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‘I Try Not to Have a Schedule’: Talking Writing with William Vollmann

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William T. Vollmann is as renowned for the size of his books as the magnitude of his subjects: poverty, the morality of violence, the collision of Indigenous and European cultures. His book Rising Up and Rising Down spans seven-volumes and 3,300-pages. Imperial runs 1,306 pages. But his beautiful sentences, challenging structures, and documentary photography deserve equal attention, and his ten published novels and four story collections often require as much research as his nonfiction.

His newest project is a two-volume series called the “Climate Ideologies” that addresses how the wonders and waste of energy consumption are irrevocably heating our planet. The first volume, No Immediate Danger, covers the effects of manufacturing, farming and nuclear energy, and it took him into the restricted zone one mile from Japan’s ruined Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Volume two, No Good Alternative, covers coal, oil, and natural gas.

Prolific, original and determined, on paper Vollmann cuts an intimidating figure. He famously wrote his first novel You Bright and Risen Angels at the San Francisco office where he worked as a computer programmer, often sleeping there a week at a time and living off of vending machine candy bars. In person, his warmth and humor make for easy conversation. Years ago, when I gave up on a big book project that was tormenting me, I did something crazy and wrote him a letter through his agent, telling him about my idea and struggles. Four months later, a handwritten letter arrived in my mailbox, encouraging me with wisdom that distilled his own approach to writing: read as much as you can about the subject, take the trip as many times as necessary to get it right, then the story will be yours. His words were just what I needed. I booked a flight soon after and wrote a whole book based on that reporting trip. Writers need mentors, and hungry readers need writers like Vollmann.

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Aaron Gilbreath: You start No Immediate Danger by stating that it’s too late to stop climate change, so now we can only understand what led our species here so future generations know the details. Did your 2014 book Last Stories, about death, help prepare you for this grave work?

William Vollmann: Yeah. I had been preparing for the worst for a long time, but in Carbon Ideologies I do believe that it’s probably too late, but I’m hoping I’m wrong. Any book is really about its own present, even a science fiction book or a book like this, so it’s always possible that maybe some sort of a plant-based carbon sequestration system could come to our rescue. I’m not counting on it.

AG: I like that it’s dedicated to your daughter since that does add a small sense of hope that maybe salvation is possible.

WV: It would be nice, and if it isn’t then I’m just hoping that her life won’t be too much worse than mine and that there might be a few more generations yet before it peters out. You never know.

AG: One interesting thing about Carbon Ideologies is that it functions as an apology to future generations for the earth that we destroyed. The fact that you’re even hopeful enough to envision future readers makes me want to uses this interview to talk about writing in the same way, as a time capsule message to other writers both alive and unborn.

WV: Why not?

AG: You are one of the most productive writers on earth. A lot of my fellow writers know how hard it is to research, report and write a single-story, so we always wonder how you sustain your pace, publishing so many books at this size nearly every year. People like me picture you sort of living at your computer from morning until night. They wonder if you sleep. What are your writing days like?

WV: Well, I try not to have a schedule. So, I’m pretty much writing every day at some point, but I do other things also. When I get bogged down, there is something that I don’t understand, I set that aside and do something else, whether it’s another writing project or doing a little maintenance at my studio or painting or going on some river adventure to see my outlaw friends in the Delta. I just try to mix it up. So I very rarely feel any boredom, unless of course, I’m on my stationary exercise bike. After about 10 or 11 hours of misery, I get off and realize it’s been about 30 seconds.

AG: That sounds like my gym experience. Is that bike in your studio where you can toggle between it and your computer?

WV: It’s at the home, yeah and maybe I should get one at the studio too, I don’t know. But it’s also so hateful that it might be better just to swell up and die of diabetes or something. We will see.

AG: Did somebody convince you to get a bike, or was that your own decision to start that?

WV: It was my own decision. I have had that bike for 20 years, and once in a great while I will force myself to use it.

AG: The older I get, the more I wonder how exercise fits into the daily routine of somebody with a sedentary profession that involves so much reading and writing. Do you take preventative measures? Are there measures you wish you had taken now that you’re 58?

WV: There was an old guy one time who said, “Bill, in your 50s you start having problems. In your 60s you realize that you have to do something about those problems, and in your 70s you realize that those solutions don’t work.” So, you might as well just have a sense of humor about it and know that it has to end badly one way or another so, why worry?

AG: Smoke a cigar and have a drink.

WV: Exactly.

AG: It surprises me that you don’t have a schedule. Is part of your productivity related to successful multitasking and time management?

WV: I guess so, and also the fact that I don’t want to feel forced to do this or forced to do that. Sometimes I have to for a while, but mostly, if I really don’t want to be working on one particular thing at that particular time I don’t have to do it. That keeps me feeling fresh and gives me the sense of novelty, because once that’s gone you are thinking, Well, why on earth am I doing this? How can you write something interesting if it’s just drudgery?

When I’m researching a book, there is some necessary drudgery, so if I’m working on one of the Seven Dreams books, I try to get up to speed on the anthropology or archeology of those people whom I’m writing about. With Carbon Ideologies, there were a lot of tables I had to put together. At first, that was a rather dreary experience. Then I began getting quite interested. Whether or not the reader will ever be interested, I can’t say. But, once I had those tables, I felt that I was able to start saying things about what the tables implied. So that’s just how I do it.

AG: Making sure that it retains enough freshness to drive your interest?

WV: Yeah, I would say. How about you when you are writing, what do you do?

AG: Sort of the same thing. Since most of the time nobody is paying me ─ I write so many essays on spec ─ that I only write because it’s interesting and not drudgery. I operate almost entirely out of curiosity. I want to know or process my own experience or learn about the world, so I write because those subjects are fresh.

WV: That makes sense to me. If I try not to put limits on the curiosity, then I’m more likely to actually learn something. In Riding Toward Everywhere I talked a little bit about this one thing Thoreau said that I have always found inspirational. It runs something like, “We must not let our knowledge get in the way of what’s far more important, which is our ignorance.” So as long as I keep saying, “Alright, I’m ignorant. I’m ignorant about everything, and I want to learn more,” then I’m more likely to actually learn more, as opposed to saying, “Okay, now I know the answers about climate change.” People knew the answers about climate change a long time ago, and they were wrong.

AG: I saw that you mentioned that in the book that people had suspicions in, was it 1945 or the ’50s?

WV: By the ’70s people really started wondering. At Oak Ridge they were saying, “Well, things probably won’t be too bad until we get up to 400 parts per million of C02, but why worry, because that won’t happen until the 21st century.” So it’s an odd thing thinking about our obligation to the future. We never really had to do that. We probably should have done that, but we never actually considered the possibility that we might be making the future unlivable. Then suddenly here we are forced to decide, “Well, is that our responsibility? Do we want to do something about it?” I hope the answer is yes.

AG: In No Immediate Danger you distilled that sort of frivolity with the phrase “Keeping the lights on.” That seems to summarize the sense of convenience and thoughtlessness. Flicking the lights on and leaving them on, we don’t even think about energy’s effects or waste.

