The Disappearing Act-cent, a guest post by Weather Lenczewski

Posted on August 27, 2022 by Ed Battistella
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Weather Lenczewski  is a junior in the Honors College at SOU. She is a Sociology and Anthropology major with a History minor. She hails from Woodstock, Illinois, but currently resides in the Rogue Valley.

 

 

 

The Disappearing Act-cent

In 2020, I packed almost everything I owned into three suitcases and moved all the way across the country for college. I’m sure going off to college is weird and scary for everyone, but it was especially scary for me. I lived in my hometown for 15 years; in the same house for 15 years. Almost all of my conscious memories occurred in the 15 years that I lived in that house. I moved almost 2,000 miles away from my home, my friends, my family, and my cat. I missed everything about my home. The people, my house, the Dunkin Donuts… I didn’t originally want to leave the state. My parents wanted to move to California. It’s too hot for me in California. I needed seasons, at least two or three, instead of the perpetual summer of Southern California. I had never been to Oregon. It had pretty trees and temperatures below 80, so it seemed like a fine choice. I was going to be living alone and attending college all in a new state. Quite scary, indeed.

A common question you’re asked in college is: “where are you from?” My college is in Oregon, so most people respond “Oh, I’m from Bend, Oregon,” or “I’m from Sacramento.” I’m always excited to tell people where I’m from, and also nervous to tell people where I’m from because when people ask me where I’m from, I lie. I lie and say: “Oh, I’m from Chicago.” I’m not from Chicago. I was raised in a small town about an hour and a half away from Chicago. My town is barely considered a part of the suburbs of Chicago. If, anything my house was closer to Wisconsin than Chicago. Yet, when people ask me where I’m from, I say Chicago. Why do I say that I’m from Chicago? Maybe it’s because no one has ever heard of Wonder Lake, Illinois. Maybe it’s because I like it when people’s faces light up when I say Chicago. It’s a big, exciting city. I’m sure my face lights up when I talk about it too.

I wish I could say that I am from Chicago and not be lying. I can barely say that I’m from the Chicagoland area. Sure, I love Portillo’s, watch the bears, and take the L, but I’m not really a Chicagoan. I say pop and gym shoes, but I don’t sound like a Chicagoan. My mom does. She says “Can I get you a baaax?” or “We’re having haht dahgs for dinner.” When I tell people in Oregon that I’m from Chicago they say: “Wow, I never would’ve guessed! You don’t have an accent at all!” Which, hurts a little inside. I wonder why my mom, who sounds like she’s from Chicago, has an accent, but I don’t. I was raised by her, shouldn’t I sound like her?

Apparently, this isn’t just my experience. The Chicago accent seems to be disappearing. Gone are the classic blue-collar Chicagoans taking their dahg on a wak and instead people who have lived in Chicago their whole lives are starting to sound more and more like…me. The “Chicago Accent” is turning into more of a “Chicago Dialect” it seems. That’s what inspired me to look into the disappearance of the Chicago accent. The generational shift in accents, from my great-grandma to my grandma, to my mom, to me. We all sound different and I wondered why.

What differentiates the Chicago accent from the New York or Boston accent? Many people believe they all sound similar, but are they all actually the same? The New Chicago Accent is actually the result of an interesting phonological happening. The Chicago accent has its roots in the Inland North Dialect, also referred to as the Great Lakes dialect. While the dialect was originally referred to as “Standard Midwestern,” it became Inland North when the region experienced the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, which is what switched the Classic Chicago accent to the New Chicago accent.

The Northern Cities Vowel Shift features a specific chain shift that occurs in 6 stages (Inland Northern American English). The first stage is the raising and tensing of the “short a” so that cat sounds more like “cay-at (Northern Cities Vowel Shift).” The second stage is the shift in the “short o” or “broad a,” like in the words hot or father. This vowel changes to sound more of an “ah” sound, like the Boston accent’s “cahr” or “pahrk.” This vowel change I notice in my own accent. Instead of calling my mom, I call my “mahm.” I don’t notice the “short a” change as much as the “short a/broad o” change, though it’s likely more potent in downtown Chicago. I associate the “short a” change with Boston more than Chicago, but that might just be my experience.

