Exploring Place, Past, and Self

Writer Morgan Sjogren finds her way

This bonus newsletter is a monthly feature for paid subscribers, the eleventh in the series. These extras showcase edited interviews with someone whose work intersects in some way with this newsletter’s focus—place, history, writing. I hope you enjoy this one and those to come.

BONUS: This month, to celebrate Taking Bearings’ two years of publication, I’m making the interview available to all subscribers. I hope it will entice you to sign up to become a paid subscriber. (I’m running a discount through July that reduces the price.)

Introduction

Several years ago, Morgan Sjogren and I found each other on social media. A shared fascination with public lands and the past connected us. I watched Morgan’s feeds as she tracked an explorer from a century ago through southern Utah—just the sort of project that entices me.

When Path of Light: A Walk Through Colliding Legacies of Glen Canyon appeared, I was excited to read it. My anticipation was paid off and then some. With great insight and careful prose, Morgan captures the past, present, and maybe future of the desert Southwest while revealing her own evolution. It’s a delight.

Before Path of Light, Morgan published stories in many magazines, always with wildness in the forefront. Her Substack is Wild Words.

Adam Sowards

Can you tell me who you are and how you describe your work?

Morgan Sjogren

My name is Morgan Sjogren. I'm a freelance journalist and storyteller.

My writing focuses on the environment, landscapes and watersheds, and the intersection of communities with place. I also explore the complicated politics and human histories that affect our past, present, and future relationships with them.

Adam

How has that work evolved over time?

Morgan

It's constantly evolving. It’s been an evolution, constantly learning and discovering new ways that I can express what I'm learning.

My early reporting focused on trail running and endurance sports. But the complex connections between outdoor experiences and the history, the politics, and the environmental issues they're connected to have always been on my mind.

It's something that's always kind of been a part of me. In my 20s, it was something that was more private. I read books like Cadillac Desert, then I would go on a 20-mile run in the Owens Valley and see the pipelines where Los Angeles was diverting water, and spend the run dissecting that history. It was a personal fascination.

Now, it's something that I've found ways to express through writing.

Adam

How do you describe your book, Path of Light: A Walk Through Colliding Legacies of Glen Canyon, in just a couple of sentences?

Morgan

It took me almost as long as it took to write the book to be able to describe that! It was a process of exploration to consolidate that into a statement.

For five years, I retraced a series of historic century-old expeditions in the greater Glen Canyon region. I wanted to see how much the landscape, the people, the politics, and the environment had changed in the last hundred years, and to contextualize what I was experiencing in this landscape now.

Path of Light is a blend of narrative history, personal memoir, adventure, and current events encapsulated in a quirky book about hiking thousands of miles around the desert. On these travels, I was joined by historians, scientists, archaeologists, tribal elders, and people who I organically connected with in seemingly unlikely circumstances––a woman alone living in her jeep in a very remote part of the Utah desert. I was very much alone in many senses of the word––freelance writer, single, didn’t have a a home to go back to. . . .

By choosing to follow these expeditions, I started to meet and find a sense of community within the desert and understand not only a sense of place, but a living sense of place that exists there.

Adam

Is this the book you expected to write? If it's not, what changed?

Morgan

Yes and no.

I expected to write a book retracing expeditions and contemplating things like what did the Colorado River corridor look like before Glen Canyon Dam. I didn't expect many of the adventures and the people I got to experience them with. Especially the 300-mile expedition route in Glen Canyon and Bears Ears. I didn't expect to meet so many people by choosing this course and learning from them.

I think the most surprising part of the book, though, is how much the course of my own life changed along with it and how much it empowered me to make better choices in my personal life. Those were things I knew I needed to do, but I didn't realize that the book was setting me up for that.

I wrote the book in real time, as I was going along. It really is an expedition journal of sorts. Of course, there was lots of revision and reflection along the way, but still almost until the end of publication, I was adding new things to it that were relevant.

That comes back to your previous question about trying to describe to people what I was doing. I'm not doing something. I'm not going out to prove anything. I'm going out to explore and learn. It's been such a joy—a painful joy at times—to have the book reflect that uncertainty and the things we can learn in life if we open ourselves up to it.

Adam

When I was reading Path of Light, I almost had the impression that history was not a preexisting interest of yours but one that you had to come to because of what you were doing. You could have written your adventures in the backcountry in the greater Glen Canyon area without retracing a historical route, for example. How did history become, a huge thread that ties the book together?

Morgan

History is definitely something I've always taken interest in.

I think in spending so much time alone in Bears Ears or the Glen Canyon backcountry, in the middle of winter, you're not encountering very many people. I think the history became an antidote to the loneliness I sometimes felt, even though the solitude was nice.

I was seeking to commune in some way with other humans, through history and stories. This includes ancestral Indigenous dwellings and the rock stories written on the canyon walls, which explain that this place is a home for people. It still is. (The Bears Ears and Glen Canyon landscapes are the homelands of the Paiute, Ute, Hopi, Pueblo, Diné, and Zuni people.) How can you feel alone, when you see clearly that a place is a beloved home?

As I was trying to understand and learn about this new, to me, place, adventure narratives about canyon country didn't always exude a sense of curiosity and love for the place that I was feeling.  That's where the history books, expedition journals, and documents about the area filled in the gaps. I kept a stack next to my bed in my Jeep. As I read them, I was gaining an understanding about my own draw to the place through these historical narratives and accounts. I think that's what really hooked me.

And writing about it came naturally and spontaneously.

I had a few different assignments about the region for different outlets, and these historical hooks kind of bubbled up into the stories. History helped me understand and explain that we can perceive our one experience as a solo experience, but we're still linked to a community of people through the landscape.

