Fly Away Home

In my first year of teaching college students to write about the natural world, pandemic shutdowns sent students home the week after spring break in 2020. For me—and the vast majority of my students at Emory University—metro Atlanta was not a place we considered home. We were newcomers to this land, home of the Muscogee (Creek) people, drawn to this place by the promise of pedagogical possibilities. Recognizing the complexities of migrating somewhere new to learn, we tried to avoid reductive or extractive readings of the land. I asked us to connect with and confront our knowledge and memories of our home places and to grapple with place-based writing from near and far. We spent the year’s earliest lessons defining home together and navigating what it meant to write about these places, often most near to our hearts from a distance.

We started with questions along these lines:

How do you define “home” as a concept?
How do you compose a home?
What feelings does the term “home” evoke? What senses bring you home?
What sights, smells, sounds, tastes, or tactilities compose your concept of home?
What is the relationship between your work, your interests, and your home?
What place(s) do you call home? What people? What else?
What other people call and have called this place home?

For one of their first writing assignments before our move to Zoom, I asked students to zoom, prosaically, into the global and the local. I invited them to describe macro and micro scenes from home, by memory and by observation, through prompts like these:

Macro: Offer us a brief paragraph on where you were born, where you are from, and/or the place(s) where you have lived and called home. What can you tell us about the natural elements of this home place?

Micro: Home in on a natural entity or ecological element in a home place of your choice. This might be a specific tree from your childhood backyard or a squirrel in that tree. This could be a bird or the song of a bird. Can you identify the entity or element, describe it fully, and connect its significance to its surroundings?

Of course, none of us realized how soon most of us would return to the places we called home and how changed our homes might be upon return. As we all grappled with this virus and the violence of the world, I was grateful to receive the evocative reflections my students continued to write from their home places. I received observations of cattle across the Chinese countryside from a student who attended online classes past midnight due to the time difference. I relished rich details about waking up to birds of a South American dawn chorus. With students returning unexpectedly to these home places, we considered how our answers shifted when writing from different locales, and we moved into studying stories of homing together.

We read Chickasaw Nation writer Linda Hogan’s nested essay from Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, examining how the “whole world was a nest on its humble tilt, in the maze of the universe, holding us.” We listened to Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s generous stories from Braiding Sweetgrass. We visited ecologist J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place, and his meditations on birding as a Black man in the Southeast; environmental historian Lauret Savoy’s land-based analyses of memory in Trace; and selections from Camille T. Dungy’s Black Nature anthology.

Recognizing that our lessons would need to shift to accommodate the impact of a landscape irreversibly changed by frightening unknowns, our lessons shifted from home to the unknown. We needed to acknowledge the awful state of global politics and early pandemic times and to consider our limits of knowing. Then and to this day, I still return to a version of an inquiry-driven lesson plan Stacey Waite maps out in Teaching Queer, which Peter Moe also models in Touching This Leviathan: I ask students to go outside and generate lists of questions about what they notice, delineating between questions they don’t know the answers to and what they can’t know the answers to. It’s open-ended questions all the way down, leading to writing as a process of discovery, to research, and to simply acknowledging the limits of what can be known. It often also leads to questions of home.

The language of home and homing in all my lesson plans is intentionally avian—in graduate school, when I kept getting distracted by birds, I decided to follow Anne Lamott’s advice to write “bird by bird” with the utmost literal dedication. I wrote a dissertation asking: what can we learn about writing from birds? As I began to teach, I began to ask students: if you were a bird who was also a writer, what kind of bird would you be? Would you be a pigeon, homing in and dovetailing, getting pigeonholed, perhaps; a magpie collecting shiny stories; a starling swerving with a flock for collective survival? Would you enact the lessons of different birds through different parts of your writing process? 

I was personally working on a theory of pedagogy drawn from pigeons as actual and idiomatic messengers in my final years of dissertating and my first years of teaching—so these birds became my constant, grounding, airborne companions: no matter where I moved (literally and literarily), pigeons would indeed suddenly appear. They guided me to think and teach through multispecies discourses around invasion and pestilence, conservation and migration, and others tethered to human relationships with birds. I also began to feel at home in Georgia for the first time as the years went on, volunteering at a local bird rehabilitation center and raising backyard chickens in Decatur, the first officially-designated “Bird City” in Georgia. 

Inviting students to identify the natural entities and constants that brought them home yielded papers on cherry blossoms, the sight of rainbows after a downpour, the whooshing of winds, and so much more. After composing brief macro/micro paragraphs on home early in the term, I always ask writers to home in further, iteratively—and to expand outwards as they turn inwards. They must write a full essay on their chosen natural element or entity and then complete a “Multimodal Wildcard Remix” project, where I ask them: what would your essay look like in an entirely different form? 

