Wildwood notes : nature writing, music, and newspapers

Abstract

During the first half of the twentieth century, British Columbia was comprised of
 small clusters of settlements connected by tracts of forests, rivers, coastal waters, rural
 farmland, rail lines, and few paved roads. While municipal newspapers formed local
 identities, provincial daily newspapers interconnected British Columbia's disparate towns
 and villages into wider regional affiliation. By examining the genre of the nature writing,
 particularly naturalist accounts disseminated through the newsprint, I propose that as the
 daily newspaper's medium brings the everyday into peoples' homes, the serial nature
 essay conveys a "unique syntax" of bioregional commonplace into the reader's day-to-day
 living. Newspapers bring the outside world into the intimate sphere of the home on a
 regular basis; A serial nature essay, especially one that focuses on the local, delivered in
 the medium of newsprint extends this outside world to include events occurring in nature.
 Further, I express how musical troping, a key characteristic of nature writing, teaches
 readers how to listen to and to detect the well-being/distress of a bioregional community,
 and thus cultivate an ethic of care for the natural environment; naturalist writing, thus
 acts as an antiphony to the deafening cacophony of environmental crisis news.
 My thesis examines, in particular, B.C. naturalist John William Winson's serial
 nature columns "Open Air Jottings" and "Along Wildwood Trails," which appeared in
 the Vancouver Daily Province from 1918 to 1956. John Winson's writings, written under
 the pseudonym 'Wildwood', invite the communities of British Columbia to envision
 membership in a wider Pacific Northwest bioregional community—a relationship that
 sees beyond and dissolves the divisions of political and geographic borders, species, and
 human culture. By recuperating and re-reading Wildwood's "forgotten naturalist"
 column, specifically disseminated through newsprint, I analyze how his writings both
 promote and complicate the formation of a Pacific Northwest regional identity;
 specifically, the tensions between the genre's imperialistic frameworks (First Nations
 representation and literary ecological imperialism), which domesticate new lands for
 immigrants and the transformative experiences resulting from encounters with new
 environments and cultures, experiences that require new ways of seeing and interacting.

Arts, Faculty of

English, Department of

Graduate