ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
11.2

Marco Wilkinson
​
Exquisite Copse

Introduction: Seeing the Forest for the Trees

In the creative nonfiction classroom, when it comes to engaging with “nature” or even “place,” I’ve felt the intergenerational thread connecting my students and me becoming increasingly tenuous.  They scroll through their lives on screens, digitizing themselves into incorporeality, and barely give a thought to the trees they walk past everyday on campus, let alone think about investigating thorny environmental and ecological questions of subjectivity, justice, or epistemology. It can feel difficult to get them to connect with concepts that barely register in their consciousness.  Recently, my class read excerpts from Richard Nelson’s The Island Within, a collection of essays on Nelson’s experience hunting and fishing on an unnamed island in the Pacific Northwest. The language is luminous and rhapsodic, full of deeply mined insights into his relationship with the natural world. Many of them complained that it plodded along and was irrelevant to them. “I just don’t like nature. I never have.” In another class we read essays by Tim Robinson that meticulously and reverently chart the natural and cultural histories of minute, precise locations in rural western Ireland. Students were bored to tears by such close attention to rock formations, wells, and caves.

Perhaps, though, I was not so different from them once upon a time. As a latchkey child who was babysat by syndicated sitcoms in the afternoon or who stared at the blinking pixels of his Nintendo games, I spent my entire childhood oblivious to the natural world around me. Shooting at ducks in Duck Hunt, I never considered that one weird tree in the background. Wandering through the landscape of Legend of Zelda, I never wondered at the oddity of its grid-like forests. Nevermind the dogwood tree in my childhood home’s postage-stamp front yard or the pine trees that ringed the edge of the beach we used to go to in the summer.

But then something happened. I don’t know how or when a switch was flipped but I became curious about the natural world. After a stint as an intern on an organic farm, where workdays were in the fields and days off were spent in the encircling woods, I was suddenly aware of what I would now call the more-than-human world but back then simply called “nature": something beautiful and calming, something large and mysterious, but something very much outside of myself.

It took years of further education as a horticulturist to become aware of things like mycorrhizae and coevolution and succession, and along the way transform my sense of “nature” from something (some things) into a gut perception of process and relationship, and even longer to see that that relationship might extend to include myself within its flows, that living might be accomplished all together.

Back in the classroom today, I have often wondered, especially in this moment where whatever golden hour we might have had to alter our environmental circumstances seems to be rapidly fading to darkness, how to draw my students through the journey of ecological insight described above so that in their early twenties they might carry forward some sense of the world I am only now finding words for in my forties. In a time when all of us feel the pull into a digital world, how might I guide my students into the woods: to see them perhaps for the first time as a “thing” to marvel at and love, to trace in them the lines of relationship and flow that shift “nature” to “ecology,” and to recognize that the lives they’ve been living all this time have always been lived in/with/through the woods, all together? The following is an exercise I have developed as a potential answer.

This is a three-part exercise I have used with students in a variety of contexts, ranging from an environmental literature seminar to an ecopoetics creative writing workshop to a sustainable agriculture class. Sometimes I have run all three rounds of this exercise in one class meeting and at other times I have spaced them out so each round takes up the whole meeting. Each space brings with it slightly different learning objectives and elicits different discussions at each stage of the exercise, but creative writing, literature, and science students have all found it useful.


First Round: Opening One Eye

The first time I taught this exercise was in a sustainable agriculture course focused on soil science. At this point in the course, we were discussing nutrient cycles and flows and I was interested in getting students to move beyond thinking simply in terms of interacting with the land as a subject acting on an object or in terms of resource extraction.

I took the class into a small patch of woods, no bigger than 40 feet by 40 feet that had been orphaned from the larger woods that ring the campus when the science building we normally meet in was constructed.  It sat lonely in an out-of-the-way corner, looking like nothing more than weed trees come up in an untended spot. It’s a melancholy, forgotten spot.  There is nothing here necessarily worth the observation of a nature writer, and that’s precisely why we went there.

We began by walking for five minutes at a normal pace through the stand of trees, follow-the-leader style.  The students’ only instruction was to be silent and to observe with all their senses. This is akin to the first question I ask creative writing students in my classes when I ask them to look at art: “What do you see?”  I then asked the students to take 5 minutes to write something that attempts to totally capture what they observed.

​This observational walk in nature and recording of one’s impressions might be thought of as the classical stance of the nature writer. In this instance the writing is on-site, but often as not the nature writer’s work is one of recollection at a distance, in time and/or space.  The writing is an attempt at totalizing recall. The human writer experiences and observes some facet of the non-human and returns back to the collective human mind to enrich it with its insights. Any number of pieces of nature writing might fit this bill. What comes to mind for me are works like Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind or Henry Beston’s The Outermost House that aim to capture beauty of the more-than-human world and offer it to the human imagination. This is a fundamentally human project.


Second Round: The Woods Have Many Eyes

The next thing I asked students to do was to greatly slow down their pace of observation.  Though I didn’t name it as such, what we did was slow walking meditation.  We took half a step with each full breath cycle. In this stage of the exercise we cover the same ground as before but what was a five-minute walk can turn into a half hour or more. Most students find this maddening but the idea is to luxuriate in detail, to relax into the normally-unseen. If the first question asked was “What do you see?” then the second is “What else do you see?”

When we were done with our slow walk, I asked the students to form a circle and take out a paper and fold it into as many sections as there are students in the class.  They then write a sentence about one detail they noticed during this slow walk that went unobserved the first time around. The papers then get passed clockwise to the next student who must then write a sentence that builds on the previous one with a new detail.  And so on, until the paper returns to its original owner, with each student only seeing the sentence written by the student before them.

