Sharman Apt Russell has written twelve previous books with numerous starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist. The San Francisco Chronicle said “Russell’s writing is luminous” and The Seattle Times described her An Obsession with Butterflies, a nonfiction for adults and YA, as a “masterpiece of story-telling." The New York Times and Discover Magazine both described her book on hunger, which has also been listed as nonfiction YA, as “elegant” and "fascinating."

I am pleased to be considered in the book world as a nature/science writer. At the same time, I have relied on Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow my bliss. I write about what engages me, what I can learn from, what seems important. My topics include citizen science, living in place, archaeology, flowers, butterflies, hunger, and pantheism. Although most of my books are creative nonfiction for adults, my first love is children’s literature. I am a happy person when writing and reading Young Adult and middle-grade fabulist novels, when I open up that box of metaphor and magic. My awards include a Rockefeller Fellowship, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the New Mexico Presswomen’s Zia Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Writers at Work Fellowship, and the Henry Joseph Jackson Award. My work has been translated into Korean, Chinese, Swedish, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Polish, and Portuguese. (The thrill—and befuddlement—of seeing your words in Chinese ideograms.) I have thrice served as the PEN West judge for their annual award in best children’s literature. My next book will build on ideas from Hunger: An Unnatural History and return to the world of food aid and childhood malnutrition. I am also planning companion books to Teresa of the New World and The Council of Beings. I do love to write. Writing is how I move through the world, how I live, how and when I become my best self. Really, there’s no turning back now. 

 

EXTRA CREDIT INTERVIEW WITH SHARMAN APT RUSSELL:

Today LitPick welcomes Sharman Apt Russell as she joins us for an Extra Credit interview! Sharman is viewed as a nature/science writer. Her topics include citizen science, living in place, archaeology, flowers, butterflies, hunger and pantheism. Sharman is a writer of both creative nonfiction for adults and fiction using magical realism.  She is the author of the young adult book Teresa of the New World.

Do you have a solid outline before writing, or do you usually get ideas as you go along?

Writing a story, for me, is a balance between knowing where I am going and—at the same time--leaving lots of psychic space for discovery. Stories usually flow best when I already have a sense of major themes, a sense of the emotional arc, a sense of beginning and ending. But then the characters and details have to surprise me. That’s the energy and fun of writing. It’s a journey taking place in the present, in the very act of writing. And I have to be flexible. My understanding of the story may shift. I have to be open to the possibilities of real change.  

Has someone you knew ever appeared as a character in a book (consciously or subconsciously)?

Yes, just recently, in my young adult novel Teresa of the New World. I didn’t realize this, actually, until the book was close to publication—but the character of the sixteenth-century explorer Cabeza de Vaca in this novel is actually based on my own father, a test pilot in the 1950s who died while flying the experimental rocket-powered X-2 when I was two years old. My father, Captain Milburn Apt, was a real hero who pulled men out of burning planes and who passionately loved flying. Over and over again, he risked his life testing planes that could explode or fall apart in the sky. The conquistador Cabeza de Vaca was a man shipwrecked for eight years along the coast of Texas, who walked thousands of miles to reach the outposts of New Spain. But then, after finally getting home to Europe, Cabeza de Vaca promptly returned to the New World to search for gold in South America. Both men shaped their daughters through their actions and their passions, and both “abandoned” their daughters, too.

What do you do when you get writer's block?

Hmm. I don’t really get writer’s block. I do have trouble sometimes solving a writing problem, and then I go for a run or a walk or a bicycle ride. Oxygenation seems to help. So does the passage of time, of course, and sleeping.

If you could live in a book's world, which would you choose?

Possibly Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. I would be the character Will, of course. I also like the Paleolithic world of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s Reindeer Moon, although it’s pretty harsh as well as awe-ful and beautiful.

What is your favorite book-to-movie adaptation?

I thought the Hunger Games did a good job. The movies were very faithful to the books’ complexity but added some stunning visual scenes.

If you could have lunch with one other author (dead or alive!), who would it be?

That’s hard. The greatest women authors I admire—Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard—are also pretty moody. I don’t know if they would be fun lunch companions. I teach in the low-residency program at Antioch University in Los Angeles and many famous writers come through as guests or speakers, and I don’t always have the urge to see them; sometimes the best relationship with authors is through their books. Now, Francesca Lia Block also teaches at Antioch University, and I can tell from faculty meetings that she would be a fun lunch companion! I suspect C.S. Lewis would be, too, funny and kindly and also willing to talk about serious things.

Wild Card Question: What do you like to do when you aren’t writing?

