The idea that the humorous and the serious should be distinct modes, even antithetical modes, is a pretty recent invention—and not a good one.
Introduction
Photo by Kyle Weerheim.
Just what you’d expect when friends are invited to interview friends.
And “friend” is how so many of us in the world of nature writing and ecocriticism think of Michael Branch. I’m talking, in part, about the many ways he has supported individual writers and scholars over his 40-year career, as an editor and reviewer and literary advocate, but also as an award-winning teacher of environmental literature and writing at the University of Nevada, Reno and co-founder of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). Then there are the many ways he’s been a friend of the Earth, passionately advocating on behalf of environmental causes in his beloved high desert home, where he lives with his wife Eryn and daughters Hannah and Caroline.
Perhaps it might also be said that to commit one’s professional literary life to making this a better world to live in is also an act of friendship. If so, he is a generous one, authoring ten books and numerous individual pieces representing the full range of creative nonfiction forms—artful scholarship, personal essay, book-length memoir, nature writing—all dedicated to exploring the vital interconnection of self, community, and place. This is particularly true of his high desert trilogy from Shambhala’s Roost Books: Raising Wild (2016), Rants from the Hill (2017), and How to Cuss in Western (2018). Together these books are a kind of love song to home, one that blends humor, personal stories, and environmental knowledge, delivered with an honest, funny, compassionate voice that makes you believe you are sitting down for a beer with a good friend.
His latest book, On the Trail of the Jackalope, explores the personal, cultural, environmental, and medical significance of this legendary creature (and its real-life counterpart) in the American West and beyond, including its stranger-than-fiction connection to disease, vaccination, and curing cancer. We discuss this book in detail below but, as I said at the beginning, I was determined not to take it easy on him. I wanted to draw out the “real” Mike Branch by tossing him a few curveballs, testing the limits of his intellectual and emotional dexterity—which is significant, by the way. And that would begin with the very first, hard-hitting question….
We can’t be fully human without a rich imagination of the more-than-human, which includes not only whales and owls and pronghorn, but also unicorns and gorgons and jackalopes.
Interview
John Price: Mike, it’s no secret that when people think of your literary career they think of Black Sabbath—or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, a few years ago I attended one of their concerts, and Ozzie said, “You know, fans sometimes ask why we’d start off our final world tour in Omaha, Nebraska. I just respond, ‘Why the f*** not?!’” Then he launched into “Fairies Wear Boots.” So that’s my opening question: Of all the subjects you might have focused on at this stage in your life and career, why jackalopes? Also, what’s your favorite Sabbath song?
Michael Branch: How kind of you, John. I wasn’t aware that people thought of my literary career. But there’s more than “Why the f*** not?!” to my passion for the jackalope. I’ve wanted to explore and tell this story for 20 years, but I guess my “maturity” and “professionalism” kept getting in my way. Ridiculous obstacles! But the horned bunny just wouldn’t leave my imagination, and eventually I hopped on this fascinating story. For me, the most creative work happens once obsession eclipses good judgment. Speaking of which, my favorite Black Sabbath song is “Psychophobia.” I think it really captures the zeitgeist. Come to think of it, “Zeitgeist” is a Sabbath tune also.
Photo by Kyle Weerheim. Courtesy John Meissner, Sanborn Research Centre and Estes Park Archives.
John Price: “Psychophobia” is indeed a great one, especially that line “It’s too late now; it’s time to kiss the rainbow goodbye,” which pretty much captures my feelings most mornings nowadays. Which gets me thinking again of how damn difficult it has been during the last couple of years of the pandemic for authors to not just publish and promote books, but simply write sentences. Including me. How have you managed to power through all this and complete a book? Also, if you were an anti-vaxxer Canadian trucker, what would be your CB handle?
Michael Branch: Well, this long stint in Covidville Junction has been plenty weird for writers. On the one hand, we often profess to need solitude in order to think those Big Thoughts that go into Our Work. No shade here—everybody needs ambition. But we got more isolation than we bargained for, and more than we could sometimes handle. For me, though, writing On the Trail of the Jackalope was a Covid lifeline. It allowed me to burrow into my horned rabbit hole, escape into my fascination, and have times when I actually forgot, at least for a little while, how terrifying the world had become. Weird you should mention anti-vaxxers, because in the book I make an earnest attempt to understand the psychology and sociology of vaccine resistance. But if I were a Canadian trucker—which is a possible future for any writer—I’d have to be on the other side of that line. There’s already enough traffic in Ottawa! My CB handle would be Maxx Vaxx. 10-4, eh?
