Susan Swetnam

interviewed by Laurel Johnson

You’re a Philadelphia native who’s been at Idaho State University more than thirty years now. You’ve said the  minute you got off the plane in Idaho you knew you were “home.” How has life in Idaho impacted your creativity? 

Living in Idaho has been one of the most important factors in my writing for thirty years. The sense of space and the availability of quiet and privacy outside are absolutely essential for the way I work. My house is in the mountains, and the study where I write – my late husband Ford’s old study – has a view of a nearby high ridge covered with junipers and a more distant line of 7,000-foot peaks. There’s something about long views that clears a person’s head, I think, cliche though that is.
When I have a writing deadline, as when I was finishing My Best Teachers Were Saints, I tend to get up very, very early, write for a few hours until the sun comes up, then take a break in the backyard hot tub with coffee and watch birds, letting my mind empty and recharge. Then I’ll write until late afternoon. Depending on the season, I like to either cross-country ski or hike in the mountains alone for an hour or two or three as the light changes into evening. I’ve solved so many problems in that time after I’m “done” for the day that I’ve learned to take a notebook along on those jaunts. I’m so lucky to live in a place where solitude outdoors and lovely mountain landscape are an everyday luxury – and where a woman can walk mountain trails alone safely.

I never realized that I was claustrophobic until I moved here thirty years ago, and I found myself breathing deeply for the first time. I never realized how much maverick there was in my soul, either.

As an award-winning writer, teacher, and citizen, what has your work in public humanities contributed to your writing?

My work with the Idaho Humanities Council has been one of the three pillars of my working life for the past thirty years, along with writing and teaching. I’ve been chair of that organization’s volunteer board; have ghost-written grants to NEH for IHC for council-conducted projects on regional literature; have run a few grants of my own as project director; have been an evaluator and consultant; have been a project scholar for more Let’s Talk About It public library discussion series and more speakers bureau gigs than I can count. I love that work, and it has impacted my writing a lot. For one thing, it’s taken me all over the state – I sometimes joke that I’ve spent much of my adult life lining up projects that will involve other people paying me to drive around Idaho and the Intermountain West. My initial trips to so many places that appear in my work were funded by IHC as I worked on various public programs – to St. Gertrude’s up north in Cottonwood, for example, and to Priest Lake, just to cite two examples in what I hope will be the next book.

Beyond that, I think it’s good for writers and scholars to interact with adults who don’t live lives in the academy – people in small towns who work “regular” jobs. When you lead book-discussion sessions in public libraries, you remember just how exciting it is to read for pleasure – these folks come ready to talk, and ready to ask questions of the program scholar, and the sessions can go on for a long time. As Ford used to say when he dragged himself home after such programs late at night, “they talked about it, all right.” He loved LTAI and was probably the best discussion leader in the program’s history – people adored him. It’s good to remember what “real readers” are like if you’re writing; it’s good to be a populist as well as a craftsperson. It’s good to remember what it feels like to be altruistic, too. And the stories you hear about people’s lives! Ford and I have both stolen so many lines from people we met in the course of IHC work.

I believe deeply in the Council’s mission – to bring humanities-centered programs to out-of-school adults – and I think IHC has done superb work at that. It’s not quite accurate to say, though, that I’ve been “giving back” in what I’ve done with the Council; I’ve gotten so much joy in the work myself that I suspect I still owe.

Your interest in food led to consulting for the Smithsonian Institute. Tell readers a bit about that experience.

The Smithsonian exhibit is actually a great example of how an IHC project both grew from my past writing and is leading me to future work. I became a food writer about twenty years ago, when I submitted a personal essay about entering the Eastern Idaho State Fair to Gourmet magazine, over the transom. I was young, and I didn’t know that they almost never took unsolicited freelance submissions. Well, they took mine, and paid me well, and then they took two more essays, and then they hired me to write a few lead travel articles. Those were heady years–I was in my late thirties, writing for millions of people, making what to me were huge paychecks for taking luxury vacations. I stopped doing that kind of writing, though, when I realized that it was taking over my real creative writing and my scholarly work – it’s so seductive to write for a big market like that! I simply stopped proposing article ideas, and then the magazine changed management and style, and I haven’t written for it for more than a decade now.

