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Plague Remedy Podcast
This is the podcast for writers and those who love them.
Each week on the Plague Remedy Podcast, we discuss the craft of writing and beyond to explore why we write through thoughtful, soulful conversations with writers, academics, and artists. This show is your weekly dose of inspiration, insight, and unexpected voices.
New episodes drop every Tuesday, with bonus episodes dropping on Thursdays
Plague Remedy Podcast
Where the Veil Is Thin: Malcolm Kempt, on his debut 'A Gift Before Dying'
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Where Malcolm Kempt?
Where can I find 'A Gift Before Dying'
Malcolm's Two Books & Two Others
- Cape Dorsett Inuit art
- Absinthe
I'm Steven Satco, and from Bonnet Scotland, it's the story podcast for readers and writers.
SPEAKER_03You have to be empathetic.
SPEAKER_04You have to understand human behavior. And I think if you have a villain who's just evil, and a hero who's just good, it doesn't make for a very interesting story. If you have a hero who's conflicted but wants to be good, and a villain who is evil but thinks he's doing good, it they become so much more interesting when they're complicated.
SPEAKER_01Hello, it's Stephen. I love books where one of the characters in the books is the setting. And Malcolm Kempt has written this thriller, A Gift Before Dying, where there is a setting that I know absolutely nothing about. It is in the Arctic, the Canadian Arctic. And he's written this atmospheric novel. It's a debut, it's a thriller. And he's a really interesting guy. He spent 17 years working as a criminal lawyer in the remote Arctic re region before leaving to write full-time. The pandemic played a part in his story, as it it did for a lot of people. He won the Percy James Award for Best Unpublished Novel in 2023. That novel had a different name, but it became his debut novel, which is a gift before dying. And talks about his experience of when he was in the Arctic. Talks about his experience as a debut author. And it's a really interesting conversation. Please, if you're enjoying these, we'd love to hear from you. But we would love to hear from you, and we'd especially love it if you would just click on some stars and subscribe or write a review. It really does help out when we feed the logarithm has mercy upon us. So please do all you can if you're enjoying this. If you want to leave us a tip, you can also buy us a coffee or a pint in the link in the description. And now here's Malcolm Kempt. Malcolm Kemp, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. The first question I have to ask you, because I read this about you from another interview, is you shook hands with Vladimir Putin, and there was a gun pointed at you as well.
SPEAKER_04How in the world did this come about? My wife and I decided to go to the Sochi Olympics, and we were living in a Caliet in Baffin Island at the time. So we flew across to Greenland to nuke and then made our way to Russia. And the first day we were there, we ended up in a bar with a group of people who we just met from different countries. And this was at the beginning of the Olympics. And there was a big kerfuffle at the door, and there was something was happening, and we didn't know what it was. But apparently the owner of the bar, the person running the bar, was from a country that had just won a big medal and apparently knew Putin. And so all these security people started filing into the bar. And we thought, oh, it's a Russian celebrity, not realizing that it would be Putin himself, who was wearing this full typical Russian, he's wearing a full track suit. At it was, I think it was bright red or bright white. I can't remember. Bright red. And so he comes strolling through. And we had just met this Australian guy, Sean, who was sitting at our table. And as he walks through the bar, Sean starts shouting, Oi, Vlad, I love your work. I love your work, which is my terrible Australian accent. And he turns and he comes to the table. And he saw we were wearing some Canada gear. And so he shook all our hands. And it was, we were just blown away. We didn't even know what to do. And I got to say Priyatna Paznakumica, which is the little Russian I knew at the time, which is nice to meet you. And he said in perfect English, it's nice to meet you. And he's so small, he's a very little man. And my my wife says, Nice snowsuit, because it was like this winter track suit. And that was the beginning of his whole paparazzi handshaking thing in Sochi. Because after that, he went to Canada House and he was he was taking pictures with everyone and shaking hands. But that was the first, that was the catalyst for that whole I don't know, PR campaign by him. But they told us that there were snipers at that time pointed at the outdoor patio where we were. So I was thinking, this is the only time I've ever had a gun pointed at me, and I'm shaking hands with a world leader. So it was totally surreal. And that was the day one of our trip. And which and it was one of the wildest trips I've ever been on. I got drunk with NHL players and met all kinds of celebrities, and because nobody really came to the Russian Olympics. A lot of people from North America didn't come. I think they were worried about the situation in Ukraine at the time, and there were terrorists, there were Chechen terrorists' activity, and but uh it was wonderful, it was a crazy experience, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Never been to Russia. I'm sure it's I'm sure it's an interesting experience.
