An Interview with Derrick Jensen

by Lierre Keith

Conducted July 16, 2011, in Crescent City, CA

Lierre Keith: Gore Vidal said that first novels are thinly disguised autobiographies written for purposes of revenge. Your first book, A Language Older Than Words, was autobiographical. Though it wasn’t written for purposes of revenge, it was written to expose something that was very primary in your life, which makes it a very personal book. What compelled you to write it?

Derrick Jensen: Originally, A Language Older Than Words was supposed to be a happy face discussion of interspecies communication, where I would compile various people’s stories of how they communicate with their dog or cat, or with a tree or river. What I found was that a lot of people were routinely having conversations with nonhumans, but they couldn’t talk about it publicly because of fear of ridicule. So I wanted to put enough of these stories together that people could begin to have a public conversation about it. I was compiling these stories and having a good time doing so, but I was having trouble writing the book. I couldn’t figure out why until I realized that at this stage in planetary murder, it would be entirely inappropriate to write a book that in any way tries to put a happy face on current human and nonhuman relations. It would be insulting and a lie.

I also realized that to write a book that purports to show that nonhumans can think and communicate would be grossly insulting. It would be like writing a book that shows that Jews really aren’t subhuman or that blondes really can think. It would maintain the same old bigotry and chauvinism that characterizes this culture anyway. It would hold up humans as a standard by which everyone else must be judged. What broke the book open for me was the realization that I shouldn’t be asking, “Can nonhumans communicate, or can they not?” Instead I was really interested in asking, “Why is it that some people are able to listen, and some people are not? Why is it that some people are willing to listen, and some people are not?” And from there the book really opened out to an understanding of how before you can exploit someone you have to silence them, you have to deafen yourself to them, you have to systematically pretend they cannot speak. The Portuguese explorers said of the Africans, “When they speak, they fart with their tongues and their mouths.” So because the Portuguese stated that the Africans could not communicate, it was acceptable, in the minds of the Portuguese, for the Portuguese to enslave them. They were rationalizing their exploitative behavior. And we see the same thing on every level with the silencing of women, the silencing of children, the silencing of other cultures, other races, other species. All those to be exploited have been systematically silenced. I became interested—interested is too weak a word—I became consumed by exploring the ways that this culture silences these others. And silences our own experiences as well.

LK: What makes the book so compelling to so many people is that you are exposing your own vulnerable experiences. That really drives the power of the book. Was talking about your own history as compelling for the writer as it is for the reader?

DJ: I don’t believe I’m the first person who ever said the personal is the political. And I learned a lot from many very good feminist writers who intimately interweave their personal stories with the philosophy. Another reason I include so many personal things in my writing is that one of the rules of writing is “show, don’t tell.” It’s important to make an intellectual argument, and at the same time, for the writing to really affect people, there has to be an emotional component, too. And then I have my own experiences of having been silenced and of silencing myself, so if I’m going to write about silencing, it would never have occurred to me to not include a discussion of that silencing.

Writing A Language Older Than Words was extremely difficult for me because of the intense examination that I had to do of my own abusive childhood. I’d been doing that examination for years, but that didn’t alter the fact that, as is true for many healing crises—both psychological and physical healing crises—the process itself was extraordinarily difficult. Prior to writing that book I used to have nightmares pretty constantly and awaken fifteen, twenty times a night with night terrors. That happened routinely my whole life, because of my childhood. During the writing of that book, the nightmares and night terrors got so bad that I wrote most of it sleep deprived: I usually couldn’t get to sleep until after dawn. Then I’d just have very fitful, drifting sleep, full of nightmares until 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. and then I would get up for the day. There were a lot of times I just wanted to quit writing the book because that sleep deprivation was so extreme. But I’m glad I stuck with it, for a number of reasons. One is of course now the book and the analysis in it is out. And personally, also, it helps a lot. After I finished the book, I discovered the truth of what so many people from Robert J. Lifton to Judith Herman have said about recovering from trauma: it doesn’t really help to pretend it didn’t happen, to pretend you can go on with your life without dealing with it. And those who survive best are generally those who are somehow able to take their trauma and turn it into a gift for the community, to metabolize the pain, to make meaning of it and to then use this prior wounding as a gift to the world. Lifton calls this a “survivor mission.”

That said, I didn’t write the book in any way for personal healing. I’m not interested in writing that is done for personal healing. That’s why God invented journals. If you’re going to actually attempt to communicate, then you need to have a larger message. The personal healing was a very nice benefit from writing this book, a nice side-effect, but I wrote the book to explore and expose the ubiquitous lies that characterize this culture and that allow it to continue. And not merely to explore and expose these lies, but to affect real change in the real world.

