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Interview with Pacific Northwest Booksellers
From the April edition of FOOTNOTES, the newsletter of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association:
Collecting Some Thoughts
Sitting Down with Jack Nisbet
Spokane teacher and naturalist, and winner of a 2010 Pacific Northwest Book Award, Jack Nisbet celebrated his honor with a visit to Leavenworth, Washington in February. He spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at an event hosted by A Book For All Seasons at the town’s library. While in Leavenworth, Nisbet found time to speak with Jacqueline Haskins, A Book For All Seasons staffer and a graduate student in the Whidbey Writers Workshop low-residency MFA.
JH: You’ve just won the PNBA Book Award, honoring your book The Collector as one of the top books of 2009 written by a Northwest author. Tell us what winning this award means to you.
Nisbet: I’m really appreciative of this award. Sometimes writing awards can be pretty random, but independent bookstores have always meant a lot to me. In the last 30 years, I’ve really worked with small bookstores all over the west and gotten to know a lot of the owners. As long as those bookstores keep going, I feel like I can too.
JH: The Collector describes the journeys of explorer and botanist David Douglas through the Pacific Northwest, just 20 years or so after Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific. How did you first become interested in David Douglas?
Nisbet: If you do natural history in the Northwest, you run into David Douglas immediately. There have been other books written about him, every couple of decades, but nobody had looked at Douglas from an inland Northwest perspective. I knew the country, I had worked extensively with the fur trade, and I had a lot of tribal contacts that I thought could inform Douglas’ story.
JH: Your admiration and respect for Douglas’ independence, enthusiasm and knowledge really come through in The Collector. Were there aspects of Douglas’ character that you did not admire?
Nisbet: Oh, yes, he’s famous for whining about his health. His energy drove a lot of people to distraction, and he could be a difficult personality to be around. After his first return trip to England in 1829, his great friend and mentor William Jackson Hooker wrote a line that goes something like: “Many of us, including Mr. Douglas, wish he were back in North America …” But at the same time, Douglas had a great capacity for close friendships. He became close friends with many of the fur traders, especially the Scots, and always seemed to get along well with kids.
JH: Is there anything you discovered after The Collector was published that you wish you could have included?
Nisbet: That’s always the case. Usually when a book comes out is when you really start learning about the subject. I recently saw a letter about Douglas’ death, from a friend of Douglas, that would have been wonderful to include in the book. But I don’t fixate on those things. Douglas is a huge subject, there will always more to find out about him and what he saw in the Northwest.
JH: Is there anything you discovered about Douglas that you deliberately chose to leave out of The Collector?
Nisbet: Any writer chooses what to put in a book. I made sure I included a lot of things that fit my particular slant. Of course I try to be balanced, but nobody’s really balanced, especially with a subject like Douglas who did so many contradictory things. For example, what others who have written about Douglas saw as troubled or manic, I often saw as humorous, because I think he had a great sense of humor.
JH: You say you had a particular slant; can you describe it?
Nisbet: Douglas was really excited by the natural and human communities that he saw here in the Northwest, and I am too. That’s what I try to emphasize and bring forward in my writing.
JH: Tell us a bit about your own travels to research The Collector. Any exciting adventures?
Nisbet: Many of Douglas’ routes are the same routes pioneered by David Thompson, the subject of my previous biography, so I’d been visiting these areas for years. The real adventure for me was going to these sites in the same week during the year that Douglas had visited them. I’d often be astonished by how much that he found was still there. It’s easy to find examples of where natural environments have been ruined, but as I re-visited these sites of Douglas’s, I found lots of places that looked really good, and that was a very positive experience.
JH: That’s wonderful to hear. I know that the natural world is very close to your heart. Which came first for you, being a naturalist or being a writer?
Nisbet: I was a naturalist from the time I was a kid. I’m still not much else. Going out and looking at things, at the natural and human world together, is what I do. Writing came later; much later.
JH: What is your favorite part, and what is your least favorite part, of writing a book?
Nisbet: Writing The Collector, the research was an exciting couple of years. And also, like most writers, I really enjoy the editing process, the shaping process. The first draft was really fun to write. But my first draft was 400 pages. I had to take it down to 300 pages. My wife Claire helped me with that, and she’s really good at what she does. I tend to be easily distracted by all these little stories about Douglas, but many of them had to come out. To make the story flow, to make it work, it’s all about what you leave out. That was hard for me. But my wife was wonderful at helping me with that. And the stories I had to cut–that’s what I share with people now when I give talks about the book.
JH: What would you say to a young person just starting out in writing?
Nisbet: Just starting out in writing? I’d say go figure out something else to do. Go do something else you’re really passionate about. If that leads back to writing, fine. The power of writing is using your brain as a filter for what you’re passionate about. So go live something, and live it hard. Then think about writing about it.
JH: What is next for you? Are you already at work on another book?
