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I interviewed Jane Phillips who won the Puliter Prize for fiction for a novel called Nightw Watch.
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And what we did is we dug into passages from her writing that are going to show you how she thinks about voice, character, and also the poetry of great writing.
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And now, as you listen, I want you to notice something.
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I want you to notice how many times Jane describes writing as a fullbodied experience.
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She sees the creative process almost like an archaeologist would.
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Like feeling her way into the hidden and mysterious world of her own novel. So that sounds cool. And how do you do that?
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Well, that's what this interview is all about.
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I think a good frame for the conversation is you say, "I'm often asked if writing can be taught.
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One cannot teach talent, but I fully believe that committed literary writers who teach fiction writing and literature can encourage, inspire, mentor, and instruct a new generation of novelists and short story writers and poets. Why do you say that?
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>> I always thought that can can writing be taught was a silly question.
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Um, there's a lot of competition inside academia.
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Um, and many many English departments in order to survive created MFA programs because that brought in a whole new group of people who were interested in reading as writers and in writing.
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And some of them might not have known that they needed to read as writers, but hopefully that's what they're taught in an MFA program because um I feel personally that you teach writing by teaching literature and I tell my students I would tell my students that being a writer now is almost like being a member of a medieval guild.
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that uh you know there were those times when monks wrote these illuminated manuscripts and only monks could read them.
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And we live in a time in which you know people read they read newspapers they read signage they read on their phones but very few people read literature for meaning.
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And I feel as though if you're writing that's the way you read and you write um many times inspired by your allies that is writers whose books are really elemental for you um because it does connect to us in such a deep interior way.
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You started off as a trained poet and how does that show up both in the output of your writing and the inputs now?
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>> Well, I don't know that I was trained because that was way before uh graduate school.
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But undergraduate I did take part in these um sort of poetry workshops.
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I learned to write, I think, by writing one-page fictions, but I wanted to move past the pros poem form to a real sense of a fiction that's very very compressed, but written in a very densely um sometimes a metaphoric language,
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sometimes an ironic language, and the entire story being compressed into one page so that the the story has a kind of spiral construction that moves out of the center like a an oil well bursting or you know a circle of energy. Um
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Um and the ending has to be very very definite.
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The last line should be perfect.
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It should create a kind of white space around it.
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And the titles are very, it's as though there's the title, you read the title, you read the piece, and by the time you finish the piece, the title is is transformed for you in terms of its meaning. >> Can you read? >> Sure.
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>> This section of the wedding picture for us. >> Yeah.
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>> And um this piece first appeared in Sweethearts, which was a book of 24 one-page fictions.
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And on the cover was this wedding picture of of my parents.
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So the title wedding picture, my mother's ankles curve from the hymn of a white suit as if the bones were water.
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Under the cloth, her body in its olive skin unfolds.
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The black hair, the porcelain neck, the red mouth that barely shows its teeth.
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My mother's eyes are round and wide as a light behind her skin burns them to coals.
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Her heart makes a sound that no one hears.
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The sound says each fetus floats an island in the womb.
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>> So as you write something like this, what do you see now as from a process perspective of writing something like this?
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I can't answer that question really because when I'm writing nothing is going through my head.
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I'm just focused on following it following into the next line.
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It's sort of like one line sort of inspires the next or one line is so connected to the next.
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And when I'm writing a piece like this, I would probably write the whole thing and move just a few little things around.
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I mean, it goes from this to something about the father.
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One of the lines is, "My father's heart pounds a bell and a wrestler's chest.
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He is nearly 40 and the liies are trumpeting."
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And in the photograph, there are these liies, you know, coming up behind them.
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So it's very definitely a description of a photograph but it as you can see you know it the metaphoric language is sort of limitless in a way and I I used to have an exercise for my students where I would say to them okay everyone bring in their parents wedding picture or if they weren't married a picture of them together.
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One student brought in a picture of the orphanage where he grew up.
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Um, and they write the piece and they would bring the piece and the picture in and we just would have, you know, a great experience with them reading all of these pieces and we make a book of them with, you know, Xerox copies of the photographs and the pieces for each of the students.
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Um, it's a really good it's a good thing to do to try to describe a photograph that you know very well.
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That is you know the history the 20 years beyond that photograph.
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The 40 years beyond that photograph. >> Tell me about this.
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It's strange what you don't forget.
