Your writing is full of beautiful imagery and rich metaphors. Sometimes, particularly when you are writing about the natural world, you seem somehow, via metaphor, to make abstractions like time or emotion into something tangible. How do you feel that metaphor helps us to approach the indescribable, that which is beyond words? I see everything as metaphor. Everything stands in relationship to everything else. In fact, in Greenlandic, there’s a word which means both weather and consciousness. That to me is sort of the ultimate word, at least for people who live their lives outside. I think that’s just how I see the world. I mean, I don’t think about writing metaphors. But I do see relationships between things. In our dualistic manner, we keep trying to separate everything, and so we make a big deal about the correspondences between things. But I start from the other side and say, everything is corresponding, and it’s odd when they don’t. So metaphor comes easily, because — that’s all it is. Putting two things together, like two electrical wires, and seeing if it creates a spark. When I read your work, I feel as though you are trying to capture the life-energy in every moment. How does writing transform experience for you? I think it is like giving away the gift of a moment that I’ve savored to somebody else. It gives the experience foreground and background and center and texture. What advice would you offer to new writers who are interested in the genre of personal narrative? I would offer the same advice to anyone writing anything: read. Read deeply and widely of the best things written in every genre. If you’re writing nonfiction, to read only nonfiction would be horrific. You should read everything, all the time: poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, science. Just everything. And only the best: be a snob about your reading. You can be ecumenical about everything else. But don’t waste your time reading bad stuff. And I would also advise you to always be awake, aware, alive, observant. Neither grasping nor rejecting, just letting things soak in.