Ground Lines

I first came across Charlie’s work when I was assigned to review it as a freelance critic. I often read—and enjoy!—work that doesn’t necessarily pick at the scabs of my own personal fixations. Reading Charlie’s debut novel A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest, though, I was surprised to find a language in kinship with my own. Here was someone else just as captivated by the figure of the animal, the non- or more-than-human, as I am. It’s also writing that takes seriously the condition of being a child, extends grace to characters even as they make disastrous choices. One has to think of Mary Oliver and the “Wild Geese” quote that’s the darling of so many online posts, both sincere and ironic. 

The book is a thrilling encounter, prose lush as a carpet of ferns, and not just if you’re kept up at night by the same thoughts as I am. The glimmering little novel was just long listed for the Center of Fiction’s First Novel Prize. I caught up with Charlie to chat about animism, being a present witness, and the resilience it takes to run an indie bookstore. 

“My job here [is] to really be here in this body until I’m no longer able to,” Charlie muses at one point “to feel it all.”

The soft animal of your body loves what it loves indeed. 

— Luke Sutherland, smoke and mold Interviews Editor
September, 2024

This interview was conducted over email between August and September 2024. It has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

---

Luke Sutherland (LS): Non-human entities make up so much of A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest. There’s Moonshadow and Deer, the Old Oak. The figure of the animal, specifically, is one the main character Smokey is constantly reaching towards. I’ve spent a lot of my own time thinking about this idea of “becoming-animal” (as Smokey calls it), both as an approach to life and craft. What does becoming-animal mean to you?

Charlie J. Stephens (CJS): Like Smokey, I’ve always found great comfort in the natural world. My mom and grandma have been avid hikers, birdwatchers, and self-taught naturalists throughout their lives and encouraged a love, respect, and appreciation for plants, animals, and the lands and waters themselves. I have long struggled with being human. It started when I used my allowance to donate to an organization that was working to end animal testing, and then I started receiving mail with rabbits having their eyes injected with beauty products, asking for more donations. I had a bit of a personal crisis. I was around 11 at the time. 

I know there is a lot of kindness and beauty that humans can bring, but as a species, it seems we are quite parasitic, destructive and self-involved, generally speaking. I recently listened to an On Being interview with adrienne maree brown, and she said she’s losing sleep at night over the possibility that humans, as a species, won’t make it. That really struck me because I often fantasize that we will die out sooner than later, to leave the earth to recover from us. I’m unsettled by how far out of alignment we are: I am weary of the Anthropocene. At this point, I would give my life up if it would ease the act of living for any animal suffering because of our human ways—die for a starving polar bear or a whale tangled up in our plastics. I wish it worked like that. 

I think “becoming animal” means trying to lessen my impact, and to be a present witness to the earth and its creatures in these challenging times. A spiritual mentor of mine told me rather forcefully that my job here was to really be here in this body until I’m no longer able to—to feel it all. I want to spend as much time as I have left here doing so: walking in forests and swimming in rivers, and trying my best to appreciate and tend.

“Becoming animal” means trying to lessen my impact, and to be a present witness to the earth and its creatures in these challenging times.

LS: In an interview with Lauren C. Johnson, you talk a little about animism as method and your wariness towards anthropomorphization. What I see in Smokey is a lot of the opposite—we could call it zoomorphism or dehumanization. Much of their desires boil down to the urge to shed their human skin. Let’s layer on top of that the Indigenous scholar Kim TallBear’s claim that the category ‘animal’ (as distinct from other forms of life) is a modern invention. How do you imagine the boundaries between human, animal, and object—and what responsibilities do writers bear in breaking down those boundaries?

CJS: I agree with TallBear’s claim, though “Modern Invention” is a very generous way to name it: colonialism and Christianity have fucked us all in terms of these unnecessary boundaries—human, animal, and object. We’ve lost so much connection, so much pre-Christian knowledge and understanding, and so much culture. These hierarchies aren’t serving us, but I do believe they can be undone. One thing that helps me when I’m feeling overwhelmed is remembering that everything we have came from here. Everything here is of the earth, but again it is humans who have corrupted it. 

My friend Lena’s mom used to call most things one could find in a store “fresh garbage.” I love that awareness. From an animist perspective it can feel overwhelming at times to hold that everything has sentience, but I want to keep this sensitivity in the face of so many distractions and so much capitalistic training. 

LS: I’m interested in this idea you bring up of being a present witness to the world. I’ve read scholarship on literary witnessing applied to all kinds of collective traumas, including mass extinction and climate collapse (see Lydia Pyne or Thom von Dooren). Is your writing an act of witnessing, too? Do you find that writing makes you live more in your body, as your mentor said, or does it give you a further sense of dissociation? 

CJS: I think what my spiritual mentor was getting at was not so much about dissociation as about consciously not turning away. Every time I see dead animals on the side of the road I feel this wave of sadness and want to close my eyes, but have started pulling over, scooping them up, and finding a place in the dirt to set their bodies down, so they can be in a more respectful place, and also feed vultures and other scavengers without them getting run down too. Anthropologist Amanda Stronza helped me with this. So yes, this is a recent example of not-turning-away, and a way to put my own body to use. Unlike Smokey, it’s rare that I can dissociate. I honestly sometimes wish I was better at it! Writing though is definitely an act that, for me, has a particularly heavy, bodily, and grounded quality to it. I hope I can always do it.

