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Episode 188: Katherine Keith — Say Yes to Life
125 Plays5 years ago
Katherine Keith, author of Epic Solitude, talks about resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy.
Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing made this show possible.
As did my monthly newsletter.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
What do you say, CNFers? It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, greatest podcast in the world, where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Today is Catherine Keith, author of Epic Solitude, a story of survival and a quest for meaning in the far north.
00:00:27
Speaker
Have I got something for you but first? Discover your story, man. It's Bay Path University. You know it. They're making this show possible fully online. MFA in Creative Non-Fiction Writing. Faculty have true passion and love for their work. Wouldn't have it any other way. It shines through with every comment, edit, and reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer all questions.
00:00:50
Speaker
And their years of experience as writers and teachers have made for an unbeatable experience. Head over to baybat.edu slash MFA for more information. All right. All right. All right, partner. You know what time it is, baby.
Meet Catherine Keith
00:01:17
Speaker
Was that a Fred Durst impersonation? You gotta be kidding me, Fred Durst? Ugh, anyway, I'm sick. Kinda sick as the proverbial dog, which is germane to this conversation, because Katherine Keith is a dog musher, a sled racer. She wrote a pretty epic book.
00:01:46
Speaker
Catherine Keith did. She's author of Epic Solitude Blackstone Press. This book, let me tell you, man, when you read it, you'll have no idea how someone can endure what Catherine endured. I didn't want to bring up specifics in the interview because I didn't want to spoil it for the reader because you need to discover it as a reader. You need to turn those pages. You need to be like, really?
00:02:16
Speaker
More, how, how? So we did, we talked around a lot of these things, citing some of the things in the book, a lot of the quotes that tie into the themes of the things she was going through, so we kind of unpack the emotion of what she went through in a lot of ways, how she processed that without spoiling some of those big moments in the story. She's a certifiable badass, for one.
00:02:44
Speaker
And she was a ton of fun to talk to, that's for sure. And by the time you get this podcast in your feed, I'm gonna be somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, no lie. I will be essentially off the grid, so it's on you, CNFers, to keep the torch burning in my digital absence. Hope you will. Be sure to head over to BrendanOmero.com. Hey, hey, four show notes, newsletters, the jam. Connect on social media at cnfpod across the big three platforms.
00:03:13
Speaker
Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Stitcher. If you're feeling kind, I'd happily take a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. And this connection we have, it deepens if you share it with your various networks. I hope I've made something worth sharing this podcast and the one next week. However, they won't be edited. We're on like an unediting streak. I'm not proud of it. It's just what's happening right now.
00:03:41
Speaker
I know. It's not that I'm lazy. I hope you know that. You know I'm not lazy. Alright, I can be a little lazy, but not really that lazy. Okay, maybe a little lazy. It's that I just don't have a spare minute.
00:03:55
Speaker
And any spare minute I have is spent either reading or sleeping or working. And I'm sorry, please forgive me. My hope is to get back into the editing ring once again in about two weeks. So relish in the rawness CNF-ers because here's me and Catherine Keith.
Childhood and Wilderness Connection
00:04:20
Speaker
So you grow up in Minnesota. So take us there. What was your childhood like in getting a sort of maybe a little taste of maybe the outdoor fever that you would carry to Alaska eventually? Well, since I was a young child, I always knew that I needed to be, I loved to be alone and in the wilderness. I didn't really understand why that was until I was older.
00:04:50
Speaker
But it was just really important to me. I was eight years old and running off in search of beaver dams and climbing trees. And I didn't always need to be around a lot of people. And I read a lot of books avidly. And I had a couple explorers that came to my school. That was Will Steger and Anne Bancroft. And they had gone to the North Pole via dog team and went on to do very many amazing things
00:05:20
Speaker
And from then on, that was what I was going to do. I was going to run dog teams and go on Arctic expeditions and I began to dream. And it really led me on to the path that kind of took me to where I am today.
00:05:39
Speaker
Yeah and early in the book, some of my favorite parts of the book were a lot of the quotations that start each chapter and I think those are a lot of, those are like great entree into what resonates with you as a person and is very in and of itself revealing. And early on you quote an Edward Abbey quote, that was, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.
00:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, so at what point does something of that nature really sink into you? Probably when I was 14 I realized it really had to be that way for me. It was as necessary as breathing because it wasn't always easy for me growing up and the way
00:06:33
Speaker
to cope with a lot of that was to get outside. And when I got outside within an hour of being alone, there is this spiritual exchange that happens when you're in wilderness that would allow me to calm and be able to sort of heal from these experiences. And that's where that Edward Abbey quote really became important to me,
00:07:03
Speaker
my favorite author to this day. So no offense to any of those other awesome authors that I absolutely love. But that really has special meaning for me.
