David Guterson, the 52-year-old Bainbridge Island author famous for his debut novel Snow Falling on Cedars, writes stories steeped in the natural world. "A sense of place informs much of my work," he explains. “It’s something I can’t seem to help.” All of his novels are set in particular environments in Washington State, a corner of the country blessed with a wide variety of landforms, weather systems, plant and animal communities and human cultures.

 

Instead of functioning as decoration or backdrop, the settings in Guterson's novels often influence the story and the storytelling style. He grounds these settings with specific and authentic details, making the places come to life on the page. Guterson has developed this gift of making places leap off the page in part by traveling around the Pacific Northwest.

 

"I like to be out of doors and on foot as much as possible," Guterson writes. "The heartbreaking beauty of the world speaks to me in a powerful way and I feel a constant compulsion to be in the presence of mountains, rivers, fields, coulees, canyons, breaks, draws, and woodlands."

 

Guterson’s forthcoming novel, The Other, is the tale of two close friends growing up in Seattle. John William Barry has inherited the wealth of two of Seattle’s elite families; Neil Countryman is blue-collar Irish. They’re brought together by a love of the outdoors that takes them into Washington’s remote backcountry, where they must rely on their wits—and each other—to survive.

 

In 2003, with the publication of Our Lady of the Forest, The Writer’s Workshop Review’s Christian Martin had the opportunity to speak to Guterson at length about his writing habits, influences and goals, as well as his thoughts on the role of environment in fiction. Earlier this year, he interviewed Guterson again to update their conversation following completion of The Other. What follows blends both interviews in an edited, slightly rearranged version, true to the spirit of the originals.

 

 

CM: To what degree do you control the progression of your narrative?  How much is planned out? How much evolves unconsciously?

 

DG: I have a balance between what I know, what my plan is, and the structure, versus a lot of unknown and mystery and discovery. I work in existing genres:  Snow Falling on Cedars, for instance, is a courtroom drama. That gives me a sense of structure; I know that a courtroom drama has opening statements, witnesses, cross examinations, a verdict. In East of the Mountains, I had a mythic journey story which has its own conventions. Our Lady of the Forest has all the conventions you see in stories about apparitions of Mary. These genres give structure to what I’m doing.

 

But the details are hazy to me; I’m going to discover them as I go, and learn as I go. I think without that I’d get bored and not be able to finish. If I was executing a plan I don’t think I could sustain writing a novel for the years it takes. There needs to be the sense of discovery, the opportunity to allow the unconscious to speak, and room to have these realizations about the story and characters and yourself.

 

CM: Your fiction is often noted for strong character development, for both primary and secondary characters. I've found your more memorable characters, like Ishmael Cross, Ben Givens and Tom Cross, to be fleshed out in extraordinary detail, brought to life with complexity and compassion. Can you talk about the two main characters, Neil Countryman and John William Barry, from The Other -- who they are, what they're motivated by and by what means you wrote them into being?

 

DG: Well, these two guys are best encountered in the book itself, of course. They’re Seattle teenagers circa 1974, so they like to smoke dope and get lost in the woods. That’s my own era and milieu. Neil goes on to become a high school English teacher—so did I. John William goes on to seven hermetic years in the woods—I yearned in that direction myself, but never did it, mainly because, like Neil, I met someone who kept me in the world. John William is fixated on the Gnostics. He goes to the woods because rejection of the world is central to the Gnostic view, which he takes seriously. He’s also got family problems—the only child of dysfunctional parents—so he’s screwed up and a little off his rocker. 

 

CM: What did you find particularly challenging in creating John?

 

DG: I don’t know if I can answer this. That part of things doesn’t stand out, in my mind, as more or less challenging than anything else. It’s all equally challenging. I can’t pull out one piece without pulling out the rest.

 

CM: When creating characters on the page, do you put a lot of your personality into them? Or do you consciously avoid this?

 

DG: With characters, I’m not conscious of trying to avoid anything. Whatever works is good. If it’s a piece of me, great. If not, that’s OK, too. Here’s a person I’m making up and I just get there however I can. The process is a muddle. Honesty seems to me to be a big part of it. You know about yourself -- how complicated, contradictory, moody and ever-changing you are -- so on the basis of that, you can guess everyone else is, too. The main thing for me is not to look down on my characters. They’re at least as complicated as I am.

 

CM: How much do you control your characters, as opposed to the characters just being out there on their own and you’re dictating or taking notes?

 

DG: The characters are constantly surprising me. They begin to insist on certain things. For example, with Caroline, Father Collins, and Tom Cross, there was always this question of whether or not they would be transformed. Will there be redemption? Will the coming of Mary alter their lives?  Even though I had intended at the beginning for everybody’s life to be altered, Caroline let me know that she wasn’t going to be altered, that she wouldn’t be touched by that. And I had to listen to that. So, that happens all the time, you know?

