The iceman cometh across: an interview with Thomas Wharton

TW I don't know if I would. I try to stay away from that particular label. It seems to me to have grown to mean just about anything that's come after, right, and so I don't find it all that useful and it doesn't really help me to understand the process of actually writing, because these things aren't really conscious choices, you know. You don't set out to do something postmodernly, as a writer. That wasn't anywhere in the original impulse. A book becomes, for me... certain premises are laid down and certain things I want to explore, and then it takes on its own life, you know, it starts to take its own shape. I think what happens with those moments of self-reflexivity is that what sustains me through the writing of the book is my fascination with character, let's say, or place or landscape or whatever, but also the process I'm going through, but I don't consciously think about that. It's just that the energy of the writing gets diverted at times into comments or statements or suggestions or echoes in the book that are in some way about what I'm doing. But it's often only later that people point them out to me, and then I go, "Oh I see, you're right, that's true. I am kind of talking about what I'm doing." TW This is one of those things that I hadn't even noticed before somebody pointed it out; this is a classic example of that. I think that it's true that there may not be an "I" in the center of this story, but there is me writing, and there's me aware that my observations are subjective in some ways. So when I am thinking about a place and trying to write about it and transcribing it, I am looking for those things I didn't know before, or looking to be hit in the face with a realization about something that I hadn't considered before, relating to this place. So there's some way in which that's really quite accurate, and certainly I'm aware that I'm damaging certain stories, too, at the same time. There's the myth of the heroic creation of the railways, you know. I'm doing a small damage to that heroic story by suggesting there were some less than heroic aspects to it, right? So, yeah, I like that a lot. TW And it wasn't there and I've gotta write it. Icefields is more concerned with looking for a book about a place I've lived that isn't there, whereas Salamander is more concerned with looking for a book that I've always been looking for, that isn't there. And so that's why there's a fairytale quality in this book. In the writing of it I was searching bac