Braiding Land and Story
How women writers weave land and personal narrative together to help deepen our relationship with the more-than-human-world
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Dear reader,
Welcome to the The Process. This week, I’ll be sharing more about braiding land and story: how women writers weave land and personal narrative together to create enigmatic and moving pieces of literary art.
In the realm of nature writing, men have long held the spotlight. From the poets of the 18th-century Romantic period to contemporary writers such as the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog (1999) and Wild Wood (2006), which are often seen as seminal works that evoke the bygone wild days of the English countryside. Through reading these male-authored works, I realized the underrepresentation of female voices. They were out there, but perhaps not as well-known... until now.
Widely acclaimed nature or environmental writing from a female authorship emerged with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962)—although one could argue female writers were penning work inspired by the natural world far earlier than this (Emily Dickinson’s poetry comes to mind) and I would like to explore this further. This book kickstarted the modern environmental movement by exploring the effects of pesticides like DDT on both ecosystems and human health. Carson's pivotal work examines how ecosystems intertwine with human beings—how they contribute to our understanding of humans' relationship with the natural world. Ultimately, it underscores the inextricable link between the human body and the earth.
The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.
If you’ve can’t already tell from this newsletter, I’m fascinated by women writers exploring storytelling and the natural world. In today’s newsletter, I will briefly examine three contemporary and influential writers who are leading the way in using storytelling to build a bridge between land and personal narratives.
Braiding Land and Story
The contemporary writer and mythologist,
, completely enveloped me in the lands she inhabited in her book, If Women Rose Rooted (2016). The book is a journey of inner exploration, as told through myth and landscapes. Chapter titles include: Deep Caves and Bottomless Lakes: The Cauldron of Transformation, and Moor and Bog: Retrieving the Buried Feminine. Through her writing, we draw comparison and lessons from the land, and it’s relation to the female psyche.“Whether rootedness in place is a fashionable idea or not, whether it fits with the ‘Modern condition’ or not, there’s little doubt that both our environmental and our existential crises derive in good part from a dissociation between people and the places they live. We have grown to see the physical world around us as empty of significance, as inanimate.”
The work of Blackie challenges our definitions and understanding of what it truly means to be interwoven with the terrain. It is a call for our collective—as well as personal—narratives to sink deep into the ground of the places we inhabit, be they tamed wilderness or structured, human-shaped environments. The process of integrating our stories with the land is not just a metaphorical concept, but a tangible, lived experience that can shape our identities, our communities, and our interaction with the natural world around us.
Alice Vincent’s book, Why Women Grow (2023), delves into the relationship between women and their gardens. It reflects on women’s lives, using the garden as both a metaphor and representation of their grief, their joy, their longings.
Because women have always gardened, but our stories have been buried with our work. For centuries we have learned the soil’s secrets. We have ushered herbs from the ground and dried them for healing; we have braided seeds into our hair to preserve legacies even when the future looks bloody and uncertain; we have silently made the world more beautiful, too often without acknowledgement.
Through Vincents work, her exploration of heart-centred narratives shines a light on each woman’s stories, but also brings us into deeper kinship with the narratives being told, through the lens of the more-than-human world. The garden becomes the storyteller; each woman’s narrative woven into the soil they tend, the roses they grow, the seeds they savour.
Alice Vincent also has a wonderful Substack:
Finally, I will be sharing the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer is the botanist and writer behind Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (2013); a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she intertwines her ancestral history into her scientific understanding of the natural world. The land and the earth serves as the canvas for her narrative, a personal story of her life as a mother, a botanist, and the interrelationships between human being, and the more-than-human world.
Through Kimmerer’s writing, I learned about the exchange of stories. The land provides its own stories and language generously, and in return, she provides her stories. They are personal tales, but also the stories of the Earth and of her ancestry. These gifts develop into a symbiotic relationship, where land and story nourish each other.
"What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn't you dance it? Wouldn't you act it out? Wouldn't your every movement tell the story? In time you would be so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives."- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Why are we drawn to telling stories through the natural world? Why is it that the land becomes the conduit for storytellers? I think this affinity we have with the natural world comes from the land being able to hold our stories. Centuries of human and more-than-human stories have played out on the Earth, each leaving its mark on the land. These are the stories we need to hear; not of division or separation, but one of communion, relationship and reciprocity.
I hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter. I will be writing more about the intersection of women writers and nature writing, so if there are any writers who you love and adore that you would like me to explore and share more of in this newsletter, please leave your suggestions in the comments below.
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