Bridget A. Lyons, Author, Adventurer, and Artist

165-92

 

Will Bachman  0:02

Hello and welcome to The 92 Report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992. I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Bridget. Lyons, Bridget, welcome to the show.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  0:18

Thanks, Will, thanks for having me

Will Bachman  0:20

Tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  0:25

Okay, it’s funny. I have listened to a handful of episodes where people have been vying for the title of weirdest person in the graduating class, or, you know, most rambling journey between college and now, and so I’m, I guess I’m throwing my hat into the ring for that one, perhaps not for weirdest, but for perhaps a little more circuitous of a, of a tour, if you will, than than, than average. I grab graduated from Harvard in 92 like many of y’all on the show here, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself, I had had a really powerful experience during college of taking a course with an organization known as NOLS, National Outdoor Leadership School. Knowles is like people have often heard of Outward Bound, which is a sister organization. Knowles is a little more focused on training for doing the activities in the mountains and on leadership, and a little less so on personal development, but personal development is still a big part of it. So I had done this three month course in Alaska, three months camping straight, non stop with, you know, two showers mixed in there shortly after, like during college, or when it was after summer after freshman year.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  1:46

yep, yep. Basically, I went straight from freshman like, finished freshman year, flew to Anchorage, spent 30 days hiking in the Talkeetnas Mountains. Outside of Anchorage, spent 30 days glacier mountaineering in the Alaska range, and then spent 20 some odd days in the Prince William Sound. And this is 1989 so it was right after the Valdez oil spill, in fact, and we were sea kayaking around that area. So I had this experience after freshman year, of like transcendent wilderness experience of both being, you know, living in nature for the summer, and feeling connected to the other people with whom I was doing that and connected to the creatures I was living among. And came back to very urban Cambridge, and was like, huh, I don’t know. This is a real challenging juxtaposition. Ended up doing a bunch of things with the Harvard outing club over the course of the four years I was in school, more or less as a way to escape from urban Cambridge, and also what I felt like was a bit of a competitive and and driven atmosphere that wasn’t wasn’t always in tune with where I felt like I was, or where I had been over the course of that summer. So I graduated when I was done, I tried to get a, you know, quote, unquote, normal adult job, and got a teaching certificate and taught a couple years of school in Marin County, California. But during that time, was like, Yeah, but that Knowles thing that really worked for me, so I trained to be an instructor for them over the summer while I was teaching in Marin County. So I taught a year, then worked courses for them in the summer, taught a year, worked courses for them in the summer, and basically got to the place where, like, I love teaching, but I love doing it in the outdoors much more than in a traditional classroom setting. So I went and worked for Knowles full time for like, 13 years. Wow, teaching young adults primarily, everything from hiking to mountaineering to sea kayaking to river kayaking to rafting to canyoneering to a little bit of backcountry skiing. So expeditions between 12 and 30 days long, entirely in the wilderness. And that was, you know, that was what I did for quite a long time. And, you know, lived out of my truck for a bunch of that time, lived in storage units, sometimes rented a place, did a lot of traveling, obviously, both for work and for fun. Toward the end of my time there, you know, you get to a certain age and you miss showers and salads and consistent friends that you see on a daily basis. So I transitioned out of that, moved to the Tetons. Lived in the Tetons for an. Other 10 years or so, doing a bunch of different jobs, but primarily feeding my habit of still wanting to romp around in the outdoors and do a lot of mountain biking, do a lot of did a lot of skiing, did a lot of paddling. Owned a yoga studio, taught yoga at the time and and then moved to Santa Cruz about 10 years ago, Santa Cruz California, and started to really focus on my writing. And, you know, there’s a circuitous path to get to that, but I’ll to make a long story short, my writing is primarily focused on my adventures and my encounters with non human creatures in the wild. So I’m drawing upon this, you know, multiple decades of experience running around in the wilderness. Sometimes that wilderness is, you know, mountains in Alaska, mountains in Patagonia, fjords and Patagonia. Sometimes it’s, you know, the beach in Santa Cruz, or it’s, it’s a river not far from where I live, or something like that. But, you know, worked, started focusing more and more on my writing, went back and got an MFA and Creative Writing a handful of years ago, and now I mostly work as an editor to put food on the table to by editing other people’s books. But my own writing, and my own recently published book is focused on these encounters with with wildlife and with wild ecosystems, and really on the power of connecting to this whole other planet that is, you know, not human based, not anthropocentric, and the value of that for us, and the value of that for all these other living things that we share the planet with.

