How to Write From Nature with Julie Zickefoose

JULIE ZICKEFOOSE KNOWS ABOUT nature. She lives and works quietly on an 80-acre wildlife sanctuary in the back country of Whipple, Ohio, from where she writes and paints. Her articles and illustrations have been published in a variety of journals, including The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, Country Journal, and Bird Watchers Digest, for which she has designed 17 title covers. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write from nature.

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 Marion: Today my guest is going to bring out the total fangirl in me, so take that as a warning. Some people want to meet rock stars, actors, bestselling authors. I want to talk to Julie Zickefoose because she makes time slow down, and has for me since I began reading her work a good long time ago. Julie is a writer, author, painter, blogger, and naturalist. Welcome, Julie.

Julie: Well, thank you so much for having me. When you emailed me to ask if I were available, I was like, how many ways can I say of course. I’m just so excited.

Marion: Well, it’s wonderful. And we have this little trilogy of friends between you and me and my sister, Margaret Roach, and it is a fan girl status, and I’m the newest member of this. So, I’m just so appreciative. And let me set this up for my listeners. You’ve studied art, anthropology and biology. You’ve worked as a field biologist. You are commissioned as part of the illustrator team for the American Ornithologist Union and Academy of Natural Sciences for their 18 volume work, Birds of North America. You’ve illustrated material for Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, the United States Sufficient Wildlife Service. It’s the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. You work from home, but home in itself is kind of interesting. You live in a ranch house topped by a 42-foot tall bird watching tower. And I’ve read that you’ve seen 190 species of birds, 78 butterfly species. You live on 80 acres. You’ve written a bunch of books and essays. And here’s the picture. I think people will really get best. When in July of 2004, you were invited to contribute your first of many three minute commentaries to NPRs afternoon program, All Things Considered, you were when you picked up the phone standing in your kitchen with a basket full of chimney Swifts ready for release-

Julie: It’s the truth.

Marion: In your arms.

Julie: It’s the God’s own truth.

Marion: Good. So I think that kind of gives people a picture of who you are. But you also write a skilled, poignant, hilarious, risky memoir, really. And my audience is writers, nearly all of whom have been told by someone to get and stay in one lane. So apparently you didn’t get the memo, Julie, let’s talk about that.

Julie: Okay.

Marion: You didn’t get the memo. Can you just kind of take it from there?

Julie: Well, I’m going to start off by gently chiding you that there are now 198 species on my property list. Get it right. And I’ve painted 31 covers for bird watchers digesters, the last one just came out.

Marion: Oh man.

Julie: But that’s the nerd in me. And if I weren’t a nerd, none of this would happen. So-

Marion: Yeah.

Julie: Not staying in my lane, youngest of five, probably a bit indulged, never realized that anything was impossible. And especially now, I feel like you’ve just got to use every minute that you’re given. I guess they call it multitasking now, but I’ve never been able to sit down unless I’m actively writing or painting. I just want to do everything. If I figure, I remember when my husband and I used to give talks, we’d always open with a song, and the thing I used to say is, “we’re going to open with a song because we can.”

Marion: Yeah. That works.

Julie: I mean, if you can, you should. Right?

Marion: You should.

Julie: Yeah.

Marion: And I think a lot of people could just sort of grab a piece of paper, get a big marker, put that on the marker, and slap that on their walls because writers need all the encouragement they can get. And I work with writers all day long, and I recently had the good fortune to work with one whose piece will soon be published and whose interest is a particular species that to others might seem like odd. But as we talked to him, he started to shape her peace. I realized that what we were talking about truly was the need for a primal passion and how a lot of life is fighting to get one back or hold on to one, or just locate one amid the passions of your own family and your culture. And that’s the phrase I came up with for her. But I realized I was thinking about you. That these are primal passions that you have. And you get me laughing out loud, you get me crying, but I think it’s because I get invested because you’re so invested. But that’s my phrase, ‘primal passion’. What phrase would you use for your life’s pursuit?

Julie: I love that. Well, I don’t know Marion, I’ve always felt like my primary motivator was beauty. And I chase it constantly in every way. Not in a Nabokovian way, running after young man or anything like that, but it’s more about the light of the hour, the incredible beauty of some natural process that even if it ends in the death of the creature. I guess I just have an inordinate attraction to beauty. And so I’m always looking for a way to share that in every walk of life. I remember a formative moment when I was in my early teens and my parents had taken me to Minneapolis and we were walking down the basically a concrete and glass canyon, and I heard high overhead what I realized were tundra swans migrating, and I took off down the street grabbing people’s arms and saying, “Just look, look, look, there are swans”. And I feel like that the sky is always full of swans if you’re looking for them and open to them. And I can’t help but share. And that’s what the blog has been about since 2005. It’s something that, it’s like a treat to me to sit down and write about something that I’ve seen or experienced and want people to know about.

