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Elif Shafak and Robert Macfarlane are two of the most dreamy and articulate writers I know. Elif has written 21 books, 13 of which are novels, and she is the president of the Royal Society of Literature.
Robert Macfarlane writes about the natural world: birds, rivers, trees, mountains. He does so in such a poetic and enchanted way; his writing is infused with wonder.
I’ve had both of them on the show individually. I knew they were good friends, so I suggested we all get together for one conversation. I wanted to hear the kind of discussion they would have over coffee or lunch. I invite you to be a fly on the wall for this conversation with two really interesting writers.
Transcript
00:00:44 How to turn emotion into words
00:04:58 Linear vs non-linear writing
00:09:05 Listen well to write well
00:20:25 Why write about nature
00:24:21 Language, rhythm and cadence
00:29:07 Do writers need to be bored?
00:35:43 Write what you feel
00:43:23 What are the limits of reason
00:47:56 Give readers a new way to see
00:50:25 Find the big in the small
00:57:54 How to improve your writing
David (00:44-00:59)
Let’s start with you, Robert. When you are with a mountain or a river, moved by awe, how do you translate those emotions into language?
Robert (01:00-01:55)
First, you accept failure. Language will always be late for light. It will never truly capture water, river, rock, or mountain.
That moment of encounter — a moment in time and space where countless streams of being, presence, and sensation converge — we call ourselves awestruck, wonderstruck, astonished. Language will never fully capture it.
The question is how well language fails. For me, the beauty lies in the shattering of language, as it falls to pieces around that untouchable moment. It’s in how those pieces fall, and what they are made of.
David (01:55-02:00)
What happens when you are out in the field versus when you are at home at the desk?
Robert (02:01-03:16)
I am extremely interested in the technologies of writing. I write across many forms. Some forms, typically song lyrics and short poems, I absolutely must write in a notebook. I don’t like writing them on the screen; I prefer working them out on paper.
I have different sized notebooks for different lengths – tiny A6 ones and bigger A5 ones. I choose the notebook based on how much I need to see, and I also select a pen that works well. I have a fountain pen whose ink now carries the water of 110 rivers. If I want to write something very flowing, I reach for that river pen.
Other things, however, I need to write on the screen because I must move elements around much more fluidly. Word processors offer invaluable flexibility for kaleidoscopic writers like me, who are constantly twisting the telescope and observing how the pieces fall. I couldn’t achieve that with pen and ink on paper. It’s the old writer’s question – what do you write with? – but it remains an interesting one.
Elif (03:16-04:57)
Writing longhand is almost impossible for me. I dislike my handwriting and cannot connect with it.
I was left-handed, and at school in Turkey, it was common to convert left-handed children to using their right hands. That was a very difficult process for me. In a classroom of about 40 to 44 kids, I was likely the last to learn how to write.
That’s when I first heard the word ‘exile.’ The teacher would say, ‘You have to send your left hand into exile,’ meaning I had to hold it under the desk while my right hand remained above. For me, the keyboard and computer are solutions.
These are old, quite harmful teachings. Some are connected to religion, based on the belief that two angels sit on your shoulders: the one on your right shoulder records your good deeds, and the one on your left shoulder records your bad deeds. So, the left hand was associated with sin and all things negative. Left-handed children were thus converted to using their right hand, and I was one of them.
As a result, even today, my handwriting is quite messy and sloppy. When I sign books, I often pity the readers trying to decipher what I’ve written. I have always used a typewriter, and then a computer.
David (04:58-05:10)
Elif, Robert was talking earlier about a lot of his writing unfolding as a mosaic. Is that how you feel, or is it more like writing your novels linearly, from page one to page 400?
Elif (05:11-06:14)
My process is never linear. For instance, in There Are Rivers in the Sky, I didn’t finish one character, then start another, and then move to a third. I had to develop them simultaneously, almost like weaving a braid of hair. This requires jumping back and forth through time, geography, and location. I love these almost irrational jumps.
Sometimes I tell myself I’ll keep it minimalistic this time, that it will be a linear book, but I can’t do it. It’s simply not who I am. Perhaps it’s due to my personality and upbringing, having led a more nomadic life with many ruptures and migrations. This approach comes much more naturally to me.
A cosmopolitan canvas emerges, sometimes despite myself, which I don’t...
Robert (06:14-06:32)
...want to over-extrapolate here.
We talked earlier about how happy both of us are writing while traveling. I suppose as someone who has been pushed into exile and has moved and migrated a lot, you have to be ready to write on the move.
Elif (06:32-07:44)
Yes, absolutely. The other thing you lament, of course, is not being able to bring your library with you. A library requires you to be rooted; it needs time to accumulate. Sometimes you have to memorize your favorite passages, or at least carry those feelings with you.