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>> That's the first line of machine dreams. >> Yeah.
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my first novel and that's being said in the voice of the character who is the mother is the character who would have been my mother.
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It is very strange what you don't forget.
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>> Well, it feels profound beyond just being the first sentence.
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It feels like there's a lot of depth in that in that as an idea.
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Well, it's a whole it's this reality of we experience so many things and yet she's saying that in in the context of a very early memory.
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Why do you remember this one thing and this whole kind of primordial soup of images and things that went on and um it's so interesting and it's it's a special it's a kind of key, you know, a key to who you are and what's happened to you and what matters to you.
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Do you feel like that strangeness is something that you're kind of in pursuit of?
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Like almost trying to surprise yourself and using a kind of strangeness as a compass?
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>> I feel as though when I that I'm inside the work following the sentences themselves deeper into the material.
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>> There's not myself thinking about the material, >> you know, because what I want to do is be inside the material.
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And you know, someone said to me once, "When I read your work, I don't feel as though I'm reading about something.
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I feel as though I'm inside it."
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And that is actually um what I want the reader to feel.
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I want them to be inside the material itself.
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I mean, when we read a line like I cross the street, in your mind's eye, I cross the street, you are that persona.
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And if the writer can pull you in deeply enough, you are experiencing that voice and whatever happens in the world to that voice almost as though it's happening to you and you're responding to it in your own way in a kind of unconscious way maybe that you're not even necessarily aware of but it it forms the connection you know.
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So, do you feel like even from the beginning of a novel with with a sentence like it's strange where you don't forget like even at the beginning with the premise that sort of initial seed do you feel like you're being pulled there and kind of following that whisper like dare I say sort of surrendered to the work itself?
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>> I sure hope to surrender to the work itself.
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If you can get there that's good.
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>> What does that look and feel like?
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You're not thinking about anything else.
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You know how this can happen to anybody, a car mechanic, a painter, a cook, so involved in what they're inside that they lose track of time.
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So that's the kind of thing that happens to a writer if you're inside the material itself.
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And it happens to a reader.
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You know, we've all had that experience of reading something that is so uh intense for us that we lose track of time.
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Tell me about intense and obsessive reading.
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That seems to be something that you really value.
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Something you've done a lot of when you do that.
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What is that process like?
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How do you think about what what books to read?
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How do you think about the actual reading, the reflection?
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And then we'll end with how it kind of infuses and makes its way seeps into your life.
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like, you know, we pick up our allies and they might be living writers and they might be dead writers, but we read all of their work and we read certain works of theirs many, many times.
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I mean, that's what I encourage students to do.
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Find those writers, find that work, and really get inside that work.
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And that starts with reading the book for just intense pleasure and then reading it again to see how it works and then maybe reading it again and and plotting it out on paper.
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Um almost memorizing the book like writing down what happens in each chapter. What happens?
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Uh I mean I have I've read several books like that and one of them is Fat City by Leonard Gardner.
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is Fat City by Leonard Gardner. a book that was 800 pages that he cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut
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until it was just like a diamond it's about wrestlers in Stockton California in the late 50s and many many writers are worship at the altar of that book and there are other books like that um for me the sound on the fury is one of those books um it was a book that I carried with me everywhere all the time when I was writing Lark and Termite. >> Can you walk me through how to read
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>> Can you walk me through how to read Faulner?
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How to think about Faulner?
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>> Just beautiful, right?
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I mean, this is a very famous Faulner quote.
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>> Because no battle is ever won, he said. They're not even fought.
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The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
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>> Was anything true or ever spoken?
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Oh, Falner is just is everything.
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It's it's uh his language um the world that he creates, the way all of all the books are connected one to the other.
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You know, there was this fake lost cause that was sort of drummed up during Jim Crow, but he was really writing about lost causes and they were so sorrowful and so true only because they were lost.
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Thank God they were lost.
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Um, but he wrote about people and perception.
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I mean, writing is really always about perception.
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You know, in that last uh image of the sound and the fury when Benji is roaring because they're trying to go the wrong way in the carriage around the monument in the center of the town.
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It's because his perceptions have been shifted.
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um the way that we write, the way that we read, we're trying to show the reader how to perceive this world that we're writing about.
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>> Every book teaches you how to read it, >> right?
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>> Um >> what do you mean you say write, but that's not clear to me.
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>> I think each book teaches the reader how to read it.
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you know, you you get inside the book and you begin to see feel where you are in space.
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Sort of like you sit down in a chair, the chair starts revolving.
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Um, but you keep your seat because you're so intensely in place.
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Um, I mean, that's what I want my writing to do.
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I want it really to be about perception itself and sort of awaken perceptions around you know all the details the the time period the characters it's sort of the elements of what you're doing.
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>> So how do you bring that to life when you're writing about something in the 19th century like there's that's a literally a different time and you're trying to make it real.
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I know you went to the asylum and you took photos and stuff like that.
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Go home to West Virginia.
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Like what else do you do in research first to make a place, a time, a people, a culture vivid to yourself and then to translate that onto the page for your readers?
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You just simply are kind of preparing yourself by doing the research, but you're not just thinking the research.
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It has to be sort of more >> embodied, >> more whole body.
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But again, it's about perception and the fact that fiction is a form of time travel.
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I don't consider myself a historical novelist at all.
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All of my books take place in different times, but it's because that was the time or the place for this story, this narrative.
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Um, so it was very daunting to try to write a book about the Civil War, but I felt I had to go there because I'd written about these two civil wars between North and South, you know, in Vietnam in Korea.
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But we had this whole cataclysmic war between North and South that and we still live in its shadow today.
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Um, and I had to find my way in, feel my way in.
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And when I wrote the the beginning of Nightw Watch, it's this scene where this 12-year-old child who has sort of been the only adult in her family um, for the past couple of years.
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Her mother is so traumatized that she's now mute.
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Um, and she's being hustled into this buck board by the man she's been told to call Papa.
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And they're take, he says, "We're taking her for her rest and cure."
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Um, and I wrote that first section and they were just there, you know, their voices, the way they were talking to each other, the subtext, this very scary subtext between, you know, and what they're saying to each other and what he's saying to her.
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Um, the natural world felt as though it was real inside that piece.
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And at the end of that, I think it's 10 or 20 pages. Okay, now what? I had no idea.
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I mean, obviously they were going to the asylum, but I don't plan the book out.
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>> So, there's a kind of surprise, a kind of mystery to what you're creating.
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>> Well, the whole book is a mystery to me, but of course, it's that's a little bit disingenuous because I've been thinking about this book for 10 years.
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And in Nightw Watch, I did have periods of time where I stopped writing because I didn't know where it was going.
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And in those periods of time, I would sort of fall back into the research, you know, and do more and read more.
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And I mean I have shelves and shelves of books um books of photographs, diaries, um letters and scholarly books, you know, about the region and uh just sort of every aspect.
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Um so what do you do when you feel that sense of stuckness?
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I is it some people panic, some people get really frustrated and mad at themselves.
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You feel remarkably at peace with it. >> No, I don't.
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No, there's always a lot of fear.
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I mean, I think, you know, um it's like walking a tight rope without a net.
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I used to tell my students that writing if it's sort of like, you know, the the spaceship movies where they're in outer space and somebody's on the outside of the ship in this silver suit and they're trying to fix something and they're attached by a little line, but then the line breaks and they just drift off for eternity.
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That's kind of what writing, that's a metaphor about writing.
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And another metaphor is the writing is like you put on this esbesto suit and you walk straight into the flames and the asbesto suit is writing itself.
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>> So back to the question about stuck.
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You said I feel a sense of fear.
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What happens when you get stuck?
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>> Well, as I said, sometimes I just wait.
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either life is so is demanding so much of me that I can't write or I'm at a point where I don't know where I'm going next.
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Um, with this book in particular, with Nightw Watch, I went back inside the research, but also um, I feel as though, you know, you finish the work for the day and the next day, if you don't know where to go, you read that work again.
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You read that page again.
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And if you still don't know where to go, you go back 10 pages and you read those 10 pages.
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If you still don't know where to go, you go back to the very beginning >> and you read through to where you are and that's how you know what to write next because you have to be inside the material.
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That's a certain way of looking at it and a certain way of writing.
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There are a million ways.
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But for me, for what I want to do, and I suppose for the way that I teach, I can only teach uh sort of an approximation of my perception of writing.
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Um where you need to go is inside the work itself.
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What does it mean to edit with your ears?
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2002, you write this teaching philosophy statement and that's what you say in there.
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edit with your ears because uh language is a music >> and especially if you read the work out loud.
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I mean, I can tell by reading it in my mind, but if you read the work out loud, you can tell where it goes off.
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It's like a flat note on a on a piano.
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I mean, um it should just work sort of inside its own music.
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And when we're reading as editors, we're looking for that spot where it goes off.
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I mean, hopefully there's something there to begin with.
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You've got to be at a certain point for this method to work.
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Um, but you're listening for the work itself to know where to move in the work.
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One puzzle that's emerging is you're talking about the importance of being inside the work of art itself, but for so much of your career, you had real demands of teaching and you weren't able to write all the time and weren't always a full-time writer.
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So, how did you I'm surprised that that is such a uniquely important part of how you think about writing given that particular set of constraints that you face.
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Well, I am just doggedly persistent. >> Huh.
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>> I do not give up, >> you know. >> Yeah.
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>> And people I mean that can be a thing people can not like about me personally, but um especially it because writing is so interior, that's something that I can work with in myself.
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Um, I've never thrown away a book and I think I've only maybe thrown away one story.
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When once I start something, I feel this need to see it through because I feel it's there. I'm just not seeing it.
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So, it's about trying to get there, get inside, to see what I'm doing.
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>> How have you cultivated peers to help you with writing in terms of who you're learning from just the people that you surround yourself with because I know that you tell students that that's important.
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>> Well, you don't cultivate them. You just run into them.
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You know, you run into them somewhere.
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I mean, one of the great things about MFA programs is that one can meet two or three people in that group of people that you will know all your life that can uh who can be readers for you.
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Um, and there's a particular person who's been my reader for years and years and years.
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And I actually met her in a child birth class. Oh, wow.
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I was having my first child.
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She was having her fourth.
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and we became friends and I realized that she well she had been involved in an MFA program which she sort of didn't finish for many years because all these children um but she was a brilliant reader and she is a brilliant reader and she has has been an editor and a film editor and um and she really knows my work so I always send her everything and I've had editors who have been very very important, who've been with me through two or three books.
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>> What makes for good poetry?
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>> What makes for good poetry? >> Yeah.
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Like, as you're writing it, how do you kind of pull the yarn out to create good poetry?
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>> Oh, I don't I don't think that I'm creating poetry, but I'm I'm a reader of poetry.
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And um because it's so I'm in awe of people who are poets and I find I find it very important to read poetry. My son is a poet. >> Oh wow.
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>> Who published a book of poems about two years ago.
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So somehow I I've managed to raise two kids who are in the in the arts.
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Um I wouldn't I mean I don't write poetry but I I suppose I use a kind of poets composition process in the writing of fiction. >> In what way?
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>> Just writing line to line. Yeah.
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and and thinking about the internal rhyme, uh the the sounds of the words, the way to the syllables, the way the the way the line sits on the page. It's kind of part of it.
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Can you read this from machine dreams?
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And I want to hear you talk about it, what you're going for.
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The fields surrounding the house were full of light.
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Scrub grass grew tall and the milkweed stocks were thick as wrists.
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Wild wheat was in the fields and the crows fed wheeling in circular formations.
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Milk syrup in the weeds was sticky and white.
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The pods were tight and wouldn't burst for weeks.
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So this is a description of the fields behind the house in machine dreams which is based on the house I grew up in which my father built that is he was the foreman of a work crew that built this house. It was his design.
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Uh and it was surrounded by acres of land.
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Our yard was an acre and it had a fence and then there were three fields and a creek and then these tall, you know, these hills sort of hills beyond hills.
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And this is a description of the fields in the summer.
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There's a compression, you know, stocks were thick as wrists, so you really see that.
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And the milk syrup, which is a sort of uh sweet, sticky, thick, viscous, sticky, and white. The pods were tight.
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It wouldn't burst for weeks.
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So, you know, it's very sexual. It's very natural.
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It's very the power of the natural world, you know, there long before we were.
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When you were writing Nightw Watch, you went back and studied 19th century Appalachian speech patterns. >> Yes. Tell me about that.
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Well, I I read books written at that time and I think in the acknowledgements to machine dreams I me I mean acknowledgements to nightw watch I mentioned some of these books.
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There was one four volume set of books on the civil war that took year one, year two, year three, year four of the war.