LK: I think that that’s one of the reasons that your book is so compelling. I’ve read a lot of survivor narratives, but yours is the only one I’ve ever read that made me think: this is somebody I need to be friends with. “Breaking the silence” has become kind of a cliché, and it’s really important for survivors to do that, but your book went far beyond that because it wasn’t just your personal pain and your personal telling of your story. There’s a way bigger meaning than just “I was hurt.”

DJ: Well, a couple things about that. One is, once again, this is why God invented therapists, so that you can tell the story to therapists. And the stories should be told to therapists or to journals or to friends or to extended family. It’s absolutely crucial, but there’s absolutely no reason for me to read about it. I fully recognize that I am writing about painful subjects, and so one of the things that I strive very hard to do is to give readers gifts that are commensurate with the pain that is caused by the reading of the book. If you’re going to inflict pain on the reader by talking about extremely painful subjects, then you have to give them gifts in return. Otherwise, it’s just a painful experience.

LK: Reading some of those survivor narratives feels like lancing a wound. And that can be an important stage for when you are first coming to grips with your own story. But in A Language Older Than Words, you took pain and you transformed it into something else. You made it luminous. And in a way, that is bigger than personal redemption. You are looking at the whole scope of the last 10,000 years of history and the terrible situation that we find ourselves in now as animals on a dying planet.

DJ: On a planet being murdered.

LK: Yes, right. It’s the micro and the macro. Your personal story is reflected everywhere.

DJ: While survivor narratives certainly have their importance, A Language Older Than Words was never intended as a survivor narrative. It’s intended as an exploration of the ways in which this culture silences those who are exploited, and the ways it rationalizes exploitation. And my own narrative was one of the supports for that. And not even a central support. A little bit of trauma can go a long way in a book. There are very few pages in that book that are explicit depictions of the abuse. Maybe three or four pages out of the total of three hundred.

LK: I am reminded of, actually, a line from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe where C. S. Lewis is describing the battle at the end. He’s writing for children, and what he says is very simple, “And if I told you how horrible it was, your parents wouldn’t let you read this.” That is so much more evocative than him actually going through descriptions of chopping and slicing and people dying and all the rest of it. That line has haunted me. In some ways, A Language Older Than Words did much the same thing. Like you say, there are only three or four pages of the horrors that you went through as a child, but it was enough to make an impact. It was really all the reader needed.

DJ: Well, thank you. Something that’s interesting about the book is that there’s a place where it says “Everything I’m saying is a lie. None of this really happened.” The very last thing I wrote was that section, which means the book could have worked without the graphic descriptions of abuse.

LK: It’s right in the beginning.

DJ: I put that in because my publisher was afraid that my father might sue, so he wanted me to put in a disclaimer. And I told him to get lost. I said I’m not going to say that this didn’t happen. And then I realized that I could actually use that as an exploration of how silencing works, where I tell you what happened in the very same sentence that I am denying that any of it occurred. My father didn’t leap across the table to beat my brother, he didn’t chase my brother around the house, he didn’t—

LK: —give your brother epilepsy—

DJ: —he didn’t do any of that stuff. None of this happened. Which mirrors the experience of abuse across the whole culture. The world is not really being killed. Men don’t routinely rape women. The level of denial that goes on. It’s like R. D. Laing’s three great rules of a dysfunctional family. Rule A is don’t. Rule A1 is rule A does not exist. And Rule A2 is never discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1, or A2. That section is really a description of that process of amnesia that is central to all abusive behavior. Judith Herman begins her wonderful book Trauma and Recovery by saying that there are some things that happen that are too terrible for words, and that’s the meaning of the word unspeakable. Milan Kundera said that the struggle against oppression is the struggle of memory against forgetting. That’s what’s being manifested in that section, which was written basically as an attempt to protect my publisher from a lawsuit.

LK: One of the things that really struck me excerpting your work was how if you take any small section, it would be really hard to know which book it came from. You have this long trajectory, one meta-theme. I wondered if you felt that in your writing career, you’ve sort of been writing one book in pauses. Or whether you feel like there’s been a change in the themes that you’re addressing.

DJ: I feel like my work is one long consecutive story. I remember a conversation with a creative writing instructor I had in my early twenties. We agreed that you really don’t judge an author by a book, but rather by their body of work. So I’m more concerned with the whole body of work than I am with any individual book.