I always think about what comes with us as we move from one country to another. This was the premise of one of my novels, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in a Strange World. In it, we know immediately that the main character, a sex worker, is dead after her heart stops beating.
Interesting studies show the brain can remain active for another few minutes. So the entire novel takes place in those few minutes while her brain is still functioning. As she remembers her past, what stays with us? The good or the bad? Are some things more ephemeral? Senses and smells, for instance — these seemingly small things have very long-term memory.
David (07:46-09:17)
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Robert, how is looking at birds, which are small and always in motion, different for you from looking at a mountain, which is big and always still?
Robert (09:18-09:19)
I’ll take…
David (09:19-09:20)
Maybe you reject the categories.
Robert (09:20-09:22)
I reject the categories entirely.
Elif (09:22-09:22)
Okay.
Robert (09:22-12:21)
Big and small, we can relatively agree on, but the white-tailed eagle does have an eight-foot wingspan. When one flew over me at the lowest altitude, it briefly blocked out the sun. Still, yes, mountains are big, birds are smaller; let’s go with the comparative.
Birds are always in motion, mountains are always still. No, mountains are moving because a living mountain is a great network and conglomerate of teeming, thriving elemental material and biological presence.
There’s a wonderful line from a Japanese artist, whose name escapes me at the moment: “Place is always moving like a sleeping cat.” I think that’s true of a mountain. Birds are sometimes still, of course, sometimes very still.
But then there’s sound, of course, because one of the great gifts of birds is their song. If you’re to write about birds, I think you need to let language sing a little as well. Take the cuckoo, for example.
That’s a very simple one. You have to set up this rocking rhythm, this two-tone beat. The entry for Cuckoo in the Field Guide begins:
Where to start? With you, Cuckoo, That one-two call, perhaps from high on oak or yew, That heralds spring anew, Then beats out summer’s hot tattoo. The curious beauty of your feathers, Also their smalt hue, their smoky petrol blue. And we mustn’t forget, of course, The monstrous trick you play on other birds, That devious, terrible switcheroo.
So the cuckoo gave me that rocking rhythm, the internal rhyme. It’s a bird that sets its own beat. Then you get into the extraordinary thing it does, which is printing counterfeit eggs in the female’s belly and laying them in the nests of host species. Meadow pipit, reed warbler, dunnock — individual cuckoos specialize in different forgeries, different counterfeits. They print different eggs for different birds so that they won’t be rejected by the host parents.
Then the mothers lay them and off they go, leaving the surrogate pair to raise them. It then moves into a more eerie, folkloric account of how that practice has woven stories and made meaning with and for us. Does that make sense?
Elif (12:22-13:59)
That makes a lot of sense. I also think there’s a need to listen, to be a listener. When I’m writing, I feel like I’m tapping into something that is bigger, older, and wiser than me. This takes the pressure away because I feel like I have to do a lot of listening and learning.
With learning comes a lot of unlearning. As you said earlier, we’re all running from one place to another, from one appointment to the next. We’re very used to looking at the world from our own little corner. When you are listening and learning, you have to leave that corner and transcend a little. You have to become a student of that field and be ready and open to learning and unlearning.
The way Iris Murdoch puts it, it’s not a hierarchical gaze where you, the writer, are above things, looking down upon the world or trying to find people’s failures or flaws. Not at all. It’s actually dismantling that self. There is a moral, almost obligatory, aspect to it.
It’s also very egalitarian. You become part of something very delicate and complex. You recognize that it’s functioning, it’s moving, and you start to pay attention. Nothing is too small; nothing is too big. There are no hierarchies, no dualities, and that’s something that very much speaks to me.
Robert (13:59-14:35)
I always wonder about the phrase “paying attention.” I almost don’t want to use it because it seems to bring attention into a capitalist economy, implying that we pay attention and something is paid back to us in return.
I sometimes want to say we give attention. That feels truer to the idea of unselfish, unselfing attention. But the idea of “paying attention” is embedded in our language. Perhaps we should say “give attention” instead.
David (14:35-14:57)
When I’m looking at a painting, one of the things I like to do is challenge myself to find five things I wouldn’t have noticed at first glance. It’s as if things almost come out of the painting, or whatever you’re looking at, that had been lying dormant even though they were there the entire time.
Robert (14:58-15:39)
I sometimes wonder about the uses of boredom. In an attention-fracking economy, which is always shattering and mining our attention for each monetizable unit, boredom is considered the enemy. We’ve been taught to fear it, loathe it, and wriggle away from it.
However, boredom is also an opening of possibility. It’s when the mind starts to wander and notice things that were latent in a painting, a landscape, or a person. Does boredom become useful for you, Elif?
Elif (15:40-17:04)
It does. It’s interesting that we’re discussing this because boredom is consistently belittled and underestimated. The need to slow down is existential.