 

Will Bachman  6:44

Tell us about your latest book. What’s the title?

 

Bridget A. Lyons  6:46

Sure. It’s called Entwined, dispatches from the intersection of species, published by Texas a&m Press. And it’s a collection of 14 essays, as I mentioned, that focus on my interactions with creatures in the wilderness, and each of them braids. There’s a technique in nonfiction these days known as braided narrative. So in these narratives, I braid my personal experiences with the creature, and each of the 14 essays is centered on a different creature. So braiding my personal experience with science research about that creature, with ethical considerations around how we could do a better job living in, you know, in cohabitation with these creatures and with an adventure, usually there’s an adventure involved. So there’s a little bit of that element too. So each essay combines those elements to, you know, celebrate and hopefully induce wonder and amazement at the creativity and capacity of these other creatures that are not us.

 

Will Bachman  7:56

And did you just jump right into writing the book, or had some of these been published in magazines?

 

Bridget A. Lyons  8:08

Or, Yeah, good question about a third of them, half of them were published in various literary magazines. So I had been and I didn’t necessarily envision this book so much as I had been publishing these pieces that all braided my encounters with non-human creatures and science and memoir, like I said. And then one day, you know, sort of stepped back and was like, Huh? It seems like I have a theme going on here. And, you know, one of them was about great horned owls, and one of them was about sponges, and one of them was about chestnuts and the recovery of the American Chestnut on the East Coast. And one of them was about humpback whales, and one of them was about kelp. And I was like, Huh, you know, if I can come up with a handful more of these, and then call from this selection of them and pull the best of them into a book, then I’ve really got something that, taken as a whole, offers the reader almost kaleidoscopic type vision of life with the myriad wonderful non human life forms that are out there. And so, yeah, so it was, it was an evolution, as you suggested there. It was an evolution from publishing individual essays to publishing a compendium, as it were.

 

Will Bachman  9:30

Well, great. Well, we’ll include a link to the book in the show notes. I’m looking at it now. I love the cover with this sort of wood cut feel of the owl. It’s beautiful.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  9:40

Yeah. So that, and that’s my artwork. So I’m also, I’m also an artist. I’ve also been an artist all my life, hobby artist, more so than a, certainly not a professional visual artist. But when my editor got them in the final manuscript, she was like, Well, it seems like we ought to find an illustrator for this. And I said, well. So we could, but, you know, I actually could illustrate it, I think. And she was a little skeptical, and I said, you know, I have been making wood block prints, linoleum block prints, forever, and every year, for many years, I’ve created a Christmas or a holiday card, really. I call it a New Year’s card, and I celebrate like a creature that we need to invoke whose characteristics I think would be helpful for us to invoke in the upcoming year. So different creature every year. And I explained to my editor that I had been doing this for forever and writing these little blurbs about the creature. And she said, Well, send me some of your stuff. And I did, and she was like, Okay, great. So I went and made a whole bunch of rather large linoleum block prints that got included in the book. And then, so the cover that you’re looking at there is a combination of two of them. It’s the one I made for the great horned owl essay and the one I made for the kelp essay. So what you’re seeing there, what the designer did, who did the book cover, is she superimposed the kelp pattern onto the owl pattern, because I had asked for a cover image that would express this idea of entanglement, of entwinement, of connection, of the fact that all of these species, including us who live on the planet, are very much connected, and we can’t be pulled apart. And so that’s how she combined them, which I love, oh, I love it.

