Category: Writer Interview

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 66: Alison Wells on “Random Acts of Optimism” (wordsonthestreet: Galway, 2023)

Cover of Random Acts of Optimism showing painting of a desert landscape with a ticking clock in the foreground and a red-leaved tree with a woman’s face peering at the clock. Image by Beatrice Mecking, courtesy of wordsonthestreet.

Alison, You are very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to discuss your short story collection Random Acts of Optimism which has been described by Billy O’Callaghan as “a genuinely marvellous collection”. Published by Galway based wordsonthestreet, it was launched in dlr Lexicon on September 20th. Many congratulations.

SG: Let’s begin with the title Random Acts of Optimism, which is a theme that runs through each story – despite the diverse forms within the collection – and, in my experience, optimism is the feeling with which are left with when we’ve read each story. Can you talk about how you came to decide on this title?

AW: When I came to write the title story I recognised that for Cynthia and Tom and for many of the other characters in my stories they were often taking action in spite of or in defiance of the constraints of their circumstances. The acts of optimism we take in our lives can run from stand out courageous acts to the everyday doggedness that so many people display as they push through difficult periods of life, as losses mount up over time or as we all faced during the pandemic years. Personally, I am also fascinated by psychology and how we convince ourselves of things, we can be courageously optimistic but sometimes optimism becomes delusion and that has been the subject of several of my novels as well as the stories in the book. For me, also, Random Acts of Optimism also relates to my own long journey as a writer, and also for every writer, trying to find the right words, reach people and hopefully get published. I’ve explored these themes in my writing blog Head above Water and hope to work with people to support them to maintain optimism in their writing lives.

SG: That’s very moving – working to help people maintain optimism in their writing lives. Something so very much needed. I really loved the opening title story – the characters, the narrative but also how you used the page to communicate some of the clinical ways our society was run during the Covid-19 Pandemic. It’s a heart warming story of connection blooming in adverse conditions. In particular the use of humour to fill communication gaps:

He doesn’t know what else to say so he tells her about a woman who returned a book two years too late. The book was called Successful Time Management for Dummies.

Can you talk about the origins and writing of this story?

AW: This story was rooted in my real experiences of the surreal and poignant experience of being one of a few library staff members sending books out to ‘cocooners’ during the Covid19 pandemic from a vast empty library. (The Lexicon library, currently the largest library in Ireland). Many conversations were stark but often a joke was shared and the topic of books always engaged and entertained us.

I also wanted to explore how a male character who is bewildered by his marriage breakup and fallen prey to the anxieties of the modern world  and not really able to make sense of it might begin to find answers through his unlikely connection with an older lady through the libraries and through books themselves. I’ve written (a yet unpublished novel) about a man who loses his way in life but in that case does not find a path back.

I still feel very moved when I think about the “cocooners” at home under often very lonely and vulnerable circumstances. What happened in the pandemic underlines the importance of real human connection (which, by the way, is one of the positives of public libraries with their events, social groups and book clubs) and the power of books and writing to help us feel that connection, understand ourselves and others and just be plain entertained and carried away, even in dire circumstances.

I think writing this story, more than any, allowed me to really depict the stoicism, humour and camaraderie that so many ordinary people have while negotiating everyday challenges. I went on to write several thousand more words of the developing relationship between the characters, so we will see where that goes.

SG: Well that sounds very intriguing, Alison, I really liked those characters and would love to read more. In “There’s a Café in This Story”, you tell the tale of connections breaking down, the importance of place and how necessary it is to keep hope in relationships. I loved the entwining of the inner character with the exterior of the cafe:

There are details that build up over time, the first, shyly uncertain pleasantries, umbrellas under the table, ankles knocking against the metal legs and then against each other. He wonders…. Will the cafes all merge, with all their combined sensations of exhilaration and regret?

Tell me about the structure of this story and how it came about? 

