Interview with Fred Taylor

November 13, 2001

"The writer, through the attention to language and to its seed and inner germ, helps us find our way through very difficult times. "

 

Fred is a member of the faculty of Vermont College where he supervises Master's students. Beyond that, he is an accomplished nature writer and faciliatator of creative writing in the outdoors. Originally from the Seattle area, Fred's life journey has taken him through periods in North Carolina and now Vermont where he makes his home with his wife and dog. In this discussion, Fred talks about his own story of becoming a nature writer, the craft of teaching writng in the outdoors, September 11, and the role of writers in a complex world.

LVG: Can I ask you about your history as a writer?

FT: Well that's a great question to start with. I often like to tell that story on the first day of a writing class. It's quite a long story…it is a story that has a lot of twists and turns for me, because I haven't thought of myself as a writer til really relatively recently and the Union program was a primary focus in that shift in my identity. I was a journal-junkie for years. I discovered the journal from none other than Henry David back in my college days, and that was a liberating notion to me that one could write about oneself in little notebooks. And I being the self-indulgent adolescent college student, began doing that with great fervor. But that happened for me for years before I thought there was anything else in it beside my own navel-gazing. It happened in the mid-80s when I started discovering nature writers, with a vengeance. In the early 80s my interests were in Loren Eiseley and Annie Dillard were probably the most important in that period for me and I found in both of them a vision of writers for whom a personal journey of exploration was the story. And I thought, that's what I've been doing in my journal for years! (laughing). So, why don't I just take this seriously? So that discovery, plus the inspiration of all of these new people who were turning out work in that area, like Lopez, and Elder, - Oh my god, all of these people are doing this kind of thing. It was incredible.

LVG: So you were really right in the middle of that explosion of nature writing.

FT: I was, although at that point very much at a distance from it. I wasn't connected to it, but that period of my life was enriched by discoveries that people were doing that. And one of the parts of the process that relates to your journey is that I was also leading outdoor camping trips with high school students. One of my hopes in that period of my life was to be able to make those trips into reflective journeys using the writing process. And I don't feel I was totally successful with that initial attempt. But I took them out to Colorado and New Mexico on summer trips and took journals with us, and they took a traveling library of Annie Dillard and Black Elk and Edward Abbey, and whoever else I felt like bringing along. We hiked around and people wrote in their journals but I felt like I really didn't know much about how to engage people in their own process, their own writing, at that point in their lives. I was making it up as I went. I was thinking this morning as I was reading your story about Newfoundland, if I had known then what I know now about opening up the writing process for people, I might have had a different experience. But I felt at that point it was part of pulling teeth, how to get kids to sit down in a beautiful meadow and put their pens to paper. They kept their journals and they took things home, but I think it was a powerful experience, but the writing part was definitely not a major moment of their trips.

LVG: But it was for you?

FT: It was a part of it for me. And what happened with that experience of going with kids with journals in hand, and for writers who could speak to them. I wanted that to work out. And then I get on to Union. So when I discovered Union and John Tallmadge - I'd been reading John's work in Orion. I knew about Orion and I'd been reading Joe Meeker's essays in Wilderness magazine, so I had this feeling that there were people out there. And then when I discovered Union and the idea that maybe I could study with these folks, and they could help me become better at the writing process, that was a real opening for me.

LVG: Is that when you decided that you could be the writer with the capital W?

FT: (laughing) Yes. Exactly. And one thing that got very interesting for me about that when I committed myself to that process I came to discover all kinds of things happening in the world around me that I hadn't noticed before. Like I felt like the stories of my life sort of thrust themselves before me whereas before I liked doing them but I didn't know exactly what I wanted to write about. But it was almost as if as soon as I was willing to engage in the process of both encountering the natural world more intensively and writing about it, brought these stories to my doorstep, and I still find myself wondering, was it synchronicity, was is that these things had always been happening but an inclination to write made me more aware, or was it something else. I don't know, but I'm still kind of fascinated by that. But all of the stories that I ended up writing about in my own PDE probably some of them happened in the 80s, but many of them, the greater number of them, happened right around 1990-91 and I want to tell you more about the process of writing them. But that's sort of the overview of how those thoughts occurred for me.

