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Q&A with Beth Alvarado, author of Jillian in the Borderlands

“…bones could sing, she knew, and if she drew them in pictures, she would give them back their voices.” ~ from Jillian in the Borderlands by Beth Alvarado

One of my favorite books is Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead: a writer on writing, in which she writes a page and a half of reasons given from writers about why they do what they do, why they are driven to put one kind of story or another to the page. To name just a few: To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten. To produce order out of chaos. To express the unexpressed life of the masses.

To give voice to the voiceless.

graphic art of woman looking up, surrounded by birds

Beth Alvarado accomplishes each of these things in her new collection of linked stories, Jillian in the Borderlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). The main character throughout this book is Jillian Guzmán, whom we first meet as a young girl and get to know as she grows older and becomes a mother. Jillian is mute, but she can hear. And she can see. She listens, she observes, she sees beyond and behind, she is a finder of lost souls, she draws images of the dead. And in her quiet way, she give voice to the voiceless.

With the ecstatic knowledge of an ancient curandera and the playful, storytelling prowess of a child, Alvarado travels great distances, bears witness, presages problems, and intuits solutions. She isn’t just at the forefront of white writers writing about race, she’s at the forefront of people writing about what it means to be human and how we might survive our own dangerous shortcomings. 

~ Jennifer Tseng, author of Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

I’m honored to host Beth, who shares a little about her book, and to offer a giveaway. ENTER the giveaway by Wednesday, January 20th, for a chance to win a copy of Jillian in the Borderlands. Now, welcome Beth Alvarado!

Christi Craig (CC): Jillian in the Borderlands is very much a “recital of events,” full of reports and revelation. At one point, we read this about Jillian’s mother, Angie: She opened her laptop. Did she believe in the power of the word? That was the question. But what else could she do? Tending one’s own garden was not enough. This is a question we writers face as well. Did you experience this feeling when you sat down to write this book of linked stories? When did you know that, no matter, you must write this book?

Beth Alvarado

Beth Alvarado (BA): I like that phrase: “full of reports and revelation,” because I feel like it somehow describes my aspirations for this book! I’m going to use it somewhere. Thank you.

When I started the first tale, in 2010, before I knew this would become a book, I found myself writing about the anxieties I’d had as a mother when my children were young. In “The Dead Child Bride,” Angie is concerned with keeping her daughter safe in a rather rough neighborhood.

In a way, I believed my writing could “witness” the dangers of the world that young girls had to navigate and, further, that witnessing could help bring about change so, although I didn’t want my work to be didactic, I did believe in writing as both witness and action. This came partly from years of teaching the work of amazing writers who also were activists, like Grace Paley, Carolyn Forché, and Toni Morrison, and from the belief that stories can reach, and therefore change, hearts and minds.

By the time I wrote the last story “Los Niños Perdidos” where Angie wonders about the power of the word and realizes that being able to tend “one’s own garden” has always been a kind of privilege, children were being separated from their parents at the border. I was becoming a little disillusioned. Was it enough to write? Enough to teach? And what kind of writing could make a difference? That’s what I was feeling and, of course, what Angie was facing as she opened her laptop.

By that point the tales were becoming increasingly political but also increasingly magical, and I wondered if I should tone them down but, instead, I decided just to follow the characters. Magical realism, at least in South America, comes out of times of political duress where the writer feels the need to transform reality in order to truthfully reveal it. Of course, in order to do that effectively—so that the magic feels authentic, so that it rises from the story—the writer has to believe that magic is possible. In Jillian in the Borderlands, the magical elements all come from the characters, mostly from Jillian, but also from Juana of God and Junie the Channeling Chihuahua, and from Charlie-Carlos and his mother, Gloria, and from Jillian’s father. Do I believe that people’s spiritual and emotional impulses can transform reality? I guess I do. There are people whose effect on the world has been mythic. Really, what I think we’re talking about, here, is even bigger than intention. We’re talking about the philosophy and worldview of the writer, both of which inform intention. But, as a fiction writer, I believe you have to be willing to let your intentions evolve. You sometimes have to let go of intention and just follow the story, at least as you’re writing it, or it will feel contrived—so you are in a conundrum in a way, between the tensions of purpose and process. Or between the tensions of “reports and revelations”? Elizabeth Bowen said of the novel something like, the ending must seem at once “both surprising and inevitable.” I hope I achieved that. I was surprised by many things in these stories and feel like I somehow tapped into something other-worldly as I was writing them.

