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An Interview with Alexandra Fuller: Part Two

By Jenny Shank, 5-30-08

In the second part of my interview with Alexandra Fuller, we discuss her passion for Wyoming, her concern for the state’s welfare in the wake of the oil boom, her thoughts on other Wyoming writers, her run-in with Wyoming State Senator Kit Jennings, and how Jackson Hole “feels a whole lot smaller” when both she and Dick Cheney are in town.

New West:  How has Wyoming changed in the years you’ve lived there?

AF: Well, between a quarter and a fifth of the land is now under oil and gas lease.  The place where Colton fell used to be critical winter wildlife range in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem for the animals coming down from Grand Teton National Park.  And if you got caught trespassing out there in the winter, you got into severe trouble.  And in the summer if you were caught off road, they considered that range so critical that you would get in trouble.  I ran into one young man who grew up there who was caught four wheeling off road, and he got arrested and thrown in jail for the night. 

And there used to be this kind of reverence for the open spaces.  It absolutely was sacred ground.  There was a deep understanding that this was a difficult place to make a living for man and for beast.  It did feel wild—it felt African to me.  You could walk all day and not see another human being. 

Now it’s an unnatural place to live in.  You go out to places like Pinedale and you have 3,000 extra men in a county with a total population of 6,000.  It feels temporary and incredibly urgent.  That tranquility is gone.

NW:  Do you still want to stay in Wyoming, given all the changes?

AF: Oh well listen, they picked the wrong person.  I have my mother’s passion for land.  I don’t necessarily agree with the way she decided to fight for it, or her reasons, but I’m absolutely going to stay and fight for this land.

I think that term NIMBY—Not In My Backyard—I think corporations invented that so we would be embarrassed into not fighting for our backyards.  I absolutely am a NIMBY, and I am going to stay and fight for my backyard.  It just happens to be an oil patch.  I’m going to bear witness to the roadkill and the habitat destruction and the air quality and what’s happening to the water.  And I’m going to bear witness every time someone falls off a rig.  I kind of stumbled into the story but it’s got me now.

NW:  Where do you live?

AF: I live in Jackson Hole, in Teton County, which is completely dismissed by the rest of Wyoming as piece of fairyland.  But I have a cabin in Sublette County where I spend my summers as soon as I can get in there.  When enough snow has melted, I take the horses, dogs, and kids.  We’ve got a 900 square foot cabin. 

NW:  Are both of those areas affected by oil development?

AF: No, no, no.  Oh no, because Dick Cheney lives in Jackson Hole and he would never drill an oil well in his backyard.  Jackson Hole is a small town and it feels a whole lot smaller when he and I are both in it.

What the hell’s Dick Cheney thinking?  I know he’s seen it.  I know he flies over that oil patch.  He must be aware of what’s going on.  He must be so blinded by the money.  It makes me sick to my stomach to think that he is a Wyomingite and he’s doing this.  I could understand if Iraqis came into Wyoming and they trashed it and they didn’t care what happened to Wyoming workers.  But I don’t understand it when a Wyoming politician pushes through this energy policy.  We had environmental laws and health and human safety laws to protect us from the worst impulses of our greed.  And all those got rolled back in 2005 to a huge extent.  It just shocks me.

We’ve forgotten our freedom of speech here.  That’s what I love about being in America.  I’d never lived in a country that had freedom of speech in my life—Rhodesia didn’t have it, Zimbabwe doesn’t have it, Zambia, Malawi.  You couldn’t even talk politics in your own home safely, ever.  You wouldn’t even walk out into the middle of an open field and talk politics because you never knew whose side they were on.  So when I came to this country, freedom of speech was so exhilarating I thought that everyone must want to exercise it all the time.  My husband would say to me, “Could you stop it?  It’s so embarrassing.” I’d come back from dinner parties with black and blue shins.

NW: A few years ago you wrote a piece for Salon.com’s ”Literary Guide to the World” about the literature of Wyoming.  Did you read Wyoming writers before you wrote your first Wyoming book?

AF: Oh sure.  Have you read [James Galvin’s] The Meadow?

NW: No, I haven’t.

