New Year, New Thoughts and Plans

Hello! It’s been a minute.

Things are fine, but I have been a little unwell for the past few months. There have been too many doctor’s appointments, and dealing with insurance, and some surgery, and while all the tests came back clean, well, a childhood spent in the cancer wars means that I have not been able to get any writing done for the past couple of months. Talk about materiality. The material body made herself known. And I have had to wrestle some very very old ghosts.

I’m currently tucked up in a blanket, in my lovely greenhouse room, trying to be patient, trying to allow myself the space to recover. I am very bad at both of these things.

On top of that, over the past few months, I felt like I’d kind of gone off newsletters. Perhaps this is true for you? There are so many. My inbox is full of them. And with everything else going on in the world, it started to feel like noise. More noise in a world that is so very noisy at the moment.

So I took a pause.

I have been blogging since the beginning of blogs, and that is very much not what I want to do with this space, so I took a minute to think about what I want to do here this year. I wanted a project. I wanted something big enough that we can continue to explore it, and something that is not just what-Charlotte’s-annoyed-about-this-month.

This year, I think what I want to explore is the question of what is nature writing? What does it do? What is it for?

This was, in large part, the subject of my Phd work all those years ago, and it’s only gotten more complicated and interesting as the climate catastrophe has unfolded, and as capitalism is fraying in response to this catastrophe, and as our political systems are breaking down in the face of these two stressors. On the one side we seem to have very powerful forces of denial and capital and wealth who are determined to continue the 500 year project of rapacious colonial capitalism that has done such enormous damage, and on the other side we seem to have millions of small lights, candles glowing at vigils, posters carried through city streets, people who just want peaceful lives, lives where we can raise our children and care for our elderly without being broken on the wheel of expense, lives where children are not bombed into oblivion in their apartment buildings, lives where we can make things and cook for one another and welcome the stranger into our midst. And we are being forced to go to war to protect these things, in some cases, being forced to go to war against our own governments.

In light of all this, I am wondering what does it mean to write about the natural world now? This is also the through line of the memoir I’m working on — what does it mean to grieve in a place of extraordinary natural beauty even as you grieve for the incremental death of that place? As you can see it changing, slowly, and for the worse, all around you? As you see fewer animals every year, or, as this year, when we have not yet had a winter. It’s mid-January, and the temperatures have mostly been above freezing. In Montana. At elevation.

I will have more cogent thoughts on this soon, and I’m looking forward to kicking them around with you all. In the meantime, if you have feedback about what you value about nature writing, what you go to it for, why you read it, feel free to reply in the comments or via email.