John Price: A big 10-4, eh, to that, good buddy. My handle would be Mr. Vaxtastic, and I’d have chrome syringes on the mudflaps. Anyway, one of the other things I admire about your book is the skillful way it braids together so many different nonfiction forms: nature writing, literary journalism, narrative interviews, speculative nonfiction, personal essay, memoir, travel. It’s almost like a kind of literary jackalope, bringing together disparate forms to create something engaging and memorable. What went into your decision to use this hybrid form? Were there any points in the writing or publishing process where you faced resistance to that hybridity? Also, are there any other literary forms that should be named after freaky monsters?
From Jackalopia: The Pocket Guide to Jackalopes of the World (2016). Courtesy Lyndsey Green.
Michael Branch: Hybridity is the name of the game when it comes to both jackalopes and creative nonfiction! It’s that illicit blending, mixing, boundary crossing that liberates us from the shackles of convention (my next band name). The jackalope represents a refusal to be either this thing or that thing. As a trickster, the horned rabbit assails the boundary between fantasy and reality, and even blurs the line between life and death. As the epigraph to one of my chapters puts it, “When I make a good [taxidermy] mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said, Let thus and such critter be dead, and I said, F*** you, he can still play the banjo.” I wanted my book to be a blending that includes the essay form but also extends beyond it. Honestly, though, this stylistic hybridity was less an artistic imperative and more a matter of what tools I felt I needed to tell this particular story. I know we’re on the same page, because your forthcoming book, All is Leaf: Essays and Transformations, which I love, so clearly shows the power and range of the essay form.
But, yes, there’s always resistance to hybridity. Editors at a number of New York trade presses that considered my book said some version of “Is this book about folklore or mythology or hoax or taxidermy or virology or vaccines or what?” To which I said, “Yes!” They didn’t love that answer. But we’re writers. We have to do what we feel called to do. But I reject all notions of generic purity. Somebody’s idea of purity is how the trouble always starts! And, yeah, we do need more monsters in our literary lexicon. For example, I often use “Chupacabra” as a verb to refer to that moment (all writers know it!) when you’re cruising along and then your prose unaccountably turns to spew. As in, “I was crushing that descriptive passage, and then I just Chupacabrad all over the page.”
John Price: My new favorite verb! And one of the things that can be difficult not to Chupacabra on the page is humor, especially when used to address what are widely seen as serious issues. Climate change, for instance. Or anti-vax Canadian trucker blockades. But you and I agree that humor can be among the most effective rhetorical approaches to writing about those issues. On the Trail of the Jackalope, along with your other creative nonfiction books, offers an important model for how to do that effectively. Can you talk a little about your approach to humor in this book? Also, what surprising thing has made you laugh nowadays—besides that moment when you heard I would be conducting this interview?
Michael Branch: Man, this one chaps my hide! The idea that the humorous and the serious should be distinct modes, even antithetical modes, is a pretty recent invention—and not a good one. I mean, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Swift, Twain—it would be news to those guys that literary comedy shouldn’t do serious work. We need humor in nonfiction not only to entertain our readers (Horace was right!), but because the world is so screwed up that we simply can’t get by without laughter. In my view, humor is the mode of creative nonfiction most neglected in our writing and teaching—and at a time when we need it more than ever. The day I can no longer laugh at absurdity and vice will be the day they throw dirt on the box. Humor is an essential part of the art of survival, and we owe it to ourselves and our readers to deploy it to expose injustice, or simply to lift us up, to help us endure. Sorry, that sounded preachy. What makes me laugh lately? The cover of On the Trail of the Jackalope. That thing is brain-frying Day-Glow yellow, and it reminds me of how much fun I had writing it.
John Price: Preach on, brother—you know I’m in the choir, singing “Hallelujah!” (though a little off key, as usual). One area where preaching would not be welcome, however, is during the numerous conversations you have throughout your jackalope journey. There are so many interesting and revealing interviews in this book, whether it is with Michael Herrick, son of the creator of the original jackalope, or the owner of Wall Drug, or Frank English, possibly the most prolific jackalope maker in history. Truth be told, that last one scared me a little when he showed you the freezer full of bunny carcasses. Kind of reminded me of Silence of the Lambs. Regardless, it’s clear you have a gift for encouraging people to open up to you during interviews. What advice would you have for writers about preparing for and conducting good interviews? Were there any in the book that were particularly challenging? Also, you encounter a jackalope at the Wyoming Pioneer Memorial Museum that you claim “looked not at but rather through you.” What did it see there?
