L.M. Browning Interviews Author Ian Marshall

In his book, The Stars, The Snow, The Fire, Alaskan poet and essayist John Haines said: “The trails I made led out­ward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things under­foot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of explo­ration, myself and the land. …to take the trail and not look back.”

On February 24^th Hiraeth Press will be releasing its first title of 2012, Border Crossings: Walking the Haiku Path on the International Appalachian Trail  by Ian Marshall. This book fol­lows Ian Marshall on his journey over the International Appalachian Trail, which runs from Mt. Katahdin in Maine up through New Brunswick and out to the tip of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. Countless books have been done to chron­icle humanity’s com­mu­nion with nature, from the clas­sics written by nat­u­ral­ists such as Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, to the more con­tem­po­rary offer­ings such as Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson; how­ever Border Crossings stands out as unique among its fel­lows. Composed of Haiku and con­tem­pla­tive prose Border Crossings is book of braided styles: poetry, prose and travel writing. This style, as the author explains, is akin to that of haibun—a style of writing made pop­ular by such Japanese poets as Matsuo Bashō that merges poetic and med­i­ta­tive prose, lit­erary crit­i­cism and cul­tural med­i­ta­tion.

Ian Marshall is a pro­fessor of English and Environmental Studies at Penn State Altoona and a former pres­i­dent of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. Border Crossings is Mr. Marshall’s fourth book. He is the author of Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail pub­lished in 1998, Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need pub­lished in 2003, and Walden by Haiku pub­lished in 2009.

Ian: Probably the first moment I heard of it, which was some­time around the turn of the cen­tury. I had fin­ished hiking the Appalachian Trail as a sec­tion hiker in 1998, and I was looking for another sort of long-​​term hiking project — to give me some­thing to look for­ward to each summer. That, and a reason to get in shape at least once a year. My partner Megan and I could only get away for two weeks at a time each summer, so we did the trail in pieces over six con­sec­u­tive sum­mers. That’s not a bad way to hike a long trail, since it’s a part of your life for a long time, and every year the after­glow from one year’s hike flows into the antic­i­pa­tion and excite­ment of plan­ning and prepa­ra­tion for the next stretch.

Ian: Because I had done a book on the Appalachian Trail that com­bined my hiking expe­ri­ences with my reading plea­sures, called Story Line, I had the book in mind from the start. The plan to hike the IAT was taking shape just when I was starting to learn about haiku, and reading about the his­tory and prac­tice of haiku, so the plan took shape early — to com­bine the two expe­ri­ences, hiking the trail and along the way learning about haiku. Something to keep both body and mind busy!

Ian: In my schol­arly writing I have long been a prac­ti­tioner of what’s called “nar­ra­tive schol­ar­ship” or “auto­bi­o­graph­ical crit­i­cism,” which means to incor­po­rate your own sto­ries and per­sonal expe­ri­ences with your schol­arly grap­pling with the text. I chose to do that because it made the writing more per­sonal and engaging and acces­sible to readers who weren’t nec­es­sarily scholars. Plus it was more fun to write. In schol­arly cir­cles that sort of hybrid writing is con­sid­ered daring, but when I started learning about haiku I found that nar­ra­tive scholars like me were really rein­venting the wheel. Haibun, as prac­ticed most famously by Bashō in Narrow Road to the Deep North, is also a hybrid of genres, blending haiku with prose. Often that prose is poet­i­cally charged, but at times it’s travel writing, and at times Bashō com­ments on his poetic pre­de­ces­sors and the art of haiku — so it’s lit­erary crit­i­cism of sorts as well. The book is called Border Crossings, then, not only because it crosses a national border from the US to Canada and a lin­guistic and cul­tural border from English to French, but genre bor­ders as well.

Ian: Thoreau has always been a par­tic­ular hero of mine, and it seems that in my writing I keep coming back to Thoreau. I tell my stu­dents that Walden is a life-​​changing book, and I illus­trate that with my own expe­ri­ence — from not really get­ting it at first read in high school, to valuing it as a man­i­festo chal­lenging con­for­mity when I was in col­lege, to appre­ci­ating it as nature writing when I car­ried it in my back­pack while I was hiking the AT, to seeing how Thoreau chal­lenges us to think about what our life is about when I was working at an unful­filling job. Thoreau tells us to “live the life we have imag­ined” and build “cas­tles in the air” — but also to put good foun­da­tions under those cas­tles in the air. When I was working retail many years ago, I’d come home at night and read that stuff and just know that I wasn’t doing work that was spir­i­tu­ally or intel­lec­tu­ally sat­is­fying. I wanted to find a job where I could get paid to do the things that mat­tered to me — that would be hiking and reading books — and I fig­ured the foun­da­tion under that dream, at least the reading books part, would be grad­uate school. That started me on my career path. So Thoreau has long been part of my life. Then a few years back a col­league asked me to present a con­fer­ence paper on the topic of Thoreau and metaphor, and at first I begged off by saying, nah, these days I’m thinking about haiku. But while I was thinking about haiku, I started leafing through Walden and noticing all these images that could be con­verted into haiku. I did the con­fer­ence paper, and then it grew into a book, Walden by Haiku. In the course of looking at what’s haiku-​​like about Thoreau’s writing and life phi­los­ophy, I inevitably started making com­par­isons to Bashō, whose most famous haiku is about a trans­for­ma­tive moment of per­cep­tion at an old pond. Sounds just like Henry, living on the shores of Walden Pond. In Border Crossings I make a joke at one point that even though my journey on the IAT is an imi­ta­tion of Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, I’m not under any illu­sions that I’m another Bashō — because I think I’m Henry Thoreau! That’s a joke, of course. But I’ve sure been influ­enced by him.

Ian: There were so many high points, from the first day when we crossed the Katahdin Knife Edge on a spec­tac­ular day, to the last day in Parc Forillon, when we could look to our right and see whales in the bay, and in the forest to our left we saw a moose. There was a day on Mont Albert when there was mist swirling around the table­land on top, and we saw a couple of caribou when the mist lifted. There were lots of quiet moments of just plain sat­is­fac­tion sit­ting around a camp­fire after a hard day’s walking. But if I had to pick just one moment, it might be the evening at Lac Tombereau in the Matane Wildlife Reserve. A sub­text of our hike had become a quest to see a moose — and we’d been dis­ap­pointed for a long while even though we saw plenty of sign through Maine and New Brunswick and Quebec. But at Lac Tombereau we finally saw one — sev­eral actu­ally — which made us giddy with excite­ment. That night we saw a black-​​crowned night heron at sunset, and we heard a ser­e­nade of coy­otes. There were plenty of lovely quiet moments — making bis­cuits on our camp stove at dinner, pumping water by rushing streams. Oh, and gob­bling hand­fuls of trail­side rasp­ber­ries in the Matepedia Valley! And in terms of spec­tac­ular hiking the whole of the Chic-​​Choc Mountains in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula were a rev­e­la­tion. I guess I didn’t do a very good job picking just one moment in answer to your ques­tion, did I? There were a lot of best and most impactful moments.

Ian: There were some frus­trating moments — or hours, actu­ally — where log­ging crews had thor­oughly torn up the trail and we couldn’t find our way. Those were times when I thought maybe we should post­pone this whole trip till the trail is better estab­lished. On another day the trail had been relo­cated away from a lake where we were plan­ning to stop for lunch and water; we ended up run­ning out of water and get­ting pretty badly dehy­drated — and very cranky — that day. But the worst was the day when my hiking partner (and now my wife) Megan and I got sep­a­rated. I had thought she was right behind me, and when she never caught up I retraced steps all the way back up a moun­tain — no sign of her. I couldn’t figure out what could have hap­pened and was imag­ining all sorts of hor­rible things. Then on the way back down the moun­tain I heard her emer­gency whistle as she was back­tracking to find me; there had been a side trail also marked with IAT signs, and she had gone one way and I had gone the other. Actually, that was the same day we ended up at Lac Tombereau and saw the moose, so it turned out, after that pan­icky hour or so, to be a great day.

