One of the biggest problems that we face going forward in life, as the way that we imagine our place in the world, is to try to imagine that we are part of landscape, that we are not separate from landscape, that landscape is inside us. It’s as essential to us as the air we breathe and the water we drink,” said California Book Club host John Freeman to start off the discussion of Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, the CBC’s June selection.
Martin joined the Zoom call from her backyard, which is full of tall redwood trees. Freeman noted that she had traveled a lot and asked why she’d decided that Sonoma County, where she lives now, was where she belonged. Martin explained that when she and her partner moved to Sonoma County in 2017 because of her partner’s job, she was a city girl, but she fell back in love with the landscape, noting, “I grew up around the redwoods. I grew up in a very similar environment to this, and I instantly felt at home.”
Freeman asked her to talk about how she began to engage with Miwok and other Indigenous cultures before writing the book, which features some of that history and culture. “It felt like something that was quite natural to you, to think of where you live as belonging to a lot of people and being both spiritual and someone else’s home,” he said. Martin replied, “I think growing up in California, one of the amazing things about this region is that colonization happened really quite recently. In the 1800s, really. It began many hundreds of years ago, but the real genocide of the Native American people living here at that time was in the 1800s, or began in the 1800s rather. And so that history is always just under the surface of any story you’re going to learn.”
Freeman called the redwood trees in the book a supporting cast. Martin said, “The coolest thing about redwood trees, I think, right now, is the way they mess with time—like, living around plants that are so big and so old just completely restructures your concept of how time works.” She explained that she usually walks around taking for granted that this is what nature is like, but living among redwoods that are 2,000 years old, “you start to realize that that’s not always how it has been, and that’s also not always how it’s going to be.”
Special guest and journalist Susan Orlean, a colleague of Martin’s, joined her in conversation. Orlean said, “I find part of what’s so wonderful about your book and about the memoirs that matter to me is that they have lots of context and they have peripheral vision.... And I think your book very beautifully and very holistically is in context. The big challenge then is, How do you find the right voice for that to both be intimate, which your book certainly is, but also authoritative, which it also is in talking about the context in which your personal story takes place?”
Martin responded that one of her driving rules for the books when incorporating science or history or research is to say things as though she was explaining it to someone in conversation: “I didn’t want it to be super-filled with scientific lingo. I wanted it to stick with the sort of, you know, lyrical or poetic vibe of the rest of the memoir. And I wanted it to be something that was accessible.”
Orlean asked if Martin had previously written about things that were very personal, like her physical being, and what it felt like to do that in this book. Martin said that, initially, she didn’t plan to write about herself. Her first intention with what became The Last Fire Season was to write an essay, not a book, about evacuation and fire. But she came to realize that her understanding of the wildfire crisis was “100 percent grounded in my own physical crisis,” and that was the unique thing she had to tell.
When he returned, Freeman remarked that one of the parts of fire history Martin talks about is how setting fires became illegal. Martin responded that there were many reasons why, when California was colonized, fire became illegal, among them that forest became timber, something to sell in an extractive economy. She says that the underlying reason intentional fires were outlawed, however, was because they were part of the way Indigenous people interacted with the land, and they represented “a different kind of relationship to the land than a colonizer relationship. It’s a reciprocal, mutual care.”
Speaking about prescribed burns, which she has been involved with, Martin observed, “I didn’t really understand my relationship to fire, as well as humanity’s relationship to fire, until I actually lit fire and watched it and sat and interacted with it in that really sort of intimate way.”•
Join us on Thursday, July 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Rosanna Xia will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
