Lover of forests, birds, and people - a train fire delayed but didn't derail Deborah Nedelman

HALLIE EPHRON: One of the great things about social media is getting to reach out and touch someone you knew in school but have since lost touch, reconnecting, and finding that you have more than you ever expected to have in common. 


Today I'm welcoming Deborah Nedelman, my high school classmate at Beverly Hills High. She was (she'll correct me if I've got this wrong) nerdy like me. Smart, especially in English. She left Southern California to go to Bryn Mawr when I went to Barnard. And ne'er the twain shall meet... until now when we find ourselves both published writers.

Her path was circuitous. By way of a PhD in psychology and a career in clinical psychology (my PhD was in educational measurement, my career in teaching and educational evaluation.) Now she's published both fiction and non-fiction, including self-help and textbooks, but says "fiction is where I find the deepest truths." And I can believe that. Her first, just published novel, WHAT WE TAKE FOR TRUTH, is one of those stories that burrows in as you read it and stays there. Gives you a lot to think about.

Welcome, Deborah! WHAT WE TAKE FOR TRUTH is set in the Pacific Northwest and the small, dying logging community named (ironically) Prosperity. The landscape, the people, the Hoot Owl Cafe… it all feels so vivid. How did you learn about that place and that life?

DEBORAH NEDELMAN: I lived in Snohomish County, Washington and worked as a psychotherapist in Everett for over 30 years. Towns like Prosperity dot the North Cascade Mountains. As an avid hiker, I spent many hours walking old logging trails that switchback through the mountains. Lots of after-hike meals (and more than a few pieces of pie) at cafes like the Hoot Owl gave me time to soak in the details of these communities.

HALLIE: At the core of the book are the consequences of government regulations that destroyed many logging businesses in order to save the spotted owl. And your main character embodies that conflict. How did you come to that understanding?

Spotted owlBy Hollingsworth, John and Karen; photo by USFS Region 5 (Pacific Southwest) - US Fish and Wildlife 

DEBORAH: The logging industry built the city of Everett and the changes that came about as a result of the environmental regulations of the ‘80’s and 90’s were felt keenly there. It was during that time period that men whose livelihoods were being destroyed by these changes started showing up in my therapy office. 

These were not typical ‘talk therapy’ clients, but they were desperate, and their stories really touched my heart. I heard how they had always believed that the hard, dangerous, physical work they did as loggers was necessary and wholesome. Many of them had fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers who were all loggers. Suddenly they were being reviled; some had kids who were challenging the idea of cutting down the forest, taking the side of the environmental movement. 

Their personal stories weren’t mine to tell, but through fiction I hoped to convey the complexity of the conflict and how it impacted individual lives. It’s a common story in fishing and mining as well as logging communities throughout our country.

HALLIE: Have to ask, are you a birder? As a birder myself, as I read the book I thought I was hearing the voice of someone who was quite tuned into nature.

DEBORAH: Absolutely! I’m not a ‘competitive’ life-lister, but I do love watching birds. The parrot references in this story were stimulated by a couple of amazing birding trips to Central America. Northwest Washington State is a wonderful place for birding. There’s a bald eagle nest just down the street from me, so I hear that wild call overhead often. 

HALLIE: This is your first published novel, and I know you took a circuitous route to get to THE END. (Which is also a new beginning!) Derailed by a train fire? Please, tell us about that.

DEBORAH: I was a writer from a young age. I kept a diary from maybe third grade on. I started with one of those like Grace had, gilded edges and a lock. I’d staple together folded sheets of paper to make “books.” 

My mother diligently kept all of those early creative efforts. In high school I worked on our literary magazine, Avant Guard (do you remember that, Hallie? We were so pretentious.) 

HALLIE: Of course I remember! 

DEBORAH: I wrote poetry and more stories. By the time I left L.A. to go back east to college I had a body of work, you could say. 