SPEAKER_04Oh, yeah. I've since learned a lot of Russian in the everyone in the country, I will say, was wonderful people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I was gonna say you're the second Canadian we've had on.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01Which is good. And sorry about the tariffs. I didn't vote for him. Uh made that clear. But you're a debut author, and before we get into the book and maybe some background with the book, how did that happen? Because I think you took an interesting route with your writing.
SPEAKER_04I was a lawyer for 17 years. And during that time, and even before that time, I was always a creative. I was playing in in bands, I was making art, I was, I had applied and gotten into art school and didn't go. And through all that time, I was writing a lot, and I was also at every opportunity taking workshops. And I was lucky enough to take a lot of workshops with remotely, of course, because I was living in the Arctic, with a lot of really great authors, published authors, and I learned a lot. And and I published a few short stories, and then I started getting into editing. So I was I joined an online community called Lit Reactor, and I was I'd made a lot of good friends, and then I was doing ghostwriting and editing, and and then when the pandemic hit, I lost my job. The restrictions in Canada were very strict and they went on for a very long time. And so I was spending two weeks at a time in a hotel room locked down every time I would travel back and forth, and it was taking a terrible toll on my mental health. And so I decided to just stop practicing. And my wife said at that time, this is your chance to run with it, to write full time. And I did, and I won a literary award for the manuscript that I wrote for best unpublished novel, and a short story that I co-wrote with an author from Chicago, Richard Thomas, ended up in an anthology with Stephen King. So I thought, okay, I can maybe I can do this. And then yeah, and so I started looking for an agent, and I had some agents who were interested. And I met Gideon Pine, who worked at Inkwell Management in New York, and we really hit it off, and it all just snowballed from there, a two-book deal with Crown and imprinted Penguin Random House. And yeah, it's been wonderful.
SPEAKER_01That's great. That's that. When you were telling this story, I think in one of your interviews, though, you said after you won the award, because I think this is a typical experience of a lot of people, including myself. You win this award, and you think, now everybody's gonna talk to me and everything. Yeah, but you still can't get people on the phone. So you really still have to be persistent.
SPEAKER_04Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and really it's funny. Being an people say, What's it like being a published author? And I say, it's a roller coaster of elation and demoralization, where you're just like, Oh, these people love the book. I'm interested. There's a signing, oh, there's no one here. Oh, then this happens. There's a signing with a lot of people, and so you know, up and down and up and down. But that was the first down. Yeah, I thought I won this award, I got into this anthology. Now things are really gonna start rolling. But it took a while and it took some work. And uh, but once I I signed with Inkwell with Gideon, everything went uphill or downhill from there. Nowhill, uphill. I shouldn't say it went, it got better.
SPEAKER_01Let's put it that way. Downhill, and then there was an e there was more of an ease, yeah. An ease, but not negative, not like everything. They have a wonderful saying phrase in the UK, which uh amuses me when they say everything is called pear-shaped. Yeah, we say that. Pear-shaped. I never heard it before, so I don't know. Anyway, that's good. We should say the book is, I believe it was released 22nd of January. In the UK, yes, yeah. Yeah, in the UK, yeah. And it is called A Gift Before Dying. And can you uh let me say there? There's so much we could talk about this book. It is it comes out of your experience of being a lawyer in the Antarctic part of Canada for 17 years. So you're dealing with the Inuit and I don't know, you're dealing with a lot of issues in this book. Maybe if you just introduce it a little bit and then we can talk about some of the things that you write about. Sure.
SPEAKER_04The book is a story of a police officer who is failed in almost every aspect of his life. He's estranged from his daughter, he's divorced from his wife, his career has taken a turn for the worse because he's botched this murder investigation in another jurisdiction. And he's just haunted by all the failures and traumas of his life. And he ends up, I don't want to use the word exiled, but he ends up transferred to this remote town in the Arctic, which has the highest crime rate per capita, violent crime rate in North America. And it's just plagued by all these social problems. And a young woman who he really takes a liking to is found dead. And it seems to be a suicide, but he's convinced it's a murder, and he sees solving this crime and bringing justice for her will redeem him and redeem all these mistakes he's made. And his unlikely partner in doing that is a 10-year-old boy who is the brother of the woman who was murdered. And I used a lot of my experience in the almost two decades that I spent in the North to try and channel the place as best I could while at the same time trying to tell a Kraken good crime story.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. A good thriller story. Maybe because I don't think we have a lot of listeners in Canada, we have a lot in the United States and in the UK. Maybe explain a little bit about where this takes place. It's in in Cape Dorset, I guess it's called, but there's an Inuit name for it as well. King, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And just to because it is in the Arctic. I don't know if and the Inuit culture there. Can you maybe explain to people who might not be familiar with that? Sure.
SPEAKER_04When a lot of people think of the North American Arctic, they think of Alaska. And so they see this in films and television, and they have the preconceived notion of what it looks like. But the Eastern Arctic, which is the Canadian Arctic, and I always tell people it's west of Greenland, is completely barren. It's like a desert with snow. There is no vegetation, there's no trees, and when there is melting, there's no grass, there's no there's very little of any vegetation at all. And so it's a very bleak and barren landscape. But at the same time, it's gorgeous. It has incredible vistas, beautiful views, mountain ranges, glaciers, and incredible wildlife. And it's the population is predominantly Inuit, which is the they make up about 85% of the population there. And the language is inuktitut, which I had to learn a great deal of in order to work in the territory. And it's this it's incredibly unique culture. Things like kayaks come from the Inuit, the Anorak, the Parkas, and they're hunting sustenance culture. They're hunting polar bears, whales, narwhals. It's fascinating. And I tried to incorporate as much of that as I could into the novel.
SPEAKER_01And I think you do a really good job. It's we had David Hesky Wombly Wyden on, and he wrote a great thriller, but made even better by the his knowledge of Native American culture, and he it's set on a reservation. And I always like books like that where you learn about a place. You use a lot, I won't say it's a mystical book, but you do use a lot of the spirituality and the mysticism of native peoples in the book as well.
SPEAKER_04I grew up in a very mystical culture with a Celtic background. I was born in Cape Breton Island and then moved to Newfoundland. And I've traveled to Nazgaleins in Peru. I've been to Easter Island. I'm really attracted to places where the veil is thin, where there's an almost mystical connection in the place itself. And I've said this quite a few times recently. You're skidooing in the dark across the frozen ocean with the northern lights surrounding you overhead. It's hard not to feel almost insignificant, but at the same time, you feel connected to everything as if there's something greater than ourselves. And I tried to incorporate a bit of the Celtic mythology and folklore that I knew as a child, as well as the Inuit folklore. And it's difficult to do as an outsider because I'm not Inuit, but I tried to show it from the perspective of an outsider.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Because I think you have to do that. Of course. I think you have to do that. What happened to the first novel that you were writing, by the way? Which one? The first thing that you won the award for was Oh, that's this manuscript. It is this manuscript.
SPEAKER_04Okay, you just had a different title, but it was the same manuscript. And when I brought it to my agent Gideon, he recommended a number of changes and said, let's figure out how we can make this novel even better. And so then I spent three months reworking it in order to incorporate those changes.
SPEAKER_01I'm glad that happened. This is often the case that the first novel never sees the light of day for some people. And they need to write another novel. That was their learning novel. So I'm it's brilliant that you were able to get it published. Going back to the story, and I think that's what makes it a little bit distinctive from just like your average thriller. There's an underpinning of kind of mysticism in being here in Scotland. We do see the northern, we do see the Aurora Borealis, but sometimes there's a lot of clouds in the sky, and we see just only parts of it. But it's pretty amazing. Oh, of course. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. And I like the way you said where the veil is thin. Yeah. Because this kind of the starkness of the of the landscape and that makes you feel like the veil is thin, that you're doing something on the edge. Now, the place you were working in, you said it it has the highest violence rate per capita in North America, which surprises me.
SPEAKER_04It surprises a lot of people because the Nunavut territory where I was working, it's about a fifth of the size of Europe with about 30,000 people. And all those people live in 26 isolated communities. You can only get in and out by air. So there's isolation, there's the desolation of the landscape, the darkness of the winter, you have drugs and alcohol in a culture that hasn't been used to being exposed to drugs and alcohol for centuries. And so it creates a ton of social problems. And there's not a lot of resources in these small towns to deal with things like addictions and mental illness and counseling for marriages. And so you s you end up seeing a ton of social problems like suicide and murder and violent crime.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's very surprising. There's also this undercurrent in your novel, I would say, of colonialism and the impact colonialism has had.
SPEAKER_04Any culture that they're going from bone tools, living in a very hostile environment in isolated groups, to within 150 years, you have anyway dentists and chartered accountants and the internet and this infrastructure. And to be pushed as a culture that far and that fast, it's very difficult, particularly when there's role reversals where you have the men who are the leaders in the village who are the hunters may suddenly be unemployed, and suddenly their wife is now working as a in an office position for the government. So a lot of the cultural norms are flipped upside down. And it's hard for any culture to go through that type of process, that colonialist process, without either being assimilated or suffering. It can be difficult to watch, particularly to go there now. And I was there for two decades, and the same and the problems didn't get any better in the time that I was there. If anything, I think they may have even gotten a bit worse. And why do you think that was? It's a it's a complicated situation. It's a I we could spend a whole podcast just sitting here talking about the difficulties of Nunavut. And I try to focus more, and I did this in a novel as well, in the by the end of the novel, is to focus on the hope. I the only reason why I stayed there for so long and didn't burn out, like many people burn out.
SPEAKER_01I would imagine, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Was that I focused on small victories. If you can see one child get ahead, one enemy person travels to university and then comes back as a lawyer, as a dentist, as a veterinarian, it's a victory. And you have to focus on those victories in order to get through it without burning out.
SPEAKER_01That's interesting, yeah. So and from journalism, I kind of experienced that sometimes you're just dealing. The first thing they do in journalism, usually, for guys, probably a little sexist, is you're on cops. And if you do well at cops, you go to the courts. But you're always dealing with these horrible stories day after day. And I know that took its toll on me, and it must have been the same way being a defense attorney in this area.
SPEAKER_04And one of the things I try to show was police officers are on the front line. As a journalist, you're reporting the stories. As a lawyer, you're hearing about what happened when violent incidents, and you're looking at the photographs, and you're talking to the victims, and you're talking to the people who perpetrated the crimes, and you're reliving it in court. But the police officers and the nurses and the paramedics, they're the frontline people. They're dealing with it as it happens. They're walking into the rooms where there's blood everywhere and the babies on the floor, and the or they're trying to assist someone who's just been assaulted or seen someone murdered. They take the worst of it. And we're also the hardest on the police officers and the paramedics and the nurses up front criticizing them about their jobs. But we have to keep in mind that their job is the most difficult.
SPEAKER_01I think so. I think emotionally difficult without sometimes without what a support system for that. But any first responder, any anybody who's a first responder, as you say, the medics, firemen, police, that's anybody who's responding first to an incident, it takes I think it does take a special toll on them. Because they're never sometimes they're never relaxed because they always knew they can get that call. They're a nice dinner with their friends, and they can get that call. And then they have to be a professional in these really harrowing situations.
SPEAKER_04And the police in the northern communities, as I state in the book, they're on call sometimes 247. And there is no place to go for dinner. They're not having friends. They're there as a solitary outsider. And they may have a partner, or if they're lucky, two or three partners. Now in Cape Dorset, I think they have six officers. They've got full cell service. So things are improving in certain ways. But the burnout rates are still high.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But you said in another interview, you still felt that most of the people you dealt with were not irredeemable, that had the and that's a really great thing to be able to be in those situations and come out still thinking that.
SPEAKER_04It's funny, as a people always ask me, how do you represent murderers and rapists and the home invaders and these terrible people? But when you're forced to sit down with them one-on-one and you go through their lives and understand why these why they've done these things. Crime doesn't happen in a vacuum. A lot of the people who commit these terrible crimes are victims of other terrible crimes. That's not always the case. But I've only met probably three people out of the thousand people or more that I've represented who were, I thought, irredeemable. And we're so used to seeing sociopaths and psychopaths and these terrible villains in television and in books. And it's just not the norm. We get we get so used to thinking that they're everywhere. But the reality is most people are just screwed up and they're traumatized in their own way, and then they re-traumatize other people. It's a cycle of violence. And you need that as a criminal lawyer over the years.
SPEAKER_01How do you think you brought that into your writing? When you're writing you're writing about a villain in this book here. So how do you think that impacted your writing when you sat down to write about it?
SPEAKER_03You have to be empathetic.
SPEAKER_04You have to understand human behavior. And I think if you have a villain who's just evil and a hero who's just good, it doesn't make for a very interesting story. If you have a hero who's conflicted but wants to be good, and a villain who is evil but thinks he's doing good, it they become so much more interesting when they're complicated. And I I work with aspiring authors and I tell them make your villain more sympathetic, make your hero less sympathetic, and you'll find that the story will be and become interesting.
SPEAKER_01That's a great advice. I'm just thinking, if we want to go a little bit highbrow here, I'm just thinking of Richard III. I mean, he's a wonderful character. He's a jerk, but he's a wonderful character, and you understand exactly why he's like he is. Well, Hannibal Lecter kills people and eats them.
