Claire Cameron

My guest on this episode is Claire Cameron. Claire is the kind of person who has led canoe trips in Algonquin Park and worked as an instructor for Outward Bound. She has taught mountaineering, climbing, and whitewater rafting in Oregon and beyond. But also the kind of person whose writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the Guardian, Lenny Letter, and Salon. Claire is the author of three novels, the most recent of which is The Last Neanderthal, which was published in 2017 by Doubleday Canada, and went on to be published in a dozen other countries. It was a bestseller in Canada, and was a finalist for the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

The Los Angeles Review of Books said about The Last Neanderthal that "Cameron pulls out all the literary stops in giving Neanderthals as much free rein, agency and authenticity as possible. . . . This could easily be the best book that shakes up the classic Neanderthal tropes in science fiction and fantasy."

Claire and I talk about how she does her best writing when is able to write from inside out, rather than the outside in, how being diagnosed with a form of skin cancer after the publication of The Last Neanderthal changed not only what she wrote about next but how she engages with the outside world, and about how the idea of taking a dump in the woods is kind of central to the way her imagination works.

 

Claire Cameron: claire-cameron.com

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact