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Right so tonight I'm pleased to welcome Miley Milloy to discuss her new collection of short stories both ways is the only way I want it both ways. New York Times writes Though it may seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn't do. What really sets Malloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise disciplined in length and scope and she's balanced in her approach to character neither are blinded by love for her creations nor abusive towards them. Malloy's restraint also comes through not in the way she plots stories which is boldly but in how she chooses to reveal her plots delivering shocking twists in a low key manner as possible and for the Los Angeles Times. In the best short stories by Poe Raymond Carver Hemingway Flannery O'Connor or Alice Munro there's always malaise if not outright heartache on the horizon and less able hands. This convention turns lugubrious and contrived but Malloy's lean targeted descriptions and her ultimately compassionate. I make this journey hurts so good. Ms Malloy's previous works include the story collection Hafen love the novels liars and saints and a family daughter.

MS employees were can be seen in publications such as The New Yorker The Paris Review in Granta. Sure you see the Paris reviews Aga Khan Prize for fiction. The pen Malamud award the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim fellowship. We were very thrilled to have her with us tonight so please join me in welcoming Molly Malloy. Thank you. Thank you for coming. I'm always amazed when people show up but it makes me really happy. I am going to read a little can you all hear me. Hi Grace. I'm going to be a little bit not a whole story just part of the story and then talk a little bit and then I'm as happy to answer questions. The story is sort of the one that the book started with which I'll talk about in a little at the end. And it's a Christmas story which I don't know in this weather maybe seems sort of

refreshing. It's a period piece in that it's set in 1978 and there are no cell phones and there's a child in a car who's in no way in a car seat which I feel like makes it historical fiction. And it's called Oh Tannenbaum. It was a fine tree. Everetts daughter agreed his wife said it was lopsided and looked like a bush. But that was part of its fineness. It was a tall lopsided Douglas fir bear on one side where it had crowded out its neighbor the branchless side could go against the living room wall. The bushy side was for decorations and now the crowded tree in the woods had room to grow. Everett dragged their fines through the snow by the trunk and Ann-Marie who was four clung to the upper branches and wrote on her stomach shouting faster daddy. Pam his wife followed with an armload of juniper boughs. She does not seem to have decided not to say anything more about the tree which was fine with.

The Jimmy was parked where the trail split off from the logging road and Everett opened the back to throw the tools and bows in then broke the tree to the roof with nylon cords. Pam brushed off Ann-Marie snowsuit and buckled her in the front so she wouldn't get carsick. The smell of pine and Juniper filled the car as they drove down the mountain. Everett saying Chestnut's roasting on an open fire in his best lounge singer Kroon with Jack Frost nipping at your nose. He reached over and nipped it and Marie's and she squealed. He stopped forgetting the words. Pam prompted Yuletide carols half singing shy about her voice. He picked up the song again and reached for the high note. And that was when they saw the couple at the side of the road folks dressed up like Eskimos ever thought for a second that he had conjured them up with his song. The two of them stood in the snow under the branches of a big lodgepole pine. The man wore blue parka and held up a broken country ski. The woman wore red

gaiters over wool trousers. A man's peacoat and a fur hat they waved and Everetts slowed to a stop and rolled down the window. Nice day for Askey he said. It was the man said bitterly. He was about Everetts height and age not yet pushing 40 with a day or two of bristle on his chin that broke a ski and were lost. The woman began. We're not lost the man said. We are completely lost. The woman said she was younger than the man with high pink cheekbones in the cold. Everett felt friendly and warm from the tree and the singing. Your car must be close he said you're on the road. The car is on a different road. The woman said. Well we'll find it said in the rearview mirror he saw Pan's eyes widen that him from the backseat. Pam was slight and dark haired and accused him of favoring the kind of blonde who held sorority carwashes.

