How to Write What You Know with Margaret Roach

MARGARET ROACH HAS BEEN a leading garden writer for 30 years, writing for such publications as Martha Stewart Living and Newsday. Since April 2020, she has been the garden columnist for The New York Times, where she began her journalism career decades ago. She hosts a public-radio podcast, lectures and holds tours at her 2.3-acre Hudson Valley (NY) Zone 5B garden in “normal” years, and always says no to chemicals and yes to great plants. Oh, and she is my older sister. She’s had a terrific career writing what she knows best — gardening — and in that is one of the great lessons I know in how to write what you know. Listen in and read along as we dissect how to write what you know and more importantly, what keeps you sane.

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Marion: Welcome, Margaret.

Margaret: I wondered if you were going to tell the sister part or pretend it wasn’t true.

Marion: It’s a good question. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, full disclosure. On your website, awaytogarden.com, in your online biography, you write, “There was little hope of escaping a career in the world of words, being born to a couple of journalists who also love to read.” I love that you always credit our upbringing with your current life. But set this up a bit more for my listeners, who are writers, by talking a bit more about personal taxonomy. Walk us back to where you first discovered the garden as a place you might want to inhabit.

Margaret: Well, for me, as I think for many people, the garden came as an escape mechanism, a hobby, a getaway, a refuge. When our mother was ill, we were in our mid-20s. Our mother was ill, our father had died. Our mother was ill with early onset Alzheimer’s. I went home to the house we had grown up in to live for a number of years and managed that care. There I was in my 20s and got a job at night at The New York Times as a copy editor and what was I going to do all day? It was a pretty depressing situation and so I escaped, not too far, because I couldn’t go too far. I was on duty, so to speak and I escaped to the yard, which was a traditional suburban yard in need of some redoing, rethinking.

I knew nothing and I got a book. I think maybe you might have given me the book; Crockett’s Victory Garden, an old classic how-to. Month by month garden book from a PBS show of the time. I just started doing the things really badly, but 40 years later I’m still doing them. But that’s how it is. Again, it was an escape, it was a refuge. It was my occupational therapy of that moment. Yeah, yeah.

Marion: Sure. You worked three long stints at three places. The New York Times, Newsday, Martha Stewart Living Omni Media. Very early in your career, you wrote The New York Times Sunday Women in Sports column. You took a break for two years to edit Women’s Sports magazine created by Billy Jean King. You were the first fashion editor at Newsday, and then the garden editor there. It was your Newsday columns that attracted Martha Stewart to hire you as her first garden editor and led to your long career at Martha Stewart as the head of the internet direct commerce division, managing the birth of martha stewart dot com. After that, the editorial director of the magazine’s books and internet.

Well, whew sister! I watched this and thought, “Wow!” But all the while you had a weekend place and commuted religiously to that spot, transforming what when I first saw it was a very simple two plus acres into a place of absolute divine inspiration and peace. That’s where you created your website, away to garden dot com, where you wrote two book-length memoirs. What I always noticed is you kept your eye on what you really wanted through all of this. Our mother’s illness, your career, what you really wanted, which is what you do now, living and writing from your garden.

Many of us have to do that in our writing lives, have careers that afford us the privilege to write what we want. Can you talk a little bit about how to keep your eye on the life you want as a writer amid the challenges of a big career and what it does for us if we have our eye on something like that?

Margaret: I don’t know that I kept my eye on it for the first couple of decades. I was editing other people’s work. I mean, as you’ve mentioned, I did have some writing stuff along the way, but none of it was of the heart. I wasn’t a sports person, it wasn’t meaningful to me. It was an opportunity, a career opportunity and that’s very different, I think from when you merge your passion, the material of your heart with your writing or your quest to write. I think that yields very different material. That took me a long time to, I don’t know, you could say indulge myself in or permit myself to do or whatever, because it was a bit of a leap. Frankly, if it hadn’t been for the fact that I got to love the garden so much and I really wanted to again, merge my professional life and my passion and The Times didn’t have an opportunity where I was working at the time and Newsday did, I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to start writing a little bit closer to my heart.

Where the opportunity is depends on your career trajectory and your nerve, I guess. But the thing I just want to say to people is, it doesn’t even matter because I could have 20 years prior been writing about whatever my passion was. I mean, we don’t have to have an outlet in a paycheck necessarily to write about it. So I could have probably started earlier, yeah.

