Archives of Interviews

“By autobiography, we meant daydreams, nightdreams, the act of writing, the relationship to the reader, the meeting of flesh and culture; the self as collaboration, the self as disintegration, the gaps, inconsistencies, and distortions of the self; the enjambments of power, family, history, and language.”

In Communal Nude: Collected Essays, this is one of the ways Robert Glück introduces New Narrative, a term he coined with Bruce Boone and Steve Abbott in the late 1970s to describe a form of prose writing emerging in the San Francisco Bay Area as a response to Language poetry and its formalist obsession with breaking apart (and breaking down) voice and context to interrogate the ways that words generate meaning. New Narrative writers included Glück, Boone, and Abbott, as well as Camille Roy, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Mike Amnasan, Francesca Rosa, and Sam D’Allesandro—they admired the intellectual rigor of the Language poets, and the social worlds they created around their work, but wondered if this wasn’t just another straight-male dominated purity campaign.

New Narrative opened language up, but by addition rather than subtraction. New Narrative writers reveled in the excesses of voice—in sexual and romantic obsession, in gay and queer longing, in contradiction, gossip, pop culture, self-representation, shame, shamelessness, and all the possibilities and limitations of the body. Embracing the tangent, the non sequitur, and the nonlinear ramble, these writers refused to distinguish between fiction and autobiography, questioning texts in the process of creating them, and in the process creating other texts. Borrowing from the ideas of Marxism, New York School and Berkeley Renaissance poets, European critical theory, gay liberation, camp, and the dreams, schemes, and themes of their own relationships with one another, New Narrative writers rejected the conventional realism of mainstream fiction and the rigidity of the prevailing challenges to its reign.

New Narrative writing refused to separate the analytical from the personal, the societal from the intimate, the professional from the homemade, and Communal Nude is emblematic of these tenets. The book functions not just as an analysis of New Narrative, but as Glück’s informal autobiography through immersion in the work of others. The pieces in the book range from long-form essays to short rants, diary entries, introductory notes, lectures, art criticism, book reviews, and mini-biographies. It’s a historical scrapbook, and a literary collage.

“I am interested in writing that explores our pervasive sense of marginality, our loss of meaning and value, and the reconstruction of meaning and value,” Glück writes in Communal Nude, and here I talk to him about these lofty goals.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: You describe your writing practice as “theory-based,” but I think that, by centering the body and its needs, desires, and limitations, your writing is an antidote to the disembodiment of most theory. Is this part of your intention?

Robert Glück: The word theory conveys rigor, does it not? — so perhaps it’s misleading. Believe me, by the time I understand something, anyone can. I pillage theory — it interests me only when it gives me access to my own experience. Usually that does not mean whole systems of thought, often just a line or two. Except for Georges Bataille, who taught me so much. If you ever wonder what is the connection between death and sex, read Eroticism.

In a way, I think you’re making theory unnecessary by opening up the possibilities for embodied experience through writing—and, writing through embodied experience.

I guess my idea is to address the complexity of experience, not to make it add up. I gathered together the New Narrative essays in this book so they would all be in one place, but there are also essays on Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, the best lube to use, Georges Bataille, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, essays on gardens, on certain artists, gay mid-life, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simpson….

You write, “The book becomes social practice that is lived.” In this way, you view writing as both an individual and collective process, a way to articulate and question the self, and a tool for community-building. What are the risks of this type of writing?

I wish I could put more risk into writing. I want a novel to be like performance art, where the audience and the performer share real time, where nakedness and disclosure are irreversible.

So when you say “the self is a collaborative project,” you’re challenging the narrow individualism of contemporary US politics.

Seeing the self as collaboration allows me to climb out of the box of psychology, where so much fiction is located. I can enter the intimacies of the body, so close the observations become general — it is thirst speaking, lust speaking. I can pull back into long shots that take in history, politics, the largest matter. I can do this and never abandon the precious fate of my dear characters, because I have added, not subtracted. We are either threadbare codes or larger, more porous, more glorious beings than most fiction wants to recognize.

You’re more interested in revealing contradictions than smoothing them out, and this strikes me as a loyalty to truth-telling not based on conventional middle-class norms. Is the dismantling of middle-class respectability part of your goal in writing?

I am happy if the sofa matches the drapes, but I don’t think literature should. I may set out to shock for the fun of it — why not? — but mostly I want to articulate as much of an experience as I can in as many different registers as possible, and that sometimes means saying more than is comfortable even to me. I want to say what is impossible to say because we don’t yet have a language to describe it.

In divulging your secrets, you invoke a sense of play in both writing and living, thinking and dreaming. Is there a tension between this ideal, and its practice?

I imagine there would be if I understood which was which. What is the ideal? Pouring a cup of tea for a friend? Having a job that is not alienated? Cooking a dinner with food that is nutritious and tasty?

It seems like one of your strategies in these essays is to resist closure, not just in the conventional sense, but even in terms of the very act of looking back at an essay to synthesize its meaning or impact. The final lines of the essays rarely force us to reassess the rest, and in this way they function more like conversations or monologues. Is this your intent?

Well, it’s probably just the way I think and move through the world. I am always reconsidering, re-deciding, remaking a plan. No decision is firm. No plan is final. It is sometimes very frustrating for my lover and for my publishers.

I love the prison journal you wrote after being arrested at an antinuclear protest in 1983, and held with 450 other male protesters in a tent at the Santa Rita jail for 10 days, while close to 800 female protesters were held in a nearby tent. While in general you point to desire as the formative impulse toward gay community, in this case it seems like you found a temporary community formed by the desire for change. Is there a contradiction between these two impulses?

What a good question! That essay is about negotiating my loneliness and longing in a tent with 450 men. I hope that desire for love and desire for change can go together. Certainly the best thinkers on the left wanted that. [Antonio] Gramsci felt that for a progressive movement to be viable, we should be able to find everything in it—culture, love, friendship. Not just a set of political goals, but also tuba bands. Could I substitute a bathhouse, or the broad smegmatic river that is Men Seeking Men on craigslist, for those tuba bands?

You say that, in the 1970s, gay community, “was not destroyed by commodity culture, which was destroying so many other communities; instead, it was founded in commodity culture.” Do you think that the intervening four decades of gay immersion in consumer culture have now destroyed genuine structures of community?

Yes. No.

Well, a community can be three strangers sharing an expression in an elevator. There is never not gay community. It may have migrated to the internet and social media, but what hasn’t? Or is it honeymooning in Niagara Falls? After bemoaning our preoccupation with society’s most oppressive institutions, marriage and the army, I did marry my Catalan partner, and this new civil right allows us to stay together in Sweden, where we live.

I’m sure you also agree that marriage shouldn’t be the only way to obtains rights that everyone should have access to.

I hope gay marriage will do exactly what its opponents fear — that is, change the institution. I can’t see why marriage should be limited to two people. Why not marry your dog, your toaster?

Toaster marriage would definitely function intrinsically as a critique, so I will toast to that. Some would argue that the assimilationist direction of gay politics became dominant in part due to social ostracism exacerbated by the AIDS crisis, and the drive by some gay men to appear “healthy” by conforming to straight norms. In a book that functions as an informal history, not just of your own life, but of gay culture, community-building, and creative practice over the last four decades or so, AIDS is a theme that only emerges occasionally. Was this intentional?

Nothing was intentional! It’s difficult to explain. AIDS shrank my writing horizon, Steve Abbott, Sam D’Allesandro, Bo Huston, editor George Stambolian, and a generation of queer readers as well [died due to AIDS-related causes]. Meanwhile I was doing anti-nuke work and anti-interventionist work with a gay affinity group. AIDS was personal. It meant driving my friend Ed to the hospital, watching movies with him in his bedroom, organizing a memorial, writing an obituary.

You’re now writing your “version of an AIDS memoir”—what does this look like?

The book is called About Ed. It takes me a long while to bring subject matter into fiction. Though what became the first section was originally published as “Everyman” in 1992. So you could say I have been thinking about AIDS steadily. I am glad it took me so long—now I am an old man playing with skulls. My own death was not part of the mix twenty-five years ago.

Ed Aulerich-Sugai was a Japanese-American artist and we were lovers during our twenties. Ed was a sexual mountain climber, a real explorer. Also he was a great dreamer—he could relate his dreams back through the night. The first section of About Ed is the day Ed was diagnosed. The second is his illness, his death, my mourning, and our life together in the seventies. The third is a fantasia of his dreams. I’m working on that now. I want the novel to be refracted through his dreams. I read twenty years of his dream journals to get him inside me. It was a very strange experience — for example, sometimes I would run into myself, always disappointing as it is for any eavesdropper. And do I really have Ed inside me? — or have his dreams given a shape to a feeling called Ed that was already there?

You write, “I take it as a given that the well-modulated distance of mainstream fiction is a system that contains and represses social conflict, and that one purpose of experimental work is to break open this system.” I agree wholeheartedly, but I wonder if experimental work often fails at this purpose by remaining willfully insular, a commodity for elite consumption. How can writers and other artists challenge this form of disengagement?

Like you, I write exactly what I want — not as simple as it sounds — and I put everything into it. Each new book is impossible — I am not fully engaged until I have made a book impossible to write. I’m not smart enough, I’m not skillful enough, not sufficiently empathetic—really I have to become a different person in order to write it, and I do. As for so-called difficult writing, well, usually writing is difficult not because there is a puzzle to unlock, but because the sense of time and representation is different from the reader’s expectations, yet it may be what we actually experience, and what we already accept in a painting or even a music video.

We experimentalists are so lucky — we are always emerging! We emerge till the day we die. I’ll put “Still Emerging” on my gravestone, if I have one.

Rufi Thorpe gained accolades for her first book The Girls From Corona Del Mar, which was long listed for both the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize, and the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Her latest book, Dear Fang, With Love, is being released today (we ran our review yesterday). I talked to Thorpe over Skype from her home in California. (Author photo by Nina Subin)

You start the book with that great poem from Czesław Miłosz. Can you talk a little bit about that?

