Author and ‘diehard biology wannabe’ Eileen Garvin weaves her love of nature and writing in newest novel Crow Talk

Like for many, pandemic-era closures were hard on author Eileen Garvin.

In particular, the Oregon-based, Spokane-born author yearned for fresh air, going stir crazy with the closure of national forests and state parks near her home of Hood River.

“I’ve always taken a lot of comfort and energy from being out in the woods,” she said. “And that is from growing up in Spokane and spending a lot of time at Lake Coeur d’Alene when I was a kid.”

So she returned to her family’s cabin on Lake Coeur d’Alene, under birdsong and against the tranquil waters of the 50-square-mile lake, she constructed the fictional June Lake of her latest novel, “Crow Talk,” in which protagonists make a similar pilgrimage to a childhood cabin on a lake under the looming mount Adams.

June Lake is a blend of her childhood memories in Idaho and her adult residence of Hood River.

“What if I created a place like that I loved as a child, and I put it at this place that I loved as an adult. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Mount Adams, but it’s really a beautiful location,” Garvin said. “So what if I made it up and then I put some troubled people there and how might this natural place help them solve their problems? That was the game I decided to play.”

Garvin’s affinity with the pen grew from her love of reading fostered at an early age. Her older sister taught her to read at age 3, before she was enrolled in school, and she hasn’t stopped since.

“My writing began with a love of reading,” Garvin said. “I did not take any creative writing classes. I don’t have an MFA and never studied formally,” she said. “I imagine I always wanted to be a writer, but I wasn’t the kind of kid that was really assertive about what I wanted to do.”

Though she graduated from Seattle University with a bachelor’s degree in English and earned her master’s from the University of New Mexico in the same subject, writing professionally didn’t seem to be in the cards for her. She worked several “writing-adjacent” jobs, she said, as an English teacher in American Samoa and Spain and eventually as a managing editor for a weekly business newspaper in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Enjoying the news business, but wanting to do more reporting, Garvin moved to Hood River, Oregon where she now resides, and freelanced for several print publications.

“There’s just a real delight in interviewing people and gathering research and figuring out how to put a story together and then writing it and seeing it in print and then you move on to the next thing. So that’s my first experience,” Garvin said. “I was hooked after that, I’ve been writing ever since.”

In freelancing, Garvin found the time to invest in writing books. She published her first, a memoir called “How to be a Sister” in 2010. In 2021, she wrote a national bestseller and Northwest Passages feature, “The Music of Bees.” That novel came to her serendipitously, whereas the inception of “Crow Talk” was far more deliberate in her pandemic-era escape to the lake.

While a writer, Garvin has always been drawn to the natural world as a “diehard biology wannabe,” she incorporates natural elements as themes in her books. One of the protagonists is an ornithologist, which she said gave her an excuse to lean into her obsession with writing about birds and nature.

She selected the crow as the title avian, transitioning from her first idea to center a spotted owl, because corvids are so prolific in the region and intelligent, a study by University of Washington crow specialist John Marzluff indicates. Marzluff’s work found that crows could recognize the faces of friends and foes, and teach this wariness to their young.

“I was hooked on how smart they were,” Garvin said. “And noticing them everywhere and wanting to include so many of the stories that I read in Marzluff’s work and the work of others about crow life.”

Though “Crow Talk” characters bond over tending to an injured crow, they’re not her favorite bird, she said. That would be the ever colorful varied thrush, a noisy bird with a bright orange chest and speckled gray-blue wings, also commonly found in the Pacific Northwest.

Garvin will be migrating back to her hometown of Spokane and discussing “Crow Talk” at a Northwest Passages at 7 p.m. May 2 on the Steamplant rooftop event space. She’s eager to take part in her first in-person Northwest Passages talk, her last being virtual due to COVID-19.

“It’s really a vibrant hub for the arts for literary arts in the in Eastern Washington, I’m so pleased to be included in that,” Garvin said. “I love Spokane, I love the downtown. It’s just very familiar.”

Editor’s note: This feature was amended to correct Garvin’s previous employment.