Patrice Gopo is the author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence. She lives with her family in North Carolina, where she enjoys walks just after dawn and thinks a perfect day ends with ice cream. Please visit patricegopo.com to learn more.

Terra Trevor is the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir. A professional writer with forty years of experience, she is a contributor to fifteen books and is the author of numerous essays and articles. Her first memoir is Pushing Up the Sky: A Mother’s Story.

Two UNP authors, two essayists, two books on different journeys but walking the same path.

In Autumn Song Patrice Gopo invites readers into her personal stories of encountering absences, examining the details as one might turn around a prism, looking for the splinters of color each angle reveals. In We Who Walk the Seven Ways, Terra Trevor (Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) sought healing and found belonging. After a difficult loss, Native women elders embraced and guided her over three decades, lifting her from grief and showing her how to age from youth into beauty.

Below, Patrice Gopo joins Terra Trevor to discuss everything from tea parties to adult friendships to life as an essayist.

Interview Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability and clarity.

Patrice Gopo: Terra, it is truly a delight for us to do this today. I found your book one day while I was searching through the University of Nebraska Press’ recent books. I saw yours and thought, ‘Oh, I love the cover of this book,’ and when I saw the topics of healing and belonging, I felt so drawn to it.

Terra Trevor: Oh, I was so glad you reached out to me. I immediately, of course, went to your book, and I was so drawn in, that I read it by the very first day. I couldn’t put it down. I donated my time. I said, ‘This is what I’m doing now. I’m reading this book,’ and it was just wonderful.

PG: We’re doing this interview candidly, so let’s just start here. I read your book as a memoir in essays. Do you feel like that, or would you describe it differently?

TT: Very accurate. In my first draft, I set out to write this entire book in essay form, but all essays would bridge together and tell the complete story. So, my first draft was completely in essay, and then in later drafts, working with my editor—It was just very clear. This was a memoir that needed to be bookended between three decades—all thirty years. So that’s how it all happened.

PG: I did feel that as I was reading the book, each section was its own contained section, so I could put it down. At the same time, I was still called to the overarching story that was unfolding. I love what you said about it being across three decades. I thought that was quite remarkable because, while reading, I felt like I had a sense of this narrator experiencing change and growth across the book.

PG: How do you see yourself as having changed from the start of the book to the end?

TT: I started in my mid-thirties when I met these women—my Native friends. I didn’t know them that well, I knew them casually through a writing class, and we’d always been together at Native communities, so I knew them, but in a more formal setting. I was in my mid-thirties, and they were all in their seventies and eighties. Some of the characters, of course, I didn’t keep in the book because they were in their eighties, and so they weren’t around for that many years. So, I picked the youngest ones that had been in my life for a very, very long time. At the end of the book, I’m nearing seventy and I’m walking into my elderhood. I’m using the lessons that they passed on to me for those years. It was quite a shock. It was like, ‘Wait, I’m not the youngest anymore!’

PG: Absolutely, that was something I appreciated about your book—that sense of intergenerational friendship and seeing how you move from youth into this space that embodies the friendships that were at the beginning. You’re taking on their role.

TT: Now I feel like I’m in the youth of my elder years, I’m just beginning that.

PG: That’s lovely. That’s really lovely.

TT: In Autumn Song, I felt as though I was reading your memoir, even though it was a collection of essays, and that drew me in. Each essay told a complete story. I know you set out to write it in essay form, but did you consider a memoir at any point?

PG: That’s a good question because I agree with you. When I look at the arc of Autumn Song, there is a story that’s unfolding. But it tends to be more thematic around this theme of absence. So, I don’t think I ever thought of it as being a traditional memoir. I had these essays that I was working on—these stories I wanted to tell—and I felt they belonged together, but I wasn’t clear from the beginning how. It was only in the process of delving into and understanding the themes in each essay that I started to see that they were revolving around this larger theme of absence. So, in having highlighted that theme, it might feel more like a memoir, but I know for myself, that I wrote it as a traditional essay collection with the intent that each could stand alone even if together, they tell a larger story.

TT: In Autumn Song I love your introduction—how you explain this concept, so I knew going into it. Can you talk more about that? Because I thought that was different, and I liked it a lot.

PG: I appreciate that! Yes, once I realized that there was this larger theme that was happening—for me, it felt important to highlight that and draw attention to that. I felt the theme of absence had the potential to be somewhat subtle, so if I explained why I made some of the decisions I made, I felt it would enrich the reading experience. Even as you are saying that, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, okay, so it worked!’

TT: Yes, very much so.

PG: One thing we share across our books is thinking about ideas of home and place. When you think about the word ‘home,’ what comes to mind? Has that definition shifted across the experiences that you share in your book?

TT: For me, home is a place I carry within. Every place that I’ve ever lived. It shapes me, and it serves as an elder and friend. In We Who Walk the Seven Ways, I write about Luke’s home by the river in New Mexico as a home I carry with them. The interesting thing about We Who Walk the Seven Ways is that it’s set in the forty-three years that I lived in Santa Barbara on Chumash Land. But probably a year before the book was published, after the pandemic, I moved. After more than four decades, I moved away. It wasn’t planned. My husband decided to retire earlier, and our lives changed so much with the pandemic. We decided we wanted to be closer to our daughter and our son-in-law and our grandchildren. So, we ended up moving almost 300 miles north. We’re still on the California coast but in a completely different location. So, when I was working on the final draft right before publication, that made it even more memoir form for me, because it was no longer my current life. I was looking back.

PG: There are multiple things in here that I’m resonating with. I love the idea of carrying home within you because oftentimes in our society, in our culture, home gets labeled as this one particular place, that it needs to be just one spot. Yet what you say reminds us that home can be expansive.

PG: I’m interested in this idea of leaving a place you had been for so long. A place that is your book, and what it means when we are no longer in the place we had been writing about. Would you want to share a little bit more about how that feels?

TT: I’m still processing, and that is going to be the subject of my next book, which I hope to write in essay form. But who knows with me! As an essayist, I always set out to write essays. But then, my two books are both memoirs. So, I’m hoping to do the essay collection, and my theme would be ‘change.’ To your question—I’m still living it. We Who Walk the Seven Ways took me many years to write when, finally, I realized I couldn’t complete it because I hadn’t finished living the story. That might turn out to be what’s happening again. But, at my age, I don’t have a whole lot of time, so I better get going on it! It’s easy to get going on the writing, but I need to get going on the living.

PG: I remember a friend telling me one time when I was getting ready for a trip—she said to me, ‘You know there’ll be time for the writing, but right now is the time for the living.’ It just occurred to me that, in this creative process, the space for living matters.

TT: I remember a lot of times writing this book that I just would be focusing, focusing, focusing on writing because that’s how I am. Once it’s something and I can feel the project coming together, I’m driven. I was sitting with a group of women we were laughing, and talking, I said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’m not living. I’m just writing about living.’

PG: Yeah, that is an interesting moment. To recognize in our process that we could be so focused on the actual tangible getting the words out that we’re not necessarily looking up to see what is happening in our lives.

PG: I wonder if we might think about some topics of belonging and community because that’s another theme that shows up quite a bit across our work. One aspect that I love about your book, as I mentioned earlier, is the power of friendships with other women, particularly women who are older than you. Deep friendship is something that many people long to experience. I’m curious, Terra, do you have any thoughts about how we can build spaces of belonging for others, even as we may be searching for spaces of belonging for ourselves?

TT: I very much do. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts about it, too. I’m in that space all over again. I left my community. Then, during the pandemic, it’s a miracle I made any friends at all. One friend I made when I was trying to put my home together; I asked someone a question in a fabric store because I couldn’t find what I wanted, and we became friends. I’m going to read from my book and use this as my map to answer your question because I have been using it as my map since I moved:

To begin making new friends, I made it a priority to put myself in a wider range of situations and places where I would have an opportunity to meet a variety of women.

