Catherine Reid, December 2009
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
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Catherine Reid is an award-winning essayist and author of Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst (Houghton Mifflin), one of Bookloft’s “top 20 bestsellers for 2006.” Other work has appeared in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Green Mountains Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, where she was the featured writer for their inaugural issue. She teaches at Warren Wilson College, where she specializes in creative nonfiction.
Catherine’s story, “When an Ox Blinks,” will appear in the upcoming 7.1 winter issue of Redivider.
Some work online:
“Water Rhythm” in Isotope
“The Return” in New Millenium Writings (1st prize)
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The Nature of Where We Go
An Interview by Nonfiction Editor Jessica Rae Hahn
Place has a strong presence in Catherine Reid’s writing, but she recently left the land she knew best for a job at a school that she claims embodies the future: Warren Wilson, an eco-emphatic, historical work college, with its farm and forest and imaginative students, who share the responsibility for running the place. There she teaches creative nonfiction and environmental writing. She has also begun taking flying lessons as a way to gain perspective on the land she now inhabits.
It is obvious after reading only a few sentences of Catherine’s work that she has gleaned the best from nature and woven it together to create nonfiction that reaches past the monotony of modern daily life. It beckons us to ask what part am I of this?
Catherine has recently taken the time to answer a few of my questions via email.
Redivider: You are the author of articles, essays, short fiction, poetry, and a book on the study of the eastern coyote. One could say you write it all. What magic trick do you use to write in so many genres?
Catherine Reid: I have no trick other than desire, no approach but curiosity, which stops me at all kinds of odd moments. That leaves me with much to share but I’m clumsy with speech; my words can’t keep up with my thinking. With writing, however, I can shape and reshape, experimenting with sounds and rhythms, with the compression of scenes and behaviors to their essences. I would have liked to do more with both fiction and poetry, but creative nonfiction got me by the throat, demanding the kind of honesty and rigor that gave new meaning to the act of sitting down to write. With Coyote and with the anthologies I edited (Every Woman I’ve Ever Loved and His Hands, His Tools, His Dress, His Sex), there were days when the writing felt terrifying, like scaling rock faces without a rope. I could hardly bear it at times, and, of course, I couldn’t stop, heading into yet another paragraph, another rough ridge.
RDR: I’m going to quote you here before I even ask the next question. “It helps to find other writers and swap work often.” What exactly does the writing process consist of for you?
CR: My best writing comes after I’ve tired myself with physical work or been oxygenated by a long enough walk. Then I need to be alone so I can get words onto the page. Hours can pass and I won’t remember such things as eating or drinking or whether I stood up or when. Fortunately, I don’t live by myself (I think one could be deformed by such behavior), and when I finally have something worth sharing, I turn first to my partner, Holly Iglesias, who has a poet’s sensibility, a journalist’s economy, and an impeccable knowledge of grammar gained from years of Catholic schooling. I also meet with a group of faculty members, where we drink wine, comment on each other’s manuscripts, and remind ourselves that our lives are larger than simply being professors.
RDR: I’ve got to cover some of the basics. What books are on your nightstand right now?
CR: A Postcard Memoir, by Lawrence Sutin; A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland; Finding Beauty in a Broken World, by Terry Tempest Williams; In the Mind’s Eye, by Elizabeth Dodd; Edison & The Electric Chair, by a friend, Mark Essig; and two to help me design a class: Bloodroot and Listen Here, both anthologies of writing by women of Appalachia.
RDR: Your current project is “Writing the Nature of Our Lives,” about place-based creative nonfiction. Would you like to say a thing or two about it?
CR: What Barry Lopez writes in “The Literature of Place” resonates with me: “My comfort, my sense of inclusion in the small universe I inhabited, came from an appreciation of, a participation in, all that I saw, smelled, tasted, and heard. That sense of inclusion not only assuaged my sense of loneliness as a child, it confirmed my imagination. And it is that single thing, the power of the human imagination to extrapolate from an odd handful of things–faint movement in a copse of trees, a wingbeat, the damp cold of field stones at night–the human ability to make from all this a pattern, to compose a story out of it, that fixed in me a sense of hope.”
Over the years, I’ve collected dozens of prompts and challenges that help writers claim such stories and put them on the page. This project is a way to share these exercises along with some of the results produced in both my Writing About Place classes as well as the “Writing the Nature of Our Lives” workshops I’ve offered in different communities.
Perhaps as a counter to such rootedness, another project I’m working on looks at migration and the forces that set us in motion around the planet. As part of the research, I have been taking flying lessons in a light experimental aircraft (slightly bigger than an ultralight) as a way to learn more about wind and perspective from a few thousand feet above the ground.
RDR: Any observations you want to share about the writing of creative nonfiction?
CR: One of the things that most surprised me while doing a book tour with COYOTE was that most audiences wanted to ask about coyotes and not about how the book was written, which, to me, was the far harder and more deliberate part of its crafting. I framed the coyote search with personal experience, laboring to add stories that I thought would make clear why I needed to go on this journey. Yet, it was rare to hear the questions I ached to answer: When did you know that coyotes would be a metaphor? How do you know when to bring in your poet voice versus your more pragmatic voice? What helped prepare you for the interweave of short scenes?
It makes sense, of course. Our work is known by its subject matter. One has only to wander a library or bookstore to see that there isn’t a “creative nonfiction” section. Our work is filed throughout the stacks. But it’s odd to realize that an influential work like Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge is catalogued under “breast cancer” or Maddy Blais’s wonderful memoir, Uphill Walkers, under “single parent family.” Both books are about far, far more. I trust readers of Coyote feel the same way.
RDR: What is the one thing you tell writing students over and over?
CR: Be specific. Use all five senses. Know what writers you like. Read lots.
12/1/2009
