Amy Irvine on Almost Animal, the Isolation of Motherhood in the Wild, and Breaking Free from Ancestral Legacies
[0:00]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:02]I'm Zibi Owens.
[0:04]I've interviewed more than 2,000 authors on this show
[0:07]and learned endless amounts about storytelling,
[0:10]reinvention, and life itself.
[0:11]Because when you talk about books,
[0:13]you're really talking about life.
[0:15]So get ready to hear from today's best authors,
[0:18]the best-selling and the not yet discovered.
[0:20]Come find your next great read and the story behind it.
[0:24]Enjoy.
[0:27]Welcome to Totally Booked.
[0:28]I am so excited to be here today
[0:30]with Amy Irvine to talk about almost animal
[0:33]a memoir of motherhood, wildness,
[0:35]and the American West. Congratulations.
[0:37]Thank you, and thanks for having me today.
[0:39]Oh my gosh, it's a thrill.
[0:41]Let me just start off by reading a little bit about you,
[0:43]if you don't mind, from the back here.
[0:46]Amy Irvine is a sixth generation U-ton
[0:49]who descends from the first Mormons to occupy the West,
[0:52]from memoir, Trust Pass,
[0:54]living at the edge of the promised land,
[0:56]received the Orion Book Award
[0:57]and the Colorado Book Award.
[0:59]Her second book, Desert Cabal,
[1:01]and new season in the wilderness
[1:02]is a feminist response to Edward Abby's Desert Solitaire.
[1:06]And during lockdown,
[1:07]Pam Houston and Irvine co-authored
[1:09]the Epistolary Airmail Letters of Politics,
[1:12]pandemics, and place.
[1:13]Her vice essays have appeared in both,
[1:15]the Best American Science and Nature Writing,
[1:17]and the Best American Food Writing,
[1:18]as well as Orion, Outside High Country News,
[1:21]Literary Hub, and Backpacker.
[1:22]She lives in rights on a remote Mesa in Southwest
[1:25]Colorado.
[1:26]Congratulations.
[1:27]Thank you.
[1:28]Oh, Amy, I absolutely loved this book.
[1:32]It is so good.
[1:33]Loved.
[1:34]Just had to say that.
[1:35]Thank you.
[1:36]I'm so glad to hear that
[1:37]because I didn't know how it would resonate
[1:39]with people outside the region,
[1:40]women in particular.
[1:41]I wanted it to resonate far and wide,
[1:43]and it seems like it's making its way.
[1:48]I mean, I don't think,
[1:50]I think the fact that I'm not as familiar
[1:53]with the American West, I mean, I am,
[1:54]but not like in depth the way you have been like living there.
[1:58]Just made it more interesting to me
[2:00]because you're still coping with all the same thoughts
[2:02]and feelings and everything
[2:03]that people have everywhere.
[2:04]It's universal.
[2:06]And yet you have new elements to add to the equation.
[2:09]So, truly, yeah.
[2:10]Truly, I think, you know,
[2:12]motherhood is such a universal experience, right?
[2:16]And of course, there are so many challenges
[2:19]in terms of resources, socioeconomic status.
[2:23]If you're in a war-torn region,
[2:24]I mean, there's so many things that make motherhood difficult,
[2:27]but even with all the privileges I had,
[2:31]you know, to still get so knocked back on my heels
[2:35]and feel so isolated,
[2:37]even though I was a woman that chose a lot of time
[2:39]in the wilderness alone,
[2:41]really speaks to how much we all sort of relate
[2:44]in the same way.
[2:45]You don't only write about motherhood
[2:48]and from all angles,
[2:49]and you start the book with Kerry.
[2:51]I love the structure.
[2:52]Kerry, Toddle, walk all of it,
[2:54]how every chapter is in age.
[2:56]Like it's a beautiful way that you did that.
[2:59]But you talk about very different ways of living
[3:03]from ancestors of yours to placenta eaters to,
[3:08]you know, I thought like people going to a certain preschool
[3:12]was like wild and you are really with the wild moms.
[3:16]But that's okay.
[3:17]So tell me a little bit about learning
[3:20]these fundamental skills while you were in a new place.
[3:23]And you had recently moved to a different area
[3:26]where you said something along the lines of feeling
[3:29]like you understood how caged women felt
[3:32]because we're now in this new land
[3:35]and yet you felt sort of trapped by it as well.
[3:39]So I just talk about those feelings and everything.
[3:42]Yeah, as a daughter of the West,
[3:44]I had the great privilege of growing up on public lands
[3:49]and having lots of adventures on rivers
[3:53]in the mountains and the deserts.
[3:56]I made sort of my entire life about living
[3:59]an outsized adventurous life and sort of bucking
[4:02]against all the patriarchal norms
[4:04]of Mormon culture in particular by doing things
[4:07]like becoming, you know, a wild lands firefighter
[4:09]and a park ranger and a competitive rock climber.
[4:13]And I was the last person I thought
[4:16]that would be literally to go with the theme of the book,
[4:20]Cowed, or made almost animal in a confined domestic sort
[4:25]of way when I had my child.
[4:26]And I was surrounded by millions of acres of wild land,
[4:30]adventures awaiting.
[4:31]I thought I'd be the mom who was out with my kid daily.
[4:35]And not only did I have severe postpartum depression
[4:38]that went undiagnosed, I also experienced it.
[4:43]And some of the psychosis that went with it,
[4:45]I think as zucosis, which is the madness
[4:48]that comes with caging a wild animal.
[4:51]And so even though I had millions of acres
[4:53]in every direction, I still felt caged
[4:55]and I couldn't understand it until I started diving into,
[5:00]The Mormon ancestors I descend from, the women who were all plural wives pretty low on the totem pole in terms of marital privileges.
[5:09]There was really a hierarchy and that determined how many resources your kid got, your kids got and the kind of house you got to live in the amount of food you had.
[5:19]And I descended from women who all lived literally almost like animals.
[5:24]So again, the title rings true and that way and I had never really thought about them until I became a mother myself and I ended up on sort of a remote homestead living.
[5:34]Sort of what we now have glamorized as the Trad wife life, you know, these Trad wife influencers are sort of horrifying to me because I don't think it's a romantic life at all.
[5:43]I think it's an incredibly difficult and disempowering life for women and I learned that firsthand.
[5:50]But it took going back and sort of making sense of the lineage I came from to understand sort of how I may have drifted into that without realizing it.
[5:59]And then the story is mostly about my clawing my way out of that or breaking free.
[6:05]You have clawing, you have so many brushes with animals, you have the lion you're riding mica and you come across this mountain lion.
[6:16]I mean, that alone would be like, I'm done, I'm done with hiking, I'm done with riding the woods, I'm done, but not you.
[6:23]And you have bears who are like at your doorstep, literally you are just surrounded and that's just like two of the crazy scenes that were so vivid.
[6:34]And not to mention your reliance on dogs and try also found fascinating.
[6:39]Discuss your relationship with the actual animals in the book.
[6:43]Well, I just can't believe how many animals domestic and wild predators and prey came into my life and my daughter's life to sort of help get us through.
[6:56]And as you know, for meeting at Zippy, my child had a mysterious and severe illness that went undiagnosed for a very long time.
[7:05]And I was told often that it was in my head.
[7:07]So I, it turned out they were nocturnal seizures 20 to 30 ground mall seizures a night.
[7:13]And so I didn't sleep for years.
[7:15]So I was not in the best frame of mind.
[7:18]And my kid was very developed, developmentally delayed.
[7:21]And so the days were hard, little on the nights.
[7:25]And these animals came to just carry us through when we couldn't carry ourselves.
[7:30]And truly I began to see the connections between women and animals in a new way and realizing that mothers need mothering more than anybody.
[7:41]And I come from a line of women that didn't really get to mother their kids in a nurturing, abundant kind of way.
[7:48]And as hard as I tried to do something different with my child, I found myself also having a hard time.
[7:54]And it wasn't until these animals showed up to take care of us and literally the dogs protecting us by getting us home in a terrible snowstorm.
[8:03]And which my kid falls out of the sled as I'm skiing through as you know, like it was an epic night.
[8:07]One of the scariest of my life, but the dogs got us home in a blizzard that I was completely turned around in.
[8:14]So I really began to realize that the natural world can mother, women in a way that maybe we don't otherwise get mother, especially as mothers.
[8:25]And I'm so grateful for all those animals that came even when they were challenging and scary, which many of them were.
[8:31]There was some way there was what I think a lot of indigenous cultures would call strong medicine, you know, believing the animals are bringers of medicine.
[8:39]And I really feel like they helped both my healing and my child.
[8:44]What are we supposed to do when all of us in buildings around the, you know, in all of these cities disconnected from not only the land, but perhaps animals aside from, you know, squirrels.
