Alison Townsend is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, The Blue Dress and Persephone in America, and a volume of prose, The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water. Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, she lives in the country outside Madison. An excerpt from her essay “An Alphabet of Here: A Wisconsin Sampler” can be found here. It appears in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “An Alphabet of Here: A Wisconsin Sampler”?
The last few years I’ve been working on American Lonely, a book-length collection of nature and place-based essays, about the four acres of prairie and oak savanna where I live in southern Wisconsin, and other beloved landscapes I have been blessed to inhabit in the past. It’s really a book about finding a home where I am and making peace with places I have lost. Although I’ve lived in the Upper Midwest longer than anywhere else, I’m not a native. Raised in rural areas, I’ve always been a “nature girl.” But when we moved to the country outside Madison, I realized I had a lot to learn about this particular place and its inhabitants. As a way of getting to know the land and having a kind of conversation with it, I began keeping a place journal, which slowly morphed into the essay collection.
As for this particular piece, the writing of it was pure serendipity. In an effort to challenge ourselves and generate a lot of new work, a friend and I took a quite demanding (and wonderful) ten-week online course, called “The Shapes of Stories” from the late Waverly Fitzgerald. We read and studied a different essay “shape” every week—and then wrote an essay. It was wild and very intense. We were on collage essays when I began to put together “An Alphabet of Here,” and suddenly everything came together. I know I would have eventually written the piece, which was, to use Denise Levertov’s phrase, “irritably brewing” on a back burner in my mind. But the energy of the class (and the pressure of deadline) really helped.
Did you begin with the abecedarian structure in mind, or did it emerge as you expanded the piece?
I write poetry, too, so the abecedarian form was familiar to me. I had long wanted to find a compressed way to write in prose about the natural world around me. I had been observing the seasons, the geology, the flora and fauna in “An Alphabet of Here” for a long time, musing on them, thinking about them, wanting to write about them more deeply than I had in the scattered notes in my place journal. Faced with the constraints of the assignment, I suddenly realized I could use the abecedarian form as a way to organize, limit, and contain the many aspects of this place. The hardest part was choosing which details of the natural world to include for each letter. I wrote multiple “entries” for each one and at first thought I could get away with using all of them. I then realized that, for economy and impact, I’d have to pick a single entry for each letter. I tried to pick the entries that were most resonant—both in terms of what they reveal about the land and what they represent to me personally. I confess that I cheated on W, where I included white-tailed deer and wood ducks, unable to choose between the two. Although I wasn’t conscious of it while writing, I think the fact that I was jumping off from a poetic form forced me to be compressed, lyrical, and prose poem-like in the writing. It also released something. The entry for each letter came to me as a nugget of beauty or mystery I was attempting to capture.
I was moved by how much of the nature is around your home. Do you have tips for readers who want to learn more about the ecological world closest to them? Are there any resources that were especially helpful?
I’m fortunate to live on prairie and oak savanna, in an area surrounded by woods, fields, lakes, and farmland. It’s not wilderness (there’s a state highway a half mile away), but it’s definitely not living in town, either. Paying close attention and engaging in deep looking is for me the way “in” to the mysteries and wonders of the natural world. I think a place journal is the best way to begin observing and understanding the ecological world around us. All my writing begins in longhand in my journal, so my own “place” journal is woven into the rest of my life and writing. Flipping through it, I’m struck by how many entries begin with an observation about the natural world around me. It seems to be a way to ground and orient then lose myself. Contemplative and meditative, place journals force us to slow down, pay attention, go deeper, and reconnect with what Rachel Carson calls “the great realities.”
Prior to my retirement, one of the courses I taught at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater was Nature and Environmental Writing, and the place journals students kept were always my favorite part of the course. Even when the writing was rawer than in finished pieces, it had a life and vitality that made it leap off the page. I’d like to emphasize, too, that one needn’t live in the country to write about the natural world. It’s all around us, even in the city. Memorable urban nature journals I recall from my class include a natural history of railroad tracks, observations of animal life around a dumpster, and a record of fall afternoons on the Milwaukee River. Perhaps the most heartbreaking one was written by a young woman (also from Milwaukee) about her “garden” made of broken glass.
