How About This Presents Dr. Greg Loewen

Interview with a former academic and forever writer

Welcome to Atlantic Canada Mondays, a regular feature of How About This where we interview interesting residents of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Today we’re presenting an interview with Dr. G.V. (Greg) Loewen, one of Canada’s leading researchers in ethics, education, aesthetics, health, and social theory. He is the author of over fifty books and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades in both Canada and the USA. Greg and his wife currently live in Nova Scotia.

Here’s Greg!

Photo credit: Dr. G. V. Loewen

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When you were a teenager, what did you want to become when you grew up?

I was certain I was to be an archaeologist. But by the time I’d finished my MA in archaeology and begun a Ph.D. this focus had shifted quite radically. But as a young person I was fascinated by both the romance of unearthing the past ‘as it was’ as well as the sheer thrill of being the first to see something which had been hidden for ages. To this day I follow the archaeological news and watch various documentaries wherein those two feelings are captured. I spent almost three years in Mississippi doing salvage archaeology, though the historical period was far away from the one I had studied as a student. And having been a stamp collector since I was a kid, the experience of uncovering something occluded has found an ongoing expression there. Of course, such auction lots as have unknown qualities about them are highly valued by philatelists! But aside from the possibility of instant investment dividends, there remains this basic thrill of discovery, which in itself can be linked to the process of writing; in the one something old is being given new life, and in the other something new is being created out of what was old.

Do you prefer writing by keyboard, do you prefer pen and paper, or do you have another favorite method?

I write almost exclusively on the keyboard, though I never was properly taught how to type. But I will use pen and paper to jot ideas down, plot sequences, character charts and the like. And for verse I will often use paper and pencil and later transfer it into digital. Likely a cliché, but I use up a lot of 3M ‘sticky’ notes. Although I have used a lot of machines over the years, the 2010 iMac small keyboard is by far the best I have ever written on and I continue to use it to this day, disconnected from the internet as to preserve its long term viability as a simple digital typewriter. I visited William Faulkner’s house south of Oxford MS many a time and always marvelled at the room whereupon all the walls were covered with his writing and notes. Never once though have I thought of attempting to duplicate that.

What's the story of how you came to publish your first novel?  

An odd one. My first piece of fiction was a novella. My first victim was a well known Canadian novelist who has won many awards and happened to be our writer in residence at the university at which I was professor and chair of a department. He graciously agreed to read it and when we later met, he said ‘I don’t know how to say this delicately, but its quite a bit better than I had thought it would be’. Needless to say, one can only take such a response as a compliment and the writing lesson went on from there, for over three hours. He told me what needed to be fixed but not how to fix it. I asked one of my non-fiction presses to consider it and they published it gratis and on top of this, their CEO issued a public statement that they were proud to have published such a ‘pointed and perceptive work’. Hardly was it either, but it did explore a taboo topic, which my happenstance mentor suggested was ‘interesting’ that I should write about something that would be met with such scandal. We know from social research that 90% or so of ‘underage’ relationships – those with such large age differences as to make them illicit under the law – are usurious and also potentially abusive. But what about the other 10%? More of a Romeo and Juliet than  a Lolita, ‘Halcyon Summer’ (2017) – the very title is too romance-novel to be taken seriously – explored just such a relationship and in both an intimate and edgy manner. ‘Steamy’ was what the then director of Nanaimo Literacy commented for instance, which amused me. Here of course it was society itself that played the role of censor, rather than two feuding families or other interested third parties.

              But this was a minor publication both in terms of length and reception. There was no scandal. Kindle didn’t block it, as the publisher had feared, and the two reviews that came on-line were very approving and insightful. Ho-hum. I moved on to write my first actual mid-length novel soon thereafter. The circumstances were similar to what a friend and colleague who was then head of English at the same school said had occurred when Shakespeare had taken in a weak and inept version of what would become Hamlet in his much more capable hands. In my own smaller way, I felt I could improve upon but also radically transform and uplift a narrative that I had half-witnessed on streaming, a series entitled ‘The OA’, and which my wife and I only got half-way through due to its interminable pace and ludicrous precept. Nevertheless, I was negatively inspired by it and ‘Forgetting the Dreamtime’ (2018) appeared. It is a hybrid YA novel which crosses fantasy, romance, and the occult pitched as a coming of age narrative, Nothing original in any of that alone. But the heroine not only meets the undead God but has ferreted out the reason for His death in overcoming her own evangelical upbringing. I think the best thing about it is that it takes on at the deepest level the problem of ideology in religion, or the use of religion for ideological purposes, and overturns it. What I absolutely didn’t know at the time was that it would become simply the first volume of an eleven book 5500 page epic saga!

What's one thing about being an author that most people don't understand? 

