Episode 118 - Rick Bass: Part 2 - For a Little While

Part two of This Writing Life's transatlantic conversation with Rick Bass, novelist, activist, award-winning short story writer, begins with a question referencing Philip Larkin, Romanticism and Transcendentalism and continues with an answer discussing fiction, geology, humans and time: 'We are new to this world. We don't know how to be in this old world.' From here we moved towards some if not all the following:

• Bass, religion and nature
• 'fostered alike by beauty and by fear': nature as teacher?
• autobiography, family and discovering nature
• nature as idea or reality?
• Annie Gillard, Peter Matheson, Edward Abbey: Bass and nature writing
• 'I like people. I just don't like being around them': Bass as misanthropist?
• bookshops, Russians, Flannery O'Connor, Jim Harrison: how did Bass start writing?

Part 3 to follow.