We were lucky to catch up with Stephen Trimble recently and have shared our conversation below.

Stephen, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?

All of us need to know how to write with clarity and pithiness and color. Our lives and our work and our relationships all benefit from good writing. I’m kind of obsessed with this. Bad writing makes me crazy. It’s a teachable craft, and the educational system isn’t great at teaching us this universal skill. Science and tech and business are pushing aside the humanities, alas, and that’s a loss for us all.

I’m a writer. Have been for decades. But I didn’t learn the magic key to making my words sing until after high school, after college. Not until I worked for a U.S. Bureau of Land Management biologist who taught me to rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite.

My assignment was to take wildlife research papers and summarize them for BLM managers in the field. Sounds boring, right? And my boss, John Crawford, was a low-key and rather phlegmatic guy. But he took my drafts and for the very first time in my life, edited me hard. And so the process became challenging and engaging.

John reordered my paragraphs to get the good stuff up front. He deleted all the unnecessary words. He demanded active voice. He did so, draft after draft, asking me to go back and improve the text—something no teacher had asked me to do in 16 years of school. In short, he taught me to write—and to keep at it until I had worked on every word and every sentence to make each one serve the story with strength and concision. In the process, I actually transformed the academic papers into reasonably lively pieces about prairie dogs and wolves, tundra swans and peregrine falcons.

I’ve made my living as a writer and photographer ever since. And I couldn’t have succeeded without that one government scientist marking up my drafts in a sea of red. Years later, I was able to tell him so.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I feel like I have always written because I love books so much. I never really made a decision to be a writer, and I never really made a decision to be a photographer. I simply wrote and I took pictures—and eventually people paid me to do these things.

I’ve had amazing, unforgettable experiences while working on 25 books as writer, editor, or photographer. I floated the Colorado River in Grand Canyon with musicians from the Paul Winter Consort, listening as they recorded in side canyons. I walked pristine tundra and forest at Snowbasin with the Swiss course designer as he imagined the jumps and turns that would become the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic downhill racecourse. A San Carlos Apache medicine man invited me to photograph during the three days of a young Apache woman’s coming-of-age ritual, the most powerful community ceremony I’ve ever witnessed. I’ve listened to Pueblo potters tell me stories about how they dream their designs. I’ve photographed wildflower superblooms and nesting great horned owls. And I’ve seen the Northern Lights from the Black Rock Desert years before Burning Man discovered the place.

I think of myself as a messenger, going out into the world and listening—to the folks I interview, to the landscapes I pay attention to—bringing back stories in words and photographs for everyone who hasn’t been there.

My most recent book is completely different.

My buddies in my writing groups and my family members have pushed me for years, saying, “You’ve got this story of your brother. That’s the biggest emotional story you have to tell. You’ve got to do something with it.”

I wasn’t ready. It was too incendiary, too emotional.

So I lived with this unfinished business, both as a person and a writer.

I waited until everyone had died—my brother, my mother, my father… Finally, a year after my father died, I was ready to open “the Mike file,” the envelope that preserved the few documents, clippings, and letters that constituted the record of my brother’s life. I knew that I needed to grapple with Mike’s story. And that decision quickly led to writing, and the writing led to a book.

When I was little, Mike was my big brother, who I adored—just as every little boy adores his big brother, right? But as he headed into adolescence, he became angrier and angrier and more and more unpredictable. Diagnosed as “paranoid schizophrenic, capable of violence,” Mike was committed to the Colorado State Hospital. He never spent a night at home again.

I was six when Mike left, and so I never had an ongoing relationship with my brother. His difficult life and tragic death at 33 parallels our continuing failures in effective mental health treatment.

Have you ever had to pivot?

For decades, I made my living as a stock photographer. That income stream supported my book projects. But when the Internet flooded the world with images, many of them free, stock photography disappeared as a profession. My colleagues closed their studios and became car salesmen. I had always imagined that my tens of thousands of stock images, many from the days of shooting on film, would be my retirement income. Now, my filing cabinets full of 35 mm slides turn out to be unmarketable artifacts from the past.

I began casting around for ways to make my years of image-making continue to earn income. I worked with a friend who ran a speakers’ bureau, trying to turn myself into a corporate event keynoter. When he told me I sounded like the host of a PBS nature program, I was flattered. Alas, that soothing voice was not what he had in mind.

I ended up teaching writing at the University of Utah for ten years, and this has been enormously gratifying. Teaching didn’t replace the income from selling reproduction rights to my pictures for use in textbooks, guidebooks, and magazines. But I was able to push my students to strive to always get the facts straight, to never take no for an answer when trying to nail an interview. And to rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

That’s my goal, a journey through life to eliminate bad writing from the world. I’m an obsessive copy-editor. I find typos in menus, in ads, in billboards. Dull writing is everywhere. What a waste. There’s no excuse, just an explanation: laziness and sloppiness. And lack of a good teacher, a good editor.

Get rid of those bland and trite descriptions, those empty superlatives. Tighten your writing. It’s physical, visceral—like kneading bread, and just as nourishing.

Liven up your words—and you liven up your life.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.stephentrimble.net
• Instagram: @stephentrimblephoto
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephen.trimble.37

Image Credits
all photos © Stephen Trimble