The book originally had three quotes from different Czesław Miłosz poems in it, and then the copyright was such a disaster, it was so expensive to keep them in, so I fought for that one poem to at least get to stay, and even still, it's not going to be in the audio book, it's not going to be in the UK addition, it's just…I don't feel like you can really write a book that is set in Vilnius without talking about Czesław Miłosz. You can't even walk around that city without seeing images of Czesław Miłosz. He is beloved in Vilnius and really is sort of like the patron saint of poetry for Vilnius.

I personally just find his writing…I have a huge connection with it and I find it very, I don't know, like someone's been writing down all of your secret thoughts that you didn't know how to put into words. Those poets that are personal for you. It's not even that you academically admire them, it's just that they're your guy, and he's one of my guys.

You spent time in Vilnius, right?

Yeah, I went there as part of an SLS. There's a program called Summer Literary Seminars run by Mikhail Iossel that has contests, so I placed, I forget if it was second place or if I did even worse than that, but I won free admission to one of their programs, and the one that I could do with my adjuncting schedule was in Lithuania because it was the only one in the summer time. I went, even though I didn't know a ton about Lithuania, and I didn't really have any conception of Vilnius as a city, in particular, and then was just blown away by it.

It was sort of paired with a history program, so we got to attend all the events being run by the history program. We would go on these walking tours with a historian who is very much like Darius and, in fact, I felt that Darius was such an homage to him that I had him read it before we published it. I was so nervous because he's this deeply, I think, this daemon of historical knowledge, but he's also kind of funny in the book, and I could see someone really taking it the wrong way, but instead was like, "I love it." I got very lucky, I guess.

I knew pretty much nothing about Vilnius, so it was a great introduction. I came in, I felt a little bit like some of the characters, coming in a little blind and not knowing, but learning quite a bit. That trip started your history, but did you have to do more research? Did you go back?

I mean, it's not like I was taking notes. We were wandering around and then…I got to know Vilnius that way, and then I read…I recommend it, I think, in my acknowledgments, but it's Laimonas Briedis book, Vilnius: City of Strangers and it's such an enchanting, very cerebral history of the place, filled with incredible anecdotes, and then I read a ton of other books, too. I wanted to include a bibliography, but I guess you're not supposed to do that with fiction.

Lucas is a really interesting character. Do you consider Lucas your protagonist or do you consider Vera the protagonist?

I think that they're both main characters, in the sense that I think that ultimately the entire book is held within Lucas' mind, since even her letters, we later come to understand, are texts that he has discovered. I consider him the protagonist. In the original version of the book, her letters were not part of the text. It was told entirely from his point of view, and then she sort of emerged through later drafts. Once you get her talking, she'll just talk and talk, so a lot of it was trying to keep a balance between the two of them in the book, but I think it is, in many ways, his book.

What was missing without her letters, because I can't imagine the book without it, frankly.

I know, right? It was a much quieter book, but I think that there was a certain tension created, just in terms of having her not understand her parents' relationship creates this tension for the reader about trying to understand the relationship, so it makes that whole back story a little bit more than back story. It certainly makes the book more dynamic, I think, from the reader's perspective. Whenever the reader gets to be putting two things together and trying to see how they match, I feel like that's a much more engaging. I think that when it was all from his point of view it was a little bit one note. It was a lot more about, he had a fiancee and this whole other plot line about his love life and what kind of man he wanted to be, and it was all a little much, so I kind of cut out even that whole question of his love life and refocused the book on his relationship with his daughter. That enabled the book to…It just gave it a much clearer focus. It was a little bit more trying to be about his whole life, and this made it much more focused and I think more dynamic between the two of them.

It feels like you have a very assured prose style. Immediately, from the first sentence, I totally trusted where you were going. I trusted Lucas as the storyteller, to a certain degree, you kind of see the cracks in his veneer a little bit. You also see the cracks in other people's veneers, which was really an interesting experience trying to see those undercurrents. Your characters are very sharply drawn, but they're also very layered, and seeing them from the different angles kind of brings it on.

One thing in particular that I noticed was you have all of these women throughout different periods of their life, but you have this almost stair-step from Vera to Rüda to Justine to Katya up to Judith, and it's really fascinating to see Lucas react to women in different parts of their lives, and obviously very different relationships with them, some of them circumstantial, but that was really interesting, I thought.

Character is, I think, what I'm in it for, and it's certainly what I seek in novels, as a reader. If the characterization is good, I'll read about anything forever with no plot. Just character I'll read forever, if it's good enough. I think it's a huge compliment for you to say that the characters seem like they have layers. It's a book that's almost all women. I guess there are male characters and there's the issue of Lucas' cousin and this doppelganger of self, but it's funny. Different interviewers have asked me how it was that I felt writing a man and whether that was okay, and I'm like, "Well, I didn't create him in a world of almost exclusively women."

It was a unique opportunity, I think, in writing. I feel like I'm answering your question so diffusely and roundabout, but I guess what I would say is, I didn't intentionally set out to draw portraits of women in different stages of their lives, but I think that when you're talking about family and you start to have different generations, that is fundamentally what the activity of understanding a family is, is understanding not only these generations of women, but how they have reflected each other and informed each other and the ways that they are reacting against each other, and the ways that Lucas' own mother was formed by Grandma Sylvie and the way that all of that came to be.

I think that that's really fascinating for me. Families and the ways that we process where we came from and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our parents. I'm always really baffled. When I'm getting to know people, one of the first things I'm like, "What's your mom like?" Really want to know about their family. Some people are really incurious about their parents' lives, and I have grilled my mother. I don't think there's a single one night stand she's ever had that I haven't asked the details about. It was very frustrating. My grandmother would always claim to just forget huge swathes of her life. I'm like, "Why did you do that?" She's like, "I don't know." How could you not know? You're holding back!

Does your mom actually like sharing that or is it something that you push her to do?

She didn't have very much choice. We spent a lot of time in each others' company. She was a single mom, I was an only child, we talked a lot. Our relationship has always been more friendly than strictly parental. She's very open. I'll write about her life in essays and publish it and stuff, and she's always very "Fine, write about it, that's fine," but then I started drafting this piece about how many pets of ours died when I was little and she was like, "Uh, maybe not that. Maybe not that."

That's hilarious. The relationships with mothers, especially, in the book, and grandmothers, very important. It's interesting that…. There's a couple things. First of all, there's a moment later in the book where he says something to Katya about the guilt of Lucas not being there and Katya basically put it on its ears, you know, "You've got it wrong. I felt sorry for you. You were the one that wasn't there." It's a very sweet moment, especially, I think, for a parent who's "How could you make that choice to not be there?" Obviously some people do and they have their reasons, but seeing Lucas grapple with that and seeing it through his eyes was really an interesting moment.

There's a couple ways that you flipped expectations in really nice ways that I thought spoke to really interesting things. One was that against classical gender roles, Lucas is a little meander-y, a little unsure about what he wants, and most of the women in the book are like, "This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to go do it." And also this idea of a Catholic man investigating his past which has to do with his Catholic grandmother in a Nazi death camp, which is kind of a twist, and some irony there to her escaping, I think.

I definitely think that I have a tendency to go about things sideways. I think that I do that all the time. The book, I think, to me, is very much a book about California and Californians, even though it's a book about Lithuania also, in the sense that I grew up where almost everybody had some sort of roots to a past or a religion, but they didn't even really have any significance anymore. Maybe it was small and faded, but no one was really going to church that I knew growing up, so whether you were Catholic or whether you were Jewish or whether you were Mormon….

We were all basically just secular Californians, and I feel like there's something amnesiac about California in particular, where it almost seems to be ahistorical in some way, and part of it's the newness of the construction, and part of it's maybe even, especially in southern California, the desert and the sun, and maybe you jut have too much serotonin. You're not actually able to remember anything, you're just blasted by the sun and the beauty and you're like, "Whatever, we'll just let it go." I think that there's this meandering journey between remembering and forgetting, so I really wanted the book to have people who come from all sorts of different backgrounds.

I also was very keenly aware that I was trying to write about the Holocaust and I am not in any way Jewish, and I didn't want to be trying to say that I was saying anything unique or remarkable about the Jewish experience or about Jewish diaspora. I fundamentally believe that people can understand each other and that that material is within my ability to understand, but I'm not going to have anything unique or profound to say about that because it's just not my personal experience. I think it was a lot of a balancing act to try and find the places where I could be authentic in writing from a man's point of view, in writing about characters who had Jewish backgrounds. As a fiction writer you can't only write about people who are exactly like yourself, or you would have an extraordinarily small cast. You would have one person who is an idealized image of just yourself.

I think you kind of saw some of that between Vera and Judith, where Vera was looking up to Judith and asking her these questions that Judith was perhaps not really prepared to answer because she was struggling with some of them herself. This idea that we're not all completely settled on our identities or our past.

Exactly, and that they're very much in progress, and that everyone is sort of cobbling them together from whatever happened to be at hand for them. I think that that's very true of my own experience, anyway.

You have two kids, is that right? How do you make writing happen? It's tough, especially for women, I know, often times, who get the brunt of caregiving in the house, no matter how equitable the relationship, so how do you make that happen?

How do I make it happen? Right now it's as scrunched as I think it's ever going to be. I actually wrote the first draft of Dear Fang when I was pregnant with baby number two, and even before then, I wrote it basically the year before selling The Girls from Corona Del Mar and The Girls from Corona Del Mar came out, and then I spent about a year revising it and rewriting it, and it substantially changed. Then I think I got the manuscript in final edits for this book right before giving birth to my second, who's now almost one. For the past year, really, we had a move across country and then I've been doing publicity stuff and edits, and this kind of work.

I started the next book, but I'm really only 60 pages in and I'm doing just a ton of reading and notes and I'm not producing polished pages every day, and it makes me a little bit insane, but it's also doing something kind of interesting to be book because not being allowed to write it, it's not getting smaller and smaller, it's getting bigger and bigger in my head. Maybe being forced to hurry slowly will kind of pay off in the end. Right now my elder son goes to preschool and my little one has a morning nap, and that is my productive time, is those two hours. You can actually get a lot done in two hours if you're desperate. I try and do my emailing or my other stuff and times when he's awake and playing on the floor or something and save those two hours for whatever I'm most desperately trying to get done.

