A young woman in the midst of cancer treatment goes on a road trip in a broken down El Camino with her no-good ex-boyfriend. A man working as a ghoul at a sort of Halloween theme park learns that his whole life has been a lie. A gay man is forced to come out over and over again to his senile misogynist father. A mother’s moral outrage on behalf of her son goes seriously awry. Two new collections of short stories tell stories about people living on the edge of a society that is failing them. George Saunders’ “Liberation Day” is filled with wry humor, even as his characters are often trapped by their own foolishness. The characters in Jess Walter’s collection, “The Angel of Rome,” are often filled with humor and hope, even as they struggle against poverty and indifference. OPB’s Geoff Norcross talks to Saunders and Walter about the art of writing short stories about our time.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: A young woman in the midst of cancer treatment goes on a road trip in a broken down El Camino with her no good ex-boyfriend. A man working as a ghoul at a sort of Halloween theme park learns that his whole life has been a lie. A gay man is forced to come out over and over again to his senile misogynist father. A mother’s moral outrage on behalf of her sons goes seriously awry. Two new collections of short stories tell stories about people living on the edge of a society that is failing them. Today, we’re gonna bring you a conversation with the authors of those collections at the Portland Book Festival. I’ll let Geoff Norcross introduce you.
Geoff Norcross: George Saunders is the number one New York Times best selling author of 11 books, including A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. Congratulations by the way. Tenth of December: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the inaugural Folio Award, The Braindead Megaphone, and the critically acclaimed collections, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Pastoralia and In Persuasion Nation. His most recent book is called Liberation Day and he teaches the creative writing program at Syracuse University.
Jess Walter, to my immediate left, is the author of 10 books, most recently, the short story collection, The Angel of Rome and Other Stories. His other nine include the national best seller, The Cold Millions and the number one New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Ruins, The Zero, the finalist for the National Book Award. and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award. His work has been published in 35 languages and his short fiction has appeared three times in Best American Short Stories. Please welcome, to Portland Book Festival, George Saunders and Jess Walter. (extended applause)
I once heard you compare the difference between short story writing and novel writing as the same difference between dating and getting married.
Jess Walter: My wife didn’t like that answer.
Norcross: And I’ve heard other analogies too, like the difference between sprint running and marathon running. And so I want to first start with both of you. Do you know when you start a story, how long it’s going to be?
Walter: We were just talking about this and I thought of swim in the pond in the rain did the best job of sort of explicating how it is to have the writing itself lead the story. And so often, no. I do usually know if it feels like a short story. I’ve only had one short story kind of evolve into a novel. The rest of the time, I do feel like I’m writing something where I can see the end of it. But how long it is, unless I’m purposely writing micro-fiction, sometimes I’ll say I’m gonna write something under 800 words, for me, no. It really is this sort of process of discovery what the next line leads to and the next line. And that becomes so thrilling and joyful that I can’t imagine doing it any other way.
Norcross: You said there is a short story that you decided to go long with it. Does it ever go the other way? Like, you set out to write a novel and then at some point it’s done nothing more, needs to be done here?
Walter: Every every time. You know, novels are just so exhausting. And you take six or seven runs at them. They’re like, you know, trying to climb some peak without oxygen or a tent or anything, you just keep making these attacks on them. And so I have false finishes all the time. My journal is filled with ‘finished the novel today!’ and then two days later ‘back on the novel’ and then ‘this stupid novel, I hate this novel’. And so my finish is about six months, usually a year between the time I think I’m done and the time someone finally rips it out of my hands.
Norcross: What about you, George?
George Saunders: I just assume they’re all stories because that the novel that I wrote, I’m not sure it’s actually a novel. It’s got a lot of, a lot of white spaces, you know. (audience laughter) So I have my basic aesthetic - something like, you know, little toy car, you wind it up, get it under the couch as fast as possible (audience laughter). So really, that’s how I understand all storytelling. Doing something and cutting it down and then as soon as it stops escalating just end it. So I think that’s it’s always I just assume it’s a story unless it tells me otherwise, which it never has.
Norcross: By the way, welcome to the morning of metaphors. We’ve already had five! (audience laughter)
Saunders: Writers, it’s like a metaphor factory. Yeah. six. (audience laughter)
Norcross: Okay. You know George, you once said that from the time you were 15, you wanted to be a short story writer. Is this form kind of where you live artistically?
Saunders: Yeah, very much. I had a really heavy experience with Hemingway early and then after that with Maupassant and Isaac Babel finally. So I just always found it really, I thought it was very cool to be because you weren’t necessarily known, you know, but you were doing something really intense. And even when I was younger you read a story and they don’t always. Let’s say it takes a while to learn how to read a short story. I think they’re not, it’s not an intuitive form. So I could feel that there’s something kind of cool about it and it would take some study to figure out what was the story and what wasn’t? So I thought it was and we went to Syracuse. Tobias Wolff was there. Raymond Carver had just left. So there’s a real feeling that there was a kind of a sacred art form that was difficult to master, you know?