[8:58]Do you, is your not advice? I mean, obviously you've chosen the life you have, but what do you think about the different ways that we all live even in the same country, which are so wildly different.
[9:08]So wildly different and we're increasingly even with my life out in the outback. I'm challenged by all this time on zoom and you know, all my traveling for teaching and now I'm about to go on book tour and be back in the cities again.
[9:21]I find myself needing to double down on my commitment to getting out and just standing with my hands on a tree, even if it's growing out of a sidewalk or going to a park early in the morning when it's quiet and having a little bit of a walk and just sort of taking the place in.
[9:40]So I think we can steal these moments even if we just sit in the window like a cat in the sun, but that we really take the moment in that we really let the natural world touch us in ways that we forget to as we're busy on our phones and onto the next thing.
[9:56]And as you know, mothers in particular, I think never guess.
[10:00]the chance to be in the moment anymore and we forget how more than anyone because you're thinking
[10:04]when, you know, once the next meal, what does my kid need for school? You know, there's never
[10:09]what's the next doctor's appointment. And so this need to be fiercely devoted to our own physical
[10:17]bodies and our sensory sensual connection to the natural environment wherever we can steal it
[10:25]makes a huge difference. I'm like, I better go outside today.
[10:30]That is my takeaway. Yes, my takeaway from this. You do such a beautiful job of showing us
[10:38]what the stress of a child who is sick or going through something stressful can do to a marriage.
[10:46]Not to say there weren't other influences on your marriage, but I feel like as what do you call
[10:51]her B? B as B's symptoms escalate and she's turning blue and you have all these fears and
[10:58]you're noticing delays and then you have Z because like little man cave and all of that and
[11:04]you know, the long distances, you really take us into the interior life of a wife and you have
[11:10]this really great paragraph towards the end. Can I read this? Is that okay? Okay. You said, I understood
[11:15]marriage in a whole new way. It wasn't about who was in the driver's seat and you went off the road.
[11:21]It wasn't about who did or didn't pack heat, who did or didn't shoot, whether you stayed or
[11:27]left or even straight. It was about letting the relationship run like a river. It's path determined
[11:32]by so much more than the water. The river will go where it is able. There will be obstacles you
[11:38]can anticipate. The flow might be split or siphoned off or damned. It will merge with other waters
[11:43]or it will dry up entirely sending molecules skyward to gather as clouds before starting the cycle
[11:49]again. The course of our river had taken our family somewhere new entirely. So beautiful. Yeah,
[11:55]it was a really tough marriage. Just the book chronicles for many reasons. But one is the
[12:03]severely gendered roles that I think tradwives, if I can put myself on that category for a short
[12:09]time, end up living. And so we really did part ways like a river in hindsight making sense of that.
[12:17]It just this lineage of women I come from and the my view of marriage that had been so much
[12:24]shaped by not only Mormon patriarchy and Mormon scripture as a utah girl, but also by my father's
[12:33]abuse who sort of justified his entitlement to females and my need to sort of be chased except for
[12:42]when he was abusing me as a sort of weird way to make me almost a compulsive marriage seeker.
[12:51]And the idea of not, you know, plural wives didn't get to have plural husbands like it
[12:55]only be plural wives. And I almost feel in hindsight like I was sort of bucking against that.
[13:00]So we did part ways and the circle would begin again and her would remarry and his wife,
[13:08]his second wife is at the end of the book when we're with
[13:11]be all sitting together in the cold while her horse was dying, which that horse carried
[13:17]all over these big mountains out here. And so it was a huge loss for us. But just that way of
[13:22]like thinking of our lives and our choices and our relationships as being shaped by so many
[13:30]forces rather than just these decisions we have to make that are very black and white and uniquely
[13:36]our own. Well, thank you for letting all of us in to that. You know, sometimes people think it has
[13:44]to be the most traumatic marriage story. But sometimes it says date those moments, those
[13:50]afternoons or those small conversations that really change the trajectory and show so much more.
[13:56]And the part oh my gosh about you and your dad and the way you tell it to, you know, how when
[14:01]you got to a certain age and your mom will be at the house and the bottle would come out and
[14:06]how sexualized he made you and just all of that and how confusing that was. How did you feel
[14:13]putting that out there? Have you shared that publicly before? Like what does that feel like?
[14:17]You know, I had shared it publicly before in a previous memoir that I wrote
[14:22]when my child was very young. So we're talking 2008. It came out. And it was such a tamer version,
[14:29]which is why I felt compelled to come back and revisit both my Mormon history and my family story.
