Ash Davidson biography

Interview

Ash Davidson discusses her debut novel, Damnation Spring, and how she researched and wrote a novel encapsulating so many difficult and contentious issues.

What is Damnation Spring about?

Damnation Spring is the story of a logger, Rich Gundersen, his wife, Colleen, a homemaker and a midwife, and their 5-year-old son, Chub. Rich is obsessed with a redwood tree taller than the Statue of Liberty, and risks everything to buy the grove in which it stands. Meanwhile, Colleen has an encounter with an old flame, now a biologist, who plants the idea in her mind that the anomalies she's witnessed midwifing, and perhaps even her own miscarriages, might be related to herbicides the timber company uses. This is upsetting, because she's been desperately trying to have a second child, and it's a suspicion that gradually corrodes not just their family, but the entire community and its way of life. It's a book about the natural world and man's effect on it; it's also a book about family and about love — for your spouse, for your children, for your siblings, even when you're on opposite sides.

What inspired you to write it and how long have you been working on it?

My family lived in Klamath, California, where the book is set, when I was child, although they weren't loggers. My mom taught school, my dad did carpentry work, but our drinking water did come from a creek, similar to Rich and ...