00:07:17
Speaker
So you cite Abby. And as you're growing up too, who are some other people that you're reading and connecting with via the red word? And of course, you would, of course, take up the pen yourself. So who are some of those authors that really sunk their teeth into you? Authors that really appealed to me, now I understand them to be like the trans and dentalist authors.
00:07:44
Speaker
I had fiction writers that I really devoured, but the ones that had the greatest impact on me growing up were like the Throw, Emerson, those essay writers, along with
00:08:02
Speaker
Um, like Edward Abby had the most influence on my writing today, those nature writers, uh, because they could so eloquently capture what I felt when I was outside, uh, when I was out hiking or out rock climbing, like this way that I felt, uh, the way that I could really be my, not only myself, but the, the way that I felt that out here, you know, I am in, uh, like.
00:08:32
Speaker
this, I am out here like what I would say as you know, people could describe it as this is I'm with God out here. And the beauty that you see, you know, they could so describe it. That's how I wanted to be able to write.
00:08:46
Speaker
And I could not write like they can. One day I could constantly have a good write till I'm 100 and I would never write like they can, but I'm going to keep trying.
00:09:03
Speaker
pictures of you in your sort of athletic exploits being triathlon, dog sled racing. Were you always an athletic person and what kind of athletic things did you pursue when you were growing up? I was into sports since I was a young age teenager. I was in team sports, varsity athlete. I pursued
00:09:33
Speaker
some team sports, but then also the individual sports like cross country skiing was my, were my favorites, mountain biking, rock climbing. And then that's what I kept on with. And later on in life, I pursued the triathlons and, um, and then that kind of led me into the dog machine from there. But yeah, I loved, loved sports.
00:10:00
Speaker
I love the athletic pursuits of challenging yourself physically. I think it's really important. Yeah, and as I say, cross-country skiing, what were some of the team sports you did? Soccer. I love soccer and I played varsity and then I was in track and field. Or, I mean, volleyball. Volleyball, alright, nice. Soccer and volleyball and track and field, yeah.
00:10:30
Speaker
Nice, and a lot of people who say they love being outside, of course, will eventually want to settle back into their creature comforts. They'll have a little sample of it and then come back to what we're used to. But you've taken it to a whole other level where you were really
00:10:50
Speaker
You know, you really leaned into it.
Embracing Grit and Solitude
00:10:53
Speaker
Where do you think that comes from, that you found that comfort and that capacity to endure discomfort on a level that a lot of us probably can't? For me, I hunger for that grit. I think it's really critical for us to develop that grit within in order to
00:11:16
Speaker
be prepared for the challenges that we face in life. And that's something that I recognized earlier on. And I applied that to being outdoors. So not only did I love and crave being outdoors, but I love being, I would go hike for a couple days, but then
00:11:40
Speaker
to be out there for a week and to be able to hike not just for five miles a day, but I would go out and be able to hike 15 miles a day. Or when I was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, I would go and I would pack lightly and then be able to hike 20 miles a day and be able to be out there. It was just an amazing experience. So I think having that
00:12:08
Speaker
grit to test yourself to know you can do it, gives you that strength, it gives you the resilience, all of these things that really carry on into your daily life, which gives us the courage, the heart, and the willpower never to give up when we need it, when things kind of fall apart on us.
00:12:33
Speaker
Which, you know, they always do because we're human. Things fall apart. It's life. Of course. Yeah. And that, that grit, like, can you point to a moment or two, maybe even a person who illustrated that to you and you're like, you know, I'm gonna, that's something I want to, you know, apply to my own life and just that kind of rigor that really translates across all discipline.
00:12:59
Speaker
somebody that demonstrated this to me as a young age. Yeah, even a young age. And even, yeah, just as a shining example of what, you know, just relentless grit can be and that you can lean into something, accomplish, accomplish goals, get through hardship. If you just kind of have that kind of focus that, you know, of course is very well illustrated in your book. Perhaps I've seen this through Olympic athletes. I could see that as being a very good example.
00:13:27
Speaker
of the perseverance and determination that it takes. And similarly, if I look back at those early explorers that I was talking about, Will Steger and Anne Bancroft, it was very easy to see through their slides that they were presenting just how difficult and awful and painful that was to be up there in that extreme cold day after day after day.
00:13:57
Speaker
never knowing what you're going to encounter next, the darkness and taking care of your dogs and having lived through that and going through that now, myself, I know what that was like and I love it. So I know what it's like now, but looking at that from a young age, it was kind of clear what it took to be prepared, to be able to handle that.
