{"id":2675,"date":"2020-12-14T08:12:53","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T13:12:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=2675"},"modified":"2020-12-14T08:12:53","modified_gmt":"2020-12-14T13:12:53","slug":"allison-hutchcraft-henry-david-thoreau-and-the-art-of-nature-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2020\/12\/14\/allison-hutchcraft-henry-david-thoreau-and-the-art-of-nature-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Allison Hutchcraft, Henry David Thoreau, and the Art of Nature Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I first read Henry David Thoreau\u2019s Walden; or Life in the Woods <\/em>during my high school years in Colorado.\u00a0 There\u2019s a pond on mountainside where I grew up, and I decided to emulate Thoreau and write about the pond, just like Thoreau wrote about Walden Pond.\u00a0 I perched on the bank for about an hour, watching the occasional dragonfly zip through the cluster of cattails near where I sat,\u00a0 and then I got restless.\u00a0 As much as I admired Thoreau\u2019s writing, I realized that I lacked the discipline and powers of perception to be a nature writer.\u00a0 Still, I appreciate writers who are attuned to the rhythms of nature and who can help us understand our place in the natural world. One such writer is Charlotte poet Allison Hutchcraft.\u00a0 For more information about Allison and her poetry, please click on the following link:\u00a0 https:\/\/www.allisonhutchcraft.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I met Allison about six years ago.\u00a0 At the time, she had just had a poem published in the Kenyon Review <\/em>about a dodo bird.\u00a0 I remember reading the poem and then talking with her about her ability to make readers care about an extinct bird.\u00a0 I have followed her career ever since and have taken pleasure in seeing her poetry gain national attention.\u00a0 I am pleased to report the recent publication of Swale, <\/em>Allison\u2019s first poetry collection.\u00a0 I contacted Allison and asked her for more information about her collection.\u00a0 Here is what she sent to me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I\u2019m thrilled to share that my first poetry collection,\u00a0<\/em>Swale, was released this November by the good folks at New Issues Poetry & Prose. The book looks outward to the natural world, and also inward to the landscape of the mind. In<\/em>\u00a0Swale, water and land meet and mix, and at times become confused. Sailors hallucinate the ocean as a field. Ancient coastal forests, having fallen into the sea from shifting tectonic plates, reappear on a beach, unburied by erosion.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my work, I often find animals appearing, from bears, horses, and lambs to whales and manatees. In Swale, there are extinct species, too, particularly the dodo and Steller\u2019s sea cow, which went extinct roughly in the 1680s and 1760s, respectively. Human intervention set in motion those extinctions, and I\u2019m interested in thinking about those losses, and the kinds of worldviews that made them possible.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2018, I was lucky to be a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast. Sitka is a dream of a residency, and quite remote: perched where the Salmon River estuary spills into the sea, and steps from a national scenic research area. I saw more elk than people. Being in that particular place\u2014walking the woods and coastlines, climbing over boulders, touching rockweed, lichen, and driftwood\u2014was incredibly generative, and brought forth poems that grew incrementally from daily observations. Such writing in the field is crucial to me. At the same time, I love research. Reading about the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, led me to the naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller\u2019s study of the sea cow, which in turn led to a poem.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am particularly interested in the ways in which art and science meet and what questions and conversations such crossings might foster. I often think of Rob Nixon\u2019s <\/em>Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, in which he advocates for finding ways to bring the disasters of the Anthropocene into our shared consciousness. Nixon writes:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, to me, is an urgent call: how can we begin to make visible the precariousness of our world? Poetry, I think, offers one way to do so.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though Allison\u2019s Swale <\/em>is a work of poetry while Thoreau\u2019s Walden <\/em>is a work of prose, both writers have much in common.  For both of them, nature writing is an immersive act.  Both are keen observers of the dynamics of the natural world, and both reflect in profound ways on how humans interact with nature.  Both have an appreciation of place, and they communicate their appreciation of place through the power of their writing.  In many ways, Allison Hutchcraft is Storied Charlotte\u2019s own 21st<\/sup>-century Thoreau. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first read Henry David Thoreau\u2019s Walden; or Life in the Woods during my high school years in Colorado.\u00a0 There\u2019s a pond on mountainside where I grew up, and I decided to emulate Thoreau and write about the pond, just like Thoreau wrote about Walden Pond.\u00a0 I perched on the bank for about an hour, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[157,35],"class_list":["post-2675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-nature-writer","tag-poetry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2679,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2675\/revisions\/2679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}