Lynne Spriggs O’Connor joins the blog this week to chat about her memoir, Elk Love
Author Name: Lynne Spriggs O’Connor
Book Title: Elk Love: A Montana Memoir
Book Genre: Memoir, Romance, Healing in Nature
Release Date: June 18, 2024
Publisher: She Writes Press
Welcome, Lynne! How would you describe Elk Love ?
A world-weary museum curator and a bereaved rancher come together amidst the dazzling beauty and seasonal rhythms of a cattle ranch in a hidden Montana mountain valley – a wide-open, wind-filled place where loneliness gives way to the wonders of bugling elk, dancing birds, and the wisdom of nature.
What sparked the idea for this book?
l’d left everything about my city life as an academic behind and had moved to rural Montana, when the unexpected love story of my lifetime began to unfold…
How long did it take for you to write the book? Did you do any research?
It took me 12 solid years of writing (re-learning how to write!) with some research.
What drew you to memoir writing?
Memoir is fascinating! I’ve kept journals my entire life and have always loved to write. I’d done plenty of academic work for my PhD thesis, grant applications, museum catalogues. I was ready to learn how to write something entirely different and more personal. I found the entire creative process incredibly satisfying and cathartic.
What’s your favorite part about writing/being an author? What do you find challenging?
Descriptions of the landscape and wildlife are always my favorite! It was pure pleasure listening and observing carefully over the years, then doing my best to transcribe the delicious voices and spirits and inherent poetry of nature. I found digging up specific early memories of family dynamics challenging. I don’t remember much about my childhood and what I do remember is difficult.
If you were speaking to someone who hasn’t read your writing before, why should they want to read Elk Love?
Elk Love is for women (and some men) 30-80 – perhaps lonely, perhaps introverted – who might yearn to escape the crush of their busy lives and, for a time, wander into a lost garden to explore a secret love of nature and animals. My book is for anyone who is curious about the healing capacities of stepping outside one’s comfort zones to explore the generous wisdom of what is wild – both precious and disturbing – in us all.
Fill in the blank: Readers who liked Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer will also like Elk Love.
What do you hope readers will take away from this story?
A feeling of hope, courage, and inspiration to follow their own souls’ callings; to slow down and pay attention to what is unknowable and mysterious in life.
What about the writing/editing/publishing process has been the most surprising to you so far?
The dramatic shift that is required: after spending so many years pleasantly writing on my own and grounded in the authentic spirit of things, it is quite jarring to suddenly open myself to the world through the unfamiliar distractions of marketing and self-promotion.
What are your interests outside of writing and reading?
Horseback riding, painting, spending time with animals (including birds!) and my husband, travel to beautiful places, enjoying good food and the company of good friends.
Are you working on a new project? Please tell us about it.
I have a title and notes for a second memoir. But I’m feeling drawn at the moment to poetry and shorter essay forms.
What was the last book you read? What did you think of it?
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain. I found this book powerfully resonant on so many levels. It feels as if my own life story in Elk Love is a perfect allegory of everything she observes about our alchemical journeys of transforming pain into the transcendent grace of creativity, beauty, gratitude, and love.
Where can readers find you?
WEBSITE: https://lynneoconnorauthor.com;
INSTAGRAM: @lynnesoconnor;
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/lynneoconnorauthor; https://www.facebook.com/lynne.spriggs.oconnor/;
BLOG: https://finchnetwork.org/?s=finches+of+cloudland
Thank you, Lynne! Elk Love is out today.
Elk Love
Having spent ten summers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park, part of her doctoral fieldwork for a PhD in Native American Art History, forty-two-year-old Lynne Spriggs thinks of Montana as her healing place. When she moves to “Big Sky Country” from the East Coast in a quest to reset her life, she has high hopes for what awaits her.
Great Falls, a farming and military town in central Montana, is not what Lynne imagined when she decided to leave city life behind. But her dream of being more connected to nature in the American West comes alive when she meets Harrison, a handsome rancher thirteen years her senior. Wary but curious, with her dog Willow by her side, she leans into the seasonal rhythms of Harrison’s hidden valley and opens her heart to a wild language that moves beyond words. In a modern world where listening is rare, Elk Love explores an intimate place where loneliness gives way to wonder, where the natural world speaks of what matters most.
Author bio:
Before moving to the rural West at age forty-two, Lynne Spriggs curated exhibitions of folk and self-taught art at the High Museum in Atlanta. She spent ten summers on northern Montana’s Blackfeet Indian reservation while pursuing fieldwork for her PhD in Native American Art History at Columbia University. She also worked in the film industry as Production Coordinator for Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme on the iconic Swimming to Cambodia. After landing in Montana, she curated Bison: American Icon, a major permanent exhibit for the Charlie Russell Museum on bison in the Northern Plains. Elk Love is her first memoir. For the past fifteen years, she and her husband have lived on a cattle ranch in an isolated Montana mountain valley east of the Rockies, where her life centers on writing, animals, and family.