Laura Julier is the author of the new memoir Off Izaak Walton Road: The Grace That Comes Through Loss. Also an educator, editor, and chaplain, she lives in Iowa City.
Q: What inspired you to write Off Izaak Walton Road?
A: A series of random and serendipitous events unfolded, one after another, almost as if the universe was conspiring to create this opportunity for me to live in this old hunting cabin on a gravel road along a river south of Iowa City.
It was a place that grabbed me hard and pulled me in. Pulled at something deep inside me that I did not understand—and in fact, I realized I didn’t want to understand it at the time. I was powerfully swept up by the experience of living in this place.
Over the time that I lived there, I found myself attending more and more to the natural world around me, and it happened for some reason that during that particular winter, spring, and summer, conditions both environmental and human-made conspired to bring a surprising number of bird species.
I also found myself compelled to keep finding reasons and ways to return to live in this cabin for several months at a time, over six or seven years. I knew I wanted to write about the location, and I began with questions about what it was that called to me, why it felt like home when it bore no resemblance to any place I’d lived before.
So I began exploring: What is it that causes a place to grab hold of us? What is it about the places we feel rooted, grounded, nurtured—feel most ourselves or most connected to something larger than ourselves.
Over time, again because of both environmental and human forces and events, conditions in this area of land and river changed. Each time I was able to live there, I had to contend with loss and change, and so the heart of the book changed as well.
It became a story of confronting and living with losses of all kinds, and grief, and finding our way through that to a different understanding and to healing.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I knew from the minute I decided to take on this project that this would be the title. The book is about the time I lived off Izaak Walton Road, about the life that I observed and that I came to understand differently as time went on. It was just an obvious choice to me.
What quickly emerged the more I wrote was that this story has a lot to do with what’s hidden, what’s beneath the surfaces all around us. I followed that thread literally. I write about the life that takes place in the marsh and ditches, the unseen places in wild or undeveloped area.
There’s also a thread throughout the pieces in the book that has to do with experiences that are unspoken, and the currents of feeling and knowing that are apprehended outside of language.
There’s one moment when, as I am ending my stay at this cabin for a second time, I step off the road to allow a motorcycle to pass, and I’m standing in a field, about a foot lower than the road, which affords me a completely different perspective, a different angle to view what I’ve been observing and investigating for the season past.
It’s a very simple thing—one step—but a reminder that sometimes we have to put our feet literally in a different place in order to understand.
Q: The author Lacy M. Johnson said of the book, “Written with clarity, candor, and a tenderness of attention that is profoundly moving, this book shows the often-transformative power of loss, solace, and joy.” What do you think of that description?
A: It’s humbling for me to hear a reader name what they perceive about something I’ve written—what they receive from the experience of sitting with my words and sentences, with the object I’ve shaped and made.
I am very grateful for Lacy Johnson’s words, and I’ve used her phrase—"the transformative power of loss, solace, and joy”—to describe the book to others. It’s somewhat like looking in a mirror: I recognize myself, but there’s some distance as well as recognition.
I was drawn to working as a hospital and hospice chaplain because I’m deeply moved by the ways that humans deal with loss and sorrow. It’s a part of the human condition that keeps pulling me. No one gets through life without loss, and the subtraction of a part of our life’s story changes that story.
So for me, loss and transformation are integral to the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this memoir, and what do you hope people take away from it?
A: I carried this project with me for quite a few years, and as I said, in some ways it kept evolving and shifting, although in other ways it had a life of its own. I learned a lot about my own creative process and about being patient.
During one part of the process, I only had to sit myself down and the pages emerged; after I had most of it compiled, I had to shift from being immersed in just getting it down on the page to shaping and orchestrating the shifts and focus, what I call the key notes or melodic line in each part, shaping how they unfolded in a sequence that wasn’t linear, was recursive in some ways, yet moved and evolved.
I’m not sure I ever thought about what I hoped readers would take away from the book—I was always more concerned about shaping and sculpting this object—but since it’s now out in the world, readers have taught me what they take from it, and that is frankly a part of writing that I didn’t anticipate.
Two things I’ve heard repeatedly. Several readers have told me they have to read it slowly, that the language is so dense and lyrical that it slows down reading the way that poetry slows you down. That is probably the highest complement to me, because I pay minute attention to syntax and nuance.
A few readers have told me they appreciate that it’s structured as mostly short pieces—two to three pages—so that it lends itself to being read in small bits of time. That’s interesting to me because I write and think with a lot of white space. In fact, people close to me would, I think, say that I live that way—I need a lot of silence and time to process sensory input.
The other thing I’ve heard is readers’ own stories about a place that grabbed hold of their hearts, and I appreciate listening to those stories. You live with a story for a long time, and you think you’re the only one who can tell it, explore it, unearth it—but then you pick your head up from the manuscript and discover all the ways that story resonates, and all the ways it’s a fundamentally shared story.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have several projects gestating right now. The one that’s closest to emerging is another subject I’ve written about, researched, and carried for several years. It too is in some senses about the way stories infuse and are shaped by a particular place.
The story of Hannah Duston, a woman who lived 400 years ago in New England, is a traumatic one, but it's not a story she herself ever told. We only know about her through the ways others shaped her story for their own purposes.
I’m interested in what emerges when we layer those stories, and in what it means to control the narrative of our own lives—if that’s even possible.
A second project I’m working on is inspired by the late writer Judith Kitchen’s Half In Shade, a memoir sparked by the evidence of family photos and her speculation about family relationships.
For me, it emerges from the same impulse as the 2022 documentary film Three Minutes: A Lengthening, in which a snippet of a 1938 home movie of a European Jewish village provides the beginning of a search to fill in the gaps of what happened to the people who appear in it.
Like many people, my knowledge of my elders and ancestors is very thin. It goes back two generations with a good amount of detail, then drops off precipitously leaving me with scant matter—one photo, a first name, and that’s about it.
In my case, I had an uncle who was a photographer in his early life, and he left hundreds of photos, including many of a summer he spent with his father and brother in 1936 in Poland.
You can see in both of these projects not only the ways that I’m drawn to examining the particulars of a place and how it impacts a life, as well as looking at silences and white space.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m heading off to the annual AWP conference, this year in Los Angeles, where I’ll be signing and reading from Off Izaak Walton Road, and excited to be reading at Broadway Books in Portland, Oregon, the following week. I’ll be at Schuler Books in Okemos, Michigan, in June.
I’m especially interested in how readers from very different parts of the country respond to the Midwestern-ness of the book. More readings and links to interviews will appear at laurajulier.com.
There are so many people who have contributed to helping bring this book into being and into readers’ hands, and I’m enormously grateful to all of them.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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