AF: Oh, just put the phone down right now and go pick it up.  It might be the most perfect book in the English language.  In fact I sent my book to James Galvin because I figured, first of all he’s a grumpy old cowboy, and if he didn’t like it he would let me know.

I had read Annie Proulx before I’d done my research, and I realized after that I don’t think she’s any less of a writer but the idiom is so wrong.  No one sounds like she says they sound like.

NW:  She makes people more colorful--and the names she gives them--Creel Zmundzinski, Jefford J. Pecker, Jumbo Nottage, Wiregrass Cokendall.

AF: And she got the idiom wrong, and she got the unkindness so wrong.  It’s an incredibly hospitable place.  I was treated with such respect across the board by roughnecks and meth addicts, single mothers, cowboys, you name it.  Such respect and such hospitality and openness.  I think that’s part of the reason I’ll never leave Wyoming now.  I really fell in love with the true Wyoming, not these transplants like we have in Jackson and people like Dick Cheney with their shiny damn boots. 

I remember talking to this meth addict in a trailor with a python, cat, and pit bull and anywhere else in the world I would have been terrified.  This meth addict is jumping out of his skin, scratching and hopping about.  And he’s calling me ma’am.  And he’s dropping the f-bomb and saying, “excuse my French.”

You swear in front of Kaylee Bryant, she will have a fit, so that is not accurate in my book.  Roughnecks, believe me, do swear.  So when I gave Kaylee the manuscript she said, “I don’t care if they use that word.  You’re taking it out.” So in my book the roughnecks say “freakin’.”

I love Gretel Erhlich’s work because she’s such a brave woman and she loves the land so much.  But Galvin does something with the people that felt really right to me.  I don’t know if either Gretel or Annie have the people quite right.  Gretel certainly has some of the people right.  Because I was doing the story on meth that turned into a boomtown story, I exposed myself to a wider range of people than I probably would have otherwise, and it was a wonderful thing to do.

The people I hate are the ones who work in the corner office for the oil companies.  I can’t stand Wyoming politicians.  They’re arrogant.  Most of them are in bed with the oil companies.  There are a handful of really fabulous politicians, but there are about ten percent who remind me of Africans, man, a kind of dictator quality to them.  I did an op-ed in the paper [the New York Times].

NW: Yeah, I read that.

AF: And that senator that I talked about phoned me at home at 8:30 in the morning to scream at me.  I said, “Listen Senator Jennings, you’re a public figure.  I’m a writer.  I have a pencil.  Are you sure you want to keep doing this?”

NW: Do you have any sense of what you’re going to do next?  Will you write about Africa or Wyoming?

AF: You know, I wasn’t expecting to write this book.  I was so humbled by this process.  I know people say that and I generally find that extremely suspicious.  But I don’t know how else to say this: it was the holiest thing that ever happened to me.  It felt like a pilgrimage or something.  I feel like the truest thing I can do in response to that is to do what I did when I found Colton, which is to listen and keep my heart open, and see what else walks in, and I don’t know what it’ll be.

I’m trying to take a little bit of time off and be with the family.  I volunteer every week with emotionally and physically abused kids at a ranch close to where I live, and I’m really loving that.  I like being a little bit more connected to the world—I think writing can be a dangerously lonely thing.  So who knows?  Who knows what’ll walk back in.

NW: I read that you used to write novels.

AF: Oh God.  They’re awful.

NW:  So will you keep on with nonfiction or would you ever try fiction again?

AF: I think there are so many important nonfiction stories to be told, and I do think you lose a little bit of power if you start making stuff up.  Then there’s this whole genre where you make stuff up and say it’s true.  Artistic license aside, I think that’s been a huge disservice to literary nonfiction.

This book aged me about a decade.  It was by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.  Maybe I could lighten up a bit next time, but I doubt it.  I just get so passionate about stuff.

The kids that I volunteer with, I’m so moved by them, and there’s a disproportionate number of the kids that are from the reservation, and I am starting to feel like that would be my next place to go.  Maybe I’m always attracted to people who are lost or displaced or somehow broken.  We’ll see.

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By Jenny Shank, 5-30-08 | comments (7) | email story | print story

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