In terms of resources, there are many. Some great how-to books include Patricia Vecchione’s Step into Nature: Nurturing Imagination and Spirit in Everyday Life and Hannach Hinchman’s A Trail through the Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place. Hinchman is a visual artist, too, so her book has another dimension. Claire Leslie Walker’s Keeping a Nature Journal (which also includes art) is good. And Linda Lappin’s inspiring book, The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook, is goldmine of exercises and suggestions. I also have a bookcase full of field guides and nature books. For biological information, Anna Botsford Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, originally published in 1911, remains a mother lode. David Haskell’s The Forest Unseen is a beautiful example of what close observation of just one spot in the woods over the course of a year can yield.
Needless to say, it’s also important to read nature and environmental writers deeply and widely. My current favorites are Julian Hoffman, Robin Kimmerer, Kathleen Dean Moore, Margaret Renkl, Lauret Savoy, and Terry Tempest Williams. Two anthologies, Lorraine Anderson’s Sisters of the Earth: Women’s Prose and Poetry about Nature and Literature and the Environment, edited by Anderson, Scott Slovic, and John O’Grady are good places to begin exploring the genre.
Are there other Wisconsin writers you’d especially recommend?
There are so many it’s hard to know where to begin, so I’ll restrict myself here to a few women writers I know who write frequently about natural world. Catherine Jagoe is a Madison-based British poet and essayist who writes staggeringly beautiful pieces about the natural world. Robin Chapman and Jeannie Tomakso are wonderful poets and white witches when it comes to the natural world. Poet and essayist Gwen Ebert, who’s worked as a naturalist, is a stunning writer who should be better known. Jill Sisson Quinn, who lives in central Wisconsin, is an exquisite essayist, one of the most adept practitioners of the braided form I have ever encountered. Finally, Marilyn Annucci, a more urban poet, brings a gloriously observant eye to events in her backyard, such as an encounter with an injured crow.
How has your writing changed since you started out?
I hope it has deepened over time and that my voice has become more fully my own. But every time I look at my work, I realize I can go much further, be more courageous, and take more risks. My goal (if that’s even the right word to use) is to write as undefendedly as possible. I think it was Colette who said that when a writer loses his or her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside the pen. I am perpetually filled with self-doubt, so it appears there is no escape!
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
The natural world is my greatest source and resource. Even when I lived in cities, such as Los Angeles or Madison, it was what I gravitated to, probably because I grew up in rural places. Gardening is also important to me, for the way it grounds me and takes me outside myself. A former runner, I now take a long walk nearly every day at nearby Lake Kegonsa State Park. There’s something about the rhythm of walking that releases writing. I am constantly amazed at what I see, even on the same route. On New Year’s Day, walking at the state park, I glanced up and there was the most enormous bald eagle I have ever seen, right there, riding the updrafts along the lakeshore. Family relationships and my life as a woman also fuel my work. They were especially important in my first two books of poetry, The Blue Dress, and Persephone in America.
What is either the best or the worst piece of writing advice you’ve received or given?
I was silenced for a while by a professor in college who told me my writing was too imagistic and sensuous. I later came to see that those qualities were, in fact, my strengths. When I was finding my voice as a young writer in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, my beloved mentor, the late Holly Prado Northup, once told me I could not use the word “blossom” for sixth months. She was right, of course. We laughed about that for years.
When I became a teacher myself, I tried to give students the kind of process-honoring advice Holly had given me. Honor the personal. Trust the irrational. Find the poem (or essay or story) under the piece. Ask questions. Let the writing tell you what it knows. Dig for the true shape and meaning of the work, loving that endeavor for itself instead of fearing or being silenced by it. Embrace revision as something that’s just as exciting as generating work. Work without ego. Honor the Creative, that larger, deeply holy force in whose service we are always working.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m hoping to find a home for American Lonely, the collection of nature and place-based essays mentioned above, which will include “An Alphabet of Here.” Another long essay from that collection, The Persistence of Rivers, won the Jeanne Leiby prose chapbook award from The Florida Review and was published by Burrow Press several years ago. It got a great reception, which surprised and pleased me. I’m also slowly gathering a second essay collection, tentatively titled The Scent of Always, that’s more interior, focused on hearth, home, and private aspects of female experience. I’m always writing poetry. I have a chapbook manuscript, The Beautiful Particulars, making the rounds. And a third full-length collection, The Habit of Dazzle (after Whitman’s beautiful line), is also in-progress. Although I try to write every day, I’ve never been a very fast writer, so far averaging a book every ten years. I used to worry about this, but the older I get, the more I realize that’s okay. It’s just my process. And there’s something to be said for slow time. Nature takes me there.