Category: Writers Read

Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 67: Maggie Feeley on “Just Killings”(Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 2) (Poolbeg Crimson, 2022)

Congratulations on the second book in the Alice Fox Murder Mysteries. We last chatted about the first book in the series, Murder in the Academy (Alice Fox Murder Mysteries Book 1) (Poolbeg, 2021) and it’s great to be back with Alice and Caro in a slightly changed Belfast setting.

SG: Let’s go back to your writing, now that you’re deep into a series of novels – or is it a trilogy? Tell us about character development from book to book, in particular, our heroine Alice. I feel she’s grown in insight and confidence in the second book, (or maybe I know her a bit more). Does this relate at all to your experience in writing Just Killings?

MF: You’re right Shauna. The third Alice Fox mystery Wrestling with Demons was published by Poolbeg in August 2023, so I’ve got as far as a trilogy for the moment. Alice and I, and the other characters that carry forward from the first book, are all developing together, I’d say. I can’t claim to fully understand how that growth in each character comes about but I am coming to know each of them in an instinctive way and to understand how they will react and behave in each new context. I don’t feel that I am manipulating them to suit the plot rather that the context comes first and then they become more and more fully themselves against that backdrop. In this case, confronted by the distinctive signature murder of two men of the cloth, the Murder Squad with the help of Alice Fox, begin to investigate why these particular victims might have been murdered.

I’m influenced by reader feedback to some extent and think now about the amount of explanation I include. I’ve learned that readers don’t always want to know a lot of the detail I might serve up and so I’m more inclined now to withhold some of what I know about the people in the books. People like to create their own version of characters and I need to leave space for that to happen. At the same time, I’m not a pushover and when someone says they don’t want to read about social justice issues then I think, you’d better read someone else’s books because for me absolutely everything is about some form of in/equality.

In Just Killings Alice has settled into life in Belfast. She has links in Dublin and her work with young people in West Belfast fills the space left by her work in the College. As the work with the EXIT youth group deepens so do the relationships she makes there and we learn incidentally through these lives about the past and present in Belfast with the special legacy issues that the Troubles have bequeathed to people there. Individuals, families and communities have been coloured in by their particular history with the war and Alice, as the outsider, allows us to observe the detail of that in the day-to-day present. For the same reason there will always be an all-island element to the books as although some people identify almost entirely with one jurisdiction, others are constantly balancing the awkward reality of belonging in both places.

SG: I love the notion that you are growing with and as your characters grow and develop! Just Killings, unlike Murder in the Academy is framed not so much by Alice Fox’s own story but by differing government and societal responses north and south of the border to the revelations of institutional abuse by priests in the Catholic Church, and the Murphy and Ferns reports. We open with a rather gruesome description of a murder – I felt like I was in the Netflix series Criminal Minds – which firmly connects these threads. From our last Writers Chat, I know you like the story to lead you, rather than have it plotted out. Did this opening scene come at the start of the drafting process and then lead on to the second murder or did you work out the details at a later stage? 

MF: I’m always surprised when people say they are taken aback by the way that I can produce such gruesome murder scenes that don’t match their understanding of me. In the first book I found the murder hard to create but it’s becoming easier with practice! I’m not sure what that means for the future…  In the case of Just Killings I actually began with the murder that is discovered in the church in Belfast and added what becomes the initial Wicklow scene some time afterwards when I began to incorporate the Ryan report findings into the story. The structure unfolds gradually as the plot develops and I move pieces around to suit that.

You are right that I always see the structural framework behind individual and community social practice. The connection between clerical abuse in parishes and institutional abuse in Irish industrial schools has always been clear to me. The abuse by clerics of women and girls, boys and vulnerable young men was widespread for much of the last century and fictionalising those events, or their consequences absorbed me. I am familiar both personally and academically with the minutiae of how the patriarchal church and state behaved when those abuses took place and how they responded as the subsequent inquiries proceeded. I remain unconvinced by their acts of contrition and incorporating that into a murder mystery allows for the personal impact of those criminal events to become imagined and elaborated.

