Which Living Person Do You Most Admire?

Proust Questionnaire 5/35

I took my first creative writing class in my sophomore year of college. It was a fiction class (believe it or not, I have a fiction minor) and up until that point, writing had consisted of the 5-paragraph essay, of which I was gloriously, spectacularly terrible. I remember writing a massive 5-paragraph essay (which in hindsight was probably like 1,200 words — less than I normally write for The Hag) on Toni Morrison’s Beloved in high school. I recall with painful clarity how proud I was when I handed the stapled packet to my teacher, cover page and extensively cited bibliography thickening the body of work so that my 16-year-old self felt as though I was handing in a manuscript. My teacher passed it back to me a week later with a big fat “C” stamped on the cover page — the lowest grade I had ever received in English.

I stayed after class, tears running down my face, asking what I did wrong. He looked at me with a headshake that was either compassion or frustration (I’ll never know) and said, “Anja, you’re a fantastic writer. But you fundamentally do not understand how to write or cite a research paper.” I held it together the entire bus ride home, then in the quiet of my empty house let the wails and moans pour out of me. What could it possibly mean to be a good writer but get a C on a paper? After utterly bumbling through algebra and physics, writing papers seemed like the one thing I could do (which outside of novel writing was the only kind of writing I was aware of). And now even that was failing me.  

Which is roughly how I ended up in a college 101 fiction writing class. I needed to pack in a few more writing credits for my environmental studies degree and figured since I clearly couldn’t write anything else that perhaps I could write fiction — a practice that seemed much less stuffy than a research paper. 

It only took a few weeks before I was enamored with the course. By the end of the semester, I had a small stack of creative pieces (I’m hesitant to even call them stories, I’m sure they were pretty terrible) that I was excited by. I wanted to do more. At the end of the last class, the professor pulled me aside and asked what I was majoring in. I told her environmental studies, but I was actually feeling a little torn about that because I was enjoying this kind of writing so much.

“Check out a book called Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams and see what you think,” she suggested. “Maybe you could find a way to blend environmental studies and writing.”

I picked up the book from a local bookstore the next day, plunked down in a wooden booth in the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, and started reading. I’m completely sincere when I say I was hooked within the first few pages. First of all, Terry opens the memoir with Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese (which moved me immediately to tears and sent me on a lifelong love affair with Mary Oliver’s work). Secondly, I discovered within just the prologue that a person could write to heal themselves — a concept completely foreign to me. And within another chapter or two, I discovered that not only was it perfectly okay for a person to have big, deep feelings about the physical and metaphysical world, but you could also write about those big, deep feelings and potentially help others access that part of themselves too. All while talking about birds and the landscape and the environment.

Growing up in a household where feelings were absolutely not allowed, and an education system where the 5-paragraph essay reigned king, these flowy, lyrical pages of thought and emotion and connection to the natural world solidified a turning point in my life. I walked away from Refuge a different person with completely new goals for my future. I wanted nothing more than to dedicate my life to writing and living like this.  

In so many ways, that’s almost precisely what happened. When I finished the book a few days later, I sat down at my laptop to look up similar books. What else could I read like this? Who knew this kind of writing existed?! I discovered a list of the best environmental writing published by the University of Colorado Boulder’s environmental journalism program (something that doesn’t seem to exist anymore online) and saw that Refuge was on the list. I’d never heard of the school before, but recommending that book seemed like a good enough place to start. I printed it out and made it my goal over the next several years to read every single one of the fifty or so books on the list. 

It was actually this list that two years later led me to apply to CU’s environmental journalism Master’s program (almost completely on a whim — it was the only school I applied to) and what ultimately brought me out to Colorado. I guess I credit Terry Tempest Williams with how I got here.

At one point in undergrad, I wrote Terry a postcard, and she later wrote me back. I still have her postcard pinned to the fridge, reminding me I’m supposed to be here.

She came to town for a reading at the Boulder public library in 2016 and partway into the night, the fire alarm went off sending us all wandering out onto the lawn, including Terry. She stood in the wet grass, wrapped in a shawl, draped in turquoise jewelry, silver hair shifting in the breeze. No one approached her. I waited and waited and waited and finally, when it seemed like no one else would say anything, I took a huge gulp of air and walked over to her. 

“I don’t know if you remember,” I said, explaining the card I’d sent to her. “But I just wanted to say thank you for the postcard you wrote back to me. It meant a lot to me as a new writer.” 

“Oh yes,” she said with complete sincerity. “I remember you. It’s good to finally meet you.” Then the library doors opened and the fire alarm went silent and we all shuffled back in for the rest of her reading, throughout which I cried silent, happy tears.

To admire someone is such a strange endeavor. To declare a “most admired” is even stranger still. To name a person I’ve met only via her books and once in passing seems to me the strangest of all. 

Still, her words bring me back into my body, bring me back to the magic of the earth. Whenever I feel myself slipping into the doldrums of media and bad news, I flip through her work, turning to the most worn, most underlined pages, and find myself a passage or two to remind me there is still amazing beauty in this world. When my writing feels stale and stagnant, I turn to her work to revitalize me.    

In this way, she has unknowingly carried me all these years, and still carries me. I found myself flipping through the pages of Refuge just last night as I stalled out on an essay, looking for a morsel of inspiration, a reminder of why I do this. This is what I read:

How do we empathize with the Earth when so much is ravaging her? 

The heartbeats I felt in the womb—two heartbeats, at once, my mother’s and my own—are heartbeats of the land. All of life drums and beats, at once, sustaining a rhythm audible only to the spirit. I can drum my heartbeat back into the Earth, beating, hearts beating, my hands on the Earth—like a ruffed grouse on a log, beating, hearts beating—like a bittern in the marsh, beating, hearts beating. My hands on the Earth beating, hearts beating. I drum back my return.

This, published in 1991, more than 30 years ago, is enough to bring me back to the empty page and try again. 

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Next Week’s Question: What is your greatest extravagance?