Camp Meeker writer Manjula Martin reflects on living in the age of wildfire in ‘The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History’

Manjula Martin lives in a small white cottage nestled into a sylvan half-acre among the redwoods at the end of a steep, narrow road. A hillside garden behind the vintage two-bedroom house overflows in spring and summer with flowers and fruit trees she planted herself.

When she and her husband, Max Bell Alper, landed this Camp Meeker property in 2017 after being squeezed out of San Francisco, they were thrilled to finally become homeowners. They had achieved what seemed almost impossible for a writer and a community organizer and activist in one of the least-affordable housing markets in the country.

But something happened on the way to their happily ever after.

Martin suffered a health crisis and Sonoma County caught on fire.

The Tubbs Fire seethed through north Santa Rosa the night of their housewarming party, a portent that natural disasters made worse by climate change were no longer an abstract in the future or a fluke.

More than five years later, living with the threat of fire in this region has now become a way of life. What is now being called The Pyrocene, or age of fire, has arrived — with massive fires igniting more frequently and more intensively across California, the West and around the globe, fueled by climate change, human mistake or design and changes in land use and management.

It was a confluence of internal and external events that would eventually change Martin’s perspective on many things, including her own health, the health of the planet and her place within a natural world reacting and adapting to climate change.

She reflects on one pivotal year — a year when wildfire met COVID and her own struggles with intractable chronic pain — in a new memoir “The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History.”

In luminous prose Martin weaves science, natural history and the unfolding events of 2020’s devastating fire season across the West with her own parallel story of the horrible aftermath of a botched IUD removal that left part of the device in her body. An occurrence that has caused her internal damage and excruciating pain, along with a cascade of unresolved medical issues.

As she writes: “It was a season of death in a year of death in a culture bent on ignoring death, within a national body politic that was consumed with the gobbling up of itself by a death cult called oil, capitalism and empire.”

This wasn’t the book she intended to write.

Martin was knee deep in her first novel when her agent suggested she shift gears and write about that brutal year — the wildfires that threatened her community and forced her to evacuate, the year in which, on Sept. 9, dawn never broke through the smoke and the day remained in eerie sepia-toned twilight.

She could sell that book immediately she was assured. And she did, with an advance generous enough to allow her the time to research everything from the history of wildfire and wildland management beginning with Native peoples, to wind, California geology, PG&E practices and a medical system often indifferent to women’s pain, to name just a few of the threads of a finespun narrative that is both sweeping and highly personal.

“It was traumatic. Experiencing the events of 2020 and immediately signing up to write about the events of 2020 for three years afterwards was kind of brutal,” she said, chuckling at the irony. “There were times when I thought, ‘Why did I do this?’ But I think it was worth it. There is a reason why 2020 looms so large in people’s imaginations. It’s because it was a really powerful moment, a moment where a lot of this stuff connected.”

Pantheon, a division of Penguin Random House, will release the book Tuesday but it already is generating buzz. The New York Times singled it out as one of 18 new books to watch for in January. Her blurbs are impressive.

“Martin comes in with a one-two punch: Her book is as lyrical as a prose poem but as smartly reported as the best journalism. Her account of living a year in the smoldering, angry, inflamed Northern California woods will thrill, haunt, and ultimately charm you,” wrote Susan Orlean, whose narrative nonfiction includes “The Library Book” and “The Orchid Thief.”

Martin will share her insights and revelations during author conversations and talks Thursday at Russian River Books and Letters in Guerneville and Friday at Copperfield’s Books in Santa Rosa.

Child of the redwoods

It’s a damp day in the woods and Martin, 47, wearing warm tights, is curled into a chair in her compact living room.

There is an Eames chair in the corner rescued and restored from a grandfather’s storage locker and a wall of old family photos behind the sofa.

Passing through a Narnia-like closet of hanging coats, you emerge into her writing nook, which is carved out of a laundry room where paper sheets on the wall bear the outlines of another novel in progress.

An old school turntable and plank wood shelving filled with neatly arranged vinyl records give the place a cool 1970s throwback vibe.

All of it, including the redwoods and the outside garden she and Alper carved out of massive brambles, ivy and wild blackberries is comforting and familiar.

She was born of hippie parents in the redwood forest of Bonny Doon and grew up in nearby Santa Cruz.

Her mother taught English at UC Santa Cruz, and her father, Orin Martin, is a well-known horticulturist who oversees the university’s renowned farm and garden. The wooded campus was an extended playground for Martin and her brother.