Marion: And we’re deeply grateful that you do. And I wonder, when I mentioned earlier about your illustration history, and I assume there are benefits to running your hands over a piece of paper, sketching out a bird. And what I want to know is, does that make the writing more intimate? I’ve never done that. I’ve never sketched something and then written about it. But give us a sense of the tactile to the typing, the conversation maybe that your brain is having or your heart and brain and what you think one gives to the other.

Julie: That’s a very interesting question because I have what I think is an extremely tough corpus callosum running down the center of my brain, separating the writing half from the painting half. I’m in a painting mode now, and I’ve been painting for a couple of months, and in order to switch from writing into the painting mode, I really grind my gears and I stall a lot and I have a lot of trouble. Once I’m in the painting mode, that’s all I want to do. And when I’m in the writing mode, that’s all I want to do. So you would think that as I write these heavily illustrated books about natural history, that I’m writing a chapter and then I’m merely illustrating it, and then I move on to the next new. I finished all the writing in a very linear way, and then I do all the painting. That said, I’ll never forget the college botany class where my instructor, Carol Wood, had us draw the parts of a flower that we were attempting to understand. And it was such a natural thing to me to do that. But all around me, the students were just going, ‘oh, so that’s how it attaches’. And that was such a powerful thing to come into a botany class, with drawing skills. But see, people have their eyes open to the beauty of drawing as a way of understanding.

Marion: Yeah. It’s wondrous to me. And I’m fascinated that you’ve got that corpus callosum that you describe as tough and mighty and the border of it. And of course, I assumed that you wrote a little, drew a little, wrote a little, drew. So it’s wonderful always to talk to creatives and find out how in fact we work. And you observe the turn, turn of the world and nature upon that world. And I think a lot of us who read and listen and watch you find it deeply comforting to read that. So first, let’s just talk about what this great tradition that you’re engaged in. You’re not the first to do this. You’re part of a long tradition of looking, of considering end of writing, drawing, giving us that. So can you just talk a little bit about that tradition and how you stepped onto it and what you think about that? And then let’s talk about that comforting aspect in a minute.

Julie: Oh, I remember where I was standing when I first saw Edith Holden’s work, A Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady.

Marion: I have that book.

Julie: Yeah, most of us do.

Marion: Yeah.

Julie: Came out in the ’70s, I think. And I was in a used bookstore in an attic on Martha’s Vineyard on a rainy October day. And I opened that book and I said, ‘this is my sister. This is what I do. This is who I am. Who is this person?’ And there she was in Edwardian times, going out, finding a used nest of a bird, maybe finding some old eggs or something, bringing home a sprig of violets, setting it up on her drawing table, doing an faithful little watercolor of it. And it was also accessible. But I think the pairing of her writing with the art is what really sank into me. And so I was already doing some of that. But to find someone who’d done that before me, and so long before me, was comforting and validating. And I love that you said, I slow down time for you because that’s a precious thing. And I slow down time for myself. I allow the natural turning of the seasons and the things that happen at certain times to be my entertainment, to be my guiding light. I don’t have a TV, I just look outside. I go for walks, I go for hikes. And all this cool stuff happens when you do that instead of something that commands your attention but doesn’t give you anything back.

Marion: Oh. Well, I’m going to give you an example of one of the pieces you wrote that not only slowed down time for me, but had a profound effect. And on your website, and I’ll put lots of links, you have series of wondrous essays, all of which I recommend for anyone who just wants to sit right down in the good seats and be amazed, calmed, educated, laugh out loud and cry. But I have to admit, crying is top in my list of one of my responses to you. And literally, and sometimes in the most unlikely of places, I find myself crying. In your piece, “The Imperative Tomato.” You take us first into the demand our tomatoes put on us to harvest and store. And I know. It’s like, “Oh man, it’s tomato day.” And I wonder, “Why did you put up 18 tomato cages? Man, you’ve lost your mind.”

Julie: Yeah, yeah.

Marion: But then you go out there and you’ve got to pick them and you got to cook them. But then this piece morphs into the melancholy of autumn. So let’s talk about the writing process. Did you sit down with the idea of melancholy or with the idea of tomatoes and see where it led. Or do tomatoes being end of season for any of us above a certain gardening zone, just carry in the melancholy for you? Just chicken and egg this for the writers who are listening.

Julie: It’s the E. L. Doctorow quote. “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far ahead as your headlights, but that’ll get you all the way there.”

Marion: Yeah.

Julie: Or something like that.

Marion: Yeah.

Julie: I never know what’s going to happen when I sit down. And as an example, my late husband’s birthday was March 3rd, and I sat down to write a laudatory blog post. And what I sat down and wrote was not that. And I said, well, we won’t be doing that today. Because what comes out is what comes out. What comes out is what’s in your subconscious. What comes out is what’s most important to your psyche. And if you try to direct that, you’re probably going to get a stiff or fairly crap-tastic piece of writing.

Marion: Crap-tastic.

Julie: One of my favorite words.

Marion: I think I know what I’m going to do with that word. Yeah, that’s so good.

Julie: You’re going to steal it, aren’t you?

Marion: Totally stole it right out of your mouth.

Julie: There you go.

Marion: Going to use it. I’m going to see if I can get paid for it actually. That’s what I do.

Julie: There you go. There you go. Use it in good health.

Marion: Good. So I have a confession. It’s possible that my favorite possession in the world is my bird bath. I shriek with joy at the activities that go on in there. And because of you, I got a winter bird bath for my very cold climate. But I’ve read that you keep a bath list. So instead of me saying how many species of birds you’ve seen in there, because I’m going to get it wrong, talk to me about the list. What are you doing when you’re, it’s wonderful to be a bird observer and make a list, but just talk about that process a little.

Julie: I don’t do a whole lot of that listing stuff. For instance, if you asked me what my life list is, I’d be hopeless. I can’t tell you. I don’t know what my state or county list, I don’t keep those. But the thing that I keep religiously is a bath list and a yard list. And that’s because that’s what matters to me, is what I’ve seen around my place. So 198, the yard list. I spend time thinking about what the next couple will be. The bath list, I think is 89 now, which is an insane number of species of birds to come into your bird bath.

Marion: Yes.

Julie: They have to land, they have to get their feet wet. They don’t have to take a bath. But this fall, I had Ruby Crown Kinglets lining up to take a bath, which I’d never seen before. I mean, I guess I thought Kinglets never bathed because they stay in the top of the tree and you just see these little tiny shapes flitting along. But I’ve got this bird bath that I invented that brings Kinglets and Vireos and Tanagers out of the trees. And warblers too. Yeah.

Marion: Oh, it’s lovely. And my husband will hear me. I’ll be screaming, “Oh, look what they’re doing.” There’s something about the delight, but it also allows you to see a lot of the way they move and the way they share and the way they wait and they do line up. So it’s a beautiful place from which to experience joy, but also to learn a lot.

Julie: Yes.

Marion: And speaking of learning a lot, you rehabilitate. And I’ve seen pictures of you feeding meal worms to bats. I’ve seen pictures of you holding birds in your hand. I’ve seen so many experiences. And you turned one into a 2019 book, your book, Saving Jemima: Life and Love With a Hard-Luck Jay, and I delighted in this book. You had a young orphaned Jay presented to you who was virtually tailless, palm sized, starved, sick. But why don’t you take it from there and explain what happened. And just if you can touch on when this became a book.

Julie: I had always wanted to raise a Corvid. The Corvids are the jays, crows and ravens. And I knew that if I ever got my hands on a Corvid, it was going to be an experience. And I started writing about Jemima the minute I looked into her eyes, the minute I took her out of the box and held her in my hand, I knew there was a book in that bird. So I kept even more careful logs of daily interactions and behaviors. I took even more thousands of photos than I usually do. And I just knew, I knew from the beginning. It was like dating online and you meet the perfect person.

Marion: Yeah.

Julie: It was like I knew it was meant to be. So yeah, that book started and it really unfolded in warp speed. I had her in 2017 to care for, I had her for eight months, and the book was done a year later, illustrations and all. I just went to town on it. And it came at such a fortuitous time in my life that it saved me. It gave me a place to go. It gave me a refuge to run to.

Marion: Can you talk a little bit more about saving you?

Julie: Yeah, yeah. Well, what was going on in my life at the time I got this bird was nothing I wanted to share with anybody. And my marriage was crumbling, finally after 13 years of epic struggle. And I had been replaced to tell you the truth. And it was hard. There’s nothing that I’ve found that is as crushing and invalidating as being told you’re the one and then being replaced for somebody better. So that was the backdrop, the final dissolution of our marriage. And so along comes Jemima, and I’m like, well, I think I’ll study Jay’s now. How about we do that?

Marion: Turning our attention elsewhere and really looking can be such a responsibility. It can be such an invitation, but it can be a saving. And before we went live, we were talking about how when I was in my twenties and my sister and I were dealing with the fact that our mother at 49 had Alzheimer’s disease, and I described it as, and my father had just died, and I described it as saying, and my sister started digging holes in the lawn. And that’s what she did. She began her gardening career, and she’s now America’s premier gardening writer. And we can turn our attentions to nature in ways, deliberate ways, but what we can’t ever know is how much we’re going to be saved if we do. And I think that’s what you get from me every time I read you. You’ve introduced me to bugs, bats, plants, the poignant calling of the outdoors and the passing of time. You’ve gotten me to care about what goes out of my bird bath. And I have come to love bats because of you.

Julie: Good.

Marion: I know, really and truly. But not one character of yours combines the emotions as much as does your relationship with Curtis Loew. And Curtis the dog, you write “Love between two humans can sustain, enrich, swell, fade, rack and rend, and that many splintered thing, wonderful or heartbreaking, or somewhere in the gray zone between can go on for many years. But dog love is constant, a bright flame we get to kindle and cradle in our hands, but for a decade and change, and then it must go be replaced in a different way”. And you go on to say, Curtis was sent to teach you how to love without clinging, to hold on loosely. “It shouldn’t be that hard for me to do. That’s the kind of love I’d always like to have too”. And I love my dog more than I love any of my friends. And if that’s a shock to my friends, they can just take it right on the chin.

Julie: They know.

Marion: I think they already know. But we’ve all seen that writing go badly and over sentimentalize and bestow way too much responsibility on the dog.

Julie: Yeah.

Marion: But we’ve seen it go wonderfully where we neatly kind of fall to our knees in recognition that someone gave us the language for what we feel. So help the writers listening to the podcast, help them understand how you stay in the borders of what we can do with a beloved creature with whom we want to spend some real time. How do we write best about that kind of love?

Julie: Yeah. Well, they say show don’t tell. Just show what the dog did, just say he walked over and laid his head on my knee. Don’t say he loved me so much that he wrapped his paws around me. So there’s a difference. You just keep it simple and let the dog’s actions say. Where did you get that passage about dog love?

Marion: Where did I get that passage?

Julie: Yeah, yeah.

Marion: I think I got it on your site.

Julie: On my blog?

Marion: Yes. Oh, from the Blogspot. Yes, from Blogspot.

Julie: Okay.

Marion: Yes.

Julie: Because I got to go find that.

Marion: Yeah. Well, you’ve got this lovely video of his tail, you’re celebrating the second anniversary of “Gotcha.” I’ve watched that. I’ve watched a bunch of them. But that one, that ridiculous tail under the blanket, this little tail tip starts doing its metronome thing.

Julie: Right, right.

Marion: And I think it’s on there.

Julie: Yeah. Well, Curtis is exactly the dog I need for this passage of my life, which is a passage where I realize I don’t need anybody else. I really don’t. I mean, it’d be great, but I’m okay. And Curtis is the kind of dog who, when he’s gone for three and a half hours, that’s when you start thinking, ‘wonder what he’s doing’. And you have to be okay with that. You have to let him go to love him.

Marion: Oh.

Julie: Yeah. Yeah. And I want to write about him so bad. I just need to, because it’s such an unusual relationship in this day and age of dog keeping, where we harness them and leash them and fence them and electric fence them. You know?

Marion: Yeah, I do.

Julie: And I have the immense luxury of living in a place where I don’t have to do that. Where he is not going to get rolled out by a truck if he runs. And I realize that, but I’d like to show people what that’s like. I read a book called Merle’s Door about a dog by Ted Kerasote. How Merle was free to come and go. He was essentially a stray who chose to stay with Ted. And it’s a revelatory book. And I think that in large part has shaped the way I reacted to having occur, which is synonymous with having a dog who’s going to disappear on you.

Marion: Yeah. It’s a very difficult reality to know that. But I love that you’re able to let him go, and I love what it does for you.

Julie: Yeah.

Marion: My most recent dog book is Speckled Beauty by Rick Bragg, which-

Julie: Just read it. Just read it.

Marion: Whew, yeah.

Julie: Yeah.

Marion: Yeah. He’ll do.

Julie: Yeah.

Marion: Between the dog’s description and the description of his mother’s tomato sandwich, I was incredibly happy reading that book. And apparently his mom does make the best tomato sandwich in the South, so that’s good to know. In case we need to stop in.

Julie: Might need to stop in.

Marion: Yeah, might need to. So you’ve done things that many people have never done before. No one’s ever done before. Your book, Baby Birds: an Artist Looks into the Nest was groundbreaking because it depicts nestling development day to day from hatch to fledgling and beyond. And it’s got more than 500, I think, watercolor studies. So talk to me just a bit about getting the chutzpah to do something that no one’s done before.

