Cover Story | Anthony Doerr: The Power of Distant Places

EXPOSE The Power of Distant Places

A Q-and-A with Anthony Doerr

By Rich Brame NOLS Alumni Relations Director and Aimee Newsom NOLS Alumni Relations Coordinator

All photos courtesy of Anthony Doerr

Readers may know Anthony Doerr as an author and 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning creator of the novel, All the Light We Cannot See. He’s also a three-time NOLS grad and a NOLS parent. The interview below, courtesy of NOLS staffers Aimee Newsom and Rich Brame, occurred just before Tony’s new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, launched. The interview has been edited for clarity.

Share your story. NOLS and the outdoors are part of your trajectory, but can you share a quick overview of your life?

I grew up in Ohio, in a rural area outside of Cleveland. In the 1970s, it was sort of rusting as manufacturing moved away. There was a sense that things were happening elsewhere and that Cleveland’s glory days were in the past. There is leafy beauty there, but my daydreaming led elsewhere—I was thirsty for mountains and summer snow.

I loved maps and the outdoors. National Geographic really fueled my imagination with images of the West. I was also into adventure books and fantasy fiction; it let me travel to fantastic places and worlds.

Eventually, as a kid, I started to fixate on Alaska—the big spaces and imagined wilderness. I felt the power of distant places. I just got mountains in my head and I was always tearing mountain pictures out of magazines. I sort of threatened my mom, at age 15, that I was going to use my lawn mowing money to buy a van and drive straight to Alaska.

We eventually reached a compromise. I’m not sure how I found NOLS exactly, but a NOLS Alaska Expedition was a solution that I was lucky my parents could afford, and that they felt comfortable with, from flying on my own to spending weeks away.

As I think back on it now, it was a pretty incredible alignment. I mean, consider that there was no internet and that the only images I really had were scattered photos in the NOLS catalog. We may even have fibbed a bit about my age to get me on that first sea kayaking course.

You first joined NOLS on an Alaskan sea kayaking course. What stands out from that experience?

It was fantastic. I mean, there were obviously hard days and memory tends to erase some of the bleaker moments when you wish you were home. What stands out was the remoteness, huge forests, intact ecosystems, humpback whales, and thumb-sized salmonberries. I hadn’t ever seen those things before.

The hardest part was staying positive in bad weather; the actual kayaking was not that physically difficult for me. Staying upbeat when it’s pouring rain and you have dirt in your pancakes really provides a gritty challenge. You can actually bring positivity to yourself and others. It’s EB (“Expedition Behavior”) and I consciously tried to do my best in that regard.

That first big wilderness experience still resonates. And EB comes into play every day when you’re stuck in traffic and choose to crack jokes instead of indulging your frustrated internal dialogue. If you stay positive in challenging circumstances, not only do you help those around you, but you also somehow help yourself. It helps in relationships. It helps in parenting. There is real power in sharing positivity and humor. And remembering that even tough times that seem endless will at some point end.

A NOLS expedition is a chance to really experience “defamilarization,” which is just a fancy way of saying: take the things that are familiar in your life and do something new that makes them feel new to you again. Habits are useful, but sometimes deadening (the 300th drive to the office). Removing yourself from habit and getting out of the box on a 30-day trip means you see everything so differently when you get back. The appreciation of the daily comes back into life.

Heading into the mountains is unfamiliar and so is returning since new eyes see things so differently.

And for teens, it’s such a powerful gift to be somewhere where phones don’t work. As parents, we’ve tried to get our kids outside as much as possible. I think they sense my joy. There’s normal-day dad and powder-day dad—they like powder-day dad much better.

Your teenage son participated in a NOLS Alaska Expedition last summer. How did it go for him?

Covid-19 has been hard on young people. We’re social creatures and evolved to interact. My son describes his course as fun and an intense team experience. He had confidence before and has more now. He’s always been an amazing cook and is now more so. It was a leap for him too—he’d not been out more than three or four nights.

The gift NOLS offers is extreme for young folks who have been so isolated by Covid. It’s deep social immersion and today’s tech tools allows folks to stay in touch after their course too. It’s that “defamiliarization” we touched on earlier—what a gift it is to hang out with your pals, even on hard, wet days. I’m really proud of him.

Do you remember when landscapes and conservation really became an interest or what influenced you in this regard?

I’ll absolutely guarantee NOLS was a part of it, as was reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in high school.

It’s so mind blowing to learn what an active brilliant human being can do on her own like that. She was able to save so many birds and influence our thinking about DDT. It’s incredible.

