Photo by Marty Espinola
Writing the Land is a collaborative outreach and fundraising project for land protection organizations. Through our anthologies, poets help raise awareness of the importance for land conservation.
Our project partners with various nonprofit and environmental organizations to coordinate the “adoption” of conserved lands for poets. Each poet is paired with a land usually for about a year, and they visit the location to create work inspired by place. This project emphasizes the importance of individual connection to land and place, and optionally includes event-sharing experiences of poets reading on behalf of conservation and environmental awareness—inspiring others to visit or donate toward the protection of these conserved lands of all types including conservation easements, ranches, farms, ecosystems, habitats, sanctuaries, and wilderness preserves.
Poems created for Writing the Land are available to the land protection organizations indefinitely for use in their media and outreach, and through the anthologies produced. Poets retain their individual copyrights for their work.
Writing the Land is an attempt to honor nature and our relationship with it in a way that is as equitable and transparent as it is deep and entangled. As poets and advocates, we declare our intention that the scope of this project be as inclusive—to humans and places—as we hope the mantle of protection that land trusts offer can be. Our work in writing the land will never be complete but rather gains strength, depth, beauty, and energy from a multitude of voices.
Our Team
Past Interns: Thanks Everyone!
NatureCulture LLC
NatureCulture LLC is the parent organization of Writing the Land, a production of Lis McLoughlin. NatureCulture organizes and produces events and anthologies for the creative and environmental communities including the annual Authors and Artists Festival. All our events are solar powered from an off-grid location in the rural forests of western Massachusetts. Visit us to see a complete list of our services, what we’re hosting now, along with past events.
Our Story
Into My Own
by Robert Frost
Apis by Martin Bridge (cover art for Writing the Land’s 2021 anthology)
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
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Before Writing the Land, there was Thinking the Land. Enjoyable, but not quite efficacious. In my off-grid cottage in a mature hemlock forest in western Massachusetts, for years I contemplated the land. And as I walked those wooded acres, feeling Robert Frost's cadences in my hiking feet, I knew that words and land wrote each other. And it occurred to me, that in this way land contributes to its own protection; that land speaks, and further, that Nature poets are trained to hear those voices.
So what does it matter, this conversation, asked the activist in me? In a time when land needs all the help it can get just to avoid being clear-cut or paved over, how can poets help the land that we love protect itself? The answer, as it so often is in Nature, is to cooperate with partners. Land Trusts, as conservers of land, bring our writing into action. By pairing poets with protected lands, we offer ourselves as conduits for the land to speak, to sing, to cry out, to comfort. The Writing the Land project in 2021 was comprised of 11 land trusts, 36 separate lands, and 40 poets helping the voices of the land translate into acts of protection and care. Each 2021 land trust has a chapter in the 2021 anthology, which is offered for sale through the land trusts to benefit the work they do. In 2022 there are 42 land trusts and over 180 poets in 4 anthologies, 2023 also has 4 anthologies, 2024 has 4, and 2025 is forming with 1 complete book for Washington state, 1 in conjunction with partners in New York, and a few other surprises. We currently have over 150 land conservation partners and 350 poets; we are growing every day.
Writing the land is honored to be doing this essential work. We invite you to join us by exploring our website and enjoying the poetry; buying and reading the anthology; donating to your local land trust; enrolling as a poet in our project; or by hiring one of our speakers for your next event (use the form to Contact Us). Thank you for listening, protecting, and respecting the land.
---Lis McLoughlin, PhD; Director of Writing the Land