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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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Sunday Series: Ramona Payne 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 Ramona Payne, who writes about nurturing creativity with practice, exploration, and commitment.

Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash

My writing starts with an experience, a question, and sometimes an awakening. From there I try to sort out why a particular story takes hold, what it means for me. I hope that by writing I can figure it out and start a conversation with others.

Although I have loved writing since I was a child, it took years before I called myself a writer. Saying you are a writer elicits so many questions. Some are easier, such as, “What do you write?” When I respond to this question, I explain my love for the essay form and then say my favorite genre is creative nonfiction. That term usually requires explanation—isn’t all writing creative?— but then I tell them I use the tools of the novelist while telling a true story. This seems to help them understand, and I can point to examples, such as essays, books, or magazine pieces that fall under this genre.

Then comes the inevitable second question “So have you written a book yet, are you published?” Even though my answer to that question is “Yes,” I had to learn that being published, the frequency of it or the recognition it can bring, cannot be my reason for writing. If I have labored over a work, it is often my intent to send it out, to share it with others. But first, I have to get over imagining the book cover, the catchy title, and book tours and reading. I am left with only one course of action— I have to sit down and actually put the words on paper. All of those imaginings are great for inspiration and ideation, but until I place the words on the page, then wrestle, tease or caress them until they are properly positioned, it’s all make-believe. 

Writing forces me to deal with my desire for perfection. Every time I sit down at my desk to begin a new piece, I wonder how it is going to turn out, or if will it be any good. But the best part of writing is I give myself permission to just let the words come, whether they are in a rush so swift I cannot contain them, or if they come as a measly drip, drip, one tentative word at a time. At the end of the time spent writing, I always am slightly amazed at myself, not because the writing is so incredible, because it is not most of the time, certainly not right away. I am amazed because I sat down with the intention to write and I did it. I kept a commitment to myself, using a gift that I let languish for years because I was busy doing other stuff. I used to wish I was like those people who discovered their vocation early in life, and had started earlier on this writing life. I made peace with that years ago, now that I have lived long enough to have rich and varied experiences, and enough years have passed to give me perspective and insight about what I have gone through.

I believe everyone is an artist of some sort. Creativity has to be nurtured, but it must also be explored. This exploration takes place when we become more aware of the diversity of thought, experience, style, and culture around us. Without this awareness of diversity in artistic expression, a child is told their picture “doesn’t look quite right,” and believes it. A writer tells a story, and because it is so foreign to your worldview, you dismiss it, instead of looking for the kernel of truth, insight, or even humor that might be present.

I go to hear other authors read, visit museums, poke around in small shops, travel, always searching for other ways to look at and feel the world. We are all artists of some sort, and to the question, “How do I get paid for it?” my advice is not to wait to figure out how to make money at writing or any art. Practice, explore get better, and then consider if this craft is something you love enough to do whether it feeds you or not. My life is richer for my writing and that is why I write.

RAMONA M. PAYNE is a writer and author and her work has appeared in essay collections,  magazines, and online. She completed the Creative Writing program at The University of Chicago Graham School, has a liberal arts degree from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from Duke University. She supports local theatre, practices Pilates, and leads her expressive writing workshop, Write.Pause.Reflect.

Currently living between Cincinnati and northern Indiana, she is working on an essay collection. Find her at ramonapayne.com and follow her on Instagram @writepausereflect or Twitter @RamonaPayne1.