Theft: A Novel: Beyond the Old West with author BK Loren

Welcome to InScape Quests, where insightful conversations redefine perspectives.

I'm your host, Trudy Howley. Join me as together we delve into discussions about relationships, work, and passions. My special guest today is B.K. Lauren, the author of the award-winning books Theft, a novel, Animal Mineral Radical, a collection of essays, and The Way of the River, a meditative memoir.

She is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the Willow Women Writing the West Award, the Mountains and Plains Reading the West Award, the Tom Howard John Reed Nonfiction Award, and many others. She lives in Santa Fe with her wife of 35 years and is the creator of writingwithheartandmind.com, which offers anti-workshops, and inquiry writing classes. Welcome, BK. It's such a pleasure to have you here today.

Hi, Trudy. I'm so happy to be here, too. It's so good to talk with you, and I'm looking forward to this. So, I recently read your novel, Theft, and there's so much to talk about this amazing, haunting, and lyrical book. It's set in the Wild West, and that seems also a metaphor for so much. I've long been fascinated by this edge of civilization and where that meets the wilderness. How do you see the map of this story, Theft?

Oh, the map of it. That's interesting. I'll address the West part first, if I may. That was important to me when I was writing this. Zeb, the main male character, is embracing what I would call the Old West, which is man against nature and shaping things in a way that you're more in control of. And Willa, his sister, is at what I would call the New West, which is trying to rehab, trying to live with animals.

And though Zeb would like to get there, he's such a troubled character that he can't quite let go enough to do that. That was one of the rifts between the two characters. She's very into... Rehabilitating wolves. And in the book, he has a sort of archetypal relationship with the mountain lion. The way he deals with that mountain lion is meant to be representative of the wrong way to deal with the mountain lion.

Interestingly enough, I've had some groups protest the book because of the way that he deals with the mountain lion. And it perplexes me because you can't have change without looking at both sides of change. And so they really are on both sides of change. So they are in the liminal place that you talk about, like up against civilization and nature, but they're also in the liminal place of the West and how we as humans tend to deal with nature in the Old West and in what I'm calling the New West.

So there are a lot of liminal places in the novel. And that really ties in with a lot of contemporary issues around the wolves as well. I know from what I've been learning most recently about the removal of the wolf from the West as an apex predator, and that's had a massive cascading problem from the top down with the abundance of Things like coyotes and elk and deer, and then it trickles down even further to the environmental landscape.

And so these real-time effects and story, how do you see this intersection of what is actually really going on with the wildlife situation and the wolves? Yeah. I'm very careful when I talk about this because I work with a lot of biologists, and I know enough to know that I don't know as much as I should know to be talking about this. So I can only talk about wolves in relationship to story and perhaps archetype and such.

I do know a bit, but I have to preface it with that I'm not a professional about wolves. The wolf that I was writing about was the Mexican wolf, which is the most endangered mammal in North America, or at least it was at the time I was writing the book. At the time I was writing the book, there were 49 of them.

There are hundreds of them in captivity, waiting to be released, but they can't be released because of the pressures. The Mexican wolf, when it is released, is released onto an area where ranching is allowed. And so it has a far less chance of survival than the Yellowstone wolves that we're more familiar with. That has been somewhat of a success story. And that's encouraging, especially for the wolves that are coming into Colorado.

There will be a trophic cascade, and I'm sure you're familiar with that term, where the land starts to replenish from an apex predator. My biologist friends will tell me that the wolf, in fact, is not the apex predator that is most natural to this land. There were far more predators back in the Pleistocene, and they believe that in order to restore the land to the degree that it needs to be restored, that you need to go back that far. I know enough to know what I don't know.

It's just such a controversial issue. And I can see there are many biologists that I know who say that the release of the wolves in Colorado was not done correctly. And then there are others who say, yes, it was done correctly. I don't know enough to be able to take a stand on that. I know that wolves should be on the land and that they will help the land restore in many different ways.

I'm curious if we look at the wolves metaphorically as well with an idea of maybe exile and return and predator and prey, how do you feel the wolves showed up for you as a symbol or metaphor in your story? Yeah. Well, I'm embarrassed to say that the wolf wasn't there until the last draft of the story. A lot of people think that it has driven the story, but it did not drive the story. And what drove the story were the many types of theft that have happened.