It was a joke but it was partly true with a bucket and sponge. This girl would fit right in. But arguing over giving them a ride would make everyone uncomfortable and Pam would agree in the end Everett got out of the car and untied a nylon cord to open the back hatch. Pam had sleds and jackets in the back seat with her and he thought she would want some separation of family and hitchhikers. She wouldn't look at him now. You'll have to sit with the juniper boughs he told the couple. Better than freezing in a snowbank. The blonde said climbing into the way back even in the wool pants she had a sweet figure of the car soaping type. We really appreciate this. The man said Everett shut them all in lasht on the skis and tied the tree down. It made no sense for Pam to be angry. This wasn't country where you left people in the snow. The man looked strong but not too strong. It could take him if he needed to. Back in the driver's seat he pulled back onto the road as snow fell in clumps of the big pine the couple that stood under. His

daughter turned around in her seat as well as she could with her seat belt on and announced to the new passengers. We have a CB radio. The warning tone in her voice came straight from Pam. It was identical in some technical musical way to Pams. We're going to be late and her I'm not going to tell you again. A CB radio the man in the park said What's your handle. Ann-Marie looked confused. Your name Everett explained on the radio. That girl and Marie told the strangers her cheeks flushing. Oh he loved Ann-Marie loved it when she blushed. He would never put his wife and child in danger and he hadn't put them in danger now and he resented Pam's eye widened implication that he had you got a handle. He asked the hitchhikers in back. I'm Clyde the man said Bonnie The woman said. Everyone was

silent for a moment. That's really funny. Everett finally said but between his shoulder blades he felt a prick of worry. You must have a CB2. No those are our names. The man said the Seabee crackled on. What's this continental divide. A man's voice asked. Everett picked up the handset still thinking about Bonnie and Clyde. You mean what is it. Yeah the voice said so Everard explains that the snow and rain on the west side of the mountains ran to the Pacific and the water on the east side ran to the Gulf of Mexico. I never heard of such a thing. The voice said that's what it is. Everett said he thought of something the recruiting of a witness. We just picked up some hitchhikers named Bonnie and Clyde. They said How about that. A wheezing laugh came over the radio. No kidding. The voice said You watch your back then. So long as it hung up the handset.

So he said to his passengers as if he hadn't just acted out of fear of them. Where is your stolen jalopy. We parked by fire creek. You didn't get far. No Bonnie said. How'd you break the ski. Bonnie and Clyde both fell silent. Everett drove. The windows were iced from everyone's breathing and he turned up the defrost the fan seemed very loud. He took the road to fire creek which was unpaved under the packed snow. This is it he said stopping the Jimmy. There was a place at the trail head to park cars but there were no cars. Just snow and trees and the creek running under the ice. It didn't look back at his wife. He scanned the empty turnout and hoped this was not one of those times you look back on and wish you had done one thing different though it seemed perfectly natural to do what you did at the time. I'll stop there.

I usually talk a little bit about how this book came to be. But first I feel like I have to talk about how strange it is to be back here. I was an English major at Harvard and this bookstore is so much a part of my life as a reader at a time when I was sort of figuring out that maybe I wanted to be a writer. So being back here as a writer is really intense. I was all my friends were going off to medical school and fancy consulting jobs. This was back when there were fancy consulting jobs for people right out of college. And I had no idea what I was going to do and I decided I would write a thesis about the literature of the American West not really understanding that it was something I'm maybe wanted to be part of which made it really difficult. And everyone I asked to be my advisor was so bored by the topic that they

refused to advise me. And finally a wonderful Ph.D. candidate we agreed to be my adviser and helped me get through it and suggested that I try writing short stories. And I don't I'm so grateful because I don't know that I would have thought to do it on my own. Richard Ford is coming to teach a fiction class and you had to write a short story to get in. And so I wrote a short I wrote something like a short story and it instantly felt like what I wanted to do. And so I feel like this and I wouldn't admit it for a long time because it seemed so improbable as a way to make a living. And so sort of presumptuous to say but I really feel like that year and writing that. Thesis about about this the literature of the American West with no cal per note is so great and taking Phil Fischer's 20th century novel class and sort of thinking about

20th century fiction and then taking this fiction class sort of made it all come together in a way I'm like I said I'm really grateful for and my summer job was as a River Ranger from my uncle on the BLM for the BLM on the green river in Utah. And it wasn't even really a job it was sort of a volunteer position with a stipend and like a tiny trailer to live in when you weren't on the river. And I think it attracted a lot of really crazy people. And I just it just occurred to me this morning when I was thinking about it my uncle was trying to use me as a buffer against the lunatics who usually showed up to take the free trailer and I brought a friend. We went out and the job was nine days on and five days off and on then the day is on you would go out to this place called sand wash. Just one of the most remote places in the United States and live in a double wide trailer which is bigger than the one and check people on the river in the morning it was a five

day river trip through desolation Canyon and make sure they had their fire pans in there and they knew not to touch the sugarless. And then they were gone and you had the rest of the day in the middle of nowhere in the desert with no phone and no internet and no TV and no cell service and I just sat out there and tried to write short stories. And then when I was off the river my aunt Ellen and my uncle's wife her first book was coming out and I was staying with them. So I didn't have to stay in the tiny trailer it seemed to be full of hantavirus anyway. And and she was getting review reviews sent over the fax machine from our agent and their agent came out to visit and I'd never met a literary agent before and she would get up at five in the morning to write before it got too hot and she had a side job working for writing catalog copy for Patagonia which meant she had great samples like River shorts and padded jackets. And it started to seem

possible that this was a way you could make a life and a living as a writer. So then I had a bunch of other strange jobs and I moved to L.A. and I ended up in an MFA program which was really not for everyone but was really good for me. And I wrote my first book which is to the collection of short stories in that program and then I wrote two novels and then I was writing another novel I thought and this and Granta magazine called and said that they were going to put me on their list of the best young American novelists. And I was I remembered reading the list. They do it every 10 years reading it 10 years earlier and I remember the pictures in it and the stories and I think never occurring to me that I could be in such a thing. So I was completely thrilled. But the catch was that they needed a short story in a month and I didn't have any short stories. And I'm really bad at writing them on demand. And so I

put aside the novel and I got out all of the stories that seemed like they might be salvageable all this sort of abandoned drafts and I abandoned abandoned hundreds of drafts. I mean there are so many but these were the ones that seem like there might be something you know I just couldn't get the to work or something and it never quite jelled. And some of them I had abandoned for years. But they were just the ones that seemed closest when I started working on all of them hoping that one of them would go to really always feels like like can you get the car in gear. You know you can have her motor running and it just won't go. So I finished one of them which was a Christmas story and granted didn't care that they were publishing in July and that was the one that I sent them. And then but by then I was interested in the other ones and I feel about going back and forth between novels and short stories that it's kind of like going back and forth between running marathons and sprinting and you kind of need to get used to the pace again and get those muscles back again.

And so but from working on these stories I've gotten used to the pace again and so I wrote a couple of news stories and I had already had maybe three that had been in magazines before that that were done and my editor called and she said she was going on maternity leave and she wanted to make sure because I hadn't actually switched to publishing houses with her yet that I wasn't. But I did wasn't going to have a book while she was gone. And I said no no. And she said well what are you working on. And I said short stories and she said How many do you have and I said probably a dozen. And she said that's a book send it to me so suddenly I had this book that I hadn't expected to write and that I felt deeply ambivalent about because so many of the stories in it were my problematic stories and stories that have been hard for me and it was coming out in the middle of summer in the middle of a recession. And I just expected it to absolutely vanish and you and I also when I was because I felt insecure about the stories in putting

together the order I sort of lead with the ones that had been in the New Yorker thinking that it's like playing spades you lead with your aces. And then you tried to flip the sort of four of hearts and the three of clubs in later. But then people started liking the four of hearts and the three of clubs in the book had this amazing reception that I totally didn't expect. And I feel like the moral of the story is not to give up on your reject pile whatever form your personal reject pile might take. And I feel like the fact that there was something difficult in the stories meant that there was something promising in them. So that's how this book came about. And O'Toole's. Yeah. Oh that's so cool. Liam and Ray are my cousins. O'Toole's is a bar in Helena Montana my hometown. You don't usually look out at a wreathing and see a T-shirt from it.

That's awesome. So I can answer questions. I used to when I first started I would the bookstore person would say I think Miley will take questions now and I would look so terrified that everyone would feel sorry for me and no one would ask any. But it's gotten easier over time. I make a cup of tea. I get dressed I make a cup of tea and then I go straight to work and I have one of those astronaut chairs that tips back with an arm that comes over it with a laptop on it because it's much easier on my shoulders. Writing is hard physically isn't it. It's really hard on your shoulders. So this means that I'm sort of tipped back like that and I just start working on whatever I'm working on pretty much right away. I used to work at night because I was in college and that's when you work. And then I went to a reading an Amy Bender said she works first thing in the morning and does only two hours and then she's done. And I thought two hours seems like nothing but the idea and I know everyone has said this you know Cheever

said it very Conor's that everyone says you just have to be there when it's not working so that you know you're there when it starts working and I really feel like that's true. And that first thing in the morning you're fresher and your mind is making more random associations and you're closer you know you're not thinking about all the other things. And you know it's a luxury to be able to write first thing in the morning but it's been incredibly useful to me also to make the time be the requirement and not what you get done. Because for a long time I was like I have to. All right. Whatever it is needs to be finished. And then after a while I didn't know what was close and what needed to be finished and so I felt like as long as I'm there working eventually something will get done. It depends where I am in the project if I'm sort of toward the end where I'm just kind of sailing through and fixing things then then I can work all day. If I'm at the beginning and it's going really badly sometimes I'll try for a while and I'll try writing about why it's not going well for a while and then I'll just cut my losses stop. And then sometimes like especially early a couple hours I feel like is all I

have when you're really doing that first kind of hard hard work of getting a book going. I feel like by the middle of the day I'll start making things worse and that it's just all the it's all the brain I have to work for a couple hours. So it just depends on where I am in the project. I have no other job. I know I feel really lucky. Really lucky. I have had other jobs but not right now. You sort of have a feeling which ones my work might be still interesting too. This was how it was for me anyway. And then and then just sort of read through them and I feel like time is the great editor. And what happened with those stories is enough time and past that I could see ways to fix things that I couldn't see to fix before. And also because 10 years had passed not 10 years but a lot of years some of them I had abandoned early on a couple of one maybe two of them I had a band and when I was writing my first book of short stories I'd written two novels in between. And what happened from the time I was first writing short stories to the time I was writing now is

I learned to let things go on longer and get a little out of control. And one of the stories that I fixed in here I just meant made it go on longer and got past the point that I thought it should end before and I really feel like that came from writing two novels and from growing up a little bit and just seeing like this needs to go further it needs to have other characters come into it. It needs to go on. But then beyond that it's just sort of a feeling. And then reading it over and over again until it until nothing stops you anymore. For me. I'm terribly inefficient. Well when I was first when I was in university I didn't know what I was doing but I when I was first in graduate school and I first really knew what I was trying to do and I knew that I was trying to write short stories. A writer came to talk and I asked them how you put those stories in order. And and she didn't have an answer. And I feel like now I have an answer for you lead with your aces. I mean you know it's a more complicated answer than that about how things work together and how you sort

of create the experience of a book and what stories how certain stories need to go early and certain stories need to go live. And so that's just the question that I had that I know went on answered back then. Someone once told me and I think this is really good advice to read things like Tolstoy that seem huge and amazing. And like you could never do that but it makes writing seem like this hugely important thing in the world. And then to read sort of little novels that make you think oh I could do that. And to go back and forth between those two and that that it's it's something someone did tell me but I was I it was really good advice and read all the time and write all the time. You mean advice for a writer right. Yeah. I read as much as you can and read as many different writers as you can. I feel like especially if you're a writer who writes dialogue writers tend to be good mimics and I think if you read as many different writers as you can then you won't end up mimicking any one of them and you sort of find your way

into a voice as you're writing at the same time but you just do both. I get ideas about how to do things from books. I just read a novel called the Stone diaries that was actually given to me by a dear friend of mine when I was here and I didn't read it and I just read it and I'm kicking myself that I didn't read it because I would have learned so much and it's so interesting in terms of how it's structured such a strange structure. And why didn't I read it. What was I reading. So. So how do things come from books but like how people are and what's interesting to me. You know what happens between people is always interesting to me and that happens out in the world every day. Carol Shield's Yeah it's not usually because it's so many. There are times when I don't write when I don't read at all and I feel like it just sort of comes and goes. And then I go back to it again. There are books that have individual

books that have made me feel paralyzed. I read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and I stopped writing for like eight months. I was just completely floored and I just thought my brain will not do that. And if my brain won't do that then what's the point. I mean I it really threw me for a loop although I do really feel that if it's not working at all beating your head against the wall is not just going to bum you out. So so trying to sort of figure out why it isn't working. Reading other kinds of books you know it just eventually I just kept sort of in that I'm finishing the notes on a novel and I'm supposed to be writing a book review and that is just that is too much for me. I really am so much happier just with one that time working on the multiple stories was really unusual. I'm usually working on one book only and I feel like that's all I can. You know some people work with music on I feel like my brain cannot do. One other thing at the same time but really it will pass I promise. Although I've never read American Rosenau I won't.

