Landscape Writing Project

H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

October 2025

About the book

I read Macdonald’s Vesper Flights early this year when we were in Hawaii. Flights is a book of essays mostly about natural history and mostly about birds – though, true to the original meaning of essay, “about” covers a lot of ground. The writing was beautiful, and I not only read the book but studied it to improve my own writing. I’d expected much the same from Hawk.

But Hawk is a very different book. To be sure, the writing is beautiful, and it will repay study, but it is a single-track narrative rather than a series of essays. Hawk traces out two central narratives: one is an account of her training a goshawk and her experiences training, living and hunting with it; intertwined with this narrative is an account of coming to terms with her father’s death, and the period of isolation, depression, and gradual recovery that ensured. Though as I write this, I note that the ‘coming-to-terms’ narrative is really itself a braid that includes childhood memories and an account of the life of T. H. White. Hawk was published in 2014 – I believe it to be her first book, possibly excepting poetry.

I am not going to provide a chapter by chapter account. Rather, my aim here, is just to record the phrases and passages that struck me.

LS: A Wilder Time,* William E. Glassley

*A Wilder Time: Notes from a Geologist at the Edge of the Greenland Ice. William E. Grassley, 2018.

A lyrical book that provides an account of a geologic expedition to gather evidence for a 1.8 Ga collision between continents that resulted in a series of shear zones in western Greenland. Also important for providing evidence that plate tectonics has been going on for a long time, something that has been contested. Content is quite interesting, but I also appreciate it for its lyrical writing about landscape and geology, which is this focus of my “LS” project.

LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. Willard

February 2024…

This book was recommended in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, as a good guide to the ecology and botany of the Sierra Nevada (and the upper portions of other North American ranges). And, indeed, it is beautifully written with a narrative style in which the reader moves through landscapes with the authors, looking at this and that, in contrast to what I had expected would be more of a catalog or encyclopedic approach. The book is divided into two principle parts: part 1 examines elements of ‘above the trees’ ecosystems, like fellfields or krumholtz; part 2 looks at particular North American tundra ecosystems, with one chapter being on the Sierra Nevada.

LS* – Finding the Forest, Peter Bundy

December 2023

* This is part of a small project of reading essays that focus on landscape and natural history, the idea being to familiarize myself with this genre, and to develop a better sense of what I like and do not like.

This is a short book about the author’s journey into forestry. I’m ambivalent about it. The first part of the book focuses on his own story, which I don’t find particularly interesting or inspiring. I also have to say that the writing is a bit precious – he is fond of invoking Mother Nature, and personifying the forest; he also tries to be lyrical in what seems to me a clumsy and prosaic way. However, once he becomes established in his career as a forester, I find the book more worthwhile: it is a good survey of the today’s thinking in forestry, about both its past shortcomings and its current approaches. But the combination of preachiness, romanticism and clumsy attempts at lyricism will keep me from recommending it to others.

LS*–The High Sierra: A Love Story, Kim Stanley Robinson

November 2023

The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanely Robinson. 2022.

* I was reading this for other reasons, but nevertheless it fits well into my project to read essays that focus on landscape and natural history.

TL;DR: I love this book. But it is not for everyone. On the other hand, it is organized in such a way that readers interested in particular topics — geology, history, etc. – could skip through the book attending to one or a few themes that interest them. It has great pictures, too.

I’m a big fan of KSR, and think it likely that I’ve read everything he’s written, although it is possible that that omits a few early science fiction novels that were retroactively published after he became better known. I like the complex characters he develops, the intensely developed worlds he portrays, and especially his attention to geology, climate, economics, politics, and the role of large institutions – themes that are uncommon in much science fiction. Also unusual is that he sometimes ventures beyond the borders of SF, as with his novel Years of Rice and Salt, and especially with this book, which is multi-threaded work the interweaves memoir, geology, natural history and history.

LS* – A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson

November 2023

* This is part of a small project of reading essays that focus on landscape and natural history, the idea being to familiarize myself with this genre, and develop a better sense of what I like and do not like.

While, overall, it was an enjoyable read that managed to keep my interest, I was not that keen on it. It is an example of what I am expecting is a subgenre of writing where the author sets out on an ‘adventure’ with little or no preparation (and often with an even less prepared companion), and then recounts his misadventures. Amusing, but to someone who believes research and preparation, a bit difficult to engage with.

Bryson is, in fact, a good writer, and when he actually turned his eye on the environment around him managed to craft some nice phrases. The phrases I tended to like often fell into a few rhetorical categories.

LS* – Writing Landscape, Linda Cracknell

December 2023

Writing Landscape: Taking Note, Making Notes, Linda Cracknell, 2023

This is a small book of essays, both in form (easy to tuck into a pocket), and length. The essays follow a pattern: the author sets out on a journey — either to camp out for a few days, or to attend some kind of writers’ retreat or workshop – and reflects on the place where she finds herself. Her focus is on nature, and occasionally on the history or people associated with the place; she occasionally discusses brief encounters with people, but we learn nothing of her friends or companions.

w/CS: Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flyn

September 2023

Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, by Cal Flynn, 2021.* This book looks at how nature — fungi, plants, animals – are re-colonize landscapes that have been destroyed and abandoned by humans. Examples include massive slag piles, nuclear test grounds, etc. It examines both how primary succession occurs in unpromising circumstances, and how the absence of human presence facilitates re-wilding. In the introduction, the author notes that we are now in the midst of a vast self-directed experiment in re-wilding, driven in part by the concentration of people in cities (and a soon-to-be-decreasing population), and in part by the depletion of non-sustainable natural resources that leave ‘waste lands’ behind.

Post-reading comment: There are three or four chapters in the book that are great, and really align with the aims laid out above. Unfortunately, more of the chapters, particularly as one progresses in the book, are more in the line of what I would call disaster tourism: lyrical descriptions of degraded environments and terrible situations, with little or no mention of how the ecosystem has adapted or not.

* Reading with CJS, fall of 2023