The cover of Hotshot features a long-legged woman in a hard hat and protective gear, her backlit smile obscured by the inferno behind her. That’s author River Selby in another life: before they claimed their identity as a writer and non-binary person, before they attended college or became a professor or ever imagined they’d publish a book. The image has a surreal, almost magical quality, as it should: It’s a photograph of a person in a crucible, forging their way from one life to another.
By the time this photograph was taken, Selby had already survived homelessness, addiction and assault before becoming the only female-bodied wildland firefighter on a California crew—and eventually one of the elite firefighters known as hotshots. Informed by their decade fighting fires across the American West and years of meticulous research, Hotshot is an exhilarating and heartrending exploration of the cycles of creation and destruction that govern both the natural world and our worlds within.
Selby’s unflinching honesty on the page is hard-won, and they are the kind of human and writer generous enough to pry their memory and heart open like an antique watch, laying it out so we can inspect the gears and perhaps learn to better understand and operate our own. It’s a thrilling read that nonetheless asks the reader to engage with challenging questions. How do we coexist with nature’s creative and destructive cycles? How do we coexist with our many selves, across time, across place, across memory, within the creative and destructive cycles that looking back affords us? As we enter wildfire season under an administration particularly hostile to environmental conservation efforts, women’s bodily autonomy, and nonconforming gender identities, this book is a fierce, compelling riposte to the fear and destruction we’re living through.
I got to speak with Selby over Zoom about finding authority as a marginalized writer, how we can learn from Indigenous land practices, and the courage to imagine a better world.
Sarah Bess Jaffe: The way place functions in Hotshot is really interesting. We move through time with you, but we also move through place, and it feels—bear with me on this—like a fresh iteration of the American Western. It’s a quest for self-discovery with a lot of physical and emotional hardship as you move from the familiar touchpoints like big cities in California to the wilds of Alaska. Were you in any way intentionally subverting that mold?
River Selby: I never would have thought about it like that, but thinking of it as a modern Western makes so much sense. It does feel right in that [Hotshot is] working against certain narratives or tropes of the Western. It’s not about conquering things. It’s about coexisting with things.
Thinking of it that way does make it appropriate that it ends up in Alaska, where, out of all the places I had been, there was this wilderness. Sometimes it was really scary on fires when there were bears. I still am very scared of bears—there’s a trauma association there for me for sure. My yurt on that compound was a refuge for me. It was a dry yurt with no running water or anything. So many people would be uncomfortable living in a place like that, because it doesn’t have the resources or access that other places have, but that felt like the safest [place] to me in a lot of ways.
SBJ: It was a real joy to get to immerse myself in these different, visceral landscapes, but I did find myself feeling real fury and heartbreak about how we, as humans and specifically as Americans, treat land and each other. How did that inform the book?
RS: The public in the United States is so undereducated about the history of our country and how public lands became public lands, and how unjust our country’s beginnings and middles and nows are. There’s so much that’s invisible to people. What even is fire suppression? Why do fires exist? What’s the history of fire? I wanted to use these fires that I went on and these crews I worked with to take the reader with me. There are so many different landscapes, and they operate in different ways. Most of them were evolving with human intervention for thousands and thousands of years. One can’t just say, This is how fire should be done in America. In a single California county, there are so many different microclimates, and you can use fire in different ways in each microclimate—fire operates differently depending on slope, aspect, plant communities, wildlife interaction—so even one tiny valley can have several ways of burning. It’s that granular.
Within the prose itself, I was undermining my authority.
SBJ: How did you balance writing about the history of fire with writing about what you went through as a firefighter?
RS: One of my primary goals in the beginning was to write a book where it was clear that I was an addict, who grew up in a traumatic environment, who made many mistakes and a lot of “wrong decisions,” who was really struggling with an eating disorder for the whole time I was a firefighter, and beyond that, who struggled as a human being, and as a minority in firefighting. Many co-workers saw me as less-than, and I naturally inhabited that role.
I was writing about my much younger self, when I was very vulnerable to these power dynamics. Through no fault of my editor, I found myself in a similar power dynamic. I saw myself as someone who didn’t know anything, and I saw my editor as the person who knew everything. There was a lot of back and forth conversation about the narrative voice and point of view. The tension through the revision process was that my editor really wanted me to establish my authority. But I would be in PTSD flashbacks while I was revising, reliving these past experiences from the felt sense and perspective of my past selves. This made me very hard on myself and very judgmental about decisions I had made—and that is what my editor was paying attention to that I wasn’t seeing. Within the prose itself, I was undermining my authority. It wasn’t about what I was doing. It was about how I was writing about it, and how I was judging myself. I really had to get to a point where I was like, Okay, here I am, Person Working On This Book, who is an adult person in their forties. And there I was in my twenties, with no tools, with no support, trying to make my way through life and also doing this crazy job. By the end of the last revision, I was like, Oh, wow! I actually was a total badass. I can’t believe I actually did that. That’s crazy! Of all the things I could have done, that’s what I did.
