Compassion, An Offering, and So Much Rage: Barrelhousing with River Selby, author of “Hotshot: A Life on Fire,” by Kasey Peters
Wildfires rage in the background of our national consciousness, burning to the forefront in acute tragedies every year or so. We might think of it as part of the reality of being on the runway to climate collapse, but fire on this continent isn’t new. Many of the ecosystems that burn are adapted to wildfires. The land’s relationship to fire is much older than our contemporary, fleeting sense of static, managed ecosystems; it is in fact our management—colonizers’ management—of fire-adapted ecosystems that’s new, and failing now.
River Selby’s Hotshot: A Life on Fire is a tremendously smart book about the interrelations of contemporary American societies and land relations, woven through their personal history of working as a woman in the highly gendered space of a wildland hotshot crew. I put the personal narrative component second on the list just now, but it is really the heart of this book. While this book spans ecosystems and legacies of land management and stewardship on this continent, it’s also a book about one person’s incredibly moving life: a journey from sex work and homelessness, through alcoholism and disordered eating, into a culture that is at times a masculinist caricature of U.S. imperialism, through life-threatening survival situations, and toward an adulthood of self-knowledge and healing.
Hotshot does something magical. Not only could I not put it down, but I’m smarter, and more empathetic, for having read it.
Selby and I corresponded via Zoom and then email earlier this summer. We discussed the long, vulnerable work of memoir writing, the research process, manual labor and nonbinary embodiment, and how many lives they’ve lived.
Kasey Peters: This is a book about fire, certainly, but it’s also a book about your younger self, and you’re very generous with your experiences and your thought patterns and actions. That’s hard to do, both on a writing level, and on the level of vulnerability.
River Selby: Yeah. This book is about a time in my life where I didn't know myself very well, and it can be really scary, when you know yourself, to write about a time in your life where you were behaving in ways that, now... It's just like, I wouldn't want to do that again.
KP: And you write about your younger body a lot. There's this turn at the end where you gesture towards becoming a writer, and coming to understand yourself as non-binary, and coming to this retrospective position on some pretty traumatic gender socialization and gender trauma. What was it like to write about your own younger body so much?
RS: It was hard. This book took six years to write. A lot of revisions. It wasn't until probably the 4th revision that I began to find that distance for the narrative voice that I needed. Partially because I kept experiencing emotional PTSD flashbacks. I didn't realize they were happening until later in the process. But I had to experience them in order to get the truth on the page, and then get through that, to the narrative distance from which I could write reflectively.
My experience of writing about my body was like a dual experience. First I had to retraumatize myself, in a way, and reenter those experiences from the perspective of my younger self, inhabiting the way I used to see myself, and feel myself…or not feel myself. Then, when I learned what emotional flashbacks are and how people experience them, I had to spend some time away from the book before I could go through and start revising.
KP: Yeah, I get that. I had an experience last week where I hit a point in what I was trying to write, and I could not gain any traction without spiraling out. I spent like 2 days just trying to write, getting to 100 words, and crying for an hour. It was demoralizing because it made me wonder: Am I actually perceiving this from far enough away that I can handle articulating it? Or am I just still in it?
RS: When you're writing nonfiction about traumatic things that you have been through… In my experience, there is no escaping the pain that you have to go through to get it on the page. And I think my favorite books are the books where I know that the author went there. They gave that to me. Those books are the books that give me language for myself that I didn't have before. It's one of the reasons why being a nonfiction writer is so hard, and I think poets…all writers deal with it to some extent.
KP: Oh, I say poets are tougher than us all the time because it seems like that is the bread and butter of their craft. That moment of: can I actually handle saying this?
RS: Yes, totally.
KP: But you did so much work in this book, writing about your younger body. You really went through it.
RS: Yeah. Through writing about my body, I was able to locate the visceral self-hatred that was once my total reality. It was so internalized that it felt like my own, and I accepted it as such. But it wasn’t mine. The hatred was a cultural brainwashing I’d been undergoing since childhood. There was also this extreme discomfort with constantly being perceived as an object, as something to be taken in, to be consumed in a way. And I've always felt that perception and discomfort so viscerally, since I turned, like, 12 years old and my body became marked as a woman’s body. I felt that discomfort all the time.
