How to Find The Right Voice for Your Memoir, with Catherine Raven

CATHERINE RAVEN IS THE author of the brand new book, Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, just out from Spiegel & Grau.  I’ve been waiting quite a while to speak with her after I heard about this book, and I’m particularly interested in speaking with her about how to find the right voice for your memoir. So, listen in and read along as we discuss that, and more.

Catherine: Oh, thank you. I’m so happy to be here and you’re very welcome to my time. I love other writers.

Marion: Oh, good. So, let’s set this up for the listeners. You built yourself a tiny cottage in an isolated part of Montana from which you taught remotely and led field classes in nearby Yellowstone National Park. And one day, a mangy fox shows up and continues to show up around the same time each day. And here’s the part that made tears shoot into my eyes when I first read it. You pull out a copy of the classic book, The Little Prince, and you read to the fox. All this happens by page five in the book. And I read that section three times to locate how you get the readers buy-in and acceptance of this utterly radical act and utterly prevent us from saying, “What?” And instead, we say to ourselves, “Oh yes, of course, you read him The Little Prince. I think it’s in the voice you use. So, let’s talk about that voice right from the start I’ve read your more, how should we say, science-y work and I’ve read this beautiful book. What’s the difference in your voices, please?

Catherine: There’s a big difference in the voices and the most important thing I want to tell writers, especially those of you that have to explain technical information and you need an encyclopedic type of voice. In one voice, you are getting information from the world out to your reader. That’s the direction to your listener, to your students. It’s from you to them. In my other voice, my memoir voice, the voice I love, my writing voice, it’s the opposite. The information is coming from the world to me. I am just a conduit. I’m just open and everything’s flowing from nature, from the things around me into me. It’s a very different way to establish a voice.

Marion: Ah, perfect. It is a rare and wonderful experience when reading a book and the reader begins to feel like the writer has connected a string to the reader’s heart. And that is exactly how I feel about this book. I am uniquely connected to it. I carried it with me and maybe it’s because I talk to birds or because I sing to my dog or that I garden a very large plot of a garden and spend a lot of my time in nature. I’m not sure, but you achieved an intimacy with me right away. And I think it’s your honest open loneliness that you are able to characterize right at the beginning. You portray it in a few sentences on page two, you say, and I’m going to quote you here. “Living in this remote spot left me without reasonable employment. I was many miles beyond reach of cell phone towers, and if a rattlesnake bit me, or if I slipped climbing the rocky cliff behind the cottage, no one would hear me cry for help. Of course, this saved me the trouble of crying in the first place.”

It’s that last line that characterizes you and gives you to us as you are. And we carry that into the tale as the lens through which to view you. So, talk about contrasting that characterization of you and the emotional decisions behind it, please. How did you come to that clear, but small passage that delivers so much?

Catherine: I have a personality and when people compliment my voice in this, I say, “Unfortunately that is my voice.” One of the things that I keep in my mind that really helps me focus on what I want to say are anecdotes that are so perfect, so specific. And for example, in the case of the loneliness that just so is so much a part of me. I was at a conference, a science conference about a decade after I finished my undergraduate work at the University of Montana. And when I signed in, I grabbed a name tag, Cathy, slapped it on my chest. Didn’t even consider the fact that Cathy’s kind of a common name.

One of my professors saw me and said, “Cathy, you’re wearing the wrong name tag.” And I pulled it off and looked at it and it was some other girl’s last name. So, I immediately said, “Well, how do you know I didn’t get married?” And he started laughing. The two other people standing with him, they all remembered me from 10 years earlier and they knew me so well. The thought of me getting married, it just made them laugh so hard.

Well, when you have a personality that’s that strong, it’s easier for you to and remember those anecdotes and remember that you, the way you talk, the things that are natural to you, that brings out that particular personality. Now, I need to tell writers and I know they know this, but they’ll have to hear it again. When you write a memoir, it isn’t you because you are an incredibly complex person and by the time you’re writing the memoir, you’re writing it in the past even if it’s something that only happened the previous year. So, you are still a protagonist, you’re a character, so some elements of that character will change after the book, but some things don’t. Some things are just so absolutely you that it’s easy for you to get the point across by just being your natural self and that really helps a lot, much easier than writing fiction as a first person and making yourself a character. Does that make sense?

