steep slopes of Appalachia, and wherever cropland is being destroyed to make roads and suburbs.” It is a wonderful moment in the essay, of opening out and refocusing from a simple, enlightening natural experience to a critique of human intervention in the natural order of the ecosystem. Kimmerer also notes the environmental damage done to her people’s homeland, writing, “Today, the land where the Peacemaker walked and the Tree of Peace stood isn’t land at all, but beds of industrial waste sixty feet deep.”

Typically, a writer sitting down to compose a nature essay such as Berry’s would erase that car motor from his or her record of this occasion, simply leave it out; it is tempting in nonfiction to pare down our experiences to those sights and sounds that make a unified whole. A passing mention of the noise as an anomaly—out of tone with the peaceful surroundings—would also be a natural move to make. It would be a far less important and less honest tack, though, than Berry’s turn, which was to discuss how these woods in the essay exist in uneasy, threatened relationship to the human-dominated world around them.

Travel Writing

Often, a sense of place comes into sharp focus when we travel off our own turf and into lands foreign to us. In the context of travel, “place” begins to seem not so much the land itself, but everything and anything associated with the land: its people, animals, food, music, religion—all the things that make up life itself.

Pico Iyer, a well-known travel writer, sums it up this way: “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.” Your task, as a good travel writer, is to both pay attention to the details of place and to render these details in a voice that is wholly your own. You must situate yourself as both participant and observer, ready to learn and move beyond your own preconceptions.

This mandate requires you to find a purpose for your writing above and beyond the travel experience itself. If you expect the travels themselves to carry the weight of narrative interest, you will end up with an essay that looks disconcertingly like: “First I went here, then I went here, and look what an amazing/horrible/fascinating/soul-searing time I had!” Eventually, no one will care. The places themselves may be intrinsically fascinating, but if you render them into flat landscapes, you’ll be left with the lame protest, “Well, you just had to have been there.”

In a way, the demands of travel writing can epitomize the challenges of any kind of creative nonfiction writing. How do you shape or draft the work so that the experience becomes more than itself? Critic Paul Fussell answers that question this way: “Successful travel writing mediates between two poles: the individual physical things it describes, on the one hand, and the larger theme that it is ‘about’ on the other. That is, the particular and the universal.”

For example, to come back to Pico Iyer, his books not only describe his travels into places as diverse as the L.A. airport, Burmese temples, and suburban Japan, but they also often become inquiries into the effects of globalization on the world’s cultures. Born to Indian parents in England, then living for a long time in California, Iyer brings with him his innate awareness of how modern cultural boundaries have begun to blur. He begins his book Video Night in Kathmandu with a description of how Sylvester Stallone’s movie character Rambo had infiltrated every cinema in Asia during his visit there. By using this one specific example as a focus, he sets the tone and purpose for the book. “I went to Asia,” he writes a few pages into the first chapter, “not only to see Asia, but also to see America, from a different vantage point and with new eyes. I left one kind of home to find another: to discover what resided in me and where I resided most fully, and so to better appreciate—in both senses of the word—the home I had left.”

You will find that good travel writers avoid the pitfalls that lead to self-serving or clichéd writing. They also show awareness of themselves as outsiders who may very well carry with them an ingrained colonial or privileged perspective. In much of the beginning writing we see about travel, writers fall into clichés about the people of the lands they visit, or see them as stereotypes. They also complain about other travelers, with little awareness of their own culpability in tourist culture. Their attention to place becomes myopic and misses the point.

The other pitfall in travel writing is for the voice to become too much like a guidebook, commenting on mundane details that are not very interesting. As Fussell puts it: “Guidebooks are not autobiographical but travel books are, and if the personality they reveal is too commonplace and un-eccentric, they will not be very readable.” As with any good creative nonfiction, the self must be wholly present in the work, a voice that engages us to take this trip along with you, to stand at the windows and gaze out at what you, and only you, choose to show us.

