Note: Links to books are affiliate links to Bookshop.org. If you purchase books through these links, I’ll make a small commission, which helps me keep Drafting the Past going. Thanks for supporting our guests and the podcast!
In this episode, it was my pleasure to interview science journalist Melissa Sevigny about her new book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Colorado River. She is the science reporter for Arizona Public Radio as well as the author of two previous books, Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest, and Under Desert Skies: How Tucson Mapped the Way to the Moon and Planets. Her work has also appeared in many places, including Orion, The Atavist Magazine, Science Friday, and more. I spoke with Melissa about writing a book while working a full time job as a reporter, how she created such detailed scenes, and the helpful metaphor she used to think about the book’s narrative structure.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW
- Iowa State environmental writing MFA
- The Atavist, “The Wild Ones”
- Allison Hawthorne Deming
- Debra Marquart
- Richard Shelton
- Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
- Ellen Meloy, Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River
- Kevin Fedarko, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History through the Heart of the Grand Canyon
- Terry Tempest Williams
- Pam Houston
- Ash Davidson, Damnation Spring
TRANSCRIPT
Kate Carpenter: Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a show about the craft of writing history. I’m your host, Kate Carpenter, and in each episode I interview a history writer about how they get their words on the page. In this episode, it was my pleasure to interview science journalist Melissa Sevigny about her new book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Colorado River. She is the science reporter for Arizona Public Radio as well as the author of two previous books, Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest, and Under Desert Skies: How Tuscon Mapped the Way to the Moon and Planets. Her work has also appeared in many places, including Orion, The Atavist Magazine, Science Friday, and more. I spoke with Melissa about writing a book while working a full time job as a reporter, how she created such detailed scenes, and the helpful metaphor she used to think about the book’s narrative structure. Enjoy my conversation with Melissa Sevigny.
Melissa Sevigny:
Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here. It’s funny because I never actually wanted to be a writer, and yet here. I’ve been writing since childhood, but I always wanted to be a scientist, specifically a geologist, and I was really on the track to be a research scientist, all the way up until college and in college I enrolled as an environmental science student at the University of Arizona, and as I was doing my degree, I just found that part of my brain wanted something more creative. I just craved something else. So I started adding creative writing classes and eventually just ended up with a double major in environmental science and creative writing, and along the way I had opportunities to take jobs that kind of blended those two loves. Ended up going for an MFA in environmental writing at Iowa State University and then landed a job as a science journalist, which is not at all what I expected to be doing, but here I am.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s awesome. I love it. Let’s talk just about practical stuff and where do you like to do your writing?
Melissa Sevigny:
Well, if you had asked me that four or five years ago, I would’ve said like, oh, I go to coffee shops and I get together with friends, but then of course the pandemic happened and everybody changed what they were doing, so now I write at home and it actually works. I think I’ve discovered that all of that other stuff was maybe more of a distraction than a help. It works. I stay at home. I’ve got a nice desk with a window, and yeah, I write on Saturday mornings. That’s my routine. I get up in the morning on Saturdays, sit down, and I write for as long as I can, which varies from week to week, but I find that pattern really works for me.
Kate Carpenter:
During the week. Are you working as a freelance journalist?
Melissa Sevigny:
I am a full-time staff journalist at the local NPR station in Flagstaff, Arizona. So yeah, I do have kind of a nine to five job, Monday through Friday, and then I write on Saturdays and I do my best to actually take some time off on Sundays and recover from all of that.
Kate Carpenter:
Great. When you’re working on your own things, do you have a system for organization? How do you handle your workflow?
Melissa Sevigny:
I do have a system. I suspect it would make no sense to anyone else, so I can’t recommend the system. I don’t use any of those fancy softwares that people have. I use footnotes to keep track of my sources, and then I have folders upon folders upon folders of sources. I just looked it up before we started talking, and my research folder for this book has more than 300 folders inside of it and more than 10,000 files, so that’s a lot, but I have kind of a system to organize it. Each folder has a Word document inside of it where I take notes as I’m doing the research, and that’s really handy, because then when I need to find something, I just use the search function in the Word doc and pop up where it is on my computer, so it’s a system that works for me. I’m not sure it would work for anyone else.