LVG: How does it play into the work that you do now as a writing teacher? Do you share a lot of your personal process with your learners?

FT: I do. I do. And I have a couple of things to say on that. One is that my own personal experience with the journal as kind of a laboratory form of writing discovery and I emphasize journaling a lot in all of my classes. In some classes we open with a freewriting and I hear in the second class, "That freewriting we did in the first class was incredible, let's do that every week!" So we do that now and I think some of the most exciting things that we've done in this class come out of that and sitting around in a circle with each other. One week wrote about Tara's bagel, and we went off and some people wrote on the smell and others went off in this direction or that direction…And those freewritings are very important, as well as journaling. I try to encourage the idea of writing right now and whatever is in the moment is fine….And all of these writing exercises are just ways of trying out new ways of getting into the writing process.

LVG: Where do you get your best moments? Is it with your students? Is it on your won own in the woods? I'm sure you're much more in touch with your personal process.

FT: Hmmm. Where do I?

LVG: For instance, I know my best writing environments. Kevin and I joke about this a lot because I need background noise and a cup of coffee, so I work in every coffeehouse in Oxford. Mercifully there are about 12 in town so I rotate through them. Certain ones I can do certain kinds of writing in, and others I can't. And I'm very aware of how much sunlight I need and why I can't work in a certain café in the afternoon because it's too dark. Those sorts of things. I can't work in complete silence. Kevin can't work with any background noise or music-

FT: I'm much more like Kevin in that regard. I thrive on solitude. Writing with a group in silence. By nature, though, I'm much more inclined to want to write by myself. My favorite might be sprawled on the couch with a fire in the fireplace on a cold winter's night. Or lying in bed with the sun streaming in a window. Or even better, on a cloudy morning where I know I can't go outside, and I pick up my journal.

LVG: Can you talk a little about your relationship with nature and writing because I know the two are very linked for you.

FT: They are. Nature, for me, is the place I go for discoveries about myself and the world. The writing process helps tell the story of those discoveries. So, it's very much tied to the notion of stories. Another way to put that is that I like to go out journeying and the excursion model of writing about nature is a bridge for me. Whether it's a walk in the woods or backpacking in the mountains, and so I like to go on these journeys, take note of what I see. Usually I don't write about it during the journey, although sometimes I do, but when I come home I try to remember what it is that was most exciting about that trip and write it down. And what happens for me then, as I begin to write about it, through freewriting and through journaling, what comes out are patterns or themes for me. Sometimes I'm aware of them and it is more of a fleshing them out but often they are things that I wasn't even aware of at the time. And I can give you an example of that from just quite recently. It's been such a beautiful fall and I've been out trying to get out... I've been able to get out practically every day for an hour or two. And one of the things I found myself doing was picking apples in an abandoned orchard right down the hill from our house. And this is a real bumper crop year for apples. So this orchard, with maybe thirty or forty trees was just loaded with apples. The apples, some of them were on the ground, some of them in the trees. So I just went nuts. I love to eat apples. I love apple pie. I love apple sauce. So I thought, this was great. I could pick apples. I could give them away to my friends. Charlene will make an apple pie. In the process of picking these apples, I started noticing all of what was going on in the orchard as a little ecosystem. There were deer droppings on the ground. Signs that deer had been coming and eating apples off the trees. Some of the apples on the ground had deer tooth marks in them. And I picked up one apple and discovered on the underside of it there was a kind of big chomp mark where about a dozen yellow jackets were just feasting , drunk with probably a little hard cider. And there were apples that had worms sticking out of them, crawling and wiggling their little tails, and I just started getting fascinated with all of the life that was living off of this decayed overripe fruit, including myself.