Witnesses to Our World

In Chapter 2, “Writing the Family,” we discuss nonfiction as a literature of witness—the sense that, in a world flooded with activity and change and information sources the public growingly distrusts (rightly or wrongly), the individual voice may provide the ultimate record. In the last decades nothing has changed faster than the environment. The world’s population has burgeoned, and technology has developed the ability to clear lands, pollute the air, and drive species to extinction in record time. Your life has witnessed the eclipse of hundreds of thousands of species, even if they passed out of this world without your awareness. (The current rate of species extinction is matched only by that of the age of the dinosaurs’ demise, sixty-five million years ago.) Your life has also seen the destruction of much natural land and its replacement with human-made habitat, even if this fact, too, only barely crossed your consciousness.

For example, if you can remember a time when Rhode Island spent winters buried under several feet of snow—now replaced by light snows and rains—you may be a witness to the phenomenon of global warming. Or, if you remember rivers thick with migrating salmon, or chasing frogs as a child—creatures that have seen drastic species declines—you have witnessed the current loss of species diversity. Perhaps you have simply noticed that where you live, the last decade has contained most of the area’s historic high temperatures. There is a reason nature writing has become so urgent in our era—both the need to record what is left and the need to chronicle what we are losing. Take your role as a witness seriously; think of your writing as a way to capture the changes you’ve lived in the natural world.

TRY IT

1.   For ten minutes, write down every detail of the surroundings you can remember from your morning “commute.” Whether this be a walk to school, a bus ride, a drive to your office, or simply moving from one room to another—what are the details, images, snippets that come to mind?

Now, write a new paragraph that begins with the line: “I’ve done this _____ (walk, bus ride, drive, etc.) a thousand times, and every time I notice _____.” Write down what seems to stay the same, and what changes with the seasons.

Now write a new paragraph that begins with this line: “Years from now, when I no longer have to do this _____ (walk, drive, bus ride, etc.), I’ll miss _____.” Write down what you think you’ll remember most vividly and why.

2.   Since many of us are focused on our phones as we move through the day, think about the digital world as part of your environment. Can we consider the life on our screens as a “place” that is parallel to our physical surroundings? Can you capture the sense of living in these twin places at once?

3.   Isolate a single room or outdoor place that to you forms the most essential place of childhood. Quickly write down every element of the place you can remember with as much detail as possible. What were the patterns of the things you see? Are they old or new? Which odd details do you remember (e.g., a gargoyle-shaped knot in the wood, a gray rug with a dark stain the shape of Brazil, and so forth)? Now fill in an emotional tone for each detail. Did the wallpaper make you feel safe or frightened? What were your favorite things in this place to look at? Your least favorite? Why? What felt “yours” and what felt other? Assemble these specifics into an essay about the emotional landscape of your childhood, moving about the room, letting your essay function as an emotional “camera.”

4.   Many of us, like Mukherjee, find our sense of “desh” blends real and distant—maybe unseen—places. Is your family one of the many in this country that embodies a divided sense of home? What does “home” mean to you, your siblings, your parents? Many contemporary American families are very transient now. As one of our students, whose father had been transferred multiple times as she grew up, put it, “home is where there’s a room for me to unpack my things.” Think about whether there’s a single place—a physical location—your family defines as “home,” or what you do as you move around to bring the sense of home with you. If you’re adopted, your birth family, whether you know them or not, may represent another concept of home. Consider writing an essay in which you unpack the complex layers of meaning in the word home, with specific references to all the possibilities.

5.   Is there an “old country” in your family profile? How does it affect your family culture, traditions, or modes of interacting? Write about the ways your family’s country or countries of origin cause you to see yourself as different from others in your area, perhaps straddling several very different cultures.

6.   Examine a piece of your writing and scrutinize place as character. Is your setting a developed character? What kind of character is it: positive, nurturing, menacing, indifferent? Imagine the setting of a scene as a silent character, shaping and adding nuance to the action surrounding it.

7.   Using the passage we quote in this chapter from E. B. White’s “Good-bye to Forty-Eighth Street” as a model, describe a home environment, past or present, by the objects that inhabit it. You can use the same plot—packing up to move—as a way into the essay. How can you fully get across the character of this place through your descriptions?

8.   Write a biography of a place. Choose a street, a forest, an airport (possibly look at Pico Iyer’s essay on the Los Angeles airport, “Where Worlds Collide,” for guidance), a shopping center, any place that has character to you, whether positive or negative. Write a profile, a “character study,” of that environment.