SPEAKER_04But yet people love him. And it's because he's complicated, it's because he's cultured, it's because he's interesting. If he was just a Michael Myers from the Halloween movies, the mindless killing machine, he's less interesting. And I think the talking about Michael Myers in the Halloween movies, because they never explain why he is the way he is, that's what makes him interesting. So unless there's an element of mystery, if you're going to explain the character, you have to make him complicated and likable.
SPEAKER_01Doesn't have to be wholly likable, but maybe relatable is a way to say that relatable, make him a human being with there. And yeah, and I think also the second thing you say is a really good observation, especially I think in genre fiction, if you make the character a little bit unlikable, they become really interesting. If they have glaring flaws, they become really interesting.
SPEAKER_04We all have glaring flaws, and at times we're unlikable. We do things that are rude and terrible. Well, we all do at times in our lives. So to have a character that doesn't do that, then they're not realistic.
SPEAKER_01You also you write children in this book. And that's an interesting choice. Do you think you can talk a little bit about that? And how do you write children? I think some people find that very hard.
SPEAKER_04I think a 10-year-old boy, I've been a 10-year-old boy, and I can think back to what that was like. I have my son is three, and when I was in the north, I met a lot of troubled young men and young boys. And so I think it all it's all in there somewhere. You try to find the voice for your character, and so I pull a little bit from all of those things in order to do that. But in the end, I you just try to make them human. You try to empathize and understand what they're going through, and then that'll tell you what they're gonna do in the scenes. I think people overthink it. Some authors I read they're children, and they don't seem like children. It seems like a child written by an adult, but then other authors, you do it so well, and I think that's the difference.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's the temptation maybe to go too cutesy or too trying to get into psychology because children are wonderful to write in a way because they're surprising. They'll say things that surprise you. Now, did you always want to be a thriller writer? Or was how are you drawn to this genre?
SPEAKER_04I love horror. And but when I sat down to write a novel, I'm a criminal lawyer living in the Arctic. So the first novel has to be a crime novel set in the Arctic. And it was where all my experience was. They they say, write what you know, write what you're passionate about. I follow both of those pieces of advice. And but I love writing horror. And you know what? I would write anything. I think it's fun to dabble in different genres. And I read extensively outside my genre, and I always recommend that to aspiring authors. Get outside of your genre, read romance and read whatever you can get your hands on, because there will be things in that you can take into your own work, and things that may surprise you they might enjoy that you don't expect.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think if you're reading, like if somebody wants to write literary fiction, I tell them to go read a commercial novel and vice versa, because if you're reading outside of your genre, sometimes you're looking more carefully about how the story is actually put together. Yeah, and you're seeing more of the craft in a genre you don't usually read. Children's books are actually good for that. Sure. I read a lot of those to my son. They're great fun too, but you know how little if somebody likes the character, how little the goal that character has to be rooting for them. They want their the bear wants his hat back, or the girl wants the cookie. You'll just root for them about how what the stakes are. It's interesting that you said horror, because that's come up quite a bit here on on some of the authors who you wouldn't know. Claim McConnell Chaplin, he's a horror writer, he's very good. Because there is something about this book that is a little bit horror too, because of some of the some of the mystical stuff that I talked about. What do you think it is about that genre that attracts people?
SPEAKER_04People like to be frightened. I think it's they like to be unsettled, they like to be uncomfortable. And there are people who don't like horror because they don't like that. But the people who do enjoy it, they like to be a little shaken up. And I think they're also interested in, as I said, the places where the veil is thin. We don't know what's beyond this life. We have beliefs and we have ideas, but we don't really know. And so when you start showing the darker aspects of that, it can be quite fascinating. And there are elements in my novel of J horror, Japanese horror, and the book got picked up in in Japan. And I think I'm wondering if maybe that's why. And because I love Koji Suzuki is a Japanese writer, he wrote the ring trilogy. I love it, I think it's I think it's fantastic, and it's much more complex and interesting than the Japanese film or the American remake would have you believe. But I also love old horror like Algernon Blackwood and HB Lovecraft. And the it's and I there's a lot of that in the book as well, because it's what I enjoy, it's what I like to read. That's great.
SPEAKER_01I think Clay McHalg Chapman said that horror took the subtext to something, which is usually some people's fear, and it just ratches it up and puts it at the very top. Which I think is a great way to look at that. You had a one of the things that you're dealing with, also is the malleability of memory. And you had an experience with a case that you talked about that really brought that home to you.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I wrote an article for The Guardian, and I also did an interview with Neil Nyron about a case where this man had shot up a car full of people, and there was a ton of testimony saying he came out, he shot up the car, there were gunshots, the bullet holes and the glass, and the smell of the smoke, and people were terrified. But then, as the forensic evidence came out, the there was no firearm, and he had smashed out the window, smashed out the windows of the car. But they had a they'd come to the house thinking that there was a gun in the house and he was going to shoot them. And it's incredible how our reality can be bent by our expectations and then reinforced by talking to each other after a particular trauma. And I saw this time and again in in trials and in cases where people said the car was red, the man was tall. And then when you look at the video footage or you talk to the people who were at uh also at the incident, it's the opposite. And it's fascinating. And we can bend our reality and convince ourselves that things are so certain when they're not. And yeah, and over time we reinforce it in our own mind. And yeah, and I've talked about that about childhood memories, and also I've done trials where he gives really compelling testimony, and then near the end of the trial, something cracks and they say, Okay, I made all this up. Oh, jeez. And it happens, it happens, yeah. I had yeah, I had one sexual assault case and a young woman who I believed, and I thought my client was doomed. And as a last question in the trial, I had no further questions for her, but yet I brought her back onto the stand and she was still under oath. And I said, This is your last chance. Did you make this up? And she said, Maybe some of it. And then it just fell apart. And there's like a hush over the courtroom, and the judge almost fell over, and I almost fell over. And then everything began to unravel, and then suddenly you realize reality is not as concrete as we'd like it to be.
SPEAKER_01That's yeah, that's a moment. If you put it into a novel, probably people wouldn't believe you. The judge asked me after the trial, he said, Are you a Jedi?
SPEAKER_04I said, It's a total it was a total fluke. It was I just happened to ask that question. But then I think if I hadn't have asked that question, my client would have gone to jail for five years. And so everything is so fragile.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And we should mention in that incident, nobody was killed or um injured or anything. Just the one in with the windows.
SPEAKER_04Oh, no one was seriously injured. No, I imagine they were they were clearly traumatized, though. That's the thing is we say they were net they weren't shot or they weren't hurt badly, but I'm sure the people in that vehicle will live with this for the rest of their lives. And then probably end up in counseling about it because they were so terrified.
SPEAKER_01I'm certain, yeah. You know, I was actually a witness 9-11 actually there seeing it, and it was so foreign to me that uh when I was looking at it, I I saw the building, not I didn't see the planes go into the building, I was on the subway, and I came up out of the subway and it was on fire, and I saw the first building that fell, I witnessed the first building falling down. And if you had asked me, I did, I walked to my office because I was trying to get to work that day. If you had asked me what happened, I don't know if I could have told you. Because it was so outside my experience and what I expected to see that I had to paste, paste it all together over weeks and months, really, even years, to really understand what I witnessed.
SPEAKER_04And our brains are very good at filling in the gaps, but the problem is they don't always fill them in accurately because we see one thing and then we see another, and then a week later we're trying to reconcile the whole story, and we end up linking those things together in a way that may or may not be accurate, but it's in a way that our brain can make sense of because we need to process it, particularly when it's traumatic. Like you see something like that, it's traumatic.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, it yeah, I can definitely say it was traumatic. Yeah. You also told a story about a near drowning that happened to yourself, yes, and going through the process of coming to terms with that.
SPEAKER_04One of the things I wanted to do, having success as an author, and the book it ends up in the New York Times, and I'm doing interviews and I'm talking to people. I really wanted to help promote Inuit culture, get more Inuit authors recognized, get them writing. I wrote an article for People Magazine about the unassisted free birth I did with my wife and how wonderful that was, and get more people talking about birth and women's autonomy and the birth process. And I've also wanted to talk about men's mental health. And a vast majority of my clients, male clients, have had trauma and it's never been dealt with. And it does lead to addictions, it does lead to crime, it does lead to problems at home. And we're afraid to talk about a lot of these things. Suicide is a big thing in my novel, and people don't want to talk about suicide, particularly with men. In this case, it's with women, but it's difficult to get these issues into the public eye and get people talking about them. So anytime I can do that, which is why I did the piece for The Guardian, it's great, you know. And I I tried I tried for years to deal with it on my own, and then end up getting help to try and deal with mental health issues that I had and work through them. And I should have done it 20 years ago, but I probably wasn't ready to deal with it 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_01I mean, what is do you think the deal with men now? Because we keep hearing these things that men are in trouble and boys, especially young men, are in trouble. Young men seem to not have, I don't know, have lost their way in some ways. And I don't know how true do you think that is? Or are you in a position to judge?
