Above is my old writing desk, with Ava on her basking shelf. Emo was smaller then and his enclosure was a pen to the right of the desk. But he needed more space, and I needed more privacy to write. Mark built a bigger pen around the dormer and a ladder so Emo could climb up and see out the window. Since the two bathrooms in our barn are the only rooms with doors, I moved my desk into the one upstairs on the opposite side of the barn, where Che has his basking shelf in the dormer. He’s my office buddy. Our office has a radiant-heated slate floor and a clawfoot tub where all the lizards get baths.

That’s “King Blue” in the center, a fundraising toy created for the Grand Cayman Blue Iguana, cousin of the Jamaican iguana (and of my iguanas).

 

Jill Jolay won King Blue for me in an auction, as a gift to acknowledge the book he’s sitting on, Blue Iguana. Jill travels to Caribbean islands to work with the scientists who are saving critically endangered rock iguanas.

I wrote Blue Iguana when I heard about what happened to these beautiful, sweet iguanas:

In that stack of books under Blue Iguana are my others, The Sundown Rule, Lizard Love, and Iguanas: A Guide to Their Biology and Captive Care, which I coauthored with Dr. Fredric L. Frye in the early 90s. Some reviews of my books are at the bottom of this page.

Above King Blue is a Bahamian dollar with a rock iguana, Cyclura rileyi. There’s my Iguanafest fundraiser cup, and the excellent Godzilla that I found at the Salvation Army thrift store (I love looking for books and toys at the Sally Ann’s). Next to Godzilla is Beanbag Frog. He was a Christmas gift when I was six years old. In front of Beanbag Frog there’s a turtle bracelet I made in a silversmith class in high school. To the left of King Blue is a photo from one of the writing workshops I assisted with my friend and former editor Stephen Roxburgh. In this one, I got to work with Martine Leavitt, too. (Read Martine’s books –all of them are fabulous). Tucked into the frame is a picture of my friend and advisor Norma Fox Mazer and me at my Vermont College MFA graduation. I miss her so much.

After graduation I led some workshops at Empire State College, and then I joined the Writing Institute faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. I led writing workshops there for eleven years, and I loved it. I loved being with my writers and listening to them read their work and brainstorming with the group on how to make the stories stronger. I was sad to leave that job, but I wanted to be a reptile monitor and work outdoors.

This is from an essay I wrote called The Gift of Connecting with Animals

https://talkingwriting.com/gift-connecting-animals

“On a recent winter morning, I sat at my desk, struggling to write about a girl and a frog. I wanted my intended audience of young readers to see the frog the way I had as a child. Six years old, standing barefoot in the mud, holding my frog, I’d been part of his world and never wanted to leave. There was something between us. What I’d wanted most was for the frog to know I was his friend.

As an adult writer, though, I remained stuck in my head, self-conscious, afraid to seem sentimental—until I looked up and saw a ladybug crawling across the window. On impulse, I dipped my fingers in a glass of water and flicked drops on the pane. The ladybug changed direction, heading straight for a drop, and I watched it drink. I felt giddy; I sat up in my chair. Seeing the ladybug take what I’d offered connected me to it, bringing me back to my original impulse for telling the story—which was love.”

I didn’t always love to write. In fact, I hated it. I didn’t know how to write, and when I tried, I could not stand seeing my awkward words on the page. I went to four colleges trying not to be a writer.

I was living in L.A. in the eighties when the pet industry boom shifted from pot-bellied pigs to iguanas, but no care guide existed. People didn’t know how to feed and house their cute little green pets that could grow to six feet long and live for twenty-five years. So many iguanas died in their first year of life, or if they did live, suffered bone fractures that did not heal right and depression because their social nature was not understood: What was an iguana to do alone in a cage or aquarium? And how did the iguana’s keeper feel, watching their pet die?

During that time in L.A. I adopted iguanas in horrific shape and nursed them back to health. Soon my apartment was crawling with lizards, and though I liked that, I could not adopt all the sick iguanas. But I could write a care guide. I gritted my teeth, put words on paper and began the journey of getting over myself. Two years later I met Dr. Frederick Frye and we coauthored the care guide.

