I confess, sickly people repulse me. The blame for some of this aversion lies with my upbringing. While the stomach flu and chicken pox were treated with maternal tenderness, I nevertheless inferred that falling ill was a sign of weakness. My mother was never bedridden and 
I can’t remember my father ever calling in sick, so I surmised that missing a day of school was a kind of failure, evidence of a delicate constitution hardly befitting a young man. But my internalized message does not compare to the one assimilated by my wife through her Midwestern, Protestant upbringing. Around her house—and presumably in the environs of Illinois farms—sickness was indicative of a potentially serious character flaw (on par with falling asleep on the couch while watching football). But familial messages aside, there are good evolutionary reasons for not associating with feeble folks. With respect to selecting mates, the infirm are bad genetic bets. And in terms of survival, there’s a good reason to avoid pallid people—they’re often infected with a communicable pathogen. All of this goes to explain, if not excuse, why I wasn’t all that keen on spending time with my university colleague Cheryl.* I’m neither a shallow cad who judges people based on their looks, nor an intolerant lout burdened with psychological baggage. I’m a well-adapted organism.

Horn flies are truly loathsome insects. They lay their eggs, and spend the maggoty portion of their lives, in fresh cow dung. The size of a small housefly, an adult feeds on blood up to twenty times per day, favoring the capillary-rich tissues at the base of a cow’s horns. Hence the insect’s name. This is not to say, however, that the flies are found only on their host’s head. When hundreds (in some cases more than ten thousand) of these insectan vampires are seeking a meal, the best spots are quickly occupied. So the back and sides of cattle become peppered with hungry—and horny—flies. Females lay up to two hundred eggs in their lifetimes, and the insect can crank through ten generations a year in warm climes, such as Louisiana. That’s where I met the horn fly, while studying for my doctoral degree in entomology at Louisiana State University. Although my dissertation research concerned a less noxious creature (the southern green stinkbug, which, despite its name, emits an odor reminiscent of cut grass), I was oddly attracted to these repulsive flies. They had a gritty, unapologetic, blue-collar authenticity to their lives. One had to respect a creature that had evolved the capacity to live its larval life in a pile of shit and spend its adulthood taking blood from an animal a couple of million times its own size.

Poetry by Tanya Stepan

A poem by Bob Hicock

Notes to self on becoming a multi-award-winning fiction writer who will be termed a genius by the New Yorker: 1) Quit ascendant law career 2) Write for six to seven hours every day for twelve years, publishing an occasional story in a literary magazine, until you land a story in Harper’s via the slush pile 3) During that stretch, travel to Haiti a couple of dozen times because you want to write about the country 4) Also during that stretch, spend four years on a novel that doesn’t get published 5) Afterward, for several hours one day, consider getting an MBA, then decide against 6) Two years later, upon the Harper’s publication, embark on writing seven more stories of equal beauty, grace, and devastation that will be collected in your debut book, eighteen years after you started.

Good money says that if you were to brainstorm a plan for becoming a successful fiction writer, the above sequence wouldn’t be how you’d draw it up on your legal pad. But this is the path Fountain traveled to literary acclaim. In 2006, eighteen years after quitting his practice at a major Dallas law firm to write fiction full-time, Fountain published the short-story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. Two of the stories had won a Pushcart Prize, and a third had won an O. Henry Prize. The book itself went on to win both the PEN/Hemingway Award—for the best debut book of fiction—and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and was also named a “Best Book of the Year” by both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. Fountain himself won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award in 2007. In an essay for the New Yorker called “Late Bloomers,” Malcolm Gladwell draws parallels between Fountain and the painter Cézanne.

Brief Encounters, in other words, struck a chord. Given our rapacious desire to understand the world and to fit together the pieces of globalization, a book like Fountain’s, which spans five continents, is especially timely. One of the reasons Fountain’s stories are so moving is that, as Gladwell writes, “they feel as if they’ve been written from the inside looking out, not the outside looking in.” This is true whether we find ourselves in Haiti, in Colombia, in Sierra Leone, in Myanmar, or in central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Each of Fountain’s stories reveals, with unsurpassed compassion and intelligence, the complex ways in which the macro forces of our world influence the outer and the inner lives of human beings who are often powerless to alter the consequences. The curtain is pulled back and the emotions flayed not through reportage, but through the interior swirl of individual lives—eight personal monsoons.

Fountain was a visiting writer at UNC Wilmington in the fall of 2009. On his last afternoon in town, early in December, we sat down to talk about the lifelong practice of writing, a shifting definition of success, an unexpected paean to Shelby Foote, and an awareness of global suffering, particularly with respect to Haiti, a country that has meant a great deal to Fountain both personally and professionally. This conversation now takes place in the shadow of the well-known earthquake of January 12 that ravaged Port-au-Prince and the surrounding area, killing upwards of a hundred thousand people. Since then, in Fountain’s words, “Around here it’s been all Haiti, all the time.”

