Sherry Simpson spent 12 years working as a reporter in Alaska before obtaining her MFA in literary nonfiction from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 1995. One year later, her essay, "Killing Wolves" appeared in Creative Nonfiction. Simpson's first book of essays, The Way Winter Comes: Alaska Stories was published by Sasquatch Books in 1998. Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Geographic, and Sierra magazine. She has published essays in several anthologies including, American Nature Writing (1997) and Denali: A Literary Anthology (2000). Simpson, 43, is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

Kathy Tarr was born and reared in Pittsburgh until age 17. She has lived in Alaska for the past 24 years. Presently, she is enrolled in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh where she works as a writing instructor and serves on the nidus editorial board.

Are you fixated with bears, otters, ravens and the landscapes they wander through? Is wildlife part of your obsession?

(Laughing.) Yes, I guess I am fixated. Actually, I'm obsessed on lots of different levels. I'm writing about my marriage now, and even in that, the story is framed with a bear encounter. Lately, I'm also obsessed by explorers and their ideas of landscape. I want to get a feel for it the way some explorers saw it; I can't help myself, I'm a product of place. One of the explorers I'm writing about is William Yanert. He was a Prussian who came to America as a teenager and worked as a military explorer in Alaska at the turn of the century. After he left the army, he built a cabin on the Yukon River and lived there for almost 40 years. His brother joined him there and they called it " Purgatory." Yanert drew maps, he wrote poems and cartoons, wrote witty and charming letters. He was a great jokester, too. I find him compelling and so I wrote an essay about him and about the peregrinations of looking for a home and what it means to find it.

Annie Dillard is one of my favorite writers. She's an example of a nonfiction writer who can draft off the thoughts and obsessions of others. I like to tag along with biologists, to experience the benefit of their ability to name things. It's the same thing with the explorers. Reading about them is a great way to launch yourself imaginatively through facts.

How do you describe yourself? As an essayist, creative nonfictionist, nature writer, literary journalist, teacher, or as something else?

Well, I've used all of those labels, depends on the group I'm talking with. It's great to think that in the creative nonfiction form you can cross boundaries whenever you feel like it. I like how, formally, naturalists can better read the world -- and I want to try and pick up some of their ideas and tricks. Take Richard Carstensen, for example. He's a wonderful naturalist in Alaska. I like to go with him because he knows so much. I can question him endlessly: Why is this green color here? Why is this tree there? Why is the landscape rumpled here, but not over there? And he has the answers. It's a way of thinking I envy. As writers, we use some of those techniques, too. So Carstensen is another one of those people I could draft from, you know, following around in his wake, and it teaches me a lot. Through my writing, I can help other people catch a glimpse of how he thinks.

Is this a great time to be writing creative nonfiction? Is the market shrinking or expanding?

I think it's a great time to write literary nonfiction, but I'm not very good at markets, in the sense that I'm not good at pitching my own work or knowing what's selling. But I do think the readership for creative nonfiction has expanded. There's no way to prove it, and I'm not dead sure it's true. I do know that it's exciting when my students are exposed to it because they get so excited. Even students who have no experience writing nonfiction come in and catch on.

I once had a fiction student admit at the end of a nonfiction workshop, 'Don't tell the fiction professors this, but the essay is more flexible and exciting than the short story form.'

I do pay a smidgeon of attention in that I read The Writer's Chronicle published by Associated Writing Programs (AWP), and Poets & Writers magazine. I know I should send out more, but I'm a slow writer. Yes, I get rejected, but I also don't send out a lot.

Coming from Alaska, writing about bears and similar topics, sometimes I have a hard time figuring out who else wants to read it, as it's not always a subject that fits into literary journals.

I see you are at work on a new book of essays, tentatively titled, A Nuisance to Myself and Others: Some Lesser Adventures in Alaska, and that you have a literary agent. Tell me about this new writing project. Is having an agent a new thing for you?

Funny you should bring this up because I just asked the agent if I could extinguish my agreement with her. I decided that I had given her my collection too early and I wasn't satisfied with it. I wanted some more time to rework it without the pressure of having to have something ready for an agent.

A friend of mine gave one of the essays and my book to her agent without me knowing about it, and she's interested in the collection.

I have an idea of what this new collection should be. I think I've had a small breakthrough about what I can allow myself to do. I wrote 25,000 words about an attempt to retrace Judge James Wickersham's 1903 attempt to climb Denali. Wickersham's climb was a failure, but he published an account of it. The published version is entirely different than his private journal, and I became interested in the notion of hidden narratives.

I talked friends into taking the trip, but on the first day we discovered that the terrain was so difficult that it took us nine hours to hike 4.5 miles -- and we had 30 miles to cover in our first week, before we'd even get to see Denali. We had to abandon our plan and essentially make it up as we went along.

