books

Interview with Author Simon Rose

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My guest today is Calgary author Simon Rose, who has published eighteen novels for children and young adults, eight guides for writers, more than a hundred nonfiction books, and numerous articles on a wide range of topics.

Nina: Your most recently published books were those in The Stone of the Seer series. Remind us again of what it’s all about.

Simon: The Stone of the Seer is young adult historical fantasy series, featuring The Stone of the Seer, Royal Blood, and Revenge of the Witchfinder. The exciting story is mostly set in the mid-seventeenth century during the English Civil War. In The Stone of the Seer, Lady Elizabeth Usborne, Kate, and Tom encounter a magical stone, mysterious parchments and manuscripts, and an incredible time viewing device. In Royal Blood, Lady Elizabeth, Kate, and Tom are in London, witnessing the political turmoil at the time of the Civil War, including the king’s trial and execution. Revenge of the Witchfinder takes place in multiple time periods. The story features weird dreams, disturbing visions, parallel lives, and a bewildering identity crisis, as the lead characters discover to their horror that not even the passage of centuries can prevent a bloodthirsty witchfinder from the 1640s from seeking his deadly revenge.

Nina: Do you have any current projects?

Simon: Right now, I’m working on another historical fantasy novel series, this time set in the early years of World War II, that I’m hoping to publish next year. I’ve recently finished another story that takes place in the later stages of World War II and am putting the finishing touches to that one as well, potentially for publication the following year. Yet another series is currently in development in the same paranormal genre as my previously published Flashback series, which can learn more about on my website.

I’ve also been working on the script for a film project and continue to work on the adaptations of my Shadowzone series into screenplays for movies and TV shows. You can learn more about my work writing screenplays for clients and creating adaptations of my own work here on my website. 

Anyone interested in keeping up to date with the projects that I’m working on is always welcome to subscribe to my monthly newsletter, which you can do on my website.

Nina: You certainly seem to be very busy. You also do other work related to writing and publishing, right?

Simon: Yes, I offer coaching, editing, consulting, and mentoring services for writers of novels, short stories, fiction, nonfiction, biographies, and in many other genres, plus work with writers of scripts and screenplays.

I’m also a writing instructor and mentor at the University of Calgary and have some courses coming up in the fall, including Writing for Children and Youth. My own online courses, including Writing Historical Fiction and Writing for Children and Young Adults, are also always available.

I’ve just wrapped up work on a study guide for a fellow author’s historical fiction novel, set in World War I and World War II. You can learn more about my various coaching, editing, and consulting services, for all age groups and genres, on my website, as well as my services for business writing projects. 

Nina: So where can people buy your books?

Simon: People can buy The Stone of the Seer, Royal Blood, and Revenge of the Witchfinder, as well as all my other books, at Amazon and all the other usual places online, which you can link to on my website at www.simon-rose.com I’ll also be making some personal appearances at local events in the fall, where people can buy autographed copies of all the books in the series, as well as all my other novels.

Nina: Thanks Simon, for being my guest here today.

Simon: My pleasure, Nina.

You can learn more about Simon and his work on his website at www.simon-rose.com where you can also link to him on social media and at other locations online.

“Water Is…” now selling at Banyen Books, Vancouver

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Banyen Books & Sound on corner of Dunbar and W 4th Avenue, Vancouver (photo by Nina Munteanu)

One of my favourite bookstores in Vancouver is Banyen Books & Sound  on the southwest corner of W 4th Avenue and Dunbar. So, whenever I go back to my home town to visit family and friends, I stop there to linger amid the shelves of wonder and erudite adventure. Then I usually cross Dunbar to Aphrodite’s Organic Pie Shop for a delicious fresh pie—usually peach, if it is available. So good! Two things I love: books and pie!

Aphrodite’s Organic Pies, next door to Banyen’s, Vancouver (photos by Nina Munteanu)
Pacific Spirit Regional Park, Vancouver, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)

During my recent visit this year to Vancouver, my friends and I had a fulfilling walk one morning through the big tree forest of Pacific Spirit Park near UBC. Margaret suggested we go to Aphrodite’s Organic Café for lunch, located across 4th Avenue from Banyen Books (the sister restaurant to the pie shop). After a delicious lunch, we wandered into Banyen, like desert nomads looking for water, and lost ourselves in a treasure of books, magazines, crystals, cards, singing bowls and other spiritual/healing items. Like a braided river, we dispersed according to our wayward interests.