 

CM: When you’re starting out on a novel, what comes first: characters, plot, landscape, or quandary?

 

DG: I start with a question. I then go from there to setting, asking myself, “What’s the appropriate landscape to explore this question?” This was the case with Our Lady of the Forest—I envisioned a novel about spirituality and belief, then, after that, I asked myself “Where’s this subject best explored?” And then, deciding that it was the rainforest, I went ahead with characters and story.

 

CM: How has growing up in the Pacific Northwest, being a native son of Seattle, influenced your writing style and the kind of stories that you tell?

 

DG: The practical side is I’m pretty much stuck with this area; I’ve never lived anywhere else and I don’t know any other place, so it’s sort of for-better-or-for-worse. I have to write about here, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a good way to get to know a place inherently, without making any conscious effort to study it. It’s my life, the world I walk around in and live in, and that gives me a lot of confidence when it’s time to write about it. I'm not feeling uncertain. Say I moved to Ireland and decided to write a book about Ireland. The whole time I probably would feel that there was a high degree of likelihood that I was getting things wrong. I don’t feel that way about this place, and that’s the result of being a native.

 

The other good thing is that we have a diverse landscape here. I don’t feel I’m writing about the same specific terrain over and over again. The first novel was on an island in a snowstorm, the second was in the sagebrush steppe in the Columbia Basin, and the third was in a deep rainforest. I haven’t exhausted the landscapes of Washington State either; there’s a lot to write about without repeating myself in terms of setting. I feel like a regional writer, but not by choice— it’s just that I’ve always lived here.

 

CM: There are many "mini-episodes" within these pages that bring to life various nooks and crannies of the Pacific Northwest from an older era. As someone born and raised in the Seattle area, the many scenes and references to places in that city in particular rang true to my ear (including Dick's Drive-In in Wallingford!). Is it safe to assume that you are "writing what you know" in scene and setting in The Other?

 

DG: It certainly isn’t dangerous. To tell you the truth, I’ve never understood that “write what you know” phrase. What does it mean? It implies the possibility that I could write what I don’t know—that I have two categories to choose from. As far as I can tell, there’s no access to what I don’t know. If I don’t know it, how can I write about it? To tell someone to “write what you know” seems purposeless to me, because they have no other choice.

 

CM: Why did you choose to set your last novel in the Olympic rainforest?

 

DG: The rainforest is such a spiritually evocative place; it’s got all this density of flora and lush growth and you can’t go there without feeling some kind of spiritual possibility. It seemed like a plausible place to have a haunted vision, there in the forest with its mystery and shrouded light.

 

CM: I’ve spent a lot of time on the Olympic Peninsula and, while reading Our Lady of the Forest, I was impressed by how accurately and evocatively you replicated that environment. Do you take notes while you’re hiking, or actually write in the forest?

 

DG: No, I didn’t write in the forest or take many notes. I do remember spending a part of a day with a guy who really knew his way around Chanterelles. I took a notepad and a bucket, and the two of us went out to pick mushrooms. He’d explain things about the mushrooms and I’d write them down, and I took a few notes about the forest generally while we were doing that. But, just having spent a lot of time myself over the years in the Olympics, it’s all already there.

 

CM: As I was reading Our Lady of the Forest, I kept a list of particular species that you mention: Nymphalis Californica, alder, club moss, salal, devil’s club, ferns. What sort of natural history research did you do for this book?

DG: There’s a book that I rely on, and have for a long time, called Cascade Olympic Natural History by Daniel Matthews. It’s now in its second edition. Years ago, the Seattle Times asked writers, “What are the top ten quintessential Pacific Northwest books for you?” I mentioned this book among the top ten. That’s the book I use to check on mosses and the names of things. It’s a great book.

 

CM: Another element in Our Lady of the Forest that fascinated me was the way in which you wrote about the essence of the depressed Northwest logging town and the injuries that these communities have suffered over the past decade. Can you talk about how you were able to write about them so knowledgeably?

 

DG: For four summers, starting when I was 18 years old, I worked for the Forest Service on a brush disposal crew burning slash from clear-cuts. The town that I was in is called Randle. It’s on Highway 12, between Centralia and Yakima, and between Mt. Adams and Mt. Rainier. At that time, Randle was really a boomtown. We couldn’t burn the slash fast enough. The mills were going 24 hours a day. In Morton and Packwood, the two nearest towns, it was the same way. They were going gangbusters on the logging. I’ve got long-term experience with these towns, beginning in 1974, when I was acquainted with people and knowledgeable about these places from having lived there.