I assign students to do some version of this project in every one of my classes—academic, creative, and professional writing. The most memorable projects often emerge from the sections on writing with the natural world. The essay on cherry blossoms became a crocheted flower attached to a found branch, a crafted commentary on intercultural connections between the writer’s home cultures of Japan and the United States. The student drawn to the cultural history of rain collected rainwater to create an original watercolor artwork. The composer moved by the cacophony of wind arranged an impressive four-part musical score inspired by the four cardinal directions.

The plan that pandemic year—and the plan in the years since we’ve returned to campus—involved experiencing the outdoors together. While we didn’t get to do this collectively the year we were all sent home, I have since had the chance to take many groups of students on treks through the campus woodlands and creeks where we notice and write, wander and wonder.

I enact a peripatetic pedagogy (with accessible alternatives) that begins with a stroll down the steel-and-wooden beams of “Source Route,” an art installation built by George Trakas. We step down this steep and narrow path designed to slow one down through the ravine. We are sometimes joined by fellow teachers and local experts, such as ichnologist Tony Martin, to help guide our outings and identify traces. Together, we dodge bold squirrels and admire the drill marks of the yellow-bellied sapsuckers, the muddy cat tracks in the streambed. I ground these walks with land acknowledgments and scaffold them with meditation exercises and activities from nature journaling teachers such as Jack Muir Laws, Claire Walker Leslie, and Melinda Nakagawa. In the years since the first iteration, I’ve added Aimee Nezhukhumathatil’s World of Wonders and Amy Tan’s The Backyard Bird Chronicles as models for this observational writing. My favorite memories after returning to campus involved running into students from my first online courses. We were now in person, in the woods, excited to show one another a salamander cupped in wet leaves, found from an upturned log.

Near the final days of each writing class, after our multimodal projects and nature journals, we move into a collaboration. We return to birds through adrienne maree brown’s call in Emergent Strategy to build a “movement with such deep trust that we move as a murmuration, the way groups of starlings billow, dive, spin, dance collectively through the air—to avoid predators, and, it also seems, to pass time in the most beautiful way possible.” Drawing from this call for “strategic flocking” to the podmapping practices emphasized by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Undrowned, I tell students to map out the people in their lives who support them and who connect them with notions of home. I hope the writing communities we’ve built together will one day remind them of some iteration of a home.

We end each term with a collaborative spin on a common “Why I Write” assignment. I open a shared Google document and ask my students across sections to flock to it in synchrony. The murmur, the mystery, of watching Anonymous Goose and Anonymous Raven tap out simultaneous lines in a digital space, word by word, bird by bird, is sublime. Afterwards, I invite everyone to read through this collective reflection and remix the lines that resonate with them into a found poem. I do this exercise myself and follow the few ground rules we set together—we cannot edit each other’s words or punctuation, but we can move them around. We can correct minor errors and orthographic inconsistencies only. In the remixed words of students across sections of my “Composing Natural Wonders” course in fall 2020:

Why We Write

I write to learn more about the intricacy
of my own curiosity
to unravel my feelings and long-forgotten memories

because I have recently lost the constant of my own home
to think about all of the little details that made that memory so special.

I write because my written words alone have the possibility to initiate a change
I write because it brings me to a world full of wild ideas

to paint a story
with ideas
to make sense of myself and the world I inhabit.

inspire others to respect the natural world
in the ecology of the underappreciated
rather than destroy what little is left of it

I can change my philosophy.
I can shape myself.

I write because on paper, we are all just human.

there really isn’t any pattern to how or why I write
and then edit
piece by piece,
earliest stages to the final product

I am fascinated by written language, and I do not want to take it for granted.

I write because I can say what I desire uninterrupted
I write so that the possibility of forgetting about who I was in the past becomes nonexistent

I write to explore, discover, and reveal
a quest for solutions

to solidify my own thoughts
takes the form of a cycle

to improve critical thinking, to not simply accept things
to question the public’s common knowledge and to reveal the facts
inform readers about some of the issues of the world.

I write so that my readers
can relate
and feel less lonely in their thoughts.

I write to make sense of what I don’t understand.

to investigate, question, and ponder
other aspects I had not taken notice of before
to deepen my knowledge

I write to understand other perspectives.

to understand the many choices I can make as an individual
the feeling of contentment of placing a period on my last sentence
after hours of working on a piece.

This is why I write.

Featured photo by Burak Evlivan.

Melissa T. Yang

Melissa T. Yang is a Taiwanese-American writer raised in Nashua, NH, and based in Decatur, GA. After receiving her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh, she joined the Writing Program faculty at Emory University. Melissa directs the Emory Writing Center, teaches a range of composition courses, and pursues research on what birds can teach us about writing and rhetoric. Her work can be found in Composition Studies,  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and other outlets.