Annie Nichol

Division III

This article is part of a Climax Div III Issue.

For her Division III, Annie Nichol wrote a book entitled Four Natural Histories: The Lived Landscape of Gratton Gulch. The book is comprised of four stories about the same fictional piece of land (the imaginary boundary between West Marin County and West Sonoma County in California), each one taking place in a different period of time over the course of two centuries. The stories, based on historical research and Nichol’s imagination, blend fiction and non-fiction to evoke what she terms natural histories. Through these stories, the book, about 140 pages long, examines the relationship between people and the land they live on, how this changes over time, and the catalysts that set these changes in motion. Nichol uses "natural histories" as a word play to explore the prevailing notion of seperateness between people and the places they live, questioning this alienation and watching how it evolves over time as a cultural concept and way of interacting with the landscape.

The first story takes place in the early 1800s and is the most fantastical of the four, focusing on the cosmology of the Coast Miwok culture of Native Americans who resided on the landscape in the time of pre-colonization. The second story takes place in the late 1800s and tells the story of a family of Irish immigrants who have come to settle in California and build a house on the land. The third takes place in 1958 and recounts an abused boy’s outlook on the land. The fourth and final installment is about a young girl who’s come to live with her grandmother and and her grandmother's lover after losing her family. This story deals with the young girl’s mourning process, trauma, and resilience, which becomes analogous to the process of renewal prevelent in the landscape.

Nichol tried to avoid a haughty environmental attitude and the allocation of blame in the writing of her stories, seeking instead to objectively identify the causes for shifting relationship between people and land. She found the distinctions between people and the physical landscape they inhabit to be extremely permeable.