Also, I’ve been really heavily influenced by music. Beethoven has been a huge influence on me with the ways he works with themes. Think about the beginning of his Fifth Symphony. He takes that and then he puts it upside down, he puts it backward, he puts it forward, and he keeps coming back to it and putting permutations on it. A writing teacher, John Keeble, helped me understand how we as writers can do the same sorts of things with our writing as composers do with music. Through that I began to see writing in terms of how the writer can play with the theme, just like Beethoven turning it upside down, playing it backward and forward. So in a musical sense I certainly have themes in my work. And also, certainly there are topics to which I keep on coming back—I mean, this culture’s killing the planet.

One goal of physics seems to be some sort of a unified field theory. One of the things that I’ve tried to do is to come up with a unified field theory of this culture’s destructiveness. I don’t really write about environmental destruction. What I’m writing about are the connections between that destruction and other forms of this culture’s destructiveness, the motivations, the similarities and differences, and then of course exploring resistance to that.

Books are living. As I gain understanding, my books change. If I want to revisit some idea that I wrote about six books ago, how do I do it in such a way that it’s going to still be interesting for the people who read that older book, and, at the same time, will introduce new people to the material? I wish that my work could be one big, long book that people could read. Of course that’s totally unrealistic. The point is that, yeah, there are things that come up in one book and then I want to explore again in another book, they’re not completely independent. Each book stands alone, but there still are references back and forth. I’m presuming that’s probably true for a lot of other writers. It certainly happens in fiction. Authors have some characters that repeat, and they have themes. I mean, how many times has Stephen King scared us? Or how many mysteries did Agatha Christie write? How many times did Hercule Poroit figure out the mystery in the end?

LK: Did you always want to be a writer?

DJ: I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid.

LK: Did you like stories? Why did you want to be a writer?

DJ: I liked reading a lot. I read a lot when I was a child. And I would write stories that were essentially plagiarism. I felt bad about this until I found out that a lot of writers do it. I really liked the Narnia series, so in second grade I wrote stories about kids who went through a closet instead of a wardrobe into this other world called Palmia instead of Narnia, and the stories were essentially the same as the Narnia characters’ with very minor changes. Another thing I used to do, when I was seven and eight, was to begin typing a book. I would have the book next to me and then I would copy it. I wasn’t claiming it. I was just typing it. I don’t know why I did that particular thing, but . . . yes, I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. I wrote plays and I wrote adaptations—

LK: Do you still have any?

DJ: Probably somewhere. In fourth grade, I wrote a play about somebody who was wounded at the battle of Fredricksburg and had to make his way back to a hospital, where they cut off his arm.

LK: Was it ever produced?

DJ: It was done in class, and I think it was a bit hyperdramatic for most of the students. Most of the plays that the other kids wrote were “me and my pet dog went for a walk” or something, so my plot was pretty over the top in comparison.

LK: A plot about having your arm amputated must have been fun for an eight year old.

DJ: It took place behind a screen. And we actually—

LK: —the drama, my God.

DJ: And we actually made a cardboard hatchet to raise above the screen and bring down and made the person . . .

LK: Scream?

DJ: Scream. Anyway, I still liked to write, and in ninth grade I took a typing class. Instead of typing from the textbook our class was to use, I made a very bad deal with the typing instructor, which was that I could write stories in class and he would count one page of a story the same as one page of typing from the book.

LK: Wow.

DJ: Then in high school, I was good at science, and so I did what people who are good at science do, which is to believe that you should get a good job. I still remember one of those aptitude tests that I took in high school. I was getting great grades in calculus. I was going to go that direction. But the aptitude test said that I should be a cross between an artist and a popular entertainer. I said to a friend of mine, “These tests are so stupid. Look how ridiculous they are, because I know I’m going to be a scientist. This is just crazy!” I went to the School of Mines on a scholarship. I went there because I got a scholarship, and I couldn’t afford to go to college otherwise. I hated it, and realized that what I really wanted to do was be a writer. Then, like Joseph Campbell said about his own life, I spent my twenties learning how to write, so that when I had something to write about later, I would know how to do it.

LK: How did you learn to write? What was the most important thing that you did to become a writer?

DJ: When I was in college, I was unhappy, but so was most everybody else there. I had this habit of asking people if they liked their jobs. About 90 percent would say no. I started asking, “So what does it mean when the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their waking hours doing things they don’t want to do?” And I would ask my fellow students, “Aren’t you unhappy?” And they would say, “Yeah, I am. But when I get out of here, I’m going to buy myself a nice car.” Some fellow students were actually looking forward to retirement.

