FAQS

I’ve been trained as a biologist, more or less from the beginning. I grew up chasing butterflies, went to graduate school in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and still look at the world through the eyes of a scientist, I suppose. Leaving the halls of science for the world of literature and the humanities was like jumping across the Grand Canyon: I can plainly see a great divide that exists between two kinds of thinking. I wanted to write a novel to bridge that gulf somehow. Specifically, I wished I could explain a handful of important ecological principles: speciation and natural selection, the keystone predator, genetic diversity and resilience, and the Volterra principle, which (for instance) shows mathematically why spraying a field with pesticides actually will increase the number of pests in the next generation. These principles profoundly shape the world around us, in which we hope to survive.

Scientific illiteracy is something that worries me every day. At least half the population of this country has not been educated to understand basic, thoroughly documented phenomena like climate change, or even to grasp evolution through natural selection, which has now been the cornerstone of all biological sciences for two centuries. When a population this uninformed tries to steer environmental policy, it’s like asking a five-year-old to drive the car: we might fully expect calamity. I’ve noticed that very few people even know that ecology is a field of science — the theoretical study of how living populations interact with one another. (Many have a vague idea that it means “the environment.”) It’s a difficult science, involving a lot of advanced math and computer modeling, but the principles it gives us are literally matters of life and death. We who are trained in this science have a responsibility to make our knowledge accessible to others.

So I took my leap across the canyon, and Prodigal Summer is its name. Translating scientific ideas from clean, elegant mathematics into vernacular English was a huge challenge. It’s easy to oversimplify or alter meaning. Very few writers address this territory at all, but that was all the more reason, I felt, to do so. And I knew I had at least one strike in my favor, from the start: a biological novel will have to be full of sex.

Thoughtful food life is not just about growing your own. Anybody who has choices about food can exercise them with more care. Every grocery store carries some things that were produced closer to your home than the backside of yonder. Anyone can emphasize whole ingredients in their meal plans, and pass up the processed junk that has so many costs wrapped up in the package. And the majority of U.S. citizens live within a few miles of a farmers’ market. In fact, these are much more concentrated in and around cities than in rural places. The fastest-growing sector of the U.S. agricultural economy is the small market grower producing food for urban consumers. City dwellers might be surprised to learn that rural America has fewer farmers’ markets per capita, and the hardest place of all to find local foods is the Midwestern corn-and-soybean belt. It’s a sad commentary on our agricultural system that the bulk of our farm produce is essentially inedible.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is by no means intended to be a how-to book for growing your own food. Our intention was to explain why food is not strictly a product, but a process. That’s the lesson our culture has lost, and why we’re so dubious of the “product.” An important step in anyone’s food security is to recover an understanding of processes – for example, to learn the differences between feedlot meat operations and pasture grazing, why one requires universal use of antibiotics while the other eschews it. Why a pasture-raised chicken lays eggs with crayon-orange yolks, full of healthy beta-carotenes. Why lettuce comes in early in the growing season, and watermelons arrive late. When to look for asparagus. Two generations ago, people knew such things intuitively, but now we may have to learn them from a book. That’s why we provided a seasonal account of how foods grow — we thought readers might be interested in the natural history of what they eat. We’ve been very surprised, and delighted, that this information has inspired countless readers to try and grow at least a few things themselves. It’s a very basic human urge, it seems, to plant a seed, watch it grow, provision ourselves first-hand. I wish everyone could have that experience.

It was a deeply enjoyable conversion, so yes, it did stick. We still organize our meals around what’s locally available, when it comes into season. We don’t eat industrially-produced feedlot meats, and frankly can’t imagine it. Our garden expands every year, and our local farmer’s market also keeps growing. We buy extra fruits and vegetables when they come into season, and freeze or can them so we’ll have abundance (and easy meals) in winter. We’ve become friends with the farmers who work so hard to provide us with everything that helped make our “year of local” so delicious – why would we turn our backs on them now? It’s not just a matter of health and epicurean pleasure, but also community responsibility, for us to stay involved in our local food chain.

Once in awhile I do buy something marvelous and exotic at the grocery — Alaskan wild-caught salmon, or a pomegranate — as a splurge. Because of our year of consciously passing up such things, we recognize them now as indulgences, rather than normal things to which we feel entitled. Because really, what is normal about rushing a frozen creature three thousand miles in an airplane so I can eat it? Our culture’s expectations about food are surreal. So you could say, our family has become more realistic.