Julie: It did not come into the world full-blown. It was something that crept up on me. I realized that I could do it because I’m a wildlife real rehabilitator, and I knew what to feed the baby birds. I knew how to keep them warm and safe. And most importantly, I knew that the parent birds would not reject them if I borrowed them for 20 minutes a day. So this is all stuff that you have to have a wildlife rehab license to do. You have to be federally and state permitted to do it. So I thought, ‘well, if I can, why don’t I?’ And so I took this skillset, which involves being able to draw quickly from life and paint, and basically would hold the naked baby bird in my left hand and paint and draw with my right. And I would create these large 20 by 30 inch sheets with every stage of development of the baby bird on it, so you actually can see the baby grow in the painting. By the lower right corner of the sheet, you’ve got a feathered bird ready to fly.

So I just started doing this, and it caught on. I mean, with myself, I wasn’t showing these to anybody, and I just kept thinking, okay, what bird am I going to get this summer? Which bird can I do? This is a pursuit for which you have to be there. You can’t go on vacation and keep painting your baby bird, you have to be there. And being there is not a problem for me, since I’m an introvert and I stay at home. So yeah, it kind of snuck up on me. And then I took it in to my agent, Russ Galen, in New York. I took a sheave of these large sheets, and I remember laying them out on the table in a restaurant, poor lighting and water glasses everywhere. And he just flipped out. He was like, “nobody’s ever done this. People don’t do this, Julie, what the heck are you doing?” And I was like, “I’m doing these paintings because I don’t know how to stop”. And he said, “well, you’ve got a book”. And I said, “really?” And he said, “yeah, yeah, you’ve got to write this book”. So yeah, I did and it took 13 years to do.

Marion: Ooh. So I can’t help but not ask it. It would be a good idea for me to ask for all the people like me who are, I’m constantly picking up birds in my yard. I do have windows that I just can’t seem to get them to stop flying into them. I’ve found rabbits nests, and that have been disrupted by dogs, and I find one or two bunnies on my yard, baby bunnies. So people shouldn’t necessarily try this at home. I’ve always called a wildlife rehabilitator.

Julie: Right.

Marion: I have the phone number on my kitchen wall.

Julie: Yes.

Marion: That’s what people should do. Yes?

Julie: Yeah, yeah. You basically, all you have to do is type in your nearest city and wildlife rehabilitator into Google.

Marion: Yes.

Julie:
And you can find somebody. Yeah. You got to hand them over. Because the things you have to know to be able to raise a baby bird or a baby animal are legion.

Marion: Yes.

Julie: And I can bet you that you don’t know them. So not only that, but it’s illegal. So there’s a couple real good reasons. A, the thing is going to die if you try it. And B, it’s illegal, and you could get fined heavily.

Marion: Sure.

Julie: Yeah. I hate saying that because some of my most treasured childhood experiences were raising things that I had no business messing with. But my dad was an old farm boy, and he knew how to feed a baby pigeon. So let’s feed this mourning dove, see what happens.

Marion: Yeah.

Julie: And we did, and great stuff happened.

Marion: It’s wonderful.

Julie: Yeah.

Marion: That’s lovely. Well, as we wrap this up, and I would prefer not to, but we will because you’ve got some birds to go observe, and I’ve got to go look in my bird bath right now. I want to mention that a black Tupelo in the Dawes Arboretum was dedicated to you in 2014. The Dawes Arboretum is in Ohio. And this is just made me so happy to have a plant or a bird or a tulip or something named or dedicated to one’s work is really, I just felt like bowing down. So, you have to tell me what’s that like?

Julie: It’s crazy. I go visit them, and it was very disarming because I hadn’t been for five or six years, and I couldn’t find them the last time I went to visit the trees. So I had to write this little note and say, “I couldn’t find my plaque”. And they were like, “we’ll, show it to you. Just stop at the office the next time”. But yeah, it was really wild to have that happen and to be, I mean, recognition that’s unbidden, that comes from nowhere is the best. Where you just aren’t expecting Marion Roach to email you and say, she wants to talk memoir writing with you. It’s the best thing in the world. And-

Marion: Oh.

Julie: It’s just a lovely thing.

Marion: It’s the best thing in the world that you said yes. Thank you so much, Julie. I’ve just loved talking to you, and I’m looking forward to every next word. Thank you.

Julie: Thank you.

Marion: The writer is Julie Zickefoose. See more on her at juliezickefoose dot com. Buy her books wherever books are sold. Read her on Blogspot. 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 overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Clairmont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through 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. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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