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Sick of Nature
David Gessner's Return of the Osprey is "among the classics of American nature writing," said the Boston Globe. So why does this critically acclaimed nature writer now declare himself to be "sick of nature"?
In diverse, diverting, and frequently hilarious essays, Gessner wrestles with father figures both biological and literary, reflects on the pleasures and absurdities of the writing life, explores the significance of place for both his work and his sense of well-being, and rails at the confines of the nature genre even as he continues to find fresh inspiration for his writing in the natural world. In the end, he learns to embrace--or at least tolerate--the label he once rejected.
Whether kicking at the limits of his category or explaining why he was fired from his job as a bookstore clerk; whether recalling his youthful obsession with Ultimate Frisbee or recounting an adventure in the jungles of Belize; whether lampooning his own writerly envy of Sebastian Junger or raging at the over-development of Cape Cod or searching for solace in nature in the wake of September 11, Gessner ranges from the personal to the natural in lyrical reflections on writing, self, and society.
In a powerful concluding essay, Gessner moves from the arrival of coyotes in the suburbs of Boston to the birth of his first child in an extended meditation on his characteristic themes of wildness, place, and creativity.
In diverse, diverting, and frequently hilarious essays, Gessner wrestles with father figures both biological and literary, reflects on the pleasures and absurdities of the writing life, explores the significance of place for both his work and his sense of well-being, and rails at the confines of the nature genre even as he continues to find fresh inspiration for his writing in the natural world. In the end, he learns to embrace--or at least tolerate--the label he once rejected.
Whether kicking at the limits of his category or explaining why he was fired from his job as a bookstore clerk; whether recalling his youthful obsession with Ultimate Frisbee or recounting an adventure in the jungles of Belize; whether lampooning his own writerly envy of Sebastian Junger or raging at the over-development of Cape Cod or searching for solace in nature in the wake of September 11, Gessner ranges from the personal to the natural in lyrical reflections on writing, self, and society.
In a powerful concluding essay, Gessner moves from the arrival of coyotes in the suburbs of Boston to the birth of his first child in an extended meditation on his characteristic themes of wildness, place, and creativity.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2004
1 person is currently reading
115 people want to read
About the author
David Gessner
39 books121 followersDavid Gessner is the author of fourteen books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including the New York Times bestselling, All the Wild That Remains, Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature and Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness.
Gessner is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine, Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Audubon, Orion, and many other magazines, and his prizes include a Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay for his essay “Learning to Surf.” He has also won the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, "The Call of the Wild."
He is married to the novelist Nina de Gramont, whose latest book is The Christie Affair.
“A master essayist.” –Booklist
“For nature-writing enthusiasts, Gessner needs no introduction. His books and essays have in many ways redefined what it means to write about the natural world, coaxing the genre from a staid, sometimes wonky practice to one that is lively and often raucous.”—Washington Post.
“David Gessner has been a font of creativity ever since the 1980s, when he published provocative political cartoons in that famous campus magazine, the Harvard Crimson. These days he’s a naturalist, a professor and a master of the art of telling humorous and thought-provoking narratives about unusual people in out-of-the way-places."
--The San Francisco Chronicle
Gessner is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine, Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Audubon, Orion, and many other magazines, and his prizes include a Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay for his essay “Learning to Surf.” He has also won the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, "The Call of the Wild."
He is married to the novelist Nina de Gramont, whose latest book is The Christie Affair.
“A master essayist.” –Booklist
“For nature-writing enthusiasts, Gessner needs no introduction. His books and essays have in many ways redefined what it means to write about the natural world, coaxing the genre from a staid, sometimes wonky practice to one that is lively and often raucous.”—Washington Post.
“David Gessner has been a font of creativity ever since the 1980s, when he published provocative political cartoons in that famous campus magazine, the Harvard Crimson. These days he’s a naturalist, a professor and a master of the art of telling humorous and thought-provoking narratives about unusual people in out-of-the way-places."
--The San Francisco Chronicle
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 19, 2009
hooray for white male privilege!
December 21, 2017
This collection of seventeen essay-memoirs covers topics about father figures, reflections on being a writer, one’s relationship with nature, urban verses rural living and… Ultimate. The individual essays are broken into four sections – I. “Sick” (which contains “Ultimate Glory”), II. “Getting Personal”, III. “Back to Nature” and IV. “Howling with the Trickster”.
The book, in its entirety, doesn’t have much to do specifically with Ultimate, but one essay, “Ultimate Glory: A Frisbee Memoir” does reflect on the author’s experience playing competitively in college and with some of Boston’s top teams in the 80s (I’ve read a couple of the other essays in the work, but mainly enjoyed this one).
I connected with the first two sentences right off, “we labor over our big decisions and big dreams, but sometimes it’s the small things that change our lives forever. What could be smaller than this: It is the first week of my freshman year of college and I, looking for a sport to play, am walking down to the boathouse for crew, resigning myself to four years of servitude as a galley slave, when I see a Frisbee flying across the street” (p. 46). I started playing Ultimate in High School, but remember falling in love with the sport in a similar way, and it, too, has become such a huge part of my life.