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And these books were composed of um letters from generals from infantry from women in the south, women in the north trying to live through the war and the way they spoke just kind of I wasn't sort of looking for things or writing things down.
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It was just sort of sinking in >> washed over you.
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>> Just let it wash over you. Yeah.
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uh films that we've seen that are convincing about that period of time. Books of photograph.
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Photographs have always been very important for me. >> I can tell. Yeah.
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>> Family photographs and I have so many beautiful books of Civil War photographs.
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And that's why in Nightw Watch there are um photographs and documents um that I've got from various archives that are inside the book.
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And I have a PowerPoint where you're able to see these images very big on a big screen that I I when I do readings and events, I often show those images um because they're they just speak in a way that is beyond speech.
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You know, we're looking at something that was real.
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And if you think about the simultaneity of time, Bergen's theory, the simultaneity of time, that past, present, and future coexist, all existing at the same time.
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The fact that something is real means it's real forever as long as we can apprehend it.
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So that's how I feel about photographs.
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And why do you say that writers are like the conscience of a culture?
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>> Because we think about what happens afterward.
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Um, art is always about saving what might be lost, what will be lost.
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And I feel that very much about um well about my writing and about almost any writer I can think of that unless you write it down it will be lost and that might start with you know the first novel is often sort of the most autobiographical work.
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It starts with saving that world that's gone.
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Um, but anything you write, you're you're finding something, you're inventing something, you're listening to something, you're inside something.
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And unless you write it to the end, all of it would be lost because it's a particular vision. And we need all of that.
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We need all of those books.
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>> So, do you feel like you were born with like a hyper sensitivity to language itself?
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>> H Oh, well, I don't know.
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I was a very early reader and I lived, you know, out on this rural road and uh I read obsessively.
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little book clubs that my mother would join for me.
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The mailbox was out at the end of the driveway.
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They would come to the mailbox and go out there and get them.
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and and I've written I've written an essay um in which I describe, you know, my father had all these little paperback, you know, paperback books that kids weren't supposed to read with naked women on the cover and guns and >> sort of like and there was a an he kept them in this cupboard that was you had to stand on the bathroom counter to open the door and reach into that cupboard, which I did, to look through his books.
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And I happened to find one day a copy of Rabbit Run, a mass market copy with a kind of, you know, kind of naked woman on the cover, sort of like there.
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It was clearly, you know, the mass market edition of the book.
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And my father probably bought it by mistake. Uh, who knows?
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Um, cuz he liked Mickey Spain and, you know, that kind of thing.
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And I just opened this book and I opened it to the moment in the book that Janet drunk is bathing her infant in the bathtub.
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And because she's drunk, she loses her grip on the baby.
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And it just it just completely blew my brains apart, you know?
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It it just I remember like looking out the window and seeing the lilac bushes as though but they didn't even look like lilac bushes.
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I was just so blown away by reading that >> and I was about 9 or 10.
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>> Do you feel like in that moment you were blown away like wow I'm the scene was moving uh or I'm astonished that writing itself can move me like that or was it like wow I want to do that for my career? thinking anything.
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It was simply the power of reading that.
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I mean, um I mean, my way of thinking about it was, "Wow, my mother would never do that.
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My mother would never lose her baby in the bathtub."
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But the power of making that real, you know, I'm I'm describing afterward what was happening because at the time I wasn't thinking about anything. I just was like, "Wow."
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And I never I didn't read the rest of the book. I had to put it back.
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Of course, I read it later.
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>> I think it's so funny that I keep asking you about thinking and you're like, "I don't think.
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I have a felt experience."
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>> Well, I think constantly to my own detriment. I can't stop thinking.
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Um I have, you know, rev rev kind of brain that goes on and on and on.
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But in in the act of writing it's a different experience. I'm not thinking then.
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>> Why do you write so much from the perspective of children?
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Well, I think because one of my early mentors idols was James Ag and his book, A Death in the Family is still one of the most important books for me.
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And I love the way that he wrote from a a child's point of view.
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That book is the story of his life.
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And he was such an interesting being, you know, that he wrote sort of exploratory works in so many different genres.
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He was the first movie reviewer, you know, he wrote a book of poems.
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He was the first journalist.
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He did let us now praise Famous Men with Walker Evans, another absolutely, you know, deathless necessary book.
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um he spends two pages writing about a a wooden a handmade wooden chair in that book.
36:28
And Faulner also wrote about children, you know, from child's point of view.
36:31
And I I just feel as though children are the ultimate outlaws. >> Outlaws. >> They are. Yeah.
36:37
They don't see anything in context. It's all new. >> Yeah.
36:43
>> It's sort of beginner's mind, a sort of Zen mind.
36:47
So that um inside a child's point of view if you can write it well and believably it does something no no other voice can do.
37:01
>> You know children they're the ultimate outlaws and you said that as if that's a really important thing.
37:04
I want to write about outlaws.
37:06
Like what what what's going on with that?
37:10
>> Writing can't be afraid of anything.
37:10
I used to tell my students your only responsibility is to write with compassion.
37:20
That compassion has to come into it.
37:20
You can't hate your characters.
37:22
You know, beyond that, you you have to just tell the truth.
37:28
No matter how it might hurt people who think you're writing about them, because of course you're not.
37:34
The minute you start to write about someone, it's not that someone. Um, >> what do you mean?
37:42
The minute you start to write about somebody, it's not that somebody.
37:46
>> No, not if you're writing fiction. >> What does that mean?
37:50
>> It just means that if you're going to move into the world of character, you're not simply writing about somebody.
37:59
You're inventing a new reality.
38:04
um might have been inspired by someone you knew or some something about someone you knew.
38:10
I mean certainly when I was writing my first novel, I was thinking about my father and my mother and hopefully I approached the deeper reality of who they were who they are.
38:28
um you can't think about how people will react to your work because the minute you think about an audience because you know some people say think about your think about your audience think about you know I mean the editors are saying books about this are doing well something like that you can't think about your audience because that immediately you know cuts you off from what's really happening which is the book that you're trying to Right.
38:59
>> On the point about children, you say children formulate their own rules.
39:01
They look for a truth that is truer than what they've been given by their parents or society, which is often some screen to push down secrets. >> Exactly.
39:14
A screen to push down secrets.
39:16
That's the culture I grew up in.
39:16
And there are many, many permutations of that culture.
39:20
You know, my husband's Jewish and he would certainly say many things weren't talked about, but in that world, it was a small town.
39:32
I think I think small towns are so interesting all across America.
39:34
Small towns have certain things in common.
39:36
And I'm not talking about suburbs or, you know, really small towns that are out in the land somewhere, you know, that have these physical worlds that are very specific.
39:52
Um, and it is a world in which people know each other's stories back generations.
39:59
And there's especially for a child who's sort of hearing adult conversations and being aware of gossip or whatever.
40:03
Um there is this sense of a world underneath the world, a secret a a sort of web of secrets.
40:16
And of course that's true.
40:16
That's true about the element of life itself.
40:18
You sort of you look at it the the molecular level.
40:24
We're not aware of any of that.
40:27
The way that the molecules of that table are moving, you know.
40:33
So it's it's kind of as above so below.
40:37
You know that ancient proverb saying.
40:41
Um as in our daily lives so with eternity.
40:49
As in our daily lives so with what's the opposite of eternity? Death. So with death.
40:59
I used to tell my students too that writing is practicing for death.
41:01
It's practicing for death because you're writing about tr you're trying to write about transformation that there is a transformation involved from the thinking and the wanting to actually writing.
41:18
I mean you're you're involved in transformation in the act of writing.
41:27
You said it's practicing for death and you know we do need to practice.
41:34
I mean I want to be aware. You know what I mean?
41:37
I don't want to be no no one knows you know what what the circumstances will be but this is sort of the big transition.
41:46
We don't remember birth at least not consciously. I don't know.
41:51
I just find it very interesting.
41:56
I pulled this this quote which I'd love for you to read.
41:59
12-year-old girl speaking to her mute mother.
42:01
And I think this kind of brings together some of the themes that we've been talking about over the last little while. Children, voice.
42:13
Well, this is the character.
42:16
um she's been told to call this character papa and he has been sort of occupying their home for almost three years and during that time her mother has become so traumatized that she is mute and one day suddenly they're in the buck board on the way to the asylum and they're on the way and he's saying this to Connie talk to her.
42:45
He said, "Tell her she'll like it where she's going.
42:48
A fine great place like a castle with a tower clock.
42:53
Tell her you'll like it, mama."
42:53
I said, "A fine place like a castle built from stone."
43:01
So, of course, she's never seen this place, and she doesn't know where they're going.
43:08
Um and at the end of this section something happens that you know we won't reveal here.
43:20
I think all of my books was, you know, were preparation for writing this book in a sense.
43:25
And a friend of mine told me like maybe 10 or 15 years ago, we were somewhere together and I mentioned this book or this idea about a mother and daughter who go to an asylum.
43:41
And I don't remember that at all.
43:41
Um, but I must have been thinking about it, you know, for a long time.
43:46
And I grew up uh the small town I grew up in was about 20 minutes from this asylum.
43:52
So it wasn't a um it was a real place in my mind.
43:57
Uh although at the time that I knew of it, it was a ruin.
44:06
And part of the research with the book was going back to that place as it existed in the beginning during and after the civil war when it was a very very different of course time, place, world.
44:23
>> So how does the how does an idea transition into a book?
44:25
Do you make a decision I'm going to write a book about this?
44:28
No, you just kind of write every day and >> No, I don't even write every day.
44:32
I write um I write in in spurts almost. Okay.
44:40
>> Um for weeks or months at a time when I have the space and like I as I said I' I worked on this book for about eight years and there were times in which I would stop writing for months or and actually um I retired from my day job in January 2020.
45:04
It's convenient time >> right before the pandemic. >> Yeah.
45:08
>> And um and it was there was something about the what was happening to everyone.
45:18
There was no cure, you know, things were deserted.
45:22
This book almost became my refuge in the way that the asylum becomes a refuge, a surprising refuge for Eliza and Connelly.
45:38
And the irony at the heart of the book is that the world was violent chaos.
45:50
And inside this place there was something else.
45:56
Everything was reversed you know because it did feel like a complete reversal of what life's with what we thought life was.
46:04
Um so somehow uh that period of time in that period of time I was able to finish the book.
46:17
>> Tell me this what's going on here?
46:17
Why do you write by hand?
46:21
>> I don't >> some stuff out.
46:23
>> I don't know even what that's from.
46:26
>> Well, just more generally, you know, in terms of this is pretty standard for how you write.
46:32
>> I write uh in a notebook and I I was always a terrible I never really learned how to uh write cursive.
46:37
So my my my my is sort of printing that you can do very quickly.
46:45
Well, I have written um a few things about um hair salons because they're places where when I was a child, women gathered and I was a child, I was an outlaw inside this gathering and uh it's sort of like, you know, the the physical um the sensory element of church, the red carpet the pews, the huge organ pipes, the stained glass windows, the that world is so um impressive and um never to be forgotten for a child.
47:29
and this world with the sort of the heat in the air and the running water and the suds and um these women talking to each other in a way that they know no one can hear them.
47:46
Um for me it was a real as a child it was a real sort of looking through a keyhole into the adult world.
47:54
the world of women >> seems like you had a very vivid childhood that you spent a long time really making sense of >> I don't know I was always looking for something you know the truth and also just the beauty of it I wasn't thinking of it as beauty just the way things were I wanted to uh and later on you know as a writer I wanted to really make the work real.
48:27
And a lot of that had to do with sensory detail and physical descriptions being very clear.
48:38
There is this magical quality to it.
48:43
There's this magical quality for me to language, to the way people use language, to the way certain writers who've become so important to me use language.
48:54
And it's just really a privilege to be involved in that attempt, you know, because writers do think a little differently.
49:09
Whether that's practicing for death or embodying transformation in a way, it's a real statement of faith.
49:23
Not religious faith, not the faith that everything's going to turn out great, but the faith that life is meaningful, that it all has meaning.
49:35
Because if it didn't, why would Buoie be finding meaning?
49:43
That is, I think, one thing that we talked about writers writing so that worlds aren't lost.
49:53
If this life and all of these nameless forgotten people, you just think of it as a huge field of moving tall grass and it's all just anonymous. It's just moving.
50:13
Each person is a kind of historical genius in that each person is completely separate in their experience, their their traumas, their healing if it happens, they're moving through their lives, you know, it means so much.
50:38
And that's what writing and particularly writing I think because we are creatures of narrative.
50:46
We think in terms of words.
50:50
We think in terms of images um past, present, future, fantasies.
51:01
It's all intensely meaningful, no matter how terrible life can be.
51:08
And I just think that's kind of miraculous.
51:13
>> It's good to meet you. >> Good to meet you.