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Excerpt from Life on the Loose by Cari Taylor-Carlson
(And there’s a giveaway!)

“Everything changes when you’re at the edge, ready to slide into a river that will take you into the abyss, the unknown.” ~ from Life on the Loose: My Journey from Suburban Housewife to Outdoor Guide

Christi here. I have two visions of myself: Christi Imagined and The Real Me. Christi Imagined loves to hike the narrow trail, camps with ease, and packs only one bag of absolute necessities. The Real Me marks the map for the nearest ER, stocks up on meals, snacks, water, meds, books to read (who can take just one?), a journal & pens (of varying thickness–fine, medium, BOLD!), too many clothes, an extra pair of shoes, chapstick…wait, make it my fave: Burt’s Bees lip shimmer, two colors (I want to look good in the woods). That “one bag” bit? I have a lot to learn.

Cari Taylor-Carlson, author of Life on the Loose: My Journey from Suburban Housewife to Outdoor Guide, can teach me plenty. Below is an excerpt from the first chapter of her book, a quick view into her story of outdoor guide experiences learned first-hand, sometimes the hard way. Eric Hansen (Hiking Wisconsin) calls this a “nonstop action” memoir; Robert Vaughan (Funhouse) says “Taylor-Carlson maintains composure, grit, integrity, all in the throes of arduous adventures in nature that many of us won’t even dare to take.” So when you reach the end of this excerpt and find yourself wanting more, ENTER THE GIVEAWAY for a chance to win your own copy of her book! Deadline: Tuesday, Sept. 5th.

Now on to a sneak peek at Cari Taylor-Carlson’s Life on the Loose!

Solo on the Green

“You’re the only person on the river this week,” Dirk said as he helped load my canoe. “Oh, you’re traveling light.  Do you have enough food, warm clothes?” His muscles bulged from hauling canoes. “Most people we put in fill the canoe.” He should know, as one of the three brothers who owned Tex’s Riverways, my canoe outfitter. They launched hundreds of canoes each season. Good thing he couldn’t hear my heart slam against my chest.

I had brought two duffels, stuffed with clothes, food, and gear. Six gallons of water, a Coleman stove, and those duffels didn’t take up much space in an eighteen-foot aluminum canoe. It looked as empty as I felt. The breakfast cheese omelet and hash brown potatoes at the Westerner Cafe couldn’t fill the scared hole in my belly.

Dirk added to my growing panic when he said in a flat voice, “You know my concern for your safety requires me to tell you what you’re doing is dangerous. This is off-season.” He walked to the bank where I sat in the canoe, and put his hand in the water as if to judge the current. “Ordinarily, we tell people if they run into trouble, another canoe will come along within an hour. For you, no such luck.” He looked smug, as if confident in some secret knowledge of pitfalls looming ahead of me on the river.

When I planned this trip down the Green River in Utah, I’d arrived at a midlife junction. It was time to start the business I had dreamed about for many years, adventure travel guide. I loved the symbolism: launch a canoe, launch a new life. Ten, fifteen miles a day in a mild current would be about right for an experienced paddler checking out an adventure for her soon-to-be clients. I envisioned warm sunny days, sixty to seventy degrees, with a slight chill at night, spectacular canyon scenery, and around every bend, convenient campsites on sandbars. It added up to a dream wilderness trip in my favorite Western state. What could go wrong? I relished the challenge, a chance to prove to myself that I could be an intrepid adventurer.

At breakfast, a man at an adjacent table announced in a loud voice, “The dog’s water froze last night.  It was twenty-three when I went to bed at ten.” He slung a winter jacket on a chair, gulped his coffee, and took off his gloves. “Feels nice and warm in here.” He looked at me as if he could read my mind. How could he know?

In exactly thirty minutes I would leave for the river and five nights in a tent. Did I have to do this? Yes, if I wanted to reinvent myself as an outdoor guide. Thanks to lack of weather foresight and a habit of traveling light, my wardrobe included neither a fleece jacket nor long underwear. I knew better, but packed for Utah, not Montana. To my credit, I brought a rain jacket and rain pants that came in handy for warmth at night when I needed to wear everything I’d packed.

Food had been my primary concern, not my wardrobe. I had planned meals down to the cheese sauce for the Pasta Alfredo, fresh garlic, and the curry powder for the chicken. I would eat well.

