Does ALL SOULS draw on your real life experiences as a teacher?

The choral sections, where unattributed speech serves as a scene, draw on real life exchanges I have overheard as a teacher. 

“We didn’t know you were coming.”

“I tried to save you a place.”

“She couldn’t invite you; she could only have six friends.”

The literature taught in the novel is literature I have taught to seventeen-year-olds; and more than once I have heard the complaint that nothing happens in To the Lighthouse.  From middle school on the big books are all about death, but death in books.  In All Souls, a school community, uncommonly small, privileged, insular—another ruined garden, if you will—confronts death outside of books.  In math class Marlene Kovack, one of the sick girl’s classmates, muses, “Astra Dell’s dying: What did it mean to them all in this overheated room?” The book is bent on answering this question. 

Do you worry about what your students might think of your work, and what they might extrapolate (erroneously or otherwise) from it?

My earlier books, the two story collections and the novel, Florida, I would like kept on a high shelf until my students come of age, but All Souls, I hope, will amuse them for being familiar; moreover, it is a more accurate portrait of the school than may be seen on TV.  The author of the Gossip Girl series is a former student of mine, a good writer, who, by her own admission, spent her weekends riding horses; nevertheless, her depiction of school life tends to be sensational. All Souls is in part a response to the stereotypically repugnant, empty, pretty-girl models most often paraded in novels about private schools.

Your prose is beautifully succinct.  Do you edit yourself ruthlessly?

I do edit myself ruthlessly and rarely move forward until the passage is right. 

There’s also a kinetic energy though.  Is it difficult to balance the editing and control with intensity and daring? 

I don’t usually think of myself as balancing control with intensity; the struggle is to move characters, create scenes; the struggle is to stay interested in the scene.

Do you feel a strong affinity to poetry?

As has been true for many writers, poetry came first for me; I wanted to be a poet but despaired of achieving an evolved soul, fully believing then and now that poets live in a purer atmosphere that will not sustain lesser mortals.  I don’t think novelists ever reach the slopes of Parnassus although some have come close. 

What motivates you?  Do you have any rituals when you’re writing?

Reading is a provocation.  Reading other fiction or poetry is as much an inspiration as experience.  As to rituals, none beyond securing some privacy and time, but I do not write on trains or planes.

What are you working on now? 

I am working on a very difficult long something that I sometimes call a novella even though I don’t understand what a novella is exactly.  This long-something is to be part of a third short story collection.  Most of the stories have been published in NOON, a literary annual. 

Thank you Christine!

Click here for part one of Christine Schutt’s Q & A

Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections A DAY, A NIGHT, ANOTHER DAY, SUMMER and NIGHTWORK (named by the poet John Ashbery as the 1996 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year) as well as the critically acclaimed novel FLORIDA, which was a 2004 National Book Award Finalist.

In her new novel ALL SOULS, published by Harcourt (April 2008), popular high school student Astra Dell fights a rare cancer in the hospital, whilst her classmates at an exclusive Manhattan private school concern themselves with boys, teachers, exams, dance recitals, college applications, graduation, and, of course, the ailing Astra. 

Christine Schutt lives and teaches in New York City. We caught up over email.

What was the inspiration for ALL SOULS?

First came the name Astra Dell on an afternoon when I had been thinking of Pip’s Estella, and her name’s associations, the stars, the sky, the sky as it is experienced when Pip and Estella walk in Miss Havisham’s ruined garden.  Romantic, gauzy associations were in the air when I came up with the name Astra Dell, which combined sky and dell and seemed silly but worthy of any and all exaggerated beauty and gracefulness I might wish to attach to it.  The name, the dancer, the hair in that order; I committed to her saintliness when I took up her sickness and a community’s reaction to it as the way to organize and write a school novel with a large cast.  The saintliness and the sickness I took from life, a former student’s; she is thanked in the acknowledgments. 

The novel is set in New York in 1997.  Was it a conscious decision to set it before 9/11 or were there other reasons for the date?

Yes, I wanted the New York City I knew before September 11, 2001; the earlier date allows for a jolly solipsism, self-involvement mitigated by age and inexperience of emptiness.  In the novel, when Astra Dell is rumored sickest, she is a topic avoided for the simple reason that the sick girl’s “futureless future” horrifies her friends.  (Healthy girls, marginally unhealthy girls, American girls of all classes, do not, in my experience, look into a summer and see blank; rather, there is camp or a trip or an internship.) Since September 11, 2001, the possibility of the futureless future for us all in an instant occurs to anyone even passing through the city; everyone has been made a bit older and harder by the event—even the girls I know and teach seem born cynical.  As to why 97, my choice was made by my sons, teenagers at the time, full-blown, wonderful and awful; they and their friends and their girlfriends and the girls I taught made a deep impression on me in 1997.

All Souls raises some very uncomfortable issues (notably sexual relationships between adults and teens in their care).  Do you think it is important for fiction to be challenging?

Writers look for dramatic interest, and my experience of outdoor dramas—one drowning, two suicides, some accidents involving animals or heavy machinery—is yet small in comparison to the indoor dramas I might elaborate on.  The greatest of these dramas involve plausible sexual transgressions that keep me awake when I am writing. The writer, as much as the reader then, is challenged to look. 

I found it interesting that you’re quite un-judgmental of your characters’ behavior.  Is moral ambiguity important to your fiction?

I don’t set out to be morally ambiguous.  I want to be fair in the treatment of my characters, to admit any action is possible. 

Read part two of my Q & A with Christine Schutt tomorrow!

Can you share an interesting experience you had researching INVISIBLE NATION?

As I describe in Chapter 6, I think I’m the only journalist who used his entire gas mask and chemical suit during the war, investigating what luckily turned out to be a bum-steer from the Kurds about a chemical shell they said had made a bunch of them sick.

Has US involvement in Iraq has aided the Kurdish cause?

The Kurds have been struggling for centuries, and in recent history they owe their worst defeats and their greatest victories to American foreign policy.  At the moment they’re riding high as Washington’s most trusted ally among Iraq’s factions, but they’re watchful for a hint that America might cut them loose again.

Will their situation change dramatically if the US military withdraws from Iraq?