And Rachel Carson was just one example. When you’re growing up, you think of books as like leaves on trees—they were just there. We often think of protections like the Wilderness Act or the national parks as being innate. It’s not until you get older that you realize that people created all of these things. They had to recognize the value, see a pathway, and take action. These protections are courageous acts that exist because of humans working together. Sometimes books can play a small role too.

What can you share about your writing process and habits? What is the role of research?

It’s kind of stereotypical advice to say “write what you know.” My advice is usually “write what you want to know— chase your curiosities.”

All the Light took me 10 years to write and it started because I heard a guy complaining about the reception on his cell phone. We were on a train heading into Manhattan under the East River. The train’s going really fast and his call drops and he gets angry. He’s swearing and it occurred to me: “how do we get to the point where we expect these tiny little radios inside this tiny little machine to work when we’re going 50 miles an hour under a river?”

So, I just started reading about radio and the history of radio and I didn’t even have World War II in the book until months into the project. I set a story in a time when radio was magic—there was that sorcery of hearing a voice of somebody, a loved one or a politician, who is hundreds or thousands of miles away and hearing that voice in your living room. And the way we take that for granted today, but for the history of humanity, that was impossible.

I just knew there was something electric about that. I didn’t articulate exactly why I felt such interest and passion about that magical technology, but I knew that was going to be deep enough that I could chase it for several years.

We love your ability to describe scenes and landscapes. Does transposing sights and smells into words come naturally to you?

I had a teacher who had us keep journals. Like any kid, I procrastinated and griped about it. But then I kind of fell in love with it—using a notebook and a pen to translate experience into language.

My “daily” journal is really more like writing every second or third day. There’s something about slowing down, turning off your phone and just writing about your surroundings. I don’t know if I’m good at it yet, but at least I try to start translating this big pulsing wild mysterious thing that is the world and humans moving through it.

Just writing those things down in a journal means there’s no pressure because you’re not going to publish it. It’s kind of like athletes practicing their free throws or putting or whatever. It’s practice that keeps the writing muscles strong.

Any advice for writers?

First thing is: read, read, read.

Just because you want to be a concert pianist playing Bach, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to hip hop, or jazz or whatever. Read as widely as you can. If the classics don’t work for you the first time, give it another shot three years later. There’s a reason those stories endure—give it another shot.

Also keep some kind of diary or journal. Do daily practice that doesn’t have any commercial intent or expectation. Look out and describe the sky, or the birds. Slow down and pay attention to the world. Translate what you see into words. It’s discipline and practice. Pay attention to your own feelings. Translate that huge world into language. Practice every day.

It’s when discipline meets talent that makes a successful writer.

You’ve a new book out: Cloud Cuckoo Land. How do you describe the plot and who should give it a read?

It’s a tale of interconnectedness across characters and time. Books inside books. There are five characters: two in the 15th century, two in present day Idaho, and one in the future. It’s a tale of the discovery of a lost book. I invented one of Antonius Diogenes’ lost novels—my homage to libraries. One of the characters “finds” one of these lost books. The story illustrates our interconnectedness—decisions of our ancestors also affect us. The decisions we make today will impact our great grandkids.

It’s a complicated novel, with multiple story strands. Writing is like spinning plates; you want to touch those plates to keep them spinning in the readers mind as the book shifts perspectives or jumps in time.

You’re a multi-time NOLS grad and a NOLS parent. How do you describe NOLS?

Good question. It makes an interesting survey. When you tell people, “my son is not here, he’s on a NOLS course,” do folks even understand what I said?

NOLS is hardcore. I mean moving in the backcountry off-trail—it’s exhausting and really unique. Nature doesn’t judge, but there are consequences. Courses bring people from all corners of the world, to solve problems and challenges together. I mean think about it: usually as an adult you work through problems with people you know.

The growth of NOLS goes both ways: the student for sure, but also the family/parents who struggle with having their loved one out of touch in the “wilds.”

NOLS allows you to expand and multiply your life and at the same time leave your life for a month. It’s an incredible gift. If I had my way, I’d have every teen, and some would dread it, take a NOLS course. Ninety-seven percent would return changed in a positive way.

Rich Brame, Alumni Relations Director and Instructor, came to NOLS as a Fall Semester in the Rockies student and worked his first course at Wind Cave National Park in 1984.

Aimee Newsom always chooses tea over coffee and never leaves home without a book. She loves exploring Wyoming with her husband, daughter, and Great Dane.