9.   Can you articulate what your own vision of nature is? If the outdoors draws you and brings you a special kind of knowledge or contentment, can you put into words what that connection consists of? What would your metaphor be of the human-nature interaction that is, in many ways, the ground of our lives here on Earth? Can you think of a time when you went into a natural setting to make a difficult decision, work something out in your mind, or somehow come to feel more “yourself”? What led you to that place? Did it help you in the way you wanted?

10.   In this era of accelerating change, we ask you to think of your life as a piece of living history. Looking at your life as an intersection of personal history and the environment that surrounds you, to what can you bear witness? Write for about ten minutes, associating freely and spontaneously, about a place of your childhood, a place that for you defines your childhood—the porch of your house, a creek, the fire escape of an apartment, a special place in the woods. What did the place smell, taste, feel like? Include, but don’t limit yourself to, the natural elements: air quality and odor, trees, wildlife (including insects).

Now write for ten minutes on what this place is like now, whether from your own current experiences of it or from what you’ve been told. How has it changed? What is gone now that was there before? What is there now that wasn’t there before? Think of yourself as a living history of this place—what changes did you find between the place of your childhood and the place of your adulthood? Do these changes reflect any changes in your own life?

As you compare these two writings, see what larger elements emerge. Have you and the place of your childhood changed in tandem or gone in different directions? Are you a witness to changes that reflect larger—perhaps dangerous—currents of change in our contemporary world? Think about it: even seemingly small things, like the loss of much of our amphibian life, such as frogs, will alter over time the nature of the planet we live on. Think about your writings in the largest possible sense: often this short exercise unlocks a valuable essay.

11.   If you have a travel diary or blog, go back to it now and pull out sections that give highly sensory descriptions of place: the feel of the air, the taste of the food, the sounds, the smells. Type these out in separate sections, then arrange them on a table, seeing if you can find a common theme that may bind an essay together. What can you construe as the greater purpose for your travels? How can you incorporate that purpose into your travel writing? What is the one image that will emerge for metaphorical significance?

12.   Take a day to travel your hometown as a tourist. Pretend you’ve never seen this place before and wander with all your senses heightened. Take a notebook with you and write down your impressions. How can you make the familiar new again?

VARIATION FOR A GROUP: As a group, take this trip together. Then compare notes and see how different eyes perceive different things. Take some time at the end of the day, or a few days later, to write together and see where these sensory impressions might lead.

13.   Read Marjorie Rose Hakala’s “Jumping the Fence,” Annie Dillard’s essay “Living Like Weasels” or Jill Christman’s essay “The Sloth.” Then think of an encounter you have had with a wild animal that you found personally meaningful. As with Hakala, the creature can be seen in a zoo, or other confined place; add the creature’s situation to your meditation. Freewrite on this moment, considering the following questions: How can this creature work as a metaphor for you? How has your encounter with this animal marked you, changed you, or caused you to see yourself differently? How do this creature’s actions mirror yours? How are you fundamentally different? What finally haunts you about this moment?

14.   Think of animals we see often, perhaps, with an eye toward reinvigorating our view of them: deer, squirrels, opossums, crows. Use research, if you need more concrete information. Even the creatures we see every day have fascinating aspects to them: opossums are the only North American marsupials. Crows have documented tool use and a sophisticated language.

15.   Pull out an essay you’ve already written and check to see if locations and physical settings are established. Can we hear how a key conversation was heightened by the silence of a forest clearing? Do we see and smell the banyan trees of South Florida rather than the cedars of the Northwest? If you write of a town or a city, is its physical location and socioeconomic character clear?

FOR FURTHER READING

In Our Anthology

•   “Jumping the Fence” by Marjorie Rose Hakala

•   “To Keep an Ear to the Ground” by Barbara Hurd

Resources Available Online

•   “The Sloth” by Jill Christman

•   “Living Like Weasels” by Annie Dillard

Print Resources

•   “Elizabeth” by S. (Paola) Antonetta in Body Toxic

•   An Entrance to the Woods by Wendell Berry

•   An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

•   Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer

•   This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home, edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters

•   Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

•   “A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman” by Bharati Mukherjee in The Writer on Her Work

•   Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov

•   Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk

•   Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

•   “Good-bye to Forty-Eighth Street” by E. B. White in Essays of E. B. White

•   The Best American Travel Writing, published annually, various editors

•   The Best American Science and Nature Writing, published annually, various editors