A conversation with Josh MacIvor-Andersen
Josh MacIvor-Andersen is the author of the memoir On Heights & Hunger, and the editor of Rooted, An Anthology of Arboreal Nonfiction. His essays, reviews, and reportage have won numerous national awards and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and can be found in journals and magazines such as The Guardian, Normal School, Gulf Coast, Paris Review Daily, Fourth Genre, Arts and Letters, Sycamore Review, Diagram, The Collagist, Garden and Gun, Memoir (and), New Millennium Writings, and The Northwest Review, among others. He lives in Marquette, Michigan with his family and a fat cat named Baby Kitty.
“Alongside my messiah complex, my wife diagnosed me with ‘mean world syndrome,’ a term used to describe the paranoia and fear that can occur after one has been inundated by the violence and the general bad newsiness of mainstream media. It turns out that after enough Nightlines and Cops, one can start to see the world strictly through those quick edit montages of human evil and natural disasters.”
– from On Heights & Hunger
A car backfires somewhere and dogs sound the alarm. I jump, anticipating, watching the street from my window.
I listen to too much public radio. No, really. Stories about wildfires and North Korea and the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting. It is playing in the background as I write this. I listen to the story, the analysis of the story, and then the breakdown and critique of the coverage.
On Heights & Hunger does not try to turn off the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and I would be lying if I said the book could keep me from being overwhelmed—both by my need to listen to a constant stream of bad news and by my own paralysis after listening. But I identify so strongly with MacIvor-Andersen’s book because it helps me reframe my fear of the world. In it, Josh MacIvor-Andersen writes about being a professional tree climber, who is grappling with the meanness of the world, divinity, and connection.
In one chapter, MacIvor-Andersen describes meeting Jesus in a Waffle House, in the next, he looks for empathy in Russian orphanages. These scenes are characteristic of the careful way the book avoids easy religious dismissal or “mean world syndrome.” Instead, MacIvor-Andersen shows us his search for divinity and empathy from the limbs of a Tennessee hackberry, writing:
I hadn’t found God in the children on the sidewalks, couldn’t be him for them, couldn’t see him through the thick cast iron of the ovens of Auschwitz so I sought him in the trees and sought him in my brother, for my brother, through my brother there was a god moving in the trees destroying and feasting and never resting in the tops of all the ash trees bending down low in decline.
After reading On Heights & Hunger, I’m still thinking about the “god moving in the trees” and the many questions posed in the book. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to ask Josh how he thought about bringing together all these intricate threads.
Tracy Haack: On Heights & Hunger covers a lot of ground—family, spirituality, human connection, environmentalism, isolationism, adventure… Because you cover unanswerable questions, I wonder how you thought about narrative arc. Did you know what shape the book would take when you started writing?
Josh MacIvor-Andersen: I was first drawn to nonfiction because it presented itself as this wonderful mechanism not really to answer questions but explore them. I loved the fact that big mysteries surrounding God and love and pain and family could be interrogated through writing, even if all you got was a few messy orbits around a murky center.
When I realized that my relationship with trees (occupational, vocational, recreational, etc.) was a consistent thread running through numerous episodes in my life, the orbit pulled tighter. I felt like I had finally found a narrative way forward, but I knew the book would be episodic. I knew it would pop in and out of seasons. I just wanted to make sure I never lost sight of the woods.
TH: It has become something of a cliché to talk about the way the 2016 election has recontextualized books even when they aren’t overtly political. But as I read, I couldn’t help thinking about the book in terms of current events. That said, how much, if any, of the writing was a response to the things you were seeing or reading at the time?
JMA: I think it’s pretty hard to fully sever oneself from the contemporary air we breathe. Even if we’re writing memoir or family history or, I don’t know, historical fiction, we still live smack in the middle of a zeitgeist and that spirit informs the work.
In some ways, I feel like I was wrestling with evangelicalism when it was experiencing both an identity crisis and significant growing pains. The particular kind of believers I was surrounded with were asking hard questions and trying to understand the tradition they had inherited in the midst of a lot of collective upheaval. I wanted to write a book that illustrated some of the disconnects of faith I was feeling every day, from every angle.
Spoiler alert: evangelicalism is still in the midst of a serious identity crisis and I feel less hopeful than I once did for its ongoing relevance. As a brand it feels bankrupt. So many of its adherents have moved well outside of any gospel-anchored interpretation of current events to an insular nationalistic worldview based on fear. Yet they still crow evangelical. I think we’re on the cusp of a reckoning with all that, but I feel gratefully on the periphery of it. I’m watching from the sidelines mostly yelling: Foul!
My interest is in what’s next. What will people of faith make of themselves? How will they engage culture and issues and an accelerating world in any kind of authentic, helpful way? If you look close you can see lots of signs of real hope. Few of them, in my view, currently exist in mainstream evangelical circles.
TH: Creative nonfiction writers have an odd task of creating themselves as a character in their own work. Is this something you are conscious of while writing?
JMA: I remember first reading John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Upon This Rock” in grad school and, while there are approximately a million things to applaud in that piece, what struck me was how many different personas he adopts in a single essay. He moves fluidly from a somewhat dismissive big-city writer to slapstick bumbler to armchair sociologist to twinkle-eyed music historian to confessional former-believer-who-still-loves-Jesus. His final manifestation: a man who falls in love with these kids who he could have just as easily mocked and dismissed.
In other words, Sullivan had mastered his masks. After seeing the magic he wove, as a result I became super aware of how we shape ourselves on the page. It’s always on my mind. I think our awareness of ourselves as characters has the potential to strengthen and deepen the work. I think we ignore it to our detriment.
