(rock music) - Jess Walter is an award-winning famous author that seems to tap directly into a particular time in the country and what it's going through.

He wrote "The Cold Millions," "Beautiful Ruins," and the "Land of the Blind," many other books.

He makes my book club members swoon, and he's a salt of the earth type, who, as you'll hear, expresses his opinions, but reminds us he's an author, not an expert.

Here are Walter's thoughts on the housing shortage, the housing market, loving Spokane but knowing its faults, and of course, insights into his books, and the craft of writing in this episode of Traverse Talks.

(rock music) You, according to one of our producers, Greg Mills, who is also a fan, - I'm a fan of Greg's.

- Oh good.

He says that you're more than a hair on the humble end, and so down to earth for being, let's be honest, a famous guy.

- Oh, that's nice.

- Is that because of your dad's blue-collar background?

Why are you so approachable?

- I think it's funny.

To the outside world, it always looks like you've had instant success, but I think seven years of sending out short stories and getting them all rejected and 15 to 20 years of supporting my fiction through other means, I don't think it's a humility that I've acquired dishonestly.

(laughing) I think if you don't grasp humility, especially as a novelist, if you don't feel humility, not as a check on your ego, but it's just a general state of the universe that things are hard, they beat people up.

As special as we might feel, we read other writers and think, "Boy, I can't do that."

And so I feel like I'm pretty realistic.

I have also always believed that humility and confidence intersect somewhere.

- Yes.

- And so when I'm being humble, people don't realize it, but I'm actually being pretty confident.

Like, "This is really hard and I've failed at it."

And I've also succeeded at it a little bit, and I'm not afraid of either.

And so I think the place where my humility and confidence, when they began to feel like they were running on parallel lines, I never felt like admitting that I was afraid or that I was not as good at some things as I wanted.

It was an admission of failure but of honesty and reality, and an acknowledgement of the things that I do, have done well.

- Oh my gosh, that is so refreshing.

(laughs) Well, honestly, how many of us fake it and then get scared when we're found out and don't wanna admit when we don't know something?

There's so much more freedom in being humble and also confident like, "Yeah, I could do that, but I won't do it very well."

(laughs) - And also still faking it by the way, Sueann, (laughs) that never goes away.

But every time that I found myself, bragging or name-dropping National Book Award finalists to do a conversation, I realized it was just all about insecurity.

And that was really interesting to me to think, all of your insecurities are there.

You're not gonna do away with them.

And to embrace them and accept them for what they're.

And I think it's terribly freeing.

And for me, the other piece of it is, we live in such self-absorbed narcissistic times, partly because of social media.

And to be a little over yourself and to not look inward, but look out at the world, for a novelist especially, it seems like it's a much more comfortable way to work.

- I like that.

- Anyway, have we started the interview?

It felt like we were.

- Yes.

- Oh, excellent.

(laughing) That's so great.

- Yes, well, part of this podcast is...

I have to tell you a quick story.

So I had a chance to interview Mr. Gortler in Tacoma.

His family was able to not be in the Holocaust.

They always were just ahead of the Nazis.

- Oh, wow.

- But they were able to stay together.

It was very fortunate for them.

But anyway, when we were discussing, he was so used to the presentation and he was ready to give this presentation, but I was like, "You've done so many of these videos.

I really just wanna know more about you, and what this had an impact on your being."

And he says in his wonderful little voice, "What are you?

My therapist?"

(laughing) - That's so good.

- Jess, many people know about your work.

My girlfriends in my book club are just ecstatic that we get to chat.

They have a couple questions that I'll ask you a little later.

But I really want this interview with you to be more about who you are as a person, and maybe a bit of your journey.

- What are you?

My therapist?

- Hey, what are you?

(laughs) Exactly.

What drew you to wanna be a journalist way back when?

- I think early on, I didn't entirely separate what kind of writer I wanted to be, but I think behind every writer is a reader.

And so early on, just the love of books.

And a book affects you in a certain way or a story, and you wanna do that to other people.

You wanna recreate that feeling.

Same way as with music or anything else.

And so I think it was just being a reader as a kid.

And I found my way into journalism in part, because at my school I could write for the school newspaper in eighth grade.

And my sister, and brother, and I...

I think I was about seven.

We would got to my grandparents' farm for the summers.

And we lived out there for a year, near Springdale, Washington, a mile from our nearest neighbors.

