Meet Christian McEwen

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Q&A with Christian McEwen

Q: You have published multiple works spreading the doctrine of listening, connecting, and “slowing down”– where does the passion for these concepts come from?

A: It probably stems from growing up in Scotland in the country… and living a life that, in today’s terms, was relatively uninterrupted by tecno-machinery. We had a television and the children watched it in the evening a little bit, but only for about an hour at the most. There was a record player and a radio, but I don’t remember much intrusion of the kind that we have almost constantly today.

I also worked with teachers on using poetry in the classroom for an outfit called Lesley University which is based in Cambridge, MA, and those teachers had frighteningly little private time. And it became clear to me when I was trying to help them with poetry –which they had to write so they could teach their students how to write– that in order to write poetry, you have to listen inward, you have to slow down and pay attention to what’s going on in your own head and what’s going on around you… beyond “I need to get to the grocery store, and then I need to go home and mark my papers, and then I need to put the kids to bed”, beyond that sort of surface urgency. So that work with those teachers is probably what jumpstarted the slowness book (World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, pub. 2011).

And then in order to write the slowness book, I interviewed a number of creative people about their practice. And in the years following, I interviewed a number of other creative people (visiting poets) for the book, Sparks from the Anvil: The Smith College Poetry Interviews (pub. 2015). So in order to think well about slowness, I needed to reach out to other people who were thinking about it and that necessarily involved listening. 

 

Q: You included many stories of sound, ranging from personal accounts to well-known individuals. Were there any connections you made from writing this book that wouldn’t have happened otherwise?

A: The one that was the most strange to me was a Zoom interview I did with a man called Allen Hirson (his story can be found on pages 99-101). He’s a Professor of Speech Acoustics at University College London and he’s what’s called a “forensics speech analyst”. So he uses sound as a way of tracking criminals, and that was an extraordinary story to me! His acuity of listening and his ability to “listen behind the noise” was astonishing to me. And I would have never come across somebody like that had I not already been on the track of very acute listening skills. 

 

Q: You use an independent publisher. Are there any unforeseen benefits that come with working with the smaller press?

A: I work with Bauhan because they make beautiful books. We have now done a number of beautiful books together, about twenty years’ worth of beautiful books, so that’s the prime reason why I’m working with them. Bless them, Bauhan keeps things in print (which not all publishers do) which is one of the real advantages of working with a smaller press. And because they keep books in print, there is an opportunity for a “slow burn” rather than a succeed or fail approach when a book is first published. In the case of World Enough & Time, this “slow burn” has taken the form of consistent love letters from the universe, some of which are quoted on the back of the new edition of the book. It’s genuinely amazing to me that the book has had that level of effect. I have a client currently who sent me a photo of their copy of World Enough & Time, and it was bristling with Post-it notes. And she had a whole shelf full of books that I’d mentioned in World Enough that she had tracked down and read. And I pray to God that that happens with In Praise of Listening, too. But I really can’t tell yet.

 

Q: Are there any sounds you don’t particularly enjoy, but can still appreciate? For example, after the first snowfall this year, I was reminded of the crude sound of wet boots on a hard floor. I do not enjoy this sound, but… it was the first snow. In January if you can believe it… It was late but it had finally come and that had me smiling at the sound.

A: Well just this morning there was some kind of machinery down the hill from me, and they were working on the trees. Clearly, there was a tree surgeon and they needed to cut something because it would be dangerous and would fall otherwise. I didn’t enjoy the racket but I enjoyed the sense that the trees were being looked after!

 

Q: Were there any challenges with writing In Praise of Listening? Both anticipated and unexpected?

A: 2016 through 2017 was pretty rough. My younger sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and I was genuinely worried for her— we didn’t know if she was going to make it. And that was the same year that Britain separated from the European Union, and then that Fall, Trump was elected. Then, the following Spring, I got Lyme’s Disease and my computer was hacked, so I lost two years’ worth of work, notes, and papers. I had some hard copies but overall I needed to start again. So inside about six months, a lot of really rough things happened.

Covid, of course, was very hard and lonely, but I felt lucky for having entered into hibernation when I did because I already had the project moving and as a writer, I could continue with my work. Whereas my friend, Frank London, whose story you can find in the book (pages 143-146), is a trumpeter. His whole world was just frozen! He could hardly do anything… So I was very aware of how fortunate I was; of how portable writing is, how relatively inexpensive writing is, how little sustenance you need to get by… If I had to be hiding in a room for three years, then I was happy to have the Listening book to hide with. 

 

Q: Is there anything that you wanted to include in In Praise of Listening but it just wasn’t “fitting”? Or is there anything that has happened or you discovered after it was published that you wish you could have included?

