{"id":145,"date":"2011-04-11T21:52:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T21:52:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue9\/?page_id=145"},"modified":"2012-01-31T07:33:14","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T07:33:14","slug":"round-table","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/round-table","title":{"rendered":"Roundtable"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Tree that Owned Itself<\/strong><\/h1>\n
(Poet Amatoritsero Ede in conversation with Wayne Grady, Creative Nonfiction Writer)<\/em><\/h6>\n

Amatoritsero Ede<\/strong>: We are happy to have you hold a conversation with us at MTLS. This is unique in that most writers we have interviewed have been mostly novelists. How would you describe your writing?<\/p>\n

Wayne Grady<\/strong>: Thank you. For most of my writing life I have written nonfiction, much of it creative nonfiction, even when I was writing magazine journalism. As far back as the early 1980s I was writing creative nonfiction for Saturday Night magazine, although we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t call it that at the time: literary journalism, I think, was the term. When I moved into the country near Kingston, Ontario, and started working for Harrowsmith magazine in 1984, I began to become more interested in nature writing. Because of my magazine background, I naturally took to the essay form: the nature essay, the travel essay, and the personal essay.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> Yes, I expected you would describe yourself as an essayist. But I have read some of your work; Breakfast at the Exit Caf\u00c3\u00a9 for example or Bringing Back the Dodo<\/em>. A scientific or seemingly pedestrian subject, simple mud normally, becomes golden clay in your hands when fired through your prose. What drives your writing?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> Curiosity, mostly. The usual advice for new writers is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153write about what you know,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but I prefer writing about what I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know. I figure that if it fascinates me and I write well about it, it will interest others as well. I have no background in science, for example, but I have written a lot about science, paleontology, for instance, and global warming, and I think not being a scientist has helped me write more lucidly about scientific things. I am not afraid of asking dumb questions. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make assumptions about what a particular scientist is thinking as he or she works. Asking a simple, basic question often startles the person I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m talking to into articulating something he or she may not have had to articulate for a long time, and very often some very interesting things come out of that conversation. Essentially, I would say that there are no simple, pedestrian subjects, only simple, pedestrian ways of treating those subjects. Just as there are no simple people, or families, or ideas. Everything connects to something greater than itself, and it is making those connections that drive my work.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> I know Bringing Back the Dodo<\/em> began as a series of essays in a regular column for a Explore<\/em> magazine in the USA; and you are or were the science editor for Equinox<\/em> magazine. What role has Journalism played din your writing.<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> Being a freelance journalist for almost 30 years forced me to read and write about things I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t normally have read or written about. It took me to places, both literally and figuratively, that I would not even have known about. And it forced me to get out of my own head and into the real world. Journalism also taught me to work hard and fast and how to work with editors to improve my stories. It taught me discipline. You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t easily make a living as a freelance journalist in Canada at the best of times; you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do it at all if you are not disciplined, able to meet deadlines, able to improve a story draught by draught, and able to work with an editor.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> Bringing back the Dodo<\/em>, with its concern for human interference in the eco-system, especially brought David Suzuki to mind.\u00c2\u00a0 I was wondering if you are also an environmental activist, apart from being the writer.\u00c2\u00a0 Another work of yours, A journey to the north pole to investigate global warming, seems to suggests so. <\/em>You were \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcactive\u00e2\u20ac\u2122; you actually went to the North Pole!<\/p>\n