I really love to go for a run in the country. From my house in the Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico, I can be in the Gila National Forest in about a mile and a half. Then I can run on dirt roads and trails along the Gila River, past cottonwood and sycamore trees, through fields of grass and scrub brush. Once in a great while, I see a wild animal like a fox or a javelina or a coati, and that is a complete joy. Most often, I am just beepbopping to my music, a collection of rock and roll and dance songs. I don’t run fast at all, but I can run long—eight miles, say—and I feel like an adventurer in the world. Or a deer.

Sharman, thank you for joining LitPick for this interview! Thank you very much for sharing with us about your father. Wow! What a hero and an adventurer. How lovely to honor your father by basing the Teresa of the New World character on him.

 

SIX MINUTES WITH SHARMAN APT RUSSELL:

Earth Day is a fitting day for Sharman Apt Russell to be joining LitPick for Six Minutes with an Author! Sharman is the author of both fiction and non-fiction books and is considered a nature/science writer, her topics include archaeology, flowers, butterflies and hunger. Sharman is the recipient of many awards including a Rockefeller Fellowship, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the New Mexico Presswomen’s Zia Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Writers at Work Fellowship, and the Henry Joseph Jackson Award. Her work has been translated into Korean, Chinese, Swedish, Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, Polish, and Portuguese. Sharman’s book, Teresa of the New World, is a young adult novel. A Teacher’s Guide is available for this book.

How did you get started writing?

I am one of those people who has been a writer since she was eight years old. In the fourth grade I wrote a story about a pencil who went to a dance, my teacher praised me, and the entire experience was just so satisfying. Certainly I wanted to write because I loved reading and wanted to be part of what I loved—that world of magical realism and talking animals and plot twists and moral choices and drama and adventure. I was raised in apartment buildings by a single mother in a kind of lonely and alienated landscape—the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. Writing helped me discover a world outside that. Writing helped me discover myself. Writing gave me a voice and a focus and kept me company, too.

Who influenced you?

My first influences were the books I was reading as a child. Stories like The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper and The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula Le Guin were very powerful with their complex and rich worldviews and beautiful language. I also became a nature and science writer of adult nonfiction because of classics like This Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George and Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scot O’Dell. Later there was Virginia Woolf, of course, and Carl Jung and many other writers. But like a duckling, I imprinted first on children’s literature.

Do you have a favorite book/subject/character/setting?

I am fascinated by our relationship to the land and to plants and animals. I have always been drawn to historical periods when that relationship was particularly intense and important, when we humans had an understanding with the predators who wanted to eat us and with the prey that we wanted to eat. I wrote about that life in the sixteenth-century American Southwest in my recent novel Teresa of the New World—with additional problems that included epidemics of measles and being taken as a slave for the Spanish silver mines.  I explored the extinction of mammoths and other animals 11,000 years ago in my novel The Last Matriarch.  And I had a lot of fun imagining a Paleoterrific future 250 years from now in my upcoming science fiction Knocking on Heaven’s Door. The physical setting is always the deserts and forests of the Southwest. My nonfiction is usually about nature, too, and infused with a sense of how amazing the universe is—galaxies, mountain lions, orchids, lichen, clouds, ravens, monarch butterflies are all so stunningly beautiful and complex and surprising. My fiction is infused with an earth magic—with swimming through stone and talking to jaguars and listening to pine trees--that is really just a metaphor for this scientific reality, for what we live in and enjoy every day.  

What advice do you have for someone who wants to be an author?

You are going to have a lot of fun. My advice is to keep your eye on the prize—which is how much you like to write. How much you lose yourself in the process of creating new worlds. How much you discover about yourself. How much you have to be honest and intimate with your readers. How much you enjoy shaping sentences and playing with words.

Write on a regular basis. For me, that means a few hours every morning. Then use the nourishment and energy of writing to help you engage in the rest of your day. See writing as a basic, healthy, essential part of your life, like one of the four food groups… At the same time, especially in the first years and years and years of writing, I wouldn’t get caught up in writing as a career or in getting published. Writing is deeper and more important than that.

Where is your favorite place to write?

I’ve learned to write whenever and wherever I can—in an office, on an airplane, waiting for someone. That’s partly because I wrote a lot, over a dozen books translated into a dozen languages, while working fulltime as a university teacher and raising two children. I just created a bubble and was happy in my bubble of writing. I do need a computer as well. I love the ability to type those words so quickly and to revise and rework as I go.

What else would you like to tell us?

Writing has been such a positive force in my life, and I really like the way the internet has made writing more available to so many more people. I like how reviewers are now students at LitPick and all kinds of readers on sites like Goodreads and Amazon. I like fan fiction and how these readers write for the sheer delight of engaging in those literary worlds—and shaking up those worlds, too. I think telling and hearing stories is our natural form of play, and that play is how we make sense of our lives as human beings.

Sharman, thank you so much for spending six minutes with LitPick and our readers! It has been a pleasure getting to know you and sharing Earth Day with you!