So I’ve boxed up much of my book collection now, and doing that has got me thinking about books as part of the furniture of one’s life. To me every book I’ve collected and kept over the years has some meaning, some value to me, or I likely wouldn’t have kept it (I’m not a hoarder, or at least that’s what I tell myself). And yet books are also encumbrances—physical objects that take up space and, at times like this, have to be carted around like the rest of one’s possessions.

In order to trim down the number of boxfuls that have to be transported to our new abode, I’ve sold some of the books to a local bookseller, and given away several boxes to charities. Knowing that someone else will derive pleasure or instruction from a book of mine is every bit as satisfying as hanging on to the book myself, maybe even more so. I love the idea of putting these printed, bound, physical volumes back in circulation, one might say, at a time when we’re told AI companies are buying up loads of used books to scan what they contain and then shred them. Pure evil, of course, and I dearly look forward to the bubble bursting for these high-tech barbarians.

As a result I now see more importance than ever in hanging on to as many of my books as I can, simply so that they CONTINUE TO EXIST, unscanned and unshredded. At least for a while.

*

I dropped a book in the bath once. It was Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. I was reading in the tub (something I never do anymore) and the fat paperback slipped out of my hand and plopped into the water. I could’ve rescued Eco’s engrossing conspiracy-theory satire while it was still only partly submerged, but curiosity took over and I let the thing sink. I’d never seen a book get completely immersed in water before. What would happen?

Afterwards I set Eco’s tome out to dry somewhere, naively expecting it might return to a more or less normal shape. It didn’t. The book blossomed out into an enormous paper rose with stiff wavy petals. Like the decayed and defaced Book of Mazarbul in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (“slashed and stabbed and partly burned”) it was well-nigh unreadable; no longer a book so much as an artifact.

For a while I kept this water-engorged monstrosity, like a kind of inadvertent work of art. But it was still just a damaged book, and eventually I got tired of looking at it. For me reading a printed book is not just a mental activity but a physical pleasure: I read in part to enjoy the look and feel of crisp, clean paper; the smell of ink and binding; the comforting heft of a book in the hand; even the subtle auditory satisfaction of turning or riffling the pages. Books that have been damaged by neglect—coffee-stained, bent out of shape, dog-eared, infused with cigarette smoke, left to bleach in the sun—distress me, or used to. These days, as we race towards our glorious “post-literate” future, I now love even the damaged books, the stained books, the bent out of shape books. Like human beings they show the evidence of a lifetime’s wear and tear. They are real. They have what I call charm.

(One thing I’ve noticed in the newer houses we’ve been looking at with our realtor—the “open concept” leaves very little wall space for bookshelves. And most of the still-furnished homes we’ve viewed contained few or no books. It’s been a stark confirmation of the claim that fewer people read now, or find value in books at all).

Books are fragile in nature. I mean that in both senses. A codex is a human-made object with a lifespan. It might be a very long lifespan but eventually the elements will get to it. Its nature is to decay. And the codex, as an invention, was not designed to survive in the elements. Sun, moisture, rain, soil, sand, insects and other paper-chewing critters: they all take their toll on a book left outside. Or inside, for that matter. Since an inside is really just a temporarily delayed outside. That’s one thing you find out when your basement floods.

So I know full well that one day my library will fall apart. The pages will yellow and flake away. The bindings will loosen. Or the books will get tossed out as dead weight by my descendants after I’m gone, to lighten their own load of stuff (I had to do this with boxes of my late father-in-law’s books, which had been stored in a damp basement and were simply too far gone to salvage).

But for a while my books will be here, real and tangible, and after the move, as I unpack them and decide what to keep and what to part with, I’ve determined I will continue to give them away, bit by bit, to charities, and maybe even set up one of those little libraries in a box outside my house. This is the best way I can think of to help ensure they will still be out there, for a time, the worlds contained in their pages open to all, free, with no gatekeepers, no one (and no machine) between the printed word and the reader’s imagination.

[Image ID: solitary water-damaged book on a shelf, photo by the author]

[This is a revision of an earlier post that was archived]

Like eating a plum.

A plum is an undeniably real thing. Eating one is a real event. Some day a technology could be invented that will allow me to have a simulated experience of eating a plum. Would I be able to tell the difference? I don’t know. But for now, at least, when I eat a plum, I feel that I encounter a unique essence or quality that fake things just don’t have. For a long time I wasn’t sure if there was already a name for this essence. It’s not just physicality or tactility. It’s more like a combination of all the qualities a real thing embodies that unfold through time and that become part of us when we encounter it.

I’ve decided to call this elusive meta-quality charm.

Charm is usually defined as a kind of attraction, but not necessarily an immediate one. The person or thing who possesses charm might have to overcome some resistance in order to work their magic on us. We may be distracted, and so not quite see or feel the charm at first. And even when we do notice it, we might still hold back. We don’t like to give in. It could cost us a little extra effort. More and more these days real things seem to take extra effort, what with fake things having decimated our powers of attention.

Charm arises in real things because they don't reveal themselves all at once. It’s not that they won’t, it’s that they can’t. Real things have interiors, layers, facets, hidden sides, even to themselves. A person or thing with charm might not even be aware they have it. Which can also be part of their charm.

We can never completely know a real thing. We only ever know parts of it, but what we discover entices us to want to know more. That’s charm.

A plum from the farmer’s market is real.

A plum has charm.

I pick up a plum. I hold it in my hand, feel its cool smoothness. I turn it over to see the variations in its colours palette, from yellows to golds to red to deepening purple to almost black. I notice its imperfections, another reassuring mark of the real.

At first this thing actually repels me, just a little. To appreciate the plum I’ll have to make that initial effort to bite through its taut, glossy skin, and I hesitate. Do I really want my mouth to meet this thing? It almost feels like the plum hesitates too. Does this sealed-up, inviolate entity really want my teeth in it? I know I’m bracing myself for the tartness that’s likely to follow the first bite. I want that tartness and sweetness, but at the same time it’s a bit like plunging into cold water on a hot day—initially it might be a little unpleasant, before it becomes enjoyable. If it becomes enjoyable. With real things, I can never be quite sure how the encounter will go. What if this is a bad plum masquerading as a delicious one?

Charm can be tricky that way. A thing with charm can conceal parts of itself we might not like. It might even be dangerous. A real thing can be deceiving. But there’s always something more there, something other than deception. There’s always something new to learn about reality, some truth to be found, even when we discover we’ve been fooled.

Fake things lack many qualities of the real, but it seems to me that above all they are devoid of this fundamental something I’m calling charm. They have no interiors, no layers, no hidden sides. All they are is what’s presented to us, which, ironically, is pure deception. Bluffing. Posturing. Mimicry. An attempt to feign an unknowable essence they don’t have and never could.

When we believe we’ve got something—or someone—all figured out, we stop paying attention. Attention is what real things with charm invite. We can pay attention to fake things, too, of course. They are often manufactured only for that: to grab our immediate notice. Then we discover there’s really nothing there, nothing new to learn, no truth, and we quickly move on.

There’s no resistance to us from a fake thing. No hidden sides. No gradual unfolding of what it contains. There’s only a surface. A simulacrum of depth. I’m not talking about AI, or at least not only about AI. Real people make fake things, too. Like all the articles written in what one might call Substack House Style, where a completely trivial, meaningless bit of “news” gets inflated into a series of escalating “reveals” (“but wait, it gets worse…”) that reveal absolutely nothing, but that keep us reading. It can take a high level of skill to fake the real.

When we discover we’ve been fooled by a fake thing, we don’t feel there’s something more there than we noticed at first. Instead we feel there’s nothing there, only the intent to deceive, to hold our attention on this nothing for a few precious seconds of online economy time. That’s all that fake things want from us. Whether we ourselves have charm doesn’t matter. We might as well be fake too. As a result of this transaction with nothing a kind of emptiness opens up in us, like a little more of the world has been drained of meaning. Of wonder. Of charm.

I may not be able to stop this from happening. But I can always eat a plum.

[Image ID: a real plum in the sunshine on my deck]

In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien gives his characters depth and “roundness” not so much through conventional psychological realism as by way of what I call nominal resonance. What I mean by this is that much of what we understand about a particular character in Tolkien’s great work unfolds from and is reflected by the names bestowed on them in the course of the novel.

Instead of backstories, characters have “name stories.”

If you’ve read The Lord of the Rings you’ve probably noticed that in Tolkien’s world no one of importance to the story ever has only one name. Aragorn is a prime example. A quick glance at his entry in the book’s Index reveals that he has or is given at least sixteen different names and epithets in the course of the story and its appendices. Strider, Longshanks, Estel, Elessar, Wingfoot … to mention only a few. Some of these names are bestowed on him by other characters in the course of the narrative. (Giving yourself or someone else a new name seems to be a common practice among the peoples of Middle-earth.)

The key point about Aragorn’s many names is that each of these appellations holds some specific meaning that unfolds in scope and significance as the novel progresses.

In other words, each name carries a story.

At the Prancing Pony in Bree, Frodo and his companions first encounter Aragorn as Strider, the shady and rather shabby-looking ranger: “one of them wandering folk” who “goes about at a great pace on his long shanks” according to the innkeeper, Butterbur. Aragorn is thus first associated with walking and wandering, traits that will gain deeper signification as we learn more about him and his life’s great task. (One can also be grateful that the original “walking” nickname Tolkien gave this character, Trotter, did not survive to the final draft of the book).

It’s in the letter that Gandalf leaves for Frodo at Bree that the hobbits first learn this “Strider” has another name:

PPS. Make sure that it is the real Strider. There are many strange men on the roads. His true name is Aragorn.

This information is followed in the letter by the cryptic verse “All that is gold does not glitter,” which Frodo reads to himself but doesn’t understand. In the course of their conversation, as the hobbits try to determine whether this sketchy ranger really is who he says he is, Aragorn quotes the verse’s opening line. Surprised, Frodo asks Aragorn how he knew these words were in Gandalf’s letter.

‘I did not know,’ he answered. ‘But I am Aragorn, and those verses go with that name.’

As a young reader encountering The Lord of the Rings for the first time, I skimmed over the many verses that appear in the text, eager to resume the adventure. I paid little attention to the verse that goes with the name Aragorn and didn’t pick up on the fact that it’s actually a foretelling of his entire character arc. In other words, Aragorn’s true name is his story.

I missed all of this on first read, in my early teens. Like Sam Gamgee, I was a bit slow on the uptake as to Strider’s real identity. The first time I read the book I was genuinely surprised near the novel’s end when Aragorn became the King of Gondor (I’d assumed the title of the third volume, The Return of the King, referred to some character we hadn’t met yet). If I’d been paying closer attention to the “Aragorn” verse, I likely wouldn’t have been so blindsided.

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

By the time he has been crowned king of Gondor, Aragorn’s early nickname gains a kind of retrospective irony. With his great task achieved, he need no longer “stride” around Middle-earth on his long shanks. Instead, as he proclaims at his coronation, “In this place I will abide.” It’s time to stop walking and take up his destiny as monarch. And yet, to the hobbits, he is still their familiar, earthy companion, Strider.

For some of Aragorn’s names, it’s true that a reader has to dig pretty deep. “Estel”, for example, is a name given to Aragorn in childhood, but this name doesn’t appear in the text of the story itself, only in Appendix A, in “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”:

Then Aragorn, being now the Heir of Isildur, was taken with his mother to dwell in the house of Elrond; and Elrond took the place of his father and came to love him as a son of his own. But he was called Estel, that is “Hope,” and his true name and lineage were kept secret at the bidding of Elrond; for the Wise knew that the Enemy was seeking to discover the Heir of Isildur, if any remained upon earth.

Thus Aragorn’s “secret” name, Estel, denotes him as the last hope of his people, the surviving remnant of the faithful Numenoreans in Middle-earth, and gestures to another vast part of the history of Middle-earth. Once a reader learns this, they can enjoy a subtle irony hidden in those scenes where other characters lament that they have no hope, or that all hope is lost, all the while “Hope” in the form of Aragorn is standing right next to them.

And Tolkien’s well-chosen names don’t stand alone. The deeper one reads in The Lord of the Rings, the more the stories carried by a character’s name resonate with those of other characters, forming a tapestry of deeper meaning that one can trace throughout the book and even beyond it, to Tolkien’s other writings on his imaginary cosmos and its languages. Take Gandalf’s Elven name, for example: Mithrandir. The Grey Wanderer. Gandalf has never sat still since he arrived in Middle-earth. He has no fixed abode. Like Aragorn he is a walker, a “strider” in his own right. In a subtle way, then, both Aragorn’s and Gandalf’s names point to the value and virtue of wandering, of movement and “knight-errantry,” in opposition to the characters who embed themselves in one place to amass power, like Saruman and Sauron, and Sauron’s former boss in the First Age, Morgoth.

This is how names comes to mean in a work like The Lord of the Rings and it’s one important reason why the book still towers in stature over the weak sauce ladeled out by so many contemporary fantasy writers. The characters in current fantasy novels are too often flimsy cliches of the genre and of pop psychology: prescripted ideas about what people are like and what motivates them (these days it’s usually some childhood trauma; their father or wife or child was killed so they’re angry). These characters usually follow a gaming-inspired arc of acquiring more skill or power as they go along, as if nothing more is needed to give them life. Their names reflect this hackneyed construction and lack of depth: often a character’s name is just some random made-up word that has no organic, linguistic relation to anything else in their world or culture. Their names rarely tell us anything meaningful about them, or hold any narratives of their own.

