Arthur L. Caplan: People think of you as someone who writes about ethics: ethics of weapons, ethics of national security. What made you decide to take on your dad in book form?

Jonathan D. Moreno: Part of it was the fortieth year since he disappeared. He was eighty-four years old when he died. I was seven when he was seventy. The second reason is that it was an opportunity to write a biography about someone I didn’t know because his most vigorous years happened before I came along. But at the same time, I did know him for twenty-two years. So I had a funny advantage in that respect in writing about him. Also, it struck me that this was a guy who did so much that shaped our time. And in seeing the surprising connections in his ideas from improvisational theatre, to psychotherapy, to social networking, to social media, you view all of those parts of our culture in a different way. Continue reading…

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Q: I think we all sense that there is an invisible world around us, but through Sophie’s eyes and the magic of fiction, you allow readers to “see” it. Why is this “seeing” so important?

A: The problems facing humanity’s relationship with nature can seem impossible: the bees we rely on for pollination are dying; the fish we eat are dwindling; pandemics are on the rise; so are the oceans; and species are going extinct en masse. In this time, we need to see through new eyes. We need “consilience”—E.O. Wilson’s term for the unity of knowledge: art, science, and the humanities working together, toward a more harmonious culture. Maybe, too, we need to think a bit crazy, follow Folly. In the words of Sophie, the narrator of Invisible Beasts, “we need to see the beasts that we don’t see.” Continue reading…

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Q: Throughout his travels in Israel, the secular narrator of Monastery is challenged about his commitment to his Jewish heritage by a number of characters, including the casually devout Tamara, his ultra-orthodox brother-in-law-to-be, and a nationalistic cab driver. Why are their questions such a struggle for him?

A: I think only a Jew questions his sense of Jewishness. A Catholic doesn’t question why he’s a Catholic. A Muslim doesn’t question why he’s a Muslim. They either are or aren’t. But us Jews, inherently, neurotically, question our identity as Jews, we struggle to figure out what it means to be a Jew. I don’t know why exactly. As if, to exist, we need a struggle, any struggle, even one that is imaginary. It’s like the waiter in a deli who goes up to a table of old Jewish men finishing their meal, and asks, “Is anything alright?” Continue reading…

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Q: How did you come to write about the human foot?

A: I had just published the 5^th edition of Nutrition for Dummies and was looking about for my next project. I started the search for a subject (a moment all writers anticipate with both pleasure and dread) and my first thought was to explore the cleft lip/palate, but that lacked reach beyond the medical. My second idea was rubella, but there is already an excellent book on that. And then I thought about the foot—inelegant, overlooked, underreported and completely indispensable  (it turns out) to our climb out of the caves into modern civilization. While it is common to credit our progress to the evolution of our increasingly more complex brain, in fact, we stood straight before we began to think straight, and our two feet have influenced our language, our politics, our religion, our legislation and, of course, our medicine.

Who could resist such a mix? Continue reading…

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Q: Set in Belfast, Ghost Moth alternates between the 1940s and the period leading up to what came to be known in Northern Ireland as “The Troubles,” the late 1960s. What interested you in these time periods?

A: Belfast in the late 1940s was a very different city to the one in which I grew up. I remember hearing stories about that time from my father. Although still recovering as a city in the aftermath of the Second World War, Saturday nights would see the city bustling with crowds, with people queueing for cinema tickets and dancehalls, lively couples in busy cafés, and families happy to stroll the streets and window-shop late into the evening. As a teenager growing up in Belfast in the ’70s this seemed to me a strange and exotic thing, that a city could be vibrant, exciting, and safe.

This contrast in how I experienced  growing up in Belfast with the idea that a very different city could and had existed was important to me. As a writer I wanted to explore that difference. I knew I couldn’t ignore the fact that by the end of the summer of 1969, Northern Ireland was on the brink of a civil war—no writer writing about that time can—but I also wanted the narrative to remain insular, to be able to focus on the protected world of the child, the family, the home. I believed that even in the face of such impending political turmoil, smaller stories still had their place. That was a difficult tenet to hold on to. But I held onto it, and still do. Continue reading…

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Q: The narrator of The Polish Boxer shares your name and the entire novel has been described as semi-autobiographical. What does fiction allow that a memoir would not?

A: To me, all literature is fiction disguised as memoir. Or perhaps memoir disguised as fiction. In other words, in my own work, I don’t see the difference between these two genres. I start writing from within, from myself, from my own experiences, but somewhere before the words hit the page they get shellacked with a coat of fiction. I can’t describe this process. And I don’t pretend to understand it. There’s something magical, and surreal, and intimate, and absolutely ludicrous about writing fiction. Continue reading…

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Q: What is the significance of the title, Inukshuk?

A: For the longest time the book had another title, which I never liked: Ice Masters. That title always made me picture a figure-skating tournament or exposition, but I couldn’t think of anything else to call the book, so I seemed stuck with it. Then, as often happens in the final stages of drafting and revising a thing, I was struck by something out of the blue and just kind of knew, like the proverbial light bulb coming on—there’s my title.  Continue reading…

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