Mountain Words Festival 2026

Join short fiction writer and novelist Claire Boyles in a workshop to stimulate your creative process.

Beyond the Forest and the Trees: Layers of Landscape and Place

The author Robert Macfarlane writes: “The best of the recent [nature] writing is ethically alert, theoretically literate and wary of the seductions and corruptions of the pastoral. It is sensitive to the dark histories of landscapes and to the structures of ownership and capital that organise – though do not wholly produce – our relations with the natural world.”  To capture this complexity of place, writers must describe the immediate sensory experience of the story (the trees) and the way those physical details operate on character and story tension (the forest). They must also portray, to some degree, the historical and political contexts surrounding both (the atmosphere). In exploring these layers of landscape and place, writers will learn techniques for widening the scope of their work.