First Thoughts
When I read, I’m more likely to pick up fiction, but since most of the books I read are set in a dystopian future, the characters are usually at odds with nature. This relationship usually isn’t a major theme in the books I read, but rather it’s a way for worldbuilding to occur. I think fiction is a really interesting mode for nature writing because the author can explore similar themes as in CNF, but they aren’t limited to their own narrative or to a completely factual, journalistic approach. This makes fiction really appealing to people who don’t have the ability to engage in nature very often but still care about it. I think one of the challenges of fiction for nature writing is the fact that it is such an open genre where the only limits are your imagination, so it seems like as a writer, you could easily be overwhelmed by the amount of detail that goes into creating your story.
Final Thoughts
The text that resonated with me most from our fiction readings was Ursula LeGuin’s The Wife’s Story. There are so many elements of this story that I appreciate, but I think what I like most is how much this piece adds to the field of nature writing despite the fact that what we gain is not apparent at first glance. Even though the story boils down to a reverse werewolf tale, the point that LeGuin seems to be making, considering we don’t know the characters start as wolves, is that human life is not that different from other animals. I think this is a very important perspective on nature because as I wrote in my journal “we don’t usually think of animal social structures as being related to our own.” This specific story differs obviously from other genres of nature writing because there are some supernatural elements at play. In a wider sense, the idea that fiction doesn’t have to be true or realistic allows the author to create a story that makes a very specific point as opposed to recognizing an existing point in a story that you are retelling.
Before we started reading fiction nature writing, I figured it would all be very different from reality, and while this may be true to some degree, I realized that our fiction readings were much more true to life than I had originally thought. In my first reflection, I noted that I thought the biggest challenge of this genre was that “the only limits are your imagination” so it would be easy to get lost in your own story, but fiction doesn’t have to be entirely removed from real life. In a book like Oryx and Crake, for example, although it takes place in an apocalyptic setting, so many pieces of the story are just elevated versions of science and technology we have today. I think what fiction brings to the conversation of nature writing is that it can help bring together elements of real-life that we may not have otherwise connected, but need to be seen together in order to understand something important about the world we live in.
