George Saunders. Photo by Zach Kramer. Cover art courtesy of the author.
Following the release of his highly-anticipated collection of short stories, Liberation Day, St. Louis County Library Foundation will host author George Saunders on October 26 at 7 p.m. at the Skip Viragh Center for the Arts at Chaminade College Preparatory School.
Saunders, who teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University, was awarded the 2018 Booker Prize for his novel Lincoln in the Bardo. He is also the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
After publishing his last book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, Saunders launched Story Club with George Saunders, a Substack newsletter and literary community whose thousands of subscribers discuss each week the craft of the short story.
Ahead of his visit, we caught up with Saunders to discuss his work, the craft of writing, and telling stories at this moment in time.
PEN America is celebrating its centenary this year, in a moment characterized by, among other things, a resurgence of censorship and the threat of physical violence against writers. Back in August, Salman Rushdie, a former president of PEN America, suffered several severe injuries in an attack at the Chautauqua Institution, a place with deep roots in the tradition of American Liberalism. I wonder how you’ve made sense of the capitulation to the fear that can lead someone to act with such cruelty against another person. I’m reminded of the narrator of your story “Love Letter,” who has a brush with a cop in the trance of this kind of fear.
Well, the first thing I say to myself is, “OK, this proves that ideas matter.” The attack against Rushdie proves that fiction matters. Stories make power. Sadly, bigots and extremists don’t know what to do with that power—it upsets them. But this all makes me feel that what I'm doing is worth it, or could be, if I get it right. It could potentially be a force for good.
There's an increased stridency on the illiberal side, and that side was probably always agitated by that power, the power of truth. But, now it feels either empowered to act on that agitation or maybe it feels cornered, and, so, more dangerous.
Basically, I keep thinking to myself, Don't hold back. Don’t let any sort of fear throw you off track. And don't back down on the idea of freedom of speech. Wherever the pushback against freedom of speech is coming from, I want to stand up against it. You know: “I may not agree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
There’s something tender and dignifying in your vision of humanity at the center of the stories in Liberation Day, an insistence on the greater degrees of compassion and of intelligent moral action that your characters are capable of. Could you talk about how you tend to the contours of your characters’ inner lives, their inwardness, resisting the reflexive impulse toward approbation or judgment?
For me, writing is a practice of trying to see people more generously, or at least more fully. In real life, I’m a slightly past middle-age guy, trending toward the grouchy, trying to fight that off. But if I can put a human being in front of me on the page, and tend to that person over many, many drafts, then I find myself softening toward the character, starting to become that person. And hopefully some evidence gets left behind on the page so that, when the reader retraces my steps, she might feel tenderized too.
The reader has the same impulse the writer had during revision—to judge somebody too quickly, based on their surface indicators—and then the story undoes that. One’s judgment might get suspended, or delayed, or made more nuanced….which I think is essentially the same as compassion.
There’s an idea of the irreducible complexity of the mind that is so hard to get at.
Yes. And for me, that process is exactly equal to what we call “craft.” When I'm writing stories, I'm basically just having a fun, wild time. The mindset is something like: “Dear reader, I want you to keep reading. Haven't we got this character into quite a fine mess? Are you having fun?” The more serious stuff all happens quite naturally, via that process. And I find this hopeful, even if the story itself is dark. If the two of us can confer together over this character for eight pages, our minds melding—that’s good. It's like two friends looking at a car that doesn't work. At least you're together there under the hood, trying to figure it out.
Your collections of stories share this aural quality that’s tough to describe, like an afterimage but with sound. The stories in Liberation Day are still as energetic and percussive as those of your previous collections, but their tone seems more elegiac than other narrative modes you’ve used, less “obligatory-edgy” as you’ve called it. How do you figure the musicality of your stories has changed over the years?
I got to be a writer kind of late in the game. I published my first book at 38, and so there's a tendency to feel, “O.K., I'm the edgy guy. I don't want to be disinvited to the party.” But then your experience of life starts to say, “You know, you're missing certain things by that approach.”
In this book, there’s a couple stories where I consciously toned it down a bit, thinking, “Hey, not every sentence has to be flashy.” It felt like I was gaining access to new, possibly more sincere registers, when not constantly dancing. And, maybe, at this age, one does get a little elegiac, as things that once seemed solid start to fade and change and vanish. At the same time, I'm trying to keep alive the outrage that I felt when I was young and looking around at the culture and feeling, “Oh, this culture demands optimism from us while crushing us, some of us, so many of us.” Elegiac is nice, but it can also have a resigned quality. And I don't want to feel resigned quite yet.
The aesthetic closure of the stories in this collection reminded me so much of the stories of the Russian authors — Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekov — who you glossed in your last book. Those last three lines of “Mother’s Day” were a doozy. What was it like to return to writing stories after A Swim in the Pond in the Rain?
It was awesome. I got such a boost from writing that book. And I didn't think I would. I had the fear that if I talked about writing too much, analyzed it too much, I'd mess with my mojo or something. But it was actually the opposite. After studying the Russians in that way, I noticed that, at certain places in a story, I felt more aware of what my habitual tendency would normally be, and therefore able to resist it. That came, somehow, from working with those Russian stories.