00:14:26
Speaker
So I believe now sort of in retrospect, I understood what I was going to have to build within myself to get ready to be at that level. To build yourself to be at that level requires grit. It requires the ability to be okay being in solitude and also loving to be in that wilderness setting. So it kind of requires all of these things.
00:14:55
Speaker
And speaking of solitude, these days, given how almost hyper-connected we all are via email or social media, solitude seems to be in rare quantities these days. How have you been able to cultivate that solitude that's so important and very just part of your DNA in a world that wants to be just almost toxically connected at times? How have you managed that balance?
00:15:26
Speaker
Yeah, you're so right about that. Today's very lazy and it's hard for us to be comfortable spending time alone, let alone going in nature, 10 miles into the woods when there's like bears or rabid foxes or who knows what's out there. What I found though is the very tool that we need to confront, like the skeletons in our closet,
00:15:54
Speaker
the emotions that we repress, the anger that we have towards ourself or others from 10 years ago. The only way we can really feel them is by being alone by ourself somewhere, that solitude, especially when we can be kind of scared sometimes or in that dark place by ourself. That's what I found. So purposefully putting ourself in solitude
00:16:24
Speaker
is important. So the way that I've learned to do that is by forcing myself to do that. So it hasn't always been easy. For example, where I live above the Arctic Circle on dog team
00:16:42
Speaker
I have to travel at night very frequently and there's moose out there on the trail. So when you're traveling with a dog team, you've got a little headlamp on, but it's never bright enough. And you're going through all these willows and you never know if there's going to be a moose around the corner. So I get very scared. I'm looking around like, okay, is there a moose? Is there not a moose? I'm not sure what's going to be there.
00:17:06
Speaker
Um, so yeah, there's a lot of fear and sometimes I'm like, I don't think I want to go out tonight because I have this fear. That was awful. Um, but you got to force yourself kind of through that and, you know, just learn to swallow it down. Cause the chances, you know, there, there could be one there, but I know how I do know how to manage that situation. Um, but when I do get through that and swallow it down, you know, you kind of, you develop that grit and capacity.
00:17:36
Speaker
And then emotionally, I can work through that. And when I do have that fear, other things do bubble up to the surface. I have doubts. Things come up from five years ago that I'm kind of managing. It's really surprising what comes up. And the same is true, not that you have to be in a dog team above the Arctic Circle, but if you have a trail and you're worried about getting out there,
00:18:05
Speaker
or just even sitting on a park bench by yourself somewhere. You got to just walk yourself through that and make yourself sit there without yourself falling or shut your phone off and force yourself to do it and it won't be comfortable. And you have to just keep doing it.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, in those moments, if you – the solitude is great to get that removed and to get some actual physical detachment from other – just from other inputs. When you're in those moments, of course, you are accompanied by just you in general, various – you know, various demons, things that haunt you.
00:18:46
Speaker
How have you learned to process that and to kind of dance with it and not let it say like pull you down underwater and just kind of process that kind of thing? How have you managed that through your life? Well, to be frank, at times it does and has pulled me underwater. The key
00:19:10
Speaker
is to keep letting it pull you underwater because eventually you learn how to swim. So over time, it just stops. You learn how to swim, so you stop drowning. So in those situations, when I do go out alone like that now, the stuff that used to drown me, it just doesn't have power over me anymore.
00:19:40
Speaker
So for anyone that, you know, has things like that, that they need to work through, you get out there, you face it, you know, it's going to be messy. Yeah. You might have a whole bunch of stuff coming out. That's hard to manage. And that's going to be really, it's going to be, it's going to be rough, but then you get out there the next day and it's like, ah, going to be rough. But, you know, eventually, um, it does, it does calm down. So you have to be careful, you know, it's like with,
00:20:10
Speaker
Um, you know, you just gotta, you just, you have to know yourself and you have to manage it. Um, and depending on the things that you're dealing with, you know, I, you just have to, um, um, you have to just manage things cautiously, but so for my, myself, however, that it does and has, uh, it has mellowed out over, over time so that now I can, um,
00:20:40
Speaker
say with certainty that all of this stuff I can now, it doesn't have the power over me that it did years before.
00:20:52
Speaker
Right. Yeah, and I'm going to talk kind of elliptically around a lot of the things. I don't want to spoil the book for people who haven't a chance to read it and a lot of the key sort of tentpole events that you write about and process and deal with throughout the story of the book. So in a way, I'll talk around that stuff so I don't ruin it for people. But I know exactly, from reading the book, I know exactly
00:21:17
Speaker
a lot of the stuff you wrote about and the traumas you underwent and the tragedy you underwent, which kind of echoes this Khalil Gibran quote that you cite too, that the deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. How did you arrive at that to know that the deep pain, deep sorrow that you've experienced can actually lead to joy?
