Truth From Fiction
Are writers telling us the truth?
It’s been a strange (read: harrowing) couple of weeks for democracy. Here’s a short list of all the little bubbles of concern currently simmering in the back of my noggin:
Biden absolutely flubbed the first debate and pretty much confirmed he’s unfit to be president. Which is a real big bummer because that other guy is also not fit to be president. Is the democratic party going to pick a new candidate? Who the hell knows. Is Trump going to win this election? Probably.
The immunity decisions: The fact that a judge has already agreed to postpone sentencing for Trump for the 34 felonies he committed PRIOR to becoming president shows we’re in a time of pretty deep shit and unchecked political power.
Ending the Chevron Deference: After 40 years of entrusting expert federal agencies to make decisions about how to interpret vague legal language around their issues, federal judges will now make that call. And as a reminder: we don’t vote for federal judges, they are appointed…by whoever is in power. Seems………not great.
France is swinging to the Far Right
Conservatives are eyeing a rollback of marriage rights (and the Christians are even coming for hetero-no-fault-divorce — the straights aren’t even safe)
Meanwhile, I’m currently posted up at my family’s cabin in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania packing for a four-day, 130-mile paddle board trip down the Allegheny River followed by an additional week of PTO.
Adventure and time off in the midst of all of this chaos feels…troubling.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Camille T. Dungy’s perspective on the solitary nature writer, how “Such writing spends so much time in solitary meditative observation that the writers ignore nearly every human experience outside their own.” Particularly, I’ve been thinking about her perspective upon re-reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek in which she realized Dillard had excluded from her work the messiness/mundanity of being a housewife as well as the messiness of national politics, specifically the disquieting of the civil rights movement happening just moments away from her doorstep in rural Virginia.
Which really just means I’m thinking about obligation — what writers owe their readers, what artists owe the world.
My Favorite Book
I’ve brought a fresh copy of Pilgrim At Tinker Creek with me on this trip, one unmarked and uninfluenced by a younger self’s perspective. The intention was not to see what gaping holes Dillard left behind, but rather to be re-inspired. Pilgrim At Tinker Creek is my favorite book and has a magical way of sending me toward the page, pen in hand, ready to write. But now I am curious. What gaps should I be more scrupulous with? Did Dillard deliver on everything she “owed” us? Did she “owe” us anything at all?
I’ve expressed my frustrations before with white male nature writing. I too feel fairly annoyed and perhaps even a little bamboozled by what white men have omitted in their writing, specifically the humans they have omitted and even more specifically, the partners they have omitted who I only learned later (specifically in the case of Edward Abbey) were there with them the whole time. Perhaps it is my extreme tendency toward gullibility, but I never thought to question the honesty of what these writers put on the page versus what they chose NOT to put on the page. If a writer said he was alone and did not mention a wife, I assumed he was alone and had no wife. Which also led me to feel inadequate anytime my adventures DID include another human being, especially if they included my partner. I’ve held off on writing about so many experiences because the presence of another person made me feel somehow less authentic in the retelling of that story. If I wasn’t ALONE, did I really experience that thing as my true, authentic self? Were other writers really just cutting those people out of their stories?
What Is Truth?
More and more often, I am losing the thread on what it means to tell the truth and what it means to be absolutely authentic, especially when it comes to writing. The problem is that there are so many truths. Those truths have nuance. Can nuance ever be perfectly conveyed? Similarly, I’m never quite sure what to include in terms of world, or even national politics in regards to my experience of the natural world 1) because I am embarrassed by what I don’t know and have failed to educate myself on and 2) because I’m alternatively embarrassed that I allow something as “unnatural” as politics to seep into my “natural” experiences.
There are some truths in nonfiction that are easy to pinpoint. For example, if I wrote a story about this river trip and claimed to have paddled 300 miles down the Allegheny in a few days, said there were snow storms every night in the middle of July that we had to endure, and that we feasted on the quite obviously native river dolphins straight from the water each night, well, you could pretty easily call me out for lying. For disrupting truth. However, if all my facts were accurate, but I conveniently failed to mention that during these four days I had a friend with me on the adventure, would that be a lie?
I’m asking because I don’t know. I don’t know how much omission a writer is responsible for. I worry most though about the omissions I don’t know I’m committing. We can’t possibly write everything. We can’t possibly REMEMBER to write everything. But we still must find a way to be honest with our readers.
Women & The Environment
In college, I worked with a professor to design a course called “Women and the Environment.” It was basically a 1-credit course in which I forced my friends to read the books I loved. On the syllabus was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barabara Kingsolver, Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams, and Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (among several dozen shorter excerpts from other works). Dillard, I learned during that class, would NOT have been thrilled to have had her work included in a course with that title. She very much wanted her name to appear on her books as “A. Dillard” so as to be genderless and perhaps even assumed a man. She refused to let her writing be included in any women specific anthologies because she didn’t want to be known as a “woman writer.” She did not want to be saddled with that identity.
Dillard labored over how to bring Pilgrim into the world — a world that required wilderness, a man’s perspective, and solitude to succeed. “If I call it truth and leave out Richard [her husband] and this house, then not only do I lose the selling-points I think I need—but also I open myself to the charge of hating my husband,” she mused in her journal. “But I think I must. I switch around.”
But it’s also unclear just how much of Pilgrim literally happened. The opening scene — a paragraph I have memorized, I’ve read it so many times — of a cat leaving bloody paw prints over her body while she slept, was in fact a borrowed scene from someone else. In some ways the entire story was a rearrangement of various components of truth, chiseled specifically to mimic these isolated male writers (who, again, perhaps weren’t isolated as they appeared), and craft a narrator that wasn’t necessarily her, but wasn’t necessarily NOT her either.
Do we still call this nonfiction? Does it matter what we call it? What if NOTHING in the book actually “happened.” Would her words still be “true?”
Knowing this, Pilgrim is still my favorite book. But I also wish I could go back in time and offer this information to a younger, college-aged Anja who often felt disappointed when a cat did not leave bloody paw prints on her body in the night, gloriously representing death and mystery, beauty and sacrifice. I spent many, many years ashamed of my uninteresting life, worried that until I’d spent a season alone in the wilderness that I would never be capable of writing about nature in any sort of interesting way. I really thought these writers wrote exactly as they lived, because that’s how I wrote. And still write.
When You Next Hear From Me…
Using tomorrow’s trip as an example, an authentic, honest balance for me may look something like sharing this:
Because my day job’s mission is to protect federal lands, it’s not possible for me to stay out of politics. Whoever is in power and making decisions drastically affects my work. So I’m pretty invested in following the stories and outcomes around the presidential election.
But because this is my job, I’m burning out a little, and I need some rest and time away from this chaotic hellscape of politics.
However, the notion that I will be paddling down a protected stretch of river surrounded by National Forest (federally owned and managed) will not be lost on me and the Trump 2024 signs I know I will pass along the way will certainly cause me to internally boil over with rage at the lunacy of promoting an anti-public lands president while enjoying public lands.
I am not paddling this trip alone. My friend Phebe is joining me, flew into Pittsburgh with me, helped me plan this trip, and has been out at my camp with me all week as we prepare and knock out our final days of work. She’s also contributed financially to this trip which has helped considerably in making it possible.
I had to carefully plan this trip around my period because the cramps during the first 36 hours of my cycle are so debilitating, I didn’t think paddling would be possible. Being a person with a uterus is…fascinating.
It’s not lost on me that this trip is largely possible because of flood control from Kinzua Dam which was built on 10,000 acres of stolen land from nine Seneca Nation communities in the 1950s, displacing at least 600 people. The dams further downriver, past East Brady, PA (our pullout) will ultimately keep me from reaching Pittsburgh (a trip I dream of tackling in the future just to prove a point).
I am able to do a trip like this for many privileged reasons:
Generational wealth in the form of a family cabin where I can stay for free before and after the trip
Educational/career privilege in which I make enough money to afford to not only buy paddle boards, but also fly them across the country AND to be able to take the time off to do the trip in the first place
A whole slew of other privileges in the form of being white and able bodied that I’ve likely fully internalized and rarely consider anymore
There will be a full story from this trip, likely a short video as well. And I’ll do my best to tell it like it is. That being said, I will both over- and under-romanticize it. I will tell you it was the most beautiful thing I have ever done. I will tell you I thought of my childhood, my first high school boyfriend, but I may forget to tell you that I confuse all that with my current life and sometimes feel like I’ve lived a million little lives, with each life a truly a different me, called by the same name. It will both be true and mystery when I say I saw the tree with the lights in it. And no one but me will really know what I saw those days on the river. And even I may fabricate something in my own mind and tell it to you as fact. And that, perhaps, will be the closest to the truth we’ll ever get.
Man I love this piece