 Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Shepard, Director of Events and we're very pleased to welcome you to our Rising Writers Series here at the Mechanics Institute at 57 Post Street in San Francisco. And tonight, we're very pleased to welcome two authors, Namwally Serpo, who's the author of The Old Drift and Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State. And both authors will be in conversation with Ted Weinstein. Also our program is co-curated by Theodore Joya. This is the third in our series and we hope you'll join us for many more programs. For those of you who are new to the Mechanics Institute, we'd like to invite you to come on Wednesday at noon and take a free tour of our library, which is on the second and third floors, our international chess club down the hallway and get a little introduction to our programs, which include author events like this one, our Cinema Lit Film Series on Friday nights, the library hosts a variety of book clubs and writers groups, and of course the chess club has grand master lectures and our ongoing tournaments. So all this is happening right here under one roof, seven days a week. So we encourage you to take the tour and become a member and join us for our programs. But first I'd like to introduce our co-curator, Ted Joya. Ted is a critic living in San Francisco and his work has appeared in The Believer, The American Scholar, Los Angeles Review of Books, It's Nice That, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Currently he's writing a book of essays about the evolution of California culture framed through food and arts. Ted is also a former partnerships director at McSweeney's. He's the co-curator of this series, as I mentioned, and he's the founder of the upcoming site Forktong, interviewing food critics on food and culture. So please welcome Ted Joya. Hi, my name's Ted. Welcome to the third reading in the Rising Writers Series at the Mechanics Institute. The seat for the series began when I first moved to the city and a friend of mine told me that young writers don't really come here anymore. And this seemed to be the kind of popular wisdom. And so I came to, I came to Laura to talk about that, to kind of challenge this conventional wisdom because I was dissatisfied with it and also dissatisfied with the way that so much discussion about the Bay Area literary landscape has evolved. There's so much focus on the past discussion of the 1950s and the beats or 2000s and Dave Eggers, but always it's about 1955 or 2002 and never about what it is to mean right now. And right now is actually a really interesting literary moment. It's an exhilarating literary moment in the Bay Area full of new writers with fresh ideas and really original debut novels. And so we founded this series as a way to kind of look at that question and to talk about what it means to be a writer in the Bay Area on the ground today. So we hope this series will be an opportunity to form for people to talk about the issues, anxieties, inspirations that matter to them and whatever form, whatever form that takes. And in a funny way, there is probably no better representation of the fecundity of California literature at the moment than the two writers on stage. Two writers whose first novels have really reimagined classic genres. So we have Lydia Kiesling is the author of Golden State in a 2018 National Book Foundation, 5 under 35 honoree. She is a contributing editor at the Millions and her writing has appeared at outlets including the New York Times Magazine, New York Online and The Guardian. And her novel, The Golden State, is a road novel unlike any you've ever read that really transforms the emotional magnitude of what that novel can be by focusing it on a coming-of-age story of a young mother. And Namwale is a zombie and writer whose first novel, The Old Rift, was published in March. She received a Rana Jaffee Foundation Writers Award in 2011, the Cain Prize for African Writing in 2015. And Salman Rusty recently hailed her as, quote, a writer on the world stage in the cover review of the New York Times Book Review. Namwale's novel is really an intergenerational epic of free families across 100 years. It's often compared to magical realism, but I think it would be more accurate to maybe call it mythical realism because it deals less in sort of fantastical surfaces than more like the psychic depths of making history and making futures. And this conversation is works cited at this conversation moderated by Ted Weinstein, who is a literary agent and a writer himself, a widely published author himself. Ted has been the music critic for NPRs. All Things Considered, a commentator for San Francisco Chronicle, the Bay Guardian, and a longtime Mechanics Institute member. So I will hand it over to Ted's capable hands. And thank you so much. Thank you, Ted. It's always nice to have an event with two Ted's in it. So thank you very much for having all of us here. Thank you both for coming. These novels are fascinating and very different. So I wanted to start with one of the similarities. You're both so focused on geography. They're both titled after a place that's an actual specific place. So let me start with Lydia because everyone here knows California very well. What does the Golden State mean mythically and literally? And why did you use that as the center? Well, first of all, thank you for that really generous introduction and for having me and to everyone in the audience for coming tonight. This is a thrill to be here with my good friend and someone I admire so much as a writer. So the Golden State, I have to say as a caveat, that was not my original title. So my title was actually more specific than that. It was the working title was the North State, which is what people in the very far north of California sometimes call it. My agent told me that that would be culturally illegible to anyone who she was going to send the book out to. And so we had to give it a new title. And then we had a lot of superficially friendly email exchanges about what the title should be. And we arrived at this. And so the book takes place in the very, very far northeastern corner of California. And it's fictionalized in the novel. But if you've ever been up to Moda County or a town called Alturas, if you've ever driven to Oregon, that's the zone where Oregon and Nevada meet basically in the corner of the state. That's where my mom grew up and where my grandparents lived when I was growing up. So it's a place that has a lot of emotional resonance for me. But it's not a place that I could ever say that I'm from or that I necessarily understand that well. But it's really been an obsession for me over time. And so I kind of exercised that by writing the book. What about it obsesses you? Well, I think there's a little bit of kind of voyeurism is not exactly the right word. But there's an interest in any place that has such a kind of different way of life from the one that is familiar and comfortable to you. And the fact that people I knew well and who shaped who I am as a person grew up in that environment was really interesting to me. And then I think when I started to sit down and really write, it was after my grandparents had died and I had fewer and fewer occasions to go up to this town. But when I did, I noticed the serious