In the Fall of 2013, I took a Major Author Studies class centered around Thoreau. We read his primary works - Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods - and some of his journals, getting fully acquainted with Thoreau's ideas and style. In addition to this reading, we also entered into Thoreauvian writing in a series of five essays. The essays were an exercise in exploring the Ecocritical notion of a sense of place; I picked a place to visit and continually revisit in order to establish and investigate an evolving sense of that environment.
For my essays, I wrote in and about a secluded section of forest and pond in Arroyo Park. Though unaware at the time, I was already developing the ideas and methods that would constitute this senior project. It was in these essays that I became acquainted with the effect of immersion in nature while writing; that I allowed my imagination to merge into my surroundings and infuse the landscape with new images and voices; that I wrestled with and became enamored with Ecocriticism and writing about the environment. As such, even though this series of pieces came well before I had ever conceived of this greater project, the essays have an important place in this body of work as the roots from which Attunement in the Estuary has sprung. |