The philosopher (Bruce Springsteen) once said, “We all carry a landscape within us.” And what I am after in my creative writing is an exploration of the congruence between my internal landscape and the landscapes of the great world, in a way that will resonate with others.
Books &
other writing
ESSAYS
BOOKS
"I walk for hours across the hardscrabble ground, beneath a sun-blasted sky, taste salt on my burnt skin. But then I am taken, suddenly, by a trace of seep willow, the rustle of cottonwood leaves, a tiny spring hidden in some rough canyon.
I stoop down, cup water in my hands, feel its cool welcome on my face, and then turn a flat rock. A small creature coils, refugee from the deepest past, from another, wetter time. I catch my breath and time spirals. The day is consecrated.
All the world’s lost, aching beauty comes flooding in and life’s long skein claims my heart."
RelicTs of a beautiful sea
An excerpt from:
Return to Warden’s Grove
03
In the Memory of the Map
02
Relicts of a Beautiful Sea
01
coming soon...
05
From the sun-baked canyons of the southwest, to the lonely and spectacular tundras of the Northwest Territories, to our own inner landscapes, my books examine the tapestry of time, humanity and nature.
book Catalog
In the North of Our Lives
04
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Relicts of a Beautiful Sea is a story about the natural world, woven out of science, poetry, aesthetics, and personal experience. It is a tale about the beauty of the Great Basin, its life, and my longing to belong fully to a place and find resonance in its creatures - in other words, to locate myself in this world and claim a home. In this age of extinction and collapsing species ranges, my story also is an argument about biodiversity's inherent right to exist. This right was codified by the 1973 federal Endangered Species Act, but many people still wonder: why should we cherish and protect the many threads of life's deep and intricate history, and just what are all the lonely and besieged species worth? This story and my argument are built around six desert animals, all of them small and restricted to aquatic habitats: a salamander, four types of pupfishes, and a toad. The animals depend upon the same desert waters that people desire, and so they are rare and mostly threatened.
GENRE: creative nonfiction
RELICTS OF A BEAUTIFUL SEA
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Throughout my life, maps have been a source of imagination and wonder. I was mesmerized by maps at a young age, because they showed me worlds that I might come to know, while they also helped me understand places that I had already explored. Interweaving personal narrative built around a variety of maps with stories told by scholars, poets, and fiction writers, In the Memory of the Map provides a personal and intellectual account of what many of us take for granted, or have never truly explored.
GENRE: MEMOIR
IN THE MEMORY OF THE MAP
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Based on three seasons of field research on Harris's Sparrows in the Canadian Arctic, Return to Warden's Grove is a meditation on science and nature, wildness and civilization. RtWG explores the challenges of conducting field work in an isolated and difficult environment, the strengths and shortcomings of scientific language, the ethics of killing animals "for science, - and the lives of Harris's Sparrows, one of the only birds whose breeding range occurs entirely within Canada. In an era increasingly marked by cutting-edge research at the cellular and molecular level, and automated observations of living creatures, what is the importance of sympathetic observation for scientists (and non-scientists)? What can patient waiting tell us about ourselves and our place in the world?
GENRE: creative nonfiction
RETURN TO WARDEN'S GROVE
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In the North of Our Lives describes a fourteen-month canoe expedition across northern Canada in 1977-1978, from the eastern edge of the Yukon Territory to Hudson Bay. Six of us paddled and portaged 1600 miles to our overwintering spot at Warden's Grove - a small island of spruce sunk deeply within the Barrenlands, 180 miles from the nearest settlement. After almost eleven months at Warden's Grove, and a bizarre encounter with the debris from a Soviet nuclear-powered satellite (Cosmos 954), we continued our paddling and reached Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay in early August, 1978.
GENRE: adventure MEMOIR
In the north of our lives
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Unlike Eliot’s Prufrock, most of us do not wear the bottoms of their trousers rolled. But like Prufrock, we are growing old—and this trend, along with my own aging, has led me to write A Field Guide to Senescence, a creative nonfiction work that considers how we might best live as we age and approach death. My book interweaves memoir with stories from poetry, fiction, and science to suggest how to navigate through our senescent years. A Field Guide to Senescence is neither a self-help book nor a comprehensive treatise on aging. Instead, it is a meditation upon finding grace in a dying world, as my life’s star goes nova—a process and practice rooted in sensory experience and the adaptive landscape of aging. As Ivan Illich observed, “To consider what is appropriate and fitting in a certain place leads one directly into reflection on beauty and goodness.” I am after beauty and goodness in the “(un)certain place” of aging — an acceptance of, and adaptation to, senescence. By doing so I hope to transcend one thing that senescence might become, which is the misery of thwarted desire.
GENRE: creative nonfiction
A FIELD GUIDE TO SENESCENCE
Coming Soon (hopefully)
"I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
-Christopher Norment
In Patterson the poet William Carlos Willaims makes the startling statement, “No ideas but in things,” and his argument is also my “writing argument”: it is in the particulars of place and being that we will take our meaning, the goodness of our lives, and the lives of others.
And paradoxically we are brought into the larger world through particular places and the ideas and emotions that they propagate.
A thoughtful approach to scientific and creative storytelling
EXPLORE PUBLISHED ESSAYS
Meditations on nature, humanity, and ways of interacting with the great world. Please enjoy these essays and creative short-form works, which have appeared in various publications.
ESSAYS
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A note from the author
One focus of my scientific research was on birds living in ecotones (the transition zones) between tundra and forests at high elevations and latitudes. I love ecological questions raised by ecotones, as well as the aesthetics of the places where I pursued my ecotone-based research (the high mountains of western North America and the Canadian Arctic). In a similar way I feel most at home intellectually in the “creative ecotone” between science and the arts.
Consequently, I pursued creative writing while also working full time as a professor of environmental science and ecology. I believe that my creative writing has been enriched by my background in scientific research and teaching, love of literature, and a lifetime spent outside.
-Christopher Norment
