The Power of Language to Promote Change

An Interview with Rick Bass

Renée J. Vaillancourt

Rick Bass is the author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including a novel, Where the Sea Used to Be, and most recently, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had. He is a volunteer board member of the Montana Wilderness Association, the Yaak Valley Forest Council, Round River Conservation Studies, and Cabinet Resources Group. Increasingly, he has used his writing to encourage environmental sustainability through the creation of books and anthologies whose proceeds are donated to grass-roots community organizations and also by writing stories and essays that inspire readers to political action.

PL: Librarians use the slogan “libraries change lives.” In my own experience, it has been specifically books (many of them borrowed from libraries) that have changed my life. In my first editorial for Public Libraries I mentioned that the portrayal of Western Montana in your books (especially Winter: Notes from Montana) was one of the things that enticed me to move to this area. David Nicholson of the Washington Post echoes this sentiment in a review of your novel, Where the Sea Used to Be, in which he states, “Sometimes, reading this book, I wished I could step into its pages and physically inhabit the world Rick Bass creates.” Many of your essays and stories take place in wilderness areas, which you have been very active in trying to protect from logging and development. How do you feel about the fact that some people, after reading your books, are drawn to visit or move to the very places that you are trying to protect?

RB: I would love to be selfishly silent about the blessings and beauty of our last public wildlands—our designated wildernesses and, perhaps more importantly, our last unprotected roadless lands—but such silence, sometimes from timidity or oppression, other times personal secrecy, has not served the unprotected wilderness well in the past and has, in fact, been complicit with the unregulated or poorly restrained liquidation of the public’s natural resources in these farthest, most unknown reaches, such as the Kootenai National Forest, and the Yaak, in Montana, and the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho.

With respect to the Yaak, to my knowledge, during my fourteen years of residency, only one couple has ever moved up here as a result of my having written about the place and the need to protect the Yaak’s last little gardens of unprotected roadless lands (we have fourteen such roadless cores left in the entire million acres that lie north of the Kootenai River). And that couple has since moved away. Far more injurious, from a perspective of development, is the general hungry swell of outlying towns and communities, who, in the affluence of the times, are purchasing five-acre tracts from the cut-and-run timber companies in the area who, having liquidated their assets—trees—have now placed their lands into real estate subdivisions (while still paying lower ag-land taxes).

Even from a regional perspective, the immigrant influx “booms” and is selective to neither liberal nor conservative, Republican nor Democrat. I think the best any of us can hope for as advocates is to help provide options, alternative ways of thinking, for these newcomers: to provide them with stories and models that take into account a resident’s responsibilities, as well as one’s much-proclaimed “rights.”

PL: Several of your recent works have taken on a decidedly political tone. In fact, you’ve written books whose purpose is to raise awareness of endangered species (The Lost Grizzlies and the Ninemile Wolves) or to protect the natural environment (The Book of Yaak). Do you feel that there is a difference in the writing process (or in the end result) when you are writing a book that is designed to inspire political action than when you are writing strictly personal essays or fiction?

RB: Absolutely. Often—not always—it’s like the difference between work and play. Very often, in advocacy-based nonfiction, the writer knows right from the very beginning what he or she wants—knows the most damning thing of all, the story’s end—and complicating this trap of advocacy-based nonfiction (or fiction) is the implicit position, right from the start, that the writer is asking something of the reader, seeking to take in that regard rather than to give. Both are necessary, I think, for fullness and diversity in a country’s or a culture’s literature, but the gulf between the two is usually immense.

PL: In the town of Yaak there is a general store, a laundromat, and two bars. But (as far as I know) there is no church and (perhaps more importantly) no public library. How far is the closest public library from your home? Do you and your children use the public library?

RB: There are churches in the Yaak, and a community center, and various annual seasonal festivals, as well as two wonderful rural schools. The schools are connected through the Internet to an excellent county interlibrary loan program. But as with all tiny rural schools, budgets remain problematic. Any extra books (or other resources) your readers might no longer have need for (grades K–8 and young adult) would be welcomed. [Donations can be sent c/o Yaak Valley Forest Council, 918 Idaho PMB #220, Libby, MT 59923.]

PL: What about your own reading habits? In your most recent book about your hunting dog, Colter, you refer to yourself as being “fully hostage to a life of reading.” What kinds of books do you like to read? What have you particularly enjoyed reading recently?

RB: I love to read novels and poetry. I don’t get to read nearly enough—a few pages each evening—and am habitually and continuously swamped with the reading of galleys and unpublished manuscripts. Two great books I’ve read in the first half of this year are an extraordinary novel, a first novel, The Lake, by Daniel Villasenor, and an amazing memoir by a man named simply Nasdijj—The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams. I enjoyed Larry Brown’s novel Fay, Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, Terry Tempest William’s Leap, and a first collection of novellas by Roy Parvin, In the Snow Forest. Additionally, I’ll always read anything by Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, and I haven’t finished Wallace Stegner’s amazing oeuvre.

PL: When you spoke in conjunction with the Montana Library Association conference in Billings in April 2000, you mentioned that you were inspired to begin writing after reading Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall. Are there other authors who have influenced your writing this strongly?

RB: There have been countless influences. I believe firmly that everything a writer reads influences him or her deeply, whether the writing is good, bad, or indifferent. Certainly the Southern writers—Welty, Faulkner, O’Conner, Hannah, Penn Warren—influenced me, as have R. G. Vliet and John Graves of Texas, the Western writers, the nature writers, the nineteenth-century Russians, Raymond Carver . . .

PL: It is my impression that one of the pleasures of reading is voyeurism—having the opportunity to experience a life that is other than your own. This may account for many readers’ appetites for personal details about their favorite authors. You refer to your “writing cabin” in Colter. Would you mind sharing your writing habits with the readers of Public Libraries (i.e., Do you always write in your cabin? When you write about outdoor experiences, do you take notes during the activities or do you describe your experiences from memory afterward? Do you write at the same time every day? Do you work on more than one project at a time?)?

RB: I think you’re right about this. And it occurs to me how acutely specific are the details of anyone’s life—how nontransferable. Even in my best efforts, for example, to describe the flavor and texture of a day spent in my writing cabin—the steady streaming song of Townsend’s warblers right outside the window, the vision of summer-bronzed marsh grass bending and waving in the wind, the creak of the tin roof stretching in the sun, and the odor of last winter’s cold ashes in the woodstove beside me—I cannot capture exactly, or perhaps even closely, the wonderful taste and feel of being submerged deep in work, wrestling with a scene or theme or plot.

With time increasingly at a premium, due to time I’d rather be spending on family—my daughters are eight and five—I can write now on planes, in hotels, wherever necessary, to try to keep focus and momentum alive in a project. But always I like best working at home, staring out at the changing days of the marsh.

When I write of outdoor experiences, I do prefer to work from notes, now more than ever. And it seems that often when I can get out and walk, the physical exertion helps stimulate me to write—and to make connections and to imagine. I do try to write at the same time every day—the first thing each day, before the realities of the world intrude upon the land of the imagination. I generally work for four hours in the morning and early afternoon on fiction, then again in the evening for a couple of hours on nonfiction, with time in between spent with family, just hanging out and doing chores. In the autumn, I hunt and adjust my schedule to write as I can—arising at 3 a.m. many mornings, particularly cold ones, to work before daylight and before anyone is awake.

PL: Most of your books have a very strong sense of place and characters (whether real or imagined) who seem to be molded to their locales. Many of your fictional works also take place in places where you’ve lived (such as Montana and Texas) and address subjects that you’re very familiar with (such as oil and the environment). Do you tend to base your fictional characters on people you actually know?

RB: I used to base my fictional characters loosely upon characteristics of people I had observed or known or heard about. Increasingly, however, they seem to me more than ever to be creations of imagination and possibility. I’m not sure why that is.

PL: Although you’ve chosen to live in a remote area, I gather (from your accounts in Colter as well as from my own attempts to track you down for an interview) that you travel quite a bit. Does your lifestyle and status as a writer set you apart from your neighbors in the Yaak Valley? How do they respond to your books about the fairly secluded place in which they’ve chosen to live?

RB: Not really. I’d like to think they respect how hard I work and how hard it is to make a living as a writer, now more than ever. Everybody up here has a bit of a beef with greater society, and crowds—we each possess our own specific idiosyncrasies—and we all just kind of fit together to make the puzzle pieces of the whole that is our community. I don’t profess to speak for anyone other than myself, even when I know many of my environmental positions are echoed by many of my neighbors. I’ve worked as an activist to keep local jobs in the woods intact, and to promote the creation of more jobs (for locals only). I try to respect, in print and in person, my neighbors’ privacies.

There are hundreds of other lifestyles and professions more intrusive of solitude—more aggressive commercial venues—and I think everyone realizes, with maturity, the complicity we all share through our residency and our lives in occupying any special place such as this one, and that we are learning to work together to help map out plans to keep intact and protected the values, both tangible and intangible, that we most love about this rainy, dark, strange, brooding place.