 

Will Bachman  11:30

It’s really a beautiful I love woodcut. I love linoleum woodcut. This is super impromptu, but do you want to go grab a copy of the book and, like, read a read a page or something, or selection. We don’t often get that. Love to hear a little selection

 

Bridget A. Lyons  11:48

of it fabulous. I will read from the first essay. The first essay is called tangled. It’s about kelp, which is which are fascinating. Interestingly enough, kelp is not a plant or an animal. When we were in college, kelp might have, still be, still have been considered a plant, but it has fungus. What is it? It is a macro algae. Algae has its own. Algae has its own world. And that’s part of the reason. When people say, well, is your book about plants and animals? I have, I have to say, Well, no, because there’s also kelp, which is neither a plant nor an animal. They’re a macro algae. So they got reclassified sometime between when we graduated and now. But this essay is about kelp, and it’s also about I spent a good part of the last 10 years becoming a surfer, because that’s that’s if you move to Santa Cruz to be by the beach and you’re an outdoor athlete, that’s, you know, that’s what you’re going to do. And worked my way up through the beginner breaks to more challenging breaks and to, you know, trying to become someone who surfs real breaks in Santa Cruz, California. And so this essay intertwines some of my surfing experience with kelp with the bigger question of how we value ourselves and how we value living things, which might be of interest to folks in this podcast. So I’ll read a little

 

Will Bachman  13:14

part of that. All right, good.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  13:18

I spend a lot of time sitting up on my surfboard watching the surface of the Monterey Bay for the darkened wave faces that make my heart beat faster in between sets, I pull a strand of kelp from the water and play with it. If it’s a piece of bull kelp, the kind with a single stalk that’s an inch or two in diameter. I grab it somewhere below the tennis ball sized air bladder and whip it around like a cellulose lasso. If it’s a fragment of giant kelp, I lay the more delicate array on my board to admire its alternating patterns of blades and stipes, structures that would be called leaves and stems on a terrestrial plant, but earn unique names on a piece of aquatic macro algae. Sometimes I’ll wrap a braid of giant kelp around my wrist so that its air bladders, smaller ones that resemble the bulb of a scallion dangle like charms from my mermaid’s bracelet, adding some flair to my otherwise bland, black neoprene outfit. These will be the most contented moments of my day. These extended breaks from the maddening habit of assessing my own worth and the value of everything around me, the texture of wet kelp is like nothing else I know. The obvious word to describe it would be slimy, but that doesn’t quite work for me. Kelp doesn’t feel like uncooked egg or earthworm skin. It is much firmer and slicker, yet still wet and cool to the touch. Unlike fish or slugs, it leaves you with no residue. Once you have pulled a stiff stalk of the genus laminaria through your fingertips, all you can say is that it feels like kelp. It is totally alien and slightly creepy, and I love. It for its uniqueness. It’s hard to find information about kelp that isn’t focused on all the good it does for other species. When I first started clicking on marine biology websites, I was simply trying to find out the names and characteristics of the various type of seaweed I was getting caught up in. But as they became my more regular companions, I wanted to acquire some cool facts about them, things like giant kelp can grow as fast as 10 to 12 inches per day. Or kelp can stretch up to 40% of its length before it breaks. And bull kelps air bladders contain up to 10% carbon monoxide. I learned that giant kelp, the garland that gets wound around the leash of my surfboard prefers calm conditions where it out competes its cousin for for sunlight, Burley bull kelp does better in turbulent waters in coastal California, where I live these two vie for predominant species status among kelp. That is, apart from this smattering of details, I was mostly inundated with information about how important kelp is to other species that sit up further on the supposed evolutionary ladder as a literal aquatic forest. Kelp conglomerations have been documented as providing shelter for over 800 species of marine animals, from invertebrates and fish to the Central Coast, beloved sea otters and sea lions. Fisheries are healthier where kelp thrives. People eat seaweed directly. We extract compounds from it that appear in shampoo, putting soy milk, toothpaste, fertilizer, nail polish, ketchup and many other commonly used items. Colonies of kelp soften the effects of coastal shore break these resources told me that we should value this creature for the ways in which it serves the greater ecosystem and ultimately us. But what about valuing it for just being? Does that count? If the value of a living thing is based on how many services it provides to the larger ecosystem, I’m looking pretty worthless. I’m a 55 year old woman who has consciously chosen not to reproduce. So I’ve already failed to turn out one of the products I could have offered the world. I would be hard pressed to say that I have a community depending on me, and my income is low enough that I don’t pay taxes. I think this one really bothers my father, a Wall Street guy who embraces the narrative of the self made man, it’s important to be a producer, an earner, a contributor. He always said when he shouted, make yourself useful from his armchair, I assumed he was referring both to the folding of laundry and to choosing a life path according to his definition of useful, one tied to output, income, status and achievement. I am failing miserably when I measure this myself this way, I feel like a lone herring lost beneath a bed of kelp where the canopy of stipes, blades and pneumaticus completely obscures the sunlight. Then again, when I picture that bed of kelp, I can’t help seeing how intertwined its elements are together. The stalks form a network of braided organisms that creates a fertile ecosystem, one in which each strand is an important part of the whole, one in which countless other creatures can find nourishment and protection. When this community undulates hypnotically with the incoming swell, I am captivated

