Where I Write: Shelley Read - In The Wilderness

‘Where I write’ by Shelley Read 

In the Wilderness

Go As A River began on a summer evening while I was out camping by myself.

I was perched on a log in a high alpine meadow, appreciating the sun’s slow descent behind a mountain ridge and the cast of golden light all around. Just then, a doe stepped into the clearing very near me, followed by one spotted fawn and, eventually, a second, smaller fawn who was struggling to keep up. I gasped; the deer turned their heads toward me in their elegant but cautious way; they crossed the meadow and disappeared into the forest; my heart ached, as much from bearing witness to the simple beauty of their evening walk toward the river as for the vulnerability of that scrawny fawn. How, I wondered, would the doe keep both of her babies alive?

I was so moved by the scene, and by my feeling of kinship with that mother deer, that I wrote it all down in my journal. As dusk faded to twilight, I set my journal aside, donned a down jacket, and lay on my back upon the bare ground to watch the stars come out - one by one until, beneath the entire expanse of the Milky Way, I felt tiny and reverent and filled with wonder. Then I crawled into my tent and wrote throughout the dark night. 

In ‘a tent of one’s own,’ I am able to escape from the demands and busy-ness of my domestic and professional life to just BE. Be quiet. Be still. Be alone. Be in the wilderness. There, the words flow.

Much of Go As A River evolved in the same wild landscape as the novel’s setting because, like Torie Nash, it is where I listen and where I learn; where I feel as humble and vulnerable as I feel empowered and alive; where my ignorant but wide open human heart tries to comprehend what the mountains and the rivers know. The more I came to know my character, the more I felt like I had a friend by my side each time I headed out into the wilderness to write, with just a notebook and a pen and a tent of my own.