(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - Hello and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Allan Vorda, and we'll be talking about his book, Talk Talk: Interviews with Writers.

Allan, thank you so much for joining me.

- Well, thank you for having me and I want to say thanks for setting this up with A&M, and also TCU Press, which did a great job of publishing my book.

- They're a wonderful partner for us, and we enjoy being able to distribute their books.

Well, I think this is gonna be kind of a fun interview cause I'm gonna interview you about interviewing.

So let's just dive right in.

And how did you get started interviewing authors?

- Well, I was an English major, and when I got out of graduate school, I went to undergrad at Creighton University and then I went to University of Nebraska in Omaha, and after I got my master's, I wanted to write.

So I wrote a novel, but it wasn't any good, I was pretty immature.

But I moved back to Houston where my parents had moved to, and I had to get a job.

And I couldn't make a living teaching, or you know, things like that.

So I got a job, which was basically building environmental rooms, which I did for about 40 years.

And I built 100 rooms here in at Texas A&M, which includes the Georgia Bush Library, and the veterinary building, everything.

But on the side, I still had this love of literature, and I wanted to keep that connection.

So one day I wrote to a friend of mine that I went to high school in college with, a guy named Ron Hansen, who was a novelist.

And I asked him if we could do an interview, he said sure.

And he was teaching at the University of Arizona.

So at that time, my wife and I went to the Virgin Islands.

When I came back, I had this real long type-written letter, that was our first, my first interview, and they just started...

I said, well, I like this, I'm gonna keep doing this.

So the next one, which really got me into it, was interviewing Max Apple, who was teaching at Rice University.

And so I wrote or contacted the Michigan Quarterly Review and I said would you be interested in an interview with Max Apple?

Normally, they'd say no but they were doing a special double issue on contemporary fiction, and they said sure and so I went down and interviewed Max Apple in his little cubby-hole office, stacked with books, the nicest man in the world, and did an interview with him.

It was just incredible.

And then after that, it just started snowballing and so every time there's a writer coming to town, for whatever event it was, then I would interview that writer.

And if I came across a writer that wasn't coming to town, but I was interested in, I sent an email to the publisher, and we'd set up an interview and do one by email, so... - So this collection that we're talking about today covers over 35 years.

How did you select interviews to include in the, or are they all in the book?

Or how did you pick what goes in?

- Well, I picked out the best ones.

And there's some that aren't in there.

So for example, I thought about putting this one in, with this lady named Tracy Quan, but it didn't really fit.

She's a prostitute.

(laughs) And I'd read one of her books, I'd gone overseas, I was in Vietnam, I think, with my ex-wife and on the way back I was in this airport and I picked up this book, it looked interesting.

I said it's just light stuff.

So we did an interview, but I said, no, that's not high-brow enough for this book.

But there was other interviews I did not include, because they weren't quite as serious.

- And are these, I know a lot of these were published, as you say, in journals or as articles.

Are these the same, or are they expanded from what you were able to put in those publications?

- As far as expanded, there's a couple of the writers that I've interviewed at least twice.

So we have Ron Hansen, Christine Garcia, Richard Powers, I'm leaving out one other one.

So those are expanding, in that sense.

But the interviews themselves were basically just...

There's a couple different ways, one would be, I'd interview him in person.

So we're getting into a subject that's really very time consuming.

So if I was interviewing a person live, I would have a tape recorder and I dunno if you can imagine doing an hour, to two-hour interview, and then having to transcribe that.

Back and forth with your recorder, and then hopefully that you don't misunderstand what he says.

But that was just so time consuming.

But it was really good.

And then the other way would be if I did it by email, that's simple, you just ask 'em a question, they respond.

And sometimes we do it live, like on a telephone, we do an interview like that.

And so it's changed, you know?

In the old days, had a tape recorder, then we started doing stuff online and if I was doing in-person or online, with a thing that's going to the digital recorders.

So just a little side thing to that, when we started doing digital recorders, I usually have two of 'em cause I was always afraid that what if I... Something happened to one battery or whatever, so I always had two recorders and then the same thing, you have to do the transcribing, so... - I imagine there's pros and cons for both doing it in-person versus email.

