Embracing Uncertainty
The Body, Brain, and Books: Eleven Questions with writer Mike Sowden
Welcome to another edition of The Body, Brain, & Books. If you enjoy reading these quick, insightful interviews brimming with wisdom and hope, please subscribe to Beyond!
What are you reading now?
27 different books! I mean that - I just counted. I’m a chronic book-starter and it’s been outstripping my ability to finish books for far too long. A reckoning is due. But two more specific answers: Being Human, by Lewis Dartnell, which is a fascinating look at how human biology has shaped world history, written by someone who trained as an astrobiologist (the study of what life in the rest of the universe might look like) - and it reads as an attempt to look at us humans from the outside, to see what drives our behaviour. I’m loving it. And secondly: Peaches for Monsieur le Curé, which is Joanne Harris’s sequel to her magical realism bestseller Chocolat. She writes so beautifully and always gives her characters so much life, including the villains, it’s a rare gift. Reading one of her books is like a dream when you’ve fallen asleep by the window on a hot summer’s day, and this is no different.
What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?
I fell under the spell of science fiction very early on, and for a long while I loved the so-called Golden Age stuff: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and so on. But then I started reading Ursula Le Guin, and began to see the flaws in those male voices: the utter lack of realistically-portrayed women, the severely rationalist plots and so on. So many of the books I most loved back then are ones I see differently now - not as “bad” (I still love them) but as deeply flawed. Ursula Le Guin felt the same way about her 1968 novel A Wizard Of Earthsea - she wanted to drag fantasy out of its lone-male-hero obsession, and during an interview much later she regretted not doing a better job. But it’s still the book I most loved reading multiple times as a teenager. Utterly spellbound. As for hiding books from my folks? Not a bit of it - my parents encouraged my increasingly wide reading and were bookworms themselves, and their bookshelves helped me discover genres I knew nothing about.
What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time?
A Wizard Of Earthsea, as I mentioned (and I’m finally reading the final few books in that series, which Le Guin released many decades later). That book helped me get my head straight about many things, because it’s a cautionary tale about power, a metaphor for the kind that tech billionaires and politicians have. There’s a scene where an elderly mage is teaching his young disciple the ways of magic, and it starts raining. The youngster knows they could just move the cloud away with magic, and he gets angry at being drenched - what’s the point of power if you don’t use it? But the older mage explains that it would unbalance the weather and create unforeseen suffering elsewhere, so a known, manageable self-discomfort was a better and more compassionate trade-off. That was a wider lesson in empathy and social responsibility, but it also helped me a lot when I realised I wanted to be a writer but had no idea how (this was pre-internet, when everything changed for me). It said, “This is just rain. It’ll pass, and Future You will thank you for hanging in here.” And I do!
What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?
I’m a Yorkshireman, and we’re big on flat caps. Hilarious things, in a way, like balancing a cloth pancake on your head, but also oddly grounding and stylish in a vintage sort of way. I’m overdue getting a replacement for the one I lost a few years ago. When I do, it’ll be like a homecoming.
What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?
It wasn’t really that recent, but - the book marketer Tim Grahl confessed in an interview that he used to work for free, in a very specific and clever way. Obviously any creative profession requires you to get paid, but helping people is an incredibly good way to open doors to commercial opportunities, and he knew it. So he just targeted specific high-profile authors and gave them some tailored, actionable marketing advice for free. Some ignored him, but a few didn’t - and one was Daniel Pink, who went on to employ him to launch what turned out to be a New York Times bestseller. So that advice is: give away some of your best advice entirely for free, no strings attached, to someone who might need it. Just go help, properly, so you can be a good person AND roll the dice on attracting new work. For me, that’s been a huge part of learning what works in online business.
Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?
When I lived in Costa Rica for a year (2017), there was a parrot in the tree of the house my partner and I lived at the back of. The parrot and that house belong to her grandmother, and the parrot was called Lollie - and grew up learning snippets of classical music radio, including opera. Lollie took a liking to me, and would serenade me with soundbites of music - really, a language made of clips. She would more or less attack everyone else (she was incredibly stubborn and uncooperative), but she let me stroke her. Just the weirdest thing, and rather lovely.
What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?
My writing career. In 2018, after a lot of family-related stress and severe burnout, I thought I was utterly done (as I explained to Valorie Clark here). All my words were flat and lifeless. It took a year of doing nothing but reading, and starting my own Substack, for those words to come back - but now I think I sound more like myself than ever, and my newsletter is sustainable in a way I've never achieved with any of my writing work before.
Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?
Singing when the kettle’s boiling! I also play guitar and sing, and I’m planning to get back into that properly. But right now, I’m enjoying getting myself fit again after a bit of ill-health - I’m going to the gym right after I finish writing this, and I’m a lover of long-to-epic walks, which is a good passion to have in the corner of Scotland where I live. When I’m walking, my thoughts unclog and my ideas shrug off their restraints. Walks are where a lot of my newsletter starts getting written.
What are your hopes for yourself?
To keep doing what I’m doing right now for as long as I can - while adding a few things here and there, including becoming an author of fiction and non-fiction. And also: to actually meet as many of the people I call my online friends as I possibly can.
What’s a kindness that changed your life?
Everyone who ever believed in my potential as a writer and gave me a chance, including all my readers right now. But particularly my friend who worked at WordPress/Automattic who tipped me off about a role within the writing team there. I applied, I got in, I started a trial period, and it quickly became apparent I wasn’t up to the job, so they let me go (aka. fired me). It was the best lesson I’ve ever had in applied failure, it stopped my overinflated ego in its tracks, and it was the best reboot I could have hoped for. Amazingly, I’m still friends with that friend - and she’s still at WordPress!
What’s a guiding force in your life?
The unknown. It used to be a source of fear for me - but the more curious I got, the more I discovered new-to-me things that made me go “WOW!”. Over time, that taught me that uncertainty doesn’t have to just be about dread - it’s also where joyful possibility resides. It doesn’t mean that the awful things in this world magically become any less awful, but it does show you that hope isn’t a fool’s game - there’s so much to learn and to do that can change your outlook for the better, including in the sciences. I’m a believer in Rebecca Solnit’s version of hope, the messy, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-fixing-stuff kind, and that requires embracing uncertainty. The game’s afoot, and we’re writing the rules as we go, and there’s everything (and everyone) to play for.
We love Mike!!!
Mike is one of the greats in the Substack community — generous, encouraging, hard-working. Loved reading this.