Kate Carpenter:
Just to clarify, when you say 300 folders, we’re talking digital folders, right?
Melissa Sevigny:
Yes, digital folders. Digital folders, although I do actually, I am kind of fond of printing things out, so I do have a couple of three ring binders that are hard copies of things. Documents that I use a lot for this book, the plant list that Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter published. I printed that out and I took a bunch of notes on it, so I have some three ring binders as well on top of all those digital folders.
Kate Carpenter:
Where in your research process do you feel ready to start writing?
Melissa Sevigny:
I actually do that right away. As I’m working, I write, so those Word documents that I mentioned where I’m taking notes, sometimes something will spark my imagination and I’ll start the writing right away. I highlight it or I put it in italics or something so I can tell it’s my words rather than notes that I’m taking, and I just put them in the document as I go along, and then later I’ll scrape all of those little bits and pieces out and put them in my actual draft that I’m working on. I remember doing that with a shopping list in particular. I was doing research and I ran across the shopping list for the food they bought when they went on this 1938 expedition, and it was so interesting. It sounded so terrible. It was all canned. Everything was canned, and so I wrote a little paragraph about the food as I went along.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you outline this? Let me expand on this question a little bit because in this book especially, I’m really struck that there is sort of an overarching narrative arc that is the story of this trip, but then throughout it we learn more sort of backstory. We learn context about science, America at this time, all these sorts of things. Do you plot out how that will all work together at first?
Melissa Sevigny:
For this particular book, I didn’t really outline it, but I did map it. So I went to Staples and I printed out an oversized map of the green and the Colorado Rivers where this expedition was, and I went through and I mapped where particular events happened in 1938 that I wanted to write about, but then also where there were opportunities to write about something else. I marked where there were going to be dams that came up in the future or where particular plants could be found, and so I had this map outline that I started with, and I will say I’m glad I did that, but most of it kind of happened more organically than that. I didn’t follow it very strictly, but it kind of gave me a picture in my head. It gave me kind of a model to follow. I knew that I was going to write about certain events when they came up in the geography rather than when they came up in a particular time, if that makes sense.
Kate Carpenter:
Yeah, I like that a lot actually. So then what does your revision process look like?
Melissa Sevigny:
I revise as I go, which I’ve always heard is a terrible way to do it. Everybody says, write your horrible first draft and then revise afterwards, but that doesn’t work for me for some reason. I usually start the day at the top of the chapter I was working on and I start revising, and sometimes all I do is revise and I get nothing fresh done on the page, but for one of the reason that works for me, I like resetting each time and starting at the top and kind of revising as I go along.
Kate Carpenter:
Oh, that’s great. There’s no right way to do these things.
Melissa Sevigny:
Right. Yeah. Who knows?
Kate Carpenter:
Brave The Wild River is interesting because for many reasons, of course, but it’s interesting because the story of these two women who are featured in it, you first wrote about in a long form piece for the Atavist, it was called The Wild Ones. Did at that point that this could be a book?
Melissa Sevigny:
I did not. When I ran across the story, I ran across Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter’s names, and I found out that Lois’s archive was here in Flagstaff where I live. She donated a bunch of material to special collections before she died, and I was really interested in this story and I wanted to know more about it, and as I was fishing around there just really wasn’t very much written about these two women, and so I kind of had this realization that I was going to have to write it myself, and I thought, oh, well, I’ll write a 2000 word article and move on with my life.
Then before I knew that I had 10,000 words on the page and I was like, oh, no, nobody’s going to take this enormously long article. So I’m really grateful to the Atavist Magazine for picking up that story and working with me on it, but I could tell I had almost the sinking sensation as we were working on the final edits for that article. I’m like, I’m still not done. I still have so much more that I want to say about this story. So it was a long time coming, but at that moment I was like, okay, I’m going to have to start working on a book.
Kate Carpenter:
What was the process like for turning something that had been a 10,000 word narrative into a book length piece?
