Prompt Entry 8

What I've appreciated the most from this course was the breadth of nature writing we've looked at and discussed. So much literature, and especially contemporary work. I liked too how it was mostly excerpts and just a few books, because now we're familiar with a wider range of authors and can pursue more reading on our own depending on our interests, instead of just having become familiar with a handful of books that some of us may already have read.

I really feel like I have a firm grasp now on what writers are the the big names in the genre, and then many others as well. Before, I knew a fair amount, but I didn't yet have the firm sense I feel I do now. The course has been invaluable for that.

The discussion boards, for me, were an excellent outlet to hammer out my opinions on the array of works we examined. Honestly, although it's excessively time-consuming, it's been a much better outlet for me to figure out how I feel on all the different books and excerpts than in-class discussion. I'm not scrambling to try and get my two-cents in because if not I'll lose points in class participation. I have time to develop my ideas, read and respond to my peers' and the professor's thoughts, and finally I can print out the discussion and keep it forever. The course has left me with three two-inch binders full of nature writing discussion. As someone who is very strongly considering the pursuit of a PhD in some part of the field and certainly hoping to produce his own writing for the genre, that's just immensely useful.

As for the nature place, my experience in the tropics was so transformative as to be permanent. Although I really do enjoy nature everywhere, I just don't think I can really love it anywhere besides in that region of the world. I really can't say the nature place exercise has affected me in any way besides confirming that fact.

However, I do appreciate the training and familiarity I've established with the blogging format. I'm planning on beginning my own blog - a literary review blog. There are a lot of fantastic nature writing books that deserve recognition, but remain pretty obscure. For many of my favorite nature writing books, I've never met anyone else that has even heard of them.

I really want to start a blog on some of these fantastic but uncelebrated books. I may even confine the scope to strictly neotropical rainforest books. Because of all the practice I have analyzing nature writing on the computer format thanks to the discussion forums, I feel really ready for this project!