Before she wrote a wildly successful international bestselling memoir, author Cheryl Strayed was a college student in Minnesota with a lifelong love of reading and a desire to “pierce readers’ hearts with truth and beauty.”
That, she’s done. Her first book, a novel called Torch, was published in 2006. The next struck like lightning. Her 2012 memoir, Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Coast Trail, became a No. 1 New York Times Bestseller and stayed on the list for more than two years. In 2014, Reese Witherspoon played Strayed in the film adaptation of Wild. Her book Tiny Beautiful Things, a compilation of Strayed’s podcasts Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars, was adapted into a Hulu television series in 2023.
On Tuesday, October 13, Strayed talked with creative writing students at Trinity University, sharing insight into her writing and advice on the craft the students can employ on their own adventures. Her visit, which included a reading that evening that was open to the public, was part of the Stieren Arts Enrichment Series, which brings to campus each year a diverse array of leaders in the arts and humanities who share their expertise and works with the Trinity and local communities.
“I feel very privileged to be here and to hear from such a well-known author. It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk with her about her craft,” said Eve Hebda ’29, a philosophy major and creative writing minor from Austin, Texas, who wants to write her own book someday. “(Strayed) talks about incredibly personal things, and that’s something that we’re striving to learn how to do in our creative writing class,” Hebda added. “We’re trying to put ourselves on the page in a way that everyone can understand and everyone can relate to and appreciate. She does that very eloquently and beautifully in her writing.”
“I love teaching (Strayed’s) work because it’s so well crafted,” said Kelly Grey Carlisle, Ph.D., director of the creative writing minor at Trinity who arranged and hosted Strayed’s visit with support from Sarai Santos-Valle, the English department’s academic office manager. “Her work really invites young people to not judge others and not judge themselves but to recognize humanity in all its messiness and all its glory.”
Trinity is fortunate for the Stieren Art Enrichment Series, which makes opportunities like meeting Strayed possible, said Carlisle, who published her own memoir, We Are All Shipwrecks, in 2017. Her students read and discussed Wild before the event.
Strayed said she enjoys working with college students. “It’s a difficult time (in their lives). It’s an exciting time. There’s so much happening in their minds and spirits; it’s exciting to be in that atmosphere. To be able to offer some support or wisdom or insight to that age group is really wonderful to me,” she said.
During an hour-plus question-and-answer with students, Strayed talked about writing interesting, credible characters, rather than likable ones. “I’m so uninterested in likeability as a writer,” she said. She said literature’s mission is to create work in which readers recognize themselves, to show people they’re not alone: “That’s powerful medicine. It’s medicine the world needs.” She also explained that being interesting or dramatic is not enough to make a story; a writer has to connect with a larger meaning. Until then, she said, “It’s not time to tell it.”
Strayed didn’t start writing Wild until many years after her hike. One day, while writing an essay, she discovered the universality: the weight of her backpack, like the death of her mother, was too heavy to bear. “I knew I wasn’t just telling a story (about me); I was writing a story about a timeless struggle,” she said.
When asked how she felt about the state of literature, Strayed said the fact that book bans are “now really a very ordinary thing and a part of a lot of people’s communities, often more so than people even know, is shocking to me and sad.”
Strayed also shared that she’s concerned by the proliferation of AI-generated material. She believes the world will always need artists and books and stories from “the original mind” that express the human condition, and she takes hope in the act of writing and knowing she’s part of a writing community.
At the public reading in Trinity’s Ruth Taylor Recital Hall, Strayed read a portion of a work in progress centered around grief to almost 200 attendees. Strayed’s husband, documentary filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, died in May after a short bout with a rare, progressive brain disorder. Since then, the author has been lost in grief, but writing her way through it, and working on another memoir. The audience was silent, rapt as they listened.
Next, Strayed read an essay about being in her 20s in a small desert town in Arizona. She left all her money in a cafe restroom, slept in her pickup, had a chance encounter with the author and activist Grace Paley, and hung out with a part-time Hollywood prop man. These details had the audience roaring with laughter.
Strayed’s stories are tightly constructed. Like a well-crafted home, the studs and joists and rafters are cut to fit solidly together, tight, but with room to breathe. They’re alive, with sorrow and pain, joy and hope, and piercing truth and beauty.