kind of population decline is one of the poorest counties in the state. And I noticed also around 2013, I would see signs for the state of Jefferson. And so I kind of started looking into what that was. It was the first I heard of it, even though I've been going to the North State as a visitor for my whole life. So I was thinking about those things and figuring out how to put them in kind of book form. That sense of rebellion or anti-colonialization, if I can overstate it, was only recently started to see specific signs of that? Well, I mean, it just depends on what you're looking for. The state of Jefferson, for people who don't know, is an effort to create a 51st state out of Northern California and some parts of Southern Oregon and some models for it. And in around 2013, a bunch of counties in the state of California actually had their boards of supervisors vote on the question. And it's mostly symbolic. There's nothing really that is achieved by having these votes. But there was, at least within the movement to the extent that I could tell from my various mailing lists that I joined to research it, it was kind of a sense of momentum building. But it's been around since, I mean, that's almost 100 years. So it's not new, but it was just not, it made me think, it made me reframe some of my own kind of cultural underpinnings. And I mean, that was never something I heard my grandparents talk about, but I made me think like, okay, well, what was the environment that shaped kind of my family on that side? And how did it affect your characters or the way you even imagined them? It's funny, you're not supposed to read Goodreads reviews. We'll talk about that later. That's the advice I always get, but I find it really, really interesting to do that. And a few people have said, the characters that are from this town are kind of, they're like cardboard cutouts, and this is written by a person who's like very removed from that. And I'm, I would obviously never respond to a Goodreads review, but it's like, yeah, that's the thing. So I think there is an extent to which you can feel an affinity for a place, but you can't really understand sort of the daily concerns. I think there also has been a lot of change in the town. I mean, the way that my mom talks about the town where she grew up is that it was a wonderful place to grow up. And that was her parents. I mean, the way that a lot of, especially white Americans talk in a nostalgic way about the post-war years, so for a very kind of specific part of the US population is kind of golden years that was in play. And that I think fuels the, some of the state of Jefferson things, like the loss of extractive industries, just an idea that if we could get those things back, things would be good again. A precursor to a lot of what's happening politically. It's been started there and elsewhere for much longer. Yeah. I'm gonna ask all of you to speak up a little more. Okay. Namali, your book moves across space and time and all over the place, but it's titled after one very small location. Mythically and then very specifically, how did you choose that location and why did you use that as the name and the center for everything? So I'm gonna echo Lydia in thanking all of you for coming and Ted Squared for having us and I'm also gonna echo Lydia in saying that that was not my original title. The original title of my book was actually Breaking, which is like a very lame title in retrospect. I was 20 when I came up with it. And then Breaking the Waves came out and I was like, I just can't use this anymore. So it had this kind of pending title for a while. And then I think in from, it was like New Year's 2013 or New Year's, yeah, 2013 to 2014. I was in Zambia with my friend, Michelle, who's in the audience, and we took a little safari trip to, against her wishes. She didn't really wanna see animals until she actually saw animals. We went to the Victoria Falls and we went to the Victoria Falls Game Park. And after an hour of seeing Impala and Giraffe and Elephant, the game driver pulled into this little grove and we hopped out and he said, this is the Old Drift Cemetery. And this is a colonial settlement, very close to the banks of the Zambezi River. And so we walked amongst these kind of like tumble down grave markers and there was a list of names on a placard. And I was like, what on earth was this? I've never even heard of this. And so when we got back to Lusaka, I did some Googling and I found out that this settlement had about, at its peak, about 200 people and from all over the world. People from Germany, from England. There was a barman from Chicago. There was, in the Old Drift Cemetery, I think as a man from Hawaii who died in one of the gorges by the Victoria Falls. And I thought, what a strange and interesting place. And Michelle, who happens to be an editor. All of my best friends are editors and writers. Just a thing I do. Very cynical of me. Said, that should be the name of your book. And it drew together so many different concepts and it's such a rich set of words together. Even like Old Drift would be different from the Old Drift. And it mapped onto this grand passage of time that I was really interested in covering. I always wanted to write an epic novel. It mapped onto the sense of drift between the three families that I wanted to write about. It just captured so much. And it also had this very specific geographic place, which is also a graveyard. But it also refers to the narrowest and stillest part of a river, where you can drift things across. And so much of my book, as I think we were discussing with Lydia's book, is about the way that borders shift or the way that borders get contested. And so the drifting of lines and the idea of a river as a border just again was evoked by this particular title. So I lit upon it and then I read a book called The Autobiography of an Old Drifter by a man named Percy Clark, a British photographer who came to that part of the world at the turn of the 20th century. And I decided to make him one of the patriarchs of the three families in the novel. You said the word epic and there are sort of two ways to write an epic. One is to follow one person's life, the appreciate hero's journey. You wrote an epic that includes so many different people, so many different eras, so many different genres. How did you decide that was the approach you wanted to take? So the novel came to me, as I said, when I was very young and it came to me in the form of three characters of three generations. So a woman, her daughter, and then her daughter's son, her grandson. And so I already had that kind of expansive time. But I also wanted to write about a relationship between families that was not simply kind of agonistic, just like Montague Capulet. I wanted to write about the way that we can affect people over here who affect people over there who affect us. So this kind of oblique relationship triangulated and so that multiplied my three generations by three families. And at that point it was basically like, now it has to be epic. And when those first three characters came to me, they came to me in different genres, which was something that was unexpected and remains inexplicable to me. I keep taking recourse to the pun of genre and generation because otherwise I don't really know why. And