I don’t think that the book could have been written from my current perspective. The structure is so woven, and it doesn’t linger on anything too long, and I think that is a product of the way I had to write it in order to not be in that PTSD flashback perspective where I’m writing from a disempowered place.
SBJ: The parallels between fire and processing trauma feel very vivid in that both are necessary and regenerative, but both are scary and things we would, to our own detriment, rather do anything else than confront. Is that some of what braids this book together?
Even with the current oppressive administration, as citizens, we have a lot of tools at our disposal.
RS: I was raised Buddhist and learned that many practicing monks and nuns treat difficulties with gratitude because any difficulty, any trauma, anything that’s disruptive, is an opportunity to show up and to work with our impulses and our reactions. From the moment outsiders stepped foot on North American land, it was with an eye towards what can we own, and what can we kill because we’re scared of it? Wolves, bears, predators? Native Americans? They made things evil in order to rationalize their greed and their violence. They deceived themselves. There was so much abundance in North America when colonizers arrived, and they just were like, God made this, this is Eden. No, actually, God didn’t make this. People are making this, and they’re doing a way better job than you. Look at where you’re coming from, and why you’re leaving. There was such an opportunity to learn, and there still is. And there’s this complete resistance because of greed.
It was important for me to accentuate that, and to highlight current stewardship movements. Even with the current oppressive administration, as citizens, we have a lot of tools at our disposal. Having a relationship with fire is one way. There’s so many prescribed burning and cultural burning networks happening. Putting fire into people’s hands and having them burn something, and then come back the next year, and see how the land has changed, or coming back over 10 years, and seeing how the land has changed, and how it’s better, healthier—that alone can do so much work. It is absolutely cleansing. I hope that my book conveys my hope for our potential as human beings, and the possibilities for change that we really do have at our fingertips at all times—it never goes away. There’s always opportunity for change and engagement. But we have to be able to take our faces away from our screens and get involved in our local communities and do that.
SBJ: This reminds me of the concept of kincentric relationships, which is mentioned briefly in the book and has stuck with me since I read it. Can you talk a little about that?
RS: Robin Wall Kimmerer and a lot of other Indigenous writers write about this, and there is a lot of science research being done about this. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about everything being Kin with a capital K. The Eurocentric way of thinking centers the human—centers us—then everything else is to serve us. But it’s not that hard to imagine that we’re all on this equal plane of importance: that I am as important as the tree outside of my window, and that tree is as important as me, is actually supporting more life than I am. Every single plant and every patch of moss or even a rock where things are growing, these tiny things that people just walk past. There’s life all around us, and it’s as complicated as we are and as incredible as we are, and there’s no reason that we need to be seeing anything as a hierarchy. That is just a cultural idea. It’s not real. In a way, it can take pressure off of us as humans. We don’t need to be in charge of everything. Why don’t I look at the way this plant wants to do this thing?
We need a big paradigm shift if we want to survive as a species, but also if we want to stop harming so many other species and people around the world who have less. As Americans, the harm that we do with our footprint is almost inconceivable to other people who will be bearing the brunt of our comfort and our need for comfort.
SBJ: You’ve lived a hundred different lives, and I feel like each one of those could be a book. I know you started as a fiction writer—are you feeling called to write more nonfiction, or do you want to move away from that?
We need a big paradigm shift if we want to survive as a species
RS: I’m absolutely open to both. I love fiction. I set out to write fiction. Some of the stuff that happens in my memoir literally can’t be written as fiction, because it’s too on the nose. People will be like, That didn’t happen. I know because I tried to write it as fiction, and people in my workshop were like, “That couldn’t happen.” I’m in a PhD program and if I did not have to write a nonfiction dissertation, I wouldn’t write another memoir yet. I also have this sci-fi novella that I started working on in my second year in the PhD. I was like, Oh, I need to start working on my dissertation. And then I realized I can’t work on any memoir material right now, because that emotional space is too intense before my first book debuts. So I’m going to work on the sci-fi novella. Hopefully, I can finish that by the end of the summer.
A gripe that I have about sci-fi is that so much of it focuses on this dystopian vision of collapse, this vision of horror. That’s natural—as humans, we have a negative bias. But that’s not the kind of sci-fi I want to write. We’re already good at catastrophizing and seeing the worst and thinking the world is ending. You do not have to go far to see somebody saying the apocalypse is happening. The crazy thing is that people have been saying that forever, and the world is still here. So why don’t we think about what we would want the world to look like? About all the possibilities there are in the world for things to turn around and work in a way that’s functional? That’s what I’m exploring right now.