The day after author Myriam Gurba filed the final draft of her latest book, the land caught fire.
She evacuated along with other residents of Altadena and Pasadena as the Eaton Fire burned, destroying lives, homes and habitats – and scattering entire communities into long-term displacement.
While she did not lose her home, Gurba was devastated. The forest had been a major source of inspiration for the book, “Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings,” about how caring for plants had allowed her to heal in the aftermath of trauma, including partner violence.
The fire was close when she evacuated, so she couldn’t take much – but one of the few items she did bring was a jar of seeds foraged during her walks.
“I felt like I had been broken into pieces,” Gurba said. “The forest helped me put myself back together.”
Fire and its history as a tool in Indigenous land management practices is one of the many topics Gurba discusses in “Poppy State,” out Oct. 21 from Timber Press.
Structured like a labyrinth, the nonfiction book takes the reader on a journey of botany lore, Gurba’s memories of childhood and her garden-loving father, snippets of newspaper columns, photos of family and seemingly random objects, bits of California history and passages of language-bending wordplay.
The heart and soul of the book are the plants, and how Gurba has been reshaped by her past and present relationship with them.
“It had been a very long time since I had woken up eager to face the day,” Gurba recalled. “Once I began bringing plants into my home, that changed, because the first thing that I would want to do in the morning was say ‘Hi’ to my plants.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You publish both fiction and nonfiction – can you tell me how your nonfiction has evolved over your career to lead you to ‘Poppy State’?
When I first began writing, I was much more committed to the idea of myself as a fiction writer. In high school, it was primarily the fiction works that hooked me. I wanted to try my hand at what the writers I admired, like Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, were doing, and because they were doing fiction, that was the first door that I opened.
The leap from fiction to nonfiction happened when I became interested in writing about certain life experiences. I didn’t want to fictionalize them; I wanted to confront them more directly. One of those was surviving a young man who attacked me when I was 19 years old. I started to read nonfiction accounts written by survivors with similar traumas, some written by people who were not necessarily the victims themselves, but who were adjacent to the events. One of my major disappointments in a lot of the writing was its humorlessness.
I have been criticized for bringing humor to my writing about sexual violence, because I think people find it distasteful. I argue that it’s absolutely necessary for survivors of trauma to be able to laugh at the people who hurt us, because that’s part of how we restore our dignity. So my interest then became, how can I do this? From that came my memoir “Mean,” and then an essay collection, “Creep.”
“Poppy State” is a result of different modalities of healing that I relied on in order to make myself whole again. I had to grieve, but Western therapy only took me so far. Once I started keeping plants in my home, I noticed that there was a shift in my attitude toward life. I became excited about watching these plants form buds, and then watching the buds open and bloom.
I was reminded of the reciprocal relationship that humans have with plants, which began to remind me of all the botanical lessons that my father gave me when I was a child. As kids, my brother, sister and I would garden with him. Once I reconnected with those memories, I was able to start putting the broken parts of myself back together – but that could not have happened without plants.
Q. The structure of the book is inspired by labyrinths – why is that?
I really enjoy puzzles. I like puzzles that challenge me, but I also appreciate puzzles that do the opposite, that let me lose myself and relax. I tend to approach a lot of the art that I make as a puzzle or riddle that I’m trying to solve.
I wanted to take the idea of the puzzle and apply it to prose, and that’s why I chose the labyrinth. I was inspired by the author Jorge Luis Borges. I should also mention “The Wizard of Oz” and some of Frank L. Baum’s other books, like “Ozma of Oz”, where in that world, you have a girl on a quest.
Q. How did you decide which pieces of history to include and where?
That’s a really good question, and it’s difficult to answer. When it came to incorporating those historical anecdotes, there was a lot of intuitive decision-making happening – gut choices. I just knew what ought to go in a certain place.
One thing I did was choose anecdotes that contradicted popular and misleading colonial narratives. For example, I really wanted to write about California Indian revolts, because when Indian resistance in the history of the U.S. was discussed, there was an emphasis on Indigenous folks outside of California. It seemed like there was this myth that California was virtually empty, or that the Indigenous population was very small when White settlers arrived. That’s absolutely not true – the population was extremely high and there was incredible resistance.
For my whole life, I’ve had a great affection for California. When I was a kid growing up in Santa Maria, I’d go for long walks in the countryside by myself. I’d inhale the scent of the soil – I was so in love with how delicious California smelled, that I wanted to put California in my mouth. That’s how inspired I felt.
When I write, I try to conjure California as a very complicated character that’s not going to live forever, because all things end. But what will take its place? These are the questions I’m fascinated by.
Q. A lot of this book discusses your father and what he taught you. Can you talk about that?
When I was around 10 years old, my family moved onto a property that was mostly grown over with ice plants and pampas grass. My father wanted those plants gone because the property was on a hill, and the plants were causing soil erosion. Rather than hire landscapers, he put his kids to work. So every weekend, we were evicting all of these invasive plants, and then we populated the hill with native California plants.
During that process, my dad taught me about each of the plants that we brought to the hill. When I was doing research for the book, I was able to return and be with the plants that are now decades old. And when I would speak to my father, I’d ask him questions about how he had learned about plants, and questions about the natural world as it related to his childhood.
He’d always been very excited about planting. But once we moved to that house, we had something like a quarter acre to garden, and my dad really became himself. He is most himself when he’s in dirt, and that’s a lot of dirt to be in.
Q. You sprinkle photos of things and people throughout – can you talk to me a little about those?
The photos are there for several reasons. I wanted to bring that spooky quality that you get with vintage imagery. A lot of them were taken during the period of time where I was reviving my relationship with house plants, and one example is an image of a floor-length mirror with a spider on it, just sort of gazing at herself. I was very deliberate in choosing photos that might be haunting, but also have a playfulness to them.
I also was very interested in bringing my ancestors into this world that I was creating, and showing people their faces. The photos of people are my family photos; I mention some of my family members throughout the book. I want the reader to see them, to give the impression they are walking through the labyrinth with you.
Q. You start the book with a preamble where you tell readers to skip the author’s note – which typically appears at the end anyway. What was the thinking behind that?
I really enjoy playing with my readers, so the preamble is there to tempt you. Would you like to be surprised? Or do you want to enter a labyrinth with a guide?
If you’ve ever been to a really big corn maze, it can be a really frightening experience if you get lost. Often, maps are provided so that you don’t lose yourself in the maze. In a similar way, I’m providing the reader a map to enter with, i.e. an author’s note that explains to them what they’re experiencing. Maybe an adventurous reader will skip the note and just do a cannonball into the book.
So the preamble is there to let you know what your temperament is. Are you a reader that can resist the temptation to skip to the end? Or is the temptation too much?