An Interview with Linda Spalding
When Linda Spalding was commissioned by Key Porter Books to travel to Borneo and write a biography of Biruté Galdikas, she did not know she would end up on a follow. A follow is an observation technique employed from a distance of the subject -- in this case, the elusive Galdikas, recipient of the Order of Canada, who has spent the last 27 years working with endangered orangutans in Indonesia. But more than just Galdikas, Spalding observed, and in some cases become personally involved with her surroundings -- the environment, the government, and even the orangutans themselves. In her resulting book, appropriately titled The Follow (Key Porter Books; hardcover; 318 pp.; $29.95), Spalding documents her journey and observations, peppered with her own revelations and musings about life, survival, and motherhood -- both ape and human. Spalding was born in Kansas and has lived in Mexico, Japan, and Hawaii doing everything from social work to public television. The author of the fiction novels Daughters of Captain Cook and The Paper Wife, she now lives in Toronto where she edits Brick, a national literary journal, and writes full time. This interview took place in 1998, following the publication of The Follow.
Kirman: When you were commissioned by Key Porter to write a book about Biruté Galdikas, was this the book you expected to be the finished work?
Spalding: No -- I can't really remember what I expected. I know I didn't think it would be a biography because I didn't think I could write a biography, and I have a hard time remaining objective which would seem to me to be part of that process. So, I think I might have thought it would be purely a travel book with Galdikas as a focus, but I didn't know I would get involved with learning about orangutans and studying human prehistory. I got very involved with the science end of it, and all of that was a surprise. I did not expect to become so fascinated with the whole aboriginal part of the story, because I didn't know anything about that. I think there were lots of surprises.
Kirman: When the project was first proposed to you, what was it about it that interested you the most?
Spalding: The travel [laughing]. The idea of going someplace entirely, entirely unexpected and alien, and still within my realm of interest. I am very involved with the Pacific culture and the idea of the survival of aboriginal identity -- all of that fascinated me. And then the thought that there was this woman of my own generation who had confronted all of that head on and had lived the life that I imagined I should have led. I was seeing it as a kind of mirror of what I might have been had I taken myself seriously in my youth. Eventually, when I came to the idea of taking my kids I began to see it as a kind of multilayered female encounter with femaleness.
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