 The mic is just going to speak for a couple minutes. I'm Betsy Peckler, and I'm the interim dean of the library. And I'd like to welcome you to our second spring semester talking in the library event with the author Greg Jackson. Adam Graver will be introducing Greg in a moment. But I wanted to share with you some information about our next talking in the library event, which will be April 11 with Claire Massoud. And Claire just wrote a book called The Woman Upstairs, which is fabulous if you haven't read it, please do. And she's going to be leading the Vermont Fellowship Writing Workshop for some students that have been awarded that fellowship, rather than university students. And that's going to be held at Rogers Free Library. And Cheryl here is our representative today. She's going to be hosting that at Rogers Free for us at 7 PM on the 11. So please mark that down. Please come. We're meeting this afternoon in Mary Tuff White Cultural Center's Instant Theater. And that term, Instant Theater, was really dubbed by the architects who did this space. But it's kind of caught on. And Mary Tuff, or Happy White, as she was fondly known, was a proud alumna of the university who came to the campus all the time and talked to students. She loved to talk to students. And it was her generous endowed gift to the Roger Williams University Library over a decade ago that made both this space and the Talking to the Library series possible. And her hope was that, by introducing students to accomplished individuals like Greg, who could share their professional and their personal stories, that our students would be inspired and would be motivated in their search for their own careers. So we are also grateful to her son, John Hazen White, Jr., who was here this fall when we kind of opened this room up. And he has continued his mother's legacy by supporting the transformation of this space from a cultural center into an instant theater. And what that means is we added glass. We added all kinds of wonderful high technology. And this has become a very popular space for student collaboration. Unfortunately, we have to kick the students out. And we have presentations like this, and they get very annoyed. But we did put up a display panel on the outside column that does list all the events in this room so at least students can be aware of whatever schedule is. So now Anna Rayburn is going to introduce Greg. And thank you all very much for coming. All right. Thanks for coming out. I want to echo what Betsy said about Claire Musud on April 11. Again, it'd be at Rogers Free Library. It's a collaboration between our library and their library, which makes it even more sort of special, I think, and makes it, and for collaboration, it also means we need to be collaborators as well on it, not just have them provide all the people. So some of these students, I know Red Claire's most recent book. If you haven't, she should have this really terrific book. She's also a terrific person, incredibly smart and interesting person on top of just the little knocks. But so I do want to echo that. I also just want to remind and give you the phone off warning for today, the silence of the phone's talk. And I will begin. Maybe six months or so ago on my desk was a galley, an advanced copy of a debut collection of stories called Prodigal Chronicles. It had come in the mail among a recent slew of upcoming releases and subsequently stacked in one of the many piles on my desk, spying out an order and logic to the piles that only I understood and one that likely will be taken to the craze. In one of the chairs in my office sat Kevin Marshall. I've been in the habit of funneling some of the galleys to Kevin based on the agreement that if one sustains his interest, he would read the complete book and then write a review for the library's connections lost. Lately, not much has been sticking. He asked if I had a collection of short stories. He said he preferred them at the moment. And so navigating through my piles from the center, I pulled out Greg Jackson's collection. I confessed to Kevin I knew little about it. Propted by the publicist's notes, I vaguely remembered liking one of the stories Wagner in the Desert, which originally had appeared in New York. I told Kevin that besides just being short stories, I thought they might be ones that were up his alley. That was on a Friday. On a Monday, I received an email from Kevin that told me the stories had changed. I didn't ask Kevin to explain. That seemed personal. And the kind of thing that we're trying to explain inevitably only reduces the feeling of importance down to an aphorism that somehow feels shallow when saying it. But I think I understood better when in his review of the library's connection site, Kevin wrote, with sentences that drive on for half a page and lyricism, you can almost taste Jackson's characters and navigate the deceivingly muddy waters of today's privileged elite. Or, wrote, Jackson demonstrates a fondness for picking his characters up by their ears and plopping them down in settings they do not entirely ask for. With people, they do not necessarily want to be with. And predictably, this technique tends to create immediate tension. Attention, Jackson sustains, mind to line, page to page. Or, these eight stories that make up prodigals are remarkably unsettling and shockingly beautiful. Philosophically uprooting and spiritually crucial. Greg Jackson probes the very depths of our existence, highlighting the ever-lingering sense of discontent that's always waiting to strike. Shall we let our guard down and look past the hidden beauty of life that so often appears to be anything but? In other words, through Kevin, I understood his experience of opening a book on Friday, spending two days immersed in its world and coming up moved and shaped and changed by the end. And such is a testament to the power of Greg Jackson's writing, his stories, and his collection as a whole. On that Monday, Kevin also asked if there was any way that we could get Greg here. Reminding me of the same tone my son had adopted when he swore he'd walk the dog every day if we could just chat him. Kevin said he would do anything to help. Subsequently, Kevin conducted an interview with Greg for Mount Hope Magazine, which by the way is for sale on the back table. The newest issue with, it does have an interview with Greg, it also has some great stuff in it, very nice as if I felt located there as well. Along with Greg's book, prodigals is for sale back there as well, 2140, right? Cash only for Mount Hope, check or charge for the book. And Kevin also said that he would talk up or promote today's meeting. So in a way he is responsible for making it happen. So I appreciate that, Kevin. And so that is the origin story. And for the present story, I have to turn it over to Greg Jackson. Thank you, Adam. Is my microphone on or should I just project? I can't even tell from up here. Is it on? No, okay. I can also talk loudly, now it's on. All right. Thank you so much, Adam. And thank you, Roger Williams for bringing me here. Thanks to the library. And a special thanks really to Kevin, who I feel like is behind my being here and who wrote a really wonderful review, extremely generous review of my book for the library website. It's probably my favorite review I've received to date and so thank you, Kevin. And thank you guys all for coming out to hear me read on this Tuesday afternoon. I'm gonna read for about 15 minutes and I hope then we can sort of have a conversation. You can ask me anything within or without reason. And I'll try and be honest. I'm gonna read a section from the final story in the collection. It's a story called Meta-Narrative Breakdown. I don't relish in some ways reading from this story because I think that a lot of the press and a lot of what people know about my work re-inscribes an idea that a lot of it's about drugs and a lot of it features characters who are in some sense, confusable for me and this just isn't the kind of, that's not what the book really is through and through, but this section does have all of those elements and so if anyone's worried, I don't know, is that a trigger warning? What are trigger warnings these days? It's fiction though, so I just say that off the bat. Also, I didn't realize now I'm actually, I'm terrified to know that I'm leading off for Claire Massoud, I'm glad it's not the other way around. You should really come see her though, she's amazing. The one thing I'm gonna say before I start reading the section is that there's one slightly odd aspect to it, which is that one section of it is written as though it's almost like a script or a screenplay and so there's no, it's just dialogue back and forth between two characters with nothing else and I'm gonna try and make that legible by switching sides like this, which shows you the extent of my acting ability and it's, yeah, it's not gonna make any sense anyway but we're just gonna do it. Okay, so we spent the night in a nearby city, a pretty harbor town where truth be told, I had once been born. We drank Belgian doubles in a cellar bar where the decorative stonework peaked out of the walls and made a piping over low arched passageways. We discussed fame, celebrity, renown, what these things were and why we sought them. The beer had washed away any last hallucinatory tincture from us, trading mistake for imprecision and because we both have failed to read the power broker for the same class in college, an omission that ever after established Robert Moses as a favorite figure of informed discussion, I now raise his example as a perhaps instructive case. So, me. Moses was a famous person, powerful. People would have known him who he was when he walked into the room, Gabby. People were interacting with the idea of him as much as with him you're saying, maybe even more so. Right, and that's clearly an important aspect of fame. You're the representative of the idea of you, not the other way around, which is pretty fucked up, especially when you consider that you're probably only fractionally responsible for that idea. But with Moses, right, short of his leading some truly lurid private life, which having read the carrow, I think we can agree he did not. It's not like people wanted to buy magazines to read about who he was dating, whether he gained or lost weight, his taste in vacation getaways. Some of that was the era though, maybe. And you know, the blinding glory of city administration work. My calendar this year, by the way, our nation's top comptrollers, topless. Ooh, I hear March is a total CPA's wet dream. He's posed with like a lamb, a lion cub, and a double entry ledger in a hammock in a windowless municipal alcove. But so you're saying people didn't feel on intimate terms with Moses. His fame wasn't bound up in enacting a social persona. Which is probably exactly the difference between celebrity and fame. And which is funny because a lot of what makes us interested in celebrities as real people, right, is they're always appearing to us as fictional people. We want the fantasy. We also want the fantasy to be real. Gaby with a mischievous relish. And we want to see them crash and burn. Yeah, we want to see them crash and burn so we know they're like us. And we want to see these perfect facades so we can imagine there's some more exalted life out there. A paradox. Yep. But there's another contradiction too, because the more we tune into this celebrity gossip, the more we realize they aren't different from us, aren't experiencing some, I don't know, transcendent spiritual election. Well, I think this is sort of where the dark turn comes. I just got chills. Because at some point, right, it's not about the fantasy anymore. It's not about the thing we're all looking at. It's about the fact that we're all looking. The most photographed barn in America. Exactly. And we want to be the barn. It seems better than just staring at the barn. Barn watching, the Amish call it, right in that sweet spot between hobby and venial sin. Very strong prohibitions on coveting that neighbor's barn. 13 year olds sneaking architectural digest into the outhouse. But then, why do we want to be the barn if we know it's all bullshit fantasy? There are plenty of other ways to make money and get laid, right? I think it comes down to a sense that if God's not watching, maybe 30 million Americans are the next best thing. That's the dream. Not necessarily a dream we could articulate to ourselves, but yes. So the longing behind celebrity worship, if I'm understanding you, is longing for proximity to God. One way to put it. Or proximity to God's absence, the innermost circle of our aloneness. Ooh, you make it sound fun. But is there comfort in the center circle? I don't, it doesn't relieve whatever loneliness or despair drove you there, does it? I told Gabby I didn't know, but I assumed she was right. I was pretty sure the aloneness was only deeper at the center, where you could hear it echo. Where unfolding the contingency of your existence always was the weightless, transparent envelope of the idea of you, a public action, having expropriated part of you into the social body, cultures eminent domain, exercising its claim on your soul. When all we really wanted were resting points, or so I thought, God, celebrity, accomplishment, sex, weren't they all just pleased for arrival, for the moment sufficient in itself, the feeling of getting there, dropping your bags, pouring yourself a drink and sitting down with an old friend on the porch. The spiritual equivalent of saying, ah, here we are. Gabby thought about it for the span of two unhurried sips, but then the morning after the day of arrival, she said, yeah, I know, I did know. I was not only coming down off mushrooms just then and getting drunk, but also due to a mix up in my prescription, going off the SSRI I usually took. It had been five days since my last pill, and as we talked and drank, I felt an increasingly tenuous line connecting me to my life, a line I imagined as the tether that keeps astronauts from floating away on spacewalks. I was floating, letting something go, possibly myself, possibly because I was in a different story and felt the need to sever ties with the old test, the tensile strength of the new. Even as the game of musical chairs, I seemed to be playing with my somatic chemistry and set off a sort of inner vibration in me, starting in my abdomen and radiating outward, proprioceptive fuzziness, like the atomization of my cells experienced from the inside out, the feeling of what it would be like for them all, for them independently and all at once to come to question whether they belong together, whether we could come to some flawed consensus that pooled our fortunes and coexist under an umbrella dispensation we would call identity. I trusted that I could ride this feeling out. I trusted that despite its buffettings I wouldn't decompose or unspool too far, that after years of holding myself together in what felt like an act of will, I could unclench, release myself and let the environmental pressure contain me like the ocean depths. And then as long as I had one hand on the line, like a grip on Ariana's yarn, I could find my way back. I want to say there was something comforting, liberating, ludic in this feeling, but I can't and remain honest. As we walked the cobblestone streets of downtown where the faux gas street lamps scattered yellow bands in the shadows and the colored lights jostling on the harbor water below us were flecks of candy on its jellied skin. It was rather placelessness, I felt, an indifference to orientation. The way standing on the North Pole only gives you one cardinal direction in which to head. For through the darkness paneling my mind, what I saw at the end of my tether, far from anchor or cleat was instead a face, not the face of any person, but the aureol-enclosed fantasy of a smiling recognition, the face that is emblem and locus of celebrity, visible seat of the invisible being. So that rather than securing me to anything firm, I understood like the velvet rope outside a club. This line was my invitation to the sanctum of celebrated space, my invitation to let go, that is, to give myself over to the idea of me, and like an acrobat transferring lines mid-air to swing up, up, up into the divine and unanchored volhalla of our debased world. I admit that this may be somewhat overstated. Grandios vis-a-vis the facts. I didn't mention it to Gabby, to whom if this was true of one person on earth, I could say anything. But it was the endpoint of this train of thought, I think, that underlay the self-discussed and wretchedness that led me when we'd shut down all the bars to buy street drugs from a figure who appeared at my elbow calling himself Little D. I glanced at Gabby, who sort of shrugged at me as though to say, sure, why not? And I wondered if there weren't a bigger D out there somewhere, whether the adjective might not be relative because our friend looked to me to epitomize male height. And this is MDMA, I said, mm-hmm, because I don't know it from rat poison. Little D looked disappointed in me. I wouldn't play you like that, he said. Okay, sure, I said, but someone who would play me like that would say the same thing, right? Nah, he kind of swatted the paradox away. And with the street lights hissing their mi-ismatic fire and a deeper quality of night shaking out through the city, I knew my imp of the perverse had made its decision in accordance with the folk wisdom that says, maybe it's better not to be, but to let yourself dissolve into the social body, the super organism, unfolding ecology, the apprehensive moment itself. I regret D, that in your line of work, you have to deal with idiots like me. We watched him move off into the night. My fist clenched around the baggie he'd left there when we slapped hands, and at the last moment I called to him, hey, what's the D stand for? He turned, what? The D, ha-ha, he grinned, you figure it out. The substance in the bag, upon inspection, resembled a large misshapen pebble. We rolled our self-smokes sitting on the patio furniture of some cafe and passed the compound back and forth, taking turns sniffing and licking it in those most primitive of chemical analyses. It had no smell, I could discern, and either no taste or was not soluble in saliva, which may come to the same thing. I found something mandatory in its inertness. We walked back to Gabby's car, licking our little drug rock. Her car, disappointingly, did not seem to be where we'd left it. It was also true that neither of us knew where that was, precisely, and that technically it was her mother's car, but the most disheartening thing was that the downtown looked to have been swept of cars, and people too, for that matter. A traffic light ran through its sequence without advising a single driver. The chill wind funneled down the street between the palisades of buildings, and I wondered why I was wearing a T-shirt before remembering that it was summer, almost 2 a.m. We wandered around for a while, contemplating what one did without a car and just a crack rock that was probably meth. It finally dawned on us to call the police. They were terribly helpful when we got through and didn't even seem concerned that the last thing we should be helped to locate just then was a car. And soon enough, we were in a taxi, crossing a bridge into the blighted outskirts of the city, a lifeless district saved from total darkness only by the sodic security lights of warehouses and irradiated signs of fast food restaurants. Our cabbie, whose first name I had found reason to use no less than 15 times on our short trip, did not seem as remorseful as I would have hoped about depositing us before a feral wraith of a man leaning against a colossal towing rig. Toyota, yep, the man said. Toyota's a pretty common car, said Gabby. How do we know you have ours? I got Toyota's, Gabby and I looked at each other. That's not really the most reassuring answer. Now that he had stepped from the rig's shadow, I could see the man's face. It might have been handsome if not for an elaborate pigmentary marking that gave it a marled look, streaks of dark nevi standing out like comet tails below the stringy hair that fell across it. There was something vaguely regal in his bearing, I thought, a hunched big bone quality like the awkward liminess of a mantis. Can we just take a look, Gabby said? Make sure it's the right car. Can't open the gate until you pay me. I don't think that's true, I said. I think you won't open the gate until we pay you. I think you can do whatever the hell you want. If you like it better that way, he said. It came to $120 and Gabby and I had maybe 80 between us. I was regretting a bit the business deal I'd entered into with little D and did a more general sense of subjective experience of being alive. I had the urge to say something to this man like, how did we get here? How did this chain link fence with its small padlock come between us? Strangers, men, women, with nothing against one another, acting out the offices of far flung and abstracted necessities. Gutter, kings, cursed and shambling, exiles, muttering, an obfuscatory patois, recreation with no faith left in the conduit metaphor of language, abandoned to our preterition of cash transfers, synthetic highs, and a reflexive sabotage that may be at heart no more than contempt for the self-importance and medicalized vanity of other people, the more comfortably unelect and yet content it seems to waste our lives in a pointless standoff at this insignificant gate. I was a bit skeptical of my ability to make myself understood, however. And so I did the one thing I could think to do, which was to take the crack meth rock crystal from my pocket and say, you got somewhere you need to be. You're looking at it, he said. He took the parcel from my hand and unscrewed a light bulb from a string, raving the lot, definitely picking out contact stem and filament with needle nose pliers. What's your name, Gabby said? As he cleaned the bulb's cavity with a bit of towel and deposited some crushed drug inside it, he held the flame below the glass. He said, the smoke drifted up from the bulb, as thick as milk. The silence of the lot struck me at that moment, the moment of inhalation, the faint wind, like a memory of elsewhere's, the threatening of distance. And as the vapor replaced the chill in me with a live magma of hot blood, as the euphoria took hold, Wendell said, and I can only relate, not explain what follows. Now I will tell you the story of the human soul. Thank you. That's part of about a 50-page story that has a lot of different elements. And some of it is a little picaresque in a manner of this, but another element is the main characters, your father is dying, and I think a lot of the sort of placelessness of this character has to do with his processing of that. But when I read that section, a lot of people have asked if that was a self-contained thing or story into itself. And I think it's important to know that it's part of a much bigger piece, the longest piece in the book. But yeah, I'd love to answer any and all questions. I've actually been reading your book over the past a couple of weeks, and I've noticed that your characters tend to question whether it would be to the reader or otherwise what's the difference between the wants and the needs. Like I remember I just finished one story for another, I'm so sorry I can't remember the title. But it was about the girl who kept remembering her encounter with Amy, and the idea that, with her girlfriend, there's a difference between the want for Amy and the needs of her girlfriend. So I was wondering, when you sit down to write a character, do you really think about those wants and needs and what the differences are, or is it all in one because that's a good character? So happy that you read my book. Thank you. I don't, maybe I'm being dense. Can you explain what you see as the difference between wants and needs in this regard? What the character, I mean in that particular story case, I feel like she doesn't maybe make a big separation, but can you phrase it one more time? Yes, sorry. Yeah, it's good. So the main character I think sees Amy as a need that she either never goes after or never thinks that she can get. And so that sort of just kind of that was her life and things that aren't ever gonna reach that level of Amy. But for me as the reader, I'm looking at him like, well Amy is in a need, you know, you might find that again with someone else. There are other things that can fulfill you romantically or otherwise, so she thinks of me, I see it as the want. I see what you're saying, yeah. Well that's, I think, as you're a grown-up. That's a very mature way to look at things. And I think that what we mean often, when we say that somebody's grown up or adult, is that they probably make that calculation to some extent. Although, we have a way of thinking that people who are idealistic, who don't really see a difference, who think that there's something that they simply need and that they can't compromise on, we see some things sort of young and I think childish and that, and maybe that is something that you're more likely to, an attitude you're more likely to believe in when you're young and you go out into the world and it asks a lot of compromises of you and you start to think that compromises are basically the substance of life. But I think we all be pretty sunk without idealists and without some people who sort of put their foot down and say, there isn't a compromise, there isn't another thing that works for me. In that particular story, I mean, I don't know that I would idealize or make the object of your passion, another person who doesn't wanna be in a relationship with you that's, you know, if you're gonna write, you know, like lyric odes or write, you know, be inspired like Dante by Beatrice or something, you know, maybe that'll work out for you, but otherwise maybe there's other things to invest your idealism in. But yeah, I don't know, I think that, I think we need some of that like stubbornness or dogheadedness and I think that maybe in that story in a way too, I start to see what Amy represents, not that anyone else really knows exactly what we're talking about, but what Amy represents to the narrator, main character, protagonist, Jesse, is conflated with a set of principles. It's not simply this other person. But yeah, I think that's an interesting divine. I haven't thought about it in terms of wants or needs. Does that sort of get it what you're saying a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, you can talk more about that too. I feel like I'm still thinking about it. It's like, you're just saying the idea. You don't have to read the book, you can just ask a question. Yeah. So you said in your sort of trigger warning that some reviewers had been focusing on this drugs aspect of your book into the settlement about, it's about, and I can see how they can maybe misinterpret it as this sort of Honduras-Conson-esque sort of book or something. Do you have a defense to that? Would you say there's a reason why these things are included in there and what they help you do? Yeah, of course. And yeah, I'm grateful to have the opportunity to to talk about this. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's, I would read, you want to read something first of all that has like a little bit of energy and humor and has, and I think some of the kind of, the like mischief of the book or the kind of like misadventures do have elements of like this sort of behavior in them and that's maybe why I chose to read it, but I do think that most of the book doesn't have this as much. And what's interesting to me in critics and in reviews is that I feel like a lot of the tone is like, characters do a lot of drugs in this book and it just doesn't actually seem to me to be true. I think that from what I know personally, but also just reading the news, a lot of drugs are being done all the time, not just recreationally too or not initially even recreationally, I think since the 90s in middle-aged white populations in the US, I think the drug overdose death toll has gone up 1000%, literally 10 times. These are people who are taking huge numbers of pain pills, which we will see as maybe a medication or we'll call them a medication on a drug, but these have the effect of an opioid and actually lead often to heroin addiction. We have people taking all kinds of drugs, whether it's alcohol or even caffeine or antidepressants or whatever, what have you to feel a certain way that they don't. And so I think just kind of symptomatically, we always are gonna think or I'm gonna think that that's a sign that there's needs that aren't being met by kind of traditional paths or by society. It might be economic needs, it might be more spiritual needs, but it seems to me like what culture is supposed to do at its best is it's supposed to somehow mediate between what you need as an individual, what you need as like a feeling human creature and what the world asks of you, how you have to compromise with it. And when it's not asking you to do it that well, you look for things that don't ask you to compromise at all. So if you take a drug, you feel a certain way and you don't have to compromise with anyone. It's a worry about any sort of therapy which is a way of like not really addressing the problem but addressing the way the problem makes you feel. So I see it more as like a symptomatic sort of diagnostic element of the book, something I see in the society, but I also think it's really important for me that it's a sort of proxy for spiritual longing and that a lot of what people look for in the actual experience of being on a drug or taking a drug is a more immediate engagement with the moment, maybe what feels like a more immediate engagement with themselves, maybe somehow moving from thinking about the future and the needs of the future to actually sort of feeling in some way present and present with the people around you. And yeah, I wouldn't go on too long about this side of things but if you do look into the history, a lot of where religious practices begin often has to do not only with drugs but often enhanced by drugs or by drug-like states, ecstatic states, which literally means standing outside the self. And I think that you probably want to get outside yourself, want to find a way to be with other people when you feel like that's somehow not permitted or made easy by just how our lives are kind of structured at this point. Yeah. First, thank you for coming, pleasure. So having not yet read your work but having read reviews of it, I'm wondering just to follow up on the question, is it possible that some of these critics are perhaps trying to pick and hold you in a positive sense and not in a negative one and what I'm thinking about is the genre of those young, talented writers like Jay McInerney among others who can write about young people in ways that are real and that they're referencing whether it's drug consumption or sex in perhaps non-virus ways is in its own way, their way of saying, you're really good and not seed or just another writer who's referencing drugs and sex and rock and roll. And you know that, Chuck, and maybe you're on that, maybe you're saying, do you belong in that platform? Do we act better? Yeah, I mean, I think the interview was pretty damn good. It was a nice review. I hadn't read Kevin's yet, but that was, you know, like, yeah. So I'm wondering... I mean, the time interview was really nice and that's a very nice spin on things. And, you know, I'd like to maybe, like, vent to you more often and have you correspond with me and tell me how I... I'll answer your e-mail. There's a literature out there. No, I think that's... Sounds like they were putting you... Sure. Well, I think that's true. There was another review that came out more recently than that that had the phrase and I don't know why I zeroed in on this, but I said the characters did truckloads of drugs and I just found the phrase truckloads of drugs, a remarkable phrase and, like, I don't think I'm ever gonna run away from that. Half of me sort of agrees because I like the compliments in what you said and half of me isn't sure because I think that some of those authors that you've identified have not entirely twisted the test of time and part of it is because they did capture a particular moment, but moments fade and moments are transient and to kind of have your finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist or the now is only so good if you can kind of keep up with the now and the zeitgeist and you also, you know, you don't necessarily want to write a book that's only gonna be interesting for people to read in the five years in which it comes out, which I really try not to do. The first and last story in this are more like that and have more of a kind of direct social commentary. With the others, I think I tried to do something a little bit more different. The other issue I think is with sort of like naming or addressing things that are so, well, I'm kind of, I don't know, I'm kind of losing the track at this point a little bit. I had a better point to make, but I kind of lost track of it. I'll come back to it. Yeah, I, it's really good for kind of sales and publicity to be very of the moment, but I don't know if that's a lastingly good thing. I mean, are there authors you would think of who sort of have stood the test of time who had this much? How important is it, is McInerney a one Johnny, one noter, or is he actively captured something that no one else did? Do you talk about recent authors yet? Reiser stands at the test of time, right? Yeah, we can, but I don't know if you want to use that benchmark. If you could write a book every five years about the now, I mean, you know, why do you feel like you need to withstand two decades? If you capture 2016 really well, don't worry, come 2022, you can definitely get something. You know, I mean, that's, so I'm kind of, well, it means I'm kind of arguing whether, you know, who are current authors? Yeah, Wolf, Wolf is great at reinventing the now. I mean, what your percent? I am Charlotte Simmons, I mean, that's, yeah, well, maybe, although I wonder if people in college would read that and think, oh, this is, this is it. Yeah, but I think he, I think he wasn't, I think he transcended the sort of immediacy of the moments he was writing about. I mean, almost none of his books took place directly in a particular historical moment or year. Come in. But yeah, no, I know what you're saying. I mean- Would students read I am Charlotte Simmons and say, is it dated? Would it be better? Yeah. But if you read it and you thought it was spot on. Well, yes, perhaps writing a book about the now every five years, I mean, I'm sure that would be, wouldn't be a career I would say no to. It does seem to involve leaving my house a lot more than I'd like to. But I think that there's a real danger and the danger I feel even in certain stories of mine in this collection that address the here and now more specifically is that there's some way in which a lot of fiction are a lot of things that are, that really put their finger on what's going on right now that really name things, name the issue, say it explicitly. They're really fun to read and they, there's a lot there immediately for you on the surface, but a lot of what they offer is on the surface and there's not much space for you as the reader. There's not much space for your imagination. There's not much space for subtext. And so it reads like a kind of highly literate, kind of like digressive essayish writing. And I really enjoy reading that myself but I don't return to that again and again. And I don't feel usually kind of profoundly changed or moved by that. And I think I'm more interested in the capacities of writing to kind of hint at and get at things that lie in between the lines or below the level of what's actually said as opposed to I kind of just like, I mean, I love David Foster Wallace, but there are times when like that kind of hyperarticulacy is there isn't much more for you to do as a reader. And that's really important. I think if you don't have some entry as a reader, if you don't do some work, I'm not sure it can matter emotionally to you in the same way, but maybe that's just my own experience. Like tragic characters are apparently more interesting than not tragic characters. And I just want to know your thoughts on that. What do you think of as a tragic character? Do you think? Like a very flawed character, like a bioronic hero kind of person, I guess. So not just somebody necessarily who comes to a tragic end, but somebody who has kind of like the seeds of their failure or kind of like embedded in their character and maybe then their strength. I don't know, I probably if like movies if fiction was separated into these categories like comedy and drama and things like that. I mean, I don't know if I might steer more towards the drama than towards the comedy section, but I don't actually think that there's nearly as much difference between the two. And I think that it's actually kind of an artificiality of fiction that divides these genres or divides the sense that there's a sort of a tragic and a not tragic. I mean, the essence of I think the tragic probably is that some people are going to die and they're going to die whether or not like they die in the story and they die young or whatever. And so people have said things like, comedy is just tragedy plus time. It's a matter of both perspectives that can be a cosmic or historical perspective. If we look back on an ancient war or something, I don't think we feel like it's as quite the atrocity that we think of as like 20th century wars. I think it's about the same token. Like I think our perspective to a character's death has everything to do with like the perspective in which that character's rendered how close we are to them as a reader. So I don't know. I kind of like things I suppose that can combine some tragedy and comedy because either one in isolation entirely feels a little bit untrue to human life and untrue to the fact that like the life goes on after the end of the story. And if comedy maybe is sometimes like the kind of classical Jane Austen comedy that ends in like a wedding and it's like this great triumph and you're like, well, then they're gonna be married for 30 years, who knows what's gonna happen. It's gonna be fun. The same way that that's kind of like a mistaken notion of some foregoing happiness. I think like tragedies that just kind of like end on like there's like a death and then like the king of like Norway marches in and it's like now we're the new kings and you're like, well, that's not really how life operates either. Like life is much more ongoing. So I like more indeterminacy, I suppose, than either of these kind of neat divisions. I don't know if that answered your question though. I might have just said my own thing. Okay. You're gonna have to see what. Okay. Can you talk about your journey as a writer and for the creative writing students in the audience, could you give them some advice? Yeah, absolutely. But I'd also, cause it's more fun when it's like a dialogue. So you guys should like pipe up if you have specific questions. My journey, my journey as a writer, if there's ever a documentary called that about me, don't watch it. My journey as a writer, I knew I wanted to write sort of from, I think, Parway through high school and it was, I think I was, I don't know, you could look at it either way. I was lucky or cursed with that knowledge early on. I was lucky in that I never really entertained something else. I sort of knew what I wanted at least. And it can be really hard to know what you actually want. But it also is like not an easy or, it's not an easy thing to do. It's not an easy path. Pretty much I'd say every few years, I would think it was doomed. And, so what I guess I keep coming back to and I don't think it's like the best thing to hear cause it's hard to hear. I would have found it hard to hear it most of what I assume your guys age is. It's like you really have to like the actual doing of it more than anything else. If you like the idea of yourself as a writer, if you like the idea of the success of being a writer, if you even like have had an experience with something that was so transformative and you think I want to do that or be that, like you somehow have to find your way into actually liking the process of sitting down and writing all the time because there's no other thing. And the most important piece of advice I got was not even from somebody who writes at all but from a friend of mine and I was in grad school and I was probably 29 at the time which shows you how late I even realized any of what I'm telling you right now. But my friend said, you know, a lot of people like talk a lot about doing things and they sort of like at some point convince themselves that talking about it a lot is like a kind of doing it but they never actually do it. And for some reason that like hit me at a really important time and I was like, yeah, that's been my entire life. And then I got much more serious and I also got terrified cause grad school was ending and I needed to make things work. But it's doable, it's just like it requires a really big commitment and I wouldn't be afraid of doing other things and especially of trying to like explore a lot of different parts of the world because what's going to inform your writing is gonna be a lot you're kind of like encounter with the world and your experiences outside of school which is a great thing but just jumping from school to school might leave you probably will leave you without kind of like the knowledge of the world that you'll ultimately need to write but that sort of is jumping around. How about there's probably some stuff to fill in there. Do people have more specific questions? Yeah. Well I was actually talking to Kevin a few months ago when just after you started reading your book and you had the interview and he was talking about your perspective on technology nowadays and how that's shaping our youth and how said you had a lot of interesting perspectives on that and when you just mentioned how a lot of people talk about doing things and it makes them feel like they are doing it. Do you think having maybe a cell phone in your life might be something that creates that where you read about things all the time and you almost hear about other people doing these things so much that just the amount of information you're putting into your head almost makes it feel like you're doing it too in some ways. Is there a way maybe technology think like connects to like kind of what you were talking about people like feelings if they do things just by talking about it? I think, well I think yeah in a way I think that's an interesting question I hadn't thought about it exactly in that regard what it makes me think of most immediately is that like one of the things that's really difficult about writing is that you want a response quite quickly and writing is like has a big lag time in especially if you're gonna publish a book or something like that. So it's really hard and say you're before that say you're like years before you're even ready to like publish work and magazines are in a book and you're writing this stuff and you want to be communicating with somebody and it is like this communication but it's sort of a communication that you're putting in this time capsule and burying and you're like I hope someone someday comes along and digs this up and they won't but eventually people will read you but even with this book it's you know once I knew it was gonna be a book it was about 20 months before it came out and by the time it comes out you know you're a different person and you're like you're so sick of it because you've just been working on it so this is a long way around to say that I think it's very tempting when you have phones and email and posting on certain things it's very tempting to do that because you get immediate feedback and immediate response and I know for example when I wasn't able to publish stuff I would write much more much longer and more elaborate emails because I like wanted to be writing and using words and I wanted people to see that and experience that and I'd write these like long emails and it was like such a waste of everyone's time but I needed an audience and that was the only one I could get then so yeah I would imagine that the seduction of instantaneous feedback in technology I mean it works against a lot of things it works against attention spans it works against larger projects but I think it also probably makes the sort of timeframe that book writing and publishing entails almost unbearable I was maybe old enough to like that I can just bear it but barely Do you like create the stories you think about like maybe as a way to bounce off ideas or have you talked to each other like oh man I want to write something about that or do they just come up? No that's not a weird question at all I mean there've been obviously teachers and writers who've helped me figure out certain things about how to write better or at least they've told me things that I should have been able to understand and then I later understood them and I thought oh yeah they were really smart and I wish I'd understood that when they told me but in terms of bouncing off different ideas I don't know I don't do that so much I think I work pretty much on my own but I do allow I mean a long gestation period I think that a lot of creativity and good ideas are not things you can control or will you can control or will the actual doing of it and doing it's a good way to generate ideas but a lot of times I think of things and then I just sort of walk around with them in the back of my mind for like months and I wait until the next other thing or next two things that I need to know how this story's gonna work out kind of come into my head that's kind of I don't know there's like a nice humility it can be a little frustrating when you really want to know what things should be but I think that's more like a kind of dialogue inside myself than with someone else which is I think you were asking more about that school so you studied mostly with Anne Beatty and Debra Eisenberg Debra Eisenberg, yeah of which your writing is not particularly of the same hill right in terms of I think especially of Anne you know the sort of minimalism versus you know such rich language and I'm wondering how that collaborative that teaching collaboration was because she clearly wasn't trying to turn you in at Anne Beatty but how did you hear what she had to say without while still keeping your own sensibility? Yeah of course, I was just thinking I was wondering at the end if I really think I don't know that want your own sensibility and this is just a minor point but I don't know that that's something I think one has to worry about maintaining or even cultivating I sort of feel like that's when you get all the problems and mistakes and things that you're trying to do out of the way like that will just happen and emerge but I actually agree with your point largely and so it's been quite surprising to see some reviews compare my work to Anne's because I think Anne's is very different and I think that that was always the tension between us when I was her student was that I was really kind of like a maximalist at that point just in terms of wanting to say everything and articulate every last thing and like capture a thought process or a thought dynamic down to the last kind of switch back in like the deepest part of the subconscious and so obviously it was unreadable and unbearable work and Anne never liked my work and that was what was interesting to me was everyone else kind of all the other teachers kind of liked it but she really like never liked it and I thought there was something really interesting there and so I asked for her to be my thesis advisor and we worked for a really long time and she still never liked it I don't even know if she likes it to this day but we're good friends and yeah she was able to sort of teach me two things and they were really valuable and I think I'm still much more effusive or discursive or digressive than she would ever be but she always said this thing to me she said, you know, why not one more word and I think what she meant was she always was like you always could say more there's always more to say how why don't you add another word if you've like said all this like how did you decide when the words were enough and probably pointing out that I never had really decided I just had written them until I ran out of them and that was really helpful to me it has been maybe the most important thing to kind of learn although learning it is an internalization of it it's not just like hearing it and you're like oh now I'm gonna apply this principle and my writing is gonna take off but what I saw in that was that a story or any sort of writing is like an ecology and in ecology and like the literal sense that everything influences everything else and if you add something that affects everything else in the story that takes away, say it's a sentence that you think adds something that also takes away a little bit of something from everything else and so I'm not sure that some of the stories in here will seem terribly restrained but it felt like a huge amount of restraint to get things down to stories even of this length and just yeah being really kind of brutal with yourself and it becomes kind of fun to be brutal in that way like not to allow anything that you don't think is really essential that really has to be there and it's really working, yeah. Okay. In a good story, what did you have to do to sell your work or get your work in front of the audience or brand it? I attempted to make like really off-color jokes. What did I have to, yeah right exactly. I got really lucky in a way but also I probably went about things in a really bad way. I got lucky in the sense that I, well I basically just struck out forever and didn't even really try because I knew I was gonna strike out forever and I started trying to publish things really late and continued to strike out and strike out and strike out but the first few places that published me were really good venues and that really kind of like catapulted me to having an agent and getting a book deal but the thing that was, the thing that kind of laid behind that was like, and I think this was also a blessing and a curse, like I couldn't really fool myself about my own work and I knew it wasn't good enough and it was really hard to know that I'd be like 30 and be like, I've been doing this for a really long time and to feel that there was a lot in it that was really good but somehow it wasn't good enough and I knew that and yeah, finally I wrote something and I was like, actually, this is good enough and that turned out to be true. It didn't immediately happen so I don't know. I think I'm like not a very good strategic person if you're looking to figure out how to do it on your own but I think learning to look at your own work honestly is important, probably also just trying a lot facing up to the inevitable rejections you're gonna get. I still get almost only rejections ever and yeah, at some point, your work will probably catch on with some editor, someone will read it in the right frame of mind and see it but yeah, if I were to advise somebody else I would probably start earlier and be more willing to accept the kind of difficulty and failure, I don't know why it was so hard for me to send things out before I was 30 but there's like very few actually good life lessons to draw from my life so. We can, yeah. All right, well thanks Greg and Greg will be around too if you guys have questions. Yeah, thank you guys so much, really appreciate it. Thank you.