Water Is… at Banyen Books, Vancouver (photos by Nina Munteanu)

Then friend Anne soon found me and pulled my sleeve. “Your book is here!” She led me to where my book Water Is… stood, face out, on the top shelf marked ‘Water: Life Force & Resource.’ In truth, I already knew through Pixl Press that the book was selling there. But here it was, showcased so nicely! It sat rather stately amid Emoto’s Secret Life of Water and Ryrie’s Healing Energies of Water.

Banyen customers find Water Is… and find a chair to take a look

One of the perks of Banyen Books are the comfortable seats for easy browsing. When I teasingly asked one of the clerks if they noticed people lingering for the day, they said, “yeah! They might leave for lunch then come back for the afternoon!” I can see why; Banyen is an entire world to discover. It is called Canada’s most comprehensive Body-Mind-Spirit bookstore, “offering a broad spectrum of resources from humanity’s spiritual, healing, and earth wisdom traditions…Our service is to offer life-giving nourishment for the body (resilient, vital), the mind (trained, open), and the soul (resonant, connected, in-formed). Think of us as your open source bookstore for the ‘University of Life’.”

“Banyen is an oasis, a crossroads, a meeting place…for East and West, the ‘old ways’ and current discoveries and syntheses.”

This is how Banyen describes its birth in 1970:

“The Golden Lotus Restaurant and Natural Food Store on Fourth Avenue at Bayswater was a hothouse for spiritual seekers, new vegetarians and spaced-out hippies grounding through good work. Banyen was born in a tiny book corner of the Golden Lotus. That lovely place was a connection to India, meditation and spiritual growth from 1967 to 1970. As its sun set, what was to become the Naam restaurant, Lifestream, Woodlands, Nature’s Path, and Banyen Books arose.”

Along with Water Is… Banyen is also selling my latest eco-fiction novel A Diary in the Age of Water.

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.

When Water Speaks: quotes from A Diary in the Age of Water

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“The truth isn’t about telling; no one just tells you the truth. It needs to be coaxed, even tricked, out. The truth is carefully hoarded—like water—and only flows among privileged acolytes who have proven themselves.”

Lynna Dresden

“Those of us who are captivated by fear, who despair in a dead zone—we need to consider new ways to tell familiar stories, to envision different endings. A book like this can change the way that you see the world at this moment, can allow formulae to take root in fiction and grow into a different kind of solution.”

Marcie McCauley, THE tEmz REVIEW
Jackson Creek in early fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

When Water Speaks: quotes from A Diary in the Age of Water

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“There simply aren’t enough Canadians to protect our wilderness; but if there were enough of us, there’d be no wilderness left to protect.”

Lynna Dresden

“Strangely compelling.”

BURIED IN PRINT

“A Diary in the Age of Water, is simply and beautifully told, profoundly true; a novel that invites us to embrace the wisdom of ages. The story stirs its readers, teaches them about the importance of water, and leaves an imprint on the canvas of the literary and scientific world.”

LUCIA MONICA GOREA, author of Journey Through My Soul
Boys explore the shore of the Otonabee River, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

When Water Speaks: quotes from A Diary in the Age of Water

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“Nothing in nature stays the same. Or if it does, it’s because change has brought it back to what it once was.”

Lynna Dresden

“Munteanu excels at extrapolating today’s science into a stark vision of what we face in the next decades. Environmentalists, science fact enthusiasts, and science fiction fans will be shaken by this cautionary tale of climate change. Great for fans of James Lawrence Powell’s The 2084 Report, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.”

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thompson Creek, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

When Water Speaks: quotes from A Diary in the Age of Water

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“We hold ourselves apart from our profligate nature. But we aren’t unique. We are more part of Nature than we admit. Using the thread of epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer, Nature stitches in us a moving tapestry of terrible irony. The irony lies in our conviction that we were made in the inimitable divine image of God. That we are special. Water flows endlessly through us, whether we are devout Catholics or empty vessels with no purpose. Water makes no distinction. It flows through us even after we bury ourselves.”

Lynna Dresden

A Diary in the Age of Water is “Unsettling and yet deliciously readable … Brilliant.”

