Nature Writing With The Everything Notebook
“The reason for writing is simple. Through writing you will learn what you think and you will come to know yourself.” — Deborah J. Haynes
In this article, I do two things: 1) define what I mean by keeping an ‘everything notebook’. And 2) show how I incorporate nature writing into this notebook through daily nature writing, or what I call ‘ecojournaling.’
First of all, my personal approach to note-taking draws inspiration from the Everything Notebook, an approach to note-taking-for-writing created by Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega.
The Everything Notebook evolved from the daily demands of writing in academia, involving things like writing research papers, preparing talks for conferences, and recording notes from readings. While the Everything Notebook got its start as a tool for academic researchers, I’ve found the Everything Notebook to be a surprisingly useful tool for all kinds of writing, especially nature writing.
As you might have guessed, everything goes in the Everything Notebook. It’s my planner, task-manager, writing project organizer; it holds doodles and drawings, maps, events, memos, research notes, and post-it notes with every fleeting thought I’d like to hold on to for later.
