Grant Faulkner: All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, National Novel Writing Month

Transcript

Marshal Poe:

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and you're listening to an episode of Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast. Today I'm very happy to say we have Grant Faulkner on the show, and if you stick with us eventually we will talk about Grant's book, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide. But Grant has done a lot of really interesting things and I want to talk to him about those so you'll have to listen to that too before we get to the book. Grant, welcome to the show.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Thanks, Marshall. I look forward to the conversation.

Marshal Poe:

This is a Grinnell College podcast and you have an association with Grinnell College. How did you get to Grinnell College?

Grant Faulkner:

I took a strange path from Oskaloosa, Iowa, which is about 40 miles away, to Grinnell. I was actually voted most likely to move furthest away from my hometown in high school and so it was kind of unlikely for me to go to Grinnell, but there was a Grinnell grad in my hometown who I encountered in the library there and kind of became friends with. He told me, "If you go to Grinnell, you won't really know you're in Iowa. You'll feel like you're far away." When I checked out Grinnell, back then you could spend the weekend there. It was kind of wonderful. I, yeah, went to a lot of great parties and saw some bands and, I don't know, made really good friends. I always say it was just because it was really just that weekend, just feeling like it was a home for me, that I met people I loved and that it was just a thriving intellectual place, which was what I was looking for.

Marshal Poe:

As it is. What did you study while you were there?

Grant Faulkner:

I was an English major. Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, your story of getting to Grinnell is much like mine. I'm from Kansas and I met somebody who had gone there. They said, "Hey, check this out." I said, "Okay, I'll do that." It was really the luckiest thing that has happened to me, or at least one of the luckiest things that has happened to me.

Grant Faulkner:

I think so too. The older I get, the luckier I feel to have gone there.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah, very fortunate. Really... Yeah. I loved my time there and it did totally change my life, and that's just the God's honest truth. Let's move on to your decision to become a writer. This is quite a big decision to make. It's not an ordinary path and it's a very risky path so how did you decide to become a writer?

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. It didn't even feel like a decision but I guess it was. I felt very early on in life that that's what I wanted to do. When my mom lost me in the grocery store, she would find me kind of staring lovingly at the paper products and the pens like I had a fetish for those, excuse me, from an early age but the decision part actually happened at Grinnell. I was deciding between two majors that were wildly different, whether to be an econ major or an English major. Very fortunately, I had a semester abroad in France where I basically spent the whole semester reading novels in cafes and thought this was a pretty good lifestyle. I didn't think of the decision to be a writer as so much as a risky one or jumping off the cliff. I kind of didn't know a cliff was there. People kept warning me about the cliff. That's the funny thing about making the decision to be a writer, is that everyone just kind of continually warns you about the perils ahead as if you don't have the smarts to know it. I knew the risk and I was 20 when I made that decision, and I never looked back, I never questioned it, I never had a plan B. I structured my life in my twenties entirely around creating space to write and read.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. That's great. I think, again, our experiences are similar. When I was thinking about going to graduate school, even some of my professors at Grinnell were like, "Are you sure you want to do that?" I'm like, "Yes, I do." I knew I was going to do it, and it wasn't really a matter of kind of weighing things. I knew I wanted to do it.

Grant Faulkner:

Why do you think they questioned that? Because in some ways I thought our training at Grinnell was so geared towards, you know...

Marshal Poe:

Well, I think it is, but I was lucky to have an advisor who was very realistic about the prospect of getting an academic job. He said, "Look, this will involve many years of your life and a lot of work and it has a very uncertain outcome."

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

I ignored all that.

Grant Faulkner:

Good for you. Yeah. Yeah. That's basically what I got over and over again when I... Soon after I graduated from Grinnell, a friend of my parents very close to them, he took me aside very worried for me and for my financial future, of course, and he said, "Grant, if I were you I would study the five top bestselling books on the bestseller list right now and just read them over and over again and figure out a way to replicate them so that you can have a bestselling book as well." This was the opposite of what I wanted to do as a writer.

Marshal Poe:

Right. Yes.

Grant Faulkner:

I'm always like, "If I wanted to create products and sell them, I wouldn't do it by creating books."

Marshal Poe:

Yeah.

Grant Faulkner:

I was all about... Into it for other reasons. Yeah, that was the last thing I would do.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Again, another parallel. I mean, I decided to study early modern and medieval Russian history.

Grant Faulkner:

Very marketable.

Marshal Poe:

How many early modern... Yeah, right? And medieval Russian historians there are, paid historians in the United States? Probably about five.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you get one of those five spots you're sitting pretty, right?

Marshal Poe:

Right, you're set. Yeah, no, you're good but it's tough to get those spots.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Your day job... I'm going to say your day job as a writer but you also work for the National Novel Writing Month, if I have that correctly.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Can you tell us a little bit about what is the National Novel Writing Month? Tell us a little bit about its history and your role there.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. It's also called NaNoWriMo for those who might know that acronym. Gosh, I can go on and on about it, but the short story is that Chris Baty founded it in 1999 and he really just wanted to write a novel. He'd never taken any writing workshops or really read any "how to write a novel" books. He looked over at his bookshelf and looked at volumes that were like Catcher in the Rye and estimated that they were about 50,000 words and figured out, "Hey, you can write 50,000 words in 30 days if you really set your mind to it." So he recruited 20 of his friends to join him. He's a very social guy. Everything he did in that first NaNoWriMo, which wasn't really a NaNoWriMo, we do today. That's what's interesting to me.

He and his friends met in cafes. They wrote together, they believed in that spirit of creative collaboration, they made writing fun, they gave each other different writing challenges and writing activities. Then the next year they said, "Hey, that was a worthwhile experience." They came back and 150 people showed up. Then the year after that, they set up a janky website and 5000 people showed up and Chris Baty had to register each of them by hand. Then the year after that, a bunch of publications like the LA Times and the New York Times were like, "Wow, 5000 people are writing a novel in the United States. Imagine that." Then now we have about 500,000 people writing novels in our programs year-round. Right now, since this is happening during November, about 400,000 people are writing this month.

Marshal Poe:

That is incredible. Go ahead.

Grant Faulkner:

Just to give a little bit of shorthand, I think it's two things. Based on that, it's one part writing bootcamp where you learn the discipline to write, you show up for 30 days to write 50,000 words, but one part of it is a big writing party, just like Chris started with his friends. We have 1000 volunteers who host writing gatherings around the world and we have all sorts of ways to create community online as well.

Marshal Poe:

Well, I mean, this is great. I don't know what the official motto or mission of National Writing Month is but it gets people involved in the arts who ordinarily wouldn't be involved in the arts.

Grant Faulkner:

Exactly. The motto is, "Your story matters." It is largely an invitation for people to get involved in the arts, as you say. I think one thing that happens is that as people become adults, creativity falls lower and lower on their list until it's not on their list at all. There's that famous Picasso quote that it's easy to be an artist as a child but it's challenging to be one as an adult. Part of NaNoWriMo's benefit is just that invitation to make creativity a priority just for one month, for 30 days, and then hopefully you will create momentum to weave it throughout your life the rest of the year.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. I mean, it gets people writing and I kind of think writing is the best form of thinking. I can't really extemporize my thoughts, if that's a good expression, I don't know. But when I start to write, all kinds of things occur to me that never would've occurred to me in the course of just thinking to myself or talking to someone.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. It's interesting you say that because I... I know I'm heavily biased towards writing just because that's what I do and that's what I'm immersed in and that's what I think about a lot, but I really do think that writing is the primary tool of critical thinking, and writing in all forms.

Marshal Poe:

I agree. Yeah.

Grant Faulkner:

There's something about language and that difficulty of finding the right way to express things and while you're having that challenge kind of going through all those nuances and those counterpoints and those doubts and... Yeah, there's just something about it that... I just wish we had... Writing actually is very secondary in most educational curriculum, unfortunately, so it's part of our mission to make it more primary. I think we will have better people and a better society as a result if we could make it more primary.

Marshal Poe:

Well, I mean, I think it's empirically correct that it is a kind of higher form of thinking because if you think by analogy, for example, you would never try to do calculus in your head. I'm sure there is somebody that can do that. I'm going to hear from someone, but you just wouldn't do it. You have to write all that stuff down and then you end up with calculus.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

And similarly with your thoughts. You have them but you don't really know what they are until you interrogate them. You interrogate them by writing them down.

Grant Faulkner:

Exactly. That's why I think the invitation... It is just an invitation to make it a priority for a month. We do hear of life transformative stories in NaNoWriMo, partly just because they've done something more than they think they're capable of. To write a novel is like climbing a mountain or running a marathon, you know?

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. One of the things I often think about the New Books Network is I'm very grateful to be able to talk to these people who wrote these books because I know how hard it is. I've done it.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

It is an enormous sacrifice to spend 10 years researching something and writing and getting it all right, and then there's the whole publishing routine and all this other stuff. There's an enormous amount of effort that went into every one of these books and I'm just very grateful to be able to talk to these people.

Grant Faulkner:

It is, and most of it's for the love, the passion of it, you know?

Marshal Poe:

Oh yeah. Yeah.

Grant Faulkner:

I'm sort of charmed by every once in a while people think I'm really wealthy because I've published books. If I could show them the financial statements, they would be completely shocked and many of them, like the friend of my parents who gave me that advice years ago, they'd be like, "Why are you doing this?" Because money is what motivates most people, but writing books... Actually, I think this is true, that most fiction writers at least... Published fiction writers. They do not make minimum wage. They make less than minimum wage when it's all done.

Marshal Poe:

I am virtually sure of that.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

I don't know how, given the amount of effort that goes into these books, that they could be making more than minimum wage.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

But they produce beautiful things. I'll be a little bit autobiographical here for a second. I never really read fiction until I was about 50.

Grant Faulkner:

Uh-huh. Really?

Marshal Poe:

I was kind of a facts and data guy.

Grant Faulkner:

Uh-huh.

Marshal Poe:

Then I started to read novels and, I got to tell you, I have the utmost respect for novelists. It's pretty incredible what they do.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Why do you say that?

Marshal Poe:

Well, I have a certain favorite... Infinite Jest is one of my favorite books and I've read it like four times. I just think of the amount of thought and effort and perspective that went into that book... I'm just awestruck that somebody could create worlds like that. It's just a remarkable thing to be able to do.

Grant Faulkner:

It's interesting because... Yeah, and our educational curriculum trend right now is to privilege nonfiction. I'm talking K-12 education in public schools and so not... Our society is more and more leaning towards that facts are what matter, you know?

Marshal Poe:

Yeah.

Grant Faulkner:

It's interesting to me to put fiction in question and actually think about what does it provide you. To me, it obviously provides you something very important. It nourishes your thoughts in a very different way, but it's hard to describe why that is. I think humanities programs have basically dried up since I went to Grinnell. It's like it's shocking how small they are now. I think all this attention to technology and what can be quantified and data... I think we need more humanities majors in Silicon Valley, basically. I think...

Marshal Poe:

Well, I think recent events bear that out.

Grant Faulkner:

Elon Musk could do a hundred books program of some sort, I think.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Maybe we should call Elon and see if the guy can support us in some way.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah, there you go.

Marshal Poe:

He might. I mean, the guy... You can never tell what the guy's going to do.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

But to go back to your point about what it does, I mean, I've thought a lot about this, what does it provide. It really provides us with Truth, and that's truth with a capital T, about the human experience.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Even though it is fiction, if you think about it, numbers... What are numbers exactly? Do they really exist? There're no numbers in the world. We create them. They're kind of useful fiction. Similarly with... You read War and Peace or Anna Karenina or something like that, you're getting some Truth with a capital T about the human experience and that has to be valuable.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. I think so. I think it is. That is what it is, Truth with a capital T. Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. I really think that's true. It is Truth with a capital T.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Well, let's move on to another thing that you're kind of known for and I know that you do, and that is 100 word stories. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey into 100 word stories and what they are?

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. For listeners' sake, you and I were... Before the show started, we were talking about how random forces have kind of guided most of our lives and that certainly goes for me in many ways. When I was born, my eyes were swollen shut and the nurses called me Mr. Magoo and so I always had a kinship with the fact that I'm just kind of walking around half blind and falling but kind of landing in the right places for the most part. 100 word story... I mean, it was very random. Actually, one of my best friends from Grinnell, Jake Strohm, his father, Paul Strohm, who was very a accomplished academic, Chaucerian, he started writing these 100 words stories later in life. He wrote 100 of them and made them into a memoir. One night I was on Facebook and I clicked over to one of them that he'd published, or a series of them that he's published, and I just became enchanted by them.

At the time, I'd been working on this... What I call my doomed novel. I'd been working on it for 10 years off and on. I just kind of started doing these 100 word stories just for the fun of it and just to take a break. It was interesting to me because I could... I feel like writers are wired for different distances. They're marathon runners who train themselves for the marathon and then they're sprinters. 100 word stories are much more in the sprint kind of metaphor than the marathon. I would write a story that would end up being 150 words and I thought that was wonderfully done, to get it down to that brevity. I told Paul that and he was like, "No, no, no, no. You've got to get them down to exactly 100 words and the stories will be better if they're 100 words."

Sure enough, I kept practicing, kept editing, kept trimming, finding places to trim away fat. I think writing these stories is a little bit like a Rubik's Cube. You add 10 or 15 words and then you have to subtract eight words and that... You know what I mean? You're just kind of constantly going for that perfect 100 words. I found that writing within a constraint brought out a different type of creativity. It was really fascinating to me what types of stories I could capture through the 100 word lens, which is a fixed lens. You can't zoom in on anything or zoom out and so it just allowed me to do a different type of storytelling. For me, it allowed me... I think I've always been a frustrated poet, and it allowed me to be... It's kind of my form of poetry, essentially, but it's still within the kind of story genre.

Then I also... I liked it for the elliptical quality and the fragmentary quality that these stories have. I think of them a lot like the old Kodak carousel slide things where you're pressing a button and a new photo goes up every second or two. That's the way these stories feel to me. They're little snapshots that create this bigger collage. Yeah, so I've been... After writing a bunch of them with a friend... This now feels like the early days of the internet. It was like 2010, but we put together 100 Word Story, the magazine, launched it in 2011. I decided that anything I do, I should commit five years to it to see if I can make it successful so I committed five years and it's been very successful on the level of thousands of people submitting us stories. We've published them and published a book and I've published my own book as well.

Marshal Poe:

Where are they published? Is there a website, 100 Word Stories?

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah, 100wordstory.org. Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Uh-huh. Well, I mean, what you said has prompted a lot of thoughts and one is, I learned this from an artist, and she said, "Constraints are your friend artistically."

Grant Faulkner:

Absolutely. That's something that it really taught me. Yeah, you... I mean, that's the thing about flash fiction. I just wrote this book, the Art of Brevity, that's coming out in February. I think flash fiction is defined as stories 1000 words or less, but within that it's like a bunch of Russian dolls. There are 100 word stories there, all these different forms of fiction, six word stories. There are all these different little containers for stories or constraints that you have to work within, and each one of them just offers really interesting possibilities. I think flash fiction writers have been so inventive. They've explored that idea of the form, so some people... I know one guy who wrote complaint letters that were a story. People have used... I once wrote a story that took the form of a comment section of a Dansko clog. I've heard Mad Libs, dictionary entries. Take all these forms of storytelling, essentially, in the world and then you apply them and transform them.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Well, it reminds me of several kind of known genres. One is Zen koans. I'm not sure that's the way you pronounce that, but very short and kind of prompts the thought.

Grant Faulkner:

Exactly.

Marshal Poe:

I mean, they never make any sense so the point is to make sense out of them, which is an interesting intellectual process. The other is I think about the biblical stories in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, the first ones, Cain and Abel, they're very short.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

I think they're astoundingly short.

Grant Faulkner:

They are. I think if you look at most forms of human storytelling... Like if you transcribe a dinner party, most of the stories at the dinner party are probably going to be around 500 words, you know?

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah.

Grant Faulkner:

Not too many of them go on too long so the short form's really kind of, I think, part of our storytelling psyche in a way. It's interesting you mentioned the Zen koan because I think the Zen koan offers a principle that I use in most of my fictional stories, and that's that they speak through subtlety and they speak through an ambiguity that, as you said, they invite thought. I think that the weird thing about 100 word stories is it feels like you can dash off a story in just a few minutes but it actually takes a long time to really work on that story and to make it speak the way you want it to speak because you are using omission in a way that you're not using in longer work and you're speaking through hints and suggestions.

Marshal Poe:

Right, the present absence.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

As it's sometimes called. Yeah. Well, I do have kind of a personal connection to this.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

That is in 2011 I was going through a very rough spot in my life and I found myself with a ton of free time. I'm a historian by training and I was thinking about memory. I decided to write down everything that I remembered.

Grant Faulkner:

Wow.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. This is the really interesting part that relates directly to 100 word stories. What I learned was when I searched my brain, it was full of anecdotes.

Grant Faulkner:

Mm-hmm.

Marshal Poe:

It's all it was. It was just anecdotes one after another.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

I spent six months writing down all of these things that I remembered, and they're all little 100 words. None of them is long. None of them is near a page.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

It's all, "This happened and then this happened and this is the way I felt about it and I was five, and this happened and then this happened and I was seven." I think there's something about the way our brains work that is that they work anecdotally.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. That was the exact reason that drew me. I mean, that's what drew me to the form, really, is that I felt like this form represented my memory better than other fictional forms. Paul's memoir of 100 word stories, I thought that was the perfect way to tell the story of your life because I think we do live through snapshots and a collage of those snapshots and that other memoirs, you can construct them into this larger narrative with a rising narrative arc and all that and all the principles of storytelling, but I don't think our mind really works that way so much.