yeah, so as, and I think also this, honestly this running joke that emerged very early with my friends in college, that I was writing the great Zambian novel, the great there, and the again, I think contributed to the sense that it needed to have this kind of epic quality to it. What that meant in practice is that I had to become better at something I'm historically bad at, which is history. Learning how to do historical research, learning how to find the stories that I wanted to tell and tell them in a way that was not just an info dump was one of the biggest challenges of the book. So if you're gonna cover that much time, you're also covering a lot of different kinds of historical details and skirting a lot of minds, like landmines of anachronism. You could end up with a games Midschner novel, which was obviously not your own. Right. Lydia, you worked in a couple of different traditional genres, the domestic novel and the road novel. What prompted you to twist them both into this very unusual form? How did you say this is the story I wanna tell and this is the way I wanna do it? Well, I think in some ways it was, anybody who's starting to write a novel, their first novel, were all kind of in the same boat. Even if you have training, there's nothing that really prepares you to just do it. And so I had to work with what I had and what I had at the time, apparently was a lot of feelings about spending time with a small child. A sense that it was worth describing those interactions at length. And a feeling that there had to be a pretty limited time frame, otherwise that would become unbearable for everyone involved. So the novel takes place over 10 days, partially because I just couldn't imagine like dragging the experience on longer than that. But I think anything that kind of, I mean, what Namali did is every day amazing to me with her book, because the scope is so vast in a number of different ways, both formal and thematic and time. But everyone has their own set of parameters I think they need to work within. So I was like, okay, well it has to be just 10 days. I think the main thing that helped me get it on paper is that establishing the voice. It's a very voice-driven novel. First person, there's a lot of, it's very interior in many ways. But that, it was very important to me to describe the experience of being with a small child and that no other voice or tense worked the way that first person, present tense. And I was horrified when I realized that I was writing in the present tense. I was like, why is this happening to me? Why? Why were you horrified? Because it felt, I mean when people say like you need to write the book, there's this sort of received wisdom, like you have to write the book that you want to read. Oh, and you don't like- I'm not sure that I would want to read my own book. I mean that's what it felt like sometimes. I mean I, you know I came to terms with that. You will all love it, please buy it. Well let me ask a question about that. And I apologize if we scar a couple of the young kids that are here today in the audience. There's some tough passages that showed almost too well how infuriating raising a small human can be. Did you end up method writing? I mean, did that writing about it all day make your own mood that much worse by the time evening goes around? Well it's funny, I have a lot, so I have two small children. Now I have a four year old and a one and a half year old. But at the time that I started writing the book in earnest, I had one and she was about, she was a year old, basically. Maybe, yeah, a year old. And I thought that I, I thought that I had a very kind of sunny feeling about motherhood. I was like, it's not the baby, that's the problem. It's society, that's the problem. The things that were hard were things like parental leave and work and that and the cost of childcare. Those were the things that felt really difficult. That was a lie that I told myself because when I look at what I wrote, it's like no, it's also very destabilizing to suddenly have this creature in your care. And I think part of what the book was for me was kind of an exploration of a fantasy of if I didn't work and I was with a small child all day and how that might not be great, but also would be great in other ways. It's an awful lot of string cheese. Yeah. I'm curious how much of the, not sure if this is the right phrase, but method writing you engaged in because you're dealing with a multi-century history of some really troubling interactions between cultures and among individuals. Some of that, was it hard to write? Was it hard even to do the research or was it all just this is in the past or it's getting better? So I think that when you experience something traumatic like to pick up the thread from earlier when I was reading the autobiography of an old drifter to do research and this is a very sort of charming, bluff British man with a bit of a class chip on his shoulder talking about coming to Africa to make his fortunes and then like 40, 50 pages in is the first time he drops the N word just like casually in a sentence and that like that I felt, which is a very familiar feeling. I think most black readers, most black female readers, most female readers have many experiences of double consciousness where you're suddenly like taken aback and you feel like I'm not part of this world. I'm not included in this world. This is not being directed to me. I'm not human to this person or this character. And this is a memoir published in 1936. So I definitely had this kind of awful feeling and reading in the archives, one of the characters in my novel is a man who started the Zambian space program. Again, a historical figure named Edward Mucuca and Coloso who was largely considered a fool by the West. He was rolling people in empty oil drums down hills and swinging them from ropes to simulate anti-gravity. His female aphoronaut was raising 12 cats to release on Mars one by one to see if it was habitable. So the West was like, this is the Zambia's village idiot and amiable lunatic, all this stuff. Then I went home and did some archival research and learned that he had been a freedom fighter, that he fought for the British in World War II. When he came back, his schools kept getting shut down. Eventually he joined a minor strike, was arrested, was sent home, started insurrectionary activity there, got arrested again, was tortured by the British, was almost drowned. And then five years later was starting a space program. It's a very different story, right? And his letters were extremely articulate, he had been mission educated, he had obviously been educated when he went to war. And reading about him being tortured was pretty, that was horrific as well. So there's definitely moments in the research for this novel where I did feel this kind of horror. But by the time you're in the process of writing and revising that, the task becomes, how do I make my reader feel the horror? Like how, and so there's a kind of distance that you get from it, almost a kind of, I almost wanna say, to psychoanalyze myself, a kind of therapeutic control over the situation, because now I have these details and I'm going to figure out how to depict them in such a way that move the people that are reading. And so I no longer feel it, right? So you're giving us your burden. But I also try to give the joys as well, right? The pleasures, that's equally kind of clinical and distant by the time you're actually putting that material together. But there were moments which were quite interesting to me where I would read as I was revising my own words and I would forget that I had written them and they would actually activate something in me. And I always say that when I'm writing, I'm kind of reading my way towards the end. I think of myself more as a reader of a novel that I have not yet written than as a writer of that novel. And so in rereading, I would get chills or I would get choked up or I would get, I would laugh. I would be like, oh, I didn't know I was funny in that one part. And sometimes it's like little punning Easter eggs for myself that no one else is gonna get, but that for me are just hilarious because of often cross-cultural knowledge about how Zambia works. So things like that. And so those moments, yeah, I think there was this sense of experiencing the novel and not just crafting it, but it came many stages after. So you're your own best first reader and then the question as you're doing... No, second or third. As you are writing, who are you thinking about as readers? You're writing about topics that aren't very well known on the side of the Atlantic. You're writing about topics that are very fraught for those who do know the history. Who are you reaching out to as you're writing? Are you even imagining an ideal reader? I mean, I always say my ideal reader is myself. It's like I steal from Nabokov the line that my perfect audience is a group of people with my wearing my face, you know? But the one version of myself would be to say that one of my ideal early readers is my sister who has a similar cultural background to me but is not as steeped in literary history because she's a professor of psychology, not of literature, but she's also very, like me, very susceptible to art. So we're the ones in the movie theater that are gasping and yelling. One time I stood up in the middle of the theater. There's three guys in front of me and they were like, dude, calm down, lady. But she's like that. So I can activate her affectively, emotionally, really easily. So I really enjoy thinking about how to trigger these responses in her. And she's also a good fact checker for me about Zambian cultural things. Yeah. So you were not thinking about American or British or Japanese readers. You were thinking very much more to a particular one or two? Yeah, I mean, I think someone said once to me and I thought this is such an amazing idea and it's so true. I think it was my friend from College Margaret who read the first pages of this book. She said, you know, I think she was talking about my emails to her and she was like, I wish you would write the way that you write your emails to me. And then I think maybe I read in some book later and it said the best way to write is as though you were writing a letter to your smartest friend. And like your smartest closest friend. And so there's a, that way you're not condescending to the audience, but you're addressing them familiarly. I mean, I don't know. I think this idea of different audiences from different regions of the world, I find a very strange question to answer and I don't know if it gets posed. Like, do you get that question a lot? I feel like it gets posed to people who write about places that are not American. And that gets to the marketing challenge, which we'll talk about in a minute. And let me segue it to Lydia. This came up when you talked about your title. And a New York based industry that let's not go deep on their views of California, but they see it as an unother. And you were writing about what is essentially flyover country, that it's maybe the northern part of California, but it's not coastal California. It has more in common with Wyoming or Nebraska, that part of our state. Did you have any fear that by writing about a place and impulses and beliefs that aren't shared by New York publishing to use it as a snag key? Was that gonna be a problem? Did you think about it at all? No, I don't think so. I mean, just because I, if you're thinking about those kinds of things when you're writing, it will just induce paralysis. And there's enough that's trying to make you not write. There are enough options without that. I do, I mean, I have, I'm very fortunate in that my, I was gonna say, I'm very fortunate that my editor is from California and I am. So I felt, you know, she sort of connected with the book when she saw it for the first time. But it is actually funny how there are a lot of people within California who are, they would be amazed that the book takes place in California. So I, one thing I thought was really funny, someone I heard secondhand from someone that she was talking with a woman of mutual acquaintance who's from California. She's from Marin County. And she was like, isn't it funny how Lydia made up that thing about the like secessionists and are my friend, or friend who is not from California is not from America originally. She was like, no, that's real. And the woman was convinced that and had to be. So I mean, I think even within California there's a lot of sense that, yeah, just kind of confusion about where it is. But no, I don't think I was thinking so much in those terms when I was writing. You've been writing a long time. Was this your childhood ambition? I think it certainly was my childhood ambition, but I'm not sure. There was a point at which I would have stopped saying it and thinking it around like adolescence. And then I think it was a very kind of subterranean impulse for a while that was not gone, but really kind of peeked out in sort of weird ways. And then I didn't start really kind of writing in earnest until I was about 25 and started with like nonfiction as a kind of entry point. When I talk to prospective clients, only nonfiction, that's all I work with. I will often say that I'm gonna try to talk you out of it, that if you're that easily dissuaded you're not going to succeed. And so the moments where you had doubts or just wandered elsewhere and then came back to it, those are the true tests. You had the ambitions from a very, very young age, yeah? Yeah, I think if you look back at it, it was sort of inevitable because I was a big bookworm. I always say that moving to the US was what kind of instigated it as a real thing because I have this little notebook from when I was eight and a half, nine, when we moved to Baltimore, that has all these story ideas, some of which are still really marketable. How do I have you know? Get along with the head, you have no interaction, that's okay. But they all had to do with negotiating new aspects of culture that I hadn't experienced before or different kinds of cultural clash. And so it's very evident to me that this was the way that I was trying to think about how to assimilate or how to be an American, how to fit in, was by writing and also I had no friends so I was reading a lot. And books became my friends at that age. So yeah, around that time is when I tried my first hand at actually writing a book, which again, I didn't finish, there's a lot of little ideas and unfinished ideas at that time, but it was like an alphabet book. And my mom always remembered that and talked about it as evidence in retrospect after a decade of me thinking I was gonna be a scientist. She was like, no, but always. So. Brian Eno is I think the best at crystallizing the view that there is no such thing as individual genius. And on the stage with two remarkably talented individual creators, but he uses the phrase not genius, but seniors, that it's about a community and a scene of like-minded people. That are encouraging, yes, S-C-E-N-E-S. I thought it was like senility. Oh yeah. Much to the other thing. So for each of you, who is your scene? Who are the folks not just supportive in first readers, but what's the larger community that you feel part of? Or do you feel like you're still solitary creators? Lydia. Well, one of the things that has been so wonderful about the past few years is that I've gotten to know a lot of writers in person. And one thing I really liked about Ted's introduction is what he said about sort of the Bay Area literary scene because there are so many writers here and at all levels of their careers. And I mean, I have never lived in New York and so I think I have a probably a somewhat like provincial view of New York that is maybe not fair, that it's more like competitive and backbitey. And that may be not accurate, but I've just been struck by how friendly the writers are to one another in San Francisco. If you go to an event like this or if you go to a reading at Green Apple or City Lights, you'll see the same people and everyone's really nice and you can get drinks. And so that's kind of the, I feel very enriched. And I thought about it just in terms of like, oh now I have pals and we all believe in one another in this career that is objectively stupid to embark upon and we can all kind of support each other in that. But I think it also, it does actually influence like the work itself and I have told not only this, but after I read The Old Drift I was, I'm like working on a new thing right now and I was like, you like take ideas from what people are doing. I'd say beyond that it's just the books that I read and seeing writers on Twitter talk about some random old book that they love and you also love, that's always, I really love those moments. You can like post a picture of a book from any era and someone will say, I love that book. And that really, that feels good. What's your sense of seniors? I mean I think, as I said earlier, I've very mercenarily chosen my best friends to be writers and editors so that's sort of my scene in terms of those are the people that I have engaged in depth conversations with and I have had for many years writing groups where we get together and write. We work on our own separate projects. Sometimes we share work but mostly it's just the peer pressure. It's like, do we have the same working vibe that will keep us from going on the internet? But my most recent version of that moved to Santa Barbara so I haven't had that in a while. And as a professor, I think who did not do an MFA, the idea of like a writing group that's more like a workshop is something that's a little less familiar to me so I haven't done that either. I think, I was just talking to my friend about this yesterday. I do think the idea of a coterie, like the beats or like the Hogarth press or like the Wolfs and Ezra Pound and all of that. Or even around the turn of the century, what McSweeney's, Eggers, what people called the Brat Pack but which turns out to have been kind of a falsely, externally imposed idea of a coterie on Jay McInerney, Brett Easton Ellis, and Janna Hanowitz. This is Tama Jannaowitz. Tama Jannaowitz. That was a very sesame street side. I'm sorry, I was like, I will not have time. Sorry, YouTube. So, but we were saying that doesn't really exist anymore. It's like, it's much more after the fact, right? So Liddy and I met each other after our books were done and read each other's books and became friends and I've been meeting other writers. Some of whom I knew before, Garth Greenwell, I read his book, he read my book, but it's always, it feels like this after the fact part of things rather than, as you were saying, this kind of conversation where it helps you with your next thing. I can see my reading of the Golden State affecting the next book that I write as well. It's the urgency, like the compressed, like that pitch. I mean, it's so beautifully done and it's so tight unlike this rambling thing. So I can see that happening, but I think it's less, I don't know how to put it, it's less organized than it used to be. It seems, again, to be on the back end, the receptive end, we are readers together, we like the same books, we like each other's work rather than this idea of a generation or a zeitgeist. And that might just be a numbers game. There's too many writers for there to be these coderies and maybe it's more just like a network like Twitter. Well, it seems like there's three different ways you can have that kind of connection. One is just reading each other's works. You wouldn't have to meet each other. One is, which is relatively new, which is social media. And then the other is the dinner parties or the parties after a reading, that sort of thing. And I think social media has risen in the percentage of time we all spend with that and I'm curious over time if you'll think that's changed things. In addition to social media, you each write in multiple styles and outlets and venues, multiple forms, I guess. Criticism and academic work and your own fiction and nonfiction and so on. Do you feel you have to do one at a time? Do they inform each other? How can you do multiple things like that and do them all well? Well, I definitely, for me, nonfiction was the way that I found a voice as a writer, generally. And I can't really separate, I think, although I would like to, sometimes, my voice is a nonfiction writer from, as a fiction writer. So I started, the first writing I did, kind of in earnest, was I started a book blog and I wrote about books that I was reading from the modern library 100 list in a very, at a remove I see, sort of unfortunate, kind of zany blog style was what I was going for. I was very influenced by, like, Gawker and this was 2009. But I see now when I kind of look back on it, I was writing about books because that was what felt accessible to me. The only place, the only time during my education that I've shown, to the extent that I've shown at all, was during English classes and writing those kinds of papers and I knew myself to be a careful reader. And so that was kind of how I got started. But one of the things that people said very early on about anything I've published was that, you know, it was very kind of voicey and personal. And so I realized after a time that it was probably less, I mean, I got an enormous amount from reading and writing about books, but it was really the writing that I was trying to do and the books were sort of the vehicle for that. And so now, I won't say that I feel like totally at ease with nonfiction writing, but I would say that seeing how much harder fiction has been, it does feel, I spend a lot less time, if I get a nonfiction assignment, I'm like, I'm not gonna agonize over this A for economic reasons and B because I wanna spend my sort of agonizing energies elsewhere. And so I think it has helped like, kind of speed things up a little bit. And what about criticism? I mean, beyond the ethics of being criticizing the community and being part of the community and so on, those are social challenges for any generation. Does writing criticism change the way you end up then writing fiction? I mean, I'm definitely much less, I never pitch book reviews now. A, because it's just not as interesting to me. And B, well, economics overall, that's one of the things. But I mean, I think also, it does feel a little bit like, I have some nerve reviewing books when I'm trying to write books. I have gotten over that feeling a little bit. One of my favorite things to works of art is the Dance to the Music of Time series by Anthony Pohl and they're 12 volumes. And there's no reason that they should be good. They're like about a very small world of kind of mostly aristocratic British people before and during and after World War II. But one of the things that I love about the books is that it shows that the world of people who are interested in reading and writing is small in any kind of milieu. And so the same people who are writing criticism are often the people who are also writing books. It's just, you're probably not gonna do one and not have an interest in doing the other at some point. So once I realized that, I stopped feeling so like, like a traitor that I had kind of tried to cross over. How have the different forms affected your writing? Even in an academic world and teaching and so on. Is that natural and easy to move back and forth among them? No, I mean I separate them by time because I remember one time trying to break in the middle of the semester to spend like a weekend writing fiction and it was like I was writing criticism of the novel I hadn't yet written. It was very much like a plot summary and an analysis of the scene instead of the scene. And I thought I do not wanna write this way and there are writers who I think tend that way and I don't wanna write like them. And I know that there are moments in my book where I sort of step back and kind of analyze the scene at hand and I want that to feel like Jane Austen or George Elliot, like aphoristic, sort of like this God-like narrative seeing the world rather than like a literary critic being like this is what's happening here. So I definitely try to separate them out in time. I think I also have a kind of ease with academic writing just I've been doing it so long so I don't stress about it if I have to do it. I don't get paid for it though, which is unfortunate. But I've recently been doing more criticism in a kind of nonfiction mode and actually, you know, I think the idea was like oh, you're just writing like an academic but like with a little bit more panache or a little bit more pizzazz, you know? And turns out it's a whole other genre that I've had to learn from scratch and it's really hard. It's extremely hard to express complex ideas about art in clear language and I do have some practice with from teaching but I find it, I have to like go through and like deacademicize my prose when I write. Mostly I've been doing film criticism. I similarly have been feeling antsy about writing book reviews. I've been asked to write some book reviews and it's true with films as well. I basically don't see what use it is for me to pan something. I'm like, how is this helpful in the world? It's like drawing attention to something regardless. If I don't think it's good art, I'm still getting people to think about it. I'm probably hurting someone's feelings and it doesn't necessarily mean that the next thing that they make will be any better. What I do do is I give a lot of mixed reviews or reviews that I always like enjoy to see like what's rotten tomato is gonna say is it fresh or is it rotten because they can't tell. It's so funny, they're always like fresh and then they'll put a quote that is completely neutral because they just, I don't write. So I take as a kind of guide this tweet that I saw from the Twitter handle Susan Sontag's Diaries which says, before is it good, what is it? And that to me is like my load star when I'm thinking about working as a critic and what is it and like sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad so I'll give a mixed review but it's much more oriented toward trying to figure out what the thing is. This is great, we've talked about the writing arts and we've talked about the writing of life and now let's get down and dirty and talk about the writing of business. Let me read a quote. I simply decided, this is by a novelist, once and for all over 20 years ago to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people who believe they've won who knows what. Today I feel thanks to this decision that I've gained a space of my own, a space that is free, that is active and present to concentrate exclusively and with complete freedom on writing and its strategies. The Ferrantez, Ferrantez. A lot of Ferrantez, exactly. So, so jelly. So blood and char. Jealous. So I often tell prospective authors that in this modern era you couldn't be a Thomas Pinscher or a JD Salinger because between social media and mainstream media you need to be your own best first promoter. Unless you're Ferrantez. Unless you're Ferrantez, she's the one example and we don't argue from anecdotes so my question to both of you is how do you market yourselves, did you before you had these two breakout novels and do you like the process? I have a client, Austin Cleon, who talks about the pause where you're doing the writing and then there's this pause where there's that couple of months, the book is out, there's nothing more you can do that publicity tour hasn't started and you gather yourself for a very different kind of existence. Do you like both those existences, the writing and the promoting? Who likes promoting? Sorry, who would say yes to that? That would be wise. She's deep in it. And it's my first time so I don't even know. Like all I know right now is that it's hell. It's just very hard to say the right things, to answer the same questions over and over. It's very hard. President Company accepted. Yeah, of course. Thank you. No one asked us this. This is why I feel like I could just say it because I've not been asked. That's great. Yeah. What's your sense of the self promotion and marketing and... Well, the Ferrante thing is sensitive for me because my mom disapproves of Twitter but still uses it to stalk me. And so she'll send me emails based on tweets that she has seen with advice in them. She sent me one two days ago. Thanks mom. And she loves Ferrante and she one of, I mean she loves Ferrante because of the work but I also get the sense from things she said that she really, really likes the anonymity of Ferrante and admires it. And I remember when Ferrante was unmasked, my mom was like, how dare they? And she has, I wanna say she's gone so far as to be like, well, you should be like Alina Ferrante and not do Twitter and all this stupid stuff. It's just like, please don't tell me that I should be like Alina Ferrante. Yeah. I'm like, okay. So that's sorry, that's a digression. But yeah, I mean, I was very much looking forward to the book tour that I went on such as it was. It was like eight days long when my book came out and it was not super intense. But a lot of it was because I have little kids and I was just excited that I was gonna be away from them and stay in a hotel and. Mini bar. Yeah, I was like, I'm gonna go out all night and it's gonna be great. And it's just not like that. It was like, I've had a lot of just free form anxiety that I didn't even realize until I was like, why was that so terrible? And then you think about it and you're like, of course it's terrible. So just a weird time, you're not like taking care of yourself and so yeah, I would say that is hard. The kind of social media stuff, I can't sort of parse out whether it's good or bad because I've really met like very close friends from social media and I really have felt, I mean, I think one of the things for being a writer is feeling like you're not alone and you're not ludicrous and social media can really help you kind of build a community of people who are in the same boat. At the same time, it's incredibly distracting. I sometimes will realize I've spent like two hours looking at my phone, I feel sick the same way you feel sick if you like eat five pizzas and so they're, you know, and then also yeah, you start to feel competitive and not necessarily competitive but you start to kind of feel sad about things you wouldn't even have occurred to you to be sad about were you not on social media. So it's a mixed bag. Social media is also as you said earlier about goodreads given readers a chance to interact with you more directly. So if you hear from more readers than any other generation would have been able to do except by looking at sales figures. Is that good, is that bad? How do you feel about having a more direct connection to a wider range of readers? I mostly like it but I think it's because it's at a level that is manageable when I see how people who are really like, you know, famous writers, writers who have like huge followings. When I see the just lack of boundaries which people like interact with them like constantly tagging them and shitty things that they're saying about them. Like that seems bad. I have found, like I feel like I met just the, you know, right sort of, I can read some really nice things about my book online if I need a boost. I can read some crappy things but not an overwhelming number. Bookmark the good reviews. Yeah, exactly. So I think that's good. Someone did send me a letter in the mail. Courtesy of my publisher. Yeah, and it was, I mean, it was an amazing moment. It really made me feel like a mid-century male novelist in a great way. And I keep it on my, and I haven't responded to the person which is shitty but I like, but it means so much to me and I keep it on my desk like in front and it's like it has my name like care of my publisher and it's so fancy. Have you feel about the direct connection? I think I mostly like it. I think even the negative stuff I find interesting. Toni Morrison said this about divorce once but I think about it all the time. She's like, it's just information. It's just more information. And I'm like, that is so wise, it's so true. I mean, everything she says I think is true but I definitely, you know, there are times when you react and your heart's up in your throat. Reading reviews is really hard for me. Listening to my own interviews is really hard for me. Goodreads, we've had conversations. Lydia very kindly agreed to be my Goodreads gatekeeper and she was like, if there's anything completely outrageous I'll let you know but otherwise don't look at it and I actually haven't. I do have one very amusing one-star Amazon review right now which is, it's titled Not a Book of Italy and the review is, this is not, this is a book of Zambia, Not a Book of Italy, one-star. And I'm like, yeah, like everything about it is, but I mean there are Italians in the book so I'm like maybe they got a misimpression from that but there are Italians who moved to Zambia but what's great is under it, if you click comments there's like nine comments of readers that are just enraged that this review is up. They're like, this is gonna affect her sales, you must Amazon, take this down, how is this relevant? It's not a book of Croatia either, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just like, yeah, my readers, it's really nice, yeah. So in general it's like when I first encountered people talking smack about my writings about a short story and it was like a Facebook chat and the story was called The Sack and I don't think this phrase is used in America but when you fire someone in England they're sacked and so it's like I sacked the sack and there's a lot of ball sack jokes, it was a very, very, it was all men and they were all just really mad about this story and I remember reading it and then reading the problems they had with the story and being like, oh, you just didn't read that one sentence or oh, you just didn't read that sentence and then other people were saying that to them and so I was like, oh, it's so fascinating to watch the conversation about your own work and also to learn about interpretations of your work that you never had in mind or maybe you secretly did. It's that I find actually really fun. Let's do that here because we have some readers and we have a microphone so we've got a little bit of time, we're getting a ringing up here by the way for the sound so if there's a way to turn that down a little bit and then any questions for our wonderful novelists here tonight? We have a microphone for you so if you have a question, please let us know. We have a question right here from a country called Zambia in Central Africa. Okay. Any other questions? Our folks here are writers. Couple of them, that's good to know, great, thanks. All right, so we had a question. Thank you. Lydia, I thought that the character of Daphne was fascinatingly complex and in many ways she's a terrific mother, she's very conscientious, she's very loving and adoring and then she makes some choices that are debatable and risky. She works at a very liberal academic institution but she has this deep-seated connection to the North State but one of the most fascinating things I thought was her attraction to Turkish culture, Turkish language and the Turkish husband. How did that occur to you to weave into the novel and what was your attraction to that and how do you see it informing the other aspects of the story? So that's a great question. The novel is very obsessed with place as we discussed and so one of the places is Northeastern California but ideas about home and other places are also very important to it and that is like many first novels, there are many autobiographical elements here although I am not married to a Turkish man but I am a foreign service brat as Daphne is which is like mentioned briefly. So I grew up living in a number of different countries and never lived anywhere longer than five years at a time sort of have places that are very important to me but that I just won't, I can't go back to even if I could go back to the place like I can't go back to the time so and I think about these things a lot and I did live in Turkey not with my family but after college it was kind of the first place that I lived by myself and a place where I learned the language which is different from kind of places I had lived with my family and really I was worried about and thought a lot about using the novel to write some sort of