LK: So age twenty, they were already looking forward to—

DJ: —to being sixty-five.

LK: Right.

DJ: I realized that that wasn’t really the life for me. On the other hand, I worked all through college. I worked summers at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and one of my bosses there got sick one time and he showed up at work anyway at noon. He said it was because he couldn’t stand to miss work, because he was so looking forward to doing the experiment. I remember thinking, I don’t ever want to work a job that I wouldn’t do if I were sick, that I don’t want to do anything with my life that I wouldn’t do if I were sick. What is it that would excite me so much that I would want to do it all the time? I have an environmentalist friend who says that a lot of environmentalists begin by wanting to protect a specific piece of ground, and end up questioning the foundations of Western Civilization. Because you start asking, why is this particular piece of land being destroyed? And if you keep asking questions, you end up questioning the foundations of this whole exploitative culture. If you ask, why do men rape women? You end up at the roots of patriarchy. And if you ask, why is there racism? Why does this happen? You end up in the same place. For me, one of the questions was, why is there a wage economy? Why do people work jobs they don’t like? If you ask that question, it takes you to the wage economy. Okay, why is there a wage economy? That leads you to start questioning capitalism. Okay, why is there capitalism? Well, that leads you to ask, why is there systematic exploitation?

When I was in second grade, there was a subdivision built right next to where I lived. I wouldn’t have called it a habitat at the time, but this home for meadowlarks, garter snakes, toads, crawdads, cottonwood trees, and grasshoppers was turned into houses. Even at seven years old, I remember thinking that this couldn’t go on forever, because if you keep expanding, you eventually run out of space. From a very early age I understood that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That was abundantly clear to me. And it was also clear to me that I was on the side of the meadowlarks and the grasshoppers and the toads. I was deeply saddened by what happened to them, and also deeply moved by their troubles.

LK: I think a lot of kids feel that. I wonder why some of us are able to hang on to it and why others forget. In your case, what do you think it was?

DJ: Well, I asked both Robert J. Lifton and Judith Herman why some people open out from trauma and some people shut down, and they both laughed and said, “I have no idea.” And they are pretty much two of the world’s experts on the effects of trauma, so if they are going to defer on that question, I think I might punt as well. And I have no idea why. You know, twenty books later I have no idea why some people are empathic and some people are not.

Back to how I learned to write. Well, I spent my twenties in some senses not doing much of anything. I started the beekeeping business and then the bees died. Then I got very sick and I couldn’t do anything for awhile. But in other senses, I was getting grounded. One reason I’m so prolific today is because I spent so much time in my twenties vomiting up the effects of the whole process of schooling, teaching myself how to really think. Because critical thinking is not encouraged in schools. I was teaching myself to question, to question everything, and teaching myself to learn how to listen. Not even necessarily teaching myself, but instead sitting by a river and learning how to ask questions from the river. I don’t know how the river taught me, but it did.

And then in my late twenties, I started to write. I had been practicing. Somebody had said to me, “You’re not a real writer until you’ve written a million words.” And nerd that I was, when I started to get serious about writing, I started keeping track of how many words I wrote. I was going to try to write a thousand words a day, because then I figured in a little under three years I would be a writer. And a thousand words a day, as you know, is a lot. There’s no way I made that. But if I wrote five hundred words in a day, I’d still be a writer in less than six years. Then the system got more complicated, because obviously it’s easier to edit a draft then to write it. Where did that fit with my five hundred or a thousand words a day? Here’s what I came up with. If I wrote five hundred words of a first draft, that would count as five hundred words. Then each word of my second draft would count as half a word, so if I edited five hundred words it would count as two hundred and fifty. And then each word in the third draft would count as a third of a word, and so on. It’s pretty silly.

My time of getting grounded really ended one day in my late twenties when I was talking to a friend who said to me one of the most important things I’ve ever heard. He said, “You have gifts, Derrick. And if you don’t use those gifts in the service of the community, then you’re not worth shit. In order to succeed at anything, you have to make it the most important thing in your life.” Some thirty-three years later I still remember where I was when I heard that. I didn’t have a telephone at that point—not because of philosophical reasons, but because I had no money—and so I was standing at a payphone outside a tiny grocery store in Spirit Lake, Idaho.

That night I dedicated my life to writing.

