Eva-Maria Müller: In your novel Icefields (1995), as well as in The Logogryph (2004), mountains feature as places that harbor stories. Icefields also gives a sense of the many different ways in which humans can tap into these stories, for example, by hiking, climbing, hunting, observing, recording, living, and listening to mountains. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship between the athletic and more intangible ways of accessing mountains and their stories?

Thomas Wharton: Mountain landscapes draw me in as challenges to be met in a physical sense, but they’re also aesthetic and imaginative experiences. They call to me in a way that no other landscape does, as if it’s in the mountains that I get closest to who or what I really am. If one wants to call that spiritual, that’s fine by me, but I just find that all of these aspects of what I feel in the mountains are pretty much inseparable. Is it possible for an experience to be purely physical? I don’t think so. The mind and the spirit, for lack of a better word, are fully involved in everything we do as human beings. Climbing a mountain with your body can only mean you’re also climbing it with your mind, your will, your imagination, your desires and hopes and fears.

I think it was probably a desire to try to understand how and why mountains make me feel that way that led me to write my first novel. As a writer, I’d been searching for a subject matter and a story I could call my own, some territory I could write my way into that hadn’t already been claimed by other writers. When I started writing about the mountain and glacier landscapes of the Canadian Rockies, I realized this was it: this was my imaginative homeland, the place I needed to write about. The strange, seemingly supernatural event that Doctor Edward Byrne has when he falls in the glacier at the beginning of the novel captures something of my own experiences. And having him as my protagonist, exploring the icy landscapes, he could become a kind of surrogate for my own need to say everything I could possibly say about this particular landscape and how compelling and meaningful it is to me.

EM: In your 1998 essay “The Country of Illusion” you recount your own Doctor Byrne moment when you slipped and fell hiking in Maligne Canyon in Jasper Park and explain that it triggered your fascination with narrative expression and the possibilities it holds for alternative endings. Icefields begins with Doctor Byrne falling into a crevasse where, hanging upside down, he sees an angelic figure in the ice. Over the course of the novel, a number of other characters and objects also fall. Curiously, though, in one way or another, they all return—and they return changed. Are these returns, together with Byrne’s alpinist failure, a reflection of how you locate a transformative capacity, an inherent value, as it were, in falling? And if so, what can it teach us about our relationship to the natural world, the command we have over our bodies, and the slippery practice of the literary sport?

TW: That’s a good question. I honestly hadn’t noticed there was so much falling in the novel, but now that you point it out . . . ! I think I’m fascinated by falling simply because I’m terrified of it. I’ve never been much of an alpinist because I learned very early on that I simply don’t have the nerve for scaling heights, even secured with a rope. I admire and envy people who can tame this primal fear and accomplish incredible feats, but in general I’d much prefer to read about mortal danger in a climbing memoir than face it myself. Some of the most haunting passages in mountain literature for me have been descriptions of falling, fatal or otherwise.

EM: Falling is just one of the many movements that run through your writing. In Icefields we encounter a glacier that rolls forward, mountaineers who traverse icy plains, travellers who cover long distances to get to Jasper—and then there is the movement of the story. How do you navigate these forms of motion? Do you see them moving in the same way or differently? And does writing about these distinctive movements contribute to your understanding of the bodies of mountains, humans, and texts?

TW: I see story and movement as intimately connected. We are animals, of course, and all animals have a strong seeking drive that impels movement. In evolutionary terms, moving through one’s environment originated as a survival mechanism, so that animals could find food and shelter, and escape becoming food themselves, but in humans and probably in other mammals and in birds, there’s a large component of curiosity and pleasure involved in goal-directed movement. There’s a need to move, but also the enjoyment of it for its own sake. I think this is at least a partial explanation for why human beings derive so much pleasure from stories. Traditional stories—myths, legends, epics—are almost always goal-directed. So many of these old tales involve heroes setting out from somewhere on a quest and returning somewhere. I think humanity cherished and retold these stories over the millennia at least partly because a story involving people in motion towards a goal provides some of the same psychological gratification and reward that actual goal-oriented movement does.

Hiking in the mountains, or even just taking a walk in my own neighbourhood, is good physical exercise, but it’s also psychologically enriching, and always feels just a little bit like a “hero’s journey,” especially during this pandemic when I spend most of my time cooped up at home. I’ve always thought it must be significant somehow that my settler ancestors were people who travelled huge distances, from their homelands to an unknown country, to make a new life for themselves. I’m a product of people that had that desire for movement and adventure, and I know I have it too, though I’m not accustomed to the same hardships they were. Increasing prosperity allowed my generation to take trips all over the world quickly and in relative ease. So maybe that desire for movement gets satisfied pretty easily in our world, but the experience of struggle and risk doesn’t, and that’s why the mountains call to so many people.

As for glaciers, I think we’re psychologically habituated to see intention and goals even in the movement of inanimate things. That’s why the poet Shelley says in his poem “Mont Blanc,” “the glaciers creep / Like snakes that watch their prey” (lines 100–101). We see movement, even the slow epochal movement of a river of ice, and we have to find a story in it.

EM: That’s interesting and it makes me wonder whether what you are saying about the glacier’s movement might also apply to the writing process. You are not just a writer but also a teacher of writing. Do you encounter moments when writing itself feels like a “slow epochal movement” and what is your advice to all those who find themselves in the writer’s equivalent of hanging upside down in a crevasse?

TW: One of my writing mentors, Robert Kroetsch, had a lot of great advice for writers. He said once, “Remember storytellers, just to attempt the impossible is victory enough.” I like to remind myself about that whenever I’ve reached a point in my writing, or my writing life, where I seem to have hit a wall: I’m blocked in some way by a creative challenge I can’t solve, or a story I’ve poured my heart and soul into gets rejected for the thirtieth time, or I just feel like giving up and doing something, anything, easier than writing. Kroetsch’s words remind me that it’s in the doing that the true fulfillment and reward comes, not in the results of the effort. If you have a vocation, a gift, a love of something difficult, whether it’s mountain climbing or writing or whatever, when you’re immersed in it fully, you know who you are. Or, rather, you forget who you are and you simply become what you do. After you leave that heightened creative state, the critical voice within returns and tells you how well or poorly it thinks you’ve done. And the world gets its turn to evaluate your performance too, and sometimes they’ll acclaim it, and sometimes they’ll ignore it. But no one and nothing can take away the joy that comes from doing the thing itself, expressing the gift, the vocation, and giving it everything you have.