- [Gregory] Jonathan. - [Jonathan] Hello, Gregory. - [Gregory] It's so great to see you. - Yeah, I'm really grateful
for the invitation. This is nice. - We have students watching from various domestic households, apartments.
- Yeah. - So where are you calling
in from today, Jonathan? - So I'm in my house in
Claremont, California, where I teach and where I live just four blocks from the
campus of Pomona College, where I've been, you know, a creative writing
instructor for a decade now. Yeah, this is where I, where I would still
normally be living until, you know, two or three weeks more when I would usually come east. I have no idea, of
course, whether I'll budge from this house soon or not for a long time. We have crazy Southern
California summer weather all of a sudden here,
as of the last two days. My two boys got into the swimming pool in the backyard yesterday. That was the the breakthrough, so I
can't complain too much. - So as we discuss, I'm
gonna ask you a series of open-ended questions, so
that you can answer as you wish. - [Jonathan] Great. - That have been compiled
between myself and the students. So shall we begin? - Sure, anytime, absolutely. - What is your most vivid
memory from childhood? - Oh wow! Most vivid, it's a very interesting way to index them. I'll start by saying I
remember a lot of my childhood. I've cultivated that, that kind of recollection by
writing about it repeatedly. And I think I've also just
been blessed with a recall. But I've worked with friends, like yourself who know the time and place, which
is now growing so much more just in exotic, telling stories and etching
these things into memory. There's like, what's the
involuntary vivid one and there's what's the one
that I've enshrined the most. I guess my feeling, my
heart immediately went to the back yard at Dean Street. - [Gregory] In Brooklyn? - In Brooklyn where I, you know, grew up. Not so far from where you grew up. I think there was the primal memory scene is like, the back porch that my father had built. These heavily creosoted boards and the French doors that opened onto it and then the stairs down to the, what was really just a
backyard that was rubble. Because so much of that neighborhood had become a kind of a dystopian you know, abandoned city. The brownstone next to ours had collapsed. And its remains had not been carted away because no one could afford, no one would bother to cart it away. It was just sort of, they
just turned over the ground. So there was like a rubble of a brownstone that was next door in a vacant
lot beside our brownstone. It was like archeology. Walking on that ground was you know, there were bathroom tiles
and shattered up pieces of the marble fireplace, you know, mantle piece. And pieces of the old newel post from the banisters. So I was living in one
crumbling brownstone and walking around in another. - Amazing.
- With my friends playing in the backyard, that's the, that's this primal scene. - That's beautiful, beautiful image. What was your first aesthetic awakening? - That's great. Well you know, I find I'm already
speaking of my good fortune or my luck in life and you know, my father was, is,
because he's still alive and still painting, a painter, and there's no question that my, the origin of my aesthetic senses, which is really like a
pre-conscious point of origin, was being a child in his studio. Watching him paint, looking at his art in progress, his oil paintings. Thinking about them, wanting to touch them or reproduce them. I mean, a lot of my baby pictures are of like, me drawing
on a wall in his studio. I've written somewhere that, you know, I learned to think by
watching my father paint. Certainly I learned to
have an aesthetic nerve, (chuckles) you know, awakened in my brain by looking at his pictures. - Was his studio in the house or was it? - It was. This is, so before our family, my mother was a New Yorker. I was born in New York but
when I was a very small baby we moved to Kansas City 'cause my father was teaching at the
Kansas City Art Institute. - Oh yeah.
- And so, from, until age three, three and
1/2, I lived on the campus in a campus building
that had both his studio and an apartment that we lived in. And that's the studio
that's the first scene. But then in Brooklyn, on
Dean Street in Boerum Hill, yes, his studio was always the top floor. It was very much like a psychic brain at the top of the building. It was the whole, the whole fourth level of the brownstone was his painting studio. - That was the opposite of my situation where my father, who was a psychoanalyst, worked in the basement.
(Jonathan laughs) A terrarium, as you pointed out. - The well or the Id, the underworld. - Do you feel like your
work is autobiographical in any sense? - Yeah, I mean, it's helplessly that. I think, I invited this really directly when I wrote
"The Fortress of Solitude," my sixth novel. And I'd been, at some level I felt consciously holding the
autobiographical impulse at bay until that sixth novel. And you know, that was the time in my life when I had moved back to
New York from California. And I'd began to deliberately cultivate what I alluded to in
answering your first question, these conversations with
kids I'd grown up with, and kind of holding a mosaic image of what the gentrification
of Boerum Hill and Gowanus were like to live through as a child. It was such a gigantic
scene of contradictions and intensities for me. Things I loved and
things that terrified me. I wanted to reconstruct it in that book so I became a kind of a self anthropologist, you know? So there I was, like deciding, I'm gonna write a Bildungsromana, a confessional, autobiographical,
coming-of-age novel. And I wanted it to really be, I wanted to maximize that decision. So I wanted, you know, I read
a lot of books like that. Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks." You know, "Another
Country," by James Baldwin. "Call It Sleep," by Henry Roth. All of Doris Lessing's books about coming of age in South Africa. And I was like, now it's my turn. So this is where I became
an autobiographical artist. But then conversely, when I look at
the books that preceded it, where I thought I was keeping this at bay, I was like, "I'm gonna wait,
I'm gonna do other things." Those books are all about me and trying to understand
myself and my life, too. It just pours out of the
work in all kinds of ways that I couldn't have ever controlled. - What is the least favorite part of the writing process for you? The least favorite? - Publication. (laughs) I mean, you know, it's what
you dream of at the start. And I still can taste some of the thrill of the desire for it, but most of what happens is so qualified. You know, small-d disorienting. It's not like, trippy or
exciting or you know doesn't, reveal unexpected fascinations, it's just like day-to-day, undermining, discomforting kind of, unsatisfying. And the only thing you
can do is write again, eventually, to get out of it. So the publication time is you know, there are gratifying moments within it. But I don't care for it the way I do for making the work. - I understand that. What is the part you like the best? - I really love to be in stride in the middle of a long novel. You know, I write short
stories and essays, and sometimes weird little things that I can blurt out in a day, like a song lyric for a friend's band. But my deep nature, you know, and the way I've spent
most of my adult life, even really before I
was an adult was making, you know, I've now written 12 novels. And that's a long, those are
long commitments and I love it. It's how I feel most
like myself, is to be, in a way it's a double life. I'm living in the world, we're all here, living in, and I'm also in this story I've made. Which is you know, if it's any good, it's rich
and strange to me, too. It's like an act of discovery. The characters do things
that I didn't plan and there's spaces behind
closed doors that I open up. And it's like, oh,
there's a whole room there or a whole new story there. Exploring that on a daily
basis is what I live for. It's kind of a sublime daydream. - Tell us more about your writing process. Like, what's the day look like when you're? - Well, there's the idealization and what often actually happens. I learned at some point pretty early on that I was better, in a lot of senses better, happier person and a more productive
writer, if I put it first, if I tried to write in the morning. I basically, you know, had my coffee and got to it. That isn't to say like, an early to bed, early to
rise thing necessarily. The morning might start at 11:00 a.m., you know, it's whenever you wake up. But it's just this prioritization. Just having it be like, the first thing I really turn myself to was really healthy, and if
I could make that happen I would, and I spent a lot of years measuring how centered I am in my work by am I getting to it first. But once you're a teacher and a parent, and with everything that goes on, you also lose, you know, you compromise those ideals. So my other index is, I
like to work every day at least a little. And it really sounds very you know, sounds like a lot, but it's
actually often not a lot. It's often like, half an hour, 45 minutes. I might write a paragraph,
but the everyday-ness has become a real value to me. So, touching the project every day. So that militates against the morning rule because if you miss the morning it's like, oh, well you blew the day! Well no, I'll take it
later on if it comes. I'll exhaust my children
and put them to bed and drink a little bit more coffee and write at 8:00 p.m.
before I get to watch, you know, whatever T.V.
show I'm binge watching. And if I just work for half an hour then the truth is I'll feel
much better about myself and about my work, and
I'll wake up the next day with it still in my head. The two facts of my writing practice are early if possible, and every day anyway (chuckles). Every day, whether it's possible or not. And if I do that, I don't
really have to very often concern myself with other kinds of accounting or organization, you know? Like, the work piles up even in short bursts every day. I'll write a novel in a couple of years if I follow this everyday practice. - So if you look at your life's work, if you look at the novels, the essays, you know, the entire thing, what do you see? Do you see any sort of, central themes or preoccupations that
like, run through it all? - Yeah, for sure. You know, it always feels very spooky to name them as if they're simple, because if they were simple they wouldn't be inexhaustible (chuckles) the way they have turned out to be. There are two fairly simple names for things that seem to
come out of every project I really give myself to, and that is I write
about loss all the time. And I write about something a little less appealing, or, a little less appealing even (chuckles) than loss which is culpability. I write about discovering... that one is part of things that you're trying to hold it off or inspect or judge, or get away from, and it turns out you're
inside, you're enmeshed. - Who's your imagined
audience, if you have one? Either writing or after the book is done. - Yeah, it's really, it seems like it should have a more stable or easily named, I should have a simpler
answer to that question. Because it's been asked of me all along. I have feelings about that, but I also feel that it's
a kinda weirdly shifting, moving target, or it takes, it's like it's a mysterious entity which presents representative faces. You know, and almost, I mean, one thing I could say is I think I imagine myself at the
height of my reading life; the discoveries that
I was making when I was 13, 14, 15, 16, the way that I would
devour novels and stories, and the writers became
these awesome presences in my psyche, it was like
they just had illuminated enormous ranges of experience
for me all in a flash, and I was like, wait, there's this? I think I write for that 15-year-old reader, who's kind of a version of myself then. You know, to imagine that I could, I could be revelatory that way is very humbling, very
inspiring possibility. But then you know, also,
readers present themselves and they become, like I say, visible emblems or
place-holders for this mystery of who am I writing for? And so I remember certain encounters around certain specific books. I mean, with "Girl and Landscape," a novel that was very important for me. Well, has remained very important for me to have been able to, to write. There was, in Wisconsin
when I was on book tour, it was a very rainy night, a
very quiet night on book tour. There are plenty of those where not, you know, not that many people show up. (both chuckle) There was this father
and daughter that came to talk with me after I
read from "Girl in Land," well no, it was from a later book. Of course it would've been a later book. I was thinking I was maybe actually there on behalf of "Motherless Brooklyn," but this teenage girl, she might have been 13 or 14 maybe, had read
"Girl in Landscape," and she'd asked her dad to
go to the store that night. And she wanted to tell me
what the book meant to her. And I just remember the
transmission of this affect between us where I was like, "Oh my God, you are who
I wrote that book for!" But you know, I had to do it. A couple more years had to go by. The book had to be an
older book, you know? And you found me on this
day when that wasn't even the book I was talking about, but you brought your copy for me to sign, and now I understand why I wrote it. - Wow! Beautiful story. What work of art or film has made you cry? - (laughs) I'm a soft touch. I cry so frequently that it's shameless. It's almost like, weird
for me when one doesn't, but I still like it, you know? Just, I was reading an Ursula Le Guin novel
called "The Lathe of Heaven," aloud to my children,
and that is a definite, you know, that's a bog of tears for me, reading aloud to my boys. I can rarely ever finish a meaningful, moving novel aloud to them without choking up towards the end. So much now that they
make fun of me for it. And they'll remind me of other times like, you know, when I got to the end of reading them "The Lord of the Rings," or "Wind in the Willows." They're like, "Is this happening? "Is it happening again, daddy?" And I'm like yes, you know. - Any movies that you can think of? - Many movies. Let me think of a good example. - "Lord of the Rings?" (Gregory chuckles)
- No, actually I think back to those, I don't, I went through all those films but I wouldn't want to
have to do that again. No, what's a movie that chokes me up? I mean, any Nicholas Ray
movie, at some point. You know, "Bigger Than Life." "In a Lonely Place," those are just total weepies for me. - What's on heavy rotation now while you're in quarantine? - Well, I'm doing a thing
that makes me think of you not infrequently. My partner and I are
doing a systematic binge of "Twin Peaks," so we're
going through the first two seasons on Netflix. I have a disc of "Firewalk" with me, which we're gonna watch in between and then we're gonna
do the last, you know, the recent return of "Twin Peaks." And we're nearing the end of season two. You know, that was such a piece of, I don't know, what would I call it? Like a galvanizing sensibility token in our
coming-of-age time, you know? And I feel like it relates to my work and I feel like it relates to your work. But it's really interesting to look at it, you know, every nook and cranny of it now. - How does it feel looking back at it now? - Well you know, there's
a lot of references that I couldn't have
identified at the time. And there's also one giant, overarching observation about the original TV show, which is it's so much based
on daytime soap opera. - That's right.