Fast forward ten years. I read in a book on creativity that the magic number between when you dedicate your life to intensive study of an art and when you release your first truly creative work is supposed to be about ten years. It was true for Mendelssohn, Mozart, Beethoven, a lot of the big composers. And the same was true for me. I dedicated my life to writing in 1987, and in 1997 I wrote A Language Older Than Words. I wrote a couple of books before that, but that was my first book where I found my voice, or where my voice found me.

So in 1987, I started writing seriously. I started practicing a lot. I did things like copying good or great writers’ work. You know, painters do that all the time. Writers don’t do it nearly enough. I would take writing that I liked and hand copy it word for word, which is interesting now that I think about it because that’s essentially what I was doing as a kid. Except now I wouldn’t type it, because that’s too fast. I would hand write it slowly, and I learned a lot . . .

LK: Your synapses form in a whole different way.

DJ: Absolutely. And then after that, not only would I copy it, but I would then modify it and make it my own. For example, if the author wrote a description, I tried writing the same description with a few changes: if the author described the secretary for the detective’s office, I described the postal clerk in the same way.

I was doing all this writing, and the writing was really hard, and my writing was pretty horrible. It’s just tremendously painful work to write like that, simply forcing out the words. Then in 1987 I became good friends with a family whose daughter was married to an abuser. In fact, when I first met her, her husband was in jail for raping her. And we talked a lot. Meanwhile, I was going to copy a story by James Herriot, the All Creatures Great and Small writer. I’d read one of his stories about a man who had only one friend in the world, and that was his dog. Every day he would go to a bar, and the dog would sit next to him on a barstool. Then one day the dog died and the man killed himself. It’s something like a ten-page story. By the first sentence, I knew what was going to happen, and by the end of the end of the story I was bawling. I thought, “Wow, that’s a really good trick. I need to learn how to do that.” So, I decided to write a story about a guy whose only friend is his dog and the dog dies, and, since I was a coward, I was going to have the protagonist move out of town instead of kill himself. I tried and tried and tried to write this story, and couldn’t, in great measure because it would have been a terrible story.

Meanwhile, this friend of mine was thinking of going back to her husband. One night I talked to her mom until 4:00 in the morning, asking each other, “How can we keep her from getting back together with her husband? What can we do, what can we say to her?” And then I went home and went to bed, and I woke up the next morning with the plot of a story in my head. Here is the plot: there’s a woman who is in an abusive marriage. She becomes friends with a guy who has a dog. They talk about her abusive relationship. Eventually her husband finds out about their friendship and kills the dog. The guy moves out of town. The woman hits bottom, and that’s the catalyst for her to finally love herself enough to give her husband the boot.

This was going to be about a ten-page story, which I vowed to finish before I went to sleep. When I got to about page seven, I realized it was going to be about a fifteen-page story, which I couldn’t finish that day. Soon I got to page twelve and realized it was going to be about twenty-five pages. I got to page twenty and realized it was going to be about fifty pages. Two hundred pages later I had my first novel, which never got published. The point here is that I wrote it as a two-hundred-page attempt to help my friend understand why she should leave her husband. That was the moment when I became a writer because I wasn’t writing for practice, and I wasn’t writing from my head. Instead I was writing because I had something that I desperately needed to communicate.

Some writer asked Amy Tan, “Does writing ever get any easier?” And she said, “No, but it gets better.” That’s not my experience at all. My experience is that writing has gotten much easier. If it were still as hard to write now as it was when I was twenty-five, I would have quit a long time ago. The thing that’s hard is finding the place where it’s easy. But if you can find that, if you can tap into that place where the writing comes easily, it flows. Years ago I read an interview with the writer Charles Johnson, in which he said that the writing he wants to read is that which the writer writes as though there is a gun to the writer’s head, and the writer will be killed as soon as the writer writes the last sentence of the last paragraph of the last page. Now, if you write with that sense of honesty and urgency, as though this is the last thing you can ever say, as opposed to writing for publication, writing for a grant, writing for this or that other motive, that if you write with that intensity, then you’re not going to lie, and you’re not going to mess around, and every word is going to be sharp. Like I said, that was the moment I became a writer, because I wasn’t writing to become a writer. I was writing to try to save my friend from that terrible situation.

LK: And now you’re writing to save the planet from that terrible situation.

DJ: That’s exactly it. And that’s one reason I’m so prolific; if writing makes any difference whatsoever, I need to write as much and as fast as I can. If I have this gift, I need to use it in the service of my community, or I’m not worth shit, you know? I have a tremendous responsibility. If I believe that words are worth anything, I can’t dilly-dally around. All of my writing does come from that sense of urgency and the sense of wanting to communicate something.