CC: Jillian, is such a unique character. Since birth, she has never spoken, but she makes herself known in other ways: in her sublime personality, in her art–drawing images of the dead and maps for the living, and in her gift of listening so well that she can easily find the spirits of the dead and almost dead around her. She’s a complex character with a profound presence, even as she remains silent. How did Jillian come to life for you? Did her complexity grow as you moved further into the writing process?

BA: There is so much that is pure serendipity about this book. “The Dead Child Bride,” the first tale, began as an experiment. I wondered if I could imitate four authors in one story—which gave rise to the structure: with four different “voices,” I would need four narrators and therefore a segmented story. The first author was Flannery O’Connor and I picked elements of “The Life You Save Might Be Your Own,” maybe because it was darkly comical. In that story a grandmother is standing on her porch watching a man approach; next to her is her deaf-mute granddaughter. The grandmother “becomes” Angie; the man, a neighbor; and the granddaughter, a daughter who happens to be “mute”—but I wanted the daughter to have a rich interior life. I wanted to push back against the way O’Connor portrayed the granddaughter as deficient and powerless. And I wanted to see through the daughter’s eyes—which we never get in O’Connor’s story—because I love the way that a child’s naïve point of view can reveal things that we, as adults, have been conditioned not to see. 

Another of the writers I was imitating was George Saunders—who, in his stories, does exactly that, gives us another way of seeing—and so in the first segment from Jillian’s point of view, I tried to imitate the contemporary, surreal, and humorous qualities I saw in his work. Of course, when you imitate you never accurately replicate the original—nor is that the goal—but you instead create something of a hybrid between the original and your own voice or vision. And, always, if an imitation is going to be successful, it has to take on a life of its own. If these things I borrowed hadn’t worked, I would have changed them or never continued to create more tales—but the characters kept coming back to me and the constraints ended up being generative and when they were constraining, I had to invent ways around them.

Anyway, that’s how Jillian was “born.” It was an interesting challenge, making her mute, because one way you develop a character and a character’s relationship to others is through dialog, but I had taken that tool out of the box in her case. She can hear her mother—and she can ignore her—but Angie has to interpret Jillian’s drawings to understand her and she can never be sure if she does so accurately. When Jillian’s father shows up in “Jillian Speaks,” he seems to be able to hear her; at least he “answers” her thoughts. We also are led to assume she gets some of these qualities—hearing others’ thoughts, seeing the dead, intuition—from him or his side of the family.

As Jillian grew older, she did become more complicated. That’s partly because it’s true of all of us, but it’s also a function of the writing. With each tale, I would think, well, okay what other “gift” can Jillian have? I wanted her to have agency, first of all, as well as a “voice.” My idea was that, because she was mute, the “universe” had compensated by giving her other gifts—so she had the gift of drawing so she could express herself. She simply “knew” things about history although it was always an incomplete knowledge; she could also foresee things, but again, that was incomplete, she could only see glimpses; she had the gift of seeing and/or hearing the dead but not necessarily understanding them. I made limits to her “powers” because that created conflicts. In my mind, her gifts are all metaphors for qualities that some people have or develop.

The gift of hearing others is empathy. “Foreseeing” the future might be intuition but it also could just be an intelligent reading of the world. I guess the main thing is: I had made her voiceless and therefore, because she is created in language, I had made her helpless. How could I remedy that?

CC: As an author, you have written memoir, personal essay, and short stories. How has your writing up until now influenced the work you put into Jillian in the Borderlands?

BA: I started out as a fiction writer—my MFA was in fiction—but I remember having a hard time with “plot” because I interpreted it to mean that the writer had a plan. I never had a plan and, you know, I can’t even follow a recipe. But then I read a book on narrative theory that said that the short story was really more like a poem than a novel because it was one moment in time that suggested the life around it whereas the novel had to move through time. It was like the difference between the photograph and a film. True or not, this was really liberating for me as a writer and applies to my stories and essays and even to my memoir Anthropologies, which is actually a series of photographic moments that, together, build a kind of narrative arc.