And to keep ourselves entertained, we started this little family magazine and we called it Reader's Indigestion.

It was like reader's digest, (laughs) but indigestion.

And we just loved cracking each other up.

And writing little stories about grandpa's tractor and cousin Lance DUI.

(laughing) So this, as long as I can remember, it was just loving that combination of reading and of telling stories.

And then I would go through waves.

For a long time, I really wanted to be a novelist as like a teenager.

That was my dream.

And then I became a young dad at 19 in college.

And so I switched back to journalism because it was a way to write and still support this-- - The family.

- The family, yeah.

But I ended up loving both and feeling very much a member of both worlds.

- You do that so well.

- Thanks, yeah.

- The back and forth, the journalistic reporting, and then the fiction writing, which leads to another question is, what skills did you take from your journalistic career that then you have found works in non-fiction?

- I always wanna assure people that when I was moving back and forth, that no fiction was working its way into my journalism.

But there were quite a few things I think that come from journalism.

First is a lack of pretension about what you're writing.

You write it that day, it goes in the paper.

You can't wait for the muse to strike.

You're less afraid of publication.

Sometimes people will put their heart and soul into a poem or a short story, and to share it with the world would be to share this part of themselves that feels fragile, could fracture.

Journalists tend not to feel that way.

We have a disconnection from the work which served me well, because I could write a short story, send it out, that lack of fear of publication.

But the biggest thing for me is a curiosity about the world.

What I loved about journalism is that you're always going and asking about other people.

You're always going to figure out how this system worked, or that system worked.

And I loved that.

And I try to bring that to fiction.

As much as people wanna read 16 novels about me dealing with growing up in the Spokane Valley and whether or not the Squire Shop is gonna have the jeans that I want, I feel like the world is such a big dynamic, interesting place that I'd rather look outwardly at the world than write fiction that just keeps excavating me and my concern.

- That is an interesting thing because when you write and then you get fans 'cause they really connect with you and the story, the story and then you, or however, you know what I'm saying.

- Yeah.

- Then you're put into this other realm of, they have thoughts about who you're, and they wanna know more about you.

How do you deal with that?

- It's interesting.

I think because I do write things that feel very personal to me, and I write about characters who I have this deep affinity, and feeling, and connection with, but they tend to not look much like me.

Pasquale from "Beautiful Ruins" is an Italian hotelier in the 1960s, which couldn't be further from me.

But he's lived in his hometown his whole life like I have.

He's a bit of a dreamer like I am.

And so I have these connections with the characters.

But I think when people read them, they don't necessarily look for me.

In fact, the number of people who think Jess Walter is a female writer is surprisingly large.

- I would see... That's like a compliment because it's your work.

- It's such a compliment.

There was only one time when I found it irritating.

I went to the Winnipeg Book Festival, and I got off the plane, and a woman holding a sign that said, "Jess Walter."

They're my literary escort.

And I said, "That's me."

And she said, "No, I'm waiting for the author, Jess Walter."

And I said, "I'm the author Jess Walter."

(laughs) She held up "Beautiful Ruins."

She said, "No, it's the author of this book."

And I said, "That's my picture on the back."

And she said, "I'm pretty sure a woman wrote this."

And I said, "Pretty sure I did."

And she looked at the picture.

She said, "Oh my God, it is you."

And I said, "Yeah, it's me."

- Oh my goodness.

- But then every place she took me, she would say the same thing.

"Can you believe this is a man?"

And after a while, I started getting just a little bit of a complex.

It's like she was questioning something else.

But usually I love it when people say, "Wow, I loved "The Cold Millions".

After I read "Beautiful Ruins", I assumed Jess Walter was a woman."

And I was right back.

Thank you, 'cause I think that to them, it means that you're writing maybe about emotions or things in a way that they don't expect for a male writer.

So I take that as a compliment.

But also just the fact that the book itself lives beyond the author.

And that's one of the things I love about writing fiction.

Is it's not necessarily about me.

And when people have questions, they're really honest questions about, how did this story come about?

They wanna know this book that I loved.

"What were you thinking when this happened?

How did this character come to you?

Which of these ideas came first?"

And that intimacy of sharing a book with someone, you love a book, you give it to someone, and they love it too, you feel this connection with them, and has a little bit of a feeling of what it's like to be an author.

- That's good to know.

And there's a bonding too.

What you're saying to me is something we say, well in public radio which is, "It is and isn't about you."

It is and is not about you.

The work exists.

The work goes out to the people.

The people consume it may or may not know your name, but they remember the work.

- And I think the other similarity, I have a friend in radio and she always says, "You may be talking to thousands of people, but you're also talking to them one at a time."

And I think with books, it's the same way.

If I write something, it's not like you watched it on TV, and it just unraveled in front of you.

There's active participation in reading a book.

I always liken it to, I've written a piece of music and now you're playing it, because you're picturing your own characters in your mind.

You're saying those sentences to yourself.

You're playing the notes that I've written.

And so when someone really likes a book, to me, it's more than I've written a movie you liked or I've... Because we've gone down the same road, with those characters and those sentences.

And I love that.

So it's really one of my favorite things.

And it's the reason that I try to answer every nice note I get.

'Cause those people played my song on their piano.

It's really lovely to hear that they liked it.

(upbeat music) - Did you know you can find us on NPR's Podcasts?

Just look up Traverse Talks on the NPR website and enjoy.

(upbeat music) - Have there been any characters you've written about that have haunted you after you've stopped writing?

- Yeah, you know what?

I think the characters that haunted me the most were the book that I had the most trouble writing, which was "Beautiful Ruins", which was weirdly my most successful book.

But I worked on that for almost 15 years.

And so, I had this vision of Pasquale and Dee.

This star crust couple meeting on this beach in Italy.

And at first I thought, "Oh, Pasquale goes to find her 30 years later."

I start writing.

I can't finish the novel.

I can't find my way around it.

And so the next draft, it's 35 years later because the past is set in 1962 and the present just keeps moving.

And pretty soon it's 40 years and 45 years.

I'm thinking, "These poor people are gonna be dead and I can't get them back together."

But I had such an attachment to them.

And the way I write, I move back through the book and then move forward again.

And so I kept never writing the ending of them meeting each other.

And 12, 13 years after I've started this novel, I finally get to the place where they meet again.

And I felt kind of breathless.

I felt like I'd been carrying these two people around.

And it's not entirely a love story because they don't really even know each other.

But they meet at a moment in time in which they both are needing something that the other provides.

And so I always say that it's not a love story between two people.

It's about falling in love with the moment.

And they've both fallen in love with the same moment, and now they've lived their lives.

And now they're coming back together to celebrate that moment.

And so the temporal feeling of that, and then writing these two characters that I've walked around imagining, writing lines in their voices, I wouldn't say I was haunted by them, but I felt such affection for them.

And I started the book as my mom was dying.

And so, Dee, the female character always connected with my mom.

And so finishing the book was a little bit like saying goodbye to the grief that I had carried in that period.

And I'd had in the 15 years from very beginning of starting that novel to finishing it, my oldest daughter had moved out and gone to college.

I'd had two more children born.

My mom had passed away.

I'd lived so much life.

And it felt like it was all packed into those two characters.

And that in the scope of the novel it takes place over 50 years.

I felt this connection to them that I thought we'd really been through something together.

- Yeah, you have.

Wow.

When you're talking and describing that, it's as if I'm wondering about creation, and here we are as humans wondering about our ancestors' experiences or what God has to do with our lives.

And you as an author is a bit like God, and you're taking your experiences, and infusing them into this other creature in these words.

But the depth of their characterization is felt because of your depth of life experiences.

- It's funny.

I've seen other people use the God Creator analogy for fiction.

But it's funny because I do feel aware of the fullness of the life of the characters.

But I feel like such a limited vessel in what I can give them.

- Wow.

- And so I feel like I wanna apologize to them that their creator isn't endowed with more power.

(laughs) - Wow.

- One of my favorite novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, one of his later novels, "Breakfast of Champions", he goes inside his novel and sets his characters free for that very reason at the end of the book.

And it moved me so much when I was a young kid.

He's goes to them and says, "Look, I've put you through terrible ordeals, divorces and career failure.

And now I'm giving you the one thing that every person wants, freewill.

I'm not gonna write about you anymore."

And I loved that.

I loved that relationship to the characters and into the idea of what's moving us through the world.

But it's funny.

And when I read that as a kid, I thought maybe I would feel like a creator.

