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Lisa Dale Norton: An Interview
by
Daniel M. Jaffe
Lisa Dale Norton (www.LisaDaleNorton.com ) authored the acclaimed memoir, Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Picador USA/St. Martin’s Press). Her forthcoming books include Ogallala: The Life and Death of the Great Plains Aquifer and Bad Girls: Claiming Your Voice and Writing Your Life. A writing teacher in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, Lisa founded, in 1994, the Neahkahnie Institute on the coast of Oregon. Under her direction, the Institute offered nature writing workshops, including the Writing Workshops for Women, as well as the Onion Peak Reading Series, in which writers from around the West read and spoke about their work.
Publishers Weekly captured the essence of Hawk Flies Above in its description: “Growing up in a small Nebraska town, Norton had a magical childhood until her mother abruptly abandoned her family. Because of this and another traumatic event (shortly after college, she was raped and beaten by a stranger who left her for dead), life seemed meaningless, and for years she wandered aimlessly around the country, drinking, smoking pot, overeating and trying to run away from herself . . . In this memoir, Norton recounts with disarming simplicity her attempts to find a purpose in life by returning to her childhood home, weaving her story together with sensitive descriptions of the windswept dunes, the vegetation, the wildlife and the people of the endangered Sandhills.”
Given the rich appreciation for Nebraska’s natural beauty in her work, I asked Lisa if Willa Cather’s Nebraska-themed writing influenced hers. She replied, “While I knew of Willa Cather and her work, and had read some of her stories, I had not read all of them, nor did I use her as model. A less known and less sophisticated wordsmith—but a great storyteller—Bess Streeter Aldrich, who my grandmother, Catherine Hayden Norton, turned me on to, captured my young imagination, but once I began pursuing the craft of the writer, if there is any one Nebraska writer who resonated with my soul it was the anthropologist, professor, lay philosopher, and brilliant esoteric essayist Loren Eiseley.
“Certainly, one of the strongest influences on my work has been the writing of Annie Dillard. I believe she sees into the true heart of things.
“Long ago I began analyzing texts, scribbling in the margins of magazine articles and novels trying to figure out what the writer was doing at any given moment. I'm always looking to the underpinnings of story, regardless of its nomenclature: news story, short story, feature story, poem, narrative nonfiction, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, letter, novella, essay, memoir, editorial, literary journalism, history, biography, the novel . . . they are all just stories.”
Have the observation of nature and its meaning always been important in Lisa’s writing? In terms of writing process, does she begin by exploring place? “I can't not see the natural world,” explained Lisa. “It rises up and speaks to me. Even in the midst of a city I will find the one spot where a weed grows, or a bird carves out a life and ponder that miracle. Consequently, I can not avoid making the connections these miracles imply to me about life and in due course, the human condition.
“The natural world will always assert itself in my writing because for me stories happen in places, and those places inevitably become key characters in the story. Perhaps that is because I grew up in the American West.
“In terms of the writing process, I always begin with memory. That leads me to place. For me, they are inseparable.”
How did Lisa decide to write Hawk Flies Above? “I didn't decide to write Hawk Flies Above. A story was gnawing at my insides. Through hundreds of attempts, drafts, and rewrites I created a story . . . That journey took 15 years. I taught myself to write along the way.”
Writing a memoir requires a willingness to expose vulnerable parts of oneself and one’s experience. When approaching this memoir, I wanted to know if Lisa started with the most painful sections or the most emotionally easy? “I always begin,” she explained, “with a memory that rivets my attention. I believe that a memory haunts me because it is invested with power—power I may not even understand until I begin to look inside the memory, to mine it for details. Memories that haunt are most often invested with powerful emotion. That emotion may be inviting or off-putting, but it will be powerful. I follow the power into memory. Hence, I simply write what presents itself. Much of the deeper memories were pulled out of me by my brilliant editor at St. Martin's Press, George Witte. He would ask for a little more in a particular place, and then a little more, and then, well, finally it was all trickling out. I do not think I would have gotten to the core of many issues if it hadn't been for George. As memoirists we must be courageous or our writing falls flat.”
I asked Lisa to describe her newest writing project, Ogallala: The Life and Death of the Great Plains Aquifer. “In my new writing project, I return to the Great Plains, the general setting of Hawk Flies Above. A part of that book was a cry to protect the water of the unsullied Ogallala Aquifer, a huge ‘lake’ of water, the deep end of which lies beneath the surface of earth and within the porous soils of the Sandhills of Nebraska. The Ogallala historically stretched south though Kansas and Okalahoma into northern Texas and west from Nebraska into eastern Colorado and New Mexico where it recharged rivers, streams, and lakes since it was created, and fed the water systems of towns and industries since the beginning of settlement.
