Like You'd Understand, Anyway: Stories | Jim Shepard | Talks at Google

Here's my secret plan. I'm going to read the beginning of one of the stories in your collection and then stop, sort of maximize your dissatisfaction. Then I'll read a short short in the collection, a story that's only just a few pages long, and then I'll answer questions as best I can on any subject, including neurosexual history or whatever. Anything. Yeah, she's like, really? Oh my God. Because I have some ideas myself. Right. We got it on Facebook already. Yeah, you already got it. The light kind of blows up here. Have you noticed that? I'm going to read the beginning of a story called Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay and It's on page 79 for those anal types who want to follow along. But I have to tell you, if I look up and I see you looking down, I won't assume you're following along. I'll assume you're like blackberrying or something like that. And I'll just read about 10 minutes of this and then the short, short, short. Two and a half weeks after I was born on July 9, 1958, the plates that make up the Fair Weather range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped 20, 21ft on either side of the Fairweather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now is that the southwest side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay jolted upward into the northwest and the northeast shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the southeast. One way or the other, the result registered 8.3 on the Richter scale. The bay is T shaped and seven miles long and two wide at the stem. And according to those who were there, it went from a glassy smoothness to a full churn. A giant's Jacuzzi next to it, mountains 12 to 15,000ft high twisted into themselves and lurched in contrary directions. In Juneau, 122 miles to the southeast, people who turned in early were pitched from their beds. The shock waves wiped out bottom dwelling marine life throughout the panhandle. In Seattle, a thousand miles away, the University of Washington seismograph needle was jarred completely off its graph. And meanwhile, back at the head of the bay, a spur of mountain and glacier, the side of a half mile wide city park, 40 million cubic yards in volume, broke off and dropped 3,000ft down the northeast cliff into the water. This is all by way of saying that it was one of the greatest spasms when it came to the release of destructive energy. In history. It happened around 10:16pm at that latitude and time of year. Still light out. There were three small boats anchored in the south end of the bay. The rumbling from the earthquake generated vibrations that the occupants of the boats could feel on their skin like electric shock. The impact of the rockfall that followed made a sound like Canada exploding. There were two women, three men and a seven year old boy in the three boats. They looked up to see a wave breaking over the 1700 foot high southwest bank of Gilbert Inlet and heading for the opposite slope. What they were looking at was the largest wave ever recorded by human beings. It sized off 300-year-old pines and cedars and spruce, some of them with trunks 3 or 4ft thick along a trim line of 1720ft. That's a wave crest 500ft higher than the Empire State Building. Fill your bathtub, hold a football at shoulder height. Drop it into the water. Imagine the height of the tub above the water line to be 2,000ft. Scale the height of the initial splash up proportionately. When I was 2 years old, my mother decided she'd had enough of my father and hunted down an old high school girlfriend who'd wandered so far west she'd taken a job teaching in a grammar school in Hawaii. The school was in a little town called Pipikio. All of this was told to me later by my mother's older sister. My mother and I moved in with a friend who lived in a little beach cottage on the north shore of the island near an old mill. Pipikio Mill. We were about 12 miles north of Hilo. This was in 1960. The fen's name was Chuck. Her real name was Charlotte something, but apparently everyone called her Chuck. My aunt had a photo she showed me of me playing in the sand with some breakers in the background. I'm wearing something that looks like overalls put on backward. Chuck's drinking beer from a can. And one morning Chuck woke my mother and me up and asked if we wanted to see a tidal wave. I don't remember any of this. I was in pajamas and my mother put a robe on me and we trotted down the beach and looked around the point to the north. I told my mother I was scared and she said we'd go back to the house if the water got too high. We saw the ocean suck itself out to sea smoothly and quietly in the muck of the sand and some flipping and turning white bellied fish that had been left behind. Then we saw it come back without any surf or real noise like the Tide coming in. In time lapse photography, it came past the high tide mark and just up to our toes. Then it receded again. Some wave, my mother told me. She lifted me up so I could see the end of it. Some older boys who lived out on Mamaloa highway sprinted past us, chasing the water. They got way out, the mud spraying up behind their heels, and the water came back again, this time even smaller. The boys, as far out as they were, were still only up to their waists. We could hear how happy they to seemed, sounded. Chuck told us the show was over and we headed up the beach to the house. My mother wanted me to walk, but I wanted her to carry me. We heard a noise, and when we turned we saw the third wave. It was already the size of the lighthouse out at Waialia. They'd gotten me into the cottage and halfway up the stairs to the second floor when the walls blew in. My mother managed to slide me onto a corner of the roof that was spinning a half a foot above the water. Chuck went under and didn't come up again. My mother was carried out to sea, still hanging onto me and the roof chunk. She'd broken her hip and bitten through her lower lip. We were picked up later that day by a little boat near Hanohina. She was never the same after that, my aunt told me. This was maybe by way of explaining why I'd been put up for adoption a few months later. My mother had gone to teach somewhere in Alaska. Somewhere away from the coast, my aunt added with a smile. She pretended she didn't know exactly where I'd been. Left with the Franciscan sisters at the Catholic orphanage in Kahili. On the day of my graduation, one of the sisters who'd taken an interest in me, grabbed both of my shoulders and shook me and said, what is it you want? What's the matter with you? They weren't bad questions as far as I was concerned. I saw my aunt that once, the year before college. My fiance, many years later, asked if we were going to invite her to the wedding, and then later that night said, I guess you're not going to answer, huh? Who decides when the time's right to have kids? Who decides how many kids to have? Who decides how they're going to be brought up? Who decides when the parents are going to stop having sex and stop listening to one another? Who decides when everyone's not just going to walk out on everyone else? These are all group decisions, mutual decisions, decisions that a couple makes in consultation with one another. I'm stressing that because it doesn't always work that way. My wife's goal oriented. Sometimes I can see her to do list on her face when she looks at me. It makes me think she doesn't want me anymore, and the idea is so paralyzing and maddening that I lose track of myself. I just step in place and forget where I am for a minute or two. What are you doing? She asked once outside a restaurant, and of course I can't tell her because then what do I do with whatever follows? We have one kid, Donald, named for the single greatest man my wife has ever known. That would be her father, Donald, 7. When he's in a good mood, he finds me in the house and wraps his arms around me, his chin on my hip. When he's in a bad mood, I have to turn off the TV to get him to answer. He has a good arm and good Hyundai coordination, but he gets easily frustrated. Who's that sound like? My wife always says when I point it out. He loses everything. He loses stuff even if you physically put it in his hands when he's on his way home. Gloves, hats, knapsacks, lunch money, a bicycle, homework, pencils, pens, his dog, his friends, his way. Sometimes he doesn't worry about it. Sometimes he's distraught if he starts out not worrying about it. Sometimes I make him distraught when I tell these stories. I'm Mr. Glass Half Empty, which is all by way of getting around to what my wife calls the central subject, which is my ingratitude. Do I always have to start with the negatives? Don't I think he knows when I talk about him that way? She says, you're too harsh is the way my father in law put it. At the time he was sitting on my front porch and sucking down my beer. He said he thought of it as a kind of mean spiritedness. I had no comeback for him at the time. You weren't very nice to my parents, my wife mentioned when they left. Friends commiserate with her on the phone. My father in law is a circuit court judge. I run a seaplane charter out of Ketchikan Wild Wings Aviation. My wife snorts when I answer the phone. That way my father in law tells her, who knows, maybe I'll make a go of it. And if the thing does go under, I can always fly geologists around for one of the energy companies, even knowing what I make. He says that number one on her to do list is another kid. She says Donald very much wants a little brother. I haven't really heard him address the subject. She wants to know what I want? She asks with her mouth set like she's already figured the odds that I'm going to let her down. It makes me what she calls unresponsive. She's been on me about it for a year now. And two months ago, after three straight days of our being polite to one another. Good morning, How'd you sleep? And avoiding brushing even shoulders when passing through doorways, I made an appointment with a Dr. Calvin at Bartlett Regional about a vasectomy. Normally couples come in together, he told me at the initial consult. This whole thing's been pretty hard on her, I told him. Apparently it's an outpatient thing and if I opt for the simpler procedure, I could be out of his office and home in 45 minutes. He quoted me $1,000, but not much out of pocket because our health insurance should cover most of it. I was told to go off and give it some thought and get back in touch if and when I was ready to schedule it. I called back two days later and lined it up for the Saturday before Memorial Day. That'll give you some time to rest up afterwards. The girl who did the scheduling pointed out he had a pretty big trauma when he was a baby. My wife reminded her mom a few weeks ago. They didn't realize I was at the kitchen window. A couple of traumas, actually. She said it like she understood that it was going to be a perennial on her to do list. So for the last two months I've gone around the house like a demolition expert who's already wired the entire thing to blow and keeps rechecking the charges and connections. I'm going to stop there with that perversal number. Then I'll read a really short short and then we'll get back to Nora's past. This is called Proto Scorpions of the Silurian, and when you have the emotional inner life of a 10 year old and a very nerdy background, you tend to have stories titled things like Proto Scorpions of the Silurian. I was recently taking a pile of books out of the science library, the college where I work, and the woman who was checking me out said, can I ask you a question? I was like, sure. And she was like, what do you do? It's like there's always a completely different okay, and this is on for those of you who can't bear to look up page 24. It's a crappy rainy morning in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I'm home from seventh grade with a sore throat and my parents and brother are fighting and I'm trying every so often to stay out of it. Jonathan Winters is on Merv Griffin doing his improv thing with a stick. My father is beside himself because he thinks my mother throughout the Newsweek he's been saving to show my brother it had war casualties on the COVID You couldn't find your ass with both hands in a banjo, he tells her, though she's not looking. Go take a shit for yourself, she tells him. On her way through to the living room. He slams drawers in the kitchen. When he gets like this, he stops seeing what's in them. We have to double check everywhere he's looked to find anything. All of this is probably going to make my