The next stage backs and lowers the “short e” sound (Northern Cities Vowel Shift). The “short e” like the e in bet or egg, turns into more of an “ae” sound, turning words like egg into “aegg.” I catch myself doing this one a lot, which is funny because I used to pick on my mom when she said she was going to make me an “aegg sandwich.” I can’t tell if I was repressing my pronunciation of egg, so my accent has changed over time. The next shift is the “short u” sound. The vowel shift changes the u in bus, so that instead of being pronounced like bus, it’s pronounced like “boss (Northern Cities Vowel Shift).” The next shift is with the “short i” vowel, which can be heard in the word bit or knit (Northern Cities Vowel Shift). This “short i” shifts to sound like a “short e,” like in ten. This is sometimes referred to as a “pin-pen merger.” I don’t hear either of these two in my accent. I have heard some of my family members have the “short i” shift in their accents, but the “short u” shift is less familiar to me.

The last stage doesn’t occur in the Inland North Dialect, but it does happen in the neighboring “Upper Midwest’ dialect (Northern Cities Vowel Shift). The shift in the “aw” vowel, like in the word stalk, shifted to sound more like the vowel in the work stock. This vowel shift, often called the cot-caught merger is common among Canadian and Upper Midwest dialects. I’ve heard this vowel shift a lot in the accents of people from Wisconsin and Minnesota. Every summer we’d go up to Minnesota for a camping trip and a lot of the locals will say they “cot a fish and are going to sleep on their cot.” I can recognize that my family and most people that I know do not pronounce cot and caught the same way.

The vowel shift still seems prominent in the Chicago accent. Based on my personal experience, people around my age still have shifted vowels. It’s more obvious in my mom’s accent than in my friends’ accents, but I can’t say that that is due to a generational divide or just where in the Chicagoland area each of them grew up. Depending on the location, someone’s accent might not feature all six stages of the vowel shift. Some accents, like mine, only have a few, while other accents may feature all of them. This makes it hard to pinpoint what exactly qualifies as a disappearing Chicago accent and what is just a naturally occurring difference in accent. It also makes it hard to pinpoint exactly where the Chicago accent changes from the classic “Da Bears” Chicago accent to the more modern “Haht Dahg and Pahp” Chicago accent, or if the two are different at all.

Is the Chicago accent disappearing? Well, yes and no.

The “Classic” Chicago accent is definitely disappearing, but it seems to have been trickling down the generational line as it goes. The Chicagoland Language Project looked at the change in the prominence of the “Classic” Chicago accent in older generations versus younger generations (McClelland, 2021b). Annette D’Onforio, a linguist at Northwestern University, and Sharese King, a linguist at the University of Chicago, found that the Northern Cities Vowel Shift has become less prominent among younger generations (McClelland, 2021b). The older generations and working-class citizens retained the accent. Their theory is that the younger generation views the Chicago accent as a piece of Chicago’s history of “white-flight” neighborhoods and retaining that accent would be playing into that history. While I doubt that that’s the only reason for the accent’s disappearance, I do think that it’s interesting to consider, especially since Chicago is now one of the most diverse cities in America. The younger generations increased contact with people of different races, ethnicities, and accents would probably affect their accents, so I think this D’Onforio and King do make a solid point here. I do think it’s important to look at the disappearance of the accent among older generations too, though, and to do that we have to look at the history of the Chicago accent.