If America leaves the region the Kurds will be able to hold their territory in the north against any of the internal factions.  It’s outside powers like Iran and Turkey - both with restive Kurdish populations of their own - that the Kurds of Iraq see as a major threat.

What inspired you to become a writer?

I got addicted to travelling when I was 19 years old, taking a back-pack to Central America and Middle East and I always kept a journal.  It wasn’t until 1996 that some journalist friends clued me in to the fact that I could make a living from it.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring foreign correspondents, what would it be?

I’d skip school and head out into the field.  Once you get a taste of the “ground truth”, you’ll never go back to watching from a distance.

Is there a particular ritual involved in your writing process? Or is it all about the deadline?

For writing news, the deadline is the only incentive you need, I’ve filed stories from the top of an armoured car stuck in human traffic (that was in 2005, the last time the Gaza border with Egypt burst open).  For writing the book I enjoyed a long cross country ski in the morning before a long day of writing, then another one in the evening if I’d earned it.

How do you relax?

I’ve been building a house out of stone in Maine for about a dozen years, it’s an eternal work in progress and once of my favourite things to do when I come back from the field.

What books are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading What is the What, by Dave Eggers and The Accidental Empire by Gershom Gorenberg - about the Israeli settlers movement. I also just picked up The New Cold War, by Globe and Mail correspondent Mark MacKinnon.

The largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland, 25 million Kurds live in the area around the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. In INVISIBLE NATION, BBC correspondent Quil Lawrence delivers an intimate and unflinching portrait of the Kurds’ quixotic quest for statehood and how it is reshaping Iraq. 

Quil is the Middle East correspondent for BBC news magazine The World. He has spent much of the last seven years in Iraq and Kurdistan, reporting for National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has won various awards for his journalism, including the Harry Chapin Media Judges Award and the Judges Award from the National Conference of Community Broadcasters.

He lives in Jerusalem, and we talked about INVISIBLE NATION by email.

What first interested you in the Kurds and their quest for statehood?

While I was a free-lance journalist based in Bogota, Colombia, I read in the Guardian Weekly about the capture in Kenya of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish rebel group in Turkey, the PKK.  Hundreds of Kurds around the Middle East and Europe were so passionate about Ocalan that they immolated themselves in protest.  I had no idea what a Kurd was at the time, but the protests made a deep impression and peeked my curiosity.

I made my first visit to Iraqi Kurdistan in early 2000, when I was a Pew International Journalism Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).  I spent several months in Washington talking with policymakers about the subject - Paul Wolfowitz was conveniently dean of SAIS at the time, he would later become the principle architect of the Iraq invasion.  I made two trips to Iraq as part of the fellowship, in the days when foreign reporters were a rare sight.  The Kurds were desperate for media attention and afraid that without it Saddam might easily crush them again.  It was a good time to get to know people like Jalal Talabani - then a rebel leader and now President of Iraq.  I met and formed lasting relationships with key figures of what is now the Kurdish Regional Government.

I had no idea at the time what good preparation I was making.  After my fellowship in 2000 I began working for the BBC World Service radio on their news magazine The World, produced with PRI and WGBH in Boston.  In January of 2003 I found myself back in Northern Iraq, crossing-in through the mountains from Iran in a blizzard.  With no idea when the US invasion was coming, I waited out the war for three months.  In those days most of the world was convinced that Saddam had anthrax or at least mustard gas - Kurdistan had living proof of that.  As the war approached many Kurds fled population centers fearing a last ditch revenge attack by the regime.  I slept with a gas mask next to my pillow.

I did most of my research just listening back through the audio recordings I’d made over 7 years covering Iraq - hundreds of hours of interviews.  In 2006-7 I took a sabbatical from the BBC.  I made one two-month trip to Iraq for research and then moved home to Maine to write in the wintry seclusion there.  I was also commuting to visit my girlfriend in Ottawa, and I would listen to entire day’s worth of audio recordings while I drove across Quebec to see her.

Read Part Two of our Q & A with Quil Lawrence tomorrow.

What inspired you to become a writer?

Reading as a child introduced me to a vivid world of the imagination. Travelling with my parents as an adolescent revealed the richness of a wider world of real experience. Writing combined both those pleasurable realms. Then after a while I discovered I could get paid for it.

Did you have a mentor, or was there a journalist who you particularly admired?

We never met, although I interviewed him once by phone, but Pierre Berton was my model: a wonderful story-teller who found material on every street corner and in the neglected back-closets of history. He also encouraged me to believe (against the odds early on) that a fellow could be a financially successful writer without either being an academic or an employee of some large corporation.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?

Do it: write. Write at every opportunity. Write for an audience, write for a teacher, a client, a friend or yourself; but write. No one ever got good at anything without spending a lot of time being bad at it first. But never, ever, write carelessly. Write about something; observe it closely. Choose every word with precision. Make every phrase you write, whether it’s in an email or a novel, the very best you can make it at that particular moment. Then go back later and see how you could have said it better.

Is there a particular ritual involved in your writing process?

I plan. I imagine the story then think about what I will need to know in order to write it. Then I go and learn that. Then I draft an outline and organize notes around it pointing to the relevant parts of the research material I’ve collected. All this can take between weeks and months.

Then one day I start at the beginning of the outline and start putting the real words down. When I’m writing for a project, I usually begin writing sometime between eight and nine o’clock each morning and continue until around five. I take several short breaks during the day to fix coffee or a soup or salad, but seldom a longer one. I eat at the keyboard. I usually work six or seven days a week until a manuscript is complete.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a major magazine feature that will extend the ideas in DRY SPRING into a new area, and on a novel that imagines how far someone might go who truly believed some of the darkest predictions being made for our climate future.

How do you relax?

A lot of what I do for my work is huge fun. Reporting, for example. I don’t really need to ‘relax’ from it. But at the end of a writing day I do like to veg in front of a good TV crime drama (Numbers, the various Law and Orders and Without a Trace are all faves). My hobbies are creative woodworking and (not so creative) home repairs. Now and again, not as often as I’d like, I cook in a style I call bistro improv!

What books are you reading at the moment?

Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest, about the worldwide flowering of groups seeking ecological and social justice; James Lee Burke’s Louisiana-set Dave Robichaud mystery Pegasus Descending (I’m a long-time fan); Partha Dasgupta’s disarming A Very Short Introduction to Economics (from a series of such useful ‘very short introductions’ published by Oxford Press); an assortment of other books about the economics of the environment; El Reino del Dragon de Oro, an adventure for adolescent readers by Isabelle Allende (with my Spanish dictionary in hand).

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

For people who are concerned about our future and the planet we are creating, I recommend the philosophical groundwork laid by Thomas Berry, who reconciles today’s most urgent tasks with the ongoing story of mankind and our sense of the divine in his The Great Work.

For people interested in how Canada deals with the environment, I recommend Elizabeth Brubaker’s short book Property Rights in the Defence of Nature (Earthscan, 1995). It made me think differently about our legal approach to protecting the environment, and it’s well written.

Thanks Chris!

Click here for part one

Click here for part two

Who are the worst offenders when it comes to wasting water?

North Americans, without a doubt. And Canadians as a group waste as much water as Americans. But it’s important to put some perspective around that. North Americans use more water than anyone else on earth in their daily lives (and could reduced that use by at least half without any penalty in our quality of life). But domestic use as a category consumes only a small fraction of all the water ‘used’ in a country. Agriculture uses the greatest amount. In both the U.S. and Canada, some irrigation is highly efficient, some not. Industry also ‘uses’ a lot of water but returns most of that water to the environment. The issue there is how clean the water is when it’s returned, and by and large North American industries do much better on that score than factories in those countries to which we’ve outsourced our consumer manufacturing, places like China and Indonesia.

What is the key to preserving our water?

The place to start is to recognise that our economic life relies entirely on water delivered from natural ecosystems, and that we must begin to account for that value in all our economic choices. That means not only in what we build and where, but in what we buy and what gets included in the price of things. And that shift in thinking has to be put into action.

The practical place to start first is to insist all of us, families and industries alike, pay the full cost* of the water we use, whether it comes from wells or a community system. Communities that haven’t done so already should switch immediately to metered water service to homes and business and water rates that rise with the volume of water that either consume.

We also need to make every drop of water we do take from nature work as hard as it possibly can for us. We need innovators to discover ways to do more with less of it. And once individual needs are satisfied for water to drink, cook and wash with, we need to direct every drop to the most valuable, most productive end. The most powerful instrument we know of for motivating innovation and directing resources to their most productive use, is the marketplace. So we also need shed our exaggerated fears of allowing water and markets to mix.

*’Full’ cost means not only the cost of treating water for consumption or the cost of pipes to deliver it to homes and businesses. It also means the cost of protecting in perpetuity the headwater valleys and wetlands where nature’s water supply is gathered and delivered to streams and aquifers. It includes the cost of preserving the downstream ecosystems that remove from water the heavy metal toxins that elude our treatment plants in sewage effluent.

What should governments be doing?

Much of what we can do isn’t expensive or technically challenging, but it does require political leadership to change rules. Beyond installing water meters and volume pricing at the municipal level, most governments need to review their whole policy around water and the landscapes that provide it to ensure that the value of both is reflected in all the other activities government influences. That may mean instituting new rules for water ‘capture’ from the wild, or making special provision for the protection of wetlands that filter water and recharge wetlands. In many places, communities and governments are discovering that they need new forums for making decisions about water that take into consideration all of the interests in a watershed (the area drained by a single big river).

Can you share a success story?

Perhaps the most powerful example is New York City. In the 1990s it faced spending $5 billion on a new water treatment plant to meet its growing thirst, and another $1.5 billion on two additional sewage treatment plants that would be required when that new water worked its way through the city’s drains and toilets. Instead, its leaders opted to spend $500 million on a range of investments that improved the quality of water the city receives from the Catskill Mountains through better land-management practices there, and others to reduce water waste in the five city boroughs. Rebates got owners to replace nearly half the city’s toilets with low-flow models. Plugging leaks in city mains saved nearly as much water. Altogether the city cut its water needs by one-fifth and escaped both an expensive building program and the political fight over where to put two new sewage plants.

In Canada, local private investors are building a new community for 2,500 people in Victoria that will use water so carefully that over a year it will save as much water as the entire British Columbia capital city uses on the hottest day in summer. The neat thing is that the builder told me, the more efficiently his projects use water and every other resource, the more money his business makes. In other words: green pays!

Are there some simple steps an ordinary person can take to help conserve water?

The most obvious things begin at home: keep an eye on running water and fix leaky taps promptly. When you replace toilets and shower-heads, go with low-flow models. The place where most households use the most water is outdoors. In dry regions, irrigating lawns can quadruple water use. Choose landscaping and ornamental shrubbery that work with your local climate’s natural rainfall. If you do decide to irrigate, use timers to apply only what is needed (more can actually damage your lawn, garden plants and soil).

When issues surrounding water arise in your community, give them your attention. Lend your voice to sensible solutions that respect the great value we receive from healthy ecosystems that collect, clean, store and deliver our most important economic, human and natural resource. 

Read the third and final part of our Q & A with Chris Wood tomorrow! (click here for part one)

CHRIS WOOD is a veteran international journalist and former Maclean’s editor and correspondent. He has written for The Globe and Mail, The Financial Post, The Walrus, TheTyee.ca, and more. His writing on water has won two Gold National Magazine Awards, and he was co-author of Blockbusters and Trade Wars, which was shortlisted for the Donner Prize.

Chris’ new book DRY SPRING, which examines the future of water in North American, is not just “another book about ‘climageddon’,” he promises. It is about what we can all do, indeed must do, to ensure that we survive the changes in our climate: “There are many reasons to be apprehensive about the quarter-century ahead. Many things could go terribly wrong… Water, however, is at the heart of solving all these other problems. If we can get the water part right, we will have the chance to apply our astonishing collective ingenuity and adaptive capacity to all the rest.”

After three decades of reporting natural phenomena, Chris’ research took him to the deck of a foreign freighter transiting the Great Lakes, the bed of the drained Colorado River south of the Mexican border, and the Rocky Mountain foothills where a century-old ditch recalls a long-forgotten standoff between Canada and the United States. He recorded scores of personal interviews with ranchers, vintners, fishermen, ship captains, families who have fled their homes - all so readers could “experience the impacts of climate change today through people like themselves.”