Melissa Sevigny:
I thought that I was going to use the article as an outline almost. That was my initial idea, was that I would even maybe copy and paste it into a Word doc and kind of use that as an outline, and that didn’t happen at all. That went all the way out the window. I was surprised at how much the book felt something new. I really started over with the book. I think it’s just a different pace of story, and there were so many things I wanted to slow down and tell in a much longer kind of slower way that I ended up just leaving the article behind and starting all over. But it was nice having the article because I didn’t know where I was going. I had a lot of the research done that helped enormously when I was writing the book proposal, for example. I kind of had this outline in my head, even though I wasn’t using it on the page.
Kate Carpenter:
So this is actually your third book, but it’s your first with a trade press. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about the differences in the pitching and publishing process.
Melissa Sevigny:
Sure. Yeah. My first two books were with university presses, and I’m really, I’m so grateful that university presses exist because they publish things that otherwise wouldn’t really get published. They’re not so concerned with whether it sells as much as they’re concerned is this scholarship that needs to be out in the world? So for example, my first book Under Desert Skies was a very local history about planetary science in Tucson, Arizona where I grew up.
There wasn’t any other press except the University of Arizona Press that was going to be interested in that story. So it was pretty straightforward from that sense. I sent them a fairly brief proposal. At that point, I already had the book finished and asked them if they would be interested, and I’m so glad they took that. So it’s quite different with a trade press. I spent a lot of time working on the proposal, which is much longer and more complex. I was working with an agent, Lori, who’s just wonderful, and it got picked up by Norton, and I kind of feel like one of the major differences is, well, there are a lot of differences, but I do have a whole team with my agent and my editor and the publicists at Norton who are really helping me bring this book into the world. So that’s a good feeling. I really enjoy that.
Kate Carpenter:
Did you work with your agent for a long time in terms of sort of finessing and putting together the proposal?
Melissa Sevigny:
It felt like a long time to me. I don’t know if it was objectively a long time, but it certainly felt like it took a long time to put the proposal together. Yes.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m interested. So in this book, but also in your first book, there really histories, but your background is from that of a science journalist and nature writer and a scientist. How do you think about the relationship between your work and academic historians?
Melissa Sevigny:
Yeah, this is such a great question because it is quite different. I think an academic historian would approach this story very differently than I did. I mean, one of the most obvious differences is that I put a lot of science into the story because that’s kind of where my heart lies, is doing science writing. I think that was a good choice because Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter when they were alive, they really wanted this expedition to be seen as a scientific expedition, and that kind of didn’t happen.
The newspapers at the time left out the science entirely or sometimes would say things like, well, the science they did wasn’t very important. I know that was a disappointment to both of them for their entire lives. So I wanted to approach the story as this was a scientific expedition and the work they did is something that still matters today. So I knew I wanted to tell not only the adventure story of their expedition down the river, but weave in this larger story of how has the Colorado River changed since they saw it, and how can we look at it through their eyes and then see how it’s changed today? So I think that’s an approach that I could take as a science journalist that maybe an academic historian wouldn’t necessarily take.
Kate Carpenter:
Did you rely much on the work of historians in terms of your research for this book?
Melissa Sevigny:
Yes. Yes, absolutely. Historians, it’s so wonderful they exist because they do that really nitty-gritty work that I don’t necessarily want to do of pinpointing the tiniest little facts. There’s a really wonderful group of historians who specialize in the Colorado River, and I fell into the habit of just emailing them when I had questions and they were very kind and answered my emails or even met with me in person, and I could email them the most obscure question you could ever think of, and they would often have really wonderful answers for me. So I really appreciate that, that historians exist and that they’re available in that way.
Kate Carpenter:
To talk more about how Melissa’s approach to writing works on the page, I asked her to read a short excerpt from the prologue to the book. Here’s Melissa Sevigny, reading from Brave the Wild River.
Melissa Sevigny:
Cataract Canyon where Jotter was stranded was only the beginning, their first test, and they had failed. The Grand Canyon still lay ahead. By 1938, only a dozen expeditions, just over 50 men all told had successfully traversed the Grand Canyon by boat. Since John Wesley Powell’s journey, nearly 70 years before, only one woman on record had attempted the trip. Bessie Hyde, who vanished with her husband Glen, on their honeymoon in 1928, their boat was left empty. Their bodies were never found. People said women couldn’t run the Colorado River. Well, Clover and Jotter weren’t just women, they were botanists and they were going to try. Jotter had time to remember those stories and to wonder what had happened to her companions somewhere up river, no doubt, trying to reach her. But the night stretched on and they didn’t come. An unseen fish splashed out on the water.