 

Will Bachman  18:22

several different strands there you have.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  18:26

Yeah, exactly. I thought that one seems like a good example of sort of bringing personal memoir, personal contemplation, in with science, in with the activity that I’m engaged in. In that case, it’s, it’s surfing and surfing with kelp and so, yeah, that’s a little taste of what my writing is doing and what I’m doing in this book.

 

Will Bachman  18:46

Wonderful so entwined dispatches from the intersection of species will include a link in the show notes. What a wonderful reading. That was, thank you. That was that we don’t well, like doubling now is like audio book here that was great. Tell me about you mentioned your dad in that reading. Tell me about your dad and his take on a daughter who, you know, spends 13 years leading wilderness stuff. It seems like, tell us a little bit about that.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  19:19

Sure. That is not the only essay in which my father makes an appearance in the book. There’s another one that’s about the American Chestnut Tree. He has been he’s very involved in a fishing and hunting club in the Poconos, and he personally has gotten quite invested in the resurgence of the possibility of re introducing the American Chestnut to the East Coast. It got wiped out by a blight quite a long time ago. But there’s some, you know, genetic modification stuff going on, and some other projects happening to potentially try to produce a blight resistant strain. And so one of the essays is about me. Me looking at myself as this, you know, child free. Not not continuing the lineage as it were, person, but the ways in which I do continue the lineage, through my conservation efforts and my efforts in connecting people to nature. And how my father, I think, expected me to continue the lineage, and expected a certain expected me also, I think, to continue in his financial career footsteps. And over time, that’s been a source of some tension. But in the end, I think we have found some common ground in our interests, in in certain aspects of of the natural world. And seeing my father become invested in the American Chestnut and invested in other conservation efforts on his hunting and fishing club property has given me a space to connect with him. And you know, he still, despite the fact that I think I didn’t end up the way he would have liked me to, I do think he has a lot of respect for, you know, the fact that I’ve climbed a lot of high peaks, the fact, you know, just the other day, I was on a scuba diving trip for a couple of weeks, and he wants to hear about what I saw. And he, I know he talks to his hunting, fishing club, people about, you know what I’m doing and what adventures I’m on. So I think that despite maybe having different views about how I should navigate the world as an adult, I think we are in a good place of appreciating the places where the spaces where we share commonality. Yeah. I mean,

 

Will Bachman  21:45

you talked about your income being below the level where you need to pay taxes, but you have spent your life doing what a lot of people kind of dream about doing on their vacation or when they retire, right? Yep, yep.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  21:59

And that that’s, you know, that that was a conscious choice. And I would be lying if I said I made that choice and never looked back. I would love to say that I’m that confident. I definitely have have demons, just like many of other people do that, that say like, oof, why couldn’t you just like, you know, you did really well in your LSATs? Why didn’t you just suck it up and go to LA and go to law school and do the thing that you were supposed to do? And you could be fighting conservation battles that way. And you know, that kind of questioning is still a part of my reality. And by the same token, all that time I spent leading young people in the wilderness, I feel like I had a powerful impact, not because of me, but because of just facilitating them. Getting to be in those spaces had a powerful impact on a lot of young people. I feel like the writing I’m doing now. You know, I did a book tour last summer and fall, and the people who showed up at these events were super excited to talk about their connections with non human creatures and to share their stories, and to realize that there’s a lot of us out here trying to do the work of creating more connection with with the land, creating more connection with other species, and that they’re not alone in that. So you know, by and large, I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve gotten to spend so much time in so many wild places that other people see on their screen savers, and in some cases, I’ve been in those places for a month at a time, and you know, and have done an incredible amount of cool athletic activities in all of these places and all of these ecosystems. So I feel incredibly fortunate. And for sure, I have the I have that the battle that I hinted at in that little reading is, you know, never quite goes away.

 

Will Bachman  23:50

You mentioned transformations among young people that go on your trips. Give us one or two, like hyper specific examples. You can sanitize their name, but tell us story. You know, one or two stories that stand out to you of kids that have gone on these trips and what they experienced, what they told you about it, what it meant to them.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  24:16

Yeah, I mean, I It’s been a while since I taught any of them. But I mean, the things that stand out the most are students that, quite honestly, students who came from similar backgrounds as mine, which is to say fairly privileged, upper middle class, European descent families. And that’s not everyone who goes to Knowles, but that’s a decent chunk of people who end up on nulls courses, and that was very definitely was very definitely me and a lot of these children like me didn’t have a lot of experience cooking, didn’t have a lot of experience taking care of their stuff, didn’t have a lot of experience making decisions for themselves. They had, like me, been, you know, kind of ushered along with like. Study, hard, study, hard, work, hard, get to, you know, write good papers, do all this, but didn’t have a whole lot of practical life experience. And that was absolutely me that summer after my freshman year in college, I was like, What do you mean? I have to cook two meals a day for myself. I don’t know how to cook. I go to a dorm, you know? I live in a dorm. I go to the dining hall. They they shovel food onto my plate that, you know, and my mother cooked for me when I was young, and, and so for me, for that summer to be like, okay, and, and, you know, Knowles doesn’t use freeze dried food. Knowles gives you, like, a bunch of bag of pasta, bags of pasta, a bunch of bags of cheese, some spices, some flour, some baking powder. And then teach you. And then the instructors teach you how to make pizza and how to make macaroni cheese. And so, you know, just learning, just learning to fend for myself in terms of food was a big deal, and was has been a big deal teaching students. But then on on top of that, in, you know, in the front country, as we call it, which is, you know, where you and I are sitting today, if, if you, if your clothes get too wet, or your shoes filled with water, or something like that, you have another set of clothes. You have another pair of shoes. If you’re in the back country and your shoes get wet, and you leave them outside the tent and they freeze overnight, you’re, you’re hiking boots. That’s all you’ve got. You’re putting those frozen hiking boots on your feet the next morning, those frozen wet hiking boots, and you’re going to hike for as long as you have to in Frozen wet hiking boots, and there’s a good chance you’re going to get blisters doing that, and then you’re going to set the group behind, and then you’re going to be in pain, and then you become a liability to your expedition. So very simply, teaching, or not even teaching facilitating experiences where students realize that the consequences of your actions are significant, like you need to take care of your stuff. And by your stuff, I mean your emotional stuff. I mean your physical stuff. I mean your interactions with other people. You need to keep your stuff together, and if you don’t the retro, the consequences are immediate and in your face. And that’s not always the case in the front country, like we can do things good for good or ill, and they may or may not have immediate repercussions in the wilderness, I feel like you know, you put up your tent poorly, and then your tent flaps all night, or it rips, and then you’re in big trouble, you know, leave your boots outside. They freeze. You’re in big trouble. You lose your your pots and pans. You leave them at a previous camp. You can’t cook for the next 27 days. You know, again, consequences are really high. So I would say this is more general than specific, as you asked. But I really feel like one of the greatest things that I got to teach, again, not through direct instruction, but just through, like, helping people be out there was this you. What you do matters. Here’s how, here’s how your interactions with the world come back to you. And how can you think? How can you be a responsible traveler in this world, whether it’s in nature or whether it’s in the front country. And I think a lot of the courses that I instructed really hit that home for people. And I would get letters from students for a year saying like, Oh my gosh, I got back to school and realized that I have too much stuff and I can’t keep track of anything. And like, what if I whittle down or I can actually cook my own food, and I don’t have to keep going out and just, you know, things, ways in which they would reevaluate the way they were walking on the planet, were, were I was always really happy to receive that kind of feedback later on.