   At first I went in search of women my age, someone who might mirror my own image back to me, to find someone similar to me. And then I remembered how long ago I’d stepped away from my comfort zone and allowed myself to be drawn to women whom I perceived to be different, women who might have intimidated me in a previous time of my life. It brought me into a community of elder women who fed my soul.

   They embraced me and guided me through the cycles of my life, from motherhood toward elderhood. Over three decades these women lifted me from grief, instructed me in living, taught me how to find richness in living every stage of my life, and showed me how to age from youth into beauty. I felt beautiful. The women I had grown to love all had grandmother faces and flying clouds of white hair. They grew smaller as they aged, wrinkling into buttery skin. But I only saw how beautiful they were and how they were at home in their bodies in a way I was becoming more familiar with.

   To find new friendships, I began looking for ways to connect with others and let go of my old habit of viewing differences as an obstacle. Slowly, my circle of friends expanded and included women who were younger than me and a few who were older, all with qualities I admired and hoped to gain.

We Who Walk the Seven Ways, Chapter 45

TT: and I’m in the process of that right now, and I’m feeling like my readers are becoming part of this circle when I visit book clubs—we’re all brought into the community.

PG: That’s beautiful and quite interesting that you find yourself in this moment again. There’s this misconception that we arrive and figure it all out. When actually, life can change and shift, and we find ourselves drawing on the lessons from our past. Myself, when I think about this question, I feel as though the answer has changed and shifted. One of the things that I found, particularly in my thirties, I’m in my forties now, was this idea of: ‘What does it mean to be a friend to myself?’ It felt as though, to form friendships of substance with others, there was a journey of recognizing the beauty of my friendship with myself too. When I look back into my thirties, maybe even before that, a lot of how I entered friendship was much more focused on—I don’t know, I like to think I’m a reformed people pleaser—

TT: I think I can identify.

PG: Yeah so, I needed to address some of those things to be more expansive and welcoming and embracing of new relationships. So, that’s been a growth area for me when I think about friendship. So, regarding the question, I think having the courage and ability to embrace ourselves as friends empowers others to do that for their own lives, which makes us all better people.

TT: I think so. And you, reaching out to me through our books is exactly another extension of that—it brings it all together.

PG: Thank you for saying that. I’m going to just share this little piece from an essay that I have written:

I used to host tea parties. A gathering in spring. Another in autumn. My invitations brought together neighbors and friends, older and younger, black and white. As the Knock Out roses began to flower or the first falling leaves drifted to the ground, I decorated a table with assorted teacups and a sugar bowl. For my menu, I offered far more than tea. Curried chicken salad sandwiches dotted with raisins. Cucumber sandwiches paired with cream cheese. Oven-fresh scones served with strawberry jam and freshly whipped cream.

   The food was rich. The conversation filling. My guests looked forward to the next gathering and then the one after that. I hosted tea parties until I became the woman who used to host tea parties, my teacups dusty from lack of use.

Autumn Song, “More than Tea”

PG: I shared that part because for me it highlighted how I’ve changed. There was a time when I was very intent on gathering people. My internal journey has changed how I go about wanting to gather people together. That’s just something I think about, ‘How do we make room for those changes in ourselves, too?’

TT: I love that chapter. That essay. I feel like I am at your tea party. I’m one of your neighbors. I’m walking over. I’m there. I can feel myself walking home. I read it as there are seasons of your life where you just can’t host tea parties so much, but then you will again, and they will change, and different people will sit at your table.

PG: Yes, yes, exactly. It makes me think in these larger questions of community and belonging, that what matters is that we, as individuals, do not stay the same. And so how we move through the world amongst others is going to shift over time, too.

TT: Very much so.

PG: That makes me think about how the ways our beliefs can shift in huge ways over time, but also in subtle ways. Could you talk about experiences with changing beliefs that you might have felt across We Who Walk the Seven Ways?

TT: When we sat down to write our questions to figure out what we were going to talk about during the joint interview—everything came to me immediately. I knew what I was going to talk about, but this is the one question that I’m pondering still. I think our beliefs shift and change—they make up our reality. They do need to change so that our reality can change. The way I handle awkward situations about race has shifted. I pretty much always struggle with how to walk in two worlds: Native and white. And I’ve never been gracious when white people living within the confines of white enclaves with white mindsets could make insensitive comments, and assumptions were put on me. While writing We Who Walk the Seven Ways, I began to wonder if I could be a more effective teacher if I were to become more gracious, though, after reading Autumn Song, “A Brief Statement on Grace” on page 77, your essay, I’m realizing I’ve got to stand my ground. Hopefully, I can do it kindly. But I can’t be gracious and allow them to agree. And I was struggling with that while I wrote the book because some of my readers were like, ‘You’re just being too hard, you’re drawing too hard of a line here, you know. Can’t you? Can’t you just soften it?’ I have a conversation with my friend Bill in the book about this and it’s something I—after reading Autumn Song and your essay, I was like, ‘no, no, I’m standing more ground,’ because we won’t help people unless we bring the truth.

PG: Yes, that we bring the truth of our experience.

TT: I’d love it if you could talk more about it because I’m learning from this.

PG: I resonated with what you just shared because I think there can often be this caution, this desire to not be harsh with people. Sometimes I feel as though kindness and truth are pitted against each other; you can either be kind or you can offer truth. For me, this journey that continues to unfold is recognizing that truth is often a kindness offered to people, and offered to ourselves, too. It’s a way of being kind to ourselves. I was talking earlier about being a people pleaser. In my forties, I see less of that, but it’s still there because it’s a way that I’ve been conditioned to function in the world. This idea of speaking truth can feel scary at times. One of the main ways my beliefs have shifted through writing this collection is believing in the value and importance of speaking the truth of one’s lived experience rather than trying to soften it or make it kinder, so others find it easier to hear and take in.

TT: Because they can’t know us if we don’t do that.

PG: Right. There’s just such beauty about sharing lived experiences. We Who Walk the Seven Ways felt like an invitation to journey through your life with you, and to hear the stories that you wanted to share. That, to me, is very powerful, and a reflection of truth being brought to the world.

TT: Well, when I read Autumn Song, I felt that you were part of the journey, but I just hadn’t met you yet. I feel similarly to what you’re saying.

PG: There were so many moments that called to me when I read We Who Walk the Seven Ways I thought ‘Our lives are so different,’ yet there is this sense of journey that you highlight so beautifully in the book that just calls to us. In it, I am reminded that even as we journey through our lives, others are journeying and, at times, we get an opportunity to walk alongside each other.

TT: You brought up a really important point. Our lives are so different, but it brought us on the same path. I’m learning to look for similarities. Differences are so easy to find, so I’m always looking for similarities, and I’m beginning to find them in amazing places, in ways I never imagined I would.

PG: You’re right. One thing I felt challenged over the years to do when thinking about differences is to ask: ‘Why do those differences exist? What is giving rise to them?’ Being curious about them has been helpful for me in this journey of sharing stories and knowing that stories can offer truth in the world as well.

TT When I begin to make new friends. I always look for similarities. Then our differences are going to come out and we’re so much more accepting of each other’s differences. We can learn from each other’s point of view because we’ve already built this foundation of trust.

PG: Right, building foundations of trust is important, because when we can find connections with other people, it makes us more able to address injustices that might exist and give rise to differences. It makes people more open. That, to me, is the beautiful work of pursuing justice in the world.

PG: Well, I wonder if we should wrap up our conversation with some thoughts about the writing life since we’re both writers here. I’d love for us to spend a couple of moments just thinking about essays and what draws us to the essay form.

TT: What do you think?

PG: What draws me to the essay form feels a little silly, but I like shorter things. I like to write shorter. And—

TT: Oh, yes, oh, yes.

PG: —I’ve been asked on multiple occasions, ‘Why not a memoir?’ and I have explained that I’m very much drawn to shorter forms. I also write picture books, too. I just don’t know if I can sustain a full-length book in one narrative. The other thing with the essay that I love is that there is a lot of opportunity to be thinking on the page. I feel as though essays are a vehicle for thinking, the making sense of the world. Something I love about writing is the sense of curiosity and exploration, and trying to understand what might be happening, and what might be going on.

