Interview Conducted by C J Brady

BRADY: Your most recent project, The Age of Deer, is centered around deer and their relationship to humans. I was wondering: as you were writing it, did you look to any comparable books about a specific type of animal to see if there was anything to emulate or avoid, or do you prefer to write without that kind of outside influence?

HOWSARE: I definitely can see an argument for trying to stay free of those influences, but that’s not the way I do it. I like to read anything I can get my hands on and have time for that’s related to the topic. There’s a great book, Heart and Blood, by Richard Nelson [also about deer]. It was published at least 20 years prior to my book, and I read that early on when I was kind of considering the idea. And in one way, it was kind of like, “oh, it’s been done”—It was very similar in some ways to what I wanted to do—but in other ways quite different, just coming from a really different perspective. He’s a wonderful writer. He’s a very specific type of deer hunter who lives in the Pacific Northwest, so when you’re reading it you feel like you’re in Alaska or you’re in Washington state, which are really different geographically from where I’m based. He covered some of the same things, but not all the same things that I wanted to look into. So it was a really nice model, but also it didn’t put me off of my project.

And I remember this from marketing discussions with the publisher: There are a lot of books out there that focus on one animal. There’s a book about beavers, the Montgomery book about the octopus [The Soul of an Octopus]. Some of those I read, but I didn’t necessarily feel like those were my most important inputs in the process. I think I was more inspired by books that look at natural history in a somewhat broader way.

[She’s looking over her bookshelves, and pulls one down.] This is one that I really love. The Others by Paul Shepard. He looks in a deep, anthropological/ecological way at what it means to be a human on the planet. “The Others” refers to animals, so, not just learning about ourselves, that’s kind of shallow compared to what he’s getting at, but in relating to animals and sharing the Earth with animals, what do we become? How does being human depend on the fact that we share the Earth with animals?

BRADY: Reading your book made me think about experiences I’ve had seeing deer, even in my apartment parking lot when I lived in the Mountain West, or outside a glass university classroom door. Can you think of any remarkable stories you’ve heard that someone told you about after reading your book?

HOWSARE: Well, “apartment parking lot” makes me think of somebody at the University of Virginia law school. When I went to speak to a class taught by a friend of mine at the law school there I invited people to tell their stories, and somebody had a story about walking down a sidewalk nearby. Right in Charlottesville, you know, it’s in town. There’s trees around, it’s not super urban, but it’s definitely in town. And a deer apparently ran right by them on the sidewalk and nearly ran them over–almost made contact. So that was an interesting one.

I’ve heard from people near where we live in Charlottesville that for a while in a certain neighborhood there was a white deer. A lot of people, of course, noticed the white deer and felt like they formed a relationship with this deer. Then at some point, the deer got hit by a car. So many people were sad about that. I’ve heard from people who have had fawns turn up right outside their back door. The mother deer secures the fawn in what she hopes is going to be a nice safe place during the day while she’s out and about and sometimes, surprisingly to us, they choose the bushes that are right under your window.

Recently, I had a guy come up to me when I was at an event, and he was eager to tell me about the fact that for him and his father, who really had nothing in common, deer gave him something to talk to his dad about in what sounded like an otherwise kind of unsatisfying relationship. (Relying on my first impression of this guy, I mean, he was at a book event. I think he was, like, a bookish guy, more of an intellectual type of guy, and his dad was a deer hunter, and I just got the sense that maybe his dad was more of a sort of traditionally masculine, man-of-few-words kind of person.) The son said, “We always had so much trouble connecting and talking, but we could talk about deer.” The son would just talk about deer sightings, and the dad would talk about deer hunts, but somehow it wasn’t a conflict, it was just, we’re both interested in this animal.

BRADY: I really enjoy the use of images in The Age of Deer, from the photos of ancient art and Buffalo Bill, all the way up to modern trophy photos. I also checked out your fascinating podcast miniseries If You See a Deer. What kind of value do you think there is in multimedia, and that kind of cross-genre work?

HOWSARE: In terms of the book, including images was a no-brainer because part of the point that I wanted to make was that deer imagery has been so important to humans for such a long time, literally back to the caves. I remember making some collages at the beginning of the process, just finding lots of different types of deer images. From the cave art to landscape paintings to corporate logos to pub signs from England–where there’s lots of White Hart pubs, so the signs tend to be pretty cool with an image of an antlered deer.  Putting those all together on one page, I’m excited about how this one image turns up in so many different contexts and carries so many different meanings.

Getting into podcasting–compared with books, it’s a medium that I’m so much less familiar with. I have listened to podcasts like everybody else at this point, but I haven’t been listening to thousands of podcasts my whole life, the way I have been reading books my whole life. It felt like an unexplored territory by comparison. My collaborator [Tyler J Carter] and I felt free to just make it up as we went, and it felt like there were fewer conventions that we were dealing with. We said to each other at the beginning: “Let’s think of this as an art project.” I have this sort of journalistic impulse from years of doing that kind of work, so I kept feeling myself doing a more straightforward thing. But then we would say, no, it’s an art project, so it’s okay if it’s weird, it’s okay if it has strange gaps in it that the listener can fill in however they want.

It was freeing to work in this audio medium, which was totally new to me. I think it carries some possibilities that books do not: just hearing voices, hearing ambient sound. We’re kind of living in the Golden Age of the podcast, so it’s a medium that people are really, really connecting with and fits in with the way people live. They can listen to things while they’re doing something else, and that’s important for the way people live now. so that was appealing to think that somebody could be driving or raking leaves or whatever, and also taking this in.

BRADY: Speaking of podcasts, I listened to your interview with another podcast, Biophilic Solutions, and you mentioned that you’d first written about deer in a poem during your MFA program. So, I was curious: how did you hang on to that idea? Do you have any advice on how to mine your past ideas for future projects?

HOWSARE: So that would have been around 20 years ago that I was writing that initial piece about deer. It certainly wasn’t a conscious decision, like “well, I wrote this kind of poetic thing, and I’m gonna hold on to it for more than a decade and visit it in some very different form.” But I remembered it for the same reason that it came up in the first place, which was just that truly deer had been an intriguing and maybe troubling subject for me since childhood. There was something about them that when I was in grad school and I was focused on poetry, made me think, hmm, there’s something there, and I wrote that one piece. And then again [for this book]. It’s not so much a conscious process of thinking, “how could I mine something I wrote a long time ago,” but more that I’m not done with that subject. It’s still around. It still feels like there’s a lot more to say about that.

Now that it’s been a couple decades since I finished my MFA, and I have more perspective on the writing life–which I don’t want to overstate, I’m definitely still trying to figure out the writing life–I feel less internal pressure to always come up with a new topic and a little bit more comfortable with the fact that most of us just have our topics. We have our obsessions, and we probably know what they are, even at the beginning of our careers as writers. If you think about it, you probably already know what you need to write about. I think it’s okay to come back to those things over and over again. I think a lot of great writers have done that.

I just finished this book by a writer named Kathryn Wilder, who is out west. The book that I read [The Last Cows] has to do with ranching, and that’s something she does: she’s always on her horse, rounding up cattle, and she’s in her 60s. She’s got a long history of ranching in her family. Her previous book has to do with wild horses, which are also present. She’s out in Colorado, and so, these wild Mustangs are a thing there, and she’s really interested in them, and you can see that she wrote and had success with this book about wild horses. And now she’s writing about ranching and cows, but she keeps talking about wild horses. I think that’s kind of how it is, maybe especially in non-fiction or personal writing, that your stuff just keeps coming up. So, maybe just give yourself that permission to return to those things.

BRADY: You mentioned that you worked mostly in poetry during your MFA days. What made you want to take that leap from poetry to non-fiction, or have you always written both? How do you feel that writing poetry has impacted your non-fiction or vice versa?

HOWSARE: Yeah, I was in the poetry track in my MFA program, but even at that point I was interested in non-fiction. The program I was in was very friendly to and encouraging of this blurring of the genre boundaries. Where does one become the other? What can we write that’s kind of got a foot in two worlds or more than two worlds? People were doing some wild projects that blended performance and poetry and visuals, and it was really cool to be in that atmosphere. I was quite interested in where the prose/poetry border is, and whether I can obliterate that somehow.

