← How I Write
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- [00:00]
A
Well, you write so beautifully about nature. You've been writing for 22 years, and you've written about all different kinds of nature, but you've written about mountains and rivers, and you've written about time. And what I want to start off with is the sensitivity that you've developed over time. A sensitivity to be connected to this much larger world that we live in, both in space and. And in time. Where does that come from? And how have you cultivated that?
- [00:30]
B
Hard to reverse engineer an answer for that. I grew up in mountains. I think that's probably the first answer to that. And mountains sensitize you, right? They are intense spaces and places. The light feels brighter. The snow on the face feels sharper. The air you breathe, you feel. Feel it. Like a wire in your nose, it runs down into your lungs. And so everything kind of crackles and tingles in the mountains. And also because they're dangerous places, you have to be alert. And being alert means risk assessment, but it also means being open as the kind of atoms of the world meet you. So I sometimes say my heart is made of mountains and always will be. They're the. The beginning and the end of all natural scenery as far as I'm concerned. So from that, I think at some level, I learned an obsession with rock and ice and water and light and all the things that flow through and build my work. And also, I guess they wore away the usual boundaries and shells of the self, and they continue to do that in me.
- [01:49]
A
Tell me about that obsession with light. So I was flying into New York the other night.
- [01:52]
B
Yeah.
- [01:52]
A
And it was sort of a dark, kind of a very cloudy evening, thick clouds. And we're kind of landing. We go through the clouds and we get to the bottom of sunset time, and there was this blood orange light that was shining through the clouds. And it was marvelous. It was magnificent. And I have my phone in my pocket to go take a photo. And I go, I'm never gonna be able to capture it. There's just no way. I stopped myself. I didn't take the photo. And then I just started grieving that I'm never gonna have the words to describe how beautiful this color light was. And it's just gonna be in my memory fading away every single day. And I was like, I wish I could describe this, but did I do that?
- [02:36]
B
Has it faded?
- [02:37]
A
I don't know. I feel like I can't explain it to you. And it makes me sad. It was so beautiful.
- [02:43]
B
Well, there was a slaughter in that sunset. Right. It was sanguinous. It was bloody, it was wild. Language will always be late for its subject. When its subject is light, it will be. It stands no chance, right? Nothing moves faster, nothing is more allotropic. Nothing shifts its textures, its granulations, its forms more than light. So I would say abandon the dream of correspondence. So language will never ever meet light. Granite has no grammar. So for me, once you reach the point where you stop the futile questing after correspondence, like, oh, how can my language possibly meet, reproduce, carry the thing I have just seen what can't cause? Das dinganzig, the thing in itself. You'll never do that, so abandon it. And then you're no longer irritably questing after that and feeling that you're falling short. Instead lean into artifice. So for me, metaphor, which is fundamentally a distortion of the thing. Aristotle defines it metaphor as like unlikeness, so sort of matching one thing to another, but across time and space is one of the most beautiful ways of evoking. But not. And this is a verb. I hate capturing nature. We shouldn't dream of capturing nature because then it becomes our captive and then it prowls restlessly backwards and forwards in its cage, and it's not itself.
- [04:22]
A
So is it like I'm thinking of an impressionist painting, right? I think of a Monet. He's not trying to capture the scene, he's trying to paint his impression of.
- [04:32]
B
The scene, the representation of perception rather than the thing itself. And perception is always multiply filtered. It's highly dynamic, it's psychologically textured. So water. I've spent a lot of time trying to think about how to write water recently, as I spent four years writing this big river book. And one thing I came to realize is there is no single grammar of animacy. There is no one way to write water. Water. There is an obvious way to write water, which is to let language flow as river does. And I absolutely have enjoyed playing with that. So there are sentences in Is a river alive? Which go on for. There's one that goes on for two pages and there's one that's 515 words long.
- [05:21]
A
I did catch that. Wow.
- [05:22]
B
Well, and the dash. So I'm a preposition obsessive and a punctuation obsessive. So the dash, the em dash, that long dash, not the hyphen, but the one that lives between words, to me is such a beautiful, fluid piece of punctuation. I think it's my favorite piece of punctuation, where a full stop bangs down the hard end, the bookend To a sentence, to a thought. The dash is liquid. It. It flows two ways, both ways, meaning can move against the current, eddy back up the sentence, or flow down the sentence. So looking at how we, as it were, traffic control, meaning using the tiny stuff, the punctuation and the prepositions, which is something maybe we can come on to talk about the buys, the widths, the next tos, the aboves, the belows, all of those.
- [06:17]
A
Let's go into it.
- [06:17]
B
Yeah. Okay. Well, I am. I love to speak for prepositions because they don't get listened to enough. So to give an example, I sometimes talk about the ways in which I write with nature. So I write with rivers or with mountains.
- [06:34]
A
Like almost as a co author.
- [06:36]
B
Exactly. And there the preposition is what makes the difference. Because if I were to say to you, oh, I write about rivers. That's different. That's me speaking about the river. But writing with rivers, preposition shifts is a new thing. That's where the rivers and I are co thinking, our co writing. And then there's a step beyond that, which is being written by river. And there. So we've gone from about to by. And we've gone. Metaphysically, we've gone a huge distance. Whoa. And being at the very end of these years of river journey, I think I came to know briefly and very consequentially what it meant to be written by rivers.
- [07:24]
A
Does the word conduit feel right?
- [07:27]
B
Yes, you become a channel. Exactly. A conduit is a lovely word for it because it is a river word. It's kind of what rivers are. I mean, water seeks a body. We're water bodies. Doesn't always. It will always find a container. Sometimes that's the banks of the river. Sometimes it's a wetland, Sometimes it's a human body. In this case, I felt very strongly that the river was almost creating language through me as a conduit, to use your excellent word.
- [07:59]
A
Tell me more about how you weaved in the flow and the rhythm of rivers into your writing.
- [08:08]
B
Well, so rhythm is. I'm obsessive about many things. I'm an obsessive, obsessive. But. So you've so far heard me on prepositions.
- [08:16]
A
You should come on how I write sometime. I feel like it'd be a good show for you to come on.
- [08:19]
B
That's a great idea. We can wig out, we can nerd out.
- [08:22]
A
All right, I'll set up a time. I'll find a space so, you know, have a chat about it.
- [08:25]
B
It'd be a really Nice library background. Yeah. Okay. Nerd to nerd. Rhythm. So we recognize rhythm as a function of poetry. It's something we actively listen for when we meet a poem. When we read a poem, we hear it in our mind's ear. A poem, we sound it. Even fiction. I mean, James Joyce's Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake. Deeply, rhythmically alert texts. But in nonfiction, I think partly because it has this weird name, nonfiction, the thing that it isn't like.
- [09:01]
A
It isn't fiction.
- [09:02]
B
It isn't fiction. That's the only way we define it. It's like, what. Why two kinds of books? Exactly.
- [09:08]
A
There's fiction, and then there's the stuff that's not fiction.
- [09:11]
B
Not fiction. Right. Which I just find so strange. And I think that almost subordinate relationship with fiction that nonfiction has is one reason why we don't expect it to be rhythmic, let's say, or to be sound patterned. And rhythm and sound pattern are something that I have been obsessed with from the very beginning because they work upon the mind, the reader's mind, the reader's mind's ear, in ways that are different to propositional language. They're not telling you what to think. They're not an argument. They're not a set of facts. They're not laying out propositions. They're working on what Heaney once called the backwards and the abysm of the mind.
- [09:51]
A
What does that mean?
- [09:52]
B
I think it means that they get. They speak to deeper down forms of knowing. Like in the same sense that rhythm, you know, when. If we're dancing, if we. Our brains are not rationally analyzing beat, our bodies are moving with it in ways that are surprising and pleasurable, but are involved with knowledge as well. So rhythm. What does that mean in terms of, like, nonfiction? So first lines. I probably spend longer on first lines than. Than whole chapters. And they get rewritten hundreds of times.
- [10:26]
A
So this is the first line of books.
- [10:28]
B
First line of the whole book.
- [10:29]
A
Okay.
- [10:29]
B
So much happens when you meet the first line of whole book. So is a river alive 12,000 years ago? A river is born. First line of the wild places. The wind was rising, so I went to the wood. Let's take that one. The wind was rising, so I went to the wood. Exactly. So there's a. Exactly. We have alliteration. The wind, the wood, the went. But we also have. We have rhythm. And there's also a puzzle. Hold on. The wind's rising. But why would you go to a wood when the wind is rising? Isn't that the last place you want to be. It becomes a dangerous place. And so you know how Hemingway sort of wrote these? He played with these sort of flash fictions long before flash fiction. How much suspense or puzzlement could you set up in a single. In a single sentence? So very often I try to test a first line like that. 12,000 years ago, a river is born. A river is born. What does that mean? Is it born forever in time? And why 12,000 years ago? But also that one is less rhythmic.
- [11:39]
A
Shall we say, but it's more mysterious. There's an ominousness about it.
- [11:44]
B
You. Yeah. Something happened 12,000 years ago. Okay. Wow.
- [11:47]
A
We're about to go way back in time.
- [11:49]
B
Way back in time. Exactly. And then. Yeah, I think the next line is, at the foot of a hill on which flints lie white as eyes, water rises for the first time from a crack in the chalk. Rises and flows, rises and flows and on we go. So flints lie white as eyes. We have the white in the eyes at the foot of a hill. And then rises, rises and flows, rises and flows. Picks up the sound of the eyes. So already the sound patterning starting to happen and the reader's mind's ear, as I keep referring to it, gets activated by that. I think whether they know it or not, they start to hear internal rhyme and it just makes you kind of sit up. Okay, I'm not dealing with a kind of fact book here. I'm dealing with a text in which something other forms and forces are going to be active here.
- [12:48]
A
Yeah. Maybe you can help me ground this. But I'm thinking about the different flows of rivers, right. There's rapids, there's still waters. We say still waters run deep and then there's rivers that kind of meander. There's straight rivers. Like there's every single flow that you could get in writing. I feel like you could find a river equivalent for that.
- [13:09]
B
Absolutely. And that's why I think the idea that river language is just fast language isn't right. Because rivers move deep and slow. They pool, they pause. Yeah, exactly. So there's a bit I remember trying to work on. So I paddled this huge river, the Mutexica ship, with the Magpie river up in northeastern Quebec. And we were dropped in by float plane. And then we paddled out over. And there's nothing like you get dropped. We got dropped in at the head of this lake, LAC Magpie, that's 75 kilometers long. That's like from my home to the centre of London. Canadian scale boggles my tiny English mind. But the river has You And. And you follow the river through some wild water all the way to the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So there are so many, as you say, like, kind of forms and almost species of water in that 120 miles. And so when I came to write about it, I realized that the flat water, the lake water, needed a different set of rhythms and tones. And then the river, where the river was fast, that's where the dashes came and the liquid language came and the speed came. And I wanted the reader to feel. Feel what I felt like when that river picked me up.
- [14:29]
A
So tell me, how do you write speed? Is it like short sentences? Is it fast sentences? Like, how do you write that? Like, is that what it is? What do you do?
- [14:37]
B
So I can give you an example. So we're cutting into a sentence that is already half a page, half a page long, and I am staring straight down into the hole at the wave's foot. And then I'm airborne and slammed into the hole headfirst and upside down. I am exploded out of the boat on impact as if hurled from an ejector seat down into the white hole. And river is punching fingers up my nostrils, and river is ramming fist into my mouth and down my throat. And I'm deep now, but the right way up. So I grab handfuls of water and haul for the surface on them as if they're holds on a cliff or rungs on a ladder, but they dissolve under each grasp. And I'm kicking out and feel my feet bang against the rocks on the riverbed. And one of them catches briefly, and so on and so on and so on. So there's a couple of things there. And. And is your friend, right? And is the conjunction equivalent of the. The dash, it just. It tumbles and it tumbles and it tumbles. It doesn't slow or stop or ask you to establish primacy or hierarchy between clauses. It just runs you on and, and, and, and. And the clauses between the ands get shorter and quicker and. And verbs become more active. River. And I dropped the article there, so it's not. It's not the river. It's river rams fingers up my nostrils and river rams fists down my throat, and I'm calling, and, and, and, and. I mean, it's very simple, really. It's a syntax of panic, of speed, of rapidity in both senses of the word. So kind of. Kind of easy. But when you read it, you yourself become breathless. You can't. You don't know when to breathe. And that's what it's like being buried in a rapid. Like that. Yeah.
- [16:15]
A
Tell me about how when you're out, the notes become.
- [16:20]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [16:21]
A
Become books. Because you start off and you write these little scribbles. Yes, just little scribbles here, little scribbles there. And you're not back to that word. You're not trying to capture the experience. It's just little scribbles. And then you go from there and then there's another step and then there's just the work of actually writing the book. How does that happen?
- [16:39]
B
Yeah. Thank you. It fascinates me. It is alchemical. It's quite mysterious. It's also very laborious. So just to break it down into stages, then. So because of the nature of the big books I write, they often take between four and eight, eight years. They take many journeys. There's a lot of field work where I'm meeting people. I'm thinking with other people, with rivers, with mountains. So on those I have my phone, but I prefer to use just these little notebooks. They're just about. About this size, about a six. So they. They bend, they stick in a pocket, whatever. And into those I'm just always pouring what I sometimes call like qualia, or qualia, like in. In the philosophy of mind. Those are just the phenomena of. Of perception. Subjective perception is broken down into. Into qualia. And by that I. That's just a grandiose name for saying stuff. The bits, the bobs, the fluff, the pebbles, the feathers that stick in my mind as it might be a fragment of conversation. It might. But most often it's an image. Yeah. There's a Rilke line that I'll come back to, which is about what happens to image between notebook and page. But I'll come back to that. And so the notebook's there and I'm just. They're so messy that it's fragments. There's no continuity. Sometimes I call them like mica, like shards of mica, the stuff that glitters, that goes in there. Because you don't have time to sort of fully process this stuff when you're having encounter with river or people or mountain. Just gotta get it down, gotta get it down and then not worry about it. But that would be quite. You know, at the end of each day, I'll often. Even if I'm 4,000 meters on a mountain or 100 miles down a river, I'll still tired, flick the head torch on in the tent and just lie there and just jot and jot and Try and pull it out of the brain fresh. Cause it's only a few hours old.
- [18:47]
A
Then you know what I've been doing recently? I just get a little piece of paper. It's like maybe 4 inches by 2 inches, like smaller than an index card. And I've just been writing down thoughts that I have during the day with the goal of filling up the index card. And I'm always amazed at how many thoughts I've had that I didn't even realize that I had. And if I kind of force myself to get that full index card on the page, I'm like, oh my goodness. The number of interesting things that are actually happening here. Maybe not even interesting. The number of things, whatever, it could be junk, is actually way more than I thought. But I need to just sit with it and let the thoughts kind of arise and arise. It needs space. It needs time, stillness.
- [19:30]
B
So the page in your description becomes like a condensation surface. So you have this sort of vapor that you. You've of thought that you've been working in and with, but almost invisibly because it's evaporated. But then when. But the paper then becomes the thing that condenses those thoughts. And I speak for paper. Pen and paper do things that pixel and keyboard can't. I really believe that.
- [19:56]
A
What about more intimate? What is it?
- [19:59]
B
I think there's a. Yeah. I sometimes say they're kind of. The notes are what you flip fresh from the fire. Like they're hot and they glow. They're unformed in terms of ways that could be communicable to other people. Like nobody could read my notebooks and follow a linear flow.
- [20:22]
A
I looked at them. They seemed completely messy and beyond comprehension.
- [20:26]
B
Exactly. Except to me, so highly encrypted. There's only one. There's only one person.
- [20:31]
A
This is the original encryption. It's bad handwriting.
- [20:34]
B
Exactly. WhatsApp, end to end, has nothing on my. If anyone. Yeah. So then how do you then turn a highly encrypted code, readable, legible to any one person, into a book that might be read by 100,000 people, if you're fortunate. And the answer is with a lot of work. But the next stage is when I come home from a big field trip. I will have, you know, five, six, seven, ten notebooks all rammed and crammed. And sometimes I will literally pick up feathers and bits of earth and leaf and stuff and just stick them in the back of the notebook just as more mnemonics. But then comes the what and what happens at this stage? Is I sit with the notebooks and I work through page after page. And now I am on screen and keyboard, and there this kind of filling out happens because each of those little fragments to me becomes the end of a thread of memory. So that's the only bit you can see is the tiny fragment. But as you pull, pull, pull, pull. Exactly, exactly. And they just keep coming. And so there my memory seems to be able to kind of go back into what the fragment was. And then the whole scene within which the fragment was jotted sort of opens around it. And I find that very exciting. And I then kind of summon that space as best I'm able in language or make a connection with. And now is when pattern recognition starts to happen as well. You start to see this interesting mycelium of connections open up. And this is where I'll just mention this Rilke line and see what you think of it. So it's in his letters to a young poet, which I would say to any reader, gotta read it. Any writer that's actually at.
- [22:23]
A
It's on the main table at my house right now.
- [22:26]
B
No way.
- [22:27]
A
Yeah, I was reading it last week.
- [22:28]
B
Oh, that's beautiful. Slender, wise, distilled. Just fabulous. Yeah. Writer to writer, as it were. And he says, I don't know whose translation this is. The images of the eyes are now present, but now is the time to go and do the heart work on the images that lie inside you. Something like that. So I think what he's getting at there is the distinction between that kind of immediate, empirical sort of noticing. The notebook work is at some level the image of the eyes, but the heart work, that's the really hard work. The hard work is the hard work. And that's. That's what comes when you return to these. To these images and start to kind of understand their relation to other parts, to see how they've lodged in you, to see how they resonate. So that's the heart.
- [23:24]
A
Make that concrete for me. What's an example?
- [23:26]
B
Yeah, really, really good question. So when I was writing a book called Underland, which took me eight years, I came to realize that there was a series of images that recurred across many of the journeys. And one of those images was, perhaps, unsurprisingly, the image of the open hand. I say unsurprisingly because the earliest cave art is exactly. I don't know if you know how those were made, but I don't know anything about it. Okay, so what you'll know if you summon them into your mind's eye is that they're not hand prints. So it's not that you get a red print of the hand. You get the outline of the hand. And the way it seems that the early artists, cave artists, did this, they would take a mouthful of red ochre dust, let's say, and then they would place the hand on the cave wall and then they would blow the dust around it. So in effect, they're creating a stencil. Some of the earliest art is stencil art with the human hand as the stencil. So then you take the hand away. You don't have the mark of the hand. You have the mark of the absence of the hand. And there's something very beautiful and ghostly about that, that what we see is not mark, but absence of mark. And I became obsessed with that and realized, you know, I'd see it in graffiti in the Paris catacombs, like made using spray can 20 years earlier rather than 36,000 years earlier. But there was a commonality between those. And I began to realize that the open hand was part of a repertoire of images that would become the heartwork of the book, to use Rilke's term.
- [25:17]
A
So what you're saying there is you see this image of the hand in the absence of the hand. You see it in Paris, you see it in the old cave art. Exactly. And then you get to the keyboard, you say, okay, there's something deeper going on here. And then that is when you begin to pull on the thread to figure out what is that deeper thing, and then to even go back to earlier in our conversation, that's when the work of Impressionism kind of comes into the writing or something.
- [25:40]
B
Yeah. So it's sort of about pattern recognition again, to use a phrase I used earlier. And I don't teach writing very much because I teach at Cambridge my whole time. But when I do teach writing, the first rule I give would be, writers is ass on chair. Turn up for work. It hurts. It's not much fun. You feel like you're banging your head against a blackboard. Don't run away from it. Don't fetishize the working environment. Don't think. You have to get the angle, the feng shui angle of your pencil exactly right on the writing desk before you can possibly begin to start writing. Ass on chair. Show up for work every day and put the time in. Second thing, look out for patterns. And so the open hand. I suddenly realized that the open hand was recurring throughout my notebooks, including not just that kind of cave hand placement, but Also the open hand of greeting, of gesture, of community, of welcome. And so I began to find ways of trying just highlighting the open hand wherever it occurred in my journeys, in my writing. And that then becomes a sort of pattern that lights up for the reader and for the writer. And that lighting up is exciting when it happens. Yeah.
- [27:04]
A
As I was reading Is a River Alive? One of the things that occurred to me is that there was a sense of awareness that you had a connection with nature and attunement that I think we lose as adults. And you were talking to your son, and the conversation went something like, I'm writing this book about Is a river alive? And your son said, duh, of course. Like, that book's not gonna be very long. And it made me realize, like, there's these things that kids know.
- [27:36]
B
Yes.
- [27:37]
A
That are facts about the world. Obviously, it's like that. And then as adults, we. We lose that. And somehow, when it comes to nature, you haven't lost that.
- [27:49]
B
Well, I. I think wonder is an essential survival skill.
- [27:54]
A
Oh, tell me about wonder.
- [27:55]
B
Well, wonder. Wonder is. Is. Is Jaw dropped. Right. It's the moment where you are just stepped back by the world, by the miracle of the world and the freely given miracle of the world. A rainbow is like. I mean, a rainbow is. I think when you see a rainbow, you still stop and of course.
- [28:18]
A
Oh, my goodness, the most magnificent rainbow. I just stood there by the window. I was like, wow. How is that? Every time.
- [28:25]
B
Every time, that's wonder. And every time, rainbows are like. They're the charismatic megafauna of wonder. Right. They do it often. And. Well, the other thing about a rainbow is it's utterly bespoke. That is, it was your. It was David's rainbow. It was no one else's rainbow in the way it appeared to you. Because it's a prismatic function that the water is lensing light and separating light into its constituent wavelengths. But the precise nature of that color and the position and form of the rainbow in the sky is. If you'd stepped a yard to the right and become a different person, you'd have seen a different rainbow. So different. That's wondrous. And science finesses the real into wonder. Like science is. Science doesn't mean unweaving the rainbow. It can help us continue to be astonished by the world. Just understand a little bit better how it works. So I don't see science and wonder as opposed, but I am.
- [29:20]
A
I always struggle with that. When I was a kid, I used to tell my science teachers, I don't want to know. I don't want to know because for me, there was a way that science was taught that actually stripped the wonder out of the world. And I didn't like science class because I didn't want to know about the stars in the sky. I just wanted them to be like little dots that God or whatever hung in the sky, and that was that.
- [29:39]
B
Cool. Well, you and John Keats, the poet who castigated science for, as he put it, unweaving the rainbow. So, yeah, so you have a friend in a romantic poet, great author of Ode to a Nightingale, nodonagrishna. And so don't. Let's not unweave the rainbow. Actually, I think unweaving the rainbow is part of the rainbow is fine. I'm fine with that. But wonder is super powerful. And it's. Kids have it, right? Not always. I mean, children. But I sometimes call children wonder naughts. Like, they're not astronauts, they're wondernauts. They're continually voyaging in wonder. So when I write for children, I try to let wonder kind of take charge, as it were, but also with an ear to rhythm and sound. So I wrote a spell in this big book of spells, nature Spells for children.
- [30:25]
A
You wrote this?
- [30:26]
B
Yeah, I wrote this called the Lost with this wonderful artist called Jackie Morris. And so I wrote, for example, I wrote a spell for the otter. And the idea is that children would speak these aloud as spells. They would become spellcasters and they would kind of conjure back these creatures or plants or birds. So the otter spell begins. I'll see if I can do it. So otter enters water without falter. What a supple slider. Out of holt and into river. This shape shifter's a sheer breathtaker, a sure heart stopper. But you'll never spot an actual otter. Only ever bubble, skein or shadow flutter. And then it ends. Run to the riverbank, otter dreamer. Slip your skin and change your matter. Slide your outer being into water and enter now as otter without falter into river.
- [31:28]
A
Nice.
- [31:28]
B
Something like that. But you can hear again the liquidity of the flow of the internal rhyme and the otter and the language and such like. So I think there's wonder, there's otter, there's rhythm, there's pace. That at least is what I'm trying to do. And then watching children actually take. Take those and speak them aloud, I get these wonderful films sent to me of children kind of on riverbanks speaking the otter spell. And then like, where's the otter? Where's the otter.
- [32:00]
A
Well, what you're talking about with wonder, it reminded me of awe. And there's a poem by William Blake, and it starts like this. To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
- [32:17]
B
Yes.
- [32:17]
A
Like. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Right. Like to see a world in a grain of sand. Like there's a way of activating and awakening your mind that it's just a grain of sand. Come on, let's go on. Versus like it's a grain of sand. Think of the lineage of that grain of sand, how it got there, and all the times that the waves have come over it, the feet that have touched that thing. And like just in a grain of sand, the variance of what we can see or not see can be so vast. And I think if you're right about nature, that applies to everything. Right, yeah.
- [32:54]
B
Blake's a wonderful example. And he also says the green tree is to some people just the thing that stands in the way, and to others it will set them weeping. Something like this. So again, it's that kind of. It's the perception of perception, as it were. So, yeah. And the other thing to say about that Blake poem is, of course it's tiny. It is itself a grain of sand in that sense, but it contains or speaks to eternity and universality. So Blake's playing with scale there. And I think when you realize that the human scale are six foot bodies or whatever.
- [33:35]
A
Thank you, thank you. I'll take six feet.
- [33:37]
B
Six feet, I'll lend you, I'll lend you.
- [33:40]
A
You walk it back anytime.
- [33:41]
B
I'll lend you a coup inches. They're sort of how we measure and see the world, but they're only one scale. And in fact, we stand sort of vertiginously above all of these extraordinary micro scales and then the macro scales above us. And that fascinates me. Like there was this moment in the early 17th century when the microscope and the telescope were suddenly cracking open the scales of the world. And Galileo was seeing the mountains on the moon, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek was using a microscope to peer into a droplet of pond water and see it, as he put it, teeming with animalcules. Suddenly all these other scales of life and structure were revealed through technology. And technology is amazing at that. But yes, as a writer, I'm often interested in nesting different scales next to or within one another. Yeah.
- [34:34]
A
The other thing I wanted to get at is the blinders of rationality.
- [34:38]
B
Oh, Great phrase.
- [34:39]
A
And you write for those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism. To imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counterintuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning.
- [34:56]
B
Yeah. And the question is, what is unlearning?
- [34:59]
A
How do we unlearn what is unlearning? And that's what I was trying to get at with the kids, that there's a way that kids see reality more clearly than adults do. But it's also enchanted and it's filled with mystery and awe. And that was one of the, through lines of stepping into the body of your work is like, whoa, there's something there that I don't know how to put words to. But it's sort of a question to pursue, you know.
- [35:26]
B
Thank you. I see the universe as. Or the universe we inhabit as. How to put this shadowed by mystery. Like, actually, we think of these early, you know, the early cave explorers, the early cave painters. When you hold up a light in a cave, especially if it's a flame light rather than a torch light, you light up just a tiny bit of the cave wall and you're barely aware of the extent of it around you. And as you move, the light follows you, but is only ever lighting up. That's where we live. I mean, rationalism. We think rationalism is the great light that floods the universe and tells us the secrets of everything. Francis Bacon in 17th century says, Let us torment nature until she yields her secrets to us. But nature's secrets far outstrip the tormenting tools of rationalism. So I suppose I enter each landscape, each encounter, each book, aware that there is no possibility of catching and representing everything. So then it becomes a case of what do you light up? And also what mysteries do you allude to? Do you recognize? I mean, on the river. I had this encounter at the end of this big, big river journey, at the end of four years of river travel with something that I can only describe as a kind of river being. It felt like a very godlike presence. How does language even come close to representing? That's the bit where I really felt I was being written by an external force.
- [37:05]
A
So what happened? You were.
- [37:07]
B
Well, we'd been traveling, you know, this hard river journey for 10, 12 days. We'd been buried by the river. The river was running really high. Huge wild river that time of year. Normally running about 150 cubic meters a second. At the outflow here, it was running 275. So it was like it was more than double its normal or it's approaching double its rate. And so every day we were tumbled, we were swimming, we were bashed off rocks, we were running huge six foot waves sometimes, and that just wore us away. And each night we'd pitch camp and we'd have to catch fish for dinner. And it was just hard travel. But also metaphysically, it was kind of wearing me away, it was unlearning me. And that is where we come back to your question. The river did the unlearning and it did it physically, but it also did it metaphysically. And it said, well, what do you mean? This is just water, this is just dead matter. That's sort of what the river was doing to me. It was showing me its agency, its will, its presence, its force. And a great deal changed for me in that time. And then at the very end, I just, I think I describe it as kind of these two auras, as it were, my aura and the river's aura, just sort of overlapping and setting up an interference field for the first time and becoming very, very aware of this thing that has been moving through that landscape hugely, consequentially for again, 10 to 12,000 years. And so I felt small, I felt one among many kinds of being. And it was, I suppose, an experience of the divine, of something like faith, temporarily visceral. Visceral and mystic and utterly fascinating and changing forever. And then you're left with the question, how do I find language to carry that? And again, it doesn't have to carry it. It merely needs to kind of register some analog to what happened then, because you'll never carry that.
- [39:20]
A
I think that another thing that you do is you find these questions, these, they're narrow questions, but they're expansive. You know, there's the question from Jonas Salk who says, are we being good ancestors?
- [39:37]
B
Right.
- [39:38]
A
And then you ask, can a forest think? Does a mountain remember? And then, is a river alive?
- [39:46]
B
Is it river alive?
- [39:47]
A
Right, tell me about those questions.
- [39:49]
B
Yeah, so the, the very first book I wrote in my early to mid-20s was a book called Mountains of the Mind. I grew up as a mountaineer and a climber, as I mentioned. And that was a book called. That began as a question. It's a very old and famous question. Why climb mountains? And why do we climb mountains? Why do I climb mountains? George Mallory, who died on Everest in 1924, famously responded in New York in 1922 when asked, why are you climbing Everest? He said, because it's there. Which became this sort of legendary answer, but actually gets. Does that help me at all? No, exactly. You're right.
- [40:28]
A
I want to be like, wow, that's profound. I don't think that helps me one bit.
- [40:32]
B
It's a bit like my son saying to Isaru, like, well, duh. Yes. So.
- [40:36]
A
Well, that one, I feel like is like your sun is just smack dab. Right.
- [40:41]
B
Okay. Because it's.
- [40:41]
A
But the Everest guy, I'm like, okay.
- [40:45]
B
You know what I mean? Well, I hear you. It has become the kind of most used answer to the question, well, why do we climb mountains? But so the Met, so the Matrix.
- [40:54]
A
The view is nice. It's challenging, but.
- [40:57]
B
Yeah. Well, it took me 300 pages to answer the question in a mantis of the mind. Took me 300 in. Is a river alive? And I didn't come to the end of any of them. But I think having that puzzle, that enigma, the enigma wrapped in the mystery, I think is a phrase for it. These are deceptively simple questions. Why do you climb a mountain? Because it's. There. Is a river alive? Yes, but no, actually, when you begin to ask them, so they become. I don't know how to put it. They become. Let me give a caving example. It's the portal. It's the narrow portal, seemingly narrow portal. And once you can make your way through it, dive the sump that it leads to, and then you surface into this immense space. And that is the space of complexity, of mystery, of polyphony, of many voices.
- [41:50]
A
It's crazy how much you see that in mythology. Right? That's the closet in Narnia.
- [41:54]
B
Yes.
- [41:54]
A
You walk through and you enter a whole new world. There's so many examples of portals, so many. And that's what they always are. They're narrow. You step through the narrow gate. And then vast expansiveness on the other.
- [42:06]
B
Side, the wardrobe that leads to the other landscape, the bungalow. You duck into and find yourself in a cathedral. The portals fascinate me. And actually you've helped me to a really useful crystallization of that, which is those questions are portals. They're modest. They're the wardrobe. They're the modest entrance point. And then you push through the fur coats. Whoosh, you're into a. And in fact, mountains of the mine that you've reminded me now begins with an image of from Narnia. The very first page has an image of my grandmother because I remember my grandmother's wardrobe with her fur coats hanging in it up in the mountains. And I would push through into that dreaming that I would step through into a winter landscape and then actually that the mountains help me do that. So, yeah, the questions are portals. The other thing I should say I do at the very start of a book, other than find the question that is the portal, is I write myself a letter.
- [43:00]
A
Whoa.
- [43:01]
B
My future self a letter. Because I know these books are gonna take once I've committed to them, once I've found the portal question, they're gonna take me 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8 years. I change a lot in that time. The world changes a lot in that time. The book, of course, will mutate and metamorphose a lot in that time. So I tend to write dear Rob, future Rob. And then in that letter I try to say what my heart hopes the book will be, how I think it will be shaped, what it's resonances or key metaphors might be, where. Where I'll. Where I want to go, and then eventually what I. What I want it to do in the world. And they're all tentative, right? I'm not. These are not. It's not a set of commandments. They're an evocation of how I'm feeling about the book at that very, very, very early stage. Then it's. What I love is looking back at those letters when I finish the book and, and seeing the relationship. And sometimes it's hugely discrepant and other times it's surprisingly close.
- [44:14]
A
So with those questions, do you like, hang them on your desk? Because here, for River Alive, it's so obvious. Okay. It's the title of the book. It's the driving question. You're just gonna think about that over and over again. Is it always that kind of explicit.
- [44:27]
B
And concrete, trying to think? So I don't pin questions on my desk, but I do put quotes. So, for example, with this book, there's this amazing line from Ursula Le Guin that she wrote very late in her life. And she says something like, I think.
- [44:47]
A
It'S right before the first chapter, after the prologue. And if you just want to read it correct, I think that's where it is.
- [44:53]
B
One way to stop seeing trees or rivers or hills only as natural resource is to class them as. As fellow beings, kinfolk. I guess I'm trying to subjectify the universe because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co opt, colonize, exploit. This is the bit that I really focused on. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of mind and imagination. Yeah, it ends strongly.
- [45:25]
A
A great reach outward of mind and imagination.
- [45:29]
B
Exactly. And that helps us think back to the portal. So the question seems simple, the key that unlocks the door. But actually the real work is because to really answer yes, if you're not a nine year old, to the question, is a river alive? Those of us raised on rationalism, it requires a great reach outward of mind and imagination. So Le Guin helped me keep thinking. I have to keep reaching. I have to keep reaching outward. Mm.
- [46:02]
A
Sorry. There's so much that was just, like, washed on me. It's almost hard to, like. I don't even know where to. I don't even know what to ask.
- [46:09]
B
The river's going.
- [46:12]
A
How much of writing a book for you is an adventure versus, like, a plan? Actually, maybe we'll just follow a river analogy. Like, say that you're whitewater rafting. Like, there's. We're gonna go from point A to point B, but how you're gonna get there is gonna be nuts. And hopefully you make it there. Right?
- [46:28]
B
Yeah.
- [46:29]
A
Where does that analogy break down? Where does it hold up?
- [46:32]
B
So with the river book, more than any other book, I felt torrented from the beginning. We'll stay with the metaphor. But actually I felt rather than rafting downstream, I was walking upstream. And you know when you walk in a river.
- [46:48]
A
Yeah.
- [46:49]
B
And you feel the muscles of that thing? Right. A river is a. It's a. It's a powerful presence physically.
- [46:56]
A
And it's unceasing. It's relentless.
- [46:58]
B
Exactly. It's just push, push, push, pressure, pressure, pressure. And one thing I've found from physically walking in rivers, which I do quite a lot because they make great paths, especially where the forest is thick on either side, is that when you have your feet planted, you're fine. River's not going to push you anywhere. It's when you have to lift a foot to make progress. So one foot comes up and then you're only on one foot and the river is pushing you off balance. So actually it's stepping forwards. It's the act of walking that unbalances you. Writing a book is like walking upstream in a river. You can get to a point, stabilize yourself, but when you come to take the next step, you lift that foot. That's when river knocks you off balance. It's also really exciting, and that's how you make progress. But I found very strongly that the river was also showing me the direction. I didn't need to worry about direction. It felt very intuitive. But each step was because the force of the flow of ideas and people and encounters and rivers themselves was so strong. It was unbalancing, torrenting in fascinating, but not always easy ways.
- [48:06]
A
You've been talking a lot about your relationship with rivers and what is your relationship with other people in the book writing process? We sort of got it, actually, with that Ursula Guin quote, right, where you get other writers who are almost giving you seeds, and then you can basically take those seeds and turn them into something else. What about peers? How does that show up in. In your writing?
- [48:29]
B
Such a smart question. And they are themselves kind of river presences. A person is not a fixed and sealed thing, right? We know this. We are all in motion and changing all of the time. We're all in flux. But I love people. A lot of nature writing, a phrase I hate. But a lot of nature writing used to be thought of as. As kind of almost people. Less. It was only about the land, as it were.
- [49:00]
A
I mean, John Muir, I don't think of people. Whenever I think of his writing, I always think of the mountains and stuff like that.
- [49:05]
B
Right. And in fact, Muir very shabbily treats and sort of discards the native presence in those landscapes. And particularly in his early work, when what he calls Indians come into view in the landscape, he will kind of shuffle them off, he will frame them out. So. And I have come to love writing about people. And it's partly that I hang out with. I try and get myself to travel with people who fascinate me. It's back to being an obsessive, obsessive. And almost all the people who fascinate me are people who are themselves fascinated by stuff. Obsessive, obsessive. Specialist. Specialist. So, for example, Giuliana Verci, this Chilean, Italian field mycologist, mushroom fungi specialist, who I traveled with in Ecuador. She's one of the most amazing people I've ever met. And she can hear fungi. She's a dowser. She can sense buried water. She can tell you flow rates. She has an astonishing sensitivity to water, and that's, I think, inseparable from her sensitivity to fungi. I was traveling with her in this cloud forest trying to find, find, make second collections of two new species of psilocybe, of magic mushroom, as we might call them. And she could hear them before she could see them. She could sense them round three bends in the path. And I know you're as puzzled as anyone else I've told this story to, but I watched it happen once, and I was there when it happened a second time. She just sort of says, ah, I think. I think they're near now. We were two more turns in the path and then woohoo. Which is what she calls when she sees a fungus. And she's down and there one. One specimen in each case. Single fungi in a huge cloud forest. And I should say she's a serious hardcore field scientist. Right. She's written the field guides to the fungi of Chile. So we're not talking about a kind of, you know, crystal swinging mystic. I mean, she's hardcore scientist, but she goes about things a different way. So how do you write someone like that? In a way, it's the easiest thing. You just transcribe them. Right. Their speech is incredible. Their way of being in the world is incredible. I love it when. And I found it particularly with this book, people talk about them as characters. So it sounds like this is a novel. It isn't a novel, but they are characters. They're incredible, incredible characters. So the books are filled with dialogue because. But it's true dialogue as it will best fit. True dialogue.
- [51:44]
A
Yeah. There's a poet I like. His name's John o'. Donohue.
- [51:46]
B
Oh yeah.
- [51:47]
A
And he has this line, he says, when was the last time you had a conversation? A conversation that wasn't just two intersecting monologues, but a conversation where both people found something within each other, within themselves, that they didn't even know that they knew. And the way that I imagine that is like you're kind of building a fire in conversation. Like what we're doing right now. It's like, I can't do this on my own. You can't do this on your own. We're in this together now. We're actually creating. We're in a process of co creation and that's what conversation is. And he talks about that. And the last line is so beautiful. He says, conversations like that are food and drink for the soul. It is like, wow. And all this is to say the writing process, when you're with somebody like that woman or your friend who you go kayaking with, there's probably things that can get into your book that you would never be able to get on your own. And they're almost a kind of co writer for you.
- [52:47]
B
Absolutely. I love your idea of building a fire together. I think that's. I actually almost prefer that to John o' Donoghue's metaphor of food and drink for the soul, though. O', Donoghue, it's fascinating how many people. Because he was sort of a quiet writer. But I have so many conversations like this where there's one line or a poem or Something and just lights people up.
- [53:08]
A
Tell me about poetry like you learned poetry as a kid. And also one of the things that we sort of talked about before, but it's how rhythm, sound and tempo, they can kind of move you as a reader in ways that exceed the actual prose itself. And that's what poetry does. It's almost more than the words, but it's implicit. And I think this is why you have to memorize poetry is because it's only once it begins to be known by heart, we say. Right. Once you know it by heart, then you begin to see all the rhythms and they. It's almost like a flower. Like it takes a while to bloom, but once it does. Wow.
- [53:48]
B
I didn't know it could do that exactly. The blooming is a lovely image for it. It's entered you and then the seed is sown and then the blossom comes. And I mean, the last 10 years I've been lucky to collaborate with artists with. So I've written libretti for full length choral works. I've also written a bunch of albums. And actually, I have to say, songwriting, writing lyrics has become. I think all of these have helped me with. With Is a River Alive? I think that's the book that I've spent the last 22 years learning to write, and particularly the last 10, because actually writing lyrics, writing libretti, writing poetry.
- [54:27]
A
You wrote a requiem, right?
- [54:29]
B
Written a full length requiem. Like, yeah, that's going to be like a 75 minute huge choral work. It's going to premiere in Helsinki.
- [54:36]
A
So can we do this? Can we just go through libretti and then all of them. I just want to hear quickly, like what those forms have taught you about.
- [54:45]
B
As a long form writer.
- [54:46]
A
Yeah, exactly. So we'll start with libretti. What did that teach you as a long form writer?
- [54:49]
B
Well, so I've written for opera. I've written for. We created an improvised jazz opera that was about 15 years ago, which we performed in a former nuclear weapons testing site, which was very cool. Not what I expected you to. Not what we expected to hear. But the most recent one, the one I've just finished, is called the World Trade Tree.
- [55:10]
A
Okay.
- [55:11]
B
And it's about this. Did you follow the story of the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree in the uk? It was chopped down in the middle of the night by two men who just wanted to visit harm upon it. It was a completely iconic tree on Hadrian's Wall. It featured in Robin Hood, Prince Thieves. Anyway, it was a huge national and indeed international thing and it Was. So it's about. It's a deep history of forests and trees and people in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere. It's called the World Tree. But what did I learn from that? Well, writing for voice, especially for multiple voices, you have to work so closely on, for example, just the way one word transitions into another. So if you have a glottal stop, like a at the end of one word, that then the singer then has to overcome to flow into the next word. That's fine if it comes at the end of a line, but if it comes in the middle of a phrase or a thought, doesn't work. So you begin to think about the kind of sound currents of single phrases and the singability. And that is not something as a writer you would quite think about. But in writing song lyrics, one of the things, the single thing that that has taught me most clearly is to let images lapse into looseness with one another. Let me put it like that. And by that I mean as a teacher at Cambridge, as a prose writer, I'm basically a control freak. I'm like, I have to make meaning mean exactly what I want it to mean. And so you work with syntax in all of these really, really knotty and complex ways to kind of carry meaning. So I wrote a song called Uncanny Valley with my friend Johnny Flynn. So we all got lost in the uncanny valley Took a wrong turn at the end of the alley no one had a map and no one kept tally in the uncanny valley in the uncanny valley. And so when you speak it, it sounds almost like a nursery rhyme. And I'd be embarrassed if I'd written that flat for the page. But when you sing it and set it to beat, and Johnny immediately looked at that and he said, I want to set this off beat. So when you hear the language and the guitar backing, they sit slightly in friction with one another. And that gives it this uncanny off kilter, sort of lightly strange. And from the beginning, everything is off balance. So that's. So they're letting language lapse into looseness, letting images live with one another in ways that they start to cross pollinate in weird ways.
- [58:04]
A
The other thing with that, that I always love talking to artists about is the ways that serious artists are conscious of things that are below the register of consciousness for the consumer of that work. Like those things are talking about. I would have never thought about those things. I could probably listen to Uncanny Valley a hundred times and be like, maybe I'd get to, wow, there's something uncanny about the song. But what you're saying is this is why that's happening? Exactly. The puzzle pieces aren't quite matching up. And that is a feature, not a bug.
- [58:38]
B
A feature, not a bug. Exactly. What seems like a glitch is precisely a glitch. This is a song about glitch. And then I kind of carried that over to, I mean, the biggest glitch, as it were. Glitch.
- [58:52]
A
Glitch is such a cool word.
- [58:53]
B
Such a cool word.
- [58:54]
A
It's such a cool word. It's such a cool thing. It's such a cool word.
- [58:57]
B
It's where everything starts to kind of vibrate and the hologram flickers and reality is doing strange things and rationalism's limits start to be met. And the biggest glitch in the Matrix I've ever known was the encounter with. With this river being. And so there you have to start to find ways that language can glitch itself. So, again, something I learned in songwriting carries over into the big books. And then.
- [59:24]
A
Poetry.
- [59:25]
B
Yeah, poetry. So mostly for children, but here's a glitch poem for you, actually. So a wren, this beautiful, quick little bird that moves so fast you can barely see it. So when wren whirs from stone to furze the world around her blurs. For Wren is quick, so quick she blurs the air through which she flows. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So there. It's all about the glitch, really. It's about speed. And then glitch. Because the wren is so quick, she seems to pass out of sight. She seems to glitch.
- [60:04]
A
We gotta talk about words.
- [60:05]
B
We have been.
- [60:06]
A
We gotta talk about words.
- [60:07]
B
No, no, no, no, no.
- [60:08]
A
Now we're really gonna talk about words. So tell me about place words.
- [60:11]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [60:11]
A
Like how you've collected place words for terrain, elements, light, life, place names.
- [60:16]
B
Yeah, yeah. Toponyms.
- [60:18]
A
Now we're really gonna talk about words.
- [60:19]
B
All right, well, let's get some words going. The Onomasticon. The toponym. So toponym is a place name. Onomasticon is a gathering of. Of words, particularly for places, obviously. Glossary, lexicon. So all of my books have glossaries. I'll give you a few. I'll give you a choice view from the glossary of not. Because I want people. I don't use big words because I want people to think I'm a big word user. I use them because they are fantastically precise.
- [60:53]
A
Descriptive.
- [60:53]
B
Yeah, descriptive. Precise. Precise. And I think precision is a function of lyricism.
- [60:58]
A
Yes.
- [61:00]
B
So here's a few from the glossary of is a river alive sump, a pit or pool into which waste liquids are drained, a cesspit, super void in astronomy, a very large part of the universe containing very little or no known condensed matter, galaxies, superclusters, et cetera.
- [61:19]
A
I have a cool one.
- [61:20]
B
Go on then.
- [61:22]
A
Runach Mum.
- [61:23]
B
Oh, Runach Mum. And you pronounced it pretty well.
- [61:25]
A
That's because I transliterated it. I literally went to Google and I was like, I'm not gonna be able to pronounce this, so I'm gonna get the actual pronunciation on my piece of paper. So I practiced that.
- [61:36]
B
You did. Good job.
- [61:37]
A
So you're talking about precise. The shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day.
- [61:46]
B
Yeah. Runach Murm. Exactly. What's that? Four syllables. But there it takes us in English, a paragraph, really a long sentence to describe. So this, I should say this is from Gaelic, Scots Gaelic. And specifically, it's from the Western Isles dialect, as it were, sort of idiolect of Scots.
- [62:07]
A
Well, what I would imagine is, as much as anything, the language of nature is really diverse as you move around the world.
- [62:17]
B
Super diverse. Exactly. Yeah. I spent a wonderful two, two and a half years collecting. So I was raiding old glossaries in libraries, regional libraries, because in the 19th century, people were making these dialect glossaries and looking always for words for water, for land, for weather, for forests and trees, for moor, for mountain. Words of relation with place. Precise, lyrical, fascinating, strange, sometimes absurd. And I would also go and interview language keepers, as it were.
- [62:47]
A
What are language keepers?
- [62:48]
B
Well, so they're as, I guess, the elders of their communities, especially where languages are threatened. So Scots Gaelic, it's got as low as sort of 53,000 speakers. It's starting to bump back up a bit now. It's highly regionally specific. So I came to know an amazing man to whom the book is dedicated, called Finley MacLeod. And Findlay was a language first language Gaelic speaker, but bilingual in English. And he had made part of his remarkable life's work gathering the language together and recording it. Because a lot of it's oral culture, like, you wouldn't necessarily think to write down the specific Runach Mom. So he handed me this amazing document, a peat glossary, which was like 150 words for aspects of Morland and Pete on Lewis alone. And I just like, wow. And that's where I met Runach Murm for the first time.
- [63:42]
A
Tell me about language death.
- [63:44]
B
Yes, it happens. River death happens. Language death happens. I mean, language death is very simple to define. It's where the last living speaker of a language dies. And then the language survives in recordings, in virtual record, in paper record, of course, but it's no longer being passed on. That's language death. And when a language dies, knowledge goes with it, because language is a knowledge storage system. And when you. And some. Some aspects of that knowledge cannot be translated across into another language, they're not alienable from the language itself. So language death is a kind of biocultural collapse as well, a deletion of knowledge often that's been born and carried over many, many generations.
- [64:31]
A
I asked you earlier about getting the early notes and then we sort of talked about revision, but I know every single sentence gets revised 2100 times. Like, tell me about the revision process. How do you take something that is eh and turn it into yeah, well.
- [64:48]
B
I don't know if I do turn it into yeah, but I definitely try to move it away from eh. And I am such a. I'm a muddy, mucky, messy writer. So I sometimes liken it to potting, like being a potter. And you know, in potting, where you. The first thing you do is you have your bucket of clay and you reach down, take a huge wet handful of clay and then foot the. Yeah, down it goes on the wheel. And then the next bit is the hard work. It's like the treadling, I think they call it. So you're sort of pumping that foot treadle and that begins to spin the plate and then the work, the fine work begins, which is where you begin to shape the bowl and shape the bowl and shape or the pot or whatever. And then eventually, once you've got that form, then you start to do all the ornamenting and so on. But it is messy work. I am not a writer who has to finish one sentence before he goes on, he or she goes on to the next. And a piece of advice perhaps I would have for. I often give this to writers who are stuck with a block. I can't begin the book or I can't proceed with the book. I'm like, don't worry about that. Just. Just leave it. Actually, I have two pieces of advice. Let me give this. So the first is when you end a day's writing, Lee, make sure you know what the next sentence is going to be. So when you wake up the next morning, yeah, you're like, oh, yeah, I'll finish that. And that just gives you that little bit. It's like pushing off on the bike. And then. And then you're like, it's good analogy. So. So that's like the hook and eye. And the other is, if you're really stuck, don't worry, just go downstream, jump into the book, further down, and just write that bit. And sometimes. And I build my books out of bits. They're sort of mosaics. So I write them often very non linearly. I'll be like, okay, I know what's gonna happen in that paragraph or that scene or that bit of the river or that journey or that encounter. So I'll write that as a set piece. And I'll be doing that with 100 set pieces, even as I'm trying to kind of remember the flow. So I'm not at all scared of distraction, discrepancy, diversion. It doesn't have to be this beautiful linear writing. I don't know how Richard Powers writes. I know Alan Hollinghurst, the English novelist, won the book prize and many other things. He writes perfect linear flow, handwritten sentences. He'll write a page a day, I once heard him say, then he'll stop, and then he'll write the next page the next day, and then he'll stop. If you write 365 pages a year, you've got yourself a novel really quickly.
- [67:22]
A
That is an anointed human being. That sounds exactly. That is rare.
- [67:28]
B
Well, I think it must be. And I am the opposite. I'm like, okay, mosaic tile here, there.
- [67:32]
A
Do you like writing?
- [67:36]
B
Yes. I mean, it is not coal mining. I think writers can really whine about how hard writing is. And at some level, I think we need to recognize that you're sitting on the whole comfortably behind a desk. And yes, there are external pressures, and one may be worried about financial circumstances or deadlines or family. You know, we're all under many kinds of. Of pressure. But the actual writing work, it can be a bit hurty. Let's say it's like it's brain hurting. You don't want to do it because it's hard.
- [68:10]
A
It's unnatural.
- [68:11]
B
Yeah, well, to me, it's pretty Naturalized now after 20 years.
- [68:16]
A
Takes 20 years.
- [68:17]
B
20 years.
- [68:18]
A
I actually feel vindicated. Okay.
- [68:19]
B
Yeah, exactly, dude.
- [68:20]
A
It's totally natural. Just takes 20 years.
- [68:22]
B
You've been writing. I mean, really writing. How long? 10 years now. Yeah. Okay. You just got another 10 to do, and then it'll be fine. Like freewheeling on a bike with no hands on the handle, like a.
- [68:31]
A
Like a guy in a hammock.
- [68:35]
B
Well, it doesn't still feel like that, but we're back to ass on chair. It's like, just show up. And even if you, even if you only get a paragraph that day, your book's paragraph longer, how do you feel.
- [68:45]
A
About using ChatGPT and AI in your writing? Oh my goodness, look at those eyes.
- [68:52]
B
I mean, I don't and I cannot ever imagine doing so. The only AI I use, although I do try and switch it off, is obviously like spellcheck. You know, you get the red. And that is a kind of AI And I suppose it's been scrutinizing us for a long time, but actually I because my writing often is highly violating of grammatical norms, the grammar check goes wild, does not like it. And I'm like, good, this is excellent. I could give you an example of what, as it were, Grammarly does not like. So this I sometimes like to remove verbs from sentences, leaving them technically not sentences, but this is seeing this huge Canadian river for the first time from the sky. My first sight of the river itself captures catches my breath. New paragraph. A world snake in the green. New paragraph. Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. New paragraph. House sized boulders on the banks. Time falls from the rock faces above. New paragraph. Water blue, black and glossy in the deeper calmer runs Peep brown where it's stretched towards and away from rapids churning green gold and cream in the falls. End paragraph. So that's five paragraphs, five sentences. Sands doing weird stuff. Cliffs dropping near sheer to water. And Grammarly, Grammarly does not approve, which I take to be a badge of success.
- [70:30]
A
It's sort of the paradox of Grammarly that it makes the average piece of writing, I think, much better. But it hurts a kind of write. It takes away from distinctiveness and individuality that underlies so much great writing.
- [70:49]
B
I think that's so well put and I like the idea of it hurting that I think that's a good way of putting it. Salman Rushdie yesterday, I think said writers have nothing to fear from AI until it can do comedy. And I thought that was an interesting idea. Like the hardest thing of all is to make us is to make us laugh. But I think writing broadly does have a lot to fear from AI and we should resist it, including the absolute piracy of our books that we now know large language model composers have been undertaking for years now and absolutely feeding them without any kind of recompense or licensing or permission sought into the creation of LLMs.
- [71:32]
A
I want to hear more about what you do to make something feel visceral. Like I've been thinking a lot about that word visceral. And you talk about claustrophobia and the way that that can feel visceral. There's a line from William Golding where he talks about sympathetic kinesthesia, twitching limbs, rising heart rates, faster breathing, and that we can actually experience something vicariously. So early on in the conversation, we were talking about not trying to. Trying to capture something. Yes, but this isn't the opposite. But it's. But it's actually making the reader feel what you felt and having that feeling feel vivid.
- [72:11]
B
Yes.
- [72:11]
A
Transferring that.
- [72:12]
B
Wow. Well, it. Yes. So visceral from. As it were, viscera from the guts. Like, how do you make a reader feel it in the guts? And I mean, curiously, this is where feelings of nerves, you know, we talk about butterflies in the stomach. We feel that kind of characteristic tingles, anxiety or panic. Underland, which is the book I wrote about, which is highly kind of claustrophobic in many ways, although it's also about the immense immensities of the underworld and the ways they open us up as well as close us down. But there is a passage in that. Where I am crawling through the Paris catacombs. And I would say that the area under your chair and between the legs of your chair, so about a foot, is considerably bigger than the. I mean, the affordance of this passage was so tight that my nose. The back of my head was on the base and that my nose was on the top.
- [73:09]
A
Oh, my goodness.
- [73:09]
B
And I had to hook my rucksack to my ankle and drag. And then the only way I could. You could kind of move was just like worm, like moving your way under. And then this. This shuddering started, this vibrating started. We were in. It was a rock passage, limestone. And. And I came to realize. And the whole ceiling was. Everything was judging, and the vibrations were passing through the rock, through my body and back into the rock. It was a train. It was a. It was a tube train. We were under Paris, so it was a metro train. And I realized it was passing directly overhead of. And I mean, that probably was the time I felt most afraid in eight years of. Of. Of the Underland. Anyway, the roof didn't collapse. We made it through. But so many people have stopped reading at that point. I've had. Must have had a hundred people in readings and talks come up to me and said, I loved Underline, but when I got to that bit too much, I just had to stop. I had to jump out. I was fascinated by this, because being able to vicariously affect your reader's body, not their mind, but being able to make them kind of clench, make their heart beat, raise, make them go outside under a Clear blue sky so they can recover from the claustrophobia, even though they were reading it in a room like this. That's power. It's power and it's fascinating. And I came to realize claustrophobia is much more vicariously powerful than vertigo, and vertigo is quite powerful. So when I'd written a lot about vertigo, you know, people were like, oh, yeah, I felt a version of that. But with claustrophobia, people like, I had to stop reading this. So it's just. Yeah. Sympathetic kinesthesia is where you're affecting not mind, but body. Body and then mind. And it's a fascinating power.
- [74:54]
A
Worst claustrophobia I ever had was my first mri. I didn't really know what an MRI was, and I just showed up and it was horrible.
- [75:01]
B
You got it. You felt it. What the kind of.
- [75:04]
A
Oh, it was terrible. I asked them to stop. I had to go back. They had to say, do you want to do this? Do you not want to do this? I said, fine, I'll do it. And it was just a terrible experience. There's just something about claustrophobia that when you get it, you. You want to hit the eject button and just get out of there so fast.
- [75:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. I once.
- [75:24]
A
It's a strange kind of pain. It's a strange kind of suffering. It's more suffering than pain.
- [75:29]
B
Yeah. And it's so mental. Right. Because you would have known. The rational part of your brain knows this is an MRI scanner. Like, this is not going to collapse and crush me. It's not going to harm me. It's doing me good. Many thousands of people have been here before me. But, yeah, I once thought about. When I was writing Undone, I thought about getting a business card which just read, I do these things so you don't have to. So kind of. But yeah, yeah. The underworld. I haven't been back into the underworld much since I surfaced in about 20. 2018, I must say. Whereas rivers, they're going to flow on through my life forever. Nice.
- [76:04]
A
I want to do kind of a fire round. I want to ask you about language from different cultures and what we can learn from them. So we'll start with Old English.
- [76:12]
B
Okay. Old English used to be known as Anglo Sac. Now Old English. So the kenning. A kenning is a beautiful trope of Old English, which is where you hyphenate two words together to make a metaphoric version of another. So bone cage. Bone cage. Hyphenated means the skeleton, the body. Whale road is the sea. The sea that, for example, that the ships sail on is the whale road that becomes the sea. And this profusion of cannings which is so characteristic is just a beautiful metaphoric generosity sort of fusing two bits of language together. And once you start to play with kennings, it's very hard to not play with them. There's a spell, kingfisher spell I wrote, which begins something like, flame flicker, light, bringer rivers quiver, something like this, da da da da da. So they're all hyphenated. So there's Old English, the kenning is so strong and also in Middle English. So Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, 14th century, great epic poem of travel and nature. Alliteration and rhythm are absolutely central to that. The so called the axe knocks of the stress. And I've learned so much from that alliterative tradition of Old English. The poems like the Seafarer, Gawain and the Green Knight, really, really strong for me. So alliteration and Kennings, Hebridean Gaelic. Well, compressive precision, I suppose. We've talked about Runach Mum, the shadows cast by clouds on moorland on a sunny windy day, many versions of that. And also what's sometimes called gps, the Gallic Positioning System.
- [78:06]
A
What's that?
- [78:07]
B
Well, place sensitivity is so coded into a lot of Gaelic place names. So for example, I'm a mountaineer and this is not Hebridean Gaelic, but. But Gaelic and Norse together. So you can tell the shape of mountains depending on the names before you see them. So for example, a Ben, like Ben Nevis or Ben Moore, that's like a generic hill, will tend to be quite rounded. Stob Stob Binion, for example, will be a sharper peak. Skur Skiernangilian means literally a scarier tooth that would typically be a very sharp peak, so. Or Ben Cruachen means the hill of the forge. And it's actually shaped like a big kind of forge building. So coded into Gaelic place names are descriptors. So the Gaelic Positioning System GPS is, if you can understand the place names, you can kind of read the landscape with them and locate yourself, man.
- [79:03]
A
It really gives you an X ray vision into the natural world.
- [79:06]
B
These words, yeah, and they go, you know, way, way, way, way back. So yeah, yeah. So Bukul Etive Mor literally means the big shepherd of the, the glen, the valley of Etive. So Moore is big, Bukul is the shepherd and Etive is, is, is the valley. So. And that stands like a kind of guard peak at the head of this incredible glen of Etif. So Bukhlu Etive more.
- [79:35]
A
How about the Irish versus the English? What are the similarities, the differences?
- [79:39]
B
I think what's shared is an absolute relish for what Heaney calls the palp and heft of language.
- [79:45]
A
The palp and heft and heft of language.
- [79:48]
B
So palp as in palpable, like the feel a bit. The texture of words, the way and then heft, how they weigh in the hand. So what does Heaney say?
- [79:58]
A
What a turn of phrase.
- [80:01]
B
He just did that all the time. No one taught me the palp and heft of language better than Seamus Heaney. He says, keep your mind clear as the bleb of an icicle. And the bleb, it turns out, is not the icicle. It's that single droplet of water that melts down and then hangs at the end of the icicle and then drips off. But when it's hanging there, it's the bleb and the clarity of that, but also the way it shapes the world when you look into it. That's what Heaney's talking about. Keep your mind clear as the bleb of the icicle, huh?
- [80:36]
A
How about English writing?
- [80:38]
B
Well, I mean, where to start and where to stop? It's the water I swim in. I think sometimes you want language, English to be transparent as glass. You don't want the reader to see anything between them and what it is they think they are living with you. And sometimes you want it to be opaque and thick and rich and full of palp and heft and for the reader to feel each word and to weigh language and to feel language. If you get that wrong, it's a tremendous interference. The reader feels like they're wading through heavy water and they're being weighed down by the heavy heft of language and they just want to get away. But if you get it right, it becomes almost a physical set of performances, of lifting feel. The body's resistance to idea, to word, to language, and the mind's leaning towards it or moving away from it. And so, yeah, making the reader dance with. With palp and with heft can be wonderful for writer and for reader, but other times you want them to forget language is there entirely.
- [81:55]
A
What do you make of the early 20th century Writing advice about removing needless words? Remove it, remove it. Get simple, get down to the essence. It just seems to be the antithesis of what you do. So what is going on? When is that true? When is that not true? Is that just. No, that's bad advice. How do you feel about that, that.
- [82:11]
B
So Walter Pater, who is one of the great Victorian. He says, one of the great Victorian kind of essayists, he said, burn with a hard and gem like flame. Burn with a hard and gem like flame. And I think he. Much earlier than the Hemingway and others and later Raymond Carver, we could call them like the subtractionists, the people for whom taking away is almost always the right thing to do with language. I think Peter and Bernie with a hard gem like flame is thinking about something, something similar. I sometimes I think that's really important. And you heard the verbalist sentences earlier. It's like, meaning they're not Hemingwayan or Calverian, but they, they, they are gem like, like there's a. There's a facetedness to them and they're just like. Each of them is a sort of lapidary image. And I don't try and connect them or causally relate them. It's just image, image, image, image. And that we could. To change the form. That's what it. It's like flashing those up as on the mind screen. It's like a kind of brain cinema that's. There's a vividness to that. But then adding, yeah, I'm not a. A subtractionist except at times. But other. I mean, I just think each, each, each landscape, each encounter asks a different bespoke presence of language. And sometimes you take away and sometimes you add. Yeah, that's. So I, I just think you just judge where, where you are and what you're trying to do.
- [83:54]
A
We've talked a lot about making writing vivid. And I want to go deeper on that, of capturing astonishment, of not exaggerating. Like, we're not trying to exaggerate this, but also we're not trying to diminish. No, the astonishment that you feel. How do you do that? How do you think about capturing the truth of that?
- [84:12]
B
I think what you say about exaggeration is a really helpful note. And to writers and to myself, I, you know, hyperbole is your enemy. Straining too hard is your enemy. I mean, that way purple prose lies. I think so. Finding exactly the urge with astonishment is to render it with a similar kind of extravagant vivacity of language. And actually that can leave a hollowness and a falsity to it. I think so again. I think so. Resisting the impulse to explain astonishment I think is important. So the unknowables that I experiences that I've had in my 22 years of writing, including a ghostly encounter on a hilltop in England, sleeping out alone on my own. In a. In a. As I subsequently found out, wood, hilltop wood that has a long history of hauntology and spectral encounters. I didn't know any of that at the time. How do you, how that's an astonishment. But how do you, how do you write it? Well, I just try almost phenomenally to adjust the empirical basis of it. Just tell it how you felt it. And we're back to not representation, but the representation of perception. And let the reader. And maybe this is where subtraction becomes important, because when you don't try to say everything or overlard everything with language, the reader becomes a participant. They are co creating with you, they're filling in gaps. So letting things drop out that feel vital to you. And it's again, don't over explain. And maybe this is where lyric writing is helpful. Letting sense and cause drop out. Because then the reader steps in and kind of fills those gaps and becomes your co writer.
- [86:16]
A
Yeah, I think sometimes if you have sentences where you dot the I's, you cross the T's, you make the edges kind of right angles, 90 degrees, it's really well put. You omit the space for a reader to contemplate it, to stir on that sentence on their own. And I think that a lot of my gripe with, hey, focus on clarity, be really clear in what you're saying is a lot of good writing is you're gifting somebody a turn of phrase or a sentence that they can actually think about for a long time. And in order for that to be a fruitful experience, the sentence has to contain some mystery. And that's the only way that it can be a send off for somebody else to make their own.
- [87:02]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. And even, even when one is working with a single sentence. So I think there's a sentence in Is a river alive? In English, there is no verb to river. But what could be more of a verb than a river? Now, in a sense that's a finished thought, but in another it is a send off. It's like, hold on, so what does that. Oh, right, yeah. We don't talk about rivering this or being rivered. But of course, is a river a verb? Yeah. How do we translate? So yes, again, we're back to the portal. It's like you lend initial ascent to the idea and then it kind of complexifies in retrospect. Yeah.
- [87:46]
A
Hey, this was wonderful.
- [87:48]
B
Yeah.
- [87:49]
A
Holy cow.
- [87:51]
B
We're only just embarked on the river. We got another three hours downstream of us. No, I'm only kidding.
- [87:55]
A
But that was a crazy conversation. Wow. It's so cool to talk to someone who loves language as much as you do.
- [88:01]
B
Two nerds wigging out. That is what just happened.
- [88:03]
A
Wigging out.
- [88:05]
B
Thank you, David. It was a total pleasure. Yeah, brilliant.
- [88:09]
A
Brilliant. You know, I have a gripe with that word.
- [88:11]
B
Oh, go on. Let's end the wig out with a gripe.
- [88:14]
A
So this is my gripe. So in America, we overstate everything. Yes, we overstate everything. And the English, very understated.
- [88:21]
B
Okay.
- [88:22]
A
And so, like, that's pretty good. In, like, English. English is like, wow, that was actually great. But there's one word that we English overstate, not the Americans. And it's brilliant. I get out of a taxi in London, I say, hey, thank you. They say, oh, brilliant. I'm like, it wasn't brilliant at all. This is the most mundane. The most mundane, like, basic thing. And that's my gripe with the word okay, brilliant. Specifically with English people.
- [88:48]
B
I thank you. I consider myself chastised. It's a. Well, if you swap it. Because it's a word of light, right? Brilliant means radiant. But if you swap it with radiant, then you realize how silly it sounds. Like if I'd got it, you got out of a taxi and the taxi driver said, that was radiant. What? But no, we fully naturalized brilliant. But this was brilliant.
- [89:08]
A
This was brilliant. American brilliant or English brilliant?
- [89:11]
B
English brilliant.
- [89:12]
A
It's an exercise for the listener. All right. That was good fun.
- [89:16]
B
Cool. Thanks.