Marion: It does so much for us and well, I interviewed our mutual friend, Anna Quindlen, a couple of weeks ago and she talks in her new book about the power of writing in our lives and that’s what you’re talking about. We can write anywhere, anytime and it will, I believe educate us on what we really believe. What we really feel about things, it’ll guide us all the way through. When I think about writing, it’s just true. All my life, you’ve been my older sister of course, but I’ve taken a lot of cues from you. A lot of rules of living, God help us both. But the single one that you have delivered to me more than any other in writing and in life, is to start small. You always remind me of this, no matter if it’s a big sized sister problem or whatever, you always get me to the small material.

Let’s talk specifically about writing, small to big since garden writing, all writing now comes in all shapes and sizes and is delivered on so many platforms. You and I are both huge admirers of the writer, Verlyn Klinkenborg, whose miniatures as they’re referred to, used to grace the pages of The New York Times editorial pages for years and he writes books as well. But let’s talk about those little gems of writing. They’re short, maybe 275 words is a really good place to start. What do you think a writer can bring to such a small space as that?

Margaret: Well, a really famous English garden writer of yesteryear, Vita Sackville-West, she said something really beautiful, I think. She, by the way, made this very famous garden called Sissinghurst with her husband, Harold Nicholson, one of the most visited gardens in the world today. But anyway, she said, “It is necessary to write if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else indeed to clasp the net over the butterfly of the moment?” The butterfly of the moment is the small thing, yes? But it’s also the potentially big thing if you start small and then blow it up. What do we learn from a butterfly? We learn about metamorphosis, we learn about transitions in life. We learn about having a very short time, being ephemeral. We learn…

I could go on and on and on just from that little tiny butterfly. What are all the possible narrative arcs? And what are all the metaphors and so forth and what can we explore about it and ourselves? To me in gardening, that’s especially the case. Starting small because looking closely almost with a hand lens is where you’re going to get a lot of your best material, I think.

Marion: I think so too and I think as we move through the various forms I want to talk about in writing, you just brought up the metaphor. I think the metaphor and the ability to use it is a trust based experience. The metaphor of the garden is rich and lyrical and I think maybe a little intimidating to people. We see ourselves in the frog, we see ourselves in the butterfly. Much of the rich metaphor of all of life lives there. But my audience is writers and newer writers are far less inclined to trust when they have that funny dual purpose moment that metaphor provides. So let’s talk about following your own eye and learning to trust it when you witness a bond between yourself and nature. Let’s just talk about that metaphor and the trust that you have to be building with your own eye and soul, or how would you put it?

Margaret: Well, I mean, I think that in the fact that nature and the garden as a place to experience nature in some form and from Thoreau to Emily Dickinson and her poetry, I mean everyone who has written about some experience with the natural world, what they have been privileged to bear witness to. Every single season is life and death and everything between. It’s super rich material. I think the important thing is that we’re not just to anthropomorphize the creatures, which I think would be better in a children’s story, a children’s book, that type of writing, than to maybe learn from them and maybe elevate it a little bit again, starting small and blowing it up.

But I think the other thing is that we do a better job with the material that’s provided to us outside in nature and in the garden, if we really learn the language, the vocabulary out there and the science out there so that we’re not just using cheap surface levels like I just did to you. I said the butterfly teaches you metamorphosis. Well, of course, but which form of metamorphosis does a butterfly experience? Is it full metamorphosis or one of the other types that are partial, that some insects go through? We need to learn and what’s it called when it comes out of its covering and becomes an adult butterfly, what’s that moment called? Do you know what I mean? It’s learn the language, study the science and there’s all these beautiful, almost poetic words that are scientific words.

That was one of the things that really took me into writing almost memoir style, garden inspired material was having the knowledge from having written how-to gardening when I was at Newsday, when I was at Martha Stewart. Having studied enough to be able to answer reader questions and write a how-to article about how to grow a tomato or whatever, a lot of which involves science and I would find these incredible words. It wasn’t just I was finding the incredible insects and flowers and processes going outside, I was also finding the language of science. Therein lies a lot of real beauty too.

I mean, there are words for the smell of the earth; geosmin and when rain splashes on the warm ground; petrichor. There’s all these words for, I mean, when leaves hang on the trees all winter, like some oaks do and beeches and so forth. You see that, there’s brown leaves. Why don’t they let go? Why don’t they drop them? That’s called marcescence. It’s also giving us a whole vocabulary, a whole bunch of research material to work with as well as the beautiful inspirations.

Marion: Yeah, and I just have always marveled at your delight in the portal that the language gave you. I never worry that if this universe goes into self-destructive mode, I always think you’re going to walk into a big hole in a tree and just disappear. You just know how to do that.

Margaret: Woodchuck burrow.

Marion: Just don’t go down a woodchuck burrow.

