by Melissa Olson-Petrie

My determination to use fire as an informing presence did not spring from philosophical conviction or historiographical insight. It simply reflected how I had learned to talk about fire. On the Rim we discussed fire endlessl; there was almost nothing else that mattered. We described our fires’ quirks while hunched over ration coffee on late-night firelines, we compared our fires’ ease and misery when we returned to the fire cache, we sang and cursed our fires at the saloon. They all, each one, had a personality. There were charmed fires and ugly fires, glorious fires and fires that were existentially wretched, fires rich with loose dirt and mean fires that burned amid nothing but roots and rocks. There were fires that hurt, fires that hummed, fires that inspired, fires that infuriated. The character of the fire determined our experience.

From Fire in America (University of Washington Press, 1997 reprint edition) by Stephen J. Pyne

Starting in 1967 at age 18, Regents Professor Stephen J. Pyne spent 15 summers on a fire crew on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Those summers eventually became the subject of Fire on the Rim in 1989. In some ways, those summers helped define how he approaches writing about the history of wildland fires, starting with Fire in America in 1982 and continuing to this day, almost 20 books later.

“In effect, I attribute a kind of character to things like fire, Antarctica, the Grand Canyon,” Pyne says. “In a sense, I’m personifying, a loose sort of anthropomorphizing that invests them with a certain character. This grew out very naturally from my long experiences on a fire crew. That’s how you think about fire when you are actually doing it.”

Pyne doesn’t begin his book projects by analyzing his audience, as most writers are advised to do. Instead, he blurs the lines between how academic and literary nonfiction readers have traditionally been addressed by focusing on a distinctive voice for each of his books.

As a result, his books have been named to the New York Times Book Review’s notable books lists in 1991 and 1989 as well as Choice’s “Best 100 Academic Books of the Year” lists in 1997 and 1982. In 1987, his book The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica was included on both the New York Times and Choice “best” lists. In 1995, the Los Angeles Times awarded Pyne the Robert Kirsch Award for body-of-work contributions to American letters.

“Rather than deal with the image of the reader, I fold or subsume that into the question of voice,” says Pyne, who has likened “the general reader” to the myth of the Sasquatch. “How am I writing, and how does it sound? That in effect determines who the reader would be. If I can establish the voice, then I’m off and running.”

For example, Pyne imbued his first book on fire, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, with what he describes as an almost epic voice that stops short of “traditional scholarly diction.” He wanted the voice to suggest that the book wasn’t just a record of anecdotes, but rather something fundamental that perhaps people were not seeing.

“How do you have something that is grounded in scholarship, grounded in good research, but then can move out of lumbering academic prose and acquire a vitality and reach a larger audience?” Pyne asks.

For him, that grounding in scholarship and research comes from hours spent reading archives and government documents. Examples from his book Year of the Fires (2001) include the University of Washington’s collected letters of a Forest Service worker who fought the 1910 conflagrations. They also include military records in Washington, D.C., detailing the Army’s involvement in those fires, as well as acts by Congress regarding firefighter casualties before employment compensation laws.

When he sat down with all his research, notes, and materials for Year of the Fires, Pyne found that he could hit his maximum speed as a writer—11 pages a day. The book’s manuscript, counting neither the research done in the previous two years nor the rewriting and editing, took 34 days to complete, he says. His usual daily rate is closer to four or five pages, with the start of a project to full manuscript taking about three years.

“I’m always taking notes. I’m writing mentally all the time. Then when I sit down, I just do it,” says Pyne. “I could probably be put down in the median of an interstate highway and still write.”

Perhaps his focus on voice and other literary conventions, where fire or ice can have a presence if not a character, hearkens back also to his undergraduate studies as an English major at Stanford (although geology was a close second) and his graduate degrees in American Studies.

“I wanted to write about the natural world, things like fire, ice, canyons, forests,” Pyne writes in his recent essay “Explaining Myself.” As a result, he treats “ice as a more conventional historian might treat demographics, or fire as another might portray the career of a culture hero.”

Read the other articles in this series on science writing at ASU:

John Alcock: Preaching about biodiversity…without being too obvious
Edward J. Sylvester: Getting inside their heads—conveying brain surgeons’ experiences

For more information, contact Stephen J. Pyne, Ph.D., 480.965.4092. Send e-mail to stephen.pyne@asu.edu. Visit his Web site at www.public.asu.edu/~spyne/