AW: We can use signs around us as scaffolding to reinforce the stories we are telling ourselves. This man, captivated by the idea of this illicit romance, sees the scene and objects around him as part of a rarefied and lovely story. Meanwhile, for his wife, sitting under the infant at home, the discarded coffee cup, her own tea out of reach, the immutable reality of domesticity, objects give a different flavour. Working in Dun Laoghaire, I often walked out on the pier. The sound and scent of the sea, the clanging of the anchors, the gulls were all very vivid, sensation laden images which I used to set the scene and evoke that sense uplift and freedom that the man feels his rendezvous give him.

I liked juxtaposing the man’s reality, his illusion of freedom, movement and magic with the more solid reality of the woman’s life in the alongside their joint memories/experiences of the past. These conflicting juxtapositions are reflected in the images of the servers’ arms criss-crossing,  the struts of the bridge, reaching up to put the star on the Christmas tree.  I think the to-ing and fro-ing between the man and wife’s realities allow us to see two sides to the story.

SG: I liked how seeing the two sides worked. I’m curious as to the order of the collection. I liked how “Sad about the Plumber’s Uncle” worked next to “All that Thinking”, in that the light relief and humour in the first story sets the reader up for the deep thinking in the second. How did you settle on the order?
AW: As you say, the stories in the collection are quite diverse in tone and mood and also what you might call genre, running from realistic to more speculative and fantastical. And as you say, occasionally there was a pretty stark reversal of tone. In other cases, one humorous story follows another but then a reflective element to that story might be echoed in the next. There are some stories about writing or having written (told from the point of view of a letter) and they are close together. To me, the process was similar to the rightness of feeling I felt listening to my favourite albums in the 80s, an instinctive feeling towards tone, poignancy, energy and pause. Sometimes evenness of tone is preserved and at other times the symbols or drums break the preceding silence. I like how the first story throws you right in and how the last story refers to a moment of coming home.

SG: I loved your use of sensory detail and pause in “The Spaceman Has His Tea”. The story has a straight-forward premise yet you created a narrative that is, in its underbelly, a philosophical consideration of the nature of our existence.

Unleashed from the world is not to be free of it, it is to be put in charge of the last egg in the basket, it is to be six years old have your mother put the egg into your hand and say ‘Don’t break that.’ And the earth is as blue as a bird’s egg, as precious as Fabergé, as fragile as Arctic ice. It is to be six years old and afraid of forgetting.

I love that it also concerns the lovely act of drinking tea and “meringue, light, delicious; clouds dissolving on his tongue.” How important are the senses to you when you write?

AW: Like many writers, I’m always pained by the gap between the richness and impact of reality, especially that of the natural world and how well I am getting it down on the page. I can be carried away by ideas and competing narratives, but I think what short work can do best and what I would like my writing to develop into is being more spare, precise, immediate and evocative. The senses are key to that. I grew up in the countryside, was immersed in it, reeds, wind, frogspawn, moss. The natural world evokes a strong feeling and I hope I can put some of that across through different sense impression. Recently I read the writing of Darragh McKeown for the first time and loved the clarity of it. The key to writing is specificity, we know the world through everyday things, what they evoke through senses and memory, what they mean to us. 

We will end this chat, Alison, with some short questions:

  1. Beach or mountains? Beach by a small margin but I grew up in Kerry near the sea with a mountain at my back and now live in Wicklow which also has both!
  2. Dart, train or bus? Definitely DART these days though I spent my college years on the train between Dublin and Kerry leading to many fascinating glimpses of characters.
  3. Do you usually have one book or numerous books on the go? Both writing and reading wise, the answer to this is always many, no matter how much I fight against it. I am endlessly, pathologically curious. I read for my own pleasure, for research for both writing projects and, currently for my dissertation for an MSc in Library and Information Science, I am also fascinated by neuropsychology and creative resilience.
  4. I love the idea of being pathologically curious! Quiet or noise when you’re writing? Quiet. Not easy to find. I used to get up at 5am when the children were young and we built a writing cabin in the garden but once the world gets going, quiet is never easy to find and the noise in my head hard to dodge.
  5. What’s the next three books on your reading pile? I just went to check and counted 50 books stacked up beside the bed! One of the perils of being a public librarian is constant temptations. I am about to read Books on Fire – The Tumultuous Story of the World’s Great Libraries by Lucien x. Polastron, The Creativity Code – how AI is learning to write, paint and think. These will inform future writing projects. I also have Poetry Unbound – 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig ó Tuama put by – his selection of poems and what they mean to him. Just now, with work, study, family life and book launches, this selection is something to steady me, give me pause and interest and settle me down in the moment.  