Marion: Perfect sense.

Catherine: Have those anecdotes in your mind and know, understand how people see you. That’s very important. People think I’m an introvert, but actually, I think it’s better for writers. So, I consider myself an extrovert even though I might go a month or two without talking to anybody except the grocery store tracker. But my feelers are out listening to other people, watching other people. I’m more concerned with other people than with myself. And because of that, I see how people see me and that really helps a lot.

Marion: Yeah. That is exactly it. The kind of detail you have to pay attention to and get on the page. And I think that that’s so helpful. One of the great debates when writing memoir is when to reveal what about yourself to the reader? If you dump it all in the opener, your height, your weight, your parental relationships, your childhood trauma, whatever, you run the risk of losing the reader, because we just don’t know how much we can put in our pockets and carry in with us. And I frequently think of the best memoir writers as having a deck of cards in their hands and playing those cards one at a time in the best possible order. So, let’s talk about that with this book with Fox & I, you tell us fairly early on that you’re uncomfortable with group conversation and that you speak in soliloquy or not at all.

You tell us precious little about your childhood, but just enough to make an impression and answer our question of who you are and you do it by speaking directly to the reader. When you say, and I’m going to quote you again, “I left home when I was 15, it wasn’t at first a clean break. I’m sure you can understand how it feels to live with people who don’t like you. Unpleasant, but tolerable. My father was violent. I could live with that because you can ask my doctor, I am quite tough.” Wow. So let’s talk a little bit more about the process you went through to get to those decisions, to speak to us directly, to choose those details, which you’ve pretty much just covered there, but to also tell us that kind of truth, was it much longer in your first draft? What can you share with us about this passage in particular?

Catherine: No, it wasn’t longer in the first draft because I was so focused on Fox and also because as my own true self, I have blacked out huge parts of my life that first don’t seem to matter to me in the story. And secondly, stop me from having my own voice because they’re so negative and so hurtful. So I can’t be the person that I am and everybody should know the difference between a house and a home. And it’s like being in the wrong sex body for your gender. Something that people don’t think about because most people who are females know their females have a female body and most people who are males have a male body, but as I teach biology, I know there’s also a large percentage, significant percentage that are in the wrong body for their psyche, a female in a male’s body and male’s body in female body.

I felt that same way. This house and I knew it before I was 15 even. This house is a structure, but it’s not my home. Most people don’t have to think about the difference between a house and a home because like their sex and their gender, it’s the same, but a house is like your sex. It’s what you’re given and you can’t change it. It’s the physical part. And the gender is what you choose. And the home is what you choose. And I realize, and I don’t come to fully accept it until after the Fox, until after the fire and because of the Fox that I get to choose my home, I choose that, it’s not a given. That was one of the biggest gifts of the Fox and by the time I was writing, of course, this had already happened. So I was a different person writing and I realized I get to choose. The important thing then is how do you express this emotional honesty without bogging people down.

People want to focus on odd little details and facts and things that don’t matter as the little prince said, “Those of us who understand life could care less about numbers.” So, I could care less about numbers, it’s true, but I need to get that emotional honesty through. Do you know what it’s like to live in a structure when you’ve realized that you’re not actually there and to just feel like you have no future to leave your high school after just three years after your junior year, but to know at the beginning of your junior year, that you’re not, that’s it, that’s going to be the end, even though you were a good student and even though you had great testing scores and blah blah, there was just no future and you had to get out?

There’s no cell phone in those days, there’s no internet. So the loneliness is something, the desperation is something that it’s hard for people in today’s day and age who are much younger than me to understand. People my age who might remember back to the time when there was no cell phone and internet can understand how a child can feel so desperate and lonely and going nowhere and in the wrong place, but today’s children, they have the internet and they have cell phones. So they probably don’t feel as isolated.

So it was very difficult for me to pick just a few, just a couple of sentences to make it really short so that people would know that I don’t care about it anymore. That I’m like The Little Prince that it’s behind me, but to put enough in so that people could realize how much I loved that fox, how much I owed that fox to go from that point that was so unusual and then to find this just complete happiness and settle this settled feeling of this is my place, this is home, and I’m going to have friends and I’m going to fit in and I’m going forward and people… So, I needed to give them a little bit, but only a little bit to know that I wasn’t thinking about it and I wasn’t going to let the bad things bog me down.

