First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Robert Macfarlane about his new book, Is a River Alive?
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: You found very human stories within some of the characters you write about in each location that you traveled to look at the river and its culture. And you found loss in all three places, in Ecuador, India, and Canada that these characters faced. Loss is very human, and maybe that’s partly just the job of a writer to see all these people were more than just their loss, but it seemed that in the book that it was important.
Robert Macfarlane: I take a long time to write my books. And one thing I’ve found – I guess, I’m 11 books in now, but probably six big books, long books – I think of it as crossing a terrain, the years of writing and researching and meeting and gathering and all the wrangling that goes into a book and the heart work as well. And then you get to the far side of this sometimes quite arduous traverse, and then you look back and you realize that all of these little landmarks, these bushes or cairns or places where river meets river, that seem like individual things when you were passing them, they spring up into a kind of network, and they declare their symbolic relationship, their metaphysical relationship with one another. And it’s doesn’t all happen at once, it doesn’t light up in a second, but gradually, as the months pass, after you think you’ve come to the end of the crossing, then this glowing network starts to declare itself. And it’s thrilling. To me it’s a thrilling phase of writing. And there you realize that what you hadn’t seen as pattern is pattern. And the biggest pattern in this book is that dialectic between life and death. And I didn’t see it as it was happening. It was only at the end.
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Robert Macfarlane is a British writer internationally known for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. They have been translated into more than 30 languages and won many prizes around the world and have been adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays and films including river and mountain. In 2017 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forester Prize for literature. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge England where he is a fellow at Emmanual College, Cambridge.