An Interview with Mary Sojourner

Interview

by Charles Finn | 1 Comments

On an unseasonably warm day in March, I sat down with Mary Sojourner, author of the novel, Going Through Ghosts, and the soon to be released, She Bets Her Life, a memoir and guide for women gambling addicts. We sat outside in her yard, myself in a wire chair and Sojourner perched halfway up her front steps. Sojourner is 70, proud of it and there is a vitality to her you don't find in women half her age, as well as a tough as nails quality.

Her toughness, I discovered, is the flip side of a tender heart, a heart she says has been broken by human mistreatment of the earth. At all times Sojourner exhibits a sincere love and deep felt empathy for the natural world. In her book of essays, Bonelight, she describes herself as a cross between John Muir and Shirley McClaine. Not surprisingly, a set of prayer flags with bird silhouettes hung from the woodshed next to us, and an alter along a fence displayed stones, gems, pieces of wood and animal figures. She was genuinely delighted when a flicker visited, calling it one of her allies, and at one point when our conversation drifted into environmental degradation her eyes watered over and she touched her chest. “I think you just broke my heart,” she said – and I could believe her.

If there is a single, pivotal moment in her life, it was when a friend drove her across the country, led her by the hand to the South rim of the Grand Canyon. If there is a second, it is when she discovered survey stakes in an ephemeral wetlands meadow where she hiked everyday.

Mary Sojourner was born in Rochester, New York, in 1940. She described herself as, “the little girl who goes to the library and gets eight books and then two days later returns them and gets eight more.” Books were her refuge, as was the outdoors, two things that would continue to give her solace throughout her life. “I learned how to be a human being from reading,” she says. She can remember the moment in first grade when she learned to read, individual words suddenly combining to become coherent sentences. “I'll never have to be lonely again,” she thought. This love of books, Sojourner believes, and the fact that her mother was “a brilliant and gifted bipolar/psychotic and her father, “an ordinary Joe . . . utterly baffled, scared and hurt by what my mother went through,” are the biggest contributors to her becoming a writer. Sojourner also raised three children on her own.

Today, she lives with four cats and no TV in a small house nestled in the center of Bend, Oregon, within walking distance of downtown. She works part-time at the Bend Community Center, sometimes teaches writing circles and writes everyday. For all her good will and an easy laugh there is a sense in talking with her that you don't want to get on her wrong side. She can narrow her eyes and look you directly in the eye, and the feeling is that she could stare down a bear, or as she would prefer, a land developer. Likewise there is nothing hidden, fake or false about her – what you see is what you get. Her look is a purposeful step up from disheveled. She is also a recovering gambling addict, “sober” as she calls it for over two years and speaks candidly about it. Politically aligned with Ed Abbey, she calls herself a writer/activist and although this order has changed many times over the years, it would be impossible to separate one from the other.

Sojourner's writing career began in Rochester when she wrote an alternative healing column for a regional feminist newspaper. Even before that, however, she had the bug. When she was 12 she wrote a poem in the style of Dorothy Parker and submitted it to The New Yorker. “Surprise, surprise, they didn't take it,” she laughed. She also kept a journal, (and does to this day) which she says helps her see cycles and connections in her life. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Rochester, Sojourner went to work as “the first feminist counselor in the city,” and began writing her column. She'd been political since her high school years in the late fifties, and it came out on the page. “I'm still convinced,” she said, “that a good deal of what people go through is because of this totally brutalizing culture that cuts across all socio-economic lines – except, of course, the poor get hammered the hardest.”

At that point in her life there was little time for fiction but by 1983 her children were grown and that's when a friend invited her to take a trip west. Sojourner was reluctant. "I told my friend the Grand Canyon was just Disneyland with rocks.” Her friend took her to the edge of the canyon with her eyes closed and said, “open your eyes.” When she did she knew instantly she had been changed. “My old life was over and it was time to begin a new life. I was home, maybe for the first time in my life.”

