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A.E.: From literary history  – I am thinking of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes for one – I know collaborating with your partner it is not the easiest thing to do – two writers together. Or is that in/famous difficulty exaggerated? I know Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir managed it beautifully. But then that union was complicated in its own way.

W.G.: All unions are complicated. I don’t know if Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath actually collaborated on a work, but if they did I would really love to read it. What a concept. Simone de Beauvoir wrote her own book about travelling through the States – Merilyn refers to it in our book. Merilyn and I worked wonderfully together on this book. There was some initial trepidation, naturally, as there would be at the beginning of any collaborative effort (I co-authored a book a few years ago with David Suzuki, and worried at the start about how the relationship would work.) In both cases, my hesitations were unfounded. We both respect each other’s work very much, and there was never any question of one writer’s voice dominating, or of blending our separate voices into one genderless monotone. We each take sections of the trip and write whatever comes into our heads at the time. The only rule we had was that neither of us would ever censor what the other wrote. The book ends up being as much about our marriage as it is about the relationship between Canada and the U.S. – indeed, our marriage becomes a kind of metaphor for the relationship between the two countries. But we figured that if we could survive three months in a small car, we could survive writing a book. And we did.

A.E.: How do you separate professional relationship from the personal – especially in a case where you work on the same book together?

W.G.: Well, we are both writers, we live in the same house, have mostly the same friends, many of the same interests – it’s very hard to distinguish our personal lives from our professional lives. But we do, somehow. Merilyn writes primarily fiction; I write primarily nonfiction. Merilyn is a very careful, meticulous writer who writes many draughts; I write quickly and want to send my work off to the printer immediately. Merilyn can sit at her desk for days on end, repelling interruptions and focusing on her work; I get up every five minutes to get myself a coffee or to check the mail, any excuse to take a break that may last two days. Merilyn never shows her work to anyone, including me, until she has got it to where she wants it; I come running down the stairs with a sheet of paper in my hands saying, “Hey, read this, I just wrote it!” We each respect the other’s way of working, and we are each supportive of the other’s integrity. All these essentially professional quirks become part of our personal relationship; they bloom out into our everyday lives constantly. They enrich us.

A.E.: Just as Exit café is a travelogue, I am thinking of your oeuvre as one endless travelogue, metaphorically speaking. In order words, you travel through roads, gardens and the environment to bring us a report and feedback and we see afresh through your eyes. What do you think of this idea?

W.G.: It’s true that much of my work involves travel, at least metaphorically. What I want, what every writer, every artist, wants, I think, is to make people look at something they have never seen before – or, if they have seen it, to see it with new eyes. Physical travel forces the traveler to do that, because everything literally is new. But writing can turn any reader into a traveler: I can write about a tree that has been growing in your back yard all your life, and after reading what I wrote you will see that tree in a way you have never seen it before. Who can resist that? Is that nature writing? The tree doesn’t change; the reader changes.

A.E.:  Is it a coincidence that Merilyn is a gardener and writers about nature just passionately as you write about a larger garden that is the wider environment?

W.G.: Merilyn was a gardener long before she met me, and I was writing about the environment before I met her. But since we have been together we have seen that both are really the same kind of writing. What gardeners do is try to control nature; to make a plant grow where it doesn’t want to grow, and to get rid of other plants that want to grow there. That is a superb metaphor for what we do to the planet as a species; we try to control nature to make it do what we want. That has been disastrous for the planet, but without it we would not have survived as a species. Merilyn and I are essentially writing about the same impulse, and exploring the same conundrum: how to resolve the dichotomy between existing as part of the natural world without having to resort to hunting and gathering.

A.E.: Why do you not explore the novel form. Or do you have a manuscript somewhere locked away or perhaps you do not like the form?

W.G.: How prescient of you. As a matter of fact, I have written a novel. It is about a black man who passes for white, marries a white woman, takes her home to meet his family, and never, despite all evidence to the contrary, admits to her that he is black. It is, of course, based on my parents’ story, but it is a novel. It has taken me twelve years to write. At first, I was thinking of it as a “fictional memoir,” but I think it has taken off along a road that clearly has “fiction” as a signpost. It‘s called Emancipation Day, and will be published by Doubleday Canada in the spring of 2013.

A.E.: Finally since a there are not many nature writers out there, what suggestions do you have for a young man or woman intending to go in that direction do?

W.G.: First, hone your skills as a writer. It doesn’t matter how much you know about a particular subject, if you aren’t a good writer you won’t write a good book. Write a lot; write every day. Then read a lot. Read promiscuously, fiction, nonfiction, modern, classics, read, read, and read. But make sure you include the classic nature writers. I’m not going to list them because there are too many and I will forget one or two, but they are out there. There are anthologies. There are sections in libraries and bookstores. There are websites. Second, convince yourself that there is no difference in the quality of the writing in the best works of any genre. Thoreau was as good a writer as Emerson, as Louisa May Alcott, as Daniel Hawthorne. They just chose different genres. Then get to know nature. Get to know it so well that you love it. Then look at what people are doing to it. The rest will come.

A.E.: Thank you very much for taking the time during the festive seasons to chat with us.

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