I grew up in the church – my father was a Presbyterian minister, as was my maternal grandfather, and an uncle. My mother’s sister is a theologian.

I come by Joe’s “ultimates” preoccupations honestly – including his “tendency to position climbing as something philosophical, less a physical endeavor than a form of moral striving.”

But he’s not me. I’m lighter, and I’m further along. I’ve had less trouble heeding Pete’s quip to Joe: “It might be an awesome enough responsibility just to enjoy your life a little.”

I took notes for this novel in June 2013 on a rest day during a climbing trip – initially in Pete’s voice and from his point of view.

In December of that year my friend and climbing partner Bill Beckwith died in a motorcycle crash. I believe Joe’s voice was birthed out of the grief I felt for losing Bill. Just months after, I wrote the first several pages, including the letter from Will to Joe that opens the novel.

In the year before he died, Bill rode his motorcycle from San Francisco to Tierra del Fuego. From Chile he sent me a note: Bill’s Note

I’ve known and appreciated and climbed with several manifestations of Pete – the talented, driven, charismatic, visionary, obsessed. Each is named in the acknowledgements at the back of the novel (alongside many others).

Pete is one person I am practicing becoming.

The Eastern Sierra is my other, wilder home – the very 100 mile stretch of high desert and alpine peaks depicted in the novel. In the past year alone I’ve spent more than two months in a tent not far from where Pete’s trailer was situated – climbing, hiking, writing, enjoying sunrises over the White Mountains and too-early sunsets (esp. in the cold months) over the Sierra.

Sage, stars, pinyon pines.

Pete and Joe went all in in ways I resisted and avoided. In some ways their ten years together reflects a re-conceived life, or fantasy, for me.

Of the climbing in Native Air, I’m drawing on my experiences if often re-positioning and/or re-purposing them. The homoerotic passage up the Lighting Bolt Cracks in Part One, for instance, is based on Jason Wells’ and my ascent of the same route in 2009 – though we climbed it in conventional style and without interpersonal strife.

I came to fiction and poetry late – in my teens and twenties – but have not lacked ‘for what is found there.’ I’ve been troubled and inspired and fortified by the ‘heart in conflict with itself’ (Faulkner’s formulation) evoked by dozens of writers dear to me.

The standard Joe sets for himself in rendering this book – “So long as it’s a story I can believe” – reflects his resistance, and mine, to the tidy, moralistic, and/or triumphalist stories of his pastorate and of our common (American) culture. Related: the layered, un-time-bound narrative structure of the novel corresponds to my experience of how life is lived – re-hashed and messy, the present punctuated and animated by the past.

I was born in Goleta, California, and grew up there and, for four years, in Los Angeles County.

From 1979 - 1987 I lived in New Hampshire and Vermont – hence the topography and flavor of Joe’s life there, including the climbing scenes at Cannon Cliff and Cathedral Ledge, the small church near Thetford, and the dinner Joe and Pete and Pete’s mother have at an inn in Lyme, N.H.

Faulkner’s “The Bear” looms large to me in rendering the mythical, meaning-manifest magic of wildness. What young Ike encounters in/through Sam Fathers, Old Ben, and the “puny” white men who “live in herds to protect themselves from their sources” left me, in life and in literature, looking for a consonant experience of exposure.

Climbing and writing are my hunting.

My fiction gestates for a long time. The origins of this novel are in my early climbing experiences at Joshua Tree, Yosemite, North Carolina, and the High Sierra.

In the fall of 1981 I spent a grim, disillusioning season in Yosemite. That winter, in San Francisco, I tried to fashion some fiction out of it. 33 years later I started writing Native Air.