Byl: Someone's Got to Stay Outside

Last year, I applied for an MFA professorship at a Western university. I had never applied for a tenure track job before. I had never even trolled an academic website looking for an opening. And I had zero desire to leave my home in Alaska. But this announcement came to my attention by way of a good friend, at a time when I was really worried about money. As in, trying to scab together another year of life from my usual combination of sporadic income (trail work, editing, writer-in-residence gigs, grants, and unexpected rebates from class action lawsuits--$22 from Farmers Insurance? When did I have Farmers Insurance again?) I dropped the application off at the Post Office and felt a little sick as I weighed what you must when applying for anything: what if I get it?

I didn't. Get the job, get an interview. Didn't get short-listed, called back, or even a form rejection letter until months later, forwarded through several temporary address changes.

There were many good reasons I was passed over (slim teaching experience, primarily manual-labor resume, fact that I didn't paginate my application correctly but couldn't justify the $25 to reprint it). And I truly was relieved not to have to consider changing my entire life, let alone learn how to use Skype for a job interview. But I also felt slightly ...sheepish? Ashamed? The caustic brew of emotions that accrue when we second-guess ourselves. Shouldn't I want this enough to be disappointed? Do I seriously think I can keep felling trees and teaching layout classes to trail crews for another fifteen years? Am I wasting my life?

Into this minor existential conundrum stepped Jim Harrison. I have loved his fiction and poems for years, and during one scattershot morning web-browse, I found an interviewwith Harrison that entranced me, my black tea gone cold on the windowsill. Of the many gems fiery Harrison slung out of his dragon lair (along with a few totally maddening bits), one stopped me short. Talking to the interviewer about why he had never taken an academic job despite periods of financial strain, Harrison said, "Somebody's got to stay outside." This struck me like a rock to the temple. I knew exactly what he meant, felt the shock of hearing a thought you haven't yet articulated said by someone else, more bravely than you would have. Since then I've chewed on the quote, taken what he said and given it my own meaning. It's become a kind of touchstone.

In the context of Harrison's wide reputation as a fishing and farming Upper Peninsula Michigan- and Western Montana-dwelling wanderer, the most obvious read of this quote, is: somebody's got to stay Outdoors. And folded in there: somebody's got to stay Outside of Academia. This can be made too simple, of course. It is possible to teach at a university and still get outside. (The people who seem to balance this best teach in low-residency programs, I'm noticing.)

But perhaps what Harrison meant, and certainly what I do, is that our culture isn't best off when everyone's success is measured by the same benchmark. The world needs dynamite administrators and professors, and it also needs people who primarily work outside in the field, keeping track of wind direction and counting whales, noticing where ice has melted and how long a saw will run on one tank of gas. Reminding us that smarts and syllabi notwithstanding, we are also animals in an ecosystem, which is another word for home.

In my case, the niggling dread I felt about having a tenure track job stood against this very clear knowledge: I have been grounded, matured, sharpened, softened, deepened, and humbled by a long career working in the woods. For whatever reason, I am a better version of me working in the woods than almost anywhere else. This isn't true for everyone, and it shouldn't be. It might not even be true for me forever--the beauty (and challenge) of selves is that they're always evolving. But right now, I know where and when I am least anxious, happier, hungrier. As so often happens in reading, it took Jim Harrison to show me that my hunch about myself was right.

I don't know if Harrison will follow me where I want to go next, but I suspect he might. I also hear in that quote a much broader call to arms, one that transcends nature and MFA programs, and also, draws them together, and it's this: Someone's got to stay outside of whatever orthodoxy has been prescribed for us. And as self-congratulatory as the tone can ring if you read it wrong ("someone's got to do X, and hey, that person is ME!"), I'd guess that writers, every single one of us, know what that means. Quite aside from whether we work in a classroom, on a boat, in a shop, or in an office, we all have "insides"--places we feel safe, protected, expected, one of the gang--and we all have "outsides"--places that feel shifting, difficult, rife with the possibility for failure. On the craft level, we know that the more we can force, beckon, coax or dare ourselves to leave the former for the latter, the better our work gets. And as art (or craft) imitates life, I know I get livelier on the page when I am busy roaming the countryside of my days, looking for sacred cows to tip.

If writers are necessary--and I believe they are--it must be, in part as patrollers of all borders, looking for ways out and ways in. Firebrands jumping fences. Rabble-rousers saying yes, but or no, here's why and bring it on. Harrison is my patron saint of this kind of bravery, a writer so pathologically unapologetic, it's sometimes annoying. He's a lover who is also a brawler. When I read that quote for the hundredth time--someone's got to stay outside--I still get the chills. To me, it says "it's okay you didn't get that job." It demands, "Be who you are already!" It asks "is it possible to be a gracious, humble raconteur?" And if it is (yes), do you dare?

 

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Right now, it has finally stopped snowing and I have to go outside and split some firewood. By the time you read this, February will be nearly over. It's been a great pleasure to write and think here this month, and my heartiest thanks go to those who help keep this vibrant on-line community running. Thanks also (to anyone who's gotten this far) for reading my posts. I'll paraphrase Jim Harrison one last time: I've given you my two cents, but two cents ain't the whole dollar.

Christine Byl is the author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods (Beacon Press, 2013). Her prose has appeared in GlimmerTrain Stories, The Sun, Crazyhorse, and other magazines and anthologies. Byl lives in a yurt on a few acres of tundra just north of Healy, Alaska, with her husband and an old sled dog. She runs a small trail-design and construction business. When she isn't working in the field or writing, she loves reading, homestead projects, wilderness adventures, and anything that happens in the snow. Visit her on Facebook while her website makes its slow way to the world.