Thank you, Alison, for such a generous and open attitude to and answering of my questions. I wish you every success with Random Acts of Optimism.

Order Random Acts of Optimism here and follow Alison here.

Photograph of Alison Wells, blonde hair and blue eyes, smiling directly at the camera, wearing a denim-blue cardigan. Photo courtesy of Alison Wells.

Thank you to wordsonthestreet for the Advance Copy of Random Acts of Optimism.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 65: John MacKenna on “Absent Friend” (Harvest Press: Carlow, 2023)

Back and Front cover of “Absent Friend” showing pencil drawing of John MacKenna and Leonard Cohen. Cover image: Lucy Deegan

John, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about your latest publication, Absent Friend (The Harvest Press: Carlow, 2023), a memoir and reflection on your friendship with Leonard Cohen. 

SG: Let’s start with the title. It both sums up the friendship now, and how it endures despite Leonard’s death, and also the friendship as it formed and evolved over geographical distance. Did the title come easy to you? 

JMacK: Thanks for the invitation. I’ve long been aware of the tradition in some religious communities of setting a place at table for absent friends – in fact it’s one we’ve adopted in our house. It’s a way of remembering those who are away from home and those who have died and it never fails to bring a moment or two of reflection on some or all of the missing people in our lives. So when I began writing this book the title, more or less, suggested itself. It seemed to sit very easily with what I had in mind as the theme of the book – the friendship and the absence of that friendship after Leonard died.

SG: That’s very moving – your writing as a table with a space for absent friends. It’s quite an incredible story, your lifelong communications with Leonard. How did you work out the structure for the memoir in terms of chronology of friendship/ your own chronological life? 

JMacK: That was a challenge. I had many thoughts on how to approach it but, in the end, I thought the songs are the binding force. The songs are what drew me to Leonard when I was eighteen and the songs remain after he’s gone. So I used the songs and albums as guideposts to the journey of his life and my life and our friendship. And it seemed to work. 

The parallels between events in my own living and the emotions and events gathered in his songs worked in tandem in terms of the writing.  There’s one moment in the book where I’m driving and listening to If It Be Your Will (a song about the holocaust) and I come upon a car accident and that produces its own small holocaust – that’s just one moment of the parallels being shocking. 

But the fact that Leonard was so open and so reflective of his own life – and by extension all our lives – makes the work incredibly accessible, moving, educational and emotionally connected.

SG: There were a few moments in the book where there were uncanny parallels and perhaps these actually connect to your own openness and reflection. You also capture the philosophy behind many of Cohen’s songs that have carried you through rough and tough times. You show us the power of his words and music. Why do you think he’s been painted so often as just writing about the underbelly of emotion? 

JMacK: I had one brother who was ten years older than me and he was a wonderful guide in life. Leonard was eighteen years older than me and I thought of him as a brother, too. So the guidance, the sharing of experience and direction were important to me. But Leonard’s life was radically different from mine – he came from a wealthy, Canadian, Jewish family. And, yet, much of what he wrote about in terms of emotion was blindingly familiar to me –  an innate darkness; a struggle with emotional intimacy; an interest in the spiritual. 

So, yes, he does write about that dark spaces and those muddy waters. What is sometimes forgotten is his wonderful humour – it was quiet but it was always there in his songs, in chatting with him, in his letters and emails. That’s something that is often missed about his personality. And sometimes his dismissal and the dismissal of his songs as razor blade music is just lazy journalism.