I’ve always loved the line by Ursula LeGuin that writing is like sex: it’s a lot better with two people. What I take that to mean is that journals are fine and important, but real writing is an attempt to communicate something of importance. There are a bunch of implications of Ursula LeGuin’s line. One of them is that there is a responsibility to one’s reader, also, to not be self-indulgent, to attempt to communicate, to be clear and to not be selfish. Years and years ago, I was at a storytelling festival and a very experienced storyteller corrected an incorrect word I had used. I’m horrified to admit this, but I said to her, “It’s just a word.” And she said, “No, you mugged me because you are responsible for every moment that every person who is reading your book or listening to your talk is giving to you. They’re giving you these tremendous gifts of their time, and if you lie to them, if you use a word incorrectly, if you don’t give them gifts for every moment, for every page, you’re mugging them. You’re mugging them with words just as surely as if you stole their wallet. You’re stealing their time.” That’s always been very crucial to me, to be giving gifts to the reader.

So how, then, does someone learn how to write? It’s an accretion of all these lessons. I went back to get an MFA because I had learned as much as I could by reading Doestoevsky. I wanted to be able to have a teacher of whom I could ask questions. I hated school a lot, and the only really positive experience I had is when I got my MFA, which I enjoyed very much. That’s probably because I went to school not to get a degree, not to pass time, not because I had to, but instead I went specifically and solely, explicitly and completely, to learn how to become a better writer. And I was completely ruthless about it. If something helped me become a better writer, I was very focused on it. If it did not help me to become a better writer, I ignored it or got it out of my life.

LK: Is that how you are in your life now as a writer?

DJ: In terms of being ruthless about things . . . yes. Writing is the most important thing to me. I mean, obviously, the real world, the living world, is more important to me than writing. But in terms of things I do in my life, everything else is pretty secondary. I know some writers who have had regular jobs, I’ve known some writers who have had families, and I don’t know how they do it.

LK: I don’t either.

DJ: I also just know that the best way that I can contribute to a living planet is by writing. I’m not saying my contribution is more important than someone else’s. I’m just saying that this is my gift. I was working a few years ago with an attorney who has done great work protecting trees and protecting forests. She’s argued before the State Supreme Court of California. She’s great. She literally wrote the book on fighting the California Department of Forestry. A local neighborhood group hired her to protect some forests here, and to lower her fees so it would be manageable, I had to do a lot of the basic writing for her. As we were writing documents for court, I asked, “Oh my god, do you like doing this stuff?” And she loved it! I said, “That’s really great because I wouldn’t like this at all.” On the other hand, I really love the sort of writing that I do. She and I are both contributing in ways that suit us.

I don’t talk about my romantic relationship life at all in my books, in part because I share so much of the other parts of my life that I need to keep some things just for me. Nonetheless, I’m going to tell one story. I was dating somebody about ten years ago, and that relationship was kind of a disaster for any number of reasons. My mom didn’t like her, and the woman wrote a letter to my mom asking her why. My mom wrote back, “I don’t know you. The only thing I care about really is that Derrick is happy, healthy, and writing. And since he met you he’s been unhappy, he’s been sick, and he hasn’t been writing. So, actually, no, I don’t like you.” And she was right, those are the things I care about in my life. But the order of importance would probably be am I writing, am I healthy, am I happy.

A very important thing happened to me when I was in eighth grade. I went out for the football team and a friend of mine who was a couple years older said, “Even if you get really tired, keep trying as hard as you can, because someday it’s going to be over and you’re going to look back and wish that you would have tried harder. Don’t look back with regrets.” That stuck with me.

That’s part one of that story. It continues. My experiences in athletics were terrible in junior high. The coaches were horrible, discouraging, and mean, in general, and specifically to me. They were so awful that it intimidated me and kept me from going out for any sports in high school even though I was quite athletic. Then in college, I was in a handball class where there were too many people for the number of courts, so every day somebody would be randomly assigned to run laps on the track. I’ve always hated purposeless running, and one day when I was assigned to run I noticed there was a high jump pit set up on the infield. I’d loved high jumping ever since I was a kid, so much that I made my own pit and bar and standards when I was in fourth grade. So I set up the standards and I started doing some jumping. The handball coach came out and saw me. I thought he was going to yell at me for not running, but instead he said, “You know, you’re jumping higher than anybody we have on the team. Why don’t you come out for track?” My confidence was so terrible that I told him, “No.” And, what do you know, the next day we have handball class I was again assigned to run. I went out and high jumped, and he came out and asked me to join the team again. I said, “No.” It happened again the next day I was assigned to run. The coach kept this up until I finally agreed to come out for the team. That was my sophomore year, and by the time I was a senior, I had broken the school record, tied the conference record, and won our collegiate conference championship. And then I graduated.

