Sam Keck Scott is a freelance writer of both fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Atlantic,Outside, Popular Science, Orion, Hakai, Longreads, Smithsonian Magazine, Terrain.org, Camas, and others. Sam has also been an author for the National Geographic Society, a Writing By Writers Fellow, the co-author of the children’s book, Sip the Straw, and the winner of the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction. In addition to writing, Sam is a wildlife biologist, conservationist, and avid adventurer. Though currently, he is on a different sort of adventure as a stay-at-home dad to his four-month-old daughter. Sam earned his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Southern New Hampshire University, where he was awarded the Lynn Safford Memorial Prize for best nonfiction thesis.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam about his work as a writer and a biologist. He talked about how the Mountainview MFA program changed his writing routine and process as it applied specifically to his short story, “Dreaming of Water with Tiger Salamanders,” which was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Sam also offered his thoughts on blending a science background with the drive to write.

Trina Peterson (TP): Given your science background, what brought you to writing and an MFA program?

Sam Scott (SS): I’ve always felt drawn to the place where science and creativity meet and the power that art has to make people want to learn about subjects they otherwise might not be interested in or turn away from because something might be painful to look at. Writing has always been my favorite way to try to express some of the urgency I feel about the state of our world and the work I get to do as a wildlife biologist. The trouble was, though I had long felt called to write, I liked the idea of writing a whole lot more than actually sitting down and doing it. I didn’t start writing in any serious way or trying to get published until I was 30, and was never planning on getting an MFA. But in 2019, I found out about the week-long Writing In the Wilderness workshop that Orion Magazine hosts in Arizona, and it sounded cool, so I signed up for it. Orion has long been one of my favorite publications because it so beautifully explores that intersection between science and art, among many others. Amy Irvine, a faculty member at SNHU’s Mountainview MFA program, was my workshop mentor there, and we hit it off. I didn’t have anyone holding me accountable as a writer at that time. She told me about Mountainview and said we could basically just keep doing what we had done for the past week but for two whole years. I left the workshop feeling so inspired and decided to apply.

TP: Did you continue your work as a biologist during the MFA? How did you balance the two?

SS: Yes, but only part-time. Luckily my field biology work is almost all based outdoors, so it was a nice balance to get away from the computer and get some fresh air while working. I was fortunate to be able to afford to work only part-time during the program.

TP: You began publishing before attending Mountainview. How did the program change your writing and the way you got it published?

SS: Before attending Mountainview, I didn’t have a writing discipline and hadn’t learned how to revise and polish yet. I was a bit allergic to the idea of revision [laughs]. I wanted to be able to simply write something and have it come out great on the first go, but as any writer is forced to learn, that’s just not how it works. Mountainview offered accountability, community, mentorship, and a push to keep producing pages no matter how much I didn’t want to. The addition of craft essays immersed me in reading and thinking about writing, and for the first time, writing was at the very center of my life in a way it had never been before. A few years before I applied to Mountainview, I had decided to buy an Airstream trailer and live on my friend’s farm, thinking it would be the perfect set-up for writing. But I quickly found the conditions weren’t the problem. I was the problem. I needed to do something like the MFA to get myself to stop all the distractions and cut through the noise.

As far as publishing goes, the program changed my success simply because being in the program made me a better writer, and most importantly, it made me write! When I graduated, I was able to publish a lot of the work I’d produced in the program and in much better-known publications than before. I felt like a lot was incubated during those two years, and I came out with something to show for it.

TP: Yes! You’ve been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for one of those pieces, “Dreaming of Water with Tiger Salamanders.” What kind of editing process did you go through to get it published in Longreads?

SS: I submitted that essay three different times at Mountainview. I used it for a peer workshop in its original form, which was very different from what it became. And the final version, which was part of my thesis, is exactly what I submitted to Longreads. By the time the editors at Longreads saw it, they had almost no notes, which was a cool experience. It’s much harder now that I’m no longer in the program and have to navigate these revisions on my own.

TP: Right, you had a crutch made of professional writing mentors and peers for two years, and then suddenly, you’re out on your own. That’s got to be scary. Have you had any writing support since you graduated?

