Poured Over: Paul Harding on This Other Eden

By Miwa Messer / January 26, 2023 at 6:00 am

“I love finishing reading a book and thinking, I feel privileged to have read that, I feel dignified. I feel like that book sort of thought of me as sacred … I want to write the kind of books that I most love to read.”

From Paul Harding, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers, comes This Other Eden — an intricate novel inspired by the fascinating true story of Malaga, an island in Maine that held one of the first integrated communities after the Civil War. Harding joins us to talk about his vibrant cast of characters, studying with Marilynne Robinson, the authors who have influenced him and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Jamie.

Featured Books (Episode)
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Enon by Paul Harding
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Featured Books: (TBR Topoff)
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Full transcript of this episode:

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Paul Harding. I am so happy to see your face right now I am so happy to see you. This Other Eden is finally here, I have been waiting for this novel and it is a miracle and a wonder and all of the things you want a novel to be. And it’s 220 pages, which we have to talk about that. But thank you for being here. I’m so excited to see you. Where did this book come from? Where did This Other Eden start for you?

Paul Harding

Oh, my gosh, oh, it goes back. First of all, thank you for having me. It’s a great, great pleasure to be talking with you. It’s so funny, because you know, now you get to the point where it’s about to be published and then people start asking, “Well, where did it start?” And that’s interesting, because every time I try to do a novel, it really just starts with like all the reading I’m doing, the music I’m listening to, the paintings I’m looking at, you know, all the different things. I just throw it all into the cauldron, you know. And then you start to get these little constellated kind of points where you think, Oh, that’s interesting and that’s interesting and you start just kind of permutating and seeing. So there are different elements that when I actually started as, like, I got to sit down and start trying to, you know, kind of invoke a novel, I just started off actually, with just some scenes that were set in one of the same locations as my second book, Enon, a big estate in Massachusetts. And one of the minor characters from Enon is like 90 years old or something, I’m just gonna plunk her down in the meadow of her family’s, you know, property, and just start riffing on her when she was like 10 years old. And I actually had this idea that she had the sense of having had a sibling or something, like a ghost sibling, and I knew it wouldn’t be the book, but I just started riffing and trying to invoke kind of this world. And then this is just so specific, it seems strange, but I’m always looking at paintings. I’m kind of a junkie for landscape and for still life paintings. I was reading about this painter, who is a Black painter in the 19th century, I think he was from Connecticut, he studied in Connecticut, named Charles Ethan Porter. And as I’m writing the scenes in the meadow in Enon, I came upon this incredible painting that he did of haystacks, of hay mowing. So, I’m just like hey, it’s early, I could do anything I want. So I just put a guy out in the meadow behind where the characters were talking out painting, you know, and somebody says, who’s that guy? So, you know, I just did it. Here we go, just sort of improvising and riffing. And then I was, oddly enough, by coincidence was reading a history of organized labor in the United States, after the Civil War, as one does. One of the things that interested me was how labor unions were one of the earliest kind of American, US institutions that actually were integrated and advocated for women’s suffrage. And you know, because when working folks live together, they tend to live together, right? And so just how you keep, you know, sort of communities at peace and that sort of thing. So I just started wondering about either all Black or racially integrated, communities after the Civil War, like there must have been, you know, people get together, right? So I just did the Google thing just like “integrated communities.” Just very straightforward, and we you know, within two or three results, we came across this story, the historically factual story of a place called Malaga Island, which is a small island off the coast of Southern Maine, that from about 1792, or 1793 until 1912 was the site of a racially integrated community small fishing community. And I thought, Oh Maine because my first novel Tinkers was set in Maine and my grandparents are from Maine. So it’s kind of in the cellular level. And then what I found out was that some of the people so in 1912, the state of Maine evicted the people from the settlement. And one of the things I found out was that some of the people were compelled to go to a place called the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. You can imagine the delights that awaited. And that was the same place that characters in my first novel Tinkers was going to be modeled after the same sort of place. You’re always looking for, like walking around with your Dowsing Rod, go and give me a sign and things start to twitch, like Maine, the school for the feeble minded. And then by chance, I discovered that I think to the month that these people were evicted from the island, the first International Congress for eugenics was taking place in London. So I was just like, that’s lemon, lemon, lemon, jackpot. All at once I realized, the guy that’s out in the field painting is from that island. Right? And then you know, then it’s just sentence by sentence trying to discover how everything comes together.

And it really does- you open with a flood of biblical proportions. And it is some of the most extraordinary writing I have seen in a while. And it was, I don’t want to spoil it for people because it is I went back and read it a second time before I kept moving through the book, because I was just like, did he just do what I think he just did? And I went to college in Maine, my family has some ties in Southern Maine as well. So I mean, but I don’t think of communities of color when I think of Maine. To be perfectly honest, and you know, now there’s a Somali community. Yeah, right, you know, up north and whatnot, but traditionally mean not really all that integrated. So I mean, right there that got my attention to and then what you do with language, and this, the members of this community, I love the women especially, I mean, the dudes are great, but the women are really kind of outstanding. So, can we talk about the cast? I mean, we’ve got this very well intentioned teacher slash minister in 1912. But let’s start with the community before we get to him.

Yeah, one of the things that, you know, as I was thinking about that, I didn’t want to write an historical novel, right? The novel was not going to be about Malaga Island. And, you know, for all sorts of different reasons- the descendants are up there, and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time it’s that kind of, you know, public domain, it’s US history. You know, this happened and not only happened there, but it happened in all sorts of other communities. So it seems essential, you know, and essentially American, but also essentially, the idea of the flood from the Bible. Displacement, human displacement. So what I knew, and again, it’s almost like with Tinkers is like, all the load bearing dramatic premises of Tinkers were factual, right. But and it’s kind of the same with this book. But you could fit them on one side of a three by five index card, right? And so I just knew that this settlement was founded by a guy, the real person’s name is Benjamin Darling, it’s tough not to use that name. It’s such a great name, Benjamin Darling, and his wife, Patience, I think her name was. Its Patience in the book, and she was from Galway, from Ireland. And I just thought about just this couple, you know, just this, you know, this, this couple who came there, and they were, you know, in a mixed marriage, as it were, , what it must have been like for just two people, you know, that sort of thing. And I was already imagining it, I was already like, I didn’t research anymore. I think I’ve maybe read three or four articles about this, that I wanted to populate on and I didn’t want too huge of a cast of characters, but I wanted a pretty robust- and I just wanted different people and different descendants. I write about actually several generations after, who would have been Benjamin and Patience. So these are the kind of the last folks that are there. And they’re all descendants. And I don’t know, what you say about the women one of the things and again, this is just it’s so concrete in so many ways. It’s one of my absolute favorite novels of all time, and I think it’s just like this neglected American masterpieces Sarah Orne Jewett book called The Country of the Pointed Firs, andl it’s all women, it’s basically all women. The men are just like these old, kind of decrepit, sea captains, And so the women are just like these- the characters in that book and what she does in that book. And some of these things are so personal, it’s so weird, but one of the things that drove me crazy about my first novel Tinkers is that there’s a character in there, she’s the mother of the family and, and she does a very difficult thing in the book. And some people find her to be cold hearted and sort of said, if you met the woman she was based on, you’d realize my character is much nicer. But I couldn’t ever quite get her right. I couldn’t quite do the justice to her that I really wanted to. I just thought of that. And so for me at the beginning of the process, and I think maybe still too, there’s a character named Esther. Who I thought of as kind of the epicenter of the novel.

Absolutely, she is absolutely. She is straight out of New England mythology. She, and I say this as someone who, you know, has lots and lots of New England women standing behind her and yeah, Esther, she’s awesome.

She’s awesome. She’s like the cranky Yankee as they call it, you know, that sort of thing. And I just knew that she was just Yeah, I just knew that she was a badass, you know, I mean, one of the things and again, the way I get my prompt visually or you know, from music, etc. One of the things is that with these articles about Malaga Island is there are photographs of the some of the families that were there in 1912. And I don’t know why they were taken. But that’s one of the first things I always think of is there’s a woman sitting there, and she’s got one of her grandchildren, apparently in her lap, and I always just immediately get behind her shoulders and think, who is she looking at who’s taking her picture, that sort of thing. And she has this very sort of suspicious, you know, just, she’s not very happy to be having it. So again, it would just be, you know, I just put this character in the rocking chair and just, you know, kind of say who are you and just, it’s the writers job is to just like, I think of it like literally like a manhole, like a trapdoor, I take the ladder down into the world. And my job is just to shut up, be quiet and look and listen and take dictation, you don’t know anything, you presume nothing. So again, we’re kind of one by one. These characters elaborated themselves. And there’s a guy that ended up being, he’s a Civil War veteran, he’s Black, he served with a Black Connecticut regiment- in Connecticut. And I just, you know, I love these old kind of New England names. His name is Zachary Hand to God Proverbs. And, you know, I just, you know, he lives in a tree and he carves stuff in the tree, you know, just kind of one by one the characters get, and then they started interacting with each other until you finally kind of have this group of people.

Yeah, the island itself, though, is one of those characters and everyone’s home, which obviously is, you know, the sisters you were mentioning earlier. They live in a converted ship’s cabin. Yeah, that somehow has been stripped out. And I’m like, I’m trying to figure out the math of this. I’m like, I don’t even know how you do that. But they’re home on this island is a converted ships cabin.

That may be, I may have gotten that from the history of Malaga. I don’t think that’s unusual, because you had these people that are you know, they’re pretty impoverished. Right. And so you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t, you know, let a good cabin go to waste. Just because it wasn’t on the water. I think, you know,

No, there’s absolutely that. And Matthew Diamond, you know, this teacher slash Minister slash, I guess he’s the minister. Sort of missionary. So he’s, you know, entirely well intentioned and teaching these children but also doesn’t want them anywhere near him because they have lice. And, you know, he’s just sort of implying that they’re all dirty. But I mean, they’re poor. It’s 1912. No one has, you know, it’s what it is. But his role. He’s well intentioned to a point but he’s incredibly impossibly disruptive. I think everyone has encountered someone like this at some point in their lives, where it’s just like, You mean, well, I understand that you mean, well, can we talk about eugenics and shutting down this community?

His introduction into the community is self-motivated, as it were, but it causes a rupture in the integrity of the of this place. And that’s kind of some of the earliest things that I had was, you know, this character, Esther, just seeing this guy and just knowing in the most general way, when people from the so called mainland, take notice of us nothing good is bound to come. You know, and so I think he’s, you know, yeah, it’s that idea of just that, you know, the best of intentions, good intentions, are often catastrophic, is a combination of better and worst impulses. He’s prejudiced, but he’s aware of it. And he laments the fact that he is, and I thought that was kind of an interesting complication. And so that part of his character I took from, in my spare time I’m like a theology nerd. I read tons and tons of theology. I read Karl Barth who’s a Swiss theologian and like every good Swiss theologian, he’s got a, you know, 15, volume, church dogma. And those things really are the models of close reading, you know, they’re close readings of the Bible. And I love them because they’re metaphysical. That’s cosmology. And he was one of the founding members of what’s called the Confessing Church in World War Two, and they were one of the only institutions to kind of like, openly defy Hitler, and to help Jews when nobody else was helping. He did something when nobody else was doing it. After 20 years of reading, even 1000s of pages of you know, one day I just happened to come across and this little volume of correspondence he just offhandedly says, he’s talking about his son, who he says, you know, I’m just very glad that my son is not afflicted with, with what I suffer, which is the visceral disgust I feel, whenever I’m in the presence of a living Jew. I mean, it’s so wretched but yeah, then here’s all this other work he did do. And you can’t- they don’t cancel each other. Like, it’s true that he said, and felt that and it’s true that he also did those good. And that, you know, for the writer, I mean, for an artist, you know, two opposite things, you put them right next to each other, you don’t tell the reader what to think about them. That’s what generates character tension, complexity and richness. So I just gave him that almost line for line a paraphrase of that about the mixed race folks on the on the island.

Diamond is our connection back to Enon, in a way, because of what he does, and I’m gonna let readers find out what that thing is, because it’s a great moment, I gasped a little bit when I saw Enon mentioned because I was trying to figure out, somehow I knew this stuff was going to loop back, you don’t walk away from New England, we would all like to walk away from it. Some people stay, some of us leave whatever, but like it gets under your skin, you don’t leave. It’s a place you never actually leave.

It’s true. You could move to California. And the reason you would be in California is because of New England.

Have you ever been to the Huntington Museum in California? Okay, so one of the buildings they have, I spent quite a lot of time in California, and one of the buildings they have is full of all of this art that you and I have seen 1000 times over in all of those tiny museums throughout New England. That have this very staunch stern looking, I’m just like, I can’t even I’m 3000 miles away, and all of those creepy flat paintings of children that if they come alive, you know, those paintings are going to murder you in your sleep and its across the hall dfrom the bathroom, and you’re just like, I would like to not die. All of that stuff is true. But yeah, New England. Is this kind of place.

Yeah It’s, I’m just like, provincial by disposition, but also by choice. You know, I just love it. Just something. I mean, I just grew up, you know, kind of a miserable young kid. Like, well, you know, I just didn’t want it, you know, so I felt tyrannized by school, by the way that you know, what you were made to do, and that sort of thing. So I just, you know, be out in the woods up on the north shore of Boston, right. And I just, you know, even today, I often enough I just say what I’m trying to kind of get down on paper is psychic and emotional experience that has this visual correlation in being in like, bare, cold New England woods, on a November afternoon, at about 4:30. And that light, and it’s just so beautiful, but so kind of stark and forlorn and just, you know, it’s just like I said, it’s just on a cellular level

And the smell. I’m a bookseller. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. But that’s smelt like you know it when you smell it?

Yeah, exactly. And the light in the sky. Actually, if you’re near the shore, if you’re near water, the Atlantic is kind of like up in the sky.

And all of these people are a product of that place. And that very, very hard to live place. Except Matthew. Yeah. And he’s saying, Well, I think I have an out and he has an out for one of the boys. Because he passes for White.

Yeah, I mean, that was one of the most striking things too, about the photographs I saw on that first time I encountered Malaga, or it was actually, it’s a picture of a school on the island, which is actually highly enough regarded to that there were actually some students who came from other parts of Maine, you know, other communities nearby and paid a small tuition because it was, you know. I wanted this guy to be legit, I wanted him to be intelligent, I wanted him to be a good soul, you know, but the photographs, the photographs, and they exist of all the kids who are on the island who went to the school, and they really do, you know, like, they present as everything from, like blond hair blue eyed to African, so he knows that that the settlement is under duress, it’s coming under tension that is not going to- that doesn’t bode well for it. So he thinks, regardless of what’s going to happen, maybe one thing he can do is save this one young guy, this kid named Ethan, who is a good painter, he has an aptitude for painting and drawing, he basically contrives to have him taken from the island, you know, it finds an opportunity for him to he thinks to practice his art off the island. And he’s, I mean, one of the things about you know, writing about these sorts of things is to be very, very, very upfront, clear, straightforward. He knows that even doing that is a deeply morally ambiguous, he’s ambivalent or that, that one of the things I’m always fascinated about when I teach the Old Testament, when I teach Shakespeare, I think, is the idea of Measure for Measure that we don’t know, the value of what we’re looking at, especially for anything that’s really meaningful or consequential. So he doesn’t know if what he’s doing is a good gesture, or is it? Is it the least worst thing you can do? Or is it catastrophic?

Well, and also he has all the power in the situation. And right there, I mean, yeah, you write about a lot of characters who don’t always have power. And not just in this book. I mean, this is, this is part of what I think of when I think of your novels. And, you know, Matthew, is how we get to Enon and, you know, I had a moment where it’s just like, Okay, here’s the kind of, okay, okay. But the idea that you’re settling into this world, where Tinkers and Enon and This Other Eden all sort of exist on a timeline, it’s not something that frequently happens in literary fiction. And it’s, it’s world building of a sort, that isn’t just the houses and the people and the places and the light and the smell and everything else. It is the way you use language. And I feel like I can’t talk to you without talking about revision, because it’s clear that and you’ve talked about this in other interviews where like, Hey, I wrote stuff on the back of receipts, and then there were post it notes, and I live and die by post it notes. I mean, we have an entire upcoming season of the show that’s mapped out on post it notes and galleys.

Right, right. Yeah.

I cast no aspersions on anyone else’s use of post it notes. Yeah. But I love the idea that you are working from these very sort of tight, specific moments. And then you figure out where they connect, that you’re not sitting down and saying, here’s the world, and this is what’s going to happen. It’s like, I have an image. I don’t know where it’s going yet. And you talked about this at the top of the show, but I love that idea. Because there’s so much in each of the three novels are gonna like, yeah, that where did that come from?

I don’t know, if it’s, you know, in a former life as a drummer in a rock band, you know, and so when you’re the drummer, you keep time, right? The idea, you know, when I sit down at the drums, it’s improvisational, and you start looking around, listening around and feeling around. And that’s just what I do but instead of doing it with a pair of sticks, you know, you do it language, right. I’m just endlessly obsessed with language. And like, I don’t even know what language is, you know what I mean? It’s just like, it’s so essentially human, and so mysterious, one of the things that I just feel more and more strongly about is that like, meaning with a big M symbol with capital, that stuff kind of takes care of itself. You know, like, if you are the writer are just taking care of the bricks and the mortar, and just making sure every sentence says what it means and means what it says. That means what it means literally, right, it means anything literal. And then as all of these literal sentences start to start to turn into paragraphs and pages and that sort of thing, then figurative meaning starts to kind of almost vibrate and kind of precipitate off. I love it. Because I’ve come upon a way that works for me, where I can have this process of just like just taking care of sentence by sentence, word, by word and everything. And it just feels like Melville called writing Moby Dick ditchers work. It’s just like, get the shovel and just like, you know, but then what starts to happen is, after a week, or whatever, you pull back and you look at the file, or anything, well, that’s way better than what I had in mind. Right? You know, the idea that the language is smarter than you. And words have made, you know, I have two full volume sets of the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, the newer one and the older ones. I just spend a part of every day spelunking through the language, and reading the quotes, and how any given word has been, how its meaning has been canted around, you know, through the centuries. Just common words, I don’t look up exotic words, just that milieu of that. Then again, if you’re just doing that without being very deliberate or goal oriented about it, I think, that ends up coming through in the language and in the novels. You know, there’s just a sense of, I don’t know deeper time, I want the characters to be super intimate and super like you know them, but at the same time, like, you know, they’re as old as Moses and they’re as recent as seeing your neighbor when you go get the mail kind of thing.