like fantasy alternate life but I think in some ways it is kind of it is sort of like thinking about a time and place that was important to me so that was one way of kind of writing and thinking about it also so you know if you haven't read the novel the protagonist husband is in Turkey because of an immigration fuckup that is real oh I shouldn't say that part so that was based on some people that I knew and both so the immigration situation both fed into things I was thinking about with like kind of borders and sovereignty and place but also was in some ways for craft purposes conveniently took the other parent out of the story which sounds kind of cold-blooded but you know the reason that a parent is not there is really weighty and inflects a text and so death wasn't what I wanted to do and so yeah her husband was a way for me to kind of think about a lot of things both about Turkey but then also about kind of narrative structure. Some of the questions. Yes. Hold on just a second let's wait for the microphone because we're streaming live. There you go. Thank you. So I'm halfway through the old drift and I'm loving it so far and I was wondering you talked a little bit about the historical aspects of the story and the research you did but what about some of the more like magical aspects like Sabilla and her hair and the you know her lover tasting it like he tasted his pins and then Martha just crying you know where did you get the ideas for that and then why did you choose those specific things or did they mean anything deeper in your mind? So I have a hard time. I feel like I should have like a statement that I say which is like I have no idea how I come up with stuff. It's like really not like it's not I'm not being disingenuous. I just don't know where it comes from or why but I do remember when. So Martha was the first character who came to me and I was in college. I just had my heart broken. I was crying and it just sort of felt like the if you took that to its kind of logical endpoint of like crying forever because your heart broken like what would actually happen to you biologically. It's sort of like when I there's this moment where when she first starts crying she sees a teardrop like land on waxed cloth and it just hovers there and the light hits it and she sort of studies it and I say she for a moment she forgot that she was crying and then it drops and then she keeps crying and she's just crying all the time and that single moment of where you're distanced enough from your emotion to actually start thinking about it is literally what leads to me writing about the scientific, biological repercussions of crying all the time, right? It's like this way that the mind separates from emotion long enough to think about it and I was always very obsessed with the body. I don't know exactly where Cibula came from. I think I was obsessed with magical realist texts around that time like when I graduated from college in my first year of graduate school Rushdie's Satanic Verses, Marquez, there was Maria Luisa Bombal whose New Islands was very influential to me and a lot of them have these kinds of bodily kind of grotesque deformations but I was also very interested in the Gothic so I don't know exactly where it all came from but I do know that because even Agnes she goes blind but every once in a while people will look at her and think that their eyes all over her body like the Greek monster Argos and so those three elements I've come to learn in kind of analyzing my own process have to do with the border of the body where the inside of you and the outside of you meet and so the hair, tears, eyes, these kind of interfaces of the inside and the outside also these kinds of liminal places where the living meets the dead so hair being a very I think succinct example of that is hair alive or is it dead? Tears, are they organic or are they just like something that dries into salt? So this kind of liminality I think is what characterizes those three characters I think that's a lot of what I wanted to explore I think I also wanted to reverse the or like undermine the idea that female affliction is simply a matter of suffering. All three of these characters are confronted at various points with people who try to interpret or cure them and they all three of them refuse it because there is a way in which they pull their bodily difference into their sense of identity or their sense of being and to me that felt very true to how it feels to be an organic being and a woman. Some other questions. Hold on, anyone else have a question in the front? Okay, we'll take your last question then. I have two questions. First one is where is the golden state in? So it's in the state of California which sometimes people call the golden state like the golden state warriors and it's in the very furthest northern part of the state. So right before you get to Oregon. And I forgot the second one. Let me ask one final question then we can mingle and talk further. For both of you, what advice do you have for emerging writers? You've been through this whole process. There are a number of writers here in the audience and certainly out online watching this event. What's your bit of guidance and mentoring you can offer? One thing I would say is that you shouldn't wait for permission from anybody and I mean this in sort of the general sense but also in the practical sense especially if you're writing essays or short fiction things that could be published now. I had this sense myself a long time ago and I know many people who feel the same way that you don't get published somewhere unless an editor says I want you, I invite you to present me with some work and that's just not how it works and the only difference between you as an unpublished writer and many of the people who you see in magazines that person emailed an editor and said can I please write this thing and you'll get a lot of rejection but no one has ever said I'm mad that I got an unsolicited email with a pitch for a piece of writing and I used to think that someone had to tell you that it was okay. I think a lot of people tell young writers to find their voice and I think that that is misleading about what the project of writing is and I think it's also a misconstrual of what it means to be a person. We all know that we have multiple voices. We code switch when we talk to different kinds of people. We speak differently to our family than to our friends than to a student or a colleague and so I always say to my students like stretch your voice, think about what kinds of voices you already have, like play with your multiple voices rather than finding like one single solitary voice because that seems to me like a a circadian task that doesn't necessarily lead you to become a better writer. You want to throw your voice, not just express yourself. Thank you both. Thank you Ted for organizing. Thank you to the Mechanics Institute for hosting and thank you both for a great writing. We're looking forward to more novels very soon. Thank you for your great questions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Now Raleigh Serpel and Lydia Kiesling and Ted Weinstein for a deep dive into the art and craft of writing. Thank you and join us again. And books are for sale. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.