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Sunday Series: Kari O’Driscoll on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Kari O’Driscoll, who sees writing as “a form of alchemy.” 

Photo by Kei Scampa from Pexels

These days, asking me why I write is like asking me why I breathe. It has become such a part of who I am, such a daily practice, that I am often ‘writing’ in my head as I experience the world – walking my dogs, preparing a meal, talking on the phone to a friend. Ultimately, writing is a form of alchemy for me, a way to find or make meaning out of something that is seemingly without any, or that is complicated and tangled and often overwhelming.

One of my odd talents is a skill for unraveling knotted necklaces. My kids both learned, early on, that if they had a chain they wanted to wear that was hopelessly twisted and matted, they could bring it to me and I’d set to work. No matter how little patience I had with anything else going on, there was something about slowly picking at the strands and knots that put me in a zen state.

I don’t know if it was the certain knowledge that there was a solution if I just kept at it, or if the consequences seemed so innocuous if I didn’t manage to undo the mess, but somehow I could settle in to a peaceful, methodical rhythm and restore it to its desired state. That’s what writing does for my head and my heart and my spirit – allows me to come to a place where I know there is meaning if I trust and if I focus and spend time looking at something from all angles, turning it over and over again in my mind but not forcing it, picking at one strand and then another to see what happens, gently loosening one loop from another.

As a kid, I believed life happened to me. The combination of traumatic events, authoritarian parents, and being a certain age meant that I felt as though I had no control over the things I experienced, no matter how much I tried to make meaning of them. Talking to adults never seemed to help; either they couldn’t explain things in a way that made sense to my youthful brain or they were impatient with the questions and refused to engage. For decades, I accepted that there were things that I would never be able to make sense of, and I resigned myself to studying the things I could, like math and science, and ducked to avoid the others. But in my late 30s, I began writing as a way to release some of the constant chatter in my brain. If I couldn’t untangle the knots, at least I could get them out of my head and on to paper so I didn’t have to hold them all inside any longer. And that’s when I discovered the magic of transformation.

Our bodies aren’t designed to hold emotion. But when we let our brains grab on to emotional responses – especially the big ones like fear and anger – and wrap stories around them, they become stuck. The more we tell ourselves those stories in our own heads, the bigger the knot gets and the heavier it is to carry. But when I write those things down – even if it’s a jumble of words – scared, sad, overwhelmed, why, angry, painful, broken, willitalwaysbelikethis, whatiswrongwithme, idontknowhowmuchlongericandothis, listening to her cry is breaking my heart, helpless, birds singing outside, the cat came to head-butt me just now – the knots start to come undone. And if I walk after writing or I talk to a friend, they release and relax even more. And if I string together more observations and more messy piles of words and feelings and observations, the patterns begin to reveal themselves and my heart and my head and my spirit find peace. Alchemy. Transforming fear to wonder. Rage to realization. Confusion to harmony.

Writing is the vehicle that takes me there as long as I surrender to it, as long as I trust that I will eventually get to a place of understanding and acceptance, as long as I sit down quietly and begin unraveling the knots.

KARI O’DRISCOLL is a writer and mother of two living in the Pacific NW. She is the author of One Teenager at a Time: Developing Self-Awareness and Critical Thinking in Adolescence, and the recently released memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape. Her other work has been featured in anthologies on parenting, reproductive rights, and cancer as well as appearing online in outlets such as Ms. Magazine and Healthline. She is the founder of The SELF Project, a comprehensive social-emotional health site for teens and parents and educators of teens.

You can find links to her work at  kariodriscollwriter.com. 

*Hidden Timber Books is hosting Kari O’Driscoll as part of their Small Press Author Reading Series on Saturday, May 9th, at 11am Pacific (1pm Central). She’ll be reading from her new memoir, Truth Has a Different Shape. This event is FREE. Register HERE.

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Sunday Series: Deanne Stillman on Why I Write

In this Sunday Series, you’ll meet writers new and seasoned as they share what inspires them to put #PenToPaper. This week, welcome Deanne Stillman, who sees writing as a way to “bearing witness to…stories” and find healing.

Writer Deanne Stillman with Bugz. Photo by Betty Lee Kelly.

In the desert I get quiet and I hear things,” I wrote in the introduction to my book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. “The beating of wings. The scratching of lizard. The whisper of stories that want to be told.”

These stories have all been of a piece, tales of war and peace on the modern and historical frontier, and they have become books that were years in the making. In each of them, two rivers have converged: my long-time affinity for the desert and an identification with those whose voices are not heard. This latter stream includes not just people, but places, and animals as well.