A: Two things that I would like to have included but I didn’t… Before Covid came along, I had this community activist project where, with some friends’ help, I created a giant paper-mache ear. And I took that Giant Ear and I set it up at the local farmer’s market and at various other local gatherings and offered open listening sessions to whomever happened to come by. I tried several times to write the “Giant Listening Ear” into the Listening book but I just couldn’t find the right way in…

And then there was a local Buddhist activist named Paula Green who did a lot of work listening across differences. If she were alive now, she would be talking to Israelis and Palestinians. She travelled all over the world and she talked to people and helped them talk to one another— she brought them into conversation in the most thoughtful and delicate way. I interviewed her and I wanted that piece about her to go in the book, but I just couldn’t get it right. And I still regret that I didn’t focus very specifically on using listening to talk across differences and to make peace, especially right now. There is a little bit of that with the Susan von Reusner story — where she uses her Thomas Watson Fellowship to talk with the young women working in textile factories all throughout Southeast Asia (pages 78-81). But I still regret not being able to include Paula Green.

And then in terms of something that came up after… Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction by David George Haskell is a truly marvelous book. He’s thinking about sound really wonderfully and deeply and in a much larger and more knowledgeable way than I could ever hope to do. And I wish that book had come out earlier in my project so that I could have learned more from it.

Another book is Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World by Kathleen Moore. She’s a philosopher and a naturalist and she actually wrote me a blurb for In Praise of Listening. But her book came out in 2021 and I was too close to the end of my project to have included it. But those are two books ‘by the elders” who take on my subject far better than I could ever hope to do myself! But I don’t mind being in kindergarten if they’re in the sixth form (twelfth grade). In my book, there are thirteen different chapters with thirteen different lenses to explore the subject of listening. So for the general reader without much background, it offers a number of different doors to enter that subject.

 

Q: What would be your one piece of advice to give to those in this modern, technological, always buzz-buzzing world, who wish to improve their listening?

A: It’s two pieces of advice but it’s really the same piece of advice: Turn off the gadgets and try not to multi-task. Which involves, necessarily, a pause. So if that’s you walking up the hill with your earplugs in, listening to a podcast, maybe don’t take the podcast along and maybe just listen to the birds as you go up the hill. And if you’re talking to a friend, taking that pause is just as important. When somebody is talking, don’t assume that you know what they are going to say and start preparing your answer. Let their words enter you. And be ready to pause a little bit even after they finish speaking. So that your answer is not just a knee-jerk answer, but is truly a response to what they have to say. And then the conversation will develop in ways you might not expect, and that is the great pleasure of them all. So the one-word answer would be: pause.

 

Q: Was there a particular section of the book that came first that led to the rest? Or did all of the chapters sort themselves out near the end of the writing process?

A: I think I knew from fairly early on that there was going to have to be a section on “childhood listening”. Oftentimes when people are working with memoir, they start with a photograph, and asking people to start with sound was relatively new and wasn’t what the average person expected. So when I taught listening workshops, I would ask people to remember their early childhood sounds. I particularly remember one workshop at a friend’s house in upstate New York, which was filled with professional people – editors, therapists, musicians, New Yorker types – and after I asked them about this, some of them were in tears. They hadn’t entered their childhood memories through that gate before… So it was made very clear to me that thinking about sound in childhood was somehow very powerful and fresh and new.

The other thing that was clear to me from relatively early on, was that I didn’t want to write just about human-focused listening. That was partly because of World Enough & Time, and partly because of another book, which I did with a friend, Mark Statman, The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing, and which made me think about what it is to listen beyond the human. Of course, there is a sorrowful side to this, too. There’s the sweet side of “take out your plastic earbuds and listen to the birds”, and there is also the sorrowful truth of climate chaos and climate change… What we are not hearing, what birds are not singing, and what we are hearing too much of. As in too much traffic, and not just the traffic that we hear but also the traffic sounds found underwater, and how damaging that is to the acoustic environment of the fish and whales and dolphins, and I write about this in the Listening book as well (pages 226-228). 

 

Q: What are you reading right now?

A: I have three books I would like to praise! One is called The Golden Mole: And Other Vanishing Wonders by Katherine Rundell. She is an astonishing woman. She writes children’s books but she also just wrote a long biography of the poet John Donne. She’s an academic, but she is also a brilliant and vibrant writer. 

Another is O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker. It’s a novel set in Scotland by the wife of the poet, George Barker. This book came out in 1991 and was recently reissued. She had a parallel life to the one I had himself, which is to say that she grew up in a dilapidated Scottish castle and she was a rebellious, bookish child. So it is extremely enjoyable.

And lastly, Notebooks of a Wondering Monk by Matthieu Ricard. Ricard is the French translator for the Dalai Llama and a lovely man. There have been many tests using his ability to meditate because he can be calm inside one of those great big FMRI machines. It’s a great, big, fat book and a source of real wisdom. 

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