One of the many important lessons a fantasy writer can take from Tolkien on how to build character, then, is in naming your fictional people. You don’t need to have the right name chosen when you start writing (Tolkien himself rarely did) but eventually you want name and story to come together in a way that suggests deeper meaning and resonates with everything else in your own imaginary cosmos. It’s a key part of moving beyond mere world-building to a far more important aspect of writing any kind of fiction: meaning-building.

[Image ID: Still image of Strider at the Prancing Pony, from The Fellowship of the Ring, Dir. Peter Jackson, 2001]

After our previous dog Boo died, I told myself, and my wife Sharon, that was it—no more dogs. I didn’t want that heartache of loss again. But after a year I realized how much I missed having that reassuring canine presence at my side. I caved in, and we went looking for a dog. We heard about a nearby breeder of Border Collies who had a litter of puppies up for sale, so we went to meet them. The thing was, the puppies were not purebred. One of the male breeding collies, the dashing Whip, had somehow pulled off a brief, unplanned dalliance with Lacey, the family’s pet Shih Tzu. The result was Sam and his siblings.

Yes, you’re right, Shih Tzu and Border Collie is an improbable combination of two very different ideas of what a dog should be. Our joking name for this accidental “breed” is Shit Collie.

When we arrived at the breeder’s, one of the three bouncy, supercute puppies ran over to greet us. No surprise then that he was the one we brought home. We named him Sam, after Samwise Gamgee. One day not long after, while playing with Sam in the yard, I thought how strange and miraculous it was that this carefree little goofball was descended from the badass wolves of the Ice Age. The little bulb in my writer brain flicked on, and the novel Wolf, Moon, Dog was the eventual result. Just like Sam, then, the book was the result of an unlikely connection. I’d never written about dogs before, even though they’d been part of my life for many years. I’d had no plans to write about dogs. But once I started to weave a playful fable about an Ice Age wolf named Wolf who becomes the very first Dog, I knew I’d found a happy confluence between two things I love.

And so I really wanted this book to be a special treat for two groups of people: book lovers and dog lovers, and especially for those of us who are both.

The original publisher of the novel, Random House Canada, wanted that, too, and so they went above and beyond to make sure the physical book itself featured elements that dog people would enjoy, including the flipbook image at the bottom of the pages, the chapter that’s nothing but pawprints, the text set in New Baskerville font (as in “Hound of the”) and all the other little touches meant to delight readers. I’m very happy that Pegasus chose to keep all of these witty design elements so that American readers can enjoy them, too.

The novel begins in the long ago Ice Age I tried to imagine while playing with Sam that day. Here’s a taste.

…

The pack raced across the frozen lake in the moonlight. They were following no scent, chasing no prey. They ran because it was a night of frost and stars and the snow was thick and powdery and they were together.

Wolf stopped in his tracks.

His eyes had caught something on the far shore, among the dark pines. A bright flickering, as if the sun had risen too early and was hiding in the forest, unwilling to reveal itself.

When the rest of the pack noticed Wolf was no longer with them, they circled and trottedback to where he stood gazing.

What in World is that? Alpha asked as she came up beside Wolf. Alpha was their leader, thewisest and bravest among them, and Wolf was just Wolf. As the youngest and least of the adults he had no other name.

I’m not sure, Wolf said. I thought it was the sun.

Alpha’s soft fur brushed ever so lightly against his, and Wolf felt his heart glow. She wasquick and strong, and her coat was nearly all white, like the Great Mother wolf who lived in the moon. Alpha had led them wellthrough the difficult days after her mate died in a fight with a cave bear over an aurochs carcass.It was only thanks to her that they had survived and stayed together. Wolf would do anything for her.

Wrong time, said Alpha. And the wrong place, for that matter. The sun doesn’t hang around in the forest.

At that moment their noses caught the scent of burning wood. This was not the sun. This was something stranger. Trees only burned when lightning struck them in the heat of summer. They didn’t burn in winter when snow was thick on the hide of World.

Quick shadows danced across the flickering brightness.

The fur rose on the back of Wolf’s neck. There are animals in the fire, he said.

He ran through his inner checklist of hunters and hunted. Cave bear, brown bear, otherwolf, big cat, smaller but still scary cat, lynx, wolverine, fucking hyena. Deer, elk, bison, aurochs, horse, ibex, woolly rhinoceros, mammoth. Did any of them live in fire? No. Nothing that was alive lived in fire.

Alpha said, This isn’t World but something else. It’s not for us. Let’s go.

She bounded off and the pack fell in behind her.

Wolf watched a moment longer, then he tore himself away and ran after them.

…

Spring returned, soggy and blustery, leaving its muddy paw tracks on the clean white snow, which shrivelled and sank and disappeared. The low places filled with water and then clouds of mosquitoes.

Alpha’s mate had died before the pair could make the spring’s new litter of pups, and she had yet to choose a new mate. The beta male seemed the obvious choice, given his size and vigour in the hunt, but for reasons she kept to herself Alpha hadn’t let him step into that role. Whenever he made advances she warned him away with snapping fangs. As for the other males, they didn’t dare betray an interest in mating with her. With this lingering state of uncertainty about the pack’s future, it was left to the beta male and female to deliver, and they got to work on it. One morning the beta female came out of her den under a ledge at the far end of the cave followed by six fluffy, toddling wolf pups who blinked in the dazzling new light of World.

Something was wrong with beta female, though. She was distracted and irritable, sometimes snapping at her pups as they nursed, sometimes batting them away. Eventually she crawled off alone into a hollow she scraped among some thorn bushes. They heard her writhing and whimpering as if there were a fire burning her from the inside. Any wolf who tried to approach received a growled warning.

One morning they heard nothing at all from the hollow. The beta female’s mate ventured in and found her dead.

From then on it fell mostly to Wolf, as the least of the adults, to keep a watchful eye on the pups while the others hunted. The pack ranged far and wide through the hills and narrow valleys, across the greatness of World, to find food for the hungry new mouths. For his part Wolf kept the pups out of trouble, while showing them what they would need to know to become hunters themselves. He taught them stalking games and wrestling games, and how to play tug-of-war with sticks and bones—all the skills they would one day depend on for their lives.

At last the pack wandered back to the dark lake nestled in the hills, where the prey herds had often been found in the past. Another wolf pack lived here too, one that they sometimes fraternized with and sometimes fought.

There were no herds. There were no other wolves. Instead there was a new animal.

It was the creature they had seen in the fire.

The new animals had established themselves not far from the water, on a rise above the pines and near a swift-running creek, with a view all around.

They were busy animals. And in odd ways clever, too.

They had constructed several small caves out of branches and prey skins and went in and out of them several times a day. The little caves were also where they slept at night.

And they kept fire, penned in a ring of small rocks. It leapt and smoked as all fire did, but it wasn’t allowed to race out hungrily to eat World. It stayed submissively in its ring, warming the strange new animals and giving them light in the dark hours.

The new animals had done the unthinkable. They had made fire a member of their pack.

…

The new animals ate meat.

They ate berries and roots, too. Things the wolves ate only when there was nothing else available. But mostly they ate meat.

It was another reason they kept the fire. They burned the meat over the flames before they ate it. Despite this bizarre custom, the meat still smelled wonderful.

They’re our competition now, Alpha said one wet and windy spring evening as the pack sat on a grassy hillside not far from the place where the new animals lived, watching them burn meat on their small, obedient fire.

Competition, scoffed Beta. Look at them. They can’t run worth a damn. When they spot one of us they flock together and make all that jabber, like panicked ducks. They’re terrified of us.

Since his own mate had died, Beta had been making it clearer than ever that he was after the top job. He’d been standing up to Alpha, taking the lead on minor matters without permission, defying her in small ways that weren’t quite enough to get him driven out or killed. It was plain to everyone that Beta was destined to become the new top male, but Alpha hadn’t mated with him yet. The one time he tried mounting her she sent him packing with his tail between his legs. He’d been so humiliated he’d taken it out on Wolf, chasing him out of camp and giving him a few painful nips on the flanks for good measure. It was his right as senior male, but Wolf knew that with Beta this was more than pack tradition at work. Wolf was no match in strength for the bigger male, but he was better at noticing the unusual and at puzzling things out. Beta hated him for that.

I don’t see the threat, Beta went on. They’re just a new kind of prey we haven’t figured out how to hunt yet, that’s all.

They kill what we kill, Wolf said from where he lay, with pups crawling all over him and nipping at his ears. On rare occasions, usually when his betters missed the point, he dared to speak out of turn.

The rest of the pack stared at him.

They eat what we eat, he added.

So what? Beta snarled, baring his teeth at Wolf. There’s plenty of food to go around.

For now, Alpha said.

Image ID: 1) A photo of Sam at the dog park 2) the front cover of Wolf, Moon, Dog

No, the old monk answered.

The next day the young monk returned to the old monk’s hut. Dear Master, he said, according to the Enlightened One’s teachings, all beings have Buddha Nature. Which means, if I understand right, all beings have the potential to awaken from delusion to the truth of existence. But you say that a dog does not. I think that what you were really trying to tell me is that the phenomenon we call a dog cannot be separated from anything else in the universe. Because the true nature of existence is that everything is one. Which means there really is no such thing as dog. It’s a label, not reality. That’s why the answer to the question is no, right?

The old monk answered, No.

The monk waited three days, until he couldn’t stand it any longer. He went to see the master again.

Master, he said, when I came to this monastery six years ago I was driven by a sincere desire to cast off all worldly attachments and find enlightenment. I knew that the road would be hard. I didn’t kid myself about that. But I’ve come to a wall that has no door, and I feel even more lost and confused than when I started. If human beings have the seed of a Buddha within them, then a dog must have it too. We’re made of the same stuff, after all. A dog may not be able to speak, but surely it has a mind and it thinks and feels in its own way, doesn’t it? So please, Master, I’m begging you, please explain to me why a dog doesn’t have Buddha Nature, or I’ll have to hand in my robe and leave the monastery.

The old monk sighed and said, Well, let’s see. Whose dog are we talking about here?

Forgive me, Master, I meant any dog. You know, just dogs in general.

I don’t know any dogs of that kind. You had better go find a dog and bring it here so we can be sure we’re referring to the same dog.

Go . . . find a dog?

Yes. Find a dog and bring it here. And we’ll investigate.

The monk shook his head as he walked away.

Find a dog. Right. Okay.

Wolf was living on the street in those days, having had enough of masters and their incessant demands. In fact, she had pretty much given up speaking with humans. Back when all they did was hunt and barely survive she could understand them and they could understand her, or at least enough to get by. But nowadays the humans had—and did—so many strange new things. Planting and harvesting the grains they liked rather than just picking them where they happened to grow. Fencing in the prey instead of wandering around looking for them. Living in crowded cities and inventing all these noisy machines, things that Wolf couldn’t see the point of.

I’ve stayed me, she often thought, but they’ve changed.

Wolf herself hung out a lot in front of a fishmonger’s shop. Other merchants usually yelled at her and chased her away with brooms, but the fishmonger would sometimes throw her a few tasty scraps.

Which is why the young monk found her sitting in front of the fishmonger’s.

Is this your dog? he asked the fishmonger, a notoriously cranky old woman with one blind eye.

No, the fishmonger said. Not mine. Not anybody’s.

The monk returned that afternoon to the old monk’s hut with Wolf leashed on a length of rope. The old monk was deep in meditation. The monk untied the dog at the door and she entered this unfamiliar space cautiously, sniffing along the walls and in every corner.

When she’d satisfied herself there was no danger and nothing to eat, she sat in front of the old monk to see what would happen next. This old human was completely at ease and therefore quite obviously the top dog around this place.

Master, here’s a dog, the monk said softly.

The old monk stirred.

A dog?

Yes, Master. You asked me to go find a dog. This is the one I found.

This is the dog you were talking about yesterday?

Well, no. Not exactly. Not this particular dog. It was the first one I could find on short notice.

She’s pretty. If it is a she.

I think so, Master, yes. I found it in town, hanging around the fishmonger’s shop. It’s a stray.

A stray what?

Dog, Master. A stray dog.

A stray dog? Where?

This one, Master. The dog you’re petting right now.

But this dog is sitting here with me. She’s not straying anywhere.

No, not at the moment, but—

Dear novice, I think you had better leave the dog with me. I will need to ponder these questions further.

Yes, Master. Thank you, Master.

Oh, and please set aside some rice and fish from my dinner this evening. And bring a bowl of milk, too. This animal looks very thin and undernourished.

The next day the young monk came to see the master and found him playing with the dog.

Master, he said, I was wondering if perhaps you’d come to an answer yet.

About what?

About whether dogs have, you know . . .

Fleas? The old monk regarded Wolf critically. Do you think so? She is quite the mess, it’s true. Her paws are filthy and her fur is badly matted. She could really use a bath and a good brushing.

I will bring some soap and water, Master.