 

Will Bachman  28:35

I’m curious to hear, I mean, I’m sure there’s been many, many such moments, but I’m curious to hear from you one or two moments that you’ve experienced in the wilderness, that were moments of transcendence or moments of insight, or whatever kind of moments that just stand out for you, if there’s one or two on some trips that you particularly recall,

 

Bridget A. Lyons  29:07

sure, I mean, I will say that, why try to have moments like that every day, and I make sure to organize my life, my schedule, where I live, so that I Go outside every day, usually recreating outside every day in a place where I get to have encounters with non human creature. And that might be like this morning I went running in an area trail, running in an area near here where the mushrooms are flushing. And so I spent an hour and a half running and saw seven different species of fungi. And, you know, got to stoop down and say hello to them and be like, Wow, how, how cool. We just had rain a couple days ago, and you decided to come up and say hello to the world. So I definitely, and that’s one of the points I try to make in the book, is that you can fly across the world to see cool creatures. And I do, and I have and you can find cool creatures like out your. Front door, if you take the time to bother to notice them. So, so yes, I make, I make a point of trying to see cool, transcendent outdoor things every day, unless there’s no physical way for me to do that. But in terms of, in terms of, like, really transcendent ones, lately I’ve been really, I’ve gotten really into trail running in the Alps. So I have gone on a number of kind of hut to hut running expeditions. And I wanted to see an ibex so badly. You know how, just sometimes you get maybe, maybe this is unique to me. You get obsessed with this one particular creature, and you’re like, I just want to see it. And I knew that Ibex cruised around the Alps, and I knew that they were unbelievably skilled mountain travelers, like way more than any human will ever be. And they have, you know, they have, have hooves that are specially adapted to adhere to rocks, and they can practically scramble straight uphill. Super cool. And I really wanted to see one. And I was run, and I had been on one trip to the Alps, hadn’t seen them. Next trip I first handful of days hadn’t seen him, ended up getting caught in this mega snowstorm, and I was running, so I had running shoes, so I’m like running through, you know, foot and a half of snow. Can’t really see the trails, you know, trying to get, trying to modify my route to get somewhere safely, despite the fact that I don’t really have gear for a snowstorm in August. Oh, well. And ended up at this hut. Next morning, I went, I went and cruised up this trail, just like I was on a rest day, and I was like, I’m gonna go up there anyway, just because, you know, I hear this little hut up there has really good blueberry tarts. And, like, you know, that’s, if you’re a trail runner, you’re like, Yeah, I’m gonna run four hours for a blueberry tart. This is what we do get there. Don’t get the tart yet. Go down this other trail, and on my way back to get the tart after I’d given up. Like, okay, I saw what I was what I was gonna see. Hear this, like shaking in the rock, like in the scree, you know, like the sound of small rocks moving. It was and, like, immediately was on guard in that way that if you’re attuned to other creatures, you’re like, Yeah, I’m not alone here. There’s, there’s someone else here. And I look up and I see this giant male Ibex with his, you know, if you’ve ever seen their their horns, they’re these huge, you know, curved structures that it’s amazing. They can even keep their heads up. They’re so heavy. And he, you know, lifts his very heavy head and looks at me. And I was like, yes, you’re an ibex. Oh my gosh. And so I just got to sit there for five minutes. And of course, during that time, like three more came ambling through, because they tend to hang out in groups. So if you’re patient and you sit, you get to see a bunch of them. So, so yeah, I had my like, 10 or 15 minutes hanging out with a herd of Ibex on this big slope, you know, well above this hut where the the blueberry tart was waiting for me and and I since, you know, since then, learned that Ibex almost went extinct in the Alps because of hunting. And ironically, the reason they didn’t go extinct is because a king, an Italian King wanted to have his own private hunting herd, so he preserved, like 100 of them, and didn’t let anyone anywhere near them, because they were for him and his buddies only, you know, so kind of gross, elitist way of preserving something. And yet, had all that out. All the IBEX and the Alps now are descended from those 100 Ibex because he kept them, and then a Swiss guy went and actually stole one from him and worked on increasing the herd in Switzerland. And so now there’s, there’s, you know, the species is doing much better numbers wise. However, they’re genetically inbred, because they’re all descended from that same 100 creatures in Italy.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  34:00

But, but, yeah, and I’ve since seen a bunch more Ibex running in the Alps, but that was kind of my first Ibex encounter, and it felt particularly magical. And, and the Alps are just magical. The Alps in the summer are, you know, you can see, there’s the Matterhorn and it’s snowy, and there’s Edelweiss in the fields, like the sound of music, and, you know, people are that there’s cows and sheep and wide open, grassy spaces. So it was just a beautiful place to be in a beautiful moment.