00:21:44
Speaker
Yeah, so to bring kind of an analogy into that situation, to tell a dog mushing story, this happens quite frequently.
Dog Mushing Challenges
00:21:54
Speaker
I'll be out on the trail and it would be a horrible, horrible run. I was running one night from a local village, Ambler on the Cobuck 440 race and
00:22:14
Speaker
Um, it was very cold, like 30 below and the winds were like 25 miles an hour. And I had gotten beat up. It was just an awful, awful run. Um, and we're, it was just having a, uh, a rough night and, um, it was very, very tired at that point in the race. I hadn't slept yet after probably two and a half days. So the point being it was, it was difficult.
00:22:41
Speaker
And so we sat down to camp for the night and, uh, you got to wonder like, why am I out here doing this? This is a little ridiculous. And things kind of come, kind of come. Compress. And then you look up and all of a sudden, like the Northern lights are out and they're really stunning. When you're that far north, they're like reds, dancing reds.
00:23:05
Speaker
greens, a little bit of like orange and the moon is out and there's stars. And I got to tell you, it's one of the most beautiful places on earth when you see the Northern lights like that on a clear night and it's crystal clear when it's that cold and it's, it's freezing 30 below. I'm not making that up. It's cold and it's the atmosphere is on, um, it's crystal.
00:23:36
Speaker
So you had, when you're, when things get that awful, you're just, you hit rock bottom and then all of a sudden you see this miraculous display. So that quote, um, it's, it's one way to say, you know, that was a physical situation. You hit rock bottom and then, whoa, look at that. It's amazing. And then it completely turns everything around. And that's found that to be very true with life that if you, um, allow yourself to really
00:24:06
Speaker
feel loss, feel tragedy without numbing yourself out, without letting addiction numb you or without hiding from that. You will once again find yourself feeling joy through
00:24:32
Speaker
at some capacity through a child or through some other form in your life. So it is important to allow yourself to feel the lows and the highs. And so that's some of what I write in the book. And writing that in the book from a creative nonfiction writers standpoint was difficult, I have to admit.
00:24:56
Speaker
Right, yeah, that was definitely something I wanted to bring up. It's one thing to, of course, you've lived your life and lived through various experiences that are deeply scarring emotionally and at times physically as well. Then it's another thing, 15 or 20 years later, to kind of dive back in and relive it and shape it and write it.
00:25:26
Speaker
live in it again for a long time deeply immersive as you're generating pages. What was the motivation for you to want to come back to a lot of your past and to relive it and rehash it and shape it in this book? Why do you put yourself through that? What was the need to tell this story? The most important reason was to
00:25:56
Speaker
pass a message on. It wasn't because I wanted to write an autobiography. It was more because I wanted to tell people that it's important to fully engage with life rather than just allowing ourselves to exist. There was a message that I received in my life that you're supposed to say yes to life.
00:26:25
Speaker
when you are in doubt, when things are really stacked up against you, when life is beating you down and you don't know if you can keep going, you have to really say yes. And that means yes, every day you're going to go out and you're going to do something that's affirmative. You're going to, you're going to really take a step forward, go do something that you've been putting off. And so,
00:26:56
Speaker
That was why I wrote the book was to not allow ourselves to walk around numb for years when we were hit with shock, but to find grit in your life, to find a way to fight back to the surface and live again. And I did that through, you know, the triathlons, through the wilderness, through the dog races, but, you know,
00:27:22
Speaker
for you, it could be, it could be anything, you know, you, everyone will have their own path. And through the book, I just wanted to encourage people to find your own path, but that it's important to find your path, but just make sure you find one and say yes to it, you know.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah, and that was a passage I pulled out, and it was kind of late in the book, too, where you wrote that. And you wrote that, I work to be a light in the darkness for people who are struggling to take the first step in saying yes to life every single day because of all that weighs us down. That's exactly what you're echoing.
00:27:57
Speaker
Ah, cool. Great. Yeah, and that kind of, you know, the part of your path was really doubling down in these very extreme physical contests, whether that's the dog mushing or Iron Man triathlon.
00:28:15
Speaker
Did you find that leaning into something physical like that was, was a, you know, for lack of a better term, like a good addiction to lean into because other people might lean into, you know, a different kind of substance abuse, but at least you put it into your body, so to speak. Although I don't feel like addiction to work or addiction to physical exertion is healthy
00:28:45
Speaker
either. For me, the challenge of the physical activity was a supplement to being in the wilderness.
