"What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World," by Robert Hass
Jeff Glor talks to Robert Hass about "What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World"
Jeff Glor: What inspired you to put the collection together?
Robert Hass: The last of the essays was about an anthology of environmental poetry by African Americans. It got me to thinking about spirituals, the blues, and the cash crops that produced slavery--sugar, tobacco, cotton, and rice.
And I began to think there were enough themes and convergences of ideas in the essays I'd written over the years to make a book. Possibly. But it began to seem like a book when my editor at Ecco/HarperCollins saw a way of organizing it.
JG: What surprised you most in the writing process?
RH: Hard to say. Writing is an incessant process of discovery.
JG: What would you do if you weren't a writer?
RH: I'd have a social life. Hike a lot. Learn a language. Learn bird calls. Paint. Play the piano.
JG: What else are you reading?
RH: Right now I'm reading a remarkable novel by a young Korean writer--it's "Please Look After Mom" by Kyung-sook Shin. A kind of Korean version of "Faulkner's As I Lay Dying." It's a portrait of a family from the end of the Korean War to the present, told from multiple points of view. It's also a fable about the costs of modernization. A very beautiful book, heartbreaking, and surprising. (from Knopf) And I'm starting on the galleys of a book by the Scottish writer Melanie Challenger, "On Extinction: How We Became Estranged From Nature." Vivid essays in natural history and the way we live now. A book of wonders and perils, due from Counterpoint in December.
JG: What's next for you?
RH: I'm in the middle of a couple more essays and then I hope to leave prose alone for a while and hope that the muse hasn't wandered off permanently
For more on "What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World" visit the Harper Collins website.
