Robin Lee Carlson is a natural science writer, illustrator, and the author of The Cold Canyon Fire Journals, a close study of fire ecology in the Western environment based on six years’ careful observation, research, and illustration at Stebbins Cold Canyon Reserve, which burned in 2015 and again in 2020. After studying evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz and the University of Chicago, Carlson spent many years working on stream habitat restoration projects in California. She is most interested in how landscapes and ecological communities change over time, especially ecosystem dynamics after disruption. Her artwork is grounded in observing and documenting the world around her as it unfolds. Visit her website at www.robinleecarlson.com.
RLC: I love your interview series!
EB: Thank you! I love doing it because I am nosy and love to ask authors that I admire lots of questions about their work. Thank you for being part of it!
RLC: Of course!
EB: So how did you begin writing nonfiction? What drew you to the genre?
RLC: I originally was planning to be a scientist. I went to undergraduate, then graduate school, fully expecting to get a PhD and become an academic biologist. I was going to study evolutionary biology and, you know, do research forever. And while I love research and science, what I discovered in my graduate program was that the most fun I had was doing this library research project that was part of the qualifying exams. We were given two topics, and we needed to go to the library and synthesize the research about those two topics and then put that together in a paper. I loved learning about an entire section of a field and then being able to figure out what the story is that connects all of this research that people are doing and then turning it into something understandable to someone who is not in that field.
I realized at that point that I did not want to be stuck researching a fairly narrow set of topics for the rest of my life, and I really wanted the ability to learn about big-picture questions and be able to spend more time on the communication aspect of it.
EB: That’s really cool. It’s like working as a translator for non-scientists.
RLC: But I didn’t have any confidence in myself as a writer.
EB: Oh.
RLC: Instead I went into field research, working with stream habitat restoration projects in California and doing a lot of communication through data and reporting and mapmaking. And then because I have always done art related to natural history on the side, I wanted to move into a slightly more personal kind of communication through my art. At that point it was very visual-based and not writing-based, but very slowly I came back into writing as I worked on the project that turned into this book.
EB: Got it.
RLC: I had started The Cold Canyon Fire Journals very much as a visual project, doing sketches on site and using those as an immediate and emotional way to tell the story that I was learning about the recovery of this canyon after fire. But the further I went along, the more I realized there was a lot that I wanted to tell in a narrative way as well, and that led me full circle back to what I had first loved. I got to talk to scientists about their research and figure out how to synthesize it all into a story and make it accessible to anyone who is interested in the natural world or just what is going on in the Western U.S. right now.
EB: I love a full circle story!
RLC: Me too.
EB: Part of why I loved The Cold Canyon Fire Journals so much is because I love, love, love when books use both images and words to tell a story. How did you decide on this style? It seems often your drawings happen in the moment or in the field to process something you are observing—is your writing process similar or different to your drawing process?
RLC: I’m still figuring that out, honestly. Drawing is something I’ve done on the side as a hobby for my entire life. So it’s something I feel very comfortable doing, and when I’m drawing in the field that process allows me to produce art that is full of life and expression and really does communicate my experience. When I’m outdoors drawing, it helps me make sure I’m really focusing on communicating life and not just erasing and redrawing the same line over and over.
But with writing, I’m not writing much at all when I am out in the field. The thing that took me the longest to figure out was how to bring all of my senses into my writing. Coming from an academic and technical writing background, I looked at writing as a very intellectual process while drawing and making art was not––it was a process with my body, seeing something through my eyes and having it come out through my hands. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to do the same thing with writing, and really focusing on how to anchor my senses in my writing has given me a lot more confidence.
EB: Oh my gosh I loved the sensory details in the book. I’ve never been to Cold Canyon but I really felt like I had visited between your drawings and the way you describe the hikes before and after the fires. It’s just so good!
RLC: I’m glad to hear it! But it does not come naturally to me.
EB: My favorite type of nonfiction is the kind that blends a personal story with research and reporting and historical and cultural aspects. My feeling is that every writer gets into a topic because they’re obsessed with it for some personal reason, so might as well just show your point of view right on the page. I feel like you do that so well throughout The Cold Canyon Fire Journals, showing what this particular place means to you. It seems that scientists and science writers are not often taught not to insert themselves, but I loved getting moments of observing smoke in the car with your son, or remembering a 1990s hike with your biology teacher who loved lichen, or a moment where you are blown away by the thirty-year-old whispering bells that were growing in that same spot when you were a girl. Did that instinct come naturally to you? How and when did you figure out how to insert yourself in the text?
RLC: That’s an excellent question, and I have two contradictory answers for it.
EB: [laughing]
RLC: First, it does not come naturally to insert myself into my writing because I don’t like writing about myself. I’m a fairly private and reclusive person. So, for that reason, writing about myself is definitely uncomfortable.
But, on the other hand, one of my biggest interests in studying science has been about objectivity and subjectivity when doing research. When scientists do research, we need to keep objectivity in mind and attempt to do what we can to remain objective, but there is also the understanding that there is no way to be completely objective, and everyone doing science is a product of their time and their place and who they are, and you can’t ever separate that from their work. So you have to keep that in mind when researching, and also when you interpret scientific results, and also when you look at the bigger picture of a field at any given time. Your background is always influencing what you do, and scientific discoveries are often a product of the time they were happening in.
EB: Like accelerated vaccine research because we’re in the middle of a pandemic?
