Writing Toward Beauty: An Interview with Simmons Buntin

Recently an inspired college student reached out to me with some questions about my work and writing style...

What I’m after, in image or writing, is beauty.

This fall, a student from the University of Central Arkansas reached out to me with some questions after reading some of my work online and learning about Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home (which was recently named one of 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2005 by Literary Hub!). I was happy to respond—even though I was far slower than I should have been, especially after the student closed his request with, “Looking at your work it honestly inspires me to do more and continue what I am doing.” Hey, any time I can be an inspiration, that’s a good thing! Or, at least I think it is…

Here are his original questions with my responses, in case you too would like to be inspired—or just learn a little more about me.

What made you want to take pictures along with writing?

I’ve been a photographer since before college. I got my first camera, an Olympus OM-F, when I was 16, just before taking a trip around the world with my high school. The trip was amazing, but so was the opportunity to record it with a camera. Since then, and especially again once we moved to Tucson in 2000, when my daughters were young, I’ve taken a camera and, more often now, my iPhone with me to photograph everywhere I go. It’s a part of who I am as much—and probably more so—than writing itself. There’s something about the way we focus with a camera in hand—the way we seek beauty in just the right light. That I can also write about my photography, and have my photography align with and support my writing, is a real pleasure. When I give public readings, I hope to include slideshows, as well, in part because my essays are long and having photographs helps the audience along. But truly what I’m after, in image or writing, is beauty. The camera and the pen are different means to that same ends.

Through all of your essay collection, how do you avoid redundancy when writing new material?

There’s certainly some overlap in Satellite—because the original essays were published separately and not written as a book, and so mentions there particularly of family and place occur in each essay. Some of that was edited out when I put the essays together for the manuscript. But in general, especially on larger topics, I avoid redundancy by choosing separate questions to ask—and essaying is all about asking questions, even if we don’t get to an answer. Probably especially if we don’t get to an answer.

In some cases I’ve long thought about what I want to write about. For instance, I knew I wanted to write an essay on migration, Sandhill cranes, and my younger daughter Juliet for about a dozen years before I sat down to craft that one. Now that I’ve written about migration and cranes, I don’t feel the need to write about them again, except perhaps in passing or as it relates to a different, larger topic or concept I’m working on. There are countless stories to tell, and topics to cover, so I don’t think I’ll ever need to worry about redundancy in my writing. Also, I’m not that prolific a writer—heck, it took me 18 years to put together a collection of 16 essays!—so there’s no risk of me writing about everything I could possibly want to write about and then having to turn back since I’ve exhausted my ideas. As writers, we are always thinking of the story in any experience, and different, essential ways to tell that story. And that story is never the same, and so our telling of it should never be the same.

What motivates you to write?

Deadlines, mostly. Well, that’s the way to get me to actually sit down and write. I don’t write as a daily practice. Sounds lovely, but that’s never been my style. Otherwise, what motivates me to write is the world we live in, the beauty of place, the inequities and other challenges the human and more-than-human world face daily and more broadly generationally, even geologically. Also, I’m more inclined to write when I’m avidly reading. Reading inspires me to write.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

The smallest grain of sand to the wide, perplexing universe, and any and everything between. Which is to say, place and our place in it. But also fatherhood, family, nature, democracy, photography and other art, animals, science, urban form. Beauty, and how we find it, define it, gain joy from it.

Looking back, is there one moment or decision that played a key role in your success that you would approach differently if given the chance? If there is, what would you change and why?

I think the single biggest factor in my success as an essayist is that I went to graduate school for creative writing, earning an MFA in Creative Writing (Nonfiction) from the University of Arizona in 2009. Before that, I wrote a fair bit, including having published a book of poetry (Riverfall) and writing a regular column for Next City magazine, but I hadn’t studied the craft of writing, nor practiced it so intentionally as I did in grad school. That time was a gift—a sacred time and space to work on my craft as a writer, to discuss writing deeply with fellow students and faculty, to get good, critical feedback on my work. Simply, it changed my life and enabled me to become a much better writer.

I would not change a thing about that experience. I was older than most students in the program—I had two daughters, lived out in the suburbs (well, Civano, but a suburban location nonetheless), and worked full-time. But I was accepted as any other student, and we had a strong cohort. I am grateful for that experience.

How was the process of writing your book Satellite?

Satellite was originally conceived as a slightly different book by another name: The Sum of All Species, which is the title of the first essay in the collection. In fact, it was accepted as a partially completed manuscript for publication by the University of Nebraska Press in 2011. But then some family issues came up, and I wasn’t in the head space to write that particular nonfiction memoir-in-essays on fatherhood and community. So I cancelled the contract. Over the next several years I wrote a few more pieces, but between 2013 and 2021 I didn’t write any nonfiction with this manuscript in mind.

Then the pandemic hit, and I revised the essays that were written, finding that I had a fair few that seemed like they still held water. To test those waters, I combined the first three essays—“The Sum of All Species,” “Calendars of Sun and Moon,” and “Satellite”—together as a prose chapbook titled Satellite and submitted it to a chapbook contest run by Iron Horse Literary Review. It was named a finalist, which confirmed what I hoped, that the essays still resonated.

But I needed more essays to have enough for a full book, and I knew then I wanted the essays to be more diverse than what the original book was going to be. I also needed to revise the essays—some of them considerably more than others. As we rolled out of the pandemic, I joined a writer’s group with a couple other writers I knew. That allowed me to share both new essays and older pieces and get insightful, constructive feedback to make them better. In the end, I only needed to write two more essays to complete the manuscript—they just happen to be the longest in the book. The first, mentioned above, is “Stopover,” on migration, Sandhill cranes, and my relationship with my younger daughter. The second, “After,” came about when I did a writing residency at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in central Oregon. That essay braids my older daughter’s fall through a plate glass window when she was 11 with the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption and the 2020 Holiday Farm Fire in the Mackenzie River Valley. I didn’t know what the essay would be about, beyond Mount St. Helens, when I visited, but seeing that burnscape, and then by coincidence having a conversation with a nearby resident, put that one into place—landscapes of natural and personal trauma.

I was also inspired by John T. Price’s terrific essay collection All if Leaf, which like Satellite includes disparate essays. Reading that book, which includes several essays published in Terrain.org, helped me see my own manuscript as more free-flowing. Yes, there’s an order, but there’s not necessarily an entire narrative arc for the book. And I like that. So it empowered me to include some essays I might not otherwise have included, and for sure would not have included in the original University of Nebraska Press book.

I updated the original book proposal and sent it to several presses. A couple were interested, and I ended up choosing Trinity University Press. The rest is, as they say, history...

And a reminder that on my website’s Satellite page, there’s a downloadable PDF of discussion questions and writing prompts for each of the 16 essays in Satellite.