Triathlon Training and Dog Care
00:28:56
Speaker
At the time of the triathlons, I was raising a young child, Amelia, and I wasn't able to get out and launch myself into big wilderness quests because
00:29:09
Speaker
It wasn't feasible. I was going to college. I was working full time and I was raising her. So the triathlons worked really well because I could train indoors. I had a CompuTrainer on my bike. I had a treadmill right there. So it allowed me to get that grit generated and allow me to work towards this goal that was important to me. I needed something to work towards.
00:29:39
Speaker
I'm gonna do a triathlon and I'm gonna launch myself into this. And every day I can do something towards that goal and I'm not gonna quit. That was something that I was gonna do because I had to keep moving forward. Otherwise, it was a really difficult time in my life because of the loss that we were dealing with.
00:30:08
Speaker
So those things were really important to me. And, you know, it didn't, the important things for me are the solitude, the wilderness and the grit. Those are the things that I've found I've needed. And so, you know, I don't compete in triathlons anymore. I did a lot of, for a lot of years I did and I still love them, but now that I can, it's easier for there to be like wilderness in my life again. I've kind of, you know, moved away.
00:30:38
Speaker
But, I loved him. Yeah, the fact that you could put in the kind of mileage on either treadmill or like a stationary like compu trainer, like to me, I've done some of that training too, and it's mind-numbingly boring at times. And I just, the mental fortitude just to be able to get into that meditative state, and I'm not saying I could do it because I was just crushed by boredom to the point where I didn't want to do it anymore, but.
00:31:08
Speaker
How did you find the reserves to pull that off? It's an amazing feat of mental strength to be able to do that. Well, Amelia and I would watch movies on it, and then I would be studying as a student, so I would have my books out, I would be reading, and I have my computer, I would be working on the computers. You can be very efficient. That's incredible. Lots of multitasking. Yeah.
00:31:37
Speaker
And something I want to pick your brain on also was how someone even gets into endurance dog racing, mushing, and then the training and the routines and the chores around that.
00:31:56
Speaker
Maybe you can take us through how you first got into that, how you adopted that, and then maybe a typical routine for you as you care for them, train for them, feed, embed them, everything that goes into it. It's kind of an expansive question, but I'd love for you to just run with it. Sure. Well, as a person gets into dog mushing, in general, speaking generally, you go up to be a dog handler and
00:32:25
Speaker
That basically means you're an indentured servant. You go to find an existing dog musher that races. You offer your services typically a year and you don't get paid. You go up there for room and board and in exchange you get experience. You learn how to run the dogs, harness the dogs, feed the dogs, everything related to the dogs and you might get to run them. Maybe not.
00:32:54
Speaker
So that's what I did. I went up to Kotzebue, Alaska, and I learned how to do all of that. It was awesome. I loved it. So happy. That's how I fell in love with the Arctic Circle. And I never left. So it was an amazing experience. Changed my life. So from then on, that was my life. Regarding what it takes,
00:33:24
Speaker
to feed and manage a dog lot of, you know, 80 dogs. It is a lot of work. Basically, you feed them twice a day. And if you can picture a five gallon bucket that you get at Home Depot, it's about seven to eight buckets of food twice a day.
00:33:53
Speaker
And you cook the food in a massive metal steel drum, you know, 50 gallon drum. And into that 50 gallon drum goes a bunch of chopped frozen fish. And you get the frozen fish underneath the ice of the ocean. But first you have to get the fish. So in the ocean, you put a net underneath the ocean that you catch the fish in. So you got to, you know,
00:34:22
Speaker
go catch the fish by pulling the net out of the ocean. And then you get the fish, you chop up the fish, you put them in the drum, and then you get the wood and you have to chop up the wood and then start to fire. Then you cook the fish. And then you put the fish in the buckets. And then you get the water, which is also from under the ocean, or not the ocean, but you get the water from the pond because it's not salt water. And you put that in there, cook it, and then you feed it to all the dogs.
00:34:52
Speaker
That's the feeding part that goes on twice a day. Then you have to scoop the yard because that gets messy with 80 dogs. And then that alone is about three, 15 gallons of dog crap twice a day. But then the fun part is running. So the training and the running, you'll hook up about 12 to 16 dogs.
00:35:22
Speaker
And you'll take them on runs between 10 to 80 miles, depending on the run every day to three times a week. And then that's the whole point. That's the fun part. And you harness them, hook them up, put booties on their feet, and
00:35:50
Speaker
on every single foot, you put a sock on them. That's a dollar, a booty. You can imagine that. And you take off and the dogs go crazy. They just jump up and down. They go ballistic. They are nuts for running. They love it. But the best part is, is you got 80 of your best friends out there and you know them all by name and you know them all by personality and they all love you.
00:36:19
Speaker
And they just, it's just wonderful. So all of the work is amazing because it's just a great, great lifestyle.