This is of course a little game of exquisite corpse and nothing too extraordinary but the goal is to get students to unearth the initially unseen details of a space and be forced to continually dig for those details as the pages circulate, to practice relationality and interdependence by generating a piece of writing that is not wholly any one person’s, and to give up control by only ever seeing one portion of the work being generated. In the end the class has generated as many composite expressions of its encounter with the little patch of woods as there are students in the class in a kaleidoscopic ecological array.  Less exquisite corpse, and more an exquisite copse. For sustainable agriculture students this becomes an exercise in understanding how the creation of anything, even a single vegetable, is the product of a vast array of interactions. When I’ve used this exercise in an environmental literature course one of the lessons is that any text is a text(ile), woven together from an infinite set of influences and perspectives, which might be another way of saying that all “singular” literary endeavors are always actually collaborative. Here, we discuss Jed Rasula’s This Compost and its illumination of the way in which words become the compost out of which other words emerge, literary tradition being akin to the nutrient webs discussed in a science classroom. I introduce students to Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book, in which he stitches together three hundred years’ worth of descriptions of nature in novels into a unique text.

​In discussing what this collaborative writing experience might offer students of environmental literature, questions that have guided discussion have included: Can we conceive all pieces of writing as something other than individual human projects? What are the ramifications of taking “ecopoetics” seriously, as a making that is fundamentally relational?


Third Round: All Together

I then asked students who we hadn’t heard from.  Given all the surprising connections and details unearthed by the exquisite copse exercise with their classmates, students had a hard time immediately coming up with an answer, but eventually someone said, “The trees.”

And so I asked them to pick one of the beings mentioned in their composite description of the site, and imagine what this non-human participant in our exercise has been sensing and observing this whole time alongside us.  At least when thinking about non-animal beings, the first hurdle is lack of eyes, so students had to consider all the ways in which observation of the surrounding world isn’t limited to eye, ear, nose, tongue, touch. Writing, especially nature writing, is an act that privileges what the writer sees, but what sees the writer? What “sees” the writer? In environmental literature and creative writing classes alike, I brought into the discussion Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” essay, in which he wrestles with what it means to stand naked before his cat in his bathroom, truly knowing that another being is seeing him. I also brought in Brenda Hillman’s idea of “crypto-animist activism,” found in Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene. She writes that “crypto-animist activism considers beetles, finches, flies, moss, dirt, bacteria, foxes, lichen, reeds, or even houseplants within buildings that are having simultaneous existences, whether related or unrelated to human agency or human intentionality.”  This led to robust discussions about ethics, humility, and reciprocity.

​Finally, I asked, “And if you were to invite this being to join the collaborative exercise we just did in the second round, what would that look like?” This is perhaps the most difficult part of the exercise, where the students (and me) have to really stretch for a way to respond.  Some placed their papers under the shadows of tree limbs to see what is obscured and what highlighted. Others rubbed their paper against rough bark and then report back on what’s been torn away. Someone buried their paper under the moist rotting leaves (“For the worms to edit.”). I told them about Stephen Collis’ and Jordan Scott’s project, Decomp, in which they left a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species out in the desert to rot for a year. I showed them Julie Patton’s poetic collaborations with slugs and leaves in the journal ecopoetics. We talked about Ian Hamilton Findlay’s work. It all feels a bit ridiculous until it doesn’t. That shift in perspective, whether in a creative writing, literature, or science class, is the point.


Debrief: What We See, What We Write, What We Do

In debriefing with the students after the exercise itself is over, we reflect particularly on this third round of writing: its implications, its liberatory possibilities, and its possible shortcomings (romanticism, anthropomorphism, colonization). Is there a way to bring into our writing processes Hillman’s “simultaneous existences?” Can we make nature writing into ecopoetics and can that ecopoetics embody coexistence? Even if we can’t, is it worth asking these questions and trying? Is there an after-effect that lingers?

Finally, after students discuss these questions, I introduce them to one concrete example of attempting to deal with the issues raised by the exercise. Robin Kimmerer, in her essay “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” in Braiding Sweetgrass, writes, “Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own.” Can we attend to the other-than-human and collaborate with it?  She goes further to suggest that we must make necessary changes to our own (English) language to hear this language of others.  Rather than “it” as the pronoun of the animate but not human around us, she draws on her Potawotami language to craft the new pronoun “ki.” For instance, “The tree lifted ki’s limbs into the sky.”  And for the plural, the even more evocative “kin,” such as, “The geese flew high in the chill fall sky. Kin would be gone from us until spring returned.“ What happens when recognizing the subjecthood of the other-than-human impacts our language? How does transformed language in turn transform action?

​Perhaps this exercise helps young budding scientists or farmers to decenter humans in their understanding of natural processes. Perhaps literature students find themselves radically rethinking how textual production happens. Perhaps creative writing students feel more freedom to be bold in their experiments with language as a way of experimenting with how to be in the world. My goal is to carry students through an evolution of the writing process (observation to relationality to coexistence) as it has related to nature, culminating in an invitation to develop new forms of language and to wrestle with the task of creating an ecopoetic practice that is meaningful in their lives and the other-than-human lives they coexist with.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​
Marco Wilkinson is the author of Madder: A Memoir in Weeds (Coffee House Press) and the translator from Spanish of Sergio Blanco's Divine Invention, or the Celebration of Love (Albion Books). His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Seneca Review, Ecotone, Territory, and most recently in the anthologies,  Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation and Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. He has received fellowships from the Breadloaf Environmental Writers Conference, Montalvo Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Craigardan, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor in the Literature Department at University of California San Diego.

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