I don’t know how to answer that in any general sense as I am but one writer. I have read about famous writers and their travails and joys, both in their own words and in those of others, and I find I recognize much of it. But how much of same is someone speaking in a way that they imagine the other wishes to hear? Or how much is rationalization? How much self-understanding? How much assuaging of one’s sense that on the one hand, writing is generally a thankless task, and on the other, it is what is necessary? Nietzsche’s famous if somewhat offhand comment to these regards, ‘I am one thing, my books are another’, certainly makes for a kind of trite sense as a book has a life of its own apart from its author, and I as a writer am not entirely held within my work. But for me, and in a word, I wonder if most people imagine the writer as being possessed of some kind of genius.

              I think the very term is a caution. Genius can be found in my general contractor, for instance. Whenever he visits our home to fix this or that, I am astonished at his acumen, none of which I myself possess. I tend to admire talents in others that I myself do not have, and would never have. I also downplay that which I do have to some extent, but I also do so in like others. One example: my wife and I were in a bookstore years ago now, before I started writing fiction but had written 20 scholarly books or commercial non-fiction titles, and there was a display of a new title with the tag-line ‘His first novel in ten years!’ and my first reaction was, ‘well, he sucks then!’. So a healthy part of genius seems a simple egotism. My only claim to some kind of ‘genius’ is that I can rip off a book in very little time, from what I know of other authors. Writing is never the issue, its reading the sources for the non-fiction and assembling the citation orders that takes a lot of work. And if I am trying to experiment this also gives me pause. But I can write a full length novel (700 pages plus) in three months, a mid-length (400) in two months and a shorter non-fiction book in three weeks, and I have written books in under ten days though they are never longer than 200 pages.

              So something that I wonder if non-writers know about writers is the ability to focus intently on a selected task. But in fact most people have that same ability and in becoming familiar with one’s respective vocation, one simply loses sight of it. For myself, the issue of anonymity as a fiction author is the most pressing. I think that readers might be too enamoured of glamorous author’s and formulaic narratives and do not explore minor titles and their associated presses, especially either self-published or hybrid contract releases, which my entire saga has come out in its first pressings as. So as far as ‘understanding’ or misunderstanding goes, I would want to be able to remind the non-writer to be more open to looking out for work that does not have an industry agency behind it.

Do you do any writing exercises or other work to further develop your writing skills?

These days every work is an experiment or exercise. Not quite set pieces, what I tell myself is that ‘I want to try to do this, this time’, and see if I can do it. Two contrasting examples: the fashionable definition of a ‘short story’ is more what I would call a vignette. One sees competitions with 2500 word limits. This is for me very short indeed. So can I do this? I was able to accomplish it, though my previous shortest piece of fiction was 4000 words in length. But I also wanted to write a digital narrative in an analog medium – I am the CEO and Creative Director of a start-up video game software corporation - and this was a failure. I sweated through a 750 page novel which took me 4 months to write and it ended up bursting the seams of the novel as form. So then what did I end up with? I ostentatiously gave it the sub-title ‘The Last Novel’ just so when it does appear – if it does – the consumer will be given pause. So my idea of an exercise is to write this or that new book. Let me end this response with a success; this past year a three volume study of the phenomenology of time appeared wherein I read the same set of sources three different ways and then related those readings centering around ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ as their respective themes. This was both an experiment and an exercise; what would it be like to write a multi-volume philosophical work? What would it be like to read the same sources in pivotally different, though related ways? I had never before done either.

From a psychological perspective there is a point of view that consciousness and conscious decision making are not what people have often believed.  Some research suggests that what we think of as conscious thought is actually a series of rationalizations that the mind creates to justify what are actually involuntary reactions, not rational decisions.  I'd be curious to know if this conflicts with your own thoughts and observations from a philosophical point of view.

Well this is a perennial motif in the history of ideas and the history of consciousness. How much of one’s volition is agentive, how much unconscious, how much habit, how much imagination or spontaneous improvisation? So one could embark on a book length ‘answer’ to such a question. It is not a simple one by any means. For myself as a phenomenologist, I first would not characterize the efforts of the conscious mind as being wholly or solely ‘rationalizations’. One, this word is often casually applied to those who find ‘excuses’ for themselves or are recovering from trauma; ‘I guess my husband was mad at me, I made him mad, so he hit me’, that sort of thing. Two, even if we depart from this colloquial usage, ‘rationalization’ then takes on two other tinges, that of both a) ‘ratiocination’, or having to do with statistical or probability choice theory, and b), providing a ‘rationale’ for something, usually a ‘common sense’ yardstick or rubric that has ‘worked’ in the past. ‘What then was the husband’s rationale?’ the police officer might ask after the fact. I do think that in hindsight we tend to provide for ourselves ‘justifications’ for our action or inaction, as you have implied, but not as part of the ongoingness of the thought process when it itself is enacted. And certainly we make our fair share of decisions which do not have well-worked out rationales backing them up. They tend to fall into two distinct categories, 1) the non-rational, which has to do with belief systems such as religion or ideology, and 2) the irrational, which is of interest to psychopathology and which has, within that discourse, attempted to take over ‘1’ in our modern period;, generating statements such as ‘Martin Luther suffered from schizo-affective disorder’, that kind of thing. For me, they retain their discreteness, as by far most people who harbor traditional beliefs do not suffer hallucinations because of them, for instance.

There are also two kinds of rational decisions, and Max Weber was the first person to work them fully out in the context of rational organizations such as bureaucracies and the State. 1) Zweckrationales Handeln: rational action directed at a finite goal. Here, the usual image of a room with many doors can serve. But one can see through these doors and thus judge what is beyond them, allowing for rational choice, unlike that scene narrated in the 1974 Genesis song, ‘The Chamber of 32 Doors’, for example. 2) Wertrationales Handeln: rational action directed to an absolute value. In this case, one is placed far beneath a goal or a object of desire or emulation, and so one can only approach it using it as an abstract guidepost. If one’s value is wealth, say, then everything one would consciously and rationally do would be to work toward increasing one’s proximity to this ideal. Now this being said, in both types of agency there may well be non-rational factors at work both consciously and unconsciously. If so, we might begin to interpret our example of abstract wealth as a kind of sign of the elect, as the early Protestants in fact did. The rich are blessed by God so if one isn’t rich, better get to work!

But short of assigning a speculative ratio to the balance of thought and unthought I don’t think there is a way to fully annotate or absorb the factors that make up a willing agency in the world. One must take into account the whole human being as Dasein, as a ‘being-in-the-world’, and the world as it is for one’s being. This is how a phenomenologist would generally begin to approach such a series of questions that you raise. And there are ways in which to do so. In phenomenological psychology, Minkowski’s 1933 work Lived Time is an excellent example of such case studies in the realm of the irrational but also compared to the normative consciousness. There are many others. I practice a version of Daseinanalyse and so both Binswanger and Boss are other sources you might consider checking into as responses to the problem of rational agency.

Over your career you've authored more than 50 books which appears to be 1 - 2 books per year (or more, depending on when you were first published).  How do you maintain that level of creative output while carrying out your other responsibilities?

I think I may have mislead you earlier when citing time periods. What I should have said at a more basic level is that it takes me an hour to write 5 pages of non-fiction and the same amount of time for 10 pages of fiction. So two hours a day suffices pending on project to get where I’m going in the time allotted. And my first book was not published until I was aged 37, so I am a late bloomer as a writer in general. In 2017 I wrote 9 books, one of them over the course of 8 days, and it was as a whole one of perhaps just two periods of adult life where I actually felt like I was living up to my potential. I don’t tend to write on weekends at all as my wife is home, and I almost always write in the mornings when I am fresh and rested. Though it is true that after I took early retirement I was able to write far more. By comparison, I had precisely 20 books in the 20 years as a professor, and in the six years since I have written 33.

Do you make any use of social media at this point (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc.)?  Any thoughts about its value or dangers it poses?

The corporation which I co-direct is more savvy to these media than I am as an author. Growing up without computers let alone the internet, I am yet a babe in the wilderness and rely fully on my business partner to direct marketing. I suppose I have the usual thoughts about digital; great for challenging and whistleblowing, whether you’re a Zapatista or a teenager who has been dress-coded, but not so great for those who are liable to succumb to the zealot, the ideologue, and the simple troll or phishing scam. Nietzsche reminds us about the truer dangers of seeking an audience: ‘Do you desire followers? Then get noughts [nothings, zeros] behind you!’.

How does Atlantic Canada compare to other places you've lived:  good, bad, about the same?

I’m a native of Vancouver Island so Cape Breton feels very much like home to me, and reminds me of my actual home as it was 40 years ago. It is certainly isolated and the people are both marginal and marginalized. At the same time, it is a relief given the lack of traffic and slower pace, the cost of real estate and the fact that nothing needs be done. One takes life at one’s own tempi rather than at the behest of some other force or set of institutions. The downside is that the entire region has been historically forgotten and it gets by through billing itself as a tourist area though it is not truly set up for tourism. Even so, my wife and I love our spot, with an ocean view and a big beach a five minute stroll away. We couldn’t afford that anywhere else in Canada or the USA. I have lived in a number of places in BC, as well as Mississippi, Missouri, and Saskatchewan, before coming to Nova Scotia and at first, Truro, so a fair sample of the continent.

Pretend you wake up one morning and you learn that the Internet has been destroyed.  What's the first thing that you do?

Dig out all my old USB sticks and back up! Then maybe buy a printer again. Otherwise, I can get along without it, having not grown up with it. Ninety percent of it seems to be about young people showing off in various ways, lurid or otherwise, so no great loss on my end. Not that I am judging them, that’s what young people do and to a great extent need to do. But its not my world and it never was.

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Thanks again to Greg for agreeing to be interviewed! Further information: personal website and Wikipedia entry.