“But the Ogallala is being pumped dry by farmers in the region who grow row crops, like corn, in a landscape not naturally able to support those crops with the annual rainfall. Already, the Ogallala has dried up in northern Texas. Its vast network of water-bearing soils is not only retreating—shrinking you might say—it is being poisoned by the chemicals common to agriculture, golf courses, and lawn care, often referred to as nonpoint source pollution.
“Ogallala: The Life and Death of the Great Plains Aquifer looks at the history of this natural resource, the consequences of a half century of profligate water use, and the effects of that overuse on people, land and the economy. It draws parallels to like stories ranging from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to the desert of eastern Oregon. Around the world, water sources are being abused and misused.
“The story pivots around the lives of a handful of characters battling for water rights in one town on the Plains. The implications of this single struggle are universal. Water is the most important element to human life, next to air.”
This past year, the distinction between fiction and memoir has received a good deal of media attention. What does Lisa see as the difference between writing memoir and writing autobiographical fiction?
“I used to think there was a difference, but of late I see less and less in terms of the writing. It's all just a story. What we like to call nonfiction (memoir), based in truth, is just a story, just like fiction is a story. They are both narrative structures we have composed to make sense of the world around us. As consumers of stories, we pick and choose those that resonate with the things to which we accord value; these values are rooted in our deepest concerns—the concerns of our culture, our species. That doesn't change the fact, though, that the piece of writing is still just a story.
“What is different between the forms seems to be the expectations that readers bring to these two kinds of narrative structures. Readers of so-called autobiographical fiction come to the page with the wide-eyed anticipatory excitement of a child: ‘Tell me a story.’ These readers subconsciously accept that elements of the story are ‘invented’ to serve the needs of the story as a narrative structure.
“Readers of so-called nonfiction (memoir) come to the page with the assumption that the events really happened as they are reported and that nothing ‘invented’ will enter the recording of that experience, that somehow (miraculously?) this writer's life transpired in this organized and meaningful way. These readers are looking for some kind of fantasy: that the power of a story actually lies in a straightforward accounting of events—the raw material of events of public record. If they get a conflation of time or an embellished character or the inevitable personal, concern-based errors of memory of the writer, the readers feel cheated. These readers do not accept that elements of the story are ‘invented’ to serve the needs of the story as a narrative structure.
“All that said, it still doesn't change the fact that both forms are ‘still just stories.’ Here's an example to illustrate what I mean with that phrase: I recently spent several weeks in Italy. There I met a man from Germany who was fascinating and with whom I wanted to share my stories of who I am and how I came to be this person. However, I spoke very little German and he spoke only broken English. I found myself thinking: But how will I tell him my stories, how will he know who I am?
“At that moment, it dawned on me. I was using my stories to define myself. I still existed in time/space without them, but somehow I thought I was my stories. How important does that make the stories, then? It makes them only as important as the weight I accord to them.
“And here's the point: Stories are simply narrative structures we create and to which we accord meaning.”
Thinking about Hawk Flies Above, I wondered whether the writing of this memoir in any way altered Lisa’s sense of self. “Most definitely. I remember realizing this very thing once the book was done and out. It struck me like a slap to the face: the events recorded, and the emotions associated with them got codified with that book. I remember thinking right after Hawk came out: What about all the other stuff, what about what I left out? It fades. It falls to the background. The memoir becomes the ‘truth,’ the story you show the world, the official reality you then walk forward inside.
“I think we need to be very careful as writers of memoir about what the truth is we make. What is the story you tell about your past? Is it the story you want to live for the coming years? Because once codified it will overtake all other memories, all other possibilities, all other truths.
“I look back at Hawk Flies Above and while I remain happy with the book, while there are sections of it I still find brilliant, I also wonder about all the moments I didn't include in the narrative—moments that have now slipped away. I wonder what other kinds of truth I might have been able to make with those now-lost parts.
“So what it comes to mean for the writer, and for me with Hawk is that I have become the girl who lived those experiences. Who would the girl have been who lived all the other experiences that weren't included in the narrative? It is as I mentioned earlier: In Italy I realized that I wanted to introduce myself to a new person within ‘my stories,’ the codified truths I carry around about myself that I believe are me. The question becomes for writers of memoir: Who would you be without your stories? And the lesson is: Be very careful of the stories you tell about who you are. So shall you become.”
Dan is the author of The Limits of Pleasure, a rather controversial novel nominated by some for awards and by others for public burning (well, almost). A former corporate lawyer, he shed his suits to become a rebel with a cause—creative freedom in life and art. Dan frequently publishes short stories and personal essays in literary journals and newspapers such as The Forward, Green Mountains Review and The Florida Review. He compiled and edited With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction, and translated Here Comes the Messiah!, a Russian-Israeli novel by Dina Rubina. He also teaches fiction writing for UCLA Extension. Dan can be reached at
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and his web site is: http://danieljaffe.tripod.com
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