“I like to ask myself, “What places do your memories stretch across?” That’s home.”
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of the nature books Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted, and her latest work of nature writing Dispersals will be published in 2024. Her first children’s book with illustrator Elaine Chen, A Garden Called Home, is also forthcoming. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and was Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge.
From 2018–2022, The Willowherb Review provided a digital platform to celebrate and bolster nature writing by emerging and established writers of colour, funded through the generous support of readers, patrons, and, from 2021, National Lottery funding through Arts Council England.
Nature writing has a power to capture our emotional connections with the world around us—from the places we live to those we only encounter rarely. In a moment when so much of our planet’s biodiversity and liveability is under threat, this emotional aspect is a vital piece; nature writing can help us understand why we care about something, how we can foster kinship, and how we can invite others into that same space of connection.
I feel like it’s been a process of ever going deeper: that the more I write about my connections to the natural world, the more that living world takes precedence over my own story, and the more vibrancy and agency I find in plants, animals, and elements on the page.
When I started the Willowherb, it was always in the back of my mind that the whole point of the project was to make itself obsolete. So it was always intended to be a discrete project that made an intervention into the space, to demonstrate that writers of colour had always been there, doing this work, and to make the space more inviting to others. And the shift – while not a total seachange in publishing – was noticeable: a wave of other initiatives popped up, the Wainwright’s long and shortlists began to be more representative, and people finally started shouting about the nature writers of colour who had long been there and not gotten the attention they deserved. So I felt we’d made our point and that it was time for others in the industry to carry on that work. I was sad to let go but it felt like the time to explore other, new possibilities.
I think many of the ways of looking at the natural world that are relevant in contemporary nature writing have deep historical roots, and as a historian, a part of me is always keen to unpack those: why do we persist in writing about the idea of wilderness, when it has been shown time and again to be little more than a settler-colonial fantasy? What are the historical roots for thinking of nature as healing, and what does it mean to centre ourselves in these ways? I suppose when I engage with the natural world, I am doing so with a tentativeness to make great proclamations—shifting constantly between ways of seeing and framing it.
In recent years I’ve been most excited to see access to land centred in our conversations around nature: who gets to ramble? Who feels that they can’t find like-minded community in nature spaces? Organisations like Black Girls Hike inspire me so much.
For me, writing has helped me understand that home is in multiplicity—that the impulse to say “You need to pick somewhere” is an erasure of so much of our lived experience, especially as migrants. So instead I like to ask myself, “What places do your memories stretch across?” That’s home.
I certainly hope nature writing is moving beyond borders, since the natural world certainly does! I think as a genre we really need to interrogate and do away with ties to nation and borders in favour of community and kinship, which feels more expansive.
Because I’ve always lived in big cities, I think noticing nature in the small, everyday details is really key: the moss on the bus stop, the birds on the wires. But I am continually aware that even small patches of green are inequitably distributed in urban spaces: having and knowing street trees is a privilege.
Dispersals grew out of some of the lingering questions I had after writing Two Trees Make a Forest. And I was inspired a lot by one of my favourite books of nature writing, Weeds by Richard Mabey. I was troubled by a lot of the language around invasiveness and nativeness, the ways that, as environmentalists or conservationists, we fall back on exclusionary frames in order to do the work. And I kept encountering plants whose identities shifted depending on the place I was – a bit like being a mixed-race migrant, so I related to this. I wanted to explore these shifting ways of seeing the world, and to unpack some of the really entwined stories of people and plants, to consider how things are really always more complicated – and interesting!
I was asked by my publisher if I’d be interested in writing for children, which was a dream for me because I’ve actually been squirrelling away children’s story manuscripts for over a decade! I was really excited to write something with all of the emotional weight that I put into my writing for adults, but without a lot of the cynicism or need for critical argument. I often talk about moving from academia to literature as a way of giving myself permission to write a beautiful sentence for the sake of a beautiful sentence; writing for children feels even more like I’m honouring that shift.
I think wonder is a key piece of what nature writing can foster. Children come naturally to wonder – so really it’s about what we lay in their path. And I think children have a lot more capacity for engagement with the wider world than many of us have as adults: think of their idealism and passion for a better world! So nature writing can speak to that, can give those passions a shape and direction.
Black Girls Hike and The Nan Shepherd Prize. I recently worked with the Sussex-based organisation Writing Our Legacy and was so inspired by the world they’re doing to foster the creativity of writers of colour in the South East.
Most recently, Michael Malay’s Late Light has me excited about the genre and the ways we can capture emotional and intellectual curiosity about species that garner little attention. And I have a shifting list of favourites but often return to a few books: The Unofficial Countryside by Richard Mabey, which I think was really prescient in its exploration of forgotten urban spaces; The Country and the City by Raymond Williams, which is not strictly nature writing but literary criticism that unpacks the political stakes of our literary explorations of nature; and of more contemporary texts, Nina Mingya Powles’s Small Bodies of Water, which for me really embodies the borderless, entangled future of what nature writing can be.
Explore this year’s compelling shortlist here.