In the following pages, Gessner hits upon many of the typical experiences an Ultimate player encounters: the sport’s eclectic mix of “semi-athletic half-hippies”, serious jocks, pick-up jokesters, etc.; the “mysterious motivation… to give up the normal benefits of life to chase plastic”; the unbridled immersion into a sport that is more of a lifestyle choice; the confusion of parents and non-players when you mention anything to do with Ultimate; the mythic stories about the sport told between players; the struggles the sport and its players face in cleaning up the image of Ultimate; and the wonderfully close-knit community that Ultimate creates.
I truly believe that it would be hard to find an Ultimate player who wouldn’t connect with at least some of the memories Gessner recounts in this essay.
This is an excerpt from my full review on my blog, High Release Handler.
The book, in its entirety, doesn’t have much to do specifically with Ultimate, but one essay, “Ultimate Glory: A Frisbee Memoir” does reflect on the author’s experience playing competitively in college and with some of Boston’s top teams in the 80s (I’ve read a couple of the other essays in the work, but mainly enjoyed this one).
I connected with the first two sentences right off, “we labor over our big decisions and big dreams, but sometimes it’s the small things that change our lives forever. What could be smaller than this: It is the first week of my freshman year of college and I, looking for a sport to play, am walking down to the boathouse for crew, resigning myself to four years of servitude as a galley slave, when I see a Frisbee flying across the street” (p. 46). I started playing Ultimate in High School, but remember falling in love with the sport in a similar way, and it, too, has become such a huge part of my life.
In the following pages, Gessner hits upon many of the typical experiences an Ultimate player encounters: the sport’s eclectic mix of “semi-athletic half-hippies”, serious jocks, pick-up jokesters, etc.; the “mysterious motivation… to give up the normal benefits of life to chase plastic”; the unbridled immersion into a sport that is more of a lifestyle choice; the confusion of parents and non-players when you mention anything to do with Ultimate; the mythic stories about the sport told between players; the struggles the sport and its players face in cleaning up the image of Ultimate; and the wonderfully close-knit community that Ultimate creates.
I truly believe that it would be hard to find an Ultimate player who wouldn’t connect with at least some of the memories Gessner recounts in this essay.
This is an excerpt from my full review on my blog, High Release Handler.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 28, 2021
Is David Gessner a writer of personal experience or a nature writer? The answer is Yes. In fact he is a philosopher of the wonder of awe much like Scott Russell Sanders, one who embraces and celebrates "the inconsistent, the chaotic, the unexpected". (p.214) Also, he appreciates that "Nature teaches again and again the interconnectedness of all life" (p. 180) and that includes human life, his human life.
March 23, 2023
Actually, I'm not "finished" with the book. I did something I rarely do: I put it down & walked away. This in spite of the fact that I know and like David Gessner and have read much of the rest of his work. I will own that maybe my mindset was poorly matched to the book and its needs from a reader, so I will go back to it someday. Meanwhile, it's back on the shelf.
November 7, 2024
Interesting book of personal essays relating to life and nature. The author connects from a place of honesy and vulnerability as he compares insights found in nature to our human ways of thinking. In a genre that can often be pedantic or condescending, Gessner speaks to us commoners as one of our own.
October 11, 2021
Gets drunk, does some crazy stunts, one of which fractures his skull, plays ultimate frisbee for many years, attends Harvard, survives his 20s, decides to look for and finds wildness wherever it is, asks questions, rambles, likes boundary spaces, in-betweens, becomes a father and moves along.
October 4, 2023
2.75/5 rounded - some of the essays I really enjoyed, some I really didn't. As expected with really any collection like this.
March 29, 2013
In ‘Sick of Nature’, the first of seventeen essays written approximately between 1998 and 2004, Gessner makes sure you know that this isn’t going to be the nature writing you’re probably used to. Although his past works have often been categorised as nature writing, Gessner doesn’t want to be limited by the genre’s ‘gentle straightjacket’, to write essays ‘praised as “quiet” by quiet magazines’ and to write ‘about the world without being able to say the word “shit” (while talking a lot of scat)’. The book (and essay) title is designed to shock; yet, Gessner admits, finally, he’s not sick of nature at all, but rebels against the earnestness, the constraint, the neatness and the naïve or blind apolitical stance of some (many?) nature writers past and present. In the words of Edward Abbey, Gessner hopes nature writing can become a ‘broader and happier field’, a field more free, sloppy, honest, dangerous, uncertain, comic and wild.
