[I wish this could be in an actual interview format, but I caught Dana in the car over the phone as she drove from the Bay Area back to Carson City, Nevada. So her comments have been intertwined into the article.]
Dana Fleming has been a friend of mine since my undergraduate years at Brigham Young University. She is a unique soul that wears her heart quite literally on her sleeve, something anyone comes to realize in the first few moments of meeting her. Dana first encouraged me to start doing long distance runs in Provo Canyon, and we enjoyed many miles running, talking, sweating, and distilling the wisdom of our life experience as we ran. Dana graduated from BYU with her degree in Theatre Arts Education, and spent three years directing the drama program at Carson City High school in Nevada. Worn out and exhausted from giving everything she had to her students, Dana decided to hike the PCT, from Canada to Mexico, over the course of several months in 2015. She logged her experience in a blog called pacificcrestrose.blogspot.com and on Facebook, which often turned into a veritable crowdsource of help, advice, and care packages to her stops along the trail.
I wanted to start with questions like, how has developing your writing skills helped you better experience the outdoors? And, how has developing your writing skills helped you become a better teacher? But we started by catching up instead and I was eager to hear about her next adventure back on the trail, so we started with the question, what does your future look like? Dana is always enthusiastic, and much of her experience has been working with teenagers. Her time as a high school drama teacher has taught her that the responsibility of a teacher is to ask great questions, be a good listener, and lead by example. She understands that it’s not just about teaching students to be “good” writers, but teaching them to be vulnerable and honest, which is best achieved through her own experience of doing that personally. She has learned that through encouraging both the people she’s asking something of, either in writing or in acting or in other ways, and herself, that with frequent writing and practice their voice/her voice gets stronger. And the writing gets better.
As a teacher, Dana has learned that encouraging writing that’s not perfect, but spontaneous is more effective with young people. If you want to know what questions to ask you have to listen really well. I remember seeing posts of Dana taking students out on trail runs in the Nevada wilderness, both in sun and snow. I couldn’t help but think that those places must be ideal for really listening well. It paid off too. One of the most common reviews Dana received was her students felt like they could take risks, and they recognized that’s where creativity happens. They saw her take risks, to not be afraid to mess up, to fail, and they learned from her example. Dana said, the biggest block to creativity is the fear of failure. Ironically, the only way to get over that is to fail. And she has that down to an art. Anyone who knows Dana or has read anything she has written will know that vulnerability is a strength for Dana, and she uses it to practice what she preaches--imperfection leads to creativity and to passion.
When I asked Dana about her recent experience taking a few of her former high school students on the PCT, she said she hopes this idea will one day turn into some sort of business or program of taking teen girls into the wilderness with a writing component. This time around, she had bought the two girls she was doing an Oregon section of the PCT with writing journals, and had planned on giving them prompts each night to write about their experience that day and their reflections on anything and everything related to the trail or to their life.
It’s important to Dana to teach students how to find their own voice, and a means of doing that is to keep a record of their experience. From her own time on the trail and even before she ever set foot on the PCT, she learned that writing and reflecting on her outdoor experience is really important for the outdoor experience itself, even in retrospect. Interestingly, Dana said in the outdoors your experience can be vague, things are happening, but in ways that need to be processed--it’s in a slow and passive way. If you try to articulate the experience outdoors it becomes more of something. Writing about it gives it power and depth and meaning. Without journaling and blogging, Dana says, some of her best insights about God and people and relationships, which came while in the outdoors, might have not been able to form without the record that she was keeping while it was happening.
I talked to Dana about what it was like to experience long stretches of the trail on her own. It seemed crucial to understanding how important writing about those experiences was to her and how she kept that record of it, like she had mentioned. I asked her, what’s the difference between loneliness and being alone? Connection, she told me. If you don’t feel connected to people it can be lonely, even in a group. When you’re alone, you can be connected to the earth, to your body, and not be alone. By writing she explained, you’re strengthening that connection, like love letters to another person, but to the earth! Dana assured me though, that you can’t worry too much about creating connections as you write or teach these principles to students. As you get people thinking about questions that are important to them, the connections will become obvious. The natural world is going to provide answers, symbols, and metaphors for you to draw upon as you look for your answers. The questions you need to focus on are about their experience in the wilderness.
Dana gave me an example of this as she described her time in the Grand Canyon where she rafted down the Colorado River with some friends this past spring. She told me she had wanted to hear God’s voice while in that beautiful landscape, and she had thoughts and answers come to her that she wrote down in her journal. But the answers came through the land, even though the question had nothing to do with the Grand Canyon. She said there is so much that we naturally connect to in nature, the metaphors are not difficult to draw.
Before her reception started to cut out as she entered the Sierra Nevadas heading back to Carson City, I wasn’t going to let her off the hook, because I did really want to know how she had developed her writing skills that she felt had helped her be a better teacher and better experience the outdoors. She answered that it’s both reading and writing. Writers like Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard, women whose voices really resonate with her have made an impact on her because they’ve inspired her to have outdoor experiences and reflect on them by writing about them. She credits her professors who introduced her to these writers. She doesn’t think of herself as a skilled writer, she’s not very disciplined. But she craves connection and expression. When she is able to write truthfully about what is happening in her heart and mind when she’s in the wilderness, it enhances the experience. The more practice she has at writing, the better she is at keeping a clear record of what’s happening in her heart and mind. So Dana is most certainly interested in becoming a better writer, but inasmuch as it makes her experience with people and the outdoors better.
Dana just started another drama teaching job at a high school in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, so we expect a lot more exciting experiences and posts from her as she prepares students to act, sing, and dance in new plays and musicals, as well as enjoy the beautiful landscape of northern Idaho. You can follow Dana’s frequent posts on Facebook, Dana Rose Fleming, on Instagram, dang_rose, and read her past posts about her experiences on the PCT and other things on her blog, pacificcrestrose.blogspot.com.