Marion: It’s an extraordinary mind field to walk through, isn’t it? I talk with writers all the time, I work with writers all the time, and I always ask everybody in our first conversation, “Who’s writing this book?” And it’s always met with either dead silence or a very uncomfortable laugh. And they say, “Well, I am.” I say, “Yeah. Well, right there, you got a lot of decisions to make.” And I think it’s very surprising to writers to consider that, that you could write from now looking back, you could write from then reanimating that person. If you write from now, you’ve got to choose the way you just explained so exquisitely who, how to explain who you once were, and also to transmit to us that you’ve left that behind is essential to this story. So, let’s talk about when you understood that you were writing this story by page nine in the book you’ve taken on the single greatest pothole that memoirs with other species can take on, whether you’re writing about your dog, your cats, your birds, because it’s the anthropomorphization, right?

The anthropomorphizing that we frequently see with cutesy stories that have to do with an animal. And you state that to avoid this at least at the beginning, you were overcome with a sense of curiosity and that that kept you on your side of the gulf between you, this curiosity. And I love that. And I love the power of curiosity that you show us. But this statement of early recognition of the pitfalls here suggests that you knew from the beginning, you were writing a book like even at that moment when you were just living. So, were you, and was this-

Catherine: No.

Marion: … the book you were writing or were you writing some other book and then you got talked into writing this book, or just tell us when you started taking notes for a book and which book was it, and then what happened?

Catherine: So those are all really good questions. So, what I meant was what I was thinking about conveying was not a book, but when you are a professor, you are basically you are telling stories all the time. And so, the Fox story was a story that I was going to be in fact, even not to my students, but even to my colleagues and the secretaries and the people that I worked with, it’s an important part of your life, especially when you’re single, I don’t know if any of you experienced this, but my colleagues were in the habit of asking me about my car because I didn’t have the husband or the boyfriend or the kids, so they would say, “And the Mazda how’s that doing?” And that’s what they would ask about because it had been like the longest term relationship in my life, I guess they figured. They were always asking about the car.

And now this was going to be, they were going to start asking about fox because things were just slipping out. And that was the story. So, that’s important to know. I wasn’t writing a book, but I knew that I was bumping into my colleagues in town, in the park, at work and I needed to face what I thought was going to be difficult and also embarrassing situation with the issue of anthropomorphizing. And the second thing about the notes. So, that’s what I do. I’m a journal taker and always have been. And when you work as a park ranger, you do that every day. That’s just part of your job. And it never crossed my mind that I would write a book about my time in the park service, but you still need to record everything in the journal, everything that happens every day.

So recording, taking notes was just what I was doing. But as far as writing a book, because I’m a professor, because I was working as a professor, I assumed that I would write a textbook. And so I was working on a textbook, but not about the fox, of course, not a wildlife textbook, a natural history textbook, a biology textbook for middle grades or high school folks. So the point that I knew that I was writing this book about the fox was when I realized I owed it to him. That was a really quick decision. I actually physically swept the pages of the textbook off my desk. I just went… It’s not a real desk. It’s just a door that I have prompt up on some file cabinets. I swept it on the floor.

That was the night that he brought the four kits over in the moonlight and I realized how much my life had changed, realizing that one individual trusted me that much and had put that much joy into my life. I owed it to him to tell his story. And that’s when I knew I was telling this story, this memoir, Fox & I.

Marion: Ah, such a wonderful answer. And this becomes a very interior tale, which would require sweeping the textbook notes onto the floor. I read in an interview with you that it was another writer who explained to you that Fox & I was not simply a true story, it was a memoir as much about you as it is about him and that you really respected this writer. And so you set out to turn your story into a memoir, but you had to change the structure. So, let us into the structure, changes that were required from a non-fiction book with a different intent to a memoir that you feel you brought to this book.

Catherine: That’s right. And by the way, the writer was Deirdre or D. McNamer from the University of Montana and I hadn’t even thought about writing memoir, I had never studied writing and having not taken any classes in writing, you don’t realize that that’s a possibility. And when your training is in the natural sciences, you do realize that academic writing is a type of writing and encyclopedic writing. Besides writing papers and science, every lecture that you give a student, every video that you prepare for a student has a script. So, that’s a particular kind of writing. And to let yourself in meant what are the most important parts of your internal dialogue, your emotional life? That’s the first thing and it took me a long time by the way, after Deirdre wrote back to me and said, “You feel so deeply, but it’s you, you need to get more of yourself so we can understand.”

