Writing a way home

 

have we the wisdom to know our place?

Photo by J. Harrington

This morning I registered for an online “nature writing” course offering a lesson by each of the following:

• Rebecca Giggs
  

  Her debut nonfiction book, Fathoms: The World in the Whale, came out in 2020 with Simon & Schuster (US), and Scribe (Aus/UK). In the US Fathoms was awarded the prestigious 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The book also listed as a finalist in the Kirkus Prize and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. In Australia, Fathoms won the 2020 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Prize for Literature, the Royal Zoological Society's Whitley Award for Popular Zoology, and the WA Premier's Prize for an Emerging Writer. It was also shortlisted for the 2021 Stella Prize — Australia's most renown award for writing by women and non-binary authors in any genre. Recently the book was distinguished by being 'Highly Commended' in the shortlist for the 2021 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation.

• Charles Foster
  

  Charles Foster is a writer, barrister and traveller. His books cover many fields. They include books on travel, evolutionary biology, natural history, anthropology, theology, archaeology, philosophy and law. Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'

• Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
  

  Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is a writer based in northern New England. As a staff writer for Emergence Magazine, she explores the human relationship to place. Her work has been featured in Crannóg Magazine, Inhabiting the Anthropocene, and the EcoTheo Review. She is currently writing her first book.

• Lucy Jones
  

  I’m a journalist and author, based in England. I also teach writing workshops (the Guardian Nature Writing Masterclass) and talk about my research areas. My first book, Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love & Loathing in Modern Britain, was published by Elliott & Thompson in 2016. It was long-listed for the Wainwright Prize and won the Society of Authors' Roger Deakin Award. My second book, Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need The Wild was published in March 2020 by Allen Lane (Penguin). The paperback was published in February 2021. Losing Eden was long-listed for the Wainwright Prize and received a Society of Authors’ K Blundell Trust Award. The Times and Telegraph named it a book of the year (2020) and the paperback became a Times' bestseller (2021). It is published in German, Spanish, Italian, the United States and soon in Portugal and Estonia. My third book, co-written with Kenneth Greenway, is called The Nature Seed and is published by Profile Books. I write features about science, health, wildlife and the environment for a variety of publications, including the BBC, Emergence, the Guardian and the Independent. Before going freelance in 2015, I worked at NME and The Daily Telegraph. I am represented by Jessica Woollard at David Higham Associates. For commissioning or broadcasting queries, you can write to me at lucyjones01@gmail.com. I am currently researching matrescence.

• Lia Purpura
  

  Lia Purpura’s new collection of essays, All the Fierce Tethers (Sarabande Books) has arrived! Her most recent collection of poems is It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Viking/Penguin.) She is the author of three previous collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil); three previous collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase), and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch & Taste of Ash).

• Jamie Figueroa
  

  Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel BROTHER, SISTER, MOTHER, EXPLORER, which “brims with spellbinding prose, magical elements, and wounded, full-hearted characters that nearly jump off the page” (Publishers Weekly). Figueroa is Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio and is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, and Agni, among others. She received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar. A VONA alum, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Given the array of writers, this should be interesting. I'm continuing to explore why New England remains "home" and Minnesota is a "home away from home." Maybe this will provide either insights or paths to follow, or both. After all, Robert Frost, known as a New England poet, was born in California. That’s really far from the real ocean, you know.

The Death of the Hired Man

By Robert Frost

 

... ‘Home,’ he mocked gently. 

                                       ‘Yes, what else but home? 

It all depends on what you mean by home. 

Of course he’s nothing to us, any more 

Than was the hound that came a stranger to us 

Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.’ 

‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, 

They have to take you in.’ 

                                      ‘I should have called it 

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ ...

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