The fire burned to embers, two rowboats, their fresh white paint showing new scores and scrapes listed on their sides on the riverbank. Jotter checked the ropes that anchored them and nervously checked again. She dragged out the bedding and spread it to dry in the firelight, she unpacked the drench bags of food, matches and cigarettes. She stoked the fire with another stick of driftwood, gleaming and polished from its tumble down river. She put her back to a stone and her face to the flames. She toasted some bread and ate it. The river was rising, and soon she had to move the fire back from the encroaching edge, stars bloomed in the sky overhead, one great river of stars, a perfect echo of the real river below with nothing but stars on the river for company. She had time to wonder if coming here had been a mistake.
Kate Carpenter:
Talk to me about how a passage like this comes together. It’s so beautiful. There’s so many sensory details. What sources did you draw in for this?
Melissa Sevigny:
Yeah, I’m glad you picked this one because this was the scene that made me want to write this book. I had just started dipping my toe into the archives at Northern Arizona University, and I found a letter that Lois Jotter had written to her mother just a few weeks after this incident. So they’ve had a very bad day. It’s their first day on the Colorado River. Everything has gone terribly wrong, and she stranded all alone, all night, which I think for most of us would be a pretty terrifying experience. I think I would be fairly terrified by that. But I found this letter she wrote to her mother where she tells her the newspapers are saying that I was alone and I was in danger. Don’t believe any of that. I had a lovely time and I really just loved that, and that made me want to write her story, the kind of person who would get herself into this situation, but be like, it was fun, it was quite lovely.
So I had three sources to kind of reconstruct this scene, and all of them are from Lois because she’s the only one there at this moment. So she wrote about it in her diary, kind of right there at the river as it was happening, and she wrote about it in that letter to her mother a few weeks later. Then she talked about it in an oral history that she gave decades and decades after the fact. So when I was kind of reconstructing scenes, I tended to give more weight to the diaries because that was right in the moment, really, really fresh. But in this case, I was able to integrate all three of those sources together to really create this rich, rich scene. So all of the details in there came from those sources that she talked about how she was eating bread that she toasted and step by step what she was doing with her time in this moment when she’s alone and how the river rose, and she had to move the fire back and even the sounds that she was hearing kind of wrestling in the brush.
So I’m lucky that I had those sources to tap into. That was just such rich material, and I wanted to spend time on the scene. I really wanted to slow down and have the reader feel what was happening in this moment. She’s not afraid, it’s kind of this lovely moment of solitude. I think if you’re a writer, you’re probably an introvert and you know the loveliness of being alone in a beautiful place. So I really wanted the readers to feel that in the rhythm of how I put the scene together.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s interesting that you say that because I’m struck by it. It’s clear throughout the book that she writes great letters. She writes great diary entries, which is a gift to the writer and the historian. Absolutely. But I was struck that unlike maybe a lot of academic historians in this opening, especially, you don’t rely on quotes from her here, you’ve put this all in your words to reconstruct the scene. Talk to me about that decision and how you do that?
Melissa Sevigny:
Yeah, I really wanted the reader to feel very immersed in the moment. I want them to feel like they were on this river trip in 1938. That’s probably another difference in my approach compared to what an academic historian would do, is that I actually wanted my sources to be sort of invisible. I wanted them to fade to the background. I didn’t want to stop and say, oh, I got this from the diary, or I got this from a letter, and I didn’t want to stop and say like, oh, here’s three different accounts that people had, and I’m going to put them side by side. That’s all something a historian might do, and it certainly is important in certain contexts. But for this story, I really just wanted my readers to feel like they were there, and that kind of meant letting the sources fade to the background and being as immersive as possible in what I was describing.
Kate Carpenter:
We talked about this a little bit and how you outlined it, but one thing that this book does so well is that there’s this great interaction between scenes where you kind of summarize context or background information or even just, I don’t want to say boring, but things that we don’t need to get into every detail of in the story. Then there are scenes like this where you really slow down and let the reader be there with you. How do you decide which is which and sort that out as you go?