Thank you, dear novice. By the way, I’ve consulted the Book of Beasts. It says there are three types of dogs: hunting, guarding, and edible. Which would you say she is?

Well . . . none of them, Master.

I agree. Another puzzle we will have to solve.

When the young monk visited the master the following day, the old monk was brushing Wolf’s fur.

The dog’s coat looks much better now, Master.

Yes, the master said, beaming, and I have an answer to your question.

You do?

You wondered if she had fleas. She doesn’t.

Oh. That’s good.

***

The above is an excerpt from Wolf, Moon, Dog, my novel about the many fabled lives of a dog named Wolf. Available from Random House Canada and coming out on May 5th in the US from Pegasus Books.

This excerpt is my imagining of a “sequel” to the famous two-line koan that begins the Zen classic The Gateless Gate, where a monk asks the master if a dog has Buddha nature and the master answers “Mu” (meaning “no” or “no thing.”)

[Creative Commons of “Dog Meeting Buddha” from Jessica.Davidson.Co.uk]

I have to wonder, have these folks ever actually read the Bible?

Let me take you back to the 1970s. I was an earnest, obedient Catholic kid who liked to read. The books available to me back then included stuff like Tarzan, the Hardy Boys mysteries, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, and superhero comics. Exciting but safe adventure tales for boys like me. Safe primarily because no sex was allowed in these narrative universes.

One day in my early teens I set myself the ambitious goal of reading the Holy Bible from cover to cover. I think I did this mainly to impress my father, who had been hinting that the priesthood might be the life for me. Or at least a life for him to live vicariously through me.

Our home copy of the New American Bible bore on its title page the Latin inscription nihil obstat—“nothing stands in the way”—which meant the contents were Vatican-approved to contain zero content contrary to Catholic faith and teachings. Okay, then.

What I found in this most sacred of books was a riotous cavalcade of violence, depravity, lust, and sin that, if it had been made into a movie, would be rated R without question, if not X-rated, and thus forbidden for me to see. But because this was the Bible, no content warning was standing in my way. All ages admitted…

Deep breath: Cain murdering his brother Abel; Lot offering his virgin daughters to the mob in Sodom; Lot’s daughters getting him drunk and having sex with him to preserve the family line; the fiery immolation of every living soul in Sodom and Gomorrah; the destruction of humanity and countless innocent living creatures in the Flood; Noah getting passed-out drunk and his sons seeing him lying naked on the ground; Abraham having sex with his wife’s servant Hagar; the binding and near sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham; the rape of Dinah and subsequent massacre of the Shechemites; Judah sleeping with his daughter-in-law Tamar, disguised as a prostitute.

And that was just Genesis.

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I couldn’t stop reading. The books of Exodus, Judges and Samuel were jam-packed with further lurid, lecherous, brutal stuff. Jael driving a tent peg through Sisera’s head; the prophet Elisha summoning bears to kill a pack of boys who mocked him; graphic descriptions of war and killing; the gang-rape and dismemberment of a concubine; the plagues of Egypt, including the murder of all firstborn Egyptian sons.

Most shocking of all: God actually approved of many of these horrors—in fact he was often their ultimate perpetrator. If you were on Team Jehovah, then inflicting harm on others, even wiping out entire peoples, was more than okay, it was a virtuous believer’s duty. A handy excuse for depravity that remains popular to this day.

By the time I got through the Old Testament let’s just say I was no longer an earnest, obedient Catholic kid. Instead of inspiring faith and devotion in me the Bible awakened restless doubt and curiosity, as well as a visceral antipathy for the book’s main character, this petty, vindictive, murderous tyrant called “God.” What an unforgettable antagonist! YHWH has remained ever since in my top ten list of fictional villains, in the company of Sauron, Count Dracula, and Milton’s Satan.

The Bible roused my rebellious inclinations and stirred my heart, as well as other more corporeal parts of me, provoking disturbing new feelings and generating questions I’m still trying to find the answers to. Above all, reading the Bible spurred me on a quest to find more books like this: stories that dug deeper under the safe surface of things than boys’ adventure tales were allowed to. Stories that probed into the dark and unsettling corners of our nature. I needed to understand what human beings were capable of, what sort of world I really lived in, and most importantly, who I was. Or could be. Stories, I believed then and still do, could help me discover all of that.

So I sought out other books, books for older readers (if I could get away with checking them out of the library), stuff that good Catholic kids were probably better off not reading. I started with science fiction and fantasy, finding stories that smuggled dangerous, radical ideas about humanity and society under the guise of adventures in “other worlds.”

Did I encounter books that were not age-appropriate? You bet I did. The Bible was merely the first. I believe it’s a necessary rite of passage for every reader to tackle stories that push us beyond what we know, that disturb and challenge us. After all, life itself is going to throw challenges at us that we’re not prepared for. It’s how we grow and mature. Why shouldn’t books do the same?

From speculative fiction I found my way to the classics. The Canterbury Tales. The Odyssey. Tom Jones. Crime and Punishment. Sons and Lovers. Tropic of Cancer. Lolita. Song of Solomon. And so on. There was plenty of sex and nastiness in these books, too. Lust. Greed. Envy. Drunkenness. Self-degradation and gleeful degradation of others. Perjury. Debauchery and wantonness. Blasphemy. Adultery. Rape. Murder.

And that was just The Canterbury Tales.

The western literary canon contains so much that is beautiful, uplifting, mind-expanding, but there’s no denying that it’s also full of sex, violence, and really shameful behaviour. Just like the Bible.

So if we’re going to police what young people read, maybe we should start with the grandaddy of all dirty books. If you’re a conservative Christian parent and you want to keep your children safely thinking just like you, whatever you do don’t let them near the Bible. It might turn them into a reader, and then what?

[Image: Engraving of Moses breaking the tablets of law, by Gustave Dore]

So begins Byung-Chul Han’s essay on stories, narration, and the disenchantment of the world, The Crisis of Narration (translated by Daniel Steuer, Polity Press, 2024).

Han is a South Korean-born German philosopher and cultural theorist whose original field of study was metallurgy, of all things. He has published a series of short, pithy essay-length books which have been appearing in English over the last ten years or so, including The Burnout Society; Saving Beauty; The Disappearance of Rituals; and Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity. Bucking the time-honored trend of philosophers penning immense, impenetrable doorstops, his books are brief and relatively accessible to the layperson. The titles alone suggest much about what Han’s preoccupations are when it comes to modern societal and cultural problems. So far I have read only three of Han’s books, and of those The Crisis of Narration, despite being a mere 76 pages long, has given me the most to think about, probably because I’m a writer of fiction.

It’s possibly because of his training as a metallurgist that Han focuses so much on objects, surfaces, the feel and shape and scent of things. Even abstract “things” like time. This is one of the chief delights of reading him. When you put one of his books down and return to the unwritten world, even ordinary “stuff” seems to have regained a little bit of its tangibility and radiance. The wordless presence it had when you were a child.

Han can also take a familiar word and deftly turn it over, showing us its other side. Like the word “screen”: “Etymologically, a screen … is a protective barrier. A screen bans reality, which becomes an image, thus screening us off from it” (46). I’d never thought of my smartphone that way: as a shield.

I am not a philosopher and I don’t feel qualified to offer a critique or even a review, really, of a book studded with heavyweight names like Arendt, Heidegger, Kant, and Nietzsche. You won’t hear those names again, I promise. All I really want to do here is set down a few of Han’s insights so that I can think about them. Let them unfold.

So, Han says, everyone is talking about narratives, but he doesn’t see this as a hopeful sign that society is turning back to stories from a culture of noise. Instead, “A paradigm becomes a topic, and a fashionable object of academic research, only when there is a deep-seated alienation from it. All the talk about narratives suggests their dysfunctionality” (vii).

Back when we gathered around the fire to listen to the storyteller, no one talked about stories. We didn’t need to because stories were the “anchor of our being,” and living itself “was a narrating” (vii). Storytelling gave off an “aura” that coloured all of life. It was a form of enchantment, a spell we cast over ourselves. Now we theorize about storytelling, deconstruct it, write “how to” books about it, post on social media about it.

According to Han, narration has ceased to be magic and has become “contingent, exchangeable, and modifiable” (viii). We live in a time of rapid “micro-narratives” which lack gravity and a “moment of truth” (ix). These micro-narratives are bearers of something that he refers to in another of his books as “non-things” that “destabilize life.”1 In this book, however, he simply gives these ghostly non-things their more familiar collective name: information.

It’s the current tsunami of information, for Han, that has cut away the anchor of our being. Digitally-delivered information “is relevant only briefly, so it is quickly exhausted. It is effective only for a moment...” Once facts are “registered, they immediately sink into oblivion...” (4). A barrage of rapid, random, immediately vanishing content robs us of our own rich inner landscapes:

“Information has neither distance nor expanse. It cannot hold rough winds or dazzling sunshine. It lacks auratic space. Information therefore de-auratizes and disenchants the world” (39).

In this non-space we quickly become disoriented. We lose our senses—of direction, meaning, ethical grounding, community. We become desperate for a story that will make sense of it all:

“When everything becomes contingent, fleeting, and accidental, and all that is binding and unifying dissolves … there is a clamour for storytelling. The inflation of narrative betrays a need to be able to cope with contingency. But storytelling is unable to transform the information society, which is devoid of orientation and meaning, back into a stable narrative community. Rather, storytelling is a pathological phenomenon of our era” (xi).

Storytelling itself, according to Han, has become a pathology.

How did something so fundamental to who we are become a sickness?

*

Han traces some of the historical antecedents of the narrative crisis. He looks at the rise of the modern newspaper and how it trained us to jump from one “item” to the next. The reader never stops to “let her gaze drift into the distance and linger” (1). Instead of falling under the spell of a story, we remain at the superficial level of facts, which is usually accompanied by a quick and ready explanation.

For Han, explanation and true narration are mutually exclusive. “A narrative often has something wondrous and mysterious around its edges” (3), like a halo or an aura. A good story doesn’t instantaneously surrender its secrets, if it ever does. It offer images, journeys, shapes of thought, and leaves us to ponder their significance.

This significance unfolds through time, and requires “a state of relaxation” (5) in a reader or listener for that blossoming of meaning to take place. But this state has become hard for us to find, and remain in. Our attention has been shattered and we no longer have that kind of time. We’re tired. We’re impatient. We have to stay current with the latest outrage in the neverending shitstorm of the news. And so explanation becomes our substitute for story. Our narrative fast food. Don’t expect us to wait around while your story unfolds its meaning. Just give us the simplification. The gloss. The instant takeaway.

This is how, Han argues, storytelling in our “exhausted” late modernity decayed into storyselling.

These days, Han writes, we “consume more narratives than things” and as a result “it might seem as though we have a renewed passion for telling each other stories. In fact, this storytelling is anything but the return of narration… Storytelling is becoming established as an efficient communication technology, one that is often manipulative and has an ulterior motive” (66). Like everything else now, a story’s purpose is to be consumed and forgotten.

Storyselling “knows only one form of life, and that is life as consumption” (68). This is the sickness that Han suggests our storytelling has fallen into. One could call it a kind of cognitive eating disorder. After all, if information is a barrage of substanceless “non-things,” then consuming it means we’re eating nothing. We’re getting no nourishment. Our hunger will never end.

Stories are now sold to us not just as entertainment but as explanations, as useful data, as tools that we too can learn to use better to get an edge in a crowded, competitive attention economy. Or maybe call it a distraction economy. In such a feverish space our narratives, driven by the survival of the briefest, tend to get shorter and leaner, stripped of any invitation to relax, to dream, to linger. We’ve got a minute, probably less, to offer the reader information they can “use” before they get restless and move on. Under this kind of pressure only the quick, sensational pitch thrives. The actual writing comes to matter less than the presentation. The brand. The performance.

This neoliberal imperative to perform, Han notes, “turns every individual into an entrepreneur of his own self (62).”

*

The Crisis of Narration was originally published in 2023 and came out in English in 2024. Unsurpisingly, Han points a finger at social media in his diagnosis of our pathology: Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram. There’s no mention of Substack in the book, but in light of Han’s argument I couldn’t help stepping back to consider the very platform I was writing this “book report” for.

It’s obvious that even here, in this new, healthy, diverse media ecosystem, a monoculture of narrative-as-consumption is thriving. There’s still much carefully-crafted, thoughtful storytelling worth lingering over to be found here. There’s writing that plays with language, that enchants, that holds rough winds and dazzling sunshine. People come here for community, too, and for all I know, many find it. But just like every other digital platform, the ecosystem was built for storyselling. And one of its most popular commodities is information about writing for a digital audience.

Witness all the content about Substack itself. Like the how-to newsletters that promise us the “secret” to writing an irresistible article that’ll get us tons of likes and new subscribers.

Remember Han’s point that all of our talking about narrative is really a sign of its dysfunctionality?

Consider all the famous authors showing up on the platform now (like an invasive species they’ve noticed a niche they haven’t exploited yet). What do these renowned tale-weavers do once they’re here? Instead of telling stories they offer advice on how to write. More blather about narrative. And why not. These folks are smart. They know where the money is. No one wants to read actual stories anymore. We’re all too busy consuming explanations.

