Episode 26: Autofiction: Universal Virtue or Literary Selfie?

July 11th, 2019
Hosted by Brian Birnbaum
Guests: Seth Katz, George Sawaya & Jared Marcel Pollen
Produced by Katie Rainey

Welcome to the twenty-sixth installment of the Animal Riot Podcast brought to you by who else but us of the warren deceased. Too soon? Too bad. Because today we're talking all things autofiction--that modern neologism for autobiographical fiction. Is it good for the technology, or is it the literary equivalent of a selfie? Does it come from a desire to portray the universal, or is it merely a clever sublimation of modern egocentricism bred by social media and its inherent focus on the self? We're here to break such binaries and exhume the alluvial truth of the matter--or at least do our very bunny best. Join us as we talk about these things and others with a few of our O.A.s (Original Animals): Seth Katz, Jared Marcel Pollen, and George Sawaya. 

>> Brian: Welcome to the 26th episode of the Animal Riot Podcast brought to you by Animal Riot Press, a literary press for books that matter. I'm your host, Brian Birnbaum. We're here today with Seth Katz, a writer of fiction and film criticism whose short story called The Present Progressive, is out with In The Machine coming soon, right?

>> Seth: Yeah, it's just called The Machine.

>> Brian: Oh, it's just called The Machine.

>> Seth: It's a literary magazine of Folsom Lake College in California.

>> Brian: Beautiful. We were talking about You need to do that, shot out. We argued argued for hours, But I guess you just got it in. We'll talk about it later. George Sawaya is also here, a poet whose chap book, A Good Leave he co wrote with fellow OR Devin Kelly who you guys all know. And George is also a fiction writer currently querying a couple of opuses. And finally we have Jared Marcel Pollen, a writer of fiction and criticism whose debut collection of stories, The Unified Field of Loneliness, is out with Crow's Nest books. I also reviewed it, and it's coming out tomorrow with Atticus. My glowing review. And Crow's Nest is also publishing his debut novel, Venus and Document. So the gang is here. We all went to Sarah Lawrence and we are the, What do we call ourselves? The Stillwell, crew, right?

>> Seth: In your dedication to your thesis, you referred to us as the Stillwell Avenue Cognisant. (laughter)

>> Brian: Oh God. Shit. I should have kept that from my novel. I just did. I just did 25 Stillwell, which sounds a little more ominous. I think the number... It's like, you know, signs and semaphores, you know? Anyway, Okay. So we're here. Oh, yeah. Today's brand of fuckary is brought to you by the K Hole, The krat hole, the kratom as they call it. We out here, I'm sipping, I'm sipping Lean. I'm sitting that green lean guys.

>> Jared: Is it still legal in New York State?

>> Brian: It is still legal. Honestly, the fight is looking... The kratom lobbyists are winning right now.

>> Jared: There's a kratom lobby?

>> Brian: Oh, yeah. There's a couple. And with Gottlieb said, stepping down the FDA has a better strategy now, rather than trying to make it illegal here, they're kind of just extorting the growers and exporters out in, like, Indonesia and those countries and stuff like that, you know? So we'll see how it goes. But right now, the legal battles going well here in the States and lovely free United States anyway, so we're here today to talk about auto fiction and the like. So I don't know if you have to define that. What do you guys think? Who has a good definition on hand? Don't don't raise your hand at once, all right?

>> Jared: The literary equivalent of a selfie.

>> Brian: Just disdainful enough to know that it's Jared. (laughter) Um, I mean, I right. Here's a good way to do it. How do we distinguish auto fiction from I don't know, autobiography?

>> Seth: I think it's a hard question because most novels will be interrogated on that level. When you write a novel, people always want to know which parts of it are true, or they assume that much of it is true, whether that's the case or not. And I think that when you're really close to a piece of writing that you've been working on for a long time, you can see parts of yourself in it that nobody else can see so often novels are autobiographical in ways that people would never expect. I went to a Jonathan Lethem reading in 2014 when his book Dissident Gardens, came out. And I asked him about autobiography and his work. Because his early novels are mostly genre fiction, science fiction and, you know, kind of detective fiction stuff like that. Where as his more recent novel seem to be drawing more from his family and his upbringing. And, you know, we're set in New York City.

>> Brian: Were those early novels with a genre novels or they literary mystery?

>> Seth: There's sort of AH, genre deconstructions in a way particularly like Gun with Occasional Music is kind of a SciFi noir hybrid, sort of like Blade Runner.

>> Brian: In a meta sense?

>> Seth: It's very conscious of the tropes that issue. But anyway, let them said that those early those early novels are just as autobiographical as the more recent ones because they were growing out of the stuff that he loved. The pulp novels, the music that he loved, the comic books or whatever, whatever other influences he was drawing on were very personal to him. So those early books are autobiographical in a way that most people might not that most people wouldn't be able to recognize.

>> Brian: Do you have to put some stamp on it that says, This is part of my life? Or do people just know that because we have so much information on people?

>> Seth: I think I'm just trying to broaden the way that we think about what is autobiographical direction, because any fiction that you write is going to be autobiographical on some level, whether it means that there's a 1 to 1 correspondence between a character and a real person, like in the novels of Jack Kerouac or if it's you know, I mean anything that I just mentioned with Jonathan Lethem is just as a good example, huh?

>> Brian: I guess I should have said memoir rather than autobiography, because you can kind of tell right off the bat. You know, autobiography is kind of like it sounds it comes off. It's like something you turned into your eighth grade teacher or something. Whereas memoirs kind of like it. I don't know. It's got that connotation that it's kind of artistic, I guess. I don't know.

>> Seth: But everyone's writing memoirs now. People right 5, 6 memoir throughout their career. (laughter)

>> Brian: I will kick us off by citing an article that Hermoine Hoby recently published in The New Yorker. Hermione is a fantastic writer. Her novel, Neon and Daylight, I think it was published in 2017 but do not quote me on that. She honestly, the novel isn't about all that much, but she kind of just, you know, she has a way with words. She can make you kind of interested. If you're interested in sentences, you're gonna be interested in anything, she writes, because she's got a great pen. So let's try and summarize this, uh, this article, it's called "What does it mean to be a real writer". And it uses two novels that are, I guess, can we agree that areAuto fictions, two novels. They're they're called... Jared. Help me out here. You got him in front of you.

>> Jared: One of them is Loudermilk and the other is Bunny.

>> Brian: Yeah, Loudermilk is the one that's set at The Iowa Workshop, Right?

>> Jared: I believe so.

>> Brian: Loudermilk kind of felt like it kind of asks, Does it matter whether you're the one who's good? Like, you know what? Like what? What does authenticity mean? In a world where we're trying to find, like, you know, I guess to quote the title Riel like real talent, you know, because he's basically been plagiarizing a friend, and even after it's discovered that he's been plagiarizing that friend, he still gets all of those contracts and all of his approbation, you know? And then Bunny is another novel set in an MFA program I believe that one is based off the Brown MFA workshop, and it follows a group of women who basically create this clique, and it gets sort of I guess you could say, paranormal in a sense, where their characters start to come and come to life. You know, I'm just quoting Hermoine on this, but basically she calls them basic, you know, before we get into the books themselves. I guess we're talking about right novels that are about MFA programs, which I could not If you're gonna ask me, like to read these novels, I couldn't have cared less, but her mind, he does make me care like that. She does make me interested in them, but yeah, I mean, they're they're inherently auto fiction in the sense that these people both went to Iowa and Brown. You know, this was there there either satires, parodies or sometimes just critical of the programs they came from, you know, even if indirectly. But yeah, I mean, I think it's more to me. I'll give my first take and then you I'll hear from you guys. But to me, my first thought was despite how good this article is, despite how interested it made me in these books, I'm like, really? Like we can't write about anything except our own writing and like our process of coming to write in this industry that is self sustainable because we keep shelling out money to quote unquote learn how to write, which are all great questions that her mind he poses in our in our article, you know, what does it mean to learn? How do you teach all this stuff, but yes. For me, despite how promising Hermione makes the work sound, I'm like, there's a There's a lot of interesting stuff in existence right now. Do we really have to be writing about ourselves?

