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A Biblioasis Interview with Patrick McCabe

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A Biblioasis Interview with Patrick McCabe

Tell me a bit about yourself.

Well, I suppose I have been a full-time writer for twenty years now. I used to do other jobs, but they are not of any interest to either me or your public. I suppose I have written a lot about contemporary Ireland, the ancient world, and the interplay between them.

How does the ancient world—folklore, myth—influence your work?

I was brought up on the Catholic Gaelic tradition, you know, which is filled with all sorts of contemplations of alternate worlds and alternative realities and that is always really appealing to a child. In my case, it became comingled with what we call the “culture of the degraded image.” Popular culture like horror movies, comic fiction, TV, all sorts of things. The various manifestations and expressions of the inexplicable in the modern world and the ancient world became one for me. That is very true of Poguemahone. It is ancient folklore and contemporary folklore performing a progressive music dance.

There is also an element of hilarity and self-parody as well. I suppose what I like to do in fiction is to do battle with the English language. There is a sympathetic understanding between the two languages—that is to say Gaelic and the English language—in the book but also a kind of mischievous duet. It has been said that the characters speak in English but feel in Irish. Feel in Gaelic, in the Catholic Gaelic tradition, but speak in the Anglo-Saxon, more pragmatic, straight-talking tradition. There is a lot of that kind of dancing going on. Language dancing around itself, as it were.

It is evident on the page and, well, in moments where characters don’t realize they have slipped into Gaelic. Those moments are very poignant.

Well, it is a serious book and, poignant is what I was looking for. It is ultimately about the greatest horror I’ve ever experienced, which is Alzheimer’s. I haven’t experienced this personally, but I have been very close to it. If in the ancient world people said a spell had been cast either on a person, or a town, it might seem to the rational or contemporary mind to be a ludicrous superstition. But, when you are close to Alzheimer’s, it is as good an explanation as any. Because that is what it looks like.

In the age of TikTok and in the age of the information superhighway, we know everything and we know nothing more than the ancients really. A simple plague can knock everything out. If this had been a bubonic plague, none of these things would have counted for anything. They would have just been toys. It might happen yet.

Yes, it might happen yet. I mean, it is obviously a raucous book. But I found it to be quite serious throughout.

It’s meant to be deadly serious—it is the most serious book I’ve ever written. The overlay of hilarity, self-mockery, and parody is just that: an overlay. The subterranean river running through it is one of dread.

My next question is about your narrator—

I’ve been married for a long time, 40 or 50 years now. I’ve got 2.5 grandchildren, there is one coming in May. I’m sort of a traditional anarchist, as it were. Imaginatively anarchistic, socially traditional. I like order. It is very easy to be anarchic in your imagination if you are ordered in your life. If you are disordered in your life, all hell breaks loose on both fronts. I like steadiness.

When I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of Joyce, Nabokov, especially when thinking about Dan, and the role he plays as the narrator—

As a young man I was very influenced by both of those writers. I suppose who you encounter first leaves a lasting mark. I read all of Nabokov’s work, some of it I liked more than others. I mean I found Ada impenetrable. But the other ones are linguistically very exciting. It is all about language in a way for me in the end. If you get the beat and the rhythm and timbre of a language right, the novel usually emerges through the language, through the cracks between the words. I don’t start off with a story, I never have an idea of where it is going to go. I just follow the language.

This book started off as a traditional, chapter-based book. When I saw what I had, I was in despair, and felt like tearing the whole thing up. I didn’t like it, didn’t think it was original enough, and then a couple of things happened that kind of released the book. It was like an emotional pressure valve that, when released, the book came out. And it came out in an entirely different form than originally anticipated.

And that was very true with this, you know. A lot of it is set in the 70s and to the kind of rhythm of the 70s, like Dylan’s Desolation Row or the poetry of Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. It is at once an homage and a means of acknowledging the rhythms of an age which, for me, release the emotions of an age.

A prospective publisher said to me: “I don’t understand why it is written in this middle of the page kind of poetic style.” I said, “well you know, if it is good enough for Ginsberg, it is good enough for me. If it is good enough for TS Eliot, it is good enough for me. But also, didn’t you know that Irish Leprechauns speak in iambic pentameter?” And he said, “no I didn’t,” and I said, “well they do, and I’ve seen them.” At that point, he terminated the phone call.

Yes, well, I am a reader of poetry first and I think, you know, opening a 600-page book of poetry can be daunting for anyone, at first. But it immediately became viscerally clear why you chose this form.

Yes, well, I completely understand those concerns. If it is difficult to read a 600-page book of poetry, it is equally daunting to write it. I didn’t want to write it unless the story barreled along and was very clear. I am no fan of opaque epics. I love poetry but if something is keeping the reader out, rather than bringing the reader in, particularly now more than in any other age, it is already lost. Because of the proliferation of visceral imagery now, you notice at the theatre or movies, the audience will give [something] ten minutes before glazing over, unless there is something going on that is of interest to them.

So we are in a different time, concentration-wise. I was well-aware of what the challenges would be. But I think once I got the note struck, whoever is going to be interested in this, they are not going to be willfully excluded from anything I have to say.

Yeah, well it is quite stunning, and, in that way, very clear.

That is very important. Nothing maddens me more than a poem that eludes you unnecessarily when you could have been brought into everyone’s advantage, especially the author’s.

When you were thinking about Dan, as the speaker, was it important that he was unstable, unreliable?

If you think about what is happening, it is like a basilisk or a virus (to which we are all accustomed now) has gotten loose. It is the basilisk of vascular dementia, and you don’t know what way that is going to go. You don’t know if what you are being told is the truth, or if it is one time the truth, and next time not the truth. That is the way that affliction works.

It is also an allusion to general apprehensions of reality. The way, say, a Gaelic Catholic sees the world is not the way, say, an Indian Hindu sees the world. Is a tree the same thing to everyone? What is a tree anyway? Who calls it a tree?

These things only become apparent as you get older and you see them collapse. Like the foundation pillars that maybe held a person’s life both intellectually and theologically together crumbling in front of them. What was once very familiar is now terrifying, strange, maybe amusing, but it’s not the thing that was there before. So what is it? So then it’s very important that the narrator had a multistranded view. And the person that he’s representing—or is he representing?—what is her reality now?

It is as big a book as it is because the number of questions it is taking on is quite a lot for me. Normally, the focus is narrower than that. This one, you’ve got two narrators in one, in a way. You’ve got the Spanish/Portuguese element which represents the dreamlike world of the Latin which is very close, I find, to the Catholic Gaelic, one in that rationality moves in and out of itself all of the time. It is colourful. Linguistically it is impish, daring, and challenging in a way that perhaps the Anglo-Saxon Canadian/American anglophile world, shall we say, is not. Not that either is better or worse, they are just different.

You find those differences between Ireland and England. Superficially, they seem the same, until you start listening, and digging a bit, and you see curious gaps. Interesting gaps.

Those are minor explorations though. I suppose really what this story is, is one of exile and heartbreak. You’ve been exiled from yourself, that is the ultimate exile, isn’t it?

That was my next question: exile and the role it plays in your work. I know Fogarty—the last name of your main characters—translates to “exiled” in Gaelic. I’ve read quite a bit of exile literature, rarely from Ireland. A lot of German literature. I know there are many different ways to approach the subject. Exile from the self, the country, what kind of country you are talking about, what the historical conditions of exile are…

I love that tradition of European literature. There is an element there of stark, bony exile feel. But then there is the florid Latin/Gaelic, that is equally trying to lasso the notion of exile but is expressing it in an entirely different way.  But you are still left with the empty room of Kafka in the soul. Had there been anybody there at all? Did you imagine the whole story? Where did the story come from? Fogarty also means outlaw, being on the fringe, on the perimeter of society. But what is society? Is it made up of individuals? Which brings us to Camus. I’ve been interested in L’Étranger—a couple different translations of it.

One translation would open: “Mother died yesterday.” Okay, that is one. Another translation would be: “My mother died yesterday.” Straight away you have two different books, haven’t you? They are both dealing with exile. So, “Mother died yesterday” is the more European, Anglo-Saxon statement of fact. Three words. But then, when you add “my,” it personalizes it, which is the way the Irish mind would approach it. It brings it to the village.

But it doesn’t matter which way you express it, really. The exile is still the same. You are left alone. So, definitely, there is an element of The Waste Land. Who knows anyone? Who knows oneself?

These are such heavy questions. I couldn’t have written them except for in the style in which they emerged, a rainbow river that tumbles and torrents along. It had to come out for me that way, all these other things were buried deep. The form helped them to be released.

Do you think the condition of their being in exile helped you work out other themes that exile compounds? Like madness, alienation, isolation?

If you look at any of my humble offerings. There is always an element of someone being at the center of things, but they’re not. And they know they’re not. In The Butcher Boy, there is the illusion of being happy-go-lucky, but in fact the soul is desolate. You will often find, particularly if you examine Irish history, expressions that there is some terrible loss. Maybe even just in the biblical sense, as simple as banishment from the Garden of Eden. A sense of what is missing. People search for it in good work, love, God. It often eludes them.

It seems to me, having come through a God-centered world and now, in its absence, that the exile may be far deeper than we have begun to realize.

The world as it reconfigures itself and moves at such a speed, there are sometimes in the secular world when people seem to me to speak with enormous authority without any great information. Unbelievable confidence, but when you start to pick at this technological delivery, it doesn’t do a great deal. That’s not to say that I am particularly religious, but I grew up in a world where the psalms were known to very ordinary people, they could quote things, even if they weren’t particularly well-schooled or educated, they had a relationship—however oblique—with the classical world which is now laughable…

Obliterated.

Completely obliterated, annihilated, and in fact scorned. You see politicians who are attempting to impress but are so fool-hearty and ham-fisted in their delivery that it is nothing but an embarrassment. We may come out of this, I don’t know. But I think there is some time left for it to run, before something happens, and the game is up. It certainly does embarrass me. Do you know what I mean by that?

Yes. The denigration of language that was once universal for a community. Exile as a universal, philosophical, or existential condition, yeah…

Ultimately, it doesn’t make any difference if you were here or not.

Yeah, and now you might not have the language to express or even approach expressing those feelings.

Well, that is really worth exploring. Why, it is really good to have a dialogue with younger people because when you get to your mid-20s, these things might start to be of some interest. Because the thin ice that they’re fed, it only lasts through the teens. When real emotions start to come in, the language that has been attacked and obliterated could be of service to them. You can see the difference between people who have now realized that and people that haven’t.

The ones who haven’t would be really fine writers, maybe, and competent. It’s not their fault that they have been tumbled into an age where these things have been derided, particularly in America now. It wouldn’t be the first time. It just seems to have happened at a furious speed to me. But the 50s and the 70s didn’t differ in that respect, so much.

Kind of a shift but, not really. I would love to hear you talk about the role music plays in the text.

The beat of the book is set by the appearance of one particular song, which is an old Irish, Scottish folk song called “The Killiburn Brae.” A brae is a slope or a hill. It is generally sung to the beat of a hand drum. Like a lot of work songs, it is about the war between men and women. A man speaks about sending his wife down to hell. She is so infuriating that the Devil brings her back and dumps her at the doorway of her husband’s house, saying “you can look after her, because I can’t handle her.” The lyrics of this song are not that significant, but what is significant is the rhythm. It is the first song you encounter and is the musical foundation of the book.

As it moves into different areas, you could encounter the cool crooners of the 1950s, it could be Nat King Cole, or scat beats of the 60s. When it goes into the 70s, it moves into the psychedelic, transcendental phase. You have that absorbing period between 1970 and 1974 when all sorts of outlandish experimentations were taking place. In a way, the book is an homage to that as well, insofar as it is a drug-fueled opera. This sort of thing that was very common at that time. It was possible for record companies to form some of the most outlandish projects imaginable before they ran out of road, and punk came in.

But the circular librettos of the 70s certainly inform the book, as does William Burroughs and George Corso and all those … well I don’t like the word experimental, they are all part of the canon now. They might have been seen as experimental against Tennyson but not now. Just look at Bob Dylan, the most experimental of them all has won a Nobel Prize and is regarded along with Shakespeare. Quite rightfully so, I think.

Dylan told someone that in 1972 that he was a sea-faring mariner off the coast of Barbados. It was all a pack of lies, wasn’t it Bob, and it would have turned out to have actually happened to someone like Dave van Ronk. Dylan would’ve stolen the story and convinced himself that he was there. And if he convinced himself, well, maybe he was there.

It is operating on that level. I have always been interested in that multi-layered aspect of Dylan’s imagination. He rang his mother up one time, and he said to her, “I hope you don’t mind me making up all these stories.” She had read somewhere another pack of lies about when he ran away with the carnival. She said “Oh, absolutely no dear, but why are you doing it?” and he said “oh, well, I think it helps my career” and chuckles. And, you know, I like to chuckle.

It helps with the condition of exile. There isn’t that much of Dylan in the book, just a little bit. Because he is too powerful. If you admitted him in, he could take over, then it’s no book of your own, he would scoop the prize again, like he did to Dave van Ronk.

I found it very operatic, in the way that The Wall and Quadrophenia, are.

Those albums, at their best, well, I love their absolute audacity. They really shouldn’t have the nerve to do those things. I thought that with the original 1500-page manuscript of this book, it was quite tame. Little strokes trying to burst, little veins. Then, when I got them all together, it came out in a torrent. But it was a controlled torrent. The original manuscript was solid and not as imaginative. But it provided the foundation. Like what I was saying: you live a relatively straight life so you can let your imagination go where it wants. If you are living a too dangerous life, and your imagination is going where it wants, you may well end up in trouble. And there is plenty of evidence, with the history of writers, to suggest that. It just doesn’t really work. It can be really dangerous. Anyway.

Well, you have addressed this already, in so many ways, but one of my questions is about the departure from prose. Especially as it pertains to dementia and expressing fractured consciousness. Maybe there is more you want to say on that.

I have approached it before, in other books, but I’ve never quite gone full throttle ‘til the end. It has been part of chapters here or there. I suppose, I’ve never been this close to fractured consciousness. At various times in my life, I’ve been semi-fractured myself in my perception or I have been associated with people, specifically in those countercultural days, who willfully courted distorted perception. Jim Morrison would be a great hero of ours. All these people who made it very attractive, especially to the young.

But when you are older, my age, and you are close to fractured consciousness to the extent that it terrifies you and terrifies you. You can only do it justice by writing a book like this, which addresses it head on. It is not funny. It is not a cultural fad. It is a nightmare.

Well, those are all my larger, thematic questions. My final question is what you are reading now?

I’m reading a book called Dead Fashion Girl by Fred Vermorel. It is set in the demi-monde of London’s Soho, late 1950s. I don’t know why I am reading it. There is a nexus of writing of people like Eoin McNamee and David Peace and a number of other English writers, that seem to circle the same world, a blue-lit, tremulous world of secrets and illicit comingling of the upper and lower classes in Britain. But it also affects Northern Ireland. There is a strange, fetishistic nocturnal world there. Post-war Britain, just before the 60s break, that is very, very interesting. I don’t know why, but it is. I don’t know if these writers communicate. There is something going on there.

 

Order your copy of Poguemahone here!

 

DANTE’S INDIANA, CHEMICAL VALLEY, THE UNSEEN: Media Hits!

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IN THE NEWS!

DANTE’S INDIANA

Randy Boyagoda, author of Dante’s Indiana (September 7, 2021), was interviewed on the Today Faith Podcast! The interview was posted on February 18, 2022. You can listen to the episode here!

Order Dante’s Indiana here!

CHEMICAL VALLEY

Chemical Valley cover

Chemical Valley by David Huebert (October 19, 2021) has been reviewed in Hamilton Arts & Letters! The review appears in issue 14.2, and was posted online on February 22, 2022. Check out the full review here.

Reviewer Jenn Carson writes,

“[A] masterful exploration of dirty nature writing … Chemical Valley’s stories, for all their dystopian demons, are balanced by Huebert’s insistence on penning his characters with an empathetic hand. His gaze may be harsh, like the reality we inhabit, but his love for his fellow man, and our desperate desire for connection, is unwavering.”

Order Chemical Valley here!

THE UNSEEN

The Unseen (April 7, 2020) by Roy Jacobsen, and translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw, was reviewed in the North Bay Nipissing! The review of this first book in the Barrøy Chronicles was posted on February 19, 2022. You can check out the full review here.

Order The Unseen here!

Check out the sequel, White Shadow, here!

Preorder the third book in the series, Eyes of the Rigel here!

 

A Biblioasis Interview with Elaine Dewar

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Elaine Dewar’s On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years is not what readers have come to expect from Biblioasis. But it seems to us one of the most important works we’ve been part of at the press. As Phil Marchand pointed out with her last book, Dewar “is justly well-known for her relentless research and we’re fortunate to have her,” and this relentless research is on full display with On the Origin.

What she uncovers is a scientific world of little oversight, questionable motives, greed, deception, and political malfeasance, one open to manipulation and sabotage by outside forces, all of it with deep implications for how we move forward, not just with the COVID-19 pandemic itself but with the systems and structures that allowed for it, and which, if they are not reformed, may result in the same thing happening again. Dewar has uncovered facts about this case and made connections that have not yet been made public, in either our national newspapers or parliamentary debates. Its implications are explosive. She has provided language for what we are all experiencing, and in total this book should be read as a wake-up call to all of us, to demand more accountability and transparency from all, but especially those in positions of power.

Q1: Your new book On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years tackles one of the most troubling and controversial subjects of our age. To start, can you tell us a little bit about the book’s origin?

A1: I started clipping bits and pieces about the pandemic in January of 2020 because the coverage I was reading so reminded me of SARS, up to and including the false assurances from Canadian authorities that Canadians had nothing to fear, that the risk to Canadians was “low.” I was struck by how in those early stories the numbers kept doubling; the sure mark of easy person-to-person transmission of an infectious disease, and clearly a bad disease because the Wuhan hospitals were apparently very crowded. And China’s authorities were playing that down. By the end of January, Canada already had its first cases, yet the federal government kept saying nothing to worry about, we have no direct flights to Wuhan, as if that meant anything. It was obvious there was a great deal to worry about. China had locked down a city of 11 million and was frantically erecting enormous field hospitals. They clearly expected an unprecedented disaster. By then I had already started reading whatever I could find on the pandemic and noticed a story about two researchers in Wuhan who published what is called a preprint claiming that the virus might have leaked from one of two labs in Wuhan that study coronaviruses sampled from bats in the field, and that the researchers don’t take proper precautions. At about that time, someone asked the Minister of Health at a press conference about the possibility that the virus had leaked from a lab in China. She snapped the reporter’s head off and accused him of asking a racist question. By then I had been following the story of the collapse of Canada’s relations with China for some time, and the two stories sort of snapped together in my head. By the time Dan Wells got in touch in May and asked me to do a quick book for a new series he was launching, suggesting something on pandemic profiteers, I was already hooked on the origin story. Where did it come from? Lab or nature? How could I find out with the borders shut and Canada in lockdown?

Q2: Well, how could you find out? And what did you find? How did the research and writing of this book differ from those which preceded it?

A2: How to find out was the big problem. I don’t work for a newspaper: I could not argue that I needed to cross borders to do interviews. And I couldn’t get to people anyway because labs were closed, government offices were shut down with most bureaucrats working from home. So I was reminded of I.F. Stone, the great American journalist who published a weekly out of Washington D.C. He found his most explosive stories by reading published documents and making Freedom of Information applications for documents that were not public. I thought given this was a story about the science of virology, I should start by reading the publications in peer-reviewed journals about the origin of a virus that clearly seemed to have adapted immediately to human beings. And so that’s what I did. And what I found in peer-reviewed journals and in papers published by the scientists at the heart of the story led me into the story of a science that has gone global since SARS with very few regulations and a whole lot of pandemic potential danger attached to it. The more I read, the more the lab leak thesis seemed possible, not the deranged maunderings of racists and tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists as they were by then being described by scientists who were organizing all kinds of publications to knock that theory down. At which point the story expanded from reading the science to following the undeclared interests…

Q3: Yes, undeclared interests. That could have been the title of the book, and it’s one of the main things, I think, that On the Origin untangles. By the end of it I was wondering how we could trust anyone on anything remotely touching on the pandemic. There are too many to list for this interview, but is there any undeclared interest you would like to highlight here?

A3: I think the undeclared interests I found that upset me most, angered me most, were those connected with an article that appeared in the most highly rated science peer-reviewed journal Nature, which purported to show that the genome of SARS-CoV-2 could not have been the result of laboratory manipulation. There were five authors on that peer reviewed paper. The only one who declared a competing interest was an expert from Tulane University who declared he had interests related to a company he’s involved in. Three others on that paper all had serious interest in staying on the good side of China, who used this paper like a shield for the next year to say “You see, serious scientists say it couldn’t have been made in a lab.” Kristian Andersen, the lead author who is at the Scripps, which was in such financial trouble that it entered a relationship with a Chinese entity to keep it out of trouble, also had an application into the NIAID, a grant he later won. The NIAID had funded work done at one of the labs thought to be a possible source of a lab leak in Wuhan, Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And that funding was aimed at the kinds of gain-of-function experiments which had caused fear and concern to critics for years. Another author on that paper, Ian W. Lipkin at Columbia, worked out of an institution that had been paid large sums of money from USAID through a charity called EcoHealth Alliance, which funded one of the labs in Wuhan. He had been honoured by China and has an honorary position there. Nothing was said about his competing interest. The third is E.C. Holmes, whose work is mainly done in China though he has a position at the University of Sydney and also at Fudan University in Shanghai. He had helped his Fudan colleague put up the genome sequence of the virus on a blog run out of Edinburgh because China’s officials were holding off its publication. This article was written shortly after both Holmes and Andersen called Anthony Fauci, head of the NIAID, on January 31, 2020, after Science ran a story in which one expert said a lab leak was a possibility. They told Fauci that their investigation of the genome revealed that a small portion of it might have been engineered in a lab. Holmes did not reveal in the Nature paper that he had done a number of papers with the lead bat /coronavirus researcher in Wuhan who works at the other lab suspected of being the source of the leak, the Wuhan CDC. The very next day, Andersen and Holmes were part of an emergency conference call organized by Fauci, Francis Collins of the NIH, Fauci’s boss, and several others in which this possibility was urgently discussed. Undoubtedly the difficult position of these funding agency directors was that they might be accused of funding the creation of SARS by funding one of those labs. Yet two days after that, Andersen was participating in crafting a letter to send to the White House accusing anyone who said a lab leak was a possible origin of the virus of being conspiracy theorists. He wanted to make the letter tougher than the man writing it, Peter Daszak. Daszak was also the author of a statement in Lancet yelling about a lab origin thesis as a conspiracy theory. Daszak did not declare a competing interest on that statement—specifically that his charity, EcoHealth Alliance, had been acting as a cutout for US funders like the National Science Foundation, the NIAID, and USAID, who all had funded Shi Zhengli’s work at the WIV’s lab. And we’re not talking about a little bit of money, we’re talking millions. Daszak went on to become chair of Lancet’s task force on the origin of the virus, again without declaring his interest in avoiding any investigation of a lab leak at the WIV, and also got himself appointed to the WHO-convened study of the origin of the virus. The WHO did not publish the competing interests of those foreign researchers who participated in that study and had them all sign confidentiality agreements so they couldn’t squeal on each other. The study’s phase one pointedly avoided any kind of investigation of the labs in Wuhan without doing any study on that question at all. It took months for various researchers to put these interests together.

Q4: There is a Canadian thread to your book, one which, though not directly connected to the origin of COVID, nevertheless sheds some light on the issue. Can you tell us a little bit about this?

A4: There was a theory in the early days of the pandemic that the virus might have been shipped from the National Microbiology Laboratory to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the leading coronavirus study group in China. Back in 2019, two researchers had been taken out of the lab, their security clearances revoked: one of them had done papers on both SARS and on ACE2, one of the receptors for SARS-CoV-2 in humans. There was nothing to it: but it got me looking at what had gone on at the lab, about the two suspended researchers who came to Canada in the middle 90s when a whole group of researchers were sent from China to study in western labs, and what I discovered about their connections to China and the Wuhan Institute of Virology shed a lot of light on how biological science has become a globalized operation, and how China has placed its people in very important western institutions and then made use of them. It gave me the framework for the larger story of China’s long term plan to treat biology and biotechnology as a strategic high ground. The NML story took me to a bigger one.

Q5: And what was this bigger story?

A5: The larger story is about China’s long term plan to occupy the strategic high ground with regard to biology, and biotechnology, including apparently both the capacity to wage and defend against bio warfare. In pursuit of that strategy, which dates back to Deng Xiaoping’s time leading China, many very bright young aspiring scientists were sent to the West for their graduate studies. Many of them were high achievers who ended up on leading academic positions as well as in leading pharmaceuticals (like Sanofi in Canada) and also in the main high containment laboratories in the US (like Galveston) and in Canada at the National Microbiology Laboratory (Qiu and Cheng, etc.) Some of these people smuggled out important reagents, hid their connections to China’s military and transferred important data to China.

Q6: As you know, the Trudeau government faced a lot of pressure to release information about why Qiu and Cheng were fired from Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory, and that they went further than perhaps any government before them by suing the Speaker of the House to keep these documents from parliamentarians. This week, and in the middle of an election, as reported in the Globe and Mail, the government quietly withdrew its lawsuit. What is the significance of this? And why should Canadians care about who Qiu and Cheng are, and why they were fired?

A6: The timing of the election was in part to avoid having to produce the documents as per the June resolution of the House of Commons that the President of PHAC deliver unredacted versions of all emails and documents relating to the firing of Qiu and Cheng. The President, Iain Stewart, had claimed he could not provide unredacted documents due to the Privacy Act. The Canada-China committee brought forward a resolution in the minority Parliament which passed it demanding the unredacted documents. When the House voted in favour of the resolution, and PHAC and the Minister of Health still did not comply, the President was admonished at the bar of Parliament, which has not happened to a non-politician since 1910, the Speaker was about to decide whether to send the Sergeant at Arms to PHAC to get the documents when the House rose for the summer break. The Speaker decided to hold off sending the Sergeant at arms until the House resumed in September, but the government by then had decided to call the election. By going to the Governor General and asking for an election, the House was dissolved, the resolution became moot, and so the government withdrew its suit against the Speaker. It would have lost in the Federal Court. The Supreme Court has already ruled that Parliament is supreme, no court can stop it from getting information it asks for from the government of the day. The government was doing its best to cover up what had been going on at the National Microbiology Laboratory for years, which entailed what seem to be really outrageous breaches of national security, including experiments done by Qiu and Cheng along with a major general in the Peoples Liberation Army. If that woman, Chen Wei, did not have access to the NML labs, and I am pretty sure she did, she certainly had access to its data, which also requires a security clearance, long after Qiu and Cheng were suspended and their clearances retracted. Papers were published in 2020 that make that clear. Instead of being transparent about the mistakes made, over which the Minister of Health should have resigned, along with the Minister of Public Safety, the government chose to call an election to avoid the public knowing the exact nature of its amazing failure of oversight.

On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years coverQ7: This book is part of the Field Note pamphlet series, and was signed on as On Blame. But over the course of your research the focus of the book changed and expanded, and blame became a far lesser concern, if only because there was so much to go around. It’s about the origin of this specific pandemic, yes, but it is about much more than this, too, with ramifications for how we move forward. If there were one or two quick takeaways you would like your readers to have on finishing On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years, what would it/they be?

A7: The most important takeaway is that this book demonstrates the real danger is from arrogant and reckless globalized biological science which may have let loose the whirlwind. Globalized science is usually presented as a great boon, the best minds wherever they are working together for the good of humankind and the planet. What this book shows is what just about everyone who studies the practice of science knows: scientists are not sweet and selfless souls just following their curiosity. Like the rest of us, they must compete to achieve. For their work to continue and their prestige to grow, they must capture public resources. She who can do that best acquires power, which will in turn be used to defend those interests. In other words, research science is by definition intensely political, and when it is done across national boundaries by scientists from countries that are competitors, the merely political becomes geopolitical. China sees itself as a rising nation held back by the US. The US and Canada rightly see China as a strategic threat. The US in particular has been very careless about who and what it funded in China, apparently so it could keep a close eye on what China might be doing in the way of biological warfare research. But that meant work was done in China with American support that remained outside the regulatory purview of the US and in conditions that are not acceptable in the US. Canada, under intense economic pressure from China, clearly allowed our top containment lab, which used to do wonderful work, to be captured by China’s operatives acting in China’s interests, which do not coincide with our own. All governments and the scientists involved in this story have done what governments and people often do when they’ve screwed up. They covered up. And it’s up to us, the stakeholders as we are called, who have suffered and died from their mistakes, to hold them to account.

Available August 31 in Canada and September 14 in the USA. You can pre-order a copy here.

A Biblioasis Interview with Robyn Sarah

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A decade and a lifetime in the making, Robyn Sarah’s Music, Late and Soon will be available to readers August 24, 2021. A memoir of a young woman’s career in music, which she leaves (for a variety of reasons) for writing, and returns to much later in life. An enticing ‘what-if’ story for the many people who abandon music in their youth and contemplate a return, but feel it’s too late. Sarah has spent the past decade with her first love, the piano, and has spent much of this time re-connecting and learning through celebrated teacher Phil Cohen. As a well regarded and award-winning poet, Sarah explores the relationship between the verbal and non-verbal arts, and verbal and non-verbal learning. A memoir of artistic vocation, it will be intriguing to music and poetry readers alike.

Q1: Can you provide a brief introduction to those readers who are not familiar with your work?

A1: Writing has been a constant in my life for as long as I can remember. I had it in my head from the age of six or seven that I was going to be a writer when I grew up, and that remained a lodestar for me through a lot of digressions – notably ten years in music school, when I thought I was headed for a career as an orchestral musician. I graduated from the Quebec Conservatory in the early 70s with a diploma in performance on clarinet, but abandoned music as a career path soon after, and eventually became the writer I always meant to be. Like many of my fellow writers in Montreal, I taught English in Quebec’s junior college system for many years, but since the mid-1990s I’ve worked as a freelance writer and literary editor, most recently serving ten years as poetry editor for Cormorant Books. Poetry is my primary genre. Though I’ve also published essays and stories, I think my poet’s perspective leaves its stamp on everything I write.

Q2: Music, Late and Soon chronicles another decade-long – to use your word – digression, a return to the serious study of music after more than three decades. “I was late for my piano lesson,” your memoir begins. “Thirty-five years late, to be exact.” Can you tell us a bit about why, at such a stage in your life, you returned to music, and perhaps a bit about the genesis of this book?

A2: Who can say with certainty why we do anything we do, and why at a particular moment? Human motivation is so layered. We have conscious motives, we have unconscious motives, we have intentions and impulses. We have game-changing encounters with chance. When we say, “It was just something I had to do at that moment”, we may not even know what tipped the balance. But when we make such a statement, we’re on our way to telling ourselves a story. This book is the story I told myself to explain why, at nearly sixty, I had to take piano lessons again – something I had thought about doing many times before without acting on it.

Robyn Sarah, age 8

– Which leads to your question about the genesis of the book. On this particular occasion, the thought came simultaneously with the idea of writing a book about it. And somehow, it was the book – the untold, unlived story I sensed there – that made it possible for me to do what I hadn’t been able to do before. I felt propelled into simultaneously living the story and writing it. At first I thought it would be a much shorter book – a story about a year of late-life piano lessons, leading to a small recital. I didn’t know it would take me back to my years in music school. I didn’t know it would demand that I finally make some sense of my abandoning a career as a clarinetist just as it was getting off the ground. It was only in the bringing together of both processes – my literary process and a return to serious musical practice on my first instrument – that the living and the writing overflowed those initial parameters.

Q3: You’ve explained how writing about your return to music took you back to your musical past. Can you say a little about where that return has taken you as you’ve moved forward?

A3: Well, it wasn’t very long before I realized this was no caprice. It wasn’t even a “project” – not in the sense of something I could finish and walk away from. I realized I was back at the piano for the long haul. I had dropped any expectations; I was open to wherever it wanted to take me. The second part of the book describes some of the places it initially took me – among them, playing piano in local cafes and a retirement home; playing a small private recital beset with unexpected challenges; attending a three-week summer piano intensive where I was the oldest participant by – you guessed it – thirty-five years. It also brought me new friends, new repertoire, new perspectives, and a sense of ongoing adventure as I entered my sixties.

Q4: Your memoir chronicles more than a return to and relationship with an instrument (or many instruments, several pianos and clarinets both!); it also tells the story of a special relationship with a very special teacher. Can you tell us a little about this?

A4: Philip Cohen’s legacy – very much his own, but at only one remove from celebrated pianist Alfred Cortot, who taught his teacher – lives on in the teaching of his students in Montreal, New York, Chicago, L.A. and overseas, all of whom acknowledge his extraordinary qualities. I began studying with Phil at eleven, stopped at seventeen, and returned briefly in my early twenties. When I came back to him at 59, I never imagined I would end up studying with him again for nearly nine years – the same length of time as I did earlier in life. My adult years as mother, teacher, and writer were book-ended by those two periods of intense musical mentorship. This “late and soon” aspect of our relationship was one thing that made it special. But everyone who studied with Phil Cohen had a special relationship with him, and everyone’s was different. His approach to teaching was based entirely on his appreciation of the individual human being: you felt he understood you better than you understood yourself, that you had his full attention, and that he cared. Not only were his musical insights endlessly inspiring, but regardless of age, background, or personality, he was able to reach people on a soul level.

coverQ5: The initial goal of this project was to return to piano for a year, to ready yourself for the possibility of performance, and to write a short book about the experience. Both book and the experience it chronicles became much more than this, and I think Music, Late and Soon is, among other things, one of the best books on artistic dedication and vocation I’ve read. Can you highlight a few of the things you learned along the way?

A5: When I first approached my teacher with the project of spending a year working to prepare a modest recital program, his response was, “Why would you not just start working again and see where it leads? Playing the piano is like any art form, any creative process – it doesn’t work by deadline.” I think the primary thing I learned as we worked together anew was to respect creative process – to trust it and to recognize the patience it requires. Not just at the piano, and not just in my writing, but in living life. The book became as much a meditation on creative process as it is a personal story. Many of the things I learned were actually things I had learned before but found myself relearning on a deeper level. This itself was one of them: that serious learning is a process of coming back again and again to deepen acquaintance with something we think we know.

You can order a copy of Music, Late and Soon here.