Some stories I grew up with: my father in his rowboat coming upon Greta Garbo swimming in the buff; my great grandmother wishing her enemy would drop dead, and his doing so, right then and there.
Tensions I grew up with: the toxic divide between town and gown, and summer people and winter people—rarely spoken of, never obviously violent, but not without pervasive cruelty. And alcohol. Lots of alcohol.
As a writer I begin with the personal and move quickly to the fictional. The personal is only a seed. Not even a seed, because a seed contains its entire DNA code, whereas the snapshot that twists into a plot, or the observation that sprouts into a person, becomes something entirely different from its source.
It’s a common instruction to a writer: begin with what you know. Interestingly, however, you don’t always know what you know. Amos began as a “bit part”: the handyman. As soon as I started to write him, he stood up and took over the novel. I never knew anyone quite like Amos, but he made himself known to me. Perhaps I wrote him because I, like Aubrey, needed him.
When Amos meets Kona, who is Cree, the world view behind the novel becomes more fully fleshed out. When I became part of a Navajo family, my world view changed forever.
When I was twenty-two, I left the privileged suburb in which I had been raised, and I hitchhiked around the U.S.A., a young woman alone on the superhighways, proving to herself that people aren’t as awful as they appear on the evening news. It might sound reckless, but it was, for me, necessary. And yes, there was one very terrifying ride. But I took hundreds of rides. And generally, the hospitality of strangers was nothing short of gracious.
Then I was picked up by a Navajo woman. It was a ride that affected the rest of my life. I was taken into a Navajo family some fifty miles north of Winslow, Arizona. (The reservation is almost the size of England, and outside of the newer concrete-built villages, there was no running water, no electricity and no sewage system.) I learned to weave and tend sheep. I learned a smattering of Navajo and attempted to learn to make sand paintings. Though I did not master the language, and made one embarrassing mistake after another at every “sing” and ceremony I was honoured to take part in, I learned from my Navajo family and friends another way of seeing.
Readers often comment on my writing about nature. Or, more generally, my “settings.” Whether it’s a cottage or a wood, I will write the location as living—not anthropomorphic, yet a character in its own right. I have the Navajo to thank for that. I learned from them a vibrant reciprocity between a person and her environment. To me, environment is not a backdrop. It is not a mere setting. It’s the living field in which the person arises, and a character cannot meaningfully arise without it. Person and place are equally alive, and both exist as storytelling. It is said, not just by the Navajo, but by many native tribes, that your wealth is not in your bank account, but in the stories you hold.
I think of stories as “relationships unfolding.” For better or for worse. Beautifully or violently or both. Amos knows this. He knows it more deeply once he meets Kona. And Aubrey, trying to hold the changing, living, confusing and terrifying world in the lens of his little camera, has to learn it.