Isn’t that the purpose of the novel, though, honestly, is you’re capturing time, right. And novel allows you intimacy with characters and their inner lives that no other medium does. Right. I think that I mean, film and television. They’re great. They serve their purpose. All props. Yeah, but at the same Time, you don’t have the freedom to roam way you do on the page, like I’ve just got to deliver the thing and everything has to move forward. It’s very, very structured. Whereas one of the things I really appreciate about This Other Eden and certainly with Tinkers, Tinkers flows a little more in plays a little more with time the way This Other Eden does, Enon, obviously, when you’re dealing with the death of a child, it’s a different kind of reading experience. I mean, Charlie, poor Charlie, poor Charlie that’s a whole other conversation but yeah, for Charlie, but the way Tinkers and This Other Eden sort of sit in this universe that is nonlinear. That is image driven. And even the way the characters interact, like, Esther and her son.

Yeah. I love them.

I mean, what a great character. But at the same time, you know, there’s so much happening at this kind of simmer for everyone in This Other Eden and, you know, Esther knows more than some of the other people in the community without a doubt. And certainly, I loved her more for not trusting Matthew, yes, he is well intentioned, but I mean, immediately her eyebrows up.

That’s one of the interesting, you know, one of the interesting kind of antitheses that sort of came up, and this is things you just discover, and like me saying, This doesn’t like, Oh, now you’ve got the skeleton, right? Well, I tried to do with everything just out there in the open, like, your meeting starts when you know what’s happening, as opposed to the way that we’re taught to read and sometimes taught to write which is no sentence means what it says it stands for something else. Like my one of my absolute hard and fast rules is every sentence means exactly what it says but you know, Matthew Diamond and the Mainlanders the white quote, unquote, you know, the white characters their term is pure white, that because that would be eugenics. Right? And the Islanders and Esther and the women in her family, the generations for them, it’s plain white, right? You know, and that and she’s just it out, so she just knows, like her hackles raise. But yeah, I mean, I think that goes back to it again, just a personal thing I want to write- you said the book is like 220 pages long. I want it to be 1000 pages deep, but I wanted every sentence to read like you should read it slowly. People read it slowly. The object is not to finish it quickly. I’m just always amazed at how much meaning sentences can have, you know, and the way they build up

One of the things you had me thinking about as I was reading This Other Eden actually is Colm Tóibín and The Master, his novel about Henry James. What Tóibín does with sentences in The Master made me finally go back to Henry James, because I mean, seriously? Seriously, I love him. And you know, and I get I and I respect, I finally made it through The Bostonians because of The Master. And, you know, I’d done Washington Square and Daisy Miller and The Turn like I did all of the stuff I was supposed to do in high school. And then, you know, I did other stuff in college. So I missed out on Princess what’s her name that goes out? Yeah. No, I know, my limits as a human being.

And you know, James it was because he started dictating his novels out loud.

Yeah, I’d heard that and it shows but The Bostonians I had a new understanding because of what Tóibín does with very simple sentences. And, you know, here you are doing some simple sentences, because it’s right there. It’s, as you get the layers…

Right. That’s it. That’s what it is, layering and layering and layering and layering.

This leads us to revision, because there’s no way you can do what you do without spending a lot of time chipping away at the chaff.

You know, I teach writing. I’ve been teaching it for a long- fiction writing. And I have just like, in the last couple of years, just come to realize that it is my personal opinion, in my humble opinion, that what we call revision is writing. It’s almost a misnomer. Because what I spend, you know, I’ve been working on this thing for, like, 10 years. I have spent, you know, just when people say, How many drafts did you do, I’m like, I probably did 100 drafts of every sentence, and just one of the things I continually do is like, every six or eight weeks, I print up a hard copy of whatever, wherever the manuscript is, and I just read the book. And so you know, and it’s always like a feedback loop. I’m always, you know, thinking and then feeding it back in, but it’s just iterative. I just keep going and keep going and keep going. And so I’ll get so I can read through the first 25 pages without touching it, and then I start tweaking again. And then time I can get to 35 pages and you’re always just. And the deeper you go, you know, you get to page 150, you go back to page one and you realize stuff about page one, right? You didn’t know about until you got to this this continually, you know, it’s feeding back on itself. I don’t know if people think about this now, but you know, my generation or whatever, it was always like, when have you revised too much? I’m afraid I’m like, I went past that ideal point an it’s over revising. The way I think of revision is precision of expression. And I think, you know, if, and I’m very platonic, about you know, like, there’s a, there’s a perfect version of This Other Eden somewhere out there, and I gotta get this closer. So I just think you can’t over revise, if you’re just trying to make things clear and precise.

Okay, so this is interesting to me, because you studied with Marilynne Robinson, I quite really love her work as well. But she also I think, has said she doesn’t revise and I’m wondering if that is, goes back to what you were just saying about how revision is essentially writing and that you are just doing the work.

So I think there’s a couple of things. One is just that I think she doesn’t revise, it’s how she composes. I just compose right on the page and throw it all in, and it’s a mess, and it’s like, I’m a magpie and I go, ooh, look shiny, I just throw it in. I’m just, I’m collaging and weaving and doing and, you know, put the blowtorch in and then melt it back to you know, whatever. Because that’s just what I do. It’s almost like, productive inefficiency. I just try everything. You know, because I’m always listening for like, Oh, I’ve never heard that note struck before or that key, or that color, or that juxtaposition that’s kind of just riffing. It’s almost like, you know, just trying to come up with jamming, you know. And I think what she does is she composes in her head, I think, you know, what, she takes walks, that sort of thing. But it’s true. I mean, this is one of the perils of teaching and writing, learning, which is, I mean, the very first class I ever took in creative writing was with her, she’d walked into the room within 10 minutes. I was like, That’s the life of the mind I want for myself. And but then, she’s like, I just start on page one and I just, and if I get 100 pages, and it’s not right, I just throw it out and I start again. And if I thought that’s how you had to write a novel, I would, you know, I’d be a plumber. You just realize that kind of like it, whatever it takes for you to get it on the page, right? Like, there’s no way that a real writer would do something. There are only ways that you can get to real writing. I think, you know, each each individual author

Tinkers came out in ‘09, right? You win the Pulitzer in ‘10. And Enon comes out and ‘13. Okay, so, and Tinkers sort of had this notoriously rejection filled life until Bellevue Literary Press found it and everything went as it should. And that beautiful jacket, and lots of people yelling, kicking and screaming and all of the right things happened at all of the right times. But did you write Enon faster than you wrote Tinkers?

I was working on it before. I had the deal for Enon before Tinkers won the prize. I was already kind of futzing around with it a little bit. Yeah. And like I mentioned earlier, you know, Enon’s kind of a monologue.

Yeah, it’s a different it is a different book from these two by far.

I mean, I think it has the same DNA and the landscape and everything. But because it’s a monologue, it was just kind of easier to write Charlie. I had friends who had lost children. The minute I became a father, I realized, there’s something that could happen now that I would just go out in the backyard, dig a hole and get in and just cover myself over. And these people not only had not done that, but I just it was kind of unfathomable to me. So, I just wrote that. I think that it felt a little bit more straightforward.

Because it’s been nine years well, almost 10. We are sitting in that slipstream of New Year, and it’s just like, what year are we talking about? What are those numbers? Yeah, but how long? Did it really take 10 years for the new book?

I would say yeah, I mean, there are probably a couple of years where I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to partly because I was moving, I got a job and raising kids and that sort of thing. It’s that weird silver lining, if you’re not really mystically inclined, maybe a little bit, but you know.

Dude, you’re a New Englander. It’s part of the baseline settings.

Like Tinkers I couldn’t get published to save my life. So I worked on Tinkers for 10 years that patience and that like, Oh, I just want to get this thing published, but during that time, I couldn’t get it published. I would still work on it. Even though l think I’ve learned, now, there’s a certain pace and there’s that kind of like, Goethe said, as we all know, “write without cease and without haste”, and just like that it’s a big cauldron on the back burner set it, and it just bubbles, just let it interact, let them sift through each other. And, you know, finding out how these characters interact with one another and how they interact with the island. And it’s like getting to know real people, that takes time. And so if you’re lucky enough, you have that book, when that book comes out, it’s going to have your name on it, and it’s going to be in the world forever. If it takes an extra year or two to get it just right, that’s going to seem like nothing in the in the fullness of time. And plus, I just get to the point too where I feel like I missed the characters. Can I go back to go back to the island and talk to them again? I think maybe if I’d had more time to just devote exclusively to writing rather than teaching work, it might have been a year quicker.

But it’s still, essentially what I’m hearing is it takes what it takes. It takes what time it takes and it shakes out, and you get the thing when you get the thing.

Yeah, there’s just a lot of writing in this that for long periods, where it’s like, I have an intuition that all of this comes together. It’s like a stand of aspen trees. I know that the root system, it’s one organism, but I don’t know, like, the connections are submerged. You just have to test something. I spent a lot of time permutating, and kind of collaging and moving stuff around. Until things sort of start to really click with one another and call back and forth to one another through the book. The millions of mixed synesthetic metaphor, I remember writing- one of them is just I liked the idea of the, again, the ideal of you could grab, take any sentence in between your thumb and forefinger and your thumb, pull on it. And it would tug on every other sentence in the in the book. That everything is totally connected organically.

Yeah, no, I get that. I do get that. But was there anything that you had to jettison? I feel like you had the thing early on, and it sort of revealed itself that there wasn’t, you know, sometimes you’re reading a very tightly written book and you’re like, what’s missing? What, what got yanked out, because it sat in a strange way. And I sort of feel like there wasn’t anything like that here.

