Guy Gavriel Kay talks writing, publishing, being a Prairie person at Festival of Words

Gordon Edgar - Moose Jaw Express/MooseJawToday.com

With 15 novels, a book of poetry, many literary awards, and millions of sales, Guy Gavriel Kay is widely regarded as one of the greatest living writers of historical fantasy, and indeed as a shaper and former of the genre itself.

He is a member of the Order of Canada whose reimagining of historical periods, celebration of culture, art, and music, worlds including the Sarantine Mosaic and the Fionavar Tapestry, and famous collaboration with Christopher Tolkien on The Silmarillion continue to win him new fans. Born in Weyburn, Kay grew up in Winnipeg — and still considers himself a native of the prairies.

On July 15, Kay, 68, was interviewed at the Mae Wilson Theatre by Dr. Angie Abdou as part of the 2023 Saskatchewan Festival of Words. Abdou is a Moose Jaw native, an acclaimed novelist and author, and a professor of creative writing at Athabasca University.

“This is my third time here,” Kay told the audience at the Mae Wilson. “You guys run a wonderful summer book festival, it’s actually a pleasure to be here, and I mean that sincerely, not just because we’re adjacent to my birthplace.”

Kay and Abdou discussed a little of what it means to both of them to be from the Canadian Prairies. Stubbornness, Kay humorously noted, is a key personality trait of such people.

“One thing is that prairie people are stubborn. We’re warm, we’re friendly. Winnipeggers [in particular] are never late for meeting someone, especially in winter, because the person you’re meeting may die, and you don’t want to live the rest of your life with that on your conscience.”

Kay told the story of writing Tigana (1990) immediately on the heels of his success with The Fionavar Tapestry (1984-86). While Tigana eventually became an incredible bestseller and won the Aurora Award for Bestcept it — they wanted more of what Kay had already done and regarded Tigana as too big a change.

“Agents and publishers want you to, ‘do to me again what you did to me before,’” Kay said, telling the audience that prairie stubbornness was part of his resolution. “I said ‘No’ … my joke … was that I didn’t believe in writing four-volume trilogies. The math doesn’t work out.

“So, I shifted ground quite radically, both for myself and for what could be called the fantastic. The genre of the fantastic, at the time, had not seen a book like Tigana turned out to be.”

Kay said the painful experience of trying to market

I use the words “yet another” because there have been several such attempts in the history of neuroscience, and each has produced new insights. As time passes there will no doubt be more. We wait with bated breath…

By Leon Retief

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the au-

The Idea of the Brain - The Past and Future of Neuroscience

Matthew Cobb

Basic Books. 470 pages the views of Nicolaus Steno (1638 – 1686) who saw the brain as a machine which can be understood by taking it apart. This is followed by discussions of various paradigms which dominated research through the ages: the heart, forces, electricity, neurons and so forth, as well as useful explanations of the contributions made by each of these paradigms.

Cobb is a renowned researcher at Manchester University’s School for Biological Sciences, where he investigates nerve cells involved in worms’ sense of smell. Good heavens, researching the sense of smell in worms, I hear you say, and on the face of it this seems a reasonable response.

However, given the complexity of nervous systems in general – and this includes even less intricate systemssearch is completely in step with present efforts to expand our rapidly growing but still meagre knowledge of the human brain, which is probably the most complex system in the known universe. After all, we still don’t even nearly know how the human brain makes us aware of our perceptions (how do we experience red as “red” for example), so it makes sense to investigate simpler systems in yet another attempt to lay a foundation on which to build an understanding.

Unfortunately, the incredible complexity of the human brain – of all nervous systems in fact, but more so in the case of humans – does not make this task easier. Even a locust is more complex than a star. The earth is about 150 million km from the sun; every human contains about 1.3 kg fatty tissue inside our skulls, but we still know less about those two handfuls of tissue than of a star 150 million km above our heads.

Part Two, “Present” is devoted to memory, circuits, computers, chemistry, localization, and is followed by one of the most meaningful sections in the book: consciousness – that ever elusive, mysterious phenomenon which still makes neuroscientists scratch their heads.

The book contains concise but clear descriptions of, among others, Sperry’s writings on splitperimental surgery on awake patients. Scattered throughout are interesting snippets of information about just what else is to be found in our brains and what is going on in there – or what we think is going on…

The humorous history of the dispute about the the book, nearly 700 pages long, taught him not to submit

“That story speaks to me of how it’s such a different thing, the market of publishing and the creative act of writing,” Abdou noted. “They just wanted you to do the same thing again, and that’s not what you’re in it for.”

“The interface between art and creativity, and books on sale,” Kay said, “is not a seamless interface. There is something substantial, ambitious, risky, and the desire to pay the mortgage.”

Kay and Abdou’s conversation ranged across subjects such as what it is like for Kay to be considered one and sexuality, the change in interests across a writer’s lifetime, and how he establishes a routine for turning out a book every three years.

“I’m very aware of how much good fortune is embedded in the idea that I can just write my novels,” Kay said. “If I take on other projects, it’s because I like the people, I like the idea — but I don’t have to do that.”

Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest novel, All the Seas of the World (2022), is set in the popular world of his Sarantine Mosiac, and is available wherever books are sold.

“mother cell,” and the apparently logical result, namely the “grandmother cell” and the cell involved in the recognition of Jennifer Arniston certainly made me smile.

There is brief mention of Jonathan Weiner’s truly wonderful little book, “Time, Love, Memory” about Seymour Benzer’s groundbreaking work. This book is still available and is highly recommended for anyone interested in this subject.

The part about synapses and neurotransmitters, of which I like to think, rightly or wrongly, that I have some knowledge, is well presented but perhaps just a little bit too concise – I would have liked to see an explanation of the importance of these phenomena for medicine.

The brain is at the moment far too complex for us to comprehend and I’m not sure that we ever will reach that point. Perhaps the following quote will help explain my pessimism – and bear in mind that this is about a mouse brain: “The little block of brain they were studying was slightly less than one tenth of a millimetre on each side. There were just 89 neurons that had their cell bodies in this space, making up less than 3% of the total ‘wiring’ they observed. But crammed in alongside these cells there were 2.7 m of neuronal ‘wires’ from other cells that had their cell bodies outside the studied volume – in total this tiny part of the mouse brain had 6979 pre-synaptic and 3719 postsynaptic sites, each with at least 10 synapses, making a total 153 171 synapses. Remember that there are perhaps 70 million neurons in the whole of the mouse brain.”

I do have one small criticism however: the illustration preceding page one of the introduction shows two illustrations of a partially dissected human brain, with two lines from the word “amygdala” to the insides of this organ. One line ends in the left amygdala, as it should, but the other one, which should indicate the right amygdala, actually ends in the corpus callosum.

Cobb was slightly embarrassed when I sent him an email about this, but hey, we all make mistakes and this does not at all detract from the value of this book.

No more than high school biology is needed to understand the contents and I think that this is one of the best works on this subject that I have read.