Flying High

You've been writing for many years. How did you get started?
I've been writing as long as I can remember. I used to dictate stories to my baby-sitter and she would type them up. When I was in college, I was going to write the great American novel. I wrote short stories for adults; I had a collection published by the University of Illinois Press. I also wrote poetry for quarterlies. That was all before I began writing for young people.

When did that happen?
We moved up here to northern Michigan about 23 years ago from Detroit, because we loved the quiet, the wild, and the woods. We were here just a couple of weeks and someone knocked at our door, with a Texas accent and cowboy boots, and said, "We want to drill for oil on your property." We didn't have the mineral rights, so we had nothing to say about it. They cleared three acres and bulldozed a road in, and we watched this big derrick go up. Of course, we hoped that the oil well would not produce because we didn't want any kind of permanent installation on the land. We were lucky: the well didn't produce.

We were so fascinated with the whole process that I wrote a novel about a young boy who worked on an oil rig. Because he was a young boy and I was telling his story, somehow it turned into a young adult novel [A Clearing in the Forest; Putnam, 1978]. So that was my first novel. Of course, being up here in northern Michigan, away from the city, gave me so much more time [to write]. I could do novels instead of short stories. That made a difference, too.

The world of Oxbow Lake, where you now live, comes through in many of your stories. What attracted you to such a remote part of the country?
Our family had been coming up here for years in the summertime. I came up here as a child with my father, who was an enthusiastic fisherman. So I knew northern Michigan. It has always been a part of my life. I particularly love a river up here. That river [the Au Sable] comes into almost every book I write, and Forgive the River, Forgive the Sky is about that river. My husband, who comes from northern Minnesota, loves the North Country, too. So finally, on a Sunday, we decided we didn't want to go back to the city. We wanted to stay. So, we stayed.

Tell us a little about the land you live on.
We have a couple hundred acres. The nearest house is about a mile away; our mailbox is a half a mile from the house. We're on a small lake, and we're the only cabin on the lake. I look out my window when I'm writing, and I see herons and beaver and deer and fox, trotting around the lake. In the wintertime, we see coyotes out on the frozen lake, sleeping in the sun.

I do a lot of walking in the woods. I'm not out so much this time of year, but fall, spring, and summer I walk at least three miles a day. I like to fish, when I have time--fly-fish. I don't like to fly-fish so much to catch fish. It's just a good excuse for walking down the middle of the stream. You know, that was Thoreau's passion. He loved to walk down the middle of rivers, and I do, too. I've been involved with the [Grand Traverse Regional Land] Conservancy, and we've actually put an easement on our property, which means that all the property that we have will never be developed. It will always stay just the same. So when I look out there at the lake and woods, I know that it will always remain just as it is.

One of the things that comes through in your books is your empathy for Native Americans. Do you have a personal connection to them?
No. I didn't really have much knowledge of Native Americans when we first moved up to northern Michigan. But I happened to write Next Spring an Oriole [Random House, 1987], and Native Americans were a part of that book. Native Americans are so much a part of northern Michigan. In 1812, the time of my books about Mackinac Island, there would easily be a thousand Native Americans camped on the shores of that island. So Native Americans gradually began to be a part of what I was writing. As I began to write about Native Americans, I began to read more. For Miranda's Last Stand, I had just read a biography of Chief Sitting Bull. I was tremendously impressed with Chief Sitting Bull, so he found his way into my book, and really was an important part of that book.

There are a lot of people, I know, who say you can't write about these things if you're not a Native American or an African American. But I feel very strongly that that's not true. It seems to me that if we can't understand one another, then our society has very little hope. Compassion comes from our understanding of one another. Imagining yourself into the lives of others is really what makes life tolerable. It's what makes us all human. Do we really want to segregate our literature, like we were once a segregated society? I don't think so.

What was the genesis of Homeless Bird?

Tell us more about researching the novel?
It's a treasure hunt. You begin reading one thing, and that leads you to another, and that leads you to another. It's like a chain. When I was researching Homeless Bird, I had never been to India. I had a lot to learn, a lot of research to do. I would find little odds and ends that were so useful. I wanted Koly's first job to be threading marigolds for special occasions, weddings, and funerals. I came upon a sentence that explained how the fibers of the banana plant were used in the process. So that was useful. I discovered that there are bats that hang out in the temples and lots of snakes appear after the monsoons. Those were little things I had not been looking for. But when I found them, they fitted into the book perfectly.

Other than attending that exhibition in New York, were you able to do the rest of the research in Michigan?
Yes. I did it all in northern Michigan, just reading. We have two very good libraries up here, one in Traverse City and one in Petoskey. The one in Petoskey has a superb Michigan collection compiled by William Ohle, who lived up here in northern Michigan and left it to the library. The library has a small room, where you can read the books. They have been a tremendous help.

Was it difficult for you to write about a place you had never visited?
No, not at all. For some reason, I enter into any book that I'm writing. I was very involved in Homeless Bird. But then I had written a book about Vietnam--a book that is used in a lot of schools--and had never been to Vietnam. I was able to find a wonderful book written by some Michigan State professors about life in a small village in Vietnam. They had lived there for several years, and included all sorts of detail. It was a treasure for me. You do find these things. Somebody does your work for you.

What impact has winning the National Book Award had on your life?
It's been nonstop. I've had many, many calls and interviews. I have a quote taped to my computer: nulla dies sine linea--it's Latin for "no day without a line." The Greek Pythagoras could draw a perfect line, but he said if he didn't draw it every day, he would lose the skill. So on my computer I have "no day without a line," and I really make myself write every day. It's what I like best to do, and it's what I do. But lately, it's been a tremendous struggle.