TH: What was the easiest or most satisfying section of the book to write? The most challenging?
JMA: I had never read a book that addressed in a literary way what my brother and I were doing for a living every day. The inner workings, you know? There were books on trees and some on adventure climbing and others on research or protest, but no personal account of what it was like to climb every day in an urban forestry context, or compete for championships. I was really motorized by that lack and found great satisfaction trying to make the more technical climbing sections come alive, along with our colleagues and their callouses and unfortunate tattoos.
On the flipside, I had tried writing about my dad for years but always felt dissatisfied with how he came out on the page. Sometimes he seemed too villainous or other times too silly. I think writing about him in a way that felt, at least for me, both honest and honoring was really tricky. And when I finally settled in behind a drumkit to smash my way through his songs in an act of immersion nonfiction, well… that was a pretty charged and fraught experience. I doubt my upstairs neighbors appreciated it, but it had to be done.
TH: In your “Acknowledgments and Admissions,” you remind the reader of the many interpretations of events that always exist. You say, “Lastly, this is a work of memory and interpretation, both of which are intimately my own. While it is mostly nonfiction, a few names have been changed and the chronology of events, as well as some details, have been shaped for the sake of story.” What does this mean for your writing process? How do you make the decision to make changes “for the sake of story”?
JMA: I come from a pretty traditional approach to nonfiction. Whatever you do, you can’t make stuff up, right? Well, kinda. Sure. Maybe? Now, I’ve spent so many years absorbing and loving genre-blurred hybrid forms that in my reading, at least, I don’t even think about it much. I guess I drank the Kool Aid.
But for my writing, I still feel some contractual obligation to at least try and clue in a reader to the places where I’m pushing past verifiable, public-record truth. This is just personal. Nothing I feel should be codified in the universal bylaws of CNF. It’s the journalism education I just can’t fully shake.
So when a conversation in the book takes place in a Waffle House with my dad, a conversation that happened verbatim in a different context yet felt like an amalgam of thousands of Waffle House conversations, I embedded it in an imagined scene and tried to key in a reader to its dreaminess.
The funny thing: my dad’s half of the dialogue is the most accurate thing in the entire book. As in, recorded and stored. I just wanted (needed) to engage with it in a different way than it actually happened, so I had the conversation I wished I had had on the page. I gave readers my best wink wink and the gods haven’t struck me down yet.
But I will say that was the only place I felt like I needed to take such an overt liberty. It was a place where I had this critically important content (my dad describing his relationship to drumming) that simply needed the proper context.
TH: It can be really challenging to write about others, especially if you aren’t present or the person is in vulnerable circumstance. In my own writing, I find it really difficult to write about family or to write about people who are disenfranchised. Sometimes, I avoid writing these scenes because I am anticipating the potential of my words to hurt or erase the experience of another. You write about your family. Do you have any advice for writers like me?
JMA: No advice! But I can tell you how I handled sensitive passages with family members who are A) still alive, B) dearly beloved, and C) never asked to be pulled into my interpretation of family history.
I wrote what I felt had to be written and, in the case of my parents, I corroborated and discussed what would appear and, in the case of my big brother, I made sure he was past the Tennessee statute of limitations and couldn’t go to jail and, in the case of my baby sister, I actually asked permission after showing her a draft of the chapter where she is prominent. She was the only one I approached that way. I offered to lose the pages if she didn’t want to appear as a character in the book and was basically hovering over select-all with my finger on the delete button.
But instead of wanting to be removed, she thanked me for tackling the history and gave me her enthusiastic blessing. I know there are a range of contracts writers have with their subjects. Some are fiercely protective of the writer’s right to tell the story and others, of course, are much more sensitized to the subjects and their particular, real-life situations.
But I think your point on writing about folks who are somehow disenfranchised is really important and timely. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why and how I have a “voice” at all while so many are silenced (either by themselves or systemic, outside forces). I used to think it was enough to be a voice for those without one, but I find myself revisiting the fundamental imbalances and injustices that have empowered me and diminished others in the first place.
TH: What are you reading now? And what are you currently working on?
JMA: Books recently finished yet still stacked on my bedside table waiting to be returned to their proper resting places on the shelf:
- Wrinkle in Time Trilogy, Madeleine L’Engle
- We Were Eight Years in Power,Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Stephen Florida, Gabe Habash
- Citizen, Claudia Rankin
- Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
- The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
- Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
- Chokehold: Policing Black Men, Paul Butler
I’m working on stories of arrival. Inching forward. I’m also working on a full-length guidebook for my small town by a big lake, Marquette, MI, on commission from the Chamber of Commerce. That’s fun and weird and I want to make something that doesn’t feel like a glossy brochure with restaurant menus and stock photos of people on fat bikes. We have lots of that around here.
We all live in places blanketed by cultural clichés. No one’s safe. To be from the Midwest means X or the Pacific Northwest X or—egad!—the Southeast. I’m anxious to both address Upper Peninsula stereotypes and disrupt them.
And lastly, thanks so much for asking questions! The truth is, we all write in a relative closet, even if we work in cafes or libraries, and to have anyone interested in the words once they’re revealed is an incredible honor. And I don’t just say that. It’s really special to have a chance to talk about the work. Thanks for taking the time.
TRACY HAACK teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She has an MFA from Western Washington University. Her work has been published in The Fugue, The Pinch, Hobart, and more. When she isn’t reading and writing, she enjoys crafting with her cat, Benjamin Buttons.