I think that by the time he's two then he'll be in some kind of nursery school of something, and then my mornings will really open back up again. The main thing right now is that I'm not teaching, and that's kind of a calculated risk that we're taking right now to try and launch my career and make sure that I have time to write a third book, but also because the kids are only little once and it's hard to not want to spend time with them.

It's pretty fun, at that age.

It's pretty fun. It's not fun when you feel like you're losing part of your adult identity or when you don't have time to shower, when you're just feeling frazzled, and that can happen sometimes, but if you can find the balance…I feel like I can see a golden world here I get to pick everybody up and two in the afternoon and then just spend all afternoon in kid world, but that I still have this sacred adult time in the morning, so I'm just trying to work towards that.

What are you reading now?

What am I reading? Right now I'm reading Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. It's really good. Have you read it?

No.

It just came out. It's about this family…it's kind of a big family drama. It reminded me a lot of Ann Packer's latest. It's about a family where the father is extremely clinically depressed and then winds up killing himself, and then it's about the children as adults. It's an intensely weird book and I love it when books are weird.

How do you feel about the push towards more plot driven, I would even say Hollywood influenced works, these days? It seems to be that's the general movement in literature these days.

I think that I'm kind of squarely in between commercial and literary concerns and affiliations. Commercial people always consider me so literary, and for literary people I'm never literary enough. I studied with a writer who was very much a commercial writer, did a lot of ghost writing, and I learned a lot of craft, and the idea of pay-off scenes, and a lot of screen writing-y type strategies, and I really like them. I think it's really important, as a writer, to be worried about whether or not your reader is enjoying it and having a good time and it with you. I think that ultimately, all those tricks are just designed to make sure that the reader is engaged. I don't think that there's any reason why being meaningful also has to mean being boring. Being interesting seems to me to be the goal. I also think that you just have to write what's interesting to you, and it's possible that my own personal proclivities really place me where I am, and if I had a longer attention span my books would be more boring, or something like this.

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't mind it. The books that I read that I'm obsessed with and that I consider the novelists that I wish I could grow up to be, like Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Strout, Jane Smiley, they're all best sellers because they're incredibly readable, but they all are saying deep things, and they all, actually universally, have an amazing ability to create memorable characters. If that's what we mean by Hollywood writing, is writers like that, then I'm like, "Yes, bring it on. More of it," but it's just sort of like…I have a harder time with books that turn on a trick.

Like Gone Girl. I think the writing was so good and I like all her books, honestly, but I couldn't handle the end. It lost me because it felt too much like playing a trick on the reader.

Lindy West’s debut memoir, Shrill was published yesterday to great acclaim. I had to recuse myself from reviewing it for the Seattle Review of Books due to personal circumstances; I was Lindy’s coworker at The Stranger for three years, and she asked me to read Shrill before its publication. And so I know I’m biased, but I do love this book: I think Shrill is funny and honest and heartbreaking and empowering and meaningful. It starts in the way you always expect Lindy’s writing to go, with some jokes and sharp observations, but by the end it’s become something different. Lindy’s writing gets more nuanced and vulnerable and powerful as the book goes along, creating so much more than just a collection of personal essays: it’s a story of evolution and a personal account of growing up, both as an adult and on the internet as a personality. Lindy and I met up for lunch on Tuesday, April 26th to talk about the process of publication, what she’s been reading lately, and her relationship with the internet.

How's it going?

Great. It's going great. I'm eating a beet salad. I'm home for a couple weeks before I leave for a book tour in earnest which starts May 14th and goes until, basically, the end of June, which is going to be really intense and really fun and really hard to be away from home, I think. But I'm excited.

You are doing all sorts of pre-pub stuff right now. Posing for photos and things like that.

Glamorous photos. It's very glamorous.

Some of the photos are amazing.

Thank you. Yeah, it's been really fun. It's weird to have your picture taken and try to look fancy. You get used to it, I guess. So, basically, right now we're just ramping up to the publication date. I'm doing interviews and photos and typing stuff on Twitter, which is always fun. The response [to the book] has been really amazing. It's been really good so far from people who've read it.

It has been.

We got a starred review in Booklist that came out today.

Congratulations.

Thank you. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, too. It's really scary to write something so personal. It's so isolating; writing a book is very solitary. Basically, I was just alone for a year writing really much more personal things than I normally write. Now, all of a sudden I have to just send it to people — strangers — and let them read it. Especially as a former — I guess or still, current — critic, it's kind of like, “oh no, I should have been nicer. I should have been nicer about people's precious art.”

Are you worried that Sarah Jessica Parker is going to review Shrill at some point?

Yes.

You kind of were on the fast track with this book because you did write it in a year…

I mean, I really wrote it in like, four months to be honest. It was really fast.

Well, that's your process. That was the pattern when we worked together at The Stranger: you tend to come in at the end with a finished draft just at the moment of deadline…

Yeah, exactly.

…as someone who has edited your work.

It was partly process and partly necessity where we set up a really tight timeline. I knew that I wouldn't really need the whole year. We did a long timeline and I was like, “I'm gonna do it in the last four months anyway.” So, might as well just go for it and try to get it out in the spring. When we signed the contract in March, that would have been for a Fall 2016 release. We decided to publish in spring so that it didn't clash with the election.

Right.

So, I just had to bang it out, which was really hard and scary but I don't know that I could have turned out a better book in a longer amount of time. I feel really good about what I did.

It's been very impressive, watching you through this process because when we were at the paper together you never missed an issue, but you did come up very close to the deadlines sometimes. Which is okay! Some writers only work under deadlines and that's fine.

I have never failed.

Right.

Like, ever. I don't think.

So the way that you were able to sort of work with your process and make it work for you, I thought was really impressive and showed a lot of self-awareness.

Thank you.

It was a grown-up way to put a book together.

It was also, knowing my own process, way less painful than I would have expected.

The writing of the book?

Yeah, there were only maybe two all-nighters in the whole thing, which, for me, is impressive because I do an all-nighter a week trying to get my Guardian column done and that's a thousand words. So the fact that I wrote seventy-thousand words and only stayed up all night twice crying ...

As opposed to seventy nights.

Yeah. I don't know what's wrong with my brain, man.

It clearly works for you.

Thank you. You're so supportive.

One of the things that I miss about working with you is that you would go to a movie and you would come back from the movie and you would yell at me for a half an hour and then you would write your review down and it would be a lot of the things that you yelled at me, only a little more eloquent.

Yeah.

So I’m wondering who do you yell at now for your process? Did you yell this book at someone's head?

Yeah, I guess I mostly yell at my husband now. Although I wrote this book mostly by myself. No, actually there were big parts where I was like, "Meehh, I can't write it! Come home and let me yell at you," and then he did. He's a wonderful — much like you — a wonderful sounding board and he really understands how I think and how I write jokes, so he helps me a lot. He's really proud because there's a couple jokes in the book that were his jokes. I'm not going to say which ones. All the funniest ones are mine.

Obviously.

No, I mean, we both work from home and don't really do anything else, so usually it's really just us in the house all day, everyday, yelling ideas at each other and making jokes. I guess he's my new Paul.

As I think it's pretty obvious, I write in my own voice. I know that when people read me they just hear me talking. People who know me tell me that all the time. It's a pretty natural way to do it, to just sort of blab on and on about something and write down the best sentences. I just sit there and I type. Sometimes I even just talk into my phone recorder and then transcribe it later.

Really?

Yeah.

It's funny because there was a point where I realized that that was your process. I'm thinking about the only other writer I know of who wrote like that was Robert E. Howard who wrote the Conan books.

Nice.

He apparently screamed all the words as he was typing them, which makes reading the Conan books a lot more enjoyable, because I'm imagining this sort of mamma's boy who's homebound shouting at his typewriter: "AND THEN CONAN DREW HIS SWORD!" I think it makes the books a lot more interesting.

I never read any of those but now that I know that we're kin, I will.

If you ever want to get into barbarian novels, that’s the way to do it.

Barbarian novels are not that far from my personal wheelhouse.

It's true, you've written amazing things about Game of Thrones.

Yes. Big fan.

Are you still reading fantasy?

Yeah.

Who do you like?

It’s a genre where the canon is so dominated by men, but it's so heavily consumed by women. It's a weird negotiation to read fantasy and try to figure out, “where am I represented in this? How is this treating me as a woman,” you know? Mostly what I do is I like to have a… [pause] This is so dorky. I can't believe you're making me talk about this.

This is great.

I like to have an audio book on hand at all times ... just as I do stuff around the house. I find it very soothing to have some sort of escapism that I can just feed into my brain because my life's kind of stressful and garbagey a lot of the times.

I mean, it's great but you know, I also have this steady drip of poison into my brain thanks to the Internet. It's nice to have this completely bizarro escapist other-universe to go live in a little bit each day. I like to listen to my audio books when I go to the gym and then I call it my fantasy body. Which I think is funny.

Right now I'm listening to Brandon Sanderson's… what the fuck is it called? Hold on. It's like you could just have made it in a fantasy book title generator. Hold on, it's called “Words of Radiance.”

It's just like this huge sprawling, endless thing. I think it's great. It's not super gross about women, which is good. Although, when I found it, I was Googling "best fantasy audio books" and I was looking at some Reddit board. Unfortunately, it's clearly like all dudes recommending books by dudes to other dudes.

Right.

There's this couple who narrate audio books and their names are Michael Kramer and Kate Reading and they're married. I became familiar with them because they narrate all of the Wheel of Time books which are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours long. I'm almost all the way through them. That's where my fantasy body started.

So Kate Reading reads the female chapters, chapters that are for the female narrator, and Michael Kramer reads the chapters of the male narrator. They do the same thing for these Brandon Sanderson books and also, Brandon Sanderson was the author who was brought in to finish the Wheel of Time books after Robert Jordan died.

Anyway, so I'm looking at this message board and they're like, "these Stormlight Archive books are amazing," or the audio books. They're like, "Michael Kramer's so good! Kate Reading, I don't care for." They're like, "I don't know what it is about her. There's just something annoying that I hate."