SG: Thanks again for the great insight into your writing self, Maggie, how a certain type of writing might be difficult at first, but with practice becomes more manageable, or familiar. A key theme in this book, for me, was family and society’s definition and denial of it. I really enjoyed how various characters’ experiences of this were shown in parallel narratives. We see-sawed from Jed’s search for answers to his family’s hidden history to Alice and Caro’s open making of their own history. This threading of the individual/ communal as much as Alice Fox links all your books. Can you talk about these links?

MF: In the 1980s, feminist Barbara Demming published We Are All Part Of One Another and cemented for me the belief in our irrevocable interconnectedness. I see feminism as the antithesis of all things patriarchal and families in their diversity are another site of that struggle. The Irish church made use of the family structure and women’s role in it to support its own power and influence at the same time as it was covertly causing havoc in individual lives. Those individual hurts and harms that were perpetrated by members of the clergy against vulnerable people placed in their care were inexcusable. As were the behaviours against those who trusted the holy personna they projected and then betrayed. The survivors of these abuses became communities of the wronged whose damage extends across generations and who, with their allies, have struggled to get some kind of recognition of how the patriarchal church has offended against them. In Just Killings I take the liberty of hitting out against the hypocrisy of the church and imagining what would happen if the victim claimed some measure of personal justice. I do believe strongly that it is solidarity that can take down oppression and Alice and Hugo as well as the survivor communities north and south are the expression of this in Just Killings.

SG: Yes, this sense of solidarity is what Alice hones and fosters in both herself and those she works with. Just Killings not only takes place in Belfast but spans the island – from the second murder site, to discussions of institutions in the West of Ireland. While this is a work of fiction, it feels that many of the fictitious institutions are based on real places. Are you at liberty to discuss your research and reading, besides the influence of your other publications such as Learning Care Lessons, on the societal structure, class and disadvantage.  

MF: Just Killings is a form of historical fiction in that it is based on the reality shared with me by survivors of abuse. From 2002-2007 I carried out an ethnographic study in the community of survivors of abuses in Irish industrial schools. I was particularly interested in their memories of the learning of literacy in those institutions and how the absence of care impacted on the capacity to learn. It is not by accident that there is a literacy thread in all my books. I have been involved in adult literacy learning for most of my working life and am clear that literacy is a real barometer of in/equality in society. From my immersion in the survivor community I gathered stories and details of experiences that allowed me to write Learning Care Lessons: Literacy, love, care and solidarity. Having unmet literacy needs is directly linked to all forms of inequality and disadvantage. In my research, care was uncovered as a vital element in learning and it is ironic then that those taken from their families into the care of the state were deprived of the most minimal level of literacy learning.  Those who preserved even some small element of familial affection were much more likely to learn than those who didn’t. These small loves emerged as hugely significant and always strike me as an undervalued source of social sustenance.

Far beyond the impoverished educational elements of life in these institutions, people shared deeply personal memories of family circumstances, of the isolation a child experienced when deprived of the company of siblings, of physical neglects in terms of hunger and emotional trauma brought about by the constant fear of corporal punishment, humiliation, sexual grooming and repeated assault. Much of what is written in Just Killings is rooted in those and other recollections of adults who survived their time in the care of the state and have bravely shared their truth about what happened behind those closed doors.

What is totally shocking is that the fictional revenge sought in Just Killings is the only detail that isn’t informed by my first hand experience and research. For the most part, survivors were avid adult learners, solidary supporters of their fellow survivors and focussed on making the best life for themselves and their families. Causing hurt to others was not on their agenda.

SG: That is most shocking indeed, Maggie. Thank you for sharing these insights into your research and most caring work. This leads us to our final focus which is the title – Just Killings. Alice reflects on this

It was a very different role to be facilitating the detection and capture of someone, maybe himself a victim, who had decided to punish acts that had incurred little or no punishment inside the legal system. Did that reluctance within the system to bring these abusers to book make it okay for someone to take the law into their own hands? Should those who are wronged be expected to behave more morally than their leaders?