W.G.: <\/strong>Yes, I did go to the North Pole for that book (which is called The Quiet Limit of the World: A Journey to the North Pole to Investigate Global Warming is the subtitle). I spent two months on a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, leaving Victoria, BC, in July 1994 and arriving in Halifax, NS, in September, after crossing the Arctic Ocean over the North Pole (the first ship in history to make that transect, by the way). In a way, I would call that book a work of environmental activism, in that the general consensus at the time was that global warming was a hoax perpetrated by a bunch of scientists who wanted to get funding to spend their summer on a ship breaking through 32 feet of ice to get to the North Pole. My book took the stance that global warming was real, was on the way, and was going to cause a lot of havoc in the not-too-distant future. And I was right. My view of environmental writing is that if people are going to do anything to save the natural environment, they have to know something about it. If no one knows anything about the red wolf, for example, then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to be hard to convince them to do anything to save it. So my books help them to know nature, and to go from there to loving it, and to go from there to want to save it. In that sense, it is environmental activism. Passive activism, I suppose you could call it.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> As the blurb of A Journey to the North Pole<\/em> says, is it still a scientific fact that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The five hottest years since records have been kept are, in descending order, 1996, 1995, 1994, 1993, and 1992?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I ask because the 2ist century seems to have displayed the effects of global warming more than those other years in the 20th century. Is the new millennium hotter?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> Yes, it is now a truism that the five hottest years on record will be the past five years, no matter what year you make the claim in. Every single indicator tells the same story: global warming is no longer just coming, it is here. We have dithered and debated and denied long enough, and there is now nothing we can do to stop it. We are already living on a different planet from the one we were born on.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> It is interesting that you actually display social consciousness in your art, unlike most writing today, which one can say is art for art\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sake. What do you think?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> Well, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think there is anything called journalism for journalism\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sake, although come to think of it, maybe there is. But there shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be. Even art we produce for our own satisfaction has definite social value, assuming it is true art. As I mentioned earlier, if I write something about the eastern coyote that strikes a cord with a single reader, then I have created something that does not exist for its own sake. All writing is a political act; even deciding not to write is a political decision. And a political act is an act of social consciousness. There is a reason why the first thing a political dictator does is get rid of the artists (in Canada it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s called making severe budget cuts to arts organizations). It isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fiscal responsibility; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s controlling the people who make other people think.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> Should writers also have causes, activism, show political engagement in their writing and question the social order or disorder etc? We live in a country whose prime minister is on record as saying there is no such thing as Canadian culture. Which means that if I write a book there is no compelling reason why a Canadian should be more interested in reading it than in reading a book by an Australian or a Chinese writer. Which in turn means there is no compelling reason for the Canadian government to subsidize it. This is such cynically self-serving nonsense that it is actually quite difficult to argue against it: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like the phrase in Haruki Murakami\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novel 1Q84<\/em>: if you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand it now, you won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand it when I explain it to you. A political leader who believes that his country doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t exist culturally is living in some kind of parallel universe that is inaccessible to reason from the real world.\u00c2\u00a0 And yet we must continue to make the case for Canada as a cultural entity. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily do that in our art \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the art must speak for itself \u00e2\u20ac\u201c but in our daily lives, in the associations we join and the activities we engage in. We are living in a profoundly anti-intellectual age, and also in a time when the temptation to regard ourselves as belonging to an amorphous, globalized social network rather than to a specific place is enormous. The individual is at risk of disappearing altogether. Culture, specific to a country, or a place, and a time, can correct that, but only if it is allowed to continue to exist.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> You are a translator too and you have won a governor General ward for and another prize for that aspect of your work. What are the challenges for capturing nuance and range of signification from French into English? Where is the line between translation and transcription?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> Machines can do transcription. Have you ever pressed the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153translate this page\u00e2\u20ac\u009d link on Google and then tried to figure out what the hell the article was about? This ties in with the previous question, actually, because what a translator does is not so much translate or transcribe or transliterate words from one language to another, but find linguistic and cultural equivalents between the source and target languages. There is a good example of that in Douglas Hofstadter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s excellent translation of Fran\u00c3\u00a7oise Sagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s novel La Chamade<\/em> (which he translates as That Mad Ache<\/em>). In his introduction, Hofstadter points out that the dictionary translation of the French ascenseur<\/em> is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153elevator.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But when a French person thinks of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153un ascenseur<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he or she will have an entirely different mental picture in his or her head than a Canadian will have when he or she thinks of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an elevator.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d In Paris, say in Sagan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Paris, or in Walter Benjamin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Paris, un ascenseur<\/em> is a metal, clanking, open-grille-work contraption that closes like a steel trap and takes you up through a series of holes in the floor, possible at the risk of several fingers. An elevator, on the other hand, is a silent, efficient, enclosed box whose doors close automatically and you are whisked almost motionlessly up to your destination while listening to the Hollyridge Strings playing soporific versions of early Beatles tunes. The challenge is, how to get the reader to think ascenseur<\/em> while reading elevator? By extension, similar considerations pertain to words like bread, tree, wine, ice, boulevard\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6well, you get the idea: all words, in fact.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> Breakfast at the Exit caf\u00c3\u00a9<\/em> is a travelogue about Southern USA. I was in the audience at the Ottawa International Writers Festival where you read some touching passage from the work about a tree, upon which more care was showered than the slaves who probably had to tend it That tree still stands today. The book took a subjective twist where you weave your own personal history into the text. It came out that you have black ancestry going back generations. Do you mind telling us more about this physical tree and that tree of ancestry?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> Not at all. The tree in question is in Athens, Georgia, and is known as the tree that owns itself. In the early 1800s, the tree\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s owner deeded the tree to itself so that no one would ever be able to chop it down. In the book, I contemplate the sad irony of there being a tree that owned itself in a time and in a place in which thousands of black slaves were not allowed to own their own children. I had recently discovered that my father was of African-American descent, and that trip through the American South was an extremely emotional experience, which I tried to evoke in those parts of the book (actually, in the book, which I co-authored with my wife, novelist Merilyn Simonds, we travel from Vancouver to Kingston through 22 of the United States; the Deep South was only a part of the longer journey). My father passed for white because, I think, he wanted his children to have a different kind of childhood than he had had as a member of Windsor, Ontario\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s black community. Consequently we knew very little about racism, segregation, cultural and familial annihilation. Travelling through the Deep South as a white person with black ancestry \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that is, travelling with the benefits of being taken for a white man while knowing that I was not \u00e2\u20ac\u201c was psychologically devastating. I still haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t come to terms with it. Or rather, I am still coming to terms with it.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> From literary history\u00c2\u00a0 – 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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.<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> All unions are complicated. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work very much, and there was never any question of one writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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. \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> How do you separate professional relationship from the personal \u00e2\u20ac\u201c especially in a case where you work on the same book together?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> Well, we are both writers, we live in the same house, have mostly the same friends, many of the same interests \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hey, read this, I just wrote it!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d We each respect the other\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way of working, and we are each supportive of the other\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s integrity. All these essentially professional quirks become part of our personal relationship; they bloom out into our everyday lives constantly. They enrich us.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> Just as Exit caf\u00c3\u00a9<\/em> 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?<\/p>\n

W.G.: <\/strong>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t change; the reader changes.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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.<\/p>\n

A.E.: <\/strong>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?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 story, but it is a novel. It has taken me twelve years to write. At first, I was thinking of it as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fictional memoir,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but I think it has taken off along a road that clearly has \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fiction\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as a signpost. It\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcs called Emancipation Day<\/em>, and will be published by Doubleday Canada in the spring of 2013.<\/p>\n

A.E.:<\/strong> 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?<\/p>\n

W.G.:<\/strong> First, hone your skills as a writer. It doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t matter how much you know about a particular subject, if you aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a good writer you won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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.<\/p>\n

A.E.: <\/strong>Thank you very much for taking the time during the festive seasons to chat with us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Tree that Owned Itself (Poet Amatoritsero Ede in conversation with Wayne Grady, Creative Nonfiction Writer) Amatoritsero Ede: We are happy to have you hold a conversation with us at MTLS. This is unique in that most writers we have interviewed have been mostly novelists. How would you describe your writing? Wayne Grady: Thank you. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-145","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":873,"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/145\/revisions\/873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}