A Trail Through Leaves: The Journal as a Path to Place
- Book Review,
by Hannah Hinchman
From Library Journal
Artist and naturalist Hinchman, who has kept a journal since 1970, shares in this work her ideas about keeping a daily record of one's observations and experiences. Her advice, directed to "would-be naturalist/journal-keepers," focuses on the tangible details of the natural world, "moments of the ordinary-made-extraordinary by the simple act of choosing and isolating them." She emphasizes the value of adding drawings to a journal and includes many samples of her annotated sketches of plants, animals, and landscapes. Excerpts from her own writings are basically accounts of the minutiae of her surroundings in Wyoming's Northern Rockies. Although her excerpts lack real insight, her recommendations for observing the natural world more intensely are valuable. A potentially helpful purchase.?Ilse Heidmann, San Marcos, Tex.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Boston Globe
[B]oth a rich work of performance art and a personal growth tool with many handles.
John R. Stilgoe, professor in the History of Landscape, Harvard University
This is an important book, brilliantly produced. Its light will linger a long, long time.
Book Description
To artist-writer-naturalist Hannah Hinchman, the blank pages of a journal are a call to awaken the soul, to celebrate being alive in the world, to get to know both the wilderness of our inmost selves and the "unpredictable and potent" natural world. In the richly illustrated pages of this book, she unfolds a myriad of wonders --the pattern of a bee abdomen, varieties of ice forms and sky colors, the joys of a garden --and shows us how to capture them on the page. Hinchman's respect for the miracle of our five senses, and her passion for what they can tell us about the world, is contagious. "Start with a smell, like a crushed marigold leaf, the sea, coal smoke," she advises, and from such raw materials begin to "decant the stuff of life" into journal form, "where it remains fresh, still tasting of its source." Even for one who has no intention of journal-keeping, to delve into Hinchman's own work is to see with new eyes. A Trail Through Leaves is a true gift and inspiration, a treasure-box of ways to write, draw, and be alive to the world.
From the Author
How do you find the time to keep a journal? At first it's hard to justify the time for such an apparently selfish activity. But the rewards are tangible. They tend to reflect back into daily life, adding a level of clarity and attention that affects everything from negotiating traffic to family conversation. The act of recording, even noting things to record later, amplifies wakefulness and curiosity, counteracts irritation and boredom, invites engagement, and begets energy. The act of recording fulfills a hunger, and the feeling of satisfaction it brings makes me want to do more of it. So I find the time. I decided early on that I wouldn't make the journal into a daily regime; otherwise it might become a duty. Sometimes I open it several times a day, sometimes not for a week. But now it's become a well-established habit, an immensely rewarding one I'd never want to forgo. My first book (though it assumed that any journal-keeper would also be a lover of the woods and fields) emphasized the interior changes wrought by making a record of one's life. A whole life, with its dark turns and its apparently dull stretches. In it I attempted to make new converts to the joys of joining art and writing on blank pages, pointing towards the increase in "wakefulness" that is one of its chief rewards. In this second book, I've allowed the scientist and naturalist a freer rein, and that seems to go well with my somewhat more mature point of view: I write less about interior shifts, and more about what's right in front of me, knowing better how well they mirror each other. I invite creatures, plants, objects, clouds, landscapes, and people into the pages in the form of words and pictures. Those moments of focused attention have an almost magical effect; they seem to coax out of concealment details, quirks, gestures that would remain hidden to the cursory glance. When I teach workshops on the illuminated journal, I explain what I call a "scale of journals": On one end is the Informational journal, the true naturalist's field journal. It concentrates on the quantifiable and identifiable, gathering names, facts, and observations with an impartial thoroughness. It contains drawings, but they are meant to be explanatory. There is little room for the personal in this kind of journal, though I admire it for the valuable role it serves in adding to the body of knowledge. On the other end of the scale is the Reflective journal. It's purely personal, mostly concerned with human-generated culture, investigations of the psyche, relationships, responses to art and writing, dreams, memories-as in Anaïs Nin's diaries. The self is the subject rather than the world. The art in this journal might look more like William Blake's paintings. In between the two poles are two other kinds of journals that have become more and more central to my interest. The first is the Investigative: It documents the outer world, but includes many unmeasurable and unnamed phenomena, like the effects of light, ways the seasons change, patterns and textures in nature. It goes outside the categories of the Informational journal and finds links between apparently dissimilar things. Thus it includes more of the person making it, because it's up to that person to invent new categories. Art in this journal would look more like what we find in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The other is the Resonant journal-so called because it acts as the place of interweaving between the person and the world. Curiosity extends both inward and outward: You are a naturalist on the trail of your own life, and you search for insights in the more-than-human world as well as the human. These two kinds of journals, as embodied in Goethe and Thoreau, seem to me the richest of all. The art included in them might look like anything from Dürer to Paul Klee. The journal has been for me both a room and a door. It's an entirely private refuge for musing, raging, and celebrating. But it's also an entry point into the larger world, a way to engage what's going on around me. A Trail Through Leaves asks you the reader to go outside first-in hopes that you will find the outside finally the most encompassing inside.
About the Author
Hannah Hinchman lives in Dubois, Wyoming, and was the author of the column "Hand and Eye" in Sierra magazine. She teaches workshops on the illuminated journal for the Yellowstone Institute, Glacier Institute, Teton Science School, and the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities. She is also the author of A Life in Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal.
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