The “Classic” Chicago accent’s history begins with immigrants from the East Coast coming to Chicago and settling near the Great Lakes, hence the Great Lakes dialect (McClelland, 2021a). The dialect brought by these East coasters is what turned into the Northern Cities vowel shift (McClelland, 2021a). Irish immigrants also had a large influence on the Chicago accent. A large population of Chicago was Irish and a lot of their accent and dialect can still be heard today. For example, our plural of you, “youse”, comes from Irish immigrants (McClelland, 2021a). The “original” Chicago accent has close ties with the Irish and with the working class. The Chicago accent is that of the blue-collar, working-class of Chicago. It’s theorized that one reason the Chicago accent may be disappearing is the influx of white-collar, high-rise workers. When the children of blue-collar workers went off to college, they lost their “dem, dere, does,” pronunciation and adopted “educated,” business speech. The gentrification of Chicago and its new label of “Second City” has made it a hot spot for finance and business, which shifted the population, and accent, from a mostly blue-collar to a mostly white-collar one.

Another theory is that the people of Chicago have become aware of their accents and are proactively changing the way that they speak. After the famous SNL skit “Bill Swerski’s Superfans,” it’s possible that Chicagoans became embarrassed of their accent after it was publicly mocked on television (McClelland, 2021a). This would be unfortunate. While the Chicago accent has never been considered the sexiest accent, I would hate to see it go away.

America is built on diversity. We’re diverse in race, culture, food, and accents. It’s cool that just by hearing someone speak you can tell if they’re from New Jersey or Beverly Hills. I especially think the Chicago accent is cool. It has a deep history in Irish and Polish steel workers and represents the working class of Chicago that made the city what it is today. Every field trip, birthday, or day out I’ve had in Chicago feels exciting, and being a part of the culture of Chicago is something that means a lot to me. My great-grandparents moved here from Greece and Poland to start a new life. They adopted the working-class accent, working in restaurants and factories, and passed it down to my grandparents, who gave it to my parents. My parents moved us to the suburbs, but even on the outskirts of Chicago, you feel like a Chicagoan. I’m not from Chicago, I’m from Wonder Lake, Illinois, but I’m a Chicagoan. I don’t sound like a true Chicagoan, but I do sound like a new Chicagoan. Even though I don’t bet on da bears, I do call my mahm and call Chi-CAH-go home.

References

Inland Northern American English. Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias. (n.d.). Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/3173913

McClelland, E. (2021a, August 18). The disappearing Chicago accent is layered with local history. Chicago Reader. Retrieved May 11, 2022, from https://chicagoreader.com/best-of-chicago/the-disappearing-chicago-accent-is-layered-with-local-history/

McClelland, E. (2021b, May 27). Why the classic Chicago accent is disappearing. Chicago Magazine. Retrieved May 11, 2022, from https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/why-the-classic-chicago-accent-is-disappearing/

Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Academic Dictionaries and Encyclopedias. (n.d.). Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/270794

 

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An Interview with P D Viner, author of THE CALL

Posted on August 5, 2022 by Ed Battistella
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P. D. Viner was born in South London and developed an early interest in the theatre and film. He earned an MA from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, the world’s oldest film school, and later lived in New York and in New Zealand. He now lives in Brighton.

Viner is an award-winning film-maker, audio book producer and novelist. He is the author of The Last Winter of Dani Lancing (Crown, 2013) and Summer of Ghosts (Ebury Press, 2014) as well as several novellas and short stories. His most recent novel, THE CALL was released by Hera Books in 2022.

Ed Battistella: I enjoyed reading THE CALL, which start of when Ben gets a late night call from this wife who tells him she’s killed a man. Then all manner of hell breaks loose. Where did you get the idea for the story?

P. D. Viner: There is no eureka moment – but I write in visuals and key scenes. The first moment I thought about was… but that’s a spoiler. There is an absolute Jesus-H-Christ-that-is-crazy-intense moment on page 101, the final moment of chapter six, and that was my opening image. How do you cope with that? From there I went forwards with characters and set myself a whole series of rules (see below) to guide my writing. That explosive image set me on a rollercoaster of twists and turns and the result is The Call.