And the most important parts of myself were the roles that these, I don’t want to call them make-believe, but I guess people who know me would say my make-believe friends play in my life, Ishmael, my favorite, favorite protagonist, yes, that’s the technical term, but he was my favorite person. He was on my mind all the time. I think I let that out in the book without letting you think I was an insane person, but you can see how these people who live thousands of miles away from me, hundreds of years away from me, and to make matters worse, not only are we separated by time and space, but they’re not even real people. And yet they were on my mind all the time. That’s a really important part of my life. Frankenstein, he meant so much to me when I was getting my doctorate.

And I know that my opinion of him is a lot different than Mary Shelley’s opinion of him, but having these other, you want to call them creatures in my mind meant so much, so I had to put them in the book and that’s what I think every writer should ask themselves. What is… Don’t just think of something obvious, “Well, I have a dog and a car,” or, “My niece is so adorable,” but think really hard. It took me a long time. What is, especially since it’s so much part of you that you can’t think of it? You have to get above yourself. I mean, seriously, physically feel like you are up there staring at you. You are watching yourself as though you’re a different person and examine yourself and observe yourself the same way that you’re observing the fox or another creature in your story, observe yourself and see what it is that’s so important to you, not physically, but to your emotional state. And that’s what you want to fit into the book to take it from being an encyclopedic account, a true story to a memoir.

So, from going from a true story of the fox to a memoir of the Fox & I.

Marion: Well, that’s wonderful. And you mentioned Ishmael and I have to say one of the trickiest things a writer can do is reference other books because it can so very easily sound pretentious. I’ve probably talked two dozen writers out of writing memoirs that just recount what they’ve read. It’s like a list of all the things they’ve read. And I say to them, “No, no, no. That’s a given. If you’re going to write that, you’re going to read, but you have to read some great books to write.” And in your case, you use Ishmael and Moby Dick to draw us richly into the story of you and the fox. And you had had to hit the right tone here and you did. So, can you talk a little bit about using that device a little bit more about that device to characterize yourself? How did Ishmael inform us about you, do you think? Because he does.

Catherine: Well, before I answer that question, I have to tell all the folks listening, please, please, please listen to that advice. Every time I read a review of a memoir by a writer, and it’s going to be about books that they’ve read, I usually don’t read it. The difference between my story and that story is that we are talking about writers and we know that writers read, but I was best buddies with Ishmael before I even finished my undergraduate degree. And that’s important to realize. Not only had I not finished my undergraduate degree, but I didn’t study writing, any writing classes is when I got to the University of Montana, they said, “Oh, look at your test scores. You don’t need to take any writing classes. You just tested out.” So, I just took physical ed classes and natural science classes. Like, “Are you kidding? I wanted to write about animal… I’m just like, “Are you kidding?” That’s right. Pick your college carefully. I’m not kidding, that true story.

Marion: Oh, yeah.

Catherine: So, I didn’t take any writing classes. So here I am with Ishmael before I even had a bachelor’s degree. And of course no writing background, that’s a huge difference. If you are a writer, then you are reading very differently. And with Frankenstein, I did have a bachelor’s degree, but when I write about how important he was in the book, I’m getting my doctorate. But when I met Victor Frankenstein, I still hadn’t finished my bachelor’s degree. I was a backcountry ranger who only picked up the book because I needed to carry as little weight as possible. I weigh like 110 pounds and you’re carrying like a 25-pound pack. The park doctor saying, “No, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that.” But I wanted a book and they didn’t have NOOKs in those days or Kindles. And so, I just got the tiniest, tiniest little book. I still have that copy of Frankenstein. It’s really, really yellowed, but it doesn’t weigh very much. And so that’s why I had it.

So, you can fit books into your story, but not if you’re a writer, please don’t because I think that it just doesn’t work. And the second important thing I want to say is there’s a line in my book that says, “Writers cannot…” Something similar. I’m paraphrasing myself, “Writers can’t control the well-meaning pirates once their book sets sail onto unknown waters.” That’s one of the most important things that I learned and I hope you’ll take it to heart. And I hope that Dr. Seuss isn’t rolling in the grave and coming back to haunt me or Mary Shelley for that matter because I’m abusing their characters, their purpose for the book. Because when you are a writer, when you’ve studied writing, then you learn about Frankenstein and Ishamael and Dr. Seuss if you study that, you study it and you learn what the writers wanted you to know.

