[NANCY PEARL] Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is Spokane native Jess Walter.
And we're going to talk about all of his work, but especially
his new collection of stories, "The Angel in Rome and Other Stories." Jess
[JESS WALTER] Hi, Nancy.
-You're in Spokane, right? I got that right?
-I am. Yeah.
Thank thank you for having me again.
-Well, you know, I love this collection of short stories.
And I have
I have lots of questions.
But let's begin with you.
You were a newspaper man.
How do you think that first of all,
how did you make the transition to writing fiction,
and how do you think that your work as doing
as a journalist affected or influenced your writing style?
-Yeah, I suppose I was almost more
of a newspaper boy than a newspaper man.
I started as a 19 year old.
I was a young father and I always had literary aspirations.
But coming from a working class family, paying for my own college
and suddenly a wife's college and having a child
I wasn't ever going to be able to afford to get an MFA and study creative writing.
So I went into journalism as a way to build my writing chops
and to see the world honestly.
And it I couldn't have chosen a, I think, a better education.
The whole generation of reporter of a of novelists
and and fiction writers that I admire came through journalism.
And I think it's unfortunate that that path isn't still there.
I feel like if you're armed with your sense of curiosity
and your ability to research, it teaches you to ask questions.
You lose fear of publication.
You can't come in to the newspaper editor and say, the muse didn't strike you
that day.
You write. You write professionally
and you learn to do it and you learn how systems work.
I think it made me a much better fiction writer.
There's no there's no replacing,
just reading amazing books and studying them and writing.
That's the first thing you should do.
But I wish every novelist had to go spend a year or two
in a 1970s or eighties newsroom.
I think it was a great way to learn your chops as a writer.
-Uh huh. One,
one of the things that strikes me that particularly struck me
when I was reading the stories in The "Angel of Rome"
is like your your your one liners.
I think that I mean, they're not always funny,
but they just encapsulate so much in like one line.
And one of the ones that I was especially struck by
was in the story about
a young man
who has to keep coming out to his father
no matter how how much the father has aged,
and he now has dementia, and he doesn't remember that his son was gay.
But there's the scene in where where he's talking about the main character,
the young man is talking about coming out first, coming out to his parents.
And he says something about
I was just the same straight A student that I always was...well maybe not
straight.
And I mean, I thought you just
that was just I just love lines like that.
-I think for me, the writing process is often toward
a line that makes me laugh.
And then I almost have to defend keeping it in.
Sometimes I take a pass through.
It's funny, in Hollywood, they have what they call the joke pass
where they'll often take a script and give it to a screenwriter
whose job it is to throw, punch it up with a few jokes.
And I almost have to do the opposite sometimes I have to look for places
where the humor maybe is taking away from the characters in the story.
But I do often find myself,
and I think I'm also drawn to the aphorism to a line, that sort of
and I find myself often in stories, writing a line
that synthesizes what
the character felt in that story.
So for instance, in there's a story called "Cross the Woods" in which
in this one sort of gentle moment, she realized, she ponders that
perhaps all emotions come from the same spring
happiness, sadness, grief, pride, joy and that.
And and when I get to those moments of synthesis,
I always think it's kind of this communion between me and the reader
in which I discover what the story has been about.
And if I can make the line work, then maybe the reader will take that same journey.
-Are you
conscious of the reader when you're writing?
-I think only in that I'm a I'm
I think of myself as the reader, as I'm writing.
I don't think, you know, who will like this story
or who won't like that story or should I tone down the language
or should I do this?
I'm not really thinking that way. I trust.
I think one of the one of the gifts of becoming
as I become an older writer, I mean, I'm
this is my 10th book and I've been publishing for 27 years now.
And to find yourself at that place is to trust your instincts a little more.
And if I think it's funny,
I generally think the reader will think it's funny.
If I think it's moving, I've learned to trust more that the reader
will find it moving.
I think in general,
another thing that journalism handed me was that was clarity.
And I think if there's anything that I want to give the reader, it's
not that they're indulging
my creative side, but that they know what's happening in the story.
I feel like clarity is the least you can offer any reader,
even if your goal is to make a story
that muddies in some way, or at least to make even that clear,
you know,
but there might not be the resolution that they want or,
you know, that ends at a certain point.
But but I think I think that's mostly how I think of the reader.
-Do you think that that people
everybody reads a different version of your book?
And what does that mean to you?
I mean, how do you understand that, I guess, is the question.
-I actually it's the thing I maybe love about writing the most is
I sometimes think of it as a piece of music
that I've written that you then have to perform yourself.
I know how the notes should sound.
I know where I think it should go.
Of course, everyone who plays a song, it's going to have a similar version of it,
but they're really going to bring their own life and meaning to it.
It's one of the joys of writing a short story
collection is not, as everyone has a different favorite,
you know, much with characters in a novel too.
You find those those stories that you inhabit in a way
that are meaningful to you and,
and so, yeah, I know everyone's going to read it differently.
It was a
it was a big shock as a young writer that not everyone would love everything I did.
But you're you're sort of
like a precocious four year old walking in, you know, with a broken cookie jar.
Look what I've done.
And the fact that not everyone loves it shocks you when you first publish.
And now I find it
this joyful thing, you know, people will say, boy, I loved this story.
Or This story meant so much to me because my dad also
suffering from Alzheimer's or I identified so much with this girl in "Drafting,"
seeking out a terrible old boyfriend to lurch her back into life.
Or it's really the joy of it is having people connect in different ways.
-In this collection of short stories.
How did.
I've always wanted to asks a short story writer this.
But I for some reason I didn't. I haven't ever.
So you're the first, do you how did you decide what order to put them in?
I assume there are some.
Well, I mean, it would be fun to say there's an algorithm.
-There is absolutely no algorithm.
But I always because I'm a writer, I just always search for metaphor
in everything.
And to me, there there are two types of short story collections.
The yard sale, where you just put it all out there
and the album and I try to structure them like albums
I want,
for instance, with this one, I wanted to start with a strong story.
And "Mr.
Voice" begins "mother was a stunner," and it ends with the word father.
And I always sort of loved the fullness of that.
And then and then I really wanted the title story,
"The Angel of Rome," which is this big set piece in the middle
to almost close the first side of the album.
And then you turn the album around and it closes
with another big, long story, "The Way the World Ends."
And so for me, it was almost two sides of an album,
five songs on one side, seven on the other.
Alternating short and
long, alternating female and male perspectives often
that sense of variety
not having similar stories follow one another.
My first collection, "We Live In Water," was much more themed.
They were all about sort of poverty
and the people we look away from this collection was much more about
relationships and aging, about memory.
And so making sure that those notes sort of struck
differently was the key.
-Have you ever had to, like, argue with your discuss with your agent,
with your editor about an arrangement that you want?
-Yeah, I mean, Jennifer Barth edited this collection.
She's terrific.
And and her,
So I had I looked at the stories
that I had published in about an eight or nine year period.
And there were 43 or 44.
And so I thought, wow, this is going to be hard.
And then I realized only 17 of them were any good.
The others were just extended jokes or they were very similar.
Often your you will write something that is a version of another story in here
and so I had the stories that ran in Esquire
and some great magazines that I that I thought were similar to other stories.
And so the big help Jennifer was in, I got it down to 17
and then she helped me sort of figure out which other stories
maybe weren't as strong or did something the other stories did and
she sort of left the order up to me.
But we agreed conceptually on those sort of, you know,
varying tone and voice and, you know, some of the stories are first person
some or third person.
There's one second person story, one, one you story in there "Before you Blow."
And so just finding a place where they all kind of fit,
you know, and and hopefully built thematically.
And then
because it's called "The Way the World Ends," I thought that needed
to be the last story.
And and Jennifer totally agreed with that.
-Yeah, there's there's a great I thought that "The Way the World Ends" was
was a really strong just a really strong story
with with a lot of those one line one line descriptions
describing.
So it's about it's about two climate scientists
who are competing for the same job at Starkville, Mississippi,
at Mississippi State University.
My husband interviewed at Starkville way back in the sixties,
and they weren't sure they wanted anyone from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to come to.
-Probably didn't go like the interview in the story I would imagine.
-Exactly.
-You probably shouldn't go, right.
-What I was going to say is there's one section, one line,
one paragraph in this story where
where the main woman character, one of the climate scientists, says
"among climate scientists, it's called pre traumatic stress disorder.
But the feelings are no joke anger, hopelessness, depression, panic, a
recurring nightmare in which you see the tsunami on the horizon
but can't convince anyone to leave the beach.
She knows scientists who have become drunks,
who have dropped out and moved to the desert, who have committed suicide."
-Yeah.
It's a, that's a difficult story, and
I, I tend to I think the
the key that I tend to write in is the sort of hopeful humor.
And my kids, especially, feel as if they live in a sort of doomed world.
And for a parent, that's the most heartbreaking thing.
And I wrote that story to say, I'm going to look directly into it.
I'm going to find those characters, those kinds of people for whom
they have to deal with this every day.
And the fact that it's been politicized, that it's been, the fact
that science has been politicized, animates a couple of the stories.
"Magnificent Desolation" and this one
when I was growing up, conservative
was the person who trusted authority the most.
And and to me, science is authority.
Science is the best that we can know about a certain thing at any time.
And so to have climate scientists working so hard
devoting their lives to this, I wondered where do they go for hope?
And that's kind of what the story's about is
is Anna
this character trying to find the place
that inspires her to do her job?
And that that I knew sort of writing that story.
That's where it would go.
But but to do that, you have to look right into the dark thing that we're facing,
you know, and and and the bit I wrote about
pre traumatic stress is exactly what many of these people have.
It's a it's a harrowing job when the world ignores or
or overtly rejects the work that you're doing.
-And I think that that describes so many of us who aren't
climate scientists, but we're living with that pre
traumatic stress disorder.
-Yeah.
And it's you know and I think it's as happens in the story,
it's good to remember times when when we do change, when, when,
when we are capable of great things and great change and you know, to
watch the clock tick and us not take action is terribly frustrating.
But if I thought if I could give those characters in that story, you know,
again, I go back often
and read the very beginnings of stories and the very ends of stories.
And to begin a story collection with the word
mother and end with the word hope was just meaningful to me.
-So I'm
going to read another sentence that I that I thought was fabulous
from the same story, not having to do necessarily with climate,
but having to do with Rowan, the other climate scientist.
And I want to just see if this was one of the story,
one of the lines that you felt you were writing for yourself.
Because I thought you were writing it for me.
She, this is Anna is describing this her her fellow climate scientist.
And she says "she puts him 5 minutes of grooming from being handsome."
That's wonderful description.
You must have smiled.
-I think one of the great things for me often is using fiction as a
as a sort of telescope that I can turn around.
And I many of these stories I find myself writing from the point of view of
a young woman
seeing a man who thinks his beard looks
dashing and and the fact that she puts in 5 minutes of grooming
because 5 minutes is a lot of grooming, if you think about it, that
he might be might be further from handsome than he ever imagined.
But I loved I loved the way
many of the stories hint at romance,
a certain romantic connection, and are really about something else.
And the one thing I knew in that story was that
Anna was not the the target of
of a romantic connection, but
was a professional working in this field.
And I wanted
you know, I desperately wanted that to be what the story was about.
And then when you know that sometimes if you can faint at the idea of romance,
but yeah, that was definitely a line that made me smile. And
I, I think one of the other things I've learned about writing is to write
toward things that did that tickle me that you know, or that make me cry.
Many times I'll be writing and I my sappiness almost embarrasses me.
But I'll find myself in a moment with these characters where
where I just start crying and and then conversely, laughing
at the line like that.
-Well, Jeremiah, one of the the third main character, I think, in
this story is a very
I mean, your stories are such lovely
combinations of that humor because I'm thinking about Jeremiah,
who's been out for 36 minutes or something, you know,
and yet facing these really moral decisions
in their lives about that's going to direct.
-Yeah.
You know, when I look back at those stories over the last ten years,
I found it to be a really difficult, hard time in the country
and personally and for my kids.
And a lot of wonderful things happened, too.
But my dad, you know, descended into severe Alzheimer's.
My I had a very close friend commit suicide.
You know, the
children grow up and move out of the house.
And and you've all that happens and you process it in certain ways. And
and yet I found myself,
as I said, really looking for hope and humor.
And and and then you find yourself seeking out those characters on the page.
You know, who gives this single mother hope on the night when she wakes up alone
after she takes her boyfriend. Who gives, you know, a retired newspaper
copy editor hope when a year after his wife has passed away,
you know, and then finding those moments
and then writing truly toward them, not in some Pollyannish way, but,
you know, really going through the depths of what the characters are feeling
and finding the connection that gives their life some purpose.
That that seems to be what the project of my short
story writing was during the last ten years.
-How did you decide,
some of these short stories
could have been a novel or a novella?
Did they come to you as a short story, or did you?
I think the "Angel of Rome" is a novela honestly
just by its sheer length.
I love to play with time.
I love to flash forward in time and then come back, as I often do.
And so I think I think you could probably call
both the "Angel of Rome" and possibly "The Way the World Ends" as well is
but they in both cases, they felt like the story was complete.
The Angel of Rome especially I wrote that in collaboration
with Edoardo Ballerini, this terrific audio narrator.
And he and I were having this discussion about the way stories are written
for the page.
And then an audio version is, you know, with books tends to be an afterthought.
And we said, what if we collaborated on something?
And he had studied Latin in in Rome when he was young.
And I said, Oh, I'm just going to take that piece
and to build my own character
who does the same thing and just let this wild stuff happen.
I grew up next to a drive-in movie theater, and I love
genres of film and I wanted to write a kind of madcap romantic farce
around that idea.
And then being a sort of young cinephile in the seventies and eighties,
when I was watching drive-in movies from my tree fort on this tiny
screen, I developed
crushes on the most unlikely people like Isabella Rossellini.
And so creating a character sort of like that, or
like Monica Vitti, who's on the cover.
And so as
we work through that story and then I would send Eduardo pages.
He would send me some notes.
We would talk about how to voice the actors.
And then I flew to New York and he actually table read it.
And so when it was done, I felt like it was so complete.
And to me it didn't need to be any longer.
But I was also so pleased that I got to revisit
the world of "Beautiful Ruins" without having to dredge
those sweet characters out of their slumber
and try to put them through some other adventure.
You know what if Pasquale solves a murder or something, you know,
or commits one?
And so it was I was able to write about the same kinds of things.
And, and with both cases, I felt like the story had come around
and completed itself just just like some of the really short stories that are
like "Cross the Woods," complete themselves in only a couple of pages.
I really have this sense that they've done what they were meant to do.
-When you're working on a short story, are you always working on a novel
simultaneously or?
Yeah, I would.
I don't know that I yeah, I would simultaneously as in exactly
the same word.
It's not as if I have two keyboards going in it like I'm an air traffic controller,
but I, I tend to get stuck on novels and then
rather than just sit and stare at the page
or I found it's so helpful to step away and think about anything else.
And so I might be on page 51 of a novel, and I don't know what happens next.
And so I'll go write a short story in a very different voice,
almost just to break the flow of the other thing I was doing, and
I don't know if you've ever had a problem that vexes you,
and as soon as you go wash the dishes, you get the answer.
It's almost like applying some other mechanical muscles to another project.
And so that's sort of how I sometimes use short stories
as these palate cleansers in these ways to remind myself that I'm a writer.
You can get so lost in the story you think you don't have control of it anymore.
There's nothing better than taking a short story which you can pick up and mold.
You can change the the the point of view, the subject.
And that reminds you that you're a writer and you sort of have
some agency in determining what happens.
-So I loved your description in the story about Boise
and the couple who moves to Boise and it just echoed
a friend of mine and her husband moved to Boise
and said all the same things, Oh my gosh, we can get solar panels
and you know this house and it was so cheap and you know all of that.
So I just wanted to get that out of the way
and tell you that just rang true for me.
You're always
you're always described
as a writer who who who doesn't you can't be pigeonholed.
You don't write in one in one genre.
And and you've always said
that you write what you want to read or you write
what you're interested did in, and you're interested in lots of things.
And so you get books
like and I have to mention my two favorite of your books,
which I'm sure you can guess what they are, but one is "Citizen Vince"
and I'd love it if that were made into a film.
-Oh you and me both.
-So I think it's a natural actually.
And then and then "The Cold Millions," which I thought was very
just such a powerful book.
And I wanted to mention both of those because I hope people will go
from this collection of short stories,
"The Angel of Rome and Other Stories,"
back to to your novels.
-Yeah, yeah. Thank you. And I and
your early championing of "Citizen Vince,"
I still remember, you know, and I think we were at the University
Bookstore and you kind of leaned across and you really did it this time.
I was.
And for a writer to hear from someone like you, it was it meant so much.
And my wife too, "Citizen Vince" is her favorite.
And that book has never not been some Hollywood producer's desk.
So maybe someday, I don't know.
But I yeah, I, I don't know,
I think at some point I even became belligerent about not repeating myself.
You know, it became like a sort of badge that I wore.
I think I'm less interested in that now than I am in
just really finding stories
that move me in a way that goes beyond
whether or not the
book sells or wins an award or anything, but just that,
you know, has such deep meaning that I almost can't
not write that story. And
but by the same token
I do pride myself on almost always
making the worst commercial decision that I could make as a writer.
Whatever an agent said, you know, what would make sense is to write a sequel
to this book. I would say that's the last thing I'm going to do.
So that seems to be the only guiding principle
is that I'm driven by something other than what makes sense.
-Well, I think that for those of us
who have read and loved your books, the legions of us
who have read and loved your books, you're making all the right decisions for us.
-Well, as always, that means so much. Thank you, Nancy.
-Thank you.
Jess, thank you so much for being on the show today.
The time has flown and go get tanned.
More tanned.
-Angel of Rome,
I have one right here.
-Oh, me too.
All right.
Thanks again.
Bye bye. -Thank you, Nancy.