After grad school, what I found myself doing was working at a newspaper and writing very straightforward prose that was based on factual research and getting quotes. It was all about accuracy. So very different, but also, sometimes there was room to play with voice in those pieces, or to create some features that weren’t just straightforward news reporting. But they did feel separate for a long time, poetry and journalism.

At some point, Kate Schapira, who was a poet friend of mine from MFA days–she and I actually collaborated on a book of poetry [FILL: A Collection]–she published this great personal essay. Something about having such a good poetry friend writing this very wonderful essay opened up something in my mind, and I thought: Oh, I bet I could do that. I could see her using her poetry skills in this lyric essay project, so I got excited about that, and I started working on those kinds of things. I published a few of them. I feel like the deer book was a chance to combine all of this. I was doing a lot of reporting and a ton of research for this book, so that was the journalism thread, but I felt like my poetry background was at play also, in terms of being attentive to the language. A lot of my poetry feels to me like collaging; I’m often kind of taking things that are somewhat separate or discrete and trying to arrange them like a quilt or a collage and have something greater arise from that. I feel like that’s what my strategy was with this book, too. It’s many different stories and questions and histories and experiences, and I do feel like putting the book together was very much like making a collage.

BRADY: I was going to ask about that, because I noticed how your work often draws on research and can be as informative as it is creative. We have a couple of people in our MFA program who are transitioning from journalism to a slightly more creative side of things. You spoke a bit about how that has impacted your writing, but do you have any tips for people who maybe don’t have that journalism background for doing research in order to do creative writing?

HOWSARE: Well, I’ll tell you some of how I tackled it with this book. One of the first things I did was to set up some Google news alerts on deer and a couple of other related terms. That was great, because right away, you start getting an email every day with this list of news stories that are very current, and it gives you this snapshot of what’s going on out there right now with deer. How are deer showing up in the world right now? And it happened to be fall when I did that, which was the perfect time because there’s always more going on with deer in the fall. It’s Hunting season. It’s rut time. They’re running off in front of cars more. So I was like, wow, there’s a lot going on. I could see the sort of categories of things that were going on, and that was an early version of how I organized the book. The deer are playing this role, and this role, and this role. Those are the buckets, and I can collect stories and put them in these buckets. For example, we see deer as victims. Okay, here’s the list of like 100 different news stories that show how that plays out in real time. That was super helpful, and it works if you’re writing about something that is going to be currently unfolding. If you were just researching a historical thing, maybe that wouldn’t work.

Also, as I said at the beginning of the [interview], I started reading everything I could get my hands on–about deer, but also about the idea of wilderness, and the natural history of North America, and animals that are considered to be pests. I was combing through anthologies of poetry and combing through art history books looking for deer. Just anything; any avenue I could think of I was trying. It was a very maximalist approach. I didn’t really do any archival research. That’s not something I’m experienced with. I think it would be cool to learn more about how you do that: taking advantage of library archives and Special Collections and things like that.

Watch the movies, too. I watched The Deer Hunter, classic movie, which I don’t think was mentioned in the book ultimately, but things like that, even if they don’t make it into the final product… it’s just part of the compost, you’re just processing and composting a lot of stuff, and it becomes a rich soil to write from.

BRADY: Maybe moving on from deer a little bit; I read and enjoyed your poem “The Breaker Boy,” and I was impressed with the way you drew on your family history. I was curious—how did you come to know that family history, and how might other writers draw on their own family history?

HOWSARE: Oh, you read a lot of stuff.

BRADY: I went deep!

HOWSARE: That particular part of my family history is just something that my mom had mentioned to me: “Well, you know, your great-grandfather was a breaker boy in the coal mines.” She briefly explained what that meant, and then that was it. I mean, my family is not necessarily the type to deliberately pass on a ton of information, you know? If you want to know, you have to ask and dig a little. I decided to look up, well, what does that mean to be a breaker boy? In no time at all I had these horrific facts about what that meant coming in front of me, and I couldn’t believe that somebody in my family went through this. It just was stunning to me, thinking about how that was his life, and I am just three generations later. How utterly different has my life been than that? And then thinking about how fossil fuels are–we don’t have child labor in the coal mines anymore, but we’re still extracting fossil fuels, and it’s still impacting people and their bodies.

I have a manuscript of poetry all about coal that hasn’t been published. Coal is another thing like deer that goes back to my childhood. It’s this thing that fascinates me. There’s something there, you know, so maybe someday I’ll publish something about coal.

So, trying to think of advice on all of this. You don’t necessarily have to know a lot about your family history, but find one little thing, and maybe you can supplement that with research and figure out what it is about that one little family fact that is important to you.

BRADY: Almost like a touchstone. I love that.

HOWSARE: Yeah, it’s like a little node or a hotspot, you know. It’s sensitive. What else can you add to that? If people do have a lot of knowledge about their family, because some do, that’s even better. But maybe you don’t necessarily have to have all of that.

BRADY: What’s the last book you read that made you excited to write?

HOWSARE: Hmm. Well, I mentioned the Kathryn Wilder book, which is called The Last Cows, that one was inspiring in the sense that it’s very immersive. It pulls me in, and I’m in this beautiful world out west, right next to this woman, even though I don’t ride horses. I don’t have any of the skills that would be required, but I liked virtually coming along with her. And there’s an ease to the prose that’s very seductive. It’s like she’s rolling around in her material; she’s like a horse rolling on its back, just reveling in it. There’s something really, really cool about that, not approaching it in a very cerebral way, but very sensual and heart-centered. There was an openness and an ease to it.

Also, a friend loaned me this book called The Work of Art by Adam Moss, who’s a kind of big time magazine editor, and he set out to interview a few dozen different creative people about their process. They’re writers, they’re artists. Even a master sandcastle builder. There are all kinds of creative people, and he gets them to share artifacts of their process: sketches and notebook pages and emails, the stuff that accumulates when you’re making something that isn’t part of the final thing, but that shows some of the steps you went through. He also had really good conversations with them. So that also felt inspiring, to see “oh, their notebook pages look as dumb as mine.” And that’s okay, because that’s not the ultimate product, but it’s a step you take to get there. It was comforting and motivating.

BRADY: I know that The Age of Deer came out pretty recently, but if you’d like to share, do you have any projects that you’re just starting to work on?

HOWSARE: I’m trying to figure out what the next project will be. I know it’ll more or less sit on the same shelf with The Age of Deer. I don’t like the word “nature”, and I don’t like the word “environment” either, but that’s the name of the category that I’m in, so that’s fine. I am interested in–well, one of the things that happened with writing The Age of Deer was that I kind of experienced a deeper level of communion and connection with the Earth and the land through some of the experiences I had in that writing process. I’m thinking a lot about what gets us to a place where we can have that connection, even if we are living in a city and living a highly technological way of life. By default, we’re usually indoors, you know. So how can we get outside more?

BRADY: Did you ever watch season two of Planet Earth? They have an episode called Cities, which is about the animals that live in the urban environment. I thought that was so interesting, because we usually delineate [wildlife and cities] so much, but there’s certain animals it features, like pigeons and catfish, that have actually exploded in cities. So very fascinating stuff.

HOWSARE: You know, one of my preoccupations is, what is this “wilderness” idea that we have? How does that shape our thinking about so many other things, when we believe there’s this pure place somewhere that’s free of human influence? I don’t really think that exists anymore, if it ever did, but we still believe it’s out there. It kind of shapes our thinking–you might say it warps our thinking in a lot of different directions. There’s so much more wildlife all around us that we don’t seem to notice.

BRADY: I’m so curious—what do you dislike about the words “nature” and “environment”? Is it just part of the difficulty of being categorized?

HOWSARE: When I say that, I’m not so much talking about how my book is filed, but the terms themselves. It’s part of what we were just talking about: “Oh, there’s something called nature, and it’s over here on the Shelf.” Everything else in the store is not about that, right? The way people say, “oh, I’ve gotta get out in nature more.” On one hand, that’s a really valid feeling. I sympathize with that very much–you would like to be near some trees or some water, you know? Right on. But also, almost no matter where you are, even if you’re in Manhattan, you are in nature. You are surrounded by birds, insects. Rats. You might not like them, but they’re there.