One reason we all love literature is that it helps us to slow down, pay attention, and embark on an inner journey. At the end of that journey, you realize you’ve connected with something beyond yourself, with the “other.” Then you understand there is no true other; the other is your brother, your sister. Literature gently dismantles those dualities.
It’s crucial that we slow down, focusing less on information and more on knowledge and wisdom. We are constantly told to achieve, to move from one thing to the next, and that failure means you’re a “loser.” We even have a new political lexicon centered on this idea of not being a loser.
We all love the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it’s one of the many reasons I do, because it forces us to think about failure and defeat. We don’t have a hero who achieves everything. It completely turns that concept upside down, doesn’t it?
Robert (17:05-18:11)
It does, absolutely. At the beginning of the epic, Gilgamesh embodies the modern god-king, a subject defined by force, pace, control, mastery, and toxic masculinity. He is a terrible ruler. The people complain to the gods, who decide they must find a way to balance him.
They bring Enkidu, a wild man formed from moss, earth, sand, water, and wolf. This leads to a mingling between the wild and the city, uniting these two forces. However, more hubris and tragedy ensue.
Eventually, this trajectory compels Gilgamesh to slow down and pay attention—something he finds incredibly difficult. He slowly learns to do so, and to love something other than himself.
Elif (18:11-18:53)
Absolutely. It’s a woman who brings Enkidu from the wilderness into civilization, which is a fascinating detail. As you mentioned, at the beginning of the epic, Gilgamesh is not a lovable person at all; quite the opposite. He is not a hero in the classic sense, committing terrible deeds.
However, through friendship, loss, grief, defeat, and failure, he changes by the epic’s end. The story explores many themes: our fear of death, our desire to prolong youth, and most importantly, the possibility of change.
Robert (18:55-20:25)
Regarding attention, there’s a moment that triggers Gilgamesh’s great conversion from arrogance to humility. His dear friend Enkidu has died in his arms, stricken by a disease the gods sent as punishment for the ecocidal felling of the cedar forest and the slaughter of the Bull of Heaven, who embodies wild atmospheric nature.
Gilgamesh cannot believe Enkidu is dead. He refuses to admit Enkidu’s mortality because it would mean admitting his own. As he lies there, hugging Enkidu, suddenly, after six days of grieving, a maggot crawls out of Enkidu’s nostril. It’s a brutal, grisly, and profoundly mortal moment.
Gilgamesh staggers backward from this memento mori and begins his time in the wilderness, where he changes his clothing, shaves his beard, and grows his hair long. That moment, for me, is what Roland Barthes would call the punctum, a piercing moment in the epic. We’ve come a long way, back to the mountains, the forest, and the maggots.
David (20:25-20:47)
You’re talking about the word “wilderness,” and I see a wilderness in both of your work. For you, there’s the literal wilderness when you’re working on Is a River Alive?, spending many days out with your notebook. For you, there’s a metaphorical wilderness of the imagination. My sense is that you get completely lost in those worlds; it’s a different kind of wilderness.
Elif (20:48-22:02)
Absolutely. I would prefer to use the word “nature” or “ecosystem,” but it always comes back to dualities because we have disconnected from nature. We believe we are above all other creatures, the cleverest species, superior and separate. We have turned ourselves into consumers of nature.
When I was writing There Are in the Sky, we discussed unlearning earlier, and I had to do a lot of unlearning myself. This was particularly true as I wrote about the Yazidi minorities, one of the most misunderstood, maligned, and persecuted groups in the Middle East.
This is relevant because when you talk to Yazidi grandmothers, especially in the month of April, they tell their grandchildren to walk slowly, to tread the earth gently, even as children play and jump around. According to their faith, the Earth is pregnant in April, so you must give it your attention and love. These are the ancient teachings we have lost, as old as the mountains Rob loves and writes so beautifully about.
Robert (22:03-23:12)
That’s a wonderful parable. It’s also an example of how ecological knowledge is transmitted intergenerationally in the form of story.
Of course, walking gently upon the earth in April makes sense because we do not want to crush the buds with our feet. Tulips are fragile, exactly.
This idea of story as the most durable transmitter of ecological, emotional, and social knowledge is powerful. Story is a technology for encoding, protecting, and then carrying information across immense spans of human time.
We’ve both seen the tablets of Gilgamesh, made of clay. It is that seemingly frail vessel — river clay, river reed, sun, water, time — that has carried the oldest known written story to us, with all its warnings and learnings. I still find that amazingly beautiful and touching: both its frailty and its durability.
Elif (23:12-24:09)
Me too.
It’s also fascinating because for a long time, the story was transmitted via oral culture, with grandmothers and grandfathers telling it to their children or grandchildren, before it was written on clay tablets. It’s actually much older than we know, and there are different interpretations of the story.
For instance, you used a very important word earlier: ecocide. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Enkidu and Gilgamesh are known as heroes for going to the cedar forests. However, a tablet in Suleimani talks about Humbaba, who is traditionally seen as the monster of the forest. He could almost be considered our first climate activist, defending the forest.
Robert (24:09-24:10)
He’s the guardian of the forest.
Elif (24:10-24:20)
He’s the guardian of the forest. He cares about all the animals and the birds. Ultimately, the story changes depending on who tells it.
Robert (24:21-24:52)
Elif, when you’re writing, does it feel like a wild experience? David asked if it felt like entering the wilderness, or the wildness, of the imagination.
Sometimes, writing feels like the greatest act of exerted control I can undertake. Other times, it feels like stepping into a coracle on a river in spate. Those are the two extremes of the writing experience.
Elif (24:52-25:46)
That’s so interesting. I liked David’s metaphor very much. I experience it as a space I enter into, and I feel the same way about language.
For me, language is not a tool or an instrument used for practical purposes and then set aside. Rather, it’s a space I enter and breathe within. It shapes me; it changes me.
You are a very different person when you’re writing in Turkish, Spanish, or English. Languages change us; they shape the way we think. When we have more words to describe a particular issue, like a tree or a bee, we think about them differently. Vocabulary and cadence both matter. Does that make sense?
Robert (25:46-27:40)
We both care greatly about rhythm and cadence, something we’ve discussed before. We often think of rhythm as an inadmissible property of nonfiction. Similarly, sound, internal rhyme, sound patterns, echoes, broader leitmotif arrangements, and larger symphonic patterning across a work of nonfiction, often feel like the domain of fiction, song, or poetry. However, I believe they must be recognized and incorporated into nonfiction.
Nonfiction can sing; it can establish patterns of memory within itself. It can work above and below propositional forms of language. That, to me, is when it becomes truly interesting.
Returning to listening, I pay very careful attention to language, rhythm, and sound. Even with major nonfiction works, the first lines of books are always paramount. Examples include: “12,000 years ago, a river is born,” and for The Wild Places: “The wind was rising, so I went to the wood.” The first line of Underland is: “The way into the Underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.”
I work on almost an opening song that signals to the reader — and here we return to stepping over the threshold of language — that they are entering a space where language will attempt to inhabit them, to become part of them in a way that exceeds or subtends the argumentative or propositional. This is what you do in fiction, right?
Elif (27:41-28:59)
It’s so interesting how you feel about nonfiction and poetry almost coming together. I feel the same way about prose and poetry within the art of the novel.
I’m generalizing, but some novelists prioritize plot; they are very plot-driven. Other novelists are more character-driven. Then there’s a third group for whom language is a passion, and they want to write prose that reads like poetry. Flaubert was one such writer. I always felt closer to that third group.
For someone like me, to stop writing in my mother tongue — my first novels were all in Turkish — truly felt like cutting off the hand I was writing with. You then have to recreate yourself, to refind your literary voice. You become a student again. That was a very painful, difficult process.
At the same time, it enriches your imagination because, as you said, you pay more attention to words. You take nothing for granted.
Robert (28:59-29:05)
We are back to attention, which is becoming the key word of our conversation.
David (29:06-29:31)
I’ve always struggled with the idea that “boredom is important.” That’s not quite it.
I agree that stillness, or not consciously doing anything, is important. But it’s something else entirely. It’s a space where you can let your mind wander. You pay attention to something, and I’m trying to figure out what that thing is.
Robert (29:32-30:48)
Perhaps it’s distraction, rather than boredom, that I find more generative. To be absolutely honest, I sometimes have my best ideas while running.
I run every day, often quite long distances, and something about that helps. I often send myself voice notes while running, then later try to decipher these panting messages from my tired self to my recovered self. I might also send emails on the go or even write on my hand if I have a pen.
I think this is because my body engages in another task. My brain concentrates on navigating what’s underfoot, which seems to free up other parts of my mind. This is a familiar concept; Kierkegaard said the mind works best at three miles an hour. Mine probably works best at about six or seven miles an hour, to each their own.
Sometimes, when you give absolute attention to the task at hand, that’s when it becomes hardest. So, perhaps you shake thought free by doing other things.
Elif (30:48-31:04)
That resonates with me. I don’t run, but I walk a lot. As you said, the best ideas often come during movement, and then you have to send little notes to yourself. I do that too.
Robert (31:04-31:04)
I’m reassured.
Elif (31:04-31:49)
One thing I don’t like, and we discussed this earlier, is silence. I don’t feel comfortable with too much silence around me.
Perhaps it’s the effect of Istanbul on me; it’s such a noisy city. I’ve lived in a part of Istanbul that was even noisier at night than during the daytime. I loved opening the windows and letting the sounds of the city seep in.
The other thing I don’t feel comfortable with is when things are very neat, pristine, and tidy. I like my own chaos; I can operate in that. The books and notebooks are fine. It’s the silence and perfection I’m not comfortable with.
Robert (31:49-31:51)
That’s probably why we both like writing on trains.
Elif (31:51-31:51)
Exactly.
Robert (31:52-32:52)
I like the clatter and chaos, and knowing I have an hour and 22 minutes to get a thought down.
When I talk to younger writers, I sometimes say, “Beware the fetish of the desk.” This idea suggests that the desk must be feng shui’d into a perfect orientation, the pencil sharp, the notebook just right, and silence must reign. While that can bring you to a devotional state, you’re then confronted by the problem of writing itself, rather than the problem of preparing to write. It can be quite abrupt.
I prefer a messy pragmatism because, for me, writing isn’t an unfurling of perfect sentences in a woven fabric. It’s much more mosaic and kaleidoscopic, moving pieces around to recognize their relations rather than seeing those relations intact.
David (32:52-32:59)
Do you feel that way throughout the entire process of writing a book, or only at the beginning before it takes on a more orderly form?
Robert (32:59-34:03)
There’s a thrilling moment, I don’t know if you experience this, after working on a book for, say, five years. You’ve watched it come into being, doing the ‘wax on, wax off’ work of twisting and twisting, seeing patterns form and reform, and then recognizing the relations between them.
Then, in the final five or ten percent of writing a book, there’s a rush. Suddenly, all the big, heavy, monumental moving has been done. All the architectonics are in place, and you understand what you’re saying or helping to articulate.
Suddenly, you think, “That goes there, this here, this here.” The whole thing accelerates. Auden said a poem “comes right with a click, like a closing box.” That’s not quite true for a 500-page book, but there’s a series of clicks, like, “Ah, that box is closed, that box is closed.” Do you get that kind of rush where you can see what needs to be done, especially now that you’re nearly finishing a novel?
Elif (34:03-35:44)
What’s interesting to me is that it really doesn’t matter if it’s your first book, fifth, or tenth; you always go through valleys of anxiety and mountains of depression. One week you feel like you’ve got it, that you have an amazing story that will be great. Then the next week, you look at what you’ve written, think it’s terrible, and throw it away. That’s okay; what I’ve learned over the years is that this is also part of the writing journey.
You can’t control everything. There are different approaches; some authors focus more on the cerebral plotting that goes into a novel’s structure. But I love writing with intuition as my guide. Of course, you do a lot of thinking and research; the research process is immense, almost insane. But there comes a moment when you feel like you can take off, you can fly.
From that moment onwards, I don’t truly know what I’m doing, but I trust my intuition. I like it when my characters surprise me. As you said, nearing the end, when all these pieces start to come together, it’s almost spiritual. Something very mystical happens, and you’re not necessarily controlling it.
There is a flow that you have to respect. You must respect and understand your characters, even those that might seem minor. Nothing is minor in a novel, so that holistic approach is very important for me.
David (35:44-35:55)
When you say “mystical,” do you mean that you’re not consciously aware of what you’re doing, yet you’re doing it? Or do you feel there’s an outside force acting as a guiding hand?
Elif (35:55-37:30)
Maybe I’m trying to find a third approach. There is a lot of thinking. I do find echoes of myself in what I’m writing.
But literature, for me, is not necessarily autobiographical. I think we live in an age where we put too much emphasis on the autobiographical side of fiction. In many creative writing classes, the first thing taught is, “write what you know.” This is admirable and important. However, all fiction writing cannot be reduced to that motto.
We should instead say, “write what you feel.” If we embrace that, then a male writer can write about the female experience. If there is a genuine connection and the necessary effort is put in, why not? You can go beyond the boxes of identity that appear at first glance.
I respect the autobiographical side of literature, and many amazing books fit that description. But I’m much more interested in the transcendental aspect. This is how I started writing. I thought my life was very boring and I had nothing to write about.
I was much more interested in going beyond the life given to me, to see what it would be like to become someone else, and then someone else again. Then you realize the person I saw as “the other” is not actually that different from me.
Robert (37:32-41:09)
I am primarily a nonfiction writer, though I also write fictional forms such as libretti and verse novellas.
From a nonfiction point of view, returning to the elemental and wonderstruck at the end of Is a River Alive?, I thought I’d finished that book three times. The first time was recognizable to me. We had paddled to the sea over 11 or 12 days. It was big, hard river running; I remember it so clearly.
We reached the seafall, which is always a hugely powerful moment for a river and for a river follower. It was a bright day, and the current carried us out to sea. This was in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Suddenly, I heard a high, sustained crying. There were several notes to it, braided together, and it was uncanny because I couldn’t identify them.
Then, in my kayak, I almost punched the water, realizing they were jet skis. I thought, “What a terrible, pathetic moment at this holy encounter where water meets water!”
Then I realized they weren’t jet skis. As we paddled on, I realized they were seals. There was a colony of seals on a rocky island just off the coast, calling out—a choir of seals. It was a deeply haunting and beautiful moment, made all the more powerful by having first thought they were jet skis and then watching them convert into something far more mystical and strange. I thought that was the ending.
But then the river itself wrote the ending. I had never before experienced being written through by water.
I then had a secondary version of this experience at the quiet springs near my house. I walked up again, having thought the book was finished. Suddenly, a drama played itself out in the theater of my mind.
It was almost as though the springs, the water itself, were the projector—a magic lantern projecting this drama: I was dead, my children mourned me, time and the river had moved on, and they came to the springs to put a pinch of ash into the water to remember me. Suddenly, I was a ghost. I was made spectral by the presence of that water.
I narrate these as semi-mystical experiences because they were. The first, with the seals, was real. The second, the river, was hugely powerful, almost as if I had been inhabited in ways we’ve been discussing.
The third was eerie, sad, and beautiful: seeing my children still alive and bright in the world, remembering me, and the humility of knowing that time, the river, is always flowing. We are always in its current, never standing dry-footed on the bank.
Perhaps this is a conversation about how fiction and nonfiction, at times, move within the same currents and flows, inhabit the same eddy pools, and are porous to the same encounters.
Elif (41:09-42:09)
Sometimes we both appreciate the elements of—for lack of a better word—magic. There is magic in life, in daily life, even in the most seemingly ordinary moments.
That is one reason I dislike the term “magical realism.” It assumes there is a world of magic and a world of reality. It implies you must bring together these two separate elements. I believe, however, that everything in life is constantly mixed.
It also, in my opinion, comes down to our notion of time. We tend to think of time as a linear, steady march. But when you pay attention to a river, a tree, a rock, or even the soil itself, there is no linear time. Even following the journey of one river makes you question: is time much more cyclical? Linear time is an illusion.
Robert (42:09-43:24)
Rivers can move against themselves; they can flow uphill. Huge counterflow channels in a big river happily flow uphill. I’ve often crossed eddy channels hundreds of meters wide in a big river. It’s almost eerie because it is counter-gravitational.
While we think water always runs downhill, it doesn’t in a counterflow. The line between the flow and the counterflow is called the eddy line. There, the twist that flow gives to counterflow, and counterflow gives to flow, creates spirals. When we look down at water and see those spirals, it’s because a helical spin is created by flow meeting counterflow.
I sometimes think of those spirals as temporal. A river teaches us that time moves in circles, in spirals, and against itself. It’s not that linear flow. They also have a wonderful hydrological function: they oxygenate the water column.
Again, that is a kind of nourishing act where time and flow become complex. It draws life down into the water column, into our ideas of experience.
David (43:25-44:22)
One of the things we’re discussing here is the limits of rationality. We associate rationality with truth, but reason doesn’t always lead us to every element of reality.
I had forgotten you told me that the world is pregnant in the spring. Since we last spoke, I’ve moved to a place with a garden in my front yard. I struggled this winter, having moved from Texas to New York, where it was cold. Watching the world come alive again was incredible. I thought about your phrase, “the world is pregnant in the spring,” countless times, having completely forgotten you said it. I saw the world more truthfully because of that irrational way of thinking.
Elif (44:22-45:58)
Fascinating. Trees and plants are much more sentient than we recognize.
I was raised by a very traditional grandmother until I was 10 years old. In her world, mountains spoke, trees whispered, and stones had something to say. One simply had to become a listener. As a child, I found it irrational, but I appreciated it more and more as I grew older.
One of my earlier novels, The Island of Missing Trees, deals with difficult subjects like civil war, division, and partition. It’s about the beautiful island of Cyprus, with its vibrant people and culture. However, a partition line separates the majority Christian population from the majority Muslim population: Greek Cypriots from Turkish Cypriots.
Perhaps more importantly, depending on whom you talk to, memories clash. The past is remembered differently, and the wounds are not yet healed; they are still bleeding. As a storyteller and writer, how do you approach such a difficult subject without creating more division? A fig tree allowed me to approach this subject. Sometimes, if we step back and let nature be our guide, we can find another perspective on even the most difficult, convoluted subjects and political divisions.
Robert (45:59-47:55)
Yet, that is a hard place to reach. Your description of the fig tree as a teacher, with its roots joining and binding, brings to mind a counterexample: the two men who felled the Sycamore Gap tree on Hadrian’s Wall. That event was a shock that resonated globally, becoming a lightning rod, drawing strong feelings from all directions.
When those men were tried and sentenced, one of them simply said, “It was just a tree.” That moment condensed an entire way of thinking and feeling about the living world: that it is inert, meaningless; that we do not make meaning with it; that it has no life, no autonomy of being, and no rights.