[14:35]Again with a clearer view of how Mormon patriarchy shaped my father's sense of entitlement.
[14:43]But also I think the crimes of the forefathers, which were significant in the West, my family
[14:50]did a lot of harm was part of a lot of dislocation of people, genocide and enslavement of people,
[14:56]and harm to the natural world.
[15:00]I can't help but think that in the way that we think of, say,
[15:04]the descendants of African American slaves
[15:07]or Native Americans carry generational trauma,
[15:10]I think families like mine probably also do too,
[15:13]and that maybe that had something to do
[15:15]with my father's drinking and his passing on abuse to his daughter.
[15:21]And in some ways, I almost began to see my child seizures
[15:25]as some sort of way of trying to shake off this family legacy
[15:29]and that it became clear to me in writing the book
[15:32]that that was part of bees and my mission here on Earth
[15:38]was in this lifetime, whatever that is,
[15:40]was somehow to end that cycle of abuse and harm
[15:44]and the history of harm that frated it.
[15:48]Well, speaking of writing,
[15:49]and I obviously now have to go back
[15:51]and read your prior memoir,
[15:52]I know you've obviously said what works,
[15:55]and I didn't have time to read them all.
[15:56]Where did you learn to write like this?
[15:59]Not just school, but like when do you realize you could write
[16:02]and that you loved writing?
[16:04]I loved writing.
[16:05]The minute my mom told me that when they came home
[16:07]from a weekend away that I taught myself to write the alphabet
[16:11]and my own name when I was like two and half, three years old,
[16:14]I was always really drawn to writing
[16:18]and putting things down on the page.
[16:21]But I wrote a family story that was pretty disturbing
[16:24]in high school and my English teacher wanted to submit it
[16:26]to a bunch of competitions and get it published.
[16:29]And my mother, we didn't have computers
[16:32]and hard drives to store things on.
[16:33]My mother was very upset by and tore it up
[16:35]and that was the only copy I had.
[16:36]And so I thought writing, I quit writing for a long time.
[16:39]And it's also always been a very thorny issue of my family
[16:43]that I tell these stories that involve family
[16:46]and the culture that we are steeped in here in Utah.
[16:50]And so I stayed away for a long time
[16:54]but just continued to devour books.
[16:56]And finally, I went to work as a wilderness advocate
[17:01]for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance,
[17:03]which is a grassroots conservation organization
[17:05]out of Utah, very, very effective one
[17:07]in protecting public lands from development and harmful impacts.
[17:12]And our on our board was Terry Tempest Williams.
[17:16]And she knew I was publishing a little bit here and there.
[17:19]And I went to her when I decided I needed an MFA
[17:22]to really pursue writing.
[17:25]And Terry, bless her heart, refused to write me a letter.
[17:29]She said, get out there and live your life
[17:32]like it's worth writing about.
[17:34]And keep your own voice, don't let anybody
[17:38]try and train you into some sort of particular kind of voice
[17:41]or storytelling style.
[17:43]And I will be forever grateful for her.
[17:45]I did go back and get an MFA, but it wasn't until
[17:48]after I published my first book.
[17:50]And I had sort of my own, and then I got it.
[17:53]So I had more teaching credentials,
[17:54]but I'm really grateful for that advice
[17:56]because it made me realize that I had something to say
[18:00]in a way that only I could say it.
[18:02]Where you do have a really distinctive powerful voice
[18:05]and it's amazing.
[18:07]It's beautiful and the way you tell the stories,
[18:11]how you bring us in, but you also describe nature.
[18:14]I mean, you can't, not everybody can do that.
[18:16]Like that is a good and hard to do that.
[18:20]And to bring nature to life and animals to life
[18:23]and yet also feelings, it's very powerful.
[18:27]So whatever you did, sounds like it worked out.
[18:30]Thank you.
[18:32]Who have been some of your role models?
[18:34]Like when you, like what do you love to read?
[18:36]Well, Terry was a huge influencer early on
[18:40]as was Ellen Malloy, who was another great chronicler
[18:43]of the West.
[18:44]Those two women in particular have been great influences
[18:48]on me, but of course Octavia Butler,
[18:50]who wrote about so many of the issues I care about
[18:54]and wrote about in particular the drought
[18:57]and the West that would prompt people
[18:59]to become climate refugees.
[19:01]She first saw that before anybody was thinking about it.
[19:05]And I love, I go to poetry a lot.