WV: There is something very beautiful in the idea that we have all this electric power at our disposal to make our lives better, and of course, in many ways, it has improved our lives, and will probably continue to do so. One of the real troubling things is that what we’re doing is not entirely frivolous. The fact that someone can do all the cooking and cleaning in the kitchen in less time than they used to. That’s really great. But what about all the so-called vampire power? All the lights on, computers and surge protectors just to keep telling you, “Yes, everything’s good, I’m still drawing current.” There are so many things that we don’t need, and one very dangerous aspect of our economic system is that there’s this notion that one has to keep creating demand. That means we will need more and more power, and no matter how efficiently we use it, if our absolute demand is increasing, most likely so will our greenhouse emissions. That is not very promising at all.

AG: Is that related to the sort of capitalist ideology of constant expansion? Edward Abbey said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”

WV: That’s right. It is a capitalist pattern, and it was also a socialist pattern. I talk at one point about the Russian’s idea that there have to be more consumer goods. They were doing it differently at a different scale, but what it really comes down to in my opinion is natural biology. A tree is going to try to grow taller and maybe crowd out the competition. A rabbit is gonna have lots of bunnies if it can, and we humans are going to want to have more and more. We want to reproduce and make our lives more comfortable and interesting, and in a sense that’s the natural thing that every organism does. Of course, the problem is that there are not unbounded limits. There are bounded limits, so unless organisms are checked by some means, organisms that obey their natural proclivities will get into trouble. I can’t even really blame capitalism as much as I would like to.

AG: In a sense, it’s a very judicious way of viewing our perilous climate situation. You do an impressive job in No Immediate Danger of not being judgmental of the culprits and instead simply look at why we do what we do, and assess what we have done. Are you are saying we are the victims of our own biology, even if we don’t recognize it or not?

WV: We’ve been very successful. I love being able to plug my laptop into the wall; I’m able to write more books. I love being able to get on a plane and fly to other countries. Probably the single best thing that you or I could do would be to give up air travel. I mean, there are lots of other things we could do. I’m still flying. I want to advance my career. I want to write a book. I want to see this or that, so I’m part of the problem. How can I blame capitalism for that?

AG: You implicate yourself right before the table of contents. You admit that you’ve consumed all these forms of energy and say, “Better an honest muddler than a carbon-powered hypocrite.”

WV: That is right.

AG: I grew up as an environmentalist, so I always felt very conflicted about procreation because of the amount of waste generated with plastic diapers and trash bags and all sorts of things. Once I met the right person, I wanted to have a kid. Then I met my daughter and just thought, To hell with it, this is the right thing to do.

WV: In a way that’s the so-called tragedy of the commons. Are you familiar with that paradigm?

AG: Yes.

WV: So, we all want to do what’s best for us, and we each take a tiny share of the net detriment to everyone that our choice has caused, so we’re still ahead by getting most of the net benefit.

AG: There’s obviously a moral imperative, but in our very individualistic society, is it possible for us to accept that moral imperative that comes with being a part of the commons in order to make any lasting changes?

WV: I am guessing that you and I as individuals can’t really do very much. We can reach out to other individuals and maybe, if I were lucky and many people read my book, and they all decided, for instance, not to fly anymore. That would make some difference, but my suspicion is that it wouldn’t make enough difference. What we really need are top-down regulatory changes. Why is it that in Japan it takes a lot less coke to make coal than it does in the US? Why shouldn’t we say, “Alright, if we’re going to make steel from coke then we have to at least use the Japanese technology?” And maybe somebody has to decide when we really need to use aluminum and cement and these other so-called big five materials that use 80% of all the energy for manufacturing. Of course, the more of this regulatory or bureaucratic burden you impose, the more we become something like East Germany. It will get less and less pleasant. But it may well be that we are approaching a state of emergency and won’t have any choice. It’s certainly true that the sooner we start figuring out how to reduce demand, the easier it’s gonna be.

AG: The regulatory experiment that Mayor Bloomberg did with the size of sodas in New York was an interesting way of changing people’s perception of what’s required to quench their thirst and what actually qualifies as a “large size.” It seems you’re right: the only way to make these large-scale, long-term societal changes will be top-down regulatory in that same generational way.

WV: I think that’s right, and I think that we are going to have people making cost-benefit analyses of various things. For instance, it takes almost a hundred times more energy to manufacture a pound of aluminum than a pound of cement, which is the lowest energy user of the big five materials. But aluminum, by being so strong, light and recyclable, makes a lot of sense in skyscrapers and bridges, and it may actually be more energy efficient to use that aluminum than to use the vastly heavier, greater quantity of steel that you would need to use. So who is going to figure that out? You want someone who is intelligent, practical and doesn’t have some kind of a bias, someone who is not a show for the aluminum industry or the steel industry. Where are we going to find people like that? I don’t know where to look. Those are the kinds of things that really make me very disheartened about the dilemma we’re in.

AG: It might be easier to create a colony on Mars than to find an unbiased politician who isn’t influenced by industry lobbyists.

WV: Yeah, a colony on Mars would probably be a fantastic boondoggle, and a lot of people could probably get rich supplying and exploiting it.

AG: If we are going to keep creating demand, why not do it on another planet?

WV: That’s right. First, we need to create some Martians that we can sell to.

AG: I did enjoy your comments in previous interviews about the potentially positive effects of swine flu.

WV: It’s all rather bleak. And that would certainly be an effective way to reduce demand, but I would rather we reduce demand in some voluntary and kinder way.

AG: A question for you about the origins of this book. A lot of us nonfiction writers fret about how to come up with ideas: have we run out of ideas? Can we generate more? I remember you saying you came up with the idea for the Seven Dreams Series while researching Rainbow Stories, asking yourself what the continent looked like before all these parking lots. How do you generate ideas, and how did you come up with Carbon Ideologies?

WV: Well, I guess it was my visit to Fukushima in 2011. First, I saw the devastation created by the tsunami. Then I went into the areas that were already abandoned as a result of the nuclear disaster. The tsunami left very palpable effects, but when I first went into the town of Kawauchi, for instance, it seemed as if people might almost still be there. It was very eerie. There were blinds pulled down, a couple of places maybe an umbrella would have fallen down at the front doorway, some potted plants starting to die. Over the next few years, as I kept returning to those parts of Fukushima that hadn’t been reclaimed, they were looking worse and worse and more creepy. But still, the local people kept saying, “Well, I don’t even know what radiation is. I mean, I don’t itch from it, I can’t really see it. It’s invisible.” And I started thinking about how great a metaphor that is for the effects of all these fuels. After a while, you can see indirectly the effects of the radiation contamination by looking at these hideous abandoned places, but you can’t see the contamination directly. Then when you go to nonnuclear fuels, you start seeing certain affects ─ the mountaintop removal and various ugly sites of oil and coal in Bangladesh ─ but you can’t see the emissions. So it’s a more slowly unfolding version of the tsunami or of the radiation contamination. You kind of have to work yourself into understanding it or to feeling it. That’s how I started thinking about Carbon Ideologies.

AG: So you started with invisibility as a metaphor, then in No Immediate Danger‘s Japan sections, you use your dosimeter and scintillation counter to bring this invisible drama to life, both to measure it and to prove that it exists at all. And people in the no-go zones still don’t believe you!

