“You know where you belong by who responds to you…”

Priscilla Stuckey joins Cave of the Heart and answers 6 questions on self-trust

Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart. 

Priscilla Stuckey writes and swims in the ocean and still hopes to help change the world. Her first book, Kissed by a Fox: And Other Stories of Friendship in Nature, won the WILLA Award in creative nonfiction for weaving together personal and cultural memoir. Her second book, Tamed by a Bear: Coming Home to Nature-Spirit-Self, is an inside look at a spiritual practice that opened her to more joy. She produces the Nature-Spirit podcast and is working on her third book.

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

We live in a beautiful but very expensive place (Maui), so we live small—a cottage of 700 square feet plus basement. But it actually doesn’t feel small because we have a pocket view of the ocean. Right now I’m on a recliner in the tiny living room with my laptop, looking out at that view through the patio doors. I especially love spring and fall here because the light at midday strikes the water just right to create an insane tint of blue.

Childhood

Q: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?

For a person who grew up to find my deepest solace in nature, I sure didn’t spend a lot of time outdoors as a child. Where I lived, in the Lake Erie basin of northwest Ohio, there were mosquitoes—and DDT-spewing fogger trucks; I can still conjure up the smell of that spray. I didn’t go camping until I was a teenager, and then it was pretty uncomfortable (see: mosquitoes). I got the feeling that “outdoors” was where you worked more than where you played. This was a farming community, and the town was filled with gardeners who grew produce for canning and fathers who mowed lawns and mothers who hung laundry on clotheslines. There wasn’t a culture of outdoor recreation except maybe softball. No hiking trails or paths or anything like that. Almost no wild places to disappear into or explore.

So I was definitely the reader. I found my wild places in books. From the time I could talk I remember pestering my older brother and parents to teach me to read. And they did! They were patient and helped me sound out letters and then syllables and then whole words and sentences. So from the age of three or four I was off and running after books. After that it was hard to get me to do anything else.

Though I did fall in love with music, too. It seemed like music was the only place where I could express all those strong feelings, all those inchoate wishes and hopes. My church community bathed me in four-part a capella singing every Sunday, and at school I played in band and orchestra. I actually entered college as a music major, thinking I would spend my life making music. I sort of do now, just on the page instead. Being a musician definitely shaped my writing voice and trained my ear for rhythm and tone. I am always fussing over the words until they have the right feeling, the right sound and flow.

Influences

Q: If you had to choose one person from your past that most influenced who you are today, who would that be and why? This can be a person from history, an animal, a fictitious character in a book, TV or movie.

I was an autistic child (though I didn’t know it), and I tried to fit in with whoever was around me, which meant trying to copy their ways of being. Either that or I reacted against their ways in order to go a different direction. Sometimes that happened with the same person. When I was a child I always tried to do everything my older brother did. But after my first year of college I suddenly realized how different I was from him and how that meant I was on my own now and would need to set out in directions that didn’t include him. That was a lonely moment, a defining moment. But it was freeing too because it did allow me to choose paths that were more suited to me.

But maybe the biggest influence on me came from the wider family. There was a birch tree in our yard that my parents had planted a few years before I was born, and we grew up together. I remember touching fingertips to branches when I was very small and peeling the tissue-paper-thin white bark. And I enjoyed being outside on summer days. Sometimes as a teenager I would sit on the grass beneath the tree and read and write in a journal.

But it was what that tree did when I was in my early thirties that set me on the road to becoming the person I am today. I was living in Oakland, CA, by then, and one day the tree came to visit me in spirit. It just became very real and present in my mind’s eye for several minutes, and then it faded away. I wondered what that was about—until my brother called later from our hometown and said the tree was not doing well and would have to be cut down. So the tree had come to spend a few more moments together and say goodbye. I’d never experienced anything like that before, and it began to change me.

And a few years after that, when I was visiting the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest, a bald eagle also made a dramatic appearance that shifted my worldview some more. That eagle opened me to seeing more possibility and more mystery and more love in the world. Those two stories open the first two chapters of my book Kissed by a Fox.