To be fair I should include this article you’re reading right now. I didn’t set out to write about Substack but here we are: More theorizing, more meta-narration, more explaining. Are my words simply contributing to narratile dysfunction? Should I have woven you a tale instead?

*

Han incisively diagnoses our illness, but offers no easy remedy. It seems to me this refusal to suggest solutions is integral to his point. More information, more empty ephemeral micro-narratives, can’t fix this crisis and will only make it worse. Why? Because, as he says, “living is more than just problem-solving. Someone who merely solves problems does not have a future. It is only with narrative that a future opens up, for narrative gives us hope (15).

How does narrative itself (as opposed to any particular story) provide hope? Han offers some suggestions, such as that a narrative always contains the power of a new beginning (68). This is how “new forms of life” are brought about.

I like that idea. I want to sit with it for a while and let it unfold. Another way to frame it, perhaps, with an image rather than an explanation, is to imagine that a good story, a story that allows new life to come forth, contains not explanations but seeds. These seeds come in the form of images, journeys, mysteries and wonders, beginnings and endings that grow within us into a spreading canopy of meaning. A shape to shelter under, to live within.

[Image ID: Royalty-free image of a campfire on a beach, from Pxhere.com]

What you’ve just witnessed is the human spirit struggling to free itself, and failing.

What is the spirit desperate to escape? Flatness.

The world isn’t just getting hotter, it’s getting flatter. It’s becoming more and more horizontal, shallow, compressed.

Less and less often do we bother to look up, or even to gaze down at the ground at our feet. Instead we spend more and more time peering at those little screens, like prisoners trying to glimpse the world through a narrow slit in a wall. And what’s worse, we cheerfully cooperate in this shrinking of our own dimensions.

The act of scrolling might seem to refute the idea that our lives are flattening. After all, we scroll up and down, right? That’s not “flat” is it? The problem is that in scrolling what moves is not the person. The head and the gaze stay fixed in a kind of rigor mortis while images and text whizz by. This isn’t vertical freedom, this is Alex in A Clockwork Orange, straitjacketed and head-clamped in front of a ghostly flicker of images. Only in our case we voluntarily put ourselves there.

Our field of view narrows along the horizontal, the linear, and as a result the things we can see in such a plane flatten too. We lose entire dimensions. Our aspiring tech-dystopia overlords love this flattening and encourage it. Humans who move in fewer dimensions are more easily reducible to data that can be mined and weaponized.

Our reality is becoming like the trash compactor in Star Wars, only it’s squeezing us from top and bottom, not from the sides.

I have a bad feeling about this. Maybe you do too.

*

The vertical is a dimension to the world, to bodies and space and the “out there,” but it’s also inside us. Verticality is a field of movement without and within that allows not just new and different perspectives in the physical world, but a similar possibility of change of perspective for the mind and the spirit. The vertical intersects the tick-tock horizontal axis of “one thing after another” to remind us that we contain spires and cataracts of thought and feeling. One lightning bolt of insight is sometimes all it takes. But you have to put the fucking phone down first.

When you’re standing somewhere, anywhere, on the Earth’s surface, you’re only able to see a tiny fraction of our spherical planet, the small patch that’s immediately around you. When you look up at the full moon, you can take in half of its surface in one glance. You can behold the entire sunlit face of another celestial body just by raising your head. That’s the power of verticality.

*
Without verticality things exist on the same level and all the same flavour. It’s just one thing after another, to be negotiated or consumed before moving on to the next. This flattening infects even the most meaningful of our experiences and how we relate to them. I saw a video montage recently summarizing a person’s past year of travel. A rapidfire blur of beaches, famous landmarks, cocktails, smiling faces. Each experience shrunk to an instant exactly like every other instant. Nothing lingered over, or truly seen. No ups or downs. No peaks or valleys—only peaks. When everything is a peak, nothing is.

To allow the vertical into life, you often have to feel yourself as smaller than, or below, something else. We don’t want to feel that way anymore. We’re against hierarchies—suspicious of any hint of “higher” or “lower” in society, art, culture. No one, we’ve decided, should ever feel “small” or “below.” And no one should be allowed to feel “above” anyone else, either.

But hierarchy and verticality are not the same thing. Verticality doesn’t favour top over bottom. You can gaze down in wonder just as easily as you can gaze up. The entire mountain creates verticality, not just the summit.

In our zeal for dismantling pernicious old hierarchies, we’re in danger of banishing an entire dimension. Our current myth is the myth of Babel, only in reverse. We rush to take down every eminence, and everyone ends up speaking the same language and saying the same things.

If you’re old enough to remember the vacuum tube TV set, you’ve seen what happened when they were shut off: the picture suddenly collapsing on itself, shrinking for an instant to a horizontal line with a fuzzy blob in the middle like an afterimage of a black hole, before blipping away into nothingness.

No more vision. No more story.

*
When I really need to look up, I go to the mountains. When I can’t get to the mountains, I try to remember to raise my head every so often, to take in the sky. I walk my dog at night and stargaze. Or I look at art with a prominent vertical dimension, like the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.

But verticality isn’t just visual. It can intersect everything we do, if we let it.

It’s in music. Brian Eno’s “Ending (An Ascent)”. “Meditation II” by Sufjan Stevens. Katharine Petkovski’s “Principles of Light” and “First Dance.” Or “Closure” by Edmonton songwriter Conch, an under-appreciated pop masterpiece that dreams along pleasantly until, three minutes in, the beat drops away and you soar over a deep canyon of longing, with towering sonic columns approaching in the distance.

In contrast, so much popular music these days is linear, driven by beat, tuneless, effectively unmusical. Even the catchy songs are more likely to employ “horizontal” metrical effects rather than melody to make themselves infectious (compression, stretching, stop and go, patter). It’s as if songwriters have forgotten notes can actually go up and down on a scale, not just across.

*

This Great Flattening, I would argue, is the reason UFOs are back again, in a big way.

Well, they never really left, did they? They just faded into the background for a while.

As a kid I was fascinated by UFOs. I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I hoped and believed that our civilization’s meeting with benevolent extraterrestrials was just around the corner. They would reverse pollution, save the whales, wake our leaders up, stop war. They would fix all the bad things.

But the glowing ships never appeared over our cities with musical messages of peace. The otherworldly visitors remained ghostly, elusive, doubtful. And so I lost interest. Or rather, I got interested in a lot of other things, and got on with life. Whatever these flying whatsits were—if they even existed—they had no impact on the terrestrial events that mattered to me.

I never had a UFO encounter, but I know two people who have. One was my brother Dave, when he was eleven or twelve. He was out delivering newspapers one cold winter’s evening many years ago in our home town of Grande Prairie, Alberta, and came rushing home in near panic to report he’d seen a weird glowing object in the sky, just hovering there as if watching him. (The word Dave actually used was “hoovering,” which made our mother laugh: “You saw a flying vacuum cleaner???”).

Dave described what he’d seen as a triangular object with a dark metallic surface and a row of blue and white lights on its lower rim. Of course I believed him. How I wished I’d been there to see it. A UFO in our ordinary, boring little town? This was exciting, unprecedented. I got Dave to recall as much detail as he could remember and I painted a picture of what he’d encountered. I don’t know what happened to the painting—I suppose it got tossed out long ago (Mom was an expert at making “clutter” quietly vanish—including my cherished copy of Wolverine’s first appearance in The Incredible Hulk #180). I wish I still had that painting. And that comic book, which would be worth a lot of money now.

*

And then the UFOs returned.

In the last few years, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, as we’re now supposed to call them, erupted into mainstream consciousness in a big way. These days it’s more difficult to debunk what thousands of people have experienced, or to deny the UFO/UAP phenomenon entirely. Archives of encounters and unexplained photos and footage have been released to the public. Governments and the military are now admitting these things are real, even if they can’t explain them. Scientists are building new instruments and forming coalitions to share data on the anomalies, in the hope of pinning the phenomenon down.

We’re determined to find out once and for all where these elusive visitors come from and who they are.

There’s no shortage of theories. And every theory reflects the theorizer.

They’re from other planets—benign extraterrestrials waiting for our consciousness to evolve before they reveal themselves to us (New Agers).

They’re extraterrestrials, yes, but they’re clearly hostile. They’re carrying out reconnaissance to gauge our weapons capability, in preparation for invasion (US military paranoia).

They’re cryptoterrestrials—advanced humanoids who live in the ocean or under the Earth’s crust, stealthily keeping watch to make sure we don’t destroy the planet (although maybe they’re okay with us destroying ourselves).

They’re from another dimension, like Mr Mxyzptlk.

They come from Heaven—they’re actually angels.

They come from Hell—they’re obviously demons.

They’re fairies—the Little Folk, returning in modern guise as spacecraft and aliens. Or rather, we’ve always been encountering them, only we used to call them fairies and now we call them UAP (Jacques Vallée).

They’re us, from the future. No, wait, they’re AI1 from the future. A future in which humans have gone extinct and our machine children have traveled back in time to witness the era of their own birth….

They’re acausal synchronicities, physical emanations of the archetypes of the collective unconscious (Carl Jung).

They’re daimons: morally ambiguous imps—or impulses—from the Imaginal ground that gives rise to both our physical and mental realities (Patrick Harpur and Bernardo Kastrup).

They’re the harbingers of an emerging spirituality (D W Pasulka).

*

I’m as fascinated now as I ever was by the visitors. I yearn to know who or what they really are. I’m most partial to the speculations that link UAP to consciousness and the spiritual, but at the same time I have to admit I’m eagerly waiting for those open-minded scientists tracking the sky and sharing data to come up with some “solid” answers.

But I also hope we never pin the visitors down. Being elusive, inexplicable, unpindownable, is what they do. If they have a purpose at all, that would seem to be it.

In other words, UFOs appear in the skies because we need them to. They hover at the edges of our certainties, they flash and glow and emit blinding beams to attract our attention (if they really wanted to stay hidden they could presumably just turn off the lights), they zip up, down, here and there, they vanish and reappear. They disrupt and dizzy us with awe at what we can’t quite take in. With their unearthly acrobatics, their flouting of gravity and causality, they release the relentless pressure of world-flattening.

Their message isn’t “we come in peace” or “take me to your leader.”

Their message is LOOK UP.

*

[Image ID: Manipulated photograph of a crowd of people at Cova da Iria, Portugal witnessing the “The Miracle of the Sun” on October 13, 1917].

Here’s one.

When I was fourteen my Dad, a manager for Alberta Power, the electrical utility company, accepted a job transfer that took us from our home in Grande Prairie to the town of Jasper in the Canadian Rockies.

I did not want to go. I had friends. I had a crush on a girl at school, and any day now I was sure I’d find the courage to actually talk to her. But I was fourteen and I didn’t have much choice about where I lived. So my family uprooted itself and we moved to the mountains.

With accommodations being pricey and hard to come by in a place like Jasper, we had to take what we could get. This turned out to be a much smaller and older house than the one we’d lived in in Grande Prairie.

The transfer meant that my Dad’s salary increased, but the move had its hidden costs, in the strain it put on everyone in the family. We were coming to a place that, as an isolated little town that was also an international tourist destination, had its own unique challenges, and learning to navigate all of that would be a bumpy ride for each of us in different ways.

At the time my hometown of Grande Prairie was a growing city, undergoing one of its periodic oil and gas booms. Jasper, in contrast, was very much a typical small Alberta town, with the peculiar exception that during the summer, thousands of tourists flocked to it, and drove through it, and wandered around in it. This meant that prices for groceries, gas, and so on were artificially high. And there were other new temptations and dangers for teenagers like me: Jasper was also a hub of transient workers, hitchhikers, social drop-outs, with plenty of illegal drugs passing through town as well.

Besides the crowds, the other thing that Jasper had that Grande Prairie didn’t, was mountains. Little did I know at the time that it would be mountains that would turn me into a writer.

So, 1979. That fall I start high school in Jasper. One day I meet a girl—and actually talk to her!—she becomes my first girlfriend. In Jasper I try activities I never had the chance to in my hometown. I go on multi-day hikes, I ski, I rock-scramble, I encounter wild animals. I nearly die on an ice climb in Maligne Canyon for which I was stupidly unprepared.

One night at a party on the shore of Pyramid Lake I get stoned on booze and cannabis, and wander off by myself and lie down in the woods. I gaze up at the towering black spruce and the night sky, suddenly I can hear the trees speaking, in low, murmuring voices. The trees are talking, they’re talking to the stars, and the stars are talking back, in the same soft, drone-like tongue. There’s no doubt in my mind: the trees and the stars are aware and sentient, and holding a conversation. They’re laughing, too, it seems, maybe at me, at how small and pitiful I am. I can’t understand what they’re saying to one another, and I feel sad not to be included.

This event was an experience of what I call the numinous, about which I’ll have more to say later.

The teen years are intense and character-forming for anyone, of course. In my case the dramatic, angsty adolescent stuff I was going through happened in a landscape that felt equally dramatic and grandiose. The incident with the trees and stars was just one extreme example. All of the upheavals going on inside me seemed to find a corresponding upheaval in the towering, fractured massiveness of the landscape. I would go hiking alone in the hills and project my desires and humiliations into these wild places, which had ample space and silence to contain them. Unlike in town, where one had to bottle one’s feelings up and hide them.