SG: And that’s a gift – being able to combine dark and deep spaces with humour. You write about your own relationship to form (books, songs, poetry) as well as the impact and/or influence of teaching (the system) on your creativity. The “links” that pull you in to Leonard’s work are also what work in writing:

an idea, an experience, a phrase, an image

To what extent did you learn or work on your writing craft through exploring Leonard’s songs? (For example, your novel Once We Sang Like Other Men)

JMacK: I first heard Leonard in 1971 when I was recovering from meningitis and I can still clearly remember the shock of hearing a story I was very familiar with (the Biblical story of Isaac) retold in the song Story of Isaac but hearing it told in the voice of a nine-year-old boy. The familiar became the fascinating. That was the first step on a writing road toward the realisation that old stories, familiar characters, well-worn situations can be viewed and re-told freshly. That was inspiring. 

The other thing I learned from Leonard’s work was that less is more – his ability to suggest things is powerful. There’s a line in a very late song about angels scratching at the door. That one verb is extraordinary in what it suggests and how it avoids the cliched. 

The subject matter of a lot of Leonard’s work is the spiritual and that’s an area that fascinates me and, as you say, I’ve examined it in Once We Sang Like Other Men and Joseph. It’s a road we were both interested in, that place where spiritual and human collide.

SG: Yes, that verb “scratching” alongside the softness (perceived) of angels is great. Absent Friend also serves as an exploration of religion. You speak about going to a monastery church in Moone, Kildare

in search of spiritual consolation and calmness

and at length about Leonard’s time in a monastery. How important was it to Leonard and how important is it to you in your writing?

JMacK: Leonard said the monastery at Mount Baldy and his times there saved his life. He went from absolute fame and an absolute dependence on alcohol to a time (six years) of reflection and removal from the demands of the world. It got him back on an even and healthy keel.

For me the quiet times spent at Bolton Abbey are important in two ways. They reconnect me with summers in my teenage years spent working in the gardens there – a wonderful time of ideas and debates and discussions and laughter with the monks. But they also connect me to a way of life that isn’t mine but one in which I recognise the importance of silence, of contemplation, of peace, of communal spirit. 

And that feeds into my writing. As I get older I find myself looking more and more (in fiction and non-fiction) at the place of the human in the world of the spiritual. Belief wise, I’d describe myself as an agnostic but I love the search, I love the things that are part of the monastic life – the internal and external landscapes in Bolton Abbey. And I get a tremendous reassurance and uplift from time spent there. The monks are good men, interesting, funny, they have a depth you don’t often find in the world. 

SG: How do you think you’ll carry Leonard’s legacy forward – in music and in writing – and do you see Absent Friend as part of this process? 

JMacK: I was honoured to work with Leonard on Between Your Love and Mine, a requiem for theatre that we completed in the summer before his death. That requiem has had two extremely successful tours – playing theatres across the country as well as the NCH and Aras an Uachtaráin. The requiem will be restaged next year to coincide with Leonard’s ninetieth birthday so that, I feel, is important. 

I hope Absent Friend contributes, in some small way, to spreading the word of Leonard’s genius as a wordsmith and musician.

SG: I am sure your book has already contributed – we see Leonard through the eyes of a friendship that endured a lifetime. I very much look forward to experiencing the requiem next year. So we’ll finish up, John, with some short questions:

  • Coffee or Tea? Coffee
  • Silence or music as you write – and if so, what music?  Music – I normally choose one CD to listen to per book – for Clare it was 19th century hymns but it could be anyone from Paul Simon to Mary Chapin Carpenter. Always there are words involved.
  • Longhand or laptop? Laptop – except for poems, they’re longhand
  • What are you reading now? Steeple Chasing by Peter Ross – a book on English churches!
  • What are you writing now? I’m redrafting a short novel set in my home village of Castledermot in the winters of 1963 and 2010 – the years of the big snows.
Photograph of John MacKenna wearing a white shirt, looking thoughtfully at the camera. Photo credit: Kevin Byrne used with permission

Thank you to The Harvest Press and John for the copy of Absent Friend. Purchase Absent Friend here.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 64: Jeff Fearnside on “Ships in the Desert” (SFWP: Bethesda, Maryland, 2022).

Book cover of “Ships in The Desert” showing a black and white photograph of a ship in the desert.

Jeff, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on this intriguing collection of essays, Ships in the Desert (SFWP: Bethesda, Maryland, 2022). The collection fit right into the non-fiction I’ve been reading lately and congratulations on the recent awards your collection has received: The Eric Hoffer Book Award (Culture category) and the Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award (Essays category). 

SG: I’d like to situate Ships in the Desert within a canon – let’s say, following in the footsteps of great American nature writers such as Aldo Leopold, John McPhee and, given the type of landscape your essays examine, Mary Austin. Environmental destruction and (western) capitalism have been the concern for many essayists, writers like Annie Dillard and Janisse Ray spring to mind here, but in this collection, you bring us to Communism, to the old Soviet bloc, and show us (I quote) a “goulash of languages”, “nuanced picture of Muslims”, and, what seems to me a real “tribute to the life-giving bounty of the Aral Sea”. Do you see this collection of essays as contributing to a growing collection of important nature writing?

JF: Naturally, whether it’s considered important or not isn’t up to me; others must be the judge of that. I do very much hope it contributes in some way, however small, to the body of literature of the natural world. I think what we call nature writing is in a state of transition right now, one which corresponds to how quickly the natural environment has been changing around us due to climate change. We need to address this somehow, and the older model of nature writing, which was born out of a nineteenth century meditative pastoralism, doesn’t hold up as well today. Don’t get me wrong: Thoreau will always rank among my favourites! I still love the work of Wordsworth. But while writing in different countries, they both came out of a Romantic period aesthetic that glorified the individual. I don’t think we can do that anymore. We need a literature that shows us how to work together.

            I’m a big fan of the writers you mention, particularly John McPhee and Annie Dillard, and I’m not trying to suggest in any way that they or the others failed to properly emphasize community or that their work is no longer important. I’m very much indebted to them as they were indebted to Rachel Carson and John Muir and Ralph Waldo Emerson and all those who came before them. But just as Carson and McPhee and Dillard—among many others—moved the literature forward, so are we at a point where it feels it needs to move forward again. In my book I intentionally combined science writing with memoir, travel writing, literary journalism, and even outright environmental advocacy because I didn’t want to be limited by or beholden to the conventions of any one of those genres. I felt I needed another way to present the material and its message. My hope is that others find some kind of value in it, though again, that’s not for me to decide. All I can do is try to honour my subjects by presenting them in what seems the best way possible, which is going to be different for every subject, every book.

SG: Thanks for that insight – I like how you let the work present itself and the reader decide on the value, and certainly, I found the title essay of the collection, Ships in the Desert, one of the most informative and interesting. You speak of being haunted by what you saw – nature’s destruction for “white gold”, cotton:

“If you don’t plant cotton, you will be jailed/ If you don’t pick cotton, you will be killed”

It seems profit and growth trumps all. You warn that

“if we’re not careful, the twenty-first century could well be defined not by terrorism or the growing disparity between rich and poor but water wars.”

Given the war in Ukraine and the continuing climate and natural resource crises, do you still believe this is the case?

JF: I wish I didn’t, but it still seems probable and even likely to me. Most of the climate and natural resources crises occurring right now are linked to water shortages in some way. It’s true that weather is cyclical, and we will occasionally see temporary relief from water issues, as we did with an unusually wet past winter in the American West that refilled many badly depleted reservoirs. But the long-term trend continues to indicate that our water issues are, overall, getting worse, not better. Average temperatures around the world are growing hotter. The science is very clear on this.

            In my book, I wrote of the falling Ogallala Aquifer, the toxicity of Owens Lake and the Salton Sea in the U.S. These problems continue to worsen. At the same time, new crises have developed. The Great Salt Lake, Lake Mead, the Colorado River, and the Mississippi River all hit historic lows last year. While there has been some rebound from that, there’s still a lot of reason for concern. The conservation nonprofit American Rivers considers the Colorado River, particularly the portion that runs through the Grand Canyon, the most endangered river in the country. This is a river system that provides water to forty million people in the U.S. and Mexico.

            Famines are often linked to droughts. Wars, both legal and lethal, continue to be fought over water rights. Water is at the heart of so many issues, which makes sense: It’s what sustains life.

SG: Yes, water is at the very heart of life. Your essays don’t only shine a light on environmental catastrophes that many people might not be aware of (this reader included) but also provides great insight into the country and people of “beautiful, crazy, haunting, surreal Kazakhstan”. I was moved by the opening essay, “Itam” in which you paint a portrait of great care for families and animals, but not much, if any, self-care and I particularly enjoyed the random details of western music still popular there (the live version of the Eagle’s “Hotel California”, Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red”, and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”), the wonderful dancing at the wedding (Itam). For me, this merging of personal experience with the communal, and connecting it to place threaded these essays together. Can you talk a little about this in relation to the order of the essays in the collection?

JF: Because the two longest essays are strongly focused on environmental and cultural issues, it was important to me to bring the personal into the book in some meaningful way as well, and so it opens and closes with my host family in Kazakhstan, while the remaining three essays focus on more personal feelings about my time there. I very much wanted that kind of balance in the book. While much of it is about catastrophe in the big picture, there is also something of hope as found in the personal. That’s really where hope is to be found. We can’t look to the big corporations to save us. They’re rootbound to the container of capitalism. To change their growth pattern from one focused solely on profits to something more holistic would take too much pruning, if it’s even achievable at all. For better or worse, it’s going to fall on us individuals to effect change, working in coalitions, community by community. It can be done—if we have time. That’s really the biggest challenge we’re up against. The longer we wait, the more challenging it gets.

SG: Interesting to hear that you feel hope is in the personal, and of course, we can’t look to big corporations to save us (as capitalism would have us believe). Following on from the personal, much of what you discuss in these essays is actually philosophical and spiritual. You link place. Having travelled and lived in various countries and cultures, I can appreciate how being a stranger, you can see a place with new eyes, for both good and bad. In “Place as Self,” you talk about how places, like people, change, but that they are

more often like comets, or rivers…But time passes, and the next time we look, we see that a wildfire roared over the mountain one fine spring day when the wind was stretching its limbs uphill, and now the mountain is an unrecognisable old man. A six-lane superhighway runs through a neighbourhood we once knew and loved.

You talk of the difficulty of capturing the spirit of the place

“Examining a place in a particular time freezes portions of it. Our writing then becomes like an archival film”

and it felt, for a reader who came to the collection and to Kazakhstan blind, that you did capture the spirit, as you encountered it. The idea of place and self not being static, but still needing to be cared for and protected really stayed with me long after finishing the collection. Looking back to that time now, and if you were to return to those places – even though some of the people are no longer there, and even though, the places will have changed – do you think the spirit might still be the same?

JF: Good question! I think the answer depends on how one views it. Certainly, in a place with a history as long as Kazakhstan’s, going well back before even the Great Silk Road, there’s a certain spirit that isn’t going to vanish over the course of a decade or two. On the other hand, I do believe that our personal experience of the spirit of a place is unique to a particular time, which I write about in the essay you mention, “Place as Self.” In that sense, even a year or two can be enough to irrevocably change how a place feels to us. Kazakhstan has moved on since I lived there, and so have I. It’s in a different place, so to speak, just as I am now.

