An Interview with Ann Zwinger

P A U L W . R E A University of Northern Colorado An Interview with AnnZwinger Ann H. Zwinger, natural historywriter, isboth an exacting stylist and a relentless researcher, thereby linking the arts with the sciences. Her graceful, well-crafted sentences carry scientifically accurate information. Striving for clarity and rhythm, Zwinger often listens as a friend reads her final drafts aloud before she puts the polishing touches on her manuscripts. A native of rural indiana, Ann Zwinger earned a B.A. in Art History from Wellesley, an M.A., also in Art History, from Indiana, and did work toward her doctorate at RadclifTe. In more recent years, Zwinger has received honorary doctorates from Carleton and Colorado Colleges, and, perhaps, more importantly, has relentlessly continued her studies, taking courses in entomology, plant morphology, and printmaking. Zwinger’s style combines an artist’s eye for beauty with a biologist’s sense of detailed observation. Drawing on her expertise, she has taught at Carleton, Colo­ rado College, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center. She is a witty and enthusiastic presenter. Despite the comprehensiveness of her research and the meticulousness of her style, Zwinger is a prolific writer, one who has published eight major books in less than two decades. Emerging from her duties as a mother to three daughters, she began to write in the late 1960s. Her first book, as she reveals in the interview that follows, grew from a challenge by a friend who was a literary agent: Beyond the Aspen Grove was published in 1970, and later received the Indiana Author’s Day Award. Here Zwinger shares her experiences getting to know the mountain property that she and her husband had recently purchased. This remains her most personal book, for later ones tend to focus more exclusively on natural history, minimizing 22 Western American Literature personal expression. Writing with Dr. Beatrice Willard, a biologist, Zwinger followed vfithLand Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, which appeared in 1971 and was nominated for the National Book Award. Four years later, Zwinger published Run, River Run: A Naturalist’s Journey down one of the Great Rivers of the West, an especially readable book that won the Burroughs Association Medal for nature writing. Ms. Zwinger indicates that “Run, River Run is the book that means the most to me because that was the first time I went out alone. That was a real passage, from the little housewife to what I am now” (Trimble 9). By 1978 Zwinger completed Wind in the Rock, an engaging treatment of the Grand Gulch area in Utah— and one of her very best books. In it she exhibits both her sense of humor in recounting her exasperation with her horse and her novelist’s ability to imagine the life of a young Anasazi woman learning to make pottery. Next she wrote, along with Edwin Way Teale, A Conscious Stillness: Two Naturalists on Thoreau’s Rivers, which appeared in 1982. Zwinger still reveres Teale as one of the last American “innocents.” The following year A Desert Country Near the Sea appeared, enlarg­ ing her range to include the lower tip of Baja California and winning the Colorado Author’s League award for non-fiction. Emphasizing the “history” part of natural history, Zwinger turned to research on a great nineteenth-century naturalist, publishing John Xantus: The Fort Tejon Letters (1857-59) in 1986. A second volume of The Letters of John Xantus followed, published in the Baja California Travel Series. Since then, she has been working on her latest book, The Mysterious Lands, which will appear in 1989. Her pencil drawings grace all of her nature books, and she recently illustrated both a new edition of John Burroughs’s Signs and Seasons and Verne Huser’s River Reflections: A Collection of Writings. Her next project will be a study ofthe natural history of the Grand Canyon, done for the University of Arizona Press. Since 1960 she has made her home in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but travels widely in the West. Because of the high quality of her work as a researcher and as a stylist, Ann Zwinger has become one of the prominent figures in the...