In the book Chris focuses on the years immediately ahead. Suggesting realistic solutions, he courts controversy by challenging lobbyists who oppose the so-called ‘commodification’ of water. According to Chris, these well meaning activists are not saving the environment, but instead setting it on a path to destruction. “Nothing inspires innovation faster than a problem that can be solved profitably,” he argues. “Once we shed our fear of mentioning water and markets in the same breath, a panoply of inexpensive, effective and adaptive solutions begin to recommend themselves.”

Chris lives in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island, where he is active in local efforts to achieve a more sustainable community. We corresponded by email.

When did you first become interested in the weather and climate?

I’ve lived most of my life in the country, where weather is much more present in your day. That was especially so over the nearly ten years that I spent living on boats. You notice when the weather changes more than if your day is spent inside buildings. I made the connection between climate change and the increasing wildness of the weather when I had the opportunity to interview one of Canada’s top climate scientists in the aftermath of a horrendous ice storm that devastated eastern Ontario and southern Quebec.

Why did you decide to focus on water?

Weather is where climate touches down in our life, and the most important variable in the weather is water. Is it raining today? Snowing? How many days has it been since we last had rain? Storms that also bring rain, like hurricanes and typhoons, do more damage than winds alone do. Droughts (too little rain) and floods (too much) are the number 1 and number 2 most-costly types of natural disaster.

Weather, when you think about it, is also our only renewable source of clean water. Even the water in rivers, lakes and most wells depends ultimately on rain and snowfall. Everything else that we do, from growing food to making goods for sale, also depends on that water. After I had been following the science on climate change for a little while, I realized that the effects of ‘global warming’ weren’t waiting for the middle or end of the century to be felt. They are apparent already in the way that weather patterns are changing and hence, how our ultimate source of water is changing.
Changes in the availability, reliability and quality of our water supply will be the most acutely felt impact of climate change. And they are already upon us.

Are we really facing a water crisis?

Yes - and no. It’s important to distinguish between water resources on a large scale, viewed across a whole continent or over the period of a year, and what is available in a particular community right now, today. Over the world as a whole, across North America or all of Canada, there is enough water in theory to meet all our needs. (Canada is even getting more water than it used to). Of course none of us actually live in theory. And in the real places where we do live, climate change is making local water problems more acute.

The explanation for the paradox is this: climate change is also making weather more variable and extreme. That is, the weather is swinging from unusually wet to unusually dry with increasingly rapidity and becoming more extreme at the margins: wetter when it’s wet, but also drier when it’s dry. At the same time, climate change is moving entire features of the global weather system around, so for instance, rain which used to be reliable as clockwork in certain places and seasons, now falls either somewhere else or during another time of year.

So our water crisis is real, but it manifests differently from place to place.

How is the crisis manifesting itself?

In some regions it may be felt in water shortages. That’s been true lately in the American southeast where major urban regions like Atlanta have come within weeks of draining their reservoirs dry. In other places (or even the same ones at other times) the crisis may be felt in torrential downpours that overwhelm drains and flood homes under record amounts of runoff water.

It may also be felt in less obvious ways. When a combination of climate change and development reduces the amount of rainwater that percolates beneath the ground, aquifers decline and wells run dry. When summer rainfall arrives in fewer but heavier rainstorms, it washes enormous volumes of toxic pollutants off roads and fertilizer excess out of fields, flushing these into swollen rivers where the unprecedented flows are also increasing erosion. So we see that too, especially in places like Ontario or the US Atlantic seaboard.

Even harder for many of us to notice is that less winter precipitation is falling as snow. That has astonishing significance. It’s a factor in low water levels later in the year in the major rivers of western North America and the Great Lakes.

Where are some of the worst hit regions?

In North America, the U.S. southwest is in the crosshairs of reduced rainfall and the rising loss of water to evaporation because of hotter days. But virtually the entire United States is growing progressively drier as changing weather patterns drive rainfall further north.

Canada, in contrast, is getting wetter, but most of that extra precipitation is falling in the far northwest. Southern Canada, where most Canadians live, is in some places getting drier and everywhere experiencing an increasing severity of both extreme droughts and extreme floods. Southern Alberta got both in the first half of this decade. It is particularly vulnerable, and already running out of water in some river basins. Southern Ontario faces increasingly competitive demands for a water supply that is not growing and in summer is declining. The Great Lakes region as a whole is going to have to adjust to lower lake water levels, particularly late in the year. British Columbia, where I live, is getting walloped at both ends of the deal: wilder, wetter winters and much drier summers in places like the Okanagan Valley where water supplies are already often short.

Internationally, Australia is a special case. It’s the driest continent already and in the last three years its people have awakened to that fact that for them climate change is creating a nationwide water crisis now. The Mediterranean countries, central Asia, the Sahel region south of the Sahara, northern Mexico and the Amazon Basin are all places that are likely to lose water in the global weather realignment.

Read Part Two of our Q & A with Chris Wood tomorrow!

What inspired you to become a writer?

Initially I thought of going into academics, but I couldn’t bear the thought of putting your heart and soul into writing that nobody was ever going to read. Nonfiction writing seemed like a good compromise between university life and journalism.

You wrote a feature for the magazine Toronto Life that went on to win a National Magazine Award. What was the article about?

It was about the dark side of Huntsville, the town I grew up in. After university, I moved to Toronto, and it struck me that my friends there had a very one-sided experience of Huntsville—to them, it was “cottage country,” a playground of the rich, a Canadian version of the Hamptons. The Huntsville I knew was very poor and culturally unsophisticated—more like Appalachia than the Hamptons. So I wrote this story about a family feud between two old logging families, in which one guy tried to kill his son-in-law with a hunting rifle. But the story was also about my own relationship to Huntsville. My ancestors were among the first to settle the area in the late 19th century, when it was pure wilderness. I wanted to figure out what it means to say you’re “from” somewhere, when that place is so far from your present identity, when it only lives in your memory.

How did winning the award affect your writing career?

