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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.

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Sunday Series: Michelle Cameron 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 Michelle Cameron, a historical novelist, who sees the gift of discovering story in research.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

“Something about numbers mesmerized her, made the world fade away. The bustle of the ketubah workshop, the messiness of the artists’ desks, the fanciful decoration and sketch work she had no gift for were replaced by a world that seemed logical and fixed, firm around the edges.“

This passage is from Beyond the Ghetto Gates where my heroine, Mirelle, contemplates her love of numbers, a love she employs daily to help manage her father’s ketubah (Jewish marriage certificate) workshop.

It’s ironic that I chose mathematics for Mirelle to excel in, considering my own lack of skill. I constantly mess up dates and the simplest of calculations eludes me. But I was able to imagine how someone could love them because of how writing captures me. So let me apply that first sentence to my own passion: Something about writing mesmerizes me, makes the world fade away.

When I’m in the zone, one world truly does fade away – our mundane present day – and is replaced by the world of my imaginings and the characters who speak to me, often taking the action in unanticipated directions. In Beyond the Ghetto Gates, I was transported to Italy during the period of the French Revolution. I loved bringing the harbor city of Ancona to life:

“The walk to the cathedral was steep; it made Francesca, burdened by her pregnancy, gasp for air. The women rounded a bend in the road and paused, looking over the panorama spread before them. The red, white, and pink stone buildings with their red-tiled roofs were bathed in a golden glow. In the harbor, multi-masted cargo ships with furled canvases were anchored in the bay. “

In The Fruit of Her Hands, my previous historical novel, I entered medieval Europe and lived the lives of a Jewish family coping with mounting antisemitism; in my first published work, In the Shadow of the Globe, I stood backstage at the Globe theatre, watching my literary love, William Shakespeare, as he embraced a full-blooded Elizabethan life – all the while writing the masterpieces we still marvel at today.

As a historical novelist, I love delving into these different periods, figuring out what people ate, how they dressed, what they did to survive. Honestly, there can be a bit of terror associated with this, especially in the newest novel, where I describe Napoleon’s military battles. I know that someone, somewhere, will point out what I got wrong. But I reassure myself by recalling that I’m a novelist, not a historian. It’s the story that’s important.

But when I discover in the research ways to shape the plot, it can be an astounding gift. The ketubah workshop, for instance? That arose from a discovery that Ancona, Italy – the harbor city where Napoleon first demolished the ghetto gates – was also the world center of ketubah making. In fact, it was where artisans and scribes first illuminated these documents.

And as I learned more about the city, a strange tale came to light. It seemed – based on Vatican documents – that a portrait of the Virgin Mary in Ancona’s cathedral turned her head and wept. The devout took this miracle to mean that the Madonna would protect them from the French invaders. There was a particularly juicy anecdote that Napoleon himself, while looting the cathedral, faced down the portrait and was unnerved by it. How could any novelist resist such a story? Resist using it fictionally to inform her plot?

So why do I write? Well, any day when I don’t, I’m unsettled and deeply unhappy. Something drives me to the page, where I bring life to distant worlds and hear a chorus of invented people clamoring to be heard. Like my heroine above, I’m as consumed by words as she is by numbers.

MICHELLE CAMERON is a director of The Writers Circle, an NJ-based organization that offers creative writing programs to children, teens, and adults, and the author of works of historical fiction and poetry: Beyond the Ghetto Gates (She Writes Press, 2020), The Fruit of Her Hands: The Story of Shira of Ashkenaz (Pocket, 2009), and In the Shadow of the Globe (Lit Pot Press, 2003).

She lived in Israel for fifteen years (including three weeks in a bomb shelter during the Yom Kippur War) and served as an officer in the Israeli army teaching air force cadets technical English. Michelle lives in New Jersey with her husband and has two grown sons of whom she is inordinately proud. Visit her website for more information.

You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can purchase a copy of Beyond the Ghetto Gates from IndieBound, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, and Amazon on Kindle or in paperback.

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