Wild – being wild, noticing the wild, living in the wild – forms a theme running through the essays, interspersed and often juxtaposed with personal memoir. The search for the ‘wild’ takes Gessner from Harvard to Cape Cod, Colorado, Belize and back to Harvard again. On the way, he reflects on his struggle to become a writer – what to write, how to write, where to write – his writing mentors, his difficult relationship with his father who died of lung cancer, his own recovery from testicular cancer, his bond with his schizophrenic brother and the birth of his daughter.
Gessner is sometimes surprisingly, brutally honest, about his bouts of writer envy, his obsession with ultimate Frisbee, his passion for urinating in the wilds, the consequences of writing about people he knows, the seeming impotence of nature writing and what to write, if anything, when an act of terrorism changes everything. As well as honesty, there is comedy. Gessner uses humour to undercut others’ points of view and ridicule himself more than anyone.
And there is, of course, nature, nature that is uncertain, untamed and interconnected, no more so than in the tricky shape of the coyote.
I’ve never come across a nature writer who includes shit, masturbation and Baywatch in one essay. But by the end of the collection I am, like Gessner himself, convinced that he is what he rails against, a nature writer. While he makes fun of nature writers who ‘take to the beaches to wander, alone and aimless, in search of terns and profundities’, Gessner turns again and again to nature to discover and understand other ways to be in the world and to make larger connections. Gessner wants to wedge himself into the physical world, to push roots deep into the earth, but find himself at home in transition, on the borderlands, on the ‘edge between the personal and the wild’.
I’m left feeling inspired, comforted and unsettled. I’m inspired to get outdoors, to observe, reflect and question and to write. I’m comforted to know that other writers struggle, falter and question what they’re trying to do. And as I’m currently in transition and feeling dislocated, literally out of place, the essay ‘A Polygamist of Place’ had particular resonance. Yet, I’m unsettled about what sort of so-called nature writing I want to write. But perhaps being unsettled and uncertain is not a bad place from which to start.
Wild – being wild, noticing the wild, living in the wild – forms a theme running through the essays, interspersed and often juxtaposed with personal memoir. The search for the ‘wild’ takes Gessner from Harvard to Cape Cod, Colorado, Belize and back to Harvard again. On the way, he reflects on his struggle to become a writer – what to write, how to write, where to write – his writing mentors, his difficult relationship with his father who died of lung cancer, his own recovery from testicular cancer, his bond with his schizophrenic brother and the birth of his daughter.
Gessner is sometimes surprisingly, brutally honest, about his bouts of writer envy, his obsession with ultimate Frisbee, his passion for urinating in the wilds, the consequences of writing about people he knows, the seeming impotence of nature writing and what to write, if anything, when an act of terrorism changes everything. As well as honesty, there is comedy. Gessner uses humour to undercut others’ points of view and ridicule himself more than anyone.
And there is, of course, nature, nature that is uncertain, untamed and interconnected, no more so than in the tricky shape of the coyote.
I’ve never come across a nature writer who includes shit, masturbation and Baywatch in one essay. But by the end of the collection I am, like Gessner himself, convinced that he is what he rails against, a nature writer. While he makes fun of nature writers who ‘take to the beaches to wander, alone and aimless, in search of terns and profundities’, Gessner turns again and again to nature to discover and understand other ways to be in the world and to make larger connections. Gessner wants to wedge himself into the physical world, to push roots deep into the earth, but find himself at home in transition, on the borderlands, on the ‘edge between the personal and the wild’.
I’m left feeling inspired, comforted and unsettled. I’m inspired to get outdoors, to observe, reflect and question and to write. I’m comforted to know that other writers struggle, falter and question what they’re trying to do. And as I’m currently in transition and feeling dislocated, literally out of place, the essay ‘A Polygamist of Place’ had particular resonance. Yet, I’m unsettled about what sort of so-called nature writing I want to write. But perhaps being unsettled and uncertain is not a bad place from which to start.
September 4, 2016
I didn’t expect to enjoy this collection of essays and, indeed, about half of the book wasn’t for me because I’m not into nature writing. Nevertheless I’m glad I followed through with this friend's recommendation. Those essays that weren’t about nature really did it for me. There is some wonderful sharpness to Gessner’s voice that undercuts any pretensions, like in his essay on creative nonfiction where he simply declares that a good creative nonfiction writer must be a part time arsehole. And how true is that! At times I got a bit irritated by Gessner’s slight defensiveness. One gets the feeling that this is a writer who isn’t beneath seeking a certain revenge on those who did him wrong in his view. But then there is something refreshing in this weakness of his too, a respite from the aggressive streak of compulsory self-deprecation that permeates much of quality creative nonfiction. I look forward to the time when Gessner will get completely sick of nature and release a book without even a single tree.
November 4, 2007
A generally good book, weak in some places but brilliant in others. I tip toward four stars because of the title essay especially.
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July 22, 2008How can you not love the title? Argument in nature writing -- I vote yes. Crankiness, earthiness, putting, as Gessner so wonderfully says it "the shit back in scat".
August 16, 2008
Hilarious and hard to put down!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews