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[Raban continues]... that way by accident, like most things in my life... I've never been good at sensible planning—or at sticking to my cobbler's last. Like I said, I just write what I can, which isn't nearly as much as I'd like.

LRS: Your observation of the similarities between Waxwings and Bad Land actually comes as a bit of a surprise. I see in retrospect that indeed the books have similar forms. But in reading Bad Land I had the sense of moving through a distant historical terrain made fully recognizable, while the time and place of Waxwings, by contrast, seemed somehow foreign, despite its familiarity. I spent the year during which Waxwings is set living in the Pacific Northwest, working at a dot com depressingly similar to the one in the novel, and generally breathing the same air the novel's characters breathe. Waxwings touched on memories and sensations that have not yet coalesced into history, personal or otherwise.

Historians often say of the past that it's a foreign country, one whose foreignness can be hard to recognize beneath the patina of legend, myth, and popular memory. I feel that in many of your books, Bad Land in particular, you capture something essentially true about this foreign country that more academic approaches to history often fail to do. I don't imagine that you see yourself as an historian, but clearly you spend a lot of time "doing" history. Do you "relate" to the historical characters in your work any differently from the present-day ones? Does the process by which you generate historical interpretation—imagining Vancouver's survey, for example—differ from the process by which you interpret contemporary landscapes, the people you encounter, or your own memories?

Raban: Your letter reminds me of a remark made by Richard White, the historian of the West, when he reviewed Bad Land, saying that I "channeled" my historical characters. He didn't intend this as a compliment, but rather implied that I was doing something vaguely illicit and pseudo-mystical, like that woman in Yealm, Washington who channels Ramtha, the millennia-old Native American god figure (I think... I can't be bothered to Google that nonsense...). White meant, I assume, that whatever I thought I was doing, I wasn't doing History—and of course he's right. "Channeling," I thought, was rather a nice term for it.

Most of this morning I was trying to "channel" an imaginary Americanophile Englishman who comes to Seattle to work for Microsoft and ends up committing a very American, far-western crime, and I see no great difference between that kind of explicit fiction writing and what I did in Bad Land. As an English immigrant to the U.S., I was stunned by the bare dry oceanic landscape of eastern Montana, so I found it easy to connect with a previous generation of English immigrants who'd passed that way, like the Wollastons and (my favorite character in the book) Worsell, the born-lazy slob, whose homestead was an infamous local disgrace. I had a fair amount of documentary evidence (photographs, memoirs, etc.) to go on, but not so much that I didn't have to imagine most of what I wrote. I have enough firsthand experience of trying to make a new life in a strange land to identify with (or "channel") those homesteaders, most of whom found themselves way out of their depth after being duped by the promotional literature distributed by the railroad companies and by a misleading textbook on farming without rainfall. Books brought them to the West—something else that chimed deeply with me. I tried to write about the homesteaders as my intimates and contemporaries, using as much as I could of what I had in common with them and they with me.

And there's something else here. Their history seemed to me very recent—everything happened when my own grandparents (born in the early 1890s) were youngish adults. My own family history is vivid and particular to me through the nineteenth century and into the late eighteenth, after which (or before which) it gets increasingly vague. But I could tell you exactly what my great-great grandfather did in the 1860s, or what his father was doing in the late 1830s.

The last house I owned in England was built in 1630, and it wasn't an old house by the standards of the Essex village where it stood. And I remember once stopping at a bar in rural Ireland, just as a funeral at the church across the road was coming to an end. When the mourners came in to have an impromptu wake with gallons of Guinness and whiskey, they began talking about the dead man's grave, whose grave it was next to, whose next, whose next, and so on. No more than ten minutes into the talk, they were going on about some guy, familiar to everyone, who was "killed by Cromwell's men." That would have been in 1648–50. In the next half hour, we must have meandered back, with many reminiscent side-trips, into the fifteenth century, if not before, yet the dead were still being spoken of as if they'd gone last week. So very un-American. So very, very Irish.

I do think of the 1790s as the beginning of "modern" history—partly, perhaps, because of my own ancestry, more importantly because that's when the Romantic revolution in English really took hold. So the date of Vancouver's arrival in the Pacific Northwest—1792—interested me a lot, especially when I saw the wild discrepancy between his writing about this landscape and that of his only slightly younger midshipmen. He was a mid-eighteenth century fogey, they were nineteenth century Romantic moderns.

So Vancouver's sensibility did strike me as historic—or at least pre-modern. But as Clinton would say, I felt his pain—born, not unlike me, into that no-man's-land in the English class system, somewhere between the upper-lower-middle class and the lower-upper-middle class. Life on that ship took me straight back to the horrors of my snobbish English boarding school. That way, I could "channel" Captain Van.

I don't know.... What I'm trying to say here, I think, is that I feel a sort of instinctive contemporaneity with people trying to find their footing in a novel and forbidding landscape—the homesteading immigrants in Montana in 1910, or George Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest in 1792–1794. The dates—the "history," if you must—seem much less important than the predicament of finding oneself in a place where one doesn't belong, which is what really interests me. A cruel critic might say of me that I'm merely breathing my own neuroses into the lives of innocent characters from the past, making them suffer my own sense of awkward displacement in the world. I'd try to argue back that the landscapes themselves—the Inside Passage, the Montana prairie, Seattle here and now—are so particular, so redolent of the period in which the books are set, that they give the characters a degree of historical authenticity, if you see what I mean. What I feel I have to do is to catch the friction between the people and the peculiar geography in which they're situated—and if I can do that the rest will follow.