As I stood by the river, strong, confident, free dissolved into small, insignificant, scared.  At home, the Green River was a cute little wiggly blue line on a map.  Now those fifty-five miles from Ruby Ranch to Mineral Bottoms looked more like a Lewis and Clark expedition than a casual six day outing. At least I was going downstream, not up. I should have done some research, made a plan that more closely matched the risks of this solo voyage. As an experienced outdoors person, I should have known to bring fleece, even to Utah in early November.

Would I find campsites? Did I have enough food, water, fuel, and what if my stove broke down?

Then Dirk said, “When it’s time to come off the river, you’ll come around a bend and see a cottonwood on the left bank. It’s a big tree.” He walked to the bank and started to slide the canoe into the river.  “You can’t miss it.  Get ready to pull out there.”

“That’s it? You want me to watch for one tree? Anything else I should look for?”  Now I felt the fear that would obsess me all day, every day, until I found that cottonwood.  That fear sucked the joy out of the trip. Of course I could miss it. Could I watch both sides of the river at the same time in a current that whipped me around every bend?

“Oh, you’ll recognize the tree. It’s at Mineral Bottoms, right in front of you.” When he said this, his voice a monotone, he wouldn’t look me in the eye, just stared at the river.  I knew what he thought.  This middle-aged woman is crazy. His disdain for my adventure eroded every remaining fragment of my fragile confidence. Damn Dirk. Damn the river.  Damn my confident plan back in Milwaukee.

If I got myself into a jam, there was no one to lend a hand.  The Green flowed through a wilderness canyon. I had choices; let go of the dream and stay the course in suburbia, or turn off the monkey-babble in my head, get in the canoe, and paddle.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” He didn’t ask about a cell phone. I didn’t have one, but even if I did, it would have been useless in the canyon.  Would I admit to Dirk that I was scared? Never. Just in case, we made a plan, because this mother of four wasn’t ready to feed a turkey vulture in the desert.

“If you’re more than a day late,” he said, “I’ll send a helicopter to search for you.”

Dirk didn’t know I would swim miles in the murky Green, before I’d flag down a helicopter, nor pay hundreds of dollars for a rescue. There would be a way out of that canyon even if I had to crawl naked and bloody over prickly pear cactus all the way. Still, it was comforting to know we had a plan.

Everything changes when you’re at the edge, ready to slide into a river that will take you into the abyss, the unknown. Could I flip a switch, let go of my predictable life? A tree branch floated downriver and disappeared, and finally, tentatively, I let go of the root that bound me to the riverbank. The current caught the bow of my canoe, and in thirty seconds, I was three hundred yards downriver. I wouldn’t need to paddle, the Green would do the work. There was no turning back.

~

Cari Taylor-Carlson (right), ran her own business, Venture West-guided outdoor adventures, for 32 years and was the founder of the “Milwaukee Walking and Eating Society.” She is best known as a food writer and is the author of several books on the city’s dining scene, including Milwaukee Eats, Milwaukee’s Best Cheap Eats, and The Food Lover’s Guide to Milwaukee. She also wrote about restaurants for 18 years for M Magazine and has been a regular contributor to WUWW-FM’s “Lake Effect.” Visit her website: lifeontheloose.com. 

ABOUT THE BOOK: Life on the Loose: My Journey from Suburban Housewife to Outdoor Guide explores Cari Taylor-Carlson’s thirty-two year adventure with Venture West as she and her customers traveled the world with backpacks, canoes and kayaks. In the beginning, a painful divorce led Cari Taylor-Carlson to recognize her need for wilderness, her safe place. The book, then, takes us on two journeys–the internal angst of the guide and the external beauty of the places she traveled.

~

REMEMBER: Enter the GIVEAWAY
for a chance to win a copy of Life on the Loose!

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Q&A with Jenny Forrester, author of Narrow River, Wide Sky

Our memories save us, she’d told me when she gave me a diary for my thirteenth Christmas. I started writing my memories to save myself from the grief I’d gathered and given, and to figure out how to live without her, to grow up, and to consider what it means to be of service. ~ from Narrow River, Wide Sky

There’s a theme that keeps appearing in the work I’ve been doing lately, both personal and professional: how writing saves us. Whether I’m writing a letter to a friend or pouring thoughts into a journal, as I’m editing the draft of an essay or reading a memoir, the way we pull at language or push at imagery can weave a story that brings resolution, a desire for redemption, always relief.