It didn’t really affect my career, but it definitely affected how I approached the book. In some ways, it was a model for the book. I left fundamentalism and Huntsville around the same time, in my late teens. Fundamentalists and hillbillies are both outsiders in modern society. Maybe it’s because I was a fundamentalist who grew up around hillbillies, but I’m very attracted to outsiders as a writer. I like the thought of serving up a cliché and then chipping away at it by making it more complicated and three-dimensional. Also, like the Toronto Life story, the book was an attempt to figure out what hold fundamentalism still has on me today. And what I discovered was that there’s still a lot that I respect and value about my fundamentalist childhood—the love of literacy and daily study of the scriptures; the conviction that ideas matter, that what you believe has implications in the world.

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring journalists, what would it be?

Don’t bother with journalism school. Pick up the reporting skills by doing an internship or working at a school paper. I think it’s very important for journalists to know something about the world—about culture and history and religion—and the best way is by doing a liberal arts degree. Anybody can report on events. What the world needs today is analysis: the ability to put those events into a larger historical and cultural context.

Do you have a particular ritual that you adhere to when you’re writing?

If I have a rule, it’s to change things up—where I write, when I write, whether I use a computer or a notebook. If something isn’t working, I try something else.

How do you relax when you’re not writing?

I try to read the kinds of books that inspired me to become a writer in the first place. I’m also a bit obsessed with pop culture. I’m one of those nerds who read the early script reviews of superhero movies when they get posted on websites.

What books are you reading at the moment and what made you pick them up?

Right now I’m trying to fill in some of the holes in my education—I just finished Herodotus, which absolutely blew my mind. Herodotus is not only the first historian. He’s the first journalist. Like Augustine, he is such a modern spirit. He’s sceptical in his reporting. He’ll write, “So-and-so says that this mountain was created by a god who wanted to build a sandcastle, but I’m not totally sure about that.” At the moment, I’m reading Moby Dick. People always say it gets boring in the middle, when Melville goes into this long lecture on the biology of whales, but I think it’s fascinating. It must have been a conscious strategy. At a certain point, the book itself becomes a kind of white whale—an obsession that you can’t put down, even though it’s killing you.

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

In the late 1930s, Rebecca West wrote an account of her travels through Serbia and Yugoslavia called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She was incredibly prescient in describing the darkness that was about to fall over Europe. I’m not a huge fan of travel literature, but her book is a masterpiece of the genre: every page has these long ruminations about history, art, theology—you name it. She was also a novelist and in some ways, I think Black Lamb anticipated the so-called “new journalism” of the 1960s. She was incredibly effective at evoking the inner lives of the people she encountered, especially the religious and cultural worlds of Orthodox Christianity and Islam.

You’re living in the United States these days. What took you there? Do you still keep a connection with Canada?

I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, four years ago to do a master’s degree at Harvard. My wife is in the middle of doing her PhD, so we’ll be here for a few more years. I enjoy living in the States, but Canada is still definitely home. It might be that what they say about exile—that you can only write about a place when you’ve moved away from it—is true. Living here has certainly given me a chance to reflect on my experiences in Canada that might not have been available otherwise.

Thanks Chris! IN THE WORLD BUT NOT OF IT is available later this month.

Over the past decade, Canadian journalist Brett Grainger has written about religion and politics for a variety of magazines, newspapers, and public radio. Formerly a producer for NPR, he was an editor at Sojourners and Elm Street magazine and has written for The Globe and Mail, National Post, Shift, and Canadian Geographic, amongst others. In 2006, he received a Gold medal from the National Magazine Awards for a profile of poverty in Muskoka written for Toronto Life.

Raised in a small community of Plymouth Brethren in Huntsville, Ontario, Brett’s new book IN THE WORLD BUT NOT OF IT: One Family’s Militant Faith and the History of Fundamentalism in America is an examination of Christian fundamentalism in Canada and the United States coloured with his own personal experiences in a religious family.

Brett now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so after a talking on the phone, we conducted this Q & A over email.

When did you start to question your family’s beliefs? 

I don’t remember any particular dark night of the soul. Certainly as I got older, I began to encounter ideas, especially in high-school English classes, that were directly counter to what I’d been raised to think about the world. I remember being in Sunday school as a teenager. My teacher was this incredibly sweet middle-aged guy who worked in a factory. Real salt-of-the-earth type. One day he brought in some literature for us on how the earth had been created 10,000 years ago in seven literal days. He wasn’t belligerent, and he didn’t try to tell us that evolution was the source of all the evils in the world. He simply and genuinely believed he could give us a solid, persuasive, rational defence for creationism. But by that time, I’d already studied evolution in biology class, and I remember thinking, “Well, it’s a little too late for this.”

Why did you decide to revisit religious extremism for a book?

My sense was there are very few books that attempt a sympathetic critique of fundamentalism. Most of them are written by people who have axes to grind. Most reduce fundamentalism to a kind of political strategy. But the fundamentalists I grew around had absolutely no designs on government. They didn’t even believe a Christian should vote. They just want to be left alone. So there is this tremendous diversity that I wanted to communicate—that fundamentalism is not a monolith but is incredibly diverse and pluralistic, just like modern liberal society as a whole.

How would define Christian fundamentalism?

Someone once said a fundamentalist is “an evangelical who is angry about something,” and I think that’s true. It’s not so much a unique set of beliefs as it is an orientation, an attitude of belligerence or defiance toward certain aspects of modernity. It used to be a compliment to call someone a fundamentalist. It meant you were committed to fighting to protect the “fundamentals of the faith”—traditional Christian doctrines like the virgin birth and the divinity of Christ. Then in 1925, fundamentalists prosecuted a biology teacher named Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee, and public opinion suddenly turned against them. Fundamentalism became a synonym for ignorance and bigotry. Most fundamentalists these days prefer the more generic term, “evangelical.” Even so, I think the word is still useful in distinguishing between mainstream evangelicals, who are generally comfortable living “in the world,” and fundamentalists, who define themselves largely in opposition to mainstream secular culture.

Don’t all Christian fundamentalists believe the same thing?

A major point I wanted to make in this book is that fundamentalism isn’t a cultural monolith. For a long time it has been presented this way in the media—and by believers themselves. In fact, it is an incredibly diverse movement: it’s highly decentralized, bound by no creeds, bureaucracies, or authorities outside the Bible, and in a constant process of change. When you imagine the stereotype of a Christian fundamentalist, the image that most likely comes to mind is the pastor of some megachurch in the American south, where the sermon sounds like a stump speech for the Republican Party. You know the churches that are so big they have their own movie theatres and hold services with a full band on stage--it’s like going to a rock concert. But my experience of fundamentalism couldn’t have been more different. When we read the same King James Bible, we came to the conclusion that God didn’t want us to participate in politics—no one ever voted—or watch movies. It was even forbidden to use musical instruments in church. Defining and defending the “fundamentals” never means the same thing to two believers.