Margaret: They’re stinky down there, it’s stinky.

Marion: Yeah, they are stinky. I don’t like them, you don’t like them. But I do marvel about what you know about mosses and moths and birds and frogs and plants and ticks and other bugs and raccoons and woodchucks. But I also know that we both grew up in a house of books and that we both currently live like that. You keep a yards-long library of field guides surrounding you and that you constantly take classes online. I know that every interview you do informs you. This speaks to the admission that we cannot know everything and that we have to continue to learn. I think for young writers, not knowing things keeps people from writing. Just take that a little bit further before we return to some of the other forms of writing, and talk about the research and the humility that underpins it.

Margaret: Well, I mean, I was lucky that I had a newspaper job because I was being paid to interview people, to be a reporter, so to speak and an editor. But especially in the years I was garden writing finally, I was being paid each week to go and interview someone who knew presumably more than I did. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have asked them to be my interview that week on how to prune a tree or how to whatever. I learned by interviewing and listening is a really important whether you’re taking a class or whether you’re interviewing someone. Listening is a really important skill I think, for a writer. That was one area where my education, I have no formal education in science or horticulture or anything like that, that came in.

Then the other thing is books. Again, we were brought up with a lot of books. But probably the biggest category of books in my personal library the last 30 years is field guides. I have a whole cabinet that’s just filled with field guides. Field guides to lichens and field guides to butterflies and field guides to moths and field guides to gulls and leaf mines and all kinds of esoterica, mammals and you name it, I’ve got to field guide for it. It’s really important because if you’re going to write anything, you need a cast of characters, and how are you going to come up with characters when there’s no other people in a lot of what a gardener does? I’m alone, I’m out there alone. Yes, there are other creatures. There are frogs and there are bobcats and there are bears and there are whatever. But you have to figure out who your characters are going to be.

That’s the other part of the research. Just like when a food writer who becomes a memoir writer, who’s not just writing recipes, but is writing beautiful, incredible, there’s a lot of great food writers that go beyond the recipe. In the same way, but they know their culinary material. They don’t use the wrong word for something. In the same way, maybe they were trained, or maybe they were a restaurant chef first, but they also could write, we have to be that too if we want to write about nature or the garden. We have to also be trained and even if it’s training ourselves. For me, between the interviewing experts and taking courses and things like that, but mostly interviewing experts and then collecting all these books and studying them, that’s where I got my knowledge. The solidity that I needed to flesh out my stories, but also learned about a potential cast of characters because I learned who was connected to who and what was going on out there.

Then the other thing I would just say is that I always say curiosity is the mother of invention. You just have to ask, why is this green? Why is this leaf not green? Why is this, this size and that’s that size? You have to ask and then you have to go inside and you have to find out the answer. Why do some leaves come out of the ground in spring not green. Why in the woodland garden, why are some of them purple colors? There’s a reason. Go find out why it’s not chlorophyll, but anthocyanin and pigments, go find out. It might make a story, you know what I mean? You have to follow those moments of curiosity, those inspirations.

Marion: You absolutely do. To be a writer, you’ve got to be curious. I think it’s the highest quality. I mean, it’s the first and foremost quality of all writing. We talked a little bit about the miniature, the Verlyn Klinkenborg model of writing and after that we’ve got some other forms. You and I are both huge fans of Abigail Thomas, the memoirist who also writes in brief takes. The form is not unique to nature writing, of course and I recommend her writing to everyone I know. In fiction, the equivalent is Lydia Davis, winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant. All writers should learn about this short form. But after the miniature, my favorite form absolutely is that of the personal essay and you’ve written some doozies.

From a look at your life via your freezer jars, just love that. How your life can be told in the things that are in your freezer, to my personal favorite in which you took on a painful separation you and I experienced when our mother was ill with Alzheimer’s and how a few years later we found common ground when I took up gardening. I’ll try not to cry when I say that no love letter I ever received did more, sealed more wounds or cured more ills in my life than reading that piece by you. Talk a little bit about the personal essay, even written from the garden or especially written from the garden and what we can take on there, please.

Margaret: They just come to me. I’ll be in the shower or something or driving the car. I mean, if I were to sit down right now and you say, “Well, I need a personal essay by a Friday at 2:00 p.m.,” wouldn’t happen probably. Those for me, come out of the semi-conscious moments when I’m apparently ruminating, but I’m not actually thinking consciously about the subject. They’re not forced. Those are the harder ones. I can go outside right now and I can find 10 creatures or why questions to answer whatever and then I can fold myself into those subjects or connect somehow to them. But it’s not the same as the type of work you were just speaking about. About where we’ve both at different times written call in response essays about common childhood subjects or adult subjects where we had a different perspective on them or whatever. Those come a little harder. That’s a little more work. I’m probably not answering your question, but.