>> Jared: Well, there's something so fantastically decadent about writing about writing programs. These writing programs themselves being self selecting, very self reflexive. The purpose of them is to teach craft into stoke talent and to try and celebrate hopefully the originality of some of your students. Which seems to be what some of these books that Hermoine's article is citing our partially about the maxims of the MFA program are things like, you know, find your voice or show and not tell or write what you know all of what she mentions in the article, and it seems like the one that really sticks is write what you know and being a 25 year old in a program like, you know, Sarah Lawrence, like the one that we went to or NYC or Columbia or any one of these New York programs, especially, which gather so many people every year. There's a sense of immediate limitation being a 25 year old in a writing workshop and trying to write about anything beyond your own experience.

>> Brian: It's a problem that's the school itself cannot solve. It's impossible. It's a problem of experience.

>> Jared: Right. Well, not only do these schools not not only the school is not able to solve them, but I would argue the school is actually stoked that and encourage that they encourage that kind of self examination. But it often comes out in a very vain and self serving kind of way. You know, in our program, for example, we had a lot of nonfiction is doing, some of whom we were friends with, some of whom we were not. But a lot of the work that was produced by those students to me always felt very solipsistic and devoid of any broader awareness outside of their own experience, which sounds harsh. But I think it's accurate to the way any 25 year old who's in this cloister who has not much life experience and not much time having worked on their craft. That's about the only thing you could produce under those circumstances. And it seems now like that is institutionalizing itself as a form of writing. And that might explain why auto fiction has bloomed so much in the last decade because these programs are producing these kinds of students who are encouraged to do this kind of work.

>> Brian: Yeah, and, uh, you know, that made me think that has auto fiction not grown in tandem or parallel to the personal essay? Has the personal essay always been this big?

>> Jared: Well, the personal essay is the other side of it, and we see plenty of examples of that in this last decade as well. I'm thinking of a book like Say, The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, which is actually, I think, a very, very good collection of personal essays that sort of transcends the kind of solipsism that I think a lot of auto fiction and personal essay writing suffers from. But yeah, we've seen an equally large sort of profusion of personal essays as well in the nonfiction community. In addition to novels.

>> Brian: Yeah, and it's a no from my from my end. I have experience with personal essay I don't think I have experienced with the auto fiction. I don't know like you guys have already. Emerald City. I would not call that auto fiction. It's like too detached from my own experience, their elements in my life. But the personal essay, you know, I think you have to come to it, and the first thing you have to ask yourself is, how do I make this universal? It sounds so obvious. It's almost cliche, right? You know, like, how do I make this universal? And I think some of the some of the essays that I read where they fail has kind of been asking that first question. It's like, Why should I care? It sounds fucked up. It's like, you know, you know, you're right in like I just wrote an essay about how my dog got hit by a car, and if I read that I'd be like, Okay, well, you know, maybe 40 people got drone struck in Syria today, so why should I care about your dog? (laughs) That's how I know that sounds kind of harsh, but But see, I'm serious, like if you if there's no if there's no universal message wrapped up in what you're writing, it is kind of point. It's for your friends.

>> Seth: Not to just fall back on cliches again. But you know, the universal emerges from the particular. I mean, you can't write something that is universal because there really is no one universal experience.

>> Brian: I guess you have to put someone you have to put someone in your shoes and say, You see how you would you would react this way as well.

>> Seth: One point that I want to make about writing about writers and this is kind of tricky, so I hope that can make this clear. But I think that a writer is as good a subject for a work of fiction as anything else and whether that work of fiction is itself, a piece of writing, like a novel or a short story, or if it's a film or a play about a writer. If you are a writer, you're writing a novel or a short story, and you happen to be writing about a character who is a writer then naturally, you'll be accused of, you know, navel gazing in a way that you wouldn't be if you were, say, writing a novel about a painter, a different kind of creative type. I mean, you know, I know that we've all seen Fellini's 8/2. That's a film about a filmmaker. I mean, that is very clearly a work of auto fiction, and I don't think anyone would deny it self indulgence.

>> Brian: You know that? I think that I think that's a good point that you just brought up. I don't know if I would agree if that's an auto fiction,

>> Seth: Well, it's a fantasy. It is a fantasy. It's It's like, you know, But I mean, he The film is called Eight and 1/2 and Fellini considered it is eighth and 1/2 movie. He made eight films before and then, you know, like a segment of another kind of film. So I mean, it's clearly the work of someone who is looking inward.

>> Jared: Yeah, but 8 and 1/2 is also obviously comical and self deprecating, which a lot of auto fiction is not a lot of affection very self serious.

>> Brian: It's extremely. It was extremely serious. It's extremely everything's so grave and like. So instead of becoming the universal, it's like the universe becomes the person.

>> Jared: Right. I think it's about the way in which it's directed. The auto fiction novels that I've read that have been written in recent years, to me seem to be very inwardly direct. And I think that's that's they succumb to kind of solipsism as a result of that. But you know, work like 8 and 1/2 by Fellini is very self aware, and I think that's what redeems it. And I should say as well that you know, my first novel is also about a writer, so I'm familiar with this as well. But, you know, in my novel, my protagonist is a literary critic and kind of a cultural critic, and I take the piss out of that personality. He is a self serious person, but he's offered up to the mockery of others. And so the novel has a kind of comedy to it that I think is redemptive because I was very conscious of the fact that writing about writers tends towards that kind of self seriousness, and I desperately wanted to avoid that. So injecting comedy and irony into it is a way of saving yourself from that criticism.

>> Brian: Right. It's now been almost half an hour, and we haven't heard from George. And I'm just wondering if George is out there. Our producers were saying 15 minutes. I've got I've got a k hole time warp going on. Um, but yeah, I'm just wondering is George is George just sip in George pours down there. Is George petting his cat? What is George doing?

>> George: I'm drinking a high life and petting my cat.

>> Brian: You're drinking high life?

>> George: Hell yeah. Champagne of beers, buddy.

>> Brian: Oh, my God. Pour one out for Devin.

>> George: And I'm absorbing your commentary. I want to go back to somebody mentioned MFA maxim's right, most of which were mentioned in the article. Write what? You know, et cetera, et cetera. And then we were talking all making the universal personal the personal universal. I think that's that's answering to So what question, Right? And when we talk about something that's auto fictional something like what you were talking about Eight and 1/2. I think he I think Fellini answers that, So what question. It's so what for art. So what For cinema? I mean, it's a Norse politica in addition to being a sort of personal artistic struggle film, right? And he does is Jared said, It takes the piss out of himself. I think about the scene where he's in the sort of orphanage house again, is an adult, and he's got all these lovers and fascinations around him, and they're mocking him, you know? I mean, they're infantilizing of it and teasing him for not being able to make up his mind in the film. I mean, it really is Fellini sort of calling himself a perverted little child for the better part of three hours, you know, and I think that's that's interesting. Of course it is about making avoided is about the making of cinema and as something that that, you know, people who were interested in the creative process could get behind. But answering, answering that, so what question? I think a lot of our colleagues in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence who wrote so called non fiction. And I think is one of the few non fiction programs most MFA programs of which I'm aware of. I'm down here at the University of Florida, where, of course, my partners in the MFA program, and they do not have a nonfiction program. They have a poacher program in fiction program and that is it. But I mean, you know, when we talk about writing nonfiction, we have to answer the so what question. There is this tendency, I think, for all artists and writers to, you know, want to want to make something and then put it on the fridge. I made this, put it, put it on the fridge of little magnet. I made it. So it's good, right? But answering this, so answering the cell, what question is a different thing altogether? Like, really? And when you said when you start asking yourself about your own work, why should anybody give half a hairy shit about what I'm doing right here? Right? (laughter)

>> Brian: I'm not gonna lie. I think it's way better. Yeah, that's ah just for a second. I want to tell you that that's a way better question than you know, is this universal? That is really the question I'm asking before I sit down to write anything. Who gives a flying fuck what I'm about to write.