Norcross: Yeah. So rather than touching on all of the short stories in both your collections, I thought that maybe we would drill down on a couple. One from you Jess and one from you George. And George, why don’t we start with you. There’s a story in your collection called Ghoul.
Saunders: Good Luck with the setup on this one. (audience laughter)
Norcross: Yeah, well, I’m gonna give it a try and you can fill in the blanks if you need to. There’s a man named Brian who lives in an underground world known as The Region and his place is this kind of apocalyptic amusement park called The Maws of Hell,
Saunders: That old trope.
Norcross: Oh sure. And it’s all built for these mysterious visitors who never come. But clearly you’re not allowed to say so because employees are punished brutally for even the slightest infraction, like telling the truth. So, with that setup, could you read a passage from this story?
Saunders: Yeah, like a Lassie episode. So he’s just seen some colleagues of his making love in public, which is kind of what they do in this place, like in that one Lassie episode;
Moments after hopping over Gwen and Mr. Frame, I find Mr. Frame sitting across from me at Lunch, in Dining, explaining why he, a married man, was just now mating with Gwen.
Mr. Frame’s wife Ann Frame used to be on Guillotine-Cart Pull Team Five. Those guillotines, being heavy, needing to be pulled over some fake rough terrain, which though made of poly, still must be bumpy to seem real, Ann’s back went out, and she was transferred to Victorian Weekend, a big adjustment, since, instead of being scary, she had to adopt a mindset of mincing and she had to adopt a mindset of mincing and serving. Now she is Cockney Cook: sweet gig! All she has to do is, every half hour, blunder into this formal dining hall, interrupt interrupting some Royals (Visitors) eating in there, then blunder out, knocking over a tea cart while apologizing for humble class origins in a Cockney accent. But alas: apparently her new role has caused marital stress because Mrs. Frame is now constantly practicing her Cockney accent even while on Break in the Room. I try to be a pal by pointing out that Tom himself always takes ample care, prior to the moment of his decapitation,
Saunders: That’s another sidebar.
to appear genuinely terrified. Also re the lightning-burst-thunderclap spate of total darkness that allows him to switch the headless “After” Animatron in for himself on the chopping block before he hops down the DisaHole: does he not always endeavor to do that quickly, so the switch will go unnoticed by our Visitors? Maybe, I suggest, he’s more like Ann than he wishes to acknowledge! Isn’t his quick hopping analogous to Anne’s continually practicing her accent, i.e., a form of admirable professionalism?
“I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t practice hopping into the DisaHole when we’re on break” he says.
“I get that” I say, listening and agreeing being a proven path to friendship. “That sounds frustrating.”
“But she just goes on and on,” he says. “Guv’n’r this,guv’n’r that. And why? For what? “Wants to do a good job?” I say. “For her visitors?”
“Of whom there never are any?” he says, crossly.
Then there is this rather big silence.
“Not that I’m saying there never are any” he says.
“I know you’re not saying that Tom,” I say.
“I should probably just shut up,” he says.
“Probably,” I say.
Jeez, I think, Tom, Mr. Frame, you have really put me in a bad spot!
Rules are rules and friends are friends but rules and friends urges different courses of action upon me, and which shall I choose? (audience applauds)
Norcross: Right. Mm. So the reaction you had to that passage is the same reaction I have to George Saunders books over and over again, which is he’s writing about these hellish scenarios. But yet it’s funny. So can you talk about that? Can you talk about that balance between, you know, winking at us through this awful, awful type of storytelling? (audience laughs)
Saunders: Well Flannery O’Connor said this thing. She said, ‘a man can choose what he writes, but he can’t choose what he makes live.’ So that’s deep. Because it means we might think we’re in a certain lineage. So I always wanted to be Hemingway, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, or any combination. But then, you go to do it and if the heat doesn’t rise, then you have to take a different course. So if you, you know, you might start out wanting to be a string quartet a la Shostakovich. You play your string quartet and everybody nods off. But you notice when you pick up the accordion, people dance. Then you have to - I mean, it’s a big moment, I think, in the young writer’s life - when you go, okay, I don’t get to be who I want to be. I have to be who I have to be.