I will never know how good I could have been as a high jumper had I jumped seriously for more than two and a half years. That is a lesson I learned very well. I don’t want to die with any books in me. Hell, I don’t want to die with any life left in me. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and say, “I could have tried harder. I could have saved more land. I could have written more books. I could have done things better.” I want to live such that I use the gifts that the universe has given me to their fullest.

LK: Your books are a lot of things, but one thing that they definitely are is arrows. You’ve put the arrows in your bow, you’ve pulled back the string, and you’ve aimed. How will you know when the arrows have hit the target?

DJ: I’ll know when there are more migratory songbirds every year than the year before, and when there are more salmon every year than the year before, and when there are more newts every year than the year before, and more moths and native slugs and redwood trees and Port Orford cedars. And when the oceans are recovering instead of being murdered. That’s when I’ll know. When there is less dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. One of the most quoted lines that I’ve written is, “Every day when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.” What that line is really getting at is the difference between symbolic and non-symbolic action. Writing is by definition symbolic. And symbolic actions are nice enough. I’m glad when I hear from someone that my work has changed his or her life. I’m glad when I help them understand that they’re not crazy, that instead the culture is crazy. That’s all great, but what really is important to me is that my work affects change in the real world.

I don’t want to understate the importance of symbolic action, of helping people to understand this culture’s destructiveness. That understanding is a necessary step. I can still remember in 1988 being in a public library in Spokane, Washington. The book The Natural Alien by Neil Evernden jumped off the shelf at me. I started reading it and a huge weight went off my shoulders. It was the first book I ever read that did not take the utilitarian perspective as a given. It was the first book I ever read that said nonhumans have more than utilitarian value. They have lives that are their own that are as precious to them as ours are to us. There’s a part where he said, “What do you do if you make some impassioned defense of some creature and then when you’re done making it the other person says ‘Well, that’s fine. But what good are they?’” His answer is to say “Well, what good are you?” Not to insult them, but to point out the stupidity of the utilitarian argument. Evernden then asks, “How much are you worth? If you crush your bones into bone meal, that’s probably worth about two dollars. And your blood’s worth about five dollars.” He goes through it. You’re worth something like seventeen dollars. But of course that’s not your real value. Yet people think that way, of course about nonhumans, and about humans. Recently I was doing a talk and one guy asked what I thought about full-cost accounting, where you put a value on everything, and that will supposedly help to preserve it. So a tree is not merely worth money as two-by-fours, but instead is assigned a value for the CO2 it sequesters, and so on.

I said, “Well, okay, that’s great, but how much are you worth?”

And he said “Actually, the UN has developed numbers for that and in terms of wages and productivity I’m worth about four-and-a-half million dollars.”

I said, “Okay, great, so why don’t we make a deal? The federal government is going to pay your family five million dollars and kill you. Does this sound like a good deal to you?”

My point is that, yes, it’s important to be able to analyze this culture, to deconstruct it, to decolonize our hearts and minds. Neil Evenden’s book saved my sanity and saved my life. But none of that alters the fact that changing lives by themselves doesn’t do a damn thing for the salmon.

When I say, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam,” I’m really asking whether writing actually affects change in the real physical world. Because we can do all the analysis we want, but at some point, there has to be action.

LK: In all your books, you mention this other being who influences you, your muse.

DJ: The muse is not a projected part of my unconscious. It’s not my super-conscious. It’s not any of that. The muse is an actual being. It’s a she in my case. She’s an actual being who doesn’t have a body. She lives on other sides, somewhere else, I don’t know where. Part of the reason that I was chosen by this muse is that I have opposable thumbs, and the muse can’t physically write. She can give me the words, but she can’t write them because she doesn’t have a body. I know that in many ways this sounds crazy to members of this culture, but a disbelief in muses is only recently a part of even this culture. Only with the so-called enlightenment—isn’t that a nice piece of propaganda?—did people begin to think they wrote their own words. Before that, it was pretty much accepted by everybody that muses create art. The modern view is much lonelier. And it also makes it much easier to destroy the world. It’s far easier to destroy the world when you are the only one who matters.