And I do sometimes feel like when you start a novel, you feel like, "Oh my gosh, I'm creating life."

And you you're filled with this expansive feeling.

And then after a couple of years, I always look at it.

I think, "Well, I made life, but it's only about an inch and a half tall, and it can only do backflips."

(laughs) I have created these little stunted creatures, whose poor bearing in the world is limited by the world I've put them in.

- The humility that you have there as a creator and a writer.

That's interesting.

I want to go back just for a second about your mom.

I feel like, Jess, we don't really get to talk a lot about death and grieving.

We hide that in American society.

What did you learn about yourself going through or still going through grief?

- Still going through is a good way to put it.

It's interesting because it's going to happen to every human.

I think the two most miraculous things, birth and death are also the most regular.

And everything we write is about existence and the end of existence in some way.

And what that fills in the middle is a mad scramble to make sense of it all.

I guess I was 31 or 32 when my mom died.

So not terribly young, but she was only 54.

And so having passed that age, it made me think, I suppose, of that phrase from one of my favorite novelists, Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", this idea that we go through life almost imagining that we're practicing, that the next time around we'll get it right.

And then one moment we realize, "Oh my gosh, this was it."

(laughs) And when you watch someone you love suffer from cancer and die, you realize, "Oh my gosh, this is it."

- This is it.

And it makes you both incredibly thankful for sunny day and for your family, and for these small joys.

And also that heartbreaking feeling that this precious thing that we care about is so fleeting.

And as a novelist, that's what you have to be aware of.

You have to fill your characters with those sorts of feelings in various ways.

It was a great old short story by John Updike.

It's called "Pigeon Feathers".

It's a boy who... His grandma sends them up in the attic to kill pigeons 'cause they're making a mess of the attic.

It was just this amazing scene when he holds this pigeon, as it breathes its last breath, and they just buried a member of their family.

And he has that realization at a young age that, "Oh my gosh, we're all going to die."

And then in the very next thought he thinks, "But not me."

(laughs) - But not me.

(laughs) - And just that youthful feeling of where you just almost can't believe it.

And I think as we're certainly getting into middle age, you start to believe it.

(laughs) You start to-- (laughs) - Get closer it.

- You don't have that feeling of a boy with a BB gun.

That surely that can't happen to me.

(laughs) - And was the death of your mother coinciding with the time your daughter moved out?

- Well, it was actually my... No, it was earlier than that.

But my middle child was born the day that I took my mom home for hospice.

So took her home and my wife went into labor that day.

And I remember the time thinking, "This is one of those curtains drawing moments that as a fiction writer, you wouldn't write that.

And I could not even differentiate between the tears.

And we thought my mom had a matter of hours, maybe days.

We got her home and comfortable, and she was on morphine and would only be conscious for a few hours a day.

And you know what she wanted in those hours?

Was to hold that baby.

- Oh.

- And she has these big hands like I have, and I can still see her.

I wrote an essay called the "Holding Ava", which is my middle daughter's name, about my mom just wanting.

And for three weeks after we didn't think she would last, she held on long enough to hold that baby.

And Ava who was very cranky, just as soon as grandma Carol held her, she would just quiet.

- Oh my.

And would just lie there and rest.

And so it was, again, the paradox of life is just in front of you all the time.

And that the incredible pain and poignancy of that still strikes me as one of the hardest times in my life and a gift.

And it's what you try to capture, it's what you try to give other characters in novels, is the awareness of those moments existing at the same time.

- You were reminding me of the time that I had just opened up my mailbox, and inside were two packets.

One my divorce papers and the other, a big invitation to my cousin's wedding.

(laughing) I remember just looking at it and going, "God, life is so weird sometimes."

(laughs) - Look, you've just written a short story.

(laughing) I spend my days looking for that very juxtaposition.

(laughing) - Well, there's one.

- And to have those at the same moment is a great reminder.

It's funny.

I sometimes think if I had to quit Facebook, just I'm not sure why, but-- - 'Cause it's a horrible place.

(laughs) I just remember thinking that it was...

Some people's posts were just triumph after triumph as if... "Look at this.

I'm ahead of life 86 to one.

And then when the tragedy strikes, then it's like all of a sudden it's 86 to 42 or whatever.

(laughs) And that score-keeping, and, "My gosh, your children are beautiful."

It started to feel like everyone had hired themselves as their own publicist.

And life doesn't work that way.

It doesn't work in PR releases.

It really does work with wedding invitations and divorce papers coming on the same day, and the ability not to overcome hardship, but to live it is so important and-- - Cope through it.

- Yeah, or to learn from it, or to grow from it, or not to grow from it, but just to survive it sometimes.

I feel lucky in the work that I have sometimes because you can just sit and contemplate those things.

(upbeat music) - This podcast, like so many programs on NWPB is brought to you, courtesy of donors, people who watch and listen to NWPB for thought-provoking programs like Traverse Talks, people who give what they can to pay for current programs and the technology for future programs.

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Thank you.

(upbeat music) How do you write about a place with affection, but at the same time, seeing that there are issues, or there are historical issues, but still loving the place?

- When people ask that question, I ask them to imagine writing a novel about their family and it's the same trick.

If someone else praises them, then you tell them just what horrible people they're.

And if someone criticizes them, then you stand up for them to the last battle.

- It's so true.

- And you can't fake that kind of realistic love.

It's gotta be realistic love.

- Realistic love.

- It's gotta be not loving it for what it isn't, but loving it for what it is.

It's flaws and everything.

And that has not always been easy for me.

There was a long time when I either didn't think I could write about Spokane or I wrote about it in a way that reinforced my Seattle and New York's friends condescension about the place.

And it was only when I realized that that was a self-loathing, and that everything I didn't like about Spokane was what I secretly didn't like about myself, that I found myself looking at it in a different way.

I sometimes feel like it's a stock that I bought in 1967 where the company didn't grow for about 35 years.

And now all of a sudden it's Tesla.

Spokane has become such a great rich place.

And part of that has either involved the arts or the arts have benefited.

But it's such a great place to be a writer now, such a great writing town.

And so it feels really lucky and fortunate to have been there during that period.

- The long haul.

- The long haul.

Yes, exactly.

- So the thing about writing and storytelling is lessons to learn.

I get the sense that you have...

I'm gonna suggest that you want your readers to feel empathy.

But I'm curious, what is it that you... Are you thinking about your reader when you're writing and what you want them to be feeling at that moment or what big takeaway you want them to have?

- Not really, no.

I'm really just engaged in the story as I'm writing it.

And usually the emotion surprises me.

And then I just keep going with that.

So the story I'm writing now, I have this young character who has gone to Europe to study and he's grown up in this Catholic school effect.

He still wears his polo shirt and chinos (laughs) because he doesn't have any other clothes, and he's getting a chance to go study in Italy.

And he has this idea that he's gonna reinvent himself.

And as I'm writing about how he's gonna buy this leather coat and wear sunglasses indoors, grow his hair long enough that he has to push it out of his eyes.

I imagine like, "Well, how would that work out?"

And I think the line, which feels entirely true to me, the problem with our fantasies is, we fail to account for ourselves being in them.

And so, here he is with the clothes and everything, but he's still himself inside.

And so when you come up with something that feels true like that and connects with other times...

When I get invited to some fancy book party in New York, and I go with this image that I'll be in a smoking jacket with a pipe and people will come up and laud me for things.

And instead I go and I'm just me there.

So I'm often surprised when something that feels true works its way into the story.

And then I think if I feel that, I'll bet other people feel that.

I'll bet other people feel that universal thing.

So that's typically how it happens for me.

And then once I notice, "Oh, this is a story about how our dreams and our fantasies become real."

And what happens when we realize that we can't just remake ourselves with a jacket and a haircut, how we have to do that.

And so then the story becomes that.

But when I start out, I don't usually have anything that I want.

I have no agenda for the reader, but it develops.

And I usually find it's something that I've been thinking about that surprisingly has worked its way in if I'm honest on the page.

And then I do try to make the reader feel the thing I've felt.

- I see.

So you've been known to have your books come out right when the nation needs to learn a thing.

(laughing) So I'm asking you to predict the future with your latest work.

- Oh my gosh.

- What are we supposed to be focusing on, Jess?

(laughs) - Oh, boy.

Lessons from a novelist is like, (laughs) I don't know, taking dance lessons from your auto mechanics, (laughs) You know what?

"The Cold Millions" I wrote because I was so...

I started writing out of a deep concern for income inequality that the wealthiest and poorest Americans had reached this point that we hadn't seen since the early 1900s.

