Ana Maria Spagna: 2020 William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer

Since 2003, the William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer has brought writers from around the nation to teach environmental and nature writing to graduate students in a semester-long course each spring in the Environmental Studies program. Past Kittridge Distinguished writers include Terry Tempest Williams, Rebecca Solnit, Rick Bass, and many more. Camas welcomes Ana Maria Spagna as the 2020 Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer.

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of seven books and winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Environmental Journalists,  the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and she has four times been a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

The path as a writer isn’t always linear. Ana Maria Spagna’s story demonstrates a path into writing often takes time and patience. As a child she loved writing, but once she reached adolescence, she lost her confidence, which she believes is a likely story for many young girls. “I didn’t lose my passion, but it didn’t seem like something I could do or be,” she says.

In her twenties, her fierce desire to write returned. She thanks her time outside in the woods for her resurgence as a writer. Spagna spent time on trail crews in Canyonlands and later North Cascades National Park. While constructing trails in the wilderness, she realized her experiences outdoors and her desire to write were closely intertwined. She wrote and wrote and wrote, but experienced few successes in her writing. “It was terrible,” she admits. “It was not good writing, and I could tell it wasn’t going anywhere.” She realized her writing should answer the question: So What?

To find structure and purpose in her writing, she enrolled in a fiction master’s program at Northern Arizona University. More recently, she completed an MFA in Poetry from Fairfield University.

Her education allowed her to teach, and she came to Missoula this semester after EVST professor Phil Condon tapped her on the shoulder at last year’s Montana Book Festival. She is grateful for this opportunity: finding writing and teaching positions requires a lot of hustle. Her return to Missoula is full circle; she took her first-ever creative writing class at UM one dark winter in the offseason years ago.

So far, Spagna is enjoying the vibrant community of Missoula. “Things are happening [here], it’s vibrant, and people are forward-looking.”

The theme of this semester’s workshop is Untangling Environmental Stories. Despite its title, Spagna hopes students learn to embrace the tangle. She plans to teach them to include as many complicated threads as they can in one piece instead of focusing on one point. Ecology and life don’t have one continuous thread. “I want students to learn how they can write an effective piece and embrace that tangle,” she says.

She hopes the student writers leave with confidence that they don’t have to include everything in their writing, nor do they have to be an expert on every piece of information they include. “The voice of the generalist and ignorance is also important in environmental writing,” she says. “How do you get readers to relate to the bigness and wonder and magic of environmental issues? It’s more than we can understand.”

When asked if she has any advice for writers, she is quick to respond, “say yes. No matter what.” Back when she wrote more fiction, she was approached and asked if she wrote for young people. She shook her head no, but she said yes. She reworked an existing story and turned a twentysomething protagonist into a 14-year old adolescent, and it became her novel for young adults. “No matter what people ask you to do, say ‘yes!’”

Spagna’s latest book of essays, Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going, “reminds us to love what we have while encouraging us to still imagine what we want.” Many years ago, Spagna and her wife bought land and built a cabin in a remote village in the North Cascades. On this experience, Spagna notes, “I spent a long time with the ethic of wanting to commit to one community and one place and one landscape.” But over time, she felt something was missing in her life, and she had to accept that there was nourishment that she had to offer by leaving (though she still lives there part-time). “Uplake is about staying tethered and moving forward.”

Spagna notices her students write about home places with the perspective from here in Montana. Students are contemplating how they think about the places and communities they call home from this new perspective; much like the ideas and themes she explores in Uplake. She encourages her students to think about it in terms of nourishment: the nourishment they need and the nourishment they have to offer, that they can take back to the communities they love.

As for Camas, she is in the process of writing a piece for the Summer 2020 issue. She notes her story will be a tangle. The essay will focus on a moving experience she and her wife had witnessing the reintroduction of fishers into the North Cascades. Stay tuned for her writing in our upcoming issue.