Rural Stories, Urban Listeners
An Interview with Verlyn Klinkenborg
By James Norton

An airline pilot or interstate trucker will shrug at the distance between Times Square and upstate New York. New York's a big state, but the physical distance between city and country is one that modern infrastructure bridges with a casual flick of concrete and metal.

Emotionally, however, it's a longer trip. People still raise animals in the countryside, and they work against unpredictable weather and a tangle of economic variables to earn a living from the soil. Just a few hours south, people are consumed by the nuances of restaurant openings and the high price of urban living.

Verlyn Klinkenborg's words span the gap. Reaching a national audience through publications including The New York Times (where he also serves on the editorial board), Harper's, National Geographic and Esquire, Klinkenborg's lean prose brings the country life to urban sophisticates who may have never set eyes on a live chicken before, let alone raised one from egg to adulthood. Impressed by the complexity of rural life, Klinkenborg regularly transports his urban and suburban readers beyond their world of pavement and circuitry.

He doesn't underestimate the challenge of his work.

"It's very hard to explain to someone how profound the satisfaction of walking into a pen and scratching a couple of red pigs behind the ears while they eat really is," Klinkenborg says. "It sounds silly to say it, especially as I'm sitting here in my office in Times Square looking over at New Jersey across the river."

Klinkenborg typically works a schedule that puts him in his office at the Times for three days a week — otherwise, he's typically upstate on the farm, looking after his livestock and watching the natural world. But mentally, the separation between city and country is less cleanly demarcated.

"My head is always sort of here at the editorial board because every day you're trying to think about what needs to be said — what issues have to be addressed," he says. "What I write about here isn't just nature and the country; I tend to write about what I would call the national emotional issues."

In the wake of Sept. 11, it fell to Klinkenborg to write the editorials that summed up the attack's impact on the American consciousness. The decision made sense; Klinkenborg has lived in the Midwest and on both coasts, in the buzzing nerve center of American culture and in the quiet fields of the rural United States. The choice to make him the interpreter of — and ambassador to — America at large seems natural.

Klinkenborg was born and raised in a small town in Iowa, but then he and his family moved the only direction that made sense: west.

"My family moved from Iowa to California when I was 14, I went to high school in Sacramento and college in Berkeley and Pomona College," he says. "I spent a year in Europe after college on a fellowship, and came back to Princeton for a Ph.D. and started working in New York City, at the Pierpont-Morgan library in 1978. As a boy in Iowa, I would've never thought of going east. The only direction to go was west. It just never even occured to me. And so it's odd ... it's odd that I'm here."

In 1995, Klinkenborg was invited by then editorial-page editor Howell Raines (now executive editor of the Times) to revive the section's lapsed tradition of nature writing. After the successful contribution of some unsigned pieces to the editorial page, he was invited to step up.

"In 1997, when it became clear I could make editorials about things besides spring, winter and summer and fall, they invited me to join the board itself. The pieces I'd done before had been unsigned — the question became, 'Could we create a forum that would allow me to sign pieces?' And the Rural Life as a rubric with its little silo logo was created."

Now collected in a book of the same name, his writings are snapshots of profound but everyday events like driving through Wyoming in a pickup truck, picking blackberries in the rain or looking after a colony of bees.

But for all their appreciation of natural beauty, Klinkenborg's dispatches reflect a conscious effort to evade the syrup-sweet cliches that smother so much that is written about the natural world.

"The trick about writing these for me, and the thing I try to pay close attention to, is that world up there is very complicated," he says. "I don't believe that there's any kind of virtue in giving a false picture of the serenity or simplicity of the country. It's not simple, it's not serene — it's rewarding and engaging and as intellectually and ethically challenging as anything you can do in the city. And I wish I was able to illustrate that more completely in these essays than I'm able to do."

While Klinkenborg is happy to talk about his next project after "The Rural Life," a book on 18th century natural historian Gilbert White, don't ask him if he's planning to write the great American nature novel. He's not.

"I believe in the glory of nonfiction," he says. "I don't believe in the hierarchy of genres that seems to prevail in the United States. Is the novel the higher calling, or is poetry the higher calling? Frankly I think non-fiction is equally great and equally profound — and often gloriously better. I'm a convert to my own genre, is the way I'd say it. You meet a lot of non-fiction writers who feel their next step ought to be to write a novel, and for a lot of them, it's just not a good idea. The number who have actually pulled it off is actually very small."

Critics often mention naturalists Aldo Leopold and Henry David Thoreau when Klinkenborg's writing is discussed, but he spurns any direct comparison. And although he spent part of his graduate school years at Princeton putting out a scholarly edition of Thoreau's writing, it often has a forced quality that Klinkenborg spurns.

"[While] there are sentences of Thoreau that I admire enormously, I think it's hard to find a Thoreau work that isn't in some serious way flawed stylistically, at least to modern ears, by a kind of overelaborate sense of metaphor and analogy.

"My influences as a writer come out of a lifetime as a reader," he says. "It draws from all over the map. It comes from the real training I got as a Ph.D. scholar, reading 18th century and 17th century prose in depth. It comes really out of a love of all sorts of writers — at the moment, John McPhee and Joan Didion, essays by Richard Rodriguez, some by Annie Dillard ... It's a very eclectic range of influences, and they have more to do with what I hear in my ear than what I see in nature."

Klinkenborg also keeps tabs on his peers, for whom he has much praise.

"There are a lot of people working, particularly in the West, who are doing some wonderful writing about rural living," he says. "I think particularly of a woman named Ellen Meloy who is a wonderful writer about the subtleties of living in red rock Utah. It's a very hard thing to represent. There are people like Victor Davis Hanson who is more conservative than I am, I think, but whose book "Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea" is a good example of someone who is thinking about the political and social consequences of the agrarian ideal."

The search for a sustainable harmony between man and nature undergirds much of Klinkenborg's work. Though his clean, physical prose doesn't suggest any pat political answers, the writer lights up with excitement when asked about the possibilities of organic farming.

"Organic agriculture — it's been demonstrated again and again — is every bit as productive as industrialized chemical agriculture and far better for the water, better for the practitioners, better for the social backdrop, better for the rural landscape itself and ultimately vastly better for the animals," he says. "I believe in it greatly, and not blindly either. I read the studies, I watch the news that comes out of the agricultural community and I know that this is the right way to go."

Though he doesn't generally sink into the left's broad anti-corporate polemic (heard more and more as the United States drifts into a new Gilded Age of business influence), Klinkenborg identifies heavily subsidized corporate farms as a real threat to the American landscape.

"My nutshell vision of all this is that after World War II, American agriculture made a wrong turn — a serious wrong turn," he says. "If there aren't people out there on the land watching the way the land is overseen and cared for, who is going to take care of it? Corporate America? I don't think I want that. It takes many many many small farmers — and many many many small ranchers — for the land to be really taken care of properly. Corporate America will not do it, the government will not do it. It's up to landholders themselves living on their property."

Why guard the land? Even diehard city-dwellers suffer when air, water, and food are despoiled by industry run rampant. But Klinkenborg testifies to one of the key intangible benefits of a vibrant rural culture: Its interplay with the urban life can greatly enrich both worlds.

"I just feel like the two things feed on each other in a way that I can't really explain because I don't understand it," he says. "I do know that the centralness of that rural living to me actually is a kind of balance point to the way I think about a lot of what's going on in the world and the way I think about what I write from the post of the editorial board, although it would be very hard for me to articulate how that works."

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.