The Symbiotic Writer: An Interview with Sandra Gail Lambert
by Michele Sharpe
A 2018 NEA Fellow, Sandra Gail Lambert is the author of short stories and essays published in venues including Big Fiction, The Southern Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. A resident of Gainesville, Florida since the 1980’s, she writes about and from Florida landscapes and waterways in her memoir, A Certain Loneliness (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) and in her current project, a novel-in-progress titled The Sacrifice Zone.
In conversation, Lambert reveals how Florida’s wildernesses and ecosystems have entwined with her vision as an artist to create a symbiosis. She draws from Florida’s nature while giving back to it through close observation and celebration of the unique settings, flora and fauna of the region. Just as literature can help readers identify with those unlike themselves, Lambert’s stories and essays can help readers achieve a reverence for the rich and often exotic life that permeates Florida’s prairies, swamps, and rivers.
Michele Sharpe: You traveled a lot as an army brat and as an adult. Why did you choose Gainesville as a place to settle down?
Sandra Lambert: When I was living in Atlanta in the early 1980’s as the co-owner and manager of Charis Books, I ended up meeting a lot of lesbians from Gainesville at political events like the Savannah River Plant Action and the Women’s March for Peace. Visiting those friends, I explored places like Payne’s Prairie and the Santa Fe River, and I fell in love with the geography of the Gainesville area. Having moved around a lot as a kid, it was the first time I felt like I had a geographic home. So, when post-polio complications made it necessary for me to quit my job and find someplace less expensive to live, Gainesville was my first choice. It was one of those decisions you look back on as significant: I’d moved to a community that was very receptive to writers, and I was just starting to be a writer myself. The community nurtured me and encouraged me.
ML: Was there anything special about being a woman who uses a wheelchair that attracted you to the outdoors here?
SL: It’s flat here, so just by definition there’s a little more access. Also, a lot of the beauty you find boating, so that’s another way it’s accessible. And the state parks here do a pretty good job of providing accessibility. The state park system here in Florida is amazing. They’re not perfect about disability, but they do maintain boardwalks through places like swamps, so it’s easier to immerse yourself and get that feeling of being in the middle of nowhere, whether you use a wheelchair or not.
ML: You just mentioned the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere.
SL: It’s my ultimate goal when I’m in the natural world. When you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere, you also feel connected to what’s around you. You’re part of that nowhereness. It’s such a feeling of solace and peace, and sometimes excitement.
ML Solace from what?
SL: It removes me from my everyday life and clears the brain.
ML: From reading your memoir, I know you write a lot about being in the middle of nowhere, and that you recently finished a novel that’s set partly in Florida. Can you tell me a little about how you got started with that novel and its premise?
SL: I started thinking of the novel when I learned that some older people who’d been evacuated in the Chernobyl nuclear incident were moving back to their village, and I was interested in that level of attachment to a geographic home. It seemed they couldn’t bear to be apart from the land. And I’ve always loved the idea of mycorrhizal fungi. Here in Florida, there are plants that can’t be removed from their ecosystem because they have to be part of this underground, mycorrhizal community. The parts are all woven together.
Those two things started me imagining a community in Florida where people had that level of connection to the land they lived on, people who didn’t do well at all if they left it for any length of time. Then I added a catastrophe that quarantined those people and turned their land into a sacrifice zone. My main character is part of that community, a reporter who was able to leave home and is away from home when the catastrophe occurs. She survives the crisis thinking all her family is dead, but then starts to learn this might not be so. It’s a mystery, a thriller with an environmental context.
ML: So what location inspired the setting of the Florida scenes in the novel?
SL: I wanted the setting to be the Gulf Coast area. The road out to Ozello is one of the most beautiful drives in the state, and I was interested in the fishing villages in the region, communities that depended economically on the environment.
ML: What kind of messages do you want to give readers about Florida?
SL: With my first novel, The River’s Memory, I thought I could give a history of the springs region. I don’t think people know that Florida was once covered by a massive cypress swamp that was decimated by logging. For the same reasons it’s important to know the history of your family, it’s important to know the history of your region. Environmental work can be full of despair, but if you realize that an area that’s now beautiful, with one-hundred old trees, was once logged over, you can see that given half a chance, nature will heal itself.