00:36:32
Speaker
Well, it's got to be very nourishing to see that sort of dog energy coming in because even as it must be just kind of, it can be a grind to go through all those chores, but to see that energy in there and they're just sheer zeal for just want to run must be, you know, it just energizing beyond, you know, anything you can experience really up there. Yeah, yep. Yeah, it is.
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a moment too in the book where I think you were experiencing some hardship on, I think it's your first Iditarod, and it might have been a different dog race, but I think it was Iditarod, and you were on the phone with your mother.
00:37:13
Speaker
and you know you're just like really down and I you know and she said why don't you just enjoy being outside you dream of being outside in solitude with the dogs I know you like to compete but the pressure makes it so big you can't have fun just let go and savor the adventure what was that like to hear that did that snap you I like kind of snap you into into shape at that moment
00:37:36
Speaker
It did snap me at least for, you know, five minutes. But my mom, she was totally right. I have to admit I am a competitive person, but she was completely correct. The only reason I'm out there doing this is to be out there with the dogs. And I have no idea then.
00:38:04
Speaker
why it bugs me that I'm two minutes slower than the time that I wanted to be at this particular spot from my schedule that I created a month ago. Stuff like that, I don't know. I am kind of a type A person. So I work hard to let that go, but it is what it is. So my mom knows that about me at least.
00:38:32
Speaker
And there's another moment, too, where, and in this echo, there's a great baseball hitting coach that's been on the podcast, too, because he's written some stuff about hitting. And he's always saying, like, you've got to sort of know thyself and figure out your why. And you wrote that, too, that at one point, this is my why, what I searched for. And I circled that because it's
00:38:57
Speaker
having knowing the answer to that question can really make you you know persevere and develop you know a better grit muscle as you as you were talking about and in these endurance pursuits and certainly a lifestyle you adopt above the Arctic Circle you know what is your your why and what what you're searching for you know even you know even today and certainly you know years ago but definitely today
00:39:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty easy to explain, harder to put into words, but when I, I'll just say this, when I wrote the book, one of the first things you have to do is decide what arc you're going to follow, because there's so many when you come across your lifetime. And one of the most important ones to me is I'm a highly spiritual person. My spiritual path is a strong one, but I couldn't really put that in the book because
00:39:56
Speaker
That wasn't really the message that I was trying to portray. But when I'm out there and I spoke to this already, the spiritual exchange that happens in the wilderness, that's really what I'm out there searching for. That's my main experience when I'm in nature. It's where I'm at home. It's where my heart is. That's where I need to be. That's my why.
00:40:23
Speaker
a lot of the feeling that I have and my passion. And that's what I want to carry out for other people. I want to bring that back out to other people because I feel if other people could experience that and have a little bit of that, I think there'd be more wellness in the world and allow people to feel more whole. So for me, that's my why.
00:40:52
Speaker
And over the course of writing the book, what were some of your growing pains in writing this and developing the arc you wanted to tell and the way you wanted to tell it? What was that process like for you?
Writing and Publishing Journey
00:41:11
Speaker
When I laid the book out, I was following a path to come up with 10 scenes.
00:41:20
Speaker
I'm not a writer by background. I have no formal background as a writer, which you could probably tell when you read the book. So I read all I could. I researched everything about it.
00:41:37
Speaker
So I did it my best. It's a wonderful book. And there are people who go through MFA programs and have technical savvy, but sometimes they lack a certain
00:41:54
Speaker
electric charge beneath it because they just kind of sound like a kind of a flat MFA voice. I'll take someone who's more of a raw, somewhat writing from a place of rawness versus someone who might be more, I don't know, technically sound. So I thought it was a great piece of work you did just to put your mind at ease. Okay, thanks.
00:42:20
Speaker
So, okay, the challenge then for me was I wanted 10 scenes that I could write and come up with what those were. And I read Jim Smith's Writer's Little Helper, because I mean, it's a fiction, you know, guide, but yet this is, I still want to tell a good story to get the message across, even though it's nonfiction, but
00:42:48
Speaker
within that, uh, so what are my 10 scenes that I want to tell that can still get the message across then? Okay. Once I have these 10 scenes, what, what are the, what are these arcs? What is the arc that I want to tell? And for me, it, what needed to be, you know, the trauma loss and healing journey from that, but it also needed to be the adventure racing and wilderness and
00:43:17
Speaker
sort of the oscillating nature of those two because I think that both of them were important, not only because they were both important, are important aspects of my life, but I can't just have one whole book about trauma loss and healing. You also need the adventure racing and that, cause that helps carry, you know, the excitement through the book. It helps, it moves it forward and that's the, um,
00:43:46
Speaker
That's the excitement of the story. So both of them are important. So through those 10 scenes in there, I had this massive, two big massive bulletin boards and I had all these post-its everywhere trying to track, okay, what are the scenes that I was telling here? And what are the arcs? And I mean, I had these everywhere trying to track down
00:44:15
Speaker
all like your life, you know, sorting out what was going to have to stay what was going to have to go. And then what order because, as you know, the book doesn't go in sequential order. It doesn't go from start to finish. And that was a very big decision with numerous people chiming in on it. So in a sense, it's more of a thematic memoir than it is
00:44:43
Speaker
a standard one because of it. So there's a lot of reasons for that. And primarily it was because I wanted it to be more of an emotional experience, not necessarily that of this chronological history. And so it was meant to have the
00:45:11
Speaker
a sentiment that was happening in the raw life experience match up with the experience that was happening in the race. They go in tandem so that they build up and they, you know, simmer down at the same time. So the experience kind of ebbs and flows with more impact.