TT: Yes, as an essayist, I’m just very, very drawn to it. Also, as a mom and now grandmother, I write within the nooks and crannies of my life. I can imagine you must do the same.

PG: That is so true, essays fit well into those small spaces.

TT: So often, when I write an essay, I feel ‘this can be a bigger book,’ and a good example is, I was invited to write a chapter for Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe—this was back in 2010—and when I got done finishing my chapter for this anthology, I said, ‘You know I’ve got a bigger story to tell,’ and that story took me eleven years, that’s We Who Walk the Seven Ways. With an essay, you don’t know what the future is going to bring with it.

PG: That’s a great point. An essay can become other things, it doesn’t need to just stay in that form, it often offers potential. I have an essay in my first essay collection that I actually rewrote, and it became my first picture book. That’s still a short form, but it is a different form.

TT: How many years of essays is Autumn Song?

PG: Oh, wow! That’s a good question, Terra. Probably seven or eight, maybe nine years. There are some essays where my first child is not even born yet, up until she’s a child no longer.

TT: I’m thinking when you wrote these essays you were writing with faith. Each essay until it became a book or otherwise. You could have never imagined where they would go.

PG: This is very true. Particularly for the essays that I didn’t write during the pandemic. There were a few that I wrote during the pandemic, and by that point, I did have a sense that I was writing a collection, but the essays that came prior, especially the earliest ones, you are right. I had no sense that this was going to become a collected work. I was just writing the story and experience at that point.

TT: So, us sitting down. Rough draft form. We don’t know what we’re going to write about. We begin writing an essay. It takes shape. It begins to have themes. That’s part of our faith and belief.

PG: Yes, I agree that we continue to be present to what is happening even though we’re uncertain about what it will become. I hadn’t thought about it that way. To be a writer (maybe not always for all writers, but it sounds like for the writers we are), there is a lot of belief and faith that is involved in the process of creating. Because it’s not clear yet what is happening, what’s going to happen.

TT: That leads me to my next question. As a memoirist, I’m constantly asked, is writing about your life at this depth cathartic? And I would have to say mostly no, it’s torture. For me, I see writing as a spiritual experience, because I don’t know where it’s going to take me. How do you feel?

PG: That’s a great question to think about. And it’s interesting, is it cathartic? I also wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s cathartic. For me…I have questions about so many things in life, whether in my personal life or about the world, and writing essays helps me think through those questions in ways that honor what I’m wondering about. So, for me, essays are a gift to my curiosity.

TT: thank you for this because this is going to help me very much. Going forward when I’m stuck, I’ll be curious here on the page.

PG: Yes, I certainly write about difficult situations, but what writing does is give me a space to go past the first layer of what is happening. It allows me to go deeper to find new layers and to search for a different angle or understanding. I don’t necessarily find answers to all of these things I might be curious about. But, oftentimes, I feel that the journey is enough, at least, for now.

TT: Yes, just asking the question, even if it could take years to get an answer.

PG: Absolutely, I think some things in life don’t have answers. In We Who Walk the Seven Ways, you write about some moments of very profound grief. I know for myself, as I was reading some of what you shared, I was crying. I don’t know that there are answers there. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t write and seek to find them.

TT: Well, because when we read, I find that I connect so much with the different stories that are shared. As a writer, that’s what I hope to give to readers.

PG: Absolutely. Terra this has been so beautiful. I’ve loved this interaction. Is there a final thought that you want to share?

TT: I’m enjoying this very much. I know we could just talk on and on. I wish we could. Just walk off now and go have tea!

PG: Go have some tea, right, with freshly baked scones! That would be lovely. I’m so grateful for this time in this space for us to just consider some of these ideas, I feel as though I, as a person, and my writing life are both just richer because of our time of connection here.

Terra Trevor: I feel that way, too. Thank you.

Patrice Gopo: Thank you so much. Thank you.

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Patrice Gopo will be at AWP 2024 in February. On Feb 9, from 1pm-1:30pm, she will be signing copies of Autumn Song. We can’t wait to see you there!