I don’t believe in the despair part of environmentalism. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel it sometimes; I think it’s unhelpful. The natural world is where I write, and it’s also a part of what I write about. Florida is so beautiful, and tragic, and hopeful. It’s a rich place to write from.
ML: Do you write about nature as a character? And if so, is it a dynamic or static character?
SL: Nature is essential to plot for me, and to character development. In the memoir, I write about a kayak trip, and the context is everything. It’s easier for me to write about connection and loneliness through nature. The emotion of a piece is often wound up tightly with description of the natural world and what I observe there. In my new novel, the natural world interacts with human characters. And nature as a character is dynamic, always changing.
ML: I know you’ve taken many writing retreats for yourself. How do these retreats figure into your writing life?
SL: It could be me and the van out in a State Park for a couple of days, or me in a little motel room in Cedar Key. There’s no toaster oven to be cleaned. It’s completely different to get away. On a retreat, I get as much work done in a week as in a month at home. It usually takes me about a day to settle in. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that wasn’t nurtured in part by a formal retreat, like at Yaddo or Key West, or by parking in a camping spot and throwing open the doors of the van. Life in those settings is trimmed down to just writing. And when I take a break, I see cinnamon ferns unfurling, crested caracaras hanging out.
ML: Do you have a favorite state park for retreats?
SL: Kissimmee Prairie State Park is one of my favorites. It’s one of those places where you can see about eight miles across an open prairie with no houses, no cell towers.
ML: What does it do for your writing to be in these magnificent locations?
SL: It lets your eyes have a different focus. It gives me a certain confidence in what I’m doing. I always feel part of something, a tiny part of this expanse. Feeling connected to the natural world doesn’t make me feel insignificant; it makes me realize I’m part of that world, the same as the swallow tail kite. I have a place. I have value. And that realization helps me write.
Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The Rumpus, Guernica, Catapult, and The Sycamore Review. Recent poems can be found in Poet Lore, North American Review, Stirring, and Baltimore Review. The author of the Kindle Singles memoir, Walk Away, Michele is currently at work on a second memoir. More at www.michelesharpe.com
by Michele Sharpe
A 2018 NEA Fellow, Sandra Gail Lambert is the author of short stories and essays published in venues including Big Fiction, The Southern Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. A resident of Gainesville, Florida since the 1980’s, she writes about and from Florida landscapes and waterways in her memoir, A Certain Loneliness (University of Nebraska Press, 2018) and in her current project, a novel-in-progress titled The Sacrifice Zone.
In conversation, Lambert reveals how Florida’s wildernesses and ecosystems have entwined with her vision as an artist to create a symbiosis. She draws from Florida’s nature while giving back to it through close observation and celebration of the unique settings, flora and fauna of the region. Just as literature can help readers identify with those unlike themselves, Lambert’s stories and essays can help readers achieve a reverence for the rich and often exotic life that permeates Florida’s prairies, swamps, and rivers.
Michele Sharpe: You traveled a lot as an army brat and as an adult. Why did you choose Gainesville as a place to settle down?
Sandra Lambert: When I was living in Atlanta in the early 1980’s as the co-owner and manager of Charis Books, I ended up meeting a lot of lesbians from Gainesville at political events like the Savannah River Plant Action and the Women’s March for Peace. Visiting those friends, I explored places like Payne’s Prairie and the Santa Fe River, and I fell in love with the geography of the Gainesville area. Having moved around a lot as a kid, it was the first time I felt like I had a geographic home. So, when post-polio complications made it necessary for me to quit my job and find someplace less expensive to live, Gainesville was my first choice. It was one of those decisions you look back on as significant: I’d moved to a community that was very receptive to writers, and I was just starting to be a writer myself. The community nurtured me and encouraged me.
ML: Was there anything special about being a woman who uses a wheelchair that attracted you to the outdoors here?
SL: It’s flat here, so just by definition there’s a little more access. Also, a lot of the beauty you find boating, so that’s another way it’s accessible. And the state parks here do a pretty good job of providing accessibility. The state park system here in Florida is amazing. They’re not perfect about disability, but they do maintain boardwalks through places like swamps, so it’s easier to immerse yourself and get that feeling of being in the middle of nowhere, whether you use a wheelchair or not.
ML: You just mentioned the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere.