RLC: Right. So, while I didn’t want to insert myself, I think a critically important piece of understanding science is who is writing it, who is interpreting it, and where are they coming from. That’s why I made myself part of the story, even if I didn’t want to be.
As far as the last part of the question about how to decide when to insert yourself, I don’t think I really have a conscious answer to that. As I wrote different parts of the story, I noticed the spots where I had something personal to contribute and I’d insert it there.
EB: Can I ask more generally about the structure of the book? It feels deceptively simple. When I was reading, I was like, “oh, it’s just chronological order” but as you read more carefully you realize it really isn’t at all—it’s like parallel timelines in chronological order but not at the same time?
RLC: It was a fairly complicated book to figure out structurally because there are multiple time journeys—the stories of time happening in nature and also my own time in it. There is also the story arc of scientific concepts evolving, and then there are also multiple fires and multiple recovery periods. I wanted to tell the stories of individual groups of species (birds, lichens, trees, etc.) but also have those make sense within the larger narrative of two fires. The structure evolved as I was writing and it really was a fascinating process.
EB: I also love how you write about your misconceptions of what an area is like after a fire—how you assumed everything was dead or had fled, but through visiting Cold Canyon you start to see the ways life actually can flourish after a fire. To me this felt like a great metaphor for going into research—sometimes you assume one thing as you dive into it and you leave with a totally different way of thinking. How do you not let your own biases dominate how you view information when you are researching?
RLC: I try to keep an open mind and also make myself really conscious about the assumptions I have going into it. I make lists before starting research, like, these are the things I think I know now, or these are the questions I have now, and then I go and compare what I know and what questions I have after. It also helps to take your assumptions and turn them into questions. Instead of assuming everything would be dead and devastated after a fire—is this a devastating thing? Is it recovering? Is this something else now entirely?
I find making artwork helps too because it makes me walk through these landscapes really intentionally, having my eyes open—not looking for anything specific, just looking for anything intriguing to draw.
EB: My other favorite type of nonfiction is when we can see the universe through a grain of sand. I love how you use Cold Canyon as one specific place to look at the bigger issues of climate change and fires and ecological disasters. Do you have any advice for writers who are looking to do something similar in their own work—illustrate a bigger issue through a smaller, more personal, more close-to-home story?
RLC: Like I said, I did not come to this wanting to write a memoir in any way. But I would say that for those coming at a project from a personal angle, I suggest leaving the personal for a minute, but also don’t start with the big global picture either. Look around you. What do you see? What is interesting to you? That is what I did with Cold Canyon, and then I tried to approach looking at those things from a large and a small focus at the same time. I would say the most important thing is to figure out first, what question or problem is most immediate to you, personally, what do you feel a deep connection with? Why are you interested in that? How does it relate to the rest of the world? How do other people experience that question or problem? How does your personal part of the world experience it? That’s the most helpful part of science training—learning how to ask questions.
EB: Feel free to speak about writing The Cold Canyon Fire Journals in particular or writing nonfiction in general, but what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? And what do you think is the most rewarding?
RLC: I feel very unable to come up with stories and narratives completely out of my own head. So the most rewarding part for me, and what I love about nonfiction, is I still get to tell stories but it is much more about excavating and uncovering stories that are already out there than making them up.
The most challenging part? I think what I said before, about figuring out how to put myself in the story, even if I know it belongs there. But even that is also an act of excavating—realizing and discovering the parts of my life and the parts of what I’m thinking that are already there and connect to the bigger story.
EB: Writing (and making art!) can often be a super solitary task. Who or what do you turn to for support while writing? Who makes up your writing/artistic community?
RLC: I don’t have a particularly large circle when it comes to writing support.My husband is an incredibly close reader and has very helpful suggestions, like here it needs to be more lively, or this is inconsistent with what you said happened this year, it doesn’t add up. He and my son are also great at coming up with stories and rich imagery and language—they are fabulous at that and inspire me. My editors at Heyday also were also a big support for me as a not-confident or experienced writer. It was just a lot of fun to work with them.
I’m also part of a large and supportive nature journaling community. That’s much more about my visual arts work, but I do get a lot from interacting with that community through workshops and other places online.
EB: Were there any particular writers/books that you found influential/inspiring while working on The Cold Canyon Fire Journals?
RLC: There were a couple of science writing books I read many years ago that inspired me in terms of the way they approached a particular problem. A Plague of Frogs by William Souder is about uncovering and discovering amphibian anatomical deformities. It’s a scientific mystery, and reading this book made me want to write science for a popular audience. Also The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner is a well-told story about evolution.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man”?
RLC: There is a quote from Dorothea Lange, in her biography by Linda Gordon:
Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon… We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.
I think that’s so important because we’re not just seeing with ourselves, but we are seeing with all of the culture that is around us. All of our art and science is influenced by that, and it’s really important to keep that in mind. Linda Gordon goes on to write how Lange’s commitment to seeing derives not only from artistic openness, but also from her refusal to pass by uninvolved. The effort of sight was fused for her with a sense of responsibility to understand and act in the world. She told her students that documentary photographs should ask questions, not provide answers. And I think that’s all really important and even more so now, given that you and I are talking just a few days after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The role of artists in the world and just the role of all humans in the world right now is a really important one to be thinking about. Democracy is never an end state; it is something that people always have to be working towards.