Ben George: You grew up here in North Carolina, and write in your essay “The Way Back” that if you had stayed here “the cumulative weight of family and history and place, a kind of endlessly repeating nostalgic fog,” would have kept you from “something important.” How did that feeling play into your choice to leave?

Ben Fountain: When I was growing up, the South was physically beautiful to me. It was a lot more rustic and rural back then, in the sixties and seventies, and I never got tired of looking at it, just the lushness of the natural world. But my family has been here a long time, and I was always making connections in my mind about how so-and-so had once done something at a particular place that I might be visiting or driving by at the moment. An ancestral nostalgia was stalking me. Walker Percy once said about William Faulkner that Faulkner had managed to live in the South, but that he was really haunted by his ghosts and maybe that’s one reason why he drank. Being a drunk was the only way he could stand it. In my own case, I felt like if I was going to get any kind of clarity in my life, I had to go. And leaving was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I could have been happy in one way, staying here and practicing law, and being within this network of family and social connections. I had a ready-made identity. But on another level I felt like I would go to sleep after a couple of years of that and I would never wake up for the rest of my life. I would drift through in this fog.

Photo: Liliana Castillo

It takes a certain daring—or just plain audacity—to propose a cure for global warming. But that’s what Robert Kunzig and Wallace Broecker advocate in their book Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about the Current Threat—and How to Counter It. They argue that the climate crisis can be solved in part by dotting the planet with an array of carbon-scrubbing towers. To come up with this bold plan, the two combined their considerable talents: Kunzig is a prizewinning science journalist, and Broecker, the Newberry Professor of Geology at Columbia University, has spent more than five decades studying climate change. One of the first scientists to sound the alarm on global warming, Broecker is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.

Now senior environment editor at National Geographic, Kunzig has spent more than two and a half decades writing about science, archaeology, and the environment, honing his skills first at Scientific American and then at Discover magazine, where he spent fifteen years as a staff editor and then the next seven as a freelance contributing editor. He is the author of Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science, which won the 2001 Aventis Prize for Science Books, and has written about topics from the theory of relativity and the physics of black holes to the development of the fetal brain and the origins of agriculture, as well as the science of ice cream, airplanes, spiderwebs, ballet, Scotch tape, cheese, photographic film, perfume, and truffles.

The logic of the pair’s proposal in Fixing Climate is simple. Carbon dioxide is a waste product of human activity, industrial and domestic. In this way it is no different from human sewage, a pollutant that was once dumped out of windows and into waterways, contaminating drinking supplies and leading to outbreaks of cholera and typhoid. City planners in nineteenth-century London, Paris, and Chicago built sewer systems to safely dispose of the waste, and in the same way, we can rid the atmosphere of carbon dioxide contamination by sucking it out and socking it away in rocks. In Fixing Climate, Broecker and Kunzig describe the technology necessary to do this and explain why solar energy and wind power alone cannot solve the problem. In July, Kunzig sat down with journalist Josie Glausiusz and discussed the rigors of battling climate change and the joys of science journalism.

Josie Glausiusz: Many of us are increasingly filled with a sense that global warming is an intractable problem and that we should all just learn to live with the consequences. But in your book Fixing Climate, you and Wallace Broecker seem optimistic that the problem can be put right. Where do you get your optimism?

Robert Kunzig: I think people are born optimistic or not. Some days maybe I’m not so optimistic, but I have a gut feeling that we are a tremendously adaptable species and are not so stupid that we’re just going to let this all go to hell. When I read accounts by other writers insinuating that our civilization is doomed, I have a visceral disbelief.

A civilization confronted with climate change is not a unique problem, but a civilization that is confronted with global climate change and is attempting to do something about it is unique. It’s a problem that will take a long time to solve. But I am optimistic, because I think these problems look huger when you’re standing on the edge of the slope, but once you start to head down a path things start to happen fast. Look at the change in mood in this country created by one election. I’ve always felt that the right leadership in the United States at the top could make an enormous difference, and I think we’re getting a chance now to see if that’s true. I could be wrong—maybe I’m a sap. I just think that it is a solvable problem and we’re capable of solving it.

Photo: Karen Fitzpatrick

Women are words.                    —Thomas Howell, Devises (1581)

How strange the way change comes, without warning, and never the way we think. Like a flash flood in the desert, it doesn’t have to be raining before the water hits. I always believed my mortality would arrive on wings of grace, not through a numbing of my body that would prevent me from walking or finding my way toward words.

I close my eyes.

Let me run this scene through my mind once again. I was at the movie theater in Ellsworth, Maine. Inglourious Basterds. The film ended. The violence stayed with me. As I stood up to exit, the right side of my body went numb. I was having trouble walking. Once outside, I called my husband, Brooke, and I could hear that whatever was happening was affecting my speech, as well. It was dark. I was in my car, being guided to the emergency room through online directions delivered to me by Brooke from our home in Utah. I pulled into the parking lot and told my worried husband I would call him as soon as I knew anything.

