The Remote and Forgotten: Place and Nature in Contemporary Novels
Having grown up in a remote and forgotten place myself, surrounded by uninhabited forest wilderness punctuated by lawlessness and constantly-looming human threat, I find myself always reaching for novels where settings of the remote or the forgotten are driving forces, inhabiting the story as much as the characters, shaping the story’s emotional tenor, functioning as the story’s beating heart. Remote and forgotten settings often demonstrate both intense beauty and intense hardship, highlighting everything in society over which we both celebrate or despair. These are places that inform who we are as humans, and also who we might become.
Annie Lampman’s Sins of the Bees (Pegasus/Simon & Schuster).
Portrayed by writers for whom these kinds of places matter, writers who know intimately and intuitively the truth of such places, settings of the remote/forgotten often function as fulfilling main characters themselves. I often find these kinds of settings the richest and most satisfying as a reader, and also the most inspiring as a writer. In my own fiction writing, I can’t even conceptualize a story without knowing, intimately and personally, its place of being—the flora and fauna, the natural phenomena, all the embedded human dramas—so I typically write about places I know, places that I’ve experienced in some way personally, and the places that inhabit my work have everything to do with who the characters are and what the characters do.
“…more people are paying closer attention to the natural world…”
But you don’t have to be a nature or “place” lover to appreciate a novel that incorporates the natural world. Especially during a time of twin global threats brought by pandemic and climate change, more and more people are paying closer attention to the natural world—perhaps growing a vegetable garden for the first time; or taking walks/bike rides in parks, forests, fields, and beaches, reacquainting themselves with nature; or joining social movements that seek to mitigate the damage done by global climate change and pollution; or, like me, planting a pollinator garden to help feed the bees, butterflies, songbirds, and other pollinators that need support, while also personally benefitting from the peaceful beauty and harmony a bit of nature provides during a time of great uncertainty and stress.
In contemporary novels (and not just in “cli-fi,” i.e. climate fiction), there has also been a renewed focus on the natural world, which I would argue is a great thing for both fiction and humanity in general. But I don’t seem to be alone in this assessment. The wild success of nature/place-focused novels such as Delia Owen’s Where the Crawdads Sing, which has been an international smash-hit and has a major film adaptation set to be released soon, and Richard Power’s The Overstory, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize along with a host of other prestigious literary awards, along with recent climate-disaster-focused novels like A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet and Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam shows just how hungry readers are for the natural world being not only present, but a major focus in the fictional world of the contemporary novel.
Whether a narrow, more micro focus like the flora and fauna of the coastal marsh that shapes Where the Crawdads Sing, or a wider, more macro focus like the dramatic tropical island and arctic settings that shape Esi Edugyan’s narrative in Washington Black, nature can inhabit the world of fiction in a way that not only enriches the story itself, but also readers’ experience of that story: its particular world, its characterizations, its emotions, and its movements both large and small.
“…nature often functions as a main force in and of itself, even as a kind of main character…”
In compelling fiction, “nature”—including flora, fauna, natural phenomena, viruses, the cosmos, and everything in between—can play a dramatic role, intensifying character and story development, and serving as a powerful catalyst of change while also embodying the full gamut of human emotion. As I tell my honors creative writing students each semester: the natural world as expressed in fiction should never just sit around looking pretty, serving only as a backdrop or a bit of obligatory description readers will likely skip over—a static bit of nothing sitting around doing nothing; instead, in well-written fiction, nature often functions as a main force in and of itself, even as a kind of main character, hopefully teaching us a new thing or two about ourselves and the world around us in the process. After all, there is no “us” without the natural world we depend on for our own survival, and I don’t think fiction should be devoid of the natural world either.
And one of the major benefits about reading (and writing) fiction that carries this focus of place/nature? We all learn more about our actual, real world. No matter if it’s a place we already know well, or a place we’ve never been. No matter if it’s a dystopian future of climate disaster, or a historically idyllic setting of a coming-of-age romance. No matter if it’s something we otherwise might not pay attention to, like the lichens and mosses in Elizabeth Gilbert’s A Signature of All Things, or something we can’t help paying attention to, like the rising sea levels in Eric Nguyen’s Things We Lost to the Water. And maybe, just maybe, if we can learn about the natural world more, appreciate it more, think about it more, we might find a better way to survive and thrive in it long into the future.
Annie Lampman (Master of Fine Arts, fiction) is an Associate Professor of Honors Creative Writing at the Washington State University Honors College. Her short stories, poetry, and narrative essays have been published in sixty-some literary journals and anthologies such as The Normal School, Orion Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Women Writing the West. She has been awarded the Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction, the Everybody Writes Award in Poetry, a Best American Essays Notable, a Pushcart Prize special mention, a Literature Fellowship special mention by the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and a national wilderness artist’s residency in the Owyhee Canyonlands Wilderness through the Bureau of Land Management. She lives with her husband, three sons, and a bevy of pets (including a tabby named Bonsai and a husky named Tundra) in Moscow, Idaho on the rolling hills of the Palouse Prairie in an 1800s farmhouse where she has a pollinator garden full of native flowers, herbs, berries, song birds, squirrels, butterflies, bumble bees, solitary bees, and honeybees. She is author of the novel Sins of the Bees (Pegasus/Simon & Schuster) and the letterpress-printed limited edition poetry chapbook Burning Time (Limberlost Press).