What is the theme of the book? What are the symbols in the book? But I realized that because I was unlearned about literature and writing, I was just interpreting it my own way and saying that Bartholomew and the Oobleck was a story about man’s relationship to weather. I’m not sure Dr. Seuss really thought that it was, but that’s what it meant to me. And I know Mary Shelley didn’t really like Victor all that well, but I just loved the guy. I just liked-

Marion: Yeah, I loved him too.

Catherine: Just loved him.

Marion: I loved him too.

Catherine: Wow. Thank you. So, that’s what you need to understand. Yeah.

Marion: Yeah. You’ve got the perfect characterization with Ishmael and I think having these as you referred to earlier as your imaginary friends, that’s an interesting thing. As I said earlier, self-characterization is so tricky and all through this book, I’m fascinated by what you choose to tell us about yourself and when you do it, and it’s almost at the end of the book, that I’m pretty sure you play your best card with Ishmael and you provide the single greatest piece of characterization of you and you place it perfectly when you write and I’m going to quote you again, “People often describe Moby-Dick as a novel about a mad sea captain. I think of the novel as a journal written by a loner who loves nature and wild animals and who mourns the extermination of the American buffalo.”

And I said to myself, “I got you sister, I know who you are.” And I just really loved that line. You know, a loner who loves nature and wild animals. Yes. And it allowed us to see you through that lens. That was the perfect use. It tells me no good to read a line in your book to clarify what you were saying about writers not just writing about books doesn’t mean no good if you say, “I love Moby-Dick.” Well, I just learned nothing from that line, right? I lived by Daniel Martin. I learned nothing from that line. Frankenstein is my favorite book. I learned nothing from that line because it’s what you did in your metabolization of the story. And if they’re your co-pilots, if they’re your imaginary friends, if you talk to them, if they sit with you, if you guided your life with that friend, that knowledge, that has to be communicated to the reader, if it works in the story and you did it beautifully.

So, thank you for that. As we wrap this up, I want to ask you, I read an interview that you said you intended to write a true story, about a fox who changed my views on anthropomorphism, became my first real friend. Still, it just brings tears when I read that, and inspired me to think more like an animal. So, now that you can think more like an animal, what else might you write, do you think with that lens?

Catherine: I am working on a novel. I love all the characters. You probably guessed it’s third person because you can see the way I write about the Fox. I love the tight third-person voice. So, although it’s third person, there is one protagonist. She is on the autism spectrum and she is in the Pacific Northwest, which isn’t where she comes from. But she ends up there on her way to Canada. And she falls in love with owls. And the book is called The Owls of Sybil Springs. And she’s in an old, it’s not too old. It takes place in the eighties and there’s a whorehouse there from the days of logging and logging is disappearing in the eighties because of the spotted owl crisis. So it’s historical, but it’s also a mystery. And I love the protagonist and the three other main characters in the book that are trying to save a hot Springs deep into the hidden wilderness just as the Wilderness Act and the spotted owl crisis are happening.

So, there are animals. I can’t write it. There’s a lion, a mountain lion in the story and at the whorehouse, of course they had pet swans. So, there’s swans and lions, and owls. And a skunk, of course, that lives in the whorehouse is now a flower farm so they’ve got skunks and it’s just… I love animals and I know that there’s a lot of people out there who have the same empathy. Well, you are one of them, so, wow. It’s just great to talk to you and meet you. And we’re waiting for our books, right?

Marion: I’ll be waiting by the bookshop door for your next one. Thank you, Catherine. It’s been a joy to talk with you. Thank you so much for coming along today and being so well honest. I so appreciate it.

Catherine:Thank you so much. I hope I hear from other writers and we’re all in this together. So, we’re going to get where we’re going. Don’t give up.

Marion: The author is Catherine Raven. The book is Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship. Reach her through Susanna Lea at susanna lea dot com. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com and take a class on how to write a memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to and Qwerty and listen to it wherever you go, and if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review, it helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

photo credit: Bill Burke

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