Emily Wortman-Wunder discusses “Geography of Forgetting,” featured in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of Colorado Review, with associate editor Linnea Harris.
Emily Wortman-Wunder is the author of Not a Thing to Comfort You (2019), winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the Colorado Book Award. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Colorado Denver.
LH: I’m interested in how this piece, “The Geography of Forgetting,” came about. Could you introduce it a little bit?
EWW: Yeah, “Geography of Forgetting” came about through two things. It’s about development, particularly along the I-25 corridor, which I’ve spent a good portion of the past 30 years driving. And also, my mother-in-law’s dealing with dementia and eventual death. I’ve lived here since 1992, so I’ve seen a lot of changes. I initially was going to school in Boulder, and I moved out here to be with the man who is now my husband, and he was from Fort Collins. It was beautiful, and you kind of just see every single time it changes. Even back in the nineties, every single time you drove it looked different, and now even more so. For a long time, we were living in Fort Collins and my husband’s sister lived in Denver and we were driving to see her a lot, and then we moved to Denver and we were driving back, so we were driving it a lot and it would change constantly. I still find it upsetting, and now the growth feels like it’s shifted down to where I am, so it’s even worse. So this has been building for a long time. My mother-in-law moved from Fort Collins down to Denver, and we’ve been helping her and seeing all of her changes. Every single time she moved, her understanding of what was happening kind of crumbled a little bit, and then really accelerated the last couple years of her life. It kind of felt like there was some resonance there. I hesitated to say that one thing led to the other, because obviously it’s not a one-to-one, but it seems like there’s a connection. We have this way as a society of overwriting everything, and then for so many of us at the end of life, our lives just kind of evaporate or erode.
LH: It feels like there are a lot of parallels with how you’re writing about the land eroding too. For the three years I’ve lived here in Fort Collins, they’ve been working on I-25 that entire time. When they finished one portion at some point last year, I remember driving and thinking, oh my gosh, the construction is gone, and I had never thought to look up what it was for. It turned out that they were building an express lane in the middle of it, and I thought, wow, this whole construction just to build something that you have to pay to drive in.
I was so interested to read your piece as somebody who is working on place-based writing myself. I’m actually taking a class with Camille Dungy, whose book I see next to you!
EWW: I taught nature writing for the first time last year, and I taught her book. Her way of shifting from topic to topic is inspiring. If I’m getting stuck, she’s one of the writers I turn to to see how she does it.
LH: For her class right now, we’re reading parts of Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith H. Basso. which I’m seeing you referencing at times in the essay. That whole idea of landscape and identity, and landscapes carrying knowledge, seems to be a throughline in the essay, especially as we’re losing places. That’s all wrapped up in that idea of solastalgia too, which is a fascinating concept. Could you maybe speak to that a little bit more?
EWW: That’s definitely another one of those ideas that’s been constantly percolating. I hadn’t read Wisdom Sits in Places until I was working on this essay, but that idea is just something that makes sense on a molecular level – this sense that we have these connections to place. I know so many people that don’t acknowledge it, even though they have it. Like my mother-in-law, for example. She clearly had a strong connection to place, and at the same time, she was excited about development. So, it’s that tension and that difficulty. I’m out of step with the larger push to be constantly changing and developing, and that’s kind of where that came from.
LH: It feels like all our relationships to place are so different, and yet many of us have this experience that you’re explaining.
EWW: On the one hand, I think everybody hates sprawl. Like, everybody. Even people who are doing it hate it. And, at the same time, we don’t really seem to think that there’s anything else we can do. We HAVE to keep growing, we HAVE to keep building houses. I’m not an economist, but emotionally I think there has to be some other way.
LH: Right, and it’s a very layered problem too. I didn’t know that you were from Ohio initially, but I’m somebody who’s not from Colorado either, and I find myself writing about Colorado a lot. Is this something you’ve considered when writing about place? Being from a place or being of a place?
EWW: In fact, one of my last pieces which I read in Fort Collins was about this specific issue. Growing up in Ohio, I feel like I’m from there, even I’m not really from there. I moved there when I was five and I don’t have any relatives there or anything, but that feels like home home. Now I’m in Colorado, which I totally have no real claim to. Nobody does – there are people that do have a claim to it, and we’re not them. I’m not them. Nevertheless, we want to make connections. We long to make connections and we do make connections, and I think it’s okay to honor that, while acknowledging that quite a few people suffered for us to live here. My daughter lives in Australia right now, so I visit there and I write about it sometimes. Talk about places that I have absolutely no connection to! But, still, the way in for me is observation, and part of that is my background as a naturalist. I can observe plants and animals and so forth and that becomes my way in.
LH: That’s actually a good segue into my next question, which is about your background in the sciences. I’m someone who comes into writing with a science background too, and I’m curious how that impacts either the way you write, or what you write about.
EWW: I think for me, in some ways, I’ve always written about these things, even way back when I was a child. Then when I got to college, I majored in biology, and I worked for a couple seasons as a wildlife technician. I worked for a professor on the CSU campus for a bunch of years doing editing and grant writing. My husband’s a scientist too, so I’ve been a lot closer to the scientific process than I’ve had any right to be. So that was my introduction to Colorado: looking for owls, looking for goshawks, just exploring and looking for things. One of the things my husband and I always struggle with is that he generalizes. He’s a “lumper,” who thinks of things in terms of generalizations, but I think, “no, it’s the story, it’s the anecdote.” And, to some extent, that’s what pulled me to writing and away from science. I wasn’t feeling satisfied with the scientific perspective and the scientific approach. So, I decided to go back and get my MFA at CSU. But now, teaching scientific writing, I see so many different approaches. It’s definitely given me a license to focus on the things that are most interesting to me.
LH: Are you working on anything new right now?
EWW: Yeah, I am. My novel is out on submission right now, so we’ll see how that goes. I just finished a piece that’s about me reading a Barry Lopez story, “Light Action in the Caribbean.” I had taken my high-school-age daughter and her friend on this trip to Hawaii post-pandemic. Then we had this huge fight in the airport because coming back, all the planes were cancelled. We get on standby, and I sit down to read and center myself again, and the story that I read is “Light Action in the Caribbean.” It’s a story about two tourists on an unnamed Caribbean island who end up getting slaughtered by pirates. In all of Barry Lopez’s stories, the violence is offstage, but this one’s front and center, and it’s very graphic, and I was just like…
LH: This is not what I need right now!
EWW: Exactly! And I’m trapped in this airport and it’s like the middle of the night. So anyway, the essay is about parenting, and how we turn to writers for certain things, and then when they don’t deliver, how do we deal with that?
LH: Interesting. I’ll be excited to read that when that comes out. You’re a fiction writer as well, so you have your short story collection, and a novel. Do you find that your fiction and nonfiction inform each other at all, or are they two separate things to you? I’m always curious about that.
EWW: I think they definitely do. Honestly, I’ve done more biological research for my fiction than for my nonfiction. A lot of my short stories are about biologists, so I would have to research and to find out what exactly they were working on. Sometimes I’m like, “okay, this isn’t working as an essay. If it was a story, what would I do?” And then I try to use that to get through stuck places.
LH: I’m curious about the structure of “Geography of Forgetting,” because there’s sort of two things I noticed: one is that it’s a braided essay in some ways, with different topics weaving together, and also there are these numbered sections. I’d love to know what your intention was with the structure.
EWW: Honestly, the numbers are almost an artifact from my process. Almost all my essays start that way, and a lot of times, that’s the first thing that goes in copyediting. It comes out of this exercise that I find very helpful to get started, which is the “five things essay.” For “1,” you write about one thing as much as you can. Then you take a breath, and then you write about another thing , so “2.” Then you write about another thing that’s totally different. “3.” So, you write about five different things in one sitting, and interesting things emerge. This essay emerged from that exercise. One reason why I liked that form was because it’s sort of how I work in nonfiction. I tend not to be very good at telling these through-stories, but I do like to have juxtaposed topics and juxtaposed ideas in my pieces. It works best if then later you realize, “ah, yes, that actually did have some connection!” If it doesn’t do that, then a lot of the times then the piece just doesn’t get off the ground.
LH: I tell my students that all the time – you don’t have to tell people exactly how it’s in connection, but it should be.
My last question then: I love to ask other writers what your non-negotiable books are. If everybody had to read certain books, in your opinion, what should they be?
EWW: I love that. Honestly, Barry Lopez would be a big one. Ursula K. Le Guin. She’s so versatile, and she has such a wide-ranging mind. I teach fiction enough to know that students are always wanting to read about dragons and such, yet she does that and brings in these really complicated and interesting anthropological ideas. I love Gary Snyder, although I tried to teach him for the first time last semester and I realized that not all students really get him, and he’s kind of hard to follow sometimes because he’s a poet, and then writes essays that tend to be very associative in a way that not all students are very interested in. Robert McFarland, I really like him also.
Linnea Harris (she/her) is a third-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Colorado State University, where she is the Gill-Ronda Fellow in Creative Writing, an associate editor at Colorado Review, a contributing reporter for EcoWatch, and the Center for Literary Publishing’s unofficial plant proctor.