SPEAKER_04I don't I don't know if I'm in a position to really judge, but I do know from talking to young men and talking to fathers of young men and mothers of young men that young men really are struggling right now. And there's a real lack of mental health services, period, for anyone. But for some reason, men seem to be struggling in the current culture, and I don't know, I don't know why that is, but it is happening, and I'm hoping that we can instead of saying, Oh, it's just men whining, we can, but seriously, that's I think that's what happens. People say men need to buck up, but I think that they don't need to buck up, they need resources in order to help them, and it's not it's not available, readily available. I in Newfoundland, I I tried to get when I was dealing with my own mental health issues, I tried to get a therapist. It's impossible unless you say you're suicidal or you have something very serious, it's very difficult to get professional help. And so if you're really struggling, there is no one to turn to. And that's why I think you're seeing also that we talk a lot about we hear a lot on the periphery about these terrible people, but we don't hear a lot about the men's groups and the people coming forward to try and create groups for young men and to try and do things to help them. And we should be focusing on that rather than the front page stories about toxic masculinity. But that's that sells newspapers. But what doesn't sell newspapers is a man who's volunteering to start a discussion group for young men in a small town. That's where we should be focusing our attention and our energy because if we want to help them, that's how we have to do it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, a lot of it has mystified me. But I do think that things are changing so rapidly. Oh, AI can do your coding. AI will do coding. That used to be like, I don't know. They told me when I was in school, be a lawyer and you'll never be poor. They tell people now, be a coder and you'll never be poor. But that's so it's really difficult. If I had young children now, I don't know what kind of career advice I could possibly give them for the world they'll be in. I think that's makes parents insecure.
SPEAKER_04If I have a three-year-old, and it's hard to gauge what society will be and where our culture will be by the time he hits manhood. I hear a lot of talk about toxic masculinity because the definition is so broad. Like when they talk about toxic masculinity, a lot of times they're including just basic good human qualities, like self-discipline and self-responsibility and competitiveness. And when you have a culture that's branding those things as being terrible when they appear in men, then I can see how that's harmful. In this, I feel like I'm not an expert in it. And there are people out there who are better qualified to talk about it. What I want to do is help young men get the support that they need, particularly for mental health. I think that's just important. Yeah. But there are people out there who will talk at length about all this stuff.
SPEAKER_01Where I was going with this was that writing and reading can be a big part of somebody's life and make somebody, and we're hearing that men don't read now either. It's a little better in the UK than it is in the US. That telling stories, listening to stories, reading, readings with special intimacy with a person, because you know that person's on the page, whether they're dead or not, and you can read. So I don't know if it's not the overall solution, as you say. People need resources, people need to feel like that there's a path for them, but also writing and reading. People need to feel and be able to express themselves.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I'm thinking about I'm thinking about David Zaleh, like that book Flesh that came out. I felt really vindicated when he won the booker because I love that book. And when I read it, I thought men should read this book, and this is a great book for men. And when I talked about, I said that it in several groups of people, and people said it was the noise they made, and I didn't know why. And now these won the booker, and I'm seeing more people read the book. I'm glad because there's not a lot of books that I've read in recent years that I thought this is a great book for men to read. And maybe that's part of the problem.
SPEAKER_01I'm not sure. That's on my list. I haven't gotten into it yet, but it is on my list. Definitely. Yeah. So you have a two-bit deal.
SPEAKER_04Well, I'm already neck deep in writing the second book, and uh it's gonna be set in rural Newfoundland, which is where I'm from. And it's uh it's a very unique place that people don't know a lot about. It only joined Canada in the night, the starting in the 1950s, and it's got a lot of folklore, a lot of strange mythology surrounding the place, and the language is very strange, Newfoundland English. People know about Come From Away, the Broadway musical, and they know about the shipping news by any proof that's the mid what most people know about the place. But I want to show them I want to show them everything else, and I want I want to wrap that around a really interesting crime story with a lot of the same supernatural undertones that the first book had. And that I was at a Event in North Carolina, McIntyre's books, just last week, and they asked me to comp it. And I said, Rosemary's Baby Meets True Detective Season One. And so that's how I'm just that's how I'm describing it. But it's gonna be a lot of fun. I think people will like it.
SPEAKER_01And I I think season one was the best true detective. It is the best. That's good answer. So that kind of spooky vibe. So always our second to last question is what are two books and two other things that you'd recommend? Two books.