Working in a male dominated workspace after having been a sex worker, where I learned to internalize and leverage objectification in an effort to have some sense of agency, was especially complicated. Back then my only value, to me, was located in being sexy. Being hot, and desired. By men in particular. This was my worth. But I was also resisting those ideas, and resenting the attention. I wanted to be more than an object, but the gaze was internalized to the point of not being able to ask myself: What do I want? I couldn’t escape it, you know? And it became my reality again for a while– that lack of agency or ability to ask myself what I want.
But the editorial experience was helpful, too. One helpful thing my editor said was that the reader was on my side. I was being really hard on myself because I was writing into, and from, that younger space. Once I internalized, “the reader is on my side”—I'm not writing this for the people in my life who have traumatized me; I'm writing this for people who've had experiences like me—I was able to synthesize those two perspectives. The book is infused with my younger self, but the voice of the book is my voice, having lived through and beyond everything the book contains.
KP: Another thing that struck me—related to how much of yourself is in this book—is this question of how you managed to decide what to keep inside the frame and what to leave out. I had the sense while reading that there were the ghosts of maybe three other books right alongside these pages—this book could have been so much more memoir about your relationship to your mom, or your grandparents, or your life as a teen, experiencing homelessness, sex work, all that. I think I would read three more books about your life. So, I'm curious about how you decided what's in this frame?
RS: It was a very, very long process. In my MFA I wrote a novel– a fictionalized version of my life as a firefighter, but also about working as a stripper, and also about my mom. I worked on it for four years. And nobody wanted it. It wasn't supposed to go out in the world. That was a devastating process for me. So I gave it up. I literally threw the paper drafts in the trash.
And then I wrote this. And at first, all of it was in there. Every chapter, every little scene in Hotshot, was once longer, or a chapter itself. My first revision was on my own, and I cut the first two years of my firefighting experiences. Then it was a collaborative process with my editor. But I knew I wanted my personal story to be the machine that makes the book go, while the book itself could be in service of something larger. So much research went into the history of fire in the U.S. to write this book.
KP: It really works—the interwoven personal narrative and the research. This book is about so much. On one hand, it’s about wildfire patterns in ecosystems, and colonialism and Indigenous land relations. And on another hand, it’s about the recent US history of bureaucratic and ideological structures that produce bad wildfire management. And on another hand it’s about how those structures and management are totally interwoven with this misogynist, masculinist organizing principle. I usually don’t read nonfiction, but I both really enjoyed this book and I actually learned a ton about fire—in different ecosystems, different fuel types, all that.
RS: Yeah. There are amazing books about fire, but a lot of them are academic. And I did a ton of research for the book—so many notebooks, so many notes on my phone, so many notes on the computer. I visited the Newberry Archives in Chicago, which are devoted to Indigenous studies and the colonization of the United States, so I went there for a week and half. I took pictures of letters, texts, archival documents. Then I came home and went through them all. I think I spent four years reading exclusively for this book. And I read memoirs—Natasha Trethewey's Memorial Drive was a big help. I wanted to create something accessible; like, I wanted to trick people into learning.
KP: It totally worked.
RS: And I also really wanted my personal story to stay in this book about fire. It was suggested to me that I leave my mom out of it completely. And I was like, “No, absolutely not, I know that makes this process harder, because it’s complicated, but no.” There is a human in this book that is living a life, and that life is complicated, and I do not want to ignore those complications, and I’m willing to take a risk in leaving that in there, because folks who have been through shit are very used to hiding their experiences in service of other people’s comfort. I didn’t want to do that.
KP: I think the profound strength of the personal narrative is how it illuminates the researched parts of the book. Sometimes you have longer sections of the crew’s work logistics and well-researched exposition about the history and bureaucracies that created suppression as our only approach to wildland fire management. And then the text alternates with some personal narrative anecdote—something from your life interjects into this logistically straightforward story. And sometimes, as a reader, I just want to read about the logistics of the crew and find out what happens on this hillside, but then I’m hit with, for example, another crew member in the vehicle opening up Hustler magazine to you, showing you a naked woman to harass you. And it's like, yeah, it would be nice if we could approach this massive national, logistical ecosystem stewardship issue without misogyny in the mix, but here it is, and it is so deeply interwoven.
RS: Yeah. It is. It's all woven together.
KP: And I was thinking about one scene that stands out, where your crew gets put into a situation that is pretty obviously bad. You're dropped in by helicopter and there’s no clear reason for you to be there, and the fire is erratic and the wind is high. It’s an incredibly bad move. As in, everyone could die, and everybody knows it.
