Thursday, October 29, 2015
Northern Arizona University,
Arizona
Stephanie will present on a nature writing panel along with Yelizaveta Renfro, Wendy Call, Angela Pelster-Wiebe, and Clint Peters at the 2015 NonfictioNow Conference on Thursday, October 29, from 2:30 to 3:45 in Doyle.
Panel Description for “A New ‘I’ On Nature”:
The first-person essay has a formidable history in the field of nature writing. By “nature writing,” we mean the traditional and well-challenged notion of a first person seer engaging with landscape and species, dissecting wilderness and animal experience. This, of course, is not the only way to define “nature writing.” Many eco-writers and critics have been hard at work in the last twenty years parsing out different streams of the environmental genre: eco-feminism, eco-justice literature, eco-post-colonial literature, post-humanism, and many, many others. The stream we follow today is the personal environmental essay as seen in the context of contemporary writers as they engage with the more-than-human world. “More-than-human,” includes rocks, animals, trees, insects, carbon-dioxide, and effluent but does not mean “without humans.” As one of the pioneers of ecocriticism, Lawrence Buell, writes, “Personhood is defined for better or for worse by environmental entanglement. Whether individual or social, being doesn’t stop at the border of the skin.”