Because at bottom, I'm interested in fear, and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction, where you can enter people's heads.
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Storms are sex. They exist alongside and are indifferent to words and description and dissection.
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I like a certain grandeur to a landscape, which both the Arctic and coastal BC have. I like it to be at all times clear that people aren't the dominant fact of a particular geography.
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I've worked in the Inuit hamlets of the west coast of Hudson Bay since 1994. Over that time I've been very moved by both the pace of social change there - the loss of traditional ways of seeing the world, the affinity for and comfort with the land - and by the social disarray that change of this pace produces.
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I work on quiet call nights in the hospital, on airplanes and on my sailboat when I have a bit of time - I cram it into wherever it will fit.
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Solitude sharpens awareness of small pleasures otherwise lost.
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Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.
