Face Value

“I believe everything has a soul.” — Mary Oliver, Upstream

“… is beauty itself an intricately fashioned lure, the cruelest hoax of all?” — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“One time, springing to my feet, I said, ‘This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!’” — John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

There can be an intense want to make the world around seem bigger than itself. It isn’t that the birds aren’t beautiful in the way they gather and fly in formation, up and over the mountain’s crest. The way that the tree stands firm no matter how hard the winds blow, no matter how much the squirrel plays on its rough skin. What one is wont to do is to make the tree explode and the birds talk. It is for that reason that sometimes I have to venture back into the real world and try my best to write it as I see it. Because the world is as beautiful as a fantasy novel. As breathless as a sci-fi thriller. Yet it is hard to distill that into anything worth reading, sometimes. Unless you have that intrinsic eye like that of the nature writers.

Nature writers like John Muir, Anne Dillard, and Mary Oliver are the ones I truly look up to. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was a book that blew things wide open for me. The way that Dillard could sit by the waterside and watch nature as if it was the most spectacular play that she had ever seen. Of course the “Father of National Parks”, John Muir, has the same effect. His wonder was like a child’s when traversing Yosemite and the Sierras, when taking a thousand mile walk of the gulf. I think of Muir looking at every squirrel and talking to them, and them talking back in such a quiet chitter that he has to ask “what?” a dozen times. I think of Dillard dipping her feet into the water and it turning the color of burgundy wine. None of this happens, so I stop myself from pretending.

Pretend. A state of being that seems to flitter away at some point in one’s life. Those that harness it become artists, writers, creative types. To some pretend is a state that is just slightly removed from reality but enough to feel isolated. Calm. Safe. Solitary. There is a way to have both, it seems. To live in some thin veil of fantasy that drapes over the tangible. It is there that one can truly take their brush and their pen. I am sure this is what Oliver saw, too, when she gleaned her poetry from the natural world. These nature writers who took the world at face value but also saw the beauty bubbling underneath in shades unseen by the lazy eye. 

It is true that in your craft you must open up your mind and let your surroundings inspire you. The cat lying sleepily at your feet may not be doing much—like my own Olive, as I watch her pet the same square of carpet over and over. The music more like a metronome as you type word after word. You want to make the picture frames detach from the wall and revolve around your head. You want Olive to grow human size, wink, and then shrink to normal. But Muir didn’t need to make El Capitan shine like a diamond to make it beautiful. Especially when the sunset already turned it into a golden spectacular. 

Dipping back and forth between writing fiction and non-fiction can be challenging. You feel the want to write purple prose until it rots your teeth from its sweetness. You hold a red pen and refuse to cross out that sentence that you would vote is the sentence to end all sentences. But sometimes the best sentence is one with five of the best words that you could come up with. 

These are the things I tell myself. I am thick into revising my novel and writing these essay-type blogs. I am doing my best to extend the boundaries of my writing and seeing what works. And, most importantly, what doesn’t. My suggestion? Look to the nature writers to see how they view the world with a microscope and a fine-toothed comb. If anything, they are most worthy inspirations for your fiction. 

Learnin'

I hadn’t planned on it happening, but here we are my peoples. Maybe I had read so many fantasies and sci-fi books one after another and had figured “Hey, maybe I should start learning something.” Mind you, when you are reading Brandon Sanderson and N.K. Jemisin you feel like you are learning. If anything, how to be a writer. Or just bleeding green envy with every page turned.

It is typical of me to read some type of nonfiction along with a fiction title, giving equal time to each. But lately I’ve found that I want to sit down and spend time with cows and wolves and writers talking about writing. We readers go through phases, and this is just one of mine. We love when these phases happen because they shake things up and make us interested in things we may have only had passive interests in in the past. 

John Connell’s The Farmer’s Son was something that caught me by surprise. I was walking around my local Barnes and Noble when I found it. Granted, as I guiltily do, I was taken in by the cover. It is serene: an idyllic Irish landscape with perfect cows lying cozily hither and tither. The author photo was a scruffy younger man, not at all your average farmer. And it is true that he isn’t, just as the book isn’t your average autobiography on what it means to be in a family of farmers. Taking the mantel of farmer was not easy for Connell, having grown acquainted to an urban lifestyle in Australia and Canada before moving back home to Ireland. There was his contentious relationship with his father, missteps that lead to death of livestock, and other trials and tribulations that numbered more than bales of hay. The Farmer’s Son is a beautiful book about many things, but most interestingly about the collision of two different generations in a lifestyle that may seem to some as old fashioned.