>> Jared: That's another MFA question like it's another way of asking. That question is like, What are the stakes? You know, like, why am I reading this? Why does this matter? And I think those are valid questions. But at the same time, all good art is self justifying. All good art makes you care about it, regardless of its subject. Would you say that about a book like Underworld like, Why does this matter? Like what? Like, what is this about? Underworld is about everything, and it's about nothing, you know? And it's 800 pages, and it sustains my interest because it's self justifying.

>> George: What makes it self justifying?

>> Brian: George,  you bring up a really good point. I mean, and we can we can get in the Underworld specifically if we want to, but just really quick. I wanted I do want to say that like, I think that is a question that should be taught. And that should be really put up on a pedestal of these programs. Like if they're really interested in teaching writing and you can't fast forward someone's experience. You know you can't give them 25 years to understand the world better and to understand that these little things like if you write a story that revolves around Instagram, there's a 99% chance I don't give a fuck, you know? And I really think that should be the first question. I mean, you know, you know, not sorry not to interrupt, but like, you know, all this stuff about craft and, like how to write. It's all very important, but it's stuff that really just comes from writing and writing and writing. I don't know. How do we How do you infuse that? I'm not really sure.

>> George: I think we have to answer that for ourselves, too, if you don't know why you were sitting down to write a piece of fiction. And if you don't know why, what you're sitting down to write has to be a piece of fiction. Then you've gotta answer. You have to ask different questions. Why? Why why? Why am I doing this? What compels me to do this? What do I want out of this activity? Out of this exercise? Because if you're not writing it for your own edification, then no reader presumably is going to receive some sense identification from it. It's just going to be a Sound and Fury signifying nothing. I think if you've got a strong ethos about what you want to do, what you want to see what you want to play with and explore than that, that sort of does what I think Jared was getting at was that sort of self justification.

>> Brian: Yeah, yeah, and, you know, to make. And I just I guess, as an example of how complicated this business is, you know, on the other hand, I almost feel like to be a writer you also have to have this feeling of I don't need to ask myself why. Because I just want to. I just need to. You know, I mean, obviously that's another cliches like I write because I need to. But like I'm speaking from my own experience when I sit down, these questions are usually about a specific piece that I'm sitting down to work to work on. But I never have to ask myself why I'm writing. And that's because the question is self evident. You know, it's almost axiomatic I'm writing because it comes from this place that I really can't describe that just, like, compels me to write. So it's a paradox, really, like you do have to ask that question, you do. Or else you know, you'll just go off on some desultory tangent and like no one And then it goes like, who gives a flying fuck? You know? But in terms of like brought the vocation itself, it's almost a self evident question.

>> Seth: I mean, I'm thinking about you know, some of the nonfiction writers in our program who would read at the events that we had and and some of them were very moved, visibly moved by their own work. I think a lot of them probably felt something similar to what you're talking about. Their work was desperately important to them. So I think it's hard to really make any definite claims about this because on the one hand, I would like to believe that if the writer cares passionately about their subject and they have at least some skill, then they should be able to make it fascinating for the reader. I mean, I think I think even just the proliferation of hyper specific documentaries, particularly on Netflix, speaks to that. I mean, you know, you can watch. You can watch an entire documentary on Netflix about you know how sake is made. And most people have never really wondered about that. But you know that, millions of people watch that. So I think on one hand, you know, I'd like to believe that, you know, if you are passionate about something, you should be able to convey that passion to a third party, even if it's something that they've never thought about before. But on the other hand, that doesn't happen most of the time.

>> Brian: Yeah, I was about to ask, and that and again we come back to Hermoine's essay. I'm actually gonna scroll and find the part where she asks those specific questions.

>> Jared: In the meantime, I just like to say regarding what Seth was saying earlier, is that I think successful work of auto fiction could be defined as a work that is a work in which the persona of the writer is very closely allied with that of the capital A author and the capital A author is this sort of focus of the of the world, but it's able to kind of transcend its own self interest. Whereas an unsuccessful work of auto fiction is just all about me and about my experience and my reality in my truth. And it doesn't escape the bonds of its own self examination. It could become kind of an inverse, and I think a good example of that. And I say this with all respect to Ben Lerner, because I think he's a good writer. But I found that 10:04 succumbed to that kind of self interest in solipsism that work like a Atocha Station. Atocha Station seemed to have much more self awareness.

>> Brian: I completely agree. I think it's amazing to me how such a smart and talented writer could write a book that I really just I did. I was dragging myself across the finish line, you know?

>> Jared: But a work like 10:04 very similar to Eight and 1/2 is concerned with authenticity with how to how to make art, how to write a novel during this particular time, or how to make a film at this particular juncture in your life creatively. Both of those works ben toward the question of authenticity and examine their own kind of ineptness at that particular moment in which they're being created. So they're actually very similar to each other.

>> Seth: Well, it's something that you were hinting at that didn't really say outright Is that, you know, work of auto fiction should be just as pleasing to someone who doesn't know that it's auto fiction as it would be to someone who does. I mean, in the case of On the Road, I would say about half the interest in that book comes from people who are interested in Jack Kerouac and the beat lifestyle. But the other half the reason that that book endures is because of the pros. The other half is the aesthetic value of that work, which I would argue it has used.

>> Brian: You stand by it.

>> Seth: I stand by him in general. I'm not gonna you know, On the Road is not my favorite work. I mean, I think of Kerouac as a poet, primarily whereas most people think of him as a novelist, right?

>> Brian: I see. Well, if I could just interject for one second, I'm just gonna I'm gonna put this out here and I'm just gonna read this very short section of her mind these essay just to put these three kind of, you know, MFA questions out there, that kind of undergird programs, you know, everywhere. With this professionalization of a nation's art form Three injunctions popularized by the MFA become holy writ right when you know, show don't tell and find your voice of this trinity only the second speaks explicitly to craft and seems readily practicable. It's the first and last dicta, however, that have proved the most influential not through their utility, but through their confounding simplicity. The question isn't whether you should cultivate knowledge or voice the question instead is a screamed yes, But how? Which is kind of, I mean, you know, it's like a referendum on MFA programs, which isn't We wouldn't be the first people to to do that, you know? I mean, there's so many. There are so many writers paying to learn how to write. It's like, you know.

>> Seth: Most of those people are not writers.

>> Brian: Wow shots fired.

>> Jared: No, it's well, just statistically speaking, most of those people will not be writing five years after those programs are finished.

>> Brian: That was like, my favorite thing that Garth ever said going fall. That was probably the truest thing I've ever heard in this in this room.

>> Seth: And by the way, in Garth's lessons and in his craft talk, which I have on tape and watch Yearly, you know, he does exactly what we were talking about before, which is to take the emphasis off the craft ie 'How', and puts it on to more almost spiritual questions of why? Why I mean, that's how he ends the talk, he says. What will you be writing for? And yeah, I mean, it's true most, you know, forget about publication and success or whatever. Most people who go to MFA programs will probably not be writing at all. You know, within a few years. As Jared said, within a few years of several of our colleagues have gone off in a very different kind of career directions and things like that since graduating, but anyway, I was just kind of a minor joke I was making.

>> Brian: Yes, So we, uh, we got a couple of books that we kind of threw out there. You know, we had 10:04 but I kind of want to go back to something, I guess, quite questioning exactly like what auto fiction is. And I actually as an example of what good really good auto fiction might be. I really honed in on Giovanni's Room because, you know, I can't decide if that's really like a roman a clef or like auto fiction or those subsumes the other.

>> Jared: I think Romano clef romantic life is just an old French term for what we're now calling auto fiction. I think they're essentially the same thing.

