How do you write about a tree?

 A quiet day today, a walk around the block and thoughts about human and more-than human relationships. I've just re-read the essay by Ingrid Horrocks about writing nature called Dissolving Genre: Toward finding new ways to write about the world. Together with a colleague, I've run workshops and talks about writing the environment and the Anthropocene - and it always great to read what other writers have to say about this immersive but elusive practice.

The hound and the guardian tree

In the essay, she writes of meanings and modes of what she calls eco-nonfiction, ways to move beyond human frames of reference ('Is it possible to write or draw a forest?')

 

Velvet Earth Tongue emerging from the Marri litter

Close observation and attention

     This kowphai bloom, that estuary

     This possum, that coal fire

 

Hovea elliptica are really popping!

Ordinary or unpromising locations

     Edgelands

     The flourishing of motorway burbs

A secret pond in the bush near my place

Avoids idealisation of pristine wilderness

     Fewer epiphanies in national parks

     Fewer men on mountains

 

Favours systems that include humans

     More suburbs, kitchens, children parents

     But also oceans, rivers, oysters

Mother Marri

Observes altered worlds

      Eucalypts in San Francisco

       Ice melts in Antarctica

       Rewildings

 

And lost worlds

      Endlings: an animal that is the last of its species

Peppermint paving

Often draws on memoir

      I, sometimes we

 

Finds continuities between the human and nonhuman

       Warm breath misting

 

Demands we move outside a human frame of reference

“Is it possible to draw or write a forest?”

 

Struggles with how to do this

signed here.

 

Searches for organic forms and structures opening out stories of confluence

“What do I know but pieces, all at once?”

 

Understands that in the 21st century “to write about nature is a political act”

Hopes (within hopes) that a shift in attention
–a yielding of consciousness to a world beyond human–
will give to a shift in action.

 Ingrid Horrocks, 'Dissolving Genre: writ with water', in Bending Genre: essays on creative nonfiction, Bloomsbury, 2014.