I’ve been thinking lately about the demands that memory makes on us and about how much we tend to undervalue it. You touch on this a bit in the title story, “Liberation Day,” in terms of the enactment of national memory. We’ve witnessed dramatic changes, even within the last 10 years, in the way that we talk about ourselves and our past. The commemorative landscapes of our cities, our public histories, have changed in response to this, too. Your wife, Paula, has spoken beautifully about the idea of our country as a political or communal body, and about the necessity of compassion to its integrity.
I think writing fiction teaches us that we have to tell the truth. Even in the small things. (“What kind of coat would this character wear?” “Does this tree grow in D.C.?”). It feels fresh and exciting to just always be trying to get to the truth. I mean, that's supposedly what history is, asking, “How did it really happen?” And if we misremember or falsify the past, it costs us dearly, because we’re moving forward on the basis of a false premise. So, my feeling is there's nothing too true to hear. Especially in terms of our national history—if it’s making us uncomfortable, we just have to stand there, being uncomfortable, until our basic human hunger for truth starts making us feel happy that, at least, we’re not living in falseness.
Could you talk a little more about the platform of time you’re standing on now?
Well, I’m feeling two broad things. One is my realization that death is real, and it's coming for me, personally. Ouch! And then the sense that the world is going through something similar, especially regarding climate change. It's funny…I find myself longing to be in a more positive time, so I could just deal with the death part. I shouldn’t have to deal with the whole “my death” thing and the death of the planet. It’s too much! Plus I’m going balder every day.
It's weird. When you're younger, you think, “Well, one day, we will solve all these problems. That's what our generation is here for. These dummies have just been waiting for us to get here.” And then you think, “How sweet that I will perish, but this beautiful world will go on.” Now it's more like, “Well, not necessarily — the world may outlast me by just a few years.”
The other things, the partisan rancor and the rise of autocracy—all shocking, but I’m trying to feel: “Well, George, if you feel shocked, that's on you. You didn't see Trump winning. That's on you. You should have been more alert. You didn't realize we were as racist a country as we are. That’s on you.” If you buy at all into the idea that, as an artist, you're supposed to function like a seismometer, then the feeling of shock is a sign that your meter wasn’t working very well. But I also find some comfort in this; it implies that the meter can be recalibrated. It’s somehow hopeful to me, to say, “The world does make a kind of sense, and cause-and-effect is still operative—I was just asleep at the wheel.” As opposed to, “Oh my god, the world is broken and unknowable.”
What you said reminded me of a book by Jane Bennett called Influx and Efflux Writing up with Walt Whitman, in which she describes his affectivity as planetary in scale, expressing this feeling of closeness or kinship to the living materiality of things. It's remarkable to me that we live at a time when we can consider the heavens and the extent of their splendor with images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and at the same time we live with knowledge of ecological destruction on a scale that's also equally hard to comprehend. I think there is a place for love in all that, but it's hard to put my finger on.
I’m taking some comfort in a relatively small idea, which is that it’s within our power to influence how we feel at any given moment. We can work at feeling more affectionate and loving, and despair doesn't help anybody. Anger can, sometimes, help. Outreach can help. But despair causes passivity. So, I want to work with my mind to ward off despair and always try to feel more affection for things, more freshness—in order to be more effective.
Say we're on a boat together and it's sinking. If we go, “Oh, no, we're gonna drown, we're gonna be food for the fishes! Oh, I can't believe my life is ending this way,” then we're just sitting there, wailing and gnashing our teeth. The boat goes down and we die miserable. But if we go, “Yeah, we’re sinking, we're maybe food for the fishes, but let's work together and bail this thing out as well as we can,” well, a positive outcome could happen. And at least we’re active and engaged.
Having said that, I'm feeling agitated and a little grumpy lately. I’m not sure why. But I'm trying to remember times in my life when I felt calmer, and felt more love for things and people, felt more that things were sublime—not necessarily beautiful, but sublime. I feel I was more powerful then, more at home in the world, more fun to be around. I was not so quick to act—a more attentive, patient observer of the world.
At 63, I’m like, “O.K., I've got some number of years left. I hope it's 80 more years, but probably not.” In what kind of vehicle do I want to drive around? Do I want to drive around in a grumpy old guy body? I don't. I want to drive around in the body of that more affectionate, generous guy.
There's a far-flung community of readers who’ve apprenticed themselves to your teaching and to the vocation and craft of storytelling. What has surprised you about that experience over the past year?
How positive it has turned out to be. I don't do social media and won't. And at first I thought, “Uh oh, is Substack social media?” Because there was a comment function. But from the beginning, people just seemed happy to be there. They were positive with me and with each other, and willing to do the work. I give some pretty weird assignments, and they’ve risen to all of them. I think we're about eight months in, and it's just been such a blessing.
It also puts me on my toes, because I have to do something every week, and if I phone it in, they’re going to know. The idea that there's 40,000 or 50,000 free subscribers now who want to talk about the short story: that's just incredible.
Story Club reminds me a bit of being a teacher: if we're in class, we're going to enact a certain tone. And if you don't, we're going to go out in the hallway and talk about it. So that makes me feel confident the tone is going to be under control. And it’s amazing what can be accomplished in that mode of respect.
Tickets are available through Eventbrite or at http://www.slcl.org/authors.