 

Will Bachman  34:27

Tell us how the writing started when you were leading all these trips. Were you bringing a journal along, or did the writing start much later the decision to do an MFA. So tell us, sort of how it how it got rolling, that you’d have sort of notes on all these encounters that you were able to incorporate in the book.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  34:49

Sure, yeah, I did keep a journal for a lot of the time that I was working, but I wasn’t doing any formal writing, but I was definitely noting things. Um. Some of the stuff in the book is from, is from that, but more of it’s just from memory, like I think for the most part, a lot of the things I’m writing about are the kind of moments that tend to burn themselves pretty powerfully into your memory, or some of them are just more recent. And now, you know, now that I write much more and write for a living, I I’m much better about keeping notes and keeping and keeping track of details. But yeah, so I kept a journal while I was doing that, I you know, eventually, as in the time I was working for Knowles, I started to do more administrative work for them, kind of crawl their administration ladder, and was doing some writing for the school in a variety of ways. And then when I moved to the Tetons, and I owned a yoga studio for a long time and was a yoga instructor and did a bunch of writing for around, like yoga related topics and and then as I transitioned into writing, I was doing a bunch of writing for people’s websites and for marketing, like I was just helping people with a lot of random marketing stuff, because marketing stuff, because that’s what I had been doing for my own business. And then it sort of happened that the more and more people were asking me for writing advice than for other marketing like they wanted me to work on their copy specifically. And I’d always been a good writer in high school. I, you know, I had a major in college that required that I write a lot, so I always felt really competent in my writing. And I had taught writing some, you know, when I was teaching school, and then, yeah, it just seemed like more and more people were asking me for help with the writing. And then I started becoming a part of writers groups, because I was working on my own writing projects. And in those groups, I would give feedback. And it just happened that a bunch of people were like, your feedback in class is really good. Can I hire you to give me feedback on my whole book? And I was like, Sure. I don’t know if you should pay me for that, because I don’t know if I’m qualified, but okay. And then I did that and did that, and gradually I was I said to myself, like, okay, I guess I can actually charge for this, because it seems like I’m working hard and delivering a service. And it started to look like I was becoming an editor, and I still had that imposter syndrome thing that we often get that said, you know, do you really have the, you know, skills and wherewithal to be doing this and and so I applied for MFA programs, you know, with the intention of getting a degree that wouldn’t cost me any wouldn’t cost me anything, which I managed to do. And, you know, got funding to teach freshman comp and get an MFA. And so I did that, and then came out of that, you know, I’m not, I’m not sure that. I think the experience of being there helped me develop my skill set, for sure, and it also gave me the confidence to come back and charge people and be like, Yes, I actually do know what I’m doing, and I am capable of helping bring your books to the next level. And you know now I’ve worked with a bunch of people who have published books and and sometimes those books have been self published, sometimes they’ve been published by Harper Collins. So my clients are all over the map in terms of level of publishing wise, but in every case, what I do is help them find their voice. Help them they always know what they want to be doing, and I help them see where they’re doing it and where how they could do more of it in other spots. And, you know, sort of make the book as much the book that they want as possible. And then in the meantime, you know, working with them teaches me a ton about my own writing. Doing my own writing teaches me about helping them. So it’s a fairly reciprocal relationship in which, you know, getting an MFA, which I did, both for professional purposes as an editor and for personal purposes as a writer, like those things serve each other and are kind of like a snowball effect. All right,

 

Will Bachman  38:53

you mentioned you mentioned college, so we’ll turn to that. Tell us about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  39:06

