Solo Writer Rides into Town…
By Robin McLean
I’ve always been a solo writer. Why? Read on…
It started long before I’d written anything, as a potter in rural Alaska. No lights through the forest, no road sound as I spun my pots—it changed my midwestern, very urban mind.
“Probably your brain, rather,” my dad said (a neurologist).
“How’s that?” I argued.
He was a shy man, an introvert.
“Think of trees!” he said, as if he knew.
I did think of trees. In the Frontier State, I could have walked 800 miles through nothing but, crossed one road, arrived at the Arctic Ocean. What do mostly human-less spaces provide us? Something about the aspen quaking. Wolf call. Moose on winter trails slipping into dreams. Then it was Montana after grad school. I lived with my dog in KOA Kampground cabin, grading papers, eating, sleeping on the same plastic-covered bunk, camp stove kitchen on the porch swing, sharing occasional bonfires, libations and yarns with fellow nomadic travelers. They were solophilic too, a mysterious (sometimes lonesome) predisposition to them as well.
Next, it was an island in New Hampshire. Five winters. After the summer people scrammed, before the lake froze, my dog and I took moonlit “walks” with a river otter, plunging and gliding along the leafy shore beside us. I almost fell through the ice once, a nearly solo END to me. My dog had walked wisely wide of the weak spot, led me to hearth and home.
Maybe it’s something about the land. Non-human beings. Wisdom and where it’s found. CG Jung’s Unconscious. Myths.
Now I’ve found Nevada.
I write in a earth-bermed, high plains desert bunker in the Monitor Valley. The bunker’s face—to birds, wind, occasional human guests—is a basketweave of railroad ties salvaged from a tunnel under Lake Mead. The house is quiet enough for most—40-miles off the Loneliest Road in America—but my bunker is silent. And if I had to guess, I’d say utter non-human silence is necessary, sometimes, for everyone. Since the creative process is perilously delicate, distraction the enemy. True. Wild horses stampede overhead. Snakes get in, as do packrats who steal my stuff and goats who eat it. But here my mind runs free, as they do.
Some say, “It’s misanthropy!”
But I like people.
“Shyness!”
I’m not shy.
“We’ve had enough isolation! Covid!”
True enough.
I don’t know why I’m a solo writer. Are you one too? If so, do you know why? Or maybe you spill your genius-words in jam-packed coffee shops. If so, let’s talk through it together, since variety is the spice of life and the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl is coming right up. I’ll be in town.
Shaun Griffin will help us. If anyone can sort this, Shaun can, a writer, artist, blue ribbon Nevada wiseman: to think collectively on the subject of thinking solo, to plumb the mystery of fruitful isolation via community, all us hermits together in collective cross-pollinating at a sprawling, come-one-come-all-lit-party, a vibrating, magnificently-crowded, hopeful human hive.
Photos courtesy of Robin McLean.
Robin McLean was a lawyer and then a potter in the woods of Alaska before turning to writing. Her first short fiction collection Reptile House won the BOA Fiction Prize, was twice a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Prize, and was noted as a best book of 2015 in Paris Review. Her debut novel Pity the Beast, published in November of 2021, was noted as "a work of crazy brilliance" and a best book of fiction in 2021 in The Guardian, "stunning debut novel" in New York Review of Books, as well as a best book of the year in the Wall Street Journal. Her second collection of short fiction, Get' em Young, Treat' em Tough, Tell 'em Nothing, is forthcoming from And Other Stories on October 18, 2022. She lives in the high plains desert of central Nevada. To learn more about Robin, visit robinmclean.net. Robin is participating in the 2022 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl in Reno on September 10, 2022. Don't miss her panel with poet Shaun Griffin "Writing in Solitude," at 1:30 pm at the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl.