You moved to France from the United States with no ambition of staying long-term, but found yourself cultivating a second home there. You could say you’ve taken a risk in settling in foreign country, and in turn taking risks to experiment with many genres. How important is it for you as a person and a writer to take risks?

The notion of risk has to be put in perspective. I haven’t been compelled to go to the poorest places on earth or to war zones to witness life reduced to its most basic elements. My risks were choices in craft and life. I don’t think I became a real writer until I stopped imitating my influences. Some writers start off wholly original. I continued for a long time trying to write polished work so that it looked publishable rather than letting the work be what it wanted to be. I just became more intrepid with voice and form and then with different genres. The second most important step was to give up a tenured university position to be a permanent resident outside of the United States. But I just put my faith in the idea that my writing would help me find a new, more productive balance in my personal life and my professional life. For twelve years, I lived like two separate citizens between family life in France and teaching in the States.

Wild Edibles, your new nature book, is equally as engaging and exploratory as your previous success, The Golden-Bristled Boar. You whisk us off into the forests of Burgundy on mushroom hunts, introducing us to the eccentric characters in your village and their modern day hunter-gatherer traditions. The narratives are both educational and historical, while charmingly witty. How is nature both an amusing and timeless theme for you?

Jeffrey Greene
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

My mother ran away from a boarding school in New Jersey at fifteen, and my father was a black sheep in classic New York Jewish family for choosing sculpting over fabric design for a family business. Both were very young, surviving their fractured family situations. They met in Greenwich Village. My teenage mother, wanting a family and an artist husband, decided that we could move to the country and live off the land if we had to. It all turned out to be a fiasco, particularly planting gardens destroyed by deer and rabbits and our goats that were intent on poisoning themselves on mountain laurel. Still, a passion for the New England seaside and the woods was infused in me from the beginning. I experienced a Wordsworthian type of childhood in the country, a real sense of the nurturing powers of nature. Later in life, I regain this sense of the world by restoring an old presbytery in rural France. Ironically, my mother lives with us, and furniture, paintings, and objects from my childhood were shipped over.

While my nature projects are both deeply serious and personally important for me, I try to make the writing pleasurable to read. The aim is to engage readers as willing companions. I begin as a naive guide who takes them on a narrative journey into a subject.

You write in the preface for Shades of the Other Shore that your imagination has been “compelled by a sense of wonder” in your present work. How has your current work transformed or evolved from your earlier writing?

Jeffrey Greene
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

The informing theme behind Shades of the Other Shore is the process of aging — facing the deaths of one’s parents, friends, and oneself, but I juxtaposed these underlying concerns to life in our village, its layering of history. The book involves deep mapping of self and place. I focus on a sense of wonder about these correspondences — ghosts and nature — rather than writing one elegy after another. The way the past speaks to the present has been a conspicuous theme throughout my work.

Two things have evolved. In my earlier years, I never imagined that I would write personalized nonfiction and fiction. It seemed challenging enough to write poetry. And as I said in my response on risks, I’ve learned to experiment, try out new forms, and be less fearful of failing, something that haunted my early writing.

What is the role of publishing in your work?

I confess that I only write nonfiction with an advanced contract because these books demand a huge commitment in terms of time and personal resources. I need to know that these projects have a future. Poetry and fiction writing is different. This writing is generated from inner life and experience and then processed through sensibility and craft. Writers publish to complete the triangle of writer, work, and audience. Readers/audiences have their part to play. They bring their sensibilities and experiences to the art to make it whole, and the work takes on a life in the larger world. The writer can never fully know the implications.