It’s funny, because one of the kind of cool things, there’s just like, half the thing about this is just discovering these things. Oh, it’s gonna be really fun to try. It’s gonna be hard. I caught the Queen Lear phenomenon, okay, which is like, nobody reads King Lear and says, Where’s Queen Lear? Those girls needed a mother figure. That’s not the story Shakespeare’s telling. And so there are things in This Other Eden, that I just don’t- they’re just not part of my story. That could be somebody else’s story, but it’s a risk to take, because there’s all those people who say, “Oh, well, that wasn’t in the story.” And that would have meant, you know, things will tell you that like, you could have written the different book better, that kind of weird thing. But it’s that idea to say, I was like Moby Dick, right? Like, in Moby Dicknobody ever notices or objects to if they do notice that it’s written in first person omniscient. So part of it is that I think of ellipses. I don’t want to say, “then she got up and walked over and picked up the clay”, you know, that kind of thing. So I feel like what I want is, there’s this world that I want to touch down just the right places that just the right times. And that’s part of just presuming the intelligence of the reader and knowing that good, real good readers are, first of all, people always make connections, so you can leave spaces. And if you leave them, if you make the spaces in the right place, the reader will sort of just make a lot of connections on her own. And, and so, I like the idea too, of just writing, it’s like sentence by sentence, keeping the reader just like, giving the reader stuff that the reader is going to just love to see, you know, I, my test is like, if I go, Oh, that’s cool. The reader who’s coming behind me, like I write it, so it’s not like, I’m telling them anything. It’s like, my writing is reproducing my experience of revelation and discovery that the reader then gets. And I feel like if the reader, if every sentence gives them something to be just like, oh, cool, or that’s beautiful, that works or that then the other stuff, that’s the prerogative of art. That’s poetic license in a way.

That it all hangs. Marilynne Robinson is an obvious influence. You know, Melville, Faulkner, Dickinson, who else is in the personal pantheon?

Oh, I mean, it’s just there’s there’s so many. There’s so many. Okay, Sarah Orne Jewett for this is one of the patrons. Moses. I was doing some interview and he said, who your who’s your favorite author. I think it might be Moses just at this moment. Yeah, Shakespeare certainly.

There’s a lot of Tempest. There’s a lot of The Tempest running through that.

And that’s what I started to think of that storm at the beginning, I’m like, oh, that’s like Noah’s Ark. It’s like the island, The Tempest, there’s all these layers. Even the way that the kind of the waters rise and, and recede, and there’s a prominent image of a big tree, I thought of it as the Pequod at the end of Moby Dick rising back up out of the water and sinking. And it’s just supposed to be fun, you know? Like, how many layers can you get? You just end up being influenced by whoever you’re watching, wherever you’re- I was looking at Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen, it’s so subtle, and it’s so powerful. And, oh, I think we were looking at the part that’s about Serena Williams, because Serena retired. That part of that book is just, you could read it, and it’s so fine. It’s almost like, don’t read it too quickly, slow down, and with her, the more you slow it down, the more just, it gets deeper and deeper and deeper and more and more resonant. And it’s almost like the outrage of what she’s writing about is finally like, just literally, bowel splittingly powerful because she, her voice, is as quiet and as calm and just precise. So that kind of artfulness, that’s one of those ones that like, every time I reread it, I forgot that was in there. You know, there’s so much that super abundance, like it’s the only art form- reading books is the only art form that I can think of where people are just like they do at once and that’s it Like “yeah, I read that book.” But who says that about their favorite album, like, I listened to my favorite album, once. I saw my favorite movie once. But I deliberately try to write these books so that every time, if you want, you can go right back at the beginning. And on second reading, you’ll see all sorts of stuff in the beginning of the book that you couldn’t see it in the beginning.

Without a doubt, I used to reread Moby Dick every year. Every summer, I used to sit down and have a beast of a book. And I haven’t done it recently for you know, various and sundry reasons, but mostly when you’re producing this much original audio every week. You know, Ahab can hang out. Other people can spend, you know, as much time as they would like with him.

I do that like Moby Dick, as you know, is the essence of the example at hand. I know it so well, I just read in it. I just open it. And after years now of teaching the Old Testament, and teaching Shakespeare, I go back and I see it, I read Moby Dick and it literally freaks me out because there’s not a page in that entire book that is not utterly, totally, explicitly referring to the Old Testament and Shakespeare in this kind of telescopic way. And that’s how I thought of this book is you reading this book is me reading Marilynne Robinson, reading Faulkner, reading Melville, reading Shakespeare, reading Moses. Just that kind of deliberately, just clearly and explicitly luxuriating in influence,

Luxuriating in influence. And also, it is very much a piece of the American tradition. Like if you just look at there’s, there’s an absolute, through line for all of that. And yes, I realize I’m talking about Shakespeare as part of the American tradition. But if you look at early American literature, like you can’t- it doesn’t exist without the Bard like, it just doesn’t. And now, we keep pushing literature forward, and we keep pushing story forward, and we keep bringing more voices into it, the American tradition widens, it gets bigger, and deeper, you know, at all, it’s great, but to see this constant build, and when it’s the constant build, it’s like any book, right? Layering on whatever came before it.