LVG: Were you among the drunk bees? (laughing)

FT: Right. So I went back and started writing about that, and the word gleaning just kind of occurred to me, the notion of people who go out into the fields and glean after the harvest. I discovered later that this was a medieval tradition among peasants, that they would go out and glean from the fields after the lord had harvested the primary crop of the year. And so I started to get fascinated, partially through the journaling that occurred after these forays into the orchard with the notion of gleaning. And philosophically, psychologically, what does it mean to be rummaging around in the aftermath of the harvest to find fruit. And one day when I was journaling about that, it sort of hit me that it was a particularly apt metaphor for one moving along in years. I don't thing of myself as old by any means yet, but having turned 50 I'm more aware of my past to a degree and the time of harvesting in my life. So this notion of gleaning has just captivated me. At first I was just going to write an essay about gleaning the fall, more images of harvesting and what that might be, but now I'm thinking that the idea of gleaning might pull together a whole collection of essays about harvesting things. I'm thinking that I want to do some etymological work on gleaning on how they've used it. I can sort of imagine Joe Meeker hunkering down with his Oxford English Dictionary and I will do the same thing. So the process for me is often an unfolding from a particular moment or experience which is kind of like peeling off the layers of the onion, take off one layer and say that's pretty exciting.

LVG: Was I right that you wrote about the salmon being very important to you? Could you talk a little about that?

FT: I would love to. With the salmon, the roots of the story go way back to my childhood. Part of the challenge about writing about the salmon was finding a way to go back and lay the foundation of the story of my family situation. Growing up in Seattle, having connections with the landscape there with connections that went way back to childhood, particularly in those essays, the most salient image for me was the salmon barbecue which was a real tradition for us. Something my dad took great pride in. So that image of childhood, family connectedness, community and solidarity, and the sacramental taking in of the life of another creature, which then became a really powerful image for me later on both in the essay and in my life.

So I started with some of those childhood associations as a background. The real beginning of the essay, though, begins with some really profound experiences I had with salmon happened in the early 80s when I was just beginning to think about nature and spiritual meaning for me. One of them was being on a family sailing trip with my sister and brother-in-law and I caught a salmon. I was the only person who had a line overboard who caught a salmon and I was extremely proud of it. It became a real image of family celebration and family togetherness. So then we had the salmon barbeque, only this time it was my salmon instead of one that my dad brought home from the grocery store. So that event was followed by one summer after that, I was hiking in the North Cascades and sitting by the stream late one afternoon near the cabin where we were staying, and I suddenly noticed that there were these shapes in the water and they were the salmon migrating upstream. I had heard about this. Read about it. I knew about it, but I had never seen it. And in that initial moment of seeing the salmon in the water was probably one of the most life transforming moments I've ever experienced. It was one of those things where the world was buzzing and my heart was throbbing, I was crying and just feeling overcome by the deep mystery of life process and their connection to it. And at that point, this in terms of the writing process it's important to say, that moment of connection held within it the seeds of all kinds of discovery that I was not aware of at the time. It took years to delve into it more deeply and unpack the experience. That happened in 1982 and I didn't really complete that essay until 1991.

It sort of sat in my journals for about five years, and I started working on it in '89 or '90. I have a folder now that I like to take out and show writing classes that is my salmon prewriting and it's probably an inch and a half thick.All of the journal attempts and freewrites I made in an attempt to understand that experience and figure out how to write that. And something that I noticed this morning as I was making notes and thinking about the sorts of experiences to talk to you about, and I'd never noticed this before, is the personal experience of family togetherness and the second one was one in which I felt totally alone, and when I came back to the cabin after the salmon to have dinner and tried to talk about it, I felt like a blubbering idiot. The experience was so much beyond what I thought I could share with people creatures that kind of launched me into this journey of finding my connection with animals even more intensely than my connection with people. And that became part of the journey of the essay, trying to understand what it is that happens to me when I try and go out into the wilderness. And how does my relationship with the wild change my relationship with people.

