Porter and Austin

I have to start off by saying that I love female nature writers. It may be because I am a woman myself, but for some reason their writing draws me in and hold me there. It seems as though every female nature writer has a maternal view of nature that they bring to their writing. This makes it so special and so different from the many, many male writers that we read so often. Now I'm not saying that I don't appreciate nature writing from a male perspective, but it is just SO different when it comes from a woman.

Reading Gene Stratton Porter made me giggle and brought me back to a lunch I had with my grandmother and her friends before I came to Merry Lea. They had invited me out for their weekly lunch and during the lunch wanted to hear all about what I would be doing in graduate school. Now these ladies are not your typical 80-90 year old women, they are sharp, smart, and progressive. They loved what I would be studying and wanted to give me every bit of advice to help me. One of my favorites mentioned Gene Stratton Porter. She said that I would have to go visit her house since I would be so close to it and continued talking about how much she enjoyed reading her when she was a child. She talked about how she wanted to be just like the girl of the limberlost and read Porter to her children when they were young.

Anyways, I really enjoyed reading Porter. I remember reading her when I was young, but I didn't have the same experience as I did reading it today. I love her writing. It is so poetic yet down to earth and natural. It is easy to understand, yet beautiful. The way that she was describing the Cecropia moth was fascinating. I loved that she spent so much time focused on this one species of moth and the intense love that she had for it. The way she describes her encounters with the moth makes it seem almost magical and mysterious. If she would not have said so, I would never have thought this moth was a common one.

Reading Austin though brought me back to the type of writing I love. For some reason I love deserts. They fascinate me. I am always amazed by the amount of life that is happening in such a seemingly barren place. In my undergrad I was a Southwestern Studies minor. Basically all of my classes for my minor involved Southwestern nature writing and history. Austin's writing was very similar to all of that and I really loved it because of this. Southwestern writing tend to show this connection to the land and the culture of that land. I saw this while I was reading. She constantly refers to all the physical attributes that make up the land as well as the "Indians" that inhabited it at that time. You can tell from her writing that she really loved everything about the desert. This is true about so many people. While living in Texas I met many people who disliked Texas for many reason, but refused to leave because of the diverse landscape and culture that fills the area. I felt this many times while reading.

I looked up a bit of information about Austin after the reading. She was born in Illinois and did not move to the Southwest until she graduated college. Her family then moved to California. Throughout her life she studied Indian life in the Mojave Desert and became a defender of Native American and Spanish-American rights. This view is shown in much of her writing of all types. I saw it in this reading that we did and it felt very much like the feeling you get when you read other female Southwestern writers.