 I've got a hitch-hitting for Sarah Corbett, which for me is a huge honor of hitch-hitting for any time. I know you've been, I know you've been out on the road a lot. Is everybody hearing okay? I know you've been out on the road a lot, so I'm a little bit worried that every question I'm going to ask you is one that you have already answered approximately for a second. Not for you all, hopefully, and then I can always answer new questions. Okay, good. So I do want to talk a little bit, just that mention of your three years in Beijing at the beginning in the introduction. I'm really curious, because you wrote this memoir, where again, how many people out there have read Forgo's Good Fortune? Oh, yay, that's so exciting. Because you wrote that memoir, I think sometimes people feel like, I don't know that subject. But did you always have it in the back of your mind that you might revisit China in fiction at some point? Yeah, so I had unfinished business with China, it turned out. I had this novel sort of in my frontal lobe for about eight years after I left China. In my memoir, for those of you who've read it, it wasn't supposed to be about cancer. It was supposed to be about American family goes to China, and I was kind of obsessed with Anne Lamont's operating instructions. And I had boys, and I wanted to sort of take that to Beijing and do this kind of, it was supposed to be comedic, actually. And then cancer came, and then I didn't think I'd finished that book, but then I did finish that book and it turned into this other thing. But I had been to this yogurt treat, we'll call it a yogurt treat. It was a yogurt treat, but it was just the most rustic sort of elemental experience on the top of the Forgotten Mountain, two hours north of Beijing, nothing, nothing fancy. There wasn't really anything, there's very little fancy about Beijing in 2007 when I was living there. And this was like, there really was intermittent electricity, and we really were doing yoga on a dirt floor. And we had the day of silence, and we were walking on the donkey path in the pitch black, and I thought, yeah, I'm going to write a novel about this. I want to write a novel about this. And then I kept holding it, and then I tried it in third person because I didn't want to write another memoir about China, right? Even if I gave the conceit of first person, I was supposed to write it in the same book. So I was really in the end playing with fiction and truth, and fiction and truth. And the thing that's even more confusing about this novel is it's written in the conceit of a memoir. So it's tricking, it's trying to play with the reader the whole time. And of course, then my character becomes alcoholic, she has a lot of struggles, and I thought, oh, here we go, I'm setting myself up. Everyone's going to think it's my second memoir. Were they to drink a lot? Yeah. I just feel like she does, I've never really seen her drink a lot, so I'm pretty sure it's not autobiographical. Well, I mean, we write about things we're interested in emotionally. Alright, I will say I do. I would say that my greatest impetus for writing is emotional curiosity. It's not plot. So I'm very curious about diseases that constantly around families, around people, and I know about this disease. So when Elsie got this disease, she's also sick with just another sort of more manageable health problem. I was trying to pile things up on this woman, I was trying to really put pressure on this woman and see how she'd react, and I wanted to see if she could be strong and powerful in the end. But I couldn't believe she was going to have an alcohol problem, because that was going to be hard for me to write about and sort of share the world, because I knew so much about it. But I felt like I had to be really emotionally honest. And if there's anything I hope for this book is that it feels emotionally honest, because Elsie decides to be gracingly honest, I think. And get to know her, and she gives us a little bit more throughout the novel too, so that she can kind of, how many people have read this book? Oh, a lot of you, okay, great. You know, after I finished reading it, I wrote to you to say how much I loved it and how I felt like it was this leak from you. And I wonder, it's very, very sparse, especially, you know, compared to Paris, Paris is the place, it wasn't the place. And I wondered whether or not you're a poet, and whether in this book you felt that the pull of poetry more than you had in the past, that you felt it freer to explore that sort of sparseness that I do see in your, I mean, I'm thinking even just in terms of the book that you did with Lincoln Lewis, stop here's the place. It's Lincoln here. I think you've had those beautiful, beautiful little miniatures that you wrote for that book, and I felt that voice very strongly here, I mean, not as Susan, but it felt different to me totally. That book? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, when that happens, when you slip into that different voice, did you, were you feeling very conscious that you were paring things down? I mean, did you feel like I'm getting to a new place here? Very conscious, very intentional about voice. Voice is everything. Voice is just everything. You know, to me, I think, and to most good literature, you have so little time to hook the reader, very, very little time to hook the reader, and that voice has to sort of sing and electrify on a sentence level. I think that it wasn't so much that it felt like a leap. It felt actually more like coming back to more of this poetry. I mean, my whole life was sort of poetry, actually, for like 15 years. I also was, I'm going to say, tired of a certain conventionality that I had been like steeped in, that I'm going to say was really masculine and really patriarchal, and I was really looking for her to claim like some power and some space and sort of say things in a more unconventional way. So, there's something going on around her claiming her strength, too. She's not going to say it. I myself, and I don't know, I want to talk about this. I'm so curious what you guys think later, I feel like really daunted now when I'm handed like a 400 page book. I feel like it's got to be an attention span problem. Yet, I'm very compelled by the shorter form. So the miniatures, and stop here, this is, was the play? No, yeah, stop here, this is the place. It's funny, I remember if we could do a little game. There are little lines of stop here, this is the place, that are airlifted right into this book. So I had found the voice, particularly for the children, in stop here, this is the place. And I took them and I dropped them right into this book, like beg, borrow and steal, right, when you're writing. I always say that. You take, you hold, hold your material, you never know where it's going to go. So in fact, like verbatim, there's a verbatim section. And I thought, well anyone, this is a problem, this is a problem. And I remember to, no, but, no, it's the wolves, it's the wolves, yeah. The wolves, there's a, one of the girls in here says, I'd like to go basically, what would happen if I left you and went and lived with wolves. And the mother says, Elsie says, I really don't want you to leave, but if you go, go try it and you can come back to the family. And a real life character said that in stop here, this is the place. So a totally different gender and character, different age, you know, so borrowing from real life, taking emotional truth and moving it into fiction. And I will say for me, having it feel just as emotionally true, just as emotionally resonant. So this notion of genre sort of bending and genre fluidity is very close to my heart. And I think in America we get really tied up with, is it fiction? Is it nonfiction? Have you written a memoir? What have you written? And in Europe, we're writing stories. You know, we're just writing stories. So I'm all about storytelling now. I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about the influence of patriarchy on your style beforehand because are you talking about Paris was the place? I mean, hmm. I just think that there's been this wonderful explosion of autobiographical women's fiction. I will call it auto fiction, if you will. I hate that phrase, auto fiction. But there are some women out there that are doing such innovative, exciting things that are blending memoir and fiction. You know, I want to be on that team. Like Rachel Kosk. Yeah. Like Rachel Kosk and Sheila Heddy and gosh, I could go on and on. But yeah. Well, even so, Heidi Jules, technically The Holden Clock is memoir, but it also has sort of an auto fiction feeling to it, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of that. Jenny Awfold, Department of Speculation. That's a beautiful book, I want to say. Yeah. But so not necessarily the style of narrative in your previous books. Did you feel that those were conventional or did you feel that? Probably, yeah. Well, I think the voice, no, I mean, I was, you just, you evolved, don't you? So for me, writing a cancer memoir didn't feel conventional in a way because it had to be so honest. I think that Willie in my novel, Paris was the Place, is actually, she's fairly innovative actually, but she isn't as honest as Elsie is. You know, there's some people that, we've talked a lot in my conversations around the country, around this book, around is Elsie claiming her strength? And I've had a lot of people say that she's like allowing herself to be kind of coerced by marriage and coerced by these sort of conventions, but she's actually always strong underneath them, inside them. In fact, I have a friend, I think he might be here now, but his mom read the book and I was at a reading with her and she kind of stood up in the Q&A and said, every man should read this book. And she thought that Elsie was always strong and was kind of just playing along with her husband. That's a great blur. Yeah, because Lucas kind of says, oh go off to the yogurt tree, you'll get better, it'll be fine. If you could just go off to the yogurt tree, it'll fix all your problems. And she knows, Elsie knows she needs to do something, but I think she knows it's not, that's not going to be the easy fix. Yeah. And I think the reader kind of knows that too, probably. Right, that she's got some work and more not a lot to spoil for anyone. So, the artist that she is, that Elsie is, reminded me very much of a main artist. And I wonder whether or not I have a feeling that you probably know her and at least Ansel, I don't even know if I'm saying the name right, but that style, Elsie has this, just such an alluring description of her work that she's given up, or all that's given up really. And I kept thinking of, okay, these great big canvases that speak to the great masters, but in this abstracted way. And I wonder whether or not, just living here in Portland, whether you soaked in some of that at least inspiration. She is a friend of mine for sure and we have had some conversations about that sort of debunking, the great master works. In particular, we had one good conversation around this, you know, the famous rape paintings, right? They're so iconic, right? Lita and the Swan. That was where I really wanted Elsie to go. I wanted her to start realizing why is it with all these rape paintings on these museum walls? And can I refashion them? Can I debunk them? And then it took me to, I think freshman year of college English, and I remember like we were handed the eights and we were reading, I mean when I think back on how, we read Lita and the Swan so straight, like so literally, like there was no problem with that poem. Yeah, my new rape is history, yeah. Like the girl is raped and it's very beautiful and then Swan goes off into the sky. So I really wanted Elsie to revisit that. It's quiet though. I don't talk about that very much. Very few people actually pick up on that. You know, Elsie's got a lot of problems. That's just a small one. Hi, you know, I guess it's interesting. I was thinking about, you know, about her problems. It is, I would never say, oh this is a novel about a head case. I feel like it's more of a novel about someone who is in a period of their life that is not necessarily, that won't necessarily define her for the rest of her life. I feel like she's in transition and we're there with her. I like that, yeah. I agree. I don't feel like if you did a sequel in 10 years she'd be living on the streets. No. I'm really curious about what she would be doing. You must have started this though before the world exploded in the Me Too movement and the, you know, the whole sort of, I don't know, personally in the last few years I've been like, you know, I really do not give a flying whatever. That's why I'm here today with a running. But because of the time it takes to write a novel I'm assuming that you were not writing this and it didn't start this in a fit of rage in 2016. No. Emotional curiosity. So I wanted to know more about that woman on that mountain, Elsie. She was on the mountain. It was dark. She had a day of silence and I wanted to know more about her. I wanted to know always about all the women who were parenting in my orbit when I was bringing out my kids because I wanted to be like, do you have this figured out? Are you doing this okay? I don't think I'm doing this okay. How are you doing? I'm talking about how much they were struggling. I wanted to have a sign that read catatonicly sleep deprived and just wear it and I thought it was really self-indulgent and so nobody was complaining. Nobody was ever saying and everybody was like sinking and sinking and I think I just decided it was going to be political in the sense that Elsie had to compromise and Lucas, her husband, did not and Elsie was obsessed with her children and obsessed with her work and could she do both and she found it hard and that was like my rhetorical question for the book. She was going to have to find it really hard because fiction equals conflict. Fiction equals tension so her conflict was going to be her compromise and so at first I thought it was going to be a triptych and we were going to have three women British, Swedish the British, Chinese, American and each one was going to get their time each one was going to speak in first person and that was terrible and even my agent was like I just think maybe not maybe not and I was like okay then I'll show you and I went back and I was like what does this woman Elsie really have to say? She has some things to say and she started talking and I tell you the novel was really fast after that I wrote it very quickly because Elsie was talking she's just talking and I thought okay you're going to say some things, here we go you're going to say things that are going to make me uncomfortable and you're going to make my larger family uncomfortable and you may make some women feel uncomfortable and you're going to say them so here we go and then that was that okay I have two questions so they're related to that so you wrote it really quickly you have two teenage boys now one of whom is going up to college in the fall and you have a very active life with the Italian room which you co-founded I'm always curious about how writers do it and I wonder in that writing fast did you go away did you lock yourself in a cabin somewhere did you go down to West Point what did you do so I teach a lot and I tell people to be some of whom are here I won't look at them right now but I say you have to be incredibly stubborn about your writing time about your creative time and when I get into what I call the high pitch mode I get really stubborn and disciplined and so then I'm up in the attic and I can be like I can be like 5.30 to 7.00 a.m and then I can be like 8.00 to 3.00 I can be like that and that's a lot of time right because my kids go to school that takes like like a muscle that I have to to strengthen over weeks to get back up into that kind of form I've actually been there the last two or three weeks because I just delivered another novel that I sold in October which is a novel all about teenage boys and there it's completely set in Maine and it's kind of like so exciting and so close to my heart because I haven't really fully written about Maine yet so I can tell you that it means like Saturday and Sunday it's quiet in my house to like 11 because I have teenage boys I sleep a lot and so you can get a lot already done between like 6.00 and noon I go I do go away you know I said this week but I've been on the road a lot for this book so I've been missing my family a lot so I couldn't go away couldn't go away for this new delivery so I pretended I kind of announced like I'm going to be things are going to look you know I'm going to go up there more and then I said to my husband last week I said I should be away right now I should be because once you go away and this is exactly what Elsie talks about when she talks about the recklessness that she needs to paint it's for all women and men who need to do whatever the hell they're doing whatever project they're doing I think it calls for a certain recklessness that the conventional world does not allow you when the clocks are working on time we are not able to to go off the grid and so I always have to go off the grid so it's really hard to go off the grid and make lunch or make dinner as we all know so allowing ourselves and again I won't look at my students allowing ourselves to say no I'm going to be in a different world now I'm finishing a book or I'm finishing a painting Elsie was trying to finish you know paintings and she likes to do that at 2am and that really doesn't work particularly when you have small children so yeah I'll stop now I just want to know a long time about process no that's great I have to say that I often think about you when I am making the decision that breakfast is going to be cereal because I remember once you told me you know I just said to them you know fed for yourself there's cereal and that felt miraculous to me and it's very hard for me to let that go because I'm like you know a nice hot breakfast would be so beneficial to you in your day honey even though I know that actually you probably enjoy the cereal just as much but so that's good that you're able to do that and how on earth did you turn a novel that you sold in October I mean it's but I sold it as a draft because books take a long time to be birthed right so this thing was in production most of last year I've lost a complete track of time I have no idea when this book came out January so it was in production so that means hurry up and wait so you get a draft you do an edit and then you wait and all that time it's very very very helpful to be writing another novel or doing something creative not waiting because that's kind of painful so and I want to say that a friend of mine is not here but I'll name him because I think he would like to know he doesn't know this maybe he knows this but Seth Regaletti really liked Stop Here This Is The Place he really liked it he's a dad and he said hey are you going to do something with the boys in that book because those stories you wrote about those boys those little miniature stories those are amazing and I want you to write a book about them and I remember thinking like wow that's really working for you cause it's really cool it's particularly a man sort of and there's something to that something to what he said cause you need permission when you're starting a new project and I was hearing that those boys were resonating to that man and those are the boys those boys become teenagers in the new book wow so is it sort of is it more standby me Stephen King or is it more the outsiders or is it either it's more like Fleetwood Mack 1970s mom has some kids some boys oh and she's sort of stopped on an island and she's she's married to a fisherman who gets very injured and this is all of the main that I grew up in so it's ten right now it's tentatively called landslide that's so great and I don't know if you all saw the essay Susan wrote for decor magazine not for main women magazine I guess somebody got to her first but there's a lot of in that references in that that's an excellent piece I highly recommend for anyone who grew up in Maine or who is interested in being grew up in Maine that was coming right out of the novel alright so I'm going to come back to your your sign catatonicly when you were in that stage did you ask your mother how she maintained her sanity she had three kids pretty close together in age and I wonder how much of a rock she was for you or how comfortable you felt saying to her I I feel like you can't do this you know did that ever oh yeah you ask for help wherever you can I definitely asked for help I definitely did she's an extremely involved grandmother she's here in Maine but you know you're alone a lot my husband worked he was traveling a lot I also don't think I was writing any poetry then because poetry called on a different part of my brain that's actually when I started writing my first novel was when I had young kids because I realized it was something you could come and go from a longer narrative and that these shorter miniatures and things were much harder actually you had to distillate and crystallize your feeling in a way that the sleep deprivation wouldn't allow so that's almost like a reading process that a short story is perfect for the limited attention span but the novel is the thing that makes you want to go better at least so that you can pick it up right yeah yeah I think that I've been interested to learn that a lot of women felt like they weren't asking for enough help and that a lot of women have resonated with this book because they too were making a lot of compromises and they weren't talking about it and so that's been very interesting to take on the road and listen to and then I've been very interested in a lot of women coming forward around this book who haven't had children yet and they're thinking about having children and I didn't realize that they they're like these are women that are deeply invested in their careers and then they are seeing all of these stories as cautionary tales and that's been really interesting for me all of a sudden I feel really old but it's I mean do you feel that it's a cautionary tale in any way I mean for me I feel like I've got way more done and much more directed I mean not so much now that I go to the hockey hall that long but back today I felt like okay you have finite time get on it you know it becomes such an issue of class and privilege and day care and it's really complicated right for women to find their space it's really complicated so I know some of your students are here but I'm really curious about what the process of teaching has done for you as a writer how it might have shifted you and your own work I mean you're constantly in this role of examining someone else's effort in a level that I think is probably a little bit different from your writing group right and I wonder how just how it feeds your own process that's a really good question because it talks it reminds us all for any of us who are trying creative projects is how important it is to read voraciously right and just voraciously and widely and when I'm in my teaching mode and I teach at the grad program at Stone Coast where I've been for I think years now and I also do a lot of private book editing and I believe workshops I think it's so much a question of peace and I think that's also why I'm writing shorter compressed stories now because I am so interested in a kind of urgency on the page and that's what I'm always like sifting through in my student work I want them to really really own and carve out their voice and then realize how little time we have to hook the reader sadly but we never have had very much time to hook the reader as Mary Ann Moore, the great poet said nobody wants to read your story anyway get in and get out as fast as you can I've really taken that to heart Mary Ann Moore, grandmother Emily Dickinson let's keep it short let's get in and let's get out that doesn't mean I just got Andaji's Warlight and I loved that book I loved that longer meditative sort of sensual poetic inquiry I loved that but you want to be in really good hands I think when you're going to settle in for that this is sort of a fan girl question but how did you get Judy Bloom as a blurb I mean I remember seeing it on your website or something and just being like oh yeah so what happens in this world this sort of trolling world where you're looking for people to say nice things about your work is your editor sends your book out to a vast array of people and it's like they go fishing and they don't know where they're going to get a fight and as my dear editor who I'm now doing my fourth book with she sent a lot of books to Judy Bloom and she's never gotten a bite and Judy Bloom was my hero I really grew up on Judy Bloom I think many of us did but I was living in Woolwich, Maine and I was just devouring all through the she and I grew up together like many of us so by the time we got to forever we were hiding under a mattress and passing it around so something it pleases me greatly still that something in this book spoke to Judy Bloom and she just really responded to the book and the next thing we know she was inviting me to stay with her she did she wanted to stay with her in Key West and be her was down there as their January book club person and she in the end was there because her husband was having cancer treatment I think he's going to be ok but she wrote the most beautiful letter that was read before I read at the store and then I did stay I stayed in her home I took like fan photos I did and of course she had my book like prominently displayed on the coffee table but imagine you guys it was a loam in her home so I don't really know how to describe that except that it was on the ocean the waves were crashing it was very very surreal I think I may have to write an essay about it and then I will clear it with her but it was like being there alone like her assistant let me in she showed me where the wine was and the water and it was like being in a museum it was gorgeous an enormous sort of apartment on the beach and then everyone left and I was alone I was alone what was in her refrigerator she had a lot of ice cream she had a lot of she had a lot of snacks she did a lot of snacks she hadn't been there for a little while she had a what did she have I did I like raided the fridge I was starving she's in crackers it was really very magical and wild is forever your favorite or are you there now hopefully that one Dini it's like a book that made you think Scoliosis not so bad I can handle that if I were Dini yeah I think what was so pleasing about Judy Bloom's apartment she has the most incredible store in Key West so to see this woman that we may have put over here in YA highly highly literary woman with the incredible library reads so deeply and has first editions of everything and so beloved in the literary community and then to go to the store and see this thing that she's the engine behind and how beloved she is there and just how alive she is because she's in her guise now I think yeah inspiring to me so was there any other writer who particularly inspired you in this book you know it's funny because when I first picked it up I thought oh I think Susan's publisher is going for kind of a where'd you go Bernadette Market with this cover you know and also title but was there anything was there anything that you've read in the last 10 years that you thought yeah I don't want to do something kind of in that one thing okay so that's a good question it's nice when Mary comes at it more from like the market and sees it like the book critic from time right so the title fell in my lap and I won't there are people that haven't read the book but the title is embedded in the book and it came organically there's a moment and the title was given to me when that happened and I had another title I'm big on working titles that take me like the next 100 yards down the path and then I ditch that title and then I get the next title so for instance for a long time that new book of mine landslide was called something terrible like really bad that everyone was like yeah well no not that okay here's what it was I sold it with this title but everyone was like but not the title don't laugh and you can laugh but this is embarrassing but it worked so well for me it was this is how much I love you and other things not to say to teenagers but that's it oh colloquial it'll be great but I will tell you it fueled me and it got me that's what I needed the book to be called because that's the tone I needed that's what the mother needed to be saying that's how much I love you and other things not to say because that's the whole operation of the book so landslide had to come a lot later when I realized that my character her life had been like in a landslide so these titles come to you this book was called something else that it's funny to me I cannot remember but for a long time it was called something else now where'd you go Bernadette no one ever mentioned that maybe until the very very end when I was asked what I might do with the cover if I got to choose anything about the cover and I might have said something fun like let's make it something fun and I said David Hockney colors or throughout this novel could we ever play with David Hockney colors so I was thrilled when they sent me this this was the first try this was the first try and I was like yeah that's it done your publisher really loves you because first of all I think that most publishers these days are like about the visits of the work would you please send this to everybody you've ever met and then maybe you can come up with something but we're not even gonna spend a postage sending your damn galleys out and then to have somebody say like oh sure I like your obscure David Hockney reference we'll incorporate that in the cover and that's love I think that might be Knopf they I feel extremely lucky to be there because they care so much I mean so when I go down there and I visit literally they're all like have you seen the cover and they're all jumping up and down and they all I mean it's it's still it's literature is alive and well there and that building yeah it's like going to never never no not going there it's like going to Disneyland yeah but you were gonna say one other thing about the Bernadette and the cover oh there was there was definitely feeling and this is something that for all you writers out there it's very hard to know what your books about until after so I didn't know what my book was about I think a lot of us in any creative project again we don't know what it's about until we're done so they kept they ask you that right at the end they say okay alright so now you know we are going to go with like three angles what do you think we'll go with you know motherhood yoga and alcoholism can you write an essay about those three things please and I thought I don't think I didn't know it was about those things what is it about and so you sit with it and you think and it slowly it comes it came to me this kept coming back to me from cannot like everyone all the editors all the young and yet assistants are so excited you've written a book about motherhood and compromise and I was like oh that's what I've written about okay and I was able to go with that one I was like okay we can go with that one I was like I will not be writing essays about alcoholism no and I have very little to say about yoga I like yoga I'm not a yogi I like yoga a lot but I have no essay to write about yoga yeah so yeah so it's always or evolving it's always evolving yeah I'm just wondering if anybody out there has questions or would you like to demand reading from Susan because we could do that too you want to hear the book for a minute okay so I'll read for just like two or three pages you have to ask a few questions if you feel so moved it's very I know it's weird to go from us to you but if you have a question I'm all yours okay oh I just saw she's actually drawn through some of the pages oh yeah I write all over this thing because there's parts I don't want to read when I'm reading like there's just parts that just don't feel like they would be well read literally so I'll just read that cross for sure okay I'll take us to she gets to the mountain and I will tell you for those that are interested in process I thought this was the opening of the book and forgive me if you've heard me speak of this if you've come to something else but I really thought where I'm going to read was the start of the novel it's how I sold it how my agent read it it's how it was sitting in the world I thought this was it and then later I realized that I had about 15 pages of backstory that I had to handle and I really didn't want to drop backstory in like these dead dead weights in my urgent narrative right so I decided to start earlier so I solved my backstory problem by not making it backstory I just started earlier so I'll read you two pages where I thought I was starting which is now page 18 and then I'll just read the opening paragraph and you can see how I had to shift I drove three hours into the low mountains that form a soft brown ring around the north eastern edge of the capital and parked in a grassy clearing and began climbing doesn't that seem like a great opening I was like that's the opening of the novel here we go but it's not anymore Lucas hadn't said it was crucial I though that things in my marriage were at stake I couldn't easily identify after 30 minutes or so of walking I came to a concrete terrace where foreigners sat drinking tea at a round plywood table I was so happy for having made it that I looked out over the mountain valley and I imagined I could see China's coast which becomes round south of Shanghai like a well fed hen the pine trees were not unlike the pine trees in Maine I grew up in this comfort in me too but then I got the lurching stomach I've had the two times I've written the rickety roller coaster in Beijing and I thought my God what have you done to end up on this terrace and how can you get home the word terrace is too fancy because it was more of a scraggly concrete yard that extended over the side of the mountain the astounding view a retired middle school teacher named Mr. Liu and his wife Mrs. Liu and the old terrace and the dilapidated stone house and the rooms where we slept Mr. Liu limped when he brought me to the table where the yoga teacher stood and said he was happy to see me and I didn't know what to say back his western name was Justice and he had hair down to his waist and smelled of oil the villagers pressed from apricot trees and his skin was polished like walnuts and he was truly a beautiful man he was also owner of the yoga station a lead singer of a metal thrash band called We Can't Stop Kissing One Another and Lucas and I had seen him there years ago before the children and we still went out to see music but I didn't really know him I looked at the faces around me and was nervous because I was going to have to talk to these people a French man named André sat closest to me and seemed to use a hair oil that made his hair wavy and wet at the same time I didn't like to be the groups of strangers I worried that all of them at the table were probably what they called yogis people who did a great deal of yoga and this was a terrifying thought okay so that's that's what I thought that's what I sold and now here's where I begin the book now because I had to fit all of this in and I couldn't figure out how to do that because I had it on the mountain you know because back story you can slow the train down so this is where I started it about a year ago my husband handed me a brochure for retreat in a nearby mountain village we were standing in our Beijing kitchen while the girls played make-believe dog in our feed the brochure was more like handmade pamphlet four pieces of white computer paper folded in the middle and stapled three times along the crease there was a grainy photo of a cement terrace on the cover and a more alarming photo and text under the photos that explained something called a day of silence and yoga and the chance for participants to reinvent themselves my husband Lucas told me these things would make a good weeks vacation for me and he smiled while I looked at the photos but it was a distant smile he went back to his bowl of rice and I pressed myself against the edge of our stove until my lower back hurt and I felt so lonely I almost cannot say so that's kind of an interesting place to see if you how you responded to that I don't know what are you thinking do you see how I was able to raise the emotional stakes I got more emotion in there she's lonely she's really worried about the trip whereas when I started at the trip she almost had to be just more in it and she couldn't distance and reflect on it so that's me getting really writing nerdy on you any thoughts, any questions yes I'd love to say about the process how the book kind of leads you and you led and as a writer I have a really hard time surrendering a lot of the time to what the book actually wants to say so I'm wondering if you ever your brain ever tries to take over because of how you get back in that place of surrender or how you drop in so that for me means like living in the book living in the book thinking being what I call highly suggestible so that everything in the universe is speaking to me about my book like oh it's raining out oh I'm going to have a rain in the mountain it means it's a really good vibe for a kind of emotionality that I need to give my character like everything speaks to my book and that means I'm spending a lot of time in my book and that means I'm in that high pitched more discipline state I talked about so I'm not if you are so in your book your book will speak to you I think Jenny instead of me trying to control the book and then getting breaks so working very deeply in it and then taking a step back and realizing you know I delivered actually yesterday I just delivered yesterday the new novel again and today in the shower I was like are you seeing it from afar now in a really good healthy way so that I can next time because it will be a next time because now my editor will give me all my notes again in another round now I will see it and I will see how things that I thought I was in control of I will do this and this are arbitrary now and don't make sense I can already see that things that I wanted aren't going to work because the character took over for a while I wanted her to be like someone who was desperate to lead the state of me but it turns out and you're not going to believe this she wrote in her Twitter something that we were going to talk about Sebastco Lodge in Pittsburgh because that's where we met many years ago much of the new novel is set at Sebastco Lodge oh my god really? seriously? for real I feel like I've always thought ever since I read it I still left from her I'm sure I do have a chunk of something to say about Sebastco Lodge because it was that era when we were working there it was the era when Hotel New Hampshire was a big deal and I looked around at Sebastco Lodge and thought there's no mayor but it's like such a great place it was the best job I ever had Susan was a dishwasher though so I'm thinking she's going to argue against that being the best job she was a glamorous waitress but you know in the novel I am a hostess I listen to me I Jill no no no it's all fictional right I think you had a question yeah I'm good thank you for sharing so honestly about your process and as an artist growing up in the New York area in the 80s all I wanted to know was what you were talking about and I think that as more writers and artists talk about the fact that they don't it's just so free because in the 80s that was not allowed you couldn't even talk about that and I think that's important for people to talk more about the process of being in that place it's it's very scary but it's just nice to know but sometimes I don't even know afterwards and I've even heard artists talk about about what they do so I think it's just really important to talk about that because at one point that was not acceptable you really didn't know pretty much I don't know if that's true in the writing world there was a point where people didn't even talk about and I think were I writing crime fiction or a lot of other genre I wouldn't have to know and eventually I get my frame later much, much later but I like how you just said it's hard it's hard not to know it is scary but I think it's a little bit what you're talking about is in that era when the patriarchy really ruled fiction even though of course we were all reading equivalent but there was a lack of equity there and I think it's a little bit like men not asking for directions like God forbid they say I have no idea what my novel's about I'm pretty sure that Jonathan but nobody tells him that and I think it's great I think you should wrap up the questions you got it okay, oh one last question I'm just saying, besides what you've been is that you wanted a t-shirt to go look a lot less qualified and you nailed it but we can't stop in case you need that thank you oh God, I'd like to write more about that I'd like to write more about justice and make your character here alright I will be here I'm going to get to all your questions but I want to thank you all very much for coming and listening on this cold damn day I really appreciate it, thank you all