I titled my piece "Approaching the Mountain: How to Be An Adventurer in 25 Easy Steps." The manuscript was completely out of control. I was stuck, stuck, stuck on it. I showed the draft to a friend, and he told me it wasn't working in its present form, that I needed to do something else entirely. And you know, it was freeing to hear him say that. I can ditch it and start over -- 25,000 words -- and I can start over!

I don't want to be wedded to a narrative that's not right, but once you create the creature it's hard to kill it.

I had no market in mind; I'm bad at that. I write what I'm interested in and about what I see.

In 1998, I attended one of your mini-workshops on taking the leap of faith from magazine writing to books. How did you call up that faith, especially when it comes to publishing essay collections which are not a part of the literary mainstream? What I mean is, essay collections are not selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies and making big profits for the publishers.

When I was a reporter, I knew that I needed to write better. I didn't see myself doing that by staying in newspaper work. I'd think, only through being a magazine writer would I do better, that magazines had certain satisfactions. And then, from there, maybe someday I'd write better still and be able to produce books.

I went to a humanities conference in Sitka, Alaska, and heard Chet Raymo speak. He's an astronomer and naturalist, a beautiful writer. He told us that he had given himself 10 years to write a book. I decided then and there that if I was going to do that, to become the kind of writer I wanted to be, I would have to quit my job as a reporter for the Juneau Empire. My husband also quit his job, and we moved to Fairbanks where I began my MFA program.

I don't know what makes a person take a leap like that except they know they won't be the person they want to be if they don't.

Two of my essays were published in anthologies before I graduated, and that gave me hope that this was something I could do. I never thought I would make a huge living at it or that I would become a university teacher. I really figured that I would end up as a researcher and writer. I took classes in the University of Alaska's northern studies program, and I studied Alaskan history, and did a little freelance while I was in the MFA program. I felt like I would have some basic job and then write whatever I wanted to.

I started sending out what was basically my thesis to publication contests, and it was a finalist for the Bakeless Nonfiction contest sponsored by Breadloaf.

I sent it to Sasquatch Press too and was very, very lucky because The Way Winter Comes won the Chinook Literary Prize. All of this would have been hard for me without some kind of infrastructure, without contests and such.

To speak of Alaska's literary tradition sounds pompous, or maybe even a little ridiculous, as there's only been 100 years or so since people -- travelers, explorers, naturalists -- have "written" down anything about Alaska in a big way, to capture it as a place in our imaginations. In fact, most of the writers who have written about the state haven't been Alaskans at all: John McPhee, Joe McGinnis, and John Muir, to name a few. It may not be fair or accurate to talk about an Alaskan written literary tradition per se, but the first thing that jumps to mind is that whatever Alaska's literary history, it must be closely aligned with that of the American West, in the sense that writers confront the idea of frontier and wide open spaces and acting out our own individuality. Could you comment on that?

This is a good question, a prominent question. I wasn't born in Alaska, I moved here when I was seven. Knowing that, this plays into some ideas of what "Alaskan" literature may be. Some of it relates to this notion of restlessness, looking for something you don't have and trying to define yourself in terms of place. Especially what interests me is using Alaska as a template for investigating a lot of our ideas about what a place like this could mean. It comes through in all kinds of levels in various people's writing.

John Muir came to Alaska to understand glaciers, but when you read his work, you also get a sense that he was also looking for God in the face of the landscape. You see it in other writers, too. People come up and write about what a place like this can give you in terms of freedom; in the way you can choose your identity and live it out.

Alaska is a great place right now for examining all these contrasts -- to say something about who we think we are, and then to examine how we actually live.

Most of the students who come up here from Outside are boggled by the differences between what they expect in Alaska, and then what they see in Anchorage. They don't know quite what to think. They want it to be like something they saw in a brochure, but in the city they see box stores and traffic and ugliness. I tell my students in the writing program that, for example, Native life is complicated and complex and beautiful and difficult, that what we see in Anchorage is only a fraction of what Alaska is. To me the real Alaska is almost unknowable. How people live in the villages, how people used to live here, the way we regard animals, how we should live here -- all these things are ciphers and what's important is investigating them.

I do have one student, a Tlingit Indian, who's a wonderful writer and brilliant thinker. She's written a thesis that combines a Native understanding of landscape with memoir. She also writes fiction, modern clan stories. She lived Outside for many years and recently returned. Her writing has elements of this cyclic return that reflects the seasons and the natural history of animals and how the people live within those cycles. It's interesting that in the Native understanding of landscape, there is not this theme of being alienated as there is in the traditional Western idea of wilderness. I've learned a lot from her.

At the University of Pittsburgh, we've been talking about focusing more attention on the canon of literary nonfiction, to reach back through time, before the age of the New Journalists, for example. In the introduction to Literary Journalism, (edited and written by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, 1995), they say the genre's classics really began with writers such as Mark Twain, W.E.B. Dubois, and earlier essays which appeared in The New Yorker.

You chair the Department of Creative and Literary Arts at the University of Alaska. I'm wondering how the University of Alaska teaches its students the classics of creative nonfiction.

Well, this is an ongoing, inescapable conversation.

One thing we've done is to compile a recommended reading list of nonfiction works by de Montaigne, John Hersey, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Hellman, E.B. White, and James Baldwin, to name a few. We ask students to read essays, social and cultural criticism, narrative nonfiction, memoir, natural history and science writing. We also require them to read from fiction and poetry lists because we're big believers in cross-pollination. Our students write a critical introduction to their creative thesis, and they're expected to place their work within the genre and discuss the craft elements they've used in their own writing.

I read that when you were a child, the Scott O'Dell book on Island of the Blue Dolphins greatly influenced you. You wanted to be a marine scientist at one time, but that organic chemistry did you in, and grew up and became a reporter instead. Which writers today do you admire? From whom are you learning? Are there any writers you've recently discovered?

I have different categories of favorite writers. Among the nature and science writers, I think Annie Dillard is brilliant, and Loren Eiseley is a classic, of course. I so much admire their ability to work from fact, and from there move imaginatively to a wider view of the world.

I love to read fiction for pleasure. I like writers who use complicated sentences, like Cormac McCarthy and Michael Ondaatje. I like big sweeping epics, like William T. Vollman's series, Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes.

I've been infatuated lately with Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas. It's a memoir I keep thrusting at students so they can see how much you can do within a small, gem-like structure. And I'm a big fan of smart-aleck writers like David Rakoff and Sarah Vowell.

I love Pattiann Rogers' poetry, and Mary Oliver's. I often read poetry before I write for inspiration, to remind myself, as Patricia Hampl says, what good writing is. I'm a grazer of language.

Sometimes, poets seem a bit surprised to learn that nonfiction writers also read and study poetry, too. In a recent poetry panel at Pitt, one of the poets said: "Poets are naturally driven to record." Another poet said, "We write with our whole body, we listen to natural rhythms, to the heartbeat, to the arrows in our groins, we translate taste into words." Couldn't we say the same thing about good creative nonfiction writing? Aren't we writing to record? Aren't we tuned into the senses?

Absolutely. That's why it's a wonderful form. It weds those two sensibilities, to record and to understand, to find meaning and to convey it as well. In writing, it's not enough to simply describe something, you need to evoke in words the feeling you had.

The structure, the language, almost always spring from a moment -- writing from and toward that moment. It's what happens in poetry, except in poetry you don't need all the backing up and running around, all the armature: the research, the fact gathering, the long narrative run up, the narrative arc, then the long narrative retreat.

Lee Gutkind is prone to say that in creative nonfiction, we "take something small and make it larger" and that we must "act locally, but think globally," another fond expression of his. Gutkind says to remember creative nonfiction has a pedagogical side -- we teach the reader something about the world. What do you view as the important elements of creative nonfiction?

That's a huge part of it. I've kept Lee's words about it close to heart. There's a narrative underneath. Someone is living through the idea, and something about that story offers a way to connect a lot of dots that we might not otherwise see if we didn't have guided imagery and attention to it. One of the wonderful things about creative nonfiction is the way you can, and need, to saturate yourself into your obsession and subject. The teetering piles of things, the readings and clippings and interview notes -- you are really steeping yourself in that knowledge as a way toward understanding. The readers won't see most of that, but they have to leave your piece knowing that you, at least, have figured out some of it.

I don't ever throw anything away; it's the composting idea. I have this giant file cabinet where the drawers pull out horizontally, a friend bought it for me. It's jammed. Every once in a while, I go through these clusters of files and sometimes I look at the name and I don't remember what I put in there. Here's a file marked "Forest," here's one marked "Things That Are Lost." These clusters come in handy. They hold factoids, niggling factoids that are inspirational, and though I may not find information immediately, I know I have it here somewhere.

It's always about the search anyway, isn't it?

At many writers' conferences, it's popular to discuss the explosion in regional publishing. Alaska and Seattle, they're far away from the East Coast and its powerful and dominating publishing influences. Are we just trying to pacify ourselves when we speak about the importance of small publishers and regional presses such as Epicenter Press (Seattle), Sasquatch Books (Seattle), and Graywolf Press (St. Paul), or is there really something to this surge of regional publishing that we, as writers everywhere, should be paying more attention to?