EB: The cliff-hanger pace made it hard to put down. As a writer, how did you manage that, technique-wise?

PDV: First thing I did was set myself rules – there is nothing better than a rule to force you into creative solutions. The first rule was that this book would run in real time (think the show 24) and it would last from midnight until 8 am. Second rule – the action would run forwards, I would not use flashback (I cheat a little twice to remember a pivotal moment in their relationship but it is not plot affecting) so there is no action that is created from a past event – everything occurs in the here-and-now and we feel it with the characters. Rule three – this is a two-hander with no sub plot and limited input from a very small supporting cast. Rule four – the couple share the narrative and the narration moves between them seamlessly.

Apart from these rules, after writing 5 novels (three of them unpublished) and the two Sad Man novellas, I feel like I have a good grip on creating pace and flow. The great Denise Mina told me that the only responsibility a crime writer (and I think all writers) have is to make it difficult for the reader to stop and put the book down. So I structured the novel in half-hour segments and at the end of each half hour there is a twist or reveal or an oh-my-god-i-didn’t-see-that-coming moment that catapults you into the next half hour.

EB: Ben and Mia were interesting characters. I was rooting for them, but I couldn’t decide if I liked them. Is that the sort of reaction you had in mind? Did you like one more than the other?

PDV: Yes. There is no reason you should like a character in a novel. What I hope is that over the course of the book you can come to empathise with the character and understand why they do what they do, even if their choices would not be your own. In this novel the characters are ordinary people thrown into extraordinary circumstances and they have to find a way to get out, to survive what’s happened to them, but also work through the flaws in their own characters that have landed them in this mess. I think at the start that Ben is far easier to relate to and ‘like’ but for me Mia is the one I root for because she fights tooth and nail for her freedom. I like strong women, my mum worked three jobs and she would have lifted a bus off me if I needed it. Mia is far harder to like at the start but at the end…

EB: The redemptive ending—which I won’t spoil—was a nice surprise. Did you have that in mind all along?

PDV: I am really happy you have said this, as I love the ending. I read a hell-of-a-lot of crime and often it leaves me feeling empty because so much effort is put into setting up an amazing, intriguing premise but it all deflates in the final stage. I wanted the ending to be unpredictable and give full closure to the night. I also wanted to move from the self-destruction and self-sabotage of the rest of the book and have external forces come to bear to show how the couple have grown over the night.

EB: What’s been the reaction to the book from people you know? Are they afraid of you? Just kidding.

PDV: I am a lovely, kind and thoughtful man. A loving husband and father. But I have a dark imagination in that I can and will ask – what is the very worst thing that could happen and how would I or a character respond to that. I don’t think I write gruesomely… at least I don’t revel in gore… but I am fully aware that in war sometimes you have to cover yourself in blood and lie down in a field of corpses to survive. That is courage and bravery to me, and that is what I write about in a modern world context. Bravery and love – what will we do to save or defend those we care about?

I have been caught off guard a few times when people have said ‘you are so dark’ or ‘how can you think such things’ and I generally respond with – ‘Why don’t you?’

EB: Can you tell us about some of your other projects? What is your writing life like?

PDV: I am now with Hera/Canelo and am very happy with my fantastic editor Keshini Naidoo, and the reality of this new deal is that I am looking at two books a year. So I have a new novel coming out in October, The Choice. It is again time sensitive – though takes place over one week rather than one night, and is a road crime novel. It opens in my hometown of Brighton and ends on the Isle of Skye. It opens with Sarah stabbing her boyfriend through the heart mere minutes after making love with him… why? She swears she had no Choice, but how is that possible? To prove her innocence and get her life back,  she has to run – back to the beginning of all this. Back 15 years to when this hunt first began, because she has been in hiding for all that time and now they’ve found her.

I love this book again because we are pitched into a horrendous act and then have to run with the character and learn about her as we go along and as she meets friends and enemies along the way. I love road movies and chases are so exciting. I am really looking forward to having people read this and seeing how they react to Sarah and her plight. Again, she is hard to like in many ways but she is quite incredible as a woman.

My next novel (I am 60,000 words into the first draft) is (at the moment) titled The School Gates and deals with murder on the school run. It has a dark comedy running through it, but is a story of a best friend fighting to save the woman who saved her as a child. The book opens with two parents (not a couple, but having an affair) who meet up in the middle of the night for sex – on a Year 4 class camping trip – just yards away from the tents of all their friends and their spouses. In the middle of their tryst they find a dead body in the firepit and… it hits the fan. I am loving writing this book as I spent years in the PTA and on these bloody camping trips dreaming of killing the other parents – now I get my wish.

In terms of writing, I organize at least two Shut-Up-and-write days a week. I open up my house to other writers (a core group of about 10) and each day some of them join me to write. We start at 10am and end at 5pm and write for about 5 hours, with breaks and lunch in between. I get 4-6,000 words a day from that. The other days I dream about what I will write, so when I get in front of the laptop – I absolutely know where I’m going and can get quality writing done.

My dreaming consists of me creating the story-world in my head and running scenarios, like the Star Trek holodeck or Sherlock’s mind palace. My characters talk, move, kill etc. and I run through the scenes making changes and saying what if… what it… its like improvisation with actors. I keep going forward until I decide the architecture of the scene. I might make notes, or dictate lines I like so I have them when I write, but I don’t enforce the structure of writing on myself until I know what I am writing.

The last thing I would like to say is that if you go to Amazon then you can download the two novellas, The Sad Man and The Ugly Man for free. Because of my audiobook past I directed The Call as a two-hander with both actors (a married couple) in full-on arguing mode. Some people complain that it isn’t an audiobook – not just someone reading to you – but I think it gives you what is in my head far better than some person reading five books that month and this just being the latest they were sent by the audiobook company. I believe in the craft of writing, of a balance between plot and character and entertainment. My books should be the best ride at the funfair.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. Best of luck with THE CALL.

PDV: For news about me I have a website at pdviner.com, I’m on Twitter @philviner and on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/PDViner  I love talking to book groups and am available for events, weddings, and chats about books. Thanks.

 

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An Exit Interview with Kemble Yates

Posted on August 1, 2022 by Ed Battistella
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Kemble Yates is from Pullman, Washington. He graduated from the University of Puget Sound in 1982 with degrees in economics and mathematics and went on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics in 1984 and a PhD in 1987, both from Washington State University. His area of expertise is mathematical modeling in biology and astronomy. He has published research on mathematical modeling and has served as an expertise witness in court cases on age discrimination and as a mathematical consultant in industry.

He joined the faculty of Southern Oregon University in 1987 and was promoted to full professor in 1999. He has served as chair of the Math Department from 2003 – 2008. He has also served many terms as a faculty senator and was twice the President of the Faculty Senate and served a term as president of the statewide Inter-institutional Faculty Senate. He twice served as the president of the Associated Professors of Southern Oregon University and was the chief union negotiator several times. From 2003 — 2022, Yates served as the Southern Oregon University representative to Association of Oregon Faculties.

He is an accomplished amateur bridge player.

In 2018, Kemble Yates received the Outstanding Service Award at Southern Oregon University. He retired in 2022.

Ed Battistella: How did you make your way to SOU?

Kemble Yates: As it worked out, I decided late in the 1986-87 employment cycle to look for a job, and only a few universities still had openings. One of those was Southern Oregon State College. I got an interview, and ultimately a job offer. At the time, I was thinking this would be a good “starter job” and I’d move on in a few years. I fell in love with the university and the area, and I really never seriously considered leaving after my first couple of years.

EB: Do you remember what you taught in your first years at SOU?

KY: I taught college algebra, first term calculus, and multivariate calculus my first term. I fell in love with teaching collegiate mathematics in graduate school, and one thing that I’ve really loved about my Southern experience is that I got to teach a wide variety of courses.

