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All right. So tonight I'm pleased to welcome Eileen Lloyd to discuss her new collection of short stories both ways is the only way I want it both ways the York Times writes Though it may seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn't do. What really sets Milloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise disciplined in length and scope and she's balanced in her approach to character neither 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 as Loki a manner as possible and from the Los Angeles Times in the best short stories by Poe Raymond Carver Hemingway Flannery O'Connor or Alice Munro there is always Malays if not outright heartache on the horizon unless able hands this convention turns lugubrious and contrived. But Malloy's lean targeted descriptions and are ultimately compassionate I make this journey hurt so good. Miss Malloy's previous works include the story collection half in love the novels liars and saints and a family daughter whose boys work can be seen in publications such as The New Yorker at the

Paris Review in Granta she received 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 are very thrilled to have her with us tonight. So you please join me in welcoming Miley 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 hear me. I'm going to read a little bit. Not a whole story just part of a story. And then talk a little bit and then I have to happy to answer questions. The story is sort of the one that the book started with which I'll talk about it 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 O Tannenbaum. It was a fine tree Everett's 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 for 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 Anne-Marie who was four clung to the upper branches and wrote on her stomach shouting faster daddy. His wife followed with an armload of juniper boughs. She does not she seem to have decided not to say anything more about the tree which was fine with Everett.

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 rope the tree to the roof with nylon cords. Pam brushed off and Marie's snow suit 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 chesnuts roasting on an open fire in his best lounge singer croons with Jack Frost nipping at your nose he reached over and nipped it in Marines 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 Eskimoes 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 the big lodgepole pine. The man wore a blue parka and held up a broken cross country ski. The woman wore red gaiters over wool

trousers a man's pea coat and a fur hat. They waved and Everett slowed to a stop and rolled down the window. Nice day for a ski he said. It was the man said bitterly. He was about Everett's height and age not yet pushing forty with a day or two of bristle on his chin. I broke a ski and we're 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 in 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 Everett said. In the rearview mirror he saw Pan's eyes widen at him from the backseat. Pam was light 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. I never 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 snow bank the blonde said climbing into the way back. Even in the wool pants she had a sweet figure of the car soaping tight. We really appreciate this. The man said Everett shut them all and lashed on the skis untied 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. Everett could take him if he needed to. Back in the driver say seat he pulled back onto the road as snow fell and clumps off the big pine the couple had stood under his daughter turned around in her seat as well as she could with

her seatbelt on and announced to the new passengers. We have a CB radio. The warning tone in her voice came straight from Pam. It was a delicate and 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 parka said What's your handle. And Marie looked confused. Your name. Everett explained on the radio. That girl and Marie told the strangers her cheeks flushing. He loved and 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 was dented Pam's eye widened implication that he had got a handle. He asked the Hitchhiker's and back. I'm Clyde the man said Bonnie. The woman said. Everyone was silent for a moment.

That's really funny. Everett finally said between his shoulder blades he felt a prick of worry. You must have a CB to know those are our names. The man said the CB crackled on what's his 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 Everett explains that the snow and rain on the west side of the mountains around 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 he said. How about that. A wheezing laugh came over the radio. No kidding. The voice said. You watch your back.

Been so long. Evan hung up the handset so he said to his passengers as if he hadn't just acted out of fear of them. Where's 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 ice from everyone's breathing and he turned up the defrost. The fan seemed very loud. He took the road to fire quick which was unpaved under the packed snow. This is it he said stopping the Jimmy. There was a place at the trailhead to park cars but there were no cars just snow and trees and the creek running under the ice. Everett 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 it seemed perfectly natural to do what you did at the time. I'll stop there. Thank you.

Thank you. 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 is 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 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 help agreed to be my advisor 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 to do it on my own. Richard Ford is coming to teach. 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 would 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 that thesis about about this the literature the American West with no copper no so great and taking Phil Fisher'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. But like I said I'm really grateful for my summer job was as a River Ranger for my uncle on the beach 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 unlike 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 that 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 and we went out and that the job was nine days on and five days off and on then the days on you would go out to this place called sand wash which is one of the most remote places in the United States and live in a double wide trailer which is bigger than the the free 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 prejudice. 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. And I just sat there and tried to write short stories. And. And then when I was off the river. My Aunt Ellen 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 which seemed to be full of hanta virus anyway. And and she was getting review quote reviews sent over the fax machine from our agent and their agent came out to visit and I never met a literary agent before. And she would get up at 5:00 in the morning to write before it got too hot and she had a side job working for writing catalogue copy for Patagonia which meant she was had great samples of like River shorts and paddle jackets. And it started to

seem possible to that 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 it's not for everyone but was really good for me. And I wrote my first book which is still a 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 grant a magazine called and said that they were going to put me on their list of 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 remembered 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 the sort of abandoned drafts and I abandoned abandon hundreds of drafts I mean there are so many but these were the ones that seemed like there might be something. You know I just couldn't get the end 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. And I started working on all of them hoping that one of them would go to real he always feels like like can you get the car in gear you know you can have the motor running and it just won't go. So I finish 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 from working on these stories I've gotten used to the pace again and so I wrote a couple of new stories

and I had already had maybe three that had been in magazines before 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 that I did was going to have a book while she was gone. And I said No question at all. And she said 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. 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 and I also when I was because I felt insecure about the stories in putting together the order I sort of led 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 try to slip 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. Oh tools. Yeah. Oh that's so cool. EVAN AND LIAM AND Rainer Mike O'Toole's is a bar in Helena Montana my hometown. You don't usually look out at a reading and see a T-shirt. That's awesome. So I can answer questions that you

used 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 I wanted to ask me. 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 used to work at night because I was in college and that's when you work and. And then. I went to Reading and Aimee 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 Conners 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 write whatever 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 that 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 to work for a couple hours. So it just depends on where I am in the project. I have no other job. And now I feel really lucky really lucky. I have had other jobs but not right now. You sort of have a feeling which ones might or might be still interesting to you 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 had passed 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 one maybe two of them I had abandoned 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 met 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 it's reading it over and over again until it until nothing stops you anymore. For me yeah I'm terribly inefficient. Well when I was first when I was in university I didn't know what I was doing but 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 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 in certain stories need to go late and so that that's just the question that I had that I know went unanswered 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 something someone did tell me but I was really I think 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 want to not mimicking any one of them and you sort of find your way into a

voice as you're writing at the same time but yeah. With all the time 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 to 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 Shields Yeah that's right. 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 I can't my brain will not do that. And if my brain won't do that then what's the point I'm going to. It really threw me for a loop although I do really feel that if it's not working at all. Beating your head against a 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 and 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 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 a field my brain cannot do one other thing at the same time. But really it will pass I promise.

Although I never read American Routes No I won't but I have so many. And and I can never remember them when I am 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 the stone diaries I thought was amazing but I never read her before you know I feel like books come into your life and they 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 ever do. And you know read all those books those stories and still have them so much in my head the Chronicle was hugely useful to me. Cheever's novel when I was writing liars 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 okay what I'm doing might be a novel.

Philip Roth has I read almost all his books in a year I just couldn't stop. And I recommend it. There's a writer named say Rhoda Reda who is a Catalan writer who. It was really useful to me when I was writing one of my when I was writing letters and science also. It's her book The Time Of The Day. During the set during the Spanish Civil War and it's of this very innocent female voice in wartime and I think that was really useful to me in writing letters and saying Flannery O'Connor stories I think just blow me away still there are millions that I'm not thinking of. It's just too hard. I'm almost always reading as a reader every once in awhile I think oh I'm noticing structure. I'm very proud of myself for it. 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 Grayson Will Grayson 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 I like reading when I was 12. There is no there you know like this really. 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 at all these great young up books. And then I felt like I should read these you know just as I'm editing it to sort of this book is set in 1052 and it's so it's not really like the girls 14 and apparently for young adults the main character has to be 16 and 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 that never have any what the 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 says that about a

family 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 a 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 hitchhiker 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 not. But but. Those ones go much faster. But this is the way you usually go. So so when their names are Bonnie and Clyde that seems interesting and sinister so I'll just keep going with it. And and I know I'm

not going to write an ax murderer story. So but there's going to be this kind of axe murderer free so 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 pick them up. And then I just keep going and I really feel like you sort of stand the characters up and let them talk and then you follow where it goes and then you rise and rise and rise. But that that generally is sort of how it goes for me. Why 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 does tell 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 now. 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

set over 60 years so I went back and thought about what was happening in 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 of going back and sort of thinking about things but as I'm Going forward I mean 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 an humble home and realized 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 have I been doing trying to come up with my own story is this is great. And I was also in between books I feel like I just finished this one and so I was kind of at I think there's sort of a natural lower 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. He 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 grownup novel next. And then I wrote a family daughter and I didn't know when I was writing liars and saints 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 universes. And I wrote the first one never thinking I was going to write about the centre's again.

And then. Part of it was a publishing thing where I wrote my first book half in love with 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 in this kind of secret keeping family writing a novel scene 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 on my

other everything had written and been really realistic. And so I was writing this book that had this mad 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 virus and science 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 is lead singer. I don't know I mean we did spend a lot of time entertaining ourselves.

A little baffled but I think especially my dad's family that art was just something you did it was like a natural part of life. My aunt 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 went to law school they would make pottery and they would make glazes and there's still a glaze called Malloy black. And they started and they tried to fire it 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 the local paper my uncle was in a band

and. And my dad takes amazing photographs but it's 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 so and my grandparents really who were these sort of arty people really thought I should be a scientist because we needed women in the sciences. And you know none of them were any mostly interested. And I still sort of feel like that like science smart is smarter and that I should have gone to med school but they but they. So I feel like they think 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 in a van 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 I don't know who it is that to write that

historical but right right. Period. Things you need to read two books and close your eyes. There's a great book called Austerity Britain one thousand forty six thousand nine hundred fifty one 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 memory from sort of memoirs some of 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've actually just read that anyway. So I was really just lucky. And then read some sort of cold war stuff. Oh it's a poem by A.R. Ammons that I had always liked. It's wonderful. I actually learned it from my thesis advisor who told me to write short stories

has 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 in 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 a hundred of them and put 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 in-love liars and saints and a family daughter I had this 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 thing that was already there and all of them that I just hadn't realized. Yes in so many ways I want to put ways

that yeah. And 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 to the half it's about a girl who I haven't been repeating the question that I was posed to. Okay okay I forgot. It's about a girl. It's just sort of about being 13 and and and I think 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's not that ruthless but I. But the question is about different settings and how the region involved informs the characters right. I've been thinking about this recently I feel like setting is 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 winter time 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 and off 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 have. I feel like. The setting is absolutely essential. And it's so boring to me that I put in almost none 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 Montana is the place I have the sort of deepest vocabulary of detail.

Because I grew up there. So one of the stories that didn't work in here the way I made it work is 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 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 cathedrals 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 they 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 just 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 and I was and no one noticed him but it was really just because I was tired of my own or you know 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 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 strip

things out to make it leaner. If anything I have to add things and to make it less lean.