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My first encounter with Michael Crummey was an odd one. He wasn't there. In 1990, I was teaching Memorial University's first-year university English program in Grand Falls, Newfoundland. A student approached me one day after class and said he was from Buchans. He wanted to know if I'd be interested in reading a few poems by a writer from out that way.

"His name's Michael Crummey, sir, and he's really good. I'll bring some of his stuff tomorrow. Maybe you could read it out in class."

The next day, as I read several of Michael's poems to my students, I felt like the top of my head was being taken off with an axe. The last time I felt like that was when I picked up a selection of poems by Theodore Roethke. I wrote Michael a note asking him if he would come and read to my students. Alas, he had returned to Kingston. It would be years before I would meet him in the flesh.

LF:	So, Michael, you look like a little kid.
MC:	So I'm told.
LF:	You're what . . . thirty something?
MC:	Thirty-six.
LF:	When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
MC:	I didn't have any sense of that before my first year university. English wasn't my favourite subject. I did okay in high school but it wasn't something that I loved.
LF:	What subjects interested you?
MC:	None really. Gym. I was into sports. But I did well in high school. In first-year university, we did all poetry that first term, if I remember. And whatever happened there, whatever tweaked . . . I started writing that term.
LF:	Was there a particular poet or a type of poetry that struck your fancy?
MC:	No, a mix of stuff. We had an anthology- British, American, Canadian poetry, from the beginnings to Ondaatje. I would just sit with that and leaf through it, open it anywhere. Read mostly in the modern period. I wasn't ready to be a writer. I don't know why I thought that I could do it.
LF:	Well, it's a gift, isn't it?
MC:	I suppose so. But I did suck for a long time. Years of writing bad stuff.
LF:	But you kept at it. So you were connecting.
MC:	Yeah, something was going on there for me. The actual process of writing I loved from the beginning. That's really interesting.
LF:	Graham Green said he doesn't write novels. He discovers them in his subconscious.
MC:	Is that right? I'm not sure I'd concur with that.
LF:	I think he was pointing out that the subconscious is quite vast. There's so much going on.
MC:	It does feel like a kind of meditation, in the sense that you're concentrating on something that's completely outside of whatever is in front of you. I think writing poetry allows me to access parts of myself that I don't think I would have accessed in any other way.
LF:	Yeah, it's a zen medium, isn't it?
MC:	I think so. Well, at its best. When I'm having the most fun with it, that's what it feels like.
LF:	You once said that the way you best communicate and connect with family and friends and the things that you love is through the medium of poetry. In your "Northern Ontario: Finnish Cemetery" poem there's the line "A father can be a love as difficult as an adopted country/part of him always remains a stranger." Some of your best poems deal with family connections, in particular your relationship with your father. Is there anything else you'd like to say about that sense of connecting… it's such a powerful impetus. Or have you said it all?
MC:	Well, I don't know if you've ever said it all. Family for me is where everything starts and finishes in my writing. For all the stories in Flesh and Blood, probably with one exception, what moves the story is the relationships within a family. Between parents and children, between siblings. And I think that's an odd thing because I grew up in a very functional family.
LF:	Yes, the experience of a perfectly functional family seems to be the exception.
MC:	Yeah. I think so.
LF:	I was about to say, I think the most difficult thing in the world to do is appreciate, really appreciate your family. I think it was Aristotle who said if you want a great book, your theme must be the family. It's all there. Rex Murphy is fond of quoting the famous line about how all families are happy in the same way but different in their dysfunctions.
MC:	Yeah that's Tolstoy, I think. All happy families are essentially the same. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
LF:	Yes, it's dead on, isn't it?
MC:	Yeah and I think coming from a family that was and still is a happy one is an incredibly intense experience . . . . It's amazing to be part of a family like that. And then to see very clearly through the people I've gotten to know as friends and the people I've gotten to love as friends, to see how difficult their relationships with their families can be. And so just about everything I've ever written, even River Thieves, that book started for me with the Peytons, the father and son.