Marion: No, I love the idea that it comes from the unconscious or the subconscious. I think you’re absolutely right. I think we get a feeling about something. I think we see something and I think it’s informed by everything we’ve heard, thought, felt, tasted, listened to whatever. It’s in a resting feeling that precedes a personal essay, I find. Where you start to see something you want to palpate back or move forward. I actually think you just hit it right on the head. It’s a more misty, if you will, experience than recognizing a character in the natural world and saying, “I would like to take on that kind of frog today or whatever.”

Then there’s the op-ed that distinguishes itself by being opinion driven and you’ve written some brilliant ones about our need to protect this precious world of ours. How do you make the determination when to write an op-ed? Do you just get pissed off about something or some urgent need to tell people to take care of something? Just speak about the motivation to write one of those, because they’re very different than the personal essay.

Margaret: Yeah, and I do think that’s the motivation behind that, is as you say, when there’s something that I want to get out there to people. There are subjects even for the weekly New York Times column, there are subjects that I write about that feel to me more urgent and that might make a good op-ed as well and are more a point of view or an advocacy position. Then there are others that are again, how-to writing and then there are others that are just completely personal essay-ish. I don’t know. I mean, it really depends on the subject. These days, I don’t say like, “Ooh, I’ve got to think of an op-ed to write or anything,” it comes to me periodically when a subject is upsetting me or is motivating me.

Anything can come up at any time. I can hear in my head. You can’t tell me that I have to write from 6:00 to 10:00 every morning and blah, blah, blah. I can say that and I can do that and I can be here at 6:00 and 5:00 in the morning until 10:00, but nothing may happen. Then suddenly in the middle of nothing happening on the thing I’m supposed to be doing, I can hear in my head the lead for a story that I’m not supposed to write for three weeks. Then I have to open up another Word document on my computer and I have to write that lead even though maybe I haven’t done all the research yet, but I know what the story’s about suddenly. You know what I mean? Again, it’s this levels of consciousness. I wish I had a better answer, but my process is not methodical because inspiration doesn’t come that way for me. It just doesn’t.

Marion: I think that’s a great answer to tell you the truth, because I think that people who are new to writing think that those of us who do this sit in a chair, on a scheduled time and that the muses speak to us and what they tell us goes right out through our fingers. Of course, my keyboard is got blood on it from the times I’ve hit my head on it, pounding my head. I mean, literally tears, blood. You pace, you cook, you stir, you prune. I know your process. And when something comes, you always go in and write it down. You open up a new Word document, as you said. I think people have to be willing. It’s like standing opposite a pitching machine all day long. You have to be willing when the pitch comes, you got to do something with it. You may not be able to write that piece, as you just said, three weeks from now. That’s the piece you’re going to write, but you got to note it. You got to write it down. You’ve got to be hospitable to these ideas.

Margaret: Right and you have to catch them when they come flying into consciousness. You really do. I mean, yeah.

Marion: Absolutely. And the thing is they can come flying in these various forms. Then you have to discern, is that an op-ed, is that a personal essay, is that a miniature? Because that’s what a writing life is. A writing life is not just writing one big book that you begin with your great, great, great, great grandfather and ends with what you had for lunch today. It is this and that, this form and that form, taking the ideas as they come. Some of them have to be researched, some of them you know full well what you’re going to say because they come from a very emotional place.

Let’s talk about the longest or the most current one you’re doing and then I want to go back and talk about A Way to Garden, your book for a minute. But I want to talk about this idea since 2020, you’ve been back where you started at The New York Times. Now as the writer of their In the Garden column. Writing in a regular column is an astonishing commitment. But with the advent of such platforms at Substack and every other newsletter delivery idea, lots of people have it in their minds that they want to become columnists and they have access to a place to regularly publish. Any advice on how to decide if you have it in you to be a columnist? Because it’s a job, right?

Margaret: Yeah, in my subject area, you would have to have the expertise to be able to land that job. You know what I mean? It doesn’t just come out of nowhere, I guess. But I think for 12 years after I left my career, most recently at Martha Stewart maybe, well, actually 15 years ago, I started a methodical, as deliberate as I could writing practice because I knew I was moving away for the first time in like 30 years of full-time journalism career to being on my own. I started a blog and that was the thing that everyone was doing at that time. I’m not saying it’s the answer and it could be a Substack thing now, that didn’t exist then. If you do that, you will have in an orderly fashion, chronologically arranged, with photographs if you want, your thought process, what’s on your mind.