THE PRAIRIE BOOK REVIEW
Swamp forest by country road, Kawarthas, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

Climate Change: How the Moving Treeline Affects Humanity and the Planet

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Poplar trees in fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

 

I just finished reading Ben Rawlence’s 2022 book The Treeline. It is a book that made me think. It made me cry. It made me despair. It also gave me hope.  

Cattails line a snow-covered marsh with spruce and fir behind, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

I was gripped by this honest and unflinching exploration on the moving treeline with climate change and what it will mean for humanity. Beautifully written and rigorously reported, Rawlence invited me on a journey of all major treelines over the globe from Scotland, Norway and Russia, to Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Throughout his description of a warming world and a vanishing way of life, Rawlence meditates on the many repercussions on how humans live.

Pine-cedar forest in Ontario (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

He aptly describes the forests of the world as the ‘heartbeat of the planet,’ the cycles of breathing and the pulses of life from the spike of oxygen in the spring when trees put out their leaves to the peaks and troughs over day and night that regulate plant photosynthesis and respiration. The peaks and troughs are getting shallower, he writes. With more carbon dioxide in the air the trees work less; they inhale less and exhale less oxygen.

“The planet is a finely tuned system. A few degrees of change in its orbit can usher in an ice age; a few degrees of temperature change can transform the distribution of species, can melt glaciers and create oceans. In the future, when the ice is gone, there may be no such thing as a treeline at all. As the stable currents of air and water associated with the Gulf Stream, the polar front, polar vortex and Beaufort Gyre dissipate or fluctuate, the Arctic Ocean melts completely, and the Rossby waves in the upper atmosphere go haywire, the fine gradations of temperature, altitude and latitude first observed by Alexander von Humboldt will become decoupled and ecological transition zones scrambled. Instead of a majestic sweeping zone of forest around the planet, we might find discontinuous pockets of trees in odd places, refugees from soil and temperatures long gone, and crocodiles once again at the North Pole.”

Ben Rawlence, The Treeline
Snow-covered river shoreline with mixed forest, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

Rawlence brings this all into perspective to our present situation and the role science has played in our hubristic illusion of control:

“An unfortunate side effect of science is the illusion of human mastery: the idea that if we know what is happening then we can control. The irony is that we might have been able to. The tragedy is that it is too late. The chain reaction is under way. The curve only gets steeper from here…five metres of sea level rise is locked in; it’s just a question of how fast the ice melts. Once again, the models seem to underestimate the speed…”

Ben Rawlence, The Treeline
Willow by a river at first snow, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

What is most unfortunate for us, for humanity, is that we have known all this for some time. But we’ve done little. “Industrialist capitalism and its export colonialism” with its exploitive gaze that drives our needs and wants and actions has chosen to ignore the signs. That exploitive gaze ignored that we are not only embedded in but dependent upon the natural world and all the forests to live and flourish.

Tamarack and birch trees in the fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

What Rawlence does acknowledge is a way out of our self-created doom and accompanying solastalgia:

“Our present emergency is forcing us to remember what, until recently, we have always known: that there is a web of communication, meaning and significance beyond us, a world of life forms constantly chattering, shouting and flirting and hunting each other, indifferent to human affairs. And there is solace in such a vision. The way out of the depression and grief and guilt of the carbon cul-de-sac we have driven down is to contemplate the world without us. To know the earth, that life, will continue its evolutionary journey in all its mystery and wonder. To widen our idea of time, and of ourselves. If we see ourselves as part of a larger whole, then it is the complete picture that is beautiful, worthy of meaning and respect, worth perhaps dying for, safe in the knowledge that life is not the opposite of death but a circle, as the forest teaches us, a continuum.”

Ben Rawlence, The Treeline
Poplar trees line a road in the Ontario country (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

The planet will be alright. Species will go and others will come. Earth has experienced five extinction events (we are currently experiencing the sixth extinction event now) and after each, life flourished again, albeit different life.

Is there still hope for humanity? Perhaps—if we set our hubris aside and embrace humility and kindness. And, if in that humility, we can adapt our way through the succession we’ve triggered. There might be hope for us still…

Rawlence devotes his epilogue called “Thinking Like a Forest” to the wisdom of the indigenous people who have for millennia co-existed sustainably with the natural ecosystems of the Earth. “The Koyukon, the Sámi, the Nganasan, the Anishinaabe are just a few of the countless indigenous peoples whose world view attests to our foundational reliance on the forest.”

Time to learn from them.

Trees at sunset in winter, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.