SL: It’s my ultimate goal when I’m in the natural world. When you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere, you also feel connected to what’s around you. You’re part of that nowhereness. It’s such a feeling of solace and peace, and sometimes excitement.
ML Solace from what?
SL: It removes me from my everyday life and clears the brain.
ML: From reading your memoir, I know you write a lot about being in the middle of nowhere, and that you recently finished a novel that’s set partly in Florida. Can you tell me a little about how you got started with that novel and its premise?
SL: I started thinking of the novel when I learned that some older people who’d been evacuated in the Chernobyl nuclear incident were moving back to their village, and I was interested in that level of attachment to a geographic home. It seemed they couldn’t bear to be apart from the land. And I’ve always loved the idea of mycorrhizal fungi. Here in Florida, there are plants that can’t be removed from their ecosystem because they have to be part of this underground, mycorrhizal community. The parts are all woven together.
Those two things started me imagining a community in Florida where people had that level of connection to the land they lived on, people who didn’t do well at all if they left it for any length of time. Then I added a catastrophe that quarantined those people and turned their land into a sacrifice zone. My main character is part of that community, a reporter who was able to leave home and is away from home when the catastrophe occurs. She survives the crisis thinking all her family is dead, but then starts to learn this might not be so. It’s a mystery, a thriller with an environmental context.
ML: So what location inspired the setting of the Florida scenes in the novel?
SL: I wanted the setting to be the Gulf Coast area. The road out to Ozello is one of the most beautiful drives in the state, and I was interested in the fishing villages in the region, communities that depended economically on the environment.
ML: What kind of messages do you want to give readers about Florida?
SL: With my first novel, The River’s Memory, I thought I could give a history of the springs region. I don’t think people know that Florida was once covered by a massive cypress swamp that was decimated by logging. For the same reasons it’s important to know the history of your family, it’s important to know the history of your region. Environmental work can be full of despair, but if you realize that an area that’s now beautiful, with one-hundred old trees, was once logged over, you can see that given half a chance, nature will heal itself.
I don’t believe in the despair part of environmentalism. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel it sometimes; I think it’s unhelpful. The natural world is where I write, and it’s also a part of what I write about. Florida is so beautiful, and tragic, and hopeful. It’s a rich place to write from.
ML: Do you write about nature as a character? And if so, is it a dynamic or static character?
SL: Nature is essential to plot for me, and to character development. In the memoir, I write about a kayak trip, and the context is everything. It’s easier for me to write about connection and loneliness through nature. The emotion of a piece is often wound up tightly with description of the natural world and what I observe there. In my new novel, the natural world interacts with human characters. And nature as a character is dynamic, always changing.
ML: I know you’ve taken many writing retreats for yourself. How do these retreats figure into your writing life?
SL: It could be me and the van out in a State Park for a couple of days, or me in a little motel room in Cedar Key. There’s no toaster oven to be cleaned. It’s completely different to get away. On a retreat, I get as much work done in a week as in a month at home. It usually takes me about a day to settle in. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that wasn’t nurtured in part by a formal retreat, like at Yaddo or Key West, or by parking in a camping spot and throwing open the doors of the van. Life in those settings is trimmed down to just writing. And when I take a break, I see cinnamon ferns unfurling, crested caracaras hanging out.
ML: Do you have a favorite state park for retreats?
SL: Kissimmee Prairie State Park is one of my favorites. It’s one of those places where you can see about eight miles across an open prairie with no houses, no cell towers.
ML: What does it do for your writing to be in these magnificent locations?
SL: It lets your eyes have a different focus. It gives me a certain confidence in what I’m doing. I always feel part of something, a tiny part of this expanse. Feeling connected to the natural world doesn’t make me feel insignificant; it makes me realize I’m part of that world, the same as the swallow tail kite. I have a place. I have value. And that realization helps me write.
Michele Sharpe, a poet and essayist, is also a high school dropout, hepatitis C survivor, adoptee, and former trial attorney. Her essays appear in venues including The Rumpus, Guernica, Catapult, and The Sycamore Review. Recent poems can be found in Poet Lore, North American Review, Stirring, and Baltimore Review. The author of the Kindle Singles memoir, Walk Away, Michele is currently at work on a second memoir. More at www.michelesharpe.com