            My wife recently visited her family there, and she told me her home country was both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. There’s so much new growth in terms of buildings and roads that she hardly recognized her home city. Yet the cultural habit of not smiling in public remains. Having lived in the U.S. for many years, smiling all the time has become natural to my wife, but her family thought it was unnatural, forced, and it often took strangers aback. That said, a few were pleasantly surprised by the smiling stranger who made them feel good. She had changed, and it changed her interactions with those around her. All of this is natural. We can’t expect things to remain the same, nor should we want them to.

SG: I can completely get that – returning to the once-home, the familiar being made strange. And another strong linking thread is the idea of foreigners being missionaries both actually and metaphorically. If we take the motivation for writing the essays as a spiritual one – to preserve or capture your experience but also that of the place with you in it – and then apply this to traditional missionary work, as you examine in the essay “The Missionary Position”, to what extent was the writing of Ships in The Desert an act of saving, a part of your missionary role?

JF: As I state in the introduction of the book, the Peace Corps has three goals, and the third goal is to help educate about the host countries volunteers serve in. Kazakhstan, despite its long and spectacular history, despite its great geographical size, despite its modern importance as an oil and gas producer, still largely remains unknown to most people in the western world. I harbour no illusions of being able to write anything definitive about such a country, especially from my foreigner’s viewpoint, but I certainly was and am conscious of wanting to help introduce this place to many in the English-speaking world who might otherwise have only heard of it through the Borat films.

            But more than that, I wanted to present my experiences of the place as an example to others that there’s a larger world to explore. I wanted to emphasize the interconnectedness of peoples and cultures on this planet. I’m a missionary of the idea of human potential. If there’s anything I want to save, it’s those ideas. It does feel like these ideas are under attack today, that people are retreating into a kind of medieval clannishness, sometimes literally behind walls. Yes, we face a lot of problems, and some of them are scary, but we’re not going to solve them by separating from and fearing each other. We’ve got to work together.

SG: Yes, we are coming back to the personal always merging with the communal, and necessity to work together. But what a great thought you’ve placed in my mind: a missionary of the idea of human potential! You went to Kazakhstan in your role as a Peace Corps Volunteer and part of this role is that you are

“forbidden to proselytize on two subjects – religion and politics – or to work directly with anyone involved in such activities.”

This restriction seemed to limit your exploration of the role of both of these subjects in relation to the connections between environment and money making. You clearly point out in “More than Tenge and Tiyn” that

It was a world where money mattered immensely though not in the same way as in the States, where our aspirations are, by and large, for increasing levels of luxury. In Kazakhstan, especially in those hardscrabble days, it was a matter of survival.

You draw parallels (in “Ships in the Desert”) between the drainage and diversion of rivers with policies in LA (drainage of Owens Lake), and I wonder if there are some parallels to be drawn here between poverty and educational opportunities in Kazakhstan and in many of the impoverished minorities in the United States – and elsewhere.

It strikes me that what you speak of is the unequal state of our world which echoes the environmental destruction. In many ways this reminded me of how John McPhee examines the relationship between humans and nature in The Control of Nature (and he also examines LA). Janisse Ray says in Ecology of a Cracker Childhood “our relationship with the land wasn’t one of give and return. The land itself had been the victim of social dilemmas”. Can you comment on this?

JF: I understand this idea very much. I grew up in a corner of Ohio that had been, within only four generations before me, the Great Black Swamp. It was the last section of the state to be inhabited. Even the Native Americans didn’t live there; they only made forays into it for hunting. The first white settlers who arrived faced swarms of mosquitoes and malaria and a slog of mud so deep that one stretch of an early log plank highway was famous for having an inn every mile—that’s only as far as the wagons could make it each day. The log highway just kept sinking into the earth.