Writing is definitely an act that, for me, has a particularly heavy, bodily, and grounded quality to it. I hope I can always do it.

LS: To go back to TallBear for a moment, much of her work is at the intersection of science, Indigenous sex, and what we might think of as ‘nature.’ If you could humor me, I’d like to share a quote of hers in full:

“Nature and sex have both been defined according to a nature-culture divide. With the rise of scientific authority and management approaches, both sex and nature were rendered as discrete, coherent, troublesome, yet manageable objects. Both are at the heart of struggles involving ideas of purity and contamination, life and death, but which only scientifically trained experts or rational subjects (read: historically white, Western men) have been seen as fit to name, manage, and set the terms of legitimate encounter.” 

In A Wounded Deer, Smokey fails to play inside these discrete, colonial objects that TallBear refers to—both in terms of human-ness and assigned sex. Can you speak to the ways in which nature, race, and sex/gender co-create each other in A Wounded Deer? How do they push against the false nature-culture divide TallBear identifies?

CJS: I believe that this nature-culture divide TallBear describes is yet another facet of the damage that Christianity has directly caused. Smokey is a non-binary child, and I use that word specifically as a denouncement of the binary. Smokey exists in a body not bound by the idea of a binary gender system, and their race too, doesn’t align with the idea of “one or the other.” Smokey also exists in a human body/animal body, and we see here clearly that these are the same. The work is fiction, but in terms of identity these are my lived experiences, so for this part of Smokey’s character I relied on some of my own understandings. I want there to be more examples in literature that blur the identity definitions we have been taught to adhere to. 

LS: Changing gears a little… Indivisible from Smokey’s experience is their status as a child. Being a kid comes with a distinct lack of autonomy that can turn violent—all the anti-trans youth legislation being a recent, particularly horrific example. Unlike with non-human animals, adults writing child characters have actual lived experience to draw from. All of us have been children, yet many of us do a poor job at remembering what that was actually like. Why did it matter to you to write from a child’s point of view? What was it like to let Smokey speak through you, or to have you speak for Smokey—however you’d phrase it?

CJS: For almost ten years I taught high school English at an underfunded public school, and people would say I was basically a saint. On the contrary, spending time with those young people was one of the most profound experiences of my life. The things that ultimately burned me out were other adults and the system itself, not the students. I feel like young people of any age are not given enough of the immense appreciation they deserve. Kids are so resilient, so keenly aware, so smart, and so open. In writing this novel, I worked hard to be respectful of Smokey’s self-hood, autonomy and awareness, and wanted to get their voice right. It felt critically important.

The work is fiction, but in terms of identity these are my lived experiences, so for this part of Smokey’s character I relied on some of my own understandings. I want there to be more examples in literature that blur the identity definitions we have been taught to adhere to. 

LS: It only feels right to ask as a follow up, who are some of your favorite child characters in literature? And who are your favorite literary animals?

CJS: Great question! Favorite human children are Mick from Carson McCullers’ “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” Bone from Dorothy Allison’s “Bastard Out of Carolina,” the unnamed narrator in Justin Torres’ “We the Animals,” young Hiram in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Water Dancer,” and teenage Joe in Louise Erdrich’s “The Round House.” I was also very fond of Jas in Lucas Rijneveld’s “Discomfort of Evening.” 

Favorite literary animals include the parakeet/grandmother in Marie-Helene Bertino’s “Parakeet,” Muir’s Stickeen, Marcellus from Shelby Van Pelt’s “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” and for a plant (!) the fig tree in Elif Shafak’s “The Island of Missing Trees.” 

LS: I wanted to ask you a bit about your work outside of writing. You opened up an independent bookstore on the Oregon coast a few years ago. Can you tell me a little bit about Sea Wolf Books and what building a literary community has meant to you? How has it changed you?

CJS: Yes! I opened Sea Wolf Books and Community Writing Center in Port Orford on the southern Oregon coast in April 2023. I wanted to do something that used my skills and also served the community, and it struck me that a bookstore with writing classes could be it. Port Orford has a population of about 1,000 people and is very mixed politically. I’ve had some concerns about being harassed for being leftist/queer, and that has started happening a bit more recently. At one point a few years ago, Pam Houston started getting death threats for her environmental and conservation writing and shared the sentiment that it was scary … and she felt that she was on exactly the right track. So, I’ve been feeling a little uneasy lately, but in a way it makes me think I’m doing what I should be doing, and I know that there are others I respect and admire who are also putting themselves on the line.

When I was on book tour I met several other people who have inspired bravery in this realm—Julie at This House of Books in Billings, Montana as well as Chelsia and Charlie at Montana Book Company in Missoula. They’re all holding it down in the face of book banning, fear mongering, harassment and bigotry, and I hope to continue to do the same. 

And! Owning a bookstore is extraordinarily fun and rewarding and interesting. I love meeting all different kinds of people, getting to know locals’ literary tastes, talking about books and authors and ideas, and facilitating classes. I feel incredibly lucky. 

LS: What helps you breathe easy these days? 

CJS: The trees! It’s all about the trees these days, and now that I think about it … has been all along.