You can see a variation on this structure in Jillian in the Borderlands: each tale is composed of a series of segments, each narrated by a different character, although characters recur in order to provide over-all coherence. I think this technique also increases the narrative tension, but in order for it to work—and I learned this from writing Anthropologies—the writer has to become aware of the way her mind is moving associatively. Her mind is making leaps from moment to moment. How is it doing that? And how can she help the reader’s mind do that? I wanted to give the reader a feeling that she is omniscient, knows more than any one of the characters knows, and so can put together a narrative.

sewing needle threaded with three colored strands fanned out

I also do this because I want the work to include multiple perspectives—which I did even in the memoir by including other people’s stories and dreams and memories. In Jillian in the Borderlands, I’ve compared it to being at a cross-border dinner party where people are telling their stories, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. From the accrual of details, the listener puts together a narrative, even if there are gaps or contradictions.

While I didn’t set out to do that, once I’d done it, I realized it was a very organic form for a book set in the borderlands.

I’ve heard it said that Style = Vision and, in this case, this narrative technique does reflect my philosophy and political beliefs. I see our lives as interwoven and our “reality” as composed of many points of view. Even in the first book of stories, Not a Matter of Love, I use shifting third person point of view most of the time. My essays are more self-contained, of course, but often include other people’s perspectives. I think this comes from having married into my late husband’s family when I was only nineteen. He was Mexican American and when we were first married, we lived with his family, eight younger brothers and sisters, on the “Mexican and Indian” side of town. My monolingualism in a multi-lingual neighborhood is a kind of metaphor. Suddenly I understood that I was coming from a very limited and very privileged point of view, that my family’s understanding of history was only one understanding, and that there were whole other ways of being the world. It was transformative and liberating. I will be forever grateful for that experience.

CC: Here we are, 2021 (finally!). In the spirit of Jillian, what is your vision for the new year?

BA: I am hopeful, both because of the election and the vaccine. I think we’ve learned that, even at its best, our system is not yet equitable, inclusive, or sustainable. When we falter, the rest of the world also suffers. We need to make changes. Of course, right after I wrote this, I took the dog for a walk and got a ping on my phone: Trump’s followers had become a mob and they broke into the Capitol. So, our hard lessons will continue, evidently but, in the spirit of Jillian, I will be hopeful. We can value and take care of one another. We can band together and tend to the garden that is the earth. We need to listen deeply and be creative in order for transformation to happen. Women, in Jillian’s vision, can lead the way to healing.

CC: What are you reading these days?

BA: I am reading—and rereading—a whole bunch of essay collections because I am writing a new collection and because I am trying to revise a review essay I wrote on recent collections. So this is the list: Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, Sejal Shah’s This is One Way to Dance, Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings, Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land, Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, andT. Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. Rereading is one of the greatest joys of being a writer, I think, because it’s how you teach yourself to take your work in new directions.

Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales is Beth Alvarado’s fourth book. She has written extensively about her experiences as a Euro-American woman marrying into a Mexican-American family and spent most of her life in Arizona. Her essay collection Anxious Attachments, an Oregon Book Award winner, was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award. Beth is also the author of Anthropologies: A FamilyMemoir, and the short story collection Not a Matter of Love, which won the Many Voices Project Award. She teaches for OSU-Cascades Low Residency MFA Program.

DON’T FORGET: Enter the Book Giveaway for a chance
to win a copy of Jillian in the Borderlands!

*photo of needle and thread above by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

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Q&A with Liz Scott, Author of This Never Happened

We came from no one and we were attached to no one. I could make that sound like a bad thing but I have worn my rootlessness like a custom-made, one-of-a-kind, jewel-encrusted cloak adorned with shiny medals that read “grandparent-less,” “aunt-less,” “uncle-less,” “cousin-less.” I say I have a gypsy soul. I like the sound of that, all wild and romantic. But a gypsy probably does not crave to fill in all the blank spaces.

~ from This Never Happened

Years after I left home, I began to see my life as a puzzle with missing pieces. So I started asking questions. I read my mother’s journals after she died. I filled the pages of my own journals. I spent one November staying up late every night and, by the light of the computer screen, poured out word after word in an effort to write a novel, which turned out to be a cathartic release of fragments from my own story. I am still writing from bits of memory and experience–I have plenty to work with–and am recognizing patterns, making connections, filling in the gaps.

But what does a writer do when memories feel like grains of sand, small and slippery, and fragments are full of holes more than they are solid forms?