A year later Sojourner made a solo trip to Flagstaff and Northern New Mexico. A year after that she moved west for good, the writings of Ed Abbey in tow. “By the time I came west in 1985,” she said, “ I had become dedicated to writing and fighting for the earth, and it's pretty much what I've done for 25 years.”

Those 25 years have seen a lot of ups and downs and sideways. They was a time when “active” was still part of activism, and grassroots didn't mean a petition on the Internet. There were victories. Sojourner helped stop the development of a uranium mine on the rim of the Grand Canyon. And hard-fought defeats. Wetlands turned into par fives. “The land of the Southwest,” she says, “felt like a place that was wounded and angry.”
And there was also gambling, the dichotomy and hypocrisy of her love of the casinos was not lost on her. “I understand the nature of addictions,” she said, “and because I also had to grow up pretty fast the casinos proved to be the only place in my life where I could be a little girl, where I could just play.” On top of that casinos offered a respite from responsibility for Sojourner-the-activist, “I could get away from the fury.” Over time, however, an addiction to slot machines took over. “I like the colors, the sounds . . . There is always the potential for fabulous surprise,” she says.

She knew she would have to stop when she read Mario Puzo's, Inside Las Vegas, where he fears that if he doesn't stop gambling he may never write again. Sojourner knew that could become her. In 2007, she entered a recovery program and the first time she whole-heartedly said, “I'm Mary and I'm addicted to gambling,” it sparked a vision of a steady decline a decade long but it didn't erase the reality that, “My time in the casinos was the happiest time in my life.” The fact of the matter is, “I love, Going Through Ghosts more than anything I've written,” Sojourner says, “and if I had never gambled the book never would have existed.” Sojourner continues to attend meetings for her addiction, especially since editing, Going Through Ghosts brought up a lot of nostalgia for her times in casinos. More problematic was her research for She Bets Her Life, where even seeing a slot machine on a website could make her mouth go dry. Currently, Sojourner is writing a blog for Psychology Today about being a recovering gambling addict, and so the process continues.

“Writing,” Sojourner said, “is my lifeline,” and, “for the kind of writing I do, I need a lot of space around it. I need a lot of silence.” For Sojourner, writing is “an out of control process,” and instead of going with her first inspiration she likes to let things stew. “I'm always writing, I'm always paying attention,” she says, “I'll see things or overhear a conversation or a thought will flash through my head and that image or those words or that thought I can feel hook somewhere in my mind and I know not to do anything about it. I'll turn my thoughts away from it but it's as though they cook there and some not without resulting discomfort. I often think I'm going crazy right before a piece emerges. Eventually, and sometimes it's ten years or ten days or half an hour, all of a sudden, I'm at the keyboard and I'm working.” The work comes out almost fully formed. “I just pour it out,” she said, “I feel like a lightning rod,” (she held up her hand to the sky and closed her eyes) as though the work is already out there somewhere, that it actually exists on its own and comes through me.” The next step in her writing process she related to what sculptors often refer to as carving the wood away from what is already there. For Sojourner, “What I do is cut away everything that isn't the writing.”

“These days,” Sojourner said, "I'm wrestling with what matters today and how to make my words count for something real for the planet . . . I've said everything there is to be said about what's being done to the planet and about what humans do to each other.” Sojourner has a third novel “that needs work” and that she's contemplating a book on conscious aging. “Our society is incredibly ignorant and prejudiced about the realities of aging,” she said.

“Still my deepest passion is for how we treat the planet," she said, “and I think if I understand science right, we've reached a point of no return for the existing web of interwoven lives on this earth. The damage is so deep and extensive. At the moment, I take care of my immediate surroundings, I write what comes through me and I seem to be writing right now a lot about unanswerable questions.” After nearly two hours of questions – some answerable, others not – Sojourner, looked up at the spruce in her yard and the blue sky behind it. “I'm still on fire for writing beauty,” she said.

"AND I STILL HOPE THAT MY WRITING CAN BREAK HEARTS AND LET REALITY THROUGH.”

 

 

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