Craig Childs - "The Madness of Disassociation"

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Craig Childs makes a point of going to the very places he’s writing about and immersing himself in them. In The Secret Knowledge of Water, he traces his very being into the rock itself by mapping waterholes in the Cabeza Prieta. In House of Rain, he follows the Ancestral Puebloans across the desert, walking in their footsteps to gain a particular kind of understanding. In Virga and Bone, he immerses himself in aridness and walks through it with curiosity directed at his very affinity for it. In Apocalyptic Planet he backpacks through cornfields in Iowa, among other similarly wild trips, because, as he puts it, “that’s the way I prefer to be in the world.”

In this episode, Craig joins us from the front porch of his home in western Colorado, with snowflakes swirling around him and ravens croaking in the junipers. He talks about how stories are not the place but show the shape of a place. He shares several examples of how stories tend to repeat in the same places over and over again simply because of the geology, or other mysterious (but possibly simple) factors science hasn’t yet caught up to. We decided to save ghost stories for another time. 

We ask Craig to share his thoughts on the many obstacles that can keep us from connecting deeply to place today. He touches on social media, the internet, and other things that can remove us further and further from the land. This removal results in disassociation, Craig says. “We won’t remain disassociated as a species and survive,” he continues, “because then you don’t care about anything.”

We discuss the conundrum of being descendants of white colonizers, while at the same time being rooted in the places where fate has deposited us. Craig believes that we have a responsibility to give back to these places and their people who have given so much to us. Much of his work is an effort to do this. “I’ll be dead and gone before I ever really figure out what needs to be fed back to this place and the people of this place,” he says. “But at least I can get close, at least I can do my best.”

Finally, Craig reads from his journal, excerpts that may or may not make it into Tracing Time, his forthcoming book about rock art, to be published by Torrey House Press. 

Craig Childs has published more than a dozen books. He has won the Orion Book Award and has twice won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and the Spirit of the West Award for his body of work. He is contributing editor at Adventure Journal Quarterly, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Men's Journal, and Outside. He is a contributor to the blog “The Last Word on Nothing.” He has a B.A. in Journalism from CU Boulder with a minor in Women's Studies, and from Prescott College, an M.A. in Desert Studies. An occasional commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, he teaches writing at the University of Alaska in Anchorage and the Mountainview MFA at Southern New Hampshire University. He lives outside of Norwood, CO.

He is interviewed by Zion Canyon Mesa’s Ben Kilbourne.