 for coming out. I'm Nick Gillespie. This is the Reason Speak Easy, which is a monthly unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and group think. But we couldn't get them, so we have George Sosgreen, who tonight's guest is George Sosgreen, whose new book is Chilling Historically-Charged Murder Mystery, called The Kingdoms of Savannah, and it's a fantastic read. I recommend everybody get a copy and read it. George is a singular voice in American letters. I think it's fair to say, and a unique rock and tour that we're going to hear from him. You know, we're going to see that. Whose own past includes stints living in a cemetery and running a company that sold clothes made from rare hand-woven fabrics from Guatemala. So we'll talk a little bit about your entrepreneurial past, as well as your kind of cultural entrepreneurship. Two of his previous novels, The Caveman's Valentine and the Juror, were turned into movies. One of them a very bad movie by his own reckoning, so we'll talk a little bit about that. And a third novel Ravens drew rave reviews when it was published in 2010. He's also the founder of The Moth, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, right this year. It's quarter-life crisis. It sounds like people know The Moth. It's a wildly acclaimed and popular event show where people tell stories in a podcast that's really redefined personal storytelling in the digital age. And I want to talk with you about that, because it's really kind of fascinating to use modern technology to go back to a kind of very old form of storytelling and entertainment. We're going to talk about George's experiences on the frontier of creative expression and the ways, particularly in which the past doggedly informs the present, whether in his native Georgia or post-COVID New York City. So George, thank you so much for speaking to us. Thank you, Nick, for having me. All right. So let's start with the kingdoms of Savannah. In a way, and it's hard, like I don't want to give away too much of the plot because it's a murder mystery, and it's a thriller and whatnot. But I guess it's safe to say that in many ways the main character is the city of Savannah. You are not from Savannah. That's not your hometown, but you're familiar with Savannah. But why is Savannah at the center of your novel? Although I'm not from Savannah, we bounced around Yankee cities for years when I was a little boy. My dad was editor of weekly newspapers that kept going belly up one after another. And then finally, my mother, who was Georgian, insisted that we go back to Georgia. And so we settled in Brunswick, which was about an hour to the south of Savannah. And so when I was about 11 or 12 is when mom started to take me on drives up to what she called our capital city, because we are eighth generation savannah. So we'd get into her big barge like Chevrolet Bel Air. And she'd always have some fancy hat. And then we'd sail up route 17 and spend the afternoons at cousins houses in Savannah and these terribly stuffy parlors. And then I would become inculcated with the traditions of Savannah and the south, then the stories that were sort of hammered into my head. And the other thing that mother loved were seances. And all of the cousins loved seances. My mother's name was Dainese. And the cousins, I remember there were about four cousins who were also named Dainese. There was just this sort of gaggle of first cousins and second cousins. And they would sit around in these parlors and commune with the dead, usually with my mother's grandmother, who is called Big Dainese, who was the matriarch of the family when they lived on this big plantation, which might more accurately be called forced labor camp. But I would never have said that to my mom or to any of the Daineses. But that's where I started to get just all of this sense of our traditions and the Savannah traditions and the Savannah feel and the Savannah, you know, they didn't have good air conditioning. So you'd sit with all the Spanish moss, this sort of gray Spanish moss dead, everything sort of in ruins and sitting there sharing these traditions that they all thought were beautiful. They thought everybody had been happy in the old days. And I was aware, I guess because I'd been raised in the north, but I became terrified eventually by this world and by the seances and by the proclamations of Big Dainese. So Big Dainese was talking through the medium or? Big Dainese would talk to us through this thing called a tip table. I can't see hands, but so you'll have to shout. Does anybody know what a tip table is? Well, they were sort of like an early version of the Ouija board. Actually, the Ouija board was a 20th century high tech invention to replace the tip tables, but we would never use those. So we would sit with our, you put your hands down on the table like this and your pinkies are connected on a little three legged table. And then mother would say, is there a spirit present in the room? Please wrap once for yes and twice for no. And then the no was kind of a tell, right? Yeah. Yeah. Which was really confusing. And then the Dainese would giggle a little and then we would move on. Can you talk? But then when I said, so then she, Big Dainese would eventually be summoned and she could through this sort of alphabetical, you know, you go A, B, C, go through the alphabet until the table would wrap. Eventually you get these little Delphic messages that would be sent to us that would be the one that I remember clearly was wrong direction, which, you know, and that's just free floating wrong direction. What did that mean? Yeah. Well, the Dainese knew that it referred to today's society and the deterioration of southern culture. Can you like Savannah in Georgia? And that's where midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is. And it's, I mean, it's like Charleston or New Orleans. It's a very historically laden place. So can you kind of compare Savannah to Atlanta, right? Because Atlanta is the New South, Savannah, then is the old. Oh, Savannah is Savannah the old. I mean, Savannah has, Savannah has a lot of newness mixed in, but Atlanta is a big, busy, almost, you know, it almost has the atmosphere of a northern city. It's got a lot of stuff going. It's just way, way too big, lots and lots of traffic. And that it was the city too busy to hate, whereas I'm assuming Savannah was kind of like, now we're just busy enough to. Savannah always prided itself on being a rather liberal city. A beautiful, beautiful city. That's the difference. Atlanta is kind of, most of Atlanta is unlivable. There are no sidewalks. There are areas of Savannah. They're very nice. But Savannah is the old, you know, it has that idea of here's an old tradition. Here are the the grandees. And these are the, you know, we live in these big houses very close to the coast in sort of this ideal place. But with a terrible history, which Atlanta did not have, you know, Atlanta was pro union, which most people don't know that Atlanta voted to stay with the union. But in those days, Atlanta was very small and Savannah was much bigger. So Savannah carried it for and Atlanta is where like Scarlet of Hera ends up, right? At the end of Gone with the Wind, it's, it's a place where kind of capitalism or urban growth happens, which is something that Confederacy was always kind of suspicious of. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So can you, can I ask maybe big Inaz to explain, could you talk about what is the big Inaz present? The big kingdom that you're talking about in the book without giving away anything? I can't talk about it without giving something away, but I don't mind. I'll be a little careful about it because, because the kingdom is so interesting. There was a community during the Revolutionary War. There were hundreds around Savannah of black soldiers who fought for the King of England and they fought very well and they won the battle of Savannah. They were key to winning that battle. After the war, of course, the Americans won and so these black soldiers refused to go back into slavery and they had been stationed for a while up the Savannah River and they knew about some swamp islands and so they went to one of these swamp islands and built a fortress and then escaped enslaved people from all around Savannah began to join them until there were perhaps 200 people living. There were at least 22 houses we know about and a wall that they built around this village and they fought off the Georgia militia. They flourished for years finally the South Carolina militia defeated them in battle, killed a number of them, others were re-inslave. Many of them escaped, made their way through the woods down to Florida which had just rejoined, which had just become a Spanish colony again. So they found their way to Florida and then petitioned the King of Spain and were granted asylum and then they disappeared from history. But I just found their story, that particular story to be so fascinating. It's the story, by the way, that's repeated and that just now historians are beginning to understand how important these, they're called communities of maroons, but these maroon communities were all around the South and they really formed the initial framework for what became later the Underground Railroad. So they're really important in American history and they're just beginning to understand how important it is, but we never knew anything about this, like this is academic information that I'm now, Savannahians are getting interested in because the idea that there was a fortress of armed black soldiers who were fighting for their freedom. So it was this little redoubt of freedom in the middle. And I guess growing up or being in Georgia in the 50s, 60s, 70s even, how does James Oglethorpe fit into this? Because Georgia of the kind of Confederate states has a really interesting origin story and it's one where there was not going to be any slavery, right? So could you explain that and then how was that dealt with at a time when that would have been kind of problematic for the education system or the cultural establishment? Yeah, Oglethorpe was a truly great man and as far as I can see the only great man in Georgia history for quite a while. Until Ted Turner. Oglethorpe came over in 1742 and established the colony and said there would be no slaves and also no lawyers, which was really interesting. And then of course right away the colonists began to complain because they could just look across the Savannah River to South Carolina and they could say, oh here are all these white folks who are very wealthy over there. And you know these were, you know it's very strange because these are poor colonists who were never going to wind up owning a bunch of slaves. Oglethorpe kept telling them, you know this is a horrible thing. If you bring slaves into this colony you'll actually ruin your lives. But they had this dream that this is where real wealth is in those days, rice plantation. And they had to get rid of Oglethorpe and the trustees and they had to get rid of this rule. So they began to have these sermons, a group that called themselves the malcontents. They chased Oglethorpe out and the sermons were sermons about how cruel it was, how the king and the trustees were being so cruel to make white people work in fields that they clearly are not supposed to be working in. God had ordained a certain order and why are you upsetting this order? Why are you so cruel? And that narrative that was you know right away using this victim narrative, you all are victims. All the white folks of Georgia signed up for this narrative and they were able to get rid of Oglethorpe, get rid of the trustees and bring slavery in. And even though most of the people, most of the white people in Georgia never owned slaves. Well, at that point, yeah, exactly. Yeah, actually, they never most of the majority never owned slaves, but they bought into it. They bought into this idea of a system, a particular kind of hierarchical system that they thought it was God has ordained these castes and these classes. And so we, we have to buy into it. And it was, you know, it just created horror. Well, let's talk a little bit about the plot. I mean, what happens is early on there is a murder and a house burns down. Can you kind of quickly sketch the cast of characters and, you know, then maybe we can talk about how those represent various kind of dynamics at work in, you know, now the contemporary cell. Yeah, so the my protagonist, my central protagonist is Morgana Musgrove in her sixties, who is the Dwayne of Savannah society and has a great big house right in the middle of town. And when her husband dies, she inherits all of the little businesses that he used to own. You know, a lot of the wealthy folks in Savannah just own these odd little businesses. And one of the businesses turns out to be a detective agency, which has been lying fallow for years. But when this fire happens in town, a very wealthy, very nasty developer is accused of the crime, they say, well, he burned down the building to collect the insurance. And it happened that a vagabond was asleep in the building and burned up. And so he's accused of arson and murder. And his lawyer approaches Morgana with a seeing some of money to get involved with this case. And Morgana gathers her big dysfunctional family, all of her children who are all grown and some of her grandchildren around to help her with this case. They tend to they've they've had enough of Morgana. She's mean and manipulative and really quite awful. And none of them want to do it. But she's so manipulative that she invagals all of them to help. And all of her children and grandchildren come from different, you know, what I call the kingdoms of Savannah, they come from, you know, one of them is a Superior Court judge, one of her daughters, and she represents this whole legal system of Savannah. One of her sons, ransom, is a bit of a nair duel and has wound up living in one of the homeless encampments, because Savannah is ringed by homeless encampments. And so that plays a really important part in in the story. Morgana never really leaves the house. She's like, she's like Nero Wolfe, she just she gets up, but her family comes to report to her. And they're the ones who got. It's funny you call her the protagonist, because I would have said ransom was the protagonist. Yeah, it's funny, because I thought in the beginning that ransom might be but I actually I had fun. And when as I wrote the book, I began to think, gosh, ransom is weak. And he just he just got overwhelmed. He's trained as a lawyer, but kind of crapped out of society. Yeah, I mean, he had a big horrible thing happen with his brother and he wound is also a lawyer. He wound up goes also. And he wound up going to jail. And when he got out of jail, he couldn't get it together. So he went out to live in one of the homeless encampments. He's actually based on on a friend of mine who also was wealthy and just wound up drinking too much and found his had also been a lawyer wound up in the in living in one of the homeless encampments. I used to spend a great deal of time out there. So. So yeah. So and then there's the other kind of arguably the person who's revealed, if not as the protagonist, but kind of the future of this is a granddaughter, Morgana Jack, which short for Jacqueline. Yes. Who is she? Yeah. And you're right. You know, there really are multiple protagonists. There's but Jack is as as important as Morgana really. And Jack is is black. And her mother Roxanne married Morgana's daughter, Bibi. And so when when Jack was very young, so Jack is brought into the family and has great love for her grandmother, Morgana, and also completely distrusts her and sometimes reviles her. And Jack is obsessed with justice. And I don't know that's a that always is a really interesting thing. I've gone through certain periods of my life where I've just been obsessed by some by some injustice that I've seen. And I find people who get that obsession. I find them to I mean, I have great love and respect for them. Where does that you have that, by the way? Somewhat, you know, probably not as much as you, to be quite honest. Well, you know, because I was going to say part of the injustice in the novel, there's beyond it being set in a kind of, you know, Southern Gothic place where history is, you know, constantly pushing up and, you know, the line from Faulkner in Reckon and Ferdinand, which is in the South, the past isn't dead, it's not even past. I mean, that's the world this takes place. And it's interesting when you talk about the seances. I mean, that's the Gothic novel is that the dead are not really gone and everything is kind of a ruin. Yeah. Right. And so there's a particular event in Savannah history that you talk about a slave auction at a racetrack that also fits in. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that kind of intrudes into the present? Yeah, because Savannah this is so this is the period in Savannah history that I'm so fascinated by is the 1840s and 1850s. In the 1840s, and this may surprise you, there were a lot of abolitionists living in Savannah. There are a lot of people living in Savannah who had been born overseas or born up north, maybe even the majority of the population. But by 1852 or so, all of those abolitionists have been chased out of Savannah, sometimes tarred and feathered. The Unitarian Church, which was very active abolitionist hub, has been chased out of the South entirely. And it's replaced by this new breed of southerners who were not like the when you think of Jefferson, you think of people who felt, oh, slavery is a terrible thing. But we do have to get rid of it in the, you know, in the long run. We're powerless. Yeah. We inherited it and it'll disappear at some point in the indefinite future. Yeah, and we have to move slowly, and you know, but we are going to get rid of it. It's definitely doomed. But by the 1850s, that's been replaced by a new view, which is that slavery is an absolute virtue. It was the God ordained. And this is John C. Calhoun, kind of is the prophet of that. Yeah, as one of these people. And the group that began to espouse this were called the fire eaters. And they believed that the great crime of America was the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. So in 1809, they had just abolished bringing in new slaves from Africa. And they thought, this is the terrible crime of America, because what it's done is it's raised the prices of slaves so that nobody can make a profit anymore. And the only people who are making profits are Virginia Jews, who are selling these slaves to us down in Georgia. And so it became so of course, it became founded on anti Semitism. And not there weren't particularly anti black, they simply believe I mean, they were, you know, they were profoundly anti black, profoundly anti black that you they didn't bother to talk about being anti black, they just they just said slavery is the natural order. And and then they began the fire, this group of fire eaters began to pervert American politics. And they were led by one man in Savannah, Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar, who was a bully, who would beat his enemies on the street, and then get away with it. And was the wealthiest man in town, and an absolute narcissist. And he believed what he wanted to do, his dream was, I have this arranged somehow, for an abolitionist to be elected president, then the South will secede, will go and conquer Mexico, Brazil, and, and the Caribbean, and set up this enormous empire of slavery, which will be under the iron rule of Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar. And he had so many followers. And this particular political movement took over the South, something that's interesting, because this has been ignored, you know, you don't read this in your textbooks. But this is what happened is they took over Southern politics in the late 1850s. Charlie Lamar was staging these horrible outrages that he knew would piss off the New York Times. And that's what he was doing very deliberately. So for example, he bought the fastest yacht in the world probably, built by the guy who designed the America's Cup yachts, the Wanderer. He sailed this yacht over to Africa, kidnapped 600 people, brought them across the Atlantic. Only 400 of them survived. And he didn't do it. I mean, he didn't, he didn't lose, certainly didn't lose money on this proposition, but he didn't do it for the money. He did it because he knew the New York Times would find out about it and come after him. And James Buchanan would come after him. And he thought, this is the kind of provocation. And then when his friend, Pierce Butler, went bankrupt, Pierce Butler had hundreds of slaves, and Charlie Lamar arranged for 432 of them to be sold in one event at a racetrack in Savannah that Charlie Lamar owned. And again, pissed off, actually this was the Tribune, Horace Greeley's Tribune, sent down an investigative reporter whose name was Philander Dostix. I just, I just love that name. Came down from New York, managed to pretend he was a Kentucky planter, got into this big slave sale, and then wrote a scathing article in the New York Tribune, which was immediately picked up by all the newspapers in Europe and America, and then picked up by all the southern newspapers, and Charlie Lamar said, this is fake news, this is false news. And you once again, my people are being victimized because all we're trying to do is to make enough money, to feed our families, and you are again saying, oh, this is a terrible, terrible crime, the terrible crime of slavery, even though we're taking such good care. And, but these were the events that then led to this particular moment in American history when Charlie Lamar and the fire eaters went to Stephen Douglas, the Democratic punitive. A little giant. The little giant. He was going to be the nominee for the Democratic Party. And they said, you're going to have to allow the Atlantic slave trade to be reestablished. They knew he would say now. And this is in the Constitution that the slave trade ended in 1809, right? No, it wasn't. They allowed it to be ended in 1809. It still took an act of Congress. But yeah, they were never going to get the Atlantic slave trade back. And they knew that Stephen Douglas couldn't sign on to this. So he said no. And they all walked out of the big convention in Baltimore, splitting the Democratic Party and making way for Abraham Lincoln to be elected. They knew that was going to happen. They thought Seward would be elected. But at any rate, they knew an abolitionist would be elected. And they knew that immediately they could secede from the union. And it would be easy then to join England and whoop the Yankees. And it didn't go according to plan. And it is weird. Or is it? Talk a bit about they were the South or the Confederacy was expecting the United Kingdom or Great Britain, rather, to sign on with slavery. And can you talk about why and how that fed into the Norman Cavalier kind of motif in the South? I mean, the Norman Cavalier story was this idea that they had that Yankees were descended from Anglo-Saxons, but Southerners are descended from the Normans who took over England. And so they had been, for years, they had been buying into, particularly Sir Walter Scott, probably the most dangerous figure in American history, even though he was a Scotsman, but he had such an influence over our politics because they bought into this idea that there's a God-ordained caste system and that at the top should be this Cavalier who, in the stories of Sir Walter Scott and sort of the general narratives of the South, the Cavalier has been cast out of his land or his land has been cheated from him, but he returns and then the true people recognize that he is the true king. And then he comes and he does virtue. You know, he takes care of everybody. And all of these Southerners believe so intensely in this myth and the myth that the Norman Cavalier is right and just and good. And you guys on the outside are, you know, all these democratic ideals are, you know, they're only harmful because what you need is, you need a powerful leader who can say there are classes of people. And there's a kind of fixed hierarchy. As long as everybody stays in their class. And this is what Big Ines believed and was always trying to tell us during the Seances. If people were happy in those days, because she grew up on a plantation that was, you know, Sherman's March came down to her plantation when she was a little girl. But she could remember how wonderful things were. And she believed, oh, everybody's happy. As long as you believe in this cast system. And it, you know, this horrible, pernicious narrative that ruled us and honestly, still rules us today. You know, it's never gone away. You know, let's bring it up to New York. You live in New York City. The novel in a way, I think without giving anything away, ends in New York in a way. You know, when you talk about history and like, you know, you're an eighth generation, Georgia. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think of New York. I was born in New York. My father was born in New York. And that's like the beginning of the Gillespie line. And I think of New York as a city like that. I was talking with some people here earlier who have Dutch descendants, you know, going back to the 16th or 17th century. But New York is the opposite of the South in terms of its, you know, it's old. It's a colonial city. It's as old as any place in America. But everybody here is new. Everybody migrates here. You know, very few people are here for generations. You know, what is the, is, is that accurate? Or what is the, you know, what is the kind of interpenetration of the Southern narrative you're talking about, where people come from way old and there was a fixed order that somehow decays and breaks down. And in New York City, everybody seems to be, have moved here last year. Yeah. Yeah. But, but they worked hand in glove. And it was the New Yorkers who were supporting the slave trade who kind of ran it. And with the wealthiest New Yorkers were, were slavers. And, you know, the, and the immigrants coming to New York were completely against Lincoln's war, you know, as you know that, you know, the draft riots. Philander Dostichs is really interesting because he's that guy, you know, who came down to write that article. But Philander Dostichs comes from the Bohemian world, which was centered just a few blocks north of here at Faf's Beer Hall up on 10th and Broadway. And that was where Walt Whitman was hanging out. And I mean, the people that you, I was thinking I was sort of suggesting to Nick earlier that I guess these are early or libertarians. They were, they certainly were free thinkers. Fitzhugh Ludlow was one of this group. And he was, he had made an incredible amount of money publishing a book when he was 22 years old about, it was called The Hashisha Eater. It's just all he was was a stoner. And he wrote stone stuff. And it became the biggest book. So even before the were libertarians, they were just pot heads. They were Republicans who ate hashish. That's right. Yeah. And, and so all this group that was here, you know, it's so interesting, this kind of connection, because they were the ones who were sort of challenging Philander, who was kind of got, had gone undercover to write articles for Horace Greeley. But they were sort of challenging him. Could you go? Because Philander had developed a Southern accent when he was an actor. And they said, well, could, could you go down to Georgia? And then Horace sees him and says, come, come to the, you know, he, he saw an ad for this big slave sale. And he said, go down there, if you can. And Philander went down and changed history. But I love the idea of this sort of knot of Bohemians who were challenging Philander, Dostics, and yet they themselves, they cared about abolition for a few years. And by the middle of the war, they kind of dropped it. And they were all racists. So you find Walt Whitman later in his life is, is making statements that are, you know, truly racist. None of them would support reconstruction. None of them would support keeping the Union army there to support black people being able to vote. And they, you know, it's just an interesting group of people. Why didn't they care about such an essential human thing? Hmm. Do you have an answer to that? I don't. I don't know. I can't figure them out. I honestly, I thought, you know, they, they all seemed very abolitionist in 1859 and 1860, because it had sort of swept the country. But by 1870, they're all like, Oh, that war, that war is over. And we really need to, you know, to reunite with our Southern brethren and stop fighting this, you know, and there weren't, wasn't anybody in New York who would, who was willing to stand up and say, look, people are being re-enslaved there. None of these proclamations, you know, are actually being enforced. There were people saying that in other parts of the country, but you know. To bring it back to the thriller aspect or the murder mystery, and, you know, it's a, it's a study of power in Savannah, and there's different types of power. There is a detective who's a big figure in this, Galatis, which is a Greek name. Yeah. Who is he and how does he fit into this scheme of, you know, there are old Southerners. There are black, the daughter of a lesbian couple who is a main player who's loved by an older Grandi who is kind of racist, but kind of not. Yeah. But then who is Galatis and what does. Yeah, Galatis is from an immigrant family. There were lots of Greek shrimp fishermen in Savannah until fairly recently. He comes from that family. He's become a cop and he drives around the city and really he has the ethos of a Norman Cavalier. He believes that he brings good wherever he goes so that as long as you just recognize that he is a just man, then he'll be incredibly gentle with you and good. And of course, you know, there's a lot of darkness going along with this Norman Cavalier thing, but I like the fact that, you know, I mean, I've got several characters in the book who really are, you know, modern day Norman Cavaliers. Just as the old knights around would ride around and get into fights here and there, always on behalf of the little guy. So Nick Galatis is driving around and feeling that he's bringing justice with him wherever he goes. Just don't cross him. That's all. Right. Just accept it. There's a natural order. Yeah. The plot ends without giving anything away. There's a series of compromises and secrets that remain in place. What are you getting at with that large kind of ending where there is no there's no real justice right in this? Yeah, I mean, there's a there's a bit of justice. There's a sense that yeah, there's there things improve. Yeah, the end but Savannah is better at the end of the book than at the beginning. Yeah. And I think Savannah is better all the time. I actually think that most of the globe is better. Yeah. All the time. But that at the essence of how we progress is compromise. Now, Jack, you know, this young black protagonist is fiercely against compromise. And Morgana has become fiercely pro. I mean, she's not fierce about anything, but she does. I mean, I guess you'd say she's very strong in saying, I hate this compromise, but this is how we do things. We have to make a deal with the devil. And if we do, we can make things a little bit better. You know, there will be a little bit of justice. But there's never enough. And I do think that that's how the world gets better every day. Yeah. Very quickly, one of the things I remember talking with you as you were finishing the book, you handed in the manuscript to your publisher, and then they had a sensitivity reader go through it because, you know, at various points, you have, you know, black characters, you have female characters, gay characters, I guess a Greek American maybe is also part of that list. But can you describe what was the you know, what is the sensitivity reader and is this new compared to your earlier books? Oh, yes. How do you, how did you feel about that? You know, I, you know, I take so long to write books that, you know, my last book came out in the 1850s, but we didn't have sensitivity readers back then. It was actually a, you know, it was a terrifying experience. Because you know, here I am, I do have the perceptions of an old white guy. So it went to a sensitivity reader who turned out, I didn't know this until after the sensitivity reading was over, that she was a 23-year-old black lesbian activist who, thank God, loved the book and thought Morgana is wonderful. She just thought, oh, she's so fascinated by Morgana. She did, she was able to point out here and there, this is language that, you know, you might think about. And for the most part, I thought it was a great experience. I didn't feel as though my editor was telling me at any point, oh, you have to do anything. She said, listen. And I thought, why not? Do you find that because there have been a couple of books recently that have come out or either that have been pulled because the author was not the, you know, the race, class, or gender of what they were writing about? Did you worry about that at all? Sure. Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, I worried about it. I also felt that probably readers would understand. I'm writing a thriller that involves, it's about Savannah. And it means and I as a novelist have to imagine all sorts of people and some and because I use different points of view, I have to imagine interior thoughts. It's not like a writer say a white woman who will write a novel in which she strictly is writing from the point of view of a black woman or an enslaved woman. I, you know, that I would never dream of doing. But if I'm going to write a novel like this, I feel as though I should have the license to imagine the interior thoughts of all sorts of different folks. And I feel as though I've been given that license. I nobody so far has complained. There have been a number of complaints from racists and right wingers about the book. Yeah, every now and then, you know, I get lots and lots of really great Goodreads reviews. And then every now and then I get up like somebody throws a one bomb, you know, because most, you know, you're looking obviously for fives if you're if people are in a generous mood. But every now and then people will throw one bomb and sometimes I don't know why. But sometimes they make it quite clear. They'll use some term that, you know, is definitely kind of I feel, you know, and I mean, I have my own experience with this. There was a shift before kind of online culture and after where you get feedback en masse, kind of instantaneous, and you know, the ratings happen, you know, and everybody in every industry is, you know, kind of dealing with that eventually it's gotten to lawyers and doctors where you know, they have Google ratings or Yelp ratings and things. But does that, you know, do you do you feel like does that empower you as a creator or does that kind of make you gun shy about stuff that you're worried about? Gosh, that's an interesting question. This is the first time that I've ever really gotten all that social media, all those like the idea of dealing with these ratings. I'm not sure that I completely know how I feel about it yet, because it's been, you know, I mean, I have great scores, but those one bombs are really disturbing. You know, so there's a woman who got you know, and I sort of understand this, there's a woman who read the book. And I had called this candy bar, I called them Reese's Butter Cups, thinking I guess of the flower and somehow or another that had, you know, we have a lot of editors, but somehow it had filtered through. Well, that's on like page 290. She found it through the one bomb. And then her followers are all yeah, that book has to, that book has to die. If they have made that mistake about this beloved candy bar. Yeah, I really, it does shake me. I had enjoyed the book until I guess I thought it either. Oh, yeah. And then I think but you know, everybody has a right to their opinion. And perhaps that that is so disturbing that even though I have just written about 250 years of slavery, and the horrors that we have endured, and the compromises that we must come to, even though I have just poured out all of this passion, I got the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup wrong. Yeah. And so I deserve that one. Yeah, I think so. Let's talk a little bit about your previous novels in particular the juror was made into a big movie very quickly after the book was published, right? The book was published in 95 somewhere around here. And it was made it's a mystery about a juror who is in a big mob trial, right? And describe, you know, what that was like going through a creative process where you saw your book kind of get overtaken by Hollywood. What was your experience of that? Yeah, I mean, there were two parts to that. The first part was I had, I was extremely poor, and I was driving around in this old, was it a Toyota Tercel? I just remember that it that the floorboards were rotting so that I could see the highway as I drove, I could actually see down on the road. And I had and I had driven to give a reading for the caveman's Valentine and I had just finished the juror. And now caveman's Valentine was coming out and I went to a reading up in Boston. And it was this cold snowy night. And it was the only reading I was going to get. And I went into the bookstore and there was one lady there. Eating a peanut butter cup? Yeah, eating a peanut butter cup. No, it was an old lady who said, well, I came because my heater died. And I needed a warm place. But I'd like to hear your, you read so I read to her. And then at the end, she said, that's lovely. When that comes out in paperback. Wow. You're on easy street. Yeah. And then I got into my Tercel and drove back the next day. I remember I was so unhappy. But my editor had said my agent had said, now you got to go to every bookstore you can. So I was passing Amherst and I thought I'll stop in the bookstore here. And I went in and I said, hi, you don't know me, but my name is George Dasgrain. And I have a book that's just come out. And the owner said, yeah, I know you are. You just got this rave review in the New York Times book review, giving it to me. I had not heard it. And so that was like all of a sudden I had soared. And then I got back in the car with that sort of a different attitude. And then drove to New York, where I had just handed in the juror. And I drove to my agents who told me that I had just made a big deal. And then two days later, Hollywood made this huge deal. And suddenly I could get my Tercel fixed. And that was really important to me afterwards. Yeah, I mean, Hollywood, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to complain. Everybody tried to do a great job. Demi Moore was chosen. Look, I don't really have any complaints about the juror. Actually, a lot of people really love it. It's sort of got a weird, you know, Alec Baldwin is the bad guy. And I actually found it a blast. I didn't think it was great by any means. And they made compromise after compromise. But who am I to complain? You know, my Tercel was fixed. And you're the caveman's Valentine, which was your first novel was also made into a myth. That's right. So what is it like to have, you know, the novel, you know, nobody you're never in total control as a writer. But, you know, the novel form is like you get to call the shots, you're writing. And you know, and then what happens in the creative process where suddenly you're a bystander to, you know, how it turns out. Yeah, I mean, it's weird. But it's like, again, the people who made the caveman's Valentine is a great movie. But I love the people who made it. Casey Lemons, who just made Harriet, which is just brilliant. I just loved Casey Lemons. She was the director. I love Samuel Jackson. It wasn't this wasn't the role for him. I loved the team that made it. And I thought that everybody was trying as hard as they could to make a great movie. But movies are hard to make. And it requires a certain kind of chemistry, you know, that comes together was a novelist, you feel like when you're done, I have worked on this and consulted with lots of people who, you know, helped me out. But at some point you get to this point where you say this is this is this complete product that I feel I'm ready to take to the world. Movies aren't like that. Movies are just, let's do the best we can in the six weeks of shooting that we have and then take all this stuff and see what we can splice together. You know, when they made Chinatown, everyone thought after the shooting was done, this is just a disaster. And then just a powerful editor and a powerful music editor and Roman Polanski sat down and they pulled out of all of this mess. They pulled something beautiful together, but it could so easily have gone the other way. You never know. Who were your who are your literary inspirations? Because it's also can you talk a little bit about, you know, the age of the novelists is kind of past us, right? I mean, novels are very popular. But the novelists as culture heroes seems to have kind of dissipated a bit. Yeah, I don't know whether the novelist is gone or it's just as gone to sleep for a while. I always hope the novelists are going to come roaring back. Well, I think more novels are being sold in red, but it's not quite the cultural heft that it might have had in, you know, 1950 or 1960. Yeah. No, it's true. The more I look, that was the same complaint that we were making back in, you know, as early in my life as I can remember, but TV has really ruined novels and that's all gonna. But and then nowadays, Tik Tok is just like this. It's ruining the novel. Yeah, Tik Tok is destroying, you know, but then there's also now these book talk and these extremely influential talk heads who are just talking about the novels that they're reading and so everything's changing. But yeah, I don't know if it's the end of the age of the novelist. Washington Irving once wrote this great short story about going into a library in Oxford that was filled with these old, musty volumes. And when he goes in there, the volumes begin to talk to him, the old books. And they say, you live in a degraded world. You don't have the love of literature that we have in this world. And he says, he ends it up with saying, you know, sorry, guys, but time moves on and we now have fast paced novels and short stories and that's what everybody loves and you're dead and you're in this musty old library for a reason. So bye. And I've always thought that that is the same approach that happens all the time, you know, and then you say, oh, well, culture is dead and then you get something like fleabag and you realize, God, it's just the forms are different. Yeah, the forms are different. But the vibrancy of creation just it just doesn't go. Yeah. I mean, if anything, this it seems like we're in a golden age because you do have novels and you have television and movies. And I mean, it's just we have a super abundance golden ages might be farther than I would. Before we talk about the moth, which is a big deal. Talk a little bit about your Guatemala and business. Okay, because that's a fascinating kind of chapter in your in your life, which seems kind of out of place with the rest of your it did to me as well. I started, you know, I was just a tourist in Guatemala. And I, I had been a high school dropout. And then I never went back to school. And then I just did all sorts of odd little jobs. And eventually, in my 20s, I went down to Guatemala as a tourist, and then wound up like most tourists taking a bunch of stuff home and selling it. But it became a business because I recognize that these Guatemalan fabrics are really beautiful and could be used these hand woven fabrics could be used in more contemporary style. So it just became a very really successful business. And finally, we had about 600 boutiques around the world that were buying our stuff. And I'll just tell you one little quick story of how I got out of the business. I had discovered in the mountains near Mexico, I found that they were hand weaving rayon. That is they were weaving rayon on looms. And they did that because during the Guatemalan war, they had lost access to silk. And so they just said, Okay, well, we'll try this rayon fabric that we can get from Mexico. Well, nobody hand weaves rayon because it has the consistency of snot, you know, it's just it's just impossible. But they had learned how to do it and it was beautiful, sort of gaudy, shiny, like raw silk, but a little shinier. And I saw it and recognized, Oh, my God, this is going to, you know, I can use this in these contemporary clothes. And so we designed a line and started selling to boutiques. There was one boutique here in New York called Charivare. And they ordered a lot of this. And I then went back to this town and set up 100 looms foot looms. And I had to sort of bring down the art of dying using chemical dyes because they could they didn't know how to make fast dyes. And all of this was extremely difficult and a really interesting challenge. But one day, I got a call from from the fabric in New York, Guatemala City, saying we're not getting the fabrics being delivered from this mountain town. We've sent them many telegrams, they didn't have a phone up there. We've sent them telegrams, they're not responding. And like this had been going on for a week and, you know, orders would be laid. So I got on the next plane. And then I got picked up by a motorbike that then roared six hours, you know, on these windy twisty roads and finally wound up in this little town of San Marcos, went to the fabric. And there was a crowd of people around the fabric and they were angry because the manager's dog had attacked a child in the village. And they wanted that dog so they could kill it. And the manager would not give it up. And so had been for a week with his shotgun, keeping the crowds away. And he was completely drunk when I got there. And he allowed me to come in and then explained this situation to me. And I explained that the rich women who shopped in Charavare needed their fancy blouses. And he didn't seem to care. And I thought, if I were a reporter now or a writer, this would be the most glorious episode. But instead, the only thing I can think about is receivables and cashflow and how I'm in big trouble. And I just got I just kind of woke up, realizing God, I don't like this life, because I feel trapped. So the next day, I made a deal to sell the company. And the day after that, I sat down and started writing The Caveman's Valentine. But you are an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur. A serial entrepreneur. Because the other I mean, the other thing that you created is the moth. And can can you explain what the moth is and how that came into being? Well, I had it actually came into being because I used to go to these poetry readings down here, all over the village. And I went to the New York and cafe every week to watch their poetry slams. I just loved poetry slams, even though often the poetry was kind of droney. You know, I don't know, there's just something lovable about everybody writing this poetry. But one day, in the, I guess, late 80s, I was there and this woman was just droning on and on with, you know, that's sort of surrealistic poetry that's the six pack of my father's four on the floor, Jeep, Cherokee, dynamism is in the attic of my abuse. And, you know, just go, and then the story and then the poem stopped. And we gave this little applause. And then she said, so I'm going to read the next poem. And it's just the story of when I used to, my grandfather would come pick me up. And we're like four in the morning, when I grew up in Queens, and then we drive in his old station wagon and go up to Westchester and go trout fishing. And I just, I was very sleepy. And it was, and then we get to the trout stream and these beautiful brown trout. And I looked around and saw that the audience was completely electric now. Everybody was listening. This was because the veil between the artist and the audience had dropped because it was just a story she was telling. It wasn't a work of art. And I went to Bob Holman, my dear friend, who was the host, at the end of the evening. And I said, Bob, I have an idea. What if we have a night of the stories that poets used to introduce their poems without the poems? And Bob thought that I was taking the piss. And I guess I was. But years later, that idea stayed with me and grew and grew and grew. And finally after the juror came out and I had a little money to experiment with, I thought I'm going to try this in my in my living room. And I did. And it was instantly, I don't know why it hadn't been done before, but the idea of bringing four people to tell personal sort of kitchen stories in front of an audience, it just took off. And it's called the moth because? It's called the moth because I, the moth has always been my totemic animal because their moths are obsessive. And as I said, I love people who are obsessive. I just love the whole idea of people who have fallen to obsessions. That's always drawn me. And it somehow seemed to me that there was something about sort of gathering. I mean, we gathered around just as we sort of gather around a fire. And I could remember that I sort of had a memory of being on porches in Georgia when I was little on this and on this island outside of Brunswick, Georgia, where we just stay up all night telling stories and moths would fly around the porch light. And so that sort of all came together. The stories are rooted in personal experience, right? But they're not necessarily literally true. Or what is, I mean, are they tales or are they saying that they're not true? Do you have evidence? I'm not saying they're not true, but they're inspired by true events, right? I mean, the tale is in the telling more than whether it was supposed to be true. Sometimes people have gotten really horribly worked up if they think that a story is not true, right? There's a one of these some editorial writer who was writing because Malcolm Gladwell told a story. And this guy was able to prove that the details were not true. And then Malcolm Gladwell was a liar and the moth is a hypocritical white supplicer of an organization. And I just thought, wow, God. And I sort of thought, I don't know, to me, it was always like any Irishman whoever tells the story says, I swear to God. Right. That's the tell. So that's what I thought it was when I say, Oh, you have to tell true stories. If you but you have to get away with it, Malcolm Gladwell had gotten caught. What is the what do you think the appeal is of the moth? Because, you know, 25 years later, it is gigantic. And it's the type of thing that people, you know, it's one of the few things that people will stop what they're doing to listen to if it's on the radio or something like that. Yeah. You know, and we're a wash with stories. We have novels and we have TV shows and everything. What's the kind of genius of it? Well, the moth was that these are going to be, well, first of all, it's that the stories are unscripted. I mean, a lot of times they are memorized, but they have to feel like they're not scripted. And there's that naturalness. It's just the stories have to be very natural in the telling. There's a vulnerability that you need to expose that you are not this. You're not a great person. You're a fool. You're a clown. If you do that, you'll win over the moth audience. But I think there is this sense that people like that authenticity, whether it's ersatz or not, most most authenticity is ersatz. And there is a little bit of a problem with this in the sense that when the moth came along, it, it did just, you know, it swept over the world. And it's not just the moth, but they're sort of the, this became a global storytelling movement. There are moth clones now and almost every capital of the world. And there is something a little disturbing to me about the sense of that these personal, sometimes confessional stories have, to some degree, supplanted literature. And that's what I don't want the moth to do. Like I always want the moth to be as experimental as it can. I believe when I started the organization, I started it because it's about the art of the raconteur. And that's what I believe. I believe that this could be an art form as brilliant as any art form. And when you watch great moth raconteurs like Edgar Oliver, they utterly transform what we think storytelling is, and they completely, utterly captivate you. And those are the people that I really want to sponsor. How do you feel the moth now is 25, so it's having its quarter life crisis? It belongs kind of to a younger generation or a different generation. You're the founder and you're now Morgana. How do you feel about that? And do you feel like it's you're moving in the right direction? Just as Morgana reaches past her children who don't understand her and reaches to Jack with whom she might begin to have a communication. So if I find that the younger generation doesn't completely understand the moth, I reach to the 22-year-olds. So I feel like it's not just one generation, it's now like there's a whole new generation coming up who found that. So all I'm saying is that it's a very complicated mix back. I love it. I find it to be, I mean the story, there's always these great stories. But we always worry that we don't want it to be formulaic. And sometimes you worry about that. I just love the moth when it is most experimental and when it's really saying this is an art form. It's not something that can be really taught. It's not a craft. It's a real art form. Does that mean that the best moth storytellers are kind of one and done? Well, no, because they should have a great influence. Like when people ask me, how do you tell a story? Rather than give them rules, I point them to Edgar Oliver. I say, go online and look at Edgar Oliver. There are many other great moth storytellers, but watch the moth storytellers. If you want to learn the craft of writing novels, you don't need a teacher. You just need to start reading Nabokov. You need to start reading Mark Twain. And for me, Sylvia Townsend Warner is the great writer of the 20th century, but they're all these great writers. Can you talk a bit about her? Just for a second. Sylvia Townsend Warner has been sort of forgotten and ought not to have because she is just the absolute consummate stylist. She was, by the way, the most prolific New Yorker short story writer. I think she has like 125 stories. But also her novels, she started out very young with this, she was 25, and she wrote a novel called Lolli Willows, which is about a woman outside of London who decides to become a witch. And what she's really saying is this was the only option for women other than to get married. If you didn't get married, you were a witch or a lesbian, which was the same thing. And Sylvia Townsend Warner was a lesbian activist in the 20s, which is kind of an amazing thing to think of, the amount of courage that took. But she is a brilliant stylist. Her editor at The New Yorker, William Maxwell, thought that a collection of her stories that she published in her 80s was the consummation of Western culture. It's a collection called The Kingdoms of Elphin, and that's where I got this from. It's about elves, but it's not about elves. I mean, it's just about humans. Does it sound binary elves? They are amazing. They're very binary, because these are elves who are very hidebound. They're just like little towns in England that she's criticizing, this sort of social structure. But put in this sort of weird elfin world, so here she returns in her 80s to that fantastical strain that she'd been writing about in her 20s. And I could go on and on about her forever, but that's enough. Just read of Kingdoms of Elphin. Kind of to wrap up, could you talk about your kind of relationship with the past? Because it seems when I think of the South, I think of a part of the country, and obviously this has changed in profound ways, but the South is stuck in history. I mean, this is the Faulkner sense of the South, right? That you can't move forward because the past is everywhere, and there's no future because you're constantly maintaining the past, which is falling apart in front of you. You seem to have a different orientation to the past. You obviously care about the past a lot, and you spend a lot of time rummaging through the past for something that's usable to make sense of the current world. Where does that come from and where does that lead you? I mean, I do think it's vital that we really uncover the truth about the past, and of course, you never can. It's always, you dig a little deeper, and then you realize there are more layers, and there are more layers, and you never quite get there. But you do get to more truths as you dig down, and what's happening in Savannah is so profound, this era when people are waking up and realizing these statues all around us are abominations, because they're celebrating the things that we ought not to celebrate. But it's not that the past can't be celebrated. There are groups like that maroon community that can and need to be celebrated, really need to be recovered, and need to be brought into our hearts. And we are beginning to do that, and I do think that I find that Savannah is going in a direction that I would call exultant in a way that communities are beginning to say, really, we're done with that shit, and we're really going to look for what the truth was and some balance. And I think love, I feel as though the communities are working together more than they ever have. I don't have a despairing view that, oh, I think that America's falling apart and falling into these little groups. That may be true, but it doesn't seem to be true in Savannah, which is, which I think is a lovely, wonderful place. And despite all of that poison, I think we're rising up from it. My final question, I guess, is what are you driving these days? I don't have any more cars. I live in New York City. I'm driving everyone crazy. Very good, very good. Well, I think we're going to leave it there. George Shosgreen, the author of Mess Recently at the Kingdoms of Savannah, thanks for talking.