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.