KNOWN AS A CHRONICLER OF THE AMERICAN West since the publication of her celebrated Wyoming elegy, The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich is a nonfiction writer, essayist, novelist, poet amd filmmaker. She has explored topics as diverse as American Buddhism, her recovery from a near-fatal lightning strike and life in a World War II internment camp for Japanese-Americans. Ehrlich describes herself in Solace as “a cultural straddler,” and as both storyteller and an interpretor of place. In her newest book, This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland, Ehrlich explores the icy home of Knut Rasmussen and the modern-day Inuit.
I understand that you wrote This Cold Heaven over the course of seven years — and really took the time to immerse yourself in the place and the culture. In much of your nonfiction work, you seem to write from a position of being simultaneously a “native,” or a member of the community, and an “outsider” to the places you explore.
I would never assume that I was a member of a community, so I’m an outsider in that sense. But I try to travel in such a way that I kind of melt in as much as possible. I always travel alone, and I never really have a plan of what I’m going to do; I just sort of sniff around and talk to people. I do a lot of background research first, just trying to understand the culture, using whatever materials exist. And I just kind of see what happens. And if nothing happens, I don’t write. If it does, I do.
Do you think that you write differently about places when are feeling like an outsider to a place?
Yes, I think I do. You’re looking to see what holds a society together: how the language expresses the inexpressible, the interactions among people, how the landscape fuels their sense of who they are and where they are — and who I am and where I am.
How deeply do you have to know or understand or belong to a place or culture before you feel comfortable writing about it?
You can always write something because — as an outsider that’s your privilege. But one finds as the years go by, or the months go by, your understanding of a place changes.
But I think that also, as an outsider you have a fresh view, which is sometimes good; you stop seeing things after you’ve been there awhile, you get so used to them. So I write continuously. I mean, I take notes ... From the minute I leave my house on, and just try to keep my antennae up .
You’ve written that the essays in The Solace of Open Spaces were drawn from journal entries. Do you still keep a journal?
I consider it all the same thing, journals, notebooks, they all merge together eventually. Sure, I write… I have a journal hanging around all the time. I keep these little spiral notebooks that I buy at the drug store. I keep them in all of my pockets wherever I go and in the car, in the bathroom. They’re always handy. So I just try to write things down. A lot.
It’s just a memory aid, that’s all. There’s nothing mysterious about it.
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