India, May 17 -- You have said you are "north-minded," drawn to high altitudes and high latitudes, to snow, ice, and rock, to mountains. You debuted with Mountains of the Mind but then your trajectory descends and your latest book is on rivers. Why?

Mountains and rivers live in an ancient dialectic; mountains lend their gravity to rivers, as it were, and rivers in return sharpen and cleave mountains. So, in a strange way, turning to rivers felt like a coming home! I have always and will always be drawn, as a writer, to the limitless terrain where nature meets culture; where the complex and eventually unmappable reciprocities of imagination and landscape shape one another, dynamically. Is A River Alive? asks its readers to imagine rivers ...