Adam

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your writing process for this book. You've already suggested that it was almost an expedition journal, but you went to some libraries. You talked to some people. You spent time out on the land. When did you write? Did you have long stretches? Did you write in notebooks every night? Could you talk about about any of that and major challenges to the writing process?

Morgan

It's all of the above and probably not as neat and orderly as some people!

I would go out for two weeks, hiking with my notebooks and journals. Or reading in the back of my Jeep and taking notes and underlining and highlighting things. Then maybe a storm would come, and I would look up an archive in a nearby town and do some research about what I read. Then, the storm would clear, and I'd go back out to the desert and do some more on-the-land investigating. Then I would start drafting stories, often while crouched in my vehicle. I would start drafting a chapter for the book after a big adventure that paralleled with one of the historic expeditions or stories or a current event that I wanted to create a narrative around.

That went back and forth.

My living situations evolved throughout this period tremendously from living in my Jeep in Utah, to having a boyfriend in Colorado that I would go stay with, to writing in a 1987 trailer in Arizona. It all got much more streamlined after a breakup––just me and the desert! I would block out time to go to the trailer that didn't have air conditioning or heat, and often in extreme heat or very low temperatures, and spend two weeks fully focused on writing until I was exhausted. Then I'd have to go out, just be out in the land, even if it was freezing or really hot, to recover from that.

A big push of writing the manuscript was during COVID, during shelter in place. There was only a two-month period where I couldn't go to the desert canyons, and at a time, when I felt distressed that was where I wanted to be. So, I immersed myself even deeper into writing the story as a way to travel to where I wanted to be. I dove into developing the manuscript and a story arc. I sent out a book proposal. Through that process I realized this book was going nowhere, other than a bunch of nice stories, unless I actually took on one of the the biggest expeditions, that Charles L. Bernheimer took through Bears Ears in Glen Canyon in the 1920s. It really kind of laid bare to me what was missing. So I decided at the end of 2020—no publisher, no nothing—I needed to go on this expedition because maybe this isn't even supposed to be a book, maybe this project is just pushing me to go and experience the landscape with these hundred-year-old journals in tow, and have the opposite experience of being sheltered in place, be out in the landscape for an unknown period of time on an expedition.

So that's what I did.

Adam

You describe yourself as an environmentalist and I'm interested in how your writing and activism intertwine—or don't—and any challenges that brings or opportunities that brings.

Morgan

Writing inherently is an extension of myself. My care for the environment isn't something that I can compartmentalize. That's part of who I am, and I view myself and all people as part of the environment. So to me, there's no real separation in these areas. It's part of the whole.

Adam

I'm curious if it has if being an activist has limited opportunities for places you might publish.

Morgan

No. One thing I've made clear since I began writing about these topics is that I'm very curious. And journalism allows me to talk to many people who have different perspectives. That is a line you have to thread. If you're reporting on something, you're reporting on multiple sides of the issue.

That also helps me better inform my own activism and decisions because my information is not just coming from a one-sided view. That's probably part of the process that I enjoy the most: getting to talk to as many different people as possible so I can learn about it because you can't just learn about anything from one perspective.

When it comes to journalism and the stories that I write, I don't view myself—and I make this very clear in Path of Light—as an expert. I view myself as a learner and an explorer, and I get to share what I learn. Of course, that's going to inform opinions, but my goal as a writer is not to shove my opinions down anybody's throat. I hope that people read what I write and they start asking more questions and they get curious about the world around them in terms of current events and also curious about when they go outside and what they hear and smell and see.

I view myself as a learner and an explorer, and I get to share what I learned. . . . I hope that people read what I write and they start asking more questions and they get curious about the world around them in terms of current events and also curious about when they go outside and what they hear and smell and see.

Adam

I'm a historian, so I spend most of my time thinking about the past. But we have to look to the future too, especially when we're wearing our activist hats. For the places that you care so much about, what are your deepest hopes and deepest fears?

Morgan

I feel like if I were to say my deepest fears . . .  you can't let that sort of thing out into the world. That's too negative. That is not choosing the path of light.

If the things that I feared were to happen to the places I cared about, that's one of the worst things I could imagine happening in this world. I say that not because those places are any more important than anywhere else.

That speaks to our human connection to place and how important it is to all of us, and how we are responsible to protect the environment because everybody is connected to somewhere and has a deep investment and care for its future. And people are a part of place.

My greatest hope is that people realize that and buy into the adaptations that are increasingly necessary to mitigate the effects of climate change and overdevelopment and the unsustainable ways humans are dominating the environment right now.

Adam

My newsletter focuses on place, history, and writing. Choose one of those and tell me why you think it's important for you and maybe why it should be important to others.

Morgan

That's a great question. All three of those are very near and dear to my heart, so it's hard to choose. I choose place because that is so much of my inspiration and motivation for writing and learning about history.

Place is what holds my heart.

What I often feel is that my heart is made out of is the connection to the world around me and those experiences. That is what allows me to write and devour stacks of books and maps. I think it's something that all people do have an ability to cultivate a sense of place with where they're at.

Begin with wherever you are. Going outside and paying attention to the sounds, the smells, what is from nature, what is human constructed, and just gaining that personal sense of space and awareness and the changes and fluctuations. But also, it's just spending some time investigating the history of the area you're in, how the town you're in was settled, at what time, who are the indigenous people who are native to the land you're on, what is their history, and taking the time to read first-person primary source information about the history of the place you live. I think that's really impactful, and helps us understand shifting baselines. Especially for younger generations, it's hard to not just assume that things have always been the way they are, but there have been multiple iterations of change wherever you are living. Gaining some perspective of those changes, can also help us prepare for the changes ahead.

Support Morgan’s Work

You can find more information at Morgan’s website. You can subscribe to her newsletter, Wild Words, here. To order Path of Light (and support independent bookstores), click here.