Four Questions on Farsickness is an interview series with creative writers for whom place is essential to their work. Each writer answers the same four questions—and featured here is creative nonfiction writer Zoë Bossiere, whose debut memoir, Cactus Country, is published by Abrams Press (May 2024).

CACTUS COUNTRY by Zoë Bossiere

1. Share a little about where you’re from. When you were growing up, what place—real or imagined—most fascinated you, and why?

I grew up way out in the Sonoran Desert of Tucson, Arizona. My family and I shared an Airstream trailer in a trailer park called Cactus Country. Growing up, I was most fascinated with the desert surrounding the park and took every opportunity to spend the day out there with my rag-tag group of friends—all of us boys. Out in the desert, I loved the way our often-bare feet kicked up dust with every step. I loved the smell of the creosote bushes and the gnarled ironwood trees that formed hollows for the secret forts we built with long ocotillo stalks and abandoned pieces of lumber. Out there, the boys and I became outlaws on the run, staking out a spot to spend the night. We became hoboes sharing a can of beans with a single spoon, waiting for the next slow train to come along. We became the desert animals, the howling packs of coyotes and screeching herds of javelina. In the desert, you could be anything or anyone and that’s what I loved about where I grew up most of all.

Sunset over Cactus Country in Tucson, Arizona

 

2. What travel has been a particular inspiration to your work?

Interestingly it was leaving Tucson for graduate school, living in other landscapes and seeing other parts of the country, that inspired me to write Cactus Country. Because it was only once I’d left that I began to see myself as being “from Tucson” and to understand the ways this region, this desert, the boys and men I’d grown up with, had shaped me as a person and informed the way I related to the world. Despite my strong desire to leave the desert and establish roots elsewhere, the more time I spent away, the more Tucson began to feel like a home I deeply missed. So my way of working through those conflicting feelings was to write them out on the page from the memories I had of how it felt to live in that place at that time.

the Sonoran Desert

 

3. Where do you “escape to” to recharge creativity?

As a new parent, I feel like the most honest answer to this question would be something like “the store without my toddler.” But I also recharge by reading a lot of contemporary nonfiction at home, especially those by queer and trans writers. I am particularly drawn to works that consider place, home, or family as an important feature of the story. Some books I’ve picked up or revisited recently include Camellia-Berry Grass’s Hall of Waters, Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child, Meredith Talusan’s Fairest: A Memoir, and KB Brookins’ upcoming nonfiction debut, Pretty: A Memoir (May 28, 2024).

4. Where would you most like to travel to next?

A lot of the travel I’ve done recently or have coming up is book-related, and right now I’m really enjoying the experience of meeting so many talented writers and enthusiastic readers from all across the country. Though I grew up in Tucson, I now live in Oregon with my family so I’m especially looking forward to spending more time in the Southwest this year, returning to a few of my old Arizona haunts and getting to know some of the other Southwestern states—what makes their deserts and people unique and beautiful—a little better along the way.

 

Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is a writer, editor, and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and co-editor of the anthologies The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins. Their debut, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir, is forthcoming from Abrams Press (May 21, 2024). Find more at zoebossiere.com.

[Author photo credit: Annalee Altavilla. Other photos credited to Marc and Susan Bossiere.]