00:45:38
Speaker
And some people like it, some people really dislike it. And, you know, it's really gonna be depending on people's style. So as for myself writing it, those were some of the biggest challenges was first putting those tensings together that would accomplish my goal, which was the message of engaging, you know, what my message was.
00:46:08
Speaker
You know, how do I encourage people to engage with life, you know, and stay within those arcs and then without, and somehow put the, not overly confused on that oscillating nature of the two, you know, the two storylines like that.
00:46:35
Speaker
Yeah, that was something I know that sort of fractured aspect of it was kind of kaleidoscopic in a way because it's – you get these little slide shows things that take you from one piece of time, put you in a different timeline and then
00:46:54
Speaker
But the overall, if you take the helicopter view of it, it does have more of an emotional arc that seems consistent even if we're not chronologically consistent. Was that a strategy that you struck with your editor or was that just something you felt in your bones as you were telling this?
00:47:23
Speaker
Yeah, it was something that I started with. I had a couple different proposals, couple versions of a proposal put together, and that was the one that was selected. So I could have gone either way with it, but this is the one that was more important. And if you consider it now that you've looked at the story, it wouldn't have made much sense just to go all out really heavy handed
00:47:53
Speaker
with the whole first 30 years of life. And then at the back end, just have a whole bunch of races. And that like, it would have been awful. And that's why I really didn't want to go that route because I mean, it just wouldn't have made any sense to me. I wouldn't have wanted to read that myself. I would have put it down. And then just to have all of a sudden
00:48:22
Speaker
bunch of dog races. I mean, I didn't like that approach at all.
00:48:28
Speaker
Yeah, that could get, it's kind of like if J.K. Rowling just had like a bunch of quidditch all the time. It's kind of like you need to deploy it strategically, otherwise it loses its meaning and it doesn't seem novel anymore. So it's like, you know, you're able to kind of dollop. You know, Roy Peter Clarke calls a lot of these things like gold coins for the reader. And it's like, you know, you place these things strategically throughout the thing and it pulls people through. But yeah, if you front load things,
00:48:57
Speaker
I mean, you could slam the reader with a sledgehammer chronologically speaking through the first 30 years of your life. And then at the end, they would just be like, oh, this is cool and all. But the balance on the seesaw of the narrative wouldn't work. And your instincts were perfect in that, if I have to say. Yeah. And then maybe there's one last thing on that. Most people were expecting
00:49:26
Speaker
just a story about dog racing. They really just wanted only to know about Catherine Keith, the dog musher. So they would have been expecting what was my life like from 30 on through my dog races. What was that like? You know, tell me about all the dog racing. Like that's kind of what they want to know. So then
00:49:50
Speaker
So I tried to write it just like that. And without writing any stories about what happened, you know, maybe a little bit about what happened in my life out in rural Alaska at camp, you know, but then you learn really quickly about yourself in writing a memoir. It's really hard to write about one event without writing about what happened before because
00:50:21
Speaker
You become a liar without telling the back a little bit of backstory because it becomes really empty. And then you back it up a little bit more.
00:50:32
Speaker
and then you wanna write about yourself at 24 or something that happened, but it doesn't make any sense what happened at 24 if you don't talk about something really important that happened at 20. Okay, well then why did you arrive at what happened at 20? It doesn't make any sense. How did you get there at 20? That's really awful. Why did you make that dumb decision? Well, then you have to talk about what happened at 19.
00:50:59
Speaker
I found that happening throughout this whole thing and that's ultimately why it ended up including, I started the book when I'm about 10, which was not the plan. I wasn't going to go that far back. I was going to start it when I was on the drive up to Alaska, which was when I was 21.
