Getting 2 Know Gordon Sombrowski

What’s the most memorable book you’ve read lately?

Gordon Sombrowski: The most memorable and intimidating book I’ve read in the past year (re-read for the first time in about twenty years) was A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell. This masterwork in twelve volumes takes the reader into the lives of a cast of characters in Britain who are chronicled through narrator Nick Jenkins, a writer. What he recounts allows the reader to see inside almost a century of British life. The characterisations are rich, the story powerful and the analysis of British life extremely observant and accurate. The writing is often humorous, though the modern reader might find the prose more elaborate than we are accustomed to. But it is such a pleasure to read such eloquently written work. Someone else who has captured me with his writing in the last year is Alain de Botton, if you haven’t read him yet, find his work, it is a must read.

What are books for and why does what you do matter?

Gordon Sombrowski: The other day I heard a distinguished writer say that she despaired her writing was not changing the world, and in particular the behaviour of her one time hometown and place of birth Calgary. If only she looked and saw how writing has changed Calgary, changed Alberta. Because of writers Albertans have become more concerned about the future of the planet and their impact on it. Writers daily express the difficult conundrum that we love nature and at the same time are doing so much damage to nature by our collective consumption of it. This is one of the greatest challenges that we all face, how to live and earn a living without destroying ourselves and the world we live in.

Books do change the world, sometimes more slowly than the writer might like, and often it is the cumulative effect of many years of writing by many writers that makes the difference. One currently hears an American Presidential candidate make the ludicrous statement – America needs leaders not readers. How asinine. More than ever we need readers and writers. The world’s greatest leaders were all readers, and those leaders were influenced for good or bad by what they read.

It was not accidental that the Nazi’s burned books. They knew the power a writer had.  Anthony Powell entitled one of the volumes of his monumental work, A Dance to the Music of Time, “Books do Furnish A Room”. He was making a tongue in cheek statement about making a living as a writer but I would argue he might also be interpreted as meaning books determine our world and its future.

This is why I am so concerned that children should not only learn to read but should read fiction. There is research that indicates that people who do not read fiction are less empathetic than those who do. This is no surprise to me, we cannot in our short life spans, unless we read fiction, get to know enough people and their circumstances in order to get a good understanding of humanity in all its complexity and diversity. In the course of reading books we encounter hundreds of characters created by a multitude of authors and they all give us insight about our world in a way that other media cannot.

Read an INTERVIEW with Gordon Sombrowski.

Read more about Gordon Sombrowski’s collection of short stories What Echo Heard

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