The Juncture talks to Dan Werb
The writer, epidemiologist, musician, and father finds peace in a world of constant flux.
In late 2019, Dan Werb and his family were living temporarily in Halifax. His debut book City Of Omens (Bloomsbury, 2019) had been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, and yet Dan felt as though he was searching for his path as a writer. In February 2020, as a novel coronavirus spread throughout the globe, Dan placed an Op-Ed in the New York Times outlining the various paths the then-nascent pandemic might take. What eventually resulted from that essay was The Invisible Siege (Crown, 2021), Dan’s sophomore book, which won the 2022 Writers’ Trust Award for Non-Fiction.
Recently, Dan and I met up at his music studio in Toronto. I started by asking him about how he carves out time for writing books and creating music, all while working as an epidemiologist, and being a husband and father.
- Josh
Dan Werb: I feel like I can structure my time and my health in the best way to be productive, especially with writing. When I’m writing a book I think “Ok, I’m locked in.” It’s boring, but the first thing I start thinking about is my schedule. How can I structure my life so that I have the right amount of energy at the right times and that my calendar is set up in a way that’s going to protect me to write? And that’s tough.
Totally. That’s very admirable. And smart. And mature. [both laugh] Because my process is just to bemoan the fact that there’s no time to write or there’s no energy to write while being whisked along by the rush of life.
For me it’s all about setting up your day. And don’t allow the feeling that there’s other things that are more important. I realized early on, with any kind of art making – music, writing, all of it – it feels wrong to be doing it within the economic system that we live in. It feels like I’m wasting my time, even though I know I’m not. But that’s the feeling I get. And I have to immediately push back against that feeling.
Or to be specific, instead of focusing on your art, there’s a part of you saying, “I should be making money, I should be busking on the corner or whatever it is I HAVE to do.”
Exactly.
I wonder if that brain-wiring happened early on in life or if it’s something you observed from someone in your family, or if it’s even deeper than that.
For sure it’s probably from my family, but also it’s the pervasive social norm – we’re all going to work to make money. You can hang out with your friends and you can hang out with your family, those are all acceptable things to do. But if you deviate from that… that’s when it starts feeling really weird. And there’s a wrong-ness feeling of writing on your own, to art making, that I need to anticipate and confront.
I’ve always harboured feelings of selfishness surrounding my art practice. And guilt. And lately I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness and finding fulfillment and I know – I’ve known forever – that I find happiness and fulfillment in the creation of art. So I’ve been thinking more about art as the opposite of selfish, more like a self-FULL practice.
It’s hard, and you’re so right. I DON’T think of it as selfishness but when you said that I thought, “Oh yeah that is how I feel. I should be doing something else. I should be helpful right now. I should be taking care of that thing I haven’t taken care of.”
Here, our conversation shifts to the topic of mentors. In Halifax, Dan reconnected with a man named Bruce Walsh, someone with decades of experience supporting and leading Canadian publishing across the country, who’d mentored him in his early twenties at McGill-Queen’s University Press. It was Bruce who’d originally encouraged Dan to become a writer. Nearly 20 years later, in January 2020, it was Bruce who again pushed Dan’s ambitions, telling him to write for the global market, and to focus on the growing concerns that the novel coronavirus was presenting the world.
Dan Werb: The Op-Ed I wrote in February 2020 was about the Epidemiological Triangle, which is basically the first thing I learned when I went to grad school in public health. The three points of the triangle are the pathogen (the agents causing the epidemic), the host (the organism that’s being infected), and the environment (within which the pathogen and the host interact). Every epidemic can be explained by a shift in at least two of the points in the triangle. It’s a very simple concept, but it’s helpful to understand the planes upon which these natural forces are operating. So I wrote about that. And then it kind of went from there.
For me, The Invisible Siege is very much a climate book. The climate is the point of the triangle that has really changed.
And that’s exactly what I said in the op-ed. You totally hit the nail on the head. When you think about an epidemic: you have those three components and any of the three could change. The host could become weaker and more vulnerable to infection. Or something radically could change with the pathogen, it could be pushed to mutate in strange new ways. But both of those things are unlikely to happen unless there’s a shift in the environment. It’s the environment of humans and animals intersecting more–
–which is really about destruction of natural habitat.
Exactly. And deforestation and wildlife trade and sprawl. But also climate change moving animals into cities. In the Arctic, for example, there’s all kinds of animals who have moved up there to escape wildfires.
That’s terrifying.
And the Arctic is warming so it’s becoming more comfortable for them there. But they’re bringing with them all kinds of parasites that animals in the Arctic are not used to.
So, what we’re now seeing is Arctic animals colliding with sub-Arctic animals?
Exactly. And there’s a knock-on effect with human communities. I use it as an example because it’s so stark an example of things really becoming unmoored. But that kind of complexity is happening everywhere. And it’s the collision of animals and humans brought about by human power, basically, that’s blowing back on us in all these different ways. And the COVID-19 pandemic, that’s not the end. Very sadly, it’s just the beginning. I repeat this all the time, but there’s been more spillover events that have caused epidemics with novel viruses in the first twenty years of the 21st century than the entirety of the 20th century. We’re seeing an acceleration. This is not new information, but the COVID-19 pandemic is the start. That’s the new normal we have to plan for: constant perturbation, constant disruption, constant outbreaks and spillover events. It doesn’t mean the next thing will be as bad as COVID. But it changes the way we have to perceive the world. The world is not a static place. And I think we need to become more comfortable with endless change and dynamism and disruption. That’s tough, but ultimately healthy… if we can wrap our minds around it.
Healthy how?
Mentally healthy. Recognizing the fact that change is constant – that change is the only constant – is the healthiest thing you can do for yourself, in the Buddhist way that nothing is permanent. You will die alone. Ultimately, nothing that you love and value will be with you in the end and nothing will survive. As individuals, we all need to get there at some point, whether you get there a millisecond before you die or you get there decades before you do. Getting there earlier, I think, is healthier. Nature is making the walls of humanity crumble a little bit. These pillars of stasis we’ve surrounded ourselves with are falling down. Look around: there’s a gazillion different crises. And they’re all real. So you could think of it in two ways: this is totally fucked up and not right; or this is the way that the universe works.
One thing I find ridiculous, and that was made painfully evident in the early goings of the pandemic, is that in our colonial-capitalist system we feel the need to commodify everything. Everyone thinks they have a right to their freedom and what that entails. Whether it’s to have cheap oranges and to visit with their best friend on a beach somewhere, to not wait too long in line, to not wait too long in traffic. I don’t know how we got these ideas in our heads that these are guarantees of life that are unassailable. Bananas and oranges and olives are expensive because we don’t live in a part of the world where we grow those things, and their existence is threatened. And it’s not our RIGHT to have access to them. It’s truly a privilege.
[laughs] That’s true.
With the acceleration of climate change, I’m paying attention to the language we use around it. And I’m finding instances of very scary language slipping nonchalant into our parlance. Like how the frost in BC in 2023 caused a 95% die-off of their viticultural root stock. I heard this stat–95% die-off–cited on the CBC the other morning with much less drama than they gave the traffic report. So wait–we’re now using phrases like 95% die-off without batting an eye? And there’s a proliferation of these terms. Like fire-tornadoes and atmospheric rivers. We need to take a beat to acknowledge what these things are.
That’s interesting. Look, Heidegger was very problematic in profound ways, but I studied him for my undergrad philosophy degree and one of the things you mention reminds me of one of his ideas. It’s that there’s the everyday world where everything is “at hand”, everything is an extension of human individuals. So we don’t think of anything. We don’t think of the keys in our pocket or how the car works or anything. But when shit breaks down you get thrust into an existential crisis. You’re no longer on the level of the everyday when your fucking pencil breaks because you’re like “oh shit, what is a pencil? How does it work? Where does it come from? What is this system that allows me to have a pencil? What if it all collapses? What is society?” And eventually you escalate to the level of the ontological where you’re thinking about God and existence and all that stuff.
So if you’re taking all of this in and any change is an apocalypse from which there’s no exit or safety, that’s a problem. Embracing change and confronting change and understanding that everything is in complex perturbation and understanding it to be normal. Especially with climate stuff, if you can’t normalize it you can’t start working towards a solution, or an adaptation.
That’s why Doomerism is the new Denialism.
Totally.
The rapidity of the change is truly the most terrifying part to me. There were climate issues when we were kids (acid rain and the hole in the ozone), but not like this. Our parents were probably raising us to be just like them. Get a job. Buy a house. They weren’t thinking “by the time you’re my age you won’t have any stability and you’ll be living in constant flux.” Ok, so our children are the same age. And they’re born into this crisis of constant flux. So how do you think about talking to children about climate change?
I try to be really up front with my kid. The planet is changing. Climate change is real. It’s a problem and we have to be as conscious as possible about doing things to help. We certainly don’t say things like “the planet’s fucked and it’s a downward spiral from here,” but for a five-year old you can apply values. It’s basically all you can do.
Right, you can instill values such as love of nature and the way you carry yourself on the planet. My kid knows how to separate waste into its respective bins, recycling and compost, and she thinks nature is beautiful because we make a point to go walk in it. She loves birds because she sees how I lose my fucking mind over certain birds. I stop and witness. But these are my own mechanisms that I’m distilling down for her. These are all the mechanisms I use to combat my own climate anxiety, my own climate grief.
You also don’t need to venture OUT into nature, necessarily. Cities are hubs of biodiversity. They’re often more biodiverse than the natural areas that surround them. And you can either bemoan that, or you can ask “what’s happening in cities then?”
Then we should have a greater level of ambition for our cities and what they’re capable of.
Absolutely! Absolutely we should.
That makes me feel good.
And suddenly it becomes tangible. It’s not just “we should stop climate change;” the question becomes, “how do we build a relationship with nature within our own homes?” But with kids, all you can do is be a role model. It doesn’t matter what you say; I really don’t think it does. They are absolutely reacting to the way we walk around in the world. It only matters who you are as a person. And they’ll either lean into that or react against it. And that’s where the growth happens.
Dan’s forthcoming book (Knopf) is slated for publication in 2026. Click here to reserve a copy of The Invisible Siege, winner of the 2022 Writer’s Trust Award for Non-Fiction.