“With nothing more than a pen and a notebook, nature journaling can help you slow down and create a reference you can call upon to bring your reader into the worlds you build on the page.”
Excerpted from “How Nature Journaling Can Help Your Writing,” by Maria Bengtson. Writer’s Digest, July/August 2024.
Go outside with pen and notebook, get settled, observe, use sensory detail to enhance your writing.
Bengtson suggests using these prompts
I notice . . .
I wonder . . .
It reminds me of . . .
“Your observations will create a reference that will help you transport your reader from their cozy chair to the world on your pages. Sketch a tree or flower or a critter you see.
The work of creating a rough map, schematic, or stick-figure diagram forces you to think about how things are related to one another, and how the environment and the things in it are structured.”
For example: Dave Seter’s poem, “Fox Trot.”
A curtain parted, beaded, of mustard grass.
Fox made an entrance and trotted across
an asphalt stage, expanse of empty parking spaces
stained with motor oil. Without missing a step.
The audience was wind, full of bluster,
phrased with pollen mitigated by a whisper
of unseen lilac. But the fox was seen
despite having gotten scent, or sixth sense,
college was closed, cars and people absent.
The fox’s coat was the color of caramelized sugar.
He/she/they paused like a debutante waiting
to be conferred royal title, the applause of a suitor,
but it was my nose that was in the air.
My heart on my sleeve hid a heart tattoo.
What is happiness, I asked, what sweetness
has been missing? But the fox didn’t answer.
Did the fox want to be seen frozen,
skilled as lawn statuary unmoved by wind?
Or did the fox just not want to give audience
dancing in a coat the color of caramelized sugar?
Dave Seter, civil/environmental engineer, poet, and essayist is the Sonoma County Poet Laureate for 2024-2026.
He is the author of Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag, 2010).
He writes about social and environmental issues, including the intersection of the built world and the natural world. He is the recipient of two Pushcart nominations.
His poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in various publications including Appalachia, Cider Press Review, The Florida Review, The Hopper, The Museum of Americana, Poetry Northwest (forthcoming), and others.
He has been an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has served on the Board of Directors of Marin Poetry Center.
He earned his undergraduate degree in engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California.
“Fox Trot” can be found in “The Write Spot: Musings and Ravings From a Pandemic Year.”
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