Wild at Heart

Three years ago in July,  I read WILD by Cheryl Strayed. My friend Jeannie had left it in a bag hanging on the handle inside the storm door as a surprise birthday gift. What was odd is Jeannie didn't know that I'd looked in every bookstore on the Coast of Maine the week before and not been unable to find it. Sometimes books just find you.

In the early winter of 2013, I decide on a whim to go the the Association of Writers and Writer's Programs Annual Conference, as it was being held in Boston that year. Cheryl Strayed and Austen Burroughs just happened to be the keynote speakers that evening and even though it was sold out, someone at an earlier seminar invited me along. Ira Silverberg, and his hubby Bob Morris, were also in attendance. I'd first met Ira when he was a pup at Grove. Ira, this weekend, was being feted with the Publishing Triangle Award for Leadership and at the time was the Literature Director for the National Endowment for the Arts.

I remember sitting in the seats at the various seminars, and in the audience waiting for the Keynote speakers to get settled in and having Barry Gifford's voice ricochet around my brain. His voice was the voice of his letters to me when I still worked at Curtis Brown in NYC. The same era when I'd first been introduced to Ira. Additionally it was Grove, with Morgan Entrekin and Ira, who published Barry's novel, WILD AT HEART. At the time, I was Barry's first reader in NYC, as my boss, Peter Ginsburg represented Barry.  We'd exchange letters, since the Internet didn't exist yet, for years before meeting face to face in CA.

Barry's voice was saying to me; "See Karen, you should have joined the phone company like I told you, so your mental energy would be free on nights and weekends. They you could have written your cement boat hurricane story", and "See Karen, that time you first climbed Katahdin with your Dad, when you were six, that last summer your parent's were together? That could have been an alternating chapter", "You see Karen, You're the one with the WILD HEART and it still hasn't met it's match".

I hadn't channelled Barry voice in a long time. Not since I'd left the Bay Area a decade earlier. Last I knew he was spending a lot of time in Europe, mostly Italy and writing plays. The plays were being performed in Europe and in SF. I'd heard through the grapevine he was also writing a film, but I haven't followed that lead I now realize.

That night in Boston, Barry's voice was loud. And it was exciting to allow myself to remember how encouraging he was to me, as a potential writer at ages 25-30, when he was 40-45 and internationally renowned. One day, when we were both living in CA, he took me for a ride in his Cadillac convertible through the Berkeley hills and out to lunch near his studio in the flats. I'd recently returned from a camping trip in Yosemite that was supposed to be for just a weekend, but there had been an earthquake with resulted in an avalanche, so the boy I was dating, Mark, and I had an unexpected hiking vacation extension. He listened to me tell the tale and marvel at how different the Sierra's were from my mole hills back home in New England. Yet I said, if Katahdin was good enough for Thoreau, it was good enough for me, too.

Barry thought my kayaking stories of paddling under the Golden Gate Bridge were on the risky side, and hadn't heard of the rogue wave I'd been paddling off Moss Beach in the winters (It would later be named Mavericks, and world class surfers would compete to ride it ~ if you have an older OS system, you may have the curl of the wave on your desktop right now). He indulged my adrenaline junkie raving and told me stories of literary legends whose paths he'd crossed during his travels.

Then we spoke more about literature, poetry and my wanting to write creative nonfiction. We had long talks about memory vs re-membering. I'd recently spent an afternoon with M.F.K. Fisher, shucking and feeding her oysters with a mutual writer friend, Michael. She'd also spoken, in whisper tones, as the Parkinson's was slowly stealing her story telling strength, about daily writing and journal keeping as a way to preserve memory, even if the lens, or perspective of age, changed the narrative.

So I looked up as Cheryl Strayed began to speak at the AWP Conference. She is a large woman with a deep voice and a blond beauty with kind eyes. There are many fans in the audience and you could tell she feels the weight of responsibility of wanting to both address their interests and answer the questions. She mentions for the first time that the book will be turned into a film. She adds the the actress Reese Witherspoon has bought the rights and will play her in the film! She's funny and humble about this twist of fate. And then she says something that takes me aback for a second. She adds that Laura Dern will play her mother! Now most people in the audience probably didn't hold their breath for that second, but I did.

Why you might why ask did I pause and look around for a second? Because the biggest commercial success that Barry Gifford had from a book being turned into a film was Wild At Heart and who was the young female star in that film: Laura Dern.

So tonight I'm feeling very Wild at Heart. I've just gone to see WILD. Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern are both perfection in their parts. Cheryl has a cameo in the opening scene.

I first climbed Katahdin the year before I learned to write. I last climbed Katahdin  a year before I left NYC  to move to CA. I thought I was leaving publishing then, too. And if Barry had his way, I would have been writing in my speak-easy in Moss Beach and working some manual 9-5 job. Last time I climbed a mountain and camped overnight was in Yosemite during that avalanche. So, I think the next time I climb Katahdin should be before my kids leave the nest with strong flight feathers on their own wild journeys, and hopefully I'll have the seed stages of story worth telling by then, too.

(Photos: top Katahdin 1976, bottom Katahdin 1989)