“(Carroll’s earlier works) have become acknowledged classics in the literature of the environment; in Self-Portrait With Turtles he proves himself a master of the memoir as well. (His) work transcends the road-less-taken form in its reflections. In his inspired and eloquent evocation of a particular American landscape – the hills and bogs of the north country – he recalls the nineteenth century writer who chronicled, in vivid detail, the days as they unfolded at a pond we have come to know as Walden.”
—Smithsonian.
As it appeared that Swampwalker’s Journal was at last reaching its final phase (seven years from signing to delivering) editor Harry Foster expressed an idea for another book. “A lot of people have read your books now, and they don’t know anything about the author…”
“I think it best to leave it that way Harry,” I countered, adding that Memory Lane was not my favorite street.
He went on to say that he thought I should write “a more personal book”.
I noted that he avoided the word “memoir”, which would have sent me running. But he was ever a determined sort of man, sort of editor, and every now and again he would put the idea forth. And I continued to defer, telling him of the book I had in mind to do next.
Among my earliest drafts for Swampwalker’s Journal, as I worked on chapter two, I came to see the chapter as coming from a different perception, or sensibility, a different path to pursue. The underlying approach had a more meditational mood and was not tightly cued to a natural history ambience with a scientific companion structure.
Putting it aside as a book I would take up some day, I withdrew the chapter and set it aside. It carried a provisional title of “Following the Water”. Harry told me that that was his favorite chapter, but that he understood why I had decided to separate it from the others.
Continuing his campaign for a more personal book, Harry offered a cautionary perspective. “You could submit a proposal for another nature title, but I believe Houghton would think you have already written that book.”
That gave me pause. But I wasn’t certain if that were the case, or if it was a ploy to edge me into that “more personal” book. I continued to resist the idea for some time. But his persistence and persuasion gradually overcame my reluctance.
I discussed the concept with my agent Meredith. She was helpful in my deciding that I might be able to write something along the lines of a memoir if it were to be centered on my lifelong (since age eight anyway) bonding with turtles and their world.
“Naturalist David Carroll (Swampwalker’s Journal, 1999, etc.) reveals all the touchstones that turned him from a Turtle Boy to a Turtle Man. At the age of eight the author came across his first wild turtle, his first swamp, first real border. A spotted turtle becomes his all and only during the early days… But turtles will not be his only fixation; art will also help him make the connection he wants with the raw world. He traces the trajectory of his life, as true as a well-fletched arrow… throughout, his words have the ping of authenticity; Carroll is an environmentalist who lives the word right down to his wet sneakers. A pitch-perfect memoir, skirting sentimentality, getting at nature’s marvels and its endless transfigurations.
—Kirkus Reviews – Starred Review.
Spotted turtles and wild plum
It was late March. I kept thinking about how I might begin such a book. I wrote to Harry that I would soon be embarking on another turtle season, and that I would take an extra notebook with me, in which to write down anything that came to me that might open up a way to undertaking a memoir.
This was the first time that I had established such a division in my note-keeping. But given the turtle-life thread, the two would inevitably be interwoven, each having an effect on the other. The focus on my Digs notebooks had always been centered on my observations. But I also wrote down thoughts and musings not directly related to my field records, material that I mined as I developed my books.
When autumn came on I realized that although I had not written much in my separate notebook, I had set down more than I thought I would have. And I found myself more comfortable with the idea than I had imagined would be possible. This comfort zone came by way of that lifelong turtle connection with so many aspects of my life, from art and writing, my teaching, my ways of thinking, my advocacy for truly preserving wetland ecologies via exclusion of human activity.
“My turtle life”… although that would not be my book’s title, became the leitmotif, a sort of a literary imprimatura upon which I could write about many things consequential to my thought, my work and history. The book came to encompass the interconnected paths of my life, up until I finished the final chapter, at age sixty two.
