Fantastic Metropolis

Robert Freeman Wexler: The Mount and many of the stories in Report to the Men’s Club are set in the mountains, similar, I assume, to the area where you spend the summer. Do you write different kinds of things depending on where you are? Do you feel more drawn to mountain/desert settings than cities? There’s so much great detail about rattlesnakes and such in The Mount, which you probably never would have thought about if you spent all your time in New York.

Carol Emshwiller: Ever since I came out here and discovered the mountains I’ve been in love with them. Mountains are exciting. More than once I’ve come around a rocky corner and shouted without meaning to, at the sudden view of snow caps beyond. Nothing else has ever made me do that but mountains. I write about the mountains when I’m in NY. If I can put mountains in a story I will. I think the rattlesnakes come in because certain summers they seem to be all over. Remember Emily Dickinson’s line, “zero at the bone?” It doesn’t matter how far away the rattlesnake is, you get a chill along your spine when you see one. They’re not up in the mountains, but down here were I live, in the lower hills and desert. One summer I had two living in my carport. I learned to watch where I stepped.

Besides loving mountains, I also learned to love the desert. I never knew it well before. It’s an acquired taste, like lobster. Once you learn to like it, it becomes one of your favorites.

Robert Freeman Wexler: Mountains seem to represent freedom. In “The Project,” Harrier feels disdain for the big, clumsy people of the valley, who can’t even climb up to where the mountain people live without throwing up from the altitude. People are always going to the mountains to escape something in their lives, the artists in “It Comes from Deep Inside,” Ben in “Creature.” In The Mount, the Hoots and their tame people live in the valley and the free humans live in the mountains. Of course, geographically it makes sense, since the Hoots can’t walk. And it makes sense in places like Afghanistan, Kashmir, and lots of other mountainous regions. You didn’t grow up in the mountains. What drew you there originally? And is there a place in your writing you can point to and say “That’s where it happened”?

Carol Emshwiller: I don’t equate the mountains with freedom—more with excitement, danger, joy, beauty… And they’re often frightening. There are avalanches, they have scarier weather. There are often hail storms when it’s sunny down in the valley. I love the landscape up high where things are stunted and facing hardships. I love the Bristle Cone pines the best of any trees because they have to go through so much. I love that they lasted as they have because of hardships.

Maybe I love mountains all the more because I didn’t grow up in them. But the people who did seem to love them just as much. Lots of people living all their lives right here are as passionate about them as I am. The whole town empties out every weekend. I meet my dentist, my optometrist, and the clerks in the shops out on the trails.

I’ve always loved mountains but I didn’t know much about them until my husband moved out here to teach at Cal Arts. Then I understood what being in them really meant… how exciting it could be. When I moved here for the summers after Ed died, I knew even more about how to be in them and I loved them all the more. I miss them when I’m back in NY City. It’s hard not to have them crop up in every story. I don’t think… at least not right now… I can point to a specific place where they started to show up. Hmmm, they’re in Ledoyt, but mostly it was a ranch that was in that. I love ranches and the desert almost as much as the mountains.