Melissa Sevigny:
Yeah, that’s interesting that you characterize it that way, because I don’t think I really thought about that consciously as I was writing. What I did think about consciously was the movement of the story. So most of it takes place on the river and it moves the way a river trip moves. It was one of the things I did for research that I never imagined I would ever do was I rafted the Grand Canyon to research this book, and it kind of moves that way where there’s things that are crystal clear in your memory. There are moments where everything kind of slows down, and then there are other things that blur together, and you just have this sense of impressions, these kind of beautiful impressions of the canyon and the river that all kind of blurred together. I think without really knowing that, because I hadn’t rafted… I rafted the river pretty late in the writing process.
I was kind of echoing that in my writing. I wanted it to feel like a river trip. So there’s times this scene that I read where everything kind of slows down and I really get into the detail, and part of it has to do with what sources I have available and how detailed the sources are. Then there’s other scenes where I wanted it to just to be days blurring by to get that sense that they had that these days were just kind of becoming almost tedious. They write about how even rafting the river can become almost tedious, where it’s like we get up early, we press the plants, we get the boats ready, we raft the rapids, make dinner late at night. The women were the one doing all the cooking, press more plants, go to bed and there was just exhausting. I wanted that sense of everything blurring together in other scenes.
So it kind of goes back and forth. Structurally, I borrowed this structure for the book from a writer who’s been a mentor to me for a long time. Alison Hawthorne Deming, she’s a wonderful poet and nonfiction writer, and I took a workshop with her years and years ago where she talked about how one way to structure a story is to imagine you’re ice skating down a river and you have a destination at the end. It’s like a hot cocoa stand that you want to get to. But along the way, you skate from side to side and you look at different things. You look at an interesting tree or you go talk to a friend, even though all the time you’re trying to get to the end of the river. I kind of had that just tucked in the back of my mind. When I found this story, I was like, this is the structure.
They’re literally on a river. They’ve got a goal, they’ve got to get to the end. They want to stay alive and get their plants. But along the way, I wanted to stop and have these moments of history or moments where I talk about botany or I talk about ecology that kind of just get wrapped into the story. So there’s the scene, there’s the summary like you described, but there’s also these little things from the past. I thought of them in my head as eddies, because when you’re rafting a river an eddy will take you upstream, kind of slow you down and take you upstream. So that’s how I was thinking of the structure of the book in my head as this literally a river that they’re going down. Hopefully I was a little rambly. Hopefully that all made sense.
Kate Carpenter:
No, I love that. I’ve never heard that metaphor before for a narrative approach, but I love it. Often when I talk to people who write more environmental histories, they talk a little bit about the importance of being able to see the place or go to the place. What did that mean to you to be able to be on the river?
Melissa Sevigny:
Yeah, I mean that was so critical. Of course, I got the contract for this book right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I had all of these big plans. I had these archives I needed to go to, but I also wanted to see everything that they saw and everything shut down. I was draft and I couldn’t go anywhere. So it was pretty late in the project that I was able to actually go and do some of these things I wanted to do. So I went and saw the place on the Green River in Utah where they launched the boats and I rafted the Grand Canyon. That really, I mean, that was just so critical.
I have to say I’m not that adventurous of a person. I’m outdoorsy. I like hiking and camping and whatnot, but I never imagined doing a whitewater rafting trip, and I had never done anything like that before. So I volunteered with a botany crew that was weeding an invasive species and spent two weeks on the river. I kept a diary the entire time where I mostly landscape description, descriptions of plants. When I got back, I read the whole diary and I typed up bits of it, and then I printed it out and I cut it up with scissors and I literally taped it into my draft.
There’s moments in the story where in the diary they said, well, we reached Tanner Rapid, and we looked up and we saw the Desert View Watchtower, and I had that information in the diary. But until I saw it for myself, until I had that experience coming up on Tanner Rapid and looking up and seeing the watchtower on the ridge, I couldn’t really describe it until I had that kind of experience, the same experience that they had. So that was really an incredible thing to be able to do.
Kate Carpenter:
Was it difficult to balance working a full-time job and writing a book?
