Author and teacher Sharman Apt Russell is deeply rooted in southwestern New Mexico — she and her husband, Peter, moved to the Mimbres Valley four decades ago to pursue their back-to-the-land dreams — but researching her 18 books of fiction and nonfiction has taken her as far away as Africa and deep into Earth’s history.
On Thursday, September 12, Russell will speak at Collected Works Bookstore about her newest book, What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs. The book — not a dry field guide! — introduces readers to the lives of North American mammals through the signs they leave as well as to Russell’s wry sense of humor, voracious curiosity, and passion for this animate planet.
Her body of work spans a dizzying array of subjects: homesteading memoir, public lands grazing, archaeology, the sex lives of flowers, the natural history of hunger, butterflies, pantheism, citizen science, and childhood malnutrition. Plus, she’s written three books for kids and three adult novels of magical realism, one set as woolly mammoths were dying out, another imagining the life of conquistador Cabeza de Vaca’s daughter, and a post-apocalyptic novel set after our civilization collapses.
Pasatiempo recently spoke with Russell about her work and her journey as a writer.
What connects the wide-ranging subjects of your books?
Our relationship to the natural world. The subjects are all interrelated, even the one on childhood malnutrition: the relationship of healthy children to a healthy Earth.
What prompted you to write about tracks and the art of tracking?
I got involved in a program of tracking skills and immediately gained a better understanding of who was walking around my backyard at night. Skunks, raccoons, gray foxes, javelina, deer, the occasional bobcat and mountain lion. The wildlife winding secretly through our lives is impressively diverse, especially in cities like Santa Fe.
I began to appreciate the aesthetics of a track, the tiny print of a pocket mouse or the long curved toes and palm pads of a ground squirrel. The pebbly weirdness of a porcupine. There’s the real sense that you’ve crossed paths with this animal in some way. I felt enlarged. When something big like this happens to me, I am going to write about it.
Did you consciously plan to weave science, natural history, and personal experience — as well as the humor — into each chapter, or did it just grow organically?
Both. Writing out of personal experience is an organic part of my books. And I did deliberately want humor. But you can’t be too deliberate with humor. Fortunately, all the possibilities of being wrong about identifying a track makes the experience inherently humorous. You are entering into lives so different from your own. You have to be humorous, imaginative, maybe a little playful. And humble!
How did you choose which animals to feature in What Walks This Way?
I was especially interested in the animals I live with here in New Mexico. Four species of skunk — striped, hooded, hog-nosed, and western spotted — might walk around my garden. I often see the sign of black bears and coyotes using the same forest trails I use. And mice and rats and rabbits and squirrels pursue their own interests all around me.
As an environmentalist — I’m on the board of an organization that protects the Gila River and its watershed — one of my intentions in the book was to look at the health of mammal populations in the United States. Do we have enough mule deer? Pika? Lynx? I already knew that we needed to keep moving toward better wildlife management practices, especially in terms of predators. We need to ask ourselves why we allow the trophy hunting of mountain lions and steel-jaw leghold traps for wolves and other animals.
I also wanted to celebrate the wild animals that we still have in North America — despite the bad news of habitat destruction and global warming. We still live in a wild world. In a lot of ways, the book is about celebration.
Your various books and their subjects have taken you across the world and back and forth in time. Yet your life for the past four decades has been deeply rooted in rural southwestern New Mexico. How has living in that part of the state affected your writing?
When Peter and I moved to the Mimbres Valley, we wanted to build our own adobe house and grow a ridiculously huge garden and have goats and homebirths and just sink into the soil like a carrot or potato. We did that, mostly, although now I realize how culturally naïve we were too. We didn’t understand how complex and difficult — and not necessarily environmentally friendly — the “simple rural life” can be. Eventually we also got jobs and bought appliances and became more mainstream.
I think that my writing, the process of going both inside yourself and also out into the world, is how I kept hold of that original desire — to become part of a place, to honor and know a specific ecology, to be at home in a landscape. Living here and writing about living here is such a dynamic, the one deepening the other.
While some of your earlier books are written as dispassionate, albeit lyrical reportage, the more recent ones, beginning with Anatomy of a Rose, include a strong personal voice. What changed your writing perspective?
The editor of Anatomy of a Rose read a few draft chapters and suggested that I let myself go more. Feel more free! Use more of my personal voice! That was such a gift. She went on to be Michelle Obama’s editor.
What did you learn in writing What Walks This Way that you didn’t know you needed to know?
So many things! Wildlife tracking involves animal behavior, plant ecology, weather patterns, as well as attention to detail, curiosity, field experience, and lots of field guides. I’m content to stay at a modest level of expertise, to identify the tracks and signs of mammals in my neighborhood and also, sometimes, to say knowingly, “Ah, lizard scat,” and “Cool, this looks like a female turkey.” But there’s always so much more to learn. Some people go very deep into tracking, which is a little surprising and wonderful in this modern world.
What are you working on now?
I recently finished a time travel novel set 20 million years ago in the Miocene, a Swiss Family Robinson sort of wilderness story with bear dogs and time loop paradoxes. Writing fiction is so satisfying, just letting the characters and plot rise up out of the unconscious. There’s a lot of research involved. I love that too. ◀
Susan J. Tweit is a botanist rooted in big sagebrush and wide skies and the author of 13 books of creative nonfiction, including Bless the Birds: Living With Love in a Time of Dying, winner of the Sarton Award for memoir.
