West with Giraffes
West with Giraffes
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Lynda Rutledge on West with Giraffes
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Thirteen years in a drawerThe book began not with a plan but with a stumble. In 1999, while in San Diego for an unrelated project, Rutledge came across yellowed scrapbooks documenting a real 1938 giraffe journey to the Zoo. She looked immediately for the zookeeper’s diary, the document that would have let her write nonfiction. There was none, and without it she had no way in.
I thought the story was ridiculously amazing, and I searched for the zookeeper’s diary, but didn’t find one.
The idea spent thirteen years in a drawer. In 2012, the San Diego Zoo hired her to write their centennial history, and she went back through those same crumbling clippings as a published novelist. This time she read them differently: the historical gaps that had once blocked a nonfiction account were now spaces she could fill with invention. What locked the project in was a single real document, a Lloyd’s of London telegram listing every peril they’d insure against during the transport: blowouts, dust storms, floods, acts of God.
From the moment back in 1999 when I first read about the hurricane the Zoo’s first giraffes lived through before they even landed in New York harbor and then were driven across country to San Diego in pre-interstate times, I was hooked.
The near-future frame, in which an elderly Woody writes his memoir in 2025 after seeing a news report about giraffes going extinct, was not decoration. It gave the book its second argument. Woody’s age is a calculation: named Woodrow Wilson after the president and Nickel so she could slip in the phrase “don’t take any wooden nickels,” his 105 years put the frame story at precisely 2025, a century and a nickel after his birth.
I had to make it not only a love story to animals, tame and wild, but also maybe make a statement about Sixth Extinction, the extinction crisis we are now in.
How she wrote it
A year on the whiteboard before a word on the pageBefore she wrote any prose, Rutledge spent a full year filling a whiteboard. She had more than thirty clippings that gave her facts: the hurricane, the quarantine, the Zoo’s director Belle Benchley, the approximate route. They gave her nothing about what happened on the road. That emptiness was the project.
a stack of yellowed news clippings, a very old map and a blank whiteboard [that] turned into this calculated mess, and only then I finally began to write [paraphrased from audio]
The invented crises were not random. She built each one from the geography the real journey had to cross. The flash flood in Texas, for instance, exists in the novel because it forced a moment of moral consequence: a chance for the photographer Red to act at great personal cost.
I mean, how could they not find themselves in peril crossing the Shenandoah Mountains? It had to happen. And it was a big sacrifice. She saved them all.
Red, the female photographer who joins the journey, drew on Rutledge’s own career. Rutledge had worked as a travel writer and photographer and grew up with Life magazines in the house. But Red’s purpose in the story was structural as much as personal: a woman on a 1938 road trip was, by the standards of the time, already a scandal, which made her the right vessel for the novel’s argument about women’s freedom.
I knew, for balance, I needed a woman on the road somehow with them, a ‘scandalous’ character who would embody the social situation for women in 1938.
Once the story was down, revision became the phase she valued most. Her copy-editing background let her approach the publisher’s request to cut 10,000 words from a 110,000-word manuscript without panic. She worked through it methodically and felt she lost nothing of substance.
a first draft just gets the story down, but the second draft is more fun, as you start painting with words
The personal thread
Texas voices and a life on the roadWoody’s narrator voice came from somewhere specific in Rutledge’s own memory. The Texas Panhandle inflection she needed was already inside her: she grew up in Texas, and those rhythms were available the moment she decided where Woody was from. His name and age were wordplay, but his voice was autobiography.
Perhaps deciding to make him a Texas Panhandle boy helped too, since I have those voices in my head, being a native Texan.
The pleasure she describes in making the novel was not incidental to the project. It was the standard she held the work to. After more than 25 years as a freelance journalist and travel writer, she came to fiction with a clear account of what the form could give her that journalism could not.
There is nothing more joyful than creating a world I can live in for a while and then share with others.
On craft choices
The velvet punch as a methodRutledge’s description of her own style points to a deliberate tonal strategy that runs across all her novels. She invokes Robert Frost not as a general inspiration but as a technical specification: delight as the entry point, wisdom as the destination. The word she reaches for to describe the delivery is “lightly.”
I’m told my style is ‘humorously serious.’ I like that. Robert Frost nailed what a good piece of writing should do, saying it ‘begins in delight and ends in wisdom.’ A good story, the kind that stays with you and gives you food for thought, packs a velvet punch — so it must have some gravitas to it, but it should be delivered lightly and with a dash of joy. That’s what I’m aiming for in all my novels, the past ones and the ones still to come. [paraphrased from audio]
The Author’s Note at the end of the novel is not a formality. Rutledge directed readers to it by name in her own discussion materials, treating it as a second argument running alongside the story: an account of how real conservation work has changed since 1938, when a zoo was still primarily a display case for captive animals.
I tell why I wrote it, how I uncovered the true story and especially about how/why today’s best zoos have turned into conservation organizations.
The note lands the book’s environmental argument on factual ground, so the novel’s emotion and its nonfiction claims arrive at the reader together.
What she wants us to sit with
Why the old man writes it downThe moral inventory Rutledge built into the novel is wider than the road trip. She named each of its serious subjects in her own discussion materials: the Dust Bowl, the Sixth Extinction crisis, racial injustice across the Jim Crow South, the treatment of women in 1938, and the ethics of keeping animals in captivity. She does not want readers to set those subjects down when the journey ends.
I tell why I wrote it, how I uncovered the true story and especially about how/why today’s best zoos have turned into conservation organizations.
She describes her novels collectively as works that take serious subjects and deliver them playfully, aiming to leave readers not burdened but enlarged. That ambition has a name for her.
serious topics written in a playful manner, that hopefully make readers celebrate life
The question Rutledge says is her favorite theme in the book is not the extinction crisis or the road trip itself. It is why old Woody writes the memoir at all, why the act of putting a story into words at the age of 105 is the story’s real subject. She framed that question for herself long before she answered it for readers.
There is nothing more joyful than creating a world I can live in for a while and then share with others.