Nature Journaling

This is the first in a series of posts describing tools I have found helpful in my writing. I learned about nature journaling at the 2007 Writing From Nature Founders Workshop offered by the Highlights Foundation. While I have been taking photographs and doing darkroom work since I was a teenager, I never considered myself someone who could draw. I learned from our workshop leader, Mark Baldwin, education director at the Roger Tory Peterson Insitute, that there are good reasons to do it anyway. The process of drawing enlists parts of the brain that writing doesn’t. Drawing helped me see things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise and it led to questions, which is always a good thing for nonfiction writers. Here is a sketch from the journal I kept during the workshop and a photograph of the same subject. To read the full text of an article I wrote describing nature journaling techniques, click here.