Kim Echlin was born in 1955 in Burlington, Ontario, but currently lives in Toronto. She has studied French at the Sorbonne, completed a doctoral thesis on Ojibway story-telling, travelled extensively through the Marshall Islands, China, France, and Zimbabwe, and is a former arts documentary producer with CBC's The Journal.
Elephant Winter (Penguin, 1997), Echlin's first novel, has been greeted with tremendous enthusiasm by both readers and reviewers. We spoke about the book at the Robarts Library in the University of Toronto, a place quite familiar to Echlin, who did much of her elephant research there.

ET: Why do you think Elephant Winter is being greeted so warmly? Is there something in the novel perhaps that appeals to the "spirit of the age"?
KE: Elephant Winter is the story of a young woman called Sophie, who returns home to take care of her dying mother. While doing so, she learns to take care of elephants on a neighbouring safari farm, falls in love with the elephant keeper there, and becomes pregnant with her first child. At the beginning of the story, Sophie says, "If you choose to live with elephants, you've chosen to live enthralled. I allow myself to be ravished by them. I risk their force to break and blow, to untie and overthrow. I am imprisoned by them and our bonds free us." I'm not sure what the spirit of the age is, but many people do seem to be looking for a stronger sense of purpose, a feeling of connection to others and to the sacred.
Sophie has never had a strong sense of purpose, but she begins to sense her direction while tending the elephants. Like her, they are now imprisoned in a cold northern climate. They are behind safari fences. She is in her mother's house, far from her adopted home in Africa. It is only by submitting to bonds that Sophie can learn a greater spiritual freedom. These ideas echo, of course, John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14", "Batter my heart, three-personed God.", which explores the paradox of submission and freedom in spirituality. Perhaps that idea appeals as much in our time as it did in John Donne's. Many people want to experience the transcendent, to know there is something bigger than themselves. Sophie learns this through watching elephants.
ET: Is the exploration of the mother's death in Elephant Winter at all autobiographical?
KE: No. The story is entirely fiction. However, I have lived through several deaths, though not my mother's. The first time you experience a big death, whether it's a parent or a lover or a dear friend or a sibling, you're left feeling disconnected from the world. It took me a long time to let go of grieving, which I think never really ends. Someone finally said to me, "You've got to redeem their death." At the time that seemed brutal, but there is a great wisdom in it. I have been very fortunate in that I have been allowed to share death. When we live through the death of someone close, we experience, even briefly, a dreadful kind of reverence for life and how transient it is. It makes you want to breathe in deeply and just "be".
ET: How long did you work on this novel?
KE: Two years on this one, but I've been writing my whole life. This is my first published novel, but I have several apprentice works lurking around. I've done collections of stories from different mythologies and some other fiction.
ET: Where does your interest in elephants come from?
KE: I've dreamed about elephants, and I pay attention to my dreams. Elephants are a big symbol in the dream world. In my dreams about them, they've been in northern Canadian lakes. So in the dreams they were already outside their natural locale, but clearly in my own psychic locale. Then when I actually saw elephants while travelling in Africa, the real image was so powerful and so beautiful that I thought when I came back I would like to work with these creatures. They touched me deeply, their intelligence, their ability to communicate, their enormous size and potential for both nurturing and destruction. I didn't know how to get access to them in Canada, so I went to the library and started reading everything about them.
There are an enormous number of images of them in North America considering they are not indigenous-TV commercials, children's books, iconography. Since I've published Elephant Winter, many people have told me how interested they are in elephants, and I think they are responding to the archetypal significance of the animal, pointing out to me the types of themes they're seeing in the book, because if you plan them or not, if they're archetypal they're going to be there.
ET: When you talk about elephants as archetypes, in what sense do you see them as symbols? Do they mean anything in particular to you?
KE: Archetypes resonate on many levels, which is one of the reasons they are so powerful. If you go back and look at world mythology, you're going to see the elephant working in different ways. The Romans thought of the elephant as a religious animal. Pliny observed it worshipping the sun and stars. Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, is associated with the head of an elephant, and the early Christians called the elephant the "Bearer of all Infirmities". In India, the god Ganesh is part-man, part-elephant, and the night that Buddha was born, an elephant came into the dreams of his mother so he would be patient, strong, and meek.
Aristotle said that the elephant is the beast that surpasses all others in understanding and approaches man as nearly as matter can to spirit. This is a lovely way of thinking about elephants.
I think that whether or not people know these details about elephants, they are still responding to the "bigness" of the image and the archetypal resonance.
ET: The theme of language is also an important element in Elephant Winter. How well can humans and elephants actually communicate? Is there such a thing really as elephant language?
KE: Elephants do communicate in infrasound among themselves. Katy Payne at Cornell University first documented infrasound by recording the silence around the elephants and playing it back at ten times the speed. She's identified estrus or mating calls, a "let's go" rumble, danger calls, nurturing calls for the young. But the Elephant-English Dictionary in my book is totally fiction. When you create a language, you are really creating a world-view.
In this case I asked myself: If I were to create an elephant language, what would be their world-view? What would their language be expressing? Because elephants are matriarchal and because (after survival) their purpose is to live harmoniously together and to nurture their young, I wanted their language to reflect this. The other thing I wanted their language to reflect was the idea of a group whose purpose was not to name things (nouns) or to act on things (verbs), but to "be in the moment together." I wanted to explore what it would be like if, embedded in a language, the individual's sense of purpose and happiness depended on a harmonious relationship to the community.
ET: Yet, interestingly enough, at the end of the novel, Sophie and her baby seem very independent, isolated almost. They seem more involved with the elephant community than with any human one.
KE: This is true, but because of what Sophie has been through, she has the potential to re-enter a human community. In fact, because she has a baby and has taken on a new role as a mother, she is at the centre of a new community which opens out into the world as the child grows. By observing the elephants and how they nurture each other, she learns. Also, taking care of her own mother through death and losing her own "first community", she has earned a deep appreciation of what connection to others means.
ET: One reviewer called Elephant Winter an "adult fairy-tale". Do you agree with this?
KE: I wouldn't use the term "fairy-tale", because it implies a story for children. I'm more comfortable with the word "myth", mythic structure. I wasn't setting out really to create either a fairy-tale or a myth, though there are resonances of those structures in the book.
ET: Where did the book actually begin for you? Did you start with the dictionary, with Sophie? Her mother?
KE: It started with the elephants. [Laughter ] One of the earliest scenes I wrote-though it comes up very late in the book-was the scene of the elephant walking down the road alone after her miscarriage.
ET: How extensive was your research?
KE: A good solid year. I've read everything in this building [the Robarts Library] on elephants. All of the physiology in the book is grounded in research. At the turn of the century there were physiologists doing the kind of research we see Alecto doing.
ET: Let's talk about Alecto for a moment.
KE: Alecto is the name for one of the Furies, whom the Greek poets thought of as inexorable. I think there is the potential for disruption or disturbance regardless of how harmonious a situation is. Alecto is the force of disruption. When he first comes on the scene, Sophie has become Jo's lover. She is learning the value of staying still, and she is growing more centred. And yet, through no fault of pride or moral deficiency on her part, Alecto appears. He and Jo have a long history of different approaches to elephants, and that history and Jo's pride must be addressed. The idea is that regardless of how centred or self-sufficient we might feel, there's always the potential for disruption, psychic or otherwise. That's the role Alecto plays. He's a turn-of-the-century-style scientist, who is interested in science for science's sake. Without questions about What does this mean?, Do these experiments have to be repeated over and over again? He's very interested in knowledge for its own sake without asking why and what the implications are for himself and his community and his subjects.
ET: What about his muteness?
KE: There are many silences in the book. The elephants have silences which we learn in fact can speak, and they're rich with meaning. There are the silences between Sophie and her mother as they explore their living and dying together. Jo is a taciturn person. Sophie cannot communicate easily with him except on a visceral level because he's not a talker. She's an intellectual but he isn't, and he's not interested. Alecto is basically mute-has a very limited language capacity-but unlike the elephants, who have rich silences, Alecto's silence is threatening and destructive.
ET: One last question. In the introduction to the elephant dictionary, Sophie says that she offers "it up then to the interested reader with little to fear or hope." Can you comment?
KE: That line alludes to Samuel Johnson's preface to his dictionary of the English language. At the end of the preface he offers his book to the reader "with little to fear or hope." It's probably quite ironic given the mammoth task of putting together that first dictionary and Johnson's undoubted understanding of what an act of genius it was. But fear and hope also speak to what language can and cannot do. The words are uttered, but the fear is they won't communicate what was intended, the eternal hope is that they can. Anyone who has been misunderstood knows all about this. Language depends both on the speaker and the listener, on the writer and the reader.