Ian: Probably the biggest real­iza­tion is that Megan and I are a really good team, which is why we’re now mar­ried! But any­thing that’s hard, like a long hike or the ongoing attempt to learn how to write a decent haiku, is also a lesson in humility. There’s no one step that’s going to get you to the end of the trail all by itself, and there’s no one magic incan­ta­tion that will sud­denly make you a won­derful poet — or a won­derful any­thing, for that matter. It’s a matter of just keep plug­ging away, a step at a time, and with patience maybe you’ll get there. And if the path turns out to be steep and not very well-​​marked, well, there’s no sense get­ting angry about it — just do your best and during the tough sec­tions realize that tomorrow is bound to be a better day.

I sup­pose I also learned that I really like the rhythms of com­bining phys­ical exer­tion with the con­tem­pla­tive work (or play) of reading and writing. When you’re hiking, all the clutter of your life and your mind falls away, because on the uphill you really have to focus your ener­gies on the task at hand (or foot), and the rest of the time you’re just caught up in this soothing rhythm and noticing what’s going on all around you. And then your mind seems more recep­tive to fresh ways of seeing things or of putting words together. I’d notice some­thing along the trail — the slant of light through balsam fir, the bold­ness of a spruce grouse, the taste of a berry — and I’d chew on it all for a while, placing images and words together in my mind, then pause to scribble some­thing down. It wasn’t really emp­tying the mind — just focusing it and reducing the clutter. It wasn’t quite the Zen state of no-​​mind, but at least it was nar­rowing it all down to one thing at a time.

Ultimately, then, the spiritually-​​satisfying part of the hike was not so much any sort of self-​​realization as it was absorp­tion in the world around us. Haiku is really good at cul­ti­vating that, because it’s about looking out­ward rather than inward at the soul or psyche. Actually, there’s another sort of border crossing involved in all that, trying to get beyond that dividing line between self and world.

Ian: I just fin­ished a project with a class at my col­lege, where we built a replica of Henry Thoreau’s cabin — that kept me busy through last semester. I do have some writing projects underway, but I don’t think I want to talk about them until I get fur­ther along — some sort of weird super­sti­tion, I sup­pose, where I don’t want to jinx things. Or maybe it’s that I don’t want to put a label on it until it’s taken more defin­i­tive shape! But I’m always looking for ways to make my work and my play merge, so maybe I should find a writing project that incor­po­rates biking, canoeing, learning guitar, and drinking good craft beer.

L.M. Browning grew up in a small fishing vil­lage in Connecticut where she began writing at the age of 15. A long­time stu­dent of Religion, Nature and Philosophy these themes per­meate her work. Browning is a two-​​​​time Pushcart Prize nom­i­nated author. In 2010 she penned a three-​​​​title con­tem­pla­tive poetry series: Oak Wise: Poetry Exploring an Ecological Faith, Ruminations at Twilight: Poetry Exploring the Sacred and The Barren Plain: Poetry Exploring the Reality of the Modern Wasteland. In late 2011 she cel­e­brated the release of her first full-​​​​length novel: The Nameless Man, which was co-​​​​authored by Marianne Browning. Browning is a partner at Hiraeth Press. She is an Associate Editor of the bi-​​​​annual e-​​​​publication, Written River: A Journal of Eco-​​​​Poetics. She is Founder of Homebound  —  an imprint of Hiraeth Press devoted to fic­tion. Balancing her love of writing with her love of learning, she is cur­rently working for a degree in Philosophy through The University of London External Programme and writing her next book  —  a young adult novel ten­ta­tively sched­uled for release in early spring 2013.