>> Brian: Yeah, well, it's It's almost like roman a clef has this, like peculiarity to it.

>> Seth: Here's what I think of when I hear the term roman a clef  which is how it's pronounced, by the way. Well, I'm not just gonna go along with saying it wrong, but what I would I think of when I think of roman a clef is a work of fiction, where they're in which there is some kind of 1 to 1 correspondence with the reality. For example, Citizen Kane is a roman a clef about will about William Randolph Hearst. I mean, it's very it's It's very clearly based on him, but it's it's not explicitly about him. That's how I think of it.

>> Brian: You know, the good. Google's definition is a novel in which really people or events appear with invented names.

>> Seth: Which is Kerouac, I mean, that Kerouac wrote about his buddies and just changed the names.

>> Brian: Yeah, it does kind of point to a broader sense of, like auto fiction. Or like, you know, I don't know, but you're you're pretty much right. It kind of is synonymous, but something my Giovanni's Room is like, I mean, the decision to make his character white, for example. It's just these little things. It's like, How much does this distance from auto fiction? I mean, because, you know, I mean, does anyone know, too? Did Baldwin have an experience resembling that one in the sense of, like was there was there an affair?

>> Jared: I don't know, but I'd have to imagine that something similar to that probably occurred. He was living in Paris at the time.

>> Brian: Yeah, but it's also it also wouldn't be insane to say he's a fiction writer. He came up with a lot of that shit. You know what I mean? Like, maybe an affair like that never really did happen. Maybe. You know, I'm sure he's had ones that he drew from. There's no doubt about that, but yeah...

>> Jared: Baldwin wrote that I guess he was quite young. And you know when you're when you're younger, you write I think a little closer to life because at that point, it's right you have right. A lot of a lot of early novels by writers are semi biographical. Even a book like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce has has a right biographical elements to that. And we think of Stephen Dedalus as being a stand in for Joyce, and we define that as being a roman a clef per se, like on the road. So and there are sort of great age gradations here. I just think that there are gradations here between, you know, on one end, a work of straight fiction, a work of fiction that has autobiographical elements to it. Ramon a cleft and then something like auto fiction, which is a very auto fiction, invites the reader to see the persona as the author of the person holding the pen. It tries to collapse the space between the fictional conceit and the written reality, right?

>> Seth: But I mean again, that's that was one. The first thing that I said I don't think the reader even needs an invitation to do that. Readers tend to just do that on their own. I mean, if you go to any Q and A for any book launch for any novel that comes out invariably someone will ask, You know, Is this based on your life.

>> Brian: I don't know if you agree, but I think it's diff very dependent on the material. Sometimes we just Yeah, I mean, if we had Kwame Opoku-Duku on last week. I want to say, Well, by the time this episode drops, I'm not really sure when that'll be. But he was talking about how that question is often associated with black writers. To what extent? I'm not sure. But I definitely agreed with him in the sense it like, there's almost just like I called it, like drama porn. It's like, you know like, especially white people in America. They're like, Oh, I really want to know about that struggle. You know? I know this is a little off base, but it does go back to why do people ask that question? When do people ask that question? Because I don't think they're asking that about Giovanni's Room.

>> Seth: If you've just written a novel like Master and Commander, they're not gonna ask you if it's based on your life. If you have just written a novel like Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, you know a historical work, right? And obviously, if people are not going to ask that if it's any kind of genre fiction. But when it Here's the thing. If you tell someone that you write fiction, they ask you what genre you right in. And if you can't name a genre, then they assume that you write about yourself.

>> Brian: Their heads explode. (laughter)

>> Seth: If you're talking about if you're talking about detective fiction or horror or anything else like that, then people are not going to ask you those kinds of you are Michael Chabon and you've just written Moon Glow, which is about your grandfather, you know, telling you his life story from his deathbed and has the same last name as you then people are gonna ask you which parts of it are real and which parts of it are made.

>> Brian: And then you're going to go, What the fuck do you think? I just have to say auto fiction. I just think it's It's such an unfortunate name.

>> Jared: There's something about it, isn't there?

>> Brian: I can't stop thinking about auto erotic asphyxiation. And like, honestly, that's the thing. It's like if there really is something honest IQ about it and like it really is revealing, you know, and it's just like unabashedly. It's like, this is auto fiction and I really don't want to sit here and act like everyone who's writing about themselves or their lives is just jerking off on the page like it's not true. But I do think that when something becomes an epidemic, you know, it's a problem. You know, it's like, you know, when you have tens of thousands of 20 somethings out there at MFA programs and I can see it, I can see it in some of the submissions I get. I just read a submission, and I was like, My God, this this person can write. This person can string a goddamn phrase together, you know? But it's like, it's amazing the contrast between the prose and the turns of phrase and the just absolute, almost just straight up, immature level of subject matter and the way it's being handled and rendered, you know? So I don't know. It's like it's almost like I do view it as a problem like an epidemic, and I don't know how much it's tied to the personal essay. I don't know what you guys feel about that. I don't really read tons of personal essays. I'm usually referred to them. So maybe my experiences have less left as much of a sour taste in my mouth.

>> Jared: Is it really all that surprising in the age of digital avatars in the age of Facebook and Instagram? In this kind of relentless broadcasting of everything that we're doing in our lives and this relentless attention seeking from the world. I mean, that's why I started by saying that I think that auto fiction is the literary equivalent of a selfie, because it does feel very self serving, right? I think that's one of the things that distinguishes some of the more recent auto fiction books written by young writers than from something like Giovanni's Room and On the Road, because those were much more mature works.

>> Brian: I said I love it because we had Seth shaking his head over here. We have a, you know, I just disagreement. I love I love disagreement. I left attention. I love drama. No, I mean, I want to stoke it. I want to find and, uh, okay, yeah...

>> Seth: I think it's easy to make that argument and to blame social media for a lot of the world's ills. And certainly we can't ignore it completely. But and there's there's definitely truth.

>> Jared: I'm not blaming social media. I'm just saying that it fits into the gestalt of the whole thing. I mean, I think there's a reason for it.

>> Seth: Okay, sure, Yeah, I agree with that. I think that the part that I and if I haven't said this already, I just I don't think we're living in an age of auto fiction anymore than we were before. This is nothing new.

>> Brian: I can agree with that. I think I think it's the but the mode.

>> Seth: It's the same way that's the same way that it's the same way that representational painting changed once photography came on this chair. Once you had a photograph that could mechanically reproduce, you know something in the real world. Then painting became more abstract in response because you no longer need it. You need to keep painter to do, you know, portraits and landscapes. So it's the same. I think that social media is probably having a similar influence, and, by the way, I don't think any of us have read it. But, I mean, we're basically talking around the new medal Meghan Boil book, which is called Liveblog. Tyrant published it. It's about an 800 page book. Maybe it was a year. Maybe it was a month. I have no idea. I haven't read the book, but Meghan Boyle Liveblog. Everything that she did for a certain period of time. So this is sort of a merger of social media and auto fiction in a way that sounds hellish. But again, I have not read it, so I cannot pass judgment on the text

>> Brian: My first thought was, If you didn't do anything with that material and it's just and it's basically unedited, there's zero chance I'm gonna read that book.

>> George: Yeah, it doesn't sound pleasant. I'll be honest. 800 pages of just talking about what you're doing. I mean, it seems like present tense self narration. I am picking up the cup. I am taking a sip. But of course, Assess said, I mean, we haven't read it. Who knows? It could be brilliant, you know? I mean, it would it would take one hell of a writer to make that interesting.

>> Brian: She could be going through something, you know, that makes it inherently, you know, viable as something to be published. But, like, I don't want to say that like, there's no chance I would read it, But I'm saying, like if this is just some normal person and it's an unedited transcript, I mean like that, that's insane.

