Interviewed by Stefan Labbé

J.B. MacKinnon is a non-fiction writer steeped in deep-dive book research and a fair share of shoe-leather reporting.

His most recent book, The Once and Future World, was a national bestseller and won the U.S. Green Prize for Sustainable Literature. MacKinnon is widely known for co-writing The 100-Mile Diet (with partner Alisa Smith) which chronicles the personal dietary experiment that helped spark the local food movement. His first book, Dead Man in Paradise won the Charles Taylor Prize for best literary non-fiction. The story traces the assassination of his uncle, a priest gunned down in the Dominican Republic as the country struggled under the heel of dictatorship.

When I first met MacKinnon, he struck me as a freelancer’s freelancer. Part of that has to do with the fact that he has won 11 National Magazine Awards and has written for publications ranging from National Geographic to The New Yorker. But he has also avoided the milieu of a traditional newsroom. Instead, he seeks that clean break from day to day life, slipping away to his broken-down cabin in Northern British Columbia or punctuating his day with rock climbing or birdwatching.

Naturally, I asked MacKinnon for an interview over an outdoor pint. It was December and the nylon awning overhead bulged with winter rain. He agreed on the spot, as long as it didn’t interfere with a whirlwind of reporting trips to Japan, Iceland and Arizona. Several weeks later, we swapped rain and beer for sun and tea in a lazy café in central Vancouver. 

How did you get started in this kind of work?

When I went to university I was looking around for something extracurricular to do. The student newspaper seemed intuitively appealing to me, so I signed up with The Martlet and I just really enjoyed it. I did more work for the newspaper than I did for my classes.

I never learned how to do journalism, so from the get-go I would over-report everything. I mean quite literally, among my first stories for The Martlet, I would be trying to get comments from the ministers responsible for the areas I was writing about, or the premier. I mean, ridiculous—things that I would never do today. And sometimes, oddly enough, I actually got them. I would just follow the stories as far up the line as I could take them every time and then write them way too long. So I was feature writing pretty much immediately.

And then two years into university I had a mix-up with my student loans and I wasn’t able to go back for my third year. Circumstances forced me to try to turn freelance writing into a paying gig. It didn’t pay well, but it worked and that was the end of my university career.

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Interviewed by Geoffrey Gideon

I was introduced to Wade Davis through the University of British Columbia. I was a student in the first introduction to anthropology class he would teach at UBC, and his lectures were unlike anything I experienced in academia. I remember one class we were learning about the complexity and intelligence of the Polynesian Wayfinders, a culture that perfected navigation well before European contact. Sitting in front of me were two twenty year-olds. The first couple of classes they were the backwards baseball cap wearing students who would rather talk about their weekend plans than listen. And in fact that’s how the class started, but midway through the lecture they stopped talking and for the rest of the term they listened.    

Those students never stood a chance. Wade Davis has lectured at the American Museum of Natural History, the Royal Ontario Museum, given numerous Ted Talks, and delivered the CBC Massey lectures. He’s also the author of twenty books. Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest received the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize, the top award for literary nonfiction in the English language.

Not only can Wade Davis speak in a non-academic fashion, but between 1999 and 2013 he served as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and is the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at UBC. In 2016 he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.

I sent Wade an email thanking him for his class and asking him for an interview. A couple days later he responded and happily agreed to speak with me about literary non-fiction, anthropology, and even Donald Trump.    

How do you select a project? Do you go looking for a story or do the stories find you?

I think Hemingway said the most important credential for a writer to have is something to say that the world needs to hear. He also said famously that anyone who thinks that writing is easy is either a bad writer or a liar. In other words, book projects are always all-consuming and I’ve always found that the thing that gets me through a project is passion, and I mean that in the sense that I really have to care and feel to some extent that I’ve got some mission. This is not something that I think about consciously; it just seems to be the way that it works.

If you look at all the books that I’ve written they’re always driven by a sense of mission, so for example when I came upon voodoo having no previous experience with the African world view I became in a sense outraged at how this religion had been reduced to caricature. There’s no question that that was a motivation that kept me pursuing that subject. At one level it was a scientific investigation but it was also driven by an almost evangelical sense of addressing that wrong and revealing to the world that voodoo was by definition the religion of Africa. That’s why it was so appropriate that the subject that I was studying, zombies, was a phenomenon that had been used in explicitly racist ways to denigrate what is in fact a remarkable religious world view.

Similarly when I wrote the book One River, I was really motivated by a desire to position Schultes in the historical light that he deserved, and Tim Plowman. In fact that book was literally conceived as I stood at the podium at the Field Museum in Chicago delivering a eulogy at Tim’s funeral service. Other books, such as The Wayfinders, were driven by my concern as an anthropologist and trying to draw the world’s attention to the central revelation of anthropology, the idea that every culture has something to say and each deserves to be heard. So all of my books have been driven by some kind of sense of personal mission if you will.

You just never know where that idea is going to come. I mean, the most important book I’ve ever written, and by far the best, is Into the Silence, and that was almost conceived on a whim on the eastern flanks of Everest when I stood on ground higher than anything in North America and looked up at two vertical miles of ice rising on the face of the South Col. And my friend who had brought me to the valley, Dan Taylor, suddenly began to speak of these Englishmen dressed in tweeds who read Shakespeare to each other in the snow at twenty-two thousand feet. And I was always intrigued by the great war and knew a lot about it.

That little whimsical decision to write a book about these men would end up consuming twelve years of my life, but that’s what books are all about. They become measures of your life. When you pass on as a writer I suspect what people will think about is the books, and that’s why books are so powerful. They outlive the author. It’s like when Faulkner was asked what he thought of what Hollywood did to his books and he just points to his bookshelf and says, “They didn’t do anything to my books. They’re not books.”

