Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, essayist, and novelist, who has worked as a volunteer in wildlife and raptor rehabilitation. She is the author of The Radiant Lives of Animals, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, The Book of Medicines, and Solar Storms, among others. In 1995 she organized a conference for tribal elders on endangered species and was part of a working group for Native input into the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act. Her lifelong area of interest has been the traditional relationship between indigenous peoples and animals. Hogan is a professor emerita at the University of Colorado, former faculty at the Indian Arts Institute, the writer-in-residence for The Chickasaw Nation, and she was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for her novel Mean Spirit. She lives in Colorado.

EB: How did you first begin writing about animals?

LH: From the beginning of my childhood, I cared about the non-human lives around me. Even in later years, when I went to help an animal, my uncles and aunts would say, endearingly, “You were always like that.” I knew the other lives were intelligent, and that their being was equal to mine, to ours. I have always tried to help other animals in pain and to stop abuse. For me, it isn’t an interest as much as it has been a “calling” if I can use such a word.

I once had a work-study job in a zoo. I was studying comparative psychology. As I have said before, I learned more about human behavior in the presence of the caged lives.

With a friend, we followed whales. I had also worked with birds of prey in rehabilitation and was happy just to clean up, as long as I could learn from the bird, be close to them. I have written an essay about my relationship with a golden eagle I called Grandmother. This all sounds like “I” but that wasn’t the way. It was about Them, not this small human being. They were the teachers. They were the beloved ones. The Radiant Lives of Animals, my book about 30 years of living in a wildlife corridor, was also about the non-human animal beings, and in 2022 the book received the inaugural National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award. But then, every book before this was about non-human lives and how they survived, taught us, and flourished along with us. Power, for instance, was about the complications involved in the killing of a Florida panther.

Earlier in my life, when I discovered the art of writing, the magic of words, I applied everything in my life to this interest—my writing, reading, and research. Some of us are born caring, while for others it is more of an intellectual consideration. It is more of the experience of the writer and not the Other, which is the most important figure in our works.

EB: You write about animals in both poetry and prose—do you find you approach writing about animals/the natural world differently when you are writing in one form versus the other?

LH: Writers who work in more than one genre find that their work is different in each way they write, yet the topic may be the same. It is just another form and way of thinking. Some things can’t be said in a poem or a novel but might become an essay. Other pieces of work begin as a poem then make a turn into an essay. The work is shape-shifting even if the inner person, the psyche of the writer, remains the same. The approach may be the same, but the final product is quite different than the writer first thought it would be. Creativity goes its own direction. It has its own life energy. Writing is the teacher and we follow it.

EB: While you write about non-humans in your work, often your writing is really about the relationship between humans and non-humans. What is it like for you, writing about people versus animals?

LH: That is a difficult question—what is it like for me? I puzzle over humans. They can talk, but they can lie. They do not always know their own motivations. They are worth studying and I do it because they fascinate me. Some are competitive because it has been their cultural teaching and the way they have learned. Others find this an unacceptable behavior. Many teachers in Native schools speak of children who won’t answer questions because it will make others seem “smaller.” It is not an acceptable way to behave. Some have one kind of belief and way of being; others have another.

As I said, humans can lie, but non-humans do not lie, although they may hide their nests, roosts, homes. (Read “Crows” in The Radiant Lives of Animals.) They learn quickly they can’t trust humans at all times, although they can feel those people who are safe. Their motives are rarely gray, but easier to discern. While groups of non-humans have different cultures, even different dialects in the same species, they accept one another. Humans find their differences too often as fracture lines. I have loved working with non-human animals, but find that I also have love for humans once I learn them. Especially younger people who are still open to learning and who do care about what is happening to, and in, our world. I’ve had older people say that the climate crisis or extinctions don’t matter because they won’t be here. But everything matters and it needs to matter to all of us for the future. As we say, we need to care for the next seven generations.

EB: What has been your favorite animal to write about? Which species do you find you keep returning to?

LH: Every day I read about another life form. Maybe it will be spiders or possibly the development of butterflies or the intelligence of crows. Sometimes it is the re-discovered intelligence of an animal. Sometimes a new species is just discovered. Sometimes it is the human brain. I try to keep up with the science magazines. And every day, another species fascinates me. The figs. The different varieties of pollen. How could I possibly remain with one species? Yet I do return to those I felt the most intimate relationships with, such as whales and dolphins who all seem so interested in us and so willing to watch and even to care for us. They want to communicate, not just with one another, but with our species and with other non-human animals. Those are the ones I return to most often, but they are also the ones I’ve learned the most about. I’ve had the most time in their presence and the most humorous or sweet moments with these cetaceans in water, with dolphins, or following whales in canoes, then later reading about their histories and their sometimes-tragic meetings with humans. I am very interested in how whales come together from all places around their part of the world, hold something like a conference, and after they meet, their language changes, as if they have a new story to tell. They change the language and the story of what has happened or is happening in their worlds.

EB: Has writing about animals changed your relationship to the natural world in any way?

LH: Writing about animals has added much to my relationship with the natural world because it requires that I also learn their habitat. I have had to study the damage to the environment that is sending other life forms over the edge of earth into near extinction. I am often outside with non-human creation. Walking, searching for very small food items, finding the paths that certain lives travel from place to place, home to hiding. It is a life of constant observation and learning. Sometimes, other than love and tenderness for our own, what else is there to learn in this world for us?

For now, I watch in other ways, until I can be outside more often again, so windows and balconies are my schools. But it is temporary. Then I will be out again. There are great trees, evergreens, outside my windows, and birds go inside them and hop around, move about, consider nesting sites. My cat loves this place. He sits in the window all the time, and he watches. So do I.

EB: In general, what do you think are the biggest challenges and rewards are of writing nonfiction, not just nonfiction about animals?

LH: The biggest challenge I have is to not just tell the story of what happened, but to remember to place the detail, the beauty and interest. There are times I just want to tell the story, what happened, what I saw or did, why I was in a location, etc. But I have to make it interesting by bringing in the more exciting and beautiful details. The excitement of writing an essay, especially about an environment or another life form, is what I learn and what I can add to the writing elsewhere. I love the art of learning. It doesn’t always stay with me but reading about snail teeth and thinking about how many crows roost together, watching them fledge their young with the help of magpies, it is all exciting and leaves me, and hopefully the reader, in a state of wonder about our world and the cooperation of one bird with another. I think this also answers many of the questions about why it is important that we read and write such works. Readers fall in love with the planet, their own environment. They want to find their path toward making change, to learn how it may be done.

EB: Who are some other writers that you admire who write nonfiction about non-humans?

LH: The number of writers I admire cannot be counted. Top on my list has long been John Hay, a little-known writer who has written many great books. Deborah Bird Rose, an Australian writer, recently had a collection of essays written about her called Kin. I find a large number of Indigenous writers from this and other continents that add to my knowledge. I also just got the book Syntax of the River, a conversation with Barry Lopez and Julia Martin, in the mail. I can’t wait for time to read it. It seems that time, its odd dimension, just keeps moving so quickly by.