Turtle Watercolor
“He’s a marvel, a nature writer’s nature writer. Emerson memorably wrote that ‘life is an ecstasy’, and David Carroll recapitulates that truth in his rhapsodies. He is rapt. He is a marvel. I read him rejoicing. Even the poignance is quite enthralling. I read it in a single night.”
—Ted Hoagland
I shared a few initial drafts with Meredith as well as Laurette – to whom I dedicated the book. Their highly enthusiastic responses furthered my own growing excitement about this project. Happily, the title Self-Portrait With Turtles came to me, and with increased zeal I began putting together an outline and proposal, along with sample chapters.
Harry must have thought I had taken a writing class after “Swampwalker”. The first chapter of that book arrived on his desk with a 40,000 word text was followed up here by the opening vignette of “Self-Portrait…” which checked in at two pages.
For the record, I never took a writing course. I had been encouraged with my writing as an aspect of English and English literature courses by teachers from the sixth grade on… all the way through my academics with Tufts University, in my combined program as a painting major at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
When I think of it, my writing emerged from my love of it it, and the background of my lifelong devotion to endless correspondence, journal, and notebook keeping. Papyrussmann, I call myself, when confronted, with great frequency, by my severe limitations in the techno-processes of the computer-et.-al. driven world.
I am forever up to my eyebrows in mountains and cascades of papers; journals; notebooks; writings in the foreign languages; correspondence; and drafts of all kinds. Adding my art to this essential writing side of my life, I count my tools as pencils, pens, and paintbrushes.
I began to see that I could write about, and honor, the importance of teachers, and my own teaching, to the writing and art aspects of my turtle-naturalist life. The theme could expand, without leaving the center, the foundation of my intimate and necessary connection with the turtles and their world… the natural world.
I could express a deeply personal, and in many ways unique, creative life and evoke its interwoven aspects in meaningful detail without having to enter into a level of personal life that I did not want to, or see a need to, address in this book.
I looked forward to treating the subject of my non-natural-history art; that is to say my many trajectories as a visual artist that are distinct from the art I developed for my books. This branch of my creative work, so much a part of me, my life, with a long history, remains essentially unknown beyond a very small circle of friends and collectors. [I discuss this oeuvre in my page and virtual gallery entitled “Seldom Seen”.]
Bill Miller had introduced me to a modern artist who immediately had a hold on me – Paul Klee. But we did not have much in the way of introductions to currents in twentieth century art in high school.
This changed quickly and dramatically when I went on to the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts the year after I graduated. Over time I came to be influenced and deeply inspired by Klee’s “magic Square” paintings, my first response to something in the way of abstraction and abstract art. This, and works of the Cubists and Surrealists, the human figure in Renaissance and cubist treatments, along with other individual artists, on to the non-objective work of Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde, became an illuminating source that led to this parallel path in my own work from the nineteen-sixties to the present.
Magic square piece
An introduction to Asian art led me to a deep appreciation, I should say veneration, of Chinese landscape painting and Japanese screen painting. Chinese poetry opened a new world of writing to me. I have always thought that if I had to choose only one era of art to live with, it would be the schools of the Japanese screen painters. Here I see extraordinary truth to nature with the most remarkable, inventive abstractions, exquisite materials, designs, and painterly techniques.
It was commonplace in these works to combine superlative calligraphy, writing and poetry, with the ultimate in visual art. My own periods of botanical art (discussed in the “Botanical Art” sector of my core archive) and turtle and other subjects often showed a strong Oriental influence in design, composition, and feeling. I could integrate such inspirations and my own ways with art and writing, and my combining of the fields art and writing that were not far removed my naturalist perceptions.
“Carroll… uses lyric prose and vivid illustrations to wrap the meaning of life around the wonders that lurk in our ponds and brooks. It is more like a poem than a memoir, its descriptions are so beautiful.”
—Cindy Kibbe. New Hampshire business Review.
