Creativity in Nature: SFASU Students Explore Gayla Mize

Our final outing was a collaborative venture with the creative writing club, SubPlots. Allen and Miranda wanted this to be both an educational and fun event, so they made foldable handouts for each participant. The handouts presented information about National Park Trust, benefits of writing outdoors, history of nature writing as a field, common poetry styles, and outdoor opportunities around campus in a neat and crafty package.

Nacogdoches in spring sees rain nearly every weekend, so thunder boomed about every 15 minutes during the outing. Powerful rumbles sounded above whistling leaves and rushing wind while the club took their seats. The location was adjacent to the semi-famous Gayla Mize Azalea gardens, in what SFASU’s Horticulture department calls the Plantery and the Color Gardens. Exotic and native plant species bloomed in every corner. Alyssa, the president of SubPlots, can be seen reading excerpts from some of her favorite nature writers, Henry David Thoreau and Mary Oliver, within the Color Garden.

For the creative portion of the workshop, students were encouraged to spread out and choose areas where they found inspiration. Allen and a few others remained at the lily pad fountain, listening to the soft music of water. Other students chose to sit in the nearby forested area under towering and verdant pines, known as the Mast Arboretum. The remaining students decided to sit on the top of a tiered bluebonnet patio. Miranda roamed around. Once finished, everyone met back at the fountain to share what they wrote in time for the sky to open. Fat drops of water, a respite to the humidity of the day, fell on our upturned faces. We sheltered and shared what we wrote in a nearby greenhouse, and the students spoke about continuing to hone their newly learned skills.

An acrostic poem about thunder during the outing:
To be
Heard is to be alive
Until I hear you again.
Not all find you lovely, so they
Deny your rumbling odes,
Everlasting song,
Resonating within my heart.

And a haiku about Texas’s state flower, the bluebonnet:
Bluebonnet beauty:
I did not know you had beans
Sweet, soft, and fuzzy.