This week we welcome Chris Clarke, who blogs at Coyote Crossing and is the founder and moderator of Carnival of the Arid. Chris is an environmental journalist with 20 years tenure in the field, a former nationally syndicated garden columnist, and now a freelance editor/writer/web designer looking for work. He can also be found on Twitter as canislatrans.
Chris, why do you blog?
I blog for a number of reasons, but mainly for the immediate feedback from readers that the blog format makes possible. This isn’t necessarily an entirely good thing, of course: not only does the habit of getting immediate feedback detract from less-immediate forms of publishing, such as journal or book writing, but even within the blog context it’s hard to resist the tendency to write the kind of stuff that has gotten lots of comments in the past.
I started blogging because my day job, editing the quarterly environmental mag Earth Island Journal, offered me nearly unlimited opportunities for writing bad news. My first blog, Creek Running North, I started in May 2003 as an outlet for more “serene” natural history writing. Within a year or so I had far more readers of my blog than we had subscribers to Earth Island Journal, so the blog actually became my primary outlet. More wide-ranging material started to find its way in there, and by the time I shuttered Creek Running North in May 2008 I’d written poetry, political diatribes, book and movie reviews, essays on paleontology, the visual arts, medicine, and ethnicity, recipes, and satirical posts as well as publishing my photos of various topics. The blog was probably mostly known for frequent cameo appearances by my dog Zeke, who had a serious fan club, especially as his life came to a sad but peaceful end in early 2007.
2008 was a sort of stereotypical mid-life crisis year, my marriage ending and me leaving the Bay Area after spending my entire adult life there, and so it seemed sensible to end CRN, which was very much place-based. A few months later, having given away most of my possessions and moved to the Mojave, I started Coyote Crossing. Coyote Crossing is far more nature-centered than its predecessor, though when you talk about nature in a threatened place such as the desert it’s impossible to avoid politics. If you write about the wonderful desert tortoise without mentioning that ill-thought-ought “green” energy development, military base expansion, ORV use, urbanization, and other factors are actually threatening the survival of the species, you’re not serving your readers properly, not to mention the tortoises. We make people love the plants and animals and fungi and fossils and geological formations we write about; they have a right to know what threatens their loved ones.
What’s unique or different about your blog?
When I write, rather than just tossing off a quickie “go here and sign this petition” kinda post, I tend to write at length more than bloggers in most genres do. This runs counter to the usual advice given bloggers, and I’m sure I lose some readers with each 3,000-word post, but I think there’s a fairly large group of readers who like to read more, on occasion, than the usual two-paragraph blog post. And it’s paid off, over the long run: more than one prominent blogger has called CRN the “best writing on the internet” or some similar overblown phrase, which, while wholly unwarranted as regards my writing, seems to me to indicate a hunger for more depth in blog posts than one usually finds.
What are your favorite posts from the blog?
Well, we have my post on The Cronise Cat, a hanging dune in the Mojave and my essay on green support for massive desert solar projects, Is a fish more important than a tortoise?
How do you promote your blog and attract readers?
I’ve set things up so that new posts are posted to Twitter and to Facebook. I take advantage of Facebook’s Networked Blogs application, and so should any other blogger with a Facebook account. Other social networking venues I don’t use so much, though I do make bookmarking buttons available on each of my posts so that people can Stumble or Digg or (whatever venue) a post they like.
I’ve also started the Carnival of the Arid, a desert-related blog carnival, as a sort of “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” way of generating and sharing traffic.
Any comments on being part of the nature blogger community?
Glad to be here! I have noticed that nature bloggers share a level of collegiality that’s rather unusual online. The mutual support and encouragement is wonderful.
Has blogging changed how you think about nature? or how you write?
When I did more political blogging and thus got unnecessarily involved in blog fights, I could get ten miles into a hike before the stress wore off and I started seeing the sharp-shinned hawks. So there’s that.
There was a point at which an observation of something wonderful — a kestrel perched on a wire eating a dragonfly, a dragonfly wing fluttering lazily to earth like a stained glass maple samara, or a coyote so rapt in watching a ground squirrel hole that he didn’t hear me hiking up right behind him — would immediately become blog post fodder in my mind. That’s not entirely a bad thing: interpreting our observations for a wider audience is an honorable calling. But it’s nice now that I can frequently just observe without that other layer, the blogger observing the observer.
Any words of wisdom for new nature bloggers?
Write what you love. Hold the occasional post back a day and re-read before posting: in the light of day you’ll almost certainly notice some compositional habits you’d rather not have, and noticing them will make your off-the-cuff writing better. Respond to comments, especially from first-time commenters. Make a point of commenting on other blogs in the genre. And install everything you need to track site visits, then ignore everything except the incoming links. A prominent mainstream blog may send you thousands of visitors in a day, but few of them will stay longer than 60 seconds. A blog in a related niche that sends you ten readers is a treasure beyond price, because those ten readers may be more new long-term readers than you’ll get from that front page link from Daily Kos. And that’s where you ought to put your community-building energy.
Anything else you’d like me to ask you, or that you’d like to volunteer without being asked?
Just to thank you, Wren, and the other wonderful folks at the Nature Blog Network, for doing the fantastic work you do to provide a pivot for this far-flung community of bloggers.
Thank you, Chris.
4 Comments
Thanks for this interview. I’m afraid I’m one of those people who’s been heaping overblown praise on Chris’s writing over the years, and lately I’ve also been sharing some of his posts about Big Solar with email lists for Appalachian-based activists fighting Big Wind, where it’s generated some enthusiastic reactions. My only fear there is that people who don’t read blogs too often may get the mistaken impression that all blog posts are so thorough, and will be lured into spending more time online than they should. Which is a backhanded way I suppose of encouraging other nature bloggers to follow Chris’s lead and write meatier posts more often, with a conservation message whenever appropriate. Also, I’d have to say his advice in the next-to-last paragraph is far sounder than than the crap all the blogging gurus are always spewing about SEO and what-not: “A blog in a related niche that sends you ten readers is a treasure beyond price, because those ten readers may be more new long-term readers than you’ll get from that front page link from Daily Kos. And that’s where you ought to put your community-building energy.”
One of my favorites. Field guide type blogs are fine, but I generally prefer blogs which don’t isolate nature from the human world but instead include values and consequences and quality writing. This one fits the bill.
First, you did an excellent job of interviewing Chris, Wren. (I love your interviews!)
Second, although I would not personally want to live in the Mohave (dry skin, get sick from heat), I’m grateful Chris does. It allows me to read about some parts of nature I would not otherwise experience. I grew up in NM where we found all kinds of interesting creatures in the deserts. Since I’m related to Euell Gibbons, we learned how to survive on “cactus liquid” (had to have plastic and a penny to get it) and other things few knew. So I’m sure Chris knows all of those techniques, too. Great article!
Dave, greentangle, and April, I’m glad you enjoyed the interview. I love the dessert, and would glad live there given the chance – but then, I’d be contributing to the problem of development in a fragile ecostructure, wouldn’t I?
As Dave and greentangle’s comments illustrate, there’s room in the nature blogosphere for a variety of approaches, content, and styles. One of things I hope arises from these featured blog posts is exposure to a wide range of writers, photographers, and interests. Diversity is more comfortable when we know each other.