Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Dave Eggers

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

David Eggers is an author, publisher, and founder of nonprofit publishing company McSweeney’s. He first became widely known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and went on to write acclaimed books including What Is the What, A Hologram for the King, and The Circle. Beyond his writing, he co-founded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit organization that provides writing and tutoring programs for young people. Most recently, he released Contrapposto in June 2026, a novel about friendship, love, and the lifelong pursuit of art. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Anthropic https://Claude.com/tetra ------ AG1 https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Athletic Nicotine https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 https://Lectio365.com ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

tetragrammaton. I almost always know how it ends because it feels not at all fun if I don't know where I'm going at all, you know? Like you're saying you're going to Alaska, it could be any which way you get there, but this is our destination. So I don't outline in any traditional way,

but I'll jot some stuff down and then I'll write scenes. So to me it's always set pieces and scenes, and I don't write an order. So this new book, I wrote a scene. The first thing I wrote is now, I guess, in page 100, I think. And it was a scene I wrote because I wanted to write it. And then I knew generally where it would fit.

But it becomes a patchwork that you stitch together later. I've never been able to write linearly. And I find it really boring to do that. And also, if you're stuck with something, you're just stuck right there. Whereas you could just go just around that bare. You know, you've got to fix something here, but just keep going. But I do know a few writers, older writers, write straight all the way through,

and that's where I think you get this idea of writer's block and the person pacing around the room and throwing crumpled up pieces of paper into the corner. I think it's because they're just, they've structured their work in such a way that they can't go around the obstacle. But it is harder in the end to stitch everything together. Do you ever change the order? Yeah, for sure, especially when it's like memory, and flashbacks, that kind of thing.

Those could occur anywhere. You have options. And this new book is the first one, I think that structured sort of strictly linearly, where it starts when the characters are 8 and 9, and then it ends when they're 74. And it's like, to me, that was not the kind of book I read when I was young, experimenting has a little bit more of a traditional structure. And so I was really used to be pretty much

more interested in the form than I was the story. I never read mysteries because I didn't care who did what, to who. Now I really love them. But at the time, I was like, I don't know. We know this didn't happen. Why do I care? But so I was always interested in like, well, how are we breaking the form? How are we reinventing what happens on the page. And that was what I was interested in. And that's a lot of what McSweeney's did. We always welcomed formal experimentation, even if it failed.

Like the problem with that and conceptual art or anything is that much of it, in retrospect, it doesn't age well. But in the moment, you're like, oh, that's interesting. That's something new. And then you look back on it and something has superseded it and now it looks a little embarrassing. But we did a lot of that. And only, you know, just in the last 15 years or so,

I'm much more interested in and invested in just the storytelling and just going as deep as I possibly can into the characters, and especially in this case where it's two that are just like entwined for 70 years. But it's a really different place where I am now from where I started. Are the characters you write all rooted in something familiar? You know, what's funny, my wife had to talk about this a lot because on a purely like living in the world level, if you base something on someone in your life and they know it, then it makes a very awkward interactions with your friend or your neighbor, your colleague, or your relative. So you get to the point where you're so determined to go far afield of anyone you know so that nobody is confused. And if anything, you borrow, or I do, borrow a few things from my own life.

Like I went to art school for a little bit, and this guy went to art school. So you borrow one or two things that you might know about, but all the other secondary and tertiary characters, and down to their names, you get to the point where you know 1,000 people in real life. You can't use any of their names even. You run out of names. So these two are Cricket and Olympia, two names I've never known anyone in real life. but it becomes a challenge

because you do want to be able to just move through the world and not have anyone mistakenly think that they're in your book. Has anyone mistakenly thought they were in your book? Yeah, books, movies, for sure. And it's always the person that you never had a moment's thought about.

Like, I know that elf character that you wrote in Lord of the Rings. That was based on me. I mean, it's always something out of left field. And you worry about your next door, or neighbor growing up, misunderstanding something. And it's always like your cousin, Ted, who is sure that the whole book about the cowboy in New Mexico

in the 18th century is about him. It's really strange. But it hasn't happened in a while because I think you get a little bit better every year at making sure that there's nothing remotely close. But I would think that knowing that can happen, that would free you up the other way to just use anything you want. Well, for sure. That's how most novelists work. And, you know, most novelists will, for a given character, it's an amalgam of 50 people. So they'll borrow a note that they just saw at the beach about how somebody walks. They'll map that onto the way that their uncle dresses. And then they'll map that onto the speech pattern of their college professor. So no, not any one person is a majority of that character, but you drawing from life for these.

bits is key because if you make it all up out of whole cloth and like you end up in a far less naturalistic or believable world starts feeling more like AI right thank you that's actually what it would be like it's just like milk toast like nothing specific everything's sort of borrowed and generalized so when i taught writing at to high schoolers for a lot of years the first thing we would do is they'd come in this is in the mission district of Francisco, I'd say, pair up with somebody and go out and interview anybody on the street, the most interesting person, and the person you're least likely to talk to otherwise. And then you're going to write a story that has aspects of that person in it.

And they would come back just like a glow because they'd never had a reason to talk to some stranger in a bookstore or a cafe. And then they would write something far better than whatever they would just imagine because they're using specific details of actual. humans, how they look, what they talk, and also their contradictions. So there was a street busker that used to play all the time on Valencia Street and leather and studs everywhere and boots and like, and turns out he was like, he was a Republican and live with his mom and like all these things that they found out in minutes from this guy. I was like, that's the contradictions of

actual humans. But you've got to talk to them and you have to observe because they're far more complex than generally what we're just going to come up with from scratch, especially if you're 16 and you'll only met nine people in your life, you know? So being able to just bring a notebook out in public and write a few things down and catch those details. Are you always paying attention in that way? Are you listening for a phrase that you think, I'll bank this for some later date? Yeah. I mean, so I have a garage. And in the garage, I have just dozens of sets of drawers that I bought from like restoration hardware type but much cheaper and each has a piece of paper, you know, strip of tape that says what that is,

details, conversations, or ideas for this book that might never come to be. And I usually just write on loose leaf copy paper and that sheet goes into that drawer. And at the end of the day or in the morning after, you know, I'm writing stuff at night, I have to file everything. And then once that stack is a certain half a foot or so, then maybe you're onto something. And that, like, contrapasto, this book was, like, 20 years of taking notes.

And finally, it was like, all right, it's time to make something of this. But it can be a burden, too. You really want to turn off sometimes and not have to listen or remember this thing or, God, that's good. You know, just there are a lot of times that you do have to be like, I've got nothing to write with. We're going to let this one go.

I can't tethered to this responsibility at all times. Like Susan Sontag, I think when she finally stopped writing, she called it like, you know, described this incredible liberation because she was free of the burden of converting her life or what she saw into prose. It's truly a full-time job. The way you interact with the world, old to have the material that can then someday turn into something else.

Yeah. It's just like this relentless nut gathering. And you think, well, I've got a tree full of nuts. I've been saving for, you know, 20 winters. There should be plenty. And then you're still like, oh, that's a really good one off the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And across this highway to get it. It's a habit. Especially when you're finished with something. In this case, like, I finished this book, about eight months before it's coming out, which is like a big long time for me. It's usually a much tighter window.

So I've been a little bit more on mental vacation, I guess, than I usually am. And in general, you just get a little bit less hyper about these things. And then there's just like a backup. There's too many things. And books take a long time. It's not like, I'm so jealous, not to say that writing a song is easier,

but I do have a lot of friends that have written a song in a day. We have friends who've written songs in 10 minutes. There you go. I don't know anyone who's written a book in 10 minutes. That's why I love, for me, drawing is that. So I like to be able to finish something in a day or even an hour, and they become like a riff, you know,

or a quick melody, and you can put a figure on a page and be done with it, and maybe somebody wants it, maybe somebody doesn't, but it's done. And that's a palette cleanser for me when I'm working three years on the same book. It's feeling like you can finish something. It's necessary because I have a lot of friends

that spend eight, nine, ten years on a book. And it's really tough to think about it. Like, you hope that that was worth the ten years, but some fatal flaw could say, you know what? Be brilliant language. characters are fantastic, but there's something that's not working. And all of that time, you might have been applying clay or whatever to the wrong interior structure, and there's something that's wrong about it.