This idea holds true with Jenny Forrester’s new memoir, Narrow River, Wide Sky (Hawthorne Books, 2017), a beautiful book that Kirkus calls “finely etched” and one that is encapsulated in the quote above. Forrester digs into the past in order to envision a future. Her book moves from scene to scene with little whitespace but plenty of close detail, offering a wide angle perspective on a society bound in politics and religion. The crux of her memoir is revealed in select critical moments between brother, sister, and sister-in-law to-be: we may grow up together in tight spaces and common struggles, but our journey can split at painful, philosophical divides and leave us hungry for understanding, for acceptance. Forrester writes of her return to such grace.

I’m honored to host Jenny for an interview and thrilled to give away a copy of her new book. Click HERE to sign up for the giveaway (deadline to enter is June 18th).

Now, welcome Jenny!

Christi Craig: You and I met several years ago in one of Ariel Gore’s Literary Kitchen online courses, and I remember mention of you wanting to write a memoir back then. It’s wonderful to see your book finally released into the world–here’s to perseverance, the twists and turns of the process, and success! How has your vision of this book changed from back then to now? Or maybe the vision has always been the same and time played a bigger (necessary) role in massaging the story onto the page?

Jenny Forrester: The desire to write a memoir has always been to pass the stories of my mother to my daughter, but the evolution to something bigger and for a wider audience happened over time. Time was required for this to become what it’s become. For sure, there was no other way than to be patient and keep writing towards the invisible (to me) ultimate form it took. You’re so right.

CC: In the chapter, “Supine,” you write “I got good at spinning in small spaces, careful of the river rocks around me,” and on the opening page of your book, you consider where to bury your mother, saying, “She liked expanses, the wider view. She’d suffered narrowness long enough.” Your memoir speaks on sense of place in relation to self as much as it does other themes (life & society, politics & religion), and it is a moment you experience at the Salt River where place takes you back to your core being:

I started to remember again rivers and where I’d come from after spending so much time and emotion on forgetting what I’d been and learned and forgetting what I’d fought against without knowing why.

Is there relief, then, in putting your story to the page?

JF: Writing helps me cope with the small and massive details of life, and I wish I didn’t have to have this sometimes. It would be so much easier to watch television and numb myself or maybe get involved in some other art form, but I do this because I must. I’m compelled. I would love to write fiction from now on.

CC: You are curator of the Unchaste Reader series, an ongoing literary event in Portland, Oregon. Can you tell us a little more about the series–its roots and its effect on writers, readers, and audience members alike?

JF: The series for women poets, spoken-word artists, and musicians began as a reaction to the male-dominated literary scene and has evolved as my understanding of the gender binary and other social issues and skills and you know, grit or maybe bossiness-used-for-good, and the know-how to create supportive art spaces has evolved. So the main effect of change has been on me, I suppose, and I hope it’s helpful to others. There’s this other effect that is hard to quantify – but it’s joy. There’s this joy that comes from the readers/performers that is so addictive. They’re happy, so I’m happy. Joyful, in fact.

CC: What are you reading these days?

JF: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Book of Joan and Sherman Alexie has a memoir coming out. Ijeoma Oluo, too. And Ariel Gore’s got a new book out soon, too. I’m always reading poetry.

CC: Do you have a quote or mantra that stays with you lately? (Because in many ways, life & society, place & politics hasn’t changed.) 

JF: As I drove through Colorado on the book tour, I kept hearing the lines of the book, and that meant so much to me. So, I suppose one of my mantras is to listen – the landscape has much to offer (solitude and sanctuary) and has much that it needs, you know? I navigate wanting more and being of service and seek to do right and believe that that rightness will widen the river, an important metaphor for me. And as a mantra, a repetition – I write myself resilient.

Jenny Forrester has been published in a number of print and online publications including Seattle’s City Arts Magazine, Nailed Magazine, Hip Mama, The Literary Kitchen, Indiana Review, and Columbia Journal. Her work is included in the Listen to Your Mother Anthology, published by Putnam. She curates the Unchaste Readers Series. Visit her website for more information on her writing or the Unchaste Readers website for information on upcoming events.

Don’t forget! Enter the giveaway for a chance to win a copy of Narrow River, Wide Sky (deadline is Sunday, June 18th).

