I can't remember how I first met Susan, whether it was through Women Writing the West, or through Deb, my editor at Nomad Press. All I know is that I was impressed with her writing and the way she manages her life and career. I also admire her ideals and values: her appreciation of nature, her love of gardening, her embrace of people, and her open and affirming spirituality. I'm always amazed by how often I meet people with whom I share so much, although I never go out of my way to meet people who are like me. Coincidence? Serendipity? Luck? It's probably just that we notice what we are interested in, what we are paying attention to. Sometimes it's difficult to pay attention to what's around us because we are so self-involved. But when we take the time to look around, to smell the roses (or the coffee), we will always have a worthwhile and memorable experience.
Because I've been working on a memoir for the last couple of years, and that book has stalled because I keep changing my mind about what I'm writing, what I want to write, what I should write, and what I think about everything I'm writing (and not writing), I asked Susan questions about her writing process and her experience working on a memoir. Her answers go beyond the writing process and will give you a taste of her writing and a glimpse into what her work is about in a larger sense. I hope this interview will make you want to learn more about Susan and her writing.
The interview is below the fold.
What inspired you to write Walking Nature Home?
A quirk of genetic fate shattered my life when I was in my early twenties. Years later, after I had picked up those shards that were worth carrying on and I had walked my way into a new life, I thought about how much I'd learned from dealing with a life-altering crisis--the sort of thing we all likely experience, and I wanted to share the story with others in the hopes that they're be inspired and not repeat my mistakes.
Is the final book the same book you initially envisioned? If not, how did it change during the process of writing (and living)?
The final book is very different from the version I wrote more nearly three decades ago. The first thing I had to learn was that the point of the book wasn't the particular kind of challenge itself (being diagnosed with a disease and told I had only a few years to live). It was how I learned to live with that challenge, and the decisions I made to use the experience as a teacher, to learn from it and adapt to it rather than fight it. The crisis that opens the book was so profound that by a year later, I had divorced my husband, left my dream job, moved away from the place I called home, and was struggling to see what path I could walk with what I had left. What I made of that is the story, a tale of love and redemption, of the restorative powers of nature and hope and home. It seems to me that what is important about how we deal with tough times is who we become and what opportunities we find. Out of crisis comes not just danger, but opportunity too: chances to evaluate the path we've been on and find ways to live more authentic, open-hearted and generous lives, lives that allow us to pursue our dreams. If we've going to have pain and fear and uncertainty and struggle, we might as well use the lessons they teach to claim the selves and lives we most want.
Walking Nature Home is a very personal book. Did you (or do you) have any concerns about revealing so much of your personal life to the world?
Yes. I'm completely private, despite what you'd think since I've just basically undressed my life in public in this book! At some point in the decades I've wrestled with the best way for me to tell this story, I realized that I had to tell it as the beginner me, the me who knew only what I knew at any particular point in the story, not as some all-knowing expert. So I worked to strip away my fears about being a less than perfect person, and to find the voice of the real me, the vulnerable and fallible me. In the doing, I also found the funny me, and that helped lighten the story a lot.
How long did it take you to write this memoir? Was it all in one spurt or spread out over time?
I started the memoir in graduate school nearly thirty years ago, long before I even knew what memoir was. I wrote out what I thought was the whole story then, sent it to some editors and agents, and collected a whole set of very interesting rejection letters. At various times over the intervening decades, I picked it up again and rewrote the whole thing, adding episodes, taking out others, changing the structure of the story, the voice, the balance of nature and science information to action, and even its path through time. I don't remember know how many completely different versions it's been through, but I'd guess more than a dozen. I'm a bit of a slow learner, but I don't give up!
What do you think makes a place home? I grew up in New York, but that is not home for me. For me, home is where ever I live now. The place where I have felt most at home is Southern California but I don't consider that "home" now that I am living in Colorado.
I think what makes a place home is very different for different people. Some people are at home wherever their family is; some people regard home as where they grew up or a place they felt especially part of the community. Others of us are very attached to a specific landscape. For me, home is described by a particular look to the light, a particular shape of the horizon, and a particular set of species making up the community of the land. It's a set of smells and sounds and a particular rhythm of the seasons. I think that feeling "at home" is about the complex thing we call "belonging," literally feeling a part of the place. I'd bet home for you in particular is wherever you feel you belong in the deepest, most fundamental sense, and I'm guessing that has more to do with language and culture than any landscape (at least any landscape on this continent).
What was your favorite part of writing this book? The hardest part?
My favorite part of writing the book was finally figuring out how to make the story sing. When I read it out loud and felt it in shake my soul, I knew I had told a story that would grab readers by the heart. The hardest part was finding that voice and structure and narrative thread, and editing out all the stuff that got in the way!
One of my favorite parts of the book is how you tie in the bits about the constellations in each chapter. How did you come up with this idea? Was it difficult to make it work in the overall structure of the book?
I initially used the constellations as a framework for the book because I am very drawn to the stars and what they represent to us in terms of the different stories we attach to them, the stories of science, or astrology, or myth and culture. I wanted some way to represent the people who figure most prominently in each chapter, people who themselves represent a stage of growth and learning in my life. Rather than naming the chapters for each person, I named them for the constellation who is most associated in my mind with that person. It turned out to be tricky to weave the star information into the chapter without interrupting the flow of the story. As with any good story, it meant understanding what I was trying to say with the constellations and cutting out all the extraneous material--cutting the star information down to its heart, and then revealing it in a way that illuminated the point of each chapter.
Is there anything else you want to talk about that I didn't mention?
Just thanks--thanks for hosting me, thanks for asking great questions, thanks for reading the book!
Check out the rest of the blog tour. The entire schedule is here.
Posted by donna at 06:00:00. Filed under: Interviews
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