And I've had that experience where it looks like a book, it reads like a book, but somehow it doesn't take off. Do you think it's something that could ever be figured out, or is there a magic aspect to it? Oh, for sure. For every kind of art, every masterpiece. is this an accident. Everyone. I think in the middle, sometimes you know you might be on to something, but then there's this like alchemy that happens

where it's like, I have no idea why, why that song after this or why this particular book is resonating with people, and this one isn't. I think a lot of it has to do with letting it breathe, letting light into it, like through it, you know, like not trying to overstuff something. And I think sometimes you think that you can, make it work by overworking it, you know?

Muscle through it or something, yeah. And more words are going to fix it, you know? Like, well, if I just explain a little bit more and add another hundred pages, whereas Great Catsby is like, basically a short story, it's novella, it's 120 pages maybe. It's incredibly rich, but short, it's gestural, doesn't over-explain anything. It doesn't have to build an entire world in some way

that people feel necessary to do now. So you do have to let the weird, odd take be part of it, the unfinished thought be part of it, something that you don't have to connect certain dots and explain it to people. There's no more participatory art form than reading. You're the cinematographer when you read. You're the narrator.

You're doing all of this work. So that's where you read. really, you can't control it. You don't know how it'll play in someone's mind. And you really have to chalk it up to luck sometimes that somehow the assemblage of words and the way you structured it and a few happy accidents have led to this thing connecting with people, but you also know when it's not. And I'm trying to tell students now, like, if your response to your work is quite muted, you know, and you show something to the reader who you really want to, you know, boy, this book is about surfing. I'm going to show it to my surfing friend. And you get this

kind of muted, kind of reserve response like, well, this is respectful, or I see that you put sentences there, the grammar looks good, or whatever kind of, then you got to listen to that, too. It means you have work to do, maybe. There was a time when every great thinker had a confidant. a trusted companion with whom to wrestle ideas, to think out loud, to help uncover the essence of what path to take next and how best to follow through.

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Try it today. How do you know if an idea is going to be a book or a short story, or do you know that before you start? Well, before I start, I do. How do you decide? Well, I think it depends on how many sort of themes can fit into that vessel, you know? I'm writing a short story about hang gliders and kitty hawk right now, which is something I researched. I didn't know what I was going to do with this research, but I know it's a short story, because there's only so much about it that I'm interested in.

But for a novel, I mean, let's say pull a number out of that air and say maybe there's like five major themes in a short story. like a novel you're talking about, 25. You know, there's a scale and a scope of it, for me at least. But then you do have that blurry line between short stories, novellas, short novels. But at this point, I'm working on a series of books that are called The Forgetters. They're like short stories, but they're part of a much larger thing, like thousands of pages eventually, that I'll get all in place and nobody will read it. But for me, I know the mosaic.

I can see it, and they work as individual pieces. Yeah. You don't have to know anything about the rest of it to make it work. Is that the case in the new book when you're writing in sections? Yeah. Do each of those sections stand alone in work? I think so. Cool.

That was the hope. The hope was that obviously you get to know them when they're eight and nine, and so when you are reading about them when they're 50 or all of that history as part of your your understanding of them, but if you were to pick up and start on page 300 and when they're however old, I think it would make perfect sense. You don't have the benefit of all of that sort of like that shared history, but I do really like that the jumping ahead. So it's like 10 years, you have to fill in the gaps and where would they have been in between, but that's the pleasure of being participant in it as a reader. I can't tell you,

where they were, and it doesn't matter to me. But, like, you can sort of fill in those gaps. And we all know that we do so many drastic things, most of us, I think, in our lives. Like, more and more I meet older people. I have so many friends in their 80s that just have reinvented themselves yet again. And they have, like Gary Bird, and I was talking about this art director, album designer. He told me one time, he was like, I think he was 30 or 40, and he said he always wanted to be a cowboy. So he just like decided one day, like he grew up on military basis, but he went

Montana or wherever, worked as a farmhand cowboy, and that's what he did for a handful of years. And I love more than anything the people that will just make a hard break and do some drastically different things just because they want to. I mean, I would love to have been a cowboy at some point, stuntman over here. And so I gave cricket in this case, like every time we and we meet them. He's in a really drastically different place. Like he's a shipbreaker in the coast of Turkey and, you know, gets a call from Olympia, his old friend, and she needs him back in the U.S. Because he comes from rural Indiana. Is that possible? But of course, like, the number of, like, really distinct and drastically different stages of our lives that so many of us have,

especially if you're a little bit of a wanderer like he is. So, It was satisfied to kind of give it that scope. Would you ever jump over a period of time in a character's life, and during that time, something really significant happens that you know about, but you never say what it is and you never talk about it? Not even mentioned, not alluded to? No. Well...

You know that it determines a lot of things going forward, but you don't explain that. Oh, that's interesting. I haven't done that, but it's almost like when you hear about, about actors writing a whole history of their character that's not in the script. And I really, I totally get why you would do that. And I don't think an actor can over-preper. I feel like all of that helps.

And so I really admire when an actor will take a character infinitely further than you even wrote on the script because it's theirs now. But for me, I guess, you know, there are all kinds of scars and things that happen to these two. And every time they come back together, they come back with all of their baggage and scars from in between, but most of it is at least alluded to,

even if we don't get a full recounting of it. But it's so funny how quickly you can just gesture at something and be like, well, that was that time, you know, that stretch when I was a junkie. And like, you can pick up everything from that. And if you trust the reader, which you always should, they want that too. They don't want it be over explained and talk down to and have it like,

all right, now we're gonna go through what it's like to, you know, fall into a heroin spiral and whatever. It's like especially these two talk to each other with a real top spin and a real like, it's quick and banter that you have somebody you've known all your life. They can't get away with anything with each other, which is the case with, you know, I've had the same friends since grade school and there's no pretending on anything. They know you inside and out.

You mentioned the writing exercise that you gave to high school students. Tell me about writing exercises. Well, I took no creative writing classes in my life outside of one in high school. I was a painter and then journalist. So I'm like weirdly ignorant about how regular college or MFA programs work. But I taught a, we have this center called 826 Valencia. It's like a writing and tutoring center in San Francisco and we published student work. I would work with high schoolers every week,

and I was always trying to give them assignments. I guess I would want myself. And the other thing that we do is interview people outside in the community, but then the other one that I'd broken classes with is like interview each other, basic character on each other, or you can do an exact portrait of your peer.

And these were all very, volunteer students doing this as an elective in evenings, but they're 15 years old, they would write these exquisite miniatures of each other, and they would read them out loud. And you could see kids like going, you know, flush red, kids crying, like just their jaws on the ground. And you realize that for most people, you never have anyone notice everything about you and write it down artfully. And they would learn what it's like to listen to somebody, what it's like to sublimate your own writing to like honor somebody else or exalt somebody else. Do them justice, right? Get it right. See things about them that are unique and beautiful. And then for the recipient, for most people,

that might be the most detailed written account of who they are outside of a diary. Because there's so few opportunities to just really listen and then also make art from it. And so we do a lot of oral history too where kids interview their parents that might have immigrated here from elsewhere. And when you see that process where they get an excuse to really listen, there's an oral historian Dave Isay. It says listening is an act of love. You know, we're in a position where we get to interview people and talk to people a lot. But most people have very few opportunities. And then, you with the idea in an oral history that it will be a written account and it'll be edited into a linear form and maybe published. You see kids that know their grandparents came from Cambodia that fled the Khmer

Rouge, but that's the vaguest thing that they know, just a little bit. But now give them six hours to do a real oral history. It's just like it's the most important thing in their high school years. They all say the same thing. And their estimation for their forebears is just like goes through the roof. They see them as 100 feet tall. And we really have to find space and to have those moments. I always think the very first week in any class at every grade should be about writing your story of who you are now. Great idea. And every teacher gets to know every kid that much better, even if it's a page. Here's what I love. Here's what I want. Here's what I'm afraid of here. And there's a calm that comes over kids when they've written their truth out and they get it just like, you know, if you're angstyy at the middle of the night, you write it down, it goes away.

