In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Ruby McConnell, who write about lessons learned from manuscripts called “boring” and how writing for a small audience helped her find her voice.
Photo by Liam Simpson on Unsplash
If I am to be honest, I never meant to write. It just kind of snuck up on me.
First, I was a reader, one of those ravenous inhalers of the written word, willing to pick up anything, gulping in fiction, literature, beach reads, newspapers, and backs of cereal boxes. Backed up with a family of readers, the reading of books in particular, played an outsized role in my world from a formative age.
Then, for the longest time I was an academic. In school I wrote mountains of short question answers, term papers, and lab reports until I worked my way up to theses. As a student geology and environmental studies, little of what I wrote was evaluated for construction, readability, or beauty. More often, I produced technically correct exposition that teemed with the minutiae of laboratory precision and descriptive science– I have a 300-page tome on pumice sitting on a shelf that an advisor once called “the most boring thing he’d ever read.” Boring? Definitely. Instructive? Yes. Aside from some things about eruption dynamics, I learned a lot about the craft of writing. Academic writing taught me how to work with large drafts, about research, organization, and, thanks to one supremely diligent advisor, grammar. Maybe most importantly, I experienced the real but somewhat unquantifiable expenditure of time and energy required to bring to fruition a book-length work. For me, unlike many of my colleagues, the actual writing of the manuscript felt, actually, kind of good. Satisfying, somehow.
That experience, the path to that first real book-length work, and the whole of my graduate studies, became foundational to my future writing. Geology exposed me to unique and interesting people and experiences and taught me a specialized way of observing the world and a rich and vivid vocabulary to put to those observations while my environmental studies made me familiar with what then were problems that most people considered only in the abstract, sea level rise, storm hazards, drinking water quality, logging. I finished school with an ability to complete things and a lot of non-real-world knowledge. I had a foundation, but I wasn’t a writer.
I was, though, still writing. As a working environmental scientist, I wrote templated reports, sometimes a dozen a week, describing contaminated properties ranging from fifty-year-old beach houses to industrial plating facilities. Still technical and boring. But now, at least, the work had import. These places were making people sick.
And then one day, I just felt like I had something to say. Maybe it had to do with maturity. Maybe not. But I had reached some kind of threshold in my life where experience and knowledge had converged and my response to that convergence was to begin to write.
For years, my writing was confined to an obscure blog in a quiet corner of the internet. There, I wrote short observational pieces about art, social justice, foodways, and, always, the environment. Eventually, I found my voice. By then, the issues I held a passion for and expertise in, the outdoors, the environment, climate change, were no longer abstract. I started writing essays, longer pieces centered on place and personal experience and the value of the natural world. My first try was, shockingly, published on the first submission. So was the one after that. Something, some dam inside me that was so concerned about all that I had learned and seen, had broken. With that momentum, I turned to bigger projects. Alarmed by deteriorating wellness and dwindling outdoor participation among women, I started writing prescriptive books to empower women and girls to be brave, explore, and heal themselves outside. I found a home for this work at Sasquatch Books.
And just like that, I was a writer.
RUBY McCONNELL is a writer, geologist, and environmental advocate living and writing in the Pacific Northwest. Her work examining the relationships between landscape and the human experience won an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in 2016 and has been published in Grain Literary Magazine, Entropy, Oregon Humanities, Complex Online, Huff Post, Mother Earth News, Grow Magazine, Seattle Backpackers, and Misadventures Magazine, among others.
Her First book, A Woman’s Guide to the Wild, was published in 2015 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. The companion volume, A Girl’s Guide to the Wild was released in 2019. A collection of her essays entitled Ground Truth is being released in April of 2020 by Overcup Books.
You can almost always find her in the woods.
www.rubymcconnell.com | @rubygonewild
Hidden Timber Books is hosting Ruby McConnell to read from her newest book, Ground Truth (published by Overcup Books) on Sunday, April 26th, @ 2pm Pacific. This event is FREE but registration is required.
