Essays on Literature, Literary / Textual Criticism, and Pedagogy
Editor: Ollie O. Oviedo, Eastern New Mexico University
Assistant Editors: Royal Prentice, Harvey Stanbrough,
Eastern New Mexico University
Book Review
A Forest of Voices: Reading and Writing the Environment
By Chris Anderson and Lex Runciman, eds.
(Mountain View, CA, London, Toronto: Mayfield Publishing, 1995. 775 pages)
Norma Tilden
English Department
Georgetown University
Nothing focuses attention on the practical merits of an anthology quite so effectively as an overdue book order for a brand
new course. A Forest of Voices: Reading and Writing the Environment currently shares space on my desktop with two
"reminder" forms from the university bookstore. This review is, then, framed by two practical pedagogical decisions I need to
make: one for a first-year intensive writing course entitled "Critical Reading and Writing," and one for an elective on
environmental literature.
In a decade of teaching writing, I have collected a tall bookcase of textbooks for college composition. As best I can recall,
however, I have never ordered a reader. This reticence speaks to my basic uneasiness about the place of readings in a writing
course. Since 1983, when Winifred Horner collected a series of essays on the challenge of Literature and Writing: Bridging
the Gap, those of us who teach writing have constructed a variety of speculative "bridges" to describe the ways that careful
reading might elicit good writing: by presenting stylistic and generic models for imitation, by initiating dialogue, by addressing
issues, and even—if we are honest—by providing something wonderful to talk about in class.
Neither have I ordered an anthology for my courses in the suspect terrain of environmental literature, and here my reluctance
is more practical. Until recently, there were few such anthologies, and those few seemed poised uneasily between a
concentration on literature (often with "nature writing" in the title) and a concentration on ecological rhetoric (with the word
"environment" prominently featured.) Nowhere have I discovered a collection that would help my students understand how
literature can radically alter the way we perceive the natural world—how it animates and enlarges what Lawrence Buell calls
the "environmental imagination."
As soon as I send off this review, I intend to fill out those coursebook forms, ordering A Forest of Voices for both the
first-year composition course and the eco-lit elective. Here's why.
More intelligently than any thematic reader on my shelf, A Forest of Voices manages to "bridge the gap" between writing and
literature, twinning these activities in its two-part structure: "Writing to Read" (Chaps. 1-5) and "Reading to Write" (Chaps.
6-14). The editors build their bridge straightway—"The best way to read is to write"—and, indeed, they encourage students
to write their way through the readings collected in Part II. Here, Chris Anderson and Lex Runciman have assembled a
superb collection of 75 environmental pieces, concentrating on essays but including a number of poems and stories, all with a
grounding in "local knowledge": experiential, intimate, first-hand. Many readings are preceded by a paragraph of guidelines for
"Before and As You Read," and every selection is followed by three sections of reading/writing activities, ranging from journal
explorations and structural analyses to collaborative research projects. These exercises constitute, to my mind, the most useful
pedagogical apparatus since Donald Hall's directives in The Contemporary Essay. Like Hall, Anderson and Runciman are
practicing writers as well as writing teachers, and their questions are insistently writerly, always returning the student to
observations on form, style, strategy. The reading guides are especially good at directing attention to the formal choices a poet
makes, and here we may see the hand of Runciman, a working poet. For example, students are presented with these
questions for group discussion of a difficult poem by Charles Wright: "Pretend that . . . you wrote this poem. What prompted
you to write it? Why didn't you write an essay? . . . Think about length, think about impact, think about stanzas versus
paragraphs, and the like." Such rhetoric addresses precisely the strategies that students must "think about" if they are to
understand that, as Joan Didion put it in "Why I Write," "the arrangement of the words matters."
The collection begins with a five-chapter section entitled "Writing to Read," which offers a built-in style manual full of practical
advice. Some of this information, informally delivered, may strike the experienced writing instructor as pretty basic. But in fact,
Anderson and Runciman answer the very questions that undergraduates are often afraid to ask—as in, "we didn't know what
you meant by": a "reading journal," "annotating," "paraphrasing" as opposed to "summarizing." What is a "position paper"
anyway? How does it differ from a "personal essay," and how will studying the personal essay help me with term papers? The
editors address these questions directly; here, for example, is advice on "Reading to Write a Summary": "You should pay
special attention to figuring out the mental moves that a piece of writing makes—that is, pay attention to how it's been
structured." Through their guided "reading and responding" activities, Anderson and Runciman effectively challenge the
separability of writing from content. They bring readers to the realization that environmental literature is, at base, writing, and
that the way we write reflects our fundamental relation to what we are studying.
Still, A Forest of Voices is, on balance, a reader, and the editors easily persuade any remaining skeptics that the subject of the
environment provides the ideal interdisciplinary focus for a college course in critical reading and writing:
The environment is like a forest—complicated, full of interrelationships, everything dependent upon everything else—and that
is what you'll find to be true about every other topic you encounter in your college classes. There's always more than meets
the eye. Things that seem simple turn out to be complicated after all. What college is always trying to teach you, underneath
everything else, is not to accept the easy answers, not to act out of prejudice and unexamined assumptions.
In grouping their selections, the editors treat "environment" very broadly. In an early reading on the constructed environments
of zoos, "No Rms, Jungle Vu" by Melissa Greene, we learn how Kiki, a silverback gorilla in the Seattle zoo, one day
"escapes" from his created landscape. The zoo director explains that Kiki was not running away, but "exploring outward from
the center of his territory to define its edges." Kiki's route describes the direction of this anthology. Implicitly, by the
arrangement of the readings, the editors encourage us to revise our notion of environment, moving outward in a series of
"excursions" beginning with the environments we make ourselves ("Created Worlds") and moving in ever-larger circles through
"Observing the Other" (on animals) and "The Nature of Nature." The early selections tend to be "environmental" in a
fundamental sense that admits essays such as Ishmael Reed's "My Neighborhood" and Joan Didion's "On Going Home" as
well as such classics of nature writing as Thoreau's "Walking" and Abbey's "The Great American Desert." Later chapters
more insistently negotiate between ecological insight and environmental advocacy. As the editors point out, "all of these writers
recognize that how we understand nature strongly influences how we act toward nature." Accordingly, the collection moves
gradually toward questions of ethics, action, and use. By the time students encounter the issues of "Nature in Crisis" and "Land
Ethics," the previous seven chapters will have prepared them to enter this conversation with a discourse both informed and
critical. Moreover, they will come to these closing texts as writers, with "local knowledge" of how style both represents and
responds to environment. "We learn revision," the editors say at the opening of the final chapter, and their pun is both
complicated and intentional.
Last Modified 12 Feb 2000
Comments or Problems to: ENMURWT@ENMU.EDU
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