We started by talking about A Language Older Than Words and how this culture silences other beings. The fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded Westerners generally perceive listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. That’s one of the central reasons this culture is killing the planet, because it perceives the world as consisting of objects to be exploited as opposed to other beings to enter into relationship with. In this culture, it is considered crazy by many to believe that a tree can speak to you. Or to believe that a muse speaks to you. But this has been commonly accepted by essentially every other culture besides this one. This culture is an extreme aberration in terms of not believing that others have something to say. That’s an extraordinarily narcissistic perspective, and exposing this narcissistic perspective for what it is, is one of the things I’ve wanted to accomplish with my work, to knock the materialists off of their intellectual high ground, to show that their intellectual high ground is based on many untenable assumptions.

Part of my job as a writer is to articulate things I know in my heart to be true, but to which I’ve not yet put words, and in so doing, to help other people articulate things they know in their hearts to be true, but to which they’ve not yet put words. The single most common piece of praise that I’ve gotten is, “Thank you so much for saying the things I knew but I couldn’t put words to.” It’s not my job to write something new or amazing, and I don’t need to do cartwheels or backflips. What I need to do is attempt to tell the truth as honestly as I can. And in so doing it will help other people to tell their truths. And part of my job is to say these things and then have people laugh at me “Oh, he’s crazy. He thinks that trees communicate.” But that will give another person the courage to say it. And then another person and another person, until finally people don’t feel strange saying that. Until people once again don’t feel strange saying that they had a conversation with their muse. And when they don’t feel strange saying, “We need to bring down civilization before it kills the planet.”

There’s another reason that I’m so prolific. Early in my career when I was writing A Language Older Than Words, I had an agent. The agency’s address was 1 Madison Avenue. They had an entire floor of that building. So it’s a huge, prestigious literary agency. I sent my agent the first seventy pages of the manuscript, and she told me that if I cut the social criticism and the family stuff, I’d have a book. I fired her. It was the same day that the members of the MRTA got massacred in the Japanese ambassador’s house in Peru. I wrote to her and said, “If they’re going to give their lives, then the least I can do is tell the truth. You’re fired.” I was in therapy for twelve years, talked about all the abuse in my childhood, and I never once cried. Except that day. The only day I cried in therapy was that day, because I thought I had destroyed my career even before it began. All my adult life I had wanted to be a writer. I had a Madison Avenue agent. I had a book I was working on. And I fired her.

The good news is that the muse has rewarded me greatly for that loyalty that I showed. That’s one reason I have such a good relationship with the muse. In a tangible sense, I showed her early on that what she said to me was more important to me than financial success, more important to me than fame, more important to me than my career, that the important thing was having integrity with the work. In retrospect that was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. Which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t difficult. I finished the book and sent it to another agent, who said I could keep the family stuff and the social criticism but that I would have to get rid of the non-linear organization. I could have one chapter about coyotes and one chapter about child abuse. She didn’t sell the book either. I sent it off to a number of publishing houses. They all rejected it. In fact, here’s another piece of trivia: the serial killer in Songs of the Dead is named after an editor who sent me an especially nasty rejection letter. He said that he really hated books like this one and that he always told young writers never to project their tiny epiphanies onto the natural world. And it made me so mad that I saved up his name to use it years later.

Anyway, the muse is real. People, presumably including nonhuman people, have them.

LK: How does she communicate with you?

DJ: That’s a good question. When I was a teenager, I read the Merlin Trilogy by Mary Stewart. There was a line I’ve never forgotten: “The gods will not speak to those who have no time to listen.” If I don’t make time, communication doesn’t happen. The muse is there, but if I don’t ask for help, I don’t get it. Another thing I’ve found is I have to try on my own to write something, and I have to try hard enough, but then when I can’t, I just say, “I need some help. Can you please help me?” Usually she gives me help right away. It used to take a long time. Now it’s pretty fast. We have a much better relationship. I’ve nurtured this relationship. I give her credit. How’s that, a white man giving a female being credit for something? I always thank her. I treat the muse as I would treat any other being. I also don’t insult her work. I don’t say bad things about the words she gives me. I can certainly say some bad things about my processing of those words.

The muse is as terrified of this culture as I am, and she wants to stop it. That’s one reason she works so hard. We’re a team. We work on this together. I can’t put out the books without her, and she can’t put them out without me. We are, together, trying to save the planet, as best we can.