Nisbet: I do have a few ideas in mind, but I’m not sure which one I’m going to do next. I think it’s a common problem for writers, how to transition out of such an all-consuming project. It’s not necessarily a good idea to jump into the first thing that interests you. What might be next for me is a museum exhibit on Douglas. His story has so many visual aspects–the natural world, tribal artifacts, artwork of all kinds, plants and trees–it might be a great way to get people who aren’t readers excited about Douglas and about what he loved.I
Douglas presentation posted on KRFP (Radio Free Moscow) website
If you missed Jack Nisbet’s Moscow presentation on January 28 of “A Most Remarkable Spring: David Douglas in Idaho and Beyond” or would like to listen again, a recording of his entire 100-minute talk as well as an abbreviated, half-hour compilation of selected excerpts, will be posted on the audio page of KRFP, Radio Free Moscow’s website. For more information, please contact station manager Leigh Robartes at leigh@radiofreemoscow.com or 208-892-9300.
Co-sponsored by the White Pine Idaho Native Plant Society and others, Nisbet gave this lecture on January 28 at the 1912 Center in Moscow, in support of his latest book, The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest. In his talk, the Spokane-based teacher, naturalist, and acclaimed author of several books on Northwest history and nature described the adventures of intrepid, Scottish botanist Douglas as he explored the native landscapes and cultures of the Northwest. In 1826, this early naturalist traveled with a fur trading brigade to the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake rivers and all over the Columbia River basin, collecting specimens for European horticulturists and scientists, seeking knowledge of native plants, and observing tribal plant use and landscape maintenance.
Oregon Public Broadcasting Interview, December 25, 2009
http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/shows/discovering-david-douglas/
Discovering David Douglas
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His name graces an Oregon school district, an iconic tree, a Vancouver park, and the scientific nomenclature of more than 80 local plants and animals, but most Northwesterners have only a cursory knowledge of the Scottish naturalist David Douglas.
Two decades after Lewis and Clark, Douglas was the first European visitor whose sole job was to investigate the natural history of the Northwest. Investigate he did: he ranged throughout the region — racking up 7,032 miles by foot, boat, and horse — collecting 650 species in Oregon alone that were diligently catalogued and sent back to England. These specimens transformed English gardening and landscaping, but what did Douglas’s “discoveries” mean for the Northwest?
That’s one of many questions Jack Nisbet tackles in his new biography of David Douglas. In Nisbet’s telling, buttressed by Douglas’s letters and journal entries, Douglas is a man of “self-effacing humor” and a “consuming interest in the world around him.” He is a “practical naturalist” who, after blowing out a grouse egg for his collection, scrambled the contents for a meal. (The scramble was added to a “comfortable supper” of dried buffalo and fresh grouse.) But Douglas wasn’t just focused on plants and trees. He mingled and traded freely with tribal members, sampling their cultures and soaking up their languages.
Nisbet fleshed out his narrative by following Douglas’s itinerary throughout the region, visiting each site in the appropriate season.
What questions do you have about the land that first Douglas saw? Or that Nisbet traveled with Douglas’s observations in hand?
Where do you see the lasting effects of this collector on the land and landscape that he so diligently catalogued?
November 9, 2009 Radio Interview with Steve Scher, KUOW
Jack Nisbet and the Natural History of the Northwest
Steve Scher
11/09/2009 at 9:00 a.m.
The Douglas fir is one of the most recognizable and common trees in the Pacific Northwest, but do you know who it’s named after? Writer, historian and naturalist Jack Nisbet does! He joins us in the studio to discuss his newest book: “The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest.” It follows the young David Douglas, an influential member of the second wave of Westward explorers. The Collector is an in–depth look at Douglas’ purposeful mission “to capture some of the New World’s unpredictable vigor and infuse it back into the Old.”
Guest(s)
Jack Nisbet is a writer, historian, teacher and naturalist. His most recent book, “The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest,” follows David Douglas, an influential botanical explorer in the Pacific Northwest. Douglas’ most notable discovery is the Douglas fir.
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From the Portland Examiner, by Karen Gilb
The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association recently announced the winners of its annual PNBA Book Awards. This year, Awards Committee members considered more than 200 titles nominated for work published in 2009 by a variety of Pacific NW authors. The 2010 winners include Jack Nisbet for his book entitled The Collector: David Douglas and the Natural History of the Northwest.
The Collector tells the story of Scots-born botanist David Douglas who became the “premiere botanical explorer in the Pacific NW and other areas of western North America.” Douglas undertook his plant-hunting expedition in 1824 on behalf of the Royal Botanic Institution of Glasgow. His discoveries included a wide variety of western plants–most notably, the Douglas Fir–which were then introduced into English and European markets.
Nisbet’s book takes the reader along on Douglas’ journeys into a strange new world that stretched from Puget Sound to the Sandwich Islands. “In telling his story, Nisbet evokes a lost world of early exploration, pristine nature, ambition, and cultural and class conflict with surprisingly modern resonances.”
Jack Nisbet is a teacher, naturalist, and writer who lives in Spokane, Washington. The Collector is his 6th book. Previous titles include the Murray Morgan Prize-winning book Sources of the River.
The Pacific NW Booksellers Association is a non-profit group of independent bookstores located in five states. One of their oldest and most popular programs is the annual PNBA Book Awards. The Awards Committee is made up of nine volunteer booksellers from independent bookstores located throughout Washington, Oregon, Idaha, Montana, and Alaska.
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The Collector wins 2010 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award!!