SS: I miss that crutch so much! Luckily, I do pass work back and forth with one solid writing friend I met at the Orion workshop. She’s a fantastic editor and has helped me a lot. I call on her when I think I’ve got something where I want it, and then she rips it to pieces, and I think, Wow, how did I not see all that? There are things we can’t see in our own writing. We just can’t. She’s so sweet and supportive and compliments me everywhere she can so that when she eviscerates me, I can still stand on my own two feet [laughs] and not just throw the piece away.

TP: You’re fortunate to still have someone who will deliver those hard truths; your work shows evidence of that. I’m curious about how you seem to meld your science background with artful prose naturally. In “Dreaming of Water with Tiger Salamanders,” for instance, how much research went into that piece versus scientific information you already possessed?

SS: My first draft had no research at all, and I think the piece got a lot stronger when I wasn’t only relying on my anecdotal evidence as a biologist. For example, I knew there had been a lot of habitat loss in the place I was writing about, but when I researched it, I learned that the actual number was 95%, and that figure really jumps out at you. I also learned about salamander mythology and all the different things people thought about salamanders throughout time. I didn’t know any of that until I started looking, and once I learned more, I knew it would improve the piece. I can be lazy and resist research, thinking I just want to write what I already know, but I’ve found that if I’m willing to put in that extra work, it helps make my writing more trustworthy and dynamic.

TP: At the same time, your pieces don’t read like science texts. The narratives are accessible and alluring to a broad audience. Tell me about how you do that.

SS: Amy (Irvine) helped me to understand the importance of incorporating a personal aspect into my writing because everyone is looking for a way to connect to a story and not just to be depressed all the time by hard subjects like extinctions or climate change. You can still write about these things, but by interweaving a relatable human story into the work, you’re more likely to keep your reader engaged, who otherwise might have plenty of bad news fatigue as it is. And it isn’t all doom and gloom; one of my other main goals as a writer is to share the wonderment I feel for this world, and remind people that all is not lost, and apathy is the last thing that will save us. So whether it’s me in the story, or someone else, I always try to make a human connection and not just report from a distance.

TP: I noticed that component in all your work I read, and it comes off as effortless. For instance, one of your blog articles for National Geographic blends marine biology and the destruction of coral reefs with your personal history on a 108-year-old sailboat and subsequent voyage through pirate-inhabited seas to help save the reefs of Indonesia. It is truly fascinating. How did you land the job with National Geographic?

SS: In 2017, I was invited back to a boat I had helped to restore years earlier for a big sailing trip through Indonesia to do coral reef restoration and education projects with a group called the Biosphere Foundation. The woman who runs the Foundation proposed we try to get on the National Geographic Explorer’s blog to document the trip. We pitched them, and amazingly they accepted. I gained access to their blog, which allowed me to post articles straight to the platform throughout the trip. Unfortunately, Nat Geo got rid of the blog about a year later, and thousands of amazing articles from their explorers throughout the years vanished.

TP: That is very sad, and I’m glad I could access one of the Indonesian voyage articles on your website. One of my other favorites is your fiction piece, “Hourglass,”—winner of the 2015 John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction. Besides the smattering of marine biology in that piece, how much do you draw from experience in your fiction?

SS: The characters themselves are totally made up, but my brother had a friend in high school with a fatal heart condition, and everyone knew he was like a ticking time bomb and would eventually die from it, which he did when he was only 17. I think that’s where the seed of the story came from. I was young when it happened, but I remember my brother and sister really grieving, so it had a big impact on me. A few years later, my high school girlfriend’s uncle had a heart attack and bit his wife’s finger while he was dying. Those two unrelated things, neither of which affected me very closely, were dramatic enough that they snagged in my brain and ended up in my fiction years later.

TP: One final, crucial question for you, Sam. What should I be reading this semester?

SS: You should read Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller! It was my favorite book last year—an incredible blend of biography, natural history, philosophy, and even murder mystery. It’s nonfiction, and similarly to what we talked about before, she does an amazing job of weaving her story into the book. It’s a very cool example of what a book can be.

Sam Keck Scott: https://www.samkeckscott.net/publishedwork

Trina Peterson is a second-semester student in the Mountainview MFA program. She lives in Wisconsin with her family.