- I really, and I don't think I grasped that when I watched it the first time. Because it was so iconoclastic
for network television, I focused totally on the
surrealism and the disturbance and the horror, but an
enormous preponderance of what actually goes on in it, is just like, he took a daytime soap opera and moved it to nighttime
television and confronted an upscale television audience with the downmarket aesthetics
of the daytime stuff. It's a really interesting piece
of intervention in that way. - Makes me wanna go back and, maybe I'll do it as well. As an entire series. What is your favorite guilty
pleasure, if you have one? - I've always resisted the term. It seems very Protestant to me. If it's pleasure, it's pleasure. (Gregory laughs) Why do we have to drag
guilt into this scene? But that said, I have some things that I know signify like, guilty pleasure. You know, embarrassed pleasure might be-- - That's it, that's a good term. I like that, yeah. - So I have recently been exposing my nine-year-old to to certain prog rock talismans. But not even like, the
hardcore, intense like, you know, King Crimson stuff. We've been exploring the whole
Supertramp catalog right now. (Gregory laughs)
Those things are, speaking of heavy rotation, those things, because when he latches
on it's in a big way. We've been playing like this, and I have a turntable and I have the LPs, which I was lucky enough
to find at a record, a used record store in Joshua Tree that had all the old Supertramp. So we have all the prime Supertramp LPs and these nice crackle, and you know, they have these garish album covers. That's been, I've been suffusing myself in the embarrassing,
almost sickly pleasure of listening to Supertramp a lot. - Some really interesting production value on those albums actually.
- Yeah. Well you know, it's sort
of like with "Twin Peaks," when you go back you can catch resonances or relationships that would've evaded you
when you were younger because you had very clear
hierarchies of value. And I'm convinced that Supertramp's, this was not what I was expecting to be discussing with
you today, by the way. (chuckles) I'm convinced that Supertramp's "Crime of the Century" was like, Roger Waters' favorite record just before he made "The Wall." There are little thefts
from the Supertramp all over "The Wall." Which you know, even Pink
Floyd's a bit embarrassing, but that's still like, in
my childhood that was like, a thing you could be, wear on your sleeve. I'm into "The Wall," I
memorized "The Wall." It's really serious art. Supertramp was like, you know, was saccharine. But actually I think there's a lot of connection between those two. - That is good. So what role do you think,
do you feel that art and criticism plays in a time of crisis? - Well, you know, one
of the things that I, has always been a marker for me, I mean, in a way it's
in this conversation. As silly as it is to be connecting this to you know, "Twin Peaks" and Supertramp. But I grew up going to used bookstores and reading out-of-print authors. You know, I was very much unconcerned, it began
with a sense of unconcern with the idea of art as breaking news. That the idea of the contemporary or the (chuckles) what's the current phrase
that we're all thinking about right now because we're
doing online teaching is synchronous versus
asynchronous connection to things. Right, the idea of art as
like, kind of a newspaper, a synchronous event, like oh, Fiona Apple just dropped her record and now we're all gonna listen to it because it's the now. I mean, it might be great but it might be equally
great to discover something that dropped, quote/unquote, you know, 20, 30, 100 years ago. The nourishment, the connection, you know, between me and those authors that I was mentioning,
when I was a teenager, I wasn't going to you know, Barnes & Nobel and buying brand-new books. I was reading old, dusty paperbacks. I might've been the only person reading you know, Richard Brautigan's
"In Watermelon Sugar," you know, on that day in
1982 that I was reading it, and having it blow my mind. It was out of fashion, it
might've even been out of print. You know, so I tend to foreground for myself this idea. It's almost like, you know, the girl in Milwaukee. The reason that was a great connection was that she wasn't interested in the book that I was
supposed to be hyping. (laughs) On that book tour, it was on one of my earlier ones and that made it a much more real, individuated kind of encounter. So I think often about like, finding things or relocating things that are already trying to speak to you, that are sitting there laying in wait. As much as I do about like, gestures of connection with like, some brand new published
essay or story or novel that's gonna sort this moment
all out for us, you know? And so for myself I also
tried not to think about like, I've got a way in, I've
gotta be heard from, be relevant; it seems like
that's such a death trap. You know, that's for a
newspaper to worry about. Instead I just am gonna stay lurking around inside my own deep intuitions and inclinations. Try to make something that
matters to me to make. And let it's, any question of relevancy or you know, let alone like, commentary, you know, synchronous commentary be just, not a question. - Book stores and record stores. I'm seeing a theme here. - Yeah, yeah.
(Gregory laughs) - The final question then from me, and then if we have time,
and you're up for it, we can have the students ask a few. - I'd love to take a few. That'd be great. - What advice would you give the students in this moment of peril? - You know, speaking with my own students
and working with them in these virtual classes,
I just constantly humbled to be aware of my, my advantageous position by being this, you know, decrepit older person who has other kinds of
experiences to index. You know, and console myself with. I think it's a ridiculous and terrifying situation to be a college student right now. My heart is crushed for my
students a lot of the time. And that's not because
they're being you know, pathetic and tugging on
my sleeve and complaining. They're actually being remarkable and doing really incredible
work in some cases, that I just couldn't have imagined they were gonna do under
these circumstance. You know, I guess I have banal thoughts to offer. I do think that this, this will change and pass and modulate. You have to wake up every
single day and hold on to that. And then at the same time it's like, looking for the, not the silver lining but the opportunities for you know, reflection and, you know, deepened connection, even within the paradox of
all of this disconnection and remote connection. It's a study. It's a time that's gonna be, you know, unforgettable and emblematic in your lives in the way very little, you know, I mean, I don't know what you,
Gregory feel, or the, you know, the, kind of earthquakes of your coming of age. Everyone has them, but
very rarely are they so global, trans, transcendently universal. - I agree.
- They're usually more intimate.
- Yeah. That's a great answer. Well with that let's open up to some questions. I think Nabil has a question. Are you there? - Oh yes, hi. - [Jonathan] Hi, good to see you. - Good to see you, too. Thank you so much for coming
and talking with us today. I appreciate it. I was wondering if you could talk to us about maybe particular
photographers or filmmakers or artists who work with
narrative in visual ways that really inspire you? - Great.
- Good question. - Marvelous. Yeah, well so, I alluded
to the fact that I grew up, I mean, even before, like I
say, in a preconscious way inside an artist's studio. My first life as a, you know, my
first creative impulses were all, I thought,
my father's a painter. You know, I'm gonna make
paintings or drawings and I did it as a kid, just
almost as second nature. As my interest in story
and narrative developed, I latched on to forms that melded the visual and the narrative. You know, I was really into film. And I was crazy for comic books. I also really liked, sometimes you know, Gregory
asked me about like, guilty pleasures, you know,
one of the things that, like, my father is a
painter of his generation. He is a painter of his
generation; he's very painterly. He made expressionist,
you know, brush work. The idea of the painterly
was very important to him. But when I was developing my own index of like, what I liked and what I was into, along with science fiction
and animated films, I liked surrealist paintings and I liked really hard-edged literal ones like Magritte and Dali. And my father was like,
really made me feel terrible about that, he was like,
"Those guys are illustrators, "they're not painters!" And you know, my taste
has sort of evolved, out of, especially Dali. I still kind of have a
weakness for Magritte. I have a very, very strong responsiveness to image makers. You know, people who make wall art where it's deeply of its medium but also has narrative implication. In some way it suggests like, a story or a language, a storytelling language that wants to escape the wall, the static image and become a story. So like, de Chirico was
my favorite painter. In many ways maybe still
is my favorite painter. And then I also experienced this resonance very powerfully with like, the second half of Philip
Guston's painting life. All of those crazy Klansmen
in cars with cigars. You know, suggested to me this volcanic narrative implication. The paintings themselves
seemed to be windows into a world of story and
character and language that meant a lot to me. And you know, you can
probably see where I'm going, which is I'm gonna blow some smoke up Gregory's butt right
now and say, he does this. He makes these images that
are fantastically grounded in the photographic medium and
they're alive in every sense that you want a visual
artifact to be alive, but they also seem to cry to be understood as fragments of, or windows
into narrative possibility. And I just love that. I just can't stop, you know? So when I like, choose art to live with, it usually has some of that potential. You know, if I were trying
to make paintings or drawings or photography or sculpture, I'm sure it would have that same desire. You know, that I would be reaching for that same kind of result. But in a way, I threw
over the visual part of it and I just decided I'm
gonna make the images happen inside the reader's mind's eye. You know, I'm gonna focus on
the story and the character and the language, the
movement through time that is possible in my
chosen medium instead. - Thank you so much, I
really appreciate it. - Thanks for the question,
that was really good. - Muted here. - Okay.
- Can you hear me? - I can hear you now, yeah.
- Yeah, you can. - Great.
- I was gonna say, I'm gonna isolate that
and use it as a blurb, if you don't mind? Your comment.
- Oh sure. I don't know which bit.
- Comment on my work. - [Jonathan] Oh, yeah. Oh good, yeah.
(Gregory chuckles) - Ran Wei? - Oh hi, thank you. Thank you so much.
- Yeah, you bet. - I have a question. I'm not sure it's right or not. I'm just thinking about, what's the relationship between your novel and the movie, between your novel like, "Motherless Brooklyn?" I want to know do you
find some similar image of some place like, in my mind and then also in the, other
words, in the other's mind? - Yeah.
- Do you find some, maybe when you write this novel you find, oh the director has the
same idea, the same image in your mind, so I was just thinking about what's the difference between the photos in your mind
and in the director's mind? - Yeah, well this is a great question and it opens to a whole
area of my experience, both as a movie, as a film-goer, as a movie lover and as this weird recipient (chuckles) of the adaptation. Which is, I mean, first of
all it's really important to notice that's, that is my position. It's actually, it's a really
charged and interesting one but it's a very passive situation. I didn't write the screenplay and I didn't even really
advise Edward Norton on the decisions. I gave him permission and opened the door by saying I wanted him to make whatever film he wanted to make. And then I became this recipient. And it's also, the context
for that experience which took, you know, took 20 years from when I wrote the
book to when he actually produced a finished result with a film. So I'm very different
from the person I was when I wrote "Motherless Brooklyn." But I also, in those intervening years, have a whole bunch of other experiences which are invisible
ones, which is filmmakers trying to make some of my books into films over and over again. So, being drawn into the envisioning. You know, like, what would it be like? How would you do it? What would your choices be? How would it change? So, you know, "Motherless
Brooklyn" by Edward Norton is the only example I have
of one of these discussions, one of these possibilities
coming to light, but I've actually been involved in a kind of virtual relationship to,
oh what would the results be? There were some very
lively, marvelous projects that didn't come to be. David Cronenberg almost made a film of a book of mine called "As
She Climbed Across the Table." And you know, I still think about, I still wake up days
and I just think about what would the David Cronenberg movie of that book have been like? Edward Norton let me know very early on that he wanted to change
fundamental things about that book. And they bear upon the
basic image structures when you talk about it
from a visual perspective. He wanted to set it in the '50s. I'd set the book in the
time that it was written, in the late '90s. And that changes everything. And in a way what he did was he translated my pretend detectives into real ones. You know, like, and he
changed my pretend film noir into a real film noir. I sometimes look at
that movie and I think, oh this is the, you know,
'cause my characters are bozos who have a dream life. They walk around contemporary Brooklyn and they pretend they're
in a black and white movie about gangsters and detectives, but they're not really in one. So it's like he made the movie that they would have liked to
have made about their lives. You know, he like, took
them at their word. (laughs) And it's really great. It's like a whole other fantasy that's been grown out of
the minds of my characters. But to answer your question
in the simplest possible way, I'm not a film director,
but had I become one and I'd made a film based
on the same materials, it would've looked different
100 different ways. It would've been very nervous black and white kind of, verite mixed with weird
fantastical things. I mean, it might've looked
like Darin Aronofsky's first movie "Pi", if I had
made "Motherless Brooklyn," that would've maybe been
a visual reference for it. - Great answer. Jackie? Do we hear you? - Hey.
