On New Year’s Day of 2022, a fire, possibly electrical, gutted the space where Jon Mooallem writes, a guest room over the detached garage of his family home on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The island is “more vulnerable to disruptions,” so it was questionable whether the fire truck would make it up the hill through the snow and ice—it did. Firefighters carried out the burned paperback copies of Mooallem’s powerful book This Is Chance!, and they blew around the yard. Mooallem comments, “The book is all about disaster, like how unimaginable things can change a day in a moment.” He saved the charred cover of a paperback and put it on his desk.
This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
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To resume work in the guest room, which is also occasionally used by his wife and his daughter, Mooallem borrowed a desk. He plans to use a piece of fir to build a new one. Memorabilia on the floor still haven’t found their place, including a witty drawing by drummer John Moen that serves as the LP cover of a folk and bluegrass soundtrack to Mooallem’s memorable book Wild Ones, which examines humans’ relationship to wilderness through explorations of three endangered species. The album was recorded by Moen and the author’s other friends in the band Black Prairie, with whom he went on tour.
Work needs to be balanced with parenting. Mooallem doesn’t “engineer any kind of real structure” within a writing day, but when he’s stuck, he takes a walk in the woods outside his house to find solutions. He explains that when you work at home by yourself, a walk is “a central lever to pull…in the middle of the day.” The island walks are different from those he used to take when he lived in San Francisco, where there were “hundreds of people around and shops and things to look at and other human energy.” Walking in the woods leaves him more in his head, and his work bleeds into his evenings, too: “Trying to get a first draft of something out swallows my self whole. It’s very hard to not have part of my brain still banging against the problem, no matter what I’m doing. It’s pretty miserable.”
Mooallem is “adamantly anti-rituals.” For him, they become procrastinations. Getting into patterns of wanting to have everything perfect points him away from doing the hard work. He has to brute-force himself into the job, and yet, sometimes late in the process, “an exhilarating phase” occurs—he has “seen that it’s going to be OK.”•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