EB: What else stands out from your first years?

KY: I arrived the same year a new President, Joe Cox, did. Prior to Cox, a pretty unpopular President (at least to the faculty and staff) had left in a cloud. The university seemed to ride a nice optimistic wave my first three years. Unfortunately, Oregon’s Measure 5 passed in 1990, and higher education funding has been a painful challenge ever since.

EB: What’s been your favorite thing about being an academic life?

KY: Perhaps unusually for a mathematician, I am a people person – I really like interacting with people. The faculty and staff at Southern have always been inspiring to me. And of course, working with bright, (mostly) younger students is a true joy. I really loved being a professor at SOU.

EB: What were some high points of your work at SOU?

KY: As your bio on me points out, I have been very active in the life of the university. Through committees, Faculty Senate, and our faculty union, APSOU, I’ve had multiple opportunities to take part in discussions and decisions which have shaped the university and especially the lives of faculty. And I really enjoyed my colleagues in the Mathematics Department: their dedication to building and improving our curriculum, to helping our students learn and succeed, and to being a supportive team to one another has profoundly impacted me. In my last several years, two major highlights were: I got to help start a graduate program in mathematics, and I was the department point person for guiding senior math majors in their capstone projects.

EB: How did you get interested in mathematics?

KY: My road to a mathematics PhD was actually pretty indirect. My true love as an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound was economics. My Econ professors gave good advice – they said if you want to pursue a graduate degree, you need to have a solid mathematics background. So I backed into a double major of math and econ. And when it came time to go to graduate school, again my Econ professors suggested getting a Master’s in mathematics before switching to a doctoral program in economics. When I arrived at Washington State as a mathematics graduate student, I was awarded a Teaching Assistantship; this meant I taught one math course per term to “earn my keep”. It was then that I realized I really liked math a lot, and I especially liked teaching math. I never made it back to economics!

EB: You are a live-music aficionado. Who are some of your favorites?

KY: I do in fact love live music. I’m really kind of a mutt – I like many different kinds of music (classical, rock, bluegrass, country). And I love everything from a small club show all the way to a stadium show. I have been to over 600 different live music performances. Some of my favorite shows have been Fleetwood Mac, The Cure, Little Feat, AC/DC, and Roger Waters (of Pink Floyd fame). But over the last five years, I’ve actually “graduated” to 3-4 day music festivals. I just returned from the Northwest String Summit (bluegrass and rock) and two weeks prior, my wife and I attended the High Sierra Music Festival (again bluegrass and rock). Next week I travel to Alaska to attend Salmonfest. And of course we are members of Britt & attend 10-15 shows each summer.

EB: What are your plans, post-SOU?

KY: So I’ve always been good at filling my time, and I’m looking forward to having even more time with which to play. In addition to many live music activities, I will play more bridge (both locally and traveling to tournaments), Diana and I will travel more, and I’m really looking forward to reading more books again. I also have an eye on creating and teaching some OLLI classes, as well as taking a few OLLI classes. We will stay in Ashland – we love this area and our home is definitely here.

EB: Thanks for talking with me. I’m right behind you, retirement-wise.

KY: Thanks Ed! I look forward to your joining me in our post-SOU world!

 

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An Interview with Louise Wagenknecht

Posted on July 25, 2022 by Ed Battistella
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Louise Wagenknecht is the author of a trilogy of books about life in northwest California: White Poplar, Black Locust (2003, republished in 2021), Light on the Devils: Coming of Age on the Klamath (2011), and Shadows on the Klamath: A Woman in the Woods (2021), all available from Oregon State University Press.

Born in Boise, Idaho, Wagenknecht was raised in Hilt and Happy Camp, California, and received a degree in English from California State University, Chico. She also studied range, botany, forestry, and wildlife management at Humboldt State University and worked for the U.S. Forest Service for more than thirty years.

Her writing has appeared in High Country News, American Nature Writing, The River Reader, and Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region.

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed reading your work. How would you describe yourself as a writer? Memoirist, historian, naturalist?

Louise Wagenknecht: All of the above, I suppose. When I started writing, I was trying to make sense of the place in which I grew up, and the family in which I grew up. I knew a great deal about what had happened, but why things happened was often pretty murky.

Especially while writing the first book, I read everything I could find about the Klamath-Siskiyou region, starting with its geology, which is so tied in with the Gold Rush history of the region. I had been very interested in natural history since childhood, but the unique qualities of the bioregion were barely taught in school. When I was seven, someone gave me a children’s book about birds, which I loved, but it focused on eastern species which I had never seen, and didn’t mention most of the birds around Hilt.

At Humboldt State University, I took two semesters of plant taxonomy, taught by a specialist in northwestern California plants. That was a terrific eye-opener to the world of endemic plant species, and I gained context for what I had seen up until then.

Another resource was the library at Chico State and its northern California history collection, including all of the yearbooks of the Siskiyou County Historical Society. I stumbled onto a book called California Called Them, by Robert O’Brien, a columnist for a Bay Area newspaper, who in the 1950s wrote a series of articles about the history of the Gold Rush country. He included three chapters on Siskiyou County – Mount Shasta and Yreka – and his evocative writing style blew me away. Nobody had ever talked that way to me about my home country, or written about California history that way.

Right after I found O’Brien, I picked up Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, and was astounded to find myself reading about Grider Creek, a place I knew intimately. I stood there and read that and I thought the top of my head would come off. That’s when it hit me: people could and did write imaginatively about precisely the places I loved. It took me another thirty years to attempt it myself, but I think that’s when the germ took root.

EB: Did you start out with a trilogy in mind? How do the three books fit together in your mind?

LW: In the beginning, I just concentrated on writing about Hilt. After the first book came out, people started asking me, “what’s next?” and while thinking about what that could be, I started transcribing the diaries I had kept in high school, and by the time I finished, the theme was there: moving from Hilt to Happy Camp was still the same ecoregion, the same natural resource issues still present. Once I carved out the second book, then dealing with the years I worked for the Forest Service, in the belly of the timber beast, so to speak, was the obvious next step. But it still took me a long time to write about it.

I think now that all the books are chapters of a long tale called “The Decline and Fall of the Western Timber Industry,” which of course continues today, but with the addition of climate change as a factor. It’s another human impact, like logging, but at one remove.

EB: Something that struck me throughout was the coming together of a sense of place and the sense of people. But there is also a sense of history. How do you balance all those things as a writer?

LW: Well, that was rather difficult to do. I was fortunate, when I was trying to write the first book, to be able to attend a few really good writing seminars. Bill Kittredge was very enthusiastic about the first project. “Nobody has written about that country,” he told me. He grew up near the headwaters of the Klamath River and was interested in the history of the whole drainage. Kim Barnes recognized the same elements of patriarchy and of families dependent on the lumber industry that she wrote about in her first memoir. Mary Clearman Blew – wonderful to recall – looked me in the eye and said, “You’re really a good writer.” And Rick Bass – defender of the Yaak – recognized the ecological and political undercurrents and encouraged me to write about them.

I had some good Forest Service sources to draw on, too. Several veterans of the Klamath National Forest – Gil Davies, Russ Bower, and Al Groncki – gathered a lot of material from both their own recollections and interviews with the Forest’s first generation, and also took care that old documents were preserved. The Forest published some of their work in-house. They were compilers rather than analyzers, but the raw material is there.

I mention Paul Hirt’s A Conspiracy of Optimism in the bibliographies. He dove deep into the layers of Forest Service and Congressional politics that drove resource extraction. He first made the connection for me between what I saw happening on the ground on the Happy Camp District and what was going on – and had long been going on — in Washington, D.C. I read it while working on the Salmon-Challis National Forest, where I could see the same dynamics at work.