So the salmon essay really becomes a reflection on what is sacred in my life? What is the community that nourishes me? As well as, probably the major theme which runs through that essay, which is, where do I belong? Do I belong on the east coast or the west coast? Do I belong with people or with nature? Do I belong inside or outside? And of course the answer is all of the above.

But the process of wrestling with all of those questions comes across in the writing of the essay. I think that was something I really learned from Joe Meeker that was so powerful for me. That an essay is literally according to Montaigne the word "Essaie" in French which means to try. That the essay is an attempt to kind of make sense of something. So my own life process has really been influenced by the idea that when I'm writing about something I am trying, I am trying to make sense out of it which as the story comes into being is the process where I'm trying to figure out what it means. Not necessarily what it means but what it brings up for me.

LVG: I often talk about certain types of writing as a distillation process, and it's that dripping down and dripping down where I'm not actually sure what I'm making, but I'm brewing something.

FT: That's a great image for me. It's like the coffee percolating.

LVG: It's funny, when I asked Joe what writers have really shaped his vision. His first answer was Montaigne.

FT: I know. He really worked on getting me to read Montaigne.

LVG: I had expected Dante, or someone I know he's publicly spoken about, and it was an immediate response on his part - The Essays of Montaigne. I'll ask you the same question. What writers have been really influential to you?

FT: Probably the most influential for me, I would have to say, is Loren Eiseley. I think, well, a little aside about that is just after I finished the Union program, I was asked by John Elder to write an essay about Loren Eiseley for a project he was doing. It was a more scholarly thing about Eiseley's life and writing. I leaped at the opportunity because I loved to write about Eiseley. So part of my love for Eiseley is through that process. I think that part of it is that there is that sense in Eiseley's work that he is searching for meaning. The very idea of writing an essay is that he is trying to come together to say what it is all about. In some of these essays he starts with an experience and he ponders over these experiences and takes you on a journey in that he shares the journey that finally comes to an end. I love that. Then when I began researching him and reading his autobiography, and his thoughts on writing, I realized that he was very conscious of that process. In his autobiography he talks about creating the essay where the author takes an old experience, in his case it was usually scientific, and that the experience holds in a kind of concealed form, all kinds of different realizations and that the process of the essay is to unfold those particular things to the reader and to himself as well. I would say that he was the one who put me on the journey and the one who propels me forward today and who influences my writing currently would be Terry Tempest Williams.

LVG: Me, too.

FT: I think it illustrates a shift in my writing, because what I love about William's writing is her contact, passion, and her moment of encounter, and Eiseley's writing much more - some of his essays are very convoluted and cerebral. And my early writing was very much more that way. As John Elder said, " I can see why you like Eiseley and all of the similarities to your writing-" but in the last 10 years, particularly the last two or three years, I have found myself challenged and inspired by Terry, to really write much more passionately out of the moment and so much of my journaling now is focused on particularly intense moments of encounter without so much focus on what's the unfolding meaning of it or how does it fit into a larger story. I'm kind of stumped with that in a sense because the kinds of essays I was writing earlier fit quite naturally into a book. They all fell out to be about 10-15 pages and they're all sort of essays. Try. What I have now is much more than those bursts of awareness and bursts of experience and encounter, written in a much more sensuous and present tense. They haven't coalesced into a larger story. And I would like to be able to make them work just as bursts of awareness without the larger story, but I think what I would say is the nature of the story changes, that there is no story but the nature of the story is change. And so I don't know where that's going to go right now.

LVG: I think she's really exploded the boundaries of the genre.

