Death Valley: Reclaimed Homeland

Last winter around this time my mom and I were trying to decide where to travel together. Some place sunny, some place we’d never been. Death Valley, she suggested. Perfect.

On the way north, from the eight-lane interstate to the two-lane highway, we marveled about how only a few years earlier, as she battled cancer, we thought she’d be gone. Now she’d get to see Death Valley before she died. We speculated about the wildflowers which might be great – or not – the wildflower watch on the Internet urged us not to get too excited. So there we were on the open road, not knowing what to expect or hope for.

Even before the trip I’d been thinking about reclamation, about hydropower and dams and how the combination of outsized vision and the communal will of New Deal America managed to reclaim so much. For better and for worse. When I was young, I harbored Ed Abbey fantasies of dams blasted to smithereens, and I am as happy as the next monkey-wrencher to see the Elwha come tumbling down. But lately I’ve grown a strange and desperate faith in reclamation in all its meanings:

To take back. To make right. To make useful.

So there we were in Lone Pine. We spent an afternoon at Manzanar, the former internment where Japanese-Americans have reclaimed their history. Then the next morning, we entered the park in all its stark grandeur, and we passed this sign:
Check out the phrase at the bottom: "Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone." I was floored. I know enough of the sordid history of Indians in National Parks to know how uncommon such an acknowledgement is. When I opened the park map and saw that it was not merely a nice gesture, but reclamation at its most raw and right. The Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act in 2000 had granted 300 acres in the park and more than 7,000 in the surrounding lands back to the Indians.

Since then I’ve read everything I can find about the tribe’s history and their activists like Pauline Esteves and Barbara Durham, and I’ve interviewed several of those involved in the Homeland Act negotiations including Charles Wilkinson, author of a terrific history of modern Indian movements, Blood Struggle. My obsession with reclamation has grown even bigger and more unwieldy (outsized?) moving in several directions at once … like the very best projects. But despite my best efforts, I have yet to talk to the Timbisha. I have not given up hope.

Five things a writer needs to be able to do a lot of

Last week, I visited Minden Elementary School near Reno, Nevada as part of the sixth grade lecture series. The series is organized and run by a hard-working student committee that assembled a list of questions ahead of time, prepared an introduction, set up the tables and chairs in the library, and best of all, provided the treats for the occasion. Last year the series featured scientists. This year it’s writers, and I was the first. So I decided to go with the basics: How do you become a writer? What do you have to do?

I made a list for the whiteboard (which was, by the way, electronic – yikes! – luckily the committee trained me up in no time):

1. Read

What inspires you to write? the students asked. The answer: What I read. From Laura Ingalls Wilder when I was a kid to Zadie Smith last week.

2. Sit in a chair

As anyone who writes seriously can attest, this is a lot harder than it sounds. How long does it take to write a book? the students asked. Well, my first book, the novel I wrote sitting in a bean bag in second grade, The English Girl from Canada, took 10 days. Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus took five years. That’s a lot of sitting.

3. Find something you love to write about

For me, the lifelong urge to write turned to desperate compulsion when I landed in Canyonlands National Park in Utah just out of college, then later when I stumbled into Stehekin. I loved being outdoors, immersed in such beauty, loved the people I met and the adventures I had, and I wanted to write about all of it. So I did. Over and over and over again.

4. Work with other writers

After I left Minden, I headed up to Lake Tahoe to teach a private workshop on the bridge between essay and memoir writing. Six devoted writers offered each other support, encouragement, and much needed direction. All of them – all of us, I should say – marveled at how much gets accomplished when we’re around other writers rather than in our own little cubby holes.

5. Accept rejection

Back at the elementary school, this offered a great chance for guessing game. I told the students that I have, as of now, about seventy published short pieces. To get to that point, I asked, how many rejections did they think I’ve received? Hands shot up. Ten? Nope. Twenty? Nope. A hundred? Up and up and up the numbers went. (When I described this to my mother on the telephone, she said: just like The Price is Right.)

Five hundred, I said at last. I keep track. Five hundred rejections. And counting.

Of course the one obvious thing a writer must do a lot of that does not appear on the list is – duh! – write, so we spent some time on three short writing prompts that maybe the students can work into something in the days and weeks to come.

Then it was over. Time for refreshments. The only caveat was that, in order to partake of the cookies and Rice Krispie treats, the students would have to be talking about the presentation either with me or with each other. (Not, their teacher Ms. Bertolone-Smith noted, merely hanging out with their “stalemates.”) So they gathered around and asked some great questions: how to write a climax scene, whether you can work on more than one book at once, what’s different about writing fiction vs. nonfiction.

Looking back, I realize I did skip over one thing writers have to do a lot of: give readings and presentations and visit with readers. I’ve been doing plenty of that in the past year, and I have to say, the morning at Minden Elementary was one of the most enjoyable.

Excerpts, Covers, News

Some nice press this month has brought some amusing, uh, juxtapositions.