>> Seth: It's also a question of the of the format of the live blog format. You know, from what I understand of this book, it's you know, it's not written in full pros sentences. It is written, as one would write, you know, a status update or something to that effect. So and frankly, I mean, it sounds like George Costanza's pitch for the show about nothing, which is, which is No, Nothing happened to you on the way to work. Nothing happened. You got up, you went to work, and that's that's an episode, that's a show. That's what it sounds like to me.

>> Jared: Then why am I watching?

>> Seth: Because it's on TV.

>> Brian: That brings us back to the self justification. You know, it's like, Why? Why should I read something? Because it's good, you know? And so then it comes back to the whole thing of them MFA programs. It's like, How do you do that? You know, it's a cycle of questions that I don't know that the MFA program can solve. I do think there should be schools for craft. But I think we all agree here that we're over saturated and a large majority of the people that are going to these programs are not going to be writing or they're not going to be writing creatively, right? And I don't know, like many things in our world today, I just think there's more and more efficient alternative.

>> Jared: I always found the craft classes at Sarah Lawrence much more informative and much more instructive than any of the workshops.

>> Seth: Because the focus is on reading great works of literature.

>> Jared: You don't learn much from peer review.

>> George: I have to disagree. You do learn by studying the greats, but I think being in a room with people and trying to explain to someone why what they're doing isn't working is as valuable to how you write your own stuff.

>> Brian: I couldn't agree more.

>> Jared: What about when your peers or just not very good critics are not very good readers, which is often the case in those classes.

>> George: I don't think it makes a difference. I don't think what they're saying about your work is the important thing. I think that you have their work in front of you. You have to make comments when you come into class. You've got, you know, 10 poems, three short stories, whatever it is. And you have to make a comment and say You start getting into it, you start looking at it. You start taking apart now. I mean, reading the classics tells you what a novel is, what a book of poetry is guides you and what you want to do. It informs you. I think, in the kind of way already said it was a kind of spiritual way is in order. But I think when you're talking about sentence to sentence and line the line stands in the stands. A that's that's what you get out of the workshop. If your vigilance now, I mean, if you don't if you don't feel you know that your that your comments are in any way enhancing what you already know then perhaps not, you know. But I got a tremendous degree of satisfaction on and I think became a better period to period writer from those workshops. Litigating the syntax, things like this. Anyway...

>> Brian: No, George. My experience very much aligned with yours. I got way more out of workshop by figuring out what was wrong. To be able to articulate what was wrong with a story or what was working was infinitely insightful into my process, you know. But to Jared's point, you know what I did when I found myself in a class where  I didn't trust some of the opinions. You know, I never I never was in a class where I didn't trust anyone's opinion. I mean, I trusted a lot of people's opinions.

>> Seth: Jared used to throw away all his comments (laughter)

>> Brian: Well, I was I was going to say to me, to me, it takes a very intelligent, studied individual to articulate what's like, really going on with your story, right? But it takes someone who's barely conscious to point out if something's going wrong, and so I wouldn't I would rarely say, Oh, I mean, I would rarely take the suggestions, but I would always look at what they were pointing to. And then I would say, Okay, what? What's wrong here? Because clearly something's wrong and like, some very high percentage of the time what they suggested I was like, That's the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life. But what they were pointing to was often very accurate. I want to bring up now something I actually don't know too much about myself. But I want to talk about that Catwoman story. Seth, you want to give a little introduction about that?

>> Seth: So this was this was a short story published in The New Yorker I think in maybe 2016. I can't remember the name of the author, so we'll have to have to look that up to give credit where it's due. I know she has a book that just came out a collection of short stories. Anyway, you know the story as I remember it was about a series of just cringe inducingly bad dates with this guy. And I think there was this kind of...

>> Brian: In the way they were written they made you cringe?

>> Seth: Yeah, well, yeah, it's It's a series of bad dates with a guy just a kind of, uh crossed wires and miscommunications and just sort of borderline behavior.

>> Brian: Sounds like a fun Seinfeld episode.

>> Seth: Well, except not really that funny. Um, it's I think a lot of people found the story so relatable and so just kind of mundane that they didn't think it could be fiction because it didn't seem grand enough to have even been invented. It's like if I were to write a short story that was just narrating me walking to work from the subway, you know, nobody would... it just seems so so every day that nobody would it.

>> Brian: I now I want you to email me every time I get to work. I want a very literary a little just for that piece of flash auto fiction. You gotta embellish it a little.

>> Seth: I'll send you a haiku about my commute.

>> Brian: That's not what I asked for. That's acceptable.

>> Seth: The point is that, you know, a lot of people read this story in The New Yorker, and I think didn't realize it was fiction. I think even some of the people who saw that it was printed as fiction. I still thought that, Oh, they had some kind of inside line and that No, it wasn't really fiction and it just seemed like such as It seemed like such a silly debate because, let's say it's not fiction. Let's say everything happened exactly the way it's reported in the story, then that it doesn't really change the way that anyone would read that story, you know? So that's, you know, I think whatever literary merit the story has, which it sounds, which I would I would say is not much has very little to do with whether it is fiction or not. But of course it was published this fiction, and so I'm reading it as fiction. Most people don't read short stories, So when people read something that's that short, they assume it's an essay or something, some kind of profile or something like that.

>> Brian: So it sounds like on your end, you don't see these times is particularly as a blight on the auto fiction enterprise. Because to me, I'm one. I'm wondering because I'm thinking about Twitter right now. I go on Twitter and I see people promoting their own books. I see more genre fiction than auto fiction. But, you know, obviously these things isn't hard data. I'm wondering if the MFA program is in some way... If you don't have the experience to write, like you know, something more purely fictive and it'd be more imaginative on a more Universal Scale is that Is that pressure to publish to write? Is that what's driving people to auto fiction? Because I do think there is an uptick. I don't think it's like and we won't see in the published realm because what gets published is supposedly better than what doesn't. So that's the statistics are going to stay the same on that. There's no more people writing better auto fiction than there were before, But at the same time I did see it and in school and there is a whole genre of nonfiction taught at Sarah Lawrence, and a lot of that was the personal essay.

>> Seth: But for me, what we're talking about as auto fiction, which is a very broad term that we're using. It has been such an integral part of literary fiction for hundreds of years. And so it's hard for me to see this is some kind of new thing. I mean, even if we're talking about something like Proust, if we're talking about "In Search of Lost Time"?

>> Brian: Oh, George, tell your joke about Proust.

>> George: Do I have a joke about Proust?

>> Brian: Yeah. OK, so Jared goes and visits Proust's crave. And when he gets back, George, our producers are excited about this. And when he gets back, he tells us, Hey, I visited Proust grave and George goes, Did he have seven headstones where one would due? (laughter)

>> George: I'm witty. I completely forgot that I said that.

>> Jared: You were on your game, George.

>> Brian: George, You know the object of life is to drink away memory of your own jokes.

>> George: Hey, checkmate, buddy. I've done it. (laughter)

>> Brian: Yeah, that's literally one of the best spontaneous jokes.

>> George: I'm good for something.

>> Jared: You don't think you know, Seth, you're right. That autobiographical writing is not new especially, I mean, it's been a part of at least the novel for almost as long as the novel's been around. But you don't think there's something terminal about the state that we're in? You don't think there's something terminal about novels that are about MFA programs?

>> Seth: Well, again, I mean, the novel we were talking about earlier that set in MFA program. I haven't read it, so I can't really pass judgment on it now. The fact is, I you know, I'm to some extent I'm bluffing year because I don't actually read that much contemporary fiction, and maybe that is to my detriment. But I you know, I try to keep abreast of criticism, so at least I know what the landscape looks like. But I don't see I don't see novels about MFA Programs or the MFA industrial complex. I don't see those, you know, kind of novels flying off the bookstore shelves. You know, I none none of the none of the none of the big literary novels that have sold reasonably well in recent years, whether it's City on Fire or the Goldfinch...

>> Brian: Well, the City on Fire did not sell reasonably well. Well, that was kind of when it first came out so it could have had a next ended shelf life.