FT: I think that's very true. I think that her crossing the boundaries has really inspired me to write from a much more present voice. Writing much more about what's happening to me and not worrying so much about where it's taking me. And also using language that is more supple and less reflective. I am by nature more of a reflective kind of guy so in many ways this is really kind of challenging and I'm scared. It's very exciting. …

LVG Joe had talked a lot about this historical moment of a switch from the comic tradition a year and a half ago with the Clinton sex scandals to the language of tragedy with Bush polarizing the country into good and evil…I was thinking about what responsibility to do you think writers and nature writers have to responding to world events. Terry Tempest William's latest collection Red begins with an introductory essay which reads "Place +People = Politics." She talks a lot about story and politics and place, which I thought was very interesting. It is a very pointed piece about the necessity of being political. I was thinking about how do writers deal with a post Sept 11 world, and what role do you as a nature writer see yourself. Is it part of your work? Is it not at all necessary or unnecessary to acknowledge? I was trying to figure how, if the world is in a tragic tradition at the moment, how do you get the comic tradition back?

FT: I don't have any clear answers, but you can distill. I had a very difficult time writing after that. And when I started writing about the apples in the orchard it was the first time I had really gone to my journal. I felt like I didn't want to write and didn't know what I should write. On some level I think I had some of that post-traumatic stress, and so a couple of things happened for me along this time. One was at the Vermont College colloquium for October, I planned a workshop with one on my colleagues up there and decided to focus on the creative process in response to September 11. What we do with it and how we find ways of expressing that. And that was the first breakthrough for me. That I actually made a picture, and wrote a poem, and began to sense that even though I wasn't sure I was ready to write about it, itself, it was very important to find out that there were ways of connecting to the whole creative process. And that was real powerful, and people just poured out incredible stuff. So this was part of this constant tension of my life where I ask, am I really a writer, or am I really a facilitator of other people's writing. And I think the answer is both. But I'm not always clear where the balance is. Doing that workshop was very powerful for me but then that was October 10.

So it really wasn't until I started writing about the apple orchard that it started pouring out again. One of the things I didn't say about that before was that as I was gleaning the fall of apples I realized I was gleaning the fall of the World Trade Center, the fall of our innocence. As I explored this notion of gleaning the fall, it was all in the back of my mind, but I don't really know where it's taken me.

In a broader answer to your question, what is our responsibility as writers, I'm by nature a pretty nonpolitical person. I'm much more of an introvert-thinker rather than an activist-doer, although I am drawn to the inner sub-culture of activism. The 1960s and marching in demonstrations and all of that. But it doesn't come nearly as naturally to me as writing or inner work does. So when something like this comes along, I get doubly stressed out over what's my role now?

I had a really powerful experience last night which is relevant to this. I went to hear Bill McKibben speak, and he was wonderful. One of my earliest political writing was in response to his book The End of Nature. It was kind of critique of his spiritual ethos. What was very exciting about last night was that I thought he had really changed…He was quite inspiring. One of the things that he said to us that spirals back to your question, he thinks that in the wake of September 11, in spite of these horrible things, we have the opportunities because of that, but it nevertheless needs to be said that we are in a different world now. The world is a different place. And in that different place is a possibility for transformation. Where it may not have been possible for us before that time. And as a writer, part of out job is to find ways of articulating what is that and what those possibilities are. He was framing this in terms of an American culture. Now because we are much more vulnerable, we are much more aware of our connections…He was really framing things in a moral context that was very powerful for me. And I felt like those are the kinds of questions that I do like to ask…

LVG: I didn't know until today that Ken Kesey had died. I had seen him give a reading a few years ago where he talked about having the courage to be creative and he talked about the courage to have voice. He spoke about people's intentions as to whether you are in it for the money or in it to make the world a better place. It had been a tremendously powerful experience. He was better than his writing. He was an inspiration because he talked about what mattered. I remember him talking about the courage to be hopeful.

FT: Wow.

LVG: I think a lot about Wallace Stegner and the language of the Geography of Hope. My last Road Scholars trip it was so much about what are we supposed to do and how are we supposed to keep on. And so I talked about the courage of hope with them. They said it is so difficult when you are surrounded by people who take the lazy route - in that it's easier to be knee-jerk patriotic angry than it is to be contemplative and questioning. When you were talking about apples, I was thinking that we had been in Melville's orchard, stealing apples -

FT: Aha!

