Letters from the Divide
September/October 2008

Art and the Physical World

Pam Houston explains what writing and the outdoors have to do with each other.

Nearly two decades ago, when I started publishing my short stories about guiding Dall sheep hunts in Alaska and flipping in Wolf Creek Rapids during the hundred-year flood on the Selway, I was often asked, “How in the world do you balance all that time spent in the outdoors against your writing life?” The assumption back in those days was that all writers chain-smoked and lived in New York City and their idea of going outside meant the distance between the cab and the restaurant door. The flipside of that assumption was that given the fact that I was a horsewoman and a licensed whitewater river and hunting guide, that I had backpacked on several continents and had ridden my bicycle from Newfoundland to Vancouver, I most likely couldn’t understand the first thing about the making of serious art.

My early answers to that question bought into the stereotypes that gave birth to it. It was just two sides of my personality, I said, the yin and the yang of me. All that time strengthening and relying on my body in the wilderness made it possible to come home and sit in a chair for long hours and do the kind of living in my head that writing requires. And after a week in my head, nothing felt better than a plunge in the cold clear ocean or the view from a 13,000-foot peak. After a while I began to understand that like any yin and yang, the two things had way more to do with each other than was at first apparent.

On the simplest level, the things I was experiencing in the outdoors more often than not became the stuff of my stories: the boulders, the rapids, the mule deer, the bears. So often everything happens very fast in the wilderness; when I revisited those places with language, I could slow down enough to get a much better sense of where I had been.

In the beginning writing was less like writing and more like puking. I didn’t know why I did it, I couldn’t control it, but I felt a whole lot better after I was done. Later I came to understand that I write not only to bring to light whatever ugly things still live inside me but also to honor the impossible beauty of the physical world. Now I see that the better I become at describing the things that move me on the outside—a moonrise over Provincetown harbor or the sight of my paso fino pacing through 3 feet of freshly fallen snow—the more likely I am to get at what is on the inside: my deep love of the world, my terror at having (one day) to leave it, my fear that I have not been good enough to earn my place here, the joy that breaks through all of that when the sun comes up outside my window over a meadow full of dew.

Lately, I have begun to understand that wild landscapes often suggest a structure for my work. What better way to learn about how to manage time in a novel than by admiring a rock cut that represents 10 million years? What better way to think about the layering necessary in a short story than to study a pinecone or a daisy or a sheet of translucent mica schist? I was a double major—geology and creative writing—and I can see now that that combination was no accident. Sun breaking through fog could teach me about the story under the story. A hummingbird could teach me how to move a narrative forward even as it seemed to stand still. Watching a tribe of wild dogs for a day in the Botswana bush taught me everything I needed to know about fortitude and community. Witnessing a sky burial on a mountaintop in Tibet made me feel two things every writer needs to feel if she is to take herself seriously: the ever-present end of life tapping on her shoulder and the possibility that in the aftermath she might somehow be taken into the sky.

These days my outdoor life and my writing life are so bound up I sometimes can’t tell the difference between walking and writing, between running a rapid and relating a passage of dialogue, between skiing a chute and sticking the landing of a short story. It generates the same kind of adrenaline inside me, and it gives way to the same kind of satisfaction when I am done.

Maybe what I am trying to say is that for me writing in response to a powerful experience in the natural world is as logical as breathing and eating and then some. It is a way to love the same river twice. Nothing you or I ever write about the first snow on San Luis Peak or the place on the northernmost tip of the north island of New Zealand where the Indian Ocean meets the Pacific will ever approach the magnificence of San Luis Peak or the magnitude of the waves that crash where the oceans collide, but we might write something that will be wonderful in a completely different way.

So, next time you go backpacking, take a little book to write in; let your mind go quiet and take in what you see around you. Use all your senses. Be inventive with language and specific with detail. Don’t be afraid to sound like yourself. “A writer should strive to be a person on whom nothing is lost,” Henry James said, and he had probably never even been trekking. You might be surprised to learn how deep and broad your experience was out there in the wilderness when you take time to sit down and find the words for it. You might be even more surprised by what trying to describe the wilderness might teach you about yourself.