Liz Scott faces this question in her new memoir, This Never Happened (University of Hell Press, 2019). Growing up in a family where her parents kept their past hidden and vague, Scott turns to photos and letters to try and bridge one experience to another, to search for answers and for truth.

Deborah Reed (The Days When Birds Come Back) calls Scott’s book an “honest look at what it means to have compassion, however flawed, for the people who hurt us, and for whom we can never truly know or understand.” This Never Happened is a compelling and unique memoir that reads as a collection of tiny essays and leaves a lasting imprint.

I’m thrilled to host Liz Scott to talk about her memoir and about writing. Plus, there’s a giveaway! Enter by Tuesday, January 28th, to win a copy of This Never Happened, one of my favorite reads in the last few months. Now, welcome Liz!

Christi Craig (CC): Your memoir is a collection of very short chapters, with a few longer ones mixed in and some reading in just one sentence. This structure mirrors the way we sometimes process memories we question or difficult experiences we hesitate to revisit—in bits and pieces. Did that structure unfold naturally as you began writing or was it a decision made in revisions?

Liz Scott (LS): I’m so glad you felt that the form mirrored the way memory works. I did not write this book in a linear way or, indeed, in the way the chapters ultimately were arranged. Something would come to me—a memory, an image, a feeling I wanted to explore—and I would write that piece.

It wasn’t until I was done that I began the process of ordering the chapters. And I totally agree that memory comes in unpredictable, not-very-orderly ways. I do not think that’s limited to difficult or confusing memories though. In my experience, a memory can be triggered by so many different things and sometimes seemingly out of nowhere.

CC: Several passages in your book stand out to me, this one in particular,

“I’ve come to believe that all of this—the facts about your ancestors, the truth about your family story, the reliable connections—are what create ballast in life.”

So much of writing is about examining and understanding ourselves and the world around us. How did putting your story to the page change you as a writer or provide more balance in your life?

LS: The impact on me as a writer is easier to answer: in my book I talk about how for most of my life I’ve had an almost phobic reaction to the idea of being a writer. I had spent my early life wanting NOT to be my mother. She was a writer and had an excessive need to be famous as a writer. So I came to writing tentatively and with not much confidence. It’s still hard for me to claim the identity of ‘writer’ but creating something that a publisher wanted and people are buying has given me so much more confidence.

I think the impact on me personally is more cogent though. I’ve had years of my own therapy and as a psychologist have thought deeply about family dynamics and how our emotional lives work. I didn’t even start writing this book until I was in my late 60s so I had a more than average understanding of my own psychology. I did not embark on a project intended to be cathartic or therapeutic. Imagine my surprise when I finished and realized that in writing my book I had indeed been changed. And it has to do with this idea of ballast.

As I talk about in the book, given the strange and particular features of my family, I grew up feeling quite untethered, kind of floating from one thing to the next without ballast. When I wrote the last chapter, I realized I felt more connected to all my relatives and ancestors, none of whom I had ever met. I saw myself in that long line, the chain of people whose DNA I share and I felt much more anchored than I’d ever felt before.

CC: In your essay, “Why We Need Memoirs,” you say, “My old writing teacher always stressed the importance of fully digesting material—events from one’s life, difficult experiences, etc.—in order to tell a good story….” Distance, I would add, makes it possible to tell that story in the first place. Was there ever a time in writing your book when you took a necessary break, and if so, how did you find the time/energy/courage to return to the work?

LS: I agree. Without that distance—especially with memoir—you run the risk of writing what sounds more like a diary. That kind of undigested material can lack perspective and frankly be cloying. As I said, I had considerable distance from my childhood given how old I was when I started writing and also had a significant degree of psychological distance given my personal work and my profession. Also, I did not start writing until after both of my parents had died which is another kind of distance I think.

In terms of necessary breaks, oh yes! But for me I think it has to do more with the fact that I have a very short attention span. I do all my writing in coffee shops and find that I can sit and write for maybe an hour at a time before I want to move on to something else. It has less to do with time/energy/courage than my tendency to flit from one thing to the next. I will say though that since I was determined to be as open and honest and unflinching as possible, I put a post-it note on my laptop that said, “Be Brave”. So anytime there was a choice to demure, I marshalled my courage. Personally, I did not see the point in writing this book without being as baldly honest as possible.