EB: It seems to me that it is important to document stories like the ones you tell – stories of the small towns like Hilt and Happy Camp and of people that are experiencing a vanishing way of life. Are you optimistic about the future of the region?

LW: (I’m glad to hear you say that stories about small towns are important!) As a member of the post-World War II generation, I was raised with optimism, with the idea that things would get better, but when I look at the scientific consensus about warming and drying trends in the region, it’s hard to maintain a lot of optimism. Still, I am very glad to see the Karuk and Yurok people on the middle and lower Klamath River reestablishing traditional burning practices. I’m happy to learn of California condors soaring over the north coast once more. And I hope to be able to see for myself those four Klamath River dams come down, very soon. That will give me a bit of optimism for at least the near term future of salmon and steelhead on the Klamath.

EB: How has your writing changed in the period since White Poplar, Black Locust? Do some matters of technique and style strike you as evolving?

LW: I think I’m more confident now in my ability to just dive right into a story, and more confident that it will interest readers. That was a big hurdle for me with the first book: I knew that I was passionate about this place called Hilt, which was embedded so deeply in me. I couldn’t not write about it, but the challenge was to write well enough for publishers and readers to be interested. As far as style goes, I think I’m now better about cutting, and then cutting some more, than I used to be.

Literature of place – especially of place in the West – and memoirs by Western women have come of age over the past thirty-some years, and I’m sure reading in those genres has affected my style. Strangely enough, one of my earliest influences was Betty MacDonald, who wrote The Egg and I in the 1940s. The book was smoothly written and very funny, but it was its sense of place – the still-wild Pacific Northwest – that spoke to me. Her later memoir about the Depression, Anybody Can Do Anything, is in my opinion even better, with its focus on a family of (mostly) women struggling to (sometimes literally) survive in 1930s Seattle.

EB: At some points you mention the archeologist Jim Rock, whose historic can collection is documented in the Southern Oregon University library. Any recollections you can share?

LW: Jim was such a wonderful person, it’s hard to know where to stop once I get started. At the time that the first book came out, his wife Mary Ellen owned the bookstore on Miner Street in Yreka, and they put on a great book-signing event for me. I talked to Jim on the phone several times when I was writing the second book, and he actually tried to track down the details about a couple of incidents that I write about in Light on the Devils. His cynicism about the poor record-keeping on the part of Siskiyou County law enforcement turned out to be prescient; often, records either had not been kept or had been lost.

He was a grounded and practical person. He probably would have preferred that some of his friends not dig up old cabin sites and can dumps, but he once told me that to him the important thing was to document their locations, especially those inhabited by the Chinese miners. As far as artifacts went, all of the post-1850 sites contained the same mass-produced goods – at first brought in by pack trains from the coast, and later by wagon from inland. He was much more protective of the Native American sites. Those, as far as he was concerned, were not to be messed with.

Jim often put on archeological training sessions on the ranger districts, and the ones at Happy Camp were always fun. His slide show about how to date tin cans was an education in itself. I still remember him standing there at the front of the room, talking around the pipe clenched in his teeth. Unfortunately that pipe – or rather the tobacco he burned in it – would eventually kill him. Whenever I read an interesting news story about Siskiyou County, I wish I could call him up and get his acerbic take on it.

EB: Are you working on another book?

LW: Yes – two of them, in fact. It turns out that over thirty years of living in an Idaho valley bordered by three mountain ranges generates some stories. Who knew? The Forest Service will be back – with some of the same issues, and some new ones – and also showing up will be sheep, wolves, moose, and of course some neighbors. And – because I obviously don’t have enough to do – I’m taking a stab at writing a murder mystery based extremely loosely on the first job I ever had – working at a girls’ summer camp in the Sierra Nevadas.

EB: Thanks for talking with us.

LW: Thank you very much for talking with me, and I hope you have a wonderful summer out there in that good country under Mount Ashland.

 

 

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