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Bass: Writing from dream and conviction

This interview with novelist, short story writer, and essayist Rick Bass was conducted by e-mail by MLR managing editor Avon Waters in May 2003.

Rick Bass currently is working on a novel, “The Elephant.” He is also working with the Sierra Club books on a small book about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He was born in Fort Worth, Texas and grew up in Houston. He was schooled in Utah State University and worked in Arkansas and Mississippi as a biologist and then a geologist before moving to Montana in 1987.

Rick Bass is the author of many books, fiction and nonfiction. His work appears regularly in journals such as Ploughshares. He currently lives on a ranch in Montana, writing and working on conservation efforts.

MLR: Tell the readers a little about your journey from geologist to writer. Geology still seems to have a big influence on what you’re doing now.

BASS: One of the great things about geology is the magnificence (and importance) and elegance of scale and process. The cause-and-effect stuff that goes on in geology is gorgeous. To my way of thinking, it--geology--is little different from biology--it's like a snapshot of frozen life-processes, or life sciences. Additionally, searching the buried world, the substrate, with only a handful of clues, seems to me to be very much like what the art of fiction requests.

MLR: What was the first thing that set you out on the course to become a writer?

BASS: I read Jim Harrison's novella collection, LEGENDS OF THE FALL, and was deeply moved by the title novella. It made me want to write fiction. I was in my mid-twenties, working as a geologist. I loved the scope and breadth of the book--100 years in a hundred pages.

Communicating with Harrison was important to me--all young writers I've known have a yearning for that dialogue--but in retrospect I can see that the most important dialogues are in the work itself, and in that writer's relations with the world.

MLR: Who were the writers that influenced you? Was communicating with any of them an important part of your development?

BASS: The Southern writers were a huge influence--Robert Penn Warren, Larry Brown, Eudora Welty, Barry Hannah, Flannery O'Connor, Willie Morris--all of them, really.

MLR: Since you've been writing for quite a while now, have you changed whom you read?
BASS: I really like to read poetry, now.

MLR: It’s always been the mantra that a writer needs to read, read, read. But usually for fiction wirters, that means fiction and contemporary fiction. But I sense non-fiction plays just as important of a role for you. In Where the Sea Used to Be (1998) there’s use of a Journal of a Trapper, 1934-1843 and a heavy reliance on other sources like Alexander Winchell’s 1886 Walks and Talks in the Geological Field.

BASS:Absolutely. There are infinite paths into the imagination--physical activity, poetry, music, color--any of the senses, and certainly, any of the literary genres.

MLR: Do you consider yourself isolated where you live? And is that an important part of your creative process?

BASS: I do live in a remote, isolated setting, and it is very important to my dream-time, my creative process. A little outside stimulation goes a long way, with me.

MLR: Many of your characters are ordinary people who are fighting against big enemies. If they are the fighters, who is the enemy?

BASS: Injustice, stereotypes, inattentiveness, numbness--the usual enemies of art and thought.

MLR : When you are writing, whom do you think of as your audience?

BASS: I don't, any more. It's been a long time since I've thought of audience. It's a cliche, but I try to write stories that interest me.

MLR: New writers are always interested in routine. What’s the writing routine for Rick Bass like, how often, any number of hours or words that you set for yourself on a schedule?

BASS: I like to work in the morning, before the weight and responsibilities of the world intrude. I've got insomnia (a legacy of environmental activism!), so often work in the middle of the night, then nap right at dawn, then get up and work again, until I get tired. Then I rest until the next day. I'll spend the afternoon playing with the girls, going to environmental meetings, etc.

MLR: I heard your 1998 novel Where the Sea Used to Be took about 14 years to write. Do you prefer the novella and short story formats? Will we see more novels coming from your pen?

BASS: As a reader, I love the novel form, so I'll always be interested in that, but I suspect my more natural genre is the novella. Stories are beautiful things--an incredible genre--but very, very challenging, particularly with the demands of various familial and environmental responsibilities.

MLR: You are very active in environmental efforts. How do you balance the need to have that environmental interaction that feeds your writing and the role you need to play in literary communities to promote what you write?

BASS: I don't balance it at all. The environmental demands are incredibly taxing, and the strategies of activism (and advocacy) are increasingly in direct opposition to the dreamtime of fiction. And yet--who could be so piggish as to derive the joy and spirit from wild landscape and yet not try to return some of that gift, when given the opportunity? That's not a debt I can ignore.

MLR: Many critiques relegate your books to the environmental sections of the bookshelves, and that’s got to be frustrating. Seems like many of your characters could just as easily be from a big city but it’s the environment that makes them react, and that just happens to be wilderness. They often have the same motivations as the New York City character, but you’re given a “tag” or category to be slipped into.

BASS: It doesn't bother me. The stories are what they are. Anyone who reads them will see what they are. I don't mean this in a smart-aleck way, but I'm too old to worry about where on a bookshelf my books sit. My concern, my challenge, is to write good stories. A good story--a great story--ultimately settles unambiguously all those other issues.

MLR: I haven’t seen much criticism of your work by feminists, but it seems like if they found you, they’d love you. The women in your stories are strong, independent and many times more resourceful than the men. Mel in Where the Sea Used to Be can ski for miles with a grown man on her back. The mistreated women who escape into the Bayou in one of your earlier stories, The Watch, have a determined strength about them.

BASS: I like to think both the men and women in many of my stories exhibit strength, loyalty, endurance, trustworthiness, honesty--those so-called old virtues. I'd hate to generalize about men vs. women in the stories. I would like to think that many of the men have some feminine or even delicate qualities, and that some of the women have some rough or even masculine characteristics--that they are full and whole, complex--but that's about as far as I'm comfortable generalizing, in that regard.

MLR : Fire plays a role in many of your stories. It seems to be both a destroyer, but for you more of a creator. In Fires (In the Loyal Mountains, 1995) Glenda goes into the lake and seems like she is almost baptized by the grass fire on shore and then by the water, coming out renewed. Again, in the story Elk (In the Loyal Mountains, 1995). The narrator comes to life at the end after the tree is set on fire. Tell me about what fire means for you and how much religion influences your work?

BASS: I'm drawn to most any elemental power--stone, antler, forest, feather, wind, river, lake, rot, and yes, certainly, fire, which is a huge transformative power in the West. The natural life cycles of birth and death and resurrection are everywhere one looks in nature, stacked in layer after layer--and in the earth's record, too. The religion of story, you could call it.

MLR : Colter; The True Story of The Best Dog I Ever Had, (DATE) echoes a similar note that you have in The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness, (1989)-- people should learn to appreciate nature and life around them. It almost seems like a commentary on the fast paced world people put themselves into and get dragged through life, rather than controlling any aspect of their own destiny.

BASS: I try not to be prescriptive in my fiction or nonfiction, but to just write about what works for my characters.

MLR: In the collection of novellas, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness, you seem to be creating modern myth or retelling it. Even in Mexico of The Watch Stories (1989) the big bass becomes a kind of mythic symbol or character. As a writer, what’s your take on myth?

BASS: I tend to think in terms of the word "story" rather than "myth." Isn't a myth just a powerfully-felt story? I would hope so.

MLR: Let's not forget about non-fiction. In The New Wolves, 1998 you examine the national mandate to reintroduce wolves into Arizona. You stay active in environmental efforts well outside of your Montana home. What are the pressing ecological issues you see this county facing? How can other writers make a difference here?

BASS: Overpopulation, nuclear waste, nuclear war, groundwater contamination and depletion, acid rain, global warming, deforestation, an ever-increasing list of endangered species, invasive noxious weeds, loss of native ecosystems, apathy, clearcutting, mining, relaxation of clean air standards through the Bush administration's so-called "Clear Skies Initiative," back door secret meetings with the Bush-Cheney administration, an archaic reliance on fossil fuels, and a general spiritual arrogance, a pigs-at-the-trough greed that assigns a dollar amount to every place and commodity based solely on liquidation value. A loss of reverence for the made world.

Can writers make a difference? Absolutely. Theirs are one of the few voices not for sale. They can still provide "unpaid ads," in the lingo of the pollsters, in the service of social and environmental (as if the two are different) justice.

MLR: It seemed for a time in the 1990s that writers didn’t get involved in social issues. They were focused on self or introverted. In your view, is social engagement something every writer should consider?

BASS: In these burning days, I think it is increasingly hard for a sentient person to avoid. I don't see it being so much a responsibility of writers as a responsibility of citizens. Corporate influence is plain and simply robbing democracy. The Bush administration is loading the court system with rightwing ideologues. It's a nightmare in the making and we're just sitting on the sidelines watching.

MLR: Let’s turn to the book business. You’ve been with Houghton Mifflin as your publisher for years. As a writer, how important is the right publisher?

BASS: Very important. I've got great editors, and that's all that matters.

MLR: What about promotion. Is it something you like to do once a book is out there.

BASS: I like to go to a nice restaurant in Seattle now and then, but other than that, time at home with family is the best and rarest thing. I've given hundreds, maybe thousands of readings, and I am pretty much worn out on that end of the business. Time's too rare to keep slogging down that trail.

MLR: Since you’ve been publishing books, has the industry changed?

BASS: I really don't know. I kind of keep my head in the sand, and just try to work on the text. I'm sure it has changed, but I didn't ever pay too much attention to it--the publishing--in the first place. The writing and editing is all I can control, and those two things in themselves take more energy than I can spare, so I don't even really pay attention to the publishing.

MLR: Are there more demands by publishers to sell greater and greater numbers of books to assure they will continue publishing the writer’s work? If so, how does that affect you as a writer?

BASS: There probably are, but again, time is so short, I just write the books I want to write.

MLR: Anything you want to address or think needs to be said that I haven’t asked?

BASS: It would be really awesome if anyone would like to write a letter on behalf of the last roadless areas in the Yaak Valley of northwest Montana, on the Kootenai National Forest. A local grassroots group, the Yaak Valley Forest Council, is gathering those letters. Their address is 155 Riverview, Troy, MT 59935. Their e-mail is claymtn@hotmail.com. They also are always direly in need of donations, to keep their staff going. They are doing tremendous work.