An excerpt from Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus appears in the Autumn 2011 issue of Portland: The Magazine of the University of Portland. This is a fabulous alumni magazine, regularly lauded as one of the best, edited by the indominable Brian Doyle, and the excerpt, from the chapter "Heroes and She-Roes" is fabulously presented. Since it's the scene of John Lewis' speech at the 50th anniversary of the Tallahassee bus boycott, a fine portrait of Congressman Lewis accompanies the text.

This excerpt appears in an issue for which the cover story is:"Why Be A Priest?"



Meanwhile an excerpt from Potluck appears in the Sept. / Oct. issue of Utne Reader. A section of the title essay, retitled "Pass the Populism," appears in the Gleanings section of the magazine, another fine publication with a wide distribution. The excerpt was even noted by a NY Times writer in the Dining section of the paper on Sept. 13. That is, by Stehekin standards - by any standards, I suppose - a big deal!

This excerpt appears in an issue for which the cover story is:
"21st Century Sex: What Are You Looking At?"



In neither case is the excerpt related to the cover story, but the contrast tickled me no end.

Then came Oregon Quarterly where an excerpt from Potluck, "Saw Chips in My Bra" appears in the Fall issue alongside an essay by Robert Leo Heilman about the legendary woods-working co-op, the Hoedads. This time, the cover photo fit with my story a little better, just right even. The only downside was the news that long-time friend, supporter, author, and OQ editor, Guy Maynard, will be stepping down this winter. He will be sorely missed.


Meanwhile, I have new short essays forthcoming in Bellingham Review and Matter 14: Animal, and a short story for kids in ColumbiaKIDS.

And ... in the best news of the month, Test Ride was named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in biography / memoir. A fine honor.

The History of Skagit Dams - Seeing Things Anew

I’ve driven Washington’s Highway 20, the North Cascades Highway, for years. I used live in Rockport right along the highway, and I used to work for the national park that straddles the highway, and for one interminable summer when Laurie worked on the east side of the crest and I worked on the west, I commuted over the highway. I’ve been wowed by the mountains and soothed by the rivers, sure, sure. I’ve hiked from trailheads and watched wildlife and even taught writing at North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center on Diablo Lake. It was there, at the Learning Center, that I first thought seriously about the dams.

To reach the Learning Center you drive right across Diablo Dam. Overhead the power lines buzz. But when writers sat down to describe their surroundings, they usually wrote about birds or fish or trees or clouds. Never the dams. I was as guilty as anyone. The three dams that line the Skagit River – Gorge, Diablo, and Ross – are all more or less visible from the highway, but, in writing as in life, I’d mostly ignored them. Why? I knew the answer: because we nature-loving types have a kneejerk reaction against anything human-made. While we’re in the woods, we want to see the woods. But part of why people come to the Learning Center is to learn about things they know little about, to appreciate them anew. For me, I realized, that meant the dams.

So I was delighted this spring to see that my old friend Jesse Kennedy would teach a class at the Learning Center on the History of the Skagit Dams. Jesse can bring enthusiasm to any subject (you’d have to attend one of his defensive driving classes to believe me) and in this case, the subject could not have been more perfectly suited to him. Dr. Kennedy, who studied both ophthalmology and diesel mechanics extensively before migrating into cultural resources, described dam construction with an engineer’s precision and told the story of J.D. Ross and his battle to bring public power to Seattle with a historian’s heart. Turns out it’s a wild story with several wild subplots. Ross single-handedly fought off proponents of privatization and brought the dams in on schedule and under budget to provide more people in Seattle with more power sooner than in other American cities. Ross was also a renowned expert on lilies and tea plants, who borrowed monkeys and albino deer from Woodland Park Zoo to place on islands in Diablo Lake. The animals – along with a colorful light show and a hearty chicken meal and a ride up the dramatic cable incline used in dam construction – served as attractions for generations of city folks Ross wooed upriver for inexpensive tours from the Depression through the 1960s. When he died, Franklin Roosevelt offered space in Arlington National Cemetery, but Ross had specified that he’d prefer to lie for eternity along Highway 20 in Newhalem. A plaque at the site quotes Roosevelt who heralded Ross as one of “the greatest Americans of our time,” which is particularly impressive considering that Ross was Canadian.

When at last we visited the dams, we saw a rare sight. The dams, overfull from late snow in the high country, were spilling. The spill would be dramatic in any case – all that water, all that power – but when Jesse turned our attention to the construction, the graceful concrete arc to keep the force of the water from shaking the dam to the ground, my heart swelled the same way it does to see the larches on Liberty Bell backlit in fall. Pure beauty. And this, I realized, was why I’d come. Sometimes it takes a little knowledge to nudge you out of your ideological safety zone, a few good stories, to make you see things anew, to make you think.

These days, I’m thinking a whole lot about reclamation. More on that soon.