LF:	Yes, I noticed that. I was planning on bringing it up. For me, it was quintessentially a book about communicating or the lack therof, connecting.
MC:	Right.
LF:	I think it was Wittgenstein who said it's a miracle that we communicate a sentence to each other. Would you agree that that's what River Thieves is about?
MC:	Yes. I mean, the complete lack of communication between the Beothuck and the European settlers was really the model for every other relationship in the book. Everybody was miscommunicating or not communicating. And the father and son is a hook for me. Many of the stories in Flesh and Blood turn on the father-son relationship. And I think my relationship with dad, which is a very good one, and always has been, is still the most intense relationship in my life.
LF:	Very often families have no idea what a writer is up to. Are you connecting with the idea of transcending time, that sense of posterity?
MC:	There's something egotistical about the notion of writing for posterity. It's outside my control and should be outside my concern. Why should I care if something I write outlives me? After all, I'll be dead.
LF:	The Halifax writer, George Elliot Clark, says - I'm paraphrasing - that every word is a buffer against time. The writer is buying time with every word. Is that what writers are doing, addressing the future?
MC:	All writers have egos. Egotism fuels most of us. But there's something dangerously egotistical about writing for posterity. I've always been wary of how pompous that notion is. I'd like to say that I'm writing for the past, not the future. I'm trying to find a place in what's gone rather than what's coming. I'm always uncomfortable with the idea of the writing being more important than the people around me. Some writers seem to think that the writing is above or outside the people being written about. But that makes me uncomfortable. For me, real people is what counts. It's the most important thing. Writing is merely a by-product.
LF:	Would you have any advice for young writers, high school, early university students, about poetry or writing in general?
MC:	Read, is the advice I give whenever I'm asked that question. Read, read, read as much as you can and as widely as you can. I don't think there is any other way to learn how to write.
LF:	John McGahern, the Irish writer, addressed a group here a few years ago and he said that there is only reading, when you're reading, you're actually writing, when you're writing, you're reading.
MC:	In a lot of ways I think learning how to write is learning how to read your own material. To be able to see what's working and what's not. To learn how to edit.
LF:	And that just happens.
MC:	I think so, over time. It's something that you pick up.
LF:	Michael, you're essentially a poet. I know people who've reread River Thieves for the sheer love of the language. There's a powerful poetic moment or two in every paragraph. When you started to write, did you begin with poetic pieces?
MC:	Yes. I can remember the first time I sat down to write a poem. That was during my first year at university. Not really understanding what the hell writing was.
LF:	Was the inspiration love or death or the usual subjects?
MC:	I think it was probably the threat of nuclear war… you know… the typical… I was seventeen. I can't remember the details of the poem, thankfully, but it was something along those lines. But in terms of how the poetry translates into the fiction… someone asked me a question about this recently, and I think for me, and I don't know how this came about, but I think in terms of metaphor.
LF:	Yes, because your poetry gets into your fiction all the time and vice versa. A few times reading your poetry, I was reminded of Alden Nowlan and others. But you have a very unique voice.
MC:	Often when I'm writing poetry or fiction I try to show a reader or have a reader see or feel or smell or in some way access a particular scene or thing in a way that he hasn't done before or in a way that makes it clearer to him.
LF:	You cited the BC poet, Tim Bowling, in describing what you hope to achieve. He said: "I want to face the world with so much grace that the world would always know my love of it." In your stories, Flesh and Blood, lives lived above ground in the small Newfoundland mining town, Black Rock, the recurring theme of love comes through. Sometimes often painful love, how it endures in the face of obstacles such as estrangement, exile and misunderstanding. Would you care to comment? How does this tie in to what you've said about Tim Bowling and your notion of why you write?
MC:	Well, I think the reason that Tim's words struck me in a particular way is because there are good writers I don't enjoy reading because it seems to me that they dislike the things they are writing about. Or they look down upon the people and places they are writing about. Or they're exploiting the people and things they are writing about. And that's something that I've never wanted to do in my own writing. I think when I'm writing at my best . . . what I hope I'm doing is honoring the things I'm writing about in some way. Even when they are difficult things. Many of the stories in Flesh and Blood are not about very pleasant things. People aren't particularly happy. But in trying to write about them honestly, I hope what I'm doing is honoring their experience of the world. And the pain that they are experiencing in being in the world.
LF:	That's very beautiful. Something you might hear from someone who's been writing for 110 years. Very powerful. You've always thought that way, obviously.
MC:	Not consciously. But I think that when I look back…
LF:	And that's why writing is a meditation.
MC:	I think so. Yeah.
LF:	Wallace Stevens said that the poet is the priest of the invisible. That's really what you're doing, isn't it? Looking until you see and understand. And trying to best reflect that truth.
MC:	Yeah, I'm thinking now of Lisa Moore's latest book, Open, which is a fabulous book, an incredibly moving book, partly because what each of her stories does is honor the experience of this place, St. John's, the people here. And she's just trying to see it clearly. And speak about it in a way that honors the experience of people who live here.
LF:	Michael, you've had quite a few jobs on the way to becoming a writer. What did you find most interesting? Was there anything you felt tuned up your antennae?
MC:	I don't know if there was anything in particular. You know the old cliche, a writer's always working. I think that's true for me. Everything that happens around me feels like it could wind up being used. You know, especially if I'm working on something pretty intensely. I remember Carol Shields talking about this, how when she's working on something, it seems like the exact thing she needs comes along. And she's not airy-fairy enough to think of that as the world offering it to her or anything. To her, it's because her antennae are up and she's looking for exactly what she needs.
LF:	The foremost Jungian scholar, James Hillman, in his book, The Soul's Code, talks about each child being born into the world with a daemon, a great gift, its raison d'etre. And the role of the parent is to identify that gift and to nurture it. Your parents must be amazing people.
MC:	They are. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. The longer I'm alive, the more I realize how lucky we were. I've always known it. But the older I get the more I realize how incredibly lucky I am. I'm not really sure what it was other than the fact that there was never any pressure to be anybody except who we were. But also, we were held to a very high standard. We didn't get away with a lot, if you know what I mean. We were held responsible for our actions but we were allowed to be who we were. I think to my parents that meant that they expected a lot of us.
LF:	Your little book of poems, Emergency Roadside Assistance. The poems are great but the packaging, the marketing was brilliant. Who's idea was that?
MC:	I did that book with my friend, Gary Draper. He and a few friends run Trout Lily Press out of his living room. They just do little books of writing that they like. He said they were interested. And the last thing I came up with was the title. It's almost always the last thing I come up with. When they were ready to put it together he asked if I had any ideas for the cover. I said that I didn't have an idea about what should be on the cover but I thought it should look like something that would come out of a glove compartment. One of those tall narrow books. He called back and said, okay, tall, narrow, bright orange book, no printing on the cover whatsoever. And there's a plastic envelope that the book goes into that simply says Emergency Roadside Assistance.
LF:	Brilliant! People really got a kick out of it. Michael, you've been recognized by the Writer's Alliance of Newfoundland, the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council. You won the inaugural Brownwen Wallace Award for poetry, the Winterset award. You were nominated for the Milton Acorn People's Poetry Award and short listed for the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize. You were runner up for the Prism International Short Fiction Competition. You've appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology. River Thieves was Best Book of the Year at the Toronto SLF and nominated for the Giller Prize. Your stock is soaring right now. You must feel pretty good.
MC:	It's been a good year. Yeah. And it's funny because I've been doing this for a long time, now. Just about twenty years since I started writing. And almost from the beginning it was kind of a vocation. I didn't admit that to myself for a long time but I treated it like that.
LF:	Vocation in the sense that you felt called.
MC:	In the sense that it was what I wanted to devote myself to. I think I knew that whatever I ended up doing in terms of work was going to be just what paid the bills. And what I wanted to do was write.
LF:	That's where your heart was.
MC:	Yeah. But it's only in the last year - really, the last two years - that I've been making a living as a writer. And I never really expected that to happen. But the success of the novel has meant a lot. It means that my name is out there.
LF:	Hard Light is one of my favourite books. The details of the day to day living in the outports as well as fishing the Labrador are powerfully depicted. Several people think Hard Light is your best book. Do you agree?
MC:	Some days. I have felt that at different times. I think part of the reason for that is because of the source material I was working with, which is largely stories told to me by Dad.
LF:	This book is wonderful, especially for our young people, particularly those who do not like to read. High school students and first and second-year university students would love the '32 Little Stories' and the diary of Captain John Froude. It should be on the Atlantic curriculum. The 'Discovering Darkness' section reflects such a deep appreciation of our fishing heritage. To quote Pratt: Of dreams that survive the night, Of doors held ajar in storms. I kept lapping it up. It was such a powerful evocation of Newfoundland. Having that as required reading alongside say, Alistair MacLeod's story, "The Boat" would be a wonderful experience for our youth. In this connection, do you think there's anything special about being a Newfoundland writer? Is being here, writing in this province, special say, in a way it wouldn't be in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia? I mean there's a phenomenon happening. Every time you turn around there's another Newfoundland book being published. There's been quite a harvest of Newfoundland writing the past two or three years. People refer to our musicians and actors and political orators and ask if there's something in the water down here. Do you feel we have something special that other Canadians don't have?
MC:	Yeah. I do. But I'm not very articulate about it. Perhaps it's because we are an island. There is a very unique culture that goes back quite a ways that flavors everything that comes out of here. And I think what we're seeing now is in some ways the modern world finding its way into that old culture. And that combination somehow is creating this incredible hybridization. So it's a kind of writing or music or whatever that is unique to this place but can be taken anywhere in the world. I'll say Lisa Moore again. Because I think that book, Open, is the type of book that will influence writers everywhere else in the country. Because the writing is so good. And because her subject is St. John's in a lot of ways. She's as good a writer as anyone else in the country right now and her subject is completely unique to her. The way that she writes about St. John's and the lives of people here in St. John's is completely unique.
LF:	Well, it's a 500 year history. Before the French and English were fighting it out on the Plains of Abraham, they were duking it out on Signal Hill. Flannery O'Connor once said that if you have history and the Bible you can out-write anyone. I think Newfoundlanders have that for sure.
MC:	Yes, yes they do.
LF:	You mentioned that '32 Little Stories' is based upon tales told you by your aunts and uncles and family members, especially your father. In Newfoundland there's a character in every house. Is your father a character, in the Newfoundland sense of the word? The 'cigarette' poems in arguments with gravity hint that both your father and grandfather are characters, in the true Newfoundland tradition.
MC:	Well, I don't know much about my grandfather. He was an exceptionally hard worker, I know that, and a fairly successful fisherman. But a very very quiet man from what I understand. So, not a character in the way that my dad was, and still is. My dad is a hard case.
LF:	Perhaps you could explain that for the CFA's (Come From Aways).
MC:	Well, you know, a hard case, a hard ticket . . . someone intractable and a prankster. My father is a very shy man, paradoxically. But when he's on, which happens a lot, then he's one of the best storytellers I've ever encountered.
LF:	So you come by it honestly.
MC:	Yeah, yeah. And I think many of the stories in '32 Little Stories' are complete rip-offs. The material, the timing of the stories . . . many of them are funny, funny, funny. Then there's this dark turn at the end, you know. And that's dad. I think dad as a storyteller has been a huge influence on me.
LF:	Several reviewers have referred to the theme of suffering, especially loss in your work. Prior to this interview I called several people and asked what they thought of your work. Many referred to this theme. In "Mom's Blues" you talk about the inevitability of loss, "how even loss can be beautiful if you need it to be." In the poem "Water Birds" you say, "no measure of content could make me love my life as fiercely as learning to live with loss." The disclaimer at the beginning of Salvage announces that it is a book about loss. Robyn Sarah in a review in The National Post, said that while the poems are about loss the title says it all. It's a book about what can be regained, what can be won back. She raved about the George MacBeth poem: "It's a poem you immediately want to read aloud to somebody, a poem one can imagine being reprinted in an anthology fifty years from now." High praise! The ending of the poem is extremely powerful. I was reminded of one of my heroes, Marshall McLuhan, the great communications guru… his last days… how he was reduced to using a child's speak-and-spell toy to communicate after he suffered a stroke. Would you care to comment upon the impetus for this marvelous poem? The inspiration?
MC:	It was a CBC radio documentary, actually, that I heard completely by accident. I'd never heard of MacBeth before. The documentary consisted of an actor reading the poems that MacBeth wrote after he was diagnosed with, I'm not certain what it was, probably Lou Gherig's disease. The poems he wrote as he traveled down that road were interspersed with interviews with his wife. He talked about what it was like for him and for them as he died of that disease. And it was incredibly moving, particularly her story about how they decided it was time for him to go. And as soon as I turned off the radio I started working on this poem, which incidentally, I worked on for years afterwards. There are probably half a dozen poems in the new book (Salvage) that I work with rhyme and meter in a way that I never have before. That was one of the first ones where I made that attempt.
LF:	Ezra Pound once said that technique is the measure of a poet's sincerity.
MC:	Right. But I'm a lazy person. I avoid issues of technique because I'm lazy.
LF:	I guess as you get older and you become more famous and as people respond as they are to your great talent you'll be nudged to work harder at that . . . you'll eye more closely the statue of responsibility.
MC:	Well, I'd like to be nudged. One of the things that I felt after finishing Hard Light was that I'd gone as far as I could with my writing in a particular direction. And I wanted to try something that I hadn't ever tried before. And I did want to pay more attention to craft.
LF:	Your "Blind Willie Johnson" poem reminded me of Baldwin's Sonny's Blues in a couple of ways, in particular how the artist is always trying to make it new, how he's always on the edge, always trying to get as far out there as he can, always looking for the deeper water, always being fearless in trying to find newness.
MC:	Yeah. And I think that's always going to be a challenge. I've said before that writing a novel was an awful experience. It was really difficult and I didn't enjoy myself. But looking back at it now I think one of the reasons I wasn't enjoying myself was because I was constantly having to figure out how to do things I'd never done before. And that's a good thing. If I sit down to write another novel and I don't experience that then I'm probably not pushing myself hard enough.
LF:	Jane Urquhart said of John Steffler's book, The Afterlife of George Cartwright that it moves us to face disturbing questions about our past. The same may be said, perhaps more so, of River Thieves. You'd agree with that, eh?
MC:	Well, I hope so. I don't think I wrote the book with any particular political motive. But I would like to think that it deals with those historical events in a way that would make people consider them more closely. And I hope that they would then look at the way things are today in a different light as well.
LF:	Hearkening back to something you said earlier about the amazing burst of new talent in our province, is it easier living here and being an artist here than say being an artist in Saskatchewan or Toronto?
MC:	I think probably the difference is that, anywhere I've been in the country, there's always a community for the artist, usually consisting of other artists. I think that a place like Saskatoon has a really active arts community. I think the difference here is that the artists' community is much more integrated into the larger community. So it's not this small ghetto of artists shoved off somewhere doing their thing that occasionally gets some national attention.
LF:	A final question or two. One of the things I wanted to chat for a moment about is the phenomenon of the outside writer dropping in and writing. I'm thinking particularly of Proulx's The Shipping News. There's been hostility, some of it quite intense, toward The Shipping News, both the novel and the film. The term cultural appropriation is bandied about in the halls of academe. What generates such hostility, do you think? Is it resentment of the "come from aways," a kind of xenophobic twitch or is it a legitimate response to cultural imperialism?
MC:	Well, I think it could be a combination of all those things. I do feel though that Newfoundland right now is in a different situation. I mean there was a time when it was a fairly accepted notion, in certain circles anyway, that a man couldn't write from a woman's perspective or that a white person could not write about black experience or that straight people couldn't write about being gay. And I think that in some ways that feeling was generated by communities of people who knew their stories hadn't yet been told and were just finding their own voice. So having somebody from the outside come in and start telling those stories when they had their own storytellers who were just in the process of doing that was a loss for them. And that was a way of fighting back against that. And I think that was a fair gambit. And I think you hear that so much less now in terms of white people writing about black experience or men writing from women's experience because they have their storytellers. They're out there and they don't have to feel as protective of those stories. And I think that's what's happening in Newfoundland. There's a sense that we're just finding our voice. And to have somebody come from the outside and do it . . . It's too soon for that for a lot of people.
LF:	Do you think the writer has an ethical responsibility to reflect the community to its liking or does the flag of fiction give him an unbridled freedom?
MC:	Until I read The Bird Artist by Howard Norman I felt that the writer had unbridled freedom. That book changed my tune. I've never been so infuriated by a book. And Howard Norman is a lovely man, I just met him. And I think The Bird Artist was a good book. But I felt it was completely disrespectful to the community it claimed to be set in because it was so un-Newfoundland, at the time. It could have been set anywhere. For example, having all of the people who lived in that community in the early twentieth century, spend most of their time at the local restaurant . . . It's disrespectful, for example, to my father's family. And how they were forced to live in the Newfoundland of the time. Having a Beothuck Indian run the mail boat is disrespectful to the history of what happened to those people. And I have to be careful here because I take so many liberties, with history, for example, in River Thieves. But in Howard Norman's case, the liberties he took served no purpose other than that they were useful to him. So yes, I think that the writer does have some obligation and responsibility. On the other hand, I really respect what Wayne Johnston did in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Many didn't. For me, the liberties that he took there served the purpose of his speaking about Newfoundland. So the historical facts took second place to his idea of what Newfoundland was and how it worked. And it was Wayne Johnston writing about Wayne Johnston's Newfoundland . . . and that was his way into it.
LF:	I'd like to conclude, Michael, by discussing the business of memory, the way that it invests place with its presence and absence. The French talk about the paradox of the presence in the absence, how a dead person can have a more powerful affect than someone living. Michael Furey, in Joyce's The Dead, for example. Perhaps more than any other time in literary history, contemporary writing focuses on memory. In an interview with Alice Munro, Eleanor Wachtel brought up this subject and referred to the profound sense of absence in Munro's stories. Munro commented that most people couldn't be bothered with remembering anything but for writers it's an addiction. You're very connected to place. Would you mind commenting upon how memory informs your work?
MC:	For me, I think it goes back to this whole issue of loss. Loss really is my subject, I think. On all levels. There's cultural loss in terms of the extinction of the Beothuck or the end of the fishery, the inshore fishery. Looking at the way that that affects a community and me personally… there's the type of loss that I grew up with in Buchans, for example, where the mines were shutting down and an entire community stopped being what it was and became something different. And then there's personal loss in terms of death, the central experience of human life. And so in the world that I was born into memory in some ways is all I have. Do you know what I mean? My connection to the fishery, which is what defined Newfoundland from the time of the European settlers, is through my dad's memories. So, it's at one remove. I have memories of memories. And so for me writing through those is my desperate attempt to cling to most things somehow or find my place in them. Or even just to state the absence for what it is. The background for many of the stories in Flesh and Blood is the death of this mine. And the slow decay of this town and how much of an impact that has on the lives of these people. And much of the poetry is about loss. The last book, Salvage, is about people who were once part of my life and who are now for one reason or another no longer there. And writing about them is memory for me.
LF:	The loved and the lost.
MC:	Sure.
LF:	I have a philosopher friend who believes that the mind is having a very difficult time coping these days. A McLuhanite, he believes that living under electronic conditions has altered perception, among other things, and increased the amount of daily fragmentation that takes place, that there's so very much that we don't relate to anymore. And therefore, for many, life is becoming a bad dream. It used to be that thousands of years ago, as hunter-gatherers we took our bows and arrows and shot moose. Nowadays, you're more likely to make that connection through the windshield of your car at 100 kilometers an hour. And Uncle Harry flies in from Florida and the nurse jacks your foot into the air at a bizarre angle . . . It's all crazy fragmentation. Hearkening back to your upbringing and the connectivity of time and place you experienced, which seems to be gone now, especially under electronic conditions, it's making us all river thieves, really, isn't it? It's leading to meaningless lives. I recall the first influential book in my life, Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. At Auschwitz he asked himself why he wasn't giving up. And he realized that he had meaning in his life, real purpose, something to live for. So this whole existential nightmare, this living at the speed of light, without chronology and even order most times, where "the center will not hold," where it's becoming more and more difficult to connect at any level . . . Do you think that perhaps narrative, the tradition of story telling is a way of recovering this meaning in our lives? I'm talking about the stories told to you by your family members and the kinds of stories that you're telling, especially to Newfoundlanders.
MC:	Yes. I think so. People generally understand themselves through narrative. Who we are is a story of where you were born, who your family was, where you went to school. There's a beginning, a middle and where you are right now. And I think that's why people are so attracted to narrative in novels or films, etc. I think it is true that narrative in some ways has been emptied of its meaning, of its intrinsic meaning, because of the loss of things like a widely held religious belief, for example, within a community, which was one of the places that people went to find meaning for their lives. Or lack of common goals within a community. Or lack of dependence on one another.
LF:	But even now with urbanization. Eighty per cent of North Americans live in urban centers. It used to be you had the boroughs with their own identities but they're being hijacked daily by multi-nationals or whomever. You look around and there's an industrial complex or an airport where there was a community. So it's becoming increasingly more difficult for people to connect meaningfully.
MC:	Yeah. I think the fragmentation is that our narratives are no longer connected to a larger narrative. It's just our own individual story.
LF:	And that's not true.
MC:	Right, but that's what it feels like to many people.
LF:	In times past people got the larger narrative because when they worked on the farm or in the fishing boat there was so much tradition and so much heritage. And when Uncle Henry or Aunt Maise sat at the dinner table one listened to their stories. Is that what you mean?
MC:	Partly that. In a community like that, church was a huge part of the social fabric and it was part of where their narrative fit too so that the end point was this sense that you were going to heaven or hell, optimist or pessimist, but there were places you could find meaning for this single narrative thread.
LF:	Is that what O'Connor meant when she said once that even though she wasn't a Catholic writer she saw the world through the lens of Christian orthodoxy? She saw the world in terms of redemption and the place of Jesus Christ in human history. For her this was a very powerful way of connecting with everyone she met. Is that a fair way of saying that that's the larger story too? I mean she could have been Buddhist or Hindu . . .
MC:	Sure, I'm not really sure what I'm trying to get at here but I think part of what I'm thinking of is that there's a real tension in my life between meaning and meaninglessness. If I simply look at my circle, me, my family, the people I love . . . my life is full of meaning. But if I look at my existence in the cosmos, it looks ridiculous. What is the point? But clearly, we don't live outside that circle.
LF:	But there is order out there.
MC:	Well, of a sort. Whatever that means for us. But I think what I try to do when I'm writing, as I said earlier, is honor what I'm writing about. Part of what I mean by that is I'm trying to write about people's lives in a way that says there is meaning. Life is worthwhile. There is a point to being this person on the street connected to these other people.
LF:	Well it's Gabriel Marcel's argument with Sartre's statement, hell is other people. Marcel says it doesn't have to be. If you look lovingly, you'll always find meaning. It's always been the great hope, hasn't it?
MC:	Yes, and I suppose that's why I write about the things I write about.
LF:	Well Michael . . . thanks for being so generous with your time . . . In his wonderful book, The Danger Tree, David MacFarlane writes: My grandfather was a Newfoundlander. As far as he was concerned, no prouder claim could be made. I am reminded of that every time I read one of your books.
MC:	Thanks.