I thought that the story was done, and I realized that I had left one out, and that is the theft that happens to endangered species. So I had to go back and make room for the wolf. Zeb is a lone wolf, and a lone wolf cannot survive. When a wolf is cast out of a pack, they have very little chance of surviving and they live on the edge. So once again, that's a liminal place. That was another metaphor that played a role in the book.

I do know that it was the last part of the book that the wolf came in last. And that once it did, once I had the wolf, then I knew I had a full story. And then I knew that I could understand Jeb in a fuller way. Again, Zeb is a lone wolf, and Willa, the other character, is more of a pack animal. She lives on the mesa. She's trying to make her own. He wants to help everybody. He wants to save everybody except himself.

And you mentioned before old ways and new ways, and also there's another character in your book, Brenda, and her story of stolen heritage. as well seems significant.

There are so many different forms of theft in the book. There's eminent domain. There's the stolen heritage that Brenda and her father went through. And that is based on a real story of someone who I knew in high school. And I met her and I went over to her house and she had long, dark hair. I went over to her house and everybody was blonde and with light hair. And I asked her what had happened. And she had been stolen off the reservation

by the government when she was young. And once you're off the reservation, you take your reservation rights. You can't go back to it. And the most devastating thing about that was that they placed her with a man who had been, Convicted of sexual abuse, they found that better for her than living on the reservation. What I then found out was that her grandfather is a very famous medicine man, one of the most powerful medicine men of the Oglala tribe.

And so that affected me so much as a high schooler. We actually went and found her family together. and she was reunited. That affected me so much when I was, you know, 17, 18. I knew I had to write about it someday. And that's how that became a part of that. Do you know the American Indian movement against the FBI in the 1970s? I was on the land during that. And I really felt like I crossed into another country within our country and there was a war going on there.

And everybody out in the rest of the country had no idea about it. The wars did not end in 1889. They continued, and they are continuing for Indigenous people.

So I really felt strongly about that. So with these themes of violence and separation, what else shows up in your book is deep love as well. There is a real thread of that and it's unspoken many times. So I'm curious about how you see that transcending your narrative. The original title of this is Thicker Than Water and I changed it to theft as I started putting all the thefts in there.

But the bond between Willa and her brother just will never go away as much as they try to destroy it, as much as circumstances have tried to destroy it. The bond between Brenda and her father can never go away. As much as those things work, there's so much that tried to destroy it. And then even the bond between Willa and her maid family on the mesa, her love for the wolves, her love for the land itself, it is absolutely driven by love.

And I really appreciate that you saw that. There are two sections, but this one comes at the end of the book, and this is after Zeb has died, and it's after Willett is resolved. And so as a psychologist, you might be interested in this part of it. But when Willa is not resolved about her trauma, everything that happens in the present is written in the past tense. Because when you're still in trauma, you cannot enter the present. And once she is resolved, the tenses then smooth out.

And then the present is written in the present and the past is written in the past. But until she's resolved, those two tenses are switched throughout the book. So when she's in the present, she's always in past tense. And when she's in the past, she's always in present tense. That was my subtle way of getting across that aspect of trauma. So this is after that, and she's in the present tense now, and she's been resolved. This is the very end of the book.

She says, I don't think anyone ever does anyone. Someone else is dying right. There's no telling if we do our own right. And my guess is that matters less anyway. On the highway heading south, I rested my head on the note my mom had written, something she had left for all of us before she died, something I'd carried with me ever since. I don't know why the note that's in here at the end of the book, that's the real note from my mom, where my mom left.

And I didn't get to read it at her funeral because our family broke apart and splinters. And I thought at the end of the book, I thought, oh, I didn't get to read it. I know she wanted me to read it. So since I didn't read it there, I think I'll just publish it nationally. Amazing. And I thought, okay, Mom, I did it for you. I did it right this time. So that is a verbatim note that my mom left.

That's incredible. Thank you for sharing that. I'm wondering, as you kind of play with these archetypes through what seems like a contemporary ecological lens in many ways, do you see yourself as some kind of myth-maker? I'm really a Taoist at heart, and when you name something, you kill it. So certainly if I answered that with a yes, I would kill any myth-making abilities that I had within myself. And so I value myth. I live in myth.

I dream in myth. And I hope that myth pours out of my fingers when I write, when I type. and I would not be the person to say if I were a myth maker or not. If I said that, I definitely wouldn't be a myth maker. Some of the language that you use is so sensory as you describe the landscape and the sounds and the sights. There's just some amazing lines to me, things like the yellow of this bird is bright and saturated with the sound of the meadow in springtime.