Elizabeth Hardwick said, “There are really only two reasons to write: desperation, or revenge.”

I am more than passionate about writing their story –the lizards’—and the part of mine that’s linked with theirs. In a lecture at Vermont College Martine Leavitt said to write “with so much compassion it might kill you.”

I have learned a little about ego, though my comprehension of it still isn’t clear. My dread of being seen as emotional (I am super-emotional) and awkward (sometimes I am graceful) has made it very hard to write what’s caught in my heart with words that reach readers.

I’ve done so much of my life resisting the inevitable –like adolescence. Like my character Grace in Lizard Love. On the front flap of the book, my editor writes, “Lizard Love is a startling debut novel about a girl growing into a woman, kicking and screaming every step of the way.” When Lizard Love was published, I knew that I hadn’t done my best, though it wasn’t for lack of trying.  That’s how it goes; it was a first work of fiction. But I was still sad and I lacked faith that I could ever do better.

Recently I was in the thick of another breakdown about writing. I signed up for a Children’s Book Insider workshop given by Todd Mitchell called BREAKTHROUGH! Following the Hero’s Journey to the Creative Transformation You Deserve. Here’s an awesome bit from the workshop:

“The Ordeal enables us to see how the ego is limiting us and causing us to suffer…Breakdown provides an opportunity for breakthrough.”

One of my big questions was, why am I afraid? When an editor, or colleague, or advisor said I needed to “go there,” I thought they meant I needed to write some uncomfortable things my story’s character does. I did not understand at all that I needed to let my old self die –that’s what I was so terrified of. A death of a me whose words on paper were guarded against hurt and as a result, not strong. I’m not talking about being guarded against criticism –I thrive on editorial feedback. I can’t do without it! The hurt I’m talking about is between me and me. More than once I’ve been handed the cliché, “You’re your own worst enemy.”

Here’s something a Bulletin critic wrote about my character in Blue Iguana: “Clarice is a heroine of exceptional quality, a young woman who wades through her plaguing self-doubts and reaches the other side, recognizing her personal challenges but ultimately refusing to let them limit her.”

Endangered lizards aren’t so much on our radar. And Blue Iguana lacks elements YA readers crave. The book is out of print. But I reached one reader:  From Shelf Awareness (below), “Readers will grow to care as much for the blue iguanas as Clarice and the other volunteers do.”

Moving readers to care about reptiles is my job and I am digging in and not giving up. It seems there are to be many deaths on this writing journey. So, a little less “kicking and screaming” and more joy along the way –that’s what I’m up to.

In White Ghost Summer Mel gets to leave the city at the beginning of the story, and I went right along with her. She and her family move into a big, interesting house at the edge of a park filled with birds and trees –and she gets to ride horses. She has a younger brother who loves snakes.

Golden Dog was published in 1963, and the paperback sold for 35 cents. It is the author’s memoir of her childhood in the Australian outback with all kinds of animals. I found this in a review of the book on Amazon: “She may at times project her own human feelings onto her dogs and other animals, but she shows a self-awareness in so doing that is unusual, making it clear to the reader that an animal’s experiences are never completely translatable into mere human terms.” I wish I could meet this author! I think she was a pioneer in striving to understand what animals think and feel in a time when non-human beings were regarded as machines without cognizance or emotion.

In Island of the Blue Dolphins and Jungle Book I identified so closely with the child characters. O’Dell wrote a brilliant historical fiction novel about the indigenous girl Karana, and he could’ve left her story at that. But he went deeper and showed how living alone on the island taught Karana that animal companionship was more critical to her survival than their flesh or fur or feathers:

“After that summer, after being friends with Won-a-nee and her young, I never killed another otter. I had an otter cape for my shoulders, which I used until it wore out, but never again did I make a new one. Nor did I ever kill another cormorant for its beautiful feathers, though they have long, thin necks and make ugly sounds when they talk to each other. Nor did I kill seals for their sinews, using instead kelp to bind the things that needed it. Nor did I kill another wild dog, nor did I try to spear another sea elephant.

            “Ulape would have laughed at me, and others would have laughed, too –my father most of all. Yet this is the way I felt about the animals who had become my friends and those who were not, but in time could be. If Ulape and my father had come back and laughed, and all the others had come back and laughed, still I would have felt the same way, for animals and birds are like people, too, though they do not talk the same or do the same things. Without them the earth would be an unhappy place.”