”I think her chapters got cooties in my ears…..”

They weren't self-aware enough to realize that connection. Then a bunch of them were like, "Yeah, me too!" So, clearly it wasn't just like one guy didn't like her voice or whatever.

Then when I finished the first book in this series, then I was like, "oh, I wonder if there's an audio book of the second book." And there is. There's two main characters, a man and a woman. The first book is mostly about the man, who's a warrior-man having warrior emotions on a battlefield. Then there are also chapters about this woman but they're secondary and she's a scholar-magician-whatever. Then the second book is more about her. It was the same thing where all these dudes are like, "No, I don't know. I just really loved the first one. There's just something about this one that's kind of boring to me. I don't know. I just don't connect to it as much." It's just like man, you guys, just be around a girl for a minute. What is wrong with you?

Is that what you think it is, is that the experience is so alien to them or something?

I don't know. Also, I can't presume to know why they don't like Kate Reading and Shallan Davar. That's the character.

I remember as a kid being bored by the kissing parts in the movies, but it can't possibly be like that for an adult man, can it?

Did you see that thing? There was a story the other day where some video game was forcing dudes to play as women and they were like, "Baah." They could not deal with it. It isn't really a hostility like, "Oh, I fucking hate this book." It’s just like a boredom. It was like “I've been taught to find this boring.” I'm adding the “I've been taught” part, but there's nothing inherently boring about it. It's the same story. It's the same universe. It's the same writing style, same everything. The difference is that [the main character is] a woman. They're both doing the same, well I don't want to give any spoilers away, but ...

Okay. Hate to ruin somebody else's fantasy body.

I think a lot about why I'm drawn to this genre and I haven't figured it out yet. I'm resisting temptation to figure out a way to phrase this as a compliment to myself. I just feel the world very deeply and so sometimes I need a break. I don't know. There's something about maybe working in this job where you're just bombarded with information about the real world 24/7, and everything that's wrong with it, and everything that can't be fixed and I get so exhausted.

I always liked fantasy when I was a kid, but I read everything when I was a kid. Now I just, the idea of reading even just a really good book about real people's lives. I'm like, “oh yeah, okay, I do want to do that but, I'm so tired.”

You have this 24-hour feed of people's lives into your brain. I think I could easily break through that wall because obviously I still appreciate beautiful writing and I care about people's lives and I assume this phase will go away. For right now I have time for the Internet — processing it and writing about it. Then I have time for listening to stories about knights and people with names that sound like pharmaceutical medications. Everyone's name's like Geurdivan or whatever.

People who specialize in the riding of dragons.

There's no dragons in this series, so that's okay. There's, like, the crab things. So that's something.

I could listen to you talk about fantasy books for fucking days. I just love it.

Well, if you ever want me to give you a plot synopsis of the Stormlight Archives, I'm still figuring out what's going on. It's supposed to be a ten book series. Each book is... I haven't held a physical book but these audio books are like seventy hours long, so it must be at least a thousand page book.

Every time I try to pick up a sci-fi book now it's like the first book in a series. I just find that incredibly disheartening as a reader. That's part of the whole fantasy thing, so you must enjoy that.

It's not like I've always been a reader of contemporary ... I don't usually read fantasy novels as they come out, you know what I mean? The fact that this dude's only finished two books of his 10-book series is troubling. I only have eight hours left on my audio book and I'm like, then what? Then I have to wait twenty years for your next one, Brandon?

I'm the same with TV. I'm a binge watcher. I don't like to watch something every week they have to wait. I would rather pretend it doesn't exist and then at the end of the season watch the entire season.

It was really fun, sort of, to go through the entire Wheel of Time, sort of. So tedious. I never finished. I need to finish. An immersive, long-form book is so engrossing and you get so attached to it and you don't want it to end. Sometimes it doesn't end for four hundred hours, which is great.

Then the author dies and then another author comes in and finishes it for you.

Right. I'm a big fan of the original fourteen Wizard of Oz books, but then after L. Frank Baum died, there was like a million other authors who were like I also write books about Oz. I didn't read that shit. I don't do that. I'm not going to just read it for the sake of reading it, you know what I mean? I still want it to be good.

Which seems as good a segue as any to get back to your book. You do get more personal in Shrill. All your writing is personal in that it comes from your perspective, but you do write more about particular events in your life here. Given that your life has already been used by certain people against you, it seems like you've given them a little bit and they just take it and throw it at you.

You mean bad people?

Yes, bad people. I don't want to talk about the bad people for the most part because they just take up so much bandwidth anyway. But this had to be a consideration when you signed on to write something that's kind of memoir-y.

Honestly, it's not that big of a consideration anymore. I'm curious, kind of. I wonder what they could possibly take from this to hurt me with. I've been doing this for so long that I'm not afraid of them anymore. I'm just tired. I don't want to limit my career and what I do because of bad people.

Were there other concerns though, about writing about yourself like this? We were both kind of trained to offer ourselves to readers but not to go to overboard with it.

Yeah, when we wrote at The Stranger, writing was different then. It was especially unfashionable then to be sincere and vulnerable. Irony was still like, really big, which was great at the time. I don't know. It's weird. I was just thinking about this yesterday. I feel like people think of me as an over-sharer. Instead, I'm actually really, really private. There are a lot of things that I don't write about at all and I never would and I'd be really uncomfortable sharing. I feel like I let people into a very carefully curated part of my life that's very honest and is vulnerable.

I am curious to see if trolls bother to read my entire book. If they do, I hope they'll buy a copy. I guess they could download the e-book illegally or whatever.

There are pirates.

You think I'll get pirated?

I'm sure you will get pirated.

That'd be kind of flattering. My publisher probably would be mad that I said that. I don't know. What could they throw at me that they haven't already done?

[Knocks on wooden table.]

I know, right? I know. I probably shouldn't be interested in finding out the answer to that. Also, what's going on with the Gamergate crowd right now is crazy, where they just pick a thing and then decide what it means and then all signal boost each other until people just believe that that's true, you know what I mean?

Crowdsourced gaslighting of people?

Yeah. Like, that woman that got fired at Nintendo for nothing because they just made up a thing. We'll see. I've said this before: the more vulnerable you make yourself, the less vulnerable you are. If it's already in the book, what can you say if I already said it? You can't, like, gotcha me on anything that I put deliberately in my memoir.

I'm kind of retreating from the Internet, anyway, a little bit. I'm hoping to just move on to writing another book after this and I'm certainly not going back to daily blogging. It's so hard. It's just too taxing. There's also always the chance that a troll will read the book and change their mind.

I'm sure that does happen, because books are good at doing that to people. Putting them in someone else's head for two hundred pages can introduce a new kind of empathy to their lives.

That's kind of the whole idea, right? Yeah, so maybe that will happen. That'd be kind of interesting, not that I would ever know about it. And that was an express purpose of writing the book, was to humanize myself.

Just think about that phrase for a second. “To humanize yourself.”

I know. But, you know, to make people like me, to be funny and charming and make people like me. Then be like, "Haha, you like a feminist" or "you like a fat lady," or whatever. I did that on purpose. That's in the book proposal. This is what I want to do. I guess I look forward to people who don't like me reading the book. If they decide to torture me, ugh, I'll deal with it. It will be fine. I've dealt with it before.

There was a very specific moment when your star was on the rise when you were at The Stranger where it felt like if you had gotten started ten years before, you probably would've moved to New York City because that's what people did at that point. In the book you write about going to L.A. and trying that out for a little bit. I know you made a conscious choice to stay in Seattle and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your relationship to Seattle and what that choice was like?

I'm from here. I really love it here. I just love Seattle so much, and I always have. Both of my parents are from here. There's something about knowing that when I drive through downtown, I can see my dad walking down the street with his briefcase in 1973 or whatever. You know what I mean? It just feels like it's in my DNA. It's an easy place to live. It's quiet. It's beautiful. My family is here. I have a beautiful house. I mean, I don't own it. That'll never happen.

It's my home town. I was lucky enough to have a really great home town that I love living in. I just had the good fortune to keep getting jobs where they said I could work from wherever, so there's just no compelling reason to go. It's like well, all right. If you're going to pay me a New York salary to live in Columbia City, sweet. I will do that. I know that I'm missing out on things. It's hard to know what my career would be like if I had moved to New York. I definitely miss out on things like media cool kid happy hour, or whatever, you know what I mean.

That was a great face you made when you said “media cool kid happy hour” that I wish I could record.

I don't regret not being there for that. I think it's kind of interesting to be this weird outsider where I go to New York and people are like, "Oh, I've never met you." You know what I mean? Like, "Oh, you exist." Also now I'm married and I have stepdaughters and you can't just move children. Their mom lives here so we'd have to move her. I don't think that she wants to move to New York and I'm not a millionaire. Life gets complicated and you get rooted in a place.

Aham and I have both had opportunities to work on TV shows recently and potentially in the future. It might end up where we spend half the year in New York, or a couple months a year. We're not ever going to leave Seattle as far as I know.

That's not to say that Seattle doesn't have problems. It has problems that definitely affect us. My husband doesn't want to live in a neighborhood with all white people and our neighborhood is becoming mostly white people in a way that is alarming. I don't know what we're going to do about that. Just keep moving south, I guess.

Yeah. Tukwila, here we come.

It's really important to us that we live in a diverse area and that our kids live in a diverse area. That's going to be a constant negotiation, but we'll figure it out. Both of us are really attached to Seattle. possible to do things here on a scale that's really fun. If I wanted to do a one woman show or whatever I could call people up at a bunch of different theaters and be like, "Will you help me?" It might not work, but I would at least know who to call. In New York, who am I, you know what I mean? Where would I even start? Maybe I should do a one-woman show.

You should. You totally should. Was there anything that was especially surprising about the publication processes compared to the world of blogging and…columning that you came from? From whence you came?

There's a lot more support. You have a team of people working on your thing with you. Whereas, working for the internet is increasingly like, “okay, finish your thing and put it up. We’ve got to write eight hundred more blog posts today. No time to fact check. Don't worry about it. You're your own copy editor.” So [the process of working on a book] was nice. It feels very old school.