Marshal Poe:

No, I don't think our mind works that way at all, at least according to my little experiment.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. What a great experiment.

Marshal Poe:

While I can remember when this happened, I don't remember what color the walls were when I was there or whether there was carpet or not. I don't remember a zillion details about it. I remember the kind of basic, I don't even want to use the word plot, anecdote points.

Grant Faulkner:

Right, exactly. It's a... When I use the word plot with these, I always say it's plotting but with a slant. Yeah. Well, Marshall, first I'm going to say please submit some of your stories. It sounds like it's... I think you've got to do something. I hope you're doing something with that six months of tracing through your memory. I mean, that sounds like a brilliant... Even just writing a book about the six months could be interesting.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. It was a pretty interesting... I have it. I have it all. I was going to give it to my kids. It's full of embarrassing things so they'll know who their father was.

Grant Faulkner:

Then it's a true memoir, right? If it's full of embarrassing things.

Marshal Poe:

Oh, it's absolutely full.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah, because I tend to remember... I don't know, I don't think I'm unique here, kind of traumatic things.

Grant Faulkner:

Uh-huh.

Marshal Poe:

I don't want to say I'm any victim of trauma. I'm not, but there were things that stuck in my memory and the things that stick in my memory tend to be moments of embarrassment. Sometimes they're moments of triumph, sometimes they're moments of joy. They're absolutely devoid, though, of details.

Grant Faulkner:

Well, it's interesting. I mean, it's interesting what sticks in our memory because so much of our... Our memory isn't a decision for the most part. It's random and accidental. That's why I like the form too, is that, like with Paul's memoir and what I try to do in my story. It's about those kind of tiny subtle moments that likely won't make it into a larger story but they get to be focused on in these small stories and they're just as meaningful as any kind of big experience.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Here's another fascinating thing I learned. I mean, I did this in 2011. I will sometimes remember something kind of randomly, maybe something... I don't know, it's either unbidden, that is it's not prompted memory, it just occurs to me, and then I will go back into it to see if I wrote that down in 2011. Oftentimes I didn't.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. It's all still swirling around up there.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah. There's more up there.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. It keeps recreating itself. Our memory isn't static, it's always moving into new types of storytelling.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah, I just... This is really what I remembered during the fall of 2011.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

It would be entirely different today...

Grant Faulkner:

That's funny.

Marshal Poe:

... because I'm a different person.

Grant Faulkner:

Exactly. You're not the same person.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. It's up there somewhere. I can't access it but it's up there.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Well, I have a novel that I guess, whatever, I've been writing it for five or six years, maybe seven. Anyway, I haven't... Not the whole time, but I recently... I haven't found an agent or publisher for it yet, but I was rereading it and I said, "I need to publish this really soon because the person who wrote this doesn't really exist in the world anymore. I've moved on beyond that."

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I look at things that I wrote a long time ago and I just don't recognize that person.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

Like, how did I do that? What was I thinking when I wrote that? I just don't know.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

I was a different person.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

That's fascinating in itself.

Grant Faulkner:

It is. Yeah, especially if it's something you're sizing up to put into the world if you want to publish it. I find it very hard to publish something that I don't feel that type of mirror, you know, with.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah, no, I agree. I agree completely. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, 100 word stories, I highly recommend all the listeners go and check that out.

Grant Faulkner:

Cool.

Marshal Poe:

Let's move on to the book then, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide. That's a very evocative title, man. There's hardly a... I thought, "That's a good one." How did you get that title?

Grant Faulkner:

Thank you. It was a random phrase in a story and my friend Pamela Painter read the story and she underlined it and she said, "If you ever do a collection, you should make this the title." It largely came through her randomly, but I thought it was... It fit so many of my stories as well because I think there's a question embedded in that, is does sin provide comfort? If it does, how much does it provide? Is it worth it? What are the consequences? I just liked it for that level.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about sin. That usually is interpreted in a kind of Judeo-Christian context. What do you mean by it? Or can you actually describe what you mean by that?

Grant Faulkner:

That's what's been a little bit tough about talking about the book, which I sometimes don't like to do a lot of, but because I... Because sin is a loaded word and people do think of it oftentimes as purely in its kind of religious framework. I think that plays a part in the book but I think there's also just a kind of general sense of misbehaving, like what does it mean to misbehave? What are our societal conventions, which have a form of kind of a religious framework of what's permissible and what isn't? I think it's really about people transgressing norms or misbehaving in search of finding themselves, really. I think sin is a part of becoming, but it creates a lot of mess along the way.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree with you. One of the most amazing things about humans to me, and I don't think I realized this until I was about 40, is that we almost always know the right thing to do, or right can be defined pretty much in any way you like. It gives the maximum benefit for you or the people you love or it's in accordance with some code that you like. We almost always know what it is but we often don't do it.