CC: What are you reading these days?

LS: I always move between a couple of books at a time—that short attention span thing. I just started Trust Exercise by Susan Choi which won last year’s National Book Award. I’m also reading All This Could be Yours by Jami Attenberg. And I torture myself by obsessively consuming the New York Times, Washington Post and about a zillion political blogs.

CC: What do you hope 2020 holds for you as a writer?

LS: I just published an essay in The Big Smoke called Post-Partum Publication. It’s about this interesting, particular and often challenging time in the months after a book launch. In it I talk about what I would call the active life of a book—the writing, the work to find a publisher, the launch, the readings and publicity. My book felt so alive during all of those phases and I was so emotionally attached to all parts of the process that I did not have much brain space to start another project. I have had the germ of an idea way far back in my brain and now that I feel the particular aliveness of a new book slipping away, I just might be able to start in on it. Maybe. Hopefully. Please.

Liz Scott has been a practicing psychologist for over 40 years. She has had numerous short stories published in literary journals and her memoir, This Never Happened, was recently released. Originally from New York City, she currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon. 

DON’T FORGET: Enter the book giveaway by Tuesday, January 28th,
for a chance to win a copy of Liz Scott’s memoir!

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Q&A with Antonia Malchik, author of A Walking Life

“We walk to find our prophets, our guides, our ancestors, but ourselves most of all, and through ourselves, we find one another.” ~ from A Walking Life

Antonia Malchik's A Walking Life cover image

When I first learned of Antonia Malchik’s new book, A Walking Life (Da Capo Press, 2019), I thought, Good timing! It’s summer, I’ve got a few hikes planned, I’ll be reminded about the health benefits of walking–physical, mental, emotional. I took my time reading, savoring even the contents page with chapter titles of Toddle, March, Stumble. What I found as I moved deeper through the pages, though, was much more than a book on the simple, almost medicinal, act of walking.

Malchik has done her work curating a rich selection of research on history, science, culture, and philosophy and has built an intricate story about humanity–our innate desire to put one foot in front of the other, the disconnect we experience when we ignore that desire, and the joy and healing when we embrace it.

I can’t rave enough about this book. In fact, I’ve been talking it up for weeks, quoting it here and there. I’m thrilled to host Antonia Malchik for an interview and am giving away a copy of her book to one lucky reader. Enter the giveaway by Tuesday, July 30th, noon, for a chance to win A Walking Life.

Now, welcome Antonia!

Christi Craig (CC): Your book, while centered around the simple act of walking, is rich in information on history, culture, philosophy and takes the reader down a winding path of discovery, insight, and new understandings. How did this book unfold for you as an author?

Antonia Malchik, author of A Walking Life

Antonia Malchik (AM): A friend once described the structure of my essays as being as like fish scales. I tend to think of them as mosaics. I love taking stories and research that seem widely disparate, and diving deep to find out what connects them. A Walking Life added an extra level of complexity for me because there is a ton of detailed scientific research about things related to walking, from how we walk, which should be almost physically impossible, to the connections between vestibular impairment in children and their hippocampus development. I had to figure out how to convey that information in ways that were factually correct but narratively interesting.

That was actually really hard. I kept going back to the scientists I’d talked with to make sure that metaphors I used to, for example, describe the process of infants learning to walk or the paleoanthropology of disability weren’t misleading in the way they explained the science.

But at the same time I didn’t want to publish what I think of as a “study dump,” which I ran into a lot while researching: briefly present an idea, then give lengthy descriptions of the study behind it and repeat that process for hundreds of pages. I think that’s the key difficulty of science writing. Humans need metaphor and story to make sense of our world, but science relies on precision. Science communication has to combine those things without either muddying the science or boring the lay reader.  

On a broader level, I spent a lot of time sifting through the articles, books, and scientific papers I’d read, trying to find the threads that connected stories and themes across the arc of the book. I didn’t know where to begin because walking is a massive subject that affects us at every level of our lives, but I had to start somewhere and trust that the story would show me where to go next.

My friend Bethany Bell, who’s a journalist for the BBC, had reported on a situation at the border of Austria and Hungary, where Syrian refugees were waiting to be allowed into Austria on their way to Germany. I remembered that she’d posted photos on Twitter, including one of the Red Cross’s pile of donated shoes and others of abandoned shoes. It kept hitting me that humans have been subjected to war and environmental devastation over and over and over, and no matter what we’ve built as individuals or societies, we’re often free to take only one action, which is to walk away. When Bethany described the situation in more detail to me over Skype, she said something similar, so that’s where I started.