The thing that surprised me the most about this process was that I was able to do it. It's really scary: it feels very hubristic to me to be like, “oh yes, I can write an entire book.” I have never felt that way about myself. I never even planned on being a writer in the first place and I'm still kind of convincing myself that I know how to do it. To be like, “yes, I will now write an entire book about me.” I'm not that interesting. I'm really not. My life is really just normal and good. I wasn't raised in a cult. I didn't have any kind of cool backstory. I just had two nice parents and we lived in a nice house in a nice city and I went to a great school and I had great friends, you know?

You're really selling this book.

Yeah, don't put this part in. [To the recorder:] There is a cult.

Getting over all that was kind of scary and hard. Can I really do this? Then, once you sit down and start to do it and you're like, okay, I write a thousand words all the time; I just have to do that 85 times or whatever. However many times a book is. Mine ended up I think, being about seventy thousand. Then you start to do it and you start to trust yourself and realize, “I do know how to do it.” I've been doing this job a long time. I was surprised, kind of surprised that I got it done and that I actually made something that I'm really proud of and that people like. I hope. I hope people like it.

I like it!

Thank you.

I think it came together really well and I...

Yeah, but you're my friend.

Yeah, and that's why I can't review your book. But I think it works really well as a book, which was my concern going in — that you had such a short amount of time. Not that there's anything wrong with a book of essays, but I think it would be a little bit of a letdown for you to have written a book of essays first because people have read so many essays by you, right?

Yeah, totally.

This functions as a book and there is a narrative, even if it's not directly handed off from one chapter to another. I think it's a good book.

Thank you. I'm really shocked that I can't wait to start writing another book. I think this book turned out really well, but now I know how to write a book and now I'm really excited to see what my next book is. I think I can make it really good. I just want to win an award, Paul. It’s not so much to ask.

I guess it depends on which award.

Well, I'm not picky.

This past Saturday, Independent Bookstore Day, I interviewed author Shann Ray onstage at Phinney Books as part of the ongoing Dock Street Salon reading series. It is impossible to talk about Shann Ray without using sentences that go galumphing off into a long series of ands. Watch this: Shann Ray writes poems and non-fiction, and fiction about masculinity, bar fights, and forgiveness. His debut novel, American Copper, was praised by no less a Seattle luminary than Sherman Alexie as “tough, poetic, and beautiful.” Dave Eggers called him “lyrical, prophetic and brutal, yet ultimately hopeful.” And get a load of this passage from his bio:

He holds a dual MFA in poetry and fiction from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University, a Masters in clinical psychology from Pepperdine, and a PhD in systems psychology from the University of Alberta in Canada. He has served as a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a research psychologist for the Centers for Disease Control, and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

These ands could seemingly just keep and-ing off into infinity, with not a “but” or a “finally” in sight.

Ray is a stellar conversationalist and a charismatic reader. Before he read from American Copper, he read three poems written by other writers — Sherman Alexie, Robert Hass, and Catherine Barnett — and he sang a snippet of the Rick Springfield song “Jesse’s Girl” to further illustrate the Alexie poem. The following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

I don't know if I can recall another reading when an author led with other writers' poems beforehand. Is that something that you always do, and if so, do you always lead with those poems?

I think my wife and I, as we talked after the readings that we went to, we often said, "That was the...boringest thing I've been to." Seriously. That's rude, I know, but there are a lot of readings that are boring. She's a performer and she's a musician, and I'd ask her, "What would you do with that?" So we just talked about it a lot.

I also was, long ago, reading Dana Gioia, who became the director of the National Endowment for the Arts. He's a poet, and he wrote a book, Why Poetry Matters. In that book he said we should be reading other people's poems, we should be exposing people to the poets that we love in readings. I thought, “that's great, I want to do that. I love so many poets. Let's get some of these poems out there.”

He was talking about how poetry got a bad rap from maybe the 1930s through the 1970s by getting taught in a way that made us hate it. Also, a lot of poets for awhile there were very inaccessible. You'd look at it and be like, "I have no idea what I just read." Now there are so many poets — then, too — that are just so accessible and they really speak to you. So that's probably the reason, and my wife telling me when I would get done with something, "That was totally boring. Why don't you sing some ‘Jessie's Girl?’" All right.

It makes everything better.

Yeah, “Jessie's Girl” makes everything better. So when I come across poems I think are very meaningful to me, I might shift these [poems that I read tonight] out. This book tour I've been doing these three, but if I do too many more dates, I'll definitely shift these out.

So we are here on Independent Bookstore Day, and I've noticed in reading interviews with you, that you can namecheck specific booksellers in your interviews.

They have some of the greatest names ever. [Queen Anne Book Company bookseller] Tegan Tigani? That's like Zinedine Zidane.

I just feel like the bookstores themselves — bookstores are always their own work of art. If you love beauty and you love art, it's like being at home when you're in any independent bookseller's place.

Auntie's Bookstore in Spokane, where I live now and I've lived for the last twenty-five years, used to be this massive — just one of the great old multi-floor bookstores. Three floors, everything was books. Then the big-name bookstores come in and that gets harder for Auntie's and it gets a little bit smaller. Then the Great Recession hits, and it's still gorgeous. You can still look up through the column in the middle, but all those two floors up there are now rented-out spaces, and everything around them is rented out. They’re still a big beautiful space, but it's probably a third of what it was at this point. They're living a life of art, and that is counter to the capitalist transaction culture, and I love that. I'm always trying to be in them and be with them.

It sounds like you're always working on a poem or another, and I wonder how that works in relation to all the different jobs you have and all the different writing projects you have, and if you can maybe give us a little bit of a window into your process.

I knew I loved writing — or the idea of writing; I wasn't a writer, but I loved the idea of it — in college. I also knew that if me or my family had to rely on my writing, we wouldn't have enough money to eat a hamburger. I think that came from my dad, too. He grew up very poor with this trapping and sheep-shearing family. My dad had severe poverty growing up. He always forced my brother and I to get good grades. He was forced out of high school. He did not successfully pass high school, but they gave him the diploma because they said, "You're a hellion and we don't want to see you again."

Later he shifted. He played college basketball at a community college, met my mom, and she helped him figure out how to get better grades, and he became a student body president at community college. He went through and did eventually a master's degree. He was my brother and I's high school basketball coach and principal in the school we were in. In any case, that journey changed us into the sort of people who had to get a job. Some of it was leftover Depression-era stuff for him, too. My brother and I both have a hard time not working our guts out. That's a little part of it. But I also didn't want a job that I wouldn't be able to deeply love because I saw some jobs that different family members had had; his brother was an underground miner. But in any case, I knew I needed to go towards something I could love, so that became the psychology pursuit. I've been seeing couples and families as a psychologist for twenty-four years now, and I can see them out of my office at Gonzaga University where I teach, and I teach leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga. That job is what has allowed for the open space to writing for these last twenty-five years because I teach doctoral students every other weekend, so there's two weeks in between. I don't like writing to interfere with family, and I'm a night person anyway, so I usually go about ten to one at night. I've got the teaching job, I've got the psychology during the week, but it's all pretty open. I don't have any jobs that make me get up early in the morning. I see the girls off with my wife to school at about 6:45 in the morning then I go back to sleep, then writing at night. So that's what it looks like. Then carrying poems around, or it depends on what the big project is — if it's a novel then I'll be carrying around maybe ten pages of the novel to work on and revise. When a novel comes out, then it's usually poems, so most times I'm carrying around poems these days.

I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who teaches forgiveness before, and forgiveness figures into your writing a great deal. I find that forgiveness is generally handled very poorly in fiction in that it happens almost like an epiphany. I've read novels about forgiveness and it tends to be a lot of dwelling and then when the book hits the five-sixths mark, forgiveness happens, and the whole process feels very unrealistic to me

Did that happen in my book?

No, there was obviously some thinking into it that I thought seemed really genuine.

That's good.

I was wondering if you could talk about how forgiveness plays into your work in terms of the psychology work that you do, and also if there are any other writers who you think handle forgiveness really well?

To shift a family system, they say it takes fifteen years. For behavioral character change, the research shows about three to five years from the point of what we call total brokenness or total willingness to change to something more intimate or more whole. All of that is long-term, and I love long-term projects. And art is long-term too.

Then I also hate things that are cheesy or too fast. In general, in the research, too fast of a forgiveness is probably codependency. We know that there are people who walk the earth that are almost living angels and I'm happy any time I get to brush my shoulders with them. Maybe they are the best symbols of unconditional forgiveness, so I don't want to over-condemn that either. I think they do exist. I think of Martin Luther King Jr's wife as like that. I think Corazon Aquino from the Philippines was like that. Their vessel is unconditional forgiveness. That's how they live, and I admire that.

In the development of art, maybe you have some people like that. I think [American Copper character] Evelynne’s a little bit like that; she can carry it. But then most of us think forgiveness is threatening, it's painful, it's self-shattering. It's all these other things. I don't think there's any such thing as an easy overcoming of massive harm. I think you're just trying to capture: how do people do it?

I know the Cheyenne, they were called “the beautiful people” by the military during the Sand Creek Massacre, which was a terrible massacre. The US military comes in and mows down the Cheyenne when they're flying a white flag of peace. It’s basically a blood orgy at that point. They're cutting off body parts, they're killing fetuses in the womb, and then they come back to a public stage in Denver and they parade the body parts and things like pubic scalps on the stage, and it's a big party. This is America.

So there's no way to say, "Okay, we forgive." That's just going to be anti-humanity or against real life. So at the same time, the Cheyenne are some of the most ultimate forgivers I've ever been around. You go there, they're not holding anything against you, me, or anyone else in the history of America. They're some of the most patriotic people.

Trying to capture that in the novel was just part of trying to understand ultimate forgiveness. The research now is profound: people with higher forgiveness capacity tend to have less anxiety — significantly less anxiety, significantly less depression, significantly less anger, and (an amazing one symbolically,) less heart disease. So cool. That's kind of amazing. The Mayo Clinic uses forgiveness treatment with all of their patients now because they're thinking it has pretty significant links to stronger immune system. So all of that, that's not in [American Copper], but it's in the bodies of the people in a way. Some people are never going to forgive and some people are never going to ask forgiveness. We have got to spend our lives looking at that if we're artists. That's always the task. How to have it breathe as a living art, and I think forgiveness has a big part of that.

And other writers who write forgiveness well?

C.D. Wright — who just died, the poet — her books are, I think they're just singing forgiveness, though maybe she never says the word “forgiveness.” So she'd be a huge one. Michael Ondaatje, another major figure for me. I think his [books] just have an underlying dignity that's something about forgiveness, even if, again, he might not directly say it. Those are some.

So along those lines, you write a lot about violence — the culture of violence and personal violence. To me you write about it in a way that is not the same as, but sort of in the tradition of, some writers of the West. When I think of writers from the East coast, I don't think of the same type of violence in their work and I wonder: do you think that out here in the West, we're closer to our violent past and that's why it features in the books, or do you disagree with my premise?

If you've ever read about the different nations that make up America, the West is one of them. The deep South is way different than the West, and the northern East coast — you see what I'm getting at. I think we're closer to the direct massacres in a way. We really are. I think there's a violence that is very visceral, but then I think also that we've lost something that the Native American writers didn't lose — and that when I think about my heritage, the Czech writers, some lost and some didn't — which is a sense of sacredness, not just cold fate or nihilism.

I think that the wilderness is oriented towards an elegant and maybe inescapable sense of sacredness. If you write [about the wilderness] from nihilism or from cold fate, you get wilderness as violence. Yes, that exists, that's true, but you almost never get wilderness as intimacy, which we've all felt tons of times in our lives.

I think that's something of privilege to write from cold fate, instead of from intimacy. People make a case in theology for the northern European theologies being cold theologies versus the equator theologies. You think of Colombia and South America and you think of some of the theologies that have come out of there like Romero and others. These are intimacy theologies, matriarchal often. Then you think of native America and you have this attachment, intimacy attachment.

I was reading a lot of people like Leslie Marmon Silko and James Welch again — these people, they never lose the sacredness in the writing. So that attracted me fundamentally to what we're talking about right here: okay, so yes there's violence, and maybe it's pretty framed as patriarchal, capitalistic, dominant culture violence. It's got to be a lot more complex than that. Where are the women? Where is the circle instead of the line? Where is the gift culture instead of the transaction culture? It just wasn't receiving writing as much. It exists, now, it's blooming quite a bit more — you think about the Native American Renaissance in writing and African-American Renaissance. We're getting more blood and flesh that's oriented towards intimacy.

You talk and think and write a lot about masculinity and femininity, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but in the news right now-

Go ahead, Paul.

Yeah, I'm doing it. In the news right now there's a lot of conversation about transgender rights and bathroom bills, and it seems to be sort of tied into these questions-

Totally.

And I was wondering if you had any thoughts about this.

Glad you asked it. I think we all, if you read any bell hooks or you read any of the people of critical race theory or you've been influenced by non-dominant culture, you can see the tension that the nation's in. Heavy, high-level tension. A lot of that tension, as I see it, is the masculine being unwilling to loosen its grip on power.

The research on that is incredibly compelling. Having worked with marriages, and I think we all know biologically, we all understand that we're made up chromosomally and biologically masculine and feminine, each person and the collective. So there's maybe no such thing as only masculine or only feminine. I think of that binary and how I think the transgender movement is collapsing or fracturing the binary, which is helpful to a nation that's been too linear. It doesn't mean our country isn't beautiful and a great place to live, if you've ever lived in other countries and especially in really desperate situations. We do have a beautiful country and a great country to live in in a lot of ways.

I think as artists we're trying to critique the things that maybe need to be critiqued. I'm always trying to do that in regard to the masculine and the feminine in that — what is a holistic masculine or feminine? That holistic masculine or feminine does something different with power. Okay: it's tough for people to relate to each other, tough for men and women to relate to each other, it's tough for men and men to relate to each other, women and women. Why is that?.

The divorce rate is high. What does that mean? It could mean a lot of different things. I think that says something about the masculine and the feminine. First of all, if a person divorces once, their divorce rate goes to eighty-six percent for the next marriage, if they get married again. You can see why a lot of people are avoiding marriage, too. Then if a person divorces twice, it goes to ninety-six percent. That gets us out of this mode where, that other person is the reason why I divorced. You start going, maybe I need to work on myself.

The stuff on that's really fascinating. Eighty percent of men who divorce, they all share one flaw. So what is that flaw? It's fascinating. It comes from thirty-five years of longitudinal research right here at the University of Washington — John Gottman and their teams of researchers. That flaw is those men do not receive the influence of the feminine. That's such a gorgeous finding. It tenders us down even hearing it. They don't receive the influence of the feminine. In a way, a man's work is to receive the influence of the feminine. That's a beautiful conception in a lot of ways. Eighty percent of women who divorce all share one flaw. Contempt for the masculine. Hatred for the masculine.

That's the context of war. Do you see what we're getting at? So I think the tensions, when I look at that, I think the resistances almost always come from the unwillingness to release some hold of power that I've earned or felt that I've earned. Most of us in our most inner moral core would want to release power in order to give life to those who have been less privileged than ourselves. But the defensive structure doesn't allow us to get to that inner core a lot of times. That's what I think about it.

Last week, we interviewed new-to-Seattle author Neal Bascomb for our New Hire column. Yesterday, Bascomb’s newest book, a non-fiction Norwegian World War II espionage thriller called The Winter Fortress, was officially published. Bascomb is hosting a launch party at Hugo House tomorrow night. We talked about the pleasures and pains of research and why his book might appeal to fans of the movie Red Dawn.

Did moving to Seattle make the research part of your job more difficult?

It's so much easier to do research now than it was 20 years ago. I'm doing this book — my next book — on a World War I escape story. I felt like when I was first starting out writing, I had to be at the New York Public Library, or at Columbia, to do the research, to find archives. Now there's so much available online. Eventually, I have to have someone go to the archives, but I can find out where everything is from my office at home, which is dramatically different than it was 20 years ago.

You did eventually travel for Winter Fortress, right? You were in Norway to research this book?

Yeah. My wife says that I choose what books to write based on where I get to travel, which could be partly true. I picked some good ones: Argentina, and Israel, and Australia. Once I find everything that's available online, then I'm archiving, interviewing, or hunting down people for diaries, or letters. There is a fair bit of travel. Which I love.

What are you doing to celebrate the book launch locally?

I’ve got a reading at Hugo House on May 5th, and then one at the Nordic Heritage Museum on the 24th of May. I picked the right book to move to Seattle around, considering it's a Norwegian-centered story, and there's a very vibrant Norwegian community here.

This is probably an obvious question, but just to make sure, you were done with the book by the time you moved here in the summer of last year?

I finished it here. I edited it here. I actually did all the hard work on it here. The writing is easy, the revising is where the challenge comes in.

That seems like a very short schedule, compared to some of the writers — especially of historical stuff — I've talked to...

No, that's right. Wait. Can that be right?

If you're on a once-every-two-years schedule, I guess that's right.

Yes, for sure. It does seem short, but I was a little late because of the move, which made me a little behind. I had all my research in my boxes, and I was doing revisions, and I was like, "Shit, I can't find anything." Yes.

A cross-country move seems like it would be tough when you’re working on a research-heavy book.

The moving van had most of my research, and then I brought my own boxes, that critical research, with me because I didn't want to lose it.

So can you give the elevator pitch to my readers for the book?

Well, it's the story of the sabotage of the German atomic bomb program. It's the story of the sabotage of Vemork Heavy Water Factory, which was key to their atomic research. Really, it's the story of Leif Tronstad, who was the 38-year-old scientist who built the plant, and then escaped Norway to work for the Allies. It's the story of Leif, and then this group of young Norwegians who were mostly in their early twenties, who escaped Norway, to be trained in England, to come back and fight. A lot of them were local boys to the area.

As I often say — I say it a little flippantly — but this story, Winter Fortress, is like their Red Dawn moment. You know, the eighties movie, with Patrick Swayze? The Germans come in. The local boys go to the mountains, and they use their local skills to fight back. It does have that flavor to it.

I tried as much as possible for it to be a story that told through their eyes. There's been other histories of the sabotage of Vemork, but most of them are heavy on just the events: “they came in, they went in, they blew up the plant.” None of them really had access to the archives, or the diaries, to the level of this book. I'm hoping it's very much a story of people instead of events.

Why is that? Why has nobody done the personal side yet?

There was a book by an American journalist about 20 years ago which was not based on, really, any of the Norwegian archives, or any of the other stuff, I think largely because it's in Norwegian. A lot of it wasn't accessible. Most of [the Norwegians in the story] really didn't want to talk about it that much, but they left so much stuff. I've never had more research — primary, firsthand research — on any other book than this one. I had daily diaries. I had memoirs. I had all the secret reports. I almost had too much, from most of the key players; hundreds of thousands of interview words. It was just incredible. Now that I'm back to really having to hunt and peck for every bit on this new book, it's like I look back at what I had with Winter Fortress, and I'm like, "I hate everything." It was a dream.

Is that also just because of the time difference between World War I and World War II?

Yeah. World War I is really hard. I think a lot of [World War I artifacts were] destroyed in World War II. But in Norway, this is one of their seminal stories. It's sort of like the Boston Tea Party, but for Norway. These guys recorded their experiences. In fact, Leif Tronstad, when four of these guys went off on their mission, he said, "In a hundred years, they will be writing about this." I think some of that took seed, in terms of their willingness to believe the history of what happened. Most of the primary research, and this was all Norwegian. Probably 80% of it was primary. At the least.

I was in Norway last year, and I did get the sense when I went into museums I got the sense that they were trying very hard to impress upon visitors that there was a healthy resistance movement during World War II. It seems as though the country is still very concerned with how they tell their own story. Did you have a hard time parsing what happened from the story that the Norwegians told themselves? Did you have a hard time as an outsider separating the truth from the legends?

I definitely felt like in Norway, the presence of World War II is still pretty strong. I mean, I felt that way in Europe, too, but in Norway, they really were under German thumb for almost 5 years, pretty brutally.

Norway was occupied in 1940, right? Germans essentially ran the country. And for 60 years, or 50 years, they've done one of two things: they've either built up this heroic resistance, which was robust. There was a robust resistance, with a lot of sacrifice, and a lot of courageous acts. But there was also a lot of collaboration. There were also a lot of people who just lived their lives. I think for 50 years, they largely centered, focused on, the courage. Which is natural. I think in the last 10 years or so, they really historically made efforts to examine this collaboration.

I felt like when I was there, there was a sort of a resistance to [examining the collaboration], again. Like, "Okay, we've seen that. Now let's go back to the history of the resistance." I felt like in my research I saw all three sides of it. There were collaborationists, and there was some pretty brutal stuff. That sort of murky history is there. It's there in Winter Fortress, for sure.

While the City Slept will almost certainly be one of the best books I'll read this year. But I worked with its author, Eli Sanders, for almost ten years at The Stranger, and so there's too much of a conflict of interest for me to review it. (We published Martin McClellan's great review of the book yesterday; you should read it.) Instead, I met with Eli on Saturday, January 23rd for an interview about the process of writing While the City Slept, the structure of the book, the benefits of taking your time to tell a story, and what Seattleites can do to fix our broken mental health care system. The following is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

I really like the book.

Thank you.

Which you know, it's always a little tense when somebody you know writes a book. But I very much enjoyed it. One of the fears that I have with articles that are expanded into book form is that there's not enough material to fill a book, or that it's going to feel like a padded-up version of the article. I know that's something that you were consciously aware of when you were going in to write it. It's structured like a book. It's not a blown-up version of the article, or the articles. It's full of additional information and told in a different way. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your thoughts on the transition from the article to a finished, published product.

I didn't want at all to do some sort of book-length version of the one article that people had read. I actually worry that people will hear about the book and think it is just a book-length version of that article.

So that's not what this is and it wasn't my intent. I didn't know going in exactly what I would find and what I would create. The idea was to learn a lot more about the paths of all three of the people whose lives intersected that night. Even after having written the piece about Jennifer's testimony and even having written a short feature in 2009 about Isaiah Kalebu's path in the many months before the crime, there was a lot that I didn't know.

I saw this as an opportunity to find out what I didn't know and also to do something that I had never gotten to do with crime writing before — even with this crime, which I had written a fair amount about. And that was really get into it at a length and over a period of time. I thought maybe I could do something that was more worthwhile. I felt with other stories that I've done in the past, particularly some of the very first stories I ever wrote in Seattle, which were just, like, police blotter items for the Seattle Times when I was just an intern and learning how to do this. It never felt satisfying with respect to crime writing, and I always felt like I just barely scratched the surface of what was going on and wasn't really providing much useful intensive insight.

I was curious before it came out what the classification of the book would be. On the advance reader copy, the publisher suggested to shelve it under “social sciences.” I was wondering if this is something you talked about with the publisher? I think the book's going wind up in the true crime section of most bookstores, so I was wondering how you felt about that.

I left that to them; I actually didn't even know what category they would put it in. We had a very brief conversation once. I knew that my editor was thinking about where to put it. I kind of personally liked that it was not easy to slot into one of those categories and say, "This is that thing that I've seen over and over again." I know it's not completely new, but it’s different relative to what is out there — the bulk of what's out there — when it comes to true crime.

I know you interviewed Ann Rule when you were at the Seattle Times, and she’s kind of a central figure in true crime, both nationally and locally. Do you have any thoughts on true crime as a genre?

I enjoyed meeting Ann Rule. I respect her body of work and what she did. Also, having sat with just one crime for years now as a writer, I respect the hell out of her ability to sit with multiple crimes over many years. That's not easy.

When I think about typical true crime writing — so leave Ann Rule aside, because I actually think she did try to move the bounds of the genre a bit. She certainly moved it in terms of whether a woman could write about crime — I think that there is true crime writing that exists really just to scare people. It presents a one-dimensional villain who appears out of nowhere and does something and disappears and by the end of the book is caught. The book leaves you with this kind of abstract fear that you have nothing to do with: this is going to happen to you sometime. There's obviously something exciting about experiencing that fear because people buy true crime books.

I may not know what the hell I'm talking about in terms of the motivation of true crime readers. I may be way over-simplifying what's drawing people to the genre, or to those types of books within the genre. Anyway, that is what I had in mind as what I didn't want to to do.

One of the things that sort of did put Ann Rule apart was that she did a lot more research than I think a lot of true crime writers do. You did a ton of research when you were writing the articles and you did even more research for the book. How much reading did you do? How much of the time writing the book was spent in research?

A huge amount of it was reading transcripts because it's a very long court transcript since the trial stretched over — well, the court proceeding stretched over two years because [Kalebu] was arrested in the fall of 2009 and the trial was not until the summer of 2011. There was a lot to read on that score, although I was present for a lot of the trial as well and had my personal memory of that.

Then there were a lot of court records that I had the time, once I was working on the book, to go back and dig through. There was a lot of reading court records as well. Then there was a lot of talking to people and a bit of traveling to St. Louis to meet Teresa's family and to see where she grew up. Then traveling around the Puget Sound area.

Did you encounter anything in the research that made you rethink your approach when you were writing about it in your article's perspective?

I certainly feel like the article that I wrote about Isaiah Kalebu's trajectory in August, September of 2009, I look back at that now and I wouldn't have taken that approach if I had known everything that I know now.

What specifically about the approach?

I think I didn't see a big enough picture. I do think that article identified some problems. It identified a theme that continues in this book, which is that there were cracks that he slipped through, but I don't think I saw the cracks very clearly in that article.

Also, I think I can explain it best this way: when I called Isaiah's half-sister, Deborah, to begin trying to talk to her for this story, our first conversation was her bringing up that article, which had a headline that was, "The Mind of Kalebu." She wasn't happy with me, and that was years after that article had run. She said, "How do you know the mind of Kalebu? You don't know anything."

She was right. Compared to what she knew, I didn't know anything. Compared to what I know now, I didn't know anything. I did not know the mind of Kalebu. I don't think I do now. This whole experience has made me even more aware that no one can really know, fully, another person's mind. I was aware of that before, but not quite as deeply. Her upset is also another indicator of what that article just couldn't do at the time and what I hope to do more with this book, which is provide a fuller portrait of his path and his life. Deborah, when she was willing to talk to me, has helped me paint the portrait.

In “The Bravest Woman in Seattle”, you don't name Teresa Butz's partner, which is pretty standard operating procedure. In the book you do. You've developed at this point a pretty long relationship with Jennifer Hopper. I was wondering if you could share what you're willing to share about the facets of privacy and dignity at play here? You handled them really masterfully and I think that's something that doesn't get a lot of attention because it's such a touchy issue. It’s something that a lot of journalists get wrong. Is there anything you think journalists can learn from this approach?

One of the key elements, really both for Deborah, since we were just talking about Deborah, and for Jennifer and for everyone who I talked to in this story — and for me — was time. I had so much more time than I've ever had to work on anything.

When you have the luxury of time, you can have an encounter like I had with Deborah where one day, the conversation isn't good. She's telling me something I need to hear about her anger. We can sit with that and then I can try to talk to her again in a week, or a month. Similarly with Jennifer, the ability for us to have an unhurried series of conversations about this over many years has really contributed to what you're saying is a very productive relationship and for me, unique. It doesn’t necessarily apply to other journalists. It's a hard thing to [tell other journalists to] take more time, because this business doesn't generally allow us to have it, but that has been one of the great helps to me.

With Jennifer and what you were calling that combination of privacy and dignity, she has really led the way on that. It's, again, been good to be able to just sit back and let her do that and not feel — when you're talking about advice to other people, I don't know, I don't love giving out advice, but I think errors in this realm get made when people are rushing or feeling such pressure to produce something that they do things that aren't respecting privacy.

Jennifer, you might remember, wrote a piece after the piece that I wrote about her testimony where she decided to come forward and reveal her name. She led the way on that and basically signaled when she was ready to have her name out there, very clearly. Then, in our conversations, I feel very fortunate and also quite in awe of her willingness to just be open, continually, over many years with me as I was trying to learn more about her life. We didn't have to sit there and talk about the crime because she had already talked about it and I had already written about it, so there wasn't a lot that we needed to discuss in terms of the particular details of that night. I was grateful for that, personally.

We spent a lot of time talking about Teresa and about Jennifer and about their relationship. It was a huge help to me in building the portraits of Jennifer and Teresa that I try to present in the book.

One of the more surprising aspect of the book to me was when you recount Teresa's experience with a DUI. I was wondering if you struggled with including that in the book or if it was something that you didn't have a problem with?

Do you mind if I ask why it was surprising?

No. I think maybe, there's this whole tendency not to speak ill of the dead. I think that within the context of a true crime book, there are very few authors — like Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and a few others like that — who go so in-depth into people's backgrounds. I think that in a more traditional book like this there would have been, if it were the mass market paperback you’d find in a supermarket, the writer probably would have left the DUI out because it would have interfered with the narrative of…

Of a purely perfect...

Yeah. People like their victims to be innocent. The two words go together.

The reason I paused is because I was going to use the word “innocent” and I switched it to “perfect” because Teresa was innocent in terms of she didn't deserve this in the slightest. Her DUI has no connection to that.

Oh, no! You certainly don't make it seem like that.

Right, but she is not perfect. No one in this book is perfect and it's part of what I love about Teresa, and in talking to people, [it’s] what they loved about Teresa. She was a wonderfully, heart-on-her-sleeve, flaws-out-in-the-open human. It would have been wrong to sketch a portrait of her as an image of perfection. No one thought that, least of all Teresa.

But her great qualities were so great. There's a way in which you can also, I hope, see them more clearly when they're combined with the less perfect qualities that we all have. The imperfections provide a kind of relief, or a contrast, say, that allows you to see more clearly the wonderful warmth and energy and enthusiasm and perseverance and willingness to self-reflect and change as much as she could that Teresa had, that she carried with her.

No one in Teresa's life who I talked to tried to hide that she struggled at times with her drinking. No one saw that as an eternal condemnation or something like that. It was just Teresa. It was just a part of her. Her willingness to struggle with it and talk to people about it — when she met Jen, it was one of the first things that she brought up, the DUI. She brought it up to say, "That was a me that I didn't like as much and I'm working on being a better me."

I don't know. I felt like it was a part of who she was — and also in the DUI you see Teresa. She's wearing these two inch high-heeled boots that the officer remarks on. She's just been at R Place with some friends. She's driving from the center of Capitol Hill where she can have her really exciting gay life to where she was living at the time, which was Renton, which connects to the economic realities that she struggled with.

So, I included it because I thought it was a part of her and not to me an all-damning part of her. It was just illuminating in multiple ways, and a part of her stories that she didn't hide from other people and that other people didn't hide from me. I didn't go around and find this and then present it to other people. I had heard about it, so I went and looked to confirm it.

Also, people can't always place things chronologically in their memory. "It happened sometime. It was kind of before this. In this year maybe." I needed to get the record to figure out exactly when it happened. Then the record itself had details that were just so Teresa. She's sitting at a Denny's waiting for her friend to pick her up afterward.

I don't know. Maybe you can tell as I'm talking about this: I'm fond of her.

Yeah. You said, "What I love about Teresa,” which was telling, I think.

I see reasons to be fond of her in that interaction. I like her. She's not perfect. So what?

There’s a device you use throughout the book, a macro to micro effect that you use. In the opening of the book you start out with a wide-angle view of all of Seattle and then you slowly close in on the subject. In the opening of the book it's the aftermath of the crime, which almost feels to me as a reader like it's being viewed from the sky or like a tilt-shift photograph.

This happens through the book. You talk about the fault under Seattle at the opening of another chapter, and things like that. I got a sense of acclimation from it, as though you were preparing the reader for what you were about to talk about. It also opens the scope of the story and I think it exposes some randomness to the equation. I was wondering if you could talk about the decision to include this effect in the book and to return to it again and again.

As I was traveling around to see various places that were important in the chronology of this book, I was driving around the Puget Sound basin. I took in the landscape. I took in the geography and then I got more curious about some of the geological history. I guess I ended up in a conversation with it and tried to bring some of that into the work.

Yeah. It's a very Seattle-y book, and I mean that as a compliment, in that you get to talk about parts of the city that you don't see as often. Especially I think the gay and lesbian lifestyle – you know, going to R Place and other things like that. It was just before gay marriage was made legal, and all the changes that brought on. The whole book feels very much a portrait of a very particular place at very particular time.

If it's not too indulgent, just to even broaden that portrait, my hope is that it's also a portrait of a particular time in the sense of the wake of the financial crisis. The beginning of the Great Recession. The impacts of decisions that were made in that moment and also many years before that moment, and the areas where Isaiah and his family lived, grew as a family. I personally have not seen a lot of writing about those places and those aspects of the city.

Is Isaiah the only natural-born Seattleite in the book?

Yes.

He is?

Of Jennifer, Teresa, and Isaiah?

Yeah.

He's the only one who was born here in Seattle. Jennifer was born outside of Santa Fe. Actually, in Santa Fe, or spent early years right outside of Santa Fe in a small town with a really wonderful name that I can't remember right now. Teresa was born and raised in St. Louis.

Right. Yeah. Which I think also helps to make the story even more of a Seattle story, when the native Seattleites are outnumbered.

Moving on, do you think in general that it's ever possible for a non-fiction writer to be too compassionate for the subject?

I'm sure it is.

Did you worry about that? You're not in the book — you’re not a character in the book, which is admirable. I very much appreciate it. You've been intertwined within these people’s lives for so long. You're a very thoughtful person so you must have at some point started considering your connection to the story.

I'm sure it's possible to be too compassionate. I hope that I've remained clear-eyed in this book while at the same time extending deserved compassion. There are other pitfalls that a writer can fall into. A writer can be too much of a hard-ass. You know what I mean? A writer can lack compassion. A writer can just be mean. A writer could not be open to hearing things that they should hear. I try to avoid as much as I can — and I'm human — pitfalls like that. I think this is a situation that deserves a compassionate view. It's a tragedy. Everyone in it is touched by some source of pain. I tried to hear that.

There’s been a recurring theme in your work. It's sort of culminating in this book where you talk about the way our public health system has failed the mentally ill. You wrote a very good story for The Stranger years ago about a man who was randomly killed by another man with a hatchet, which — what? You made a face.

Yeah. Earlier when I was saying that I've written about a lot of crimes in Seattle — it's just how my career has ended up unfolding. — beginning with very short police blotter stuff, then more recently the crime story that you're talking about. The face was because I include that piece in the number of pieces that I feel like I got to write something but I didn't get to write this. I dipped in, then I dipped out.

It’s something that you clearly spent a lot of time thinking about. I think one of the great parts of this book is that you do the full portrait of America’s failing mental health system that I feel like you've been nosing around for a long time and haven't had the time and resources to go into. I think readers are going to want to come away wanting to do something to fix the broken system.

You talk a little bit about this in the book, but are there any signs of change or of hope with this subject? Are there any politicians making a difference? If a reader reads your book and wants to do something, where should they direct their resources?

First of all, the challenges here in Washington state are just a microcosm of the challenges that exist all over the country. We're probably talking mostly to people who live here in Washington or here in Seattle, so I'll talk about what's going on in Washington. As I try to show in the book, this state — particularly in the wake of the Great Recession, but over many many years — has slashed and slashed our social safety net. That includes our court system and our public mental health system. Both of these systems remain underfunded. Though you were asking about reasons for optimism; some of that funding has begun to come back.

People in need of help are subject to the cyclical winds of our budget crises in the state: why should that be? It shouldn't be. If people want one larger-picture thing to do, it is to not stand back and accept cuts to essential programs at a time of financial crisis or panic.

More broadly, [we need] to reform our state's revenue structure so that it doesn't gyrate as wildly and give people excuses or false senses of urgency about cutting back on mental health funding, for example.

In terms of even more specific things, a lot of these decisions go back to the state, so elect state leaders who care about public services. Let your state leaders know when you feel that public services are in danger. Even saying that, I know that it sounds boring to a lot of ears. I worry that that's the case. Fight that sense of, "this is too complex or too big to get involved in."

People need to stand up for basic services for their neighbors and for themselves. That means basic health care and robust mental health care for people who don't have money to get that care independently, without state help. There are specific policies that can be changed — aws that could be tightened or enacted — but I really think that if people can be more focused on the tremendous harm that's done by cutting back on essential services, essential social goods, and the value of investing in prevention, that would do more good over the long term than any specific thing I could point to right now.

I try to show in the book how much we have spent as taxpayers to pay for the consequences of this one crime. Of course, the impacts of this crime are not calculable on a money ledger, but voters are constantly bombarded with messages that they should make decisions based on the money ledger, on their feelings about taxes and so on. Who's going to save them money?

So, all right. Here's a way to save taxpayers money. Invest in the front end on promoting healthier lives for everyone in our community and reduce on the back end the tremendous cost and harms associated with our failure to invest in prevention.

We just did that, by the way, in King County. We just approved Dow Constantine's Best Starts for Kids measure. All of the arguments that he made in that push we could be making at the state level and we should be making more at the state level. I wish that voters around the state would respond the way voters in King County responded to Best Starts for Kids.

The choice to put the description of the crime towards the end of the story I think was kind of interesting in that it could have resulted in a lurid tone, or the sense that the crime was the climax of the book. You avoided both those pitfalls. The original article was structured like that too, so was the book always structured that way? I was wondering if you could talk maybe about the original decision, and whether it automatically translated to the book?

The way the crime is described in the original story that you're mentioning and now in the book, is through Jennifer's voice. She told this story before I ever told it. Really she is still the one telling it. I think that there's something that feels right to me about that structure. I wanted to preserve that in this book-length narrative. In terms of where to place her description of what happened that night, my instinct would be that it would seem lurid to have that happen at the beginning.

To me, that was not what I was doing. This book is — I’m not focused on telling you more details of the crime than I've already shared. I'm not focused on telling more details than a reader needs to know to have a sense of the horror of the crime. What I'm focused on is trying to show what was lost and show people, as best I can, with all my limitations, who it was, who the people are that collided in that moment and what the precipitating factors may have been and what the enduring consequences have been. Hopefully there are things to learn in that — just from Jennifer's grace and ability to get to a place of forgiveness afterward. I think personally there's been a lot to learn in that for me.

While you working on the book, you were the interim news editor at The Stranger. Right? You were working as the news editor, even though that wasn’t your title.

Right. I was an associate editor doing the news editor's job and some other jobs.

Yesterday was your last day doing the news editor job. Starting next month you're going back to feature writing in a part-time position. You haven't published very much under your byline while you were working on this book. Are you excited to get back to writing? You've talked about the short-term writing and the long-term writing— are you a little nervous about getting back into short-term writing?

Not at the moment. I'm excited to do some shorter projects, very honestly. I'll also be continuing to do Blabbermouth, the week-in-review podcast that I've been doing for The Stranger, which is also fun. It's not writing, but talking.

I'm excited about writing again, period. It's a weird thing to say, “writing again,” because I have been working on this big piece of writing — but writing other things again. If it's shorter, that's okay with me.

I do think I will want to do longer work in the future. Maybe the near future. I'm drawn to it, but I miss the quick fix of the short story that gets out there and you get something from it. I was going to say, "We are such junkies for that," but I don't know. I realized in stepping away from it how addicting, in a way, that immediacy of the feedback in blogging or in weekly writing is. I really went through a kind of withdrawal when I wasn't doing that. So yeah, I'm ready for it.

Are you under pressure from your publisher to produce another book? You can blink three times if you're not allowed to talk about it.

I hope that people would be interested in me doing another book, but the bigger thing is whether I am.

I don't know what it will be yet, but I would like to. Yeah. I would like to work on another book.