And I think the parallels between then and now is one of the reasons I named one of the brothers Gig was to parallel the gig economy that we live in now.

Again, that quickly falls away once the characters become themselves and the story takes over, and you go in this direction, in that direction.

And it's a novel about civil unrest and about protests for workers' rights.

And so to be writing that at a time when the country is erupting in protests over the mistreatment of African American men, especially by police felt again to be as if I was writing a historical novel that was also contemporary.

So I definitely think my eyes are on the rest of the world as I'm doing that.

But I also don't think that I'm necessarily predicting certainly.

These are the things I feel like the culture needs to be aware of.

And sometimes that works its way into the books.

I wrote a novel right after the 2008 Financial Crisis or during it actually.

And again, it wasn't so much that I had some great wisdom to impart except that a homeless person moved into the bus bench across from my house and someone was living in my Holly.

And it just felt as if the world was fraught in that way at that moment.

And so you really just wanna remind people again, that those are people, and that they're human beings.

I think somehow in the United States, we've found, maybe not all of us, but a lot of people have found a way to blame people for their own poverty.

And that's often the focus of my work, is again, in that sense of empathy, that I'm there but for the grace.

That we're all so much closer to the edge than we imagine ourselves to be.

We think we're safe and we have a good job and we're immune from those things.

And if you can have a reader crawl around in the skin of characters like Gig and Rye or Bit in my short story, "Anything Helps", and see the world from their vantage.

Then maybe they will understand that they're closer to the edge.

- Why is it hard for the media in general to tell these complicated stories though, to help people live in the skin of others?

Is that a cultural thing?

- I feel like it's gotten much more difficult.

I think as much as we rely on technology now, it has decreased our patience and our ability to carry a whole lot of information.

People become famous over 26 seconds.

TikTok is used to make the whole song to be famous.

And before that, you had to write an entire concerto to be famous.

Now you need like 13 seconds on a skateboard and you can become famous.

And we live online in these echo chambers where everyone agrees with us, and whoever has the shortest pithiest comment wins.

We don't allow for the other side to have an opinion.

We celebrate conspiracies and the villainization of other beliefs.

And I'm really concerned about the way we take in information, and myself too.

It's harder to read than it was before I had this phone, where I could just bounce around and look up anything at any time.

It's harder to concentrate and really bring in the deeper thoughts that come from books.

And I've had to force myself at times to return to a way of thinking that is more patient and deeper.

- Can you walk us through that?

'Cause I feel like there's so many of us who are going through this and don't even know it.

- To me, the recipe is really simple.

When your phone beeps on Sunday and tells you, you've spent four hours and 11 minutes a day on it, imagine that you've spent that many hours on it.

My real addiction used to be watching basketball on television.

And I had to put myself on a basketball diet and say, "Look, these games are all going to be the same.

You get two games a week to watch, except during the NCAA tournament thing, (laughs) you can watch as many as you want.

And I did the same thing with my phone.

I said, "I'm gonna get this below an hour a day."

But I think you have to actively seek out those deeper kinds of thought.

We may be raising generations that are incapable of that.

And that terrifies me.

The thing that makes me feel great hope is every time a novel comes out, I hear from so many people who still take in books.

The death of the book has been something people have worried about.

- They predicted it.

But it's like (indistinct).

- Yeah, it's been...

I think the first novel a week after (laughs) The Canterbury Tales came out I think, some 15th century Englishman said, "The novel is dead."

(laughs) Or maybe it was somebody in Spain after a Cervantes novel.

But however, we've always worried about the death of the novel.

And to me, one of the most hopeful things is that novels are still thriving.

That people still want that deep immersion in storytelling and in other people's lives.

But we have to work at it.

- Oh, this is so hard.

- It's so hard.

- I have a question from one of my girlfriends that I just have to ask.

- Oh yes.

This is from the book club.

- Right.

- Oh, I love talking to book clubs.

(laughs) I really wanna know, is there wine at this book club?

- There's a lot of wine and discussion about things other than the book that we're supposed to discuss, which is probably all book clubs.

Mariah wants to know your perspective on the history of Spokane, and how it has historically been a place of transience looking for better opportunity?

Does that look the same now or has it changed?

- I think Spokane certainly at the turn of the century, the time I read about it, was a transient place.

If you think about it, seven major railroad lines converged in this one place.