 

Since then, as I’ve gone out hiking and climbing, I’ve passed through these towns and witnessed their demise. For nearly 25 years, I've been interested in this decline, watching the historical slide, traveling through and watching the disintegration. I think my depiction of North Fork in the novel comes out from all of that.

 

CM: Your fictional town of North Fork has an authentic feel: the way people talk, the banter in the tavern, the list of items the logger buys at the local grocery store. The details are so rich I imagined you rented a place in Forks for six months and lived this life.

 

DG: I've lived in the Pacific Northwest so long that I feel really comfortable and confident writing about this world. If it was Ireland, I wouldn’t know what the hell they walk out of the store with. I’d be guessing, and I’d be wrong.

 

CM: How much of your novels depend upon their particular places? Could these stories be told as successfully in some other geographical location?

 

DG: I spend a lot of time putting landscape into my stories. I think if you change the landscape, you change the story. There’s no way you can pull that element out without pulling out the characters or the plot or the point of view. Change any of those things and you’ve got a completely different story. 

 

CM: Do you tend to read novels with landscape a central part of the story?

 

DG: I don’t seek out books because they have that quality. I read eclectically: books that people recommend to me, books that look interesting, books with different views, books that win awards. I don’t look for books that are fused with landscape.

 

CM: Nicholas O’Connell, in his survey of Pacific Northwest literature On Sacred Ground, concluded that literature from this part of the world often shares the trait of negotiating the relationship between people and place. Do you feel an affinity with this thesis?

 

DG: Well, I think that’s true everywhere. People write the “New York Novel,” the “Southern Novel,” the “Western Novel”— set in the classic mythic American West—and the “Midwest Novel.” I don’t think it’s unique to the Pacific Northwest that here we have a literature in which people are contending with landscape. It’s universal; people are immersed in landscape and contending with landscape, and their lives are involved with landscape.

 

CM: Which authors have stylistically influenced the way you write?

 

DG: Nobody comes to mind. In fact, I’m not even sure if that is really possible. I think that inevitably you discover your own voice, and you’re stuck with whatever voice you have. You can’t decide to be influenced by anybody. You may come across a writer you have a natural affinity for and recognize that, in tone or sensibility or vision, they are like you. Ultimately, it’s not about being influenced as much as it’s about a process of discovering your own voice.

 

CM: Your novels are known for their exploration of moral dilemmas and spiritual struggles. Do you feel that’s part of your writing?

 

DG: I think the notion of moral concern sometimes raised in reviews about me and my work is often confused. I don’t think it’s the right term for what’s going on in my work. I do think I am asking broad human questions that might be viewed as philosophical or existential questions, but I don’t think “moral” is the right term. I would say questions about the human condition are at the heart of my work.  You know, there certainly are a lot of other writers who have done the same--Tolstoy, Camus, and Dostoevsky—it’s not a specialty niche.

 

CM: How do you imaginatively enter into these worlds you portray? Whether it’s in a Japanese internment camp, or a WWII battlefield, or a tavern in a depressed logging town— what helps you to go to these places?

 

DG: Part of it is gathering raw material via research so that you have data to work with, facts and notes. But it’s also experiential, a matter of bringing your own mind imaginatively into the situation. Talking specifically about Snow Falling on Cedars, there’s a description of this long train ride down to Manzanar. Well, it’s not a train ride I’ve taken, certainly not in the 1940’s, and not into internment. But I’ve been uncomfortable on trains and I’ve been hot and tired and hungry on buses. So I try to take those experiences and extrapolate from them, and then combine them with my research and notes. I take those two diverse starting points and bring them together in my imagination in order to render the experience on the page.

 

CM: When you’re immersed in one of these worlds, is it hard to keep them separate from your waking reality?

 

DG: It’s a struggle to get up in the morning, go to your desk and try to situate yourself again in the world of the story. And then it’s a struggle to sustain that immersion. Like being in a dream and not waking up— that’s the state of mind I’m trying to induce when I sit down to write: an immersion in the dream world of the story.

 

CM: How long was the process from starting the first draft of The Other through to the final draft you submitted for publication?

 

DG: I really don’t know. Time and dates are blurry for me. I’m not sure I know what starting a novel means. In some ways it’s just there and always has been there.  I published my last book in ’03, and now it’s ’08 — five years. I’ve been publishing a new book every four or five years since ’94.

 

CM: Do you feel like you "push" yourself as a writer with each new book?

 

DG: I get pushed. Or pulled. Something draws me in. Then I’m stuck, for better or worse, with the challenges. Sometimes that’s satisfying; other times, it’s depressing. Sometimes I feel illuminated, sometimes I feel throttled. Another day goes by, another page or two or three, day in and day out, some of them good days, some of them bad.

