The Nature and Travel Essay

Just as the forms we call memoir, literary journalism, and the personal essay often overlap, the nature essay and the travel essay are true hybrids.

To write about nature, you should certainly begin by going outside. Or as the Japanese haiku master Basho once advised, “To know the pine, go to the pine.” You need also, however, to purchase an excellent field guide and learn the precise names of things: plant, animal, or insect. You may further need to interview a naturalist, an invertebrate zoologist, or a park ranger for greater insight. And often, you need to meditate on the self, your place in the natural world.

Travel writing is similar in this way. The travel essay often begins with a personal encounter – a visit to a new place or a new culture. Your primary responsibility is to see the place not as expected but as it actually exists, right in front of you. Then you often will want to learn more, from books, from talking with people, from studying old photographs.

A Brief Guide to Writing the Nature Essay

Successful nature writing requires more than mere description, though careful description itself is certainly important. Yes, nature can thrill you, and often the urge to tell another person what we’ve seen is very strong, but an experienced writer will move beyond that original urge and search for what can be learned, what large or small truths are revealed by the subject at hand.

Though it is certainly acceptable to reflect on the breathtaking majesty of the Grand Canyon or the towering magnificence of an old-growth forest, remember that nature writing is often best when focused on the smallest parts of nature. For instance, consider Annie Dillard’s tight focus in her essay “Living Like Weasels,” found in the textbook appendix. Or observe how Maureen Stanton captures the magic and endless variety of the natural world by focusing on a single evening’s moth hunt, in “Romancing the Light.” (Note too, that Stanton undertook considerable research after the hunt and before completing her essay, in order to provide richness of detail.)

In your case, whatever your relationship to nature, consider bringing it to the page through a close look at the undersized stream, barely on the map, that runs alongside the campus, or at a single, dime-sized toad resting on a withered leaf. As conservationist and author John Muir reminded us, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

A Brief Guide to Writing the Travel Essay

Artists – especially visual artists – often talk about seeing “with fresh eyes,” and this certainly applies to travel writing. The world is full of clichés and expected conclusions, but what can you tell the reader that she doesn’t already know? What have you seen that no one else has seen in quite the same way? Take the time to see beyond the normal and usual tourist stops – the museums and cathedrals. How do people really live? How do they spend their time?

Travel writing, by the way, does not mean that you must journey to Costa Rica, Senegal, or Tibet, though those locations are clearly rich with possibilities. Travel writing can entail a trip to a corner of your city where you do not usually venture – the wealthy, gated suburb, or the impoverished, asphalt-and-brick housing project down on its luck. Travel might mean a mere fifteen-mile journey along the road leading out of town to a rural Harvest Festival where people still compete to grow the largest ear of corn. If you are interested in experimentation and mixing genres, try writing a travel essay about the Senior Citizen’s Center you pass by every day.

Each of us is surrounded by differences in culture, ethnicity, geography, and lifestyle, but we often exist wearing metaphorical blinders, spending day in and day out traveling in our comfortable, standard grooves. Take a step to the left, out of your normal track. Author Greg Bottoms gives us two examples, one outside the French Basilique de Fourviere, and one very close to home.