You’ll be putting your material somewhere besides on printed out sheets of Word documents or just stored in the computer where you can’t even remember the name of the file and you don’t even remember which ones you wrote. It will have a shape. That garden blog was what really got me to compile what became the material of many future forms of things. Whether an op-ed piece that blew up an idea that I had done on the blog small, or some of them were short, like you’re saying these miniature things. I think it’s good to have a practice. I know I said I don’t have a practice, but I did in those transition years force myself. And even if it was just once a week and I sent out an email once a week, and even in the beginning when I had 50 subscribers or whatever it was, it made me think about what subject matter was out there and have an organized record of it.

That was helpful, that was really helpful. It was almost like journaling in a way, but not journaling as in me, me, me, me, me. But trying to write a combination of how-tos and essays and so forth.

Marion: Absolutely.

Margaret: That helped.

Marion: In this period after you left Martha Stewart, in this period as you were gathering your thoughts and you wrote two memoirs and you wrote and published in 1998, this gorgeous book, A Way to Garden, as I mentioned before, named Garden Book of the Year and reissued for a 21st anniversary edition in 2019. You have a line in that book that I love that states, “I admit it, I garden because I cannot help myself. It is no wonder so much of gardening is done on one’s knees. This practice of horticulture is a wildly humbling way to pass one days on earth. Even the root of the word humility comes from the soil, from the Latin humus for earth or ground. And a good soil is rich with the partially decayed plant and animal material called humus. Humbled or no, gardener was the label imprinted on me when the souls were handed out. And so be it, gardener.”

Let’s just talk as we wrap this up about bringing the full force of your knowledge of discipline and of writer and of organic gardening to this book that is really just a beloved book in the world. Talk to us a little bit about that decision and what perhaps you learned in that process. I feel it’s such a triumph of your expression and talent. What were you thinking when you said I’m going to turn this knowledge into a book and how does it feel to you now in that 21st anniversary edition?

Margaret: Well, when I had done it 20 however many years prior when I had started on the first version, say 25 years ago, I probably started on the first one. I needed a structure as every writer who’s going to do a long form or even a short form thing needs. You need a lead, you need a kicker and you need a middle. With a book, you have to have chapter structure. What was my structure going to be? Again, understanding something about the fact that I wanted to merge myself with the how-to knowledge, both parts were going to be in there, that it was going to be more than outdoor decorating and how-to. That I was going to be in there somehow too, the human experience, the connection, the intimacy.

I came up with a structure again, 25 years ago, which was not to have four seasons, the chapters be four seasons like so many garden books are or month to month like so many garden books are. But to have it be six seasons, each one of them likened to a season in my own human life. Conception in January, February, birth in March and April, youth coming next for two months, adulthood in the summer. Senescence, the winding down, the stage of life I’m at now, when you’re not building new cells and being more vigorous, you’re falling apart at the seams. Then death and afterlife, the end of the year. Having accomplished that maybe 25 years ago has become the guidepost for all of what I think and do and write about gardening and nature is again, I am connected to it. I am part of it. It is part of me. We grow and learn together the garden and nature and I. I hope it’s the better for me and I’m certainly the better for it.

That connection, that’s my shtick, that’s Margaret Roach’s version of this. I think every writer has to find that out and I don’t think it’s a bad idea to pretend you’re making a table of contents for a book, you know what I mean? To see what you are about, whatever your passion is, your subject matter or an outline to see what kinds of words, what kind of metaphors, what kind of material comes to mind when you free associate that way. I’m thankful that I did that then.

Marion: We’re also thankful that you did it. I’ve read the book many times and given it as many gifts. Every time people talk to me about that structure, they particularly talk about the surprise when they come upon the section on senescence and the appreciation you have for the dying back and the closing down. I can’t thank you enough for coming along today and explaining that and sharing this time with me. I’m not embarrassed to say you’re my favorite writer. Thank you, Margaret. I so appreciate this.

Margaret: Oh, well, that’s very sweet.

Marion: It’s true too.

Margaret: Yeah. Well, thank you and the garden is not just about nature, it’s not just about celebrating pretty flowers and the big bloom and stuff, those peak moments. It’s about celebrating the passings too, all the other parts. Again, that’s what’s so important is to figure out what your take on your subject matter is and then hopefully stick with it.

Marion: Hopefully stick with it. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

Margaret: Yeah.

Marion: The writer is Margaret Roach. See more on her at away to garden dot com. Hear her podcast everywhere podcasts are available and get her books everywhere books are sold.

I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overt studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, where I offer online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.