 

CM: How has fiction writing changed for you since 1994 when Snow Falling on Cedars was published? What has gotten harder and what has gotten easier?

 

DG: Nothing’s gotten easier, that’s for sure. Every day, another blank page — how to fill it with something worthwhile? I don’t have a better answer now than I did then. I have less stamina, but more experience — so those cancel each other out. The end result is that each day feels about the same as the last one, for years on end. Waiting for Godot.

 

CM: Do you keep set hours at your desk?

 

DG: Fairly set. I like to get started first thing in the morning, and then stay with it until I just don’t have the mental energy to keep going.

 

CM: How did your 12 years as an English teacher contribute to your writing? 

 

DG: I think the main thing teaching did was to focus my attention. As a teacher I didn’t have a lot of time to write, so I had to develop some discipline, making myself get out of bed early in the morning. I had to work on mental focus, otherwise the hour I had in the morning wouldn’t be wisely used. Having a fulltime job as a teacher was demanding, but it brought a certain rigor to what I was doing as a writer.

 

CM: The last time we spoke, you envisioned writing a "Washington State Trilogy" of novels that "you could crack open in 50 years and get a real window into understanding how we lived in this part of the world in the latter part of the 20th century." Here you are publishing your fourth Northwest novel. What happened to your earlier plan?

 

DG: I figured that if someone in the future wanted to open my first three novels, they would see how those books are all cut from the same cloth of time and place, and also, of structure, approach, even vision, if you will. Unlike those books, The Other is a first person narrative that unreels over a long period of time. But it’s fine with me if people in the future want to read it, too, and put it next to the others to form a quartet, because like the others, it does give you a window into our approximate place and time. I feel that part of the value of the novels is that you could read these books to become acquainted with a particular part of the world in a particular era.

 

CM: Do you think landscape and nature will always be central when you’re writing fiction?

 

DG: It’s really hard to predict the future. I don’t think I could have predicted Our Lady of the Forest. I don’t think five years ago I could have looked into the future and said, “This is the kind of book that will emerge from me.” I don’t know what kind of a book will be here five years from now, and whether it’ll have landscape in it. You go forward, learning along the way. With the history of my work, it would be a reasonable guess that it’ll depend on landscape, but it’s hard to say.

 

CM: What do you view as your strengths as a novelist?  

 

DG: I feel relatively accomplished as a prose stylist. I work hard on sentences; I don’t view the prose as just a vehicle for the story. I want every sentence to be of interest to the reader, in its own right, just as prose. That’s one area where I’ve worked hard.

 

I also feel a certain natural facility for creating the arc of a story. All three of these novels are compressed— the action unfolds over a course of a few days—and there’s a relentless movement towards a climax. They have a suspenseful, page-turning quality. That’s something else I’ve always felt comfortable with: creating the arc of a plot.

 

CM: What do you view as your weaknesses as a writer?

 

DG: A good novel happens when there’s some inexpressible level at which it’s experienced. You know, there’s just some chord struck in the reader that there’s almost no way to voice. I think that happens in the really great novels, and that’s something I’d like to achieve: that inexpressible reaction in the reader.

 

CM: You don’t think you’ve done that?

DG: No, I don’t. That’s something that emerges from the composite of the parts, all converging on one thing. There are works of real sweep and majesty out there—you see it in Garcia Marquez and Tolstoy, more recently in Phillip Roth and Margaret Atwood.

 

CM: What do you think your role as a novelist at this point in history is?

DG: I think it’s the same for me as it’s always been for others. Nothing has really changed in terms of the relationship of the storyteller to the culture at large. People have always needed stories, and the role of the storyteller is to provide for that need, to allow people to have the experience of the story. Certainly people want to be entertained; they want to be seized. At the same time, the story should engage the deepest human questions. There’s a necessity for people to ponder important questions. The story should create the context for the questioning, and I want to create an opportunity for readers to do that. The questions really deep inside of me are also the deepest questions for everybody else. I try to put those out in front of people.

 

CM: Do you have any over-arching hopes for your writing, as far as specific reactions in a reader or in specific questions you are asking?

DG: I want the book to linger with the reader. I want the reader to finish the book reluctantly; I want it to haunt them afterwards. I want them to have an emotional reaction to the book and feel something afterwards. I also want an intellectual reaction afterwards, so they feel some intellectual closure. That closure is not about answers, but it is important that they understand the questions. I don’t want finality or a neat tidy package, but I want the questions to be clear, and I want there to be a certain sense of satisfaction. I strive for stories that have a final page that makes sense, so that when readers shut the book, they do so reluctantly but with understanding.