Conservationist and freelance writer Brooke Williams credits a dream with the idea for his latest book, “Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-Enchantment,” about experiencing nature with myth, dream, imagination and culture as well as science. The relationship between humanness and wilderness has been a theme in his writing from essays in local newspapers to his books on ancestry, evolution and nature. We spoke with Williams ahead of his conversation with Harvard professor Dan Schrag on Sept. 2 at Porter Square Books. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was the writing process like for this book?
It began with a dream. I had a dream in which a dragonfly appeared, and shortly after, I started seeing dragonflies everywhere. So I started keeping track and I started making notes to try to understand what happened with that dream. It sort of dissolved that barrier between my inner dream world and my ordinary everyday world. I just kept thinking about it and kept wondering about it, and then the opportunity came to turn it into a book proposal, and I had a really great publisher who helped me take all these backstories, which turned into a story, which became that book. You can ignore this stuff and act as if it’s not significant, but then it stops happening; the more you respond to it, the more real it gets and the more important it becomes. It’s like a whole other source of information.
I relate to that. I’ve had a lot of very meaningful and spiritual dreams that have revealed things to me that I couldn’t have known otherwise.
I hope it encourages people to pay more attention to their dreams. I read a lot of Carl Jung and a lot of books about Carl Jung, who loved it when patients came in with a dream, that way they could understand a little more about that person. When they couldn’t dream, Jung would put them through this process called the active imagination, which seems a lot like making stuff up but it’s really not. I’ve used that a lot in my life just when I find myself stuck, to start to think about the symbols and the characters that appear.
How do the dragonflies in your recent book reflect that?
Going back to the Jung idea that they became symbolic for me because they appeared in a dream, and you look at a dream as if all the elements of it are all symbolic. So I spent a lot of time looking into what they really mean, what they meant historically and culturally throughout history. What did it really mean to me? Prior to the dream, I only remember seeing a couple of dragonflies out in the wild – I knew I had seen lots, but I could only remember two instances. And after that, they started appearing everywhere. I found symbols all through my house, like coffee cups with dragonflies, refrigerator magnets with dragonflies. Something had penetrated.
I realized it wasn’t just dragonflies, it could be anything, and ideally I hope that people that read the book or hear me talk about it get the sense that there is something out there that is demanding their attention. How do you find it? What do you do with it once you’ve found it? It’s usually a natural object, a natural organism, because they’ve been around forever. Dragonflies have been on the planet for 300 million years, which suggests that every human that ever lived might have encountered them, and Jung believed that those encountered become archetypes and symbols and get passed down in the same way, generation to generation like genetics do. So there’s something going on, and I think that was a big driving force as I wrote this book.
Do you think the influence of the wilderness is a part of the backstory, the story, or is it just everywhere?
Years ago, I went to a workshop with this Montana writer William Kittridge – he died a couple of years ago – and he became a really solid mentor to me and a close friend. He looked at all of us in the room and he said “My job is to help each one of you find the one story that you’ll tell over and over again, the rest of your life.” And at the time, I thought that was really a boring thing, how can you tell the same story over and over again? But now, looking back maybe 30 years, it’s sort of what I’ve done. There’s this underlying foundation to my thinking, and it is this story of: Humans have lived in the same bodies since the Pleistocene, 200,000 years, and yet we’re trying to make them work in a world that’s vastly different than the one we evolved in.
How did your writing career begin?
It seems like wilderness and nature was always a part of it. I think it began mainly with me writing op-ed pieces and editorials about preserving wilderness in the Southwest. You know how every town has a free outdoor magazine with a lot of ads? I wrote a column in one of those in Salt Lake City for years. I wrote a column in a Jackson Hole free newspaper for a long time. But my book work was always me trying to figure out why these places matter to us. What is it about our humanness that really responds to wild places? That’s been a question I’ve asked throughout the years.
What was the most unexpected thing you learned in writing this book?
That writing things down almost makes them occur. That sounds funny, but what I mean is if I wasn’t actively engaged in trying to find out what happened during that dream, and if I wouldn’t have been writing them down, a lot of the ideas would not happen. I found myself saying “Wow, I’m so glad I was there for that when that happened, otherwise it would have just disappeared.” The act of writing itself exposes many of these ideas that might have been hidden otherwise.
Brooke Williams reads from “Encountering Dragonfly: Notes on the Practice of Re-Enchantment” at 7 p.m. Sept. 2 at Porter Square Books, 1815 Massachusetts Ave., Porter Square, Cambridge. Free.
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