brother go off, and we all know it. But none of us can stop. My brother was institutionalized at 16 and released eight months later. It was at Yale, New Haven, a teaching hospital, and they either didn't have much of an idea of what to do with him or they were totally at a loss, depending on who you talk to. God forbid we should go somewhere, my mother says from the living room. She's smoking and keeping to herself. What we should do instead is show each other magazines. Maybe you should go somewhere, my father tells her. My brother and I are paying 500. Rummy. He's kicking my ass for a while. I was kicking his. He's quiet, like he's trying to concentrate. He hates when my father goes out of his way to do something for him. He pats his hair, which is falling out because of the medication, the way you check your pockets for something before you leave the house. His eyes are getting scarier, distracted and unfocused. He takes a break to make a tuna sandwich. White bread, no mayonnaise. He forks it out of the can and tries to spread it around. The tuna doesn't cooperate. He clears his throat a lot. My mother is still talking to herself. I try a joke. He gets that look you get when bile backs up. He's at this point 18 or 19 and has, as he puts it, his whole fucking life ahead of him. I ask my father why he's home from work today. What are you, a cop? He goes. I'm flipping my cards and debating whether to look at my brothers while he makes the sandwich. I'm also poking through a book I took out from the library. It has a giant scorpion on the COVID and you have to take something out and do a report every week. It always takes forever to find something that's even halfway interesting. I get good grades, which is what I do instead of talking to people. My parents think I'm going to college, my father says when people ask that. It's the one thing this family hasn't fucked up. Pre Arcturus gigas, it says, was over a meter long. I try pronouncing the name under my breath. You're all right, my brother says, eyeing me. That turns out to be a scorpion three feet long. There's a life size picture of the fossil's pedipalps, movable things near the mouth that help shovel the prey in, next to a photo of ones from the largest scorpion. Today it's like hunting knives next to fingernail pairings. My father starts rooting through the garbage under the sink, swearing. My mother calls it saying the rosary. Don't go through the garbage, she tells him. It's not in the garbage. Nobody's watching the TV in the den. Scorpions apparently went nuts during the Carboniferous period, which was way before the dinosaurs, according to what the book calls the fossil record. But our science teacher says the fossil record is a joke, that it's like saying we could figure out who lived in the US by going through 12 dumpsters. Sitting there at the table, waiting, I come across these things from before the Carboniferous that weren't even scorpions. Protoscorpions. They have like, no eyes, no claws. Who knows, they may just be lousy fossils. My father starts shaking the plastic garbage can upside down into the sink. We can smell it from where we are. I have no idea what you're doing, my brother tells him. My mother says he better not be making a mess there. You son of a bitch, my father goes, pulling out the magazine. What do you want from me? My brother says when he holds it up. Dance. After a minute my father starts cleaning everything up, dropping stuff back into the cans liner. I start winning at rummy. Fucking Cincinnati Kid, my brother goes, watching me tote up. I'm the Kid with all the answers, I tell him. You can see him wondering how I meant that and then figuring it's not worth finding out. So here's the article I was talking about, my father tells him. There's a muffin wrapper stuck to it. Very nice, my brother goes. He's rearranging the suits in his hand. He's starting to look worse. He doesn't do almost anything but work out, and his arms, when he flexes them, rip the T shirt sleeves. I'm out, I tell him again and fan the cards out between us. I catch him with another big hand. He sits there with his eyes on me, setting one molar on another while he does the math, I page around some more. In the book there's a drawing of something that looks like a shingle with some antennae. It looks like I'm showing off, beating him while reading a book, but it's somewhere to put my eyes so I can't bring myself to shut it. You're playing cards or reading? My father wants to know. He can see my brother's face. The library, my mother says from the other room. That's the only place anybody in this family goes. Where are we gonna go? It's a fucking downpour, my brother tells her. She doesn't answer. My father wipes the sponge around the rim of the sink, finishing the cleanup. I'm given a dream hand, a run and a half right off his deal, and the card I need after that is the first one he discards. I think about not saying anything. Then I go ahead. I'm out again, I tell him, putting my cards down to show him. He pulls his hands back to his lap and sits there. Then he turns the whole table over at its highest point. The whole thing's up over my head. A few minutes after it hits, the neighbor across the street calls to see if everything's alright. Later, when everything's quiet, I'm still in the kitchen. There's a divot in the linoleum where the table edge came down. I'm in the corner with my back to the cabinets. My brother's in his room, my mother is in hers. My father heard his back wrestling my brother up the stairs. He's got the heating pad on it. One end of the pad is tucked into his belt so it looks like he's plugged into the wall. There's tuna in my sock. My throat's still sore. There's not enough self pity to go around. Is he your brother or not? My father's asking me. Yeah, I tell him. So you want to help him? He wants to know. Yeah, I tell him, tearing up. Well then, why don't you help him? He wants to know. Because there's what we want and what we do. I'd figured out even then. You want to help him? He asks me again. Not really, I tell him, sitting there. Not really, I tell myself now. Thank you, Thank you. I have a friend who's a poet who says he always tries to read one poem at a reading that makes people want to come up and hug him and he goes, you're kind of the opposite of that. So what