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Interview by Aliz Tennant

Michael Booth has studied at the world’s most famous cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu, had his book on his family’s food-filled adventure across Japan turned into a NHK World Japanese TV animation and travelled across Scandinavia trying to find the key to their success. 

The award-winning author of five non-fictions books, Booth is also a journalist, broadcaster and speaker, writing predominantly on travel and food. His work has been published in The Guardian, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Times, The Telegraph and Condé Nast Traveller magazine among other publications. He is a correspondent for Monocle magazine and their radio station Monocle 24, reporting from Copenhagen, where he lives with his family. 

His first book Just As Well I’m Leaving provided him with an opportunity to escape Denmark, when he followed Hans Andersen’s travelogue across Europe, making his own adventures on the way. His latest book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People, sees Booth continue to explore his relationship with Denmark and the Nordic countries as he travels to each of them in the hope of understanding their secrets to success, what they think of each other and whether the lifestyles meet up to expectation.

I interviewed Booth via email to ask him to share his secrets to success when it comes to writing.

You worked in television before you began writing for magazines and going back to university to study journalism. Why choose a career in writing?

Television was absolutely awful, a toxic environment, but I stuck at it for a while because I had been brainwashed into thinking it was the job every graduate wanted. Eventually, I realised it just wasn’t ever going to lead me anywhere remotely happy-making. It was only when a friend mentioned that there existed such a thing as a post-graduate course in feature journalism, that I saw a possibility to become the kind of journalist I admired without having to work on a local newspaper reporting on overdue library book scandals and suchlike. I realised that freelance feature writing was a passport literally to the world, and would allow me to butterfly around to whatever subject interested me.

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Interviewed by Clara Chandler

Evelyn C. White is a dual Canadian and American citizen and a resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia. She holds degrees from Wellesley College, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Harvard. Coming from a background in journalism and civic advocacy, she is now a celebrated writer of nonfiction. Her most ambitious project to date was the ten years of research she put into her authorized biography of Alice Walker. Booklist wrote that Alice Walker: A Life (WW Norton, 2004), “meticulously traces and analyzes the stages of Walker’s life, emphasizing the impact on and importance of her literature in American culture.” 

White’s writing is informed by feminism and African American culture, as well as her ceaseless curiosity. She is passionate about ping pong and okra.

I was fortunate to correspond with her by email recently.

At what moment in your childhood/adulthood did you understand that you needed to be a writer? Not so much that you wanted to make money being a writer, but that you were one of the tribe who has to write things down. Where did you go from there? 

I started writing book reviews (of my own volition) while living in Seattle in the late 1970s.  I wasn’t assigned, wasn’t trying to make a name for myself. Would just go into the used bookstore on Capitol Hill and buy a book and write a review. I believe that my first published piece was about The Coming Out Stories, an early gay/lesbian anthology.  Some pioneering feminist publishers in Seattle who’d started Seal Press saw my book reviews (in papers such as the Seattle Gay News) and (long story short) invited me to write the first commercial general market book on the physical and emotional abuse of Black women — Chain Chain Change: For Black Women Dealing with Physical and Emotional Abuse. (In later editions the subtitle changed to “For Black Women in Abusive Relationships.”)

These pioneering feminist publishers took me to what was then called a “fern bar” in Seattle: a quasi-fancy restaurant with fern plants decorating the interior. Before this, I had received a check for $13 for one of my book reviews. That was like magic money as I hadn’t asked for any payment. I can still see the check. It was printed on goldenrod. Anyway, the feminist publishers took me to this bar and showed me the contract for Chain Chain Change. The advance was $500. They gave me a check for $250 immediately after I signed my name. This was even more amazing than the $13 check because I hadn’t written a word. The deal was that I got half of the advance upon signing, half upon delivery. 

I realized then that I had an innate talent for writing, that people would pay me to write, but I had no formal training in journalism. Hence, I decided to go to journalism school. I applied only to Columbia and was accepted. Had I not been accepted, I would have taken it as a cosmic sign that I wasn’t meant to be a reporter.

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Interviewed by Jeri Knopp

Susannah Cahalan got her start in journalism in the summer after junior year, when she got an internship at the New York Post, and worked her way up from grabbing coffee and making photocopies to a general assignment reporter.

One day in early 2009, Cahalan woke up in a strange hospital room, strapped to her bed, under guard, and unable to move or speak. Her medical records from a month-long hospital stay showed psychosis, violence, and dangerous instability. Her New York Times bestselling memoir Brain on Fire chronicles the swift path of her illness and the lucky, last-minute intervention led by one of the few doctors capable of saving her life. As time passed and she moved inexplicably from violence to catatonia, $1-million worth of blood tests and brain scans revealed nothing. The exhausted doctors were ready to commit her to the psychiatric ward, in effect condemning her to a lifetime of institutions, or death, until Dr. Souhel Najjar joined her team. He asked her to draw a simple sketch of a clock, which became key to diagnosing her with a newly discovered autoimmune disease in which her body was attacking her brain.

Also in 2009, Cahalan was the recipient of the Silurian Award of Excellence for the article “My Mysterious Lost Month of Madness,” on which Brain on Fire is based. Her work has also been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, Psychology Today, and Focus, and she still works for the New York Post, now as their books editor.

As a huge fan of Brain on Fire, I emailed Cahalan requesting an interview, and we spoke on the phone shortly afterward.

When did you decide that writing was something that you wanted to pursue?

Probably for as long as I can remember. You know, those are the classes I enjoyed most. I kept journals when I was really a little kid, I still have them.

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