Poured Over: Katherine May on Enchantment
“I’m so interested in the moment when the reader takes over … I wanted it to be a book that feels like I’m walking alongside the reader, learning as they learn.”
Katherine May’s first book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble 2020 Book of the Year, and we’ve been waiting, waiting, waiting for her follow-up, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. Katherine joins us on the show to talk about the importance of humor, holding space for joy and curiosity and wonder in her work, journaling (and the scrappy beginnings of all her books), hierophany, the memoirist’s terror, her admiration for the work of Joan Didion and much more in charming, laughter-filled conversation with Jenna Seery, Associate Producer of Poured Over. And we end the episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Jamie.
Featured Books (Episode)
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine Ma
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susannah Clarke
Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
And Yet: Poems by Kate Baer
The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer
This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang. Poured Over is brought to you by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and the booksellers of Barnes & Noble.
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.
Transcript:
Jenna Seery:
I’m Jenna Seery. I’m a bookseller and the Associate Producer of Poured Over and I am joined today with the incredibly brilliant Katherine May.
Katherine May:
That’s a grand introduction.
JS: You all remember Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. It was one of Barnes & Noble’s Best Books of 2020. And now she is back with the heartfelt, funny and paradigm shifting Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. So if you’ve read Wintering, you know what to expect. You’re already excited. You know that this is going to be something good. If you haven’t read Wintering yet. I mean, I think you should pick that up first, get yourself primed. But for those of you who aren’t sure, I just want to let you know you’re in for a big treat. Katherine, thank you so much for being with us today.
KM: A lovely introduction. And I love the bookseller-y-ness of it, like “buy both books.”
JS: I can’t. It’s the bookseller in me forever. It will never, it’ll never leave.
KM: It’s in your soul.
JS: It really is. I think, once you once you get in that mind frame, that’s it. Bookseller forever. For our listeners out there who haven’t done a lot of research yet on Enchantment, do you want to give us just a brief overview of the book what they’ve got in store?
KM: Absolutely. So Enchantment is a book that really arose from my need to find a better way to cope with the times we’re living in. There’s some pandemic stuff in there, but it’s also thinking about this long century so far, which has left so many of us feeling so disoriented, burned out, agitated, anxious, just lost, really. And I started to explore how to ameliorate that. And I came to this practice really of reconnecting with my own sense of wonder over small things, over accessible things, rather than waiting for grand events or thinking that it exists somewhere else in the world. And so Enchantment really is a book about finding our feet again, and reconnecting
JS: Absolutely, I think that the tangibility, the corporeal sense of wonder in this book is so interesting. So different, I think wonder as a term is so can feel so overwhelming, so large, so, you know, so disconnected from what we do day to day, that really in this book, you break it down for us in a little bit, something a little bit more understanding, a little more relatable for, for all of us going day to day through, like you said, these times that are different.
KM: Yeah, I think it’s about us having a sense of the possible, like I, I grew up feeling like wonder was something that must exist somewhere else, you know, that, that where I live, couldn’t possibly be good enough to be beautiful, or inspiring or full of awe, or I think that’s how we talk about it. Like, it’s this thing that you go to an amazing range of mountains to find, you know, on this once in a lifetime trip, I find that really problematic ultimately, you know. I think lots of people can’t afford to do that, or can’t physically do that, or have other commitments, like, We’re busy. We’re looking after people, right. And it’s really important for us to start to assert our rights to those really, life-giving sentiments and feelings in our own homes, like in our own backyard, you know, looking in the sky that, you know, just as you step outside your door, it’s all there.
JS: Absolutely. When this idea for this book started rolling around in your head did it start with that idea all fully formed? Or was it more? You know, you write in a lot of these short vignettes, these little stories, these snippets. How did you how did they sort of form into what this book is now?