I like to think that my passion for wide open stretches started with “Eldorado,” the haunting poem about the knight who wandered the wastes, questioning the ever-present shadow in his quest for treasure. My father often read the poem to me as a child, and it was one of my escape routes out of the mostly frozen shores of northeastern Ohio and into a land where the by-ways were lined with cactus and stretched as far as the Milky Way and beyond.

A few years ago, after attending an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls in San Diego, my thoughts about the source of my writing shifted. I had queued up for hours in line with hundreds of pilgrims, including small children, nuns, and Bikers for Christ. When I finally got to see the scrolls – a small, barely legible artifact of parchment bearing a nearly invisible cipher – I was disappointed at the less than grandiose climax. But in the hours and days that followed, I couldn’t shake the experience and I kept thinking about whatever it was that I saw. I realized that although I have had a lifelong awareness of being a member of the Hebrew tribe, I now understood that I belonged to the People of the Book, and all along, in my assembly of letters and words in arrangements that tell a story, this has been the fire that is behind my work.      

I began writing when I was a little girl. Many of my stories were funny – the result of being taught to write by my father. Yes, he loved Edgar Allan Poe and other literary masters but he was also a wiseacre and we would concoct kooky tales (some of them I submitted to Mad magazine). When my parents got divorced, I continued writing, and I recently came across a cache of some things I wrote at that time. I see that my concerns had to do with a wish for people to stop fighting, written as only a girl of 10 or 11 can do. I discovered pieces such as “They Got Divorced at the End of a Decade” and something called “Security Council,” a story about how the UN kept the world together. Reading them now, it occurs to me that these were tales of reconciliation – or at least a longing to connect once again.

Later, as I began my journey into our shadowlands, I found myself exploring the source of the disconnect, and this has led right into the dark heart of the American dream. For me, it comes into full focus across the wide open canvas of the modern West. See, over there? Some teenage girls are having a party. Their parents are drunk or in jail and then a Marine walks in, he’s just back from the Gulf War, and he rapes and kills two of them. Oh no, something else is happening over yonder…some men in a jeep, more drinking, horses running…the men open fire and a week later, 34 mustangs lie dead outside Reno…and what now? A sheriff walks up to a trailer, all Andy of Mayberry…a hermit, paranoid, hates cops, picks up the assault rifle and blows him away…

These images have become my books of narrative nonfiction – Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave; Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, and the latest, Desert Reckoning: A Town Sheriff, a Mojave Hermit, and the Biggest Manhunt in Modern California History.

Recently, someone asked me to pick my favorite. That wouldn’t be fair. They have all gotten great reviews and won awards. Mustang has led directly to the rescue of hundreds of wild horses headed for the slaughterhouse and been given to President Obama as the go-to book on the subject of wild horses. And it is now under option for a film starring Wendie Malick as Wild Horse Annie, whose story I tell in my book.

But most pleasing of all is the cast of characters I’ve met in bearing witness to rough stories: a biker chick who went to jail in place of her errant pit bull, kids who read to each other while their parents are shooting meth, cops that everyone hates until you have to call them in an emergency and they never get mad, they just show up. 

And finally there was Bugz, the lone survivor of the wild horse massacre outside Reno. She was found and rescued when she was a filly, near death, and over time I got to know her at the sanctuary where she resided. She was skittish, not comfortable with most people, but after a while, she let me in.  During the 10 years that I worked on Mustang, I would stand with her in the barn or outdoors, get quiet, and listen. In the silence, I found the strength to continue my journey, for I knew that she was at the very center of this war in our homeland, this thing we do to each other and ourselves, and somehow she had endured.

I came to believe that she survived the massacre so I could write the story of her kind. But that created a word prison; if I finished my book, would she then perish, having completed her task? That fear was one more reason it took so long to write my book.     

A year after it came out, Bugz died, succumbing to a condition that began as she fought for her life after the massacre. Her spirit is with me as I continue my journey along the frontlines of what tears us apart. But therein lies healing as well, and I’ll be exploring that road in my next book, as I return to the frontier and our wide open spaces.

DEANNE STILLMAN’S book, Desert Reckoning, is a Rolling Stone “must-read,” a Southwest Book of the Year, and recently won the Spur Award best nonfiction about the American West. Mustang was an LA Times “best book 08” and won the California Book Award silver medal for nonfiction. Twentynine Palms is an LA Times “best book 01” and cult classic that Hunter Thompson called “a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” It has been published in a new edition with a foreword by T. Jefferson Parker and preface by Charles Bowden.

* This essay first appeared on Kirkus.
** Photo of Deanne Stillman above by Betty Lee Kelly.

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Sunday Series: Ruby McConnell on Why I Write

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.