How widespread is Christian fundamentalism in Canada?

I think Canadian evangelicals are warier to identify themselves as fundamentalists. But when you ask Canadian evangelicals to spell out the content of their beliefs, much of what they’ll tell out lines up identically with the content of fundamentalist faith. I’m thinking of a pessimistic view of history, a belief in the “rapture,” a tendency to view every word in the Bible as “literally” true and inerrant, a defensive attitude to secular culture. Just because they’re not out there picketing abortion clinics doesn’t mean they aren’t fundamentalists.

Who is George Bothwell?

George is an organic farmer who lives in Owen Sound. In the 1980s, the Ontario government introduced new driver’s licenses that made use of digital imagery. George had been reading the book of Revelation, in which there’s a passage about an Antichrist figure who will force everyone in the world to give or receive some kind of mark on their face and hand. George got it into his mind that this verse was talking about biometrics—the new technology that uses things like facial-recognition software and fingerprint and retinal scans to identify people. So he refused to get his picture taken, and he spent over $100,000 in court fighting the government for an exemption, which he was denied. George is a great example of the Protestant principle of “sola scriptura,” which means “by scripture alone.” He thinks he doesn’t need a church or a minister to discern God’s will—he has everything he needs in the Bible. A basic principle of fundamentalism is this notion that any human being can pick up the Bible and interpret it simply by applying their common sense. And I think there’s a sense in which that’s true. But there’s also a sense in which that is disastrous. George also illustrates the complex and ambivalent relationship fundamentalists have with technology. George is not a Luddite—he uses computers and drives a car. But he appropriates technology selectively, based on how it will be used. That’s a good way of showing how fundamentalists approach modernity as a whole—they aren’t anti-modern, though they’re often described that way. They represent an alternate modernity, a different way of being modern.

Read part two of our Q & A with Brett Grainger tomorrow!

Here’s the part two of our Q & A chat with Edmonton’s Dan Vyleta, author of PAVEL & I.

(click here to read Part One)

What motivates you to write?

There is a magic to writing.  I can’t describe it any other way.  Time disappears.  It’s what it must feel like for a professional musician to pick up their instrument.  It’s not that it isn’t work.  Of course it is work to sit down at the computer and figure out what happens next.  But there comes that moment when the book takes on a force of its own, and starts to carry you.  On some level I think everybody should be writing.  It’s wonderful.

When you first started your writing career, did you have a mentor or was there an author you particularly admired?

There were about a thousand authors I deeply admired (and still admire), though I can’t say there was one who made me write.  I did not show my work to a great many people, but those who did read it were very encouraging.  I never had any formal training in writing; for me reading has always been key. 

Is there a particular ritual which you adhere to when you’re writing a novel?

I listen to music.  PAVEL was written to Beethoven’s piano sonatas.  I am a huge Jazz fan, but there is something about those sonatas that put me in a PAVELesque mood.  Other than that, I need lots of coffee and tea.  I used to think I could only write at night, but that turned out to be a stupid excuse for not getting out of bed in the morning. 

How much of yourself goes into your work?

Who knows, exactly.  A friend asked me a while back: how much of what you write is true.  None of the big things, I said, but all the small.  I listen into myself, if that makes any sense, and try to trust my instincts.  One could inquire further, but maybe it’s best not to know.

As a debut novelist how did you cope with the self-doubt?

It’s suffering, pure and simple.  I don’t think I coped; I endured.  And then there is the conviction, deep down, that it’s a good story; that it has moved me, hence may move others.

What are you working on now?

A new novel, but the title is secret.  We mustn’t jinx it.

What do you do when you’re not writing?

I have been working at various Colleges/Universities for the past few years, teaching across the humanities.  Other than that I read, play with the cats, watch The Wire, go for walks, listen to Jazz, do sports, go to bars, the usual. 

What books are you reading at the moment and what made you pick them up?

I read a bunch of lesser known books by Graham Greene recently (e.g. The Ministry of Fear); a Walter Mosley mystery that I picked up in the public library (Fear of the Dark); re-read Faulkner’s Light in August in a funky 1960s edition that I got at a local second hand book store, and some essays by Joan Didion.  I usually decide to read something because I read the first page in a shop or at a friend’s place and liked it.  Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John is next on my list - I have just been to Jasper, in the mountains, and this looks like it’ll carry me back.

What was the last book you started reading, but couldn’t finish?

An American Dream, by Norman Mailer, who passed away recently and deserves a better reader.  The prose is fantastic, I just ran out of steam somehow. 

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

I think everyone should read some of the nineteenth century classics: Dickens (Bleak House, or, if that seems like too fat a book to tackle, Great Expectations), Dostoevsky (any, really; The Eternal Husband if length is an issue), James (Portrait of a Lady; the late James is great but takes some getting used to), Stendhal (The Red and the Black) etc.  For me this is the heyday of the novel - these books are popular and literary all at once, just great thumping reads. 

As for contemporary stuff, I think Pete Dexter is terrific - his Train is a wonderful novel, part crime fiction, part meditation on race in the 1950s. 

Do you have any favourite Canadian authors?

The jury is still out on this one.  I had read a number of very famous Canadian authors before moving here (Atwood, Ondaatje, Robertson Davies), and am trying to get to know the Canadian literary landscape more systematically now.  I have to say, I am tremendously impressed by the vibrant literary community that exists in Edmonton, and how proud people I talk to are of domestic authors. 

How are you finding life in Edmonton?

I’m enjoying myself.  The first day at -25 centigrade was a bit of a shock, but it’s a balmy -5 right now, and the snow’s sparkling down in the river valley.  Obviously, after Berlin, it’s a very different type of city: very spread out, for one thing, and architecturally less enticing.  I wish there were more independent cafés etc, though I keep discovering little gems.  What I do like is the way consecutive generations of immigration have shaped the place; nobody bats an eyelid at my accent (which is English, with just a hint of something else: my German background, and some time I spent in the US), and there is an understanding that the world extends beyond national borders.  I also like the French cultural presence.  Myself, I speak very little French, and I understand that there have been very serious tensions between the Francophone and English speaking populations of Canada at various points, but again it injects a complexity and diversity into the place from which it can only benefit. 

