Sydney Lea is a novelist, naturalist, editor, poet, and former professor. He was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015 and a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Among other honors, Lea was awarded Vermont’s highest artistic distinction, The Governors Award, in 2021, and was named a Hero of Conservation by Field & Stream magazine in 2012. He was the founding editor of the New England Review and taught at Dartmouth College, Middlebury College, Wesleyan University, Yale University, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, and Northern Woodlands. His second novel, Now Look, was published in 2024 by Down East Books. He is a past member of the board of directors for Northern Woodlands.
Why do you write?
I have nothing brighter to say than that it’s what I do. I have an irresistible inclination to the verbal, have had it since I was a toddler, and I’ve found no real substitute. Speech and written utterance are very much related for me as a poet.
What are you writing these days? What do you hope to write in the future?
I continue to write poems and have a new and selected collection due next year. I am also completing my eighth book of personal essays, virtually each with at least some “naturalist” component. Those will be books 28 and 29. I just published my second novel, Now Look. I think that’s my lifetime fiction allowance, but I intend to keep going in the other two genres as I have for five decades. I’m 82, but no one seems able to stop me.
If your adolescent self could comment on the fact that you’re a naturalist, author, and celebrated poet, what would he say?
“In your dreams ... ” When I was a typical witless American male adolescent – concerned above all to find romance, contraband beer, and a way to keep playing hockey – no one, including me, would have imagined a future for me as a writer, particularly of poems. I didn’t publish my first book until I was 39, having discovered that poetry, not scholarship, was my real vocation.
What is your writing process?
Before composing anything, I like to wander around outdoors, preferably off-trail, not straining to come up with an “idea” for a poem or essay but believing one will arrive unsummoned ... if I let it. (A will to write can be a real impediment.) Then I come back and simply start, never quite knowing where my writing is going until I have a draft. Recently, for instance, the wind blowing my scent away from her or him, I watched a fox contemplating a weather-bleached oriole’s nest hanging from the lowest limb of a tree. I came home and simply started to record that striking scene, and before I knew it, I’d been led to a memory of a great uncle, who had taught me to identify that nest when I was 8 years old.
You were a professor for more than three decades. What advice did you give most often to student writers?
Read read read. Write write write. Though there is a sentimental notion (strangely rife among academics) that a “real” poet walks out one day, lightning flashes, and she’s Emily Dickinson. I’ve never met such a person. I liken writing, say, to Michael Jordan’s learning basketball. Surely there were athletes of equal ability, but he was the one first to practice and last to leave. The writing students I had who went on to careers had native talent, to be sure, but they were the ones who persisted. You may not end up a Dickinson or a Jordan, but with persistence you will improve a lot. I never felt I could “teach” writing in the here’s-how-you-do-it sense; I was mostly a sympathetic advisor who could help students understand what a given piece of writing, so to speak, wanted to be.
How did you end up in Vermont?
My first college teaching job was at Dartmouth College – where, at the time, creative publishing was not regarded as “real” publishing, so I didn’t get tenure. My next job was at Vermont’s Middlebury College. Given a four-generational connection to a remote part of Maine, where my parents had a camp and where the stories of male and female elders had a profound effect on me as a writer, I had always wanted to be in northern New England ... and here I have stayed for 57 years, slightly more than half on this side of the Connecticut River.
What’s your favorite forest? Why?
Oh, that is a hard question. I love them all, provided they’re part of what we loosely call The Great North Woods. I have spent hugely gratifying time hunting, fishing, and hiking in Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Washington, and more, but I’ve always wanted to live right here. Among other things, I like the variety of trees in the Northeast, each species carrying for me an association with long-gone New Englanders whom I loved. Of course, they all did other things as well, but Don Chambers, say, cut popple for excelsior, George MacArthur cut cedar for railroad ties, his nephew Creston (for whom my firstborn is named) cut hop hornbeam for stretcher handles. The women I knew from that old era worked every bit as hard as the men – tending truck gardens, canning vegetables, corning venison, salting fish, hewing softwood for kindling, literally keeping the home fires burning, picking up potatoes in cold autumn fields, and so on. I have fed on those men’s and women’s narratives all my life.
What’s the best little-known nature book you’ve read?
Deep Enough for Ivorybills by the late James Kilgo. The book is many things, but all its parts add up to a portrait of the fauna, flora, and history of South Carolina’s Peedee Swamp, about which his knowledge is impressive; and the style in which he offers it is stunningly, but unaffectedly, lyrical.
In your opinion, what’s the most fascinating species in New England?
The coyote for its astounding cleverness and adaptability, its sheer capacity to survive, to eat whatever keeps it going, and to evade those who think they can “control” its population.
What’s your favorite way to enjoy the forest?
Well, I used to flat love to hunt the New England woods, especially for ruffed grouse, and especially with my athletic, savvy pointers. Being left handed, I can’t shoot anymore. The shotgun’s recoil would whack my pacemaker. But I can still get out with the dogs and watch them work, which was always my chief delight; I just don’t pull any triggers. And I equally like hiking, especially with my wife (who accommodates my stately pace) for its own sake. I don’t charge up a White or Green Mountain anymore, but I’m lucky enough to live in a place that’s girded by woods and devoid of motor traffic. I can literally step outside and be in the forest in less than a minute.