Rural Lit R.AL.L.Y.
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Interview with PAGE LAMBERT
August 22, 2011
RLR: Did you take inspiration for your writing from early authors in the genre (for example, Martha Ostenso, Lois Hudson, Herbert Krause, Willa Cather)?
PL: The books that most engage me have always been books where the natural world comes alive as both character and setting. At an early age I gravitated toward stories set in rural areas, or in the wilderness, or in pre-industrial times, but not necessarily in ruralAmerica. Stories like Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth; Jack London’s White Fang; Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; or closer to home, A.B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky and Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller. I loved these stories because they romanced me with fiercely loyal animals and coming-of-age adventures, with jagged mountains and endless grasslands that stretched beyond the imagination, with intimate meadows and meandering creeks that fit inside the nooks and crannies of the heart—settings where the struggles of humans and animals and place unfolded simultaneously, andorganically. These were responsive landscapes.
It wasn’t until much later, when I was actually living on and with the land—raising my son and daughter, watching cows raise calves, and sheep raise lambs, watching whitetail deer struggle through deep winter snows, finding their spring fawns curled in patches of buffalograss, that I began reading nature-based literature like Paul Shepherd’s 1985 book The Sacred Paw, or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or James Galvin’s The Meadow, and began to understand place-based literature as a “genre.”
RLR: Who is your personal favorite rural author, and for what one reason do you value their work?
PL: Two books, written by women who have since become cherished friends, were the first narrative nonfiction books that awoke me to the fact that I, too, had a rural story to tell: Riding the White Horse Home by Teresa Jordan (Vintage, 1994), and Land Circle by Linda Hasselstrom (Fulcrum, 1991). “I wasn’t born on the land;” writes Linda, “I was reborn here when I moved from a small city to a ranch at the age of nine. I was adopted by the land.” Teresa, on the other hand, writes about four family generations rooted to the land. “As a child,” she writes in her opening chapter, “I used to walk the blue hogback ridges near my family’s ranch in the IronMountain country of southeastern Wyoming with my great-grandmother, looking for fossils and arrowheads.” Then I read Terry Tempest William’s memoir Refuge and began to understand how critical these intimate stories by western women were, are, to our nation’s consciousness.
RLR: What inspires your current works most?
PL: I am still inspired by these women, by the stories in Teresa’s collection The Stories that Shape Us (Norton, 1995), and the three collections of stories by rural western women that Linda Hasselstrom went on to co-edit with Nancy Curtis and Gaydell Collier (Leaning into the Wind, Woven on the Wind, and Crazy Woman Creek, Houghton Mifflin, 1997, 2001, 2004). But I have to say that the story that has inspired me most recently, that still lives inside my gut, is the 2001 short story “Everything in this Country Must” by Colum McCann. Here’s the opening line: “A summer flood came and our draft horse got caught in the river.” The story is set in rural Ireland, not America. But when I think of this story, of the young farm girl and her father, and of the horse that carries the weight of a warring country on his broad shoulders, I am breathless—even now.
RLR: What do you see as the value that rural-based literature can offer to society as it is today?
PL: Not all rural literature is rooted in the land, but how people and animals move within a physical landscape shapes many of these stories. And I believe that our relationship to the land, and to animals—wild and domestic—shapes our spirituality. As our culture moves further away from an intimate knowledge of a specific place, we move further away from our own sense of connection to the organic world of which we are a part. I believe we also lose our moral compass. That’s why I am in awe of Colum McCann’s short story—because in a few short pages, a grieving husband and father faces one of the most difficult questions a human being can face: Will I let the rest of my life be ruled by hate, or by forgiveness?
I mentioned “the nation’s consciousness” earlier. I do not want our culture to lose this important part of our identity—this inborn understanding of working and living on the land, of letting nature anchor us to this moral compass. Books such as Mark Spragg’s Where Rivers Change Direction, or his novel An Unfinished Life (Vintage, 2004), or Rilla Askew’s novel Harpsong (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007),about a harmonica-playing troubadour with deep Cherokee roots, or Debra Earling’s powerful novel Perma Red (Blue Hen Press, 2002), set on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana—these books offer society a rich, multi-layered look at who we are beyond the borders of our cities.
RLR: What one suggestion would you offer that would help preserve and promote rural literature for future generations?
PL: Good literature tells stories that resonate with the human heart, whether the characters are rural or urban. Genre is limiting. Universal themes are not. Let these universal themes be the things we talk about when we talk about stories or poems with rural settings, like Paul Zarzyski’s poem “The Day the War Began” (from Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat, Carmel Publishing, 2004). Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth is a classic because it is a story with deep humanity. Perhaps this slightly abridged excerpt is a good place to end, for it helps us to realize that rural literature is not unique to our country; it belongs to the world.
The sun beat down upon Wang Lung and his new wife, O-lan, for it was early summer. Moving together in perfect rhythm… turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods. The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes…[Wang Lung] looked at the woman. Her face was wet and streaked with earth. She was as brown as the very soil itself…Then in her usual plain way she said in the silent evening air, ‘I am with child.’
Author Bio
Author Page Lambert has presented over a 200 seminars in the U.S. and British Columbia, speaking on diverse topics from writing to rediscovering core passions. For fourteen years, she has been leading custom “Create Yourself Anew” retreats and outdoor adventures, often working in partnership with such organizations as the Women’s Wilderness Institute, the Grand Canyon Field Institute, and the Aspen Writer’s Foundation. In 2006, her River Writing Journeys for Women were hailed by Oprah's O Magazine as “One of six great all-girl getaways of the year.” Her 2012 offerings include a 5-day “Literature & Landscape of the Horse” retreat; a 5-day ”RiverWriting & StoneSinging” trip in Westwater Canyon in Utah; and a 12-day Peruvian adventure “Weaving Words & Women” (Sacred Valley, Patacancha, Cusco, and Macchu Pichu, October).
Recipient of a 2011 and 2008 Colorado Authors’ League Writers Grant, 2009 Orlando Nonfiction Award from AROHO, and two Literary Fellowships from the Wyoming Arts Council, Page is the author of the memoir In Search of Kinship (Fulcrum Publishing), hailed by the Rocky Mountain News as “one of the summer’s hottest reads.” Also the author of the novel Shifting Stars (Forge/St. Martins, a Mountains and Plains Book Award finalist), her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Writer magazine; The Christian Science Monitor; Parabola: Magazine of Myth and Tradition; Deep West; Homeland (winner Colorado Book Award for Best Anthology); Sojourns: Journal of the Peaks, Plateaus, and Canyons Association; Writing Down the River (winner Willa Cather Award); Ranching West of the 100th Meridian; Heart Shots: Women Write about Hunting; The Stories that Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about the West; Santa Fe Literary Review; The Denver Post; and elsewhere.
“Page is a horse whisperer for writers,” said Leigh Haber, editor of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, after a private retreat with Page. A founding member of Women Writing the West, Page is also a Senior Associate with the Children and Nature Network; Creative Consultant for the Clear Creek Land Conservancy, board member for the Vore Buffalo Jump Foundation, founding member of the Northeastern Chapter of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, past board member of Colorado Authors League, and member of numerous national writing organizations.
Page writes from the mountains west of Denver. More at , including a link to her blog All Things Natural. All Things Literary.
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