So you'd come through the Hi-Line of Montana.

You'd come through Southern Montana, you'd come through Utah.

All these rail lines would pinch together in this one place because you have to go around the lakes and everything, and then they would spread back out.

So to come north was to funnel through Spokane.

So 1890s to the early 1900s, the rail road is the internet.

The whole world is connecting in a way it hasn't connected before, and they're connecting through this place.

The incredible wealth of natural resources, mining, timber, agriculture.

Spokane lies at the intersection of all those things.

And because three different train depots, this is where itinerant workers would hop off the train and look for work.

So in the early 1900s, there were thousands of what they would call hobos, which was for hoe boy.

It's a boy carrying a hoe, hopping on a train, looking for farm work.

And so much of downtown Spokane was built to house them.

And it really did color the beginning of the city.

I think now we have a different kind of itinerant population.

We have families who have fallen out of being able to afford housing.

We have people with mental illness for whom the system has failed them.

We have institutions like foster care and prisons that are churning people out.

But it's a similar thing, and that we have these people who sleep between the cracks.

And I think one of our big failings in the United States is seeing people without homes as a local issue.

That is a national problem.

It's everywhere.

We have turned people's homes into their only valuable asset.

Your only involvement in the middle-class is to own a home now.

So of course the value is gonna go so high, that it's gonna price people at the bottom out.

And as long as we treat shelter like a financial instrument, we're going to have this incredible homelessness issue.

It's not a bug.

It's very much part of a system that we've created.

And in 1907 you had people who were desperate for work, who would take to the rails, who would sleep outside.

That isn't the situation now.

In many ways, I feel like it's crueler now, because we are denying people of the basic shelter that they need.

Because you know what?

That space is too valuable for me to put affordable housing on.

No one wants it in their neighborhood.

We want our housing prices to keep going up.

We imagine we're in endless carnival ride where our houses can just keep becoming more valuable.

And what we don't understand is what that's doing, is turning an entire percentage of the population out into the street.

So that does not answer the question about Spokane, except to say, I don't think you can isolate Spokane from the rest of the country.

As far as Spokane's history, I think it is very much a working class place.

A place that certainly lagged behind Seattle and Portland economically.

But I think much of that's changed.

Again, I think the separation between places, isn't what it used to be.

- I agree.

You were on track to say something about what ails the country.

Does it come back to greed, and money, and capitalism?

(laughs) - Possibly.

(laughs) It's funny.

We get all caught up in capitalism, and socialism, and communism.

We can regulate capitalism.

We always have.

We always do.

Pure capitalism would be "Drive your car 600 miles an hour."

But we say, "No, let's regulate the way the highways work."

There's no one except for a few strict libertarians who say, "There should be no regulation."

To me, we could regulate housing prices.

We could insist that cities, and states, and the country devote a certain amount of space to affordable housing.

We could find a way to battle nimbyism, so that if someone wants to put a shelter in your neighborhood, everyone in the neighborhood doesn't complain about it.

If we don't take care of the problem, it will continue to haunt us the way it does.

So again, looking to novelist for solutions is never right.

(laughs) But I do think the perspective that a novelist can bring is an historical one and one maybe geared towards human nature.

- I think this comes back to earlier in our interview when you're comfortable with being humble, but also confident.

So the ability to absorb all the grays, the innings.

That speaks a lot about your character, Jess.

Jess, thank you so much for your time today.

- Thanks for having me.

- Well, this was such a pleasant conversation.

I hope you have a good rest of your day.

- I will, thank you again.

- Thank you.

- Take care.

- Bye.

(upbeat music) Spokane native son, Jess Walter, author of "The Cold Millions" and many other great books, all of which you can find at your local independent bookseller.

I hope you've enjoyed the conversations on Traverse Talks.

I'm Sueann Ramella, and I'd like to say thanks to producers, McKayla Fox and Greg Mills, editors, Mary Ellen Pitney and Emmy Wilbert.

Thanks to intern Gabriel Del Rosario.

And special thanks to Gigi Yellen and Scott Leadingham for helping to make season two of Traverse Talks possible.

And if you are a member of Northwest Public Broadcasting, thank you very much.

Because your financial support is making these local productions possible here at NWPB.

And a big thanks if you downloaded and share Traverse Talks episodes with your friends and family, really helps.

We're looking forward to Season three.

(upbeat music)