My mentor Alan Weisman told me before I began writing that the number one thing I should do was to constantly question and push against whatever my biggest assumption was about the subject. My biggest assumption was “walking makes us human,” so I tried to push against that from any angle I could think of. It led me in a lot of unexpected directions. Like, I knew that disability would be a central subject in the book — that was important to me because almost no book about walking even mentions disability — but didn’t know I’d write so much about community, loneliness, and the future of digital technology.

CC: A Walking Life covers a range of topics from social capital and the importance of walkable cities and towns in creating stronger communities to the power of healing walks through a labyrinth or organizations like Warrior Expeditions founded by military vets and their Warrior Hike (to “walk off the war”). There’s so much we could discuss in this interview and so little space on this tiny blog. One section that stands out to me as the heart of this book, the power in walking, is your first time in a labyrinth. You write, “As a person who is less spiritual even than she is religious, if that’s possible, I tend to be skeptical of any spiritual or religious practice that claims to put us in touch with the divine, much less with ourselves.” What follows is an amazing moment for you. Would you share a bit of that experience here?

AM: I’m still untangling that moment! I stumbled across a labyrinth at Norwich Cathedral in England, and knew I should walk it, since I’d researched labyrinths but had never been to one. For some reason I had an urge to walk around the outside first, and as I walked I began to form a question — how do we, or I, walk in the world as vocal and visible defenders of justice, say, and cope with the fear that inevitably comes? I think about this a lot because my paternal grandparents in Russia had survived so much under Stalin without giving up their ethics and commitment to honesty. Where did their strength come from?

As I entered the labyrinth, my footsteps slowed down as if compelled, almost like I was for the first time aware of the gravitational pull of the planet dragging me back, making me pay attention. It was eerie. As I walked the labyrinth, an answer came, which was simply, “Be the light.” Not light from above, but light from below, which I’m not sure makes sense to people. It really was a powerful experience. I keep trying to recapture it as I walk around my hometown, or in the woods. I have to slow my steps down a lot to reconnect with that feeling.

CC: I love the walking resources you offer on your website, from local & national walking groups to meditative practice resources. Do you have a favorite resource you refer others to often?

AM: Through a friend, I came across the work of a walking coach and change facilitator in Holland named Donja de Groot. She has a set of walking meditation cards that I ordered from her and love using. They have different prompts for questions to carry with you as you walk, especially walking in nature. She doesn’t advertise them, but I believe still sells them if you email her. I like how versatile they are, how I can just pick one up on my way out the door and have some guidance if I’m struggling with something, or just want to be reminded to slow down. This is her website: http://dao2change.com/Home/.

CC: What are you reading these days?

AM: A clerk at our local bookstore recommended N.K. Jemisin’s science fiction. They’re some of the best things I’ve read in a long time, and led me to finally read Octavia Butler. For nonfiction, I’m just starting Jane Brox’s Silence (her book Brilliant on the history of artificial light was incredible) and am slowly working my way through Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Classics are a go-to when I need some recentering — I just reread Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, which had a big impact on me when I was 20, and am about to start Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, which I haven’t read since high school. And a local friend recently started a book club. We read Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red, which was just as heartbreakingly beautiful as I remember, and we’re now reading The Overstory.

CC: Favorite pair of walking shoes or accoutrement?

AM: I invested in a pair of Frye boots several years ago that I pretty much live and die in. They’re incredibly comfortable and I hope will last me the rest of my life. Good socks are the real key, especially if they’re fun. My sisters have bought me socks every year for holiday and birthday gifts for decades now, and they get increasingly silly. Which is good. Life is too short to wear boring socks.

Antonia Malchik has written essays and articles for Aeon, The Atlantic, Orion, GOOD, High Country News, and a variety of other publications. Her first book, A Walking Life, about the past and future of walking’s role in our shared humanity, is published by Da Capo Press, a division of Hachette. She lives in northwest Montana.​ Read more about Antonia and her work on her website.

Don’t forget! Enter the book giveaway by Tuesday, July 30th (noon)
for a chance to win a copy of A Walking Life.