Enjoying Outside, Inside - Women Writing on Nature
Amy Boyer • December 29, 2022
You're probably familiar with nature writers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Gary Snyder. You may also have noticed that all of these writers are men. Here are some women nature writers to explore as we come into winter, the perfect season for adventures through reading.
Mary Austin is best known for her classic, Land of Little Rain, essays about her experiences in the Mojave desert. She was deeply sensitive not only to the place she walked in but also the cultural landscape, and championed rights for women, Native Americans, and Mexican-Americans.
Gene Stratton Porter wrote novels set in Indiana's enormous Limberlost swamp while it was being logged off. Her books, like those of Dickens, are written with immense heart and memorable characters. She portrays the Limberlost as it was changing, providing a window onto a little-known place and time. My favorites are Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost.
Robin Wall Kimmerer perhaps needs no introduction, but if you read only one book on this list, make it Braiding Sweetgrass. A botanist specializing in mosses and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer weaves together scientific understanding and the lessons learned from her family, her tribe, and Anishinaabemowin, the language of the Potawatomi, to point a direction for healing the world.
Annie Proulx has a lively sense of history and an eye for place. The Shipping News is wonderful not only for its human characters but also for its evocation of the Newfoundland land-and-seascape; her other fiction is equally perceptive of the many regions she writes about. Her newest book, Fen, Bog, and Swamp, discusses one of the most important types of ecosystems in the struggle with global warming: peatlands.
Mary Oliver says she was saved by nature and poetry, and her work is based on her sharp, long-term observation of the nature around Provincetown, where she lived for many years. Dream Work is perhaps my favorite volume of her poems, and Upstream, a collection of essays, ranges from her childhood, to Wordsworth, to owls.
-Amy Boyer
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