So for me, the humor is one, but also I like to start off with a really weird premise, you know, kind of a wacky premise that is a little bit off-putting, even for some reason. That’s what I like to do. And then the mission becomes, can I, in spite of all the strangeness and the darkness, can I lead the reader to a place similar to where they might find themselves after a classic short story. So in other words, a place where they feel included and seen and engaged and that the things that actually keep them up at night are somehow coming into the story. So I found that really to do my deepest emotional work, I have to start in a kind of a strange place. I don’t really know why, but I like the challenge of that. Like trying to start with that and the reader’s first reaction might be ‘God, what a strange deal, you know. I think I’ll go watch tv.’ And then if you can kind of give enough breadcrumbs and enough little treats, then they start to go, ‘okay, maybe this is only as strange as the actual world’ and you know…
Norcross: How are these stories as strange as the actual world?
Saunders: Well, I mean, if this story is about somebody who is in a system that is requiring him to lie, you know, I mean, yeah. (audience laughs then applaudes)
Norcross: Or else he gets kicked to death. Jess, let’s bring you in.
Walter: I’m just gonna sneak the phrase ‘prior to his decapitation’ into this story, even though it doesn’t really fit because I’m so envious.
Norcross: Well, it’s interesting, it’s a little different because your story is a little apocalyptic too. But it ends on a different note. It’s called Town and Country and the set up here is a man named Jay is looking for a place where his dad, who is old, is a widower, and has dementia. And he gets a tip that there is a different kind of nursing home in north Idaho. And they go to visit. And so that’s where we can pick up the story.
Walter: The only other thing you need to know about Jay is he’s in his forties and he came out to his parents when he was 20. But his dad has forgotten and in his dementia he has to keep coming out over and over to his father (audience laughter) which I thought would just be the best sisyphean thing one could write about. And they’re very different, Jay and his dad:
It took me a week to find the Town and Country Senior Inn. This was partly because it was nearly 400 miles away. And partly because as the director said over the phone, it was not, technically, a licensed elder care facility. “Wait, which part are you technically not,” I asked, “an elder care facility or licensed?” " You really have to come and see for yourself,” he said. And when I described my father he said, “oh you’re definitely gonna want to come.” So on Saturday I threw dad in the car and we drove seven hours north on twisty Highway 95 straight up the long spine of Idaho.
The Town and Country, it turned out, was an actual motor inn built in the 1950′s on an unincorporated stretch near a stain of a town called State Line. The building had been updated when it was turned into this senior residential hotel, but it was basically the same sprawling seedy, one story motel it had always been. There was a carport fronting the lobby and behind that a chophouse lounge with no windows, a small stage and smoke stained carpeting halfway up the walls. The staff of the Town and Country were dressed not like orderlies or nurses, but like employees of the 1960′s hotel, women in waitress dresses, men in high collared blue jackets and gendarme hats. The grounds, if you could call a gravel parking lot that, were dotted with old people wandering around behind tall fences being steered back to their rooms by men dressed as bellmen and porters. The director of the Town and Country was named Skip. He was three shades of gray, stacked one on top of the other and looked like he might check into the hotel himself soon. He said he’d started this place for his own parents who had run a saloon in one of these old Idaho mining towns. They weren’t really cut out for the kind of place where Grammy does art projects, he said. The Town and Country had a simple, respectful ethos. The elderly folks were not decrepit patients, but hotel guests checked into one of the 40 guest rooms. A few of those rooms were reserved for couples, but most of the guests were single, divorced, widows or widowers. They could do whatever they wanted in their rooms - smoke, drink, screw, watch TV. But in a nod to nostalgia. The TV’s only had four channels and the phones were rotary dial. One necessary concession had been to put in a state of the art sprinkler system and nonflammable bedding. “We do tend to get a few snoozing smokers,” Skip admitted. A continental breakfast was served each morning in the old hotel lobby from 5AM to Noon, although if the guests became sick or non-ambulatory, the food could be delivered to them for a room service fee. Anything extra at the Town and Country would be tacked onto the bill just like at a hotel - laundry, meds, a haircut, all arranged for a fee. There was no group therapy, no activity room, no sing-alongs, no craft projects. There were only two things on the calendar every day. Continental breakfast and beginning at 3:30, dinner and happy hour.
“This is what we’re most proud of,” Skip said. And with a flourish, he produced a thick dinner menu and handed it to my dad. The food was straight out of my childhood. Roast and potatoes, pork chops and applesauce, french dip monte cristo. And the prices - you could have London broil and a baked potato for $4. You could have goulash or spaghetti and meatballs for $2.50. Skip saw my smile. “Yeah, the prices make them really happy. The real price, the price you’ll get on your monthly bill is approximately 4-5 times that.” The bar menu is just as amazing. A screwdriver for $2, a Tom Collins for $2.50, beer for 75 cents. “Our beers are six ounces and we make really weak cocktails,” Skip said. “We can also break up medication and serve it in non-alcoholic drinks, basically soda or tonic water. They don’t mind taking their Coumadin when it comes in a martini glass. We have a light jazz combo that plays standards three nights a week quietly and two nights we have country music. No music, Sundays and Mondays. Lights out at 8, 9 on weekends.”
I looked over. Dad was staring at the menu like it was a time travel portal. “My dad’s been having this other issue.” I said. “His libido.” Skip nodded and chose his words carefully. “The dominant model for elder care focuses of course on longevity and health. But this can be at the cost of what I would call personal choice. At the Town and Country, we want to preserve personal choice, which means,” he smiled and I saw a black eye tooth, “we go through a lot of penicillin.” It was unbelievable. Like a rat pack nursing home. I have to ask, “is this all” I looked over at dad still intently reading the menu, “legal?” (audience laughter then applause)
Norcross: Be honest. Who here really wants to live in the Town and Country? The reason I say that is because I’m sure there are many people in this room who are either in this space where they’re thinking about their last place or they have somebody in their family that is going through that transition and the options suck, you know? So I’m wondering what this story says about how we treat our elderly in this country.
Walter: Yeah. I don’t I don’t typically write very autobiographically, but if I find something that intersects with my life, then I try to find other characters to feel some of those things. And I was trying to find a place for my hard drinking, hard smoking dad who lived after my mom died, lived alone and with an even harder drinking girlfriend for about 20 years until she passed away. And I wrote this story because I wanted to invent this place for my dad. You know I remember I would, when I left every day, I would say, ‘can I get you anything dad?’ And he said, ‘you could put a bullet right here.’ I’d say, ‘you know, we both end up in the emergency room’ and he’d say, ‘that’s the truth.’
And so the last thing he wanted was to be doing craft projects. And so there’s a lot of dystopian writing and this was a utopia that I was writing. I was trying to write the place that my dad would find dignity and peace and probably get laid in his last days, you know.
Norcross: One other question about this story, Jess. It’s set in north Idaho. And you know, you live in Spokane and you reference it a lot in your stories. I mean the pacific Northwest is kind of a character in your writing. Can you talk about how that sense of place manifests itself? I mean, how does that show up on the page?
Walter: I’ve always felt a little off the grid as a writer, living my whole life in Spokane. And I remember being at the National Book Awards someone said ‘it’s so amazing to interview you, you’re kind of a recluse.’ And I’m like, I’m NOT, I’m really not! Please come to Spokane. You can stay at my house. But I love that I have a literary atlas of the whole world and I love adding the places in Northwest to it. I remember one of the first things that I wrote about Portland was for Portland Noir. The editor contacted me and I wrote a story. And I was so happy with that story, you know, and I don’t, but the character did. [It is] just that, you know, to put all that whatever anti-Portland’s stuff was swirling around in 1994 in this one character, you know, it’s really fun to have this sort of, I think less discovered playground to write about and writing about north Idaho. I mean that’s a little bit of a political story because the other thing about his dad is [he’s] a longtime factory worker. He’s fallen under the sway of Fox News and, you know, desired to live in a nostalgic, ‘Make America Great’ world again. [That] is sort of the undertone of that story. You know, that world never really existed. The Town and Country doesn’t really exist. And it’s sort of a way that I think to write about that fissure that I feel in the northwest between mostly blue Washington and red Idaho.
Norcross: Yeah. And it’s interesting George. I love your writing, but I don’t quite have a sense of the place of it. I mean you live in southern California, you teach at Syracuse, but does your writing flow from a particular physical space that you can point to?
Saunders: Not really. I think comically at Chicago, the south side of Chicago. That was kind of where I grew up. And, at that time and place in the 60′s and 70′s, it was just a kind of, I think like a Carlinesque sort of feeling. Everybody was political, kind of lovingly so. And the emblematic joke was we lived next door to this couple for years, never really knew them, they’re kind of private. Then her mom passed away. So my dad went to the service and she was 92. So my dad said to the woman, ‘you know, I’m sorry for your loss. It seemed like your mom had a long healthy life’ and the woman goes, ‘yeah, this is the sickest she’s ever been.’ (audience laughter)Yeah. And then the Chicago part of it was that my dad, he of course, ‘Oh yeah, no, no, yeah, I’m glad she had a long life’. Then he came home and he was sort of - my dad gets a certain look on his face when something beautiful has happened like that. So he just came home tickled to tell us. So he was gentle with her but then, you know, fully saw the fun in it.
Norcross: Yeah, well you do have a distinctly American voice because you put these humans in these horrifying situations but they just sort of earnestly go about their business, you know?
Walter: Yeah it’s like life.
Norcross: Yeah. Well the story you read earlier and Liberation Day is a great example of this. Am I wrong in thinking there’s just sort of something uniquely American about this good natured pluckiness and eagerness to please even in these hellish situations?
Walter: I think, I mean that was always sort of the idea that, yeah, your job sucks but it sucks worse to not have it. So buck up, you know. And so I mean I remember working at, I worked at a slaughterhouse for a while in my twenties. And you know, it was terrible hard work. I mean I would go home and the next morning I’d wake up and I was 24 or something. I couldn’t get my hands open because you’re holding these hooks and knives and stuff. So I’d have to run your hand under hot water. Finally you get them opening it and you go in again, you know. So I think, but at the same time to go in there and say, ‘hey guys, this is really hard.’ That wasn’t gonna play, you know. (audience laughs) So then you’re like, well I can either have a really miserable day full of negativity or I can go okay eight hours and you’re out and then you can get your hands open up again. So that’s certainly in the title story. There’s a guy who’s not leading his best life but you know, in order to make it not worse, he’s got a kind of buoy himself up somehow.
Norcross: Well, it’s interesting that I have a friend here in the audience, Eddie Song, who has translated three of your books into Chinese and is currently at work in translating Liberation Day into Chinese as well. Not for China, for Taiwan. Because your books don’t sell in China. (audience laughter) I wonder why? But I wonder if you ever worry or even think about how your stories could travel around the world and how they convey to other cultures?
Walter: I kind of don’t just because, for me, it’s always hard to get any story to play out honestly. So it’s all I can do just to try to deal with that story in front of me and I have this faith that - I’m a real rewriter. So I have faith that if I apply my subconscious to it over and over again earnestly, it’ll spit something out that’ll be of value. And if it’s a value anywhere I’m happy, you know. In other words, my whole writing philosophy is to try to reduce anxiety. Like not when I was young, yeah, for me. I don’t know about anybody else. Yeah, that doesn’t work over here. But you know, when I was younger there was a lot of this kind of ‘should I be experimental or realist, should I be a regional writer or not.’ And that’s the only time I ever got locked up was when I was trying to make conscious analytical decisions about what kind of writer to be. And when I finally started working pretty well, it was always just this very simple process of reading what I did the day before, making little line edits and it’s putting it in over and over again, completely free of anxiety because all you’re doing is just deciding, you know, micro deciding over and over again to taste. So that’s, in a way, my whole philosophy and I hope that it connects with people. But I know that that’s the only way it ever could, is if it’s produced that way.
Norcross: Yeah, Jess, you told the Miami Book Fair last month that you were looking forward to this event, but you were kind of terrorized a little bit because you said that it seems like when George puts together a collection of short stories, they’re just perfect. You know, they hang together perfectly. It’s like they were meant for that structure. We can talk about whether or not that’s true George…
Saunders: It is. It is. (audience laughter) It is, you don’t even have to talk about it.
Norcross: So effortless, sure.
Walter: The actual feeling was that you’ve been asked to be at a soul festival and then you look over and Aretha’s sitting next to you.
Saunders: Right back at you.
Norcross: But do you struggle with that? I mean finding how the stories come together and how they hang together?
Walter: Yeah, I mean I have always loved story writing but I started as a novelist. Mostly I was sending out short stories forever. But living in Spokane Washington with no agent, they were just landing on slush piles. I used to call them manila boomerangs because, send them out in a self- addressed stamped envelope and you had to seal your own doom in the envelope. Please send this back to me so I can send it somewhere else to send it back to me. And so I was discovered, I guess, first as a novelist. And I think, but that question of process when I’m writing a novel, I’m really writing a whole bunch of small pieces that fit together in some way. And that line between novel and short story, Lincoln in the Bardo is a great example. But also Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell. I mean, I think the expansiveness of the novel is helped by having people who also read short stories - by having it question exactly what that is. So yeah, when I put together a short story collection, sometimes it feels a little like a yard sale. You know, like I’m looking through the last 40 short stories I wrote. Well, anyone want any of this stuff? You know, there’s an old credenza, it’s kind of beat up. But if I put $4 on that, someone will want it. I read other people’s collections and they’re like these incredible concept albums. But I also am so at home with my insecurities that I would weigh like 46 pounds if I got rid of all of them. I like most of them.
Norcross: Yeah. And you don’t struggle with that too George?
Saunders: Yeah, no, I think that that process I just described, it even works at the level of the ordering. Like I will have nine stories and then kind of just put the titles on index cards and kind of Rubik’s cube them around a bit. But the same deciding process which is like the optometrist, you know. Is this better or is this better? (audience laughs) And really I have come to just trust that 100%. So I try to have no big thematic ideas, just whatever gets the reader off the roller coaster in the most stunned state. And in some sense you can actually feel that intuitively as you’re putting things together. So yeah, I mean that’s really it. Of course I think that approach does produce a certain effect, but the beautiful kind of magical part is, I don’t know what the effect is exactly until it’s done. And even then I’m struggling to articulate it, so the job is not so much what do I want you to think, but partly where do I want you to feel it? Like I know this part of the story is critical. I don’t quite know what a reader will take from it, but it will be intense at that point. I know if I put the stories in this order it’s gonna give off more heat than if I do it this way. So, I guess the value of that is that there’s something other than your conscious everyday mind that’s working on the stories and you’re giving it a lot of chances to do it. So, I’ve often had that feeling of not really being crazy about this person, the person who has to talk off the top of his head and kind of feeling him to be fairly predictable in his ideas and his politics. But the person that comes on the page after all this revision is sometimes a pleasant surprise to me. He’s not as dopey as I am. He’s a little smart or funny or a little more generous, you know. So that’s a very addictive thing.
Walter: And I think that’s one of the joys of putting the collection together is watching it come together in that way. That feels better than the pieces.
Saunders: And it’s not really you doing it. It’s kind of, ‘get out of the way. Let me order myself. And then I’ll tell you something you don’t know.’ It’s just amazing.
Norcross: There’s a story, well, the title story in your book, it’s not a short story, it’s more like a novella, The Angel of Rome. And it’s got it’s got a sweep. It’s got a novel-like sweep. It’s got characters, it spans time, it spans place. Why did you want to include that one? And why did you want to name your whole book after it?
Walter: It’s interesting. There’s another story called Famous Actor and for a while I thought the whole collection would be called Famous Actors. And then there was when I looked at that story, it is a novella. I wrote it actually in collaboration with an actor named Edoardo Ballerini. And we had this fascinating process where we/he had studied Latin in Trastevere Rome, my favorite neighborhood. And so we started just talking about that. And we thought, you know, stories are written with the audio book as kind of the afterthought. What if we wrote a story that was meant for that. And Eduardo had read my novel Beautiful Ruins and had made it better somehow, which was like a little daunting. So we started kicking this idea around and it was so thrilling. I get a real charge out of trying to do different things. And having an actor table-read a story as I was writing was so great having him make contributions, having us debate how a voice should sound.
I went back to rewrite it and it just, for me, became bigger and more interesting and it had that big sweep of time. I got to return to Italy, which I love, in the story. And when I was looking at the collection, I realized that the whole thing I was trying to find in a really difficult political and kind of personal time, these little moments of meaning or hope connected to unlikely characters. And Ronnie Tower is this American actor who’s making a movie in Italy and he is this sort of figure who becomes the angel for this young man who’s studying there. And I realized that all the stories kind of had that and I thought if I can not violate my cynical literary principles while still finding these slivers of hope in these stories. And that one felt to me like the one that did that the best. And I also thought it would just be a more welcoming title than Famous Actors, which sounded sort of small-minded and cynical.
Norcross: George, it just seems like so many of the stories that you write are allegories for what we’re grappling with these days; struggles with capitalism, authoritarianism, fake news, lies, a fractured political environment. Does writing these stories help you make sense at all?
Saunders: Not really. (audience laughs) I mean, no, no, I mean seriously. Because I think, you know, Chekhov said ‘literature doesn’t solve problems, but it formulates them correctly.’ So I’m finding at this stage of life that writing the stories sometimes confuses me a little bit more. It makes me feel that the solutions aren’t quite as easy as I might have thought they were when I was younger. But conversely I’m okay with that. I think to, you know, if stories can when I wrote that book about the Russians, one thing I took away was that stories sometimes just show us how facile our judgments usually are. You know we all know what we think about stuff and maybe literature is a place where you go for a little blessing of being destabilized about that a little bit. So Chekov has this beautiful story called Gooseberries. And one of the most beautiful parts is a big takedown of the idea of happiness. Happiness is decadent. Your happiness often comes at the expense of someone else’s. He’s got this line, you know, ‘every happy man should have an unhappy man in his closet with a hammer to remind him, by his constant tappings, that not everyone is happy and sooner or later life will show him his claws.’ So you read that and such an original take on happiness and being suspicious of it. But then in the same story, there’s a guy, the same guy who makes that speech, is in a pond swimming joyfully on his back going, ‘oh my God, oh my God, I love this.’ So those two things hang there together. And you say, ‘Anton what, which one is it?’ And he goes, ‘Da.’
So to me, that moment where my usual everyday judging mind gets just stunned for a second and goes away, that’s really worth a lot. And I would argue it probably does in some ways help you um, in times of political uncertainty. Because whatever you do will then be coming from a place of more patience and affection and stability. And even if you have to push back or you have to oppose, you’re doing it from a place that’s more capacious and it’s not just surface-level reaction. Also, it makes me feel better to be working out of affection, you know, as opposed to anger. So it’s when I go up and write, what happens with me is my monkey mind gets quieted down just by the process of looking at sentences and making small choices. The level of rumination calms way down, You know? And then you go back down just feeling, in my case, 20% calmer, which is pretty good. I mean for me.
Norcross: You were speaking with a fractious environment, you were kind of present at the creation and that you covered the 2016 Trump campaign for The New Yorker. Why?
Saunders: No, really just because they asked me. And I didn’t, it was agitating and troubling and I thought well what better way to get in touch with it than to go there, you know? So I went to a bunch of rallies in Phoenix and Wisconsin and then one crazy one in San Jose. And of course it was good because, you know, I pass. I’m like, ‘hi I’m a Trump supporter’. Or sometimes I would say ‘I’m a writer for The New Yorker’ and they go, ‘what’s that’, you know? But then I would say ‘I’m a liberal and left of Gandhi. Tell me your shit’, you know? And they would. Because I mean I can get along with people pretty well. So it was just kind of going in there and, as a fiction writer, trying to see, what does it sound like, What are they saying? What’s it smell like? What’s the weirdness? What’s the funniest? It was really interesting and of course that was just before he got the nomination. So at that time I just noticed that his rallies were 20,000 crazy evangelical people. No, I mean evangelical about him, you know, enthusiastic and I’d go to the democratic rallies like (one lonely set of hands clapping unenthusiastically), you know. But it didn’t quite register that that was a problem, you know? But in hindsight it was. It was all there.
Norcross: Jess, so many of the characters in your stories and your books, [are] so rich and there are so many dimensions to them. But so many of them are lonely, you know? There’s just a pervasive sense of loneliness in a lot of your stories and I’m wondering if that is on purpose and what you’re trying to say about it?
Walter: Never occurred to me, but I will get back on Facebook, thank you. (audience laughs) I don’t know. I mean, I think that what George was saying about the way in which reading literature and getting past those political or systemic issues and seeing them as what it is to be human. And I don’t think social media has solved loneliness from what I can tell or anything else? I think it’s a state that many of us live in - misunderstood, misread, you know. I have a great family, wonderful friends and yet that sense of being - crashing around in this casing - unable to really connect with other people, I think, haunts every human at some level. And it’s when I find it in stories that I read, when I find it in fiction, it always strikes me as true. And I guess you’re trying to write toward truth, you know? So if the characters display that, I suppose it’s because I think it’s how many of us feel deep down, at least some time in our lives.
Norcross: Yeah, totally. Both of these collections are remarkable in their diversity. You have male and female characters, you’ve got young and old, you’ve got people in the present, you’ve got people in the past, people in realistic situations and in very surrealistic situations. Is there a theme? And this is a question for both of you? You can take it in turn, is there a theme that binds all these stories together?
Saunders: I mean, having had the book just come out, the one thing I noticed, I didn’t notice that when I was writing it, it’s just that, you know, all the stories in this book, there’s kind of like someone who starts off a little diluted or misled or confused and then stumbles towards something like truth. It doesn’t always make their life easier, but that’s something I had no idea that I was doing. And then the other thing that I kind of did know was that there’s a lot of people struggling with self, like, what gets us into this problem in the world? Well, we’re born, we immediately think we’re central. We’re the star of the show. The world was just waiting for us to show up, thank you. And we think we’re permanent. And so those two ideas that we’re central to the proceedings and we’re permanent then cause all the problems. You know, when you start to get sick and die, it’s a terrible affront. When you find out that actually you’re not the center of the world, it’s difficult. So I think that was in the book. But then, sometimes when you’re writing, you have a sort of notion and the book will say, ‘are you sure about that?’ So, in this book, there’s a couple of times where I thought, oh, actually this self, it’s so fun to have a self, to have memories. And as you get older, like, 63, to go ‘wow, I was just a particular kid in Chicago in the early 60′s. That’s crazy, you know and that kid is gonna die pretty soon. Whoa.’ There’s something beautiful about that, about the idea that you know, you are a person and you have a self. So on the one hand yes, we should all be free of self. But several times in the book there’s someone who was made artificially free itself by having their memories taken away and they’re desperately trying to get back that little handful of memories they have. So I think in the end the book, a book can be a really nice way to pose an idea and then have it contradicted, you know, and let those things kind of…
Norcross: Yeah, and I found myself looking for heroes in your stories and there were some heroic acts, but also a lot of bad decisions, a lot of missteps and so it was messy, you know?
Saunders: Like humanity. Yeah. I feel like a story is hopeful to the extent that it’s true to its own DNA. So if you have a Hollywood movie where two misfits can’t stand each other but then they do like each other and they win the lottery. Like that’s not hopeful, that’s bullshit. So if you have a story, and the first two thirds of it are telling you and that’s your job in rewriting. What are you telling me, story? I don’t want to falsify you. So let me really pay attention to the clues you’re giving. Even as I’m adjusting the clues, then I want you to be so true to yourself. And I’m assuming there’s readers out there who will feel that as positivity. Not that everything turns out great, but that people do have certain resources they can bring to bear. And the most important relationship is the reader and the writer who are huddled over this made up object, what is true, what is true, what is true. And if, at the end, you feel that you and I are still together, that’s a huge victory. We’ve puzzled over something important together. And neither one of us is falsified. What could be better than that?
Norcross: That’s beautiful. Jess, common themes through lines?
Walter: Yeah. You know, I think I sort of stubbornly refused to be categorized as a writer over the years. Nonfiction and crime fiction and literary fiction. But I always see this sort of through the lens of wistful, kind of hopeful humor, even in really dark stories. And so the very first story in this collection is called Mr. Voice. And it’s about this really unlikely stepfather. There was this guy on the radio in Spokane in the 70′s who had one of those incredibly deep voices. And he’d always be like, (in a raspy loud deep voice) ‘this weekend at Spokane raceway park we’re turning into a giant mud pit.’(audience laughs) And I just thought, what if that guy was your stepfather? And so when I looked back at the stories that I chose, they had these really unlikely connections between people where there’s still a moment where they can surprise you. And having the first word of that story, I realized when I put the collection together, was mother. The girl in the story says ‘mother was a stunner’. And then she talks about her meeting Mr. Voice. And then the last word was father. And I just thought, oh, I love that.
And then I looked at the very last story, which is called The Way The World Ends, which is a comic story about two climate scientists interviewing for the same job at Mississippi State University, engaging in what can only be called the first ever literary climate orgy. And the last word of that story was hope. And I thought there was this kind of clarity through line of writing about dark situations, not sacrificing hope. Hopefully the satiric humor that I like, but still finding some way toward these connections that surprised me and hopefully will surprise the readers too that a guy like Mr. Voice can turn out to be a good stepfather.
Norcross: Last question and it flows from the recognition that we’ve all been through a lot in the last two years and every level of our lives, what we do for a living, in our interpersonal relationships, and what we take joy in have been affected in some way through the pandemic. And I’m wondering how the two of you think you’re different writers than you were in, say March of 2020?
Saunders: Well, I think what you said was just right, you know, that the the responsibility of connecting with readers is, it seems, even more urgent because I know, you know, during the pandemic too, I was working on that Russian book and to read those stories and just feel another human being on the other side of it was actually a lot more comfort than I think I would have admitted or though. To say, okay, the world seemed insane. Everything seems to be falling apart and yet Chekhov. And maybe to say that, that’s a lot actually to feel. And maybe that feeling of connection is more real than the various superficial feelings of disconnection that we’re actually being fed. We’re being fed a lot of agitation and a lot of reminders of disconnection.
So for me, it’s like actually if we have ever thought in this country that literature was sort of a fading sideshow, something that us bookies do that’s kind of cute, you know? Well, this time we’re in should remind us that no, actually, it’s central. Storytelling and story receiving is the central human activity. The brain does it in every instance, the scientists have found that you come in here at the back of the brain, your brain appears to be a church. And then moving up towards the front of the brain, it’s collecting sense data to say which kind of church and what the specifics are. So, we’re always writing stories in our minds. So I think it’s, to the extent that we feel disoriented, agitated, hateful it’s because we’ve engaged in anti story tendencies, We believe, superficial agitated agenda-laced stories and we’ve neglected maybe culturally, the long, slow-cooked Chekhovian story that assumes reader and writer are on a continuum, you know?
Walter: And creates a perspective, to put it in a time perspective. This will pass.
Saunders: Yes. Yes, 100%. Yeah.
Walter: Yeah. Similarly, I think the first live event I did after a whole bunch of Zoom events, I just almost wept. I’m like, I’ve missed you. There really is this great communion between reader and writer and so much of what you do is on the page in your head alone in a journal that to get out and, I’m always sort of amazed that people have read my books and, you know, when you’ve read a great book and you can’t wait to tell someone about it. When you’ve written a book and you can’t wait to tell them about it and they’re in a crowd, you just feel, yeah, it really feels, I think I feel more grateful than ever to be able to do things like this. And because maybe I have a journalism background, I look for ways to really capture what’s happening. Camus called it ‘the wager of your generation’ and I feel like maybe more responsibility, more of the sort of journalistic responsibility that I used to feel than just trying to write something that my agent likes or that sells, not that I don’t want to do that.
Norcross: Jess Walter, George Saunders, it was an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
Miller: That’s Jess Walter and George Saunders in conversation with Geoff Norcross at the Portland Book Festival put on by Literary Arts.
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