Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There are folk artists who live in the forest

and maybe never went to school and never owned

a pair of shoes, and they can take a tree stump,

and they can put eyes on it made out of rocks,

and they can create something that will make you weep,

that will genuinely move you.

But there's no such thing as a folk writer.

You can't write unless you read.

I was never a big reader when I was

in high school and junior high school.

I would read the books that we had

to read for school, but it wasn't my inclination

then to read for a book--

I mean, to reach for a book.

I wanted to be a visual artist, so I

would spend time with my room drawing

horrible, horrible drawings.

And then I branched out into horrible, horrible paintings.

Never had any talent for it, worked on it

the way I work on writing now, never improved.

It didn't stop me.

But it wasn't until I dropped out

of college that I started reading.

And I was living in a small town in Oregon in a trailer,

and I had no friends, and I went to the public library,

and I got a library card.

And I started by reading "Babbitt" by Sinclair Lewis

because that was something we were

supposed to read in high school, and I didn't read it.

So I started by reading the books

that we were supposed to read in school,

and then I just sort of branched out.

And the way that--

I would find a book that I liked,

and then I would look at who blurbed the book,

and then I would read their books.

So that's how I discovered people.

I didn't really have anybody who--

now I've got plenty of people in my life who will say,

oh, you need to read the new Ann Patchett novel,

oh, you need to read this and that,

and they're people who I trust, and I'm

very grateful for the recommendations.

But back then I was just sort of going at it blind.

And one of the authors who I discovered early on who meant

a lot to me was Raymond Carver.

And one of the reasons was that his sentences were

very simple and very short.

And he was the kind of person that you could read

and you would think, I can do this.

There are no semicolons.

There aren't even a lot of commas.

The people that he wrote about, I

felt as if I knew those people, and I thought,

wow, you can just write about people like that?

They don't have to be fancy people?

They don't have to be necessarily bright people?

And when I read over Raymond Carver now,

I don't love him so much.

I mean, I don't dislike him, but I can understand as a young man

what I saw there and what was so encouraging

to me about his writing.

And I think that's really good when you're first starting off,

to start with somebody who makes writing seem possible.

And again, you read Raymond Carver and you think,

I can do this, and then you realize,

oh, I actually can't because I don't have a story to tell.

But I think, also, it's really normal when you first start off

as a writer that you imitate other writers,

and that's perfectly OK.

It's just normal.

You do the same with visual art.

But I went to art school.

I didn't go to school for writing.

I went to art school.

And the very first story that I wrote,

short story that I wrote, the school

gave me a grant to turn it into a book to publish a book.

And when I say that, I mean make 30 copies.

And I'd type set it, and every copy was different,

and I made a cover for each one.

And I've always kept in touch with my writing teacher

from college, a man named Jim McManus.

And I saw him a couple of years ago,

and he said, you know, I still think about that "Atlas,"

that story that you wrote, and it

was such a hysterical spot-on parody of a Raymond Carver

story.

And I was mortified because that's

exactly what it reads like.

I was just trying to be him.

And it's flattering that the teacher would

think that I had sat down to write a parody,

that it was that good, but, in fact, I

thought I was being myself.

There's a story called "Applause, Applause"

by Jean Thompson that I read in an anthology in the 1980s.

And the ending of that, I--

"and so it begins, the sorting and testing of words.

Remember that words are things which,

when tinkered with properly, can represent

the cresting blood, the fine, living net of nerves,

defying rain or even joy.

It can be done."

That story meant so much to me when I first read it,

and I absolutely love going back and reading it.

I can't read it enough times.

Jean Thompson is a writer who--

a short story writer, and she writes novels

as well-- who just I've always thought the world of.

Amy Hempel's "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried"

is something that I read so many times that I've

memorized the ending of that.

Tobias Wolff's "In the Garden of the North American

Martyrs," the very beginning of the story

and the ending of the story-- and his story

"Bullet in the Brain" the same.

And they're endings that are made of words,

and I know that sounds goofy because if you're writing,

it's always--

if you're telling a story, it's made of words.

But, I mean, there's not a dramatic ending to the story.

None of the endings are summing up what you've heard.

They're just going to a completely new place.

They're not endings that you could have predicted when

you started reading this story.

And I guess they're just beautiful arrangement of words

more than anything else.

Just to know that endings that great are possible,

it just gives you something to aspire to, I suppose.

When I go on tour, I always recommend somebody else's book,

and I hold it up, and I read out loud from it,

and I encourage people to buy it.

And it gives the evening sort of a different flavor

because I'm reading from something that isn't mine.

Sometimes I wonder what the person

would think if they were in the audience

and they heard me reading it, if they would think,

oh my god, he's reading that all wrong or his idea of me

is so completely wrong, his idea of who I am as a writer.

I suppose that's always possible.

Often I invite the writer to come with me.

Akhil Sharma is a writer who I think the world of,

and he's written several novels in a short story collection

and is a magnificent reader of his own work.

One time, Otessa Moshfegh came with me,

who wrote an amazing novel called "Eileen"

and wrote a short story collection called

"Homesick for Another World" that

is one of the funniest books--

short story collections that I've ever read.

And she's funny in an interesting way.

You never catch her going like that.

Don't you think that's funny?

It's just not the kind of funny writer she is.

I don't know that she considers herself to be funny.

But the things that happen in her stories are so strange.

I find myself shocked, and I find myself laughing out loud

and always look forward to something new by her.

Wells Tower-- my goodness, I--

is a short story writer who I admire so much.

Ann Patchett-- somebody I think the world of.

I like listening to Roxanne Gay's "Hunger" essay

collection, just this exact sort of thing

that I love because it made me realize--

it just made me aware of so many things I don't think about.

Andrew Greer-- his novel "Less" was funny.

It was exactly what I like.

It was funny and funny and funny,

and then it was just so profound near the end.

You thought, gosh, where did that come from?

And you're just sort of devastated

at the end of the book.

Gosh, there's so many.

I feel like I'm giving an Academy Award speech

and I don't want to leave anybody out.

It's hard to think of it right now.

But if you look in the workbook, there's

a list of some of my other favorite writers.