Grant Faulkner:

Right, because we're searchers like... Oh gosh, I'm trying to remember this quote. I think it was Jung that said, "Inside of every alcoholic there's a seeker who got on the wrong track." That's one way to kind of forgive some of the sinners out there, is that they're seeking.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. I think many... I'm going to generalize here a little bit. I encourage people to read the book, but almost all of the people in the book are involved in some sort of transgression and are usually suffering for it.

Grant Faulkner:

Mm-hmm.

Marshal Poe:

Was that intentional on your part? I don't mean to say that these are sort of... You're not teaching anything in this book, but could you talk a little bit about that? They're feeling the repercussions of their transgressions.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah, I think that that is one thing that just is very random because I wrote each of these stories actually over the course of many years. I think the earliest one-

Marshal Poe:

Really?

Grant Faulkner:

The earliest one comes from the mid-90s and then all the way up to the present. They weren't really written originally with the idea of kind of fitting under this title. The title came at the end of the process, actually, as a unifying theme. But I think it probably speaks to more just a predilection of my own storytelling, you know, to have-

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Are you... I mean, again, I'll go back to Infinite Jest, which is full of people that are really deeply flawed.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Good.

Marshal Poe:

It's part of why I love it. Are you particularly drawn to those kinds of people? I mean, they do... I feel... Pardon me again for generalizing. They do tend to be the most interesting people.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. I think as a fiction writer, you don't want your characters to be too nice. I get very bored by nice characters so I want a lot of transgression happening. In some ways, since we started out talking about Iowa and how I got to Grinnell, I mean, I think it is part of growing up in Iowa in some ways. I mean, I know of course people around the world are drawn to characters like this and exploring that very deeply flawed side of human nature, but growing up in Iowa there is this phrase, Iowa nice, you know?

Marshal Poe:

Right.

Grant Faulkner:

Which is accurate. Iowa has a culture oriented towards being nice and being well-behaved, but when I grew up in this little town it was like... I heard the creator of Mad Men. He said he created Mad Men largely as if he was looking through the keyhole in the door of his parents'... Into his parents'... Like, at their parties. My parents are not responsible for any of the stories in this book, by the way, so I'll just put that as a disclaimer, but growing up in this small town it was like looking through a keyhole through this Iowa niceness and seeing a lot of the bad behavior that was happening on underneath things. It was invisible but it happened, and because of the smallness of the town you just heard about things and they could be really, really shocking things. That was what was actually nice as a fiction writer growing up in this small town, is that I was just so attuned to a lot of the messiness of people trying to find meaning or excitement in their lives.

Marshal Poe:

Yes. The parents' party. I remember this as an extraordinarily young child. I was very young. Some of my first memories are seeing adults just drunk out of their minds and acting badly and I kind of couldn't understand it.

Grant Faulkner:

I used to... My parents, again, they were really wonderful people. They weren't doing horrific things in any way, but their parties... Back then because it was the era of big parties and people drank a lot, and I would just hear these loud crescendos of laughter as a kid. Then I would traipse down the next morning, Sunday morning, with the hopes, of course, that they would sleep in because sometimes they did. I knew nothing about that they were hungover.

Marshal Poe:

Right.

Grant Faulkner:

But I'd kind of walk through the waste of the party, the ruins, and there'd be all sorts of tipped over, you know-

Marshal Poe:

Yeah.

Grant Faulkner:

... peanut platters and half empty drinks and stuff, but I'd kind of claim the sodas and the peanuts and whatever. Yeah. It was wonderful, actually. My kids didn't get that so much.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in many ways it was. It really did open my eyes. I kind of knew them as fully articulated individuals with all of their virtues and flaws.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

But those parties were a particular thing I remember.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah, me too.

Marshal Poe:

That was something. I mean, I remember very well... I mean, this dates me, but my mother's... How I grew with my mom in my mother's household, one for the road meant one for the road.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

I mean, she would make you a drink to go get in your car.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, my father was a lawyer and he tells this story of a judge who was hearing a drunken driving case and he asked the guy, who was probably a professional in community, but he said, "Well, how many drinks did you have?" He said, "Oh, I had eight or nine beers." The judge was like, "That's not drinking." Threw the case out.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah. To link two things that you said, one is drinking or sobriety, and then Iowa. There is one story that I liked about... I'm not remembering the name of it but it's about the fellow who is... He's in the lumber business and he's celebrating his first year of sobriety. I should say also autobiographically, this is not going to be news to anybody who's listened to me, I am a recovering alcoholic and I've been sober for 20 years. I don't say that by bragging, I say it because I've just been really lucky. He falls off the wagon and he meets a Lao woman and then some things happen that aren't particularly good. Can you talk a little bit about that story?

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. It was... Let me think about how to frame it. Well, one part, the woman from Laos, when I was growing up in Iowa in the 70s, I think I was 11 or 12, and very... Again, Oskaloosa, Iowa's nearly 100% white. Suddenly there were all these Laotian families in town and no one really explained to me how they got there, why they were there. I befriended one boy, Fong, and we played in fifth grade in recess. We didn't have a shared language but we played and became friends. Anyway, I was always very interested by their presence in Iowa and it turns out that about 3000 Laotian refugees from a particular tribe that I can't remember the name of them now, during all the war in Southeast Asia in the 70s, they were displaced. They wrote 30 or so U.S. governors and the only governor to reply was Robert Ray of Iowa.

Marshal Poe:

Iowa nice.

Grant Faulkner:

Iowa nice in motion. A good Republican from days of yore.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah.

Grant Faulkner:

So yeah, they came to live in Iowa and most of them are still there now. I did some research on them. I just thought it was interesting to have this. Growing up, I saw the way that they were treated in a whole bunch of different ways, growing up in the community, and how tough that must have been for them too, just to be dropped out of nowhere into Iowa. I have one character who comes from one of those families and works in the Walmart and she hooks up in a... Whatever, a shady bar in town with this guy who is falling off of the wagon. He comes from the pedigree of being a multi-generational wealth within the context of this small town, the family who owns the lumber yard. There are those families in those small towns that are kind of like royalty. Sure, they go from generation to generation and they're the ones who are in court and having their DUI cases thrown out, so as I told the story earlier. They largely live... You can live... If you're of a certain rank in a small town, a certain level of wealth, you can get away with a lot.

Marshal Poe:

You're going to know the judge.

Grant Faulkner:

You should know the judge.

Marshal Poe:

Or why you're going to know somebody who knows the judge.

Grant Faulkner:

Exactly. I was interested in that character because of his... He learned a pattern of life where he could do things and he knew he could get away with them, and so by throwing him in with this woman and him having an affair with her and sliding into more and more drinking, and then in the end... I don't know if I should give away the end or not. Should I, Marshall?

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. I mean, I think this... I won't tell everything that happens in the scene because I do think that kind of some of the smaller details matter a lot, but they have an argument, he shoves her out of the car, it's the time of year that winter is approaching. It's kind of like the time of year now, late November probably. Her coat is in the car and he doesn't... As he's driving home, he sees the coat but he doesn't even think to turn around and give her the coat and that is going to be... That winter is coming and a snowstorm happens that night. Months later she's found after the snow melts away. He does get away with it.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There are two things about that story that I'd like to talk about just a little bit. One is the description of him deciding to have a drink after his one year of sobriety.

Grant Faulkner:

Mm-hmm.

Marshal Poe:

In AA, we talk a lot about how this happens. There's a vast literature on it in AA and so on and so forth. I thought your description of it was very accurate.

Grant Faulkner:

Mm-hmm.

Marshal Poe:

You don't really think about doing it. It's kind of in your mind but then suddenly you're in a bar and you're doing it.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

It's almost unconscious, and then you take a drink and then the drink takes a drink.

Grant Faulkner:

I think it's like what you said earlier, that we know the right thing to do.

Marshal Poe:

Oh, he knew. He absolutely knew.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Then he kind of talked himself into the wrong thing with a... As humans, we can rationalize things really well, right? We can rationalize things.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. Yeah. Then to go back to the Laotian woman, this actually happened in Kansas. In 1978 I was in high school and suddenly all these Vietnamese people showed up.

Grant Faulkner:

Mm-hmm.

Marshal Poe:

I didn't know who they were, and then I learned later they were boat people, essentially.

Grant Faulkner:

Mm-hmm.

Marshal Poe:

They were people that had been brought to Kansas in order to... I mean, they were fleeing, essentially, oppression and starvation, whatever else they were fleeing. Suddenly they were in my high school, they were in a segregated part of the high school because they didn't have English and so on and so forth. I did become friends with one of them. I played soccer with him.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

But yeah, so that... I think people have this impression of the Midwest as being totally plain vanilla.

Grant Faulkner:

Right.

Marshal Poe:

It just isn't like that.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. It's really interesting to me because I don't remember it being a teachable moment. No one even took a map out and said, "Here's where Laos is." You know?

Marshal Poe:

No, nobody did that. No, nobody did that.

Grant Faulkner:

I'm sure the teachers weren't equipped for the situation, and none of the teachers in my town would've been equipped to teach English as a second language. Yeah. It's always been an interesting story in my mind, one that I actually want to do more with.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. The other thing that... You've mentioned it already but I think it's worth pausing for a moment, is that when he kicks her out of the car he really doesn't even consider the repercussions of his actions. It doesn't occur to him that she might be in peril.

Grant Faulkner:

It's-

Marshal Poe:

It doesn't even cross his mind.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. I think that is privilege in action. He's somebody who's always been able to get a ride. He can call on his cell phone, he can go up and knock on the farmer's door, whatever it is, but for her she might not feel so safe doing that.

Marshal Poe:

Right, and that is... Being from an area like this, that is what you would do. You would be out there in the countryside and you would see a house, you would walk over to the house and I'd say, "Hi, I'm Marshall. My friend just kicked me out of the car. Can I use your phone?"

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

They'd say, "Okay." But she might not be able to do that.

Grant Faulkner:

Exactly, and so she does die in a... There are questions about what happened but that is one possible scenario, is that she was just too scared to go to the farmer's door or she expected actually him to have some human decency and goodness and come back for her.

Marshal Poe:

Right. Well, that relates to the topic we were talking about earlier. That's one of the virtues of brevity. You don't exactly know what happened...

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah.

Marshal Poe:

... and so you have to fill in the blank. I mean, I've just filled in the blank in a certain way. That might not have been what happened, but it might have. It prompts a certain amount of thought and consideration as you run the scenarios through your head like, "What happened to her? What did she try to do?"

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Going back to your premise of what the purpose of fiction is, to kind of ponder the Truth with a capital T... It's really pondering it, right? It's not finding it. You're in pursuit of it.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. Well, we've taken up a lot of your time and I really appreciate it. We have kind of a traditional final question on the New Books Network, and that is what are you working on now?

Grant Faulkner:

I am... Well, two things. One, the novel I mentioned earlier called The Letters. It actually grew from a series of 100 word stories that I wrote that are in my book Fissures. They seem to have particularly resonated with readers and so I took those 20 or so stories about these two characters, Gerard and Celeste, and initially made them into a longer short story that's in my next book, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide. Then I just became... The deeper I went with them, the more and more intrigued I was with their relationship and so I wrote a book called The Letters that's largely an epistolary novel, a novel written through letters written by one of them but not sent. There's a whole storyline around that.

I did finish that, or have finished it. The thing with writing a novel is you think you've finished it several times but you haven't, you need to go back and revise it again. It's with an agent right now and I'm... Actually, I wouldn't mind poking around at it one more time before but I'm hoping to find a publisher for it, and if not one of the bigger publishers I'll go to a small press for that. Then I did just finish a book called The Art of Brevity and it's coming out with the University of New Mexico Press in February. I'm looking forward to doing a lot of publicity and discussions around that. Then what's next beyond that... I've got a few ideas but I'm really in this interlude of searching for what's really speaking to me because I know I'll need to dedicate at least a year or two to it.

Marshal Poe:

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned that. I've had a varied career where I don't seem to be able to do anything for more than about 15 years. I'm coming up on 15 years with the New Books Network and I'm kind of getting some ideas about what's next.

Grant Faulkner:

Oh, cool.

Marshal Poe:

I do have a couple of ideas.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Yeah, I think-

Marshal Poe:

I have to jump off that cliff again, and I've already done it a couple times.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah, but it's fun, right?

Marshal Poe:

It is. It's always an adventure. That's absolutely true.

Grant Faulkner:

I'm recently inspired by Nancy Pelosi who didn't start her political career until she'd raised five kids.

Marshal Poe:

Right. Yeah, that's amazing.

Grant Faulkner:

This last... It's not even the last chapter. One of the last chapters of life... If you view it in 15-year segments... Yeah, I'm looking for a few really productive 15-year segments.

Marshal Poe:

Well, that's great.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah. Want to jump off some more cliffs.

Marshal Poe:

Good luck with all that. We'll have to talk to you again on the New Books Network.

Grant Faulkner:

Yeah, you too. I want to hear what's next for you.

Marshal Poe:

Okay, great. Thanks very much, Grant.

Grant Faulkner:

Thank you, Marshall.

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