The Nature of Nature

Hans Weyandt on re-reading Tinker Creek and the problem of "nature writing"

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I trust Hans Weyandt more than anyone else when it comes to books and book recommending. Full stop. He will probably dispute this, but he is something of a legend in the Twin Cities literary community for his tireless contributions to bookselling, curating, and championing of under-sung gems and books that deserve more attention. His curiosities are boundless. His interests are many. If you’re new here, you’re going to want to read Hans’s first guest post here. I guarantee you’ll find something to discover. And you live in the Twin Cities, be on the lookout for his occasional pop-ups around town, Just Books. Without further ado, here’s Hans Weyandt.

-Josh

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Bad term papers and weak reviews usually begin with the epigraph as a sign that they have opened the material. So, we begin:

“It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.”—Heraclitus.

I don’t mean to make light or be ironic, because that is some heavy stuff to lead with. Take away the name, and it sounds like something from the Bible or a Greek philosopher. But it’s apt we start with Heraclitus because, according to the internet, he also coined, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” This aligns with a core tenet of my reading philosophy: there is so much literature out there. Don’t read books you don’t like. Don’t be bored. Don’t consider it homework or make it a contest with anyone else or yourself. Just don’t. Unless you really want to have a contest. So: I don’t reread books. And I know it’s not the same river or I’m not the same person stepping into the river, but still.

I read Confederacy of Dunces at age 20 and loved it. For some reason, maybe I wanted to laugh, I tried again at 35. It was still bitingly funny but also oh-so-very sad—John Kennedy Toole’s life was filled with and ended in tragedy, the path to publication mythical. His mother basically hounded Walker Percy into publishing it at LSU. Anyway, it’s not that it ‘wasn’t as good’ or anything like that. I’m not that kind of critic. It just didn’t work as well for me.

But all rules are meant to be broken, especially when they’re broken by Margaret Renkl. When she recently wrote about reading Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim At Tinker Creek” about 25 years after first reading it, calling it a book where “every word is arranged as though to pierce your deepest heart and lodge itself there,” I thought, “I’m going to read that book again, too.” It had probably been about the same amount of time.

It feels dim to say something like “it holds up.” However, I think that is a compliment, as very much does not hold up to the memory of the experience. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a gorgeous book. I don’t need to review or certify it in any capacity. This enduring classic went through eight printings in its first year of publication and won the 1975 Pulitzer, putting Dillard in the mix with Edward Abbey and Gary Snyder and other nature titans like Terry Tempest Williams and John Muir and Sigurd F. Olson. Of important note, until the early 1970’s, nature writing nearly universally meant white and male. Early press on Tinker Creek almost always referenced Thoreau.

Many newer additions to my canon in this genre have proven enlightening—and so many from small, independent, publishers I’ve long admired and/or worked at. Margaret Renkl, Robin Wall Kimmerer, J. Drew Lanham, Elizabeth Rush, Eula Biss, Noe Alvarez, Chris Dombrowski, Ross Gay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Gary Paul Nabhan, Lauret Savoy and Allison Hawthorne Deming. Erin Sharkey and Camille Dungy. So, so many more. However, if I had to pick a writer as a comp, I’d probably land on Rachel Carson or Zora Neale Hurston. All of this, I guess, is about nature. The elements and the land and beauty and death. The genre name itself—nature writing—seems too limiting. Perhaps that’s what rubs me the wrong way. Because if someone picks up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or anything by any of these aforementioned authors and says, “What is this about?” I can say a lot of things, but I’m sure as hell am not saying, “It’s about nature.”

Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm by David M. Matsumoto made an impression on me. I still think of it—the right time to pick, the coloring, the rain, the soil, how it can all go badly regardless. Germination, vegetation, flowering, ripening: it’s a deliberate process. Going back to this book showed me something again: paying attention often has rewards. Nature baffles and astounds and offers Polaroid perfect sunsets, and it is brutal and unrelenting. It suffers no fools and punishes nearly uniformly. 70% of Google users give this book a thumbs up (that’s so low it’s concerning), and if you google the book you get interesting results on the theodicy of the book and the question of whether she is a transcendentalist. Yet, I find myself sort of conflicted by the concept of “nature writer.” It doesn’t mean very much. Maybe that’s a designation that means something important to some people, but I’m not one of them.

Tinker Creek is meditative and even hypnotic. I suppose what I appreciate most now is that the book is not a series of answers or even questions. It’s simple. It’s the Blue Ridge Mountains seen through Dillard’s eyes. It is particular and solid. Every sight and sound is rendered unfamiliar and new. I found one sentence, from her own website which is rarely updated, bold in its aims: “I lay low…I’ve never promoted myself or my books…” The low part is true. She’s at home with the frogs and the rocks and the water—she probably isn’t much on the interweb.

So, Margaret Renkl—yes, thank you—got me back to a book I’d probably read when I was 22 or 23 and had been published 25 years before that. Some people read the same book once a year. I do see value and tradition and a through line in all of that. Will I let myself go back to other beloved books? Maybe, but I know the results aren’t guaranteed to be like this. To me, reading is as much about what’s going on in our own lives and culturally as anything—I start and stop many books and go back to them and, voila, they are “much better” or “worse.’” But are they, really?

Finally, I’ve come to think of the 15-20 minutes before I sleep not as reading, per se, but more skimming. It's far better than dozing off on a bed or couch after just a couple of pages and then wondering, "How much did I actually read?" Some novels that have managed to keep me awake are Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians, Julie Min's Shanghailanders (hello, Joey—I do pay attention to you), and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina. However, I tend to lean towards non-fiction lately. So, I've been dipping into The Potato Book from Bodleian Library publishing, which caught my eye in the WSJ weekend edition, Elizabeth Pisani's Indonesia, Etc., Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of Love, and an old cookbook by Patience Gray called Honey From a Weed from North Point Press. I’ve flipped through Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger’s Two American Scenes from the New Directions pamphlet series. And, slowly, to soak in its brilliance, I’ve been working through Lessons For Survival by Emily Raboteau. She, too, writes about nature. She, like Dillard and Renkl and Heraclitus, writes about the world.

Hans Weyandt is a reader and still occasional bookseller from St. Paul, MN. He lives in Minneapolis.

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