I have so many and it and I can never remember them when I'm asked it. I just wrote a book a novel that's for kids and so I was reading all the Philip Pullman books and I think he's fantastic. But that's just sort of a recent thing. This the stone diaries I thought was amazing but I never read her before you know I feel like books come into your life and then go and it's just too hard to pick favorites. Cheever when I was writing stories I really wanted a bracelet that said what would she do. And you know read all those books those stories and still have them so much in my head. The upshot Chronicle was hugely useful to me. Cheever's novel when I was writing letters and saints because it was a family story told from different different points of view. People in the family and it rotated between them and it just made me feel like OK what I'm doing might be a novel. Philip Roth as I read all

his books in a year I just couldn't stop. And if I recommend there's a writer named Marsay wrote a writer who is a Catalin writer who was really useful to me when I was writing one of my when I was writing letters and say it's also the time of the doves is that during this set during the Spanish Civil War and it's a very innocent female voice in wartime time and I think that was really useful to me in writing letters and Saintes Flannery O'Connor stories I think just blow me away. Still there are a million that I'm not thinking of. It's just too hard. I'm almost always reading as a reader every once in a while I think oh I'm noticing structure and I'm very proud of myself. But yeah I totally read as a reader and I've been reading because I've been reading these young adult books. I just read when you reach me and will grace and will grace and back to back and I don't know if you read them but there are two sort of

new young adult books and they're fantastic. And I just felt like oh I'm so happy I feel like like reading when I was 12 there's no I mean you know I like waiting for it because I just wrote this book for kids and I felt like and my Australian publisher sent me all their young adult books and said here look all these great young adult books. And then I felt like I should read these you know just as I'm editing it just sort of. This book is set in 1952 and it's so it's not really like you and the girl is 14 and apparently for young adults the main character has to be 16. I'm learning all these marketing roles but it's sort of a it's very different from these contemporary books because it's basically a cold war thriller with kids. I never have any idea what I'm doing. I usually start with sort of a kind of charge situation but it's usually not more than a sentence. I read a story that's that's about a family out cutting down a Christmas

tree. And they pick up some hitchhikers. And and I started with the cutting down of the Christmas tree which is the thing we used to do when I was a kid but I had no story to do with the cutting down of the Christmas tree. It just seemed interesting and promising and I and and so they put the Christmas tree on the car and then they're driving down the road. And then I really feel like the hitchhikers sort of appear as they appear in the story. And I think OK well I have to pick up the hitchhikers pick up the hitchhikers and then some. Then I got sort of interested in the CB radio and someone asks then what their handle is and they say their names are Bonnie and Clyde. And it's really as as I'm going along. I mean sometimes this isn't always true. Sometimes I have a sense of where the story's going to go for short stories novels now. But but those ones go much faster. But this is the way I usually go. So when their names are Bonnie and Clyde that seems interesting and sinister so I'll just keep going with it. And I know I'm not going to write an ax

murderer story. So but there's going to be this kind of axe murder or a free soul about this. So what is it about this couple they pick up that's going to be interesting and challenging and life changing for the people who picked them up and then I just keep going and I and I really feel like you sort of stay on the characters up and let them talk and then you follow where it goes. And then you revise and rise and revise. But that that generally is sort of how it goes for me and I never write an outline. I have a friend and I've been saying this forever that I have a friend who outlines her whole novels in her head before she starts writing but she just told me that she doesn't. I'm very disappointed because I always thought wow that would be so efficient. I would be so much faster than you know I go. I go forward like I'm in a dark room feeling for the walls. I have no idea where it's going. Even with a novel. And then I have and then I get to the end and I have this thing and then I go back in shape and think about it and you know I wrote a novel that said over 60 years so I went back and

thought about what was happening in America during that time and who was president and what was going on and that and and what it was about and how it was about the second half of the 20th century challenging this family and what they were sure about. And that part in going back and sort of thinking about things. But as I am going forward I am I wish it were otherwise because I feel like it would be faster but I feel like I'm building the bridge I'm walking on as I'm walking on it because my friends had a movie idea and they thought it should be a book first and they tried writing it as a novel and realized oh this is what we do. And so they told me the idea and I started writing it and and I thought this is fantastic. Well what what have you been doing trying to come up with my own stories. This is great. And I was also in between books I feel like I just finished this one. And so I was kind of I think there's sort of a natural lull where you don't the wells filling up again and you don't have another anything else. And this came in that time and I thought great I'm not doing anything else.

So I wrote you know 20 pages and I said OK what happens next. And they said we don't know. And then. So. So you just kept going. And it's been really really fun and and not something I would have thought of doing on my own again. I need a little push obviously but it's been great. And it's set up for a sequel. I sort of feel like halfway through it I got my own idea for a grown up novel at the natural time and then I was working on this other thing and I can't do two things at once so I was sort of frustrated for a while. But I think I'll probably write another grown up novel next. And then I wrote a family daughter and I didn't know when I was writing letters and saying that I was going to write a family daughter. I wrote two novels. They both have the same characters in them but they are kind of parallel universe. And I wrote the first one never thinking I was going to write about the enterprise again and

then part of it was a publishing thing where I wrote my first book half in love was a collection of short stories and it took two years to come out and so I wrote letters and saints during that time and I never had the experience of having a book out which I highly recommend It's fantastic as long as you can stay in that little world where you are by yourself. Stay there. But so so liars and saints came out and I suddenly felt like I had this. I knew. You know you're always as a writer sort of casting about for what you know. And I felt like I knew something about having a novel out which is not something that had ever interested me in any way before. But the idea of someone in this kind of secret keeping family writing a novel saying it started to seem interesting and the character who was most likely to do it was dead. But I thought well it's a novel I can bring her back to life so I did and started this book that was all my other everything I'd written had been really

realistic. And so I was writing this book that had this met a fictional aspect. If you read it in conjunction with the other book but not if you didn't I really wanted it to stand on its own. And for you to be able to read them in either order. But what I wanted basically in the second book The First Book is a novel that someone writes and so so I wanted the second book to sort of feel like the kind of messy or real life material out of which the more streamlined layers and saints was made and it was it made it really interesting to me like I was it was the same family but it was doing this kind of thing with my head that I hadn't thought of doing but I didn't. But then I was really done. Benign neglect. My brother my brothers in the band the Decemberists and writes all their songs and the lead singer. I don't know. I mean we did spend a lot of time entertaining ourselves. A little baffled but I think especially in

my dad's family that was just something you did. It was like a natural part of life. My my grandfather my grandfather's brother was a painter. I went off to New York and my grandfather and he started that he was a lawyer and a judge my grandfather but he directed plays and made pottery the two of them when there was a drought and there was nothing to do on the ranch before he even went to law school. They would make pottery and they would make glazes and there's still a glaze called Mulloy black and they started and they tried to find in the blacksmith kiln but it totally melted it. So they went to the local brickyard and they asked if they could use the brick ovens and they started making pottery in the brick ovens. And and now there's like this huge ceramic center in Helena that all these people come from all over the world to to come make pottery there and it's all because they were bored because there was nothing to harvest. And I you know my grandmother wrote for a local paper my uncle was in a band and my dad takes amazing photographs. But it was always something you do on the side. It was never something that. And the uncle who was a

painter basically died because he was living in this freezing flat in New York. And so I feel like he was this sort of object lesson about trying to make a living as an artist and everyone felt strongly that you should do. And my grandparents really who were these sort of already people really thought I should be a scientist because we needed women in the sciences and you know none of them were any remotely interested. And I still sort of feel like that like science smart is smarter and that I should have gone to med school. But but they. So I feel like that because it is a thing that you did but not as a job. And then there was a while when my brother was working in a pizza shop and in a band and I was trying to write short stories and none of them published and my sister wanted to be a musical theater actress. And my dad was just like oh my god. One of my children needs to get a job. Someone said and I don't know who it is that to write the historical. Right. Right. Period. Things you need to read to books and close your eyes.

I there's a great book called Austerity Britain 1946 to 1951 it's about England after the war. It's set in London. The book and it's fantastic it's all contemporary accounts. There was this thing I didn't know about called Mass Observation where they just it was like a big sociological experiment where they just wanted people to write down ordinary things that happened in their lives. So some of that comes from that some of that comes from some sort of memoirs some it comes from oral histories but it's all about it's all contemporary accounts of what happened after the war. It's totally fascinating. So I just read all of that and then kind of start and I'd actually just read that anyway. So it was really just lucky. And then read some sort of Cold War stuff oh it's a poem by A.R. Ammon's that I always liked. It's wonderful. I actually learned it from my thesis advisor who told me to write short stories as a poetry critic. One can't have it both ways and both ways is the only way I want it. It's just two words on a

line and it was always there and one of the stories one of the characters thinks of it I'm really bad at titles and my editor always comes up with like 100 of them. And my poor editor and they told me when I published my first book that I needed to have simple titles because no one is ever going to be able to remember my name or pronounce it or walk into a bookstore and say it. So I had half an love liars and saints and a family daughter. I had these really simple three word titles and I really thought I needed another one. And so when she suggested this one I thought no it's too long. But then I realized how much it brought the stories together and sort of brought something you know made the book more than it was almost by bringing out this theme that was already there and all of them that I just hadn't realized. Yes. In so many ways I want it both ways. But yeah I do like going back and forth between the two.

Flannery O'Connor said that writing short stories after a novel was like a vacation in the mountains although I just tried to write a short story after writing a novel and it wasn't true at all. But I do like going back two and a half it's about a girl who I haven't been repeating the questions and I was supposed to say OK OK. Oh I forgot. It's about a girl. It's just sort of about being 13. And and that's always interesting to me. Iris Murdoch novels always have these sort of ruthless teenage girls in them. And I love that kind of character and that girl is not that ruthless but I. But questions about different settings and how the region involved informs the characters right. I've been thinking about this recently. I feel like setting is always the given for me.

A story has to take place in a certain time you know in a certain place. That story has to take place in Montana in the wintertime because that's where you cut down Christmas trees and pick up strangers with broken skis. And because it's the given I include almost none of that in the first draft and I tend to start with dialogue and have these really stripped down first drafts and then I have to go back in and put in the setting enough so that people can see it. But I feel like long descriptions of trees if the trees don't have anything to do with the stories drive me absolutely insane like I am. I feel like the setting is absolutely essential and it's so boring to me that I put in almost all of it. So. So it's like the thing without which the story couldn't exist. And I have to force myself to go and put it in. I felt Montanas the place I have the sort of deepest vocabulary of detail because I grew up there. So some of the stories that didn't work in here the way I made it work as I moved it

to Montana and suddenly I had things to put into it that I hadn't had before. You know some of the stories are set in Utah because I was living there and because I felt like there were interesting things about this place and I think when I started you know there's that thing called Stendhal Syndrome where people get kind of dizzy and cathedral's and and I have that in bookstores I just get kind of overwhelmed and I feel like that was sort of my way of dealing of dealing with that overwhelmed feeling of walking into a bookstore and thinking how could I possibly have anything to contribute to this was that there was a kind of American West kind of version of Montana that you didn't see in books that I felt like I understood and could could provide. Which is this little tiny thing but it made me feel like OK I have something I can do here. But then sometimes but then I got really tired of it. I got really tired of the western voice and I got sick of it and I wrote a story about a 70 year old Frenchman walking around Paris and I got it completely wrong.

I had him walk from a place he could not walk to to another place and and no one noticed and it was really just because I was tired of my own voice. And yeah I make things up a lot and I think that's how I think that's sort of my natural tendency and that I in fact have to add stuff. Someone asked me if I cut out the flowers and I feel like I never have flowers and I have a really strong feeling about what beautiful prose is. But it's always about rhythm. For me it's not about ornamentation and I feel like when I'm reading things where I feel like the rhythm is off at it it's like watching someone dance not hearing the music or something and so I feel like I read I read and read and read my own work until nothing stops me until I don't have that feeling of the rhythm being off. But I don't but I don't tend to stick things out to make it cleaner. If anything I have to add things in to make it less. Celine