I like how you, and the story, leave the reader to also reflect, without providing answers. Can you talk a little about this, for example, were you tempted to expand on these questions or even answer them for the reader?

MF: Justice is a slippery concept and I’m struck by the way the people that tend to fall foul of the law are often those that the social structures have treated most unequally. Literacy levels are lower in prison than in outside society and the two-tier Irish education system is allowed to persist and perpetuate these inequalities. It often seems as if state systems are constructed to protect the powerful, even when they behave in a negligent and harmful manner and at the same time to find the least influential at fault for even minor misdemeanours. Childhood institutional abuse, state sanctioned mother and baby homes, Direct Provision for those seeking assylum and protection from torture and ill-treatment in their country of origin are examples of systems exposed as critically flawed yet where the damage experienced is slow to be acknowledged and reform comes far too late for many users. Those who are harmed in these structures past and present are not known for fighting back.

In Just Killings I was imagining what revenge might look like in the context of institutional and clerical abuses. I am not a believer in violence as a means of tackling injustice. War is an extreme example of how physical fighting does not resolve disputes and where justice is easily dropped from the agenda. Nevertheless in fiction and especially in crime fiction I think there is room to raise the hypothesis of a ‘just killing’ in order to bring the underlying contextual factors into question. I leave the questions unanswered because the important issue is always social inequality of some kind and reconfiguring that is the only action that can lead to just and lasting solutions.

SG: Well, I would love to see, instead of just killings, a just society! Lastly, Maggie, some fun questions:

  1. Coffee or Tea? I have always preferred coffee to tea but now a chronic bladder condition prevents me from having either unless all caffeine is removed which seems a bit pointless. My current favourite herbal tea is liquorice.
  2. Dogs or Cats? I admire the self-centreredness of cats however my wife Ann is allergic to both so my admiration has to be from afar.
  3. Most surprising reader reaction to your Alice Fox Murder Mysteries? After reading Murder in the Academy someone went on a weekend mission to Belfast and did an Alice Fox tour retracing all Alice’s movements. That surprised me quite a lot!
  4. I love that! What writer would you most like to have afternoon tea with? I’d like Claire Keegan to let me into her secret of writing short, rich and absorbing stories.
  5. What are you writing now? I’m having a break while moving house, incubating Alice Fox 4 and dabbling in some short story writing.
Photograph courtesy of Maggie Feeley, showing Maggie, seated in a garden with daisies behind her. She smiles with a blue-eyed gaze to the camera wearing a blue shirt.

Thank you to Maggie for her insightful answers, particularly about her writing processes, research and passion for social justice that lie behind many of her novels. I wish her much continued success and many more eager readers!

On Reading, Writers Read, Writing Life

Allow: Space and Time

reading and listening to music: the triumphs of being not myself

Susan Sontag, Pilgrimage

It started with my mobile – old, about four, five years old – which had reached its storage limit. And I thought, that’s right. Too much and too many. So instead of adding storage – more, more, more – I started letting go. Removing. Deleting. Images. Files. Applications. Accounts. Email lists. Subscriptions.

I began to hear the space, to feel my thinking, to let things be. I returned to reading for the act in and of itself, without a question in mind, without a purpose or a deadline. A gift of time. Let the body chose the words it needs: what calls? The cover – the title – the cover image – the first line – a page opened at random and a word?

And it continues. The shedding. And in doing so, a containment of sorts. An affirmation. Re-affirmation. Con-firmation. What is it we tell ourselves we need – or can release – with all this virtual and physical stuff? To remind ourselves of who we are? Or to be someone else?

Above, a photograph of books currently in progress or recently read:

  • Mary O’Donoghue The Hour After Happy Hour
  • Johanna Hedva Your Love Is Not Good
  • Amy Key Arrangements In Blue
  • The Paris Review 243
  • Susan Sontag Stories
  • Not pictured but recently read: Helen Blackhurst Swimming on Dry Land and Alison Wells Random Acts Of Optimism.

While I have disconnected myself from Twitter/X, and will, into the future, very occasionally use Instagram and Facebook, you can still connect with me through this blog.

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.