The Ecotone Interview with Rick Bass

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 Faxön 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 otherwestern writers were early influences, as muchfor theirlifestyles— 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, 39 Ecotone: reimagining place 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 ofnonfictionis generally calmer, less electrical, less wondering, less-less. Faxon: Many consider you to be a member ofthe canon ofnature 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...