My home city of Tallahassee is surrounded by national and state forests and the ocean is less than an hour from campus. Perhaps this is because of my affinity for the genre, or my affinity for long walks beneath the droopy, Spanish-moss festooned live oaks that cast shade over my neighborhood streets, but also, I think nature writing should be readily accessible to my students. Nature writing, to me, feels like an accessible way to experiment with researched writing. But even if my students do engage excitedly in personal essay writing, I want to teach them that they can enrich and complicate personal essays by turning beyond the personal, by finding research to add texture to stories.

Many students are afraid to write about themselves, afraid that their lives don’t merit writing about they also often feel that they are not ready to share their own stories, to dig into discomfort. In my introductory level creative nonfiction course, I teach nature writing as part of my unit on researched writing-a unit that allows students to understand the many different directions you can explore with creative nonfiction, how it doesn’t have to only be used to divulge uncomfortable truths or capture intense, turbulent lives. Learning about the land made me feel connected to my new home, teaching me about the uncannily pink roseate spoonbills that use their cutlery-shaped beaks to search shallow waters for crayfish and shrimp or the charismatic scrub jay, an endemic species disappearing from the Florida peninsula as we clear more and more scrubland to create citrus fields and housing developments. My bookcases are filled with books about nature-Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, Barbara Hurd’s Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains, Terry Tempest Williams’s When women were birds: fifty-four variations on voice-and when I moved to Florida, after five years living just outside our nation’s capital, I gathered books about my new home, iconic books like Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: River of Grass, and books by local writers, Susan Cerulean and Janisse Ray, writers who craft lyrical books about longleaf pines and the gulf shore, two ecosystems I now frequently wander through with my husband and long-haired dachshund.

Tales from the borderlands tropes