Shadowshine, Johnny Armstrong’s debut novel, has been in the works for a long time. While it took Armstrong over 20 years to write the book, you’d have to go back even further to find the story’s true origins. “I’ve always been in love with nature,” he says.

Armstrong, a conservationist and former pathologist, lives with his wife and dog on Wafer Creek Ranch near Ruston, Louisiana. He grew up on the property, and when he inherited it from his father, he became a staunch leader of conservation efforts to protect it. 

“It’s 400 acres of…forest and woodland down in North Louisiana,” he says, “and it’s been in my family all my life. I just loved the forest and the biodiversity in it. I knew it was special.” That land is now protected by The Nature Conservancy. “It was really my moral duty to get it protected.”

A celebration of biodiversity, Shadowshine is a richly imagined work of fantasy, full of talking animals and a spirit-filled Shadow World. But Armstrong sees the fantastical elements as rooted in reality. In the novel, he refers to the animals as “forest-folk.” The forest-folk refer to the humans as “sans-pelages”because “they were almost completely naked except for a few patches of hair that grew in various lengths at the strangest of places.”

“My intention was to try to put myself in the frame of reference of the forest-folk and how they saw it,” says Armstrong. While humans are the book’s bad actors, the novel and its animal characters pity them. As Opal, a bobcat, says at one point, “If only we had a way to communicate with them, I am sure we could give them new knowledge and wisdom to pass along to their offspring so they might not be such a threat to themselves or to us.” 

“The forest-folk can’t understand the humans, just as we can’t understand animals communicating, though they are,” Armstrong says.

The main character of Shadowshine is Zak, a possum with a gift for language. An eloquent orator, Zak is the rare creature who speaks both “the common language of the forest folk” and the “archaic language” spoken by all rodents. Word arrives of a dangerous sans-pelage named Mungo, a “severe leader” who’s been attacking other humans with fire. Zak volunteers to investigate, going on a perilous journey in an effort to save his community.

As the novel’s plot hums along, Armstrong still takes care to note the majesty of nature. Here are Zak and his friend Sena, a bobcat, traveling through their domain:

As the day progressed, Sena and Zak’s long trot carried them through woodlands of oaks, gums, maples, and pines and across deep ravines within which resided small running streams they had to jump. It carried them over gentle hills of mixed [forest] and down into flat hardwood bottoms with larger streams they had to swim. It carried them through small prairies created many years before by both soil character and wildfires, and finally, it carried them on into the early evening where…they were about to reach their destination, the edge of a prairie of more significant size than any Zak and Sena had seen during their long trek. [It] lay to the west of a great lake whose waters were born of a river that flowed from the far north. So here was a land, a lovely land, of forest and prairie and lake and river.

In the 20 years Armstrong spent working on Shadowshine, his commitment to the project sometimes wavered. But the novel stayed with him. “I was cursed with the fact that I always believed in the story,” he says, “though there were times when I didn’t want to believe in it anymore.”

Armstrong recalls a two-year period when he didn’t work on the novel at all. He thought the extended break would help him see that the story wasn’t working. In his words, he expected to find more than a few parts “verging on crappy.” Instead, he was pleasantly surprised by the book’s successes. “I read it, and I was like, damn, I love this story,” he says. “I love the characters. That’s what kept me going.” 

“You hear authors say the characters write the story,” says Armstrong. “I really was following them along. I couldn’t stop till I got them properly situated [and] tried to bring them to a satisfactory closure that not only I would like, but that they would like as well. I fell in love with the characters. I wanted to do right by them.”

Armstrong admits he might not have written the book as efficiently as possible. “I didn’t know any of the tricks of the trade about writing a novel,” he says. Still, he kept working on it, “adding muscle when it needed strength and trying to cut the fat out.” And above all, he says, “editing, editing, editing.” He remembers moments of tremendous frustration. “That bloody white computer screen,” he laughs. “Good God, it was really a lot of work.”

Armstrong, whose love and respect for the environment suffuse his prose, pities those who don’t appreciate nature. But pity can only go so far. He’s all too familiar with what humans often do to the natural world. “No ecosystem is going to survive if it’s not permanently protected,” he says. “It’s going to be trashed at some point in time. I’m 71 years old, and I’ve seen too much of that in my life. Too many beautiful places get destroyed because they’re not protected.”

Armstrong says his next project is a work of nonfiction. It’s about the work of ecosystem restoration he’s doing—work he speaks of with passion and eloquence. “Ecosystem restoration boils down to rescuing our vanishing biodiversity,” he says. But the damaging effects of climate change make it frustrating work.

“It’s a horrible crisis that’s happening,” he says. “The whole point is to bring back species that were originally in that ecosystem. And you can’t bring them all back. You can’t bring back the plains buffalo, and the red wolves, and the red-cockaded woodpeckers.”

But Armstrong sees signs of hope as long-departed species slowly return. “I had to take care of my guys,” he says of Shadowshine’s characters. His sense of stewardship also applies to the denizens of Wafer Creek Ranch—a cast of characters, flora and fauna, he continues to care for.

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C.