"Nature in Notes and Sketches": By listing, noting, sketching, mapping, collecting, and recording nature we both treasure and preserve its presence for ourselves and for others. Nature lovers habitually pay attention to the birds and creatures, plants and landscapes they discover on their walks and travels or in their own backyards. Their "notations" appear in diaries, nature journals, garden calendars, haiku, travel accounts, and snapshots. They may sometimes surface in the sketches which naturalists such as Niko Tinbergen or Ernest Thompson Seton added to their essays and presented as marginalia or plates. Smaller images of nature also find a public in T-shirts, jewelry, logos, and pictures for children's books, and more substantially in the architectural tiles of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, in memorial motifs on samplers, in the willows and lambs and lions on gravestones, in icons on sundials, and in title page cartouches. These mini-genre pieces just as surely as more developed works reveal the complexity of human responses to nature's presence and rhythms.

We welcome illustrated essays, but also poems, stories, journal excerpts, drawings, maps, or graffiti that reflect the topic, "Nature in Notes and Sketches." While notes and sketches by well-known authors and artists merit study, so may more personal narratives or graphics, such as those done for grandchildren. We welcome your own pieces: poems, marginalia, observations, anecdotes, family lore, and epistolary notes.

Please send all submissions as Word attachments, and direct any questions, to the guest editor, David Scofield Wilson: