Several reviewers say your prose reads like poetry. How do you describe your writing style?

Catherine M.A. Wiebe: As that of someone who cares desperately for meaning, and Truth, and beauty, and wants to find words that express that care.

 So do you see Second Rising as a poem? Is there a difference, for you, between poetry and fiction?

Wiebe: Yes, there is a difference between poetry and fiction, though I think of it as more of a membrane than a wall. I'd say Second Rising moves about the membrane.

 You begin the book with a number of questions. Is that how you began the writing of the book, with questions?

Wiebe: Definitely. Though I wouldn't say that I ended it with answers.

 You paint the connection between a grandmother and granddaughter in some truly remarkable scenes in Second Rising. What, at its essence, is this special bond that bridges across generations?

Wiebe: The very old and the very young are much closer in age, I think, than those of us in between.

 You are a young writer, yet Second Rising has a decidedly elegiac tone. That is largely due to the advancing illness of the grandmother but there seems to be a more general nostalgia as well. Do you have a particular attraction to the past?

Wiebe: Not so much to the past as to the preservation of things passing away.

 Did you plan to write a book from an early age?

Wiebe: I've wanted to write since I was six or seven, but the desire became a plan when I was in university.

 How has your work editing other people's writing and doing graphic layout for publications influenced your own approach to creative writing, if at all?

Wiebe: Removing the specks from others' writing makes me keenly aware of the planks in my own.

 The way humans first learn about things and then remember them is something you pay a lot of atten-tion to in this book. What particular insight or experience caused your intense interest in memory?

Wiebe: Not one particular experience so much as a constellation of them-witnessing others' memory loss, watching children learn to think and remember, and a desire to make sense and beauty from things both intangible and important.

 Sometimes quite startling in Second Rising is the presentation of food and representation of edible things. What quality about food makes you see it as more than just something nutritious?

Wiebe: We are very good at forgetting, and food's presence-as both symbol and sustenance-within our intimate rituals and traditions makes it into something that nourishes our memories as well as our bodies.

 Your book's title comes from a step in the pro-cess of making bread. Can you explain what a "second rising" is in the making of bread and why you decided to use this term as a title?

Wiebe: The second rising is typically the rising that takes place after the bread has been shaped into loaves or rolls, just before it is placed in the oven. It is the rising when things begin to take their final shape, though that shape is still fragile.

 Among the many things your book celebrates, the joy of working, of doing things with one's hands, stands out, if only because so much of modern life seems to involve trying to avoid doing such work. Yet the baking of bread, the laying down of preserves, the mending of clothes, is actually celebrated in your book. Why do you think such things are important?

Wiebe: Physical tasks and rituals are never only themselves-they connect us to each other and to truths that are important to remember in ways that mental exertion alone cannot. There is something more in almost every task we do, particularly the ordinary ones, and it is this moreness, this richness, that I hope to remind others of.

 In writing this story for a society where Alzheimer's disease and memory loss seem to be affecting more people, do you hope to introduce a fresh cultural perspective to how memory works?

Wiebe: Alzheimer's and dementia more generally were both on my mind as I wrote. The beauty of loss, rather than just its sadness, is something I wish we cherished and celebrated more.

 The remembrance of things past and lost is a celebrated literary theme, although you seem to reverse that by looking at what happens when the object remains but there is no one left to hold its memory. Should we be reading your book as an exploration of metaphysics?

Wiebe: Yes-in the broad sense of being concerned with more than is physically apparent.

 You write in your book, "Memory will sustain you." Is Second Rising an attempt to preserve memories, or is it a created memory? Do you think that created memories can be as sustaining as true ones?

Wiebe: Yes, yes, and yes. Preservation and re-creation are often inseparable, and both "true" and "created" memories can be sustaining-though what, exactly, each sustains is another matter.

 Second Rising looks at impending death, yet there is no mention made of spiritual matters-or at least not religious matters. I wondered if the title, Second Rising, had any kind of a religious overtone, at least in relation to the book.

Wiebe: The spiritual need not be mentioned in order to be present; I didn't intend a specifically religious meaning when choosing the title, but I would not dismiss such an interpretation.

 Finally, what satisfied you most in writing Second Rising?

Wiebe: The feeling, at the end of it all, that I had written something of value.