This is from the same essay that I cite above:

“I was eight years old when my mother and I moved from the Indiana farm to New York City. If not for my books and the iguana I rescued from a pet shop, I’m not sure how I would have survived. I read Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book before seeing Disney’s version, and I imagined real wolves, a real panther and bear, a real python, a real boy. I read the story over and over, especially the parts filled with aching and longing. When the boy has to leave the jungle to go live with other humans:

Then something began to hurt Mowgli inside him, as he had never been hurt in his life before, and he caught his breath and sobbed, and the tears ran down his face.

‘What is it? What is it?’ he said. ‘I do not wish to leave the jungle, and I do not know what this is. Am I dying, Bagheera?’

Later, he leaves the village and returns to the jungle:

‘When the moon rose over the plain, making it look all milky, the horrified villagers saw Mowgli, with two wolves at his heels…trotting across at the steady wolf’s trot that eats up the long miles like fire.’

I longed to be Mowgli, leaving the city behind, returning to my pond and woods…”

More books I loved as a kid. The one on the bottom is called The Keeper and the Kept by Carl Kauffeld who was curator of the Staten Island reptile house. He writes with love about the snakes he tended at the zoo, and he tells some great stories of finding snakes in the wild, and about his experience of accidental envenomation by a cobra.

Here are stacks of books I love. So many are missing! Like memoirs by Janisse Ray, Linda Hogan, Joy Harjo, and J. Drew Lanham. They are on my Kindle.

Book Reviews

BLUE IGUANA, 2014, namelos

…Informative and well-researched details about blue iguanas are intellectually and emotionally compelling, bonding the reader to both the animals and to Clarice in her devotion…. Give this to a fan of Schrefer’s Endangered, an animal lover, or a sensitive soul looking to find her way.

—The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, RECOMMENDED

[Townsend] …convincingly portrays a high school student who spends a life-changing summer caring for endangered blue iguanas on Grand Cayman Island.

Clarice, who narrates, cares so much for animals that she must leave her favorite teacher’s biology class rather than dissect a frog. She practices what she preaches: she is vegan and will not wear leather goods. When Clarice decides to spend the summer at the Blue Iguana Recovery Program in the Cayman Islands, readers learn about this unusual habitat right along with Clarice. She describes the rough karst terrain as she accompanies two researchers attempting to find out where a blue iguana named GRG (Green-Red-Green, referring to her markings) has stashed her eggs, the sweltering heat inland, and the smell of the ocean on a windy day. Readers also learn about the lizards’ diet, their life expectancy and how many eggs they typically lay. Before her trip, it seemed impossible for Clarice to imagine being a marine biologist and eating fish, as is the case with one of her new friends, but she begins to see there’s room for balance and interconnectedness in the world.

Readers will grow to care as much for the blue iguanas as Clarice and the other volunteers do. When tragedy strikes the preserve, it may well feel as devastating to readers as it is for the volunteers. Give this absorbing read to any nature lover.

—Jennifer M. Brown, children’s editor, Shelf Awareness

THE SUNDOWN RULE, 2011, namelos

[This] heartfelt story about a girl who feels most at home in nature will make even hardcore city dwellers wake up to the wonders of the natural world…Jean Craighead George fans will be thrilled to discover Wendy Townsend, a writer with a kindred spirit.                                                                                                  —Shelf Awareness

(starred, Kirkus 2011 Best books for Children) This spare, lovely novel concerns that moment in childhood, at once universal and utterly lonely, when one is forced to recognize that all life is mortal… Unfolding with the implacable clarity of the natural world Louise reveres, the novel proves that a quiet story can be as gripping as the busiest action-packed narrative—and with more staying power.                                   —Kirkus Reviews

LIZARD LOVE, 2008, Front Street

(starred)                                    —Booklist

“…I’m bowled over by the descriptions of animals – so beautiful and precise and yet available to any reader, not esoteric… Any kid who reads this book will have her eyes opened to nature in a brand-new way.”                                                                                                                                                                              —Norma Fox Mazer