Once inside the Maine Coast Memorial Hospital, primarily used by injured lobstermen, I apologized. For what? I can only remember thinking I was overreacting. Sitting in a bright white room where I waited after my symptoms had been described, blood pressure noted, and temperature taken, I watched a fifteen-year-old boy walk into the hospital screaming in pain. He was accompanied by a policeman who by law had to place him in handcuffs. “I’m not a criminal! I didn’t kill anybody,” the boy cried. “I just wanted to kill myself.”

After several hours of tests, including a CAT scan and an EKG, a physician’s assistant finally came into my room. Without a preamble, she said, “There is a soft-tissue density on the left side of your brain measuring 11.8 by 8.6 millimeters in maximal dimensions.”

I asked her to speak to me in a language I could understand.

“I don’t know exactly how to say this,” she said. “But it appears you have a brain tumor and you’re in the middle of a stroke.”

I started to laugh, unable to take in what I had just heard. By then the doctor had walked into the room. Overhearing the conversation and the edges of my humor, she interrupted, “How about this: on a scale of one to ten, you are at an eight.”

That got my attention.

Illustration: Jimmy Brown

My father was a farmer. He woke before light and spent his days trying to guide and control the life that came out of the earth. The farm belonged to his family gone back three generations. Corn from the get-go. My mother stayed at home and had us children because that was the way of the world we lived in. In my very early years my mother was a lively woman. She took us out in the old Ford truck, pushing and pulling the shifter with such vigor I was in awe of the machine, that it did not fall apart under her power. Then that changed. She stopped taking us into town, leaving the job to my father or Robert, Father’s farmhand, or even from time to time Robert’s wife, Estelle. My mother stopped leaving the property and then one day she stopped leaving the house altogether.

We lived just outside of a town called Sycamore. Sixty miles from Chicago, due west. Sixty miles made a difference then, far more than it does now. It had been less than a decade since the end of the second war, and the suburbs, though growing fast with GIs and their young families, were still just a narrow collar on the city. I was the second and last child for my parents. My sister was Harriet. I was the one, though, that our parents had been waiting for—a boy—and it showed in the way they treated me, taking my side in fights between Harriet and me, giving me a stern talking-to for something that would have surely gotten Harriet a spanking or worse. From an early age I understood myself to be different from my sister.

One summer day, Harriet and I found ourselves, as we often did on summer days, bored enough to act like friends. We scratched hopscotch into the ground by the barn, but quickly tired of it. We tried to get our dog, a black Labrador named Petal, to chase a stick, but she wasn’t budging from the shade of the house. It was too hot and she was too old. We sat down next to her just as our father came out of the barn leading Grace, his best mare. She had a hitch in one of her back legs. “Goddamn it,” our father said. “What the shit.” Then he called out loudly for Robert. “Go on and play somewhere else,” he said to us, waving his hand in no particular direction. “Robert!” he called again.

Harriet and I went around the side of the barn, but stopped and waited at the corner, peering around. Robert came out of the house, where he’d been having lunch. His wife was there that day. Estelle often came out and visited with my mother, sometimes bringing vegetables or flowers from her garden. It was easy to forget that Robert worked for our father; most of the time they seemed like partners or even brothers—Father being the elder, of course. Estelle followed Robert out of the house, but stayed on the porch, leaning against the whitewashed post, watching her husband and our father. Robert shuffled over to where our father had Grace’s leg up, examining her hoof.

Photo: vicm

Poetry by David Wagoner

A classic tale of bear meets robot

A letter from Peter Matthiessen

A letter from Robert Finch

A letter from Wendell Berry

During her fifty-two years, Erma Rapoport imagined having an active social life, particularly when it came to her neighbor of at least twenty of those fifty-two years, the wonderful Mr. Whoever. Once she secretly observed him tending his garden through her mail-order 20 x 30 mm Explorer binoculars—this being in the fall of ‘81 or ‘82—and his eyes caught her attention. He had the kindest, dearest eyes she had ever seen, a grayish-blue, unusual eyes that could probably look deep inside a person and touch the heart. Oh, my, she thought, and cooled her flushed cheeks with quick little waves of her hand.

Then yesterday Mr. Whoever died, a massive coronary. The shock of his abrupt departure took Erma’s breath away. She saw the James City County EMS truck in front of his house, its blue-and-red lights flashing. Ten or fifteen minutes later, a fat balding man and a rough-looking blonde woman, both wearing navy blue jackets, wheeled out a gurney with a plastic body bag strapped to it, presumably Mr. Whoever. The following day, she read his obituary and, after more than two decades, learned his name—Alvin Lipka. What’s Lipka . . . Polish? She thought she knew a couple of Lipkas, maybe.

He was, or had been, a fifty-eight-year-old bachelor who was survived by no one, the poor thing.

Poetry by Dan Albergotti

A poem by David Wagoner

The truck’s heater gasped a damp, phantom dog
into the cab, redolent of rain-soaked wool.
Its choke and vent was anything but warm.

The day had faded dull—gray sun, gray rain.
Even the slim college girls walking by
wore fat coats the color of wildebeests,

and the aging dour professors limping
among them were plainly no threat at all.
I should have known it would be like this, come

as I had from the bears...

A poem by Dan Stryk