And there's some other lines, screech owls and great horned owls carved out tunnels of sound in the wooded silence. And the fox red on the gold aspen leaves. I love the bringing to life of the environment. Thank you. Thank you for noticing that. I really appreciate it. So exploring the process of writing, going back to the beginning as well, because we know you as both an award-winning writer and a writing teacher. What were the early days of writing for you? How did that look?

Well, when I was in second grade, I spent all of my allowance on a notebook. And I would go up to the 7-Eleven and I would buy my little spiral notebook and I would fill it with writing what I thought were poems. And then I would bury them. I would bury it. And then I would, on Saturday when I got my allowance, I would go up and I would buy another notebook and then I would fill it in a week. and I would bury it.

I have no idea exactly why I was burying what I wrote, but I hope I was planting something. I sometimes want to go back because I still know exactly where they're buried, but I'm sure that they're disintegrated by now. That was my first conscious writing, but I couldn't stop writing ever. I just continued on with it. I didn't know really that you could do it for a living. It never occurred to me to do that until one day somebody said to me well, my friend is,

Jim, he's going to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. It's the best writing school in the world. And I said, oh, what's that? I had no idea. So I applied and I got in and there you go. And words feel like I can feel them. I can sense them. They feel like hard candy in my mouth. I can roll them around in a different way and taste them in different ways. And they don't feel abstract to me at all. They feel very visceral and alive.

Sounds like maybe a good marketing strategy is for you to have books on that seed paper that you can plant as well. Little notebooks to go along with the next works. Wouldn't that be nice if they only made those when I were younger? You know, that would be wonderful, right? I come from a non-literary family. My family doesn't read books. I mean, they just don't read books at all. So I have no idea where this thing came from for me.

And I was so ignorant about it. When I was 16 years old, I wrote a book and I drew all these pictures and everything. And I sent it off for publication. And I'm so glad that it didn't get published. But they kept it for like a year. And then they wrote me this wonderful letter saying, hey, we almost published your book. And would you like to come up and meet us? It was very thrilling for me at that time. But had I published that book, I would have been doomed forever because it was very sappy.

Are there any particular writers that have inspired you along the way? I think there's not a single writer that I've ever read that doesn't inspire me. I get inspiration from everything. I get inspiration mostly from humanity, just from, you know, from my being with people, even more so than I would say from books. But I try to absorb everything that I read and let it become something. I am very fond of Linda Hogan, who's a Chick-fil-A writer, and she's a friend also, and she's.

We worked together with Magical Bird that was very healing for both of us. We worked together to heal an eagle. And I adore her as a person and as a writer. And I think everyone should read her.

What have you discovered about your writing process now you've been working on screenplays? My screenplays are very different from writing a book. What I love about writing a novel is all of the sensory details and such. And you can't do that in a screenplay. You really have to get it down to the bones. So I dislike that about screenplays. What I love about screenplays is that you really have to be very visual.

And in this day and age, when you write a book, you're supposed to promote it yourself. When I signed up to write a book, that was not possible. There was no internet. the only way I could possibly promote my own book is to go put a flyer on a kiosk somewhere. Like, who would care about that? So that wasn't expected of a person back then.

What I love about screenplays is that you write it, and then the actors and the directors go out and promote it, and you get to be your little introverted self and go back and write again. So really what I like about screenplays is not so much the writing process itself, because it does get down to the bones and you do have to take out some of the language qualities. But it allows me the freedom to write the book that I want to write.

I will always love the books the best. And as you explore the freedom of writing in this other format, I'm curious about the actual process of sitting down, like in the morning or the evening, or do you give yourself a time limit of how much you need to spend at a desk or wherever you choose to write? Never. I do not do that. No, I think it's a great idea for students to do that because it becomes a grind then. But if it works for you, that's great. You should do that.

But so many people will say you have to write every day and there are no rules. You do not have to write every day. In fact, the thing is, I'm writing right now. And if you're a writer, you're writing in every single moment of your life. You're telling a story. You're feeling it. In every moment, I told you this morning, I saw a coyote dreaming for the first time. That was an entire novel to me, and I was writing in that moment.

I didn't have a pen in my hand, and I wasn't putting words on the page, but you bet I was writing. And so I think sometimes people mistake the actual putting words on the page as the only way to write. That's not the only way to write. In fact, that's the end stage of writing. And that can't be the most valued thing. In fact, there isn't a most valued thing. It has to be looked at as a whole. And so your whole, either you're writing your whole life or you're not.