But that work led to such exciting consequences. I did some personal essays connected with food, and I guess I got a reputation, because when Greenwood Press was putting together its regional American culture reference volumes, just after Ford died, I got hired to write the long chapter on regional foodways of the Northern Rockies. Was that fun! I did a summer of traveling research, both in libraries and on the ground (e.g. visiting farmers’ markets, small producers, etc.). I learned so much that I actually started to have credentials as a foodways scholar. The Smithsonian appointment came from that. It was fun, too – a traveling exhibit entitled “Key Ingredients, America By Food” came to six small Idaho towns as part of the Museum on Main Street program, coordinated by IHC. Each venue did independent public humanities programming – what a great and crazy mix of activities! I spoke in each town; I also did other things, including a full-day workshop on writing food memoir sponsored by the Idaho Commission on the Arts in Hailey. That was wonderful – a dozen very, very interested people came, and they wrote very well, indeed.

That led to the spin-off, which I can’t wait to get back to. One of the exhibit venues was the Museum of St. Gertrude, which is attached to the Monastery of St. Gertrude which I mentioned earlier, a Benedictine woman’s order to which I have been attached as a friend for years. I’ve been spending at least a week there each summer since Ford died, and going other times, too, periodically. I’m not nun material – everybody in this picture realizes this – but many of the sixty or so women there have become good friends, and I’ve done a little writing for various causes of theirs. After my exhibit talk, they started reminiscing about food in the monastery in the past versus now, and the talk was so interesting and significant that I wrote another IHC grant to gather oral history about monastery food and culture. Last summer, I collected about thirty-six CDs of interviews, and donated them to depository collections. The next step is to write a book about the material. It’s so rich, so evocative – the ways that eating patterns at the convent have changed over the past hundred years seem to me to be directly parallel to changes in the way they define their vocation and their relationship in community. That book is currently number three – or maybe number four – in the holding pattern, though.

Your husband, Ford Swetnam, was an accomplished poet. What effect did marriage to Ford have on your writing?

Ford and I influenced each other’s writing deeply. He modeled what a writing life that was also a teaching life looked like for me, how those were interrelated and could feed each other. He also modeled what it looks like to have incredibly high standards for yourself. What a wonderful poet he was. I just finished a piece about Ford’s life and poetry for a volume that Greg Kuzma is bringing out from Best Cellar Press in Nebraska, and it’s such a privilege –but so daunting – to write about him.

We both wrote before we married, but I think it’s fair to say that both of us got much more serious and disciplined after. We were both pretty wild before, for one thing, and marriage cut down on the free-floating psychodrama, saving us a great deal of energy for creative work. Not that a marriage between two creative people –in the same field, yet! – wasn’t volatile. But, in the years after he died, whenever I’ve been tempted to dwell on the inevitable tough memories, all I have to do is look at the books he wrote – all after we married – to know that the marriage was a good one, indeed, if it helped him in any way to do that.

He was my best editor – so clear-headed and precise in diction and phrasing, so honest about not fooling yourself with nice-sounding baloney or cliche. He was so funny. After writing days – one of us would be at home, the other at school, always – he’d come home often and say, ‘listen to this!” and he would read something he’d done, and then I’d read, and we’d talk about the work. One of the very, very toughest things for me when he died was to lose that one voice about my work that I trusted absolutely, that voice that would always tell me the truth. Sometimes I’ve been able to tell myself what I think he would have told me about a particular problem, and those are always very fine moments.

In a very direct way, Ford was such a polymath – and such a magpie – that his example has freed me to be much more wide-ranging in the reading and music and other sources that I draw on for my own work. The new creative book manuscript, for instance, alludes to everything from Hindu devotional chant and Hawthorne to the Grateful Dead.

You’re currently working on a new book project. What is the title and when will it be released? Tell us more about it.

Which one? I’ve got a scholarly book on Carnegie libraries in the Intermountain West supposedly in press right now; that should probably count as #1 in the queue.

The one I’m most interested in, though, the creative one, is a collection of thirty-four essays that make a narrative about my first six years of widowhood. Its working title is “Beginner’s Mind,” and I’ve literally been working on it since the week after Ford died. An agent – an editor at Loyola Press, which published the Saints book – has asked to see a formal proposal, and I’m in the last stages of preparing that. The proposal work has been so, so helpful – I’m finally seeing what the book is really about, I think, and I’m finally thinking of it as a book, versus my life on paper. If the proposal is a go, we’ll start shopping it sometime this spring. It includes a poem of Ford’s as an epigram to each of the six sections, and I’m excited about that.

The next project after that – now in a draft of about 45,000 words, actually – is a novel, a comic political thriller about an attempted political assassination, set on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. It’s such fun to work on; can’t wait to get back to it. I also have the food at the monastery book – which I’m imagining as a work for general readers, with photos of that gorgeous place and monastery recipes – on hold. And I have two or three essays toward another collection of creative nonfiction, to be titled Hindu Goddesses for Modern Women. So I can see where the next few years of work are going to come from. Much as I love teaching, I’m thinking about cutting back my course load in upcoming semesters, as I begin to think about retiring.