This was not an experiment in deprivation. We just wanted to stop pushing pampered fruits and vegetables around the globe on our behalf, so we changed our thinking. Instead of starting every food sentence with “I want,” we began with “right now we have… .” Each season brought a new menu. We tried to celebrate asparagus in April and apples in September, rather than whining about not having apples in spring or asparagus in the fall, if you see my point. Our farmers here grow salad greens under row cover even in the snowy months, and in January we loved the pears we’d canned in cider last summer. It’s not as if we were chewing on acorns.

It’s funny that this is the first question most people asked: what did you have to give up? We shared that anxiety too, in the beginning. A consumer culture has trained us all to concentrate intensely on what we might be missing, rather than what we have. Unfortunately, that encourages a toddler-like approach to the world: “I want everything, right now, so I can put it in my mouth!” For many reasons, I believe it’s a useful family exercise to reorder this manner of thinking. In my lifetime I expect to face the end of many kinds of abundance we’d thought would last forever.  Instead of dreading collapse, why not be inventive about adapting to a changing world? Why not begin finding ways to eat splendidly from our own local food economies, and giving them our business so they will be even better next year?

We’re a pretty ordinary family, in that we all have a thousand things to do including full-time jobs or school. Part of the point we wanted to make in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is that regular, busy people can pay more attention to where our food comes from, and use healthier ingredients for the rituals of our lives. All over the world, people have food cultures, cooking special meals on various occasions (or even every day) because it’s traditional, enjoyable, and considered to be worth the effort.  In this country, the closest thing we have to a distinctive food culture might be feeding our kids burgers in a speeding car.  Are we busier than families in Italy or Japan?

It isn’t too late to reclaim a food culture of our own. Decisions create new behaviors, and routines make things easier. We simplified recipes, cooked in quantity, did what we could, but we also decided that cooking and enjoying meals would be a significant, important part of our family life. Our family took a somewhat formal pledge in order to push ourselves into doing something we knew would improve our lives. We had to do it together, or not at all. To be honest, it was much easier than we expected.

Food is inspiring, it’s that simple. Eating is the most important human activity, and a consumer choice we make every day. Suddenly, people started noticing our country was having a three-ring food crisis: We have unprecedented health and obesity problems, due to poor diets. We’re putting almost as much fossil fuels into our refrigerators as our cars. And our farmers and rural communities are struggling to survive. All these problems have one cause: we’re buying so much of our food from far away. We rarely look at our plates and ask: “Where has this stuff been?”

At my house, we’d asked that question for years. Like many families, we were uncomfortable with the environmental costs of agribusiness and the health costs of junk food. Many problems can be solved by one solution, getting food from closer to home. We’d discovered it’s not so very hard to be a more conscious consumer of food. Not everybody can walk away from the industrial food pipeline altogether, but all of us can take a few steps, and the benefits are immediate.

I’d thought about writing a book on this subject for years, but I have absolutely no interest in telling other people what to do. It dawned on me, though, that narratives inspire people in a different way, explaining possibilities. We talked a lot, as a family, about sharing our own experience of eating more locally. We decided to frame it as a one-year narrative, in which we would try to make our best efforts. Giving the project some structure made it more fun for us, and gave the book its shape.

We live in unusually challenging times. There’s no recipe for how to fix a global economic collapse and climate crisis. Our news media don’t always help, when they flood us with superficial glimpses of disaster or lurid gossip about people we will never meet. It’s not surprising that readers may be hungry to put our experience into a more useful context.

Historical fiction can be a part of that. As a case in point, when I was researching this novel I read a lot about World War II — not the battles abroad, but domestic life. I was amazed to learn how families adapted cooperatively to rationing. Everything was in short supply, from food and clothing to wristwatches, typewriters, and bed sheets.  Access was limited equally among rich and poor. The government actually outlawed long skirts and ruffled sleeves, to save fabric, and no cars were manufactured for civilian use for many years. There was something almost cheerful about the way people accepted the necessary frugality, undertaking it as a contribution they could make to a better world. Now, that climate of unselfish cooperation is hard to fathom. Reading history suggested to me that no matter what’s happening, we have probably been here before at some time, possibly with a better attitude. Historical fiction carries that kind of useful information and can render it emotionally compelling.

