Alden Jones: Author of "The Wanting Was a Wilderness" Discusses Memoir, Writing About Craft and Cheryl Strayed
Alden Jones’s The Wanting Was a Wilderness, both literary criticism and memoir, seeks to unravel the craft through Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, while also building her own personal narrative. With writerly insight, Jones dives into a powerful question: How did Cheryl Strayed take material that is not inherently dramatic―hiking―and transform it into an inspirational memoir, beloved to so many? As writers, we are always trying to emulate those who have inspired us or breakdown our favorite author's body of work to see what we can learn. Jones’ memoir is not only a celebration of Cheryl Strayed but a craft discussion, narrative of self-discovery, and a testament to how books can change our lives.
I spoke with Alden about writing The Wanting Was a Wilderness, losing one's self in nature, writing about craft and the art of memoir.
The Wanting Was a Wilderness was written about twenty years after your journey. Can you speak about what drove you to write this story at this point in time?
I’d written about my Outward Bound experience as fiction not long after it happened. But I always felt I wasn’t done with the story I wanted to tell about it. I think many writers have material that nags at them but that they don’t know how to use, memoirists who want to write about a certain time in their life but they don’t know what they have to say about it. When I took on this project, which was at its core an analysis of Wild, it was an opportunity to finally figure out how to tell the story more completely, or at least more earnestly than I had when I’d written about it as fiction. Cheryl Strayed had made her wilderness story interesting to others—many, many others—so what could I learn from how she constructed her persona and her plot and used other techniques that I might use to tell my wilderness story, and how could I present my findings in a way that might help others either write a memoir or understand something about themselves? The answer turned out to be writing my own wilderness story into the analysis of Wild. And I’m glad to say, I think I’ve finally gotten the material out of my system. I’m sure my Outward Bound crewmates will be relieved.
One of the questions you ask yourself in this book is “What is the appeal of turning one’s back on the safety and comforts available to them? What is it we are trying to learn by choosing to do something hard that we didn’t really have to do?” This is really the heart of The Wanting Was a Wilderness, but I was curious if you would talk a bit about those questions here. Why do you think time off the grid or time immersed in nature can lead to self-discovery?
When you’re traveling in the woods and carrying everything you need on your back, simple things such as eating and sleeping require planning, physical labor, troubleshooting, and, if you are hiking in a group, working with others. All of your habits, your strengths and your weaknesses, come to the surface in this scenario. When I was nineteen, I had a habit of smack-talking activities that I didn’t have the skills to do. It was a ridiculous defense mechanism that I had to work through if I was ever, say, going to learn how to cook for myself and others. And being in a group of fourteen people, all of whom needed to eat, forced me to push through those moments of feeling stupid for not already knowing how to do something, and just learn how to do it. Once you do something like that in the wilderness, it becomes something you can do in your regular life, even when you return to the position of being able to lean on the things in the modern world that make our lives easier. You understand—in your body as well as your mind—that leaning is a choice.
You combine three different genres in The Wanting Was a Wilderness, memoir, craft discussion, and criticism. Had you played around with different ways to tell your story? How did you know that these genres were the best way to write this memoir?
The Wanting Was a Wilderness started out pretty simply, then got way more complicated about halfway through. At first it was analysis of Wild and my own wilderness journey. After a few months of writing, I realized that what I was really trying to understand, and illustrate, was how to write a memoir. So I then decided to break the fourth wall and show the reader some of the choices I was making in the writing process itself, and why I was making them. The craft talk happened organically. I teach memoir, and I talk with enthusiasm on a regular basis about the stuff we writers think about while writing memoir…what would happen if I actually included those thoughts in the text? It was very freeing to allow myself to do this.
Can you share a little about your own writing journey? Have you always wanted to write?
I was that little girl who walked down the sidewalk reading a book, who didn’t mind long car rides because I could read the whole time, who fell in love with authors and read everything they’d written over and over. I started my first novel when I was ten. It was never a question; I was going to be a writer, though at times I thought I’d be an academic writer, or an editor, or work with books in another way than writing them, or maybe do all of those things at once. I was very driven as a young person. As an adult, I spent some time feeling lost, beginning when I made the decision to listen to some bad advice from an editor I met at Bread Loaf to change the book I was writing to be something else. I spent two years writing a book I didn’t really want to write, until I realized it was empirically no good, and then spent a good amount of time distrusting my instincts and not writing very much. Eventually I made my way back to the original idea: a travel memoir comprised of discrete essays. That was my first book, The Blind Masseuse.
How long did it take you to write The Wanting Was a Wilderness? Did the writing process differ from your other books, Unaccompanied Minors and The Blind Masseuse?
All of the books were written very differently. The stories in Unaccompanied Minors had all been written originally for different workshop scenarios over the years. It took me over a decade to see how the stories would form a book. The Blind Masseuse began way, way back as a side-project to my fiction: I wrote a travel essay, “Lard is Good for You,” that I thought was a one-off, about my time in Costa Rica living on a coffee farm with a family who didn’t believe in drinking coffee, and it wound up in Best American Travel Writing. That encouraged me to turn more towards nonfiction, travel essays in particular, and I wrote a few more over the years, publishing them in magazines and having two more appear as “Notable” in Best American Travel Writing. Huh. My MFA was in fiction, but maybe I was better at writing nonfiction? I sailed around the world on a ship as a professor with Semester at Sea, after which I became more determined to finish The Blind Masseuse. When the essays began to cohere into a full-length memoir, I saw how I needed to create a more streamlined “story” (in the Vivian Gornick sense), and that was when I began to carefully consider what makes a book-length memoir work.
Those thoughts were with me as I began The Wanting Was a Wilderness. I wrote half the book in a few months. Then, when my kids were 1, 2, and 5, I found myself in the throes of a divorce. Two years later, after hardly touching the book, I went back in with a new perspective that was informed by everything I’d just gone through. In the end, it took me three and a half years to write this tiny little book. I needed all of that time to make The Wanting Was a Wilderness the book it became.
Do you keep a specific writing routine or ritual?
No. I am not your model. I have bouts of mental paralysis in which I do not write. I have very fertile “pre-writing” time in which I do not write. I have three young children and two teaching positions. I can be a binge writer. I can’t recommend my methods, but I can tell you that accepting these things about myself—that I need regular human contact, that being a mom and teaching offer me immediate rewards that I need and don’t always get from writing, that I may spend stretches of time not writing, that I am never going to be as prolific as some other writers—has liberated me considerably, and enabled me to feel good about the kind of writer I am.
Alden Jones is the author of three books: The Wanting Was a Wilderness; Unaccompanied Minors; and The Blind Masseuse. Her books have been a finalist or winner for awards including the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the New American Fiction Prize, the Lascaux Book Prize, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and a Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Best American Travel Writing, The Cut, Agni, Prairie Schooner, the Iowa Review, Post Road, and The Rumpus.
Alden holds degrees in literature and creative writing from Brown University, New York University, and Bennington College. She is core faculty at the Newport MFA Program and teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College.