Michael Branch: My friend Robert is a documentary filmmaker, and when I realized that my book would depend so heavily on interviews, I asked him to share his technique for getting people to open up during an interview. Robert told me, “If you really want people to be honest, I mean to really give it up for you, there’s a secret approach that works every time. It has two parts. First, you ask them a question. Then, you shut up and listen.” It turned out to be true! If you treat people with respect—you don’t corner them or judge them, but just invite them to share their stories—it is incredible how candid and detailed they usually are. But the shutting yourself up part is crucial, because if people feel you steering them there’s a trust that’s broken, and those stories will dry up instantly.
The book includes dozens of interviews with some of the smartest, weirdest, coolest people I’ve ever met, and many of those interviews later blossomed into friendships. So the project connected me to amazing folks all over the country and all over the world, and that’s been one of the most gratifying parts of it. The toughest interviews for me were with taxidermists, because I’m not a hunter, and I don’t grasp the use of taxidermy to memorialize killing. But those were also some of the most rewarding interviews, because they forced me to get inside another person’s life experience. And, no doubt, that original Herrick family jackalope in the museum did penetrate my soul. When he gazed down at me, I think that horned rabbit beheld the nothing that was not there and the nothing that is.
John Price: Is that another Sabbath lyric? If not, it should be.
Another thing I admire about all of your books is the many rich, detailed portraits of place. I know the phrase “place as character” is overused, but is that something to aim for in nonfiction? I mean, your characterization of the West, and in particular the Great Basin Desert, is distinctly different from those I’ve read in other books out of the same region. Are there aspects of that geographical “character” that have been overlooked or misrepresented that your writing seeks to complicate or even correct? Also, in this book and others, you are very specific about the many brands of IPAs you consume. In fact, it might be said that On the Trail of the Jackalope is framed by IPA, with “Bunny Hop IPA” appearing on page 6 and “Speakeasy Big Daddy IPA” taking us home on page 211. Are you receiving any money for these promotions and, if not, should you be? Aren’t you now, in fact, an IPA “influencer”?
Michael Branch: There is no doubt that I deserve to be compensated for promoting beer and hooch. I mention IPA and rye so often in my writing that I actually pitched a brewery and a distillery on the idea of supporting me through a product placement advertising arrangement. I mean, how else are authors going to put food on the table? Although that scheme didn’t work to plan, it wasn’t a total failure either. I’m proud to say that I am the only Nevada writer ever to be sponsored by a brewery. Great Basin Brewing Company, which I mention often in my work (see how I just did it right there?), provides free IPA at my book launches. And I’ve learned from those launch events what is tragically missing from most literary readings: an audience of people who are actually having fun. I always go for a long run the morning after readings, and when I do my perspiration is 8.6% ABV with an IBU of 105. Like my writing, my sweat has rich sage and pine aromas, with a firm backbone that allows the bitterness to shine through. Like the jackalope, it is always hop forward.
I live in the Great Basin Desert, which is often described as barren wasteland. So, yeah, part of my job as a writer is to challenge that shallow conception of this landscape. If you look at this amazing, sublimely beautiful expanse of vast desert and judge that “there’s nothing out there,” you’ve said more about your inability to understand this place than you have about the place itself. To me, places are like people: if we get in the business of saying that some are more important or more valuable than others, we’re headed down a dangerous path. The geographical “character” of my home landscape isn’t beautiful in a Sierra Club calendar kind of way, and that’s why, as a writer, I’m committed to defending and celebrating it.
John Price: And I’m deeply grateful for that, my friend. Speaking of Sierra Club calendars, I enjoyed the many photographs and illustrations included in your book, demonstrating the wondrous and sometimes disturbing ways the jackalope and real-life horned rabbits have manifested within the human imagination—from traditional mounts to tattoos to a 16th-century Flemish painting and so much more. Recently, you published a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle that included a photo of “an adult male cottontail with growths caused by an extreme case of Shope papillomavirus”—an actual horned rabbit. Let’s just say it made more than a few people nauseous, including some well-respected ecocritics. But, as you point out, those diseased rabbits are incredibly important. Can you summarize here why people everywhere should care enough about these creatures to actually look at photos of them?
Courtesy Bill Nelson.