I have been a fan of Lawrence Wright for many years. He is widely known via his groundbreaking novel about Scientology called Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. It was later made into an HBO documentary directed by Alex Gibney. He also wrote about the rise of Al Qaeda in his book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. As seems to be the pattern, this was made into a Hulu mini-series. I read his latest book, God Save Texas, interested first and foremost in learning about a state where I spent my childhood. Now that I live in California, you get a sense of how people see the Lone Star state: gun-hungry, right wing fanatics who are closed-minded and heavily against any and all government intervention. Wright, who lives in Austin, takes into account the history of the state, from the state’s break with Mexico, the Alamo, all the way to now. It is a state that has a heavy hand in politics. Wright takes a detour from his usual reporting style and writes in first person. He is a biased observer and he knows it. But he loves his state, for all its complexity and influence.

I am an unabashed wolf fanatic, which began after reading Nate Blakelee’s American Wolf: A True Story of Obsession in the West and led to as many nature documentaries about the wolf as I could get my hands on. Jim and Jamie Dutcher’s The Wisdom of Wolves about living among the Sawtooth Pack was another book that did nothing but elevate my low-key obsession. I am now only a little bit into Rick McIntyre’s The Rise of Wolf 8. He is a subject in Blakelee’s American Wolf because McIntyre was a part of reinstating wolves back into Yellowstone National Park. This was an outrage to local farmers who blamed wolves for killing their livestock, leading to their eradication years before. But as McIntyre and most experts believe, we live within the world of animals and should do our best to treat them like we would our neighbor.

And then there is Susan Orlean. Many may know her from her riveting The Library Book about the fire of the Los Angeles Public Library, thought to be arson. She brought her keen eye and hungry wonder to The Orchid Thief, a fascination about a man that started from a small clipping in a newspaper she read on a flight. From there she traveled to Florida and learned about the dark world of orchid collecting, and how those collectors fed their obsessions by acquiring the most rare and coveted flowers. A book about flowers in the swamps of Florida should not be this good, but this is Orlean. She will never steer you wrong.

Sometimes you have to read fiction. You have to escape, get lost in a space war here and there, climb on the back of an ogre, do some magic. Yet a healthy dose of knowledge never hurt anyone. Especially when it is a topic you don’t know much about. I know nothing about farming, but if The Farmer’s Son taught me anything—even if I didn’t ask—I know what a calf birth looks like. Knowledge, my friends. It isn’t always pretty.

Belief

Belief is everything when you are young.

It starts as it usually does with those holiday wraiths. I recall finding a fluff of cotton on the living room floor, presenting it as proof to my mother that we had been visited by the Easter Bunny. Believing in these childhood fantasies was so much more important than logic. To think that such a big man could go down that chimney, regardless of the physical impossibilities, and deliver Christmas directly under my tree. For a tiny pixie to exchange my mouth bones with dollar bills in a macabre transaction. These are the things I relished, collected like the skeleton keys that I kept in my treasure box. Opening the hungry keyhole of my own mind.

Raised Catholic, I took to religion just the same. Feeling powerless I could ask for help. Could kneel and wait for the warmth and glow of some higher power. To take my sins away and forgive me for those trespasses. The fact that no matter what I did I would not be trekking alone. If anything sets us apart from the animal kingdom it’s this: that sometimes we are dropped onto this earth without every necessity for survival. It isn’t enough to have our pack. Our friends, our family, our loved ones. We need a reason. For all this. Religion is incredibly useful for this. And now that I am agnostic, it makes it all that much harder. Without a belief that something happens after our last day, how does one carry on?

This led to a lot of soul-searching and research. I came across a philosophy called Humanism, which, according to americanhumanist.org, states that it is a “progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good…”; “A rational philosophy informed by science, inspired by art, and motivated by compassion.” It’s this philosophy that has captured the attention of many authors, most notably Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, and Isaac Asimov. As well as philosophers, scientists, and political leaders. It states that we as humans have a right to take care of one another. To cause no harm. Things that can be found in the commandments of other religions but without all of the parameters and guilt-building that can become toxic.

It seems obvious that we should treat each other kindly. But adopting certain belief systems is a surefire way of holding yourself accountable for your actions. Humanism is a good way of accomplishing this, if it helps for you to have some kind of credo.

It doesn’t get rid of the thoughts of the “big sleep” that happen in the middle of the day, worrying about all of the things you have yet to accomplish. But I personally choose this over the adverse, which is years of feeling not worthy for a god. Constantly feeling at fault for being human. Humanism is a way of forgiving yourself while still acknowledging that we aren’t alone in this world. That, like the animal kingdom, we still must reach out and acknowledge our kin.

Belief sets us apart as humans. What works for you may not work for your neighbor. And that is okay. No matter what we believe we must accept and respect each and every religion, no matter how extreme or narrow. Understanding is the impetus of life. A big reason for war is misinterpretation, a failure to empathize. Belief makes good writing. Belief makes better people.