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#AmReading Patty Dann’s THE BUTTERFLY HOURS:
transforming memories into memoir

I found THE BUTTERFLY HOURS by chance. I had stopped in at the bookstore one Saturday afternoon for an author event. First thing’s first: I bought the author’s book (KRAZY by Michael Tisserand) and a new pack of stationary. Then, I settled into a plush chair two rows back from the speaker podium. I figured I’d thumb through the book while I waited, but I was twenty minutes early and the author had just arrived and people were still setting things up. So instead, I decided to browse the tables of good reads nearby.

With the store set up for author and audience, furniture had been rearranged. The table of current staff favorites that’s usually parked who knows where sat off to the side but steps in front of me now, with the last copy of Patty Dann’s book directly in my line of sight.

The book’s appearance, meek and thin with a simple cover, drew me in. Its subtitle, transforming memories into memoir, clinched my attention, since I’m in the last stages of editing Family Stories from the Attic with Lisa Rivero and in the midst of my online Flash Nonfiction course. After reading through the first three pages, I didn’t hesitate in my second run at the cashier; having finished the book, I’m eager to recommend it. Dann offers chapter after chapter of advice, encouragement, and examples of how writing prompts work–really, how writing in general works.

You have to do the messy part because even if you write ten pages and you only like one phrase, three weeks later, during lunch or in the middle of the night, you might feel compelled to continue that phrase. If you don’t have that one phrase written down, there will be nowhere to begin.

People sometimes freeze up at prompts, get stuck on the literal meaning of a word or the exact image in a phrase. But Dann suggests that the point of a prompt is to start. Write awkward; write clunky. Prompt or no prompt, just write. Last Sunday I “just wrote” the opening scene to a new story–200 words of awful and 10 words of “this might work” (with those 10 being part of a definition from the dictionary). Still, if nothing was written, I would nothing to revise.

Shut your eyes and listen to the church bell, the train whistle, and the snow falling on the roof. Open your eyes and see how children speak into one another’s mouths rather than their ears. Recall the lilac smell of your grandmother as she bent to kiss your cheek. Touch the dried snakeskin on the ground and imagine the way your throat burned the first time you tried hot peppers.

Paying attention to sensory details like touch, smell, and taste can bring a story to life or a memory back to life, benefitting the writer as well as the reader. For writers, such focus on our surroundings can “open us up,” as Dinty W. Moore says (THE MINDFUL WRITER, another of my favorite reads), “help us to see the story or poem or play or monologue or memoir in everyone and everything.” For readers, intimate specifics make way for greater connections with the work.

There are days, even weeks, or certain months of the year, when you simply cannot write. Don’t bother to feel deflated. Accept the fact that you have time off and fill the well.

Ah, there is my saving grace.

Taste new foods, listen to music from childhood, hike trails you’ve long forgotten, try your hand at watercolors, recite the names of the presidents of the United States, and interview your elders.

Because it’s been several months since I opened the draft of my novel. When anyone asks, How’s the book coming along? I cringe, silently berate myself, dance around my answer, hope they won’t notice the shame in my eyes. I wonder what’s wrong with me, worry about whether or not I will ever finish.

All good questions; all good food for though. But as Dann reminds us, nothing to be ashamed of.

digital sketch of woman looking out of window
self portrait: unfinished sketch

Look at the other creative things you’re doing during those quiet weeks or months. There’s much to be said for how a simple sketch or a twist in the recipe of your favorite meal or a day with the camera may feed your creative side. There are plenty of ways to engage in the work, even with your pen tossed aside. And we need that bounty as much as we need to fill the page.

Every essay I read brings me closer to my idea of how I want ( or don’t want) to write. Every story I edit reminds me of structure, what works and what doesn’t. Every book I find by chance re-energizes and renews my affection for the craft and for the power of story. Some might say this is not writing, but others, like Dann, would suggest that respite from one piece of work or another gives way for a writer to “fill the well” once again.

About THE BUTTERFLY HOURS (from Indiebound.org): Sometimes all it takes is a single word to spark a strong memory. Bicycle. Snowstorm. Washing machine. By presenting one-word prompts and simple phrases, author and writing teacher Patty Dann gives us the keys to unlock our life stories. Organized around her ten rules for writing memoir, Dann’s lyrical vignettes offer glimpses into her own life while, surprisingly, opening us up to our own. This book is a small but powerful guide and companion for anyone wanting to get their own story on the page.