Melissa Sevigny:
Oh gosh, it was so difficult. I don’t know how people do it. I know a lot of people do do it, so somehow we manage. But yeah, that’s hard. I mean, mostly it’s just kind of a general fog of exhaustion. What can I say about that? Yeah, just general exhaustion. The Saturday thing works for me in some ways because it gives me permission to not write the rest of the week. People say you’re supposed to write every day if you’re a writer. I think that’s nonsense. I hope we know by now that that’s nonsense. That doesn’t work for a lot of people who have full-time jobs or have families or whatever the case may be.
So it was nice to know that Saturday was coming up. I would have my dedicated writing time and the rest of the week I could kind of background it. I could go back to my day job and work on my day job, but it was always kind of in the background of my mind, little problems that I was having, but start working their way out during the rest of the week. So that pattern really worked for me, and I encourage people who are trying to balance a job with some other kind of writing life to figure out whatever it is that works for them.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you have any sort of writing group or writing community that you look to for feedback?
Melissa Sevigny:
I do, yes. There’s a couple of wonderful writers here in town that I get together with regularly. Not to write, but just to be together and talk about what we’re working on. Then I also have an online writing group that I adore. They’re all women, they’re all science writers. They’re all wonderful. I don’t know what I would do without them. They have been with me every step of the way as I’m working on this project, and that’s really fantastic to have.
Kate Carpenter:
I’d love to know, you’ve already told me a bit of great writing advice, but what’s some of the best writing advice you’ve gotten?
Melissa Sevigny:
So when I was in graduate school, probably the best advice I got was from my advisor, Deb Marquardt, who’s a wonderful poet and nonfiction writer. I’m not sure she really knew that she was giving me advice at the moment, but I was in her office working on having a meeting with her about my thesis project, which turned into my second book, Mythical River. I was really in a bad place. I had gotten to a point in grad school where I had just stopped writing entirely. I was miserable and depressed, and I was just really struggling. I don’t know, maybe she noticed that, or I don’t know what prompted her to say this to me, but she said, Melissa, you need to give yourself some days where you’re just a writer. Just stay in your pajamas and just write. It’s very simple, but it was a moment for me where I realized, wait a minute, I’d love this.
I’ve always loved writing since I was a kid. I used to really look forward to getting home from school so I could sit down in front of our clunky old computer and work on whatever story I was working on. I had kind of forgotten that along the way, writing had become kind of more of a job and I was struggling. So I took that advice from her. That’s when I started writing on Saturdays. I started up writing again just on Saturdays. I’d stay in my PJ’s, I’d make some hot cocoa or some coffee and just kind of write on whatever was pulling me. Poetry, fantasy, science fiction, didn’t matter. That’s kind of how I rekindled my love of writing, which for a while it really gone away. So yeah, that was not only the best advice I ever got, but lifesaving, life changing advice.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m struck that you’ve had a couple of mentors who are both poets and nonfiction writers. Do you think that impacts the way that you write?
Melissa Sevigny:
Oh gosh, yes. I didn’t say this, but my undergraduate creative writing degree was actually in poetry.
Kate Carpenter:
Oh, wow, okay.
Melissa Sevigny:
I didn’t really start writing nonfiction until graduate school, so all of my focus was on poetry from really a young age. Really my writing mentor from childhood, Richard Shelton was a poet of the Sonoran Desert. He just passed away last year, but he was a life changing influence on me, and I know it affects my nonfiction. Even in the passage I just read, the rhythm of it comes from poetry and poetic techniques, and sometimes I run [inaudible 00:27:05], there were moments my copy editor was like, this word would be a little better here, don’t you think? I’d be like, but I want the alliteration. Alliteration is a poetic technique, and I’m sure my nonfiction editors were like, what is she talking about? Why does she want the alliteration? But yeah, I definitely absorbed a lot from my poetry background that kind of just oozes its way through the nonfiction.
Kate Carpenter:
In addition to the mentors that you’ve mentioned, are there other people you read, people you look to as sources of inspiration?
