Rick Bass is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including Where the Sea Used to Be, Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had, and, most recently, The Diezmo. In 2002, he edited The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wilderness Areas, a collection of essays about Yaak Valley by writers, philosophers, scientists, loggers, and hunters. Bass’ short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award series. He lives with his family and works in Yaak Valley, Montana, where he is a member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, the Montana Wilderness Association, the Round River Conservation Studies, and the Cabinet Resource Group. Bass was the Writer-in-Residence in the MFA program at UNCW during the spring of 2005.

Kimi Faxon: You’ve said that writing cannot be taught, but that the habits of a writer can be. How has this played out for you? I am wondering how you became a writer, how you learned your habits, and which writers you would cite as major influences.

Rick Bass: It continues to play out every day. Particularly with my desires to spend time with family, and with the ever-expanding tasks of activism during a neoconservative government, it’s more important than ever to try to carve out, and keep carved out, a couple of hours a day in which to be a writer and to remember how to be a writer, which in large part is to say, to remember how not to be anything else, so that you can inhabit your story that day as if for the first time. To bring freshness to it.

I became a writer largely by and after reading Jim Harrison’s title novella, Legends of the Fall. Harrison, Tom McGuane, and numerous other western writers were early influences, as much for their lifestyles—spending time out-of-doors and managing to make a living without having to teach. That was, and is, appealing to me. Teaching is wonderful, and an absolutely honorable profession, but in addition to sucking away from one’s own work, it also can pull one away from the business of living. It is an enormous obligation, particularly when done properly.

Faxon: You once said that you “look for the world” as a fiction writer, and that for you there is little difference between fiction and nonfiction. Can you speak about the way you look for and to the world for story, and how you make the decision to shape that narrative into fiction or nonfiction, or, in other words, how and why you employ each genre?

Bass: Part of it probably has to do with how hungry I am to write a short story, but I do believe also that certain immeasurable ideas, elements, voices, structures, do combine with the writer’s temperament at any given time to predispose a story toward fiction, rather than nonfiction. For lack of a better word, there is a kind of electricity or vitality that attends the beginnings of fiction for me, an otherworldliness and inexplicable-ness, whereas the condition preceding the beginning of a piece of nonfiction is generally calmer, less electrical, less wondering, less-less.

Faxon: Many consider you to be a member of the canon of nature writers in America, but much of that writing about nature and place has come out of your fiction. Some say that nature writing has been boxed off as a genre, relocated to its own section in bookstores. You are a writer who seems to have broken out of that box. Can you discuss this? Do you feel that fiction has been the best means for you to write about place?

Bass: The increase in place-based literature in the nonfiction genre has certainly been prolific, often in the celebratory mode (other times in lamentation)—I wonder if affording place the import of a character in a fiction story might not sometimes be a higher accolade to that place.
As far as box-breaking, it may be as much a function of subject and genre diversity that sometimes allows me a little breathing room in the Nature Writer thing. While there are nature writers out there, and certainly it’s a wonderful thing to be, there are also an awful lot of writers out there who are being called Nature Writers who are actually just plain old writers. In the end it doesn’t matter—if the writer writes well enough, and movingly enough, then the readers will be moved, changed, and such notions of categorization won’t trouble their mind. The point that the subject, the classification, is being discussed can sometimes be a tip-off that something in the text might benefit from some work.

Faxon: The theme of this issue is migration and movement. While there is a great Thoreauvian tradition of American writers who write out of their commitment to home, there is also the opposite tradition of those who write in exile; Hemingway in Paris comes to mind. You are very much a “home” writer, but also someone who travels widely for your work; how has this affected you and your writing? Do you think is it necessary for a writer to claim a place as home?

Bass: It’s absolutely not necessary for a writer to claim a place as home—I think imagination is the one tool most critical to a writer. For me, place, and an understanding of a place’s logic and systems, expands imagination. So it’s useful—and attractive—to me, for that. For me, place, and the processes of place—particularly undeveloped nature—is the genesis, the bedrock, of imagination.

Faxon: I once heard John Elder say that we call a place wilderness when it does not contain our stories. You write in the last paragraph of the essay “River People” from Wild to the Heart, “If it’s wild to your own heart, protect it. Preserve it. Love it. And fight for it, and dedicate yourself to it, whether it’s a mountain range, your wife, your husband, or even (heaven forbid) your job. It doesn’t matter if it’s wild to anyone else: if it’s what makes your heart sing, if it’s what makes your days soar like a hawk in the summertime, then focus on it. Because for sure, it’s wild, and if it’s wild, it’ll mean you’re still free. No matter where you are.” What do think distinguishes wilderness from wildness, and can we live in the midst of both anymore?

Bass: I use the phrase “wilderness” almost as a legal term, usually to refer to big tracts of undeveloped country, often though not always possessing great or significant biological diversity, and often possessing its own highly developed system of logic and natural processes, while “wildness” is perhaps a simpler abstraction, referring simply to that which skitters away from human control.

Faxon: For much of the last decade, you have used your writing to support your activism. Do you think of your writing and your activism as complementary? What happens when you come to writing with an intention, a call to arms, an awareness, instead of a poetic impulse that I’ve heard you talk about? Others have warned of this, the tendency to marry one’s art to one’s politics. Are there dangers to this? What is gained? What is lost, if anything?

Bass: This is a hard question to answer. I hate answers that are ambiguous, the sometimes-yes and sometimes-no variety, but that’s the case here. Perhaps the foremost danger in bringing intent to your writing lies in the fact that the imagination can be quickly compromised—choices can seem too obvious, lines too direct. Revelation can substitute for discovery. The rapport between writer and reader is all-important, and when you’re using the reader for your own political perspective, well, that’s a tricky game even on its own face, but even more so if your goal is to produce something artistic. The further into this I get as a writer, with so little tangible gain (none, yet, in the Yaak) having come from so many tens of thousands of pages, the more I wonder if the only real gains are of a personal nature—the repeated call to arms, stepping up to speak out against injustice, the unwillingness to accept such. The losses, of course, come in the realm of art—the plaguing notions of what could have been written, what could have been imagined, otherwise, were one not engaged in the war of one’s activism.  But I would not want to be the kind of person who loved the Yaak landscape as much as I do, and found it as special as I do, who then turned his back on speaking out for its protection.