Rust Fish

Each day before I begin to write, I try to read something, anything, that inspires me. Lately, I’ve been turning more and more often to poetry, and most recently it’s been Maya Jewell Zeller’s terrific first collection, Rust Fish. I heard her read from the collection at Burning Word festival in Leavenworth, Washington in May, and ever since then, I’ve been hooked. I want to say entranced, but it’s nothing that otherworldly or dark. Mostly, I’ve been charmed.

Rust Fish is a coming-of-age collection, more or less, and part of what Zeller does so well is conjure childhood without a hint of romanticism or regret or even ruefulness. There’s real childhood friendship (“The World at Eleven”) and real childhood meanness (“Revenge” “Serape”). There’s the chalky mouthful of powdered milk I remember so well, and there’s a sweet lullaby sung to a beloved stuffed snake, despised by her mother. Then there’s G.I. Joe come to life (my favorite line in the book: “GI Joe loved lambsweed with warm government cheese”) then GI receiving the mutilation treatment we’ve so often seen Barbie endure (“Sibling Rivalry”).

Through it all, the natural world – a distinctly Pacific Northwest version – weaves into and out of the poems the way, on the west slope of the Cascades, blackberry vines choke rotting barns. There’s skunk cabbage and balsam root and thistle, cedar and salmon and smelt, and lest you think things might stray into too-pretty description or green forest cliché, there’s the flood strewn bloated cow carcass thrown in for good measure.

Zeller’s voice is straightforward and plainly feminist (remember the treatment GI Joe got?) and unyielding without turning belligerent. She doesn’t so much confront class issues as inhabit them. Her parents owned both a tavern and a tow truck. In the last section, her poem “For a Student Come Back from the Quiet Beyond” culminates in a wrenching set of lines: “She is the student who made me cry the most./ She loves her job at a dry-cleaner’s/ where the chemicals give her hives/but her boss says she’s the best employee he’s ever had.”

Of all the aspects of Zeller’s poetry that I admire, her humility stands out the most. She’s as eager to point out irony as anyone – the new Jack in the Box on the road to Olympic National Park, say – but when she does it, with all her earnest understated passion, guess who’s in the drive thru line?

If you’re looking for inspiration, pick up Rust Fish.

On Mortenson, memoir, victims, whiners, and the sometimes sickening truth

The undeserving casualties of the recent fracas over Greg Mortenson’s exaggerations in his bestselling memoirs are many: the people that donated money to his schools in Afghanistan and the schools themselves – guaranteed now to be shorter on funds than before – and the girls who attend them. Then there are readers, even the non-donators, and attendees of Mortenson’s speaking engagements who believed a story and now feel duped. But not least among them are memoirists everywhere who have taken yet another blow to their credibility.

Credibility that has long been suspect. The root of the accusations is familiar: how can any writer remember all the details? Memoirists, the naysayers point out, compress time and make-up dialogue and details. True enough. But most readers are cool with that. The truth is, often enough, the eye-rolling exasperation has less to do with how the story is told – how true exactly – than with what kind of story it is. Memoir is the genre of victimization, say the eye-rollers. The realm of whiners.

I should know. I taught memoir writing online for several years to hundreds of writers – new writers, experienced writers, rich writers and poor, good writers and bad, women and, occasionally, men – and among the shocks I had to face was exactly how widespread childhood trauma, especially family trauma, is. Not verbal abuse, but horrid physical and sexual abuse. I recoiled. I didn’t want to read it, not once and certainly not dozens of times a day, but I was awed and humbled by the guts it took for writers to relive the trauma, and it did not take me long to realize that these stories must be told. The sheer number of them makes them impossible to ignore. Victimization is not an attitude that’s gone viral. It’s a reality that’s been shoved under the carpet. Because we want it there. We want to change the subject.

Oddly enough, it’s rarely the (mostly female) victims of horrific crimes who exaggerate or lie in memoir – I’ve never heard of a documented case – but the (mostly male) perpetrators of minor ones. James Frey lied about his the extent of his drug dealing. Ditto Malcolm X according to a new biography. Greg Mortenson apparently not only exaggerated his commitment to the village schools, but also the extent of his trespass into enemy territory and his subsequent kidnapping. Let’s face it: bad guy dramas, packed with danger and daring, tend toward excess. Whether and how to punish or prevent such excess is, I suppose, a discussion worth having.

But let’s not change the subject.

Let’s not allow courageous writers who were once victims become victims (again) by letting “Did this really happen?” morph into “Are these stories really worth telling (again)?” They are. And the most important ones may not be packed with misdeeds-turned-bravado – the street thug turned civil rights hero, the climber turned philanthropist – but with pathos and cold hard, sometimes sickening, truth.

Tribute Essay in High Country News

This week I have an essay in High Country News titled "The Sign Maker" honoring Phil Garfoot, who died almost exactly a year ago. I was lucky enough to have a couple of fine Barnhart photos of Phil's signs accommany the essay, but I thought it'd be fun to include several more. Unfortunately the snow still hangs in the high country so these shots don't include many fine trail junction signs, but they give a sense of how ubiquitous and fitting they are here in Stehekin.

http://www.hcn.org/issues/43.6/the-sign-maker