Melissa Sevigny:
So many. How much time do we have? I could go on forever about writers that matter to me. For this book specifically, there were three books about the Grand Canyon that I kind of returned to as touchstones. One was Ann Zwinger’s Down Canyon, which is a beautiful work of natural history. I took that with me on my river trip in the Grand Canyon and reread it. Another was Ellen Meloy’s Ravens Exile, which is the story of her river trips down the Green River. She’s so funny and her images are so sharp, and she’s just such a wonderful champion of the desert. I love all of her work, but especially that one. Then there was Kevin Fedarko’s The Emerald Mile, which was just a great inspiration for how to take a lot of technical and scientific and historical detail and move it in such a compelling way into an adventure story.
It’s a really cool story about the fastest speed run through the Grand Canyon. So those three in terms of Grand Canyon stories I kind of kept returning to again and again. But there’s definitely other writers who just write about the West in general that I’ve always loved and been inspired by. Terry Tempest Williams, Pam Houston. A dear friend of mine here in town, one of the members of the writing group that I mentioned is Ash Davidson, who wrote Damnation Spring. It’s a beautiful novel about a family in the Redwoods in the 1970s, and I learned so much from that book about writing place and writing character. I could keep going on and on forever because I love books, which is why I do this.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s wonderful. What have I failed to ask you about writing this book?
Melissa Sevigny:
I guess I’ll just add that it was such a gift to have diaries from both of these women. They kept diaries as they rafted the river in 1938, and they had the foresight to save those diaries and to archive them at two different universities, which I think took a lot of guts and courage in their time to think that what they did was important enough because everybody was telling them that it wasn’t. In their time people were telling them that what they were doing wasn’t important, and they both must have pushed back against that enough to feel that they should save those diaries and save those letters that they wrote. It was such a gift because I could hear their voices, and that’s what made this story possible, was really hearing their voices and their experiences and knowing what they thought and what they felt. I couldn’t have written the story without that. So I’m just so grateful to Elzada and Lois who I’ll never have a chance to meet for saving the story in that way and making sure that future writers and historians would’ve access to it.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, I know this is a deeply unfair question for someone who has a book coming out, but do you have another project you’re working on that you’d like to talk about?
Melissa Sevigny:
Oh gosh, Kate, that is deeply unfair.
Kate Carpenter:
The answer could be no also.
Melissa Sevigny:
I always have projects. Over the years, I’ve become rather superstitious about telling people about projects like new projects. I feel like they’re these little embers that I’m holding, and if a cold wind comes along, it’ll just get snuffed out. So I never really want to talk about them, but I will say that when I started working on this book, something kind of clicked for me. I felt like this work of recovering the stories of people who had been forgotten or overlooked was something that I wanted to do, it felt right.
So I’m interested in telling more of those kinds of stories. Right now I’m really quite interested in the women who worked as fire lookouts during World War II. So there’s that span of four years where all the men went to war and the fire lookouts throughout the west had to be staffed, and women went out to these really remote and lonely places all by themselves for months at a time and looked for wildfires. I don’t know whether I’m going to have the same gift of a amazing archive to tap into, but I’m looking around and so if any of your listeners have a great aunt or a grandmother who did this work, I would love to hear from them.
Kate Carpenter:
Excellent. I hope that they did because that would be so cool. I said that was my last question, but I’m curious to know, do you have an approach you like to use for looking for these types of stories, or do you just stumble upon them?
Melissa Sevigny:
Do I have an approach? Let me think. That story. I kind of stumbled upon, I guess I had known these women existed, but one of the people I interviewed for this book was Lois Jotter’s son, and he had these wonderful stories, and one of the stories he told me was about a female fire lookout whose name I don’t know, and he doesn’t know. It’s like a childhood story that his family had passed down from the time when his grandfather was a forester. So I think I get the stories by talking to people, and every now and then something will just spark where it sounds like there’s more to that. I want to know what the rest is.
Kate Carpenter:
Melissa Sevigny, thank you so much for talking to me for Drafting the Past. This has been wonderful.
Melissa Sevigny:
Thanks, Kate. I really appreciate the chance to chat with you today.
Kate Carpenter: Thanks again to Melissa Sevigny for joining me for this episode of Drafting the Past, and as always, thanks to you for listening. You can find links to Melissa’s books and the other writers we talked about in this episode in the show notes at drafting the past.com. I’ll be back soon with another great interview. Until then, remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
