Environmental and Nature Writing

This book presents an introductory history of nature writing—covering subcategories ranging from pastoral and adventure writing to postcolonial and climate change narratives—and serves as a comprehensive guide to the elements of its craft in essays, stories, and poems. Both veterans and newcomers to environmental and nature writing will find inspiration in the exercises and anthology sections, which include work by Camille T. Dungy, Juan Felipe Herrera, Benjamin Percy, and many others. * Poets & Writers *
The planet is in a real crisis - and one good effect is that it seems to be producing ever more wonderful writers about nature and the environment, almost as a human produces antibodies to ward off disease. Here you will find introductions to many of them--and an invitation to join their ranks. * Bill McKibben, editor of American Earth: Nature Writing Since Thoreau *
Sean Prentiss and Joe Wilkins’ new craft text and anthology, Nature and Environmental Writing, is a writing manual full of provocative prompts and a respectful and informative literary history of the genre we have previously kept in a small box marked “nature writing.” It also includes a discerning multi-genre reader. The book challenges writers to factor into their writing the imprint of place and landscape on the human story. Whether writers adopt this textbook for a classroom setting or embark upon its lessons and inspirations in a self-study, they will surely come away with new and wild ideas about the subtle influences that science, the natural world, and the environmental imagination exert on all of our experiences, memories, and stories. * Debra Marquart, Professor of English at Iowa State University and author of The Horizontal World *
This is lucid, interesting and highly readable. * Hywel Dix, Bournemouth University, UK *
The sense of historical development coupled with the sensitivity to the changing social and cultural landscapes makes this book useful to a number of audiences and promises to invite even more nature writers to join those already on the trail … Part II focuses on various writerly concerns such as tone, symbol, point of view, character (both people and place), persona, research, revision, and the like. Prentiss and Wilkins deal with these issues by creating chapters that offer related readings from the anthology, a free-write prompt, an illustrating vignette, a discussion of the issue at hand, and exercises. These are standard writing issues for nature writers, and I find Prentiss and Wilkins’s treatment of them straightforward and refreshing … Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology includes nonfiction, fiction, and poetry and provides a great range of writing from multiple perspectives covering multiple genres. I find the collection useful, as models for writers and as challenges to how we define nature and environmental writing. Prentiss and Wilkins have given us a useful trail to follow … I will use Prentiss and Wilkins’s book the next time I teach nature writing. * ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment *