When I Came West (Part Twenty-Eight)
When I think back on all the things I learned in the long journey of When I Came West from first idea to final publication (thirty-five years!) the one thing that shines brightest for me is the fact that I have enough humility to understand that I am a perpetual greenhorn, which means mostly that there is always something else that I need to learn: about how to live, about how to love, about how to write.
The life experiences with Bill in the wilderness areas where we lived taught me a lot about aloneness and how to survive. Those were important lessons that I took with me into my writing life. In many ways the rigors are the same.
Like a homesteader a writer must learn to live with what's at hand and make do with little or nothing. A writer must be observant, understand the intricate relationships between man and the natural world, and be prepared for any kind of weather (the publishing world has more erratic changes than most climates). And a writer must be willing to wait for the rain to stop and the sun to shine again so that projects can come to fruition.
The long winters I spent in isolated, remote areas taught me to have patience, trust, and hope…and to believe that spring always comes.
And spring, for a writer, means that the seeds of new ideas for poems, essays, stories and books sprout in what might have appeared to be fallow earth.