I'm the worst person to talk to about big pictures. It seems to me that so many people these days are trying to locate themselves or root themselves. The publishers you mentioned are those who help writers express their own "rooted-ness" and by the same token, those small presses are helping readers find those writers. So many wonderful writers you could call regional because they write out of a place or a certain literary tradition, like Jim Harrison, Barry Lopez, William Kittridge. But through their writing they manage to transcend that.

The inevitable question must be asked. You are certainly proof that a writer can build a successful writing life by staying in one place for a long period of time, that we don't all need to run off and rent an artist's loft in Soho or bum around in youth hostels for a year to be writers. How has staying in Alaska all your writing life helped or hindered your writing?

Staying in Alaska, has done nothing but help me. I love to travel and to go to other places, but I love to come home. I think it was 20 years ago, when I realized my true connection to something larger than myself was my connection to place and all that means: people, their ideas about wildlife, natural processes, what we do that's good and not good in Alaska -- an inexhaustible idea of feeling and process. And I don't want to relinquish that. By staying in Alaska, I'm diving deeper into those ideas.

A student was just asking me if I thought I'd ever return to Fairbanks, and I said, no, I'll just keep going. When I hike, I hate to retrace my steps. Southeast Alaska, where I grew up, is in my blood, alright. What's not to like about glaciers, and the mountains, and the ocean? I have a small home in Gustavus, a town of about 400 people just outside Glacier Bay National Park. I hope someday soon I'll move there and sit in my teensy house and write my little heart out.

You wrote somewhere that one can often learn by sitting and waiting. Is there such a thing as a "sit and wait" approach in writing? And if so, what is it exactly, and how do you use it? (Pause....) Hold on. Didn't you just say that's what you were going to do once you make it to that little house in Gustavus? Sit and wait?

Yes, indeed. Yeah, I think there is something to it. It's what I want so much, anyway. Last spring, I rented a cabin on Resurrection Bay in Seward for a week so I could just sit and let an empty beautiful wind blow through my skull and clear some space for reading and writing. I got a lot of work done. This summer I'm hoping to go to the Brooks Range for a week or 10 days by myself. I don't want to move across the mountains, I want to sit in them. I want to fly in, set up a tent and sit there. You wait for whatever happens. Weather is the great contemplation, right? Or maybe you'll get to see a vole or a wolf or who knows what. You wait for thoughts to rise up if you're quiet enough to let it happen.

This is a long question, so bear with me. In your essay, "On the Island of Desire," you wrote about the seven nights you spent on a deserted, remote island all alone in Southeast Alaska. The island was about twenty miles from Juneau where you grew up, and you intentionally went there to have this solitude, away from your husband and your regular life. You took a copy of Moby Dick with you, which you read for the first time, some notebooks, your survival gear, and your dog.

You've seen humpback whales drifting through the pass; you've kayaked near calving glaciers; and you've trekked through "undiscovered places" most of us will never see. What intrigued me about this essay, and many of your essays, was that you are surrounded by the natural world, you have been entrenched in it for all of your life, yet as a reader, I detect a sense of loss and longing for the wilderness. It's a paradox how you've experienced many times this deep and personal connection to nature, but still you keep needing and yearning for the wilderness.

And finally, the question: No matter how many times you converse with nature then as a writer, you can't ever get filled up?

(Laughing, then a pause.)

Longing pervades almost everything I write. It's the emotion that powers much of what I'm interested in. It's not about how wilderness fills me up; it's about a larger desire to live in the world the way you feel you were meant to.

Not the horrible, romantic longing of Chris McCandless.**  I know exactly why he did what he did, but I think he did it the absolutely wrong way.

I suppose I want to live on the "island of blue dolphins forever," to be the kind of person who lives out in the woods somewhere and knows how to shoot a moose, how to cut it up, how to live based on experience every moment of your life. It's impossible anymore. Every time I go out on a trip, particularly in the undiscovered country, I think to myself: Why don't I live that way all that time?

Whenever I go on these trips, I see it as a metaphor for how we move through life -- again, it's not just about going into the woods -- it's more than that. In the beginning, you tromp around and it's great fun, and it's also really hard, but eventually, it comes to an end. It's a narrative that you create and live, and unlike life, you know how it concludes. It's a quest metaphor that you can re-enact each time.

One of my favorite explorers is Robert Dunn who wrote The Shameless Diary of an Explorer. He accompanied Frederick Cook on his first failed attempt on Mt. McKinley. In his book, he's brutally honest. Dunn begins it: "This is a story of failure." He also said something in the introduction which I loved: "The true spirit of the explorer is primordial restlessness. It is a creative instinct." I'm incredibly fortunate to live here and do these things, and simply doing them is a creative expression all of its own.

**You can read Sherry Simpson's essay "A Man Made Cold by the Universe" in this issue of nidus. In her essay, Simpson contemplates the story and tragic end of Chris McCandless as portrayed in Jon Krakauer's best-selling book, Into the Wild.