KM: Yeah, no, it didn’t come from a grand plan. I’d love to claim, I really wish I could go “Yeah, I played it this way.” I did what I quite often do, which is I write to find my meaning. Which is, I think whether the vignettes come from rarely, you know, I, I sit down and think okay, well, what do I want to say I’m not quite sure how it relates to this book, but I need to write it anyway. And after enough times of needing to write it anyway, those things begin to string together. But it was, it was a very elusive book, this one I it was a genuine quest. I think I hope that as people read it, they’ll be able to see that I really did write from the depths of brain fog and trying to find an expression of like, what that state feels like and therefore I was looking, I was looking for, what to do, and how to deal with it and how to cope. And so the I think the process of writing the book really does mirror the journey. Like I was I was that lost at the beginning. And I really, I really did come out of it feeling changed by the process in a in a really authentic way. And it’s quite interesting, you know, because I finished the edits of the book roughly a year ago. And of course, I haven’t thought about the book very hard for a year, you know, when I’ve not been deeply engaged with it. And now I’m talking about it. And it’s made me realize, like how changed I’ve been by that process and how my own practice of connecting has been, I think, I think permanently shifted, honestly. And that’s quite nice, quite nice when you realize that your own book has got messages for you. I’ve learned something.
JS: It seemed a very like cathartic experience, almost seeing it out on the page. And I think readers will have sort of a mirroring experience there. As they’re working through it. I found myself taking a lot of breaks while I was reading and having to be like, I need to think about myself a little bit.
KM: Yeah
JS: …before I go back in and I found that with Wintering, too, when I was the first time I read that, you know, there’s a lot of those moments where, what you say something, and I think, hold on a moment, I’ve got to kind of process that back a little bit, which I think is something that any book we can find, you know, there’s something like that in all, all literature, all books, when those things hit back.
KM: Yeah, totally. And I think my like guiding principle as a writer is I’m so interested in the moment when the reader takes over, I love that readers have so much agency when they read and I know that the second I let go of the book, it becomes each individual readers. And I think I wrote in the when I wrote my proposal for Wintering, I wrote that I wanted it to be a book that feels like I’m walking alongside the reader, learning as they learn. And that really stuck with me, that was like a sort of statement of intent. That’s really that’s changed the way I write. I hope that comes across. I’m not interested in writing didactic books, we’ve got so many books out there that tell you exactly how to do it. And that leaves us with this sense of failure quite often because we rarely can do it like that. It rarely sticks. It rarely works. But I’m much more interested in creating books that feel personal because there’s so much of the reader in them, and less of me, like I’m always trying to exit the page a little.
JS: I think it works. I think readers will find themselves between these pages very much. Speaking of Wintering, I was rereading Wintering to prepare for reading Enchantment. And it’s an interesting time of year to be reading it because it’s becoming Spring here. And it’s been so unseasonably warm in New York that my brain was having a little bit of disconnect reading Wintering, but do you feel like there’s a progression from one to the other? I feel like when I was reading them sort of back-to-back, they do fit very well together as sort of this pair. Did you feel a progression when you were writing those two?
KM: I was definitely seeking it. You know, it was definitely the question that I was asking myself like, what next? Like, what do I say next? I didn’t fully start writing Enchantment until after Wintering had come out. So there was that, you know, feeling of slight pressure, you know, people were telling me that it was a book that a defined an era for them. And I was thinking, How do I approach that as a writer like, wow, I have got some responsibility now.
JS: No pressure after that.
KM: No. [Laughing] But it made me think really deeply about need, and what I needed, and therefore what I assume another group of people are going to need to think about next. And it’s about survival, how we survive in a in a very, very changed environment that feels disrupted, like we’re on shifting sands all the time. And we’re dealing with a lot of grief, the grief from death, sure. Like, we’ve all been dealing with that kind of grief, but actually, this broader spectrum of grief about a world that we are losing. And I think for me, like some very hopeful assumptions that the world was getting better that I think I really, really believed, you know, my 20s for example, the receding of that away from me. And this uprising in intolerance and hatred and violence is something that I think we all really need to make space to mourn now. And of course, the act of mourning is an act of change, an act of processing change and the world is still good, but we’ve got to find it in a really, really, really different way now and we can’t meet it with the same minds and mindsets that we did 10 years ago. It’s different.
JS: Absolutely. I mean, as I was reading, I was really struck with, though these themes are incredibly universal and incredibly beyond the scope of time, this is an incredibly timely piece of work. I think it is very important that it happened, that it comes out now that people–that we’re going through these things now. Because like you said, this is something that is a new reality for so many of us. And we’re living in this world that is post so many things, post-pandemic, all.
KM: Everything. I rebooted my podcast, well, about a month ago, and I made the subtitle like Pathways for Post Everything well, because yeah, that that word post is so relevant.
JS: I know, it’s true. We hear it all the time, post this post that and, that can be very heavy to be sort of sitting under. And there’s so much of are we entering into a different landscape now. What’s the world going to look like? And how are we going to sort of respond? And I think there’s so much in here that is directed at that. And if there’re readers looking for something that this is going to give them something there.
KM: The big question for me, because I think our online lives mean that we spend a lot of time debating what other people should do and how other people should behave better. And while that’s true. I think the big question for me is always how do I change my approach to this now? Like, what, what behaviors do I need to find that meet this moment? Wherever I’ve been going wrong, honestly. And I think the answer one of the answers for me was–lay in my long standing awkwardness around spiritual matters, which has, yeah, that question has been bubbling up in me for a long time and a desire towards a spiritual life that I’ve also felt too awkward about it to really address and kept pushing back and kind of like, no, that’s not that’s not on my business, that stuff, stuff that other people do and I’m gonna feel really silly. And that’s the very vulnerable core of Enchantment, is me owning up to that need that I feel without knowing the answers to it? And actually, without wanting the answers particularly–I think the answers are what makes me feel uncomfortable. The idea that any one of us knows how this is done, and what this all means, like on a grander scale, opening up permission for myself to wonder about it is a really different question. That’s one of the threads that runs through the book.
JS: Definitely. I think that we spent so long thinking we just want things to go back to that post pandemic, you know, but do we really, is it better to go back? Or is there a better way forward now? Is there something, is this an opportunity in some ways to, to reframe thinking reframe what we do now going forward? iI seems in you in what you write that that is something that is very important. We’ve got an opportunity to reframe some of the things that we’ve been doing, and though it comes at the expense of a lot of grief and hardship. Yeah, sometimes that’s where the biggest change comes is from those bigger losses. And moving forward now in a different way.
KM: We can’t go back, the world is changed, as the world will always do. We can’t avoid the pain either. Like that is that’s there, it’s present for all of us. And there’s no winning strategy that would negate any of that, that would take the pain away, that would make everything go back. There’s nothing there’s nothing that we could do write that we would achieve that for ourselves. So yeah, it’s a big acceptance.
JS: It’s a big acceptance. It’s a little heavy, but in your book still, there’s so much levity there’s still so much space for joy and curiosity and wonder and sort of seeking something beyond the heaviness that we see every day. Going back a little bit into these sort of short stories or short vignettes that you write in. Do you have like a favorite little piece from the book or something to sort of tease for our listeners? I mean there’s the Brocken Spectre piece that I love. There’s Okay, the shooting star piece that I love. The moment that I had to close the book the most and just think about is in the piece about meditation, when you realize that maybe meditation has been designed for men and that’s why it’s so difficult to incorporate into your daily practice. I had to do some thinking on that one for a while. That one really hit me.
KM: Yeah, that was a really important bit for me actually. It was an important shift in my own thinking was really absorbing how I’d often judged my own spiritual development (that’s a very grand term) against this paradigm of the man who goes off alone and thinks about it until they can figure it out, maybe for years. I have a problem with that, I don’t think it’s bad in and of itself. But I think a very specific set of circumstances let people do that. And meanwhile, the everyday world continues. And women, as we know, are so often the ones that are most ensnared in carrying responsibilities, and are holding everything down, to facilitate the act of spiritual enlightenment. And I just think it’s about time the respect rang both ways that’s all.
JS: There’s a very different expectation for a woman who, you know, were to leave her whole life behind for this sort of grand spiritual journey, and a man who is to leave his life behind for the same thing, I think there’s a very different response there.
KM: While his wife looks after the kids quite often. It’s not just about women and men, I mean, the number of men who are caring for partners, for example, is totally invisible. And we need to start to really admire the reserves that those people find to go back and care over and over again, at their own expense and find tenderness when they’re exhausted. And keep advocating for a more vulnerable person when they themselves are suffering. And like that is a really high calling, as far as I can see it, and it’s hidden. You know, I just, I just want some of those gurus to be sitting around the circle listening to those people. Tell them how that’s done. And tell them about the practice and the asceticism, and the contact with beating heart of life. That brings us to, there’s just a lot of mutual learning that can be done there.
JS: I think that your stories are so relatable and so interesting. There’s so many times I’m like, I’ve had so many moments like that, and the piece that’s so interesting, you know, this isn’t a personal growth book, or a self-help book. This isn’t a memoir, it’s sort of fit somewhere in between and so much of that what makes it digestible and relatable is that you’ve put so much of yourself into this.
KM: Oh, always. I always mean to avoid putting myself into like the books quite so much but I always wheedle my way in there. I’ve got a few favorite bits. I think the thing that comes to mind immediately is the bit where I talk about my grandmother peeling an orange every afternoon. It’s a really short part of the book. But it’s a touchstone for me. I’m using it to talk about the concept of hierophany, which is this idea that the spiritual can manifest itself in the physical world, and that we can read or imbue objects with our whole spiritual worldview. And for me, that is a hierophany, just returning to those moments when I in this very quiet house in the afternoon, my grandmother would sit down and peel an orange as a ritual. I don’t think she would have expressed it as a ritual, but looking back on it, it was, it was a ritual it was this, this marker in time in the afternoon, and this moment of great reverence for something that she just loved. She just loved oranges. And it’s a touchstone for me, because it makes me think, how scaping I have orange, I’m not scathing oranges, but, you know, like, I wouldn’t consider oranges to be worthy of my reference. Right? And I take those, those wonderful things for granted. So that’s, that’s the moment that comes up for me. Another real touchstone, that oriented me in the writing of this book was the bit towards the end about the meteor storm, I probably won’t give too much away about it, because I think, I think maybe people have never read about it before. It’s a magical thing to encounter, actually, but it’s a historical meteor storm that changed people’s perspective so fundamentally, and literally made people feel the sense of standing on a planet in space. And that shift that shift in thinking is the shift I kept trying to make as I was writing a book and it was just it just felt like such a fundamental part. And when I first wrote the book, that bit was right at the beginning, and it gradually got moved throughout the book because I didn’t know where to put it. You know, it kind of had to account for itself and in lots of ways it feels like slightly different to the rest of the book. But I think that’s what’s important about it, it was definitely this idea that I had to hold on to the idea that you can witness something in the sky above your head that fundamentally changes your perspective about who you are and what the world is all about. And yeah, that bit’s really important to me.
JS: Yeah, that’s, I mean, those are two of my favorite moments, the concept of hierophany. When I was reading this book was just like, oh, that’s the word for it. It’s this concept that we sort of move around. So you know, sometimes inelegantly in our own lives trying to find what is and completely, you know, for people varying degrees of it’s not a religious concept, really, it’s an internal spiritual sort of connection with the universe or connection with.
KM: Yeah, I think it unites all of the different spiritualities did not the ways you know, that it makes as much sense in Christianity as it does in like a kind of ancient animistic religion, or an ordinary person who sometimes feels like there’s a bit more magic in some parts of the world. But I love the way it kind of universalizes this very human desire to connect the material world with the non-material world. And it’s a really pretty word as well. Doesn’t it sound lovely to say it hierophany?
JS: It’s lovely. And it is one of those concepts that I think I will definitely keep, walking away with this book. It’s in there now. And I think it’s so important for sort of this rerouting that we’re all trying to do right now in this grounding within ourselves and within our own lives. And like you said earlier, it’s so easy these days to be very concerned about what others are doing. It’s so easy to be very overly connected, perhaps with what others are doing in reference to ourselves.
KM: And judgmentally to others and to ourselves.
JS: Oh, yeah. I think a lot of this, this new, you know, this idea that you’re coming to here is, how do we look inwards? I think the hierophany piece really connects.
KM: But actually one way to connect with other people is to look for their hierophanies as well. And to watch for the things that they hold sacred and to show respect for other people’s hierophany. Everybody has them. Yeah.
JS: And I think it’s sort of part of recognizing them, something that’s going to be so interesting for people to come to as they’re reading. I think it sort of shines a light back a little bit onto our own, onto the readers’ perspectives.
KM: Yeah, yeah, that. Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to learn about that word without wondering what yours are. Without a doubt. Yeah, so true.
JS: One that I think we might agree on from seeing is journaling. I think it’s a little selfish want to talk about journaling, because it’s very important to me, but I think that’s such an easy example for a lot of people is like a journaling as a practice. Do you feel like that, is that as a part of how all these books come to be is through your journaling, your writing, or are those separate for you?
KM: Both. I always, I always kind of call myself a true journaler, because I am such a sporadic writer, even in my own, like private spaces. My notebooks are abandoned for several months at a time, except for shopping lists, maybe or like crazy to-do lists of like, really boring things, you know, and then I’ll go through phases of writing in them really intensely. I mean, writing is the way I process everything, and whether that’s writing for public consumption, or privately, I’m always trying to, like, make a record of my thoughts and it surprises me so often, when I look back over my, you know, great big archive of notebooks, all of the thoughts that I’ve had that I have completely let go of, you know, that they’re no longer present. And they feel like the mind work of somebody who isn’t me, that is a source of kind of wonder to me like how much we shed. I’ve been beginning to work up some ideas for my next book at the moment, and I’ve been, you know, writing a lot about that. And I was flicking through an old notebook the other day, and this idea that I thought I’d just come up with, there it was, I think, eight months ago, fully formed, and I’d written it down and then completely forgotten about it.
JS: We have a tendency to sneak up on ourselves.
KM: Really strange. So you think these things have come out of nowhere, You’re like, no, no, I’ve been working on this for quite some time, I just didn’t remember. It’s a bit worrying, actually.
JS: Maybe it’s just, it’s a something that needed more time to ruminate. And now when you go back to it a little more formed.
KM: …the thought part of it for me, I, you know, I worry a bit about some of the online journaling coaches are so much about appearance and you know, making your journal look pretty.
JS: Mine are not pretty.
KM: Oh, God, no. In fact, like one of the one of parts of my practice is that I will only write in fairly scruffy notebooks, because the minute I mean, people are always buying me beautiful journals, and I can’t, I can’t say a thing in them, because the pressure that they radiate back out to create something beautiful is just too much for me. I, you know, like I often, you know, to writers, and I find that there’s this real sense of intimidation that some people have about putting anything on the page at all, that derives from the sense that it must be immediately, not only like intelligent and perceptive and coherent, which my journals never are, but also beautiful, like, actually physically lovely as well. And it must be in their best handwriting. And like, there must be like loads of colors applied to it. I just really want us to be allowed to get rid of that because that’s not everybody’s creative practice, like it is for some people. Fantastic. But it certainly isn’t mine. And like, I can barely even read my own handwriting in my journal let alone you know, find them meaningful, they are scattered thoughts of a person who does not make sense when you add it all up together. And that’s fine. And that’s where all my books come from, is that really scrappy beginning, I worry about how we turn every lovely thing into something full of hideous pressure. Why do we do that to ourselves?
JS: It’s something so human and so daunting that everything must now face some sort of outward criticism, this outward asceticism that is so difficult to sort of navigate within ourselves. And just not fair, frankly.
KM: Yeah, and it has to eventually appear on Instagram, like, art. oh, you know, no one is ever going to see the pages of my journals on Instagram, friends, like, let’s just be really clear. You will not be able to read it.
JS: Like you can see it but you’re not going to get anything out of it. I could take a picture of my shelf of unwritten in nice journals and that’s it.
KM: I’ve got some lovely unwritten journals in my life. They’re so beautiful. What do you do with them? You keep them you just put them on a bookshelf, they’re lovely. I’ve got one that a friend handmade for me.
JS: Oh, that’s a lot of pressure.
KM: I’m never gonna get there. What do you put in that? It’s so lovely.
JS: To switch topics after you’ve just indulge me talking about journaling. What’s the message that you hope people walk away from when they leave Enchantment? What’s that feeling that you hope they leave with?
KM: I hope that they leave with a sense that they already have all the tools at their disposal to access their own sense of enchantment. And I don’t think anyone would leave the book thinking that I have told them where that would be found, you know, my stuff is definitely my stuff and their stuff is theirs. I want people to realize this, that they probably have felt enchantment throughout their lives, they might have stepped away from it. But all they have to do is follow their own curiosity. And it’s probably to be found a couple of meters away, that there’s a line in the book, that’s the magic is of our own conjuring, which I think sums it up, really, you bring the attention and the desire to feel enchanted. And if you do that, it’s a muscle and you will tune, into whatever brings it to you.
JS: Absolutely, I think that that makes perfect sense to me. This is a little bit similar but I always like asking authors this question because I get so many interesting responses. But who do you hope finds this book? What kind of reader do you hope picks this up and, you know, gives this a try?
KM: I hope that it’s for someone who has felt the certainty slipped away from them and is feeling very lost–and who doesn’t want to return to that certainty. I think they’re the people that will find a new life in this book. It’s that sense of being in a wide-open space and looking for directions. And if you can really be in that space if you can allow yourself to genuinely be lost and directionless and uncertain, then I think the book will give you a lot, I think.
JS: How does it feel to put these books out into the world? Like you do put so much of yourself out into these into these pages. How does it feel on the precipice of putting it out for everyone? There’s fear, there’s joy, there’s, you know, your comedy, there’s, you know, crushing weight of existentialism a little bit.
KM: Existential angst. I’m sure there’s a specific phenomenon of the memoirist’s terror, you know, that seizes you in the middle of the night, probably exactly two months before your book comes out and you just think, Oh, my God did I actually put that in my book? I mean, like electricity of every living thing was such an exposing book for me, and so, like, dirty in terms of the emotional kind of content of it, that one really scared the hell out of me. It did catch me in Wintering without a doubt. And this time, I have a little bit more of a sense of, oh, this is a process that, you know, that I’ll go through, because I think what I’ve learned is that the bits that felt the most exposing to me a bit are the bits that people are the most grateful to read, and who will always be the bits that people write to me about. And I’m always seeking those moments when I’m writing, you know, like, trying to strip away the artifice of how I want to present myself and pass through that looking glass to find the actual rubbish dirty humanity. And that’s, yeah, that is it’s part of my practice. And I not satisfied with my writing unless it’s there quite often. But yeah, there is that sense of people are gonna see the inside of my head again, and it’s not very tidy. And it’s full of silly, you know, sort of dark thoughts, and wrong thoughts, and confused thoughts.
JS: We’re all very grateful to read those thoughts.
KM: Well, they’re important though, aren’t they, because it troubles me, not only that the world is full of people who are really happy to go out and present their very best side and pretend that that’s them all the way through and tell other people that that’s how it should be done. And it also troubles me that we carry on believing those people when they do it. And that’s gotta stop. That’s for me, that’s got to be one of them changes that begins to happen.
JS: Not everyone is the pretty journal on the shelf. We have to go beyond it a little bit.
KM: And even for me, like no more messiahs, you know, no more. I think, if the last 10 years has taught us anything, it is the fundamental disorderliness of the people that claim to have the most answers, and how much harm it’s done, like genuine real world harm, and how often that’s linked to abuse in a very, very direct way–that desire to control your image so tightly, and the behavior of other people, and how that translates into the way that those people actually treat others. And, yeah, I really am post-guru in my life.
JS: I think we need a lot more books from people that we can all relate to. We all have messy thoughts we all feel sometimes that untidiness in our brain, that unruliness in our own brains, and reading from the perspective of others that are experiencing the same things and are just seeking out the answers to those same questions is a lot more profound and useful for all of us in our daily lives.
KM: Let’s like tangle in it together. I mean, there’s we are so, so, so in need to find ways to be communities again, and to be families, again, in the broadest sense of that term, and to reconnect in life to genuinely reconnect rather than surface reconnect. And the answers come from all of us together. They’re never going to come from one person who’s had a little think about it. It’s not good enough anymore. It’s just not good enough. And yeah,
JS: And I know that’s something you are dealing with a lot in your podcast, obviously we want to give you the chance to do a little podcast plugs–we love podcasts here–that I know that you are working a lot on this sort of connectedness, togetherness now on this new season,
KM: I work in like mini seasons on my podcast now. And each mini season has a guiding question. And I try and ask a range of people from like very different perspectives and backgrounds and approaches to discuss a common question with me and this season, we’ve been thinking about how we can come back together again. The amazing thing about doing that is that I change over the course of the season, like I get to really, really explore a topic that I really want to know the answers to that sense of reconnecting has been enormous for my work lately, and that is because I know that I am by temperament a very solitary person. I grew up as an only child, I, you know, I’ve always lived in small families. I’ve never been part of like, that big, extended family. And I was also like, a teenager and child who didn’t have many friends. It’s really challenging for me to be in community but I still value it. And I know that I need to learn to be a better community member. And it’s, yeah, it is that authentic inquiry again. So important to me.
JS: It’s very important. To round out this conversation with my bringing back it to my bookseller sensibilities. I always feel like I need to ask people about their literary influences. You talk about books so much in your writing. You reference so many important texts to you or to what you’re talking about, I definitely go back and write down all the things you mentioned to check out. So what are some of your literary influences, fiction, nonfiction? Anything that sort of shaped Katherine May?
KM: It’s so broad, right? Yeah, it’s really hard because, you know, like you do speak to some writers who will name an author and they’re like, right, I really, I wanted to write like that. And I’ve never quite felt like that. But I do know that I’ve always been drawn to, like, very thoughtful memoir. So I loved Joan Didion from quite a way back. I think one of the first writers that I really, really wanted to be like, was Jenny Diski, who I don’t think is maybe as well known in the States. But in the UK, she wrote like a newspaper column and she wrote about mental health and the wild, but she’s also like, incredibly funny and acerbic, and that, for me, captures that everythingness of writing that I was writing to deliver, because I don’t I don’t think we always approach serious topics in a serious way. Like I think humor is woven into everything that humans do. And whenever I read something that’s only serious, I don’t fully believe it. I don’t trust it. Because I think there’s like a whole kind of sector of our humaneness that has been removed from it. And I love reading writers with that nick, but on a really different note, when I first read Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, it changed what I thought contemporary writer could do, and what they were allowed to do. And I, you know, like I think Susanna Clarke is talking about God throughout that, like, I really, I think in lots of ways she’s exploring some of the stuff I’m talking about in enchantment like that, that desire for something to make sense of this world and to bring order to her and magic. Like her magic is much more literal than mine. I remember the first time I read that book, just thinking, Okay, this is a different game than I thought it was. It was really formative for me without a doubt. I could talk about the subject for about like, five hours. I’ll give you 500 writers.
JS: Most of us could, but I can sit and really talk to you about all of this all day, but I think but I know we’re reaching the end of our time. So Katherine May, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been such an amazing conversation. I’ve loved getting to get inside your head a little bit more from Enchantment. And for all of our listeners, Enchantment is out now is going to be one of your favorite reads of the year. I guarantee it. You can see Katherine as well on her podcast, How We Live Now. Katherine, thank you so much for joining us today. I had such a great time.
KM: It’s so lovely to talk to you. And yes, as you say, we could have done this for a few hours. It’s such a lovely topic to roam around in it