Michael Branch: Believe it or not, “horned” rabbits do exist in nature; and, yes, they’re often grotesque as hell. Some of these specimen photos would give anybody the shivers, because the rabbits’ virus-induced growths can make them look monstrous. Naturalists have been interested in these weird bunnies for centuries, and for a long time they were taxonomized as Lepus cornutus, which was incorrectly thought to be a distinct species. But the reason to care about these diseased Leporids is that those gross horns have helped us to unlock the secrets of a whole range of HPV-caused human cancers. If you’ve ever had a wart, you’re a cousin to the horned rabbit, because your wart and the bunny’s horns are both caused by a papillomavirus. If you’ve had the HPV vaccine and haven’t died of cancer, there’s a decent chance that you’ve been—to quote the title of one of my chapters—“Saved by Jackalopes.”
John Price: I was moved to tears by the chapter in which you describe the history of the development of the HPV vaccine and the countless victims of HPV-related cancers. This included Julie Forward DeMay, whose stepsister shared with you her diary of her final months. I couldn’t help but think of a dear friend who was recently treated for an HPV-related cancer of the throat, which fortunately is in remission. This led me to revisit the causes for vaccine hesitation, and how to effectively address them when the lives of so many loved ones are at stake—beyond mocking anti-vax Canadian truckers. What role do you think writers and storytellers can play in that effort? Also, you mention that the key scientist in the development of the HPV vaccine, Richard Shope, grew up in Iowa and that the first horned rabbit he ever examined was also from Iowa. Given that Aldo Leopold and Cloris Leachman were also born here, is it safe to say my home state is the most important?
Michael Branch: That should be your state’s tourism motto: “Iowa: Famous for Cloris Leachman and Horned Rabbits.” Who wouldn’t plan a family vacation around those attractions? But the fact that you were so moved by the poignant story of Julie losing her life to cervical cancer helps to answer your good question about the role of storytelling in science communication. People are dying every day of preventable HPV-caused cancers. The problem isn’t the science, which is nothing short of miraculous. According to the American Cancer Society, more than 90% of HPV-caused cancers can be prevented by the proven safe HPV vaccine. But when science is conveyed as emotionless data, or highly specialized discourse, or politically polarized rhetoric, the collateral damage is illness and death. On the Trail of the Jackalope isn’t a vaccine polemic—we have plenty of those, and they aren’t working. Instead, it uses the captivating story of the jackalope as a path into a more complex conversation about why HPV vaccine uptake, like COVID-19 vaccine uptake, has been tragically slow. While science can give us the stats on vaccine effectiveness, narrative can make us feel the human joy or suffering behind those data. I’m not saying story is superior to science; I’m saying we desperately need both.
John Price: I couldn’t agree more—about the importance of story and your suggested tourism motto for Iowa. Regarding the former, you explore the ways myth and pop culture play an important role in our relationship to place and the environment—or should. In referencing Robert Michael Pyle’s book Where Bigfoot Walks, you paraphrase his argument that “the protection of wilderness habitats is important for the preservation of our own fantasies and imaginings as well as for the conservation of species.” You make a great case that the jackalope should take its rightful place among those “necessary monsters.” Could you summarize a few of those reasons? Also, as a kid were you more a Godzilla guy or a King Kong guy?
Courtesy Kari Serrao.
Michael Branch: Man, we do need our monsters! In all cultures, from time immemorial, folklore has been richly populated by monsters. They help us to imagine other worlds, confront our fears, indulge our fantasies, negotiate the liminal zone between the everyday and the miraculous. The term “necessary monsters,” which I borrow from Jorge Luis Borges, speaks to this idea that we can’t be fully human without a rich imagination of the more-than-human, which includes not only whales and owls and pronghorn, but also unicorns and gorgons and jackalopes.
My friend Bob Pyle makes this point in a very cool way. In Where Bigfoot Walks, Bob writes that he doesn’t know if a relict hominid like Bigfoot exists, but he argues that we need to have enough wilderness to sustain the vital question of whether it could exist. If wild places are lost, then so are wild thoughts. This isn’t about finding cryptids like Bigfoot, it’s about preserving a vanishing habitat for the human imagination. Without that wild jungle, there can be no King Kong (yes, I’m a Kong man). In fact, I hope to work with a prominent environmental group here in Nevada to establish a designated Jackalope Refuge in the central Great Basin. By preserving jackalope habitat, we’ll be saving the part of ourselves that wonders if jackalopes exist. At the same time, we’ll also be creating a safe space for the many plants and animals that flourish wherever the land is wild enough to support the dream of a monster.
John Price: I love the idea of a Jackalope Refuge, and I’d nominate Paxton to be its first supreme ruler. Paxton, for those who haven’t read the book yet, is the jackalope you create during a taxidermy workshop in San Francisco. As you observe, he’s got a weird ear and kind of satanic horns. At one point you look him in the eyes and say, “I sure f***ed you up. No hard feelings?” This moment reminds me of something God might say to humanity. It also got me thinking about my only experience with what is referred to in the book as “crap taxidermy.” I was 13 and it involved actual crap, a small chunk of hardened horse dung that I turned into a “turd bird” using toothpicks, fake feathers, and googly eyes, mounted on a piece of balsawood. I think it was for 4-H, and though it didn’t win any blue ribbons, it seemed to embody the late-70s, early adolescent experience for me. If you had the opportunity to invent your own hybrid taxidermy creature to encapsulate your life or the times we live in, what would it be? Also, you describe one particular taxidermied jackalope as existing somewhere “between comedy and badassery.” Have you considered copyrighting that phrase and using it as a subtitle for your books? If not, can I use it?
Michael Branch: That tagline is all yours, John. The one I’m going to start using, excerpted from a recent review of On the Trail of the Jackalope in The Wall Street Journal, is: “Mr. Branch knows at least as much about jackalopes as Einstein knew about physics.” That totally cracks me up! I mean, I chased horned rabbits, and Einstein figured out how the universe works. So… same same, right?
Your question about creating my own hybrid creature is the most fun question I’ve ever been asked in an interview. The second-most fun was “If your book was a cocktail, what would it be?” (You can see my recipe here.) Because your own taxidermy creation was (literally) a piece of shit, I don’t feel as intimidated by this question as I might have been. Still, this is a tough one! I guess I’ll go with the platypusaslothawolpertingerlope. My hybrid creation combines the actual platypus (an animal so bizarre that naturalists who examined the first specimens suspected it was a taxidermy hoax), the sloth (an animal that represents the urgency humans have shown in responding to the existential crisis of climate change), the wolpertinger (a Bavarian creature that has the head of a hare and the antlers of a roebuck, but also the wings of a pheasant and the fangs of a boar), and the jackalope (an animal without whom I do nothing these days). My hybrid is a hybrid of hybrids—a beautiful mess. Take that, ye purists!
Photo by Michael P. Branch.
John Price: One last, essential question. We write literary nonfiction for many different reasons—money, fame, power—but in this book, and in your other works of nonfiction, it is clear to me that underneath it all is a desire to do some real good in the world. And knowing you as I do, I know that the love you have for your family, especially your daughters, is at the heart of that effort. Too often, writers are represented as self-centered, self-destructive forces of pain and chaos in their personal lives, but I don’t know any writers like that. Okay, maybe two or three… but you’re not one of them. Can you speak a little about the relationship between your work as a writer and your role as a husband and father? Also, how did you feel while attending youth soccer games? Be honest.
Michael Branch: I did attend soccer games when our girls were younger, but I never went without a thermos of hot chocolate and a thermos of gin and tonics, and as a parent I’m proud to say that those thermoses only got mixed up on one occasion. (You said be honest.) And if I had known that anybody writes creative nonfiction for money, fame, or power, I would have gotten into this racket sooner. But you’re right that my family is what matters most to me. I’ve written a number of books trying to understand and celebrate my relationship with my daughters, and I love thinking about how a kid’s understanding of the natural world is often more insightful than our own. And I don’t mean to valorize Wordsworthian horseshit here. I really mean that kids just get stuff we don’t get about why the world is magic, and about the permeability of the boundary between the human and nonhuman. I mean, there’s no kid in the world who doesn’t love a jackalope! But only a grownup would have to go write a whole book about it. So, yeah, my daughters are always on my mind as a writer. I hope that On the Trail of the Jackalope will make readers laugh, and I also hope the book’s connection of real horned rabbits to the HPV vaccine might save somebody else’s daughter’s life. Either outcome would be just fine with me.
Read essays by Michael P. Branch appearing in Terrain.org: “Pilgrimage to the Pointy-Toed Boots,” “Lawn Guilt,” and “Letter to America.”
John T. Price is the author of five nonfiction books, including the forthcoming All is Leaf: Essays and Transformations, and is editor of The Tallgrass Prairie Reader. He is the Regents’/Foundation Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he directs the English Department’s Creative Nonfiction Writing Program. He lives with his family in western Iowa.
Read essays by John T. Price appearing in Terrain.org: “Pizza Night on Planet Fitness,” “Letter to America,” “Peacock, Beware!”, and “Confessions of a Prairie Lounge Singer.”
Header image: The tradition of the jackalope postcard is kept alive today by contemporary artists including Chet Phillips, whose delightful “Greetings from Austin” card collection features a playful jackalope who always manages to have a good time. Courtesy of Chet Phillips.