These presuppositions—rationalism, technocracy, an engineered world, calculability, and the coherence of the real bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment—are structures of feeling and cognitive empires. While they have brought immense good and blessings to people like us, surrounding us even in this room, they have also illegalized, outlawed, or invisibilized whole other ways of feeling. This includes the idea, as your grandmother raised you to think, that a tree might speak, a mountain might remember, and a river might be alive.
David (47:56-48:50)
One of the gifts any artist can give is a new way of seeing. I recently visited a wonderful exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, “Monet in Venice.” It was exceptionally well-curated, showcasing the various ways artists have depicted Venice throughout history.
People had a preconceived notion of what Venice was like. Then Monet arrived, offering a completely different view that, while always present, no one had perceived before. It was an expansion of possibility.
We discussed this last time: to see the world in a grain of sand, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand. Such words expand the aperture of the mind, awakening new senses of possibility.
Robert (48:52-49:30)
As Dan Sheppard says, “If I had other senses, there are other things I would know.” We don’t just have five senses; we have literature and art, which offer other ways of seeing and being. When is it most powerful and consequential?
The letters from readers that make me happiest are those that say, “You’ve changed the way I see the world,” or, “You changed the way I saw the world for a day or a moment.” I think, “Good.”
Elif (49:30-49:48)
Those are the most precious moments: when a reader says, “I read your book, I loved it so much. Now I’m talking to my fig tree,” or, “I walked by a tree, and now I see trees differently. I see rivers differently. I look at the world differently.” That is incredibly moving.
Robert (49:49-50:25)
For me, the step beyond that is when attention translates into action: when people say, “I read your book, and I joined my local river guardianship group,” or, “I’m campaigning for the rights of rivers,” or, “I volunteer at my local nature reserve.” That makes me feel wonderful.
This exemplifies the saying, “Culture wipes the floor with policy.” I don’t always agree, but there are times when it can. It can enter individual lives and trajectories with great consequence, which feels exciting.
David (50:25-51:10)
To be super concrete, this is from Rivers in the Sky. You write that the inspiration for this book came from a small idea: a raindrop that landed on your palm.
One day, while walking by the River Thames, you stopped and stared at that raindrop, admiring the light reflecting off its surface. There was such beauty, mystery, strength, and resilience in its ephemerality. You then began to ask: Where has this raindrop been? Where has it traveled?
Suddenly, we’ve expanded the sense of possibility, awakened the imagination, transforming something as mundane as a raindrop into an enchanted world of space and life, allowing one to follow their imagination.
Elif (51:10-52:13)
Earlier, David, you mentioned William Blake. It’s the same principle. When you look at a grain of sand, you don’t take it for granted; you want to see the whole universe inside. To me, that’s a very mystical approach.
You look at the microcosmos and see the entire macrocosmos within it. No human being is ordinary; nothing is truly small or above us. You want to adopt a much more cyclical approach to life.
This isn’t something we can always do in our daily lives. When we leave this room, we’ll be rushing somewhere else. But when we sit down at our desk, when we journey into literature, into the writing process, then you are able to connect.
It’s almost like you’re using a different part of your brain. You connect with the macrocosmos and the microcosmos simultaneously, and those dualities disappear. I wish I could be like that all the time, but it would be quite tiring, perhaps.
Robert (52:14-55:27)
John Muir said, “I live in an infinite storm of wonder.” That sounds great, but I think I end each day quite exhausted.
The tiny thing you mentioned, the grain of sand, reminds me of an unforgettable conversation I had with a glaciologist named Robert Mulvaney, who works at BASS, the British Antarctic Survey. He asked me to put out my hand, and from a small container, he tapped several grains of sand onto it. “Look at those,” he said.
He then handed me a jeweler’s loupe, and I examined them. They were beautiful, as almost everything is when examined at high magnification. “Strange,” he remarked, “those were taken from the ice at the end of an ice core we drilled in Antarctica.” They came up with the core’s very end.
He explained that those grains of sand are from when the bedrock of Antarctica was forming as a desert. Suddenly, we were back to the micro and the macro. The deep-time contexts of the world exploded into their vastness from that tininess.
Those moments are extraordinary, and our technologies allow us to experience them. This isn’t an anti-technology notion. When Anton van Leeuwenhoek first ground the lenses that allowed microscopic vision, he peered into a tiny drop of water. This was in the early 17th century, in what we now call the Netherlands, which was the lens-grinding capital of Europe at the time.
He suddenly described what he could see in that drop of pond water: a world teeming with animalcules. When we know how to look, we fall through scale after scale after scale. Then we lose gravity and rise through scale after scale after scale. These are thrilling things. Microscopes can do it to us; literature can do it to us too.
For me, science very often refines the real into something more wonderful. I don’t oppose science and wonder, or science and enchantment. This relates to the famous idea that Keats allegedly accused Newton of unweaving the rainbow. I don’t subscribe to that “unweaving the rainbow” thesis.