I mean email, like you say, you don't have to transcribe anything but maybe being in-person you get a little bit more back and forth, and it's a little more organic, I guess, in how your conversations go.

- Exactly.

What I like about that is that if you're interviewing the person, you know, like in a hotel room, like we normally would do, or in the case of Kazuo Ishiguro, he did it at my house in Sugarland, which is phenomenal.

But what's so cool about interviewing the writer in-person is that they'll talk about something, and they'll bring up a subject.

and all of a sudden your mind goes, oh, that's a great question.

So you go off on a tangent and you explore all these things that you hadn't even thought about asking.

So that's much more beneficial to do it in-person like that.

- I also wanted to ask, does the setting make a difference?

You mentioned you did one in your home, I imagine the vibe or the feeling of that is different than in a hotel or in a restaurant.

Does that change how the interviews feel or go?

- Yeah, a little bit.

Like, the Ishiguro interview is just phenomenal.

I mean, here's this young, fairly unknown writer and I mean, just a little side story to this though, if you got a minute here.

- Of course, yes, please.

- So he was here for the Houston International Festival, and I, you know, had an interview set up.

So I call him at his hotel room, downtown Houston.

I said, are you ready for me to come down?

He goes, God, no, get me outta here!

I go, what's going on?

He goes, I've been stuck here three days, nothing to do.

Please take me to your place.

And I said, I thought you had an interview or a reading set up.

He goes, yeah, it was at the downtown Houston Library.

One person showed up.

27 years later, he wins the Nobel Prize.

(Christine chuckles) And then he comes to my house, and I give him a glass of water and lemon that he asked for and we just had the most enjoyable conversation for about two hours and he was just fantastic, he's probably the most brilliant person I've ever met, at that young of an age, that had a total understanding of the craft of writing.

But going back to the other ones, like usually done in hotel rooms, and those are pretty good.

So, you know, I could probably say one or two negative things on some of the interviews, but overall very, very good.

The writers are just really well to work with.

The ones that are a little bit difficult, that were in-person, where they didn't want to interview in the room for whatever reason, usually it's a female.

But Ben Moser also wanted to do one downstairs.

So we'd do it in a hotel lobby.

So Jamaica Kincaid, and Valeria Luiselli, and Benjamin Moser, we would do, like, in a lobby.

And so like with Valeria Luiselli, it was difficult because we're in a bar area, and people were coming in for breakfast, and brunch, and all that and I took this to the far corner, but they had construction going on.

So it's like, a little bit of noise to deal with.

Anyway, but overall it still worked out.

- So to your mind or in your opinion, what makes a good interview?

- A good interview is being able to ask questions that I want to find out about that writer and for the person I'm interviewing to be candid with me and to tell me exactly what they think and then from there, I think if that gets printed, then it lets the reader know more about that writer.

- Which leads me right to my next one, is why do you think it's important to, well, we have the work, but why is it important to also see what the author thinks or says about the creation of that work?

- I think just normal curiosity, like, you can read a book, and then you start mentally thinking, this is how this author thinks.

Right, but that's not necessarily the case, cause they're writing fiction, you know, for the most part.

But to take it a step back further, it's like when I was a kid and I grew up in the '60s, I buy a record album at a store, and you turn it over, and you see all these liner notes or whatever and you're like, what does this all mean?

And I have the same thing about, you know, reading the book.

I want to learn more about the person that wrote that book and so that's why I love doing the interviews.

- Why do you think writers write?

- That's a great question.

I don't think there's one answer for that, but I think they write for a variety of reasons.

They want to tell a story, could be a personal experience, but they want to communicate and tell the story to the would-be readers.

And... if I could mention a line from a Mary, what's her name?

Maria Popova, she wrote a book called Figuring and in there, there's this line, she says, How, in this blink of existence, book-ended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?

So from that, I take that that's what writers are trying to do, they're trying to find a completeness of being, they want to find out some kind of permanence, some kind of legacy that they can leave behind and by writing, they can do that for the audience.

and to take it even further back than that, if you go back to say, Shakespeare's Sonnets, you know, what are the the avenues of, in those days, for immortality?

He would say, procreation, having kids.

To me, that's like, one of the great joys of life that you can raise children and have that experience.

The other is creation.

and so since we're talking about writing, then that would be the other avenue and that's why I think some of the writers write, they wanna leave a legacy or permanence.

So like, going back to Max Apple for a second, I was in his office and the subject came up about a writer's immortality, which a lot of writers, yeah, I wanna be immortal, right, I wanna live forever.

You know, who doesn't, you know?

But when I asked him this question, he goes, Even Shakespeare will disappear.

And I was just so stunned when I heard that, I couldn't get around it, cause I'm still young.

and I was, like, to think that Shakespeare, or Bach, or The Beatles or whomever, will not be here with us forever, that everything we create may be gone?

I was just stunned.

But that's what I think writers are trying to do.

They're trying to get some kind of permanence or legacy.

- I had the same reaction when I read that in the book.

I thought, Well, I don't wanna believe that's true.

- I know.

- I want Shakespeare to be here forever."

- [Allan] Me too.

- What kind of writers do you like, or novels are you interested in?

- That's another great question.

I like writers that, when you're reading a story, that it propels you along.

You want to find out what's gonna happen and so it's like they're gonna bring you into a different world, like the world that we live in day-to-day, you know, could be kind of plain and boring or whatever but all of a sudden you're thrust into this fighter's world, and you wanna find out what's gonna happen as you get toward the end.

So it's almost like living a different life but that's what I like.

- How do you prepare for an interview?

And I get, I'm gonna ask you the question that I get asked most frequently, do you actually read the books?

- Oh, of course.

(both laugh) Yeah, I definitely read the book.

So like, the easiest way to handle an interview, if a writer I'm gonna meet, for example, in-person or even online, is to read all their books.

So if it's a fairly young writer, that's better, because there's only a few books.

Or I might not have enough time, I might hear, Hey, this writer's coming to town in two weeks, so I've gotta read, like, two or three of his books.

But somebody that's written, you know, a bunch of books, then I can't do 'em, I'm just gonna take the best ones.

So yeah, definitely read all the books that I can.

I'm probably doing research, in the old days, I might have to go to the library and nowadays you can Google stuff.

So yeah, just do as much research as I can.

And when I'm reading a book, I underline everything, make notes, and then I go back into the book and I write down, as I'm going, the questions that I was thinking about, and I put 'em all down and then if I get to a point, I'll go, okay, this is a lot of questions, which ones are really, really important?

Which ones aren't so much?

And then I'll, you know, I'll cut out the ones I don't like.

But yeah, it's a lot of research.

- You've interviewed some authors, as you mentioned, that have won some of the top literary prizes, the Nobel, the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award, et cetera, and you tend to ask them if that award adds pressure to their next work or their follow-up work.

Conversely, does that award add pressure to you being able to interview?

Do you think about that as you're interviewing them?

- Not really, it doesn't put pressure on me so much.

I mean, I guess there is some pressure, to some extent, based on, like, who I'm interviewing and you know, what kind of attitude do they have?

If they come across not so good, then...

I can mention one writer that she just, we start doing an interview and she said, we're in her hotel room, and she goes, I don't want any prepared questions, just do things off the top of your head.

I go, I can't do that, I've research you for, like, weeks snd well, we got over that bump, it was okay.

But yeah, not pressuring me, but for them, I asked Jennifer Egan this question.

She'd gained a lot of fame for A Visit from the Goon Squad.

and she wrote a book called Happy, I'm sorry, she wrote a book called "Manhattan Beach."

And to me, it was like a step down, and I didn't tell her that, but I asked her, I said, did you feel pressure?

She said, yes, so much pressure.

She says, It took at least seven years to get that novel out.

I think she just published it just to get it off her desk.

Then she went on to write a better book.

Same thing with Emily St. John Mandel, who I admire, her last three novels are just fantastic and asked her, after you wrote 'Station 11,' you know, was there pressure?"

She goes, oh my goodness, how much pressure you cannot believe.

But then she wrote The Glass Hotel, which I thinks even better.

She's a fantastic writer.

- She's was one of my favorite interviewees, and I've added several books to my to-be-read list socially.

(laughs) - Yeah, she's great.

- She seemed wonderful.

What about if you're interviewing, you mentioned you are familiar, personally, with some of the authors.

Does that change the dynamic?

Does that make you more nervous, or does, how does that change things?

- Well, I know Ron Hansen, but we weren't really good friends in high school or college.

We just weren't in the same classes at the same time.

But there's, you have to, like, when you go in there, you have to just be ambivalent about, you can't... You know, like, I may have different thoughts of what I believe in, and they may have totally different thoughts.

So I just try and stay away from anything controversial, and I try and be open.

Like if Ron Hansen is extremely religious, so I'm not gonna go there and say, well, what about this?

And make him get upset.

And say, well, this writer says this, and then, you know, he's gonna be really defensive.

But yeah, I just try and be, you know, level about whoever I interview.

But yeah, there's intimidations too.

Like with Steven Pinker, he's considered one the smartest man in the world, this psychologist from Harvard.

He's just absolutely brilliant.

So my son who's an engineer, you know, he was a big help.

So we both went and interviewed him and so yeah, there's just a little bit of intimidation on some writers.

- I did notice, for him especially, his answers were dense.

He was the... (laughs) I did not feel as smart as I felt before reading his question.

I thought, wow, I need to do some more research on this man.

- Yeah, well, just to intersect about the Pinker interview, just to give you an idea of what happened, was he was supposed to meet us at the Zaza Hotel, this incredibly fancy hotel downtown.

So Shawn and I, my son, went in to ask for him, and they said he's not checked in yet and he said, well, we have an interview in the next 15 minutes and he goes, okay.

So Shawn turns around, he goes, there he is cause he's got these brilliant, you know, grayish blonde curls.

And he comes walking in, he goes, Oh, I'm sorry, our flight just got in from Miami.

He goes, give me 10 minutes and I'll meet you upstairs in my room.

So we're both there, he had just done a book reading in Miami, got on an airplane, just got into the hotel, didn't even do anything and then we sat down and did, like, a two-hour interview.

I have incredible respect for these writers that are on book tours and they're traveling, they're tired, and they're being asked a bunch of the same questions.

But yeah, so to understand it from their point of view, give the writers a lot of credit for, you know, sitting down and being coherent and lucid.

- Sure.

You just sparked a good question for me there.

Do you try to avoid asking those same kind of, where do you get your inspiration from?

Like those kind of rote questions that they probably get a lot.

- A little bit, like, questions like, what do you like to read?

You know, or who's your favorite author?

They probably get that asked all the time, so I try and stay away from that but occasionally, it'll come out.

(both laugh) - Sure.

And it may be pertinent to what you're talking about too.

- And usually, they're pretty good about it, like Richard Powers, I asked him that and he said, hey, no problem, I'm glad you asked it and he's, like, super polite.

- It seems like a lot of writers, too, like to talk about their inspiration because they love, they wanna talk about what they love and what, you know... That's just kind of part of being a reader and a lover of literature.

- Yeah.

You mentioned, too, earlier that a couple of these interviews are kind of, they're two-for-one, that you have an older interview with them, and then a follow-up many years later.

Can you talk about maybe the differences when you meet them again, or how the experience changed?

- Okay, I feel like Ron Hansen, the first one, is in a typewritten letter and do you have an idea just on how writing has changed?

He would write with a pencil in a notebook, and that's how he wrote his novels and nowadays he's on the computer.

At that time, he had no idea what was gonna be happening over the next, you know, 40 years of his writing career.

But yeah, so I guess I don't, like, can you repeat your question?

Yeah, I was trying to- - I was just, how things have changed for the authors or the writers between- - Yeah, so like with Hansen that, I came back to him about 20 years later and did another interview with him and that was online cause he's in California.

Garcia, same kind of thing.

I've met her, but the interview we did was online.

Richard Powers, I've met him, we've had had great conversations, but both of those were online too.

So yeah, it was, it didn't change a whole lot.

- It's certainly come a long way from typewritten letters.

(laughing) - [Allan] Exactly.

- We think about how technology has changed our lives, but it's changed the way we read and the way writers create too and that's not something to forget.

- Well, part of that subject that you're bringing up came up an interview with Neil Stevenson, the science fiction writer and we talked about how things are so available now.

Like if you Google something, you get it.

