Storytelling

A brief interview with COA President Sylvia Torti

Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah.

Sylvia Torti: I was compelled to do a lot of writing when I was an undergraduate student at Earlham College. I really enjoyed it and I became a better writer over time.  As first-year students, we were reading and writing a bunch, and that is when I fell in love with ecology. When you think about it, ecology is all about storytelling. I just loved the stories of how organisms were going about their lives and interacting with one another, and the forces that shaped them in terms of adaptations, evolution, competition, and mutualism. 

Dan Mahoney: From there you decided to be a writer?

ST: No. From there I decided to do tropical biology. Tropical ecology, because I wanted to go to Costa Rica. I went for a three-week course in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve, and I got stuck in the mud and there were these butterflies flying around and hummingbirds everywhere. And I remember thinking, I love this. I ended up applying to grad school not knowing anything about grad school. 

DM: So, Utah is where you began writing?

ST: Yes, Utah, however I went to grad school not as a writer, but as a scientist with research focused in the tropics. The irony is that it was only after I got to the tropics that my writing started to change and develop. I was in the Congo, sending letters and written snapshots to my husband at the time, and he really encouraged me to write more fiction because he thought I was talented. I remember thinking that I was not a fiction writer, but I was in the Congo for four months doing a lot of solo research, so, in my off time, I began to play around with stories and fables. That was the start of becoming a fiction writer. I really credit him with getting me going down that road.

DM: That’s fantastic. You had a good reader. We all need a good reader.

ST: True. I have since found other really valuable communities of readers and writers. It is essential to have community.  Anyway, after returning from Africa, I was thinking about doing my PhD research in Chiapas, Mexico, and was there when the Zapatista rebellion began. I started writing my first novel, The Scorpion's Tail (Curbstone Books, 2005), as a way to process my experience in Chiapas. In hindsight, I probably created fictional characters because the whole experience was pretty traumatic. I wrote a little short story about a character in Chiapas. And then I wrote about another character. And that is how the book took shape. But it has taken me a long time to think of myself as a writer.

DM: Do you feel like you're a writer now?

ST: Yes, I feel like I'm a writer at this point. I process the world through writing and I feel the most alive when I'm writing. When I think of ecology—ecology is all storytelling— it's no surprise that I was drawn to it. I didn't like molecular biology, I didn't like chemistry, I never took physics. I never took calculus. I'm a humanist who happens to have a PhD in ecology. When I look back on The Scorpion's Tail now, I think of it as me trying to engage with the ecology of the rebellion. 

DM: Oh, I like that, the ecology of the rebellion. Ok, so you finish that book, you're in Utah with a PhD, and how did your next book, Cages (Schaffner Press, 2017), come into being?

ST: I was working as a plant conservation biologist at the Red Butte Garden and Arboretum in Salt Lake, developing programming for them, but after a couple of years I got bored with the limitations of the job and decided to join the birdsong lab at the University of Utah. I thought I'd reinvent myself as a physiological ecologist and the principal investigator, Franz Goller,  was happy to have me hanging out there, feeding the birds, cleaning the cages...

DM: Wait, like the Rebecca character in Cages? The lab as a place of intrigue… 

ST: I think, to some degree, I am all the characters in the book. And, intrigue, yes. What I found most intriguing was that you had all these guys studying communication, and they were terrible at communicating. They never talked about anything personal. 

DM: Right. It's great to see the characters in the book wrestle with how to act inside and outside the lab. The two scientist guys never really seem like they are fully outside of the lab. I loved all the science in this book, and you have notes in the back.

ST: All the science in the books is real science. The bird stuttering experiments, birds dying in your hand… The auditory feedback… A bird needs to hear itself in order to maintain its song. The character of Ed is based on Ted Parker, who was huge in birding and ornithological circles. 

DM: Yes, Ed! I love it that there was this elite squad of scientists who parachuted into remote jungle areas to catalogue species… That's some extreme science right there. 

ST: Scientists are fascinating. And I'm a scientist too, but I really find scientists to be an almost entirely different species. They're so interesting.