00:51:25
Speaker
It was, it's interesting, the whole memoir process. I'll just say that. Right. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of, that's part of how you flesh it out through the early goings. You just kind of start and then you realize like, oh, this really isn't the start. This is closer to the middle. And you finish the whole draft and you're like, you think you're kind of done. Then you're like, no, I'm actually just getting started. And it's just, oh man, it's just, it's a morass to get through. How long did this take you to write?
00:51:55
Speaker
After the proposal was done, it took about nine months. The proposal itself took about six months because it required putting a ton of pieces together for the proposal.
00:52:14
Speaker
And over the course of writing this book and then your life the last 20 years or so, I was just curious how you've learned to carry your traumas and your tragedies with you. And they're always with you, and of course it's raw and very present in the book.
00:52:39
Speaker
So how have you learned to carry it with you over the course of your life and to process that? I've been an avid journaler since I was young. That's been my form as a writer. I would fill up these 25-cent notebooks, those dollar notebooks from Walmart. Up until I was in my mid-20s, I would write constantly. Then I stopped.
00:53:08
Speaker
very suddenly and I couldn't write anymore because I think I was afraid of writing at that point. Things just then became a little overly much. Then I sort of, I think things became a little too overwhelming and I didn't want to write anymore. For me, continuing to, I just keep going back to the wilderness. I know I'm sort of like a,
00:53:37
Speaker
repeat salesman here, but it's really been my avenue is just to get out. It's been a requirement, but dogs finding ways to accept unconditional love of our friendly companions, this is a great way to help with that.
00:54:05
Speaker
And one of your journal entries, you wrote that only a person who risks is free. And I think you wrote that maybe in 94 or something. So we're talking like, you're probably a teenager at that point, maybe 16, roughly. So I mean, it's not, can you, like, to me, that's just such a, it's such a wonderful line. And, you know, you're, you know, so, so young at that point. Does that still ring true for you, you know, now that you're, you know, in your early forties? Yes, it does.
00:54:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it still means the same thing at both ages. When I was 16, what that meant to me was sort of escaping the shackles and confines that society really places on us. I was 16 and, you know, there's a lot of pressures on you then. I wanted to go, I had a lot of things I wanted to go do. I was out rock climbing.
00:55:04
Speaker
Even at 16, I got myself, I had a car. I went road tripping around the country. I put a sleeping bag and a tent in the back of my car, and I was gone all summer going around the Southwest backpacking. So that's a risk. I took a lot of risks. I would go meet random people and go up to them and say, hey, do you want to climb? I would hitchhike.
00:55:35
Speaker
when I didn't have a car, but I felt like that was my way of getting to express like meeting new people and getting to find my way in the world. So of finding freedom and getting to experience the world without having the pressures put on you or being locked into a certain path.
00:56:03
Speaker
in a way, in a deeply spiritual way, that was being free to be open and expressing, being open in your heart as well. And today, that's the same thing. You have to risk in order to be free. You have to put yourself out there. Otherwise, you get closed in, you have to be vulnerable. And today, this book's gonna be published
00:56:32
Speaker
in a couple of days, depending on when the, in right now, today's the second. So the book is going to be released on the fourth. So that's a big risk. I'm very vulnerable to put this. I was like, all right, this is very, very, very truthful book here. But this is freeing for me. So this is going to, this is big opening my heart in a lot of ways. So yeah, it's a very true statement.
00:57:03
Speaker
be okay with risk. And kind of echoing back to what you had said earlier, a big reason why you were inspired to write this book was to encourage people to say yes to life every single day. And so at this juncture, at this point in your life, what are the things that you are saying yes to in your life going forward? Well, that's a great question.
00:57:33
Speaker
I'm saying yes to future books is one thing. I have further projects I want to write. I'm saying yes to doing future workshops because I am very serious about giving back. And I've not always been great with committing to being around people. And I think that's something that it's time to do.
00:58:01
Speaker
And I'm saying yes to climbing the seven summits, which is my next, my next big, uh, adventure attempt, which starts this July. So I continue on in my, my efforts. I'm taking a pause and dog mushing for a couple of years to do that. So, and I'm saying yes to getting my beautiful daughter, Amelia into college. So that's all these great things are happening. That's amazing.
00:58:30
Speaker
Very nice. Well, Katherine, we're kind of up against our time, and I just want to thank you for the book and thank you for coming on the podcast. Where can people get familiar with you and the amazing things you've done so they can maybe find a little more information on you, and of course, buy the book?
Closing and Further Information
00:58:50
Speaker
My website's at katherinekeith.com.
00:58:53
Speaker
And you can go there for information and my contact information. I'd love to hear from you or what you think about the book, good or bad. And Amazon has the book, Indie Bound, of course is a great place to support your local independent bookstores. And that's about it.
00:59:17
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
00:59:37
Speaker
Follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpodacrossamall. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can do interviews, see ya!