(David Guterson, Erik Larson, Peter Mountford) Authors David Guterson and Erik Larson read from recent books and engage in a discussion moderated by Peter Mountford on their work, genre overlap, and the literary arts in the Pacific Northwest.

Published Date: August 13, 2014

Transcription

Voice 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This event was recorded at the 2014 AWP Conference in Seattle. The recording features Erik Larson and David Guterson. You will now hear AWP thank the event sponsors and Peter Mountford provide introductions.

 

Voice 2:

AWP would like to give a special thanks to Seattle Arts & Lectures and PEN/Faulkner for their generosity in sponsoring this afternoon’s event. And here to introduce today’s speakers is Peter Mountford.

 

(audience applause)

 

Peter:

Thank you all for being here. I was just so worried about the format, so I’m gonna introduce David Guterson and Erik Larson and they are each going to come up and read for a little bit and then after they finish reading, we’re gonna have a sort of a conversation. A Q&A that will last maybe a half an hour, maybe more. And the conversation, we’re sort of looking at what ties them together, apart from the fact that they both live here, and there’s a real interest for both authors in the rule of research, and facts, and the rule of the relationship between research and facts and story-telling. So I think that’s going to be the thing that drives our conversation, and after that there should be time for some questions from the audience, so get thinking. Yes, thank you. I’m going to start with an introduction for David Guterson.

 

Novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and essayist. A native of Seattle, David Guterson earned an MFA from the University of Washington.  Afterwards he spent twelve years working as an English teacher by day and writing by night, or morning, or whenever. During those lean years he began placing stories in literary journals. His debut collection of stories The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind was published in 1989. His second book, a work of nonfiction, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense, was released in 1992. Since then, he’s written novels mostly almost exclusively; in fact, he’s written five novels—Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1995 and was adapted as a film, East of the Mountains, Our Lady of the Forest, The Other, and Ed King most recently. His essays and stories have appeared in magazines such as Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and elsewhere. He has a new, his first, collection of poems—Songs for a Summons—and he’ll be reading from that collection of poems today. Linda Bierds said of the poems, “Like those of Robert Frost, David Guterson’s poems often find transcendence in the natural world. In particular, the mountain ranges and island landscapes of the Pacific Northwest.” Mr. Guterson lives that way, I think, on Bainbridge Island, which is a beautiful place if you are visiting town; you can take the ferry over. It’s really nice. He has four kids—one of whom I once met. I think he’s a brewer of beer. He also went to high school, I believe, with one of the members of Pearl Jam. Is that true...same school...is it true? Close enough. Yeah.

 

Erik Larson was born and raised in New York. He got a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University. He was a newspaper man for many years. Starting off in the Bucks County Courier Times and then with a little bit of time he became a features writer for a newspaper called The Wall Street Journal and a magazine called Time. Which I think he’s still a contributing editor at Time. He’s written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic, et cetera...and he’s also written a number of books beginning in 1992, with The Naked Consumer:  How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities. He also wrote Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun, and Isaac’s Storm, The Devil in the White City, which won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime Category and was a finalist in the National Book Award. In 2006, Larson published Thunderstruck, which intersperses the story of Hawley Harvey Crippen, with that of, whose name I cannot pronounce, Marconi, with the invention of the radio. His next book, his most recent book, In the Garden of Beasts, came out in 2011 and concerns William Dodd, the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany. O Magazine called it the most important book of 2011, and Phillip Kerr writing for The Washington Post said that it “reads like an elegant thriller, utterly compelling, marvelous stuff. An excellent entertaining book that deserves to be a best seller and probably will be.” And indeed it was. Mr. Larson has three daughters and lives here in this fine city and often wears, but not today, a crisp white shirt. But not today, no. No white shirts today.

 

So Mr. Guterson will come up and read some poems, and after him we’ll have Erik Larson. Thank you.

 

David: 

Thank you very much. If Peter said I have a first book of poems, it’s from Lost Horse Press, and I started writing poems, I think seven years ago, which means I...something I came to relatively late in life, and I was surprised because I never thought of myself as a poet. In fact I told myself definitively that I was not a poet. I created a sort of gap, a chasm, on the other side of which lay poetry. I really believed in that divide and I felt that I shouldn’t cross it and couldn’t cross it. So it was a surprise to me when poems arrived, although in retrospect when I think about it, not really surprised because I loved poetry from the time I was a child. My father had some poems memorized and would read them to us sometimes at night. And I was moved by them, and I think that got me started into being moved by poetry ever since and as a high school English teacher, I enjoyed teaching poetry more than anything else. And so, I’ve always had this powerful attraction to poetry but not writing it, and so the writing of it is something relatively recent and I’ve really enjoyed doing something new. I’ve enjoyed being a beginner after five novels in a row, over twenty years really immersed in this one genre, to open a new door, walk through it, and to attempt to do something I hadn’t done before was really refreshing. So I want to share a few of these poems with you, from Songs for a Summons, and the first one, well, the first one is called “Three Raccoons.” Peter mentioned that I live on Bainbridge where we have a lot of them, crossing the roads, sometimes in the middle of the day—looking bewildered and befuddled, sometimes in groups—more often at night, blinded and looking terrified and curious. So this poem is called “Three Raccoons.”

 

(Reads “Three Raccoons”)

 

I want to share another poem that emerges out of being on the road at night, which is something I’ve always really enjoyed. I like the darkness and the solitude. And there’s kind of a dream space that emerges from me sometimes, when I’m doing this, and this poem drives out of one of those experiences, in the dead of winter. It’s called “Winter Solstice.”

 

(Reads “Winter Solstice”)

 

The third poem I’d like to share with you derives from a different source altogether. I spent a lot of time reading, I guess, what you would end up calling religious or spiritual material. I enjoy it. But often when I read this I feel I’m in the presence of somebody who really takes a dim view of life. You know...almost the sense that you ought to turn away from life. And I just have a very, very difficult time doing that, as we all do, and I feel a deep sense of conflict and a sense that this isn’t for me. And I was reading a myth or a fable or a story about the moment at which Siddhartha Gautama achieved enlightenment and is sitting under this Bodhi tree and along came Mara, the embodiment of all of the desire and attractions of this world, and pulled out every trick to distract Siddhartha from his...this, this movement towards enlightenment. And the last thing he did, bring out his daughters to dance. And as if that was the final straw that life could play, and I can totally relate to that, in the form of my wife, who’s here. This, this, this poem is called “Sages.”

 

(Reads “Sages”)

 

So one section of this book are poems that were written as monologues. They appear in quotation marks as if somebody other than myself is speaking. And one of these is called “Psychiatrist’s Example,” so it’s as if you are in there with a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist is giving you an example of something. And the subject at hand is how difficult it is to come to any insight about yourself. Our blindness to self is so deeply entrenched, that any insight is really hard won and once you do win it, while you’ve gained something, you’ve also experienced a terrible loss. The loss of all the illusions that must go now that this door has been opened. So “Psychiatrist’s Example.”

 

(Reads “Psychiatrist’s Example”)

 

Okay, I’m going to just read one more, and this grew out of a trip that I took to Las Vegas. I’d been invited there by the library system to give a talk, and it just seemed like a great excuse to go to Las Vegas and see what it’s all about. I had been there once before four years before on assignment for Harper’s Magazine to write about a suburb called Green Valley, which is neither green nor valley, a master-planned community. This time I went back and I went to this trip and wandered around and it was so stimulating and I had numerous reactions that were conflicting with one another. And I think, well they did find their way into this poem, which is called “What Happens In Vegas.” And the first line in the poem is “Goes away.”

 

(Reads “What Happens In Vegas”)

 

Thank you.

 

(audience applause)

 

Erik:

I gotta read a little from...can you hear that...I gotta read a little bit from my book The Devil in the White City. I don’t usually read from my work. I guess it’s something that nonfiction writers tend not to do. Novelists and poets do it all the time. So this is sort of a novelty to me. So The Devil in the White City, if you haven’t read the book, it’s about a serial killer and the World’s Fair of 1893, the construction thereof. I’m gonna read you a little passage that I hope will give you a sense that I’m the one that’s trying to bring this back into the research realm here. I hope this will give you a sense of the kinds of things I love to come across when I’m doing my research. If there’s anything that I bring to this...there is no magic as I was telling somebody via Twitter or Facebook or something today, there is no magic to this. It’s really about finding the right vivid details that light up a story, and if I bring anything to this that’s a little different or a little offbeat, I suppose it’s things other historians, other writers might have lightly avowed as you perhaps will get a sense here. Anyway, this is a little passage that begins when the World’s Fair of 1893 has just really started to look like it might actually be a success. This thing that was built in a year and a half. And in circumstances that might really be described as miraculous.

 

(Reads from The Devil in the White City briefly)

 

I heard that phone...

 

(audience chuckles)

 

(Reads again from The Devil in the White City. Interjects...)

 

This, by the way, was from a police report done at the close of the fair, that had, this was a treasure trove of details...

 

(Continues reading...interjects again)

 

I’m going to stop there...no I’m not going to stop for the day, I’m just gonna make a little note there, that if I spent an entire day at an archive and all I find out is that the guy who founded this innovative ambulance service at the World’s Fair of 1893 is named Dr. Gentles, I go home happy.

 

(Continues reading...interjects)

 

Mind you, this is sort of a test for the audience as well.

 

(Continues reading until he lists the cases of hemorrhoids at the World’s Fair of 1893, then interjects)

 

Now personally I think that’s low.

 

(audience laughter)

 

Now shredded wheat was introduced at the World’s Fair of 1893, so, and it was a much more active time. But still I think that’s low.

 

(Continues reading...interjects before reading last ailment that was recorded)

 

And my one most favorite fact in the entire book...

 

(Continues reading)

 

History is a wonderful thing. But sometimes there are just mysteries about things that you discover as you do your research that you just wish, you just wish history weren’t so silent on the subject. One of which is that case. Here’s this innovative ambulance service, a guy gets hauled off for extreme flatulence and the question has haunted me ever since:  Who rode with the guy? We know it’s a guy, don’t we ladies? Don’t we? I mean we know it’s a guy.

 

So anyway, fast forward to the next passage. So the big deal and thing at the World’s Fair, one of the amazing things was the invention that was meant to compete with the Eiffel Tower of the French fair held some years before, and that was a Ferris wheel. A gigantic Ferris wheel. A monster Ferris wheel.

 

(Continues reading from The Devil in the White City)

 

(Reads passage about a reporter making up a story. Interjects...)

 

Now this is another strange thing, that I had no idea that Fox News was around back then. You know? I mean, who knew?

 

(Continues reading)

 

And that’s where I’m gonna stop. Thank you.

 

 

Peter:

Thank you both so much, it was wonderful. So yeah, we’re gonna talk a bit about the role of research. Both men have worked, I mean obviously, they’ve written journalism and long form journalism, and then also book-length narrative, which is in the case of Mr. Guterson a lot of research that goes into the novels and yours are a huge amount of research for nonfiction. But I had sort of a process question about, because in teaching, you often find people who are using research as a way of avoiding the page. It’s a sort of procrastination tool, a very elaborate procrastination tool, not unlike sort of excessive copyediting. And I wondered if you guys, because you’re both very prolific, as well, if there’s a relationship—how do you manage the sort of absorption of information and the output of text? If you have a system for not getting, how do you put it, mired in research, or lost in the fun of research.

 

Erik:

Well I’ve always been curious about that with how fiction is like. I have no knowledge of how a writer of historical nonfiction goes about writing something like that. And your work is not what I would classify as historical nonfiction, although Snow Falling on Cedars had a lot of elements of, you know, detailed history, but I’ve wondered, you know, how does one go about that? Do you write the story first and then dress it and if you don’t, if you have to do a lot of advanced information, at what point does the research start to inhibit your characters, and does it become a crutch where you have to describe the Capitol building in Washington, before the tall guy with the hat gets offed?

 

Peter:

Trying to tell this story in a forest of facts.

 

David:

The presence of research in a novel can be so conspicuous that it overwhelms everything else. This suggests that the author had nothing else to rely on. Nothing in terms of the imagination and really anybody can go out, if they have the energy, and gather enough research to have the substance for a book. Books that read like that feel sort of like these shells, lacking...

 

Peter:

Right.

 

David:

But, your question about procrastination, research as procrastination, which we all know. I know about. I’ve had to divide it up into two phases. So there’s a preliminary phase of research that sort of just provides a foundation and through which you enter a world. A particular place in time, it just grounds you in the feel of the texture, and then you’re underway, even though you know you don’t know as much as you need to know. But now you go along, at particular writing moments you realize you need to bring in some more research if you’re going to be effective and make progress. So I handle that by dividing it into these two categories: the preliminary and then the embedded kind of research.

 

Peter:

But you never get sort of stuck in the research, sort of?

 

David:

As a fiction writer I haven’t. No.

 

Peter:

You never, you always sort of (inaudible).

 

David:

That hasn’t been a problem. Actually I find it to be a bigger problem with nonfiction. I feel much more free to procrastinate.

 

Erik:

I am an expert at procrastination. All I do is nonfiction research. So, you know?

I mean it started as a sort of a thing, I mean, I’m not trying to come up with a narrative and then decorate it with period dress or events that surround it. I go with what I’ve got. I choose the story very, very carefully and in advance, precisely because I want something that’s going to have a powerful novel-like narrative. There aren’t that many stories that actually can work that way. So for me, it’s more of a, more of a process where I have to, I know what the story is, and I have to find ways to make that story as vivid and interesting and if necessary, funny in places as I possibly can, by finding the little details that awake the imagination in people’s minds and put those along the path of the narrative. The danger is that you have so much stuff. I mean the stuff that I leave on the cutting room floor is ridiculous. That’s why I have my footnotes section, which is getting bigger and bigger with each book—if those of you who read my books have noticed. And the only resolution to that is my wife, the secret weapon. My wife is the secret weapon. She is a natural reader and editor. And at the end of the whole process she will read my whole book, it’s very...it took us a while to come to this, it’s a very non-confrontational process now. It wasn’t always that way.

 

(audience laughter)  

 

And the reason is that we worked out some very fail-safe things such as she’s not allowed to read the book when I’m in the same house. She reads it when she goes off to a medical conference. Or if I’m on a research trip, she reads it. Because I cannot afford to see her sitting there on the couch, falling asleep with the text, strewing across the carpet, you know? And so when she gives it back to me, she’s not allowed to say anything about what she thought of it. She’s not allowed to say, “Oh, God, I loved this,” ’cause I’ll know she’s lying. She’s not allowed to say anything. All she’s allowed to do is give this back to me, with things in the margins saying they’re good or bad. Up arrows, down arrows, smiley faces, crying faces. And then, my least favorite thing is the long trailing lines of “Z”s. Or actually more disturbing, long passages where there is nothing, no remark whatsoever, then I think to myself, “My God, my own wife, she skipped.” But the reason that’s so valuable is she helps me pick out the things that need to go.

 

Peter:

Have you ever had a book where you were proceeding and during the research and during your conception you thought, “this is going to be great”—but in fact it turns out that it doesn’t conform to sort of good storytelling? It may be an interesting story in a way, but the pacing is terrible or something or there’s too much time that passes between the interesting events or something and you don’t have like one of those filmmakers to the nonfiction films that are full of liberties, so have you ever had to kill one after looking at it closely?

 

Erik:

I’ve only had to kill...well, I’ve had to kill many in the proposal phase, which is sort of like a miniature book.

 

Peter:

Right.

 

Erik:

Yeah, where I realize that the story... There I’m composing the narrative arc and seeing if it exists, and speculating as to what kind of material will be available and what do I actually know does exist. So I don’t, not would get into a project that at some point might surprise me and fail. And I haven’t even said that maybe the current one I’m working on is exactly that one, I don’t know, but so far, no. And one thing that the power, in terms of pure technical tactics, when you are doing nonfiction and you run out of facts for a particular period. Text break. White space. Move on to the next passage. It’s brilliant.

 

Peter:

And with both of you, you’ve written a load of history fiction. You’ve written a lot of historical nonfiction...but do you, when you’re looking at them, do you feel, I guess, a need or not, I guess this is a yes or no question in a way, but to find a way to make the past in conversation with the present, or is that important? Or is it just an interesting story? Or is it you kinda want it to have resonances that work like, with Snow Falling on Cedars, did you have that way that was kind of like, part of me just wants this to be kind of a commentary on what’s going on in the time?

 

David:

I think there are a lot of writers who see it as their role to address the moment. I mean they may not be writing about this particular moment. It might not be a story that’s set in America today, but whatever they are doing they are trying to address the moment. And then presumably in the future if the book endures, it becomes a kind of document that reveals insight into where we’re culturally now, here and now, and for many people, that’s essential to what they do. But then there are writers who say to themselves, “For something to truly endure, it’s got to have a kind of timeless appeal.” It doesn’t really matter the comments on now, because the things that matter to people now are the things that have always mattered to people and are the things that always will, and so that’s another category. And I, you know, worked...I’ve tried both ways. My most recent novel, Ed King, is very much of the moment. And I think anybody who read it, you know, down the road would say, “Now I know something more about that place in time.” Snow Falling on Cedars, yes, you learn about a place in time, but in another way it’s in that second category, of, I hope, sort of enduring set of themes, considerations.

 

Erik:

I’ll tell you what I’ve had to wrestle with along those lines. When I made the transition from newspaper work, it’s so jarring to hear you refer to me as “a newspaper man.”

 

Peter:

It’s old school!

 

Erik:

But anyway, so when I made the transition from newspaper, and in particular when I left The Wall Street Journal, where I did feature stories and just loved it, to doing my first book. It just sort of broke out, it was Isaac’s Storm. The thing I had to wrestle with time and again was the thing that was beaten into our heads during, when I was working for The Wall Street Journal, and this cuts to the idea, “Is this something that has to resonate with the present?” At The Wall Street Journal we always had something that was referred to as the significance graph, and it always had to be within the first three paragraphs of the article. The third paragraph had to be essentially “you should read this article because…” This is what you said to yourself to test your idea. “You should read this article because you will learn about...this.” And when I was trying to come up with how to get this, this proposal for Isaac’s Storm to my agent, who’s a notorious proposal nazi, as in the Soup Nazi kind of thing, not the other kind of nazi. So, it had this overcoming the significance graph, because I wanted to do Isaac’s Storm because it was a great story, it’s not that because it meant anything in particular to the time. And it was so hard for me to get past that point. Now I’m completely liberated, I just choose things that are a fantastic story and if anybody finds a resonance in them today. Good for them. You know? Or if there happens to be a casual thing occurring, for example, in The Devil in the White City, I love the fact that there was this corporate suck-up that kept trying to go around, Daniel Burnham, and because that’s a universal for all of us today. There’s always some dweeb who’s trying to get ahead by stepping on our faces. So, if I find those, I’ll use it.

 

Peter:

Yeah. You’ve both done sort of magazine, newspaper writing. We were talking about this a couple weeks ago when we talked. And it evolved to written books, and I wonder a little bit about, sort of, like, it seems you both moved away from the shorter forms, except David is going back to poems which are quite short, but towards books, I mean working on book-length things, and I wondered in part, first of all, did you miss something about the magazine and newspaper writing? And then we also talked a bit about the fact-checking rigmarole, the intensity of fact-checking, and why is it that if you are writing for The Atlantic or something, that they have a fact checker on the phone with you for two hours, but when you turn in a book that’s going to be nonfiction in front of millions of people, nobody fact-checks it.

 

David:

They might fact-check it if they are a legal consideration.

 

Peter:

Right. Exactly.

 

David: 

The magazine worker, you’ve got this sort of discrete subject topic. You’re supposed to be focusing on master planned communities, as I mentioned earlier, or I wrote a piece for Harper’s on the Mall of America. I wrote one on the Washington State (inaudible). It’s a discrete entity that you’re investigating and it has sort of borders. It doesn’t seem to just sort of fade into everything else, whereas when you’re working on a book you don’t have that sense of something discrete. You’ve got a world that you are trying to engage. And to me this is really the point about research. To talk about research is to suggest that this is something called “research.” That there is something separate from life. That there’s this abstract thing that you do, you stop everything else about your life, you do your research and then you go back to living. But no. The thing with when you are working on a book, the research, in some regard, becomes embedded in your existence. You’re just alive with curiosity about something and you start jumping from one thing to the next and reading your way off into tangents and you know perfectly well that it probably has nothing to do with what you’re going to write, but what difference does it make because it’s not research anymore, it’s living.

 

Peter:

Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Do you miss it at all—the sort of shorter...

 

Erik:

No.

 

(audience laughter)  

 

No. I mean, sometimes I’m tempted to go back. And what’s short and what’s long. I mean you do a piece for The Atlantic Monthly, and it can be quite long, or for The New Yorker. But, you know, I guess in other words you are saying, do I miss sort of daily...not daily, but reporting and so forth, not a lot. I mean part of the reason I do books that are based in the deep past, I mean past a certain threshold, is because I just got to the point where I hated cold-calling people to interview. I just...dead people don’t bug you. They don’t come back.

 

Peter:

No angry letters.

 

Erik:

No angry letters.

 

Peter:

Never? You never had an angry letter?

 

Erik:

Not from a dead person.

 

Peter:

No, I mean from....

 

(audience laughter)

 

Erik:

Abe Lincoln wrote me once. Said there was a problem.

 

Peter:

But say from the child of...

 

Erik:

No. Well, I mean, I always try to contact family members. And that’s…I mean it is often not terribly useful...the distortions of second- and third-generation memory. It is really powerful and really difficult to deal with. That’s why I always deal with contemporary letters, memoirs, chronicles that were done at the time.

 

Peter:

So switch gears a little bit, you both live here in our fine Pacific Northwest. Very sunny, apparently, region. And I know that David, you’re very much, a lot of your writings put the poems, the fiction, are really embedded in this place. And Erik, far less so, but I wonder if you feel a sense of connection to the place and if it still informs your work, even if it’s not said here, and why you liked living in Seattle. Sort of pass it around between the two of you.

 

David:

Well, again, because my mind is sort of focused on this research question... There are sort of two levels... To some degree I was born here, I’ve lived here my whole life, and I know the place, and so in my fourth novel, The Other, which I’m really not doing any research, I’m just exploiting what I naturally know organically from living in the place, but, when I went to write Ed King, which is about tech moguls and a world I haven’t lived in, I may be from here, but I don’t know anything about it. Well, you know, there’s...the question you’re asking though, about living in the place and the degree to which it informs your writing. I mean it has to. It absolutely has to...no matter where you are, that’s the case. People often make the case for the Northwest in particular. You know the generic thing they pull out is that the weather lends itself to writing.

 

Peter:

....you saw that piece in The New York Times....

 

David:

But I also, for in my case, I know that there’s a mood that gets established by the light, and my own interest in nature, and that…that...that brings a kind of temperament and sensibility to my work that I don’t think would be there if I lived somewhere else.

 

Peter:

Interesting. Do you find Erik, do you write more here than you would in a sunny climate?

 

Erik: 

Write more? No. Well, let me address first the idea of subjects that you pick and so forth. I don’t...in fact, I’ve tended to avoid writing about the places where I actually live, because there’s a danger that you’re going to come to with some kind of pre-existing concept with what a place is like and what kind of information you’re going to get. I think it’s very valuable to come in...parachute into an archive not knowing anything. Come to terms with the past. I also think that, I also...again...this is kind of (inaudible) to my journalistic past is that I think it’s always bad policy to write about a place where you live.

 

Peter:

Yeah.

 

Erik:

If you’re writing nonfiction. You can get killed. Although may I just say that anybody here who is not from Seattle who wants to get a really good sense of what Seattle is all about, should read a book called Where’d You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple—hilarious and so dead-on. So dead-on.

 

Peter:

Scathing!

 

Erik:

Scathing.

 

Erik and Peter:

Scathing.

 

Erik:

Well, it’s scathing in a charming way.

 

Peter:

Charming, I don’t know. Some people would get upset...

 

Erik:

I would say this also, in following up with what David was saying, that yes, if there is one thing to be said for Seattle winter, which can be very, very gloomy, it’s not cold, but it’s dark. And if you don’t have that vitamin D, you know, you’re table-side. You’re outta it. But there is something about the darkness and the rain, and the sort of rhythms of that, that is very conducive to just putting in some really good time writing.

 

Peter: 

This is a question just for David, ’cause you now have this book of poems out. I started reading these poems, I saw one when we were in a magazine together some years ago, and I was stru...I loved the poem and I did not know this guy wrote poems and I wondered about how and why you find yourself writing poems.  Did you find yourself writing poems...?

 

David:

Yeah. I did. I mean I mentioned earlier I was surprised when poems just emerged. In fact, I so adamantly told myself for so many years they could not emerge. It wasn’t part of my identity. I mean I had pretty....consciously, intentionally pushed away the identity...it has nothing to do with me. I love poetry and all, but I can’t do it, or I shouldn’t do it, or something. So yeah, I was very surprised when poems started happening and I remember distinctly I had been participating in a writer’s conference in Bend, Oregon, and I had listened to a number of poets read. And then I was driving, you know, in that sort of dark space...

 

Erik:

At night. At night, right?

 

David:

Yeah. Well, very early in the morning. And just at dawn, I crossed...I came down the Yakima Valley, and I just pulled over and started writing a poem, which truly surprised me. So I mean, it’s a cliché for a writer to say “it chose me,” “I’m not responsible for it,” “it comes through me,” that sort of a thing about stories or poems or so on. But poetry is, for me, a completely different space from fiction, and it emerges in a different...many of my poems come out first thing in the morning, when it’s still dark and I mean that...

 

Peter:

Did you find it intimidating or sort of...I would be scared...

 

David:

It’s intimidating, but I can always say to myself, I’m a beginner, I don’t expect much of myself.

 

Peter:

I wanted to ask, it’s sort of like maybe it seems sort of like a crass question, but this is a writer’s conference after all. But you guys have both sold tons of books. Your books have been read by quite a few people, to put it mildly. And I wonder if you have...if that experience of finding such a wide audience has affected your creative process in the way you’d think about say, a novel, or a work of non-fiction. That if you, when you’re on the page, if you’re sort of aware of a kind of readership, or kind of....I wonder if just the size of the audience isn’t effect on your creative process in some way. If it’s a good motivator or if it messes with you in a way.

 

David:

It’s a mixed bag. If you’ve sold a lot of copies of a book and you’ve had some degree of success, there’s some degree of sort of pressure that goes with that you wouldn’t otherwise have. But on the other hand you feel liberated, in the sense that you do have an audience, you know, you can continue to write and make a living doing it, which is very, you know, a stroke of great fortune. And very...very liberating. Gives you time and gives you space and allows you to do what you want to do. Write the book that you want to write. You can gradually lose your audience by not meeting expectations book after book. So there’s good and bad in it.

 

Peter:

Yeah.

 

David:

Yeah.

 

Peter: 

Do you find, Erik, that you think about...

 

Erik:

Well, I think that there does come to be a lot of pressure, but I think that at the start of the next project, the challenge is to put that out of your mind to the extent that you can and say, “Okay, look. I know that there’s a certain expectation of something, but I want to write this story because...” like in the case of the project I’m working on now, I won’t tell you what it is, it’s really an exploration of...it’s a story where what I’m really trying to do is to see to what extent a real-life event can create a really sort of Tom Clancy-esque suspense. Trying to sort of do this. This thing. And that’s why I’m going after this particular story. Whether anybody’s going to care or not, I sure hope they do, but you know you gotta put that aside and say, “I’m doing this because I love this story and I love the potential for making somebody go from this point to this point in one night.” So...

Peter:

Interesting. You’re looking at a way of something entertaining within that. You’ve both also worked with screenwriters, I suppose...or have had your works optioned for film. Screen bids have been written. You had a film made, David, of your first novel, and I wonder if you absorb some of the, you know, like what you said about the screenwriter and they have these plot points and it can be kind of maddening when you see how clear their conception of plot structure is, compared to a person who works in a book, which is so enormous in a way. Did you sort of borrow something, would you get something out of that...other than...or not really...?

 

David:

I didn’t. I mean I really felt that this was a completely separate world, with a completely separate set of concerns and considerations. That the screenwriter has one set of considerations. The director has another. When the director starts to bring to bear his or her sensibility on the screenplay, with just assuming camera shots and assuming how much the story is going to be told visually. And it’s just an entirely separate set of dimensions from the world that I work in. So I don’t feel like I can really carry anything from that world into the world that I work in. But I did find it interesting and I enjoyed attempting to think in visual terms about what sort of narrative work could be done by the camera, and other considerations and not just by dialogue. It was something that you don’t think about in fiction writing where prose has to carry all of it.

 

Peter:

That makes sense. Yeah.  Have you had any experience with it?

 

Erik:

Well, I’ve had a lot of options, no film made yet. There’s always hope. But I think that maybe we kind of share maybe the same philosophy. My philosophy about Hollywood is that... it’s essentially Tom Wolfe’s philosophy and I’m misquoting here, but the sense of it is that “you take your book to the fence. You take the bag of money and run.” Because Hollywood will break your heart. I mean you know. There’s just so many people trying to get involved. I mean I’m a loner. I gotta have absolute control. I can’t have five people coming in saying, “Oh, we really love your work, but you know we’re going to rewrite everything.”

 

But one thing I would say, you know I can’t speak to it in terms of my own book because no film has been made, although there’s two under option, but when I have read a book and then seen the film, what I find so fascinating is this doing and scenes what we do through narrative where we do have scenes, narrative scenes, but the whole thing is carried visually in a film and I...I always feel...I don’t know about anybody else, but when I fly, I don’t do the movie thing. I don’t get the digi-thing on Alaska...I always look at my neighbor, always watching that film. And so I don’t have the sound in my ears, and I can tell when a movie’s a good movie, because I get it just by the unfolding of the action. One recent movie that I saw on a plane where I didn’t get anything, was The Lone Ranger. It was like, if you don’t have the sound, “What the hell’s this about?” But I think it really helps me sometimes think about, “Okay, I can do this passage in a way that is more visual than I currently have on the page.” Like in the case of The Devil in the White City. There was a trove, an incredible trove of photographs done, it was a city survey, photographic city survey done in the period before, or just after the fair. Where they actually took pictures of every street and every corner of the city of Chicago and labeled it, and told you what view you had of that... “State Street from the corner of such and such and such and such.” Which is absolutely valuable, because if you know something happened there, at that corner, you can suddenly describe it in detail and become very visual.

 

Peter:

Now I’m going to open it up to questions from the audience if you guys have questions. There’s probably not a microphone circulating, so you’ll have to use your bullhorn. Yes, in the front?

 

Audience member:

I have a question for Mr. Larson. I was wondering, how do you choose your subjects that you’re going to write about?

 

Peter:

The question is, how Erik Larson chooses his subjects that he’s going to write about.

 

Erik:

Boy, that’s another session entirely. It’s, you know, it is...I wish I had a formula. I don’t have, unlike the late David Halberstam, who claimed to have a list, or know what his next five books are going to be. When I’m finished with a book, I don’t know. All the other ideas who were contenders for the previous book sort of wither or disappear and they never come back. So I always start with a blank slate and the process, it’s a very long process for me, it takes...drives my agent and my editor crazy...it takes about a year between the time I finish to the time I get the proposal done for the next book. In the course of which I will go through a number of ideas, reaching various phases in the proposal process, until something just feels like, you...I get this sort of feeling...I almost start to vibrate....when I start to find things that...I know that. That’s what I often go by. That’s a real powerful thing for me. I didn’t know...I didn’t know anything about the World’s Fair of 1893. I didn’t know anything about Holmes. I mean all these strange things that came up in the course of that. So that’s a real powerful thing for me. And then is there, the test, the true test is that is there a built in natural, real life non-fiction narrative? Is there a narrative arc, which you fiction guys often talk about? And in real life there often are narrative arcs. The question is: Is there enough material to make that arc come alive? And that’s the next standard. It’s a long, really involved process. And you don’t want to be around me when I’m in the midst of it.

 

Peter:

Do you have a question, right there?

 

Audience member:

How important is it for you to be in the physical place, either during your research process or your writing process? Like if you spent time in Chicago, how much time do you spend in Chicago during the process?

 

Erik:

Is she asking me?

 

Peter:

Yeah.

 

Erik:

So she’s asking me where in the physical...how necessary is it for me to be in the physical space for me to write a book. Do I have to actually go there and experience whatever, and so forth. Absolutely. You have to always go to the scene of the crime as it were. I went to Chicago a lot. And I went in every season so I could sort of experience the different moods of the city. Now most things of course are very different now, but one unchanging element of the city of Chicago is Lake Michigan and that was crucial and that was, in a way, Lake Michigan was a character in The Devil in the White City. It’s sort of constantly there in the background as this inanimate, and yet highly animated, vehicle for conveying a sense of mood and so forth. So it’s really, really crucial. For In the Garden of Beasts, I parachuted into Berlin this really, really cold February day, mainly because I wanted to get the best hotel rates. You know, it’s cold in Berlin, nobody goes. Horizontal snow is not good for tourism. And so, one of the first things, I had a hotel overlooking the Tiergarten and it’s like, I never would have known this if I hadn’t gone to Berlin. I wouldn’t have had this perception, looking out my window, the first thing that came to my mind was, Corpus Christi, Texas. Why? Because Berlin, from that perspective....very, very flat. Very flat. Just no...I could see forever across the top of the land, and then also across the top of the park, and realized that just about everything took place within a 15 or 20 minute walk, not just where I was, but of the central node of the action in the book. That was really important to know. Just how close everything was.  And that’s why it became In the Garden of Beasts. (inaudible)

 

Peter:

Other questions? Yes, hello?

 

Audience member:

I had a question for both of you about research, and historical research. How do you find the sources and as well-known people, do you have some sort of access that a beginning writer may not have?

(Voice:  That’s interesting...)

 

Like where did you do your research for Snow Falling…?

 

David:

Well, because I live on Bainbridge Island and because the fictional island in the book derives historically from events on Bainbridge, it was pretty easy just to go to people I knew and interview them. Or to go to the Japanese American Community Association and receive the great gift of 800 pages of transcribed oral interviews. And go to the historical society and the historical society museum and the library and the archives of the Bainbridge Review. All these sources were at my disposal because I live in a small place for people who know each other. And so in that particular book, it made it really easy, but your question makes me think about something else, which I am actually doing right now. And I’ve never done this before, but I do feel like you can start playing the card of yourself, and so, for example, lately there are two people who are imprisoned in the state of Washington’s correctional system who I would like to interview. And I think to myself, “Do I just go through the process of filling out the application and seeing if I get approved? Or do I give them my resume and say who I am. And if I say who I am, is that going to help or hurt?” So now I’m in a different position, five books down the road, with a different set of considerations.

 

Peter:

Have you found the answer to that question?

 

David:

Well, sometimes it helps, the fact that people have already read your books, and via your books they’ve come to maybe trust you.

 

Peter:

That makes sense.

 

Erik:

Yeah.

 

David:

You know for example, you can be writing a lurid sensational book that glorifies sordid crime, or you can be doing something else.

 

(audience laughter) 

 

I mean the superintendent of the prison would not want to assist me in that effort. So...

 

Peter:

Have you found that it...

 

Erik:

Well, I find that...my M.O. I try to keep a very low profile and I would prefer that nobody knows anything about me, or even that I’m working in an archive or anything because it just sort of distorts the whole process. However, it does occasionally come in very handy, especially when an archive gets kind of porky about letting you see certain things that are kind of technically off limits, as in the case with this current project. A whole collection of (inaudible) photographs that nobody was allowed to see it. I was able to see them, I know, because they knew my work, and we were able to cut a deal where I could look at these but I was not allowed to photograph the things. So I got a certain, I guess you could call it a (inaudible) kind a...but mostly I really try to keep as low a profile as possible. I don’t want people helping me.

 

Peter:

Right.

 

(Erik and Peter talk over each other (inaudible).)

 

Erik:

Right, unless they help me for the right reasons—just to help me like they would help anybody else.

 

Peter:

Yes, back there.

 

Audience member:

It’s for Mr. Larson...

 

Erik:

Would you all just stop calling me Mr. Larson.

 

Peter:

I started it. I’m sorry.

 

Erik:

Just say ‘Erik.’

 

Peter:

I was being a little...

 

Audience member:

Erik...

 

Erik:

Thank you. And anybody that calls me ‘sir’ is a dead man. Or woman.

 

(audience laughter) 

 

Go ahead.

 

Audience member:

Well first I wanted to say that Devil in the White City was one of the most difficult books in my development as a reader and a writer, but ‘thank you.’

 

Erik:

So that can mean a number of things...

 

(audience laughter)

 

Audience member:

Is there anything....(inaudible) inspiring. And at this moment, now, I know you said that you wouldn’t....movie. But if you had complete control over a screenplay, would you write one....

 

Erik:

Good question. Did everybody hear that question? He’s asking that if I had complete control, would I write, and I felt like doing it, would I write a screenplay for one of my books. And you know, from time to time I’ve thought, “Yeah, it’d be kinda interesting.” But most of the time, it’s just, there’s something rises in me, that makes you want to vomit. (laughter) It’s because, David kind of touched on it earlier, that it’s such a different realm, with such a different skillset with a different way of thinking about things. So there’s that, but the second part of it is, I’ve already done that part of the book. I don’t want to do it again, I want to move on. You know one of the things that publishing...that movie contracts often try to stick you now with when you have a nonfiction book is that there is a clause that you are to contribute, that you are to give them an annotated manuscript. Meaning all the sources for everything in the thing. So, I have the footnotes in the back of the book, but they want something else. They want you to do it over. They want it done their way, annotated their style and all this stuff. And that almost killed one of these option deals. I was just like, ‘I don’t want to do this stuff again. I’ve done this book.’

 

Peter:

But then they’re just going to go make it all up... Strange.

 

Erik:

Well, no, because they have the book and they have the footnotes and they’re going to make it up anyway.

 

Peter:

Yeah, hey.

 

Audience member:

Yeah, this is for David. I’ve gone to a lot of readings in New York City and I might be the only writer that’s there. So I always ask about how somebody got their craft in writing and ... it’s a different type of question when you’re with all writers. And I wondered if you can... (inaudible)

 

David:

So for the benefit of the people in the back, who may not have quite heard. The question is about, I suppose, craft and how you go about writing fiction. The question’s...I mean there are two ways to view the question. One is from a day-to-day sort of practical, how do you go about structuring your time. Then there’s sort of a larger question of...I’ll give a brief answer to both parts of it. You know, the last twenty-some years of working on novels and I’ve...you know, people ask me, it must take a lot of discipline. But no, because I really am alive to the sheer pleasure, that I want to get up in the morning and go to work. I love immersing myself in the world of the novel. I love the challenges of putting it together. I like synthesizing all these considerations that you bring to bear on a single line. You know, it’s pleasurable. It’s my work and I enjoy it. So I don’t have a problem with sort of wanting to do it at all. So on a day-to-day basis, I’ll get up and I’ll start reading my way back into the moment. Go back 20 pages and sort of work my way forward. While doing that, I end up doing a lot of revising. And then it’s the middle of the day and maybe I add a page or two, and I leave it sit ’til the next day when I can see more clearly and sort of revise my way back into the moment and move ahead a couple of pages. That’s kind of the process. But larger, macro-scale I guess, I would say, process-wise, and it’s something that Erik alluded to earlier, which is you really do have to feel this almost trembling with enthusiasm—this sense of real exhilaration and energy. Particularly for me with a novel that’s going to take years, you’re going to live with it. If you’re not feeling really, really excited about it, you’re not going to finish. So I try to ride authentic energy, and if it’s not there, then I know I shouldn’t try to write that book.

 

Peter:

Have you had the experience of you feel and get a hundred pages into the book and then you feel, “whoa”?

 

David:

That’s a common experience and you have to have it. Many times early on. Particularly I think on the first...early part of your writing, you definitely are going to do that more than once. You pretty much have to, and learn from it, but I think as time goes by you get more careful.

 

Peter:

Yeah. That makes sense. We have time for a short question. One last short question before we all go. There’s going to be books for sale in the lobby area and then there’ll be a signing area that’s not exactly there, it’s right over here. One more question....short question....from (inaudible)

 

Audience member:

This question’s for Erik... (inaudible)

 

Erik:

Yes, she asked about the research. Is it sort of a process where I research, then I write, then I research, then I write. What I try for, and I never succeed, is getting all the research done ahead of time. Reaching critical mass. But there what invariably happens is I’m getting tons of stuff and I reach a point where...this is gonna sound strange...but the story just has to come out. I just have to start writing. Then the day, I go into page-a-day mode where I write one page early in the morning and then the rest of the day’s research. And gradually, one page a day...suddenly next thing you know, as I’m nearing the end of the process, because of what I like to refer to the acceleration effect, I’m doing ten pages a day. But always researching because there’s always a little fact that you gotta find.

 

Peter:

That makes sense. Thank you so much everyone.

 

Voice:

Thank you for tuning in to the AWP Podcast Series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.