Response 4: Nature's Influence on Identity

Reading Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, I was much more intrigued by her nature writing than by either Nancy Gift or Edward Abbey. Throughout her childhood and adulthood, Ray presented herself as not only an observer of nature but as part of nature. Because she equally balanced personal history with natural history, her writing flowed in a way that Gift’s and Abbey’s did not. As a result, Ray’s approach was much more successful because she included personal stories as they related to nature in order to portray her connection with the land, plants and animals and how this connection influenced her identity.

Ray’s style shares many skillful qualities I associate with Gift and Abbey in their books, respectively, A Weed by Any Other Name and Desert Solitaire: Gift’s ability to identify plants and Abbey’s strong voice that effectively portrays his personality, thus captivating the reader. However, unlike Gift, Ray writes less from an academic standpoint and more from personal experience. She pushes the family element more so than Gift to describe how nature has played a role in her life and that of her relatives and ancestors. And unlike Abbey, Ray maintained her focus on family rather than digress onto long rants related to environments, among other, issues. As a reader, I felt alienated during Abbey’s rants. His fierce opinions—whether agreeable or not—created a distance between myself and his experiences with nature. Ray, however, kept her reader close by using the following techniques:

1. She included rich, descriptive moments from her childhood to draw the reader into her love of nature and create strong characterization of both herself and her relatives, thereby helping the reader to identify with characters.

2. She wrote short, concise chapters to maintain a quick pace, yet interspersed them with longer chapters containing more complex plotlines to add some variation.

3. Some chapters were solely composed of personal history (Clyo), some natural history (Built by Fire, Longleaf Clan), whereas others were a combination of personal and natural (Iron Man, Timber).

4. Combined academic voice with the local dialect of her hometown. The resulting effect is an informative narrative that is also very comfortable, personable and relatable.

In general, Ray created a consistent narrative both in terms of voice and content, which allowed the storyline to flow from one chapter to the next. If I were to write about my own childhood, I would follow Ray’s example and write primarily from a personal perspective while simultaneously intermixing it with nature elements. Where I might lack, though, compared to Ray would be in my characters’ history with the land. Ray’s family had a long history with South Georgia, whereas my family does not have a longstanding relationship with Northern Michigan. But location does play a large role in shaping lives. As a child, I lived in an old school house surrounded by countryside near a small town. During my adult years, I moved to larger cities. So if I were to write about childhood and nature, I would focus heavily on the effect a rural area had in influencing my appreciation for plants, animals and landscapes. Gardening, canoeing, outdoor sports, smelt fishing and morel hunting were a regular part of my childhood. And I have discovered that when I speak to people who have spent their entire lives in urban areas, their attitudes toward nature and life in general is very different from my own.