I’d like to welcome Mark Morton to the blog for #WriterWednesday!

A few of your favorite things: I love amber: the warmth of its translucent color, the way it forms over eons from tree resin, the bits of leaves and even tiny insects that it often contains. When my wife and I got married, I gave her a piece of amber I found as a child on the grain farm where I grew up; I had a jeweler drill a hole into it and made it into a necklace for her. If I could only take one thing from our house, that would be it!

Things you need to throw out: Nothing! Our house is full of “artifacts”: little wooden boxes, curious stones we’ve found, vintage items like a rotary phone, a sewing machine from 1910 that belonged to my grandmother, antique coins, pocket watches, carvings—all of them embody a memory, and I couldn’t let any of them go. (However, we do, I guess, have a lot of half-chewed dog toys I could cull!)

Things you need for your writing sessions: A bit of ambient hubbub—I can’t write if it’s too quiet. Our dog Myah curled up behind my head on the top of my armchair. A glass of my home-made ginger beer.

Things that hamper your writing: Fatigue from lack of sleep; interruptions; worrying about existential threats like climate change, the possibility of new pandemics, the escalation and continuance of wars and conflicts.

Things you love about writing: I love how characters organically “emerge” as I’m writing—it’s as if they reveal themselves to me in a way I could never have intentionally imagined, like pulling treasure up from the bottom of a deep lake.

Things you hate about writing: I can’t think of a single thing—I enjoy all aspects of the writing process—even realizing that I need to rewrite a section of a manuscript is something I appreciate. Writing is a privilege that most people in the world don’t have—so who am I to complain about any part of it!

Hardest thing about being a writer: Finding time is of course always a challenge, as I so far have not been able to persuade an 18th-century patron to pay my bills. Also, as I grow older, my memory is not what it used to be: holding many plot elements in my head at the same time has become more challenging.

Easiest thing about being a writer: Thanks to tools like ChatGPT, finding peculiar facts and needed answers to obscure questions has become much easier! But at the same time, I have a genuine fear of where AI will take us as a species (see existential threats, above!).

Things you never want to run out of: Wonder; love; dogs.

Things you wish you’d never bought: A pound of steamed mussels still in their shells—one of them must have been off… it didn’t end well!

Favorite music or song: So many songs by Alison Goldfrapp (e.g., Black Cherry), John Prine (e.g., Angel from Montgomery), and The Tragically Hip (e.g. Ahead by a Century). That latter group is perhaps Canada’s “national rock band.”

Music that drives you crazy: Avant garde jazz—I just can’t enjoy anything that goes beep bop squawk.

Something you’re really good at: Mental compartmentalization.

Something you’re really bad at: Recognizing faces (I have prosopagnosia: face blindness—it’s harmless except that it often results in embarrassing mix ups and also makes it harder to follow movies).

Something you wish you could do: Forget certain memories—and not necessarily bad ones. Sometimes a good memory can remain so vivid that it becomes hard to assimilate into the past.

Something you wish you’d never learned to do: Troubleshoot other people’s computers.

Something you like to do: Watch educational YouTube series: Smarter Every Day, Vsauce, Veritasium, Philosophy Tube, ContraPoints, Up and Atom. Also, short films on YouTube channels such as Dust and Omeleto.

Something you wish you’d never done: Eaten an entire large cinnamon bun while completing these questions.

Favorite place you’ve been: Manitoulin Island—the largest freshwater island in the world. My wife’s mom has a cabin there. No electricity, no plumbing, but it has a river right behind it with salmon in it and the shore of Lake Huron is just a four-minute walk away. A remote and magical place.

Places you never want to go to again: Houston, Texas (see steamed mussels, above!).

Favorite books: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel; Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist; The Road and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy; the complete set of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Books you wouldn’t buy: Cooking with Spam. The Collected Blondie and Dagwood. Intelligent Design for Dummies. Curious George and the Electric Fence. Bigger and Better Boners (not what one might think!).

Best thing you’ve ever done: Adopting our four kids.

Biggest mistake: Not taking my mom up on her offer to pay for music lessons when I was ten. (Wait, did I get the answers to these two questions mixed up?)

About Mark:

Mark Morton, author of The Headmasters and Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (nominated for a Julia Child Award), is also the author of three other nonfiction titles, The End: Closing Words for a Millennium (winner of the Alexander Isbister Award for nonfiction); The Lover’s Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex (republished in the UK as Dirty Words), and Cooking with Shakespeare. He’s also written more than 50 columns for Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (University of California Press) and has written and broadcast more than a hundred columns about language and culture for Canada’s national radio, CBC Radio One. Mark has a PhD in sixteenth-century literature from the University of Toronto and has taught at several universities in France and Canada.