Reading across genres makes your writing stronger!

Essays train us to understand and use structure, to portray big ideas through a small lens, and to finish something. To read good essays is to savor the craft of writing, to take many trips into vastly different territories and writing styles within a short time, and to learn about plants from many different perspectives.  

Unlike fiction, memoir limits a writer's freedom in one all-important point: there can be no invention. Much as Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species reads the story of evolution in the world's distribution of animals, plants, and fossils, plot, in memoir, is discovered within the details and twists of a writer's life. The writer commits to truth, both external and internal. In a story well-told, telling that truth means you must learn a lot - not only about yourself, but also about the world.

Plants abound in poetry--for good reason: Their shapes, textures, colors and smells beckon metaphor and memory. Poetry, in return, offers a path into the gardens, the woods, a close-up lens into scraggly tufts of rooftop lichens, or a zoomed-out visualization of ecological connectivity. We need words to weave and recognize plants in the fabric of our hearts.

You've written that great plant poem, botanical story, essay or memoir--now what? Here are tools that helped me to build a habit of submitting to literary magazines and resources for planning out a book and submitting manuscripts to agents or publishers.

The short stories listed here have a strong grounding in botany - either the plants themselves play a large part in the story, or the author uses vivid botanical imagery for scene setting. All of them effortlessly shift the meaning of plants from biological to symbolic and back again, anchoring emotion in sensual detail.

The novels listed here have a strong grounding in botany - either the plants themselves play a large part in the story, or the author uses vivid botanical imagery for scene setting. But most of all, these are books I couldn't put down, stories that captured my heart, stories I've read more than once and loved more and more deeply with each re-reading.