As a child she was drawn to “that amazing stillness” in the forest.

“It’s not silence. It’s stillness. And just that smell and the coolness,” she explained. “Those are sense memories I have from childhood.”

So it was natural that after a peripatetic youth spent knocking around Europe and living in San Francisco, Portland and New York (where distant cousin Sean Strub, an HIV/AIDS activist, enlisted her to be a reporter and editor for his POZ magazine), she eventually felt homesick and headed back home to California.

After finishing her degree in interdisciplinary arts such as writing, media studies and film criticism at Mills College, she made a modest living as a writer and editor, and had some success with a provocative blog called, “Who Pays Writers.” It sparked conversations about the poor remuneration for writing work and what to do about it.

That work became an anthology published by Simon & Schuster called “Scratch: Writers, Money and the Art of Making a Living.”

“I was frustrated with the working conditions of freelancers. I started this funny project. I just said (to fellow writers), ‘Tell me how much a publication paid you for a piece and I will publish it anonymously on the internet for you to have some salary transparency. It took off in a way I hadn’t expected.”

The book was a collection of essays by writers, generally, about the business of writing or the work of being a writer. Big-name writers like Jonathan Franzen, Nick Hornby and Cheryl Strayed weighed in.

Martin also collaborated several years ago on a book with her father, “Fruit Trees for Every Garden,” which received The American Horticultural Society Book Award.

Her little half-acre is filled with fruit trees, the only food she grows, preferring to give over her land to plants that give back in beauty, which she maintains is enough.

“My dad has some lovely philosophies about that. Flowers are a really important part of any garden because they attract pollinators, and without flowers we wouldn’t have any food,” she said on a walk through the winter-denuded space that, in a few months, will come alive with columbine, peonies and roses.

Working the garden, she said, was and is a healing experience, despite doctors’ failures to pinpoint or treat the piercing pain that persisted in her body even after she underwent a hysterectomy.

A personal story

Writing “The Last Fire Season” and including her own struggles was deeply personal and revelatory.

“One of the reasons I wanted to include that experience in the book is that people don’t talk about chronic pain and specifically women’s pain. I was really lucky to land with a publisher and an editor who got it from the beginning,” she said of Denise Oswald, editorial director of Pantheon.

It was the year of the LNU Lightning Complex Fires that burned through Sonoma, Napa, Lake, Solano and Yolo counties from August to October. The Walbridge Fire destroyed more than 150 homes across the hilly backwoods of western Sonoma County. Martin’s beloved Santa Cruz Mountains also caught fire, making that a less than ideal place to evacuate. At one point they wound up at a cabin near Yosemite.

But Martin’s memoir is much deeper than a gripping “what happened when” narrative.

She talked with experts and stakeholders from many fields and quarters. They included fire scientists and Native Americans, who had long and effectively managed the landscape ecology through controlled burns until Spanish missionaries and later Mexican officials cracked down on the practice and began decimating Native populations.

It was outlawed with the Indian Indenture Act of 1850. That, along with conservation efforts, clear cutting and human encroachment among other factors, led to the buildup of a lot of natural kindling as global temperatures inched up, Martin observes.

Martin comes around to a certain acquiescence, an understanding that amid climate change denial fire is now a way of life and the challenge is in many ways to learn to adapt, to understand we are part of the ecology.

“It’s not a disaster narrative or hard-reporting journalism. That’s not what I’m doing. I guess I’m coming back to the idea of living with fire. Fire and, by extension, the ecosystems that are adapted to fire,” Martin said. “Fire is a part of this planet. It’s a part of human life and it’s been a tool for humans in their relationship with the natural world, and it’s really important to incorporate fire into all kinds of human narratives.The same for climate change.”

Rather than flee the little cottage in the woods that she has come to love, Martin said she has chosen to take a stand for it in the ways she can.

She said she is part of an organized neighborhood group that clears the brush and limbs the trees. They also have plans for how to take care of each other and make sure everyone is notified and helped out in the event that fire reaches their neighborhood.

The recent rainy years have lulled some into forgetting that dry years and fire can follow.

And yet she finds some hope in taking a stand for the land. She calls it “active adaptation.”

“It’s not waiting to die. It’s definitely not hopelessness. For it’s living consciously. It’s happening, this moment of decline, and that’s all the more reason to try and effect change. It’s more reason to try to care for the environment in ways that it needs to be cared for and to care for other people as we experience this process together. That process of care is where the hope for the future is.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.