Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things.
If the landscape changes, then I don't know who I am either. The landscape is a refracted autobiography. As it disappears you lose your sense of self.
Landscape is a piece that is emotional and psychological.
I've always liked trees. And then, growing up, I took an interest in ecology, hedges being destroyed, the landscape being turned into prairies.
If landscape is a character for me, then it helps if I'm familiar with it and I already have a take on it.
For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.
The pull of history has been a strong theme in my life as a novelist.
I've always relied a lot on landscape in my books, the atmosphere of a particular place, as well as a fair amount of external action. While writing 'Chance,' it occurred to me that this is the most internal book I've ever written. So much of the action takes place in Chance's head.
I wrote my senior essay on the Santa Fe Writer's Colony and my dissertation on sacred landscapes - the Grand Canyon, the Dakota Badlands. As a setting, I love the West. I just love that western landscape.
I am not naturally inclined to history or geography - maybe that's why I like to sing about it, because it helps me remember.