would we like to talk about. Yeah. So I'm always curious about the inspiration, especially as a short story writer. Are you? And I also didn't bother Tate getting this question, but I'm so curious about it. How much of this is your own experience? How much is what you've read? How much of it is just totally fictional, like you haven't read anything about it, you didn't experience it? As you might guess, it's sort of an unstable mix of everything. Some stories are quite a bit more autobiographical than others. The number of tidal waves I've lived through is very small. The number of family quarrels I've lived through is very large. But normally what will happen in terms of inspiration is. Especially with these stories. It so happens that all of these are first person stories, so a lot of them are voice driven. So it's a voice that starts sort of ranting, sort of an obsessive voice, and that in a lot of ways starts to dictate plot. In some ways, with something like Proto Scorpions, I would be taking stuff out of the library that just interests me, and I would be thinking, who on earth, who else could possibly be interested in this? You know, there'll be books that literally nobody else has ever taken out because they're so dweeby, and I'll be like. Then it falls to me to figure out why in any way, why this has any kind of emotional resonance for me at all. And that starts to link into all sorts of things that are directly autobiographical in terms of my inner life, but not particularly autobiographical in terms of events. And that's how the story starts to get built. Essentially. I start to say to myself, well, why it isn't, in other words, that I'm coming across stuff that I just think would make a good story, like a ripping yarn. It's like this I keep thinking about, and this I stop thinking about. There might be something where I go, wow, what a great story. And I never think about it again. And that doesn't become a short story. And then there's something else where I go, why do I keep thinking about this particular wave? What does it mean for me? So then it becomes a kind of cool thing in which the world leaves me alone to research it. And. And nobody says, why are you reading about a wave in Alaska? Because I go, I'm working. And then I just read all this stuff and sometimes nothing comes of it except that I had a sort of fun, dweeby week reading about. And at other times I'll start to piece together why this has Some resonance for me, and it'll start to go in that direction. That may be long winded and not helpful, but it's good to start. What else would you ask if you could. Yeah, apologies if you've answered this before, but could you just talk a little bit about how you approach short story writing versus novel writing? There is a significant difference in that I need more fraudulent superstructure in advance to believe that I know what I'm doing with a novel. Both are such acts of hubris that you find yourself going, what makes you think you can do this again? But with a novel, you need to pretend to a much greater organizational talent. So with a novel, what I'll have are these flowcharts and outlines and things like that that I can get up in the morning and go, look, I know what I'm doing. There it is. Chapter five, Biff Goes to the Beach. I see where I'm headed. But they are largely illusory. And I know that something's starting to work. Finally, when I'm starting to violate that form that I've set up there. It's pretty rare that I would have an outline for a short story. I might have some notes for myself that, you know, this has to happen and then that has to happen and then that. Especially with some of the stories that are based on a huge amount of research, there's a lot of material that I have to sort of organize. But the sense of fraud is much larger in a novel. And so that has to be combated in some way. I guess that would be the best way of putting it. There's a long. You know, with a short story, if I'm four or five weeks into writing a short story, I know whether I'm a fraud or not, this is either going to be a functioning short story. I don't know how good it is, but it's either going to be a functioning short story or it isn't. You know, that could take a year with a novel, which is a long time to be fooling yourself. So it's a little frightening. You know, you go downstairs and everybody's like, how's your novel? And you're like, mmm, fine. And it's totally. You know, you pick up the manuscript pages and it's like, Sally, which one was Sally again? You know, that kind of thing. Have you ever written something where you didn't have any feeling of fraudulency? No, not in the sense of. What I mean by feeling effluently is, why should you be writing about this kind of thing? No, that never goes away. That never goes away. You're trying to gain authority, trying to gather authority as you go. So you go, why should. By the time I'm finished, I hope I'll read it and go, all right, well, you talked yourself into something anyway. But going into it, you could have all the memory you want and all the research you want, and you're still going, why should you be able to do this? Somebody was saying to me, because I have a lot of weird narrators. One of the narrators in this is the Executioner at the height of the Reign of Terror in France, a real historical figure named Saintson. Somebody said, where did you think you could get off writing about him? And I was like, where did I think I'd get off? Anybody. Anybody. Not only like, my mother, but what about me 20 years ago? Where do I get off? I mean, it's all an act of chutzpah, and it's all about trying to employ the empathetic imagination. And, I mean, I'm trying to. I guess, sort of what I'm suggesting is, why even have the imagination if you're not going to push it, if you're not going to try and do this kind of wild stuff? And I have some stuff that's pretty autobiographical in terms of events, but not very much. My life is a little dull for that. There are writers who have lived off the autobiographical events of their lives very well. I am not one of those writers. Yeah. Is there one form that you prefer? Haiku? No, I'm teasing. Little Frog on a leaf trembling. That's my favorite. Yeah. I think I prefer the short story form, mostly because there's so much less money and audience in it, and I really. I crave that sort of obscurity. I like the way people go. I love literary fiction. I'll go, do you want to read stories? No, no, I don't want to do that. I don't like literary fiction that much. When I was starting out in the dawn of time and you wrote short stories, there was a real push towards the novel as a more prestigious form. I went to graduate school at Brown. I got my MFA at Brown, and my teachers there would say, really good story. So when are you going to write a novel? Like the Big Time. And they weren't thinking only about the marketplace. I mean, obviously the marketplace prefers novels. But there was a real sense in the literary world that if you were really a great writer, and to the point where people like Flannery o' Connor were hugely undervalued for you years. Because where was her list of novels, that kind of thing? What she wanted are novels. Preferably big novels, preferably big novels that dealt with big issues. Smith went to the corner. What was up with Transcendentalism? Smith thought that kind of novel proved that you had the chops. So we were always being pushed towards novels. What I like about the short story form is how little furniture moving there is in it. With a lot of novels, you feel like, okay, I guess we're gonna set the scene for a while here, aren't we? That kind of thing. And I get impatient with that. I have that 10 year old sensibility, get to the good stuff. So I probably prefer the short. Also, the short story has that in terms of that fraudulent thing, less of a sense of risk, like, oh my God, is this gonna work? Because if this doesn't gonna work with a novel, is this gonna work? Because it's all right, it's six years of my life. What the hell? Yeah. Obviously with a book of short stories, it must be tough to figure out what order you want to put them in or how you relate one to the next one. It is. What is the process? Or maybe is there something in this particular book that you went through that. It's a really good question. I mean, most of the writers I know who put together collections ask that same question, how do you do it? Because I don't do it. Well, I think you could pretty much guarantee that if you look at a writer's collection of stories, look at the first one and the last one, those are ones the writer's fond of because it seems like a bad strategy to go, here's a shitty one to open with. And you're like, I don't like this one. I know, I know, but I. The last one has a little bit of that quality too. Right. Except in my case, the last one was easy to pick. The last one was one I thought, I don't know what you follow this with. And so that's. Well, if you have nothing you can follow it with, put it at the end. Right. Normally the stories that you're most worried about you bury somewhere in the middle. And you also, I think, try to make it seem like it's a more varied collection than it is. So, like, I have a story in there narrated by Aeschylus at Marathon. I also have a story in there narrated by a hapless auxiliary who's working with the Romans on Hadrian's Wall. Now, to the uninitiated, the Greeks and the Romans are not Very different. Even though to the Greeks and the Romans, they were quite different. So I wouldn't put those two stories back to back, for example. But, you know, this is goofy, like third grade pragmatism. There's not much else that goes into the design. What I'll do when I'm trying to arrange the design is I'll actually put the stories on the floor and read the last page and the first page of each and think, how do these work as. But it's kind of pointless anyway, because very few people read stories through that way. I mean, I know I don't. I sort of look at the things and, like, I get an intriguing title or I go, oh, that one's short. Or I read, you know, the flat copy and I go, oh, where's the one with the octopus? You know, I look around for that. So I jump all over the place. So I imagine most people do, but writers fret about it a lot, mostly because writers fret about stupid things a lot. We sort of, you know, what order should it be in. But people don't read it in order anyway. Yeah. What's the story behind the image on the COVID Oh, what's the story behind the image on the COVID Writers really, really fret about their covers and publishers don't give a shit for the most part. But what they do is publishers have to deal with. They have editorial people, they have marketing people, they have art people, and they have all finally agreed on a cover and now they have to let the author in on it. And wouldn't it be wonderful if the author didn't like it after all of that? Right. And so usually the way it works is the publishers will say, here's a cover, we all love it. If you don't like it, let us know by yesterday. But we just think, oh, my God, it's so amazing. That's not true of poetry, of course, because they despair of selling poetry anyway. So put whatever you want on that. I have a friend, in fact, the same friend, Mr. Huggy, who he gets with his editor and he just go to print shops in the Village and they just spend like a day picking out the perfect image for the book. And I'm just like, oh, that sounds so great. And they're like, yeah, well, we're not going to sell it anyway. Put whatever you want. I don't care what you want. Put whatever you want on it. We'll try and do a good reproduction of it. But they still have, with literary fiction, they still have hopes of selling it. So they try to run that by the author in this case. The first version of this cover was the same Venn diagram, the same lettering, an incredibly ugly institutional bathroom, green, you know, that kind of mental institution green thing. And an engraved figure like that. Except instead of a one headed wrestling pair, which is itself enigmatic enough, there was a sort of neurasthenic 19th century dandy who was vomiting into his hand. And I said, you know, I'm insulted in about seven different ways by this cover. Which of my stories seems to you to conjure up a neurasthenic 19th century dandy who's vomiting into his hand? And the editor said, well, he's not. It's more abstract than that. He's not vomiting into his hand. I said, well, he's got a hand like this and stuff is coming out of his mouth into his hand. They go, yeah, we don't think it's vomit. And I go, what? And I go, well, I don't want to go on a book tour and go, you know, it's not vomit. They said, it's not vomit. So don't worry about that. What you're hoping for with a cover is that you won't have a horrifying thing like that in this case. I had to, you know, I said, put me in touch with the designer. The designer said, oh, I'm so sorry. What don't you like about it? I'm like the gay guy with the vomit. And he said, all right, I'll change the color and I'll change the central figure. And that's what he did. And the COVID is actually. I mean, it was on. I don't know how many of you get New York magazine, but New York magazine does this approval matrix, you know, hi. Low and brilliant and stupid. And they had the COVID up in the top corner of like, brilliant. And at first I got all excited because I thought it was my book. I was like, oh my God. They put my. And they were like, well, the COVID is amazing. Okay, but still, you know, it's like a little bit of radiated glory. Anyway, so what you're really hoping for is something. I mean, the good news was I was giving a talk at a writer's conference about how historical, literary, historical fiction works. And I was saying you have this gigantic area of non overlap with your subject. If you're writing about Hadrian's Wall. And then you have this little tiny area of overlap and essentially it's a Venn diagram. And that tiny area of overlap is the emotional core of your story. And then this guy's got the Venn diagram on there. Anyway, so it turns out, clearly, with the neurasthenic vomiting guy, he was on the right page with me. But you do hope that you're not going to end up with one of those kind of covers. Yeah. Which writers do you consider influencer? Oh, boy. A lot. A lot of writers. The sort of Pantheon group that you might expect. I mentioned Flannery o' Connor before, and. And Nabokov is a big hero of mine and Joyce and people like that. But when I was younger, I remember feeling hugely empowered by coming across somebody like Salinger and saying to a teacher, can you do this? Is this like literature? Because when I was younger, I mean, I was the first person in my family to go to college, and for me, literature was like what Henry James did. And you had to be from a place like Henry James came from the do literature. And so there were writers like Salinger who made clear to me that, in fact, it was possible to do another kind of thing altogether. And that was probably a bigger influence than I even remember now, in some ways, to know that. I mean, a lot of writers talk about this, that writer that sort of makes them feel like maybe this is possible. And those writers are often not the most intimidating ones. The first time I read Lolita, I was like, oh, this isn't possible. You want to write? Try writing Ulysses. I don't think so. Maybe I'll just block hats. They influence my work a lot. I mean, I think a lot of people have said, would you stop teaching if you ever made any money on your writing? I don't think I would, because teaching is a really nice way of disciplining your mind, especially about literature you love. Because it's easy, I think, to have a little rap about some part of something complicated and to be ready at the cocktail party. You know, it's like chapter four of David Foster Wallace's book goes like this. And people are like, that's dazzling. I know. I've been dining out on this for years. And then they go, what's happening in chapter three? And you go check. When you teach, you have to be able to figure out stuff that you didn't initially engage. How does this work? I don't even what's going on. And that is a really nice way of disciplining your mind about other people's machines, I think. And that's very useful, I think. I mean, obviously there are a lot of down things about teaching, too. You have a giant mountain of stuff Comes in all the time. And Williams students, as you've known from already interacting with Nora, are hugely entitled. So, you know, I mean, that's what they're getting for their money, right? Like, can't meet during your office hours. Does Sunday at 6am Work for you? I'm like, no, I'll be over. I mean, no, Nora wasn't like that. Of course, she never did that. Nora was. She was. She withdrew into herself in a kind of horrible, dysfunctional way. But usually there's a more outgoing, needy type. Yeah. How helpful were your MSA classes improving your writing? How important? You know what I tell my students who are trying to decide whether or not to go to MFA is what an MFA is offering is some random group of readers who say they're going to work hard on your stuff and a kind of a motley crew of faculty who are going to look at it at one point or another as well. If you go to a two year program, you'll probably have three or four different fiction teachers, and if you're really lucky, one of them will be hugely helpful. That would be a good percentage. Does that mean MFA programs are useless? No, because very often they give you time to write. They hook you up with peers who do turn out to be smart. If you have 15 peers at Iowa, it's almost certain that one of them is going to say something smart about your work. And that's more than you have at home, probably. On the other hand, it also means that most people tend to come into MFA programs expecting a lot more than they get out of them. First of all, if you go into a good. If you had any kind of good undergraduate writing class, the MFA class is not going to be much better. And if it's not a good MFA program, it may not be better at all. And that's a shock because now you're paying for it yourself. You weren't even sure you wanted to do this, and you're like, I can't believe this. These people are as stupid as my undergraduate friends were. And you're like, hello. You know, it used to be that there were like eight MFA programs. Now there's like eight in Boston or eight in this part of Cambridge or something. I mean, they've really proliferated. Because what university and colleges have figured out is all you need for an MFA program is a desk in a room and a guy with a drinking problem, essentially. So the capital outlay is very small, and then you can start charging money, essentially. So a lot of people are disappointed, which is not to say there's no reason to go. One of the things I think is goofy is the thing that gets reiterated in the media every so. Every four months or something, which is, you know, those MFAs, they just impose this style on people, and you're just like, I don't know what MFA program you've been at lately, but I wish to God they would impose this style. You know, the idea that there are all these people out at Brown who come in as these or at Iowa or at Stanford or whatever, who come in as these varied writers and then are just, like, driven through this cookie cutter so that they all come out writing quiet, realist stories about women sitting in tubs and the bathwater changes temperature or something. It's crazy. MFA programs do a lot of bad things, but homogenizing American literature is not really one of them. Not really. I mean, much more. The bigger charge you can lay at the feet of MFA programs is they're wasting people's times in some ways. You know, they're schmooze, you know, give me your money, sit down and write. You're like, oh, I guess I could have done this at home. But some people can't do it at home. You know, some people. Some of my students will say to me, I've been out for six years. I've been trying to write my novel, and I will not do it right. Writers are geniuses at procrastination. They will do anything other than write. And so a lot of them need to be given deadlines by somebody other than their lover, Essentially, yeah. The post MFA years. Coming to terms with the depression. You mean that whole thing? You know, there's such a constellation of problems involved in the post MFA years that one doesn't know where to begin. There's the sterility. There's the no. Do I have any advice? I guess one of the things that would be most useful would be the other thing that writers are really good at is beating themselves up and thereby screwing up the future. Sort of like, I can't believe I didn't write Tuesday. I can't believe it. You know, like, today's Wednesday. I know. I blew all of Tuesday. And you're like, today's Wednesday. I know, but I just ruined Tuesday, so fuck Wednesday. And you're like, this doesn't seem all that helpful. I know. So one way of dealing with the post MFA would be to go, that's behind me. It's like a bad affair. Let's just let it go. Right? It's like, if I said, do you want to meet somebody? No, because three years ago I was with this idiot guy, so forget it. Clearly I shouldn't, you know, so there's a way in which I've known people who have. They've won writing fellowships and they haven't produced as much as they wanted to, or they've gone to an MFA program and they haven't. And they use that as a reason to not write. I guess I'm not ever going to write because I gave myself a three week window and what did I do? And you're like, well, way to stay at it, you know. One of the things I tell my more talented students is that the best way to know whether you should be writing fiction is that you need to do it to feel good about yourself, even though doing it almost never makes you feel good about yourself. If that constellation is operating, you might have that rare combination of sad character traits that would push you towards fiction writing. Other questions? Yeah, when you start a project, what kind of, what part of the story do you start with? You start with character that needs to be heard. None of my characters really need to be heard. In this case, it would either be something like an image that's staying with me, you know, why do I care about this wave in Lituya Bay? Or it would be a voice that seems insistent in some ways, that seems to be obsessive about something. I don't get quite self righteous enough that I'm like, this person needs to be heard. Right. Step back. But I do get, I do think, well, I'm interested in this person. This person seems a little nutsy in a way that interests me. I think a lot of the more compelling literary voices are obsessive. Whether they sound obsessive or not, they're not often. You're not often imagining some of the great narrators of literature as diffident. I could go after the white whale, I don't have to. Or we could stay home. So there's something emotionally driving these people that's interesting and it continually complicates itself. And you're teaching yourself that as you go along. So as long as you're interested, you're hoping somebody else will be interested. But that's really where it begins. Yeah. How do you feel about reading your work aloud? You're suggesting I should feel differently than I do. I just feel like it's so good because usually you're writing for people to read themselves. That's true. How do I handle it? Clearly, erratically. I mean, on the one Hand. It's the only chance writers get to perform because normally it's at a very private exchange. You write. It's a weird way of communicating with the world. Like, I really need you to know this. Go take it in a room and tell me what you think. So readings are a little bit different in that you can actually hear people reacting, or, as in the case, like today, not reacting. But normally there's a little bit of a sense of actual human contact that's sort of pleasant. It's also, if you're obscure like me, it's an exercise in humility. Because if Stephen King goes out on the road, he's like, oh, my God, I am loved. And if I go out on the road, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's right. Now I remember why my dad wanted me to do law school. Now it's all clear to me. Right. So a lot of writers that I admire don't do the reading thing or almost never do it because they think, you know, what is the point of this? I'm going to go out there and discover that I have four fans, none of whom think I read it the way they would like to hear it or something like that. I guess I do it partially because I'm trying to build an audience and I'm enough of a nihilist. Or. Nihilist. Yeah, nihilist. Probably too a narcissist, that I would be happy standing in front of a group of people sometimes. But you do at almost anything I ever do. There's that moment when I ask myself that same question. Why exactly. Why are you here again? Because, remember, as I said, I think writers are really good at procrastinating. So this is another way of not working. And while I was up here, Joyce Carolo wrote a novel. Yeah. Do you have a favorite location or time period? No, I don't. That would be fun to have a. I'm the early Civil War guy. I do Shiloh. And no, I go all over the place. I don't really have a favorite. In fact, I was reading with Michael Cunningham a couple months ago, and he was going after me and he said, you know, I love when Jim gets up. We never know what century we're going to be in. He just launches into something and we have to go. No, this is Bronze Age kind of thing. So I'm. Yeah, whatever I'm interested in, I do. Yeah. Do you ever miss your characters when you're done writing a story? Wow, do I look that sad? Whenever I finish a novel or a book? I miss them. I want to know what they're up to, what happened? You know, it's interesting. Writers have this kind of cold blooded thing going where like, I'll get letters. I'll often finish a story or a novel in media race where it's like, and they were. And it kind of stops. Like, I don't have big florid codas wherever. And then everybody was laid to rest in their tomb. And so I'll get letters saying, whatever happened to what happens to Frank afterwards? And I'll go, what? What? And it's exactly like if someone said to you, you know, if you go beyond space, what do you think's out there? And you're like, I don't know. I mean, really, your imagination works so hard up to this moment. And then it really does sort of go, okay, I don't want to know anything more about. And I actually start speculating. Exactly. Like a reader. People go, so what do you think happens? I don't know, maybe they went to lunch and they go, but he doesn't eat. Oh, right, right. Couldn't be that. But it really is a lack of interest. I haven't been tempted to come back to characters, which is another way of answering your question. Some, you know, I mean, obviously writers like Philip Roth do, partially because they go, you know, this guy is almost as inexhaustible as I am. I need to come back to him. I don't often do that. I have, and other writers have, and this is an interesting variation on that. I have taken other writers characters and given them futures with their permission, and they've done the same with me. So that a writer named Charlie Baxter took the protagonist of my second novel who I thought had died. That's certainly the way I imagined it. And he just had him, like wandering down a supermarket aisle and chatting with his protagonist. And I'm reading his book in manuscript and I go, hey, that's my guy. And I did the same with a protagonist of one of Ron Hansen's stories. And so some of that goes on, which is kind of fun, but that's really just writers doing private, weird things with each other. Although in the case of the latter thing, a guy. Actually, both Ron Hansen's story and mine were in the Atlantic Monthly. And a guy actually wrote into the Atlantic Monthly and was like, does anybody realize this is somebody else's character? Can he do that? It was great. I was like, get the lawyers. Yes, you can do that. Turns out it's like, Ahab, you don't own Ahab. You know, that kind of thing. Other questions. I'm wondering how much of writing, the process of writing sort of feeds back into one's life. I can see how one's life inspires one's writing. Well, loved ones would say it feeds back in a particularly distressing way, which is you have mood swings, right. Sometimes Daddy is like, yeah, you're the best kid ever. Yeah. And then other times, like, get away from Daddy. And so it's like, how did it go today, dad? You know, that kind of thing. So that. And also, obviously, there's a kind of a feedback loop in terms of what you're experiencing, feeding into what you're working on. Right. So that when I read, like, even the thing I just read for you, when I read the stuff about the narrator who has a son who loses everything, my son will go, I don't lose everything. And I go, I didn't say you did. But it's that great autobiographical fallacy where people will go, were you in a tidal wave? I forget that. Yeah. When you start writing fiction, try this yourself. Just go, yes. It was a character much like me who everyone wanted to have sex with. And people are like, I never realized that. Oh, my God, you'll actually see people going, I hadn't. Oh, I have to rethink this whole thing. I thought she was unattractive, but clearly, no. It is a kind of loop. But it's not a loop you're totally in control of. But I think if you are around writers, the first thing you would say is, oh, my God, the mood swings. Because, you know, you. One of the things about, you know, the great Julian Barnes line, a lot of people don't write fiction, and no harm ever comes to them. And what he's talking about is how much that kind of creative work involves sometimes having days where you just think, wow, all I did was confront my own limitations today. I mean, nothing good came out of today at all. As opposed to, you turned in a report and somebody said, that's not the best report you've ever done. I know, but come on. As opposed to, you know, you write a couple sentences and you're like, I spent the day doing that, okay? And I can't let anybody ever see these sentences. I had a writer or friend write me in despair years ago, and he said, I'll give you an idea what my life has been like lately. He said, yesterday I had a living room quote chock a block with furniture, unquote. And it was just the most despairing little note he was like, clearly I should die. They were like, you know, chock a block. All right. It's stupid, but he's like, no, I should put out my eyes. You know? I mean, it's just. It's all or nothing in some ways. Another question? Yeah. Who's the guy who didn't write on Tuesday? The one who didn't write on Tuesday and had screwed up Wednesday? Yes, actually, I think it is. You recognized the voice, didn't you? Yeah, that's the same guy, exactly. I forgot about the Tuesday thing, but, yep, that's him. There's more of them out there than you think. Probably notice I'm invading your personal space here as well. Hey, baby, come here. ALL what else? What? Else? Would you like to. No. Yeah, that'll shut people down right away, like. Okay, well, I guess we've had enough of that. Thank you. So uncomfortable. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Actionable. I guess we can move along now and get you out on the fucking street. Shut the doors behind you. Okay. Well, thank you all for coming. Thank you.