The Flow of River Writing: Framing a Creative Nonfiction Class

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Particular places have long intrigued writers. Henry David Thoreau (1995) wrote about Walden Pond; Jon Krakauer (1996) wrote about Alaska; Eddy Harris (1998) wrote about the Mississippi River. Building on the idea of place, I designed a creative nonfiction course that centers on the Boise River, which flows alongside my campus. During the spring semester of 2002, students made four observations of the river and read Mary Clearman Blew’s Written on Water (2001), a collection of essays on Idaho rivers. Using local natural phenomena and writing on other regions, this course could be adapted to other geographical locations and themes. The river project offered several advantages. Students catalogued the rivers themselves: their locations, directions of flow, and drainages. They were introduced to eighteen regional writers and began to feel part of this community. They noticed how authors crossed boundaries, often incorporating description, narrative, and memoir with history, fact, and argument; and they reveled in the rich metaphorical meanings of rivers. This project also provided a specific focus in what was otherwise a loosely constructed class based on journal keeping, memoir, personal essays, and segmented essays, with flexible topics. The river project provided a meeting place within that varied writing. During the first class session in January, the students and I hiked down to the river to make notes. This sensory observation became the first journal entry. It was 4:45 p.m. when I began writing in a rough script with numb hands. My notes include ducks at rest, immobile; barren bushes and trees; white rounded rocks; dry leaves and twigs; geese honking; seven male runners wearing brightly colored sweats, hats, and gloves talking and laughing; stagnant water with leaves moving beneath the surface; a fast moving stream with white caps across a rock median, but closer to me, still water. I often walk to work, and to enter campus I cross a footbridge that spans the river. Doing so, I notice day-to-day changes: the occasional dusting of snow on riverbanks, winter streambed dredging for flood control, the slow return of life as spring approaches, the lush, green leafiness of early summer. As the term continued, I reminded students to make additional river observations.