They say you know where you belong by who responds to you. For me, the animals and trees and other beings of nature have been super responsive, and I am grateful for their company and for their care.

// Up next: More Cave of the Heart Questionnaires by

Satya Robyn

,

Ramona Grigg

, and others, plus a personal essay on the barriers to letting others in. Follow along. \

Creative Spark

Q: When you get an idea for a new essay or project, what does your first instinct look, sound or feel like?

It’s full of energy, very exciting. I remember when the concept for my first book hit me. It showed up as a table of contents. Each chapter title was the name of one animal or tree or place, so each chapter would focus on my relationship with that one being. The outline arrived with such an electric buzz that I couldn’t get to sleep that night—and if you know me, you know I fall asleep after dinner, sitting up, when others are just getting started. But that night I lay awake for hours with electricity coursing through me. The final, published table of contents was almost identical to the one I wrote out that first day—with the exception that at that point in time I hadn’t lived all of the chapters yet!

Writing Process

Q: What does your writing life look like today, and can you compare/contrast it to 10 years ago?

Writing is only one of several things I do, and this has always been true, except for a couple of spurts of full-time writing to finish book manuscripts. I didn’t start writing with the intent of sharing with others until my mid-forties; before then it was a personal therapeutic and exploration process. So writing has always accompanied other things I’m doing in life, and after I began to write with a view toward publishing, that remained true. I kept weaving writing together with earning a living, which for me was coaching writers or editing or teaching. I’ve never been one who advised just sitting your butt in the chair and putting in the time. That advice never worked for me—it felt too constrained, too programmatic, and it just burned me out.

Today, twenty years later, my writing hours are even less regular. And it seems they need to be even more episodic the older I get. Trying to put in even one whole day now burns me out. I used to dig in deeply into writing a podcast episode, sitting down with it nearly full-time for some days and then discovering that I took so many wrong turns that by the end I’d have as many throw-away pages as keepers. But in the most recent episode, I worked on it only as long as I felt fresh and inspired—first thing in the morning, sometimes before breakfast, and only long enough to say the one thing I woke up feeling inspired about. So that meant writing at most one or two paragraphs in the morning, then closing the file for the day. Wow, did that feel strange! The old urge to keep at it continuously almost had me feeling guilty once or twice. But by using this very light touch, the whole episode—ten pages—nearly wrote itself. It was so much less effort. And only one throw-away page at the end. So I’m getting the hint—limit my writing hours more intentionally, and the whole process might just feel easier.

Resources

Q: What’s one surprising or unlikely resource that you turn to again and again to bolster your writing life?

I do spiritual writing, broadly defined—trying to inspire changes in how people see nature and see themselves, trying to shift people’s worldview. Which means, really, changes in mind and heart. So, no surprise, my own heart and mind have to be in the right place to do this work. I rely heavily on my own spiritual practices, which are a combination of connecting with nature through the senses, which means going out and getting immersed in nature—these days, literally, swimming—and connecting with nature in spirit, sitting in visionary meditation and talking with land and water and other beings in spirit.

Someone said to me once, “It has to heal you before it can heal others.” So I try to prepare my mind and heart well, standing in that stream of goodness and letting it fill me so that what comes out of me can be helpful to others.

Bonus: Neurodiversity 

Q: What one thing do neurodiverse writers need to do differently in order to thrive in their writing lives?

I strongly encourage each person to pay attention to their own body-mind rhythms. They are not going to look quite like anyone else’s, and they may not make conventional sense. And they may change from year to year. But if you trust them, they will take you where you want to go.

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For more Cave of the Heart, a personal essay on the barriers to letting others in, and access to personalized advice on your writing in my Ask an Editor threads, become a paid subscriber to The Editing Spectrum.

Join Priscilla in the comments today

She’ll answer your questions once the sun has risen in Maui. ☀️

Priscilla shares that sometimes the best way to approach writing is in short, inspired bursts rather than forcing herself to sit for long periods. How do you personally approach your creative processes, and do you believe in taking breaks or continuously pushing through?

The essay touches on the influence of nature, particularly trees and animals, on our personal growth and worldview. How has nature influenced your own perspective on life or creativity?