Those were the days when you traveled with a big suitcase and shipped your trunk ahead to your destination. My writings didn’t fit in the trunk, so after I’d arrived at Bryn Mawr and settled into the dorm, I asked my mother to send the box to me. She was the consummate package wrapper and packed those journals and diaries and all my writing tightly into a cardboard box, put an address label on it and covered the label with several layers of Scotch Tape and mailed it off. 

A few weeks later I came back to my dorm room and found a box full of wet ashes sitting in front of my door. I learned later that the box had traveled across the country on a train that caught fire somewhere in the Midwest. Firefighters extinguished the blaze with lots of water, of course. The Scotch Tape had preserved my name and address on the label, so the US Postal Service dutifully delivered the stinky, soggy remains of my early writing efforts to my college dorm. 

I took this as a message that perhaps I wasn’t destined to make writing my life’s work and decided to major in psychology instead of English. It took almost 40 years for me to return to fiction writing, but I learned a few things in the meantime. 

HALLIE: I can only imagine how horrifying it must have been to receive that box... your incinerated life's work! EVERYONE OUT THERE: BACK UP YOUR COMPUTER! NOW!!! Because if your house burned down tomorrow...

Catching my breath... 
How does your background as a psychologist affect you has a writer?

DEBORAH: I tend to think a lot about a character’s inner life when I’m writing and I think that comes from the many years I spent exploring that territory with my clients. As a psychologist, I learned about the wide range of individual responses to trauma and tragedy and that definitely informs my writing. You can’t think in black and white terms when you’re a therapist; you’re constantly being presented with the complexities of peoples’ lives and relationships. 

HALLIE: You also teach writing workshop and offer manuscript coaching. What’s the most common issue you encounter with aspiring writers?

DEBORAH: This is an interesting question. I am trained in the Amherst Writers and Artists method, based on the book Writing Alone and With Others by the marvelous teacher and poet, Pat Schneider. One of the tenants of that method is the belief that everyone is a genius when it comes to telling their own story, whether we’re talking memoir or fiction. The challenge is to give yourself permission to write that story and to tell your truth. 

In my workshops I work with writers at all different points in their writing lives. The most consistent issue I encounter regardless of the level of writing experience is confidence. It’s amazing how effective we can be at undermining ourselves and convincing ourselves that we have no business telling our story or that no one will be interested in reading it. 

Writing is hard work, but it can be incredibly fun and rewarding when you can shut out all the negative self talk for a while and let your creative voice to sing on the page. 

HALLIE: That is great advice. I think you have to have confidence... just not so much that you can't hear criticism.

I'm still thinking about all of those diaries and stories Deborah lost, and wondering if any of you can relate to that with a loss of your own? 

What We Take for Truth is the story of a young woman who finds her strength when the world around her crumbles. It is a timely tale about shifting loyalties and the painful choices we are forced to make in order to preserve what we value most.

As this novel opens, it is 1990 and Grace Tillman, who has lived all her life in the tiny logging town of Prosperity, Washington, has just graduated from high school and is facing a very uncertain future. The spotted owl controversy is about to destroy her world before she has had her chance to learn who she is and what it means to be a part of this community.

Grace is an orphan, her mother gone since she was four and her father killed by an erratically cut cedar three years before the story opens. She has set her sights on moving to the city and turning her back on all she’s known when she meets Charlie Roberge, an independent log truck driver willing to break the law to hold on to his way of life. Charlie’s arrival in Prosperity is both a homecoming and a desperate grab at a lifeline. Though the bed of his Peterbilt is empty, he is bringing with him a secret that will challenge both his and Grace’s sense of identity and ultimately teach them about the complexities of loyalty, love, and loss. In the process, Grace will find herself as an artist and an independent woman in a world where neither is welcome.

At its height, the world of logging in the Pacific Northwest was both brutal and beautiful. When the conservation movement sent protestors into the woods and the government began to place the needs of a small, shy bird above those of families who had lived for generations off the harvest of those woods, the conflicts that erupted were fierce and heartbreaking. What We Take for Truth tells a story that both defends a way of life that is dying and celebrates a landscape that is being lost.

ISBN-10: 1-950437-18-3