- Hi. - [Jonathan] Hi, Jackie. - I have more of just a general question but I'm curious to know,
what's an unexpected source of inspiration for you? - Unexpected source of inspiration? - There's probably a lot
that would seem unexpected to people who only read my books. And because I read a
lot of novels that are not the kind that people tend to group my books with. People tend to push my books into a pile, understandably, of like, other
smarty-pants, white guys. And so people are always like, looking for the Pynchon references. And sometimes there are some of those. But I like, like a lot of mid-20th century, often British, or anyway, United Kingdom woman novelists a lot more
than I like Thomas Pynchon. So I'm like, frequently trying my hardest to write like Iris Murdoch or Barbara Pym, or Doris Lessing, or Muriel Spark. These are just writers that I obsess over and think about all the time. But no one ever like, looks at my books and is like, "Oh, look at him
trying to be Iris Murdoch." It's totally invisible, so that would be unexpected I think, to most people. Maybe not so unexpected to me 'cause it's very deliberate
and conscious engagement. I'm always, you know,
excited to think about those writers and to reread them or discover new writers
that I associated with, that kind of stylistic,
that kind of commitment. You know, Penelope Fitzgerald I came
to relatively recently. But unexpected to me would be an even more interesting question to try to answer. I think that the thing that surprises me when I spot it, but it happens so often, is the influence of books
that were children's books that I didn't think I even liked as a kid. You know, but then I see
like, I'm doing like, some element of them. Or I'm still thinking about
them at some deep level of my narrative, you know, narrative patterns in
my head, I'm reproducing like, what seemed to me
inconsequential kids books at the time but I must've
been such a sponge that they're, you know, their imprint on me was really much bigger than I realized. - Mickey. - Hi, thanks for being here. This is kind of a runoff
off of the last question you just answered, and yeah, in the spirit of kind of the light-heartedness
of this conversation, I guess I was wondering
if you have any opinions on the writing of Kerry Bradshaw? - I'm not familiar with
Kerry Bradshaw's writing. I'm so sorry, I would love
to rise to this occasion and have something to say, but I'm totally helpless. - Okay.
- Sorry. - Okay, 'cause she is someone, I think her writing style
is somebody that like, I can't get out of my head. - That's great, I love that.
- Like, real writers in any way have any opinion.
- I'm sure there are some. And now I wish I was that person for you. - Okay. (chuckles)
- Yeah. - I'll keep searching, thank you. - I'm drawing a total blank on that one. But that's cool, that's a great question. - Jonathan, what are you working on now? - I got kinda lucky, I think probably, for a novelist who writes things that take him years to write,
in that I had just finished, really just finished a book in February and I'm in like, copy edits on it. And it's gonna be published in November. So I didn't have to deal with this... disorientation, dismay, stimulation, whatever crazy bundle of things. The onset of the COVID world
and the quarantine world would've meant for writing a novel, if had come in the middle of the process. I mean, I might've just
stopped for a couple of months in confusion and then gone
back and finished a project according to its preexisting plan, but it would've been a strange thing to have it land in the
middle of a long project. But I was done. I'm mostly letting myself do things that are small gestures. And sharing gestures seem to mean a lot. Like, we spoke of bookstores earlier; there are a number of
bookstores that I treasure. Like Spoon Bill in Sugartown and, and Moe's in Berkeley, that are in crisis. City Lights in San Francisco. And I've been like, writing
things for their websites to help them with GoFundMe campaigns and that just feels good. And I'm trying to write a
couple of short stories. I had promised myself, for
years I promised myself that I would get back to
writing some short stories. You know, I'm predominantly a novelist but I used to do more exceptions, more short stories. And I kinda missed it so I was like, I'll write some short stories now. That'll keep me alive and, you know, if I bite off
a smaller portion of work it might be more comfortable
right now anyway. And I have the teaching
and parenting to do and just figuring out
how to get groceries. So I'm trying not to be too hard on myself about like, announcing
a grand new project. It's like I say, it's lucky
that I have a book coming out so I can rest on that sense
of laurels a little bit. - Well, we look forward to that. Do we know what the title is yet or? - Yeah, it's called "The Arrest." - [Gregory] Oh nice. - Which makes it sound like a crime novel but it's actually not a crime novel. It's kind of a, gentle, near-future, post-collapse book. So maybe also has some, some resonance with the current situation, but it's also like, the opposite
of the current situation because in my book, in "The Arrest," the internet is one of the
things that gets arrested and goes away, so there's no remoteness. There's only locality, there's like, just being with who you're
with in a small town. - Wow, that sounds amazing. And much needed. - Well maybe, I don't know. You know, it feels vain to
imagine what's needed right now and have the answer be: my book! (both laughs) - Well on that note,
Jonathan, thank you so much. I wanna ask all students if
they could put on their screens and their audio, and thank Jonathan with a round of applause. This has been so wonderful. - [Jonathan] Great to see you all. - [Student] Thank you. (students applauding)