It’s not surprising then, that I came to identify with the mountains. They were somehow part of me, or I was part of them. Or both.

I think this feeling of deep identification was pretty common for people living in Jasper. At the time I knew that many of the locals felt the same way. This sense of personal belonging showed up most often in a negative way, in the resentful attitude locals held towards the tourists. They depended on these visitors for jobs and prosperity, but they didn’t really like them. The derogatory slang term for a tourist in those days was “gorby.” In the minds of many of the local young people I went to school with, these gorbies were all incredibly stupid. They blundered around, gaping at everything and asking dumb questions, like “Who painted the top part of the mountains white?” All summer tourists clogged the sidewalks, creating traffic jams and paying ridiculous prices for stuff they could get much cheaper somewhere else. We teenagers mocked them and ridiculed them.

Sometimes we gave them false information. A friend of mine told the story of how a carload of tourists had stopped him on main street and asked, “Where’s Jasper?” He pointed west and told them, “Jasper’s down that highway about another hundred kilometres. Just keep going. You can’t miss it.”

It was odd—the tourists brought local people their livelihood, but the locals still resented them for their ignorant encroachment on “our” mountains. I think now that this ambivalence was the ungenerous side of a deeper feeling shared by pretty much everyone in town: that Jasper belonged to the people who lived there, that it was a deep part of their identity. I shared this proprietary attitude and I still catch myself thinking this way when I visit the park, all these years later. (“Too many damn tourists” I will complain, even though I am one). Despite the fact that I haven’t called Jasper home in decades, these are somehow still MY mountains.

In The Living Mountain,” her classic memoir of the Cairngorm Range in Scotland, Nan Shepherd writes: “Thirty years in the life of a mountain is nothing—the flicker of an eyelid.” That’s exactly how I feel about the peaks of Jasper. I look up at them now and they’re much the same as they were when I was fifteen. It’s as if I’m looking at my own past, at eternal monuments to vanished times and people who are long gone. They’re unreachable and yet at the same time they’re still here.

*

I want to focus on Mount Edith Cavell in particular as an exemplum of all this. Cavell is a spectacular, luminous wall of snow, ice, and rock that can be seen from town on a clear day. It changes colour and solidity and aspect from hour to hour, but it’s still always itself. Sometimes Cavell seems to hover in the air like a dream in broad daylight.

The mountain’s name among early fur traders was La Montagne de la Grande Traverse. And in the matter of naming mountains, as everywhere else, we can see colonial erasure at work. As I note in my novel Icefields, La Montagne was renamed Mount Edith Cavell during World War One, to honour the courageous nurse who saved the lives of British soldiers at the cost of her own.

But that earlier French name was itself already an erasure of whatever name the mountain may have been given by the Indigenous people who lived and traded in the Athabasca valley before Europeans arrived.

Long after moving away from Jasper I would dream about its landscapes repeatedly, and especially about Cavell. Often in a dream I would find myself there, climbing the mountain, looking for someone or something. I didn’t know who or what.

This recurring dream finally brought me back to the actual mountain, years after we moved away from Jasper. I knew there was no way I could climb Cavell itself. I’m not a climber. I learned on rock-scrambles and ice-climbs in Jasper during my teenage years that I just don’t have the nerve for it.

But I needed to go to Cavell, and go alone. So I set my sights on the high ridge alongside the peak, at the top of the steep upland known as Cavell Meadows. There’s a trail that ascends the meadows, but it peters out at a certain elevation. If you want to get to the summit of the ridge you have to scramble up scree slopes and sometimes trudge through patches of snow, even in midsummer. You can do this in running shoes, without gear, it’s not technically challenging, though it is risky of course if you’re unprepared ... and out of shape.

I finally made the climb one summer in my mid-twenties. When I staggered to the summit of the ridge at last, hyperventilating, I was seized by vertigo, followed by panic. There was the face of Cavell itself, towering before me across the empty air, like the naked face of a deity, terrifying and impossible. I huddled under an overhanging rock, trying to shut the vision out. What was I doing up here? It took me a long time to convince myself to crawl back down, slowly, to the safety of the trail far below.

Cavell scared the bejeezus out of me. It made me very small. Like the incident with the trees and stars, this was another encounter with the numinous.

And yet, that terrifying climb answered no questions. It didn’t reveal why I was dreaming about this place.

I only found the answer much later, when I was writing my first novel. My subconscious, all these years, had been trying to tell me what I should be writing about.

*

Back to the 1980s. My family moves away from Jasper and I start university in Edmonton. I enrol in Arts at the University of Alberta, majoring in English, and sign up for the English department’s creative writing courses, to learn the craft of becoming a writer.

But the stories I write at that time are not about Jasper. Not about mountains. I’ve left all that behind, or so I believe. I’m focused now on new experiences and on making something of myself, impressing my instructors with my serious writerliness. No more teenage angst. I nurture a secret ambition to write a great Canadian novel set where I live now, in Edmonton. I will pen the Ulysses of Edmonton.

I struggle at this. In these workshop classes I write almost exclusively about the city, or about incidents from my childhood in Grande Prairie, but they don’t fly. They don’t sing. None of these stories feels really “authentic.” They’re weak imitations of other, famous writers’ fiction. I have nothing to say about Edmonton, it turns out. And why would I? I’ve only lived here for a short time.

And then, little by little, as I keep at it, images of the mountains and the glaciers start to show up in my work, just as they’re still showing up in my dreams. These flashbacks and images of Jasper have emotional power, at least to me, though they aren’t yet stories as such. But they keep coming, and at a certain point the ice dam breaks, so to speak, and in the flood of insight I finally understand: Jasper, not Edmonton, is my material.

So I start gathering all these mountain memories and images, these fragments of personal history and lore and feeling about the mountains of my past. I still don’t have a story yet, though. And I need a story because this supposed novel-in-progress is also a Master’s thesis I’m working toward.

The brilliant Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars is teaching in the department at the time, and I’m hoping she’ll agree to be my thesis supervisor. So I take all of this Jasper stuff to her. I apologetically confess that I don’t know what to do with this jumble of fragments. Kristjana looks at the material and says, “Fragments are wonderful! You can do so much with fragments.” It’s a bolt from the blue moment. I see that a novel doesn’t have to be written beginning to end, according to some pre-arranged plan. A novel can be stitched together or assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, only it’s a jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the lid of the box to show you what it should be when it’s finished.

Over time, as I revise and expand the fragments, I discover the connections between them and eventually find the central narrative thread they can be strung on. But I also let the finished novel, Icefields, retain some of its former fragmentary quality, because I want the story to reflect the landscape it’s set in.

I think of the novel as a moraine. A glacial moraine is a jumbled terrain of broken stones and boulders deposited by retreating ice, but these scattered stones and boulders do tell a story, if you’re patient enough to piece it together.

*

As one’s past recedes, it becomes a mythology. Memory becomes myth. By myth I don’t mean falsehoods but the stories that give shape to our lives. The stories we act out again & again. The past goes nowhere—it lives in us. It persists.

To me the mountains of Jasper are my past, my mythology. I age, but the peaks don’t seem to. They persist through time. And yet the mountains are so much more than just monuments to personal nostalgia. They are places of the numinous.

The idea of “the Sublime” is often used to describe the feeling of awe mingled with fear that mountain landscapes evoke. The concept is from the Romantic era, but over time it’s lost much of its meaning and depth. Now it’s a word for tourist brochures and visits to the spa. “After a hot stone massage, enjoy a sublime Canadian Rockies sunset from the deck of your $800 a night cabin at Jasper Park Lodge.”

For me, mountains are bigger than that. Scarier. Less knowable. A word that suits them better is numinous.

Numinous, the adjective, comes from the Latin noun “numen.” A numen for the Romans was a divine presence that reveals itself only at certain times and usually in out-of-the-way places. A spring or a wood might have its own numen. Or even a mountain. Although really, a single mountain is so vast and many-faceted a thing that it could surely host many numens, depending on the season, the weather, the time of day, which side of it you’re climbing, whether or not you meet a grizzly…

From this Roman idea of a spirit inhabiting a place we get our word numinous, which the dictionary defines as “supernatural, mysterious, spiritual, appealing to the higher emotions or the aesthetic sense.”

You can go looking for the sublime or the spiritual, but the numinous is something that finds you, usually when you least expect it. Often it’s attended by fear, by the wild and unpredictable. Like my moment of terror at Cavell, or the night I listened to the trees talk with the stars.

Mountains are numinous beings. They exalt, they terrify, they are far larger than we can encompass. They have a powerful presence that can shake you to the core. You know without any doubt how small and insignificant you are when you’re on a mountain, and that is a good thing to feel.

*

Akira Kurosawa’s anthology film Dreams (1990) is filled with eerie, startling images of numinous encounters in nature. The film tells several stories all based on unforgettable dreams the director himself had over the years. One chapter in particular that conveys the numinous as it manifests itself in mountain landscapes.

In this chapter of the film a party of mountain climbers slogs towards their lost camp through a howling blizzard. They can barely put one foot in front of another, just as in dreams one can find it nearly impossible to move. Their progress is so laborious and slow it’s painful to watch. Finally the men give in to their exhaustion and drop into the snow. One of them is approached by a beautiful woman who covers him in a ragged sparkling blanket and soothes him, telling him “the snow is warm ... the ice is hot.”

The climber almost gives in but then he struggles, fights back. The woman is unmasked, revealed to be a demon, a spirit of the mountain. With a crack of thunder the apparition flies away into the blizzard.

The climber rouses his comrades, and then the sun comes out, and the mountain appears before them in all its radiant beauty. They shout for joy—they can see their camp at last and they know they will survive.

Kurosawa’s imagery reminds me that a mountain is both death and life, and they are only a hair’s breadth apart. The same with terror and exaltation. A mountain will always be bigger than we are, but strangely, once we’ve met a mountain, it will always somehow be inside of us. Reminding us that we are also bigger than we know.

*

We think with the physical world. Because rivers flow, we can imagine other things flowing: time, electricity, conversations, history. Because plants grow, we can imagine the seeds of new ideas, we can speak of being rooted or uprooted, of turning over a new leaf, of our lives flowering.

Because there are mountains, we can look up.

This is so valuable as the world seems to shrink around us, getting increasingly linear, and flatter. We can feel reduced to a set of data points. The powerful of our time want to flatten us into fewer dimensions so they can more easily predict what we’ll do, extract profit from us, control us. Work, consume, scroll, stream, obey, repeat.

When we feel this happening we can close our eyes and return to the mountain. We can find the timeless vertical inside ourselves. We can look up, or gaze down, or out across the immensities we are.

This is why we need mountains.

[This essay is based on a talk I gave recently at the Edmonton Public Library, as part of the On the Edge: Making Mountains series, in cooperation with the Department of Atmospheric and Earth Sciences at the University of Alberta]

[Image ID: Peaks in Jasper at dawn, circa 2010, photo by the author]

“Why hurry over beautiful things? Why not linger and enjoy them?” —Clara Schumann

My Word for the Year in 2025 was numinous. A beautiful word, you might even say a numinous word, that took me on a journey into new territories of thinking, reading, experiencing.

But numinous is also an aspirational word, a lofty, goal-oriented adjective that nudges behaviour, inspiring you to seek mysterious, transcendent experiences. That’s not something one can do every day, in the everyday. I definitely found that out last year. In order to even have an experience of a numen in the world—”the power that has no need for names” (Roberto Calasso)—you have to spend time in places where something like that might show itself. And that seems harder to do in the world all the time. To even have a chance at experiencing the numinous, you have to wait, bide, linger.

So I’m backing up a bit, to something prior to the numinous, and I’ve chosen linger as my word of the year for 2026.

Also a beautiful word, but an easier one to fit into most days. Like a well-worn pair of jeans. Can a person even really aspire to linger? Lingering means you’re giving up on aspiring, or at least setting it aside for a while. It means not pursuing something single-mindedly but dawdling instead. Loitering, straggling, lagging behind, waiting around, staying. The word has as many negative connotations as it does positive ones—lots of unwelcome things linger, like colds, bad moods, winter. But there’s likely something to be learned from lingering with the miserable stuff too. It doesn’t give you a choice, anyhow.

To linger also means to continue to exist. Something else I hope to do in 2026.

“Linger” is also one of my favourite songs, by the Irish band The Cranberries. I love the anecdote shared on Wikipedia about their lead singer Dolores O’Riordan’s audition to join the band:

It was a Sunday afternoon. [Dolores] arrived with a keyboard under her arm, just set it up and played a few songs. We couldn’t really hear her because she was singing through a guitar amp or something. I gave her a lift up to the bus stop and I was saying, ‘Will we see you next week?’ We gave her a tape of the music for ‘Linger’, which she took with her. The following week she came back, and she had lyrics written out and melodies and she sang along to what we were playing, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God. She’s great’.

O’Riordan’s initial audition wasn’t a smashing success, but the boys in the band didn’t hurry on to look for someone else. They let Dolores linger over the fledgling song for a week and return with something that had found its wings.