So as you're in this constant process of writing as well, I'm wondering what are your actual contracted current projects that you've got going on too? Well, I'm writing a screenplay. Actually, I'm doing two screenplays right now. One is 15 minutes short, and the other one is the feature. Actually, I'm doing three. The other is an adaptation of Theft. Then I have a third that I've just taken on that I can't really talk about yet.

But I'm pretty excited about it. What I love about screenplays that you don't get with books is the collaborative nature of it. You really have to be there with other people, with the producer, with the director, sometimes with another writer. The other wonderful thing about screenplays is that when you sell a book, all rights revert to you. But when you sell a screenplay, you sell 100% of your rights.

So when you're talking about letting go of something, when you sell a screenplay, you are telling somebody that they can do whatever they want with your work. And a lot of people will have an ego attachment and say that's what they hate about screenplays. And that's what I love. It's like, okay, here's a blueprint and I welcome any input that anyone else has. Now, sometimes it gets too diluted and it becomes a sort of a generic thing.

But I believe if you trust and put the intention in the project itself, that it won't become deluded in that way.

And in this process of letting go and collaboration as well, do you have any particular truth or teaching that you might want the novel to carry forward into future readers or generations even? Yeah. It's interesting because I've had a few directors working with me with theft, and one was very interested in the social aspects, the more political aspects. And the person I'm working with now is interested in it as talking about health care.

And because health care is another one of the thefts that happens in our culture. The theft is about the two kids, they do these petty thefts, and they could be put in jail for those. But what it really talks about is the big thefts that are socially acceptable by agencies that happen all the time. And those are the huge thefts in our life. And one of them going on right now is health care. And so the director that I'm working with right now really wants me to focus on that.

What I really love and what I really want any book that I write to do is to transform in the hands of the person who reads it. Again, it's a letting go process. So one person read the book and he wrote to me one of the most beautiful letters I received was he said, I've tried tap therapy. I've tried EMDR. I've tried talk therapy. I've tried. And he went through all the therapies that he tried to get over the grief of the sudden loss of his wife. And he said, theft did it. Thank you.

And so I have no idea how Theft did that for him. And nor do I want control of it, nor do I even really want to understand it. Because the more I let go and the more I let it shape, the more I let it become something else in somebody else's hands, the more powerful the book becomes. So the more I dictate what I think it should mean, the less it can transform and be powerful as a tool for that individual person. And that's what I really hope.

And that's what I really think that writing should do. It's a conversation. And each person who enters that conversation is going to change the theme of that conversation. Thank God for that. That's incredibly powerful. And this sort of unconscious grief and transformation of that also really showed up for me reading about Zeb's interaction with the horse as well.

That was a very potent passage. So as we think about this psychological odyssey that goes through ecological and sociological as well as deeply unconscious processes, it really is a journey of transformation. And so grateful to hear you describe this. Thank you. Writing when it's done well is an unconscious process, and that's why you're writing constantly. It's why I don't outline. It's why I don't dictate what I'm going to say.

I need to have discovery on the page. I need to not know what I'm going to say in order to say what needs to be said the best. I listen when I write rather than coming to the page with something to say. And so it's a constant process of discovery for me. When I write something, I know that I haven't really begun writing. When I get past that and I'm writing and it's making no sense to me and I look back at it and I go, what the hell just happened there?

That's gold. That's gold. And I don't know where that comes from. but I'm glad it's there. I have an exercise that I do with students. Our mutual friend, John, actually loves this exercise because you never know where you're going with it. And I've designed it that way. It's the longest exercise that I have. I've designed it that way. And it never fails that people come up with, they say, I had no idea that was going to happen. And then they can take that and use it in the book.

That thing, that no idea that it was going to happen. That's what writing is. It's not going, this is what I want to say. And that ties in with your belief about explanation being the thief of awe. I'm so glad that you saw that in the book. That's wonderful.

Explanation is the thief of awe for sure. And also, we've talked about letting go in this conversation, and there's an invitation through your writing as well as letting go, but to hold tight to wonder. Yes. Thank you. I haven't had anyone point those two things out before in the book. Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, hold tight to wonder. I just admire you and what you do so much, and it's just an absolute pleasure to be here with you. I really thank you.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you today and look forward to all your next projects too. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in today and investing your time with us. Feel free to share this episode with a friend and we look forward to reconnecting with you in our next episode.