I think I would just say that my major resonated with me, believe it or not. You know, I was an anthropology major. I always thought I was going to be an English major, and I kind of arrived at Harvard assuming that, and then I took a handful of English courses my first year, and I went to a really good high school with really good English program, really good writing program. And those English classes I took freshman year felt like I had already taken them. I was sort of like, I’ve kind of already done this. Maybe I should. Maybe, if I’m going to just write like, clearly, I’m just going to be writing a lot of papers, so I might as well write papers about something new, other than these books that I’ve already read. So So I said, like, oh, in anthropology, I can do that. And and so anthropology was kind of a random choice that was really driven by my personal interest, and I focused in archeology specifically. So it’s. I got to learn about a whole bunch of things that I didn’t learn about in high school, which was, which was super interesting to me, and kept my curiosity high. And I would say, now, you know, you know, many years later that, you know, anthropology is essentially the study of how human beings interact with our environment in a lot of ways, because human evolution is predicated upon us, our species, figuring out how to how to live in our environment, how to manipulate our environment, how to change it, how to work with it. At times, that relationship’s been antagonistic. At times it’s been less antagonistic. But I feel like what I studied in anthropology, a lot of which was, why did human beings become sedentary? Why did they start to grow their food instead of gathering their food? Why did they choose to build cities? Why did they find specialization? You know, why do people live in these certain cultures? A lot of those questions that I entertained as part of my major I think are questions that really inform my work now, as I think about like, how are we choosing to live on this planet? How are we choosing to manipulate the environment? How are how is that working for us? How is that, in ways, backfiring for us? Certainly, climate change is showing us that we have overlooked a lot of aspects of the ways that we interact with our environment, and need to reevaluate on that front. And so I really think that my major and the variety of classes I took in that major, but it’s really set me up for thinking about these questions of how humans should move forward at a time of biodiversity crisis and climate change

 

Will Bachman  41:48

Bridget it’s been so much fun having you on the show for listeners who want to reach out to you about some editing support or find out what you’re doing. What are the different places they can find you online, yeah.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  42:02

So I have for my editing business. I have a website that is Bridget a lions.com I use my middle initial a for professional purposes. So Bridget a lions.com is my editing website. The book has its own website. So the book is called entwined. So the website is entwined book.com and both of those websites have contact pages, and they both go to my email, so you can reach me that way. I’m on Facebook as Bridget Lyons. I try to post a picture of a non human creature on Instagram every day at Bridget a lions. Sometimes it ends up being pictures of, like a book event that’s coming up. You know, I have a couple coming up here in a few weeks so but, but other than that, most of the time it’s, you know, I mentioned that I whatever. I go surfing, I go trail riding, I go scuba diving. I try to post a picture of whatever creature struck me that day. Yeah, those, those four channels, I’m on LinkedIn as well. I’m not there quite as often, but you can find me there any of those places, if anyone wants to reach out about anything, even just to say hi and and connect around cool nature based experiences. I’d be more than happy to do that.

 

Will Bachman  43:17

And I’m looking at your website right now, entwined book.com and I gotta say, click on people. You should you gotta check out The Art tab on this. These are so awesome. These wood cuts. I love all of them, the octopus and the whale and the owl and the starfish. Those are, he said that they were available for at some of the book events. Are you going to make those available for people if they want to order one of

 

Bridget A. Lyons  43:46

those prints? Sure, yeah. I mean, I’ve sold, I sold a lot of them at book events over the summer and fall. I’m like, doing an art show at the printmaking studio where I printed them this weekend. So I’m selling up, you know, and I’ve got a couple more book events where I’m selling them. But if someone sees them, either online or, you know, they’re in there, they’re in the book as well. Like, here’s what, here’s what they look like the book. If someone sees it and falls in love with one, I can absolutely make them available. But it’s, it’s fantastic to hear your enthusiasm, and it reminds me that, again, there are so many different ways into connecting with human creatures. And for some people it’s the story, and for some people it’s the art, and for some people it’s the science. And my objective is to give as many entrees into this connection as possible. And I’m so so happy to hear the art is resonating with you.

 

Will Bachman  44:35

Wonderful Bridget, thanks for joining. We’ll include those links in the show notes. Thank you for joining today.

 

Bridget A. Lyons  44:41

Thank you. Bye.

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai