Vancouver Island author Michael Christie on writing a global bestseller, eco anxiety and Canada Reads

Greenwood Island, 2038.

The fictional place is at the centre of B.C.-based author Michael Christie's book, Greenwood.

By then, the world is grappling with the fallout the Great Withering, an environmental event where trees are decimated everywhere but Greenwood Island, a remote oasis of ancient trees off B.C.'s west coast.

Jake Greenwood, a scientist working on the island as a tour guide, thought the island's connection to her family name just a coincidence, until someone from shows up with information about her family's past. 

"It's a multigenerational family saga that spans 130 years," Christie told a crowd in Victoria on Tuesday night.

"It spans most of Canada."

Greenwood is one of five contenders in this year's Canada Reads competition, which endeavours to find the one book to shift your perspective.

Christie sat down with CBC's All Points West host Jason D'Souza at sxʷeŋxʷəŋ təŋəxʷ James Bay library in Victoria for an interview in front of a live audience.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about your journey as a writer.

It was very unguided and long. I grew up in Thunder Bay, Ont., never knowing a writer, never really putting it together that you could be a writer. But I was a lover of literature, a lover of books. I had a house full of books. My mom was agoraphobic — she had an anxiety disorder and didn't leave the house for much of my childhood, which was tragic, but she also filled the house with books and art supplies, and that's what we did together.

At what point would you have described yourself as a writer? 

Building 'writer' into my identity feels a little bit odd. The whole thing could fall apart at any moment and I'll be right back working a job, and I would be OK with that. Although, I must say I love writing more than anything I've ever done. It suits my character. 

This is my fourth book and you think that you know what you're doing and you think that you know you may have amassed a certain amount of skill but you're right back in the terror of, 'Oh my goodness, maybe this book is not good.' Every time. 

How did Greenwood come to be?

Characters. First I had some thoughts on particular individuals I was interested in, like a timber tycoon, a scientist who was interested in the communicative networks developed by trees, a drifter type character who finds a baby in a forest. So I had these murky and ill-defined ideas for people, but it wasn't until I was cutting down a tree on Galiano Island to clear space for a driveway. I'd cut it down, saw the stump, and realized that the tree was telling its own story within its structure and that the rings looked like pages. I thought, what an interesting way to structure this narrative that I'm working on. 

Three more years passed and I had a book. 

The novel is largely about preservation and what we lose when we don't protect trees. 

Absolutely it is for sure. And then there's also the family tree resonance there as well. This is a sort of larger metaphor for this family, the Greenwoods, but I think the book also presents an environmental message but it also presents the message that we are going to need to use some resources and so we have to learn and discover how to best do that. 

I think it presents the case that trees are sentient beings because they are, and we're discovering more and more about that intelligence, if you want to call it that, every day. 

But at the same time, a character like Harris Greenwood who's responsible for millions of trees coming down on this land, I wanted to present him not as a villain either. It would be too easy to go and paint every logger as an enemy of the environment, but I think that real life is a lot more complicated than that.

How much of yourself is in this novel in terms of your own personal life journey?

At the time I was writing it, I truly believed that there was none. My second book is a pretty autobiographical novel, and I was kind of burned out by just how close it was to my own experience. And so I was like, this next book, I'm not gonna touch personal biographical detail. 

Until after I finished it and my brother read it and was like, 'Oh, these two brothers are pretty interesting characters.' My DNA, I think, is woven into pretty much every character in this book. And that's really, that's how I operate as a writer. I really need to feel my way into a person and find common ground with them emotionally to access their consciousness. 

When you're writing a character, how much do you have to become that character? 

This book was particularly fun in that I had these distinct time periods that I was writing into, and there's five of them. I actually practiced this kind of method acting where I would sort of live in the time period as I was writing that time. The 1974 section, I was watching like the Woodstock documentary and listening to music at the time, reading novels set at the time just to really try to get a feel for the sort of mental environment. That part I love because I love to sort of nerd out on a particular time.

The book starts, I was going to say in the distant future, but I guess it's not so distant future. It's 2038. It jumps around decade to decade to decade — you're a time traveller. What was the mental capacity trying to write something like this? 

I wrote the majority of the book in a small like 10'x10' cabin on Galiano Island and the walls of it were sort of just plastered with like timelines and like strings, you know, people would go in there and be like, 'Are you trying to catch a serial killer here?' It was very involved, to put it mildly, and it just took an enormous amount of writing one section and then trying to make it jive with the other ones, then writing deeper and going back and fixing stuff. It was an incredibly complex juggling act to keep the narrative working. 

This is maybe where the terror comes from, but I had no idea what I was doing within the sections.

Writing is a really weird mix of planning and purposeful intention, and then also just winging it on a scale that is enormous.

What kind of research went into this? 

I did a ton of reading. For the 1934 section I got a hold of the Eaton's catalog for 1934 and just referenced it whenever I needed an object. Writing historical fiction is a very seductive process as well because you can really get buried in the details and you can get over-interested in your research.

When I first submitted the book to my agent, he said, "You need to turn the historical detail down by 50 per cent." I was likem, 'Ouch. All my precious research.' So that was a difficult day. But I did it and it benefited.

I'm sure there are many who suffer, as I do, from eco anxiety.  A UN report just came out this week, and it doesn't paint a great picture in terms of how well we're controlling carbon emissions right now. In the book you talk about something called the Withering. First of all, what's the Withering?

The Great Withering is an ecological disaster that takes place in the near future where the vast majority of the world's trees die off due to fungal infections, insect infestations or fires. It's something that I came up with, but I must tell you unfortunately, the American chestnut tree in the United States in the '30s was decimated by a fungus. The mountain pine beetle in B.C., flourished because of climate change and because of monoculture tree planting. But these things are already happening and I think the saddest trick that trees ever played on us was to appear so sturdy and almost immortal, when in fact they're very, very vulnerable to minute changes in their environments. 

When I talk about having that eco anxiety, was this a manifestation of yours?

For sure. It's something that I've struggled with over time and writing about it was one way for me to sort of examine it. Reading so much about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, reading the Grapes of Wrath again and realizing that that is a work of climate fiction where you have migrants who are fleeing unlivable conditions for the coast, for California, people are being turned away, I mean, it's a climate story.

Writing the book did give me hope in the sense that when you look into the past, you see a lot of darkness, but you do get astounded by the way people banded together and built community and relied on one another. It was kind of cathartic, I think, to write about it. 

Cathartic for you, harrowing for the rest of us. 

Let's talk a little bit more about the characters.  I wanna talk about Jake. Why start it with someone like Jake?

Jake came pretty early in the process and I was just fascinated by this idea of someone who had so much skill and expertise in a particular area, but was stuck working in this absurd tree resort for the wealthy. Naomi Klein has called this climate barbarism and that is the idea that as the natural spaces of the world, the beautiful natural spaces shrink and decline, they're going to become almost like luxury items for the wealthy, especially now that we know how beneficial nature is to the human being. I found that idea really chilling. 

Jake felt like a person of her time, particularly, you know, her being mired in student debt and stuck in a dead-end job. I felt like it was probably the the fate of many to come. 

Who were you writing this for? It wasn't just for Vancouver Islanders, was it? 

No, I don't think so. I think there's a universal reverence for these spaces. I mean, anyone who's been to Cathedral Grove or anyone who's been hiking in some old growth in B.C. knows that feeling you get when you are in the presence of a gigantic tree. It's a religious feeling and it's a spiritual feeling. I wanted to convey that to the reader who may not even have much experience with it in the real world, but also try to conjure that wonder while also critiquing the economics of the situation too. 

I think there was this long existing perception that oh, no one cares about Canada or we're sort of this, you know, less interesting cousin of America. But that's absolutely untrue. 

Greenwood is a bestseller in Germany and France and Italy. It's really odd for me to consider the fact that this story is so meaningful to folks who are not living here, but they are. It speaks to just the universality of the themes, I guess. 

In Michael Christie's imagined future, Canada is the most powerful nation in the world.

Yeah, that was a particularly fun sentence to write.

You describe the future Prime Minister…

She is the most powerful woman in the world.

You've done some work at homeless shelters in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and there are some themes around addiction in the book. Was that conscious or subconsciously added in there from your own experiences?

I mean a lot in retrospect and it's a story about nature, it's a story about trees, but it's also a story about family and generations and intergenerational relationships and the things that are passed between generations including trauma,  addiction, property, lies, secrets, inheritances, all that stuff that I love to think about. 

Just prior to the writing in this book and sort of during it, I lost both of my parents and had two children so it was a deeply difficult and wonderful time that really got me thinking about generations and time and family in a way that I hadn't been compelled to before. 

Certainly there are these strains that run through the Greenwood family like a predisposition to addiction, like some mental health concerns, lactose intolerance seems to be an issue for them, and so I love to kind of play with those themes as I was writing and try to paint a picture of this collection of people who share these struggles through time.

I can't imagine something as vulnerable as pouring yourself into a page, whether it's subconscious or not, and then releasing it into the world. What is that like?

It's surreal, for sure. It's nice, though, that I don't know what I'm doing when I'm doing it and that it's only apparent after.

I have an older brother and he's like a business guy. He's very different than me. So injecting him into Harris Greenwood was a lot of fun. You're digging into your own emotions and your own psyche, but you're also just kind of having fun with your life and the sort of the things that you can imagine based on your life. 

I'm certainly proud of it. I definitely put in a hideous amount of work. If you calculated my per hour rate on this novel, I think it would be very, very depressing, and sub minimum wage for sure. But I'm proud of it.

You and the book had a moment when it was first released, but now with Canada Reads it has this whole second life. What's that like? 

It's been a wonderful rebirth for the novel. It came out in 2019 originally, and in 2020 I was in Australia on a book tour and then had like a multi-city tour planned for the U.S. This was spring of 2020 and we all know how that went and so the entire tour was cancelled, so the book had a bit of a stunted birth. It's been amazing to see Canada Reads inject life into it and help it find new readers and generate interest.

What kind of reactions have you had toward the novel?

I mean it's been overwhelmingly wonderful. I feel like that connection between trees and nature really goes deep for many, many people. 

Canada Reads is next week. Are you heading to Toronto? 

Yeah. And my champion Keegan Connor Tracy is brilliant and she's really preparing in a way that I find very impressive. 

What would it mean to win?

It would be great. I mean, it would be really fun. Prizes and acknowledgement are wonderful, but the real reward is the doing of the thing and the writing. 

I just read Ducks the other day and was just devastated by how great it is and of course Station Eleven, it's incredible. This is a competition, but we're comparing a bunch of really great things. 

I'm curious how your author friends outside of Canada react when they hear about something like Canada Reads?

Right now I'm writing a TV show with American author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. We were talking over zoom the other day and he was like, 'So what's this Canada Reads thing?' And I was trying to explain it to him. He was like, 'Wait a sec, so the whole country watches this book debate? And this is normal?' I felt like I was telling him about unicorns. It's amazing that we have something like Canada Reads and I think that the most important part of this is that we have a nationally relevant book debate, which is just wonderful. 

Greenwood is being adapted into a TV series. Are you part of that?

It's being developed by a guy who made Six Feet Under and has worked on Westworld, used to work for HBO and so he's optioned it and I'm involved in the process. I'm going to be an executive producer on the show. It's going to be a limited series hopefully, and we've just found a writer to write it as well. So it seems to be moving forward. 

What's that process like a finding a writer to write about something that's been written and then knowing the author is going to be like breathing down your neck?

I mean we briefly entertained me writing it, but I sort of figured that writing 10 hours of prestige television probably wasn't the best way for me to learn how to write for television. But I'm going to be involved in the process. 

I hope it happens. I think it'll make a pretty compelling 10 hours of TV. 

What do you want readers to take away from a novel like this?

A deeper appreciation of the natural world. I really love it when readers come up and say, 'I could smell the trees' or 'I could feel what it was like to sit beneath a Willow tree in Estevan, Sask.' Those moments for me are really, really gratifying as a writer. 

I hope a reader would take away just the sense of having experienced humanity to some degree and and a deeper understanding of what makes a family, a deeper understanding of our interconnectedness with one another, I think that's a big theme of the novel.

Just as trees communicate and depend on one another, I think we are all dependent on one another as well, and I think the solution to climate change is our collective effort. Hopefully the reader will be left with that as well.

What's next for you? 

I just finished a new novel that's taken a long time to write and it's set on another fictional Gulf Island. It's the story of a woman and her daughter who go there on vacation and something happens and the young woman goes missing. The novel dives into the history of the place and the lives of the many reclusive and strange characters who inhabit this place and unearths the secret history of this island.

Can you share some book recommendations with us? 

Recently I read a friend's book called The Deluge by a writer named Stephen Markley, who's an American writer. He wrote a book called Ohio some years ago that was very, very good. And it's about climate change, it's a giant novel. It's like 700 pages, but it's sort of about governmental inaction, climate science all.

I'll give one more and that is Finding The Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, who is a national treasure. It's a brilliant, brilliant book. I've read it three times.

The Canada Reads debates will take place March 27-30, 2023.

They will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and on CBC Books. 

The debates will take place live at 10:05 a.m ET. You can tune in live or catch a replay on the platform of your choice. You can find the broadcast details here.

• How to tune in to Canada Reads 2023: Watch, listen or stream the debates