The title of Paula Whyman’s Bad Naturalist says a lot. It’s a memoir by a person bonded with plants and animals who wants to restore a meadow on recently acquired property in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. What could go wrong? Just about everything. What could go right? Just about everything. The book embraces “failure” with abundant, self-deprecating humor. Along the way, readers get an education in all kinds of natural phenomena, replete with strange facts and curious discoveries. Whyman weaves her personal story in with the history of the region, and the indigenous people whose footprints long preceded white settlers. Through tragedy, mishap, and triumph, Whyman covers the gamut in delightful prose. I caught up with her by email.

What kind of a reader were you as a child? Now? 

Voracious reader, then and now. 

How did you come to writing?

These first two questions are connected. My parents are both natural storytellers. My dad draws out an anecdote, makes it last forever until you’re hanging on every word, and always ends with a punchline. He gets people to let down their guard, makes strangers laugh. Still, at age 94. My mom talks about people she met and relates their stories in great detail— the nurse in the doctor’s office, the grocery cashier, the neighbor. My grandmother told stories about her family; often the same ones. It seemed she was trying to figure out what happened or rewrite and redefine her experience.

Before I could read, I sat my stuffed animals in a circle and told them stories. When I was in grade school, I’d go to the library once a week and take out a dozen books. I tried to read Crime and Punishment for a book report (I would have pulled that off the bookshelves at home), but on page 35, there was an extremely detailed dream about a horse-whipping, so I had to stop. 

I started writing creative stories in elementary school. A book of short stories I wrote for an assignment in 6th grade won a prize. Starting at age 7, I wrote “newspapers,” about what was happening in my house or on my street. Later, I did the usual stuff– high school newspaper editorial staff, and the school literary magazine. 

Shortly before college, I attended a panel on journalism, and a panelist said, “Don’t major in journalism, you’ll only learn a little about a lot of things; you won’t learn a lot about anything.” I took that to heart. (Howard Stern was on that panel; he was a DC radio personality at the time with short hair and a beige crewneck sweater.) So, I majored in government. I figured I’d go to law school, and write on the side… I hated my government classes. The reading was dry and I was desperate for literature. Finally, I switched majors. 

After graduation, I landed a job at a magazine publisher. The pay was @#$#. But I learned a lot, and it was a fun, nutty place. Then I moved to APA (American Psychological Association) Books, where my first boss as a production editor, was the wonderful W. Ralph Eubanks. I worked on books covering the study of personality change over time, domestic violence (one author testified in the OJ trial), refugees, stress, and cardiac health. I started out doing line editing and moved into development editing. It was a dream job to work with authors, shaping and restructuring, advising on rewrites. Then I left for MFA school. 

Talk about the challenges of writing a memoir versus fiction. Parts of this book are painful, and parts are laugh-out-loud funny. How did you do it?

Like fiction, memoir needs tension, conflict, story. I wanted to tell a compelling narrative. I can’t write without humor. That’s how my mind works. The same moment I’m thinking of something serious, I’m also making a joke about it in my head. 

As for the painful parts, I wrote them the way I write everything. I described what I experienced, and how I interpreted things. Writing about upsetting events forced me to relate these experiences to the meadow at the center of my book. I did not want trauma to be the “main event” in this memoir, and I think/hope I achieved that. 

The structure of your book is very deliberate. How did you come to it?

I never wrote outlines for fiction—I never wanted to “know” what was going to happen. But I did write outlines for this book. Initially, I was worried that this would ruin the mystery. But I was doing the work on the mountaintop as I was writing. I never knew what outcomes and results I’d be writing about until they happened. 

This book was sold on proposal where I had to write chapter summaries and sample chapters. I had a good sense of the structure, but later I came up with the section themes. As I worked, I wrote changing and evolving chapter outlines. This was a very different approach from fiction. I aimed to mirror my experience learning about the meadow and what lived there, and I wanted to end on a note of hope. We desperately need hope. Hope and action feed each other. 

Tell us about your research process. 

I’m a deep-diver. Over the years this happened with things as varied as horseshoe crabs, mangrove swamps, carpenter bees, lizards. Now I’m focused on the mountain and everything that lives here, the interconnections among creatures and plants. 

I feel responsible to get facts right. The research for writing this book overlapped with research I did for the meadow restoration. I talked to experts in farming, forestry, conservation biology, ecological restoration, soil science, regenerative agriculture, botany, horticulture, etc. I also read on related topics, like history and geology. I read research papers. 

Can you talk about your writing process?

I write too much and then cut drastically as I work through different drafts. For this book, I rearranged sections within chapters, sentences within passages. I would print out a draft chapter and cut out paragraphs, sections, sentences and move them around and to other pages, physically rearranging them, reattaching them somewhere with scotch tape. In the early draft process, some of these became like long scrolls rather than separate pages. Only when I was satisfied would I make the revisions to the document on a computer. 

My process also involves periods of flailing. Despair ensues. This can go on for days. And then I see a way forward, if not a solution. I’ve come to recognize this flailing as necessary. I “know” I’ll get out of it somehow, and yet every time it happens, I’m just as distressed and frustrated.

You are a wonderful literary citizen. Tell us about your work on Scoundrel Time, a literary magazine.

Thank you! I had the great privilege to work with Karen Bender and Daisy Fried, two terrific writers, editors, people, and our dedicated, passionate staff. I’m grateful for the work everyone did to publish high quality work with few resources, and for the writers and artists who sent us their work. I enjoy editing, and I especially enjoy working with writers to help bring out their best work. It was gratifying to get recognition from places like the Pushcart and Best American anthologies. 

What writers do you admire and what writers have influenced your work?

I’m a big Virginia Woolf fan. When I was in MFA school, I took a seminar on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner and tried to write fiction in stream of consciousness. (Good thing I stopped.) I was also very into Henry James and George Eliot and Jane Austen. And early TC Boyle, Philip Roth, and Martin Amis; the gallows humor in their work spoke to me. When I finally read Lorrie Moore, that was a voice I could relate to, as if “relating” is important? Her stories, themes, voices felt true to me. I’m drawn to humor; it is essential to the human experience. No matter how dark things are, we use humor to try to get through it.

What writing/publishing projects are you working on now?

We made the decision to close Scoundrel Time as of the end of 2024. We were pulled to other projects and couldn’t put the time into it that it deserved. (The archive will stay up until December of this year.) We had a good run.

I do have another book in the works, and in the next few months as I get farther out from the launch of Bad Naturalist, I expect/hope I’ll actually get time to work on it! It’s also nonfiction, also nature/conservation-related.

Anything else you want to add?

I publish a free monthly newsletter, the Bad Naturalist newsletter, where I talk about what I’m discovering on the mountain. There’s a subscribe link on my website and book related information, including events, there as well. I love talking to book clubs; please contact me on my website.

Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her next novel, Duet for One, will appear in May 2025. Toll has received a wide range of artists’ fellowships and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

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