that’s the idea of like, being original, being influenced, the idea that Shakespeare, I don’t think he made up any of his plays. He just did way better versions of stories that already existed. It’s received traditions in retelling the flood, placing what happened on this island, placing it in a fictional world, the imaginative world and then putting it as, it’s part of the spine, this quintessential sort of spine of American experience and literature and history. Because I think that’s the other thing too is you get all this stuff about their marginalized. Oh, yeah, no, no, no, you know, if I’m on the island, you’re my marginalized people and I want you to stay in the margins, you know, or like the mainland, is where I live is the main land, you know that Just even the shifts in that kind of thing.

The island community, they’re not the outsiders. They’re not the outsiders and that shift, that was one of the great pleasures of this book for me where we were just firmly in the community. And, you know, I’m sure Matthew Diamond didn’t really think of himself as an outsider. And certainly some other folks who come rolling through the island do not think of themselves as outsiders in any way.

Saying is this real peasant food?

Now, without a doubt, yet, here’s this community and they are amazing. This is this a wonder of a book.

Thank you. It’s always just like humbling. I’m so glad you like it. But from the very beginning, that’s one of the things I knew that was, I guess, it’d be difficult, but it’d be really cool if it worked, which is, when you’re on the island, the language has a certain quality to it. But the book consists of all sorts of different texts and other sorts of idioms and genres. And the language does very specific degrades, or shifts in certain very, very specific ways. Every time you leave the point of view of the island itself, or the characters on it. I just really wanted that- Melville’s writing about these, these poor swabbies, and Faulkner is writing about the dirt farm that these people is live on. And what they do is they give them the language of princes and kings, the most beautiful language and the most beautiful things that English can do, that’s what those authors give. And that in itself, is evaluative. It places value, implicitly that Marilynne Robinson always used to say that the quality of attention that you devote to something is value, like that gives it value. The time that you take to get something just right. So you’re just getting these imagined lives. Exactly. Right, every single sentence cumulatively ends up kind of giving this kind of value and privilege as it were.

We tell stories about the things we value.

Yeah. Yeah,

They may not turn out the way we think they turn out, or we may think we’re saying something about what we value. And in fact, we are not saying that I mean, but ultimately, you tell stories about the things you value. And the people you value and the places you value, and it is everything is about placing judgment.

Absolutely. And also the quality of language. Also, you’re devoting up to your reader. Saying I value my reader, you know, I love finishing reading a book and thinking, “I feel privileged to have read that I feel dignified.” I feel like that book sort of thought of me as sacred or whatever the word, but just like that was a soul to soul. It was courteous to me and it preserved my dignity or whatever, and that’s what I always want to think about with- I want to write the kind of books that I most love to read.

Wait, so what’s next? Sorry, I had to ask.

As a musician, “we want to play the new stuff, man.” I don’t know I have no idea. I mean, I just sit around and I sit like, in piles and piles of books. And I’m you know, a big record collection and I’m looking at art books right now. Looking at the paintings of Edel Adnan, this incredible painter of very, very simple looking landscapes and she’s from Lebanon and she lives out in the desert in California. you know, Just do it full immersion in all kinds of art and history and philosophy. And just looking for that, I think with each of the novels that I’ve done so far, that they’re not heavily plotted.

No, I don’t turn to you for plot, my friend. Sorry. Yeah. That is not the thing I come to you for.

Nor should you. It’s just like, Okay, this is gonna happen. But finding that and then the people, to me, it’s good, It just means that I put literally everything I have into that book. And now it’s gonna take a little while to kind of start filling the tank back up a little bit. I’d like to do some writing about Shakespeare though, because his plays, I teach a cycle of his last five plays, in very close succession, toward the end, and they’re remarkable. I mean, they’re like a stand of aspen trees. You know, the way they kind of Lear and Macbeth are two halves of Hamlet, in some ways. And Measure for Measure is almost a weird like dry run for The Tempest. But I would like to write about some of that. Yeah, well, that’s another thing. I just feel like with Shakespeare, you don’t need a professional to read Shakespeare. Because Shakespeare line for line, every line Shakespeare writes means what it says and says what it means. The character may not mean what he says, but that’s different that’s going on inside the play like Shakespeare’s writing is actually very clear, and especially those late tragedies, you know, so they’re accessible. He was a mensch, I think.

I think you’re right. I think you’re right, but then again, I wasn’t there. It’s okay. I’m gonna trust people to tell me something in a book.

Yeah exactly. Right.

Someone else can tell me and I knew this was gonna happen, but you know, we’ve run through the entire hour.

We barely, barely, barely started.

Paul Harding. Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

This Other Eden is out now Tinkers, if you haven’t read it, remember, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Go get it now.

Absolutely.