LVG: One of the guys was joking about what happens when you've eaten from the tree of Melville! Do you have a better understanding of good and evil?

FT: I think the inner work of writing is reflection is a process of something that is difficult and takes courage, but that process of the writer entering into that process that both shapes and guards our vision of our culture. Maybe this is my way of solving this, that tending to our words and our way of thinking and feeling about things is the difficult route of shaping consciousness, and articulating where we are and where we need to be. It's a way of countering that knee-jerk patriotism we were talking about by exploring the intense perplexities of where we stand right now. I think a contemplative stance towards life does honor complexity and doesn't seem to easy an answer of resolution. So in that sense, the task of the writer is maybe one of the most important ways of responding to our situation right now…The writer, through the attention to language and to its seed and inner germ, helps us find our way through very difficult times.

LVG: I think so. See, you're carrying the battle standard and don't know it-

FT: That's interesting. Thinking about complex ways of contemplating life.

LVG: It's been interesting that most of the very creative people I know, their response to September 11 was very similar to your description. A good three week of full numbness where the only things they could do were physical. Coming out of that into some intense period of creativity on something alive again. One led into each other but there was that long painful empty space was followed by a rush of creativity somewhere in the middle of October. Almost everyone I've spoken to who work with words, have said the same thing. It's a much bigger pattern…

FT: I'd like to tell you a little more about the way I work with writing classes and writing workshops. I told you some initially of what I did in the early days, but didn't tell you much about what I do now. When I talk about working with writing groups now I like the metaphor of going off the trail in both nature and the writing process. What I like to do in various ways is help people in going beyond the boundaries of their preconceived notions and write in ways that explore a larger territory. So therefore things like prewriting are very important for me. But also the process of what I would call, finding nature's story.

You asked me how much nature influences my writing and that's exciting to think about. I ask for people in my classes to be looking for the story within the story. To be looking for what the experience of the landscape and how it relates or reflects something in their own lives. Sometimes that happens very easily for people, sometimes they get stuck. One of my favorite journal exercises is to ask people to go to a favorite place and to write from there. You know, " I look out my window at Cape Cod and I see…" and after they've done that for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, just stop and make a leap to something that comes to your mind, could be a memory, a feeling, an association with a person, whatever, just to jump from the physical description to see where that will lead you. People have come up with really remarkable and very vibrant pieces. I like to challenge people to look for those things. It doesn't always work, but it's often helpful. It's all in the process of exploring beyond what we already know and how do we go farther into our larger world to open up to the unexpected. I know I was fascinated with one of the pieces in your web site where you wrote about how hard it is to get people to write outside. I know, and I often don't write outside even though I take people on tours and expect them to. You want them to write in the land out there.

LVG: It was so depressing to me to find that no one wanted to write there. They wanted to nap. I think it was part of something bigger and I didn't appreciate the bigness of it. If we had gone back someplace else later and written, I bet the writing would have been wonderful.

FT: That's one thing that I have often discovered. It doesn't happen right on the spot, but if you give it a couple of hours to percolate. In one class we go on a lot of adventures. Maybe one or two journaling exercises in the field sometimes work for people and sometimes don't. But we always come back in and spend time on the last morning and in those writings they are ready to roll. I have gotten more courageous in the last couple of years about not being so apologetic about asking people to write on the spot. I used to think, "They'd much rather be lying in the sun" but lately, partially through discovering some exercises that I really like, that I've become more assertive in saying to people, "O.k, now let's take a half hour and I want you to settle down in a dune and put down whatever comes to your mind." And that is one way of engaging with the landscape but I do realize that the real discoveries aren't going to happen until they come home. But that activity might plant the seeds or get them going.

LVG: Planting seeds is a great image.

FT: Yes, yet it is. That's my philosophy of teaching writing in the outdoors.