Years ago, after the publication of my first novel, Icefields, inspired by my years living in Jasper, I gave a reading at my alma mater, the Jasper High School. An old school friend of mine had died recently in a car accident and that evening, after the reading, I went to the Athabasca Hotel bar to raise a glass to his memory. Unfortunately I ended up raising a few too many glasses, and the next day I drove home to Calgary nursing a lingering hangover. One of the few cassette tapes I had in the car was the Cranberries’ Everybody Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? I listened to the album on repeat as I drove the mist-shrouded, nearly deserted Icefields Parkway, my head throbbing and my heart sad. I stopped for a while at one point and just sat in the wind and solitude, companioned by rock and ice. Whenever I hear “Linger” I’m carried back to that drive and that stop beside the road that was fleeting but somehow monumental.

“Do you have to let it linger?” Dolores O’Riordan asked in her infectious wild marvel of a voice.

No, I don’t have to, Dolores, but I’m going to, in 2026. I’m going to try lingering a bit more every day, to see what unfolds when you stop and just wait around. It probably means fewer posts on this newsletter than the usual one per week, I imagine. Anyhow, this is the plan. Whatever comes, wherever I go, I’ll pull over and sit with things for a while.

[Image ID: Photo of Dolores O’Riordan]

It’s also fun to flip through these notebooks and discover stuff I had forgotten I’d written—some of it silly, some baffling, some worth revisiting as possible material for new work.

Here’s a selection of some of my favourite forgotten and rediscovered journal entries of 2025.

Jan 26:

The difficulty I’ve always had with meditation is that I keep trying to do it, using the one part of myself that can never sit still: my restless mind.

The closest I get to stilling that mind is to go into the woods and just notice what’s in my range of consciousness. The world around me, the sights, sounds, smells, etc. When I do that I notice that everything is already at peace with itself! The trees, the flowers, the light, the clouds overhead: they’re all just being.

One day on one of these walks it occurred to me: everything in my field of awareness is already mind. We never access reality directly, we only get a representation of it, produced and directed by our consciousness. So all of this peaceful just being I find around me is actually happening in my mind. It’s already here, inside me, not “out there.”

99.9 % of one’s awareness is already this serene just being. So why identify with the tiny restless sliver that isn’t?

Don’t try to meditate. Let a tree do it for you.

Feb 2nd:

I made a resolution this morning to not use any electronic devices today. To stay fully in the here and now.

I failed.

Mar 21:

The sea doesn’t have thumbs.

What does this mean?

March 28:

Are you simply going to be content with the excretainment trowelled out to you by greedy corporations? Do you want to expand your consciousness? Then get off your fucking phone and read some literature.

[Not sure who I was ranting at here—myself or people in general]

Mar 30:

On our walk today my grandson held my hand and said “I love you, Poppa.”

April 23:

I have fixed the Bullet Journal method. Instead of bullets, seeds.

May 1^st:

Welcome to the magical land of Everreading.

May 3rd:

When you grow up you discover that the most important fact about your childhood is that it’s over. You can’t go back. And no matter who you are and what kind of childhood you had, happy or miserable or most likely some mixed state in between, that past of yours only ever takes place now ...

May 27^th:

Are humans perhaps just a little bit dog?

After all, we’ve cohabited with them for some 30,000 years. Some of that dogginess must have rubbed off on us in all that time.

Maybe human behaviour was different in some way before we teamed up with the wolf. What if, long ago, we added a canine trait or two to our repertoire and we’ve simply forgotten that’s where these traits came from?

June 4th:

Working on writing projects all morning, and then, in the afternoon, the obligatory feeling of utter hopelessness about writing.

Why do I still do this?

June 5^th:

We’re losing the culture of deep, sustained reading at the same moment in history as we’re losing Nature. What does this synchronicity mean? Was it inevitable?

June 10^th:

My life doesn’t seem to have a story. Maybe it never did. Maybe that’s why I love stories so much. Ever since I was a kid trying to figure out who I was, I’ve been borrowing stories to give my life meaning.

I’ve ingested a million stories. I still don’t know who I am.

June 22nd:

How odd of nature to evolve a being that can dream the impossible.

June 23rd:

Story idea: an alternate world in which everyone has an emotional support dog.

July 4^th:

We think of the arts as a unified thing, one kind of activity, despite all of the differences in their approaches, their forms, their outcomes. Think of painting, music, poetry, sculpture. So unlike one another, and yet they are all art forms. When did the idea that all of these disparate activities have something in common first appear?

How old is the idea of Art?

Did the Lascaux cave painters think of what they were doing as “art” or as something else?

What wild, strange, unique realities might have been lost to us when we abstracted all of these different activities under the unifying rubric of Art?

Aug 4th:

Reality is like a clean, perfect, transparent sheet of cling wrap, and then we go and wrap it around some ugly thought.

August 17^th:

The loneliness that lives in things.

The loneliness of empty, unpeopled places. Of far-off sounds of traffic, or distant ocean waves. Of empty hallways and unpaved country roads and mountain meadows.

The human soul recognizes this loneliness like an old friend.

A person can desire loneliness.

Loneliness can be beautiful.

Sept 28:

North shore, Prince Edward Island.

Storm moving in from the sea at sunset. Vast wall of grey-black cloud, tinged with red light, approaching the land, like a vision of the apocalypse.

Standing there, awed to speechless wonder and terror by this vision, it finally occurred to me I should get indoors before this Mother of Storms hits.

Back at my hotel room, my daughter texts me a photo of my beautiful grandson. I’m filled with love for him but also a deep hurting sadness at how brief childhood and innocence are. How brief life is.

If we really felt that brevity and sweetness of life more fully and more often, how much kinder we would be to one another.

Oct 12:

“Her mom died, she fell, hit her head, they had her in the hospital, she had a brain tumor they didn’t catch.”

Overheard this sitting in the local Tim Horton’s having a coffee and writing, which I’m doing because I’m waiting for the Real Men barbershop to open so I can get a real hair cut.

Nov 19:

Brief stories about women I have known:

1. One day she came home and caught me singing alone in the house. “I thought it was a dying coyote,” she said.

2. I told her I would call her. I never did.

3. She told me she dreamed about me. She wouldn’t say what happened in the dream.

4. She had come to this retreat to defeat a monster: her own feelings of inadequacy as an artist.

5. As a girl she was soft-spoken and shy. Many years later I was shaken to hear that her son had been killed at a party where someone was fooling around with a gun.

6. She thought that the constellation Orion was named for someone Irish.

   “What do you mean?” I asked.

   “You know, O’Ryan,” she said.

7. She was the little red-haired girl who lived down the street from our house. I had a crush on her. I don’t know that I ever knew her name.

8. “My memory is all burnt up,” she said, and shrugged. “Bad drugs.”

9. She told me about a strange incident from her childhood in India: whenever her mother played the piano a spider would descend on its thread from the ceiling and hover above the keys. When the music stopped the spider would climb back up.

10. She returned from a trip. I met her at the airport, dumbstruck with adoration and desire at the sight of her. She set down her big suitcase and gestured to it. “Heave ho,” she said.

Nov 26:

People can be such utter assholes.

Dec 3rd:

[Image ID: page from my notebook consisting of dotted and dashed spirals drawn in black ink]

Dec 12^th:

When people report mystical or transcendent experiences they talk of connection, communion, they talk of a sense of oneness and being part of something larger than themselves. They don’t speak of seeing a cosmos made of numbers or fields or strings. They don’t speak of particles of lifeless matter interacting with other particles of lifeless matter. The universe of physics is not what people have lifechanging visions of.

The universe they report encountering in these experiences is alive, meaningful, aware, more full of significance than the everyday world they had known until then.

As Hazel and his band set out in search of a new home after their warren is destroyed by a housing development, I was gripped by an exciting tale of survival. But Adams enlarges his story with mythology, prophecy, and allusion, elevating the rabbits’ seemingly insignificant journey to epic grandeur. A rabbit fleeing across a field with a dog in pursuit comes to seem as consequential as Achilles chasing Hector around the walls of Troy.

Watership Down was also the first book I’d ever read that had epigraphs. The quotes Adams took from other texts mostly went over my head, but they and the tales that the rabbits told one another within the novel both hinted at a mysterious truth that has captivated me ever since: What are stories made of and what does one find in them? Other stories.

It’s stories all the way down.

This was my introduction to the imaginative mental universe that we humans built around ourselves and that we live inside, existing not only in physical reality but also as narrativized participants in a vast ecosystem of entangled, mutating, competing, cross-pollinating stories. I call it the storyverse.

Watership Down expanded my consciousness in yet another way. Over the years critics have called the book a political allegory, a retelling of the Aeneid, a patriarchal, anti-feminist fantasy, and so on. Few of these commentators appear to have noticed the novel is also about rabbits. And that these rabbits live in a world dominated by another species. In other words, Watership Down is an ecological text.

For Hazel and his companions humans remain peripheral figures of menace, their incomprehensible habits and tools almost always harmful. As rabbits in the novel suffer and die horribly by way of human devices such as snares and poison gas, I shared their bewildered endurance of us. For the first time I became aware that you could, at least in your imagination, step outside of being a human and see your own species as something strange. As an antagonist. A rabbit has a life all its own in a rabbit-centric cosmos, a reality alien to me in which I appear as some sort of peripheral thing. The stranger in the field is me.

Watership Down revealed this to me decades ago, but it kept the knowledge comfortably distant, under the guise of fiction. Now, though, that larger truth has stepped outside the frame of its story and into my own.

The trees and the rabbits and me all exist as sort-of-knowable things to one another, embodied beings inside larger things, like our local biome, and an even larger thing we call climate change. Like the storyverse, it’s a something so vast and complex and spread out in time and space that no one can entirely grasp it. Eco-philospher Timothy Morton has a word (and concept) for entities like this: the hyperobject.

“A hyperobject,” Morton explains, “could be the biosphere, or the Solar System … [or] Styrofoam, or the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism” (Morton Hyperobjects 1). The salient hyperobject of Morton’s book, and our current existence, is global warming (he prefers this term to the more commonly used climate change, which because it sounds more “natural” lets us off the hook). We can only ever catch glimpses or fragments of this terrifying thing at any one time. It moves through our reality on a scale that is already beyond us.

(As a fiction writer I’ve found the idea of a hyperobject good to think with. In my recent novel The Book of Rain there’s a forbidden zone called “The Park”—the site of an environmental catastrophe where eerie, unpredictable dangers lurk. If you read the novel and The Park left you baffled, that’s good—it’s my attempt to imagine a hyperobject).

Back to the trees and the rabbits and me, existing as things inside this bigger thing. We were woven on the same biochemical loom. We breathe the same pollutant-laced air. The elements and contaminants that cycle through the rabbit also cycle through me.

It took me many years to see it, but Watership Down had something else to teach me, about those few fraught acres traversed by Hazel and company, laid with hidden traps and poisons and incomprehensible intentions. As a young reader I thought I was standing outside of these fields, safely looking in. Turns out it’s where we all live.

***

Author’s note: an earlier version of this essay formed part of a longer “animanifesto”, published in Hazlitt Magazine.

[Image ID: Black rabbit in a field, Watership Down inspired art by ShanaPatry on Etsy France]

A dog snoozes on a sofa in a dark room. Outside in the night a siren wails.

A smartphone lying on the sofa beside the dog begins to buzz. The dog raises his head, and looks around, listens, sniffs. There’s a soft slow creak from a wall or a floorboard. We see a lamp illuminating a shelf of books that are stacked with spines inward so the titles can’t be seen (why is the light pointed at the books? why are they faced inward?). We see a television screen filled with static “snow.” (Do TVs still have static? It must be an old set). Finally we see that there’s someone in the room with the dog—a man sitting hunched and silent at the other end of the sofa, his long hair fallen over his face. Disconcerting as this unexpected figure is to us, his presence doesn’t seem to bother the dog. It’s something else in the room, something we can’t see, that’s disturbing him.

Then we see blood dripping onto the phone’s screen. It’s spilling from the man’s mouth.

So begins the recent horror film Good Boy, directed by Ben Leonberg. (That the director’s last name is nearly the name of a dog breed feels perfect). In this wordless opening sequence we’re introduced to the protagonist, Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever—in reality Leonberg’s own dog—and his hapless owner, Todd.

Indy was the reason I had to see this movie, despite not being a big horror fan. (It’s not the horror that turns me off, it’s that most movies in this genre are just plain bad movies). Only a handful of feature films that I know of have ever told a story from a dog’s point of view—or any animal’s other than a human’s, for that matter. Having recently published my own dogcentric novel, I was more than a little curious to find out how a movie would attempt something similar.

As a horror movie Good Boy leans heavily on atmospheric lighting, dark rooms, eerie music, nighttime thunderstorms, and other tried-and-tested conventions of the genre. Its scares are familiar scares, so there isn’t much new or innovative about the film in that regard. What makes Good Boy unique and worth seeing is its unusual perspective.

It’s Indy we follow through the film, not Todd. The camera stays close to the dog, to his “level” of interaction near the ground, following him and showing us what he sees, hears, senses. Even what he dreams about. Todd and the other human characters generally remain in the background or not fully in the frame, their faces rarely seen in focus. What we learn about them comes from overheard conversations that Indy is present for, even if he doesn’t understand what’s being said.