Thanks Dan! Good luck with book!

Author Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and recently moved to Edmonton, Alberta.

Dan’s debut novel PAVEL & I (Bloomsbury, 2008) is set in the ugly aftermath of World War II in an occupied Berlin short on food and medical supplies, and gripped by a freezing, deadly winter.

Struggling to come to terms with the horrors of war, lonely Pavel Richter, a sick and disillusioned decommissioned American soldier, befriends a traumatized street orphan named Anders. But when a frozen dead dwarf is stashed in his frigid apartment by an erstwhile army buddy, Pavel finds his peaceful existence shattered by a vicious British colonel, an unhappy Soviet general and the enigmatic, piano paying Sonia.

Peopled with pimps, prostitutes, spies, and a gang of child thieves, PAVEL & I is a stylish, cinematic novel heralding an exciting new talent.

Dan Vyleta and recently caught up on email for this two part Q & A.

What was the inspiration for Pavel & I?

Ideas come to me by way of images and feelings: a sort of emotional “tone” that is connected to a character and place.  So the opening scene of the book coincides with its inspiration - it just popped out of my pen and urged me to carry on.  Then, in retrospect, you construct all sorts of reasons why it made sense that you were drawn to the material, and what its ‘meaning’ is. 

Did you have vivid mental images of other scenes in the book? 

Whenever I write a scene I feel I need to be able to see it.  Even before I sit down to write I see something, some detail, or hear something (a line of dialogue), but things only take on focus with the writing.  Once it’s been put on paper, the scene becomes strangely real to me and strongly fused to a mental image, which makes editing somewhat tricky.

Were films a big influence?

No.  I watched some stuff when I was almost finished to check on certain visual details, and I have a longstanding love for the film version of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, but on the whole I tried to stay away from other people’s visualisations as much as I could, though I do read avidly during the writing process.  I guess I trust that language will generate language. 

What was it about post-war Berlin that interested you as a setting for a novel?

I lived in Berlin for five years or so.  It is a city much marked by the war (and by the wall), and walking around looking at the bullet holes in old building facades set some things in motion at the back of my head.  I was also attracted to a moment in history when civilisation has worn thin, and naked survival is the order of the day.  It raises the question whether or not civility - and love - can survive under these conditions.

How much did you know about the period before you started?

I am a professional historian by training, and by the standards of the discipline I knew very little indeed.  The research I did was very different from academic work.  The book is not trying to capture an authentic historical “truth” about the period - that would be presumptuous, I feel.  It deals with one man’s remembrance of the era.  Diaries and memoirs helped me with this, as did some conversations with eyewitnesses. 

Was there a particularly interesting fact you uncovered in your research that you weren’t able to include in the novel?

There are things I allude to but don’t flesh out.  A great many things, in fact.  One that struck me was the story of a man with a white cane who convinced children to follow him, then butchered them and sold them for their meat.  It seemed too outlandish to convert into a central episode. 

Are the characters in Pavel & I based on real people?

No, though I do steal details from real people, and take stock of real emotions, behavioural patterns, etc.  One character, Colonel Fosko, is based on Wilkie Collins’s villain by the same name (from The Woman in White).  I wanted to highlight the porous boundary between fact and fiction; the narrator, after all, is clearly somebody who models reality on things he’s found in books.  Boyd White’s name is also borrowed, though the real man is nothing like my hardboiled pimp. 

Tell me about the frozen dwarf...

What is there to say?  The story of the de-nazification of the circus performers is based on fact, so I guess that gave me the idea.  I have always believed there is a lot that’s surreal about the real.  My friends claim I have listened to too much Tom Waits, and watched too many of Terry Gilliam’s movies.

Read Part Two of Dan Vyleta’s Q & A tomorrow!

Kate Summerscale is the former literary editor for the Daily Telegraph and author of THE QUEEN OF WHALE CAY, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award.

Her new book, THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER, which is published in March, is an account of the brutal murder of three-year-old Saville Kent in June 1860, a crime that so horrified England’s chattering classes, that Scotland Yard sent its best man, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, to investigate, inadvertently sparking an enduring national obsession with detection.

Kate Summerscale lives in London, England and we corresponded by the electrical wonder of the internet.

How did you first come across the story of Jonathan Whicher?

I read about the Road Hill child-murder in an old anthology of celebrated Victorian cases. I was fascinated by the story - a country-house murder in which everyone in the household fell under suspicion—but I was especially struck by the figure of Inspector Whicher, a brilliant detective whose career was ruined by the case. Whicher figured only as a secondary character in accounts of the crime, and I wondered what would happen if he were put at the heart of the narrative. By minutely reconstructing his investigation, I thought I could write a true-crime book that was structured like a mystery novel. As well as revisiting the murder itself, the book might throw light on the earliest days of detection and detective fiction. The Road Hill case, after all, was the original country-house mystery and Whicher was one of the first eight detectives in the English-speaking world, a model for the fictional sleuths of today.

Was it difficult to research the book?

It was a treat to research! I spent months in libraries, reading old newspapers and pamphlets. There was plenty to look at, since the case was a huge sensation in its day. The Victorian public seemed to have been as intrigued as I was by the dark secrets of the murder victim’s household: the wayward adolescent children, the nervous nursemaid, the spinster sisters, the bad-tempered father and his two wives—the first a madwoman, the second his former servant and lover.

I read Whicher’s notes and reports on the case, which had been preserved by the Metropolitan Police. I visited the village in which the crime took place, and the owner of the former Road Hill House let me look around the building and grounds. I spent time in the surrounding towns and countryside. I read Victorian novels that dealt with crime and mystery. I read books on insanity, wool factories, governesses, infanticide, police procedure, syphilis. The more difficult part was researching Jack Whicher’s life. The most interesting facts I gathered about his private life were hard-earned, the fruit of long hours in archives and records offices. His professional life was much easier to unearth. Thanks to digital archives, I was able to find accounts of dozens of cases on which he had worked, and from these I tried to deduce what kind of a man he had been.

How much did you know about the period before you started?

I had studied some Victorian fiction as part of my English Literature degree, but I had not done any historical research.

Your previous book, The Queen of Whale Cay, was about the fascinatingly eccentric Marion “Joe” Carstairs, heiress to the Standard Oil fortune. Do you think Whicher and Carstairs have anything in common, or are you simply interested in their stories?

In each case, I was drawn to a story that felt as rich and suggestive as certain kinds of fiction. Both Carstairs and Whicher seemed to offer fresh ways of thinking about the times in which they lived. But their characters were utterly different. Joe Carstairs was forthright, bold, theatrical, a woman of action; Jack Whicher was ingenious, private, cryptic, a man of mystery. There’s an important difference between the books, too - The Suspicions of Mr Whicher isn’t primarily the story of a life, but the story of a murder investigation.

How did Jonathan Whicher inspire the fictional Victorian detectives we’ve come to know so well?

He directly inspired the wry, enigmatic Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, often cited as the first detective novel. Charles Dickens wrote about Whicher in magazine articles, and the early detectives were the models for the all-knowing Inspector Bucket in Bleak House.
The successor to these first fictional sleuths was Arthur Conan Doyle’s immensely popular private investigator, Sherlock Holmes. Like Whicher, Holmes is cerebral and inventive - but, unlike Whicher, he is a gentleman and an amateur, and he is always right. Whicher was a working-class London copper, with a pockmarked face and a taste for brandy, and he sometimes made mistakes. His true inheritors are flawed, haunted figures such as Philip Marlowe, Inspector Morse and DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect.

Have you ever been tempted to write your own detective novel?

I enjoy detective novels, films and television shows, but for me it was more interesting to write a book that tried to trace the origins of these stories in life, and to do so in a way that recreated some of the pleasures of detective fiction: mystery, suspense, the unravelling of riddles and clues.

In part two of our Q & A, Justin Cartwright, author of THE SONG BEFORE IT IS SUNG, discusses his writing process and his reading habits! 

What motivates you to write?

I find that I have to write, and that it is only by writing that I really know what I think and feel.

When you first started your writing career, did you have a mentor or was there an author you particularly admired?

I have admired John Updike since I was 20 or so, but there are many others.

Is there a particular ritual which you adhere to when you’re writing a novel?

Yes, I go to the London Library, a private library, and write longhand in lined exercise books.

How much of yourself goes into you to work?

A lot. Sometimes my work is faintly autobiographical, but always it is written - and there is no other way - from within my own sensibility.

What are you working on now?

A novel about a family.

How do you relax when you’re not writing?

Play tennis, read, have as many holidays as I can manage and fish for trout.

What books are you reading at the moment and what made you pick them up?
Rachel Seiffert, the Dark Room; I met and liked her.

What was the last book you started reading, but couldn’t finish?

Couldn’t divlulge. Never inflict gratuitous hurt on writers

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

WG Sebald, Austerlitz, one of the most astonishing novels by one of the most original novelists of our time.

Click here for Part One

Justin Cartwright is the award-winning author of In Every Face I Meet, Leading the Cheers, White Lightning, and The Promise of Happiness.

His latest novel THE SONG BEFORE IT SUNG is based on the lives of Adam von Trott and Isaiah Berlin.

Described by the LA Times as “a quiet masterpiece”, it traces the friendship between charismatic Axel von Gottberg, an aristocratic German, and Elya Mendel, a socially awkward but brilliant Jewish scholar, in 1930’s Oxford.

Sixty years after meeting von Trott, Mendel asks a former student, Conrad Senior, to unravel his collection of letters and papers.

Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa but, since graduating from Oxford University, has lived all his adult life in London.

We met in Toronto in October 2007 during The International Festival of Authors and later corresponded by email. 

What was the inspiration for The Song Before it is Sung?

It was seeing the showtrial of Adam von Trott and others in the Imperial War Museum, London

You’re perhaps best known for chronicling the foibles of contemporary society in your novels. Was it a challenge to write a story drawing on historical fact?

It was. The difficulty is in making judgements about what aspects of the story could be treated fictionally, and which had to be faithful to some underlying truths.

How did you start researching the book?

By watching the film and then meeting families of the resisters in Germany and the UK.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford provided the originals of letters from Von Trott to Berlin.

Conrad Senior, the researcher in The Song Before it is Sung, is often overwhelmed by his work. Did you ever feel the same way?

Yes. Knowing where to stop is the problem

Does the film of the executions actually exist?

Not as far as anyone knows, although it was made.

Oxford, which is one of the settings in the novel, is close to your heart and I understand you’ve written a book about the city called THIS SECRET GARDEN: Oxford Revisited. Why is it such a special place?

For me, fresh from South Africa in the sixties, it was as if I was visiting a place and a landscape of another but parallel life.  The mythology of Oxford was, and is, very powerful.

Both Mendel and Von Gottberg as immigrants to England seem to aspire to some kind of ‘Englishness’ - a somewhat elusive quality - which (correct if I am wrong!) is something of a recurring them in your work. Where does your interest in what it means to be ‘English’ come from?

The English had an enormous talent for mythologizing their past and their character. Although it is out of fashion, it still has a hold well beyond the confines of one small island.

Another recurring theme, it occurs to me, is that your protagonists often seem to be struggling to find their place in the world. Could you talk about that little?

I think consciousness and the sense of self in a vast universe is the subject of my novels, although not too overtly.

The fictional friendship between Mendel and Von Gottberg is fascinating. It’s full of incongruities and contrasts, and yet the two men share a strange affinity. How closely does it mirror the actual friendship between Berlin and Von Trott? 

In some aspects it’s very close. They were friends, but probably not nearly as close as I have made them in the book. That said, I think it is true that Berlin was in some ways an intellectual hero to Trott.

Do you think Von Trott was a hero?

Yes.

Could you explain the origin of the title, The Song Before it is Sung?

It’s from a saying of Alexander Herzen, which Isaiah Berlin loved: Where is the song before it is sung? To which Berlin replied, it does not exist. It exists only in the singing or the writing. And by this he meant it was like a life, which exists only in the living of it.

Part two of this Q & A will be posted tomorrow.