And I said in the old days, like when I was in grad school, you go to a library and you just start researching stuff, you know, it is, you know, treasure hunting and then you'd find some little gem and you'd go, okay, yeah, I really like that and then you get all your information but nowadays it's so easy to pull up what you want right away much faster but even Stevenson said, I still go to the library because I can still find things that I can't find on the internet and there's more benefit to self-discovery.

- Absolutely.

I really like that part of the interview cause I grew up in a library and I love the library and you do, you don't have that experience anymore of just stumbling maybe across a book that's two books away from the book you were looking for and just, that discovery doesn't too much exist with Google as it used to.

- Well that happened with one of the writers in here, which is Hubert Selby Jnr.

I was, this shows you how old I am, because I was in the library looking up a writer and I was researching him on micro fish.

I don't even know if that's even around anymore.

That's why I'm sitting there spinning this thing and reading.

I came across this short story called Tralala by Selby and it's really pretty graphic.

It's horrible to read it for most people, but I was just like stunned and I go, wow, who is this guy?

And you know, later on I got to interview him but yeah, I only came across him just by chance.

- Do you have a favorite question to ask?

- For writers?

Not really.

Just, you know, more or less on each book because every book is different.

But yeah, I'm sure there's certain parts that I come in there I'll say, you know, is this a metaphor for such and such?

Or like when I was interviewing Mandel, there's a partner novel, the Glass Hotel where it's about Bernie Madoff, more or less official story about that and he's, the guy that gets caught goes to prison, but he's losing his mind and is how she does it.

It is like reading Joel Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment and I asked her that and she goes, that is one of the great compliments I've had that you picked up on that.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

- Are you, do you keep in touch with these authors after you interview them?

- Normally not.

I have their emails and so forth, like Samantha Swevlin, who's from Argentina, she lives in Berlin, so sometimes I'll, if I see something that associates with Argentina, I'll shoot her an email.

Richard Powers, I try and stay away from him.

He knows that I love his writing, he's incredible writer, but he lives in Smokey Mountains, but he said, Allan, anytime you wanna reach out to me, go ahead and he's the only writer that I sent my book to because he had just published the second interview we do the novel Bewilderment and he was says, I knew how busy he was, Allan, I normally would not do this, but because I love the interview that we did before, he says, I'll do another one.

So, because that I sent him a copy of the book and, so.

- So that must be exciting to be able to send a writer you've interviewed the writing that you've done.

- Yeah.

- Kind of a kind of a bookend moment if I can use a pun.

- Exactly.

(both laughing) Well unfortunately we are running low on time here, so in our final, maybe like two or three minutes, can you tell us what you want people to take away from this book, but also just maybe interviews with authors, in general?

- Yeah, I mean basically I would say, what's the audience I'm writing for?

I wanna write to the interviews to be read by people that love literature and it doesn't have to be any, many of it's professional, just so they like to read, but also for students that are in undergrad and graduate school and they're writing a a paper and they're trying to figure out, what is this writer trying to say, am I interpreting this right or wrong?

But they read an interview, they get an understanding of what that might be.

So yeah, I want that to happen.

But also I might bring up a book that they've never read before, like with Emily St. John Mendel, like she's famous for Station 11, but Glass Hotel, Sea of Tranquility, her books, that he might go, oh wow.

Or a writer like Kim Echlin, a fairly unknown Canadian writer.

I'ma expose people to her and wrote this incredible novel called, The Disappeared and then she has speak signs about the women that testified against all the, the people that raped the women in the Serbian war.

So yeah, if I can expose them to, not just to the major writers and some of their other works, but also to less known writers then I think I'm doing something beneficial.

- Well, if I may, I think you did accomplish that in this book cause I, as a reader, like I said, I've added several of these to my list and I just found it very enriching to just read about what these writers and what these authors think about their work and how they create and I would a hundred percent recommend it to anybody who loves to read or who loves literature or as you say maybe who wants to learn how to write questions or how to think critically about what they've already read.

I think this is a great template for that.

Well, thank you so much for being here today.

I really appreciate our conversation.

That is all the time we have today.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Again, the book was Talk Talk Interviews with Writers by Allan Vorda.

Thanks for joining us and I will see you again soon.

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