Chapter 161: Yann Martel on rural revelations and reliable writing routines

Listen to the chapter here!

[Yann Martel]

The more that you write, the more you discover how you might write, but also, naturally, what you want to write about. So I'd rather look upon the extraordinary than dwell on the ordinary. Necessarily, footnotes refer to something above it, so they don't exist on their own.

They're necessarily, like us, they're social animals. One thing I'm certain is there's always going to be a hunger for stories. Art is manufactured meaning.

To me, everything in life is about connection and chemistry, everything meaningful. I'd rather have less good poetry by a human than excellent poetry by a robot.

[Neil Pasricha]

Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha, and welcome, or welcome back, to chapter 161, 61, 61, of three books.

Oh my gosh, we got two full moons in May, people. Like, that's the cool thing about publishing on the lunar calendar. You don't know how many full moons you're going to get any given month.

I mean, you always assume it's one, right? Lunar, once a month, but no, here we are in May, we got the second full moon of the month, and we are enjoying it. And because, guess what, we got a special guest here today, Mr. Yann Martel. I never would have expected, back in 2002, when this beautiful woman that I was working with at Procter & Gamble sort of pushed this book on me, she's like, oh, I just read this book, Life of Pi, maybe you want to check it out. And I was like, in my attempt to impress her, I was like, I'm going to read this as fast as I can, right? And I wasn't, like, revving a Corvette engine.

This is, Neil Pastricha's way to hit on beautiful women at age 23 was read a book fast. Okay, that's what I had, people, that's what I was working with. But lucky for me, the book was, you know, absorbing.

It just pulls you in. Have you read Life of Pi? 40 million people have read this book across every country in the world.

Got turned into an Ang Lee film, robbed of Best Picture by Argo, but did win Best Director, did win Best Screenplay. And I was sucked into the book. I read it until 3 in the morning that night.

I think to this day it might be the only piece of literature I've ever read in one sitting, okay? I did have some, you know, the incentive of trying to impress somebody, but it wasn't me, it was the book. And when I got back to her the next day, I was like, I can't believe that happened.

What a crazy story. And she's like, it says a novel on the front. I was like, what?

It's not true? That's the thing about Yann's books. They kind of like twist and bend fiction and nonfiction in these really interesting ways.

We're going to talk about that on the show. I'm really grateful to Stephen Meyers at Penguin Random House for helping me set this up. Yann Martell has been a dream guest for a long time.

He is a really fascinating person for many reasons. 2012, we all talked about Life of Pi, the movie, but did you know Yann was born in Salamanca, Spain in 1963? He spent his childhood in Fairbanks, Alaska, Victoria, British Columbia, extensively traveling through Costa Rica, Paris, France, French is actually his mother tongue, Madrid, Mexico City, because his parents were working in the Canadian Foreign Service.

So you might say, okay, this global man of the world, where does he live today? And you might be surprised to hear, it is indeed Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Yeah, out of nowhere, out of nowhere, you didn't see that coming, right?

I didn't. I was like, he lives in Saskatoon? You might be asking why, and you're going to get your answer on this show, because we are going to have a rivaled conversation.

We're going to go straight through, you know, his formative books, but you're going to hear there's some jagged left turns, like in his writing itself. You might know that he has a brand new book that just came out called Son of Nobody. This is an instant bestseller.

It's on all the rankings, you know, Amazon, Best Of. People are looking forward to it. It's the most anticipated, I guess they call it, book of 2026, and a bunch of different lists.

And it is, you know, a reimagination of The Odyssey or like a historical epic, but it twists together like he does the story of a man from Saskatchewan going over to discover this kind of long-lost epic, and his personal life happens on the bottom of each page, while the top is the epic itself. It's really interesting how he's written this thing. Yann Martel and I are going to talk about, with you, you know, great writing routines.

You know, what does it look like to, what's the number one ingredient to being a great, successful writer? It's not what you think. The hidden power of the footnote, we're going to talk about racism in Australia.

We're going to talk about AI, how to think about AI as writers or as people in general. We're going to talk about landscape and place and creative work, experimentation, and of course, Yann Martel's three, or actually maybe four, most formative books. Let's flip the page into chapter 161 now.

I think I got an email from you in 2022 saying, the new book is done. The new book is done. And by the way, I'm in the middle of the book.

I'm loving the book. You are on book tour for the book right now. Son of nobody.

I can see online, you know, just taking a peek. It's doing really well. You know, the reviews are just glowing, and the Amazon ranking is high, and you know, everybody must be thrilled.

So you are, I take it you're not in Saskatoon right now? I am actually. I'm leaving on Sunday for Texas, for Dallas, Houston, and Austin, then I'm going to Miami, then I'm back, then I'm off to Australia.

So yeah, no, it has started well. It has had some mixed reviews. Got a, not a great review from the New York Times, but whatever, you know, you have to, you have to live in a good, healthy, critical ecosystem, so that's the way it goes.

But no, you're right. Otherwise, reviews have been positive, and certainly responses from different entities has been really positive. Yeah, and not many books have hotspots, put no blurbs on them at all, except for two on the back, from Kirkus Star Review, a brilliant novel of ideas, dot, dot, dot, a powerful meditation.

And from Bookless, another Star Review, saying original, thought-provoking, and utterly absorbing, which is how I'm finding it. The way that you break genre, you know, I think that's a uniquely Martellian trait, I remember in 2002, 2003, trying to impress a girl here in Toronto, I read the book she recommended to me that night, which of course was Life of Pi, and I gave it back to her the next day, I was like, you know, dropped it on her desk at work, and I was like, yeah, it was great, it was unbelievable. I was like, I can't believe that really happened, you know, and she's like, it says a novel on the front.

I was like, what? Like, you, that's what you do, you broke the genre for me, you made me, and this then doesn't even say a novel on the front, so I keep looking to the front, and I'm like, wait a minute, he even took those two words off. Is that the Canadian one, is that the Knopf Canada?

Yes, it is. Yes, it is, I have two copies, it is Knopf, yeah, I got one from your publisher, and I bought one as well. Good, well, that's what we want to do, you want to, uh...

So can you explain why one of them says a novel, the other one doesn't? You know, I guess the British would assume that people would know, or, I don't know, but yeah, I noticed that too, that the Americans put a novel, and you know what, stuff like that has nothing to do with the writer, that has to do with the publisher and their marketing decision, I guess it is, so I'm fine with either, I mean, either way you want it to be intriguing, so if there's nothing there, it's, you know, but most people who see Life of Pi would know that it's a novel, and therefore the assumption that this one is too. Although you're right, if you flip it open, and you look at it, you might think it's an academic work, come to think of it. Anyway, it is what it is, and I'm happy with the result either way.

I really appreciate your honesty, you know, being on Booktube 2026, this is a podcast by and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians, so we are going to be sucking up any sort of tidbits of wisdom around the writing process, the book process, the book launch process, and it's interesting to me that you're heading to Australia, actually, because, you know, I had just read your April 18th, 2026 interview in The Guardian, where the closing question is, what's your favorite place to visit, and why, and you wrote, or you said, I don't know if it was an email interview or a phone interview, you said, I love traveling, and I'm really looking forward to Australia. I'm not sucking up here, you're a really racist society, your feminism is behind the times, and you're really backwards in some ways, but you've got those marsupials, I cannot wait to meet more of your stone koalas, and your bouncing kangaroos.

One thing I'd like to see this time is a platypus. This is the last question, I'll just finish it here, in Son of Nobody, there's a mention of a platypus, I should have said that, I would be a platypus, an egg-laying mammal instead of a sloth, a weird creature that is surprising, like a writer wants to be. Yeah, this was definitely a spoken interview, because man, I wouldn't have written that saying they were that backward.

I mean, it is true, they're so racist, they're more racist than we are, and I'm the most racist province in Canada, and then, and their feminism, yeah, they really are, it's, there's something about their, I remember there's that story of the intern who was raped in Parliament, in Canberra, and the Prime Minister, his reaction was like, it took his talking to his wife to make him realize, oh yeah, that's not kosher, yeah, yeah, you're right, yes, that is a scandal, like, really? So, anyway, but yeah, they do have neat marsupials, anyway, that was slightly tacked, that's the way I said that, but yes, I am looking forward to Australia, because the book's doing very well there, I will tone down on the language about racism and sexism there, and I'll pump up the marsupials and the readers.

Well, or not, because, you know, you've backed up your statement by giving examples, and I will say, you know, algorithms love controversy, as you know, and so, I'm not saying you need to, you know, take shirtless ice bath on Instagram, but, you know, there's something about that quote that caught me to the point where I could remember when you said Australia, I was like, wait a minute, he just said something, you know, so, you know, tone down or tone up, but calling them racist is obviously strong, but I kind of feel, I don't know how to say this, I'm going to come out here to meet you on the branch here, I kind of feel like the whole world is racist, you know, like I just got back from Kenya, not recently, but last year with my mom, her first time back since she left at age 18, she's 75 now, my first time, not only in Africa, you know, but obviously to my mom's home, and she's Indian, but born in Nairobi, her parents are from, her dad is from Lahore, before the partition, and my dad is from India, so they met in England, came to Canada in 1966, my dad, and yeah, it's really fucking racist there too. You know what, first of all, yeah, the racism in China, in India, in Africa is appalling, but so I'm just comparing like with like, Australia and Canada are two settler colonial countries, the difference is here people are still racist, but at least they know they can't say it, you may still grouse, but you have to do it internally, it's just not acceptable anymore, and you know, the whole truth and reconciliation thing, has taken on a real life, I think, it's not just, it can sometimes be tokenism, but oftentimes I don't think it is, there's a sincere, you know, that whole thing of the Kamloops, those 200, you know, the whole disappearance of kids in residential schools, I think the shock was genuine, so yeah, I think there's, now listen, you know, last time I was there was 10 years ago, maybe in 10 years it's changed, and in fact it'll be interesting to see when I go there. Yeah, that's fascinating, thank you for bringing that up, we're speaking in 2026, I'm in Toronto, Jan's in Saskatoon, and you know, our Prime Minister right now is Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, who's been in office for less than one year, preceding him was nine year Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and from 2009 to 2013 they led a large public, I guess you'd call it an exposition, or a, you know, investigation of sorts, trying to call it, you know, truth and reconciliation.

My kids now, just to give a perspective here for people, like when I was a kid in high school, all the way through the public school system, I learned nothing of the residential school system, which of course was in Canada for, you know, six, seven, eight decades, up until 1996, where, you know, indigenous people were kind of, you know, pulled out of their communities, put into churches essentially, schools, made to lose their language, lose their culture, and there was a story, of course, of one child, who was stripped of their popular orange shirt, and I believe that they passed away, and so my kids now, in kindergarten, and everybody in the whole school, and the whole school system, they have Orange Shirt Day, and yeah, as you said, it might sound like tokenism, but I believe like you, it just is, just slow to just change thoughts through generations, and certainly not allowing publicly racist comments as the first step.

And you know, these changes do start with gestures, like land acknowledgements, Orange Shirt Day, that's how it starts, you know, and you have to accept that people are in good faith, I mean, I have to say, the Kamloops, that incident in Kamloops, when all these, you know, abnormalities in the soil were discovered, was such a shock. There's one thing between saying words, but then abridging a child's life, with something else, so. Yeah, it's like a child graveyard, basically, discovered.

so I think there is genuine change. Anyway, all this to say, I am looking forward to going to Australia, and I'm sure it is evolving as a society. Yeah, praise to the Aussies, and happy to hear that they're welcoming your book, that's a sign of a smart, literate community, you know, you're a big book lover, man, I love your love of books, you know, I've really had fun preparing for this, including picking up 101 letters to a Prime Minister, your 2012 book, cataloging, literally, as the title suggests, 101 letters to a Prime Minister, I was, honestly, I was kind of caught by this, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't follow along in real time, but it was your, it was your bio, in Son of Nobody, that tipped me off, I don't know if you're aware, but your bio is precisely 100 words long, I don't know if that was purposefully, you didn't know that, so it's easy to do percentages, right, so I can, I can tell you the percentage of your bio that's about where you live is 5%, the last five words, Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I can tell you that the second most common subject in your bio is, of course, Life of Pi, that clocks in at 27 words, including the mention in your kind of bibliography, the brackets that says, well, for which he was awarded the 2002 Booker Prize, as well as the supplemental feature of Life of Pi was adopted for the silver screen by Ang Lee garnering four Oscars, okay, 27 words, I mean, that's 27%, I was like, nothing's going to be more than that, but then, out of nowhere, at the end of this 100-page bio, a 100-word bio is 38 words, a 38% clocking for this. Martel also ran a guerrilla book club with Stephen Harper, sending the former Prime Minister a book every two weeks for four years.

The letters that accompanied the books were published as 101 letters to the Prime Minister, I'm like, what? I ordered this thing immediately, I'm captivated by it, I'm like, this is the centerpiece of your bio, man, this is like, what you're all about, this is the biggest thing you've got. I don't even remember writing that bio, so it is a lot on that, but yeah, that was an interesting project, you know, it's not so much that we need to read a lot, but we do need to read in our literate, complicated society, and one of the best ways to learn about life is through books, which are necessarily, you know, it takes a long time to write a book, so it's, in some ways, it's necessarily a thoughtful product.

So, you can get a lot from reading a book, and I think it's, to understand our complicated world, it's necessary to have at least one book on your bedside table that you're reading, to take refuge in that at least a bit, and I was trying to, Stephen Harper was one of those sort of narrow-minded conservatives who has simple solutions to complicated problems, we're bedeviled by that, people with simple solutions to complicated problems, they don't want to do the slog of being a citizen, a public policy, which is, you know, nuanced and complicated and not necessarily as sexy as grand declarations, those little soundbites that, you know, Pierre Poeliev specializes in, so I, yeah, for four years I send him a book every two weeks, not a project I'd repeat again, you don't want to shame someone for not reading, there's lots of people who don't read, and that's all right, but if you have power, then I think I'm allowed to ask where their dreams come from, and if you're not reading, I'm wondering where your dreams have come from then, you must, either you've traveled a lot or you've had wonderful gurus, but as I said, someone who has power, whether it's a politician or a doctor or a police officer, you know, at one point I want to know, discover about their humanity, and what they read is a sign of that.

I love the way you were talking about books in that project, I'm interested, I'm surprised that you wouldn't do it again, I mean obviously it would be exhausting, but, but, you know, I know you meet up with the reductionist tendency too, I don't want to sort of label kind of brandish all conservatives that way, but I got into a fight last week with the CEO of the largest company in Canada by market capitalization, which of course is Toby Lucca, the founder and CEO of Shopify.

I got into the fight over on Twitter, so it's public and anybody can see it, because I'm protesting against Doug Ford's seizing of the Toronto Island Airport to expand it 600 meters into Lake Ontario, a paving paradise to put up a parking lot, literally, which of course he has no control over, it's a city issue and a federal issue, he's not part of the agreement, he said, I've got the feds on my side, and I've got, I'm overruling the city because, you know, I can.

And so I've been posting about this, in my post last week, my letter to Mark Carney, I'm happy to say I got 600,000 views, I've started a petition, I'm mentioning that so people can sign it, change.org slash Billy Bishop. But what I wanted to tell you y'all was that I said to Toby Lucca on Twitter, what do you think of this? Because I thought, you know, if we could get his support, that'd be really good, he just moved to Toronto, he's bought this huge multi-million dollar house, it's public, it's been in all the papers, and so I'm like, if we could get this guy's support, this guy's literally living like the Casa Loma life, you know, down and looking at the lake, like, let's get him on site.

And you know what he said to me? Literally in writing, literally on Twitter, and he said, make the airport so big it needs its own postal code, the goddamn fishes have enough space to swim. Wow.

Wow, that's remarkably intemperate. Huh. Wow, what an odd thing to say.

Huh. Well, speaking of anger and the Iliad, and the thing you're doing right, yeah, let's jump in. Well, you were so kind, Jan, to give us three books that have shaped you as you grew up.

You know, Son of Nobody, of course, is your latest book I absolutely love. I'm becoming more and more fascinated as I read these 101 letters to the Prime Minister, going back to your trove, and as I told you, life has probably touched me in a way very few books ever have. I think Ang Lee was completely, you and Ang Lee were completely robbed.

I mean, that movie should have been Best Picture. I know Argo was good, but Ang Lee, I mean, he's been nominated for Best Picture four times. Brokeback Mountain, how is that worse than Crash?

Don't get me going on that. Crash was, like, not even close to Brokeback Mountain. Of course, Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, also great Best Picture nominees.

But yeah, later in this book, 101 Letters to the Prime Minister, you, of course, sent Prime Minister Stephen Harper a book called The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima. Would you be okay if I just took one minute to explain this book to the audience as if they're holding it in a bookstore? So, if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see the book.

If you're not watching on this YouTube, let me tell you, the cover is striking. There's a boy's small, drawn head, literally almost like trotting water up to his nose over what appears to be like a sea of blood. Originally published in Japanese in 1963 in Tokyo, English not translated for a couple years later by Knopf, you know, your publisher.

Yukio Mishima was born in 1925 in Tokyo and lived until 1970, famously dying of ritualistic suicide, disemboweling and somehow beheading himself, if I'm not mistaken. One of his acolytes beheaded him. Yeah, by Harakiri as the correct term was.

Yeah, ritual suicide in the traditional samurai way after taking over, trying to take over an army base. As one does. File this one Dewey Decimal Heads in 895.63 for Literature slash Southeast Asia slash Japanese Literature slash Fiction. What's the book about? Well, a group of ruthless 13-year-old boys reject the adult world as fake, hypocritical and overly sentimental. They train themselves to be emotionally hardened and detached.

When one boy's mother begins a relationship with a ship's officer, the boys initially admire him, but they come to see him as weak and their admiration turns to disillusionment. And they respond with shocking violence. Jan, please tell us about your relationship with the sailor who fell from grace with the sea by Yukio Mishima.

M-I-S-H-I-M-A.

[Yann Martel]

Yeah, Mishima.

[Neil Pasricha]

Well, he was a very prolific writer. He, in fact, started publishing during the Second World War. There was still wartime publishing for some writers and he was one of them.

He was that good. And that's when that particularly struck me because, as I said, it is told from the perspective of a 13-year-old boy who's disillusioned with his mother, I guess, with this sailor. And so ultimately what he decides to do is he poisons him.

He poisons the sailor because he's betrayed the sea. He's betrayed his great calling. So it's a wonderful look at the perverted world from the point of view of a child who has not seen that the world is just what it is.

It's more complicated and more subtle. And the sailor is just tired with the sea. He's fallen from grace with it because he doesn't care for it anymore and he wants to be with this woman instead but he pays a high price.

I remember reading it and it was one of those books that I sort of could nearly have imagined writing because it sort of reflects ideas that I find really interesting. But of course it was already written. So there's a few other books that have been like that.

One, Hunger, by Knut Hansen who's a Norwegian writer about a homeless man who wanders around Christiania, which is the early name for Oslo. It was also a book sort of like that that I sort of could have imagined inhabiting. So yeah, that was a book that early on turned me on to how powerful a story could be.

It could both be entertaining and really thought-provoking. Any recollection on you know, kind of where you were or how old you were or how the book got put in your hands? Oh, totally.

I read that actually in French. It's funny how some writers you know, everything can be translated but some countries have a certain preference for literature. So for example, I remember discovering this wonderful Italian writer named Dino Buzzati who wrote a novel called The Tartar Step.

And also wonderful short stories. He was kind of like a happier Kafka. Well, he's barely known in the English language world but he was huge in France.

So I read all of Buzzati in French. French was my mother tongue. I went to school entirely in English but I speak French with my parents.

I lived 10 years in France so I also speak French. So I read Mishima who was huge in France. I read all his books or all the books that I read which is a great number in French.

So I remember very clearly I read that in France when I was not much older than the protagonist. I must have been 15 or 16 years old. Wow.

Wow. You were so young. And as you say in your letter to Stephen Harper about this book it's true what you say.

The characters are exquisitely realized. The opening scene of a boy being home alone in this kind of locked bedroom and finding a little peephole and like walking around the room. It's like it's almost like nothing's happening but you are there.

Writing Masterclass question for you like can you explain what exquisitely realized means to you and then how does one start to think about that as a writer or at least any tips on becoming a better exquisitely realizing writer? When it's exquisitely realized it becomes real to you. You can imagine like you're right the boy discovers this little peephole and he can spy on his mother's room.

So you can see that that early appeal of the salacious of the sexual. He can spy on his mother and there we can spy on his mother sleeping with this sailor. You can see these two in an intimate situation that normally you would not see especially as a child.

So it's realized well because you can sort of not only imagine kind of the room it comes to life as a space and that's important secondary but then mainly you can realize the psychology of the child and his appeal when he can spy on. That sort of gaze that we always we all want to look on something to sort of witness it and this is a bit of you know it's slightly sordid it's definitely an intrusion but you can see the appeal to the child. So his psychology his motivation how he interprets what he sees all seems extraordinarily plausible and therefore very compelling to the reader.

So and that's just the start of it then it keeps on going and it's yeah it's a wonderful book. It was turned into a movie too with Chris Christopherson. I never saw the movie but it was so it's funny how he I don't think he's as well known as he is in the French speaking world but nonetheless it was turned into an American Hollywood movie and you know I read the opening pages that you're describing like what I know is this detail detail like colors you know things are brittle things are shiny things are you know that level of detail that I'm familiar with from your books obviously but also like David Mitchell is a writer who I love chapter 58 of this podcast who I feel like just like you know it becomes realized because of detail in addition to detail like what what's the magic here like is it just read a lot you'll get better at it or I say write a lot you know yes you have to read because you want to see how others what they've done it is amazing how with standard words like most words are standardized you can invent your own language if you want but most words are out there in a dictionary they're totally standard they have a standard spelling and a standard meaning now words have nuances have degrees of meaning but nonetheless it's a standardized product it's extraordinary the variety of things that you can do in telling a story not only the voice but the angle what they're trying to say so definitely reading helps but at one point you have to do it yourself because it's funny how we're idiosyncratic even the way we walk everyone walks in a slightly different way we have two legs but everyone walks moves in a slightly different way it's the same thing with writing you'd think that it would kind of be the same but no there's just a naturalness an idiosyncratic a naturalness to how we do things including writing so the more that you write the more you discover how you might write but also naturally what you want to write about you know some people are really interested about relationships how two people might interact I for example am not I'm more interested in looking out looking at the world I'm more interested in an ordinary person that could be driving a car and you're next to that person and they're a safe driver but outside the car there's a tornado there's a storm there's a monkey there's something out there that's extraordinary so I'd rather look upon the extraordinary than dwell on the ordinary of let's say two people conversing or something like that so every you discover in writing what you naturally want to write about and then the more you write the deeper you'll dig in in that way what's your like keep percentage like it's fairly high in the sense that you know for Life of Pi for example the final product wasn't that different from an earlier product an earlier draft except for that scene in the Pacific when Pi is blind and he meets another blind person in the Pacific that dialogue was initially much longer it was too long I really got lost into it lost in it that was dramatically shortened but kind of you know between the hardcover and the paperback later some of the chapters the order changed and I added one line at the very end and so it goes with God but that one not very much this one Son of Nobody a bit more I wrote more fragments there were more footnotes because there's so many things I could do with that there's so much you can do with telling an epic verse a verse an epic and verse fragments and then footnotes it's suddenly it's a very powerful way footnotes can what's interesting about writing with footnotes is that footnotes don't have to be narrative between themselves they don't have to follow a chronology or narration in any book you look at one footnote 16 and footnote 17 don't necessarily have anything to do with each other because they're referring to something else and so that allows you to say a lot without having to worry about transitions because very naturally the reader will understand that one footnote can be different from another so that unleashed a lot and in fact nearly too much so I had initially this book was longer because I was trying to do too many things because I could you know it's like you have a hose and you spray the garden you spray the windows you spray your brother you spray everything because you have a hose well I had to sort of say okay the hose is just to water the grass so it took me a little while to cut down and get to something more lean and more directed yeah and it really does feel that way I mean I just love the space like you are playing and toying with space and when I wrote The Book of Awesome in 2010 I had stated my publisher I have an entry called Absolute Perfect Silence could you give me two blank pages in the middle of the book that have nothing on them at all like the whole idea was that it's like a beat in the middle of the book and you keep turning and they're like I don't think we can do that I don't think we want to waste the pages and I'm like this guy's got you know the way it works for those that haven't read Son of Nobody yet and you know I hope by listening to this you can get a taste and flavor for this incredible book you know there's entire half pages where you're like whoa I'm flying and it gives me such a sense of momentum when I'm reading and then I'm just like loving it and then of course because the tonal shift between the top and the bottom is so extreme it's like I'm having like sorbet you know in between courses here like it's just like it's amazing it's quite epic and what I liked about yeah because the reader we should know the top of the page on some pages will have these fragments of this epic this lost Trojan War epic and at the end of each fragment you'll have footnotes that start at the bottom of the page so what I liked about that is in a sense it was a lovely dialogue necessarily footnotes refer to something above it so they don't exist on their own they're necessarily like us they're social animals footnotes they necessarily have to be coupled with something else but to me it was like a respectful dialogue you have the verse fragments of the top then they fall silent then you have footnotes that you know that talk and then it goes back to the fragments so to me it was kind of like a nice dialogue between the past and the present between the sort of the ancientness of an epic verse and the modernity of footnotes so to me it was like a nice dialogue and that space was precisely the space enough like in poetry where you can reflect you can think it gave it its proper space it wasn't rush, rush, rush, rush it was sort of the space the silence that you get in a respectful dialogue yeah oh my gosh wow thank you what a great way to describe it and I feel like the exciting thing for me is I feel like I just want to try it I want to run away and just sort of play around with that on a page what is your writing routine?

well it depends what process what part of the process I'm in and when I'm doing research I may travel so for Son of Nobody I went to there's a Peloponnese so southern Greece and I went to the ancient Mycenaean sites of Mycenae Tyrens Medea Argos and then I went also to western Anatolia and Turkey to visit Troy what's left of Troy not a very impressive archaeological site it's just south of Istanbul south of a a buzzing delightful town called Canakkale there's a what used to be Troy now it's called Hissarlik that's where the remains of Troy are it is a sorry site it's not as impressive as you might think considering I'm still and it's how old? Troy is about three thousand years old but you know time has definitely had its effect on it so I so at some when I'm doing research in a novel I'll travel and then I'll do more academic research reading so that could be just at home or I could go to the university library here at Saskatoon at U of S University of Saskatchewan and then the writing process well then I start writing and I write you know I have a family I have four kids so in a sense it becomes Monday or Friday you know nine-ish to three-ish four-ish at the latest when the kids are at school you know you want to achieve balance in everything in life including between work and family even when it's wonderful work like to be creative is incredibly satisfying to take random words and create a story I mean it's like baking it's like cooking you take random elements and you make something savory and delicious and attractive that people will come to receive so in a sense playing with words is the same thing so yeah when I'm writing I write basically when I can I rarely work on I don't like working in the evenings but sometimes on weekends I will but usually it's Monday to Friday you know daylight hours you know school hours and then it goes on for a while in a sense writing from the outside doesn't look like much you're just quiet I happen to have a treadmill desk you can see it there oh nice treadmill desk yeah thank you I've used it so much that I've worn down the treadmill I had to get a new one I love using my treadmill so often when I'm writing I'm writing walking so I'm not sitting more what speed sorry 1.3 miles an hour so you're not running you're basically just walking it just means it's not a replacement for exercising but it does mean you're not sitting all day long yeah so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so kind of famous and well-known, you know, they do like high school yearbooks and things like that.

That you've gone to them, to Altona, and you've done that. To me that's like, you've created the vision board, right? Like now you have it on your desk, you touch it, you feel it, to make it convincing.

So I made three of these boxes because I already showed it to three different readers. So I'll keep on doing that, I'll rework it, go to my printer here in Saskatoon, we did these lovely booklets. I like is where you put your finger to open it, even there I put the little fire, can you see it?

Yeah, I love it. But you just go to them and you can just publish your own thing. Yeah, well, it's not cheap necessarily, but I wanted them to sort of, just as I said, so when I really finished the inside, I put it in there, mail it to my agent, mail it to my publisher in Canada, and hopefully she'll buy it.

She'll fall into it like what does. Yeah, for sale. That's impressive and that's powerful.

And you know, I'm at the stage of my career where I'm having lots of conversations, open conversations with my publisher, other publishers, self-publishers, authors' equity, page two publishing. Like I'm just, I don't know if it's a stage of career thing or if it's just like a state of the industry thing that, you know, we are seeing, you know, one of the most prominent business publishers in the world is Seth Godin and he's declared that he's going to only publish with authors' equity now. Of course, that's James Clear's, you know, self-publishing company where 65% of royalties are kept with the author.

So this guy has written the number one most popular book in the world for the last five years, 20 million copies. And he's like, he's moving out of the publishing ecosystem in a way, or at least moving around inside of it, I should say. Yeah, well, the publishing is, you know, AI may affect it.

Reading habits may affect it. You know, it's a mystery where it's going to go. One thing I'm certain is there's always going to be a hunger for stories.

Now, whether they're expressed in, you know, Netflix series or video games or whatever, people do have a hunger for, and I do mean a story, not just entertainment, which is necessary and there's no reason to be bored. But story, because stories stitch together disparate elements in reality and give it meaning. A story is life that makes sense.

And in fact, some don't make sense. You're doing well enough, then you get hit by a car and that's the end of your life. You know, there's no justice necessary in life.

There's none that's there meaning. You have to make those. And so art is manufactured meaning.

And so there'll always be that need for that, for that sense of meaning. And that is best expressed in story, which isn't, you know, it's an invention, but it's an invention based on a real life. You know, it's our reaction to life.

So there's the initial impetus is sort of real, but then the invention interprets that reality. So there'll always be a need for stories, but it may be differently expressed, you know. So publishing may change.

I have no real opinion about that. I'm not a business person. I'm 62.

I'm sort of, I'm not, if I was in my twenties or thirties, I might get on that horse and try to ride the horse in a different direction. But now I'm quite happy with what I do on words. You know, not that I follow the conventions of writing, as I just showed you with my next one, The Forgiven and the Forgotten.

I'm quite, I like all your previous ones. So I like being experimental, but within the format of the printed word. And as I said, there's, there's something particularly powerful about the printed word because it's something you do in solitude.

The reaction is solitary. You have literally two people looking at the same language and interpret it totally differently. That's quite unusual.

Like movies are much more manipulative, you know, with music, with camera angle. The expressions are given to you by the actor. We're all going on the same ride.

Whereas none of that is available in a book. A book, you really have to, like, if you don't get the irony, if you don't get this or that, you just read it differently, which doesn't make it invalid, but it just makes it a very, very personal thing. And that's very powerful.

That's why I think people, you know, a book can be so memorable because, as I just said earlier, it is a co-creation. In reading it, you zone in on certain things that speak to you that sometimes the author didn't particularly intend. It's rare that you have a radically different conception of a book from the author, but nonetheless, it remains a co-creation.

Something you've co-created. And that makes it very intense, very personal. It goes really deeply, which is why sometimes books can change people's lives.

And this is a very, you know, I mean, just to give an obvious example, religious texts like the Koran or the Bible, those are books that have literally changed people's lives. Books, you know, not images, not music, those are, you know, can be universal and timeless too. But there's something about the written word that uniquely speaks to the human psyche.

So I don't, that's not going to go away. Just how it is told, you know, will change, maybe. Yeah, absolutely.

I love that phrase. Art is manufactured reality, which was in there, that wonderful reflection. And I also wanted to share, I don't know if you know this or not.

You may, and our listeners may or may not, but I just recently read a book called Empire of AI. I read that last year. It's one of my top picks of 2025.

Written by Karen Howe, H-A-O. Lots in there about AI. I did know some of the origin stories.

Larry Page calling Elon Musk at a party in Napa Valley a speciesist was prompted Elon to start open AI for Team Human, which of course he didn't laugh because of the fight with Sam Altman, et cetera, et cetera. But one thing that was most fascinating to me was I did not realize that in the, quote unquote, like dark ages of AI or the like long winter, I think they call it. They're like multiple decades where AI existed as a concept, as a theory, kind of Jeffrey Hinton era to the point where it kind of accelerated.

There was actually two camps. There was two camps and all these annual AI conferences. There's two camps.

It was like a bifurcated camps. One camp was the story based people that the way human brains and if we're going to make artificial intelligence, it would of course have to map to stories because that's how the human brain thinks. And the other camp was the zero and one group that everything can be still down into numbers ultimately.

And those camps fought for decades. And as we know today, the numerical camp one. So that means the whole other way of envisioning AI as a concept for decades was sublimated.

Is that the right word? It was, it's, it's, it's gone now. Like we've, we've, we've all bought into the zero and one thing, at least the version of AI that we're presented with today in the form of, you know, LLMs and that GPT and clode, et cetera, is the winning camps version of AI, the losing camp.

We, we don't see yet or, or haven't. You know what I have? I never use AI cause I love running.

I don't need AI to help me writing. Cause you'd like having AI have sex for you or, you know, or eat for myself. Well, you know, I can imagine AI for writing could be useful.

I'm just, it's not my original thought of mine. There's an article by Steven Marsh, I think in the Globe and Mail or the New York Times, where he was saying, you know, let AI do the dross bit of writing, like writing manuals for vacuum cleaners and manuals for cars, you know, writing that is not particularly creative, but it has to be accurate. Technical writing, you know, some of it could be taken over by AI cause it's not terribly um, interesting, but do we want AI poetry?

I mean, I'm sure it could generate cause often poetry sometimes works on nonsense. So I'm sure you can have good AI generated poetry, but then it comes down to what we want as a product. And I'd rather have, you know, after all, cause to me, everything in life is about connection and chemistry, everything meaningful.

I'd rather have less good poetry by a human than excellent poetry by a robot, just cause I don't particularly want to connect with a robot. I'll use a robot to vacuum my floors and, you know, tell me what's wrong with my car. But if I want connection, I want it with another human beings just cause that's, that's who I am.

So I think ultimately in terms of writing and publishing, I think we'll come to a stage where we're going to make the willful choice that we'd rather want a human product than an AI product, just cause that's what we want. There'll be a question of authenticity, not necessarily of quality, but of authenticity. Amen.

Amen. Thank you. I could not agree more.

I say, um, I say I declare in all my writing and all my email lists, all my blogs, no AI, like I declare that in my, in my offering to people. And I've had to do that more. And I wonder if that's necessary, but I just do want people to know that like, I'm not like feeding this into something, you know?

You know, I think publishers will divide. Let's say if you want, listen, there could be wonderful genre fiction where you don't want to be surprised. You want to know.

It's like when you go to McDonald's and you get a big Mac, you know what to expect. And that's what you want. You don't want surprises.

You want that easy satisfaction of comfort food. There could be AI generated, you know, romances that are exactly like that with terrific sex, great looks. And it's, it's a fantasy product.

It's not necessarily experimental. It doesn't use big, fancy words or long, complicated sentences. AI can surely generate that.

And that might be all right. So a lot of publishers will say, here are the AI things, very, very cheap. Cause we wrote this in fact in four and a half seconds.

And so it'll be inexpensive. It'll be like fast food. And then if you want higher quality, slow food literature, well then that's more expensive and don't worry.

There's no AI whatsoever. And I think that'll be the, and each will have its strength and it's, it's, you know, the AI stuff will be inexpensive, easily available, forgettable, but comforting. And you'll have as many as you want with me and you can calibrate it sort of like your Starbucks coffees.

You know, you'll want your romance, but you do want to, you want your gay one. Let's say you want it to be gay. And you know, you, you can sort of calibrate it in so many different ways.

One second, Neal. This is important. So I had a car crash this morning.

Take, take, take a beat. Perfect. That's perfect.

20, 25 minutes. I'll be there. Yeah.

I had a car accident this morning. I slid into a curb and I hit it really hard and it jarred my wheel. And so my car has been sitting there all day.

Oh my gosh. You have about 15 minutes left, Neal or Smith. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Got it.

Well, thanks so much for that. That wide ranging reflection on the sailor who fell from grace from the sea. Let's jump over to your second form of book, which of course is Deck Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.

Is that right? C-A-T-H-E-R. Yeah.

Captivating cover like this really striking oil painting with bright blues and reds. And just, you just feel this twisting of emotions on there. Published in 1927 by you guessed it.

Knopf. This cover features, I already mentioned the oil painting, kind of like a desert landscape. Penguin classics across the bottom.

People are familiar with that white ribbon penguin classics and the black undertone. Willa Cather was born December 7th, 1873 in Back Creek Valley, Virginia. She died in 1947 in New York.

But when she was nine years old, this is kind of the interesting thing. She moved from Virginia, you know, where she was kind of, I guess that was a happening place at the time, all the way to Red Cloud, Nebraska. You can kind of tell from the name, not much there under the clouds.

The book is an epic portrait of a life simply lived within the Southwest vast silence in 1851, following father Jean-Marie Latour as he navigates a rugged landscape of red hills and canyons. Follow us on Dewey Decimals over 813.52 for American fiction 1940 to 1945. Please tell us about your relationship with Death Comes for the Archbishop by Cather, C-A-T-H-E-R.

Well, with Willa Cather, first of all, she's a woman. And Cather's sort of a lone element. I think if she were born today, if she existed today, I think she would be openly gay.

But at the time she couldn't be. So she lived a somewhat solitary life, but very much not one coward. So she wrote about like, well known was Maya Antonia.

She wrote books on her own, well published, but sort of stayed on a little bit like Georgia O'Keeffe, sort of doing her own stuff away from the big centers. And Death Comes for the Archbishop I particularly like is it's a story of an archbishop sent, therefore, by the Catholic Church to New Mexico, middle of nowhere, to sort of start a community. So it's a wonderful novel about someone building a dream in a landscape, like saying, here's this belief that I have.

And it's very much about his relations with the people around him. It's nothing about proselytizing. So it's not at all a Christian novel.

It's simply about someone who has faith in something. It happens to be in Jesus. But trying to bring that to a landscape, trying to build a life with it.

So it's an interesting mix of the spiritual and the terrestrial. How do the two live together? In a sense, how does the spirit live in the body?

How does the ghost and the machine operate? And that's an interesting question. How do we think?

How do we feel, given that we live in bodies? How do the two relate? And here it's done very concretely.

It's about this archbishop trying to establish himself, his church in this landscape, his triumphs and his failures. I just remember being particularly struck by this overt attempt to look at what a life of the mind is when it has to live in the world. And as I said, it's from a writer who was not subject to fads.

She writes beautifully. But you don't see someone who's very mindfully trying to do that. She wasn't trying to show off or try like...

Hemingway is a fantastic writer. He started as quite a mundane writer. And he very deliberately developed that wonderful sort of biblically cadenced style.

Very simple, very repetitive, you know, very, very incantatory. It's a more naturalistic kind of writing. Very effective.

And as I said, exploring worlds that, you know, it's not set in New York. It's not set during a war. It's set in like the American 1850.

This is so long ago and so far away from any center of population. And yet it's a deeply thoughtful book. She's wonderful at describing landscapes.

And yet I said, this is an archbishop. I just thought it's an oddity too, who... You know, we're so used to commercial figures, to people who have money, who sort of are turnaround money, who need money or want money.

Here's a character who doesn't care at all about money. You know, he needs minimally to feed himself. But so it's a novel about not any set values, but just about someone who has values that have nothing to do with money.

So it really struck me when I read it a long time ago. And she's one of these writers who has struck me. Because of that sort of independence of mind.

And the fact that she was so out there in a sense, literally in terms of why you said Nebraska, who the hell else think it was coming from Nebraska? Yeah. Especially not then, like not years ago.

Exactly, not then, not then. Yeah. Well, this is interesting, the exploration and kind of going to new places.

You strike me, I will say, maybe like her. You're like, you're urban, you know, like you're a very urban mind. I mean, I think about urban, urbane.

I think of a guy who was born in Spain, grew up in Portugal, then Madrid, then Fairbank, Alaska, then Victoria, B.C., then I don't know the orders, right. But then San Jose, Costa Rica, then Paris, then Madrid again. And like, may I just ask kind of like, why Saskatoon?

I get a lot of Toronto types asking me that, actually. It wouldn't be the opposite. You know, I don't think Toronto's the best either.

I'm not saying like, here's better. I'm just curious how you think. You know, I came here.

Listen, I lived in Montreal for 10 years. I speak French. It's my mother tongue.

I speak French with my parents. I lived 10 years in France, but I write in English. Well, I can tell you that doesn't go down well, particularly in Quebec.

I'm the poster child, they think, of assimilation. I had nothing to do with that. I happen to live in a country where there are no French schools.

My parents, in a very benign, open, positive way, thought it would make me a good bilingual citizen. And it's totally true. It has.

So I always went to school in English. So when it came time to write, I naturally wrote in a language in which I learned, I got my education. And I love the flexibility of English.

It's such a crazy, it's, there's not one English. There's Englishes spoken by different people. It's got a sort of, it happens to have a stripped down grammar, difficult spelling, but it's stripped down grammar.

And English grammar is making syntax. There's no, you know, grammar is basically, you know, you have the plural and the possessive. That's pretty as complicated as it gets.

Then everything comes down to syntax. You don't have to have cases. There's minimal cases in English.

Anyway, it's a very powerful, versatile language. So I naturally came to writing it. But after 10 years in Montreal, I kind of got tired of the politics of language.

You know, I meant nothing negative by writing in English. It's just the instrument I happened to pick up. You know, I picked up a saxophone in a violin section.

And so I'm actually, I'm surprised that you were getting like, people were throwing shade at you for that. I mean, you're like, you wrote Life of Pi, like forgive the man. It comes out in France the same day.

Nonetheless, here I am writing in French. I just launched it in Quebec, Son of Nobody. And, you know, it's interesting how nothing was made of the fact that it was written in English.

They just don't want to mention it particularly. They didn't ask any questions about translation. What's, you know, is there a difference between English?

There's no, that wasn't brought up. It was as if it was written in French. They just don't want to mention it.

So I just got tired. So I said, oh, hey, why don't I live somewhere else for a year? And I had an aunt and uncle who lived here, two cousins.

So it was part of, it was sort of on the family atlas that there's a town called Saskatoon where we had an aunt and uncle. So I said, oh, why don't I try being here for one year? I was writer-in-residence at the public library, not at the university, at the public library.

And I thought, I'll try it for nine months and come back to Montreal. I sort of refreshed, do a little holiday. Well, I love it here.

I love the prairies. I'm not one to rave about mountains. I found mountains kind of claustrophobic.

They get in the way of the view. They shorten your days. I like visiting mountains, but very quickly, we just went skiing, my family and I, and on the way back, once we left the foothills and the prairies opened up, I felt like, oh my God, I can breathe.

I'm not spring-filled walls. I love the prairies. I compare the prairies to Rothko, to the painter Mark Rothko.

It's very much a spiritual landscape. And to me, mountains are like special effects in an overdone Hollywood movie. They're really obvious.

So that's why people like them. They're in your face. The prairies are not in your face.

And it's very hard to capture the prairies. When you see movies about the prairies, they make the mistake of looking down at a wheat field with a combine harvester. That's not really it.

You have to look at the sky. It's the skies. The, you know, on the license plate here, the motto is, Land of Living Skies.

I don't know if anyone came up with that, but it's brilliant. The skies are astonishing here. We do have mountains.

They're just called clouds. They're so enormous. So I find it, I love the landscape here.

And I didn't know that. It's like we got a cat a year ago, and I discovered I'm a cat person much more than a dog person. I love my cat.

Well, same thing with the prairies. I didn't expect to love the prairies. Like most people, I thought it'd be boring because there's nothing there where nothing is actually beautiful.

Nothing is, it shimmers with light. So here I am like Saskatchewan tourism board officer here. But I love, I've been here for 20 years and I still am, you know, there are water events, you know, like sun dogs.

They're amazing where you have three suns. You know, sometimes it's so cold that the moisture in the air freezes, but it doesn't precipitate because it's too small. And then what happens there is it refracts light.

So the air itself glitters in ways that are quite spectacular. So there's phenomenons here because of the extreme cold and the dryness of the air that's quite unique. And because the air is dry, once you're dressed for it, it's not cold.

Anyway, here it is. I love the prairie. So I've been here for 20 years.

My four kids were born here. It's a beautiful landscape. And, you know, metaphorically, the tallest thing here on the prairies is the human being.

And that means there's something very small about that. We're not very high, but that's all there is. So there's a humanity to living in the prairies.

It aggrandizes us without making us arrogant. Whereas mountains, yes, dwarf you, but then you conquer the mountain like Edmund Hillary and you're on top of it. You know, there's a distortion of the ego that can happen in mountain landscapes.

It doesn't happen here. Here we need each other because the winters are fierce. Um, you need the other little mountain, you know, two miles away.

That's your fellow farmer. Hence why the prairies were very, you know, socially disposed. The CCF started here.

A lot of good ideas emerged from Saskatchewan to do with helping each other. Universal health care, unemployment insurance, work and compensation. Those all came from Saskatchewan.

First of all, I do want to print that out onto a poster for the Tourism Board of Saskatchewan. That was epic. So thank you.

Um, does your, do your parents live nearby? Well, no, we live in Quebec. My father died two years ago.

Now my mother, who didn't know any of Saskatchewan, lives in a care home just outside of Saskatchewan, a wonderful care home that they take amazing care of her. So she's now living here with me. I'm looking after her.

I'm so happy to hear that. Yeah, my dad's 81. My mom's 75.

They're doing well, but we're at the early size. We're, you know, we're at the early start. My father died in two weeks, in three weeks of cancer of the esophagus.

Between diagnosis and death by May, there was three weeks. 82 years of a good life, and then three years of not such a great life. It's, if you have to go, that's the way you want to go.

Absolutely. I was going to ask you about death, but here's what we'll do in the last couple of minutes. Could you please tell us about how the New York Times crossword puzzles have been formative to you?

Why don't we close with that? Because I was going to go with Divine Comedy, you know, the other extreme, which I have right here, like the, you know, 700-page masterwork, but you also mentioned New York Times crossword puzzles were formative. Maybe we go with that.

One minute from the Divine Comedy. It's not a boring classic. It's the road trip through hell, through purgatory, and through heaven.

It's full of characters, full of events. It's an astonishing, entertaining, it's a monument of world literature. It's one of my favorite, favorite books.

It's truly astonishing. Crossword puzzles. Hey, I like words and I love crosswords.

You learn about the world and the clues. I'm so happy when I'm doing a crossword puzzle or a sudoku, but a crossword puzzle, it's nicely social, do it with someone. I'm in them.

I've been in three New York Times crossword puzzles. Life of Pi has been a clue three times. And that to me is immortality.

Great winning the New York Times crossword puzzle. I was so pumped up when I found that out. I was so delighted.

Is Will Shortz your favorite New York Times editor or did you have someone before that? Well, they're the originators. They started New York crossword puzzles.

It was invented by the New York Times. So I liked, I love the New York Times. It's the defining New York crossword puzzle.

I spent, I can maybe get a Monday done like 75, 80%, but I got no chance on the weekends. Is there a New York Times crossword puzzle book you'd recommend or anything? I do the weekly one that appears in the Saskatoon Star of Phoenix.

And there's any number of books edited by Will Shortz. Yeah, take anyone. But you're right.

They're easy to hard. I'm good now. We can do any day of the week, my partner and I.

The Friday one, yeah, is harder. But yeah, I do them all the time. I find it's a very relaxing way and that doesn't stress me.

I know your car is sitting on the side of the road. I know you've been very generous with your time. I really do appreciate this.

Just maybe one last tiny thing to close us off. This is a pocket spot for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. Getting a chance to talk to you is one of the dreams for this show.

I really appreciate it. Is there a final bit of advice, word of wisdom, hard fought, kind of from the battlefield, little tip you'd kind of share with us? You've given us a ton already.

Print your own book at Friesen's. Hand them out if you want to sell them. Here's ideas for good book tours.

But you know, a lot of us are writers, aspiring or wannabe or wannabe batter. Any last piece of advice for us as you close things off? Well, for writers, I would say turn your back on the world.

The world will always tell you it doesn't need another book, another poem, another play. It's not true. So ignore that negativity.

Ignore the freight of history. Turn your back on the world and nurture that little fire. Feed it.

Because you know what? You'll gain nothing by not doing that. You don't want to be 45, 55 and say, I didn't live my dream.

Live your dream. Turn your back on the world. Nurture your little work.

Because it could be a big work. And in the meantime, yeah, you might need a daytime job. Find one that doesn't totally deplete you.

But yeah, turn your back on the world is one. And otherwise, as a general life one, in Son of Nobody, there's this key line at the end of how, you know, our bodies are strong. Our joints are strong.

Our vision is clear and all that. Yet we walk on feet of dreams. We don't walk in the real world.

We walk on feet of dreams. The Trojan War is a myth. The story of Jesus is a myth in the sense we have no facts behind it.

Both are stories that have created the West. We walk on to those two feet, the Iliad, the Gospels. Wrath, love, wrath, love.

They are feet of dream. They're very powerful. So you need to find those dreams that you can walk with.

That will give you feet. So find those feet and walk. And it can be contradictory.

Like, Troy, Jesus is wrath, love. But those are the two feet we walk on. I'm blown away.

I'm staggered. I'm so grateful. I'm so appreciative.

Yann Martel, thank you so much for coming on Three Bucks. I really, really, really- My pleasure, Neil. Thank you very much.

Sorry for the delay initially. Okay, I gotta run. Thanks, Neil.

Hey, everybody. It's just me, just Neil again, back in my basement. Listening to the really wise and erudite Yann Martel.

Wasn't that hilarious how he got a phone call in the middle? Because he had a car accident. And I guess you can only do this in Saskatoon, but you can just, like, leave your car on the road.

He's like, I just left my car on the road there. I'll have to go get it now. I thought that was really funny.

And it was a longer conversation, but I just left it a little snip of it. Because it was kind of like, it was part of the show. It was a part of the show, you know?

What a generous, generous man to give us so much of his time. And so many open thoughts, all the way from the beginning, talking about, like, racism in Australia. You know, all the way carrying it through into, like, the role of a writer.

And just, like, this epic gift. If you're a writer, or you want to be a writer, listen to Yann Martel talk about writing. Man, we are so lucky on this show to be able to do stuff like this.

How about all these quotes, too? Like, we've done a lot of quotes. Including, he's talking about AI.

He said, one thing I'm certain is there's always going to be a hunger for stories. I thought that was a really wonderful zoom out. Because, you know, the books I write, I'm hearing from publishers, they're like, oh, your books are kind of gifty.

You know, this is nonfiction. Like, you know, people can type into AI, like, well, give me a thousand awesome things, right? Yeah, well, it's true.

Yeah. But Yann's, you know, quote gives me hope that I'm going to, you know, not just have a job, but just that the idea that if we as people can reflect back the things that we're going through and share those openly, then that alone is enough. You know, that's another reason why I was kind of sharing the cannabis thing at the beginning.

It's like, there's a lot more to that story in terms of, like, pros and cons and struggles and how I did it and how I'm continuing to work on it and so on. And I'm just going to try to keep sharing those, you know, as I can. Because I think that's hopefully good for both of us, right?

There's always going to be a hunger for stories. How about this, art is manufactured meaning. That one just kind of hits you a little bit.

You're like, what is, what? Art is manufactured meaning. I love that phrase.

I'd rather have less good poetry by a human than excellent poetry by a robot. And this is something that I think is true. When you find out something is AI made, like in my group chat with my old high school friend, somebody's like, hey, check out this guy's, this new movie.

And there's like a new movie blockbuster coming out this summer with like a hundred million dollar budget. And all the people are saying, well, this would have been a $300 million budget if we didn't use AI. And then all my friends are like, I'm not seeing that movie.

It's just like, right away, it sounds bad. You know? And my friend who's in the animation industry is like, and it's also stealing everything.

Like the reason it's faster and cheaper is because it's stealing everybody else's stuff. Well, you know, I don't want to push back too hard on that. But yeah, don't you think we lose interest when we find out it's made by robots?

Okay. I like this one. I don't need AI to help me write because it would be like having AI have sex for you or eat for you.

I'd rather do it myself. Amen. So funny.

Metaphorically, the tallest thing here in the prairies is the human being. That was a stunner. I've went on the train.

I think I was like 14, 15, maybe 16 years old with my parents and my sister. I think I was 14. We took the train from Toronto all the way to Vancouver, which is like four days.

Like it's far. And you know, it takes like two days to get out of Ontario. It's just like woods and forests.

Then you have like a day you like whip through the prairies, but it's like flat as hell. It's so flat. I don't know if hell's flat, actually.

And then you get through the mountains and it's twisty and turning it up and down. But like the prairies are like so unique and such a unique landscape. But that whole point that we're the tallest thing here.

Yeah, I like that. I was surprised, honestly, that he lives there. But hey, that's fine.

And then not only fine, sounds great when you hear him talk about it. We do got to put that on the poster. I think we're going to put on the threebooks.co show notes. Head to threebooks.co slash chapter slash 161. We're going to make like a Saskatchewan poster with that epic rant he gave. I just feel like that should be like the province of Saskatchewan's new like tourism board thing.

We're going to make it for them. Okay. And then he say, for writers, I would say, turn your back on the world.

This reminds me of what Quentin Tarantino told us in chapter 92, which is like, don't censor yourself. Like, you know, turn your back on the world and don't censor yourself. We're kind of of the same ilk, which is like kind of ignore everything.

Similar to Stephen King's advice in On Writing, which is that, you know, writers are kind of operating outside of the strictures of the world. I think that's a really good metaphor for artists in general, right? If we start paying attention to other things, then naturally our work will start to homogenize.

So I have some fear of that with my podcast. I'm like opening the podcast with like key quotes. I'm like trying to do video because everyone's on YouTube.

Like, is that just me homogenizing someone that was my like, just audio only, just a really long theme song. You guys remember the first 50 chapters of the show? I just played the theme song for 45 seconds.

I wanted just music, right? And everyone was like, your music and intro is way too long. And I was like, I don't care.

I don't care. But eventually I changed it, didn't I? This is the risk for artists.

We got to be careful about change, changing our stuff to match the things of other people. All right. So Yon gave us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 533, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Nishima.

I think he's pronounced it M-I-S-H-I-M-A, which by the way, I'm not done that book yet. What is so good? I can't recommend it enough.

Plus you probably never read a book of fiction ever again by somebody who killed themselves by stabbing themselves in the stomach with a knife and then having themselves ritually beheaded. Just the odds of that are pretty low, you got to say. Not to say it couldn't happen again.

Number 532, Death Comes For The Archbishop by Willa Cather, C-A-T-H-E-R. I'm going to put in number 531 here. We have a lot of duplicates on the show, as you know.

There's going to be a, if you go to FAQ on threebooks.co, we're going to have a question. I'm adding a question, which is, where are we? Because you know, 1000 or 999 divided by 333 is three, which means that after 333 chapters, we shouldn't necessarily get to 999 books.

I was thinking my number one form of the book could be the end or something. But then what happens is you get like Penn and Kim Holderness with six. And then you get like other people that are like three, they give three books, but two of them have already been on the show before.

So we had two asterisks to the top 1000. So we're going to have a regular countdown as an FAQ, which is the total number of books we've discussed divided by the total number of chapters we've had equals. And that number will be, you know, three points, something above 3.0 or two points, something really close to three. And we will keep watching that number every chapter to make it land right on 3.0 when we get to 2040, which is what we're finishing the show. All right. So number 531, New York Times Crossword Puzzle Books.

And you know what? I think I want to put here like the specific Saskatchewan newspaper that he mentioned that he does them with his wife. That'd be kind of cool because there's so many New York Times Crossword Puzzle Books.

What would you say? New York Times Crossword Puzzle Books by Will Shortz. And then number 530, Divine Comedy by Dante.

I did not know Dante's last name, by the way, is A-L-L-I-G-H-I-E-R-I, a book written, no big deal, about 800 years ago. Okay. So I have it.

I have not worked my way through it. It's about this thick. It's like a phone book, people.

I'm ready for it, but you know, I need to, I'm going to have to work up to that one. It's an infinite size. All right.

If you're watching on YouTube, this is where we bid adieu. If you're listening on audio, hang out for just three seconds. As I say, goodbye, everybody.

Thank you so much for listening to chapter 161 of three books. This is the club where I talk directly to you. You talk directly to me.

I put your voicemails. We talk some, we talk some letters. We just jive.

It's like a hangout. This is the after party and to kick us off, let's see what we always do by going to the phones. By the way, if you're listening to this, call 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.

If you want to call us, that'd be wonderful. Here we go. Let's jump over to the phones now.

[Yann Martel]

Hey there, Neil. My name is Joyce Fidler and I chose to listen to the adorable interview you did with your two-year-old. I found it delightful and I really enjoyed it.

I'm going to go to your3books.co and put that secret code in. I live in Los Angeles and I have a brand new memoir. My book is Evolution of a Baby Boomer, Life Beyond Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.

You can find it on Amazon. Anyway, I will continue to hunt you down in other ways. Thanks.

Bye.

[Neil Pasricha]

Thank you so much to Joyce Fidler for calling in all the way from Los Angeles, California. Congratulations on your book, Joyce, Evolution of a Baby Boomer. No, no reason you can't call 1-833-READALOT and tell us about your book.

We love having authors. We're a writing masterclass show here, everybody, by Joyce Fidler, F-I-D-L-E-R. What's the story about?

Well, Joyce Fidler takes us on her journey as a record store owner and rock band singer. She begins her adult years in the Bible Belt, where sex, drugs, and rock and roll dominate her life. As she relocates to La La Land in her 40s, she invites readers to witness her unexpected transformation to a fruitful, productive citizen.

Fidler's memoir traces the how and why of this metamorphosis, including a divorce from a polyamorous marriage, separation from her teenage children, and an eventual surrender to recovery from marijuana and alcohol addiction. This is sounding familiar already. I mean, some of it, anyway.

Congratulations, Joyce. Came out April 25, 2024. Only 136 pages.

Yours for the low, low price of $6.95. 93 reviews, 4.9. Joyce, congratulations on your book. Cover is really cool, too. It's like the sort of trippy, psychedelic Tom Wolfe, you know?

You know, the cover of that, like, school bus. Kind of, you know, all the flowery colors. And then there's Joyce.

I presume that's you, Joyce. Striking, smiling, middle-aged blonde woman. Short, cropped hair with, like, a black, full-length black-and-white dress.

Like, shaman-esque, dare I say? Joyce, you sound like a fasting person. And I'm touched and honored to have you as a three-booker.

All right. Now, should we do a letter of the chapter, everybody? Did we already do a letter?

Let's do another one. All right. Meredith.

Meredith writes in. Meredith says, Hi, Neil. Hope you're well.

I'm reaching out to say hello again. Loved your latest podcast episode with Rich Roll. I discovered your podcast a little over a year ago, and I've essentially been listening to your podcast daily for months.

This is wonderful. Thank you. As I was listening to your conversation with Tank Sinatra, I felt compelled to tell you about a book I recently finished that I feel you would love, since the themes overlap significantly with the values that you embraced for three books.

I am talking about Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Dewar. D-O-E-R-R. Essentially, he ties five characters from 15th century Constantinople to modern-day Idaho to a not-so-distant future in space after we've thoroughly destroyed our planet in the same thread as an ancient Greek myth, which, of course, is what Yann Martel is all about, too.

It's about values and perseverance and transformation and translation of story across multiple centuries and cultures. His writing is magical and beautiful, and I thought the entire time Anthony Dewar would be an incredible guest to have on three books. Let's add him to the pitch list.

Let's add him to the pitch list, okay? I'll try to dig up some information. I should probably read the book first, though.

All right. On a separate note from this, I wanted to thank you for your book, Our Book of Awesome. I bought it for my entire family.

Last Christmas, we had a rough year, unexpectedly losing my older brother this past August. I'm sorry. My sister Kelly has particularly appreciated your book and also your recommendations for daily habits to being a healthier and happier human.

I love it when she shares a group text to my family from your book. I know it brings a smile to everyone's face. Have a great night.

Meredith. Meredith, you're a peach and a joy. I'm so sorry about your brother.

Oh, my gosh. Siblings. We're all shifting off this moral coil, but that's a striking loss, your brother.

I'm glad Our Book of Awesome has been helpful. If you want another copy, a signed copy, please email me. As I always say, if I play your voicemail at 1833readalot, or if I read your letter on the show, just email me.

It's neil at globalhappiness.org. My email address is on the Three Books website. If I don't reply, send it again.

My inbox is like a creek with things flying down a river, it kind of feels like. Just send it to me again. But I try to mail those out right as soon as I get them.

I sign them. I have piles of every book I've ever written in my basement. You could ask for a Japanese copy of You Are Awesome.

I have picture books. I have board books. I have every book I've ever written.

Tons of books in the basement. 11 books at least. All right.

Thank you, Meredith, for your letter. And now it's time for a Word of the Chapter. And you know what time it is, everybody.

The one and only Eloquent Jan Martel, of course, deserves a word cloud. Let's jump into that now. Unique marsupials were bedeviled, remarkably intemperate.

It's exquisite to realize how each idiosyncratic mind liquefying the initial impetus. Nothing about proselytizing. Very incantatory.

It aggrandizes us. Holy cow. How cool is it to listen to Jan Martel just talking?

Incantatory. Impetus. Liquefying.

I like when I was talking about Toby Luca and I told him about that quote he said, where he's like, you know, that goddamn fishes have enough space to swim, which is literally what he said in writing on Twitter. He's a, you know, pretty serious dude, right? It's like, okay.

And he's like, how intemperate. I love that word. Intemperate?

Have you heard that? Have you? Do you know how to use that word, intemperate?

I guess it kind of means like, you know, a lack of moderation, restraint, or self-control, right? And his intemperate drinking habits eventually ruined his death. This region is known for its intemperate climate, right?

Not well-tempered. Intemperate. But I don't know if we should go with that when we could easily go instead with bedeviled.

Bedeviled. B-E-D-E-V-I-L. A verb that, according to Merriam-Webster, means to possess with or as if with a devil, to cause distress or trouble, to change for the worse or to spoil or to confuse utterly.

Interesting, because I only started this word, by the way, in the 18th century, like mid-1755, 1768. So, it's only like 250 years old, you know? Even though the devil or, you know, the Bible is like a lot older than that, because that's where it was first combined.

The B, which means to thoroughly or to make, with devil. It literally means to treat or affect someone like a devil would, to mean tormenting, harassing, or confusing someone. To be deviled, right?

To be deviled. I know it sounds obvious, but I admit I didn't quite get it right when he said it. What do you mean, be deviled?

I was thinking, like, an egg, you know? But no, it doesn't mean that at all. But then you might ask, if you're me, or you're you, because we're nerdy, because you're at the end of the podcast, like, listing the, like, I geek out about words, right?

So, it's like, what about devil? What about the word devil itself? Where does that come from?

And that is also quite interesting, because devil, the word devil itself is a modern English word from Middle English, D-V-E-L, D-E-V-E-L, from Old English, D-E-O-F-O-L, which is borrowed from a Germanic borrowing of a Latin word, diabolus, which means a slanderer, or a thrown slanderer. The idea of a devil is somebody who slanders and throws. Throws and slanders?

That's what devil originally meant. Also, interesting note that demon and devil in the religious texts were separate, and now they are combined. Eventually, demon and devil are kind of the same thing.

Of course, we all picture, though, like, you know, the red dude with the mustache and, like, a forked tail. I wonder where that came from, you know? Where did the image of a red devil with a forked tail come from?

That, to me, is, like, much newer. That's a composite invention, of course, from medieval, classical, and modern sources, rather than any kind of biblical description, with the goat legs, and the red color, and the medieval influence, and the modern refinement. Even created in 19th and 20th century commercial art, folklore, and popular culture.

Okay, we'll take it, people. What we always do at the end is try to geek out about a word, and we sure did, about a bedeviled word. That would be bedevil, the verb.

Hey, listen, if you made it all the way to the end, thank you for hanging out with Yann and me, and you on the couch in between us. This was an awesome chapter. Nice to get two chapters out in the same month.

And until next time, when I see you on chapter 162, with a classic release in the middle, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read. Keep turning the page, everybody, and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

Listen to the chapter here!