            Yet, of course, a swamp is a special entity of its own with its own ecology and its own spirit. And the white settlers not only broke that spirit, they obliterated it. My great-great-great grandfather was among those who in 1850s began systematically turning an impenetrable stretch of sodden woods and prairies roughly the size of County Tipperary into rich black farmland. There was no give and return—there was no give at all on the part of the white settlers. By the time I was growing up, there was hardly a trace of wildness left. It had become essentially a monoculture of either corn or soybeans.

            This is a story of human interactions with the land that has played out the world over. I certainly recognized it in the story of the Aral Sea. However, I don’t believe we intentionally punish the land. We simply don’t think deeply enough about our relationship with it. We take and take from it, and no relationship can survive such one-sidedness, and so it may appear the land has been victimized. But since we depend on the land, we only end up victimizing ourselves. It makes no sense on any level, including financial, to destroy the source of our food, our livelihoods, our homes. Topsoil in the American Midwest has eroded at an average rate of 1.9 millimetres per year over the past 160 years, meaning about a foot of topsoil has been lost in that time. It may not sound like much until you realize it takes anywhere from 100 to 500 years to build one inch of topsoil—that’s 1,200 to 6,000 years to replace the foot we’ve lost.

            Obviously, we’re falling behind at an alarmingly fast rate, and there’s a certain point where we won’t be able to recover. As with our climbing temperatures. As with our declining potable water sources. As with our rising sea levels. In Ireland, coastlines could rise by as much as a foot by 2050, resulting in serious flooding, as is predicted for coastlines around the globe. I don’t like sounding like an alarmist, but this is all simple science. We can measure it, track it. We can see where it’s likely headed.

            Why wouldn’t we want to face this and do what we can to mitigate it? Part of the reason relates to what you mention about poverty. Climate change disproportionally affects poorer people, we know that, and the poor have been systematically disenfranchised the world over. They—which is really most of us, the 99 percent who are not part of the 1 percent who own almost half of the world’s wealth—don’t have a strong voice in the matter. And the people in power are making too much money to be motivated to make many meaningful changes. But it will come to bite the wealthy someday, too. Again, we’re all interconnected with each other as much as we’re interconnected with the physical world. As I note in my book, quoting John Muir, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

SG: Well, it’s been wonderful connecting with you through your writing, Jeff, and those statistics you quote are stark reminders of what science simply tells us. Let’s finish up with some fun questions:

  • Boat or Plane? Boat! I love being on the water.
  • Tea or Coffee? Coffee, no doubt about it overall, though I also enjoy tea. Living in Kazakhstan helped nurture a love of green tea in particular. So, coffee in the morning or with pie! Green tea in the afternoon or later. With fresh dates or dried apricots, it especially reminds me of Central Asia.
  • Camera or memory? Tough one! I love photography. I love the art of it, and it’s also a useful documentary tool. But I must go with memory on this one. Ultimately, it’s the more powerful tool, especially for a writer.
  • Very interesting! I didn’t expect that answer! So what’s next on your reading pile? I often read to prepare for the classes I teach, so lately that included an overview of short fiction from Kate Chopin to today. I also have a queue of books to review, both fiction and poetry. Once I catch up, I’d like to dive into some Murakami.
  • Oh an overview of short fiction – sounds like a treat. Mind you, Murakami is a wonderful escape to follow that. So where do you hope to travel to next? I’ve always wanted to visit Africa. Kenya, Egypt, Mali, and Morocco are probably the African countries I’d most like to see first. Japan is high on my list. New Zealand. And I’ve been wanting to return to Scotland and Ireland! In my first visits there I never made it to Edinburgh or all the way to the west coast of Ireland or to Yeats country, and I would love to visit those places.

And wouldn’t some of those travels be amazing by boat…if time allowed! Thank you, Jeff for such engagement with my questions and I hope these essays travel far.

Photograph of Jeff Fearnside looking to the left, wearing a red check shirt, black cap and glasses. Photograph used with permission, courtesy of Jeff Fearnside.

With thanks to Kristina Darling, Penelope Consulting and SFWP for the copy of Ships in the Desert.

Order Ships in the Desert here and for UK based, order here.