[19:08]I, because I am trying to find that kind of sensory,
[19:14]poetic sensibility to help people connect
[19:17]with their own bodies so that they can then connect
[19:20]with the natural world again,
[19:22]because I feel like that's the only way
[19:23]we're gonna save this planet
[19:24]as if we're truly connected to these things
[19:27]in a deep and bodied way.
[19:29]So I love the work, of course, of Mary Oliver,
[19:33]Adele Mon, who granted me use of one of her poems
[19:37]for the epigraph of almost animal,
[19:40]has been a huge inspiration.
[19:42]And I find that I still need to pay tribute
[19:46]to Edward Abby, even though I wrote a book
[19:48]sort of challenging him on a very masculine constructs
[19:52]of wilderness and the wilderness experience,
[19:56]that still are very much...
[20:00]covering the idea of wilderness
[20:02]and what our experience should be out there.
[20:05]And it's not always that way for women.
[20:07]I write about, and one of the chapters in this book
[20:09]is the scene of some very scary men
[20:12]from Arkansas coming into elk hunting camp in the high country.
[20:16]I'm there with another mother and three little kids.
[20:18]The dads are out hunting,
[20:20]and these men have one thing in mind,
[20:22]and I ended up loading my gun.
[20:25]My hunting rifle, which of course was empty to bullets
[20:28]when I got back from hunting that day.
[20:30]And just the idea that women occupy
[20:34]the natural world in a very different way,
[20:35]including wilderness.
[20:37]And so as much as Edward Abby's writing changed my life
[20:41]and helped me understand that public lands
[20:44]are probably one of this nation's greatest national treasures
[20:48]and something that other countries regret having developed.
[20:53]Even if all we can do is go to the edge and look in,
[20:56]or just see pictures or read writing about them,
[20:59]there's some part of us that still connected
[21:03]to that original American landscape in a way
[21:06]that sings in ourselves, I believe.
[21:10]And so I have to thank Gabby for helping me get there.
[21:14]Aw, you love that.
[21:15]What advice would you have for someone
[21:17]trying to write their story?
[21:19]I would pass on Terry's original words,
[21:21]like get out there and live your life
[21:22]as what we're living about, examine.
[21:26]Don't take anything for granted.
[21:27]Like really examine the angle of the light
[21:30]and what the dog is doing in the background or the foreground.
[21:35]And can you hear the sound of a single bird?
[21:39]All those little pieces sort of bring a scene to life.
[21:42]And I have come to find and I teach this a lot
[21:46]in both fiction and non-fiction
[21:49]that if you can really cultivate the sensual on the page,
[21:53]all the sensual, sensual sensory details,
[21:56]the embodiment for a reader,
[21:59]it leads to the emotional.
[22:01]The sensual always leads to the emotional
[22:03]and then it just sort of leads through the page.
[22:06]So that is my greatest hope that
[22:09]and I tell people to develop a mindfulness meditation practice
[22:13]and get a good therapist
[22:14]because I don't think you can know a character
[22:16]even yourself and maybe especially yourself as a memoirist
[22:20]without a really good handle on your inner workings.
[22:25]What are your deepest fears?
[22:26]What are you ashamed of?
[22:27]What are you secretly attracted to that you're afraid to say?
[22:31]What are you projecting out into the world,
[22:33]onto other characters?
[22:35]And those things are attachment styles.
[22:38]The attachment theory that I think is shaped
[22:40]so much of modern day clinical psychology now
[22:43]and understanding the kinds of bonds we form
[22:46]with our caregivers at a young age
[22:49]goes on to affect how we relate to others
[22:51]in marriages, family relationships, work relationships.
[22:56]And so I'm finding that my students are really getting
[23:00]a lot out of studying attachment styles
[23:02]and figuring out that helps them understand
[23:05]like the dynamic between two different characters
[23:07]on the page and how they're responding to one another.
[23:10]Not that.
[23:11]Well, that was very specific advice.
[23:12]Thank you, that was amazing.
[23:14]Amy, thank you for this beautiful book.
[23:16]Thank you for sharing your story
[23:18]and your land and your home
[23:21]and letting us all in to experience it, learn from it
[23:26]and escape.
[23:27]Thank you very much.
[23:29]That's my great pleasure, Zebee.
[23:30]Thank you for having me.
[23:32]With pleasure.
[23:33]Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zebee,
[23:36]formerly momstone have time to read books.
[23:38]If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review,
[23:42]follow me on Instagram at Zebee Owens
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[23:46]Thanks so much.
[23:47]Oh, and bye the books.