More To Be Shaped By: Searching for Black Nature Writing

Literary Hub, March 22, 2023: More To Be Shaped By: Searching for Black Nature Writing

“So much nature writing is about freedom and access to the vast spaces that provide crisp air and opportunities for fresh perspectives. But this collection’s origins lie in a revelation that came to me while teaching nature writing in a prison setting, where participants didn’t have access to such liberative experiences. I began teaching in prisons in 2016, after years of activism in response to the violences of the ‘injustice’ system.

“I’d always preferred teaching in nontraditional classrooms and found that the best education happens between students across differences, whether in race, age, or socioeconomic experience. This is exactly the kind of teaching that happens in prison classrooms. And beneath this motivation, I felt an unanswered desire to understand my long-absent father, who was incarcerated for a time when I was a child.

“I taught classes from memoir to lyric essay in prisons before answering a call for a new class offering and proposing a fifteen-week nature writing class for Minnesota’s largest facility, a former mental hospital in the southern part of the state. I began teaching in the waning days of summer.

“During the class, we marked the way nature transcended the walls of the institution. On the first day, a blaze-orange fox ran across our path to the education building. Over the length of the course, an old-growth aspen grew unbounded, peeling its curling bark, shedding its browning leaves, holding the first Snowflakes on heavy branches.

“The writers moved through their days on a schedule imposed by a crackling voice over a loudspeaker, but they also watched birds gliding freely past the windows; industrious yellow jackets throwing their bodies against the glass; and a flock of mallards who navigated puddles in the yard, ignoring the guards watching from their towers. The course spanned the entire fall, from September, when the light stretches long into the evenings, to December, when the students craned their necks to mark the waxing moon as they made their way back to their units.”

Additional reading:

A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey, on bookshop.org

Minnesota Women’s Press, January 25, 2023: From Soil to Stars: A Conversation with Erin Sharkey