WV: I really wish that I had a lot more money to throw at this problem. I would have liked very much to have had a FLIR camera ─ forward-looking infrared ─ so that in my book I could have pictures of carbon dioxide coming out of smokestacks or people’s mouths, or of methane rising from manure heaps. But I wasn’t able to make those emissions visible in that way. Those cameras cost something like $60,000.

AG: Well, if you were online you would have been able to do some sort of Kickstarter campaign.

WV: That’s right. If I were online I’m sure I could do all kinds of great things.

AG: And be monitored. What about doing that retroactively; has it ever been done before?

WV: Well, maybe you can do it.

AG: I would love to. I’d have to get some money together. But the fact that you work in multiple mediums for different projects and have a photo book to accompany Imperial, you’re obviously the ideal person.

WV: Well, it would really be fun to be able to do it, and it would be nice if they had cameras to show the radioisotope blooms. Maybe they do. Anyway, all we can do is do our best with our limited senses. One of the things that I liked about the pancake frisker, which was the real-time analog to the decimeter, was as one of my friends put it, it’s like an extra sense. It was really fascinating to frisk my daughter’s cat. I was frisking everything for a while, and then I would be a little bit unnerved if something was four or five times more radioactive than something else. Eventually, I realized that that’s all so trivial. You fly to the East Coast or you go out to the granitic rock of the Sierras, and things are 10 times higher or whatever. Then you go to Fukushima and you might find things up to 700 times higher.

AG: What about your health: In one great scene in Japan’s radioactive city of Ōkuma, the protective shoe covers and painter’s suits “manufactured with pride in the United States of America” ripped. Have you been tested for the effects of radiation lately?

WV: I doubt that you could really tell. If I got some kind of cancer maybe there would be a way to track it back to the cesium, or maybe not. We probably all have micro-particles of various isotopes from atmospheric testing and concentration in seafood or whatever, so if I get cancer, maybe I can just console myself that it was as a result of drinking a lot of whisky or playing around in the dark room.

AG: You have made your peace.

WV: I have, yes.

AG: If the idea for this book started with your first visit to Fukushima, how do your other books evolve?

WV: It sort of depends on the book, Aaron. With one of the Seven Dreams books, I know what the story is, or at least what I think the story is. It turned out that what I thought I knew about Pocahontas and Captain John Smith wasn’t exactly true, but still I knew the basic historical events were fixed and my job was not to write a new story but to interpret those events. With something like Carbon Ideologies, the events and their effects are still unfolding and, to some extent, in dispute. My job there would be to take a lot of notes, visit the people and places available to me, read a lot of books and just let my ignorance guide me and hopefully save me from too much prejudice as I started building up judgments about these things.

AG: In your fiction, how do you inhabit other people’s lives in those historical eras?

WV: Well, for the Seven Dreams it’s possible to go to a very particular place. In The Ice Shirt I was able to go to the ruins of Erik the Red’s farm in Iceland and I could stand there and think, Okay, this is not too dissimilar to the view that Erik himself had. So I’m looking out at the water, at the clouds and the birds and grass and flowers and the stones and thinking, How does this make me feel? Is there any way brings me closer to Erik? For him, these things would all have been more quotidian and yet still there must be some kind of a common human response to wet grass and gray sky. That’s one of the ways you can just kind of work yourself back into seeing and trying to feel what those people would have. Then you try to perform some of the acts that you know the historical characters would have. For The Dying Grass, I had a chance to fire a Springfield single-shot rifle of the kind that the US cavalry would probably had fired. So I could say, Okay, this is what it feels to hold something of this weight. This is how you load it and how quickly could a person do this? Not nearly as quickly if one had an AR-15. How steady can you hold it? How difficult is it? What’s it like and here comes this topple white smoke from the black powder out the barrel, and then I have to clean it afterwards; the barrel is quite fouled with this stuff. So I’m doing all of these things relative to one particular action that if I describe accurately, I’m describing something intrinsically true about those US Calvary men. That’s another way of getting into what they might have felt and seen, and that is so much of who you are or who you become I think and what you do.

AG: So research and travel are the essential elements that unite both genres for you. The structures of all your books vary widely, so do you just adjust your approach and the structure of a book according to each project?

WV: That’s right. I think it would be a drag for me and the reader if I were just following some formula for my books. As I get older my options narrow, and I imagine that my books will become a little bit more of a piece, and that’s probably already happening. But the extent that I can resist that and make every book new, I think that’s a win-win for the reader and for me.

AG: So far, mission accomplished. One of the things that I also love about your nonfiction is its dry sense of humor. One of countless examples in No Immediate Danger was, “Let us now celebrate the miraculous smog of Calabar!” What else can humor do besides add levity to certain dark subjects?

WV: Sometimes you can make a frightening or bitter point more effectively through humor. You can actually make it sting a little bit more, and you can also try to sparkle up the page a little bit. If there are a lot of things about agriculture, fertilizers and so forth, it’s really incumbent on me to try to give the reader some little reward every now and then for reading that.

AG: You embrace the exclamation point, which I also like. Is that contentious punctuation also a way to get people’s attention?

WV: Yeah, and often in Carbon Ideologies the exclamation point adds to the ironic pseudo-ingenuous nature of some absurd claim about how wonderfully healthy radiation is or whatever.

AG: No Immediate Danger isn’t a joke, but in the way you point out the flaws of our thinking and denial about nuclear energy and climate change, this 600-page book all seems sort of punctuated by a giant exclamation point.

WV: That’s right. In a way it is, of course, a joke, right? It’s just the joke is on us and we’re not gonna like it, but maybe the beetles that replace us will somehow be able to laugh with their antenna.

AG: That sounds like your first novel brought to life. The fact that you wanted a FLIR camera to document the carbon dioxide and methane and expand the range of your climate change inquiry to a second medium makes me think how you like room to explore your subjects sufficiently. From what I gather, though, there’s been a long-standing attempt by your publishers to get you to cut your books, including page limits in your contracts and lowering royalties for longer books. Can you tell me about your legendary resistance to heavy editing?

WV: What if someone were to tell you, “We think your daughter was born a little bit too tall, so would you mind chopping off her legs?” You might not have the most compliant reaction to that, right?

AG: No.

WV: My books are my children. They’re just like my daughter. She’s turning out the way she’s turning out and that’s just how it is, so people can like her or not, but I love my daughter and I’m not going to chop off her legs. [laughs]

AG: So editing is forced surgery. You try to let the story be what it is, and the people who publish the book have their financial and other concerns? What dictates this chopping of the legs?

WV: Well, wouldn’t it be perfect for editors and publishers and maybe reviewers if all books had to be the same length? They all had to be, let’s say, exactly 124 pages, and the extra 24 pages all have to be ads. I mean, wouldn’t that just be lovely? One of the many reasons that I love the internet is, of course, because that’s how things are there. You can watch something and there’s going to be some wiggly, giggly little ad in the corner the whole time, and also, let’s track your eye movements. How wonderful it all is. As soon as there is any attempt to control creativity for noncreative purposes, we start going down that miserable road. But as I always say, Aaron, the world doesn’t owe me a living, and a publisher could legitimately say, “Well, Bill, we just don’t think you are going to pencil out, so we don’t want to publish your book.” That’s like saying, “Well, your daughter really is too tall, so we don’t want her to date our son.” That’s okay, but how awful it would be if they said, “Your daughter is too tall, so we want to chop off her legs,” and I said, “Okay, I’ll do that.” What kind of a father would I be? What kind of an author would I be to go along with that bologna?

AG: So protecting your vision of your book seems to be first and foremost?

WV: That’s right. My strength and my weakness is that I don’t really care about the financial implications. I don’t care too much about whether a book is going to make its advance back, which means I’m not a good team player. I have to be very thrilled and grateful that Viking once again saw things my way and let me publish Carbon Ideologies at the length that I thought it needed to be. It certainly can’t be too good for Viking’s bottom-line, but I think that, like me, they’re worried about climate change. They worked so hard, it was a real thrill to have such dedicated colleagues. I worked really hard too, and we all did our best without cutting off anybody’s legs.

AG: You struck a few of those chords in the “Note to the Reader” at the beginning of No Immediate Danger. You meant for the two volumes to appear as one volume. Your endnotes and citations got cut. I interpreted the “Note” as an apology to readers that the book they hold isn’t the book you intended. There and in the acknowledgements in the back of the book, you weren’t shaming Viking, but you were like letting the reader in on this push and pull between both parties. What was your intent including those?

WV: The main reason is that I’m very grateful. This is to some extent a math/science book, and I’m not a mathematician or a scientist, so I’m doing my best. Even so, it’s a risk for me and a risk for the publisher. So I’m really, really thrilled that they tried to help me and everyone by publishing this. That’s the main thing. As far as the push and pull part is concerned, I think that’s kind of interesting, and it’s probably a good thing that readers who care can learn that I didn’t want to cut the source notes. I wish they could have been in the hard copy. This is the first time that that’s happened, and it was a compromise that I was willing to make because Viking had already done so much for me and this book. Thank God I don’t have to understand their financial imperative, and I guess that’s all I would say.

AG: You do your job and they do theirs, and it seems you are able to meet in the middle.

WV: That’s right.

AG: I just love that there is a couple of places at the beginning of the book where you say, you know, it will be okay to skip the primer section and start over 200 pages in. I just pictured your publisher shaking their head, like, “Bill, please, try harder to entice the reader!”

WV: [Laughs] Unfortunately, it is to some extent a dreary book about a dreary subject. Of all my books, it’s probably not the book that people are going to put a pick up and re-read for fun. It can’t be. Just having to decide Let’s see, do we want to talk about lignite’s emissions per pound or its emissions per energy produced when it’s burned? ─ all this kind of stuff. It’s important and needs to be discussed, but it’s not particularly fun.

AG: But you clearly tried to have fun. You titled one section “The Parable of Adipic Acid” and had some fun there despite the dreariness of the subject.

WV: I do my best. [Laughs]

AG: As informative as it is, there are some funny lines in there like, “What a treat to watch adipic acid combining with the hexamethylene diamine so that we could see a pallid syrup forming, settling out into something resembling melted cheddar cheese!”

WV: Aw, how delicious.

AG: I guess it’s a good example that there are different types of books for different kinds of experiences, and your oeuvre contains so many different sorts, including the kind that we probably aren’t going to read on the beach.

WV: No, maybe not. Unless, of course, rising sea levels turn your backyard into a beach.

AG: That’s what so many residents of Phoenix, Arizona where I grew up were banking on with California earthquakes. They didn’t understand geology. Speaking of which, I was just reading about California governor Jerry Brown retiring, who said he doesn’t believe in legacies. I was wondering if you as a writer believe in legacies.

WV: Well, I want my daughter to live as long and as happily as she can, and I feel the same about my books. If people find some value in them after I’m gone so that their lives are extended, that’s a concept that makes me happy. But it’s hard for me to believe that I’m going to know it, and therefore what’s the point of a legacy in the way. You find that you give someone a very nice tomb and what happens? The tomb gets robbed. That’s life and that’s death.

AG: It seems interesting to think that since you don’t know if there will be a legacy, you shouldn’t burden yourself with trying to create one. Is that liberating?

WV: That’s right, but that doesn’t let me off the hook. I want to make sure that I do the best job I can and try to make things ─ to the extent that that’s possible ─ somewhat timeless. I try not to get too bogged down in what is current in 2018, for instance. I’m hoping that in the future someone could pick up Carbon Ideologies and say, “Alright, here and there, this part seems a little bit antiquated now, a little bit superseded, but still I understand what Bill’s trying to do, and how he’s trying to compare the different fuels, and this was how many perks per million of C02 there were in his lifetime.” What I would like is for the book to still be useful or of interest or still something in its dated way.

AG: When it’s a paper copy or in your achieves at the Ohio State University, readers will be able to see your intent and data unchanged, unlike on the evolving internet.

WV: Unlike the internet, exactly.

AG: Can I ask you about your daughter? I’m curious what it was like raising a child as a writer who travels for work as much as you do.

WV: Well, I love her very much and it’s been a thrill to be in her life.

AG: Your father was a very encouraging, cool father, a business professor who frequently told you, “Bill, if it’s not easy, lucrative, or fun, don’t do it.”

WV: Yeah, he was great. That’s a good business plan. I recommend that to everybody, especially to people like you and me Aaron who are self-employed. There is certainly no reason to do something for nothing unless it’s going to be fun.

AG: Amen. My dad, who is Mr. Practical, had good advice in that same vein. He said, “When you find what you like, do the hell out of it and make sure you enjoy it.”

WV: I agree with that.

AG: Do you see some of your intellectual appetites and hunger for knowledge and experience in your daughter?

WV: I think so, yes.

AG: As a new father myself, I just wonder how working writers balance everything, that and I want to help encourage curiosity in my own daughter.

WV: The good news is that as parents we will inevitably fail, and therefore all we can do is fail with grace and let our children see that we are not perfect and they are not going to be perfect either. If we can help each other through the hard times and forgive the rest then we are probably doing our best.

Read an excerpt from William Vollman’s “No Immediate Danger”

Protecting Your Writing Time In This Weird Time of Ours

AP Photo/The Dominion-Post,Jason DeProspero

Things are nuts. How do writers concentrate now? How do we not let the toxicity of the news feed steal our minds completely away from the page? How do we not sink into despair, because really, does writing or poetry or anything matter anymore? At Tin House, poet Patricia Lockwood has a few ideas. Get a physical book, a diary, and some coffee, find a window to sit by, and read this before you look at Twitter. Do not look at Twitter yet!

The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless, it will be like one of those dreams where you crawl into a series of smaller and smaller boxes, or like an escape room that contains everyone and that you’ll pay twelve hours of your life for. If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will install a gold toilet there. It will turn on shark week as foreplay and then cheat on its wife.

English will come out of it wrong, and then English will come wrong out of me.

The scaramucci is not just a unit of time, it is also a unit of conspiracy against you, and the work you were put here to do.

The feeling you get after hours of scrolling that all your thoughts have been replaced with cotton candy — or something even nastier, like Runts or circus peanuts — as opposed to the feeling of being open to poetry, to being inside the poem, which is the feeling of being honey in the hive.

Read the story

Leslie Jamison: Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?

In this excerpt from her book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison recalls how in the early days of recovery, she examined the work of newly-sober writers like John Berryman and Charles Jackson for clues about how sobriety would affect her as a writer. It wasn’t until she read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that she found “proof that sober creativity was possible.”

But the truer story of my drinking is really a story about tedium, about claustrophobia and repetition. At a certain point, it started to expose itself as something that wasn’t revelry, that wasn’t about connection but isolation, that wasn’t about dark wisdom or metaphysical angst — that wasn’t about anything, really, besides the urge to get drunk, by myself, with no one watching.

The night of my first meeting, when I was 26 and desperate, I drove across the river to an address near the hospital, crying all the way across the Burlington Street Bridge, my tears streaking the streetlamps into bright white rain. It was almost Halloween: cobwebs on porches, hanging ghosts made from stuffed sheets, jack-o’-lanterns with their crooked grins. Being drunk was like having a candle lit inside you. I already missed it.

Once I got sober, I became more interested in the question of what little, as Berryman put it, could be said for sobriety. If addiction stories ran on the fuel of darkness — the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis — then recovery often seemed like the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness, a tedious addendum to the riveting blaze. I wasn’t immune; I’d always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But when I got sober, I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.

Over the years, I’d come to realize that many of my drunk icons had actually gotten sober eventually, or tried to, and I went looking for proof that recovery had not blunted or destroyed their creativity. It was like the desire the poet Eavan Boland confessed when she asked for poems with women who weren’t beautiful or young: “I want a poem/I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.” I wanted a story I could get sober in.

Read the story

Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?

Longreads Pick

In this excerpt from her book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison recalls how in the early days of recovery, she examined the work of newly-sober writers like John Berryman and Charles Jackson for clues about how sobriety would affect her as a writer. It wasn’t until she read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that she found “proof that sober creativity was possible.”

Published: Mar 13, 2018
Length: 24 minutes (6,187 words)

The Truth About Writing Fiction From Your Life

Elisa Albert and Emily Gould talk with Longreads Essays Editor Sari Botton about the decisions involved in writing fiction with autobiographical underpinnings at Rough Draft Bar & Books in Kingston, NY on Sunday, February 11th, 2018.

Sari Botton | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4300 words)

I’ve been working on a few different book projects for years — okay, decades — without yet publishing. There are many, many reasons it’s been taking me so long, but one of them is that I keep vacillating between memoir and fiction.

In the early 90s I dabbled in MFA programs, focusing on fiction. What I began writing in those days was somewhat based on my own experiences, yet also very made-up.

Then in the mid-90s, after I dropped out of two different programs in succession, books like Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club appeared and sparked a memoir boom. As a reader I became a nonfiction junkie. As a writer, I switched gears, started publishing personal essays…and then spent a lot of time freaking out about upsetting people by writing the truth — or my version of it, anyway.

These days I go back and forth, working on both memoir and somewhat autobiographical fiction, and spend a lot of time debating the merits of each with other writers.

On Sunday, February 11th, I turned to two of my favorite authors, Elisa Albert and Emily Gould, for their take on this. I sat down with them at Rough Draft Bar and Books in Kingston, New York, for a conversation ranging from the choices around writing fiction with autobiographical underpinnings, to the differences — mechanically-speaking and otherwise — between memoir and “autofiction.”

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity. Below you can listen to the audio — including Albert reading a passage from After Birth, and Gould reading a passage from Friendship, plus a Q&A with the audience.

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Sari Botton: Elsewhere, both of you have talked a lot about, and written about, writing fiction from your life. I’ve been intrigued, and I thought that other people would want to hear about this too. So, is there a difference in your mind, either one of you, between straight up fiction and fiction that does have autobiographical elements, and what would be the difference?

Elisa Albert: We could do like a one word answer on the count of three, yes, or no. I don’t think there’s a difference. I think it’s like a spectrum, you know? Like a continuum, if you will. We are all bound by the limits of consciousness such as it is. Unless we alter our consciousness, but even altered consciousness is consciousness. It exists, you know? I mean, I can’t get into the physics too deeply, but even if you set something on Mars, you’re still coming from what you have to bring to bear, which is your consciousness. So, is that always necessarily autobiographical? No. But it does come from you. Or the one you, the eternal you, the shared collective you.

Emily Gould: Elisa and I obviously don’t write books that are set on Mars or in 18th century Scotland. No aliens are going to show up at the temp agency where Bev [a character in Friendship] is going to have her interview. There are no fantastical imaginative elements. But that also doesn’t mean that we didn’t make this stuff up. This book is actually so made up. And it’s actually really frustrating sometimes when people are like, “Oh, so what was it like for you when …” [name of my best friend] “decided to have a baby after getting pregnant after a one night stand?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, because that didn’t happen in my actual life.”

At the same time I want credit for being such an imaginative person, but then I look at any individual page of this book, and I’m like, well, yes, I did eat at that restaurant, and have basically that exact same interaction. But you know, then it became fictionalized. And we both have also written a lot of nonfiction, and think there is a shining line in my mind between the two forms.

Botton: You’ve both also written a fair amount of essay and memoir, and so people recognize certain things from your lives, which they can project on to your books, saying it’s totally just your life. But now you’re calling it a novel.

Albert: Change the names and there you go.

Botton: Right, exactly. But a lot of other novelists choose to completely invent worlds and that’s not what you’re doing, so it’s an interesting choice. Emily, I read something that you wrote about where the choice started. That you were having a hard time after writing a memoir, And the Heart Says Whatever. That after that you were having a hard time writing in the first person. Do you want to talk a little bit about that shift?

Gould: Oh sure. Yeah. In order to trick myself into being able to write again at all after the, sort of, critical and interpersonal disaster that was the reception to my first book, I sort of just started writing in the third person as an exercise even though I was still basically writing memoiristically. And then very gradually that became something other than memoir. It just started as a sort of thought exercise, and now this is something that I tell my students.

I’m teaching fiction now, and students come to me all the time and say things like, “I’m just so sick of myself. I’m sick of my perspective. I’m sick of all of my thoughts about everything. I’m sick of my themes. All of my fellow people in this workshop have heard the same story from me a thousand times already, and they’re sick of my shtick too. What can I do to break out of the aspects of me that I’m so bored with?” And I just tell them, “You’re stuck with you. I’m sorry.” They haven’t perfected head transplants yet, so we’re all stuck with ourselves.

But what you can do is just shift your lens. Try a new form even if it’s something that you’re really bad at. Draw a comic book even if you can’t draw at all. Switch point of view, like I did. Write a song or a poem about the stuff that you usually write about instead of just doing whatever it is that you usually do. It sounds so goofy, and 101, but it really works. You can pull the wool over your own eyes. You really can lie to yourself and trick your brain.

Even if you set something on Mars, you’re still coming from what you have to bring to bear, which is your consciousness. So, is that always necessarily autobiographical? No. But it does come from you. — Elisa Albert

Botton: So once you start writing about yourself, or write your story in the third person … although, Elisa, After Birth is in the first person, right?

Albert: Yeah. Because my first novel was in the third person, and I found it was the same thing anyway. Everybody still was kind of like, Oh, well, it’s just you, obviously.

Gould: Which is so weird because you didn’t die of brain cancer.

Albert: Right, I know. The narrator of my first book dies of a brain tumor at the end of the book, so I don’t know how that could be autobiographical. I mean, I think ultimately it’s a compliment. It has to be a compliment, you know? Because what people are saying when they’re sort of assuming those things or projecting, or whatever, is that you have created a world that is so visceral and immediate and convincing that oh, of course it’s you. You know? So you’ve done what you set out to do then. I mean, I wouldn’t want to write a book where people reading it would think, like, geez, this shit’s totally invented. You know?

And the other thing is a novel, anything you write, but a novel especially, just the scope of it, it has to be an obsession. So even if you’re obsessed with 17th century Germany, that’s your obsession, and there are deep-rooted ways in which that’s very autobiographical even though obviously you weren’t there in your current form. So whatever it is, it has to be an obsession. You can’t spend years working on something if you’re not obsessed. So even if it’s not about you, it is encompassing your deep need to think about, look at, explore something.

Botton: So then once you’ve started writing, either in the third or first person — but deciding that it’s fiction — how do you then take the elements of your life and make them into something that isn’t your life? That becomes another story, more than just your life? How do you make that leap? Or does it start with, like, I have this particular story I want to tell?

Albert: Lorrie Moore said in her amazing story, “How to Become a Writer,” which is in the second person, and is very autobiographical, that “it’s like recombinant DNA.” You change one little strand of something, and then watch how that ripples out. Then it’s a very different story suddenly. I like to use things from my own life that I’m not interested in inventing. I’m not interested in inventing an origin story. Like, the thing I’m working on now. It’s a girl from LA. I grew up in LA. I’m not interested in inventing a different origin story. That’s now where my obsession lies, so I’m going to use that. I don’t give a shit.

So that’s autobiographical. I mean, this person is not like me in many, many other ways, but I know that origin story, so I can make use of it. It would be wasteful otherwise. I would be wasting my energy. I’d be reinventing the wheel. I have a pretty deep identification as somebody who was raised in a really religious household. I’m not interested in reinventing that at this point. That’s not what I’m looking at. So that’s a given. I’m going to use that. That’s there. I’m fluent in that, you know?

Botton: That frees you, then, to create the other aspects of the story.

Albert: The things I’m kind of obsessed with looking at or turning over or flipping around or inverting or whatever, that’s what I’m going to spend these years doing. And I don’t have to then waste my energy on the other elements because, you know, maybe in a different book those elements might need tweaking, but yeah. It’s like butterfly wings, right? Like, tsunami on the other side of the globe because, like, one little movement here.

The narrator of After Birth — her mother is dead. My mother’s not dead. She has an unnecessary surgical birth that was like super inhumane and traumatic. That didn’t happen to me. She’s an academic. I’m not an academic. Whatever. But, see, then we get into this weird thing where I’m like, see! Whatever.

Elisa and I obviously don’t write books that are set on Mars or in 18th century Scotland. There are no fantastical imaginative elements. But that also doesn’t mean that we didn’t make this stuff up. ‘Friendship’ is actually so made up. — Emily Gould

Gould: I’m sure this is something that you guys definitely all already thought about before, but I find myself thinking about writing fiction sometimes in terms of almost like method acting a little bit. Like, you can take an emotional experience that you’ve had and transmute it into another form. I’ve never experienced a shattering romantic betrayal, which is one of the things that I write about in Friendship. Yet. But I have experienced betrayal on a deep level in a relationship, but just not, like fucking someone else. You know?

So I was able to use that emotional experience and turn it into something else, the same way that I imagine actors do. I don’t know. I’m a terrible actress, so I actually don’t know how that works. But that’s what people talk about in “The Actor Prepares,” which I totally read in drama class.

Botton: That’s so funny. An article came up in my world today, in my social media world, with a title like “Apply acting techniques to your writing.”

Albert: People come at me sometimes, like about opinions spewed by the character, and they really want to fight me about it, and it’s like, dude, you’re not going to go after Al Pacino for his mafia activities. Like, get your shit straight, okay? This is like a role, this is a performance, okay?

Botton: That’s a good way of putting it. When I emailed you guys and was asking like, “Are we talking about autofiction?” Emily, you were like, “Well, I don’t write autofiction.” And then Chloe Caldwell [who had to bow out of the event] was like, “I write autofiction.” It’s a really hard thing to get a handle on. What exactly is autofiction? Emily, I know that you’re a big fan of Chris Kraus, and her stuff kind of falls into that category, maybe? So I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about what it is and why it isn’t what you’re doing.

Gould:  Well, I mean, the most straightforward, I think, contemporary example of autofiction that probably the most people in this room have read, just based on the bestseller list is Knausgård. Has anyone read any of those My Struggles? All of the struggles? Yeah, there were a lot of them. But what he does, I think, is — it’s just this amazingly super detailed tracking the movements of his own consciousness thing, but filling in the gaps in his memory with imaginative detail, I assume, and that’s what makes it a novel rather than a diary. So, for example, there’s a famous scene at the end of the first My Struggle volume that’s just this virtuosic scene where he is cleaning out his disaster alcoholic, hoarder, dead father’s house for days on end. Just like, you’re there. You are in the house, smelling the smells, moving the specific objects from room to room with him, like almost in real time, for as long as it takes. That, to me, is autofiction. That form. And that’s just so, so different from what either of us have done, even though we have written about characters who are our same ages who have our same hair colors.

Botton: I was also thinking about Lisa Halliday’s new book, Asymmetry.

Gould: Ooh, yeah, that one’s good.

Botton: It’s about a relationship with a Philip Roth-like character. That’s part of it. And the author did have a relationship with Philip Roth, and she was interviewed in the Times and she talks about how she uses the basic details from her life to just kind of set up the universe, and then she makes a story and works from there.

Albert: Well, then there’s the idea that, is there such a thing as nonfiction? You know, its arguable. Even if you’re trying to write a memoir, somebody else who was there might have a very different memoir.

Gould: I think there are formal distinctions that we just have to make. It’s like the difference between painting oils or painting watercolors or something? And for some reason that’s really important to me to draw those distinctions. And I also have incredibly strong feelings about “nonfiction” that is written without faith, you know? Like A Million Little Pieces-style stuff. That bugs me.

I like to use things from my own life that I’m not interested in inventing. I’m not interested in inventing an origin story. Like, the thing I’m working on now. It’s a girl from LA. I grew up in LA. I’m not interested in inventing a different origin story. — Elisa Albert

Albert: Well that was written as a novel.

Gould: Oh, but published as a memoir.

Albert: Right.

Gould: So then we’re also talking about market forces and marketing categories informing what gets called fiction and what gets nonfiction. But we don’t have to bring commerce into this room tonight.

Albert: Let’s not bring the market into this.

Gould: We can just keep this in the lofty realm of art for now.

Albert: But you know that old line about how if you say it’s a memoir, they’ll say you made it all up, and if you say it’s fiction, they’ll say every word is true.

Botton: I was just going to say that. Yeah, so then why does somebody write autofiction as opposed to a memoir? It’s so close.

Gould: It’s not. It’s totally different!

Botton: It is? Okay.

Gould: Yeah, like a memoir has all these imaginative story elements and structures, and autofiction is really about living inside someone else’s mind, no matter how boring it gets there. It’s really trying to just transport you into someone else’s consciousness, which to me is like a super fascinating, trippy experience.

Albert: Done well, it’s, like, the best.

Gould: It’s transcendent when it’s done well. When it’s done badly, of course, it’s as boring as being someone boring is. And that’s just a world away from what we do as memoirists. Which is so much to do with eliding the boring part of the story and getting into the propulsive part of the narrative. That’s the craft of memoir. Sorry that I’m like, Duh, Sari.

Botton: That’s okay. I’m here to learn. But I have writers in my studio who talk to me all the time about what to do with what their writing. They are writing stuff that feels like memoir, but they want to explore different outcomes. I’ve been sharing Michelle Tea’s The Black Wave with people. There’s magical realism in there. I just love the way she goes from stuff that is so recognizable to, like, she’s just out there in another world. And so, I can never specifically know what is the best way for anybody to go, and this is kind of what this conversation came out of. I’m really trying to always get a handle on what are the differences. And I guess for different writers, it’s different things.

In order to trick myself into being able to write again at all after the, sort of, critical and interpersonal disaster that was the reception to my first book, I sort of just started writing in the third person as an exercise even though I was still basically writing memoiristically. And then very gradually that became something other than memoir. — Emily Gould

Once upon a time, everything was called a novel. There wasn’t the memoir category, and people wrote stories from their lives and called them novels, and so it got more confusing actually when the memoir genre got added. But I think for you, you’re very clearly writing fiction.

Albert: Well, I think I’d be out of material pretty quick. I mean, stories from our lives can be really interesting, and many of us have lived intense lives, but there’s only so much of it. Whereas, if you’re willing to sort of go off on little digressions and make up little details and see how that spins out, and bring your perspective to bear on things that are not your experience. Or try to inhabit somebody else’s perspective on something that maybe you have experienced, you have endless material. Then there’s just no end to it.

I think I would get bored. I mean, I write nonfiction sometimes, but it’s not as fun for me. It’s like a good muscle to exercise, but it’s like that playfulness, that kind of mischievous kind like, what can happen? What could I get away with? What if I push it this way?

Gould: Whereas, I feel like actually for me, nonfiction is where I started, and it’s my comfort zone, and fiction is a lot harder, and it comes a lot less easily. It is this arduous process whereas, it just is easier to come up with a halfway decent first draft of something memoiristic for me, at least. Whereas to come up with a halfway decent first draft of something fictional is just … My shitty first drafts of fiction are like so shitty. I think also there’s the hard, cold, horrible reality that just because something comes more easily to you doesn’t meant it’s good. God, that’s sad.

Botton: I mostly write nonfiction, memoir, essay. But I dabble in fiction. I started graduate school to write fiction. I published one short story on a website, which had autobiographical underpinnings, but also a lot of made up shit. But I started writing something like a year ago, and I was having so much fun doing it, but when I went back to it, I had to keep reminding myself — and it was also based on a character similar to me — but I had to keep reminding myself of the rules of this universe that this person lives in. That this person’s boyfriend is 18 years older and Italian. Having to orient myself again and again in this fictional world, I find hard. That doesn’t mean, though, that it isn’t something worth putting more time and effort toward and trying harder at, but for me it’s like a harder exercise to remember the rules of the universe I’ve created. Do you ever run into that?

Albert: Sometimes. I mean, like, plot mostly. Just to be like, okay, this happened, this happened. I can sort of hang out in a voice for a long time, but then to just keep the facts straight. But that’s administrative stuff, you know? A couple index cards.

Gould: Yeah. Those aren’t structural things, so if you’re thinking of it like a physical project? Like if you’re building something, that’s more like — the rules of the universe stuff you can always straighten out at the end in the same way that if you’re renovating a house, you can fix up the door frames and the windows. I don’t know anything about this metaphor.

Albert: It’s like curtains.

Gould: I’m going to stop. Yeah, it’s like you’re going to put in furniture and decorate and the wall paper and stuff, and that’s like the fun stuff that you do at the end. Also, copy editors will do some of it for you. And good line editors. Friendship was written a long time ago in my life, and I had never been pregnant. And now I’ve been pregnant a bunch, and I think the character who gets pregnant in Friendship was pregnant in the first draft, like the draft that sold, for like 11 months. Like an elephant. And no one caught it. A copy editor caught it. It was like, oops. And all I had to do was change some details about the weather, and it was fine, you know?

But that’s the kind of thing that — if you get bogged down in that stuff in the first draft, you’re going to prevent yourself from ever moving forward.

People come at me sometimes, like about opinions spewed by the character, and they really want to fight me about it, and it’s like, dude, you’re not going to go after Al Pacino for his mafia activities. Like, get your shit straight, okay? This is like a role, this is a performance, okay? — Elisa Albert

Botton: One of my obsessions that I’ve written a lot about, and interviewed people a lot about, and I’ve interviewed both of you about, is people getting pissed off at you for what you’ve written that has to do with them. And sometimes, when I’m working on memoir and afraid of people being mad at me, I think, All right, I’m just going to change my name. That’s one solution. The other is, All right, I’m totally going to fictionalize, and it will be more fun. But they’re still going to recognize themselves. Is this something that you run into or care about, or does fiction solve that?

Albert: I don’t think fiction solves it. People just tend to then pick out people who are not remotely related to them and be offended by stuff that they’re imagining might have something to do with them. I don’t tend to have a lot of people in my life who I need to protect that way. That’s been a long process, but I find it useful to have pretty honest relationships so that anyone I actually have in my life is a) not somebody I’m going to feel the need to fucking burn in literature, and b) not somebody who’s going to come at what I’m doing with a narcissistic vengeance. But that takes time, and not everybody has the luxury of narrowing down their intimate circle in such a way. But it’s served me pretty well so far.

Botton: I think, Emily, you’ve had a different experience, at least with memoir, yeah.

Gould: Well, yeah, there are definitely sacrifices involved in being honest always, for anyone. Not just writers, I think. And like Elisa, I think the list of people whose opinions I give a fuck about at all has been winnowed down over the course of my life from like, you know when I was in my 20s, it was like everyone. And now it’s just people I care about. So yeah, I think this has always been really hard for me, and it continues to be hard for me. I definitely don’t have all the answers about it at all, but like the tattoo on Sari’s arm says, there comes a point when it becomes harder for the flower to stay in the bud than it is to bloom. I’m paraphrasing her tattoo badly, sorry.

So, it’s like you choose between two different kinds of pain, right? It’s like the pain of keeping whatever it is inside versus the pain that you’re going contend with when you have to deal with the consequences of having written your story. And it’s a personal choice.

Botton: Incidentally, Emily was my tattoula. You know, like a doula. She went with me. She brought me gluten-free cookies so I wouldn’t faint.

Gould: It’s really important to eat before and after you get a tattoo.

Botton: And for those of you who can’t see, my tattoo, I recently learned, does not quote who I thought it did. So, yes. It’s that quote that you see on mugs and candles. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Usually it says it’s by Anaïs Nin, and it is very much not, which is fine.

Albert: Are you going to edit it on the tattoo?

Botton: I didn’t attribute.

Albert: Oh.