But because of the sort of masculinist, militaristic structure of these things and the social pressures exerted by that structure, nobody says anything. And it's like: y'all could burn alive because no one can say, “Hold on, is this good?” And I think there’s such resonance between that moment, that life-and-death moment that happens over and over, and the smaller moments in the book where being in a group regulated by masculinity norms that are hierarchical and misogynist, it facilitates or enables people to participate passively or actively in stupid shit, or cruel shit, or violent shit. Your interwoven narrative really demonstrates that you can't take those moments apart. They have the same organizing principle.
RS: And I think that speaks to the question of fire management still! So I think it was really important for me to lean into everything that came up in the process of writing the book, as a way to show why we need more diversity. In wildland fire and so many other occupations, we actually need diversity to change how we do things, on every level.
This book is making a case for a more complex approach to fire management. It would be great to ‘just’ think about the logistics. But it’s so complicated. The American ethos is one of simplification. Hegemony, supremacy. An oversimplified hierarchy. Always searching for a single solution rather than embracing processes. There's a proposal right now for a singular Federal Fire agency, instead of having several. But that is not the way things work. It hasn't worked for us. Sure, it's annoying when several organizations—city, county, state, federal—all show up to a fire. But actually that's good if you’re not threatened by various perspectives. Let it be a collaborative situation where you're thinking things through together: that is the best management.
KP: Since we brought up diversity, I want to circle back to this question of being a “woman” on a hotshot crew. The book is obviously about gender in some ways—a woman in masculinized spaces—but I felt like much of this book was specifically about being nonbinary. You write about manual labor in a way that really resonated with me, as this kind of transcendent embodiment, where you tap into feeling your body from the inside in a way that you hadn't been allowed since before you were sexualized. And thinking, “Oh yeah, that's what it's like.” But I don’t know if this book will seem like it’s about being non-binary for other readers. I’m curious about the experience of writing that into or out of the book.
RS: You know, the gender stuff was hard because I'm nonbinary, and I felt so much tension every time I referred to myself as a woman and a girl. I don't see myself that way now, and it’s still very much a tension in my life. People perceive me as a woman, and I would literally have to get surgery to change that, and that might happen in the future, but that's not what it is right now.
It’s also part of my current experience because even the marketing of the book relies on the script of a woman on a hotshot crew. Which, that’s true. I was a woman on a hotshot crew. But there was always this sense that my internal experience didn’t match other women’s experiences, or men’s. There was this constant pressure. When I came out in 2020 a valve opened, and the pressure released.
Engaging with this directly in the text would have racked focus from the many other narratives, so I purposefully left that out, except for addressing it in the beginning.
KP: I think it’s there, for readers who think about gender all the time! Since there is so much in this book, what do you want somebody to feel or do as a result of the experience of reading your book? Is that something you think about as you’re writing?
RS: That question is always present as I'm writing, especially nonfiction, because for as long as I can remember, books kept me alive. They offered me so much when I was younger; places to imagine myself into, an escape. As I got older, and especially as a teenager and as a young adult, they also offered me the idea, or fantasy, that I could be a writer. And specific books, nonfiction in particular and memoir, offered a way of seeing myself. I actually remember specifically reading Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water and she has this scene where she's driving drunk. I was like, wow, she fucking wrote that. She fucking wrote that. That book helped lessen my own shame. I felt seen by someone who was seeing themselves with compassion; not holding their actions against themselves but also being accountable for themselves.
In writing this book, first of all, the thing that I wanted from the beginning was to be able to hand it to my 21- or 22-year-old self. On that crew. The first hotshot crew. If I had read this book back then it would have literally changed my life. It would have given me so much language, so much understanding, so much rage, that I wasn't able to feel as rage. I would have fucking walked away in a second. There was so much I was just not able to imagine for myself yet.
With Hotshot, I wanted to give that to myself, and I wanted to give it to other people. The book is, in many ways, an offering.
River Selby is a former wildland firefighter, a writer, and a nonbinary person. They hold an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University; they are currently pursuing their PhD. River was the recipient of the Emerging Writer’s Prize for Fiction from Boulevard Magazine. Their writing has appeared in the New Ohio Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Vox, and High Country News. Hotshot is their first book.
Their website: www.riverselby.com.