I could take questions from any--
you might have some.
I always get nervous at this point.
I have a microphone.
Let me just come to you.
Thank god.
[LAUGHTER]
That made me nervous.
I'm like, here it comes.
I've been waiting for this one.
I was wondering, what do you think
about when it comes to dealing with time in your stories?
Oh.
Time is a part of reality.
And so when I'm writing, I think there are--
I have thought a lot about what reality is,
and I think if I'm going to write something
where on the other hand someone will read it
and actually believe it, which is one of the most
fundamental jobs that we have.
If you don't believe something, then it
will do nothing for you.
It's only if you believe it can you be affected by it.
So as I-- this is what I do.
If I need to remember what reality is,
I'll, like, go in the middle of the room.
Like, OK, this is reality.
It's kind of an odd thing to have to remind yourself to.
OK, this is what I'm trying to create.
OK, what are the different things that encompass reality.
And time is one of the most neglected
things as a teacher I see in my students' work.
They don't give a whole lot of thought to the fact
that time is very important to the way we understand reality,
and time feels different during different moments of our life,
and that we have to negotiate the truth of how time feels.
As I write, I had to come up with a term
to describe what kind of writer.
I started calling myself an empathetic writer, which
is to say that I always tried to write
from the character themselves, to become
the character themselves, as opposed to having a narrator
come in and tell the story.
There's nothing wrong with those kind of books,
but that's just not what I do.
And so it's very simple that as I
try to become the character in these moments,
I'm just thinking about how does time feel to me?
How do I keep time real?
So there's one thing that I heard someone say.
I heard someone say that Ralph Ellison did it.
I don't know if that's true or not, but that's
what the person told me.
But like for dialogue like I just read, what I heard
is Ralph Ellison would read all of his dialogue
into a tape recorder, but he would include dead spaces where
if he thought there was a pause between, like, someone asks
a question and the person has to actually think
about the answer, there'd be a pause.
And he'd record the entire conversation
how he thought it would sound as if it
were the actual conversation.
And then he would go back and he would time it out and be like,
OK, and this break here, after they
ask the question, before the person answers,
there's actually six seconds of silence.
So I know I have to create six seconds of silence on the page
without writing this goofy sentence, six
seconds of silence passed.
So you'd have to have a character go,
I walked over to the window.
I looked out.
The birds were chirping.
And then they turn and answer the question.
So you're creating a sense of how time works and feels
and the temperament of time.
So I do a lot of things like that.
But I have a whole part of my revision process, which
is just making sure that I'm getting time to feel like time.
Good question
Yeah, I'm new to your work, thank you very much.
Sure.
I'm curious, since you are so close with your characters
and you told us the whole story about how this story came
about, do you use little experiences, anecdotes,
stories from your own past regularly
to write to inspire your work?
Yeah, that's all we have is--
I mean, if we're looking for the content of human existence,
that doesn't exist outside of you.
I only have what I have, and so that's not
to say that I can't seek out an understanding of things
that haven't happened to me.
In another story, I have a character
who kills his own son in a farming accident.
That happened to my uncle, it didn't happen to me,
but I know that watching from the outside
and what happened to him.
But to write it I have to connect
with my own personal center of grief,
how I have felt grief in another context
so that I could even come close to being able to capture
the truth of what grief feels like, what confusion feels
like, what being afraid feels like, what love feels like.
And so I'll say I have no desire whatsoever to be an actor.
I understand when I come and read to you guys
that it's of benefit to you guys if I try to read it well,
and so I try.
But I have no desire to be like a proper actor.
But my sister is a director, so she's
sent me all kinds of books on acting,
like the method technique of how to use things
from your own life to actually find
your way into the empathetic truths of someone who is not
you.
And so I do that all the time.
With the exception of "Peacekeeper,"
I always try to find myself identifying
the decade, the time of when the story is,
and I love the way like in the story you were mentioning,
the first one in your collection,
it's like you write about the turkey farmer who's
thinking that turkey is going to really be selling
in the supermarket and it's not going
to be a Christmas and a Thanksgiving thing.
And I remember those times.
And so I sort of position--
I thought that story was probably
set between '79 and '84 given the details.
I might be wrong, but given the details.
But I really enjoy how, with the exception of "Peacekeeper,"
of the stories I've read so far, you
don't tell us what time it is.
But just by the sir--
so the smoke story, in my mind, had to either be
Korean War or Vietnam War.
I'm thinking more Korean.
It might even have been World War II because of the sirs
and things like that.
Well, it's interesting.
Writing those stories, I wanted them in many ways
to be out of time.
All of my relatives except for my family are from small towns,
and I don't mean this as an insult,
but small towns in a large way are out of time.
There's lots of things that just exist in perpetuity,
and that's the way things look and feel.
And so I was trying to be clever and keep it out
of time so that it can have that out of time feeling.
What's been interesting is we're working on a couple of film
projects, one for "Fort Apache" and one for "Smoke," that's
the stuff immediately they have to have cleared up.
Like, you cannot be clever anymore.
They're like, what is this place, where is it?
Like, I never say where this place is either.
And so like, where is this and what time period is it?
And so I just for "Smoke," I'm like,
well, I'm not-- they're trying to get me, and I'm still like,
I'm not really sure.
It could be World War II or Korean
or it could be even the Vietnam War,
because even when I was a boy I was watching Roy Rogers films.
As weird as it would sound, they were
still around and being played.
After "The Lone Ranger and Tonto"
they'd always play Roy Rogers films growing up.
So they wouldn't have that.
So finally they're like, OK, it's 1954.
I'm like, fine.
[LAUGHTER]
They were like, we have to get a truck of period.
We have to get the clothes.
Like, you have to tell us.
OK, all right, 1954 is fine.
So they settled with Korean.
I think it's 1954.
But they've settled Korean War would be the time period.
The awkward silence.
All right, going.
[LAUGHTER]
Going.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]