Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Cynthia Reeves. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Cynthia, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Imagine sailing on a ship ten degrees south of the North Pole, the temperature well below freezing, the wind often whipping to gale force. Imagine landing by Zodiac on a remote beach full of hidden dangers such as crevasses that could drop you without warning into an abyss. Imagine setting out on a trek up a steep incline and suddenly behind you, a polar bear bounds out of nowhere. Imagine having a health emergency or accident without access to medical help.

When I signed up for my first trip to the Arctic as part of the 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, these were some of my nightmares and concerns. The residency is a joint venture of thirty-two artists and scientists who spend two weeks traveling the western coast of Svalbard, an archipelago located halfway between Norway’s northern coast and the North Pole. As someone prone to seasickness even on land, I spent the months leading up to the voyage fearing all sorts of catastrophic events. Yet, I was determined to take the risk.

I’d begun a project—a series of stories set in the Arctic—and I’d always felt that my writing had to be authentic. This meant experiencing the Arctic directly. In turn, this meant feeling bitter cold deep in my bones; witnessing a glacier calving; watching whales and reindeer and seals and walruses in their natural environments; living through months of twenty-four-hour night; seeing the sun creep back up over the horizon in the late winter; touring a coal mine even though tunnels and caves scare me beyond reason; walking across snow-covered ground that could, at any minute, swallow a part of me; examining the native flora that braves one of the harshest climates on earth to thrive for a few brief months in summer; and so much more.

I do feel, oddly, that as I age, I’m more inclined to take such risks. I ask myself, “What’s the worst that can happen?” and the follow-up question, “Can I accept that eventuality?” The reward for risk-taking is impossible to fully gauge. In the years since 2017, including two subsequent trips to Svalbard, I’ve produced work that I could never have created without my time in the Arctic. The most significant is my novel THE LAST WHALER.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I always wanted to be a writer. I grew up in a storytelling family. Over the obligatory Italian Sunday afternoon dinners featuring the all-day gravy and meatballs we made starting at dawn, my mother and uncle, first-generation Italian Americans, told stories that had been passed down through the generations. The tales captivated me—my grandfather as a World War I POW in an Austrian prison camp; an uncle who died at three from typhoid; a great-aunt who perished in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918; the long separation of my maternal grandparents during the 1920s after my grandfather emigrated from their small village to the “big city” of Philadelphia; and on and on.

On the other hand, my father was a quiet man. When prodded, however, he’d spin tales of his boyhood growing up at the end of a dirt road in rural Maine. To me, a child of the Philadelphia suburbs, rural Maine was as exotic as the Abruzzese hill towns my mother and uncle recreated at the dinner table. My favorite was one Dad told of coming home at two in the morning after a gig playing trumpet in a swing band only to be stopped by a moose blocking the road. They are dangerous animals capable of wreaking havoc on something as trivial as an automobile. So there he sat for two hours until the moose sauntered into the woods.

I remember escaping to the basement of my cookie-cutter suburban home and typing out these stories on my mother’s old Remington typewriter (still proudly displayed on my bookshelves). In fact, when I finally turned to writing in my thirties—after a decade-long detour in management consulting—the first story I had published, “Dream of His Father’s Farm,” was an homage to my father and his lonely boyhood as an only child on that isolated farm.

Likewise, the first major project I envisioned was a novel in stories loosely based on my Italian family heritage. Before I wrote even one word of those stories, I had a title—FALLING THROUGH THE NEW WORLD. This past February, twenty years later, Gold Wake Press released the book with that same title.

Along the way, I’ve pursued a career writing and teaching, juggling those professional pursuits with raising two children and caring for aging parents. I carved writing time in the interstices of real life, and much of my writing derived from those experiences. My novella “Badlands” was, for example, the result of helping a friend negotiate the final stages of metastatic breast cancer and my husband survive Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Now that I’ve retired from teaching and without aging relatives and children to care for, I’ve had more time to devote to writing. THE LAST WHALER will be released in September, and I’ve begun work on a new project about a young woman’s obsession her dead fiancé, who perished on a remote island in the Svalbard archipelago.

The impetus behind all my work is to depict the lives of ordinary people struggling to overcome ordinary difficulties and even trauma during extraordinary times. Through fiction, I share my concerns for how the political shapes the personal. Thus, my writing has focused on the two world wars and their deleterious effect on humanity, the impact of humans on once-pristine environments, the treatment of immigrants and the difficulties of successful assimilation into a new culture, the ways in which the mentally ill are viewed and treated, the evolution of whale conservation efforts, and the despoilation of sacred Native American sites.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Most people would think the most rewarding aspect of being a creative is receiving a much-anticipated acceptance letter, or holding a finished book in one’s hands, or receiving a major review from a national publication. All of these are gratifying, certainly, confirming that you aren’t an imposter pretending to be a “real” writer.

For me, however, the most rewarding part of being a creative is going on the road, visiting bookstores or libraries to share my work, and seeing an audience moved by my words. Better still, I hope to encourage people to think deeply about the challenges I describe and to motivate them to effect change in the world.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

The word “non-creatives” seems terribly dismissive. Everyone has some creative energy to express and a unique perspective to share through their creations, whether that’s writing or photography or dance or painting or music or singing—whatever. What matters most is to have some mentor to encourage you, to affirm that you are worthy of pursuing the creative spark within you.

Mentorship is important, but artists also have to be resilient enough to stand on their own. Rejection and failure are large parts of every creative endeavor, and sometimes it’s hard to convince oneself that the work is worth the self-doubt.

Then there is the difficulty to support oneself as an artist. Creative work isn’t as valued as it once was. So many outsiders to the artist’s world have the mistaken notion that success brings financial rewards. It rarely does. That’s why writers, for example, also teach or sell insurance or even (in the olden days) staff lighthouses.

The truth is that I often ask myself why I do what I do. Why do I hole up in my office on gorgeous summer days, doubting my ability to finish a project and piling up rejections? Why not retire, travel with my husband, entertain my friends, pursue new hobbies, and make a dent in my “to be read” pile? I suppose when the latter pleasures outweigh the former pursuits, I will have my answer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://cynthiareeveswriter.com
• Instagram: cynthia_p_reeves
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cynthia.reeves.921
• Twitter: @cynthiapreeves
• Youtube: @cynthiareeves1684

Image Credits

The author photo of me in the green sweater should be credited as: 5iveLeaf Photography