by Emma Wood
COLUMNIST
give you an expose every week on some exotic person I’d met in Amsterdam, or even the boonies outside of Walla Walla. The truth is I’m spending my time with all of you. The people I wan to write about live so close they can peer in my kitchen window.
It’s scary to write about the people next door. Not all of you know Don Snow, an Environmental Studies Prof who came to academia quite by accident after many years in the wild of Montana. He loves the vastness of language as well as skies, and eventually he began to teach the art of taming words: now Maxey is his habitat, and he teaches a writing class called The Nature Essay.
Here’s what Don says when it comes to writing about people you know: “People don’t like their laundry out in full view: somebody’s streaks are gonna show.”
Don is a man who wears Wranglers to class. He forbids us to use footnotes; he wants “to get lower on the totem pole of academic artifice.” He brings a turkey whistle to class to call us back to the room after breaks, and Tupperwares full of cookies to share. He warns us if we like gooey cookies we’re going to be disappointed: he likes his sandy.
Don expects the same grit in our essays that he expects of his chocolate chip cookies. “If you’re not courting offense,” he says, “you’re not letting your lamp shine.” This is pretty scary advice: I just wrote a piece about my mother, and of course she’s going to read it.
But I don’t think the streaks we find as writers are blemishes. I’d like to say they are wild streaks untamable, illogical aspects of people’s spirits.
Sometimes we see outward streaks: Wynne Auld runs across the street bringing me experimental black bean brownies; Louise Stevens comes over to bake bread and ends up on our kitchen floor, shaking the house with laughter; Curt Bowen makes me salsa dance in the middle of Penrose Library. I too have these outbursts of spirit: I stood outside as it snowed last week, eating hot soup as cold snowflakes pelted my bowl. We have savage inner selves that crave acts of the mundanely exotic; even people we know well burst out and surprise us.
Sometimes our streaks are uglier. Sometimes they’re so deep it takes our friends years to pry them out.
People seem to have a fuzzy idea of what really counts as nature writing. They think nature writing means stories about climbing trips, gorgeous rivers or the evils of Styrofoam cups. Nature writing is about finding the wild essence in people and places, be they Whitties and Walla Walla or Pygmies and forests. Don jokes with us that only bad nature writing sounds like Mary Poppins out in the woods.
