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Alif Shafak and Robert McFarland are two of the most dreamy and articulate writers I know.
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Alif has written 21 books, 13 of which have been novels, and she's the president of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Robert McFarland, he writes about the natural world, birds, rivers, trees, mountains, and he does so in such a poetic and enchanted way.
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His writing is just infused with wonder.
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I've had both of them on the show individually, but what I said is, "Hey, I know you're really good friends.
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Let's all get together for one conversation.
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And what I want to do is I want to hear the kind of conversation that you would have over a cup of coffee, over lunch.
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And so here I'm like you, a fly on the wall for a conversation with two really interesting writers.
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All right, let's start with you.
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So when when you're with a mountain with a river and you're moved by awe and you think about translating those emotions into language, how is it that you go about doing that?
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First of all, you accept failure.
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Language will always be late for light.
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It will never meet water, river, rock, mountain.
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That moment of encounter which is a moment in time and a moment in space when countless streams of of being and presence and sensation are all convened in a moment that we call or we speak of ourselves as aruck, wonderuck, astonished language will never catch them.
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And I think the question is how well language fails.
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And it's actually in the the the shattering of language as it falls to pieces around the untouchable moment that for me the beauty the beauty comes how how the pieces fall, what they're made of >> and what happens when you're out in the field and what happens when you're at home at the desk.
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>> Yeah, that's a I mean I I'm extremely interested in the technologies of writing.
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So I I write across a lot of forms.
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Some of those forms I I absolutely have to write in notebook and that's typically song lyrics and short poems.
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I I really don't like writing them on the screen.
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I like working them out on paper.
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I have different size notebooks for different lengths.
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I have tiny A6 ones, bigger A5 ones, and depending on, you know, whether I how much of it I need to see, I'll I'll choose that notebook.
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Can I choose a pen that that that works as well?
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I have a fountain pen that has ink which carries the water of now 110 rivers in it.
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So if I want to write something very flowing, I'll I'll reach for the river pen.
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>> But there are other things that I need to write on the screen because I have to be moving things around much more fluidly.
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And you know, go God bless word processors for the for the flexibility they give.
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you know, for the kaleidoscopic writers among us who are always twisting twisting that um that telescope and seeing how the pieces fall.
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I I I couldn't do that in pen and ink um on on on on paper.
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It's the it's the old writer's question.
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What What do you write with, but I think it's an interesting one. >> Yeah, I can.
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I mean, the the long hand is almost impossible for me.
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I don't like my handwriting.
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I can't connect my hand with my handwriting. Uh I was left-handed.
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And at school in Turkey at the time, it was quite common to convert left-handed children >> into using their right hands.
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And that was a very difficult process for me.
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I remember in a in a in a classroom of about 40 44 kids.
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I probably I was the last one to learn how to write and it was the first time I learned that I heard the word exile because the teacher would say you have to send your left hand into exile by which he meant you have to hold it under the desk and then your right hand is above the desk.
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So for me the keyboard the computer is is a solution.
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I mean these are old teachings that are quite harmful and some of it goes back connected to religion because the belief is uh two angels sit on your shoulders and the the one on your right shoulder writes the good things that you do in life and the left the one sitting on the left shoulder writes the bad things.
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So the left hand is associated with sin and and with all the bad things.
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things. the left-handed children were at the time converted to yeah using their their right hand and I was one of them and that's why I could never still to this day my handwriting is quite messy sloppy um even when I'm signing books
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like I I I I pity the readers who who are trying to read what I've written um the yeah the I've always written us a typewriter and then a computer >> Robert you were talking earlier about a lot of your writing unfolding as a mosaic IC. [clears throat]
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[clears throat] >> Is that something that you feel or do you feel like it's a little bit more like to scroll your novels and it's you start on page one, you end up on page 400?
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>> It is never a linear process.
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Um like for instance in the there are rivers in the sky.
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I had to I didn't finish one character and then start another character and then go for the third one.
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You had to do it simultaneously.
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It's almost like you're weaving a braid of your hair.
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Um so you have to jump back and forth in time, geography, location.
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But I love that, you know, I I I I love that almost irrational jumps.
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Sometimes I say to myself, this time I'm going to keep it quite minimalistic.
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This time it's going to be a linear book and somehow I can't do it. It's just not who I am.
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Maybe because of my personality, my upbringing, because I led a much more nomadic life, there were ruptures, there were lots of migrations.
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And this comes to me much more naturally.
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So there's a cosmopolitan canvas that comes out sometimes despite me, >> which I don't want to overextrapulate here, but we talked earlier about how happy both of us are at writing while traveling.
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And I suppose as somebody who >> has been pushed into exile or and has moved and migrated a lot, you kind of >> you have to be right.
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You have to be ready to write on the move. >> Yes, absolutely.
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And the other thing of course you lament is not being able to bring your library with you because >> um that takes time.
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I mean a library requires you to to be more rooted, right? It requires time. It's an accumulation.
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So sometimes you have to memorize your favorite passages.
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Even if you can't memorize them, at least carry those feelings with you.
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I always think about, you know, what comes with us as we move from one country to another, which was the premise of one of my novels in a way.
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It's called 10 minutes 38 seconds in the strange world in which um we know it's about the sex worker and we know right away that she's dead after the the human heart has stopped beating.
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There are interesting studies that show the brain can remain active for another few minutes.
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So the entire novel takes place in those few minutes while the brain is still functioning.
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And as she remembers her past, what what are the things that stay with us?
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You know, the good or the bad?
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Is it some things that are more ephemeral?
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You know, the senses, the smells, these seemingly small things have very long-term memory. Mhm.
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>> When you think of school, what comes to mind?
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For me, it was lectures, homework, sitting at a desk.
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Robert, how is looking at birds which are small and always in motion different for you from looking at a mountain which is big and always still?
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>> Well, I I'll take >> maybe you reject the categories.
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>> I reject the categories entirely. >> Good question.
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>> Good question. big and small we can we can probably you know relatively agree on but um the the white-tailed eagle does have an 8ft wingspan but and when a the one that's overflow me at the lowest altitude did briefly block out the sun
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but yeah mountains big birds smaller let's go with the comparative birds always in motion mountains always still know mountains are moving because the the the living mountain is this great network and conglomerate teeming thriving elemental material and um and and biological presence. It's
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It's uh what does there's a wonderful line from um Japanese artist whose whose name escapes me at the moment.
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It says um place is always moving like a sleeping cat.
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And I think that's uh that's true of a mountain and birds are sometimes still.
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Of course, sometimes very still.
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But I well I sound of course because one of the great gifts of birds is their song and so if you are to write about about birds I think you need to let language sing a little as well.
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So uh the the for example cuckoo so how did it so um it was just I mean that's a very simple one.
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You of course have to set up this rocking rhythm this kind of two two two tone um beat to it.
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So I think that the entry for Cuckoo in the field guide begins um where to start with you Cuckoo that one two call perhaps from high on oak or you that heralds spring a new then beats out summer's hot tattoo.
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The curious beauty of your feathers also their smalty hue their smoky petrol blue.
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And we mustn't forget, of course, the monstrous trick you play on other birds, that devious, terrible switcheroo.
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So, cuckoo gives us the or gave me that kind of the rocking rhythm, the internal rhyme.
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It's a bird that um it's a bird that sets its own beat, we could say.
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And then of course you're into that extraordinary thing it does which is printing counterfeit eggs in the female's belly which it then lays in the nests of the host species.
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Meadow pippet reed wobbler dunock and individual cuckoo specialize in different kind of forgings different counterfeits and they they they print different eggs for different birds so that they won't be rejected by the host parents.
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Then they lay them and and off they go the mothers and leave leave the surrogate pair to to raise them.
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So So then it moves into more of a more of a kind of eerie folkloric account of how that practice has woven stories and made meaning with them for us. Does that make sense? A lot of sense.
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[clears throat] >> Definitely.
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And and I also think it's comes there's a need to listen to be a listener.
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Um I don't know if you feel that way, but when I'm writing I feel like I'm tapping into something that is bigger than me, that's >> older than me.
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Definitely that's wiser than me.
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Uh and somehow that takes also the pressure away because I feel like I have to do a lot of listening.
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I have to do a lot of learning.
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But with learning comes also a lot of unlearning.
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As you said earlier, we're all, you know, running from one place to another, from one appointment to the next.
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We're very used to looking at the world from our own little corner.
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Um, but then when you are listening, when you are learning, you have to leave that corner and transcend a little bit.
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You have to become a student of that field and you have to become ready and open to learning and unlearning.
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The way Iris Murdoch puts it, it's not a hierarchical, you know, gaze in which you, the writer, are above things and looking down upon the world or trying to find people's failures or flaws. Not at all.
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It's just actually you're dismantling that self.
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So there is a moral almost obligation or s aspect to it, but also it's very egalitarian.
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you know, you're part of something very delicate um and and complex and you recognize that it's functioning, it's moving, and you start to pay attention.
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Nothing is too small, nothing is big, there are no hierarchies, no dualities.
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And that's something that very much speaks to me. >> Yes. Yes.
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I I always wonder about that phrase, paying attention.
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It's I I I kind of I almost don't want to use it because it seems to bring attention into the kind of capitalist economy that we must we pay attention and in return something is paid back to us.
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something is paid back to us. um feels some I sometimes want to say we you know we we give attention >> that feels like that would be truer to the the idea of unselfish and unselfing attention but as it happens the idea of paying attention has got installed in our language but yeah maybe we give attention >> yeah I'm thinking about when you're
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looking at a painting and one of the things I like to do is challenge myself to find like five things in the painting that I wouldn't have noticed on the first glance and things almost come out of the painting or whatever it is that you're looking at that somehow had almost been lying dormant even though they had been there the entire time. >> Do you think that's I sometimes wonder
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>> Do you think that's I sometimes wonder about the uses of boredom where we're taught in a in an attentionfracking economy which is always shattering and mining our attention for each monetizable unit.
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Boredom is is is the enemy of that economy and we have been taught to fear it to loathe it to wriggle away from it but actually boredom is an opening of possibility as well.
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It's when the mind starts to wander perhaps and starts to notice things that were latent in the painting or the landscape or the or the person.
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Do you find does boredom come into the uses come come become useful for you? It it does actually.
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And I think it's it's so interesting that we're talking about this.
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Um boredom is always belittled and underestimated.
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Not only that, but the the the need to slow down, I think, is so existential.
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One of the many reasons I think all of us love literature so much is because it helps us to slow down and to pay attention and to go within.
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attention and to go within. You make an inner journey but then you realize at the end of that journey is that you have connected with your other with something beyond yourself and then you realize there is no other you know the other is my brother the other is my my sister it
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really gently dismantles those those dualities but I find it very important that we slow down >> you know that we don't pay this much attention to information but try to focus a bit more on knowledge and wisdom we were being told that we constantly have to achieve move from one thing to the next and if you don't do that then you're a loser. We have now a political
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We have now a political jargon, a neopolitical lexicon that talks about, you know, not being a loser.
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And I know we both, all of us love the epic of Gilgamesh.
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But this is one of the many reasons why I love the epic because it really talks makes us think about failure, defeat.
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You know, we don't have a hero who achieves everything. >> Don't you think?
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It just turns it upside down. >> It does. It does. Yes. Gilgamesh.
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Gilgamesh is really the sort of the modern the modern god king, the modern subject in a way at the beginning of the epic where it's kind of force, pace, control, mastery, toxic masculinity, it's all happening and he's a terrible ruler as a result.
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And the people complain to the gods and the gods say, "Well, we we we must find a way to balance him."
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And so they they bring Enkadu, the wild the wild man who's made of moss and earth and sand and water and river and wolf.
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And then there's this sort of mingling between the wild and the and the city.
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And these two forces are united and then of course comes more hubris and then more tragedy.
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And that eventually is is the arc that's that's slows that causes Gilgamesh to to slow to pay attention >> which he finds very hard to do or to give attention.
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She finds very hard to do >> um but slowly slowly learns and to love something other than himself. >> Yeah, absolutely.
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And it's a woman who teaches Enkidu or who brings Enkidu from the wilderness into civilization which is also interesting.
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But as you said um at the beginning of the epic I mean Gilgamesh is not a lovable person at all. Quite the opposite.
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So we don't have a hero in a classic sense.
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Um if anything you know he does terrible things but through friendship, loss, grief, defeat, failure.
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He comes back at the end of the epic and he's he has changed.
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I think it's also about many things of course about our fear of death about our desire to prolong youth but also I think it's about the possibility of change.
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of change. There is a there is a talking about attention there is a moment that triggers really Gilgamesh's great conversion from arrogance to humility and it's he's his dear friend Enkadu is has died in his arms really smitten by a
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disease that the gods have sent as punishment for the ecoside or ecoidal felling of the cedar forest and then the slaughter of of the bull of heaven who is really weather and climate and and nature in its wild in its wild um atmospheric forms. And he cannot believe that Enkodu is
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And he cannot believe that Enkodu is dead.
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And one reason why he won't believe Enkodu is dead is because to admit Enkodu's mortality is to admit his own mortality.
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He's lying there hugging Enkadu.
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And suddenly after 6 days of grieving Enkadu, a a maggot crawls out of one of Enkadoo's nostrils.
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And it's this amazing fleshly, brutal, grizzly, mortal moment.
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And in effect, Gilgamesh staggers backwards from this momento mori and then begins his time in the wilderness and where he changes his clothing and shaves his beard and becomes long-haired.
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And yeah, that moment for me is is the what what Roland Bart call the punctum, the piercing moment of of of of many in the epic.
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>> We've come a long way.
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We've gone back to the mountains and the forest and the maggots.
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You know, you're talking about the word wilderness, and I think that there's wilderness in both of your work.
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For you, there's obviously the wilderness of when you're working on is a river alive, going out for many days and just being with your notebook.
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And for you, there's a metaphorical wilderness of the imagination.
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The imagination, my sense, is you get completely lost in these worlds.
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And it's a different kind of wilderness. >> Absolutely. Yeah.
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And I think maybe I would use the word nature or or or an ecosystem.
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But again, I mean it comes back to dualities because we have disconnected from nature and we think we are above uh all other creatures that we are the cleverest species you know above and outside.
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We have turned ourselves into consumers of nature.
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When I was writing there are rivers in the sky you know we talked about unlearning earlier.
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I had to do a lot of unlearning myself, particularly as I was writing about the Yazidi minorities, one of the most misunderstood, maligned, persecuted minorities in the Middle East.
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And the reason why I'm mentioning it is because when you talk to Yazidi grandmothers, when you listen to them, particularly in the month of April when children are running around, you know, jumping up and down as kids do, they tell their grandchildren to to walk slowly, to tread the earth gently because according to their faith in the month of April, the earth is pregnant.
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So you have to, you know, give it your attention and love.
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These are the things that we have lost.
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those ancient teachings that are as old as those mountains that Rob loves and writes so beautifully about.
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>> That's a wonderful parable and it's also an example of how ecological knowledge is transmitted intergenerationally in the form of story.
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>> And of course to walk gently upon the earth in April makes sense because we don't want to crush the the buds with our feet.
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That's the um >> tulips are fragile. >> Tulips are fragile. Exactly.
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And so this is I mean this idea of story as the most durable transmitter of ecological knowledge, emotional knowledge, um social knowledge.
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It is story is a technology for encoding, protecting and then and then carrying story across immense spans of human time.
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And we've both seen the the tablets of um Gilgamesh which are made of of clay.
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And it is that seemingly frail vessel of of river clay, river reed, sun, water, time that has carried the oldest known written story to us with all its warnings, with all its learnings.
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Um I still find that amazingly beautiful and and touching both the frailty and the durability of me. >> Me too. Me too.
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And um maybe it also is fascinating in the sense that because for a long time it was transmitted via oral culture, you know, grandmothers, grandfathers telling this story to their children or grandchildren and then it was written on clay tablets.
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It's actually much older than we know.
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And there are different interpretations of the same story.
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For instance, earlier you you you used a very important word echoside.
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So in in in the epic of Gilgamesh, what we know is that Enkidu and Gilgamesh, they go to these cedar forests.
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You know, they are the heroes.
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But there is a there's a tablet in Sleman which talks about Humbaba who is supposed to be the monster of the forest almost like he's our first climate activist. you know, he's an echo.
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I don't want to say warrior, but he's the one who's defending the forest. >> He's the guardian.
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>> He's the guardian of of the forest.
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He cares about all the animals and the birds.
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So, all I'm trying to say is depending on who is telling the story, the story changes.
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>> I wonder when you're writing it if whether it feels like a wild experience.
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I mean, David asked if if it felt like you were entering into the wilderness of or the wildness of the imagination.
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Sometimes I think writing feels like the the greatest act of exerted control that I can undertake.
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And other times it feels like I've I've I've stepped into a coracal on a river in spate.
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>> And those are the two extremes of the experience of writing.
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>> That's so interesting.
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I I liked actually David's metaphor very much because always I experience it as a space that I enter into but I feel the same way about language also.
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So for me language is not like a tool or an instrument that I am using for practical purposes and then putting aside rather it's a space I enter in and I breathe in. It shapes me. It changes me.
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you're a very different person whether you know when you're writing let's say in Turkish or in Spanish or in English. Why?
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Because languages change us.
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They shape the way we think.
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When we have more words about a particular issue, you know, to to describe a tree or a bee, we will think about bees in a different way.
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So, the vocabulary also matters.
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The cadence also matters.
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I don't know if if if it makes sense.
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And I think we both care greatly about rhythm as well.
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Rhythm, >> cadence, something we've talked about uh before.
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I we think ofa of rhythm as a kind of inadmissible property of non-fiction.
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Uh similarly, sound or internal rhyme, sound patterns, echoes, broader light light motif arrangements, bigger symphonic patterning across a work of non-fiction.
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This all feels like either the the domain of fiction or or of song or poetry, but I think it has to be recognized and brought into non-fiction as well. Non-fiction can sing.
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>> Y >> um it it um it can it can set up patterns of of memory within itself.
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It can work above and below propositional forms of language and that to me is when it becomes really really interesting.
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it becomes really really interesting. So I coming back to listening um I I listen to language uh very very carefully and and to rhythm and sound and even even with big big non-fiction works I the first lines of books are always become very important 12,000 years ago a river
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is born is a river alive the wind was rising so I went to the wood um first line of the wild places and the first line of underland is the way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree and and then just working on almost a kind of opening song really that that signals to the reader that they are. And here we come back to
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And here we come back to the stepping over the threshold of language that they are entering a space where language will at least be inemp attempting to inhabit them to to become part of them in some way that exceeds or subtends the argumentative or the propositional.
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Um and and I mean fiction is this is what you do, right?
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>> But it's so interesting.
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I mean the the way you the way you feel, you know, about non-fiction and and poetry almost that they can come together.
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I think I feel the same way when it comes to uh pros and poetry.
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You know, um the art of the novel, I mean I am generalizing, but there are some novelists for whom plot is the most important thing.
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They're much more plot driven.
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For some other novelists, I think characters, they're much more characterdriven.
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And then there's a third group of novelists for whom language is a passion and they want to write, you know, pros that reads like poetry.
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I think Floar was one of them.
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I always felt closer to that third group.
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So for someone like me, for instance, to stop writing in my mother tongue, cuz my first novels were all written in Turkish, it really felt like cutting off my hand, like cutting off the hand that I was writing with.
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And then you have to recreate yourself.
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When I say yourself, you have to refin your literary voice.
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You become a student uh again.
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So that was a very painful difficult process but at the same time it enriches your imagination because as you said you pay more attention to words you don't take anything for granted.
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>> We are back with attention which I think is becoming the key word of our of our conversation. Um yeah. Yeah.
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>> I've always struggled with people are like, "Boredom is important. Boredom is important."
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And like I'm like, "That's not quite it."
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Like I agree that stillness or not consciously doing anything is important, but it's something else.
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It's like a space where you can let your mind wander or something.
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You pay attention to something.
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I'm trying to figure out what that thing is.
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>> Maybe it's distraction combined Maybe it's distraction rather than boredom that is that I perhaps I find more more often generative if I'm being absolutely honest.
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So I'm thinking I sometimes have my best ideas in this more often running.
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So, I run every day and run quite long distances.
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And something about that, I I I will very often be sending myself voice notes while I'm running and then later trying to decipher these kind of panting messages from my from my tired self to my recovered self or or sending emails on the go or even writing on my hand if I have a pen in my pocket.
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And uh and and again, I think that's because my my body has entered some some other kind of task.
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task. my brain is concentrating on you know navigating the what's underfoot and so on and so forth and then there's a it seems to free and this is very familiar you know we know the mind works best at 3 miles an hour says kagard and uh mine
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happens to work probably best at about six or seven miles an hour but each each to their own but uh sometimes when you are paying giving absolute attention to the task in hand that's when it becomes becomes hardest so maybe you shake shake thought free by doing other things. Sometimes
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Sometimes >> it does resonate with me.
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I mean I don't run but I walk a lot and it's always you know you get the best ideas uh as you said in that in that movement and then you have to send little notes to yourself. I do that.
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>> But one thing maybe I don't like and we talked about this earlier. I don't like silence.
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I don't feel comfortable when there's too much silence around me.
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Maybe it's the effect of Istanbul on me.
31:17
You know, it's such a noisy city and I've lived in a in a part of Istanbul that was even noisier at night than during daytime.
31:23
So, I loved, you know, opening the windows and you just let this the the sounds of the city seep in.
31:30
And the other thing I don't feel very comfortable in is when it's very neat and pristine and tidy.
31:36
>> I I like my own chaos, you know. I I it's fine. I can operate in that.
31:39
um the books and the notebooks that that that's fine, but it's a silence and the perfection that I'm not comfortable with.
31:49
>> That's probably why we both like writing on trains. Exactly.
31:50
I like the clatter and the chaos and knowing that I have an hour and 22 minutes to get to to get to to get a thought.
31:58
When I'm talking to younger writers, sometimes I say, you know, be beware the fetish of the desk.
32:04
Basically this idea that the desk has to be funued into a into a perfect set of orientations and the pencil has to be sharp and the notebook has to be right and this the silence has to rain and I think that that that can bring you to this devotional state and then actually you're confronted by the problem of writing rather than the problem of preparing to write and it can be a bit it can be a bit abrupt.
32:27
So I I like the pragmatism, the kind of messy pragmatism because for me writing it's not it's not an unfurling of sentence after sentence after sentence in a perfect um woven fabric.
32:39
It's it's much more um uh mosaic and and and kaleidoscopic moving pieces around in order to recognize their relations rather than seeing those relations intact.
32:50
And do you feel that the whole way as you're writing a book or do you feel that only at the beginning and then it takes on a more orderly form later on?
32:59
>> There's this thrilling moment, I don't know if you have this, where you've worked on a book for, let's say, 5 years and watched it come into being and and and done this um sort of wax on wax off work of a kaleidoscopic work of twisting and twisting and twisting, seeing the patterns form and reform and then recognizing the relations between them.
33:17
And then and then there's this rush in the final 5 10% of time of writing a book where suddenly all of the the big heavy sort of monumental moving has been done.
33:29
All the architectonics are in place.
33:31
place. you you understand what it is you're saying or [clears throat] helping to articulate and then suddenly you're like ah that there this here this here this here and the whole thing accelerates and then says a poem comes right with a click like a closing box
33:48
>> that's not quite true for a 500page book but that you know a series of clicks it's like ah that box is closed that box is closed do you do you have that kind of rush at the end where you can see what needs to be done with I aware I'm speaking to you as you nearly finished a novel. >> To me, what's interesting is it really
34:04
>> To me, what's interesting is it really doesn't matter whether it's your first book, fifth book, 10th book.
34:07
Um, you always go through these valleys of anxiety, mountains of depression.
34:12
You know, one one week you feel like, wow, I got this. I have an amazing story.
34:17
This is going to be great.
34:19
And then the next week you look at what you've written and it's so bad and you just throw it away. Um, and that's okay.
34:26
What I learned over the years is that too is part of the the the journey, the writing process.
34:31
You can't control everything.
34:36
>> Maybe there are different approaches.
34:38
Maybe some authors do much more, you know, focus on the cerebral plotting that goes into the structure of a novel.
34:48
But I really love writing with intuition as my guide.
34:51
Of course, you do a lot of thinking, research.
34:54
The research process is is immense. It's it's a bit insane.
35:00
But there comes a moment when you feel like, okay, now I can take off. Now I can fly.
35:05
And from that moment onwards, I really don't know what exactly I'm doing, but I trust my intuition.
35:09
And then I like it when my characters surprise me.
35:14
And as you said, as you as you near the end and all these pieces start to come together, it's almost like spiritual, something very mystical is happening.
35:25
and and you're not necessarily controlling it.
35:26
Um there is a flow that you have to respect.
35:29
You have to respect the characters.
35:32
You have to try to understand them.
35:33
Even the characters that might seem to be minor ones.
35:38
Nothing is minor in in in a novel.
35:42
>> So that holistic approach is very important for me.
35:44
>> When you say mystical, do you feel like I'm not conscious of what I'm doing, but I'm doing it?
35:49
Or do you feel like maybe there's an outside force that is basically the guiding hand?
35:55
>> Maybe I'm trying to find a third third uh approach.
35:58
There is a lot of of course thinking in I do find echoes of myself in in what I'm writing.
36:06
But I need to tell you that for me literature is not necessarily autobiographical.
36:10
And I think we live in an age in which we we put too much emphasis on the autobiographical side of fiction.
36:17
I mean in many creative writing classes the first thing that we teach is write what you know which is admirable which is important but whole fiction writing cannot be reduced to that moto.
36:30
So we have to say write what you feel.
36:33
If we say that then a male writer can write about the female experience if there is a genuine connection.
36:41
If you really put the the necessary effort into it, why not?
36:46
You can go beyond the boxes of identity that are there at first glance.
36:53
So for me I I I respect the autobiographical side of literature and they're amazing books that fall into that description but it's the transcendental aspect that I'm much more interested in.
37:04
This is how I started writing because I thought my life was very boring and I had nothing to write about, you know, about my life.
37:11
But I was much more interested in going beyond the life that was given to me and try to see what it looks like if I could become someone else and then someone else and then you realize the person as I saw as the other is actually not that different than me.
37:29
I I mean I am primarily a non-fiction writer though I I write I suppose fictional forms in the sense of liberty and no verse novelas and so forth but thinking about it from a a non-fiction point of view and coming back to the elemental and the and the wonder struck at the end of is a river Alive I thought I'd finish that book >> three times the first time was recognizable to me.
38:00
We we'd paddled to the sea over 12, 11 days. Big hard river running.
38:08
Then I remember so clearly we we we made se4 which is always a hugely powerful moment for a river for a a river follower.
38:16
And it was a bright day and we we were carried out by the current out to sea. This is in the um uh St.
38:24
Lawrence, the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
38:27
And suddenly I heard this crying, this high high crying.
38:30
And there were several notes to it.
38:33
They they sort of braided.
38:35
And I it was uncanny cuz I couldn't work out what they were.
38:37
And then I kind of punched the water.
38:39
I was in my kayak cuz I I realized that they were um they were jet skis.
38:44
And I thought, what a [laughter] what a terrible pathetic moment at this this holy encounter where where water comes together with other water.
38:55
And then I realized they weren't jet skis.
38:57
We paddled on and I realized that they were seals.
39:01
And there was a colony of seals out on a on a rocky island just off the coast.
39:06
And they were they were calling and there it was a choir of seals.
39:08
And it was deeply deeply haunting and beautiful moment made all the more powerful from having thought they were jet skis and then watched them convert into into something much more mystical and strange.
39:21
I thought that was the ending.
39:23
And that but then the river itself wrote wrote [clears throat] the ending.
39:27
And that that that experience of of being written through by water I've never had before.
39:38
I then had a secondary version of it just up at the quiet little springs near my house where I I walked up again having thought the book was finished and and suddenly a a drama played itself out in the theater of my mind.
39:50
And it was almost as though the springs, the water itself was the the the projector, the magic lantern projecting this drama which was of me dead, my children mourning me, time, the river having run on them going to the springs to put a pinch of ash into the water to remember me.
40:09
And it was suddenly I was a ghost and but I was turn I was made spectral by the by the presence of that water.
40:18
And so I narrate these as semi- mystical experiences because they are and they were.
40:23
One of them, the first the seals was was real.
40:25
The second, the river was was hugely powerful and and almost as though I'd been inhabited in ways we've been discussing.
40:33
And the third was was was eerie and and sad and beautiful to see my children still alive and bright and in the world and and remembering me and and the h and and the humility of knowing that time the river is always flowing and we are always in its current and we're never standing dryfooted on the bank.
40:52
So again, perhaps this is a conversation about how fiction and non-fiction they they move at times within the same currents and flows or they inhabit the same Eddie pools.
41:04
Uh and they're poorest to the same encounters some of the time.
41:11
>> We both appreciate the maybe the elements of I don't know for lack of a better word I'm going to call it magic.
41:18
There is magic in in life in daily life in even the most ordinary seemingly ordinary moments.
41:23
That's one of the reasons why I don't like this term magical realism because it assumes that there's the the world of magic and then there's the world of reality and you have to bring together these two very separate elements.
41:37
Whereas I think in life everything is constantly mixed.
41:42
>> It also in my opinion comes down to this notion of time that we have.
41:45
We want to think of time as a much more linear steady march.
41:50
But when you pay attention to a river, a tree, a rock, you know, just the soil itself, there is no linear time there.
41:58
Even when you follow the the journey of one river, it makes you question is time much more cyclical.
42:06
>> You know that linear time is is an illusion?
42:09
>> And rivers can move against themselves. They can flow uphill.
42:11
huge huge counterflow channels in a big river will will very happily flow uphill and they'll be often I mean I've crossed Eddie Eddie channels that are hundreds of meters wide in a really big river and it's it's it's almost eerie because it's counter gravitational and therefore counter you know water always runs downhill.
42:29
Well, no it doesn't not not in a counterflow.
42:32
And then the line between the between the flow and the counterflow is is is called the eddy line.
42:36
And that's that's where the the twist that flow gives to counterflow and counterflow gives to flow create spirals.
42:45
And that that's what when we look down at water, if you see those spirals, that's because there's a helical spin being given by by flow meeting counterflow.
42:55
And I sometimes think of those spirals as as temporal.
43:00
They are that that that a river teaches us that time moves in circles. It moves in spirals. It moves against itself.
43:06
it's not that linear flow.
43:06
They also have a very wonderful hydraological function which is that they oxygenate the water column.
43:11
So that again that that is a kind of nourishing act where where time becomes complex and flow becomes complex.
43:18
It draws life down into the into the water column into our ideas of experience.
43:24
I think >> I think one of the things that we're talking about here is the limits of rationality.
43:29
We really associate rationality with truth, but there's elements of reality that reason doesn't take us all the way there.
43:39
So, I had actually forgotten that it was you that told me that the world is pregnant in the spring.
43:45
And since we were last together, I've moved to a place where I live with a garden in my front yard.
43:52
And I really struggled this winter.
43:55
I had been living in Texas. I moved to New York. It was cold and whatnot.
43:59
And to watch the world come alive again. Holy cow.
44:02
[laughter] >> I thought about your the world is pregnant in the spring >> a hundred times.
44:08
I've had completely forgotten that you had said that.
44:11
And all this is to say I saw the world more truthfully >> because of that irrational way of thinking. >> Yep. Yep. >> You know what I mean? >> Yeah. Fascinating.
44:22
And they're much more sentience than we recognize.
44:24
I I think I mean you know trees plants definitely I was raised by a very traditional grandmother myself until I was 10 years old and in her world I mean mountains said something trees spoke stones whispered but you had to become a listener.
44:41
I didn't appreciate it at the time because to me when I was a child that sounded very irrational but as you get older you appreciate it more and more.
44:51
One of my earlier novels, the island of missing trees, I briefly want to say mention this because that deals with difficult subjects like um civil war, division, partition.
45:02
It's about this beautiful island of Cyprus, beautiful people, culture, but there's a partition line that separates a majority Christian population from a majority Muslim population, Greek criates from Turkish criates.
45:15
And perhaps more more importantly, depending on whom you talk to, there are clashing memories.
45:19
The past is remembered differently and the wounds are not healed yet. They're still bleeding.
45:27
So, how do you approach such a difficult subject without yourself as a storyteller, as a writer creating more division of our system?
45:36
And it was a tree, it was a fig tree that allowed me to approach this subject.
45:41
So sometimes I think if we can take a step back and let nature be our guide, we find another perspective into even the the most difficult uh convoluted subjects and political divisions.
45:59
>> And yet that is a hard place to reach now.
46:02
uh your description of the fig tree as your kind of teacher and as with the way it roots and joins and binds.
46:16
>> Put in mind a counter example which is the the two men who fell the sycamore gap. >> Oh yeah.
46:20
tree which >> on Hrien's wall which was a a kind of shock that rang fascinatingly around around the world seemed to become the event seemed to become a lightning rod sort of drawing these bolts of feeling from from from clouds in in all directions.
46:40
When those two men were eventually tried and sentenced, one of them said, "But it was just a tree." >> Yeah.
46:51
And in that moment that also kind of condensed an entire way of thinking and feeling about the living world which is that it is inert meaning meaningless that we do not make meaning with it that it has no life no autonomy of being in its own right.
47:06
no rights, et all all of these um presuppositions which rationalism, technocracy, uh an engineered world, calculability, um the coherence of of the real as as the enlightenment has bequeathed it to us.
47:27
All of which are structures of feeling and cognitive empires that have brought immense good and we're surrounded by them in in this room.
47:36
immense blessings to um people such as ourselves have also illegalized, outlawed or invisibleized whole other ways of feeling, including the idea >> that as your grandmother raised you to think a tree might speak, a mountain might remember um and a river might be alive. [clears throat] >> Yeah.
47:56
I think that one of the gifts that any artist can give is just a new way of seeing.
48:01
So I just went to this wonderful exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum Monae in Venice and it was really well curated because what you saw was all the ways that artists have depicted Venice throughout history and people had this sense of this is what Venice is like.
48:20
And then Monae comes to Venice and has a completely different view on Venice that anyone in the who knows how many hundreds of years before could have seen but nobody had seen that before.
48:33
It's like, wow, that is expanding my sense of possibility.
48:36
And then we talked about this last time, to see the world in a grain of sand. >> Yeah.
48:40
>> To hold infinity in the palm of your hand.
48:42
Like those words, they like expand the aperture of the mind >> and awaken you to new sense of possibility.
48:52
>> And Shepherd says, "If if if I had other senses, there are other things I would know."
48:57
things I would know." And >> yeah, >> we we do not only have five senses because we have literature as well and we have art and that is another set of ways of seeing and being when it at its most powerful at its most consequential and I suppose the the letters I get from
49:16
readers that make me happiest are the ones which say you've changed the way I I see the world or you changed the way I saw the world for for a day or a moment and I think well good that's >> yeah those are the most precious uh moments you know when a reader comes and
49:34
says I read your book I loved it so much now I'm talking to my fig tree >> or I wrote a tree and now I see trees differently I see rivers differently I look at the world differently that is incredibly moving yeah >> and then this and then the step that is beyond that is the one that joins
49:52
attention to action for me at least which is when people come and they say I read your book and I join joined my local river guardianship group or I'm I'm campaigning for the rights of rivers or I volunteer at my local nature reserve and that then I feel wonderful. This is an example of how um what do
50:08
This is an example of how um what do they say culture wipes the floor with policy.
50:13
I I'm not sure I always agree but there are times when it can and it can enter individual lives and trajectories with with great with great consequence and that feels exciting. >> Yeah.
50:25
had to be super concrete here.
50:25
So, this is from There Rivers in the Sky.
50:30
You know, you say the inspiration for this book came with a small idea.
50:32
A raindrop that landed on my palm one day while I was walking by the river temps.
50:38
I stopped and stared at that raindrop, admiring the light reflecting off its surface.
50:43
There was such beauty and mystery, strength and resilience in its ephemererality.
50:47
And then you begin to ask, where's this raindrop been? Where has it traveled?
50:51
And now all of a sudden we've just expanded the sense of possibility, awakened the imagination, and taken something that was like a mundane claustrophobia of just a freaking raindrop to now it's enchanted with with with with all this space and life and you can just follow your imagination. >> Yeah. Yeah.
51:10
And earlier David, you mentioned William Blake.
51:12
It's the same thing, isn't it?
51:14
You know, you look at a grain of sand, you don't take it for granted.
51:17
If you want to see the whole universe inside that that that that to me is a very mystical approach at the same time.
51:25
You know, you look at the microcosmos and you see the whole macrocosmos in in it.
51:28
Um again, no human being is ordinary. Nothing is small. Nothing is above.
51:34
You want to adopt a much more cyclical approach to life.
51:39
This is not something we can do in our daily lives.
51:40
When we leave this room, we are always, you know, I I'll be rushing somewhere else.
51:46
you'll be rushing somewhere else but when we sit down at our desk when we journey into literature into the you know writing process then I think you are able you it's almost like you're using a different part of your brain and you connect with the macrocosmos and the microcosmos at the same time and those dualities disappear.
52:07
I wish I could be like that all the time, but [laughter] >> it would be quite tiring.
52:12
>> Perhaps perhaps >> but what John Muer says something like I live in an infinite storm of wonder and I sort of think sounds great but I think I end each day pretty naked.
52:20
I end each day pretty naked. Yeah, the tiny thing you remember the grain of sand reminds me of a conversation to me unforgettable conversation I had with a glaciologist called Robert Mulaney who works at the Bass Brit the British Antarctic Survey and he said he said put out your hand and he out of a little um
52:37
container he tapped several grains of sand and he said look at those and then he gave me a little jeweler's loop and I looked at them they were beautiful as almost everything is when examined at high magnification strange and he said Those are taken from the ice at the end of an ice core that we drilled in Antarctica. So they were they were they they came up
53:02
So they were they were they they came up with the with the with the end of the core.
53:05
And he said he said those grains of sand are from when the bedrock of Antarctica was forming as a desert.
53:18
And suddenly the we're back to the micro and the macro.
53:20
The the deep time contexts of the world exploded into their vastness out of that tininess.
53:31
And those moments are are extraordinary.
53:35
And we our technologies allow us to inhabit this is not a kind of anti-technology notion because when um Anton vanluenhook first ground the lenses that allowed microscopic vision he peered into a tiny drop of water.
53:52
This is in the early 17th century in what we would now call the Netherlands the lens grinding cap capital of of Europe at the time.
53:59
And he suddenly describes what he could see in this drop of pond water which was a quote a world teeming with animals.
54:09
And we fall when we know how to look.
54:09
We fall through scale after scale after scale.
54:15
And then we lose gravity and we rise through scale after scale after scale.
54:21
These are thrilling things.
54:23
Microscopes can do it to us.
54:23
Literature can do it to us too.
54:25
For me, science very often finesses the real into a greater wonder.
54:31
I I I I don't oppose science and wonder, science and enchantment.
54:39
Actually, this is the famous conversation Keats allegedly accusing Newton of unweaving the rainbow.
54:47
>> I I don't subscribe to the unweaving the rainbow thesis.
54:49
And some of the most astonishing literature I read is technical literature is the literature of science.
54:54
um uh dark matter physics.
54:58
The fact that we we can um detect the consequences of the 27% missing mass of the universe, but otherwise cannot compel it to interact with our ex with our technologies, our experiments, our our our perceptions at all.
55:17
We know it's there, but it declines to have anything to do with us.
55:20
That to me is is is thrilling and as mysterious as any recess of the human soul.
55:28
>> I think the just to follow up um the the mind is always more nourished when we leave our own maybe comfort zones or our own disciplines and just become curious about someone else's field and and try to learn from that field. Yes.
55:43
to learn from that field. Yes. So for instance when a novelist um perhaps pays attention to neuroscience or water science I don't know much about these fields but then I want to learn and and and you your curiosity becomes your guide but equally when a water scientist
56:01
falls in love with film theory or when a director you know film director is drawn to poetry um those are the moments I think that when when the mind is much more nourished and and we are so auto atomized the way the academia works or multiple disciplines work. I don't think
56:19
I don't think there are enough conversations and we're not encouraged enough to read widely across the board.
56:25
Nothing is highbrow literature, lowbrow literature, whatever talks to us >> from graphic novels to cookbooks, political philosophy, whatever speaks to us in that moment is the right book for us.
56:39
Um, but I always long long for that, you know, interdisciplinary and intercultural conversations.
56:44
How can we encourage them? >> Indeed. Indeed.
56:48
Geologists in my university, Cambridge, um, not to steer clear of me because I just come up to I'm like, "What's that rock?
56:55
What's [laughter] that rock?
56:57
What's the curbstone made of?"
56:58
And >> I love Yeah, I love I'm a sort of Labrador puppy with scientists because I find what they do so extraordinary and they're super specialists.
57:06
So yeah, I I I actually I wrote my master's thesis on the relations of uh the the new physics as as it was called in the in the 1990s and contemporary British poetry and looking not just at how at what science was giving to poetry but what poetry was also giving to science.
57:26
>> Well, what we're saying reminds me of this quote from Warner Heisenberg.
57:27
He says the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist.
57:34
>> But at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.
57:36
[laughter] >> He was a good writer as well as genius physicist, >> which kind of proves his own point that the genius physicist was such a wonderful writer. >> Yes.
57:48
Proves a version of what we're what we're talking about. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. >> Let's close here.
57:54
I'm really curious to hear how the two of you having written so many books been doing this for so long think about improving at your craft.
58:05
>> I think you know so so many things go through our head but we have to always remember the core. How did we begin?
58:14
What was the main motivation?
58:14
So for me when I look at my life the desire to become a writer, a novelist, what you might call a career came to me much later.
58:25
The need for books was earlier, was much more existential, was much more deeper.
58:32
You know, I was an only child.
58:32
I was a very lonely child and really books were my companions and they showed me that there are other possibilities in life.
58:41
That is the feeling that I try not to forget particularly in times of crisis, confusion, turbulence such as the world we're living right now in.
58:50
I think our need for literature is not is deeper, you know, is greater.
58:55
It's not a luxury that can be pushed aside.
58:58
So when I look at my life, I feel that it's literature that gave me a chance to go beyond that little box that I found myself in.
59:09
I mean I was I was being raised in a very conservative, very patriarchal, very inward-looking neighborhood.
59:16
This was my maternal grandmother's neighborhood after France.
59:20
And it was books that showed me. It was Charles Dickens.
59:22
It was Doniote by Sarantes.
59:24
You suddenly connect with characters who seem to have nothing to do with your life.
59:29
And yet you are with them.
59:31
You're traveling lancha with this crazy knight and you love him.
59:34
You know, I believe as human beings, we are storytelling creatures.
59:38
Not only that, we're story remembering creatures.
59:43
Without stories, human beings are just numbers, just just categories, just abstractions.
59:48
So everything in life, everything we remember, we feel is filtered through stories.
59:52
And personally as a writer I have to remember that the moment you start thinking about your career success how many books you're going to sell whether you're going to get a prize which are all very human things you know Kamu Albert Kamu has this beautiful quote essay he says let's applaud those authors who say they don't want to be read they don't want to be recognized but let's not believe them.
1:00:20
[laughter] So every writer wants to be read.
1:00:21
Every writer wants to of course get an award and be appreciated.
1:00:26
These are very human feelings and we need to be honest about them.
1:00:31
But all I'm saying is our main motivation can't be that the main motivation is that childhood beginning that we you know we felt was almost like an existential need for stories for transcendental journeys.
1:00:45
And that's the thing that I try to go back to again and again.
1:00:52
>> The data centers we need are public libraries. >> Mhm.
1:00:58
>> I couldn't agree more.
1:00:58
I leaf took us into the past and I'll take us into the future to answer this.
1:01:03
I we are living through an age of crisis in this beautiful fragile planet of ours which is driven by us which costs us as humans terrible emiseration and is also destroying a fabric of life that has been millions of years in the weaving.
1:01:30
And it seems to me that no one writing now can or should be writing from beyond the shadow of that.
1:01:41
That doesn't mean they need to be addressing it directly.
1:01:46
But all writing that is written into this moment will somewhere in its heart somewhere in its core not have the splinter of ice that Graham Green famously said novelists had in their heart but have something like a splinter of love.
1:02:02
And I sometimes think I submit my work when I begin a new project to what I've come to think of as the casket test, which is if this book were dug up in a hundred years and read from the future, looking back to our precarious present, not would the person reading it think that it had solved anything or clarified anything, but had it tried, had it attempted to wrestle with, engage with, dream of ways out of the crisis that we find ourselves in.
1:02:42
So the casket test for me is the future looking back at the present and asking of us, have have you tried?
1:02:52
Have you really tried with all that you have and all that you can can bring to this form, this text, this moment? I think I fail.
1:03:00
But I think asking ourselves the question is is a really good discipline. >> Thank you both. >> Thank you.