And here, in a fourth book, I could again the address the ongoing loss of natural habitats, landscapes with rich ecologies, ecosystems, biodiversity… and, simply put, beauty. When I wrote, “I walk a disappearing landscape” I could see Harry’s delete sign before I had sent him the text with that line. But, “stet”… I continue to walk a disappearing landscape and cannot fail to make clear note of it, never let it go unsaid, all the while hoping I do not outlive my last places.
In two compare-and-contrast chapters, “Cedar Pastures” and “Tupper Hill”, I portray in the former a landscape of loss, in the latter a landscape truly preserved – 8,000 acres set aside for nature alone, with no public access. This is a true sanctuary. (I write about my field work in this astounding place as Visiting Naturalist-Artist from 1994-1997 in my “Tupper Hill”field notebook account).
I have always expressed my full support for places for people to go (but where do we not go?). I press on, with historic futility, with my endeavors to have places set aside, the rights of nature, Pachamama, recognized and honored.
A highland view, Cedar Pastures
“In this radiant memoir… Carroll magically collapses time into one ever-renewing turtle cycle of hibernation, nesting, and hatching… {he} takes hold of the reader as surely as he picks up one of his slow, spotted friends to examine its underside… Self-Portrait With Turtles joins Walden, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, and a handful of other great books which reconfigure the center where it has always been, with the Earth herself and her creatures…
Carroll’s memoir is in part an elegy for what has been lost.”
—BOOKPAGE.
I was also able to write about the pivotal discovery of the Digs, and my reunion with spotted turtles after fleeing lost landscapes in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I had feared that in retreating to the north in search of wild places with turtles I might have gone beyond the northern limits of this touchstone species’ range.
But I found an extensive wetland ecosystem only four miles from where I settled in New Hampshire that supported the largest colony of spotted turtles I had ever known, as well as wood and Blanding’s turtles and the far more common painted and snapping turtles. This has been the epicenter of my turtle life since I was eight years old.
“In an especially moving final chapter (Carroll) tells of following one particular spotted turtle for 18 years and finally observing her nesting ritual. Unlike his earlier book The Year of the Turtle, this is not a natural history of turtles but rather a meditation on the author’s life as a naturalist and a paean to the intriguing creatures that lured him to that calling.”
—Publishers weekly
Notes on SELF-PORTRAIT WITH TURTLES Archival Content:
*Copy of signed first edition book with original pencil and watercolor study, signed and dated.
*Proposal; drafts; unpublished material; editorial notes; correspondence
with editor Harry Foster and agent Meredith Bernstein.
*Other related correspondence.
*Art: several zoo drawings and small hardbound book (thesis project – combining art and writing) of poems and abstract drawings from my Museum School days. Other images from sketchbooks, non-natural-history art of different manners. Some illustrations from my earlier books were re-purposed for this title, as well as a number of new originals in the naturalist-artist tradition.
*Blurbs, reviews, articles.
*Photos and slides and writings, several watercolors on “Cedar Pastures”, my turtle world ages fifteen to eighteen (when I left for Boston and the landscapes I had known since boyhood disappeared or became overrun).
My Five Published Books
Trout Reflections
Following the Water
Year of the Turtle
Self-Portrait With Turtles, A Memoir
Swampwalker’s Journal
Hand Bound Books
A Book of a Number of Hours
A Book of Winter Buds
A Book of Winter Branches
Borradores
Landscapes – January 20, 1978 – April 1978
Variations: February 1, 1967 – August 1, 1968
Visions: Drawings and Paintings: 1976 – 1988
Exhibitions
“Seldom Seen” Exhibition at the Davidow Center
“Beyond Words” Exhibition at the Currier Museum
Galleries
“Seldom Seen” Gallery
David’s Wildlife Studies Sketchbook
Virtual Gallery of Art Produced for My Five Books
“Regarding Women Regarding…” Introduction
Sketchbook Gallery: 4/1/1985 – 10/14/1987
Swamp Sketchbook
The Swamp Dialogs
Drawings and Watercolors Produced to Illustrate my Published Books
CODIT – Compartmentalization of Decay in Trees