Coach House Books asks Carla Gunn a few things about Amphibian

CH: Phin, the narrator of Amphibian, has a pretty funny take on the adult world. It’s quite a skill to be able to put yourself convincingly in the head of a nine-year-old – how do you do it?

CG: I have so many amazing children in my life – my sons, my stepkids, my nephews and nieces. Since I wrote the bulk of the novel when one of my sons was in fourth grade, I had a sense of how kids that age think and feel and the sorts of things they experience at school. It also helps that we play around a lot with words and ideas, twisting things a little sideways to amuse one another. For instance, when I asked my son to check the mailbox the other day, he said, ‘I already did and it’s empty.’ I said please check it again just for me. So he did and then smugly stated, ‘I stand correct.’

CH: This book seems timely, coinciding as it does with the sudden widespread interest in the environment. Yet you’ve been working on it for years, right? What made you first start thinking green?

CG: I started writing Amphibian during the winter of 2006 when our consulting practice focused on overcoming the psychological barriers to environmental problem-solving in the areas of resource management. We originally called ourselves ‘Mess Management Inc.’ – which, not surprisingly, led to people calling us for sewer clean-ups. After a year or so we realized that the more powerful parties had very little interest in tackling environmental disputes in a collaborative way, so we changed our name to Cogent Consortium Inc. and moved into workplace psychology. The whole immersion in environmental issues during that period, though, really sparked my interest in the area.

CH: Phin loves lists. Are you a list-maker too?

CG: No – just grocery lists. I can appreciate the need to make lists, though, and have close family members and friends who do. It gives people a feeling of control. Take, for instance, Melanie Watt’s wonderful Scaredy Squirrel who makes lists of things he will do if he happens to be attacked by a shark, killer bees or a green martian. The lists make him feel a bit safer. The other thing lists are good for is reframing a not-so-pleasant-experience into something nonthreatening, and even funny. My younger son is a master at this. This past winter, for instance, the boys’ father took them ‘winter camping’ and it turned into a bit of a nightmare that culminated in their father rolling down a hill into a bog and breaking three ribs. When my son got home, he made a list of what he learned from the experience:

1. The great outdoors isn’t so great.
2. No many how many layers you wear, you’re still going to be cold.
3. Never eat more than two hot dogs.
4. I’m glad I live in a house.
5. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker or sick.
6. I hate winter camping.

CH: A real-life psychologist would probably say that Phin is suffering from eco-anxiety. Can you tell us what that is?

CG: Eco-anxiety is a newly coined term used by some psychologists such as Dr. Sarah Edwards (http://eco-anx-iety.blogspot.com) who has written extensively in the area and devised therapies for its treatment, called eco-therapy. It’s not a term that appears in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM, the guide mental health practitioners use to diagnose psychological disorders), yet a growing number of psychologists and counselors across the world are increasingly seeing clients who are paralyzed by fear of what is happening to our natural world. In fact, a 2006 Decima Poll revealed that 91% of Canadians are concerned about climate change. Every day we are bombarded with information about climate change, animal extinctions, pollutants, and it can all seem very threatening and hopeless.

CH: Is it a real disorder?

CG: It’s not classified as a disorder like, for instance, the five types of anxiety disorders that do appear in the DSM. Anxiety disorders are defined as suffering from vague feelings of anxiety or irrational fears out of proportion to any objective danger. However, anxiety about resource depletion, environmental degradation and climate change is neither vague nor irrational. As Dr. Edwards puts it, if a major tornado is heading toward us, we wouldn’t say those who are worried are suffering from ‘tornado-anxiety’ – nor prescribe relaxation exercises as an appropriate response.

CH: Do you agree with how Phin’s mom handles his anxiety?

CG: I think Liza does what most mothers do when they think their children are acting like crazy people: they try to reason with them. Problem is, Phin’s worry isn’t of something imaginary – like a monster under the bed. There’s no bottle of ‘monster spray’ to allay his fears, and there’s nothing Liza can tell him that will magically negate all that information with which he’s already very familiar. That she argues with him and against his hoard of cold, hard ‘facts’ at all only serves to detract from her credibility and trustworthiness – and paradoxically makes him feel less safe. But how could a mother know that? When she reaches her personal limit, she seeks out the help of an expert, like many of us do.This is an adaptive way of coping in ordinary circumstances. Problem is, Phin’s anxiety can’t be treated in an ordinary way.

CH: How did you acquire such an astonishing encyclopedic knowledge of animal facts?

CG: When my younger son was between the ages of five and eight, he found a lot of fiction kind of creepy (I tried once to read Roald Dahl’s The Twits to him and he was totally freaked out by how mean they were to each other. ‘Didn’t they ever hear of a divorce?’ he asked), so he tended to gravitate to the decidedly less disturbing (!) realm of real life. Animal encyclopedias were his favourite and that’s where I got a good start on accumulating Phin’s information. It’s also how I’ve cultured my bassoon-like reading voice, ‘The three-toed sloths are the only members of the Bradypus genus and the Bradypodidae family.’

CH: Phin’s mother is often caught off-guard by Phin’s knowledge and he sometimes argues her into a corner. As readers, we can really feel her frustration. You have kids – does that ever happen to you?

CG: My kids are very logical creatures and they have encyclopedic minds, so yes, all the time. One of the most memorable instances was when one of my sons was three and asked me if the bear was related to the dog or to the cat. I told him bears were related to bears. He was adamant he’d seen a program that classified the bear as a relative of either dogs or cats. In all my wisdom, I wouldn’t budge from my position and he wouldn’t budge from his and we locked horns all afternoon. At one point he yelled, ‘Didn’t your mother teach you everything? What’s going to happen to me?’ Eventually we wore each other out and the topic was dropped until one day about six months later when we were watching a nature show about bears. Guess what? Apparently from an evolutionary standpoint, they’re considered closely related to dogs! He turned to me and said, ‘See? You have to remember that.’

CH: Do you think, as Phin does, that every little bit helps? Many of us feel so overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem that it’s difficult to know where to start – what do you think we should do?

CG: I absolutely think that every bit helps. It’s illogical and entirely unhelpful to think that just because we can’t do everything, we shouldn’t bother doing anything at all. I love philosopher and animal activist Tom Regan’s analogy of being stuck in a spider web. He says that none of us can live in a way that has zero impact on animals and the environment. Even if you’re vegan and wear rubber shoes, you’re still going to be stuck in that web. You can only escape it by dying. So the goal, he says, is to get as far away from the centre of the web as you can. The thing is, when you look back and see how far you’ve moved – even if it’s only a little - you’re motivated to move ever further.