This is how we learn that Todd has a chronic lung disease, hence the blood in the first scene. After a stay in the hospital Todd decides, inexplicably, to hole up alone in his deceased grandfather’s remote, unoccupied old farmhouse. (Maybe Todd is in hiding because he can’t pay his hospital bill, and this is actually a film about the horrors of the American health care system). Todd’s sister Vera phones him often, worrying he’ll be too isolated at the farmhouse if he needs medical help. She also reminds him that the house is cursed. Haunted. Staying there is a very bad idea.

Todd, typically for people in horror movies, doesn’t heed this sensible advice. He brings Indy with him to live at the farmhouse, and almost immediately the dog becomes aware of a shadowy presence that his human owner can’t sense. A presence that turns out to have malevolent intentions towards Todd.

A familiar device in horror is the handy “expositional” character who explains what the supernatural threat is, what it wants, and how to fight it. This reassures us that there’s an explanation for the inexplicable, and a way to defeat it, even if the hero doesn’t always win in the end. In Good Boy, however, there is no Handy Explainer. Just like poor Indy, we’re thrown into an unsettling situation with very little context and no accounting for the unknown terror stalking Todd.

The result was that I’ve rarely felt quite as hopeless about a protagonist’s chances as I did for Indy. He’s confused and frightened, but he can’t fight this incorporeal thing with teeth and claws, and he can’t communicate what he’s experiencing to his owner. Todd seems oblivious to the threat, and he even becomes angry at Indy’s increasingly distraught behaviour, eventually chaining him up outside. And so, loyal Indy is powerless and truly alone against his antagonist, to a degree few main characters ever are.

It’s in this way that Good Boy becomes something more than a standard horror movie. By staying close to Indy’s point of view, the film invites us to imagine the inner life of a different species. Indy’s isolation and lack of a voice evoke, in the film’s most effective moments, what it might be like to be a dog in a human world, constrained by another animal’s incomprehensible rules. Indy’s inability to express himself is itself a powerful expression of his creaturely solitude.

I call this solitude “creaturely” because all animals, even humans, know this state. Each one of us inhabits an interiority that can never be fully shared with others. There’s a melancholy in this existential condition that the film’s sombre visuals beautifully capture. Even the “blank” books and the TV static in the first scene work as visual metaphors of the inexpressibility of the solitary self. One of the purposes of storytelling is of course to cross that gap between ourselves and others, so we can imagine what it might be like to be someone else. By fostering empathy stories can help us feel less alone.

Interestingly, as I watched Good Boy I found my empathy for the likeable dog hero extending to the “star” of the movie himself, the real Indy: the director’s Duck Tolling Retriever of the same name. It struck me that the central actor in the film is not actually an actor. He’s a dog responding to cues, treats, and even props that the director employed to get him to behave as required for the story. This Indy has no idea he’s playing the role of heroic loyal companion protecting his owner from an evil supernatural entity. His “performance” is innocent of intent. When he startles at a noise, he’s really startled. Much like the Indy within the world of the film, he lacks agency and he’s in the dark about what’s going on.

But what, in the world of the film, is actually going on? Another of Good Boy’s strengths is in the interpretive ambiguity it opens up. Todd’s ongoing bouts of illness seem to summon the entity, or perhaps they’re provoked by its presence. Either way, we’re invited to ponder a relationship between Todd’s precarious health and these menacing visitations. The film’s visual iconography, as well—the autumnal setting, a nearby graveyard, animal bones scattered in the woods—suggests another, not so otherworldly way we might understand the threat to Todd.

As for Indy, all he knows is that something is threatening to take his beloved owner away. Something that, as a dog, he has no name for and perhaps no concept of. But Indy can’t communicate his fear to Todd, and Todd, although he talks to Indy all the time in the chummy way dog owners do, as if they’re having a conversation, can’t really communicate with him either. Whatever is coming for Todd, it isn’t an experience man and dog can share. Maybe it’s something that no two sentient beings, each locked in their own creaturely solitude, can truly share.

[Image ID: Still from the film Good Boy (2025) showing Indy the dog happily being carried on his owner’s back]

I scrambled to rescue Eco’s encyclopedic conspiracy-theory satire while it was still only partly submerged, but then curiosity took over. I sat and watched as the thing absorbed the soapy water like a sponge, and sank. I’d never seen a book get completely immersed in water before. What would happen?

Afterwards I set Eco’s tome out to dry somewhere, naively expecting it might return to a more or less normal shape. It didn’t. The book blossomed out into an enormous paper flower with stiff wavy petals, like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in three dimensions.

Like the decayed and defaced Book of Mazarbul in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (“slashed and stabbed and partly burned”) the paperback was now only partially readable. The warped pages resisted being pried apart. They could no longer fulfill their function. This was less a book than an artifact.

For a while I kept this monstrosity, like a kind of accidental work of art. Its strangeness appealed to me. But it was still just a damaged book, and eventually I got tired of looking at it. Books that have been damaged by neglect—coffee-stained, bent out of shape, dog-eared, infused with cigarette smoke, left to bleach in the sun—distress me, probably because for me reading a printed book is not just a mental activity but a physical pleasure: I read in part to enjoy the look and feel of crisp, clean paper; the smell of ink and binding; the comforting heft of a book in the hand; the subtle auditory satisfaction of turning or riffling the pages.

And maybe this waterlogged paperback bothered me because it was an accelerated reminder of a truth about all books, that they’re fragile in nature.

A physical book has a lifespan. This might be a very long lifespan but the elements are always working away at it. Decay begins the moment a book is put together. We delay the inevitable for as long we can by keeping our books indoors. Take a book outside and it becomes even more fragile, in nature.

Sun, rain, humidity, soil, dust, sand, insects and other paper-chewing critters: they all take their toll on a book exposed to the elements.

I wonder if the mass market paperback was in part a response to this fact: its purpose was not only to be affordable by the reading masses, but also to concede the battle to nature from the start. Cheaper, acid-based paper, flimsy covers and glued spines, assembly-line construction: all of this is an admission that decay is coming for our books, so we might as well make them fragile and disposable to begin with. And a book that cost you only a couple of bucks to buy (decades ago, I mean, during the so-called “paperback revolution”) wouldn’t seem as big a loss if it got damaged, as would a hardcover that cost a lot more.

Maybe. In practice this built-in disposability doesn’t take into account that even a cheap paperback can be loved. I first read many of the books that are touchstones for me in mass market paperback editions. I still have many of these paperbacks. In later years I acquired new, nicer, sturdier editions of some of these personal classics, but often when I decide to re-read a beloved book, I’ll often go back to the old paperback that was my first encounter with it. The physical form that the story was packaged in has become as meaningful to me as the story itself. My old Penguin Classics edition of Moby-Dick is in really rough shape now, but I handle it with reverence, as if it’s a piece of the Pequod itself that’s somehow washed up here in the real world.

Books are more like experiences than objects. Maybe even more like people, since we’re also fragile in nature, and impermanent by design. We are physical books containing our own history. The elements will swiftly take us apart too if we spend too much time in them unprotected. Our existence as living things was never meant to go on forever, anyhow.

It comforts me to think I’m wearing out along with my books. Maybe that’s really why I cherish them so much.

[Image ID: a still from Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest, 2010]

Anyone want to play Cards Against Humanity?

No?

Okay, how about Dirty Charades?

No.

What Do You Meme? Secret Hitler? Drunk Stoned or Stupid?

No, no, and nope.

Okay. Okay. I get it. Same old. Let’s try something else. Something new.

Hmm. Let me see...

I’ve got it. Listen up, people. See this hamper? Purses, wallets, ID, smartphones, smartwatches, smart anything. Into the hamper. No exceptions. Cough ‘em up, folks. In they go. G’bye. That’s it.

Now, take something you’ve still got on your person, and give it to someone else. Anything, doesn’t matter. Comb, hand sanitizer, crumpled ball of facial tissue, earring, nose stud, bag of weed. Whatever. If you feel resistance to giving a thing away, that’s the best thing to give away. Just do it.

I mean it. Don’t think about it. Do it, right now.

At the same time, accept whatever’s being offered to you by somebody else. No turn-downsies. Take what you’re given without hesitation. These are the rules. Every game has rules.

Now do the same with something you’re wearing. Shirt, sock, tie, hat, bra, whatever. Take it off and give it to somebody else. When somebody hands you a piece of their clothing, take it and put it on.

Doesn’t matter if it’s too big or too small or it’s just not your style at all, find a way to wear it.

Keep doing this with your clothing and personal items, giving away and accepting, with as many others as possible.

Do it until there’s less left of the things you came with than the things you’ve acquired.

Some of your things, you might be thinking, exist in a kind of ambiguous state, like eyeglasses, rings, hearing aids, false teeth, prosthetic body parts. Are they personal items or are they YOU?

Doesn’t matter. Give them away.

Forget about getting your stuff back. Some of it may return to you randomly during this process. If it does, pass it on again. Whatever happens just keep stuff in circulation until it feels time to stop.

Great. Now that that’s done, time for a break. Find a quiet corner and examine all your new stuff.

Based on what you find, invent a different name for yourself. Any name. Go with your gut or pick a name you’ve always liked and wished your parents had named you. Or choose the name of someone famous.

Now go up to someone you don’t know all that well and introduce yourself with the name of this fictional self you’ve just made up. Have a conversation with this other person who is also using a different, invented alias.

If the person you’re talking to happens to be displaying something that belonged to you, don’t claim it. Just comment on it, ask them where they bought it, let them know if it compliments them.

Tire quickly of this labour-intensive exercise. For most of us it’s hard work trying to be someone else. Almost as hard as trying to be ourselves.

So stop doing that. Take a few deep breaths. Forget your new name. Forget your old name. You’re not anybody in particular.

Nice, isn’t it?

Now pretend to be something else, something in nature that isn’t a human being.

A dog, a sunflower, a river, a cloud of spores from a burst puffball mushroom.

There. Doesn’t that feel even better? You don’t have to perform human anymore, with all the tricky social smarts and tedious etiquette that requires.

Such a fucking relief.

Okay, now pass around this pad of sticky notes and pencils. Write what you are on a sticky note, and stick it somewhere on your person. This is so that you don’t have to talk anymore if you don’t want to. At least not like a human.

Got your sticker on? Good. Drift around the room and bump up against the other non-human entities. Don’t speak to them in human. Just be whatever non-human thing you are now.

No, don’t get hung up on the labels. They’re just there to help you identify what everyone else is. They’re a convenience, not reality. Okay?

Good.

Encounter another non-human, look at their label, and imagine a way that you connect with whatever they are. For example, if you’re a dog, how will you connect with someone who is a mud puddle, or a tree? When you find a connection, no matter how tenuous, don’t state it or explain, just attach yourself to that other non-human being.

Shoulder to shoulder is fine, yes, or in whatever way seems most appropriate. Or let them attach to you however they like. Like maybe you’re a mountain and you don’t move much—it’s okay to let them come to you.

Stay attached to the other non-human as the two of you continue to circulate. Others will come up and find their own connections with you or the other non-human you’re now attached to, or both. They will join you.

Two will become several. Soon everyone will be attached to someone else, to everyone else.

The party will morph into a huddle, a colony, a superorganism.

Let it.

Yes. Yes. That’s the spirit. Here we go.

Get closer, non-human things. Squeeze tighter. Beyond group hug. Beyond Twister. Beyond orgy. Push against the old comfortable boundaries and feel them dissolving. You, me, them ... vanishing into us.

Keep going. Even further. Feel the resistance between selves and electrons that prevents objects from ever really touching, and ignore it.

And now there’s no stopping it, is there, we couldn’t pull back if we wanted to, we’re beyond the point of no return, beyond label, name, history, we feel another pull taking over, the attracting, all-embracing force we once knew but left behind, the power that was there secretly all this time, for all time, that held us all, that was us all, before One became Many.

Merge. Merge. Into the One. Into the All.

Now ignite and become a star.

*

Note: The post subtitle riffs on the often-quoted line from Kafka’s 1904 letter to his friend Oskar Pollak: “A book should be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us”

The semiotician and bestselling novelist Umberto Eco, who amassed a collection of over 30,000 books in his home library, famously spoke of the importance of unread books. He hadn’t read all or even most of the books on his shelves, but for Eco that was exactly the point. In his view a collection of unread books is a valuable research tool—one day you just might need that one book you bought ten years ago and never got around to reading. Unread books are also a reminder to stay intellectually humble—they are mute signs of all the things you don’t yet know.

I’ve got plenty of unread books on my shelves, and plenty of ones I have read, either once or multiple times. As a writer as well as a reader, I find my bookshelves serve a purpose beyond just storage, and even beyond Eco’s lovely idea of a research tool or “antilibrary.” The shelves of books in almost every room in my house have become extensions of who I am, physical manifestations of my lifelong journey as a reader and writer.

I like to think I have accreted these packed shelves around me the way a mollusk grows its shell out of itself in the course of time. And I like being this shelled creature. Life is less hectic for us book mollusks. Quieter. We have solitude for thinking, and a place to dream.

For me, going to a café or library to write is like leaving my protective shell. Deprived of my armour of inked paper and bindings I feel naked and vulnerable. Even my thinking feels different—slower and “thinner”, as if I’ve left half of my brain at home. My head even feels somehow more exposed to the air, like my bookshelves are a kind of outer skull, just as important as my actual cranium for keeping my cerebral matter intact.

But these books on the shelves are more than just a lifeless carapace. They feel like living things to me.

No, they don’t move around on their own (at least I don’t think so, although more than once I’ve gone to the space on the shelf where I know I put a certain book, only to find it isn’t there). No, they don’t grow or self-propagate—their numbers increase only in the usual way, by the pleasurable act of going out and buying more books. And no, they don’t seem to respond to stimuli like light or sound. They’re silent and motionless, but still they emit a feeling of teeming life just barely contained between their covers. All I have to do is go over to the shelf, take down a book, open it and start reading—and sure enough, this inanimate object in my hand becomes warm and alive.

So if one’s books are living things, then it follows that the bookshelves they inhabit constitute an environment. An ecosystem.

At my house it’s a pretty chaotic ecosystem. I don’t alphabetize my books, nor do I arrange them by size, shape, author, or—God help us—by colour.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There are a few somewhat organized regions scattered throughout this ecosystem, for efficiency’s sake. The shelf of books about writing, for example. I also have a couple of Tolkien shelves and one of dog books. The shelf of Penguin Classics paperbacks is my only concession to spinal uniformity: each serious black spine in the series has a white stripe near the bottom, but these stripes don’t line up perfectly with one another when the books are stacked in a row. The result looks to me like a playful coexistence of order and disorder.

Within these few shelves of books grouped by topic or series, I don’t do any further organization. It would be difficult to maintain a consistent arrangment anyhow, since these are the shelves from which I’m most often taking books down and adding more.

Meanwhile, outside of such rare oases of order, the rest of my home library is a crowded, overgrown jungle of books of all shapes and sizes and contents, and I like it that way.

Sure, this randomness is inconvenient as hell. I’m constantly going on time-consuming safaris for a particular volume whose location I thought I knew but now can’t find, or at least can’t see, camouflaged as it may be by the simple fact that it’s in a close-packed crowd of others of its kind.

But these book searches, even if they take up an hour and end with me frustratingly unable to track down the book I want, are never futile. They give me the valuable opportunity and excuse to browse my own collection. During these searches (punctuated with muttered curses and head-scratchings) I will always come across books I’d forgotten I own, or books I really should read again one day, or books that remind me of who I’ve been as a reader and a writer, or who I aspire to be. I sometimes hit on a book that isn’t the one I was looking for but that is even better for whatever purpose sent me surfing spines in the first place. More often than not some other book will catch my eye and I’ll start reading it right then and there, the search and the work that sent me on the search forgotten.

Are your your teeth on edge yet, you organized bibliophiles? If so, you might not want to hear that I don’t just allow this disorder to exist, I cultivate it.

I’m constantly moving books around, on a whim. When I take one down, I’ll almost always put it back somewhere else. When new books come into the house (pretty nearly a daily occurrence, to the dismay of my long-suffering spouse) they go wherever I feel like I want them to go. A few days later, when I’ll want that new book so I can read it, I’ll often have trouble remembering where I put it. Or weeks or months later I’ll stumble across the new purchase, having completely forgotten I bought it in the first place, and in some cases having already bought another copy.

All this biblio-bedlam has a purpose, and that is to keep my library wild.

These shelves are more than a shell, or even an ecosystem. To me they are a precious, fragile sanctuary of meaning and wonder in a world becoming more and more crowded with … well, with not books.

A marsh gives way to a golf course. A meadow where foxes used to romp is bulldozed for a yet another soulless shopping plaza. Spruce woods get chopped down to build new subdivisions of big show-offy energy-wasting houses, then the subdivisions are christened Spruce Heights, while fewer and fewer of the houses in them will end up housing any books at all.

On those rare occasions when our species shows a little sanity, we realize we need to save what wilderness we still can, and so we establish preserves and parks. We recognize that the unpredictable wildness of a living, unstripmalled environment is a good thing, because this chaos is life. The wild is openness, creativity, possibility.

It’s for this reason that I like to think of my cluttered bookshelves as a wilderness preserve and try to keep them that way. Whether the books are read or unread or reread, I want my home library to be far bigger than me, and I don’t mean in terms of sheer numbers. I want this untidy gathering of books to evade my desire for containment and mastery. When we visit a natural area, what we’re really after is a disruption of the familiar. A transcendent experience: to feel ourselves part of something larger and more alive than we allow ourselves to be most of the time. That’s what our bookshelves can be for us, too.

When I can’t get to the actual wilderness, I can still go to my bookshelves. If I never know quite what will happen there or what I might discover, then the books are doing their job.

Read my novel Wolf, Moon, Dog, a fable about history’s Good Boy.

Well, gosh.

The email sender, someone I didn’t know named Marie J. Parker, had reached out to me about my recently-published novel Wolf, Moon, Dog. This was a nice surprise and quite flattering.

Then I stopped and read the opening sentence again. “… begins not just a fable of survival…”

Was there a word missing? Shouldn’t it be something like “begins not just with a fable of survival”? The sentence didn’t quite hang together. Well, maybe in the rush of putting their feelings into words, Marie Parker hadn’t been too careful with grammar.

I looked at the subject line of the email again: “Where wolves become memory, and memory becomes love.” Followed by two emojis that certainly seemed related to my book:

Well okay, yes, my novel begins with a wolf named Wolf in the Ice Age, kicked out of his pack and forced to team up with these strange new creatures called humans, thereby becoming the first dog. From that precarious beginning, Wolf goes on to live many lives as a dog in different times and places. And he does come to love some of the humans he meets along the way.

So … “where wolves become memory, and memory becomes love” could be a very poetic way of decribing what happens in the novel. This Marie Parker had a very lush, mystical way of putting things. Not really my cup of tea, but okay. I liked the cute emojis, too.

I read on.

“Reading about this story’s evolution through the ages,” Marie J. Parker continued, “from ancient firelight to the fractured future of climate change I couldn’t help but feel it as an echo of your own body of work: stories that bridge myth and memory, wonder and wilderness.”

More lovely-sounding vague praise that didn’t quite … say anything. “Wonder and wilderness” is pleasingly alliterative, but how does a story “bridge” these things? Do you mean something more like “span”, Marie J. Parker? Encompass? Evoke?

“Your stories,” Marie Parker gushed further, “always seem to circle back to the same, beautiful question: how do we live meaningfully in a world that keeps reinventing itself? Wolf, Moon, Dog feels like your most tender answer yet.”

How do we live meaningfully in a world that keeps reinventing itself…

Was this really the beautiful question that my stories always circle back to? I hadn’t seen it that way before. Maybe that really was the underlying question of everything I’ve written. Or maybe it was the underlying question in everything anyone has ever written.

“I’m Marie J. Parker,” Marie J. Parker went on, “and I run a book-review circle that highlights novels which expand our idea of what ‘connection’ means between people, places, and even species. I’d love to feature your work and share how this story turns the simple act of companionship into something mythic, a testament to empathy, survival, and time itself. Your writing reminds readers that even across lifetimes, love still recognizes its own scent.”

Love still recognizes its own scent.

Love’s scent?

Wow, Marie J. Parker was really reaching for a canine metaphor there. As if she knew that the word Dog was in the title of my novel, and not much more.

What is love’s scent, Marie J. Parker, and why is it important that love should continue to recognize it? Was love somehow, across lifetimes, in danger of losing the ability to recognize its own scent? Just what does love smell like, Marie J. Parker? Do you know? I don’t, but I do recognize your scent now, even if it took me a while to identify the odor, which you disguised with a lot of perfumed generalities.

And so I know, Marie J. Parker, that you are actually nobody at all. Or rather, you are a mash-up of reams of nice-sounding bad writing plucked from the internet and used to train an AI to say beautiful, hollow things, in order to flatter writers like me into replying, in the hope of getting my books featured in a book-review circle, which would of course require the payment of a small fee… I know you’ve never read my book, Marie J. Parker. You can steal it, but you can’t actually read it.

But you did pose a very important question, Marie J. Parker, even if you don’t really understand the question yourself. It’s not a beautiful question, as you so eloquently put it, but it is an urgent one.

How do we live meaningfully in a world that keeps reinventing itself?

How do we continue to recognize and share meaning in a world where machines are working busily 24/7 to empty language of meaning and feed us aggreggated goop?

One way to do that, it occurs to me, is to keep paying careful, critical attention to the words we use, and that AI uses. AI knows—or its creators do—that our human need for meaning, for things to make sense, can be hijacked by our desires—if a bunch of words feel like they come from the heart we might not look too closely at what they’re actually saying. We’ll ignore the scent of bullshit (disguised as the scent of love) and reach for the feeling. And as AI continues to pump out aggregated goop it will become harder for us to find and recognize meaning, and so we will become ever more desperate for it, and fall more easily for empty words that seem to promise it.

So I thank you for your kind message, Marie J. Parker. I thank you for saying nothing at all in so many flowery vaporous words that attempted to cloud my brain like sweet perfume. The result of your admiring note is that you got me thinking.

At least that’s still something I can do that you can’t.

This is an excerpt from my new novel, Wolf, Moon, Dog. The book tells the story of an outcast wolf named Wolf, who throws in his lot with humans and becomes the first dog, way back the Ice Age. As the tale continues Wolf goes on to live many lives throughout history, from ancient Egypt to the space race, as I explore the multifaceted ways that human and canine have lived together, not always in harmony. In the early chapters of the novel dog and human can talk to one another, but as time goes by and Homo sapiens become distanced from the natural world, speech between us and Canis familiaris becomes more difficult.

In the excerpt I’ve chosen to read here, Wolf lives with a woman named Anna who has bought a pack of those recordable dog talk buttons so that she can better communicate with her canine friend; however, things don’t work out quite the way she expected.

If you’d like to hear a professional voice actor read the novel, it’s available from Audible, read by Peter Outerbridge. The novel is also out now from Random House Canada in hardcover and as an ebook.

Thanks for listening, and let me know how I did!

The puppy was only seven months old when it died. Analysis of its bones showed that for at least ten weeks of its short life it had suffered from severe canine distemper, a viral infection that causes fever, vomiting, seizures, and eventually death. Such an illness would have left the puppy unable to survive without sustained human care, which means it was nursed through weeks of sickness before dying and being buried along with the man and the woman. Were they the ones who cared for the dog? We don’t know, but it’s strongly suggested by the simple fact that the puppy was buried with them.

The Bonn-Oberkassel grave is an important find because it gives us the earliest solid evidence that humans weren’t just keeping dogs for work, but caring for them as companions. The burial of this puppy alongside people hints that by this time in our past, our relationship with dogs had moved beyond a utilitarian hunting partnership to become a bond of friendship, moral duty, and love.

Archaeology usually tells us about tools, weapons, survival. The Bonn-Oberkassel puppy tells a story off the beaten path: a tale of tenderness in the midst of hardship. In these cold, ancient bones, science has given us a surprising glimpse of people in the Ice Age pausing in their hard lives to feed and protect a sick puppy. They buried it with them, not apart, suggesting that in their story of who we are, the dog was included.

In my new novel Wolf, Moon, Dog (out Sept 30 from Random House Canada) I wanted to explore that long trail of pawprints trotting alongside footprints, tracing our bond with dogs from the first time we shared a fire with another species to the present day. To imagine what it has meant, and what it still means, for human and dog to walk together.

I see stories as living things: entangled, growing, competing, cross-pollinating, adapting. They form ecosystems that shape how we see the world and how we live inside it. In my essay writing I want to explore some of the tangled threads of this fascinating storyverse we all live inside of.

That hasn’t changed. “Story ecology” is still the name I give my writing practice. But for the newsletter itself, I wanted something … well, wilder.

Story Ecology comes across a little science-y, I think, like a university seminar, and that’s not really the feeling I want for this space. What I write, or want to write, is usually more playful and anarchic than that. It’s a creative practice that involves whimsy, mind-wandering, taking odd perspectives, and standing old stories on their heads. When I notice stories that are so familiar we don’t even see them as stories anymore, my instinct is to “rewild” them.

Like Max in Maurice Sendak’s classic Where the Wild Things Are, I like to dress stories up in a wolf suit and let them make mischief.

So: welcome to Where the Wild Stories Are.

It seems to me that even us world-weary grown-ups are like Max. We live in our imagination more often that we like to admit to ourselves. We all wish we could put on a wolf’s skin and run amok, at least some of the time.

That’s the storytelling spirit I want here: writing that roams free, that surprises, that sometimes behaves badly.

This doesn’t mean my essays will suddenly grow horns and claws. The kinds of things I’ve always written here—explorations of myth and folktale, moments with animals and nature, notes on reading, writing, and the storytelling process, glimpses of literature’s marvelous power—will continue. What changes is the frame: the promise I want to make to you, the reader.

This new name also feels like the right banner for promoting my upcoming novel, Wolf, Moon, Dog (out Sept 30 from Random House Canada). It’s a fable that reimagines how wolves became dogs, and how our stories have run alongside theirs for thousands of years. I’ll be sharing some excerpts from the novel as we get closer to publication day.

A name is a kind of story. Story Ecology promised analysis, a systematic look at how stories work. I hope Where the Wild Stories Are makes for a different invitation: come with me on an adventure into the story woods and let’s see what we find.