>> Seth: Whatever the result was, it was a book that Knopf was pushing very hard.

>> Brian: Well, they did invest a fuck ton of money.

>> Seth: At least that's an indicator. And whether it's sold well or not, At least it's an indicator of where publishing was at least at that point that they were willing to put that much money behind a book like that. Which again, it's a historical novel. And from the sound of it, you know, on autobiographical one in its own way. I mean, every interview Garth has it done when I say Garth like I know him, you know, we had his class, like, five years ago, but he, uh, he always talked about his own experience coming out to New York City as a kid, you know? I mean, he grew up. I think in Louisiana. So again, it's a novel that you know, is coming from a very deeply personal feeling. Even though all the characters are invented and many of the events are invented.

>> Brian: Well, you know, I'm somewhere between you guys. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong about the MFA novel, but I do think that there needs to be a goddamn good reason.

>> Seth: If you can pull it off, then that's all that matters.

>> Brian: All that matters is it good. That's all that matters. I do think the only thing for me is I wouldn't say terminal. That's a pretty permanent word. But I would say that of everything in the universe to write about writing about writers, whether yourself or like, a group of writers or, you know, the MFA program itself. I'm really I'm reaching for words here because I really am between you guys. I don't have anything as absolute to say as Jared does. At the same time, I do think they're all I can say is I do think it's an issue. I do think it's a symptom of something. I don't know what it is. But like if you told me there's a new novel out set in Iowa's Workshop, you know where Brown's were like It's really I have to hear user reviews first. That's it. Like I won't I will not go out and buy that novel myself. And like, I hate to say it like, you know, it's like I don't want to shit on these people's work. You know, they poured just as much energy into it as I did mine. You know, it's it's not that. It's just Maybe I'm speaking for a larger population too, because I I just I find it hard to believe that people are going to get interested in something like the MFA program or something like, you know, when something like 10:04 words like we're talking about writing so much, it's about nothing, really. Like I really couldn't tell you what that book is about, except for maybe deciding to have a baby with a friend you know?

>> Seth: Who published 10:04 by the way, does anyone know?

>> Jared: Faber.

>> Seth: Faber? Yeah, because a lot of these books were being published by specialty. I mean, this live blogbook that was published by Tyrant that wasn't published by Penguin or something, right? You know, it's it's and I think if anything, it's kind of a niche. I mean, you know, and frankly, a lot of people who were doing this thing in the early two thousands were associated with the dreaded alt lit movement, especially people like Tao Lin. I mean, Tao Lin is kind of 21st century auto fiction par excellence for better and especially for worse.

>> Brian: I just heard a breathy of God.

>> Seth: Because Jared despises Tao Lin. I have more mixed feelings, although I don't want to spout off on Tao Lin right now.

>> Brian: Don't throttle yourself.

>> Seth: Well, I think he I think he kind of encapsulates a lot of what we're talking about. Like I said, for better and especially for worse. And he was frankly, probably a big influence on a lot of the lesser auto fiction writers that we could think of. Not Ben Lerner. He's top tier.

>> Brian: I mean, Ben Lerner's, he's a generational talent, you know? I mean, he's he's brilliant. He can write his ass off. It's just the subject matter really.

>> Seth: Well, we'll see how the Topeka School turns out.

>> Jared: Yeah, well, by terminal Seth, I meant it seems to me like we're in a period of bereavement now, we're so many writers feel like writing about being a writer is the only thing worth writing about.

>> Brian: Which couldn't be, You know, any further from the case.

>> Seth: I think that I think the postmodernists, the, you know, the writers of the sixties and seventies kind of exhausted that terrain, and now it's kind of rearing its head again.

>> Jared: There was something there was something tautological about that as well.

>> Seth: I mean, I agree. I mean, you know, Jonathan Bomback, for example, a kind of lesser known postmodern right, a father of Noah Bomback.

>> Brian: God bless him.

>> Seth: But, I mean, every novel about infidelity, it's like just give it a rest. I mean, I think he was a really neglected writer, so I don't want to shit on him either, but But, you know, sometimes it gets a little tiresome or, I mean, John Barth. Christ. I know Jarod read a lot of Barth, and you kind of get to a dead end with that stuff.

>> Brian: So there is a terminal state?

>> Seth: Well, no, because it's come because it's come back. Hee, I think this kind of directed I don't know if there's any kind of a cycle or period here, but I think that auto fiction, yeah, I mean, like I said, it's existed throughout literary history, and there may be periods where it's more popular or more saturated in the culture than others, but I don't think it's... It may take different forms, but I really don't think it's fundamentally, I don't think it's anything that they are.

>> Jared: They are photo negatives of each other, though in a way, in the sense that the postmodern can see is this honest engagement with the persona the writer as the narrative persona where his auto fiction seems to be on a mystically engaged with the persona as the capital A author.

>> Brian: George, what do you think?

>> George: I don't I'm with everybody. Frankly, I'm mixed down the middle. I can see what Jared saying. And I especially think at this present moment, There is this sort of creative, impulse wide sort of contagion of the of the self, of the me, right? I mean, it's happening in poetry as well. If you're not writing about your identity in some way, if you're not writing about...

>> Brian: Oh yeah, I think it's far more prevalent in poetry.

>> George: It's honestly, it's taken it over And I'm not saying for the worst. So the other day I was talking to my partner, Cheyenne, who writes poetry, of course. And for the longest time, she didn't feel as though she had anything to write about because nothing really like traumatizing has ever happened to her. She doesn't feel like she has some kind of deep wound to bring up and sort of exploring the poetic medium on. I was telling, you know, she likes to write about nature. We're both sort of naturalists and shit write about nature. That's fun. And it's great, you know, But she's starting to sort of realize that the things that she's read that sort of that sort of talk about, you know, a sense of identity or a sense of trauma or a sense of tragedy, or not necessarily what you have to write if you want to partake and participate in the craft.

>> Brian: Very much, agreed.

>> George: But it is becoming it is becoming, I think, I think less than terminal, which I agree with. What Jared was was was saying there, but I think fatigue. I have fatigue about it. I have fatigue about where I come from and I have one big about, You know, my my journey to get here. You know, there's this saying Now tell your truth, Tell your truth. I have to refer them to to the So what question to the Who gives a shit question. I'm not saying that identity and a sense of a personal journey are not worthwhile, and I know that under represented you know, people in this country are finally having an opportunity to discuss their journeys, and that's important. And I think we all need to read it and and and see the you know, the changing face of the American literary terrain in this way, and I think that's wonderful. But what I don't want is this idea that we all have to have some kind of tragedy to write about. We can write about nature still right? We can still write about the universe. That's what I like to write about. Just fuckin planets and solar systems and shit, like whatever I have to do to get to write about. That is what I want now, of course, that's what I get to write about because I don't have, I don't have. I don't feel as though I have a personal story worth sharing. I haven't met that so what question. So I don't use it in my own creative, my own riding. But I feel the same way. I feel sometimes, as though I don't have anything worth putting down in poetry anymore because I don't have. I don't have what seems to be succeeding in the poetic landscape. Fiction has been a lovely, lovely you know, haven for me at the moment because I don't have to write about me, you know? But I do. I do feel, especially in poetry, that the impetus has been put on the identity of the author. And that's what we're coming from. And, of course, many other things to get. I'm not belittling current poetic landscape. I'm just saying it seems to be quite popular in poetic expression now, at the time, the poetics of identity.

>> Jared: Right. Well, this is this change into something that I think that we should talk about as well. Which is this emerging ethic that to write about any experience other than your own is irresponsible or insensitive in some ways.

>> Brian: Yeah, that's very true.

>> George: I do wonder how much that plays in to the current epidemic of auto fiction and personal essay. And, George, you're so right. If I was the tally. The statistics of every poet ice I go see to read live or something. I mean, yeah, it's overwhelmingly about the self. But yeah, I agree with Jared. That's that's a really good point.

H: Yeah, well, how does everybody feel about that? I expect I know how everybody feels about that, but how does everybody feel about this emerging notion that you can't write about the experience of someone else. You know, if you're a straight white male you can't write about, you know, what it's like to be a I don't know, a bisexual African American.

>> Brian: I think it's something I'll go first. I think it's something that is inherent to the transition we're in. Just the infinitely ongoing transition that will always be in, at least in our lifetimes, just about race and culture in America. It's, I almost view it as a necessary outcropping of that transition, just moving towards equality and egalitarianism, as we always will be. But then again, I think it is a symptom. And I think it's bad for egalitarianism.

>> Jared: It's radical egalitarianism.

>> Brian: It's an oxymoron. Fiction can't exist without writing about other people that plain and simple. That's it. Now the whole question of can I like, let's say, as whoever I am, can I write about, you know, uh ah, black woman? Or can I write about a gay man or, you know, something like that? Personally, I say yes, go for it because what matters is whether it's good and whether it's true and like, you know. But you know, at the same time, I'm not here to tell anyone that I'm right. That's just how I feel. And I just worry about the state of our world and, like, you know, when we start getting these kind of hypocritical elements of kind of progressivism where it just, it just really doesn't quite make sense to me because it goes against what outcome we're looking for, you know?

>> Seth: Yeah, I you know, it's so it's crazy to think about a book like "What is the What" by Dave Eggers, which I think was published in 2005 or something. I mean, I don't know if people even read that today, but I mean, this is a book that Dave Eggers wrote as an autobiography of a real person who I believe was a refugee from Darfur. He interviewed this guy. He talked with him, he got his permission, everything. But then he wrote a first person account of his experience, and I just I don't think you could I don't think he would've been able to do that in 2019.

>> Brian: No way. He would’ve caught a lot of flack.

>> Seth: Sure, sure, And it's It's not a very good book, anyway, if I not to not to pivot back to film. But I think a good kind of case study for this question is Quentin Tarantino, because Tarantino has often come under fire for the language that he uses, particularly when dealing with black characters, whether it's in Django Unchained and the language of slave owners, Whether it's Jackie Brown and it's, you know, just kind of Chris Tucker and Samuel Jackson riffing off each other, and Tarantino's defense, I think, is correct at which is, you know, as a writer, I have to... it is my job to imagine the inner lie, the inner lives of my character. He's absolutely right about that. But in practice I do find his use of particularly the n word kind of gross and a little sly. So on the one hand, I think he's right on. The author's job is to inhabit their characters in their minds and their way of speaking in the way of thinking. But you also have to be able to pull it off. And you have to be sensitive and you have to be tasteful. And you have to be empathetic and you can't go into it feeling like you're getting away with something, which is what I feel like Tarantino is often trying to do.

>> Brian: What do you think about the idea that life is not graceful or tasteful or and people are not empathetic and you know, stuff like that? So what happens when that's portrayed on the page?

>> Seth: I'm saying that as a writer, you have to be those things. That doesn't mean your characters do.

>> Brian: It's just tough because you bring up Tarantino. It's strictly dialogue, right? While in fiction, obviously, only a racist idiot would drop the N bomb in the middle of like a narrative like without some context around it. You know, like you know, some legitimate context around it, but like, you know, in dialogue that might be different.

>> Seth: Well again, it's like, OK, you know, not not to get too in the weeds just on Tarantino here, but I think he's a good case study. You know, if he's going to justify slave owners using the n word in Django Unchained, there's kind of a historical context for that. If you're going to have Steve Bushemi say it in Reservoir Dogs out of nowhere, it's a lot harder to justify that. I mean, you can say his character's racist, but that doesn't really have anything to do with his role in the movie. And again, that's the kind of thing where it feels like Tarantino was being sly and trying to get away with something and sort of, you know, using offensive language. But putting it in the mouth of the character who is, you know, a thief and a murderer. And so, you know, I think there's, I think there's a very real difference there.

>> Brian: George?

>> George: Hmm, I don't know. It's a tough question. I, uh, put it like this. Open it to you like this. I personally would never for write a book in which my main character was another race was even another gender. I don't feel as though I could do that well enough. I don't feel as though I would do it with the grace that it would require. I do not believe that I can do that. I mean but But I don't I don't necessarily feel like I have to as a za Middle Eastern man, a southern Middle Eastern man. That's what I want my characters to be. I want someone in the book to be Middle Eastern. I want someone in the book to be Southern because I can speak to that, you know? But I can't speak to what it's like to grow up in Providence, Rhode Island. I don't know what that is. I would have to do a hell of a lot of research, and even then I wouldn't trust myself. You know, because you just can't get it all that right. Personally, I wouldn't do it. But I mean, you know, listen, I'm the guy that writes about genderless fish aliens, right? That's the kind of shit that I write. So I This is not a problem that I have, but I do believe for the record that that plenty of other people can do it and that there's no reason they shouldn't do it. You know, I think that if they're going to do what they should do it with a sense of grave responsibility to the character. And if you're not going to treat your character like a real person, then you shouldn't trot out, you know, a sexual preference or race or anything like that to just attached to a character that you're not going to do justice to right? I think that's just being a lazy writer. I think we can all agree on that. But yes, yes. I think everybody can and should try and write from different voices. I don't think that you should necessarily hang your entire narrative on a voice so different from yours that you're almost doomed to fail and doing in any kind of justice.

>> Brian: Yeah, I mostly agree with you. I think it's basically like if you don't know what you're doing, then yeah, The fuck are you?

>> George: Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that.

>> Brian: Yeah, right. Exactly. But I definitely I definitely. If we if no one writes about anything except for what they know, then I mean, fiction will change a lot because that's never been the case ever before now.

>> George: Yeah. I mean, what’s there left for it to be? Other than auto fiction, other than memoir, you know, other than autobiography. And I don't think anybody wants to live in a world. I certainly don't want to live in a world where the only thing to pick off the bookshelf is that right?

>> Jared: Right. Well, that's precisely where it leads us, though it leads us to a place where people can feel like the only valid thing to write about is their own experience and nothing outside of it think that's where it takes us, which is, and that's not where I want it to be.

>> George: No, no, I agree.

>> Jared: The imagination of others lives, the imagination of other consciousnesses, and inhabiting them is the spirit of fiction. That's the whole project of fiction and the injection of this identity politics into the world of writing whereby, you know, if you're not me, it's impossible for you to imagine my experience and therefore you should excuse yourself is something that will destroy the fabric of empathy that is woven into writing and imagination.

>> George: Yeah, without which Of course, it would fall apart. I mean, that's the contract that we make with the reader, especially in fiction. You know, we're we're creating.

>> Jared: It's entirely contrary.

>> George: Yeah, we're blowing. We're blowing air into this fictional world that they're stepping into. And then when they close the last page and they get to take it with him.

>> Jared: Yeah, it's diametrically opposed to what fiction is all about.

>> Brian: It's certainly it's certainly a good point to raise in terms of why auto fiction and, like the personal essay is on the rise.

>> George: I actually, I just have one question, and I don't know if it's furtive. So swat it down at me if you want to. But we were talking about how so many people, especially in the MFA program, told the write what they know? And how so many of them then in turn going to write about being writers in a program, right? And it sort of got me thinking about how, for the longest time I feel, especially as a writer of fiction, less over writer, as a writer, poetry. But I didn't know what I wanted to write. Do you remember a time as writers as individuals, each of you, when you didn't quite know what it was that you wanted, right? And do you remember finding it finally, or did you all know exactly what you want to do? At least by the time that we met or by the time he started taking writing seriously?

>> Brian: I'll say, I think even when I didn't know what I wanted to write, I was arrogant enough to think that I did when I was younger. But yeah, there was definitely there was definitely a point. I honestly think that part of the trajectory is an inherent of many. I do think that as a result of people not even asking themselves questions, sometimes they don't even know. And so, like, I mean, I think I started my... I wrote three novels before I ever got to Emerald City, and I didn't really try seriously to get any of them published. But I remember the second of the three was basically just some rehashing of like some David Foster Wallace, you know, style, you know? And like what I wanted to write about, I was like drug dealing and like shit like that. But there was nothing of substance there. You know what I mean? It was it was just And that's what I'm saying. Like when you're that young and like, you just don't you don't understand the depth of things and the texture of things as much as you do when you get older. It's like the question of knowing what to write is kind of like it just it falls into some black hole, really of inexperience. But yeah, I'll say that. And then and then And honestly, I didn't really know what I wanted to write until, well, you know, midst writing Emerald City like I mean, like I said, I wrote a massive first draft and chuck the whole thing because I don't think I knew what the fuck I wanted to do. I just I wanted to write a book about video relay service fraud and deaf culture and drugs and organized crime. But you don't know what that really means until you understand deeply all of those things, you know? So, yeah, I guess that's pretty vague answer. But that's where I was.

>> George: No, that's good.

>> Seth: I don't think I ever had a time where I didn't know what I wanted to write about was I was searching for. I think I think that what I've wanted to write has has just changed over time, and much of that is formal. I think, for example, I never thought that I wanted to write a novel until probably towards the end of our MFA program. For much of it, I was I was way more interested in short stories. I had no idea that I was interested in writing about movies. I never really even thought that much about that as a possibility until towards the end of my college years. And I think that the type of fiction that I've been interested in writing has changed a lot, as what I have been interested in reading has changed. I mean, Virginia Woolf was a really big influence on my writing in college, and when we were in grad school, I was probably, you know, I was more interested in some of the avant garde stuff that we all really liked and, you know, stuff that's really kind of language forward, you know, Gordon Lish or even Gertrude Stein I mean, Christ, what a terrible period of writing that was for me.

>> Brian: Speaking of tyrant and Gordon Lish, son Atticus Lish.

>> Seth: Yeah, I know.

>> Brian: Have you read that book properly? It's phenomenal. I just had to plug that because I need you at any time. Any time I have an avenue and applauding that book, I have.

>> Seth: Sure. I think that since graduate school I have become more interested in fiction that has a plot. And that's probably why I'm responding so much to John Irving these days. You know, I've become less interested in. I mean, I have a good, healthy diet of reading. I think that you should read, and this is I know I'm getting off track here a little bit, but... Well, this is something that I get into arguments with people about a lot. You know, if I'm talking about Harry Potter and you know, you know, they call you a snob or whatever.

>> Brian: And Seth is the most contentious person I've ever met in my life besides Jared. You run into him on the street and you'll he'll be arguing with someone. For the readers I just hope you sense the irony anyway. Go ahead.

>> Seth: My point is not the Harold Bloom Point, which is that you should not read Harry Potter. You should only read the great enduring classics of literature. My point is that you should have a balanced diet of reading. And if you're only reading Harry Potter and then that's not a balanced diet. If you're only reading James Joyce, I mean, Christ, you're gonna go out of your mind. So anyway, that's just really more of an aside. My point isn't that I don't like the avant garde stuff anymore, but I do find that I am. I am drawn more to plot and character and concerns of story and narrative in a way that I probably wasn't back when you know I was turning stuff in the workshop in grad school. Ironically, the novel I'm writing is not really plot driven at all. So maybe I don't know what I want to write after all.

>> Brian: Wow, this just turned into a therapy session. A group therapy session for Seth (laughter)

>> Seth: I'm thinking out loud here. I don't know if that actually answered your question?

>> George: No, I thought it was that was a great answer.

>> Brian: It was a little auto fictive.

>> Jared: Just a tag confessional.

>> Seth: It's definitely auto something.

>> Brian: Jared, This is This is where it's your turn.

>> Jared: Well, what do we write about? We write about things that were interested in right and, you know, for my part, I don't think my life is that interesting. I think my life is quite boring, actually. And so I don't consider myself to be interesting material for my fiction. I write about the stuff that interests me, and that has evolved over time. When I was a bit younger, right around the time that we were starting the program at Sarah Lawrence, my fiction was probably more of a delivery system for certain ideas that I was interested in philosophically. I think that's less the case now, but that's sort of where my brain was that at the time, and now I'm in new territory, but I write about what interests me, and you know what writers are people who I think are abnormally or intensely interested in things and feel the need to document it. I mean, that's what we are. That's what we do. So I'm no different than that in my work. I mean, when I sit down every day and have to work on a new paragraph or have to work on a new chapter, where my fingers take me is what I'm interested in. Whether it's the lives of others or whether it's a certain idea, or whether it's an image or a turn of phrase that excites me. It's the intensity of interest and returning to what we were talking about earlier, the question of why does this matter? Why am I reading this? I think one of the things that makes art itself justifying is the intensity of the interest of the writer. And if the writer cares about something intensely enough, you, as the reader, will care about it intensely as well.

>> Brian: Yeah, agreed. That's also a lot of what Garth was trying to tell us back in the day. George, do you want to answer your own question?

>> George: I enjoyed hearing hearing your answers because I do remember a time very specifically where I was writing what I thought I was expected to write. But I was writing in the voices and in the styles and the ways of the people that I enjoyed reading. But, you know, I couldn't find much purchase for myself in the right. Putting on this author's voice or or writing with the same sort of motifs as this author with the same thrust like it let me down and like, I was never I was never had the question, you know, put to me, What do you want to write? I never had the question put to me, Why are you writing this specifically, right? I mean it. It took me a long, damn time to shake out of it and and and ask myself, you know, what do I want to write about? And that's you know, And then, of course, my journey was a little more similar to yours. Is his writers Like I wrote when I was fascinated about and now I couldn't be happier. I've never been a better a better writer. A more Pleased, right arm or edified righter than than writing about, you know what I love what I'm fascinated about. What I'm what I'm obsessed about. I think there's an element of obsession into it. Personally, I always wanted to run away from what I was obsessed with because I didn't think that I could make that obsession you know, into something that other people could consume. Obsession feels like madness. And And if you can't translate madness, it's just you screaming out something right? And but now I think, I think quite the opposite now I think that that's what writing has become for me, a sort of is trying to dictate the obsession and and to sort of explain it, and and that's the best thing that I think we can write. But anyway, that's that's just why I asked. I didn't know if if you had similar memories from when you first started writing. You know, you were writing like so and so when you didn't know why and the stories were shit anyway, so why were you doing it? But I know it was fascinating. I just wanted to ask. Good job.

>> Seth: I think my earliest impulse with writing was just writing stuff that I thought was gonna make my friends in the literary club laugh, you know, in high school, just writing, you know, stuff that was really stupid. But that I thought was funny at the time. That was probably my first impulse for writing, at least in high school. Which is maybe not the worst impulse.

>> Brian: Honestly, I come from a similar background in the sense that when I first started writing, it was with some sense of, like, trying to, like, show what my mind was capable of or something. You know, Is there some sort of trying to impress?

>> Jared: Assert your genius?

>> Brian: Yeah assert your genius, I guess. My absent genius. But, you know, it definitely has transformed almost totally into what George and Jared said in the sense of the deep interest in obsession. That's like, That's it. That describes everything. Like, I just want to put these things that I'm obsessed with and to talk about them truthfully and interestingly. Yeah. You guys got anything else you want to talk about, or should I wrap it up?

>> Seth: Great to be here.

>> Brian: Okay, that's it for today's episode. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and review on whichever platform you're listening. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram at @AnimalRiotPress or through our website animalriotpress.com. This has been the 26th episode of the Animal Riot Podcast with me, your host Brian Birnbaum and featuring Seth Katz, George Sawaya and Jared Pollen. And we're produced by Katie Rainey, without whom we would be merely four of Shakespeare's 1000 monkeys banging on a typewriter.