Botton: It’s actually a woman [a playwright now] who was a publicist in California for an adult ed college in the 70s. She’d put that on a press release to encourage adults to go back to school. So, go back to school. That’s what we’re doing here. Yeah, so. I still like it.

Gould:  Me too. It’s great!

Botton:  It’s a good one, right?

Gould Yeah.

Botton: And then I got cherry blossoms on my other arm, so we’re all blossomed out here. I actually interviewed that woman. One of these days I’ll write about it…

Audio:

* * *

Elisa Albert is the author of After Birth, The Book of Dahlia, and How This Night is Different, and the editor of the anthology Freud’s Blind Spot. She has taught at Columbia’s School of the Arts, The College of Saint Rose, and is currently Visiting Writer at Bennington College.  She lives in upstate New York with her family.

Emily Gould is the author of And The Heart Says Whatever, Friendship, and the forthcoming Perfect Tunes. With Ruth Curry, she runs Emily Books, which sells and publishes books by women as an imprint of Coffee House Press. She is a contributor to Bookforum and The Cut. She teaches writing in New York City, where she lives with her family.

Sari Botton is the Essays Editor for Longreads. She edited the anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NY  and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for NY.

Recording by Brian Macaluso of Clandestine Productions. Event sponsored by Kingston Writers’ Studio.

 

Barbara Ehrenreich on Writing to Think

Journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich. (Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

In Typing Practice, an excerpt from her book, Living with a Wild God, Barbara Ehrenreich reflects on keeping a notebook to make sense of growing up female in a dysfunctional family. The lessons she learned offer some hope for these trying times: “But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.” Granta has an excerpt:

I had discovered that writing – with whatever instrument – was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do. You can think without writing, of course, as most people do and have done throughout history, but if you can condense today’s thought into a few symbols preserved on a surface of some kind – paper or silicon – you don’t have to rethink it tomorrow. You can even give it a name like ‘yesterday’s thought’ or ‘the meaning of life’ and carry it along in your pocket like a token that can be traded in for ever greater abstractions. The reason I eventually became a writer is that writing makes thinking easier, and even as a verbally underdeveloped fourteen-year-old I knew that if I wanted to understand ‘the situation,’ thinking was what I had to do.

But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking.

So this was the mental procedure, which even a little girl could learn: First, size up the situation. Make sure you have all the facts, and nothing but the facts – no folklore, no conventional wisdom, no lazy assumptions. Then examine the facts for patterns and connections. Make a prediction. See if it works. And if it doesn’t work, start all over again.

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Longreads Best of 2017: Science, Technology, and Business Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in science, tech, and business writing.

Deborah Blum
Director of the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

The Touch of Madness (David Dobbs, Pacific Standard)

A beautifully rendered exploration of the slow, relentless creep of schizophrenia into the life of a brilliant graduate student, her slow recognition of the fact, and the failure of her academic community to recognize the issue or to support her. Dobbs’ piece functions both as an inquiry into our faltering understanding of mental illness and our cultural failure to respond to it with integrity. It’s the kind of compassionate and morally-centered journalism we should all aspire to.


Elmo Keep
Australian writer and journalist living in Mexico, runner-up for the 2017 Bragg Prize for Science Writing

How Eclipse Chasers Are Putting a Small Kentucky Town on the Map (Lucas Reilly, Mental Floss)

Anyone willing to write about syzygy in the shadow of Annie Dillard’s classic 1982 essay “Total Eclipse” has balls for miles. Reilly’s decision to focus on the logistics faced by tiny towns preparing to be inundated by thousands of eclipse watchers was inspired. It brilliantly conveyed the shared enthusiasms that celestial events animate in us. Between these two essays, I’m convinced a total eclipse would be a psychic event so overwhelming I might not survive it. I’ve got 2037 in Antarctica on my bucket list — if it’s still there in twenty years.    Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Political Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in political writing.

Gabriel Sherman

Special correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of the New York Times best-selling biography of Roger Ailes.

The French Origins of ‘You Will Not Replace Us’ (Thomas Chatterton Williams, The New Yorker)

Anyone wanting to understand the forces that propelled Donald Trump to power needs to read Thomas Chatterton Williams’s fascinating profile of the French racial theorist Renaud Camus. Camus — no relation to Albert — popularized the alt-right theory that Muslim immigrants are reverse colonizing “white” Western Europe through mass migration. He is an unlikely progenitor of a political movement built around closing borders and preserving traditional culture. Camus works out of a 14th-century chateau and once wrote a travel book that describes itself as “a sexual odyssey — man-to-man.” Allan Ginsberg once said, “Camus’s world is completely that of a new urban homosexual; at ease in half a dozen countries.” While Williams doesn’t shy away from shining a light on the ugly racism that underpins Camus’s writings, he challenges liberals to reckon with the social and cultural effects of immigration in an increasingly globalized world. Read more…

Longreads Best of 2017: Arts & Culture Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture writing.

Kyle Chayka

Writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Curbed, Racked, and many others.

Julian Eastman’s Guerrilla Minimalism (Alex Ross, The New Yorker)

How does one write about culture when culture seems to be ending? The question plagued 2017, when each day brought its own small apocalypse. What I appreciated most this year was cultural criticism that turned into acts of construction rather than deconstruction, helping us to better understand our collective predicament. A line from John Kelsey’s “Halftime Vibes” in Texte zur Kunst stuck in my head: “Strange new forms are being tested every minute as news and advertising metabolize the very image of global precarity.” (Evan Osnos’s New Yorker feature “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich” uncovered some of the aesthetics of this forever-incipient apocalypse.)

But my favorite feature was an act of rediscovery. Alex Ross’s New Yorker essay on the almost-lost Minimalist composer Julius Eastman was revelatory. Eastman was a gay, African-American musician in the all-white halls of the iconic Minimalists. His life and art were messy and unresolved; his work was clashing and autobiographical. What better figure for our time of reclamation? Eastman’s “Stay On It” is a repeated slamming on a disco-like hook, poppy and addictive until it becomes sinister: a portrait of America’s violent ambivalence as potent now as 1973.


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Longreads Best of 2017: Profile Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in profile writing.

Seyward Darby
Executive editor, The Atavist

A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof (Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, GQ)

There was no piece of journalism in 2017 more honest or more raw than Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s profile of Dylann Roof for GQ. Its brilliance began with an enviable lede—”Sitting beside the church, drinking from a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, he thought he had to go in and shoot them” — and persisted for the duration of what proved to be an unlikely profile. Unlikely, because Kaadzi Ghansah didn’t set out to write it. She went to Charleston to cover Roof’s murder trial, planning to report on the families of his victims, but found herself drawn to the young man who sat, angry and silent and unfazed, day after day in the courtroom. She decided to profile a black hole, an absence, because she couldn’t not.

The story is unlikely, too, because of its style. Ghansah winds through Roof’s life like a criminal profiler. She collects evidence, data, interviews, and observations, then pieces them together for readers, showing where the connective tissue resides. She is an essential presence in the story, which is no easy feat to pull off, and the result is wholly organic. This is a story about race, class, anger, bewilderment, and division. It is also, as the headline “A Most American Terrorist” attests, a story about the current political moment. You come away from it knowing who Dylann Roof is, who Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is, and what America is—or, really, what it has always been.


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