Some of the most astonishing literature I read is technical literature, the literature of science. Take dark matter physics, for example. We can detect the consequences of the 27% missing mass of the universe, but we cannot compel it to interact with our technologies, our experiments, or our perceptions at all. We know it’s there, but it declines to have anything to do with us. To me, that is thrilling and as mysterious as any recess of the human soul.
Elif (55:28-56:48)
The mind is always more nourished when we leave our comfort zones or our own disciplines and become curious about someone else’s field, striving to learn from it. For instance, when a novelist pays attention to neuroscience or water science – fields I don’t know much about but want to explore – curiosity becomes the guide.
Equally, when a water scientist falls in love with film theory, or a film director is drawn to poetry, those are the moments when the mind is truly nourished. We are so atomized by the way academia and multiple disciplines operate. I don’t think there are enough conversations, and we’re not encouraged enough to read widely across the board.
There’s no such thing as highbrow or lowbrow literature. Whatever speaks to us in that moment – from graphic novels to cookbooks to political philosophy – is the right book for us. I always long for those interdisciplinary and intercultural conversations. How can we encourage them?
Robert (56:48-57:26)
Indeed. Geologists at my university, Cambridge, know to steer clear of me because I approach them asking, “What’s that rock? What’s the curbstone made of?” I’m like a Labrador puppy with scientists because I find what they do so extraordinary, and they are such super specialists.
I actually wrote my master’s thesis on the relations between the new physics, as it was called in the 1990s, and contemporary British poetry. I looked not just at what science was giving to poetry, but also what poetry was giving to science.
David (57:26-57:37)
What we’re saying reminds me of this quote from Werner Heisenberg: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.”
Robert (57:39-57:43)
He was a good writer, as well as a genius physicist.
David (57:43-57:48)
That proves his own point: the genius physicist was such a wonderful writer.
Robert (57:48-57:54)
Yes, it proves a version of what we’re talking about, absolutely.
David (57:54-58:05)
Let’s close here. I’m really curious to hear how the two of you, having written so many books and done this for so long, think about improving at your craft.
Elif (58:05-1:00:50)
Many things go through our heads, but we must always remember our core motivation: How did we begin? What was the main motivation?
For me, the desire to become a writer—a novelist, a career writer—came much later in life. My need for books was earlier, more existential, and much deeper. I was an only child, a very lonely child. Books were my companions, showing me other possibilities in life.
That is a feeling I try not to forget, particularly in times of crisis, confusion, and turbulence, like the world we live in now. Our need for literature is deeper, greater. It is not a luxury that can be pushed aside.
Literature gave me a chance to go beyond the little box I found myself in. I was raised in a very conservative, patriarchal, and inward-looking neighborhood. This was my maternal grandmother’s neighborhood in France.
Books showed me these worlds—Charles Dickens, Don Quixote by Cervantes. You suddenly connect with characters who seem to have nothing to do with your life, yet you travel La Mancha with this crazy knight and you love him.
As human beings, we are storytelling creatures. Not only that, we are story-remembering creatures. Without stories, human beings are just numbers, categories, abstractions. Everything in life, everything we remember, is filtered through stories.
Personally, as a writer, I must remember that the moment you start thinking about your career, success, how many books you will sell, or whether you will get a prize—these are all very human things.
Albert Camus has a beautiful quote in an essay where he says, “Let’s applaud those authors who say they don’t want to be read, they don’t want to be recognized, but let’s not believe them.” Every writer wants to be read; every writer, of course, wants to get an award and be appreciated. These are very human feelings, and we need to be honest about them.
But our main motivation cannot be that. The main motivation is that childhood beginning, which we felt was almost an existential need for stories, for transcendental journeys. That is what I try to go back to again and again.
Robert (1:00:52-1:03:15)
The data centers we need are public libraries. I couldn’t agree more. Elif took us into the past, and I will take us into the future to answer this.
We are living through an age of crisis on this beautiful, fragile planet, a crisis driven by us that causes terrible human immiseration and destroys a fabric of life millions of years in the weaving. No one writing now can or should be writing from beyond the shadow of that.
That doesn’t mean they need to be addressing it directly. All writing crafted in this moment will, somewhere in its heart, its core, not have the splinter of ice that Graham Greene famously said novelists had, but rather a splinter of love.
I sometimes submit my work, when beginning a new project, to what I call the Casket Test. This asks: if this book were dug up in a hundred years and read from the future, looking back at our precarious present, would the reader think it had solved or clarified anything? No, but would it show that it tried? Did it attempt to wrestle with, engage with, or dream of ways out of the crisis we face?
For me, the Casket Test is the future looking back at the present and asking: “Have you tried? Have you really tried? With all you have, and all you can bring to this form, this text, this moment?”
I think I often fail, but asking ourselves that question is a really good discipline. Thank you both. Thank you.