Both. Fortunately, I like research. I was trained as a scientist, and tend to approach tasks methodically, enjoying what I learn along the way and trying to use it resourcefully. Sometimes I did feel I was trying to move a mountain with a teaspoon. I read many books about U.S. and Mexican history just to find my starting point. Month by month, I circled in to frame the story in theoretical terms. And that was only the beginning. A novel is made of details. Every character, on every page, has to be immersed in a perfectly visualized scene: using transportation, cooking, listening to radio programs, speaking in the particular jargon of an era. Wearing clothes. (Unless they aren’t, but that can’t last long.) Each detail has to be historically exact, and in this case “the era” involved dozens of different locations in two countries, crossing nearly thirty years.

I traveled to all the settings, on both sides of the border: Washington, D.C., Asheville, North Carolina, the Blue Ridge Parkway, on this side. On the other, I hiked through Mexican coastal jungles, hung out in villages, went to see a brujo, visited Mexico City’s archaeological and art museums, the preserved homes of Rivera and Kahlo and the Trotskys, and their personal archives. I climbed the pyramids at Teotihuacán. I’ve spent a lot of time in Mexico over the past thirty years, living near the border in Arizona for most of that time, so I drew on the past too, digging out old notebooks from assignments in the Yucatan and elsewhere. I only set scenes in places where I’ve been myself.  When I create a world for the reader, I want to do it right, using all my senses.

That was the fun part, the “writer’s life” they show you in the movies. Here’s what they don’t show: the writer sitting in a chair in her study, glasses on her nose, coffee cup in hand, reading. For years and years. Biographies, court transcripts, political analyses from every angle, catalogues of women’s clothing from the ‘30’s and 40’s, recipe books, you name it. Everything ever written by or about Trotsky, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, J. Edgar Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, I tried to lay eyes on. I read literally thousands of newspaper and magazine articles documenting everyday life in the U.S. during World War II, and everything leading up to the post-war political freeze-up.  Autobiographies of blacklisted artists. The internet was useful, many newspapers now have electronic archives, but mostly it served to lead me toward better things that are not online. I had to get my nose into a lot of dusty places.  I pored over old letters and photo collections. I visited an old-car museum. This is a good example of the importance of primary sources: “Googling” a 1930’s Roadster won’t tell you how it feels to shift its gears, or that the windshield wiper is hand-operated by a lever over your head. Who would have thought? I loved the surprises. I learned that contrary to popular belief, the continental U.S. was attacked during WWII.  The New York Times ran photos of the aftermath. The Japanese sent a submarine up the Columbia River and deployed a floatplane bomber, with the goal of setting the Oregon forests on fire and creating panic in the land. But the plan was rained out. History hinges on things like this, events that get forgotten — this is the soul of the story I wanted to tell. It was thrilling to immerse myself so deeply in the era.  I dreamt of cooking breakfast for Trotsky, and became a curiosity for elderly men at dinner parties who quizzed me about arcane World War II trivia. The stacks of research materials grew tall in my office, like a forest of wobbly trees. I’ve cleared it all out now, making way for the next.

I began plotting out the structure of the story in February 2002, and finished exactly seven years later. I took a hiatus between 2005 and 2008 to write and release a nonfiction book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but the novel was still on my mind during that time, accumulating weight and momentum. The research and writing were simultaneous, almost to the end. I kept discovering fascinating or horrifying events buried in the historical record that pushed me forward to the conclusion.

No. While the novel is chock-full of real events and people, the reader’s engagement will always hang on a well-constructed plot. This I know. For sympathy, intrigue and heart-pounding suspense, I needed protagonists who would be completely malleable to my authorial control, to give me the flexibility to turn the events exactly as I needed. So Harrison Shepherd is a pure product of my imagination, and so is the indispensable Violet Brown. They were both entirely cooperative.

Of course, I had to imagine Shepherd as fully real in every aspect, including as a writer. No one has really done the Pre-Columbian Potboiler, as far as I know, but I had in mind a category of fiction that came of age around Dashiell Hammett’s time, in novels like The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. This was the last hurrah of the novel as an everyday, working person’s entertainment, and a golden time for some writers who considered themselves entertainers, yet really did sophisticated work. (Interestingly, despite his apolitical subject matter, Hammett was persecuted for communism.) Combine the Sam Spade genre with James Michener’s historical sagas – Hawaii and Tales of the South Pacific — and you’re in the right part of the bookstore.

I spent so much time thinking about Harrison Shepherd’s hard-boiled Aztec novels, I even designed their dust-jackets in my head. Immediately behind my desk is a shelf where I keep my dictionaries, the thesaurus, and the reference books I’m using most during a given project. A couple of times without really thinking I turned around to reach for Harrison Shepherd’s Vassals of Majesty or Pilgrims of Chapultepec. And then laughed at myself, out loud.