From tree planter to creative writer to literary mentor – Charlotte Gill has not followed a conventional career path. The British Columbia author’s 1988 decision to trade her urban undergraduate lifestyle for a summer spent planting trees in northern Ontario was a crucial turning point in her life. It led to 17 years work as a seasonal tree planter and, ultimately, to a best-selling book. It also, curiously, led to The Banff Centre.
Gill’s Eating Dirt – a personal exploration of both the lived experience and the science of tree planting – won the 2012 BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and the CBA Libris Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award. Gill sat down with Inspired to talk about her journey from the clear cut to the printed page.
What came first, tree planting or writing?
I am sometimes described as a tree planter turned writer, but more accurately those two things mutually evolved. I began tree planting when I was 19, and I also began writing when I was 19. My first book [Ladykiller] was published in 2005 when I was well into my planting career, so in a way I feel that tree planting was an excellent psychic training ground for me as a writer. As a tree planter, you spend a lot of hours by yourself trying to accomplish something large that is composed of a series of very tiny pieces. In a way, that is not dissimilar to writing a book – one word at a time, one sentence at a time.
Charlotte Gill at the Banff Mountain Book Festival, image: Donald Lee.
Did you keep a diary that first summer?
I kept diaries the whole time I was a tree planter. I still have a big box of them – old muddy, crusty notebooks with dead mosquitoes squashed between the pages. The problem is that when you are 19 you don’t take the kind of notes you need to craft a book years later! I was writing about beer and boys, campfires – the teenage minutiae that girls focus on.
Then, during the 2006 season, when I had decided I would write this book, I took really good notes. I wrote down everything about where we were and what we were doing, specific places on the map, the colour of the trucks we drove and the clothes we wore, bits of dialogue…and I used the framework of that year to shape the book, drawing in characters and stories from the past 17 seasons. I actually began writing the book here at the Centre.
Your first book, Ladykiller, is a collection of short story fiction.Was it difficult to make the transition to non-fiction?
When I began writing fiction, I had no sense in my mind of what non-fiction was, at least in the form I write it now. I took my first non-fiction course as part of my Masters degree in Creative Writing at UBC. It blew the top of my head off! I had no idea that – one: you could be an ordinary person and be a non-fiction writer, as opposed to someone who led a “very important” life; and two: that the subject matter could be average everyday things illuminated in such a way as to become remarkable. Tree planting can be very boring, and the danger in writing about it is that you could create a really dull book. It is hard, repetitive, physical labour, but in that labour there are moments of transcendence and beauty.
A lot of the techniques in fiction and non-fiction are similar, crafting scenes, molding character and dialogue, all those things are similar. What I find is different is the essence of the life inside the story. These are real characters and lives, so I am having a difference experience as a writer. I understand the truth of these characters. And the reader is also having a profoundly different experience, because they know it is real. There is a big element of trust there.
Eating Dirt is evenly balanced between personal narrative and science/history – was that a challenging mix?
I found doing the research for the book fascinating. Trees are these huge, quiet, static creatures that appear simple, but are actually incredibly complicated beings and communities perfected over a million years of evolution. I wrote voluminously about the natural history and the science of silviculture. Luckily, I had a very good editor who would say “ok, we’re getting into a forestry geek moment here.”
You serve as faculty for the Centre’s Literary Journalism Program – what advice do you give to writers venturing into literary non-fiction?
Non-fiction is an incredibly delicate art, because in some form or another you must write in the first person. One of the things we discuss with the writers who come to Banff is the need to engage with the content as the central narrator. The story needs to pass through you, and that requires a lot of the writer. You wear it, you live it, you breath it as you write it. It is a kind of transference, a roller coaster of emotion, and it can be exhausting. But in my experience, the greater the struggle, the better the writing.
The great thing about doing work like that at the Centre is that you are supported. You don’t have to explain what it is that you do, you don’t have to take care of daily necessities, you are just allowed to work. I think that is why people accomplish so much here.
In a sense Eating Dirt is your farewell to tree planting.
Tree planting had been part of my life for so long. It had really shaped my life, but I knew I had to retire, I had to move on. Part of my struggle with this book was to acknowledge that that part of my life was ending. I think I did that on the very day that I finished the last page. It will always hold a space in my memory, but I am not a tree planter any more.
Charlotte Gill is the author of Eating Dirt and Ladykiller, and faculty for The Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism and Writing with Style programs. Eating Dirt is published by Greystone Books, greystonebooks.com. For more on the book and Charlotte Gill, visit charlettegill.com
