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 Photo by Evan Kafka What is your favoriteplace in the world? The farm where I live, in the Appalachian Mountains of southwesternVirginia.What do you like about it?Everything. It has all that I need. The mountains that rise behindour farmhouse are covered in green forest where I can walk in every season.Directly below us are rolling fields we cultivate for vegetable production, andpastures for our sheep and cattle. I live among farmers who speak the poeticlanguage of my childhood, and whose instincts are toward community rather thanself. I live on land that feeds us and nourishes my soul. I have the solitude Ineed for a writing life, and companionship for the physical labors that alsomake me happy. In the first decades of my adulthood I lived in several citieson three different continents, and learned a lot about what the world has tooffer. When I was able to make my own best choice, I chose to live here. What place does natureoccupy in your writing?I've never quite understood the word "nature." Peoplegenerally use it to mean "everything that is not human, orhuman-made." That's almost everything. Look around. Your desk istransmogrified trees, and so are the books on your shelves. The lunch you justate was comprised of many formerly living, not-human things. (I certainlyhope.) When asked what place "almost everything" occupies in my writing,I find that such a weird question. I was educated as a biologist, so I think ofthe world as a vast, interconnected network of living forms and elements. Thatworld occupies my writing. People are in it. Like members of most otherspecies, I find my own fascinating. But far too full of ourselves for anyone'sgood. Leaning on that word "nature" reminds me of the cultures thatuse the word "people" to describe their own tribe or nation, and"ghost" or some other pejorative to describe everyone else. It'sdangerously reductive.Do animals play a greatrole in your writing?See above. Yes. Plants also. And oxygen, and water.How about plants,minerals, and elements? Yep.To what extent are yourcharacters related to the environments you create for them? They breathe oxygen that was made inside a leaf. They eat, theyexist. Some of them might believe they live in a world of humans and nothingelse, but I don't, and can't. Ever.To what degree might yourwriting be based on a scientific understanding of the world? Approximately one hundred percent.Do various myths andmythologies inform your writing or inspire you? (Could you quote a couple ofexamples?)I'm interested in the stories humans use to explain our existence,especially the ones that help us get comfortable with injustices and cruelties- for example, that humans are intrinsically entitled to use all other lifeforms to our own advantage. Or that anyone can be wealthy if only he is smartand works hard. I like to blow these myths to smithereens. Of course, in anentertaining way.Do other fields from artsand humanities have any impact on the vision of the world you try to (re)createin your writing? (Could you quote a couple of examples?)Cinema, maybe. I'm very visual in my writing process. I create amovie in my head, and then translate it into words.What is your preferredform or genre to write about nature? Oh, damn. That word again.Which writers, if any,might have been the most influential on your writing? The list is so long, I always feel miserable for those I'm about toleave out. All my life I've read like a drowning person, gulping at the prayerthat I will be influenced. Dickens, George Eliot, Garcia Marquez and a hundredmore for the genius of plot construction. Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinsonfor the poetry of their prose, Flannery O'Connor for humor, Wendell Berry andDoris Lessing for heart. Virginia Woolf for everything. John Steinbeck for thesheer brilliance of the chapter in CANNERY ROW told from the point of view of agroundhog. How powerful do you finddystopic fiction, whether literature or cinema? Depends, of course, on whether it is powerful or terrible. MargaretAtwood's The Handmaid’s Tale comes to mind as an example of powerful,because it was utterly convincing and about something real to me. And I'llconfess I cheered for Charlize Theron's ferocious one-armed super-avengergoddess in "Mad Max, Fury Road." But so often this genre, like somuch science fiction, is just a long, rutty wallow in testosterone andpreciously old-fashioned gender roles. At the end of the world, or fivecenturies from now, we're to believe, men will still be piloting the ship whilewomen run around shrieking in ripped-up prom gowns.Would you agree withsaying that all nature writers are mystics?Good grief, no. Look at E.O. Wilson. Look at the immense body ofwork left by Steven Jay Gould. We scientists are writing about the non-humanworld all the time, sometimes with an eye to the soul and spirit, often not atall.If there is such a thingas what Mark Tredinnick calls “the land’s wild music,” how do you think one canlearn to hear it, and, and how might this wild music ripple into and give shapeto one’s writing? Live in it, would be my advice, if wild is what you're after. Getyourself to some place where you can see and hear things that were not made byhumans. The world is so full of music. Most mornings a Carolina wren or aCardinal or a White-throated sparrow wakes me up, depending on the season, andif it's not the dead of winter, crickets will sing me to sleep. Everything Iwrite, in between, is bound to be influenced.Would you say that thereis a direct link between the language of the earth and the creative language inyour work? Yes. Surely.How much of your writingwould you say is about re-enchanting the world? I couldn't possibly say. For me it was never un-enchanted.Do you think humans havelost their capacity for wonder about the natural world? Millions of people live on this earth in so many habitats, in vastlydifferent relationships with the land. Some see it, correctly, as a placethat's liable to kill them, via snakes or lions or harsh elements or poisonedwater or bone-grinding work. Other see it as entertainment or a nice place tovisit. I couldn't possibly generalize.How much ecocritcal theoryor environmentalist literature do you read? Theory, not very much. Environmentalist literature, very much.Do you believe thatliterature can change the way humans think about our relationship to thenatural world around and bring about not only awareness, but also politicalchanges? Yes, of course. Literature can change readers' thinking about allkinds of things, by cultivating empathy.Can you think of a casethat you know of where policies may have followed from awareness raised by agreat novel, or any other work of art? To quote two very famous examples, Harriet Beecher Stowe's UncleTom’s Cabin is credited with sparking the movement to abolish slavery inthe United States, and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is credited withbringing an end to the perilously destructive pesticide DDT. Less famousexamples abound. But the process is fraught, to say the least: Stowe claimedthat her novel was "written by God," probably to avoid gettinghate-mail; Carson was ridiculed as a hysteric, and died before she saw theresults of her lifetime of work. I think it's wisest for artists to investourselves in the process, rather than the outcome.Do you think that mostpeople reading your work are already cognizant of environmental issues, or doyou feel like your writing might bring some of your readers to a different kindof understanding and consciousness?I can't know the answer to this. Again, it's unsafe to generalize -my readers are many, and all different.What changes do you hopemight be brought about from reading your books, on an individual level?See above. I invest myself in the process, making the very best artI can create about the things that move me most deeply. The outcome issomething that happens inside each reader's brain, one reading at a time, farbeyond my control. Maybe it's not even quite my business.How does your knowledgeand care about environmental issues and non-human life affect your own lifestyle and choices?It's hard to say, as I've lived no life but this one. Non-humanlives are part of just about every choice I make - where I live, what I eat,the walks I take, the sweaters I knit, the money I donate, the help I give toothers. The answers I gave my children when they asked me what happens when wedie. Our elements become the soil, we become grass and trees and countlessother lives. I can't remove myself from the rest of the world, and never could,not since I was a toddler lying belly down in the grass, tasting dirt in orderto know it. That's just the kind of animal I am.If you could recommend afew ways to improve one’s lifestyle in a way that could also reduce thenegative impact of humans’ activities on the planet, which would you suggest?I'm very uncomfortable telling anyone else what to do. Maybe justthis: try to be a good animal.