Anglais fiche auteur John Daniel

Anna Delanchy (Section 2)

Author Note:

John Daniel is a South Carolinian author, born in the 1950s. He lived and studied in Washington DC first and then moved to Oregon. He writes a lot about nature and the relation between mankind and the natural world. He is the author of ten books of essays, memoirs, and nonfiction such as The Far Corner (which won the Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction in 2011), Rogue River Journal (which won a 2006 Pacific northwest Book Sellers Award), or even The Trail Home (containing the essay “The Impoverishment of Sightseeing”). He has also been a poet since the 1970s and published two “collections”: Common Ground in 1988 and All Things Touched by Wind in 1994. In addition, he won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. Finally, his newest book, Gifted, was published in 2017. It is about a young man’s special affinity with wild creatures and the setting takes place in Oregon, where the author lives.

I really liked the essay he wrote on the “Impoverishment of Sightseeing” because I could really identify with what he was saying. I could really tie his experiences to my own (and I was a bit sad that we didn’t have to write the journal about that text in the end). When he was recalling his trip to Yosemite as a child and especially his encounter with snakes in a boulder field and the strong emotions that he experienced as well as how all his senses where aware at that time and the comparison then with the time he went sightseeing on a bus and how superficial and impoverishing of the reality this experience felt to him was really relatable. During the first lockdown in 2020, I really felt that way whenever I saw mountains on TV. As someone who loves skiing, snowboarding, the adrenaline that it provides and even just playing in the snow, feeling the freezing wind on my face and my gloves getting wet and cold, I really felt deprived of all these sensations when seeing the mountains, I cherished on screen or in pictures. Therefore, I really can relate when John Daniel says that solely relying on eyesight is impoverishing the experience.

works cited

Author John Daniel, https://www.johndaniel-author.net/bio.php.

Poetry.us.com John Daniel, http://www.poetry.us.com/johndaniel.html.

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