SPEAKER_04Right now, Laurent Bonet wrote a book called HHHH. He's a French writer, he won a big award with it. I'm reading his new book, Perspectives. I haven't got too far into it yet. But it's about Reinhard Heydrich, who was a Nazi leader who was assassinated during World War II. And he he writes the novel of the men who assassinated him. And at the same time, he's writing about how historical novels are written and how he researched and wrote the novel itself. So it's like this meta-novel is really fascinating how he strung it all together. And I'd recommend that book to anybody. And like it or not, you will you'll learn something from it, and it's a really interesting experience. And I've read that actually, I will definitely endorse that. Yeah. Oh, cool. And uh Katherine Faw, she used to be Catherine Fa Morris, she wrote a book called Young God, which I've been recommending a lot because it's one of those books that really stuck with me. It's not for everybody, it's very raw, it's very gritty. Appalachia, a young woman who's surrounded by drugs and sex and violence. And but it's well written. It's really well written. And David Zelay, in an interview a couple of days ago, name-dropped her. So I was like, okay, again, he's vindicated. I feel vindicated. And she wrote that book probably 20, oh god, 2019, 2017. So it's been a while, and she hasn't written anything since. But hopefully she'll actually know. Her second book came out then, Ultra Luminous, which which I have, but I haven't read. But apparently it's very different from the first book. But yeah, Catherine Fau. Okay, great.
SPEAKER_01And two other things you'd like to recommend.
SPEAKER_04Let me think. Cape Dorset is where the book is set. Everything I've written about Cape Dorset in the novel is very grim, it's very tragic, it's very dark. But uh it's a beautiful place, beautiful culture, and it's also one of the art capitals of the northern hemisphere. And people there have been carving from soapstone for a very long time, and they do some of the most intricate, beautiful, incredible works, and they also do printing, they have a full print shop set up in Dorset. So despite all this tragedy and the crime and the poverty, they're able to create such beauty. So if you get online and look at the Cape Dorset Cooperative or Cape Dorset art, you'll get to see some of this magical stuff. It's really fantastic. And as a second thing, I just it's very hard to get absinthe in Canada. And I'm a huge absinthe fan. And I was recently in the south of France, and it's just everywhere, it's ubiquitous. Oh, and I got some when I was in DC, and I can get it here in Indiana. Americans are much more relaxed than Canadians about their liquor laws. Canadians have uh draconian liquor laws, but don't be afraid of it. It's a beautiful drink, it's wonderful. Everyone thinks you hallucinate, and it's not at all. It's lovely. And if you if it's too much for your perno is beautiful, if you like licorice, it's very lovely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's brilliant. I think, yeah, I think the way they used to make it in in I guess the turn of the century or turn of the last century, there was something in it that would make people hallucinate. But no, it's not really.
SPEAKER_04So this is the wine industry was being really punished because absinthe was one of the most popular drinks in France. And so they've created this campaign to discredit it. And it's kind of like a griefer madness where they're like, weed'll make you kill your family. It's just nonsense, but it is really fascinating. And the is the active compound. And uh you can look, yeah, get online, look it up. It's there's been a real trick around it.
SPEAKER_01That's what I've always heard that back in the bad old days that you know they put something in it that the process was there. I've had it only once, believe it or not, at a pub in Edinburgh.
SPEAKER_04Oh, nice. But yeah, I liked it.
SPEAKER_01It's good, it's good.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, do you have uh I think a Sazerac has some in it? Uh Death in the Afternoon. There's a lot of cocktails with it in there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's great. Okay. And always my last question where can people find you, follow you, buy your books?
SPEAKER_04Sure. My books, if you go to my website, malcolmkemptk-empt.com, you can find all the links there for Penguin Random House and wherever it can be purchased. Most local bookstores that I've gone to and my travels across the United States, you can find it. I'm on Instagram at Malcolm Kempt. I'm on X at Malcolm Kempt. I'm even on LinkedIn. I'm like, I never had any social media when I signed my book deal, and now I've got all the social media I could ever handle. And yeah, my last piece of advice though, get off your phone. I keep saying that to everyone. Get off your phone. Your life will improve.
SPEAKER_01I can endorse that too. Malcolm Kemp, thank you very much. Thanks very much. This has been the Story Podcast for readers and writers. The Story Podcast is produced by Christian Livermore and Steven Sacco. It is hosted by Steven Sacco and edited by Steven Sacco. Please remember to follow us, rate us, and write a nice review. You can also buy us a coffee or a pint in the link in the show notes. And as always, thank you for listening.