In the chaos of childhood, if you can fence that within the boundaries of a printed page, you're much more calm and at ease. You've gotten it right. And then you can move on and look around. But if it's all contained and nobody's listening, then it's just like having these. rabid, feral beast all over within you, you got to let them out, put them on a leash, or let them out of you. And so I think even as adults, there has to be chances to do that. Put it in a linear form, all the chaos of your life and your mind. Put it in linear form. Have it make sense. Do you think most people know themselves well enough to be able to do that?

Not at the start. No way. but you work it out. Has to start somewhere. Yeah, you have to start getting it down, and I think you do get more skilled at. I've taught a lot of memoir writing to older, you know, to adults. And most of what people write is not for a mass audience or any audience. It's for them.

I don't want to say the cliché that it's therapeutic, but it is. It's like you could, what you get down on the page, half the time is as good as 100 therapy sessions with a professional. Well, it's a cliche for a reason. I mean, yeah, you understand things. In some cases, like writing an angry letter that you keep in your drawer, nobody has to see it, but it does need to get out. And if you take it that next step and make art from it,

then, you know, that's a whole different set of issues. An ancestor named T.S. Hawkins, who went across the plains from Missouri to founded the town of Hollister and wrote a book called Some Recollections of a Busy Life. And he published 200 copies just for family, and all of us that are descended from him have a copy. And it unites us all. It's a great book. But without him having taken the time,

none of us would be connected. None of us would know anything about what he went through. And also all of the particulars of that time. But I think for your descendants, for your family, for your own good, everybody should get it down, even if it's 10 pages, you know. Like just put it. put something down and get it right or in what you consider to be right. Tell me this story McSweeney's from the beginning.

The way the idea originate. Well, McSweeney's, I was, I came up in the indie magazine world, and that's where I would get all the free CDs, which was like one of the points of having a magazine, is you get everything sent to you for free. Every album that ever came out, came through us, and we reviewed some of them and kept the rest, and I still have them all.

And then we all went broke doing that. That was a magazine called Might Never Made a Dime. M-I-T-E? M-I-G-H-T, like the Rolling Stone of Gen X. That was our hope. Didn't happen. We went broke. But we all got jobs for the first time in our lives in our late 20s.

We all were offered real jobs at real magazines. And I took one in New York and very corporate, had to wear certain clothes, had to be there certain hours, all these things. I'd never done before, and I realized I was not meant to live this way, nine to five. So I quit, and we started kind of the anti-corporate magazine, which was just me and a few friends in my Brooklyn apartment. And we just did this little magazine that we printed in Iceland. I found a printer in Reichovic, and I thought, oh, you're kidding me. I thought it was a joke, but it was really a printer in Reichovic. I thought that would be perfect for this, because I was a printer.

It was kind of an outsider's magazine. And then from then, you know, now we're on 27 years. We've been doing it. Unbelievable. And I thought it would be four issues. And then new people come on, they have new ideas. What was the original going to be? It was a home for rejected stories from other magazines.

So if you got turned down somewhere else, this would be the place. If your thing was too long or too short or too weird, we were the island of misfit writings, you know. Always about writing. That was the focus. Yeah, it was mostly fiction. Sometimes interviews with, like, strange scientists. But it was all just all texts. There was nothing else.

It was black and white, too. But very, like a precious, pretty object. And then we started putting more and more time into the objectness of the book. Every issue is a different form. So one will be a giant hardcover. One was a lunchbox recently designed by Art Spiegelman. We'll have issues that are connected by Magnet.

it's, you know, we'll try to break the form every time so that people care about the tactile, the object in your hand, and then the subscribers are surprised each time. And so if you make it pretty, if you make an unusual object, then all the writing inside might have a chance to survive too. Whereas if you make a cheap or an ugly book, I think you're doing a disservice to whatever work went into that writer's task. And so the fact that we've been around this long is, I mean, how we published books and, you know, is a shock to me because I saw it as like a one-year experiment.

And so, but you know how it is? When other people join the troop, they keep it going. They carry the next stretch, and they re-inspire you even when you're tired. It also shows that even a good small idea. Yeah. can end up being a big idea that goes on for a long time. It's always more likely because you need to incubate it among a small group of people and you just please your trio of friends.

But if you seek to make something for a mass audience, boy, that's tough. Was there a moment in McSweeney's history that was like it got big in a way that was unexpected and things changed? Or was it just a slow, steady build forever? Yeah, I mean, literary journals have a very low ceiling in terms of, If you have 10,000 subscribers, you're like the biggest literary journal on this planet, which just means that we're all very small. But there's small, devoted audiences, and all you really want to do, I mean, this is how

I feel like with any art form, if you're able to continue doing that thing, meaning our subscribers pay $100 to get four issues a year, which is like a lot. But that sustains the staff of five, and then the writers that get paid. And if you're allowed to just keep doing it, that's 99% the measure of success is... You get to keep doing it. Get to keep doing it. That's great. And I really, same thing with writing books.

If somebody's willing to, you know, kill a bunch of trees to put out your book and say, yeah, we'll do the next one too. That's like the greatest gift you could ever have. And that sense that they'll be with you even if you write a book about a wayward Catholic priest and the next one is a sci-fi octopus. A mystery. You know, like if they're going to give you a long leash, which I think is the way of things in publishing, it's a very lucky business because there just was never going to be anyone that tells you what to do or how to do it. They might say no, but for the most part, that no one has any of that sort of nudgee input. There's no managers. There's nobody in between you and whatever you do. When the lights go down, the body gets to work.

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which is an All Ages book a couple of years ago. And it was with an editor named Taylor Norman who I'd known before. But there's a certain point where they recognize something in it. You know this as a producer. You're seeing, hearing something. And if that artist, or in my case, it starts to doubt it. You have to be like, no, do not touch this.

Don't touch it. And my wife is a novelist, and we both reach a point with each other's book. where we have to tell them, like, don't touch the keyboard, you will mess this up. And Taylor was that kind of editor where she saw what I was trying to do, made everything that I was trying to do better, and then she also saved me from some mistakes. I took taking out this whole one thread.

It's like taking out like the one song that isn't working as messing up the song cycle. She took out this thread and made it better. It cut 15 pages or so from the book. at a certain point, I stopped re-reading it myself, and I just completely gave myself over to her vision of it. It was pretty far long. And then that person, even after it's published, that person is still your champion.

You know Jamie Bing, he's my publisher now in the UK, and he's that platonic ideal of the publisher that's more excited than you are about whatever you've written. And so he takes that baton. You're finished. He takes it and starts telling the world about it. And that's a really lucky place to be where you have an affirmation from that person, that you're done, that it's right, that it's good. And then he's the one that can go spread the gospel. When Taylor suggested taking out that 15-page thread, what was your first instinct when you heard that idea? No way. This is essential. I've worked on that. I feel like we need this thread. How did you come around?

You sit with it, you walk with it, you ride your bike around the coast for a day or two. You're trying to, even before you respond, because you don't want to angrily say, no, you're wrong, whatever. I knew at that point that she knew the book inside now and knew what was best for it. So I was like, geez, I really don't think she's right here, but in my bones, I was like she's probably right. And so, you know, after a few days, I was like, all right, that's fine. And help me do it. What's weird about novels is that everything is threaded so many places that if you pull one, like it takes a couple, three people to sort of make sure that everything else is intact when you pull some character out of the book.

So you'll sometimes read a book, a printed book that will have somebody's name on page 238 that doesn't exist. And it's because they change the name or they pull that character. But this vestigial name is still there. and nobody caught it. Tell me about your relationship to books in general over the course of your life. I had teachers that made us make them, first grade, fifth grade, eighth grade. So I have all these books that we made, wrote and illustrated and bound, and then got into desktop publishing when the Mac was new and stuff.

So that made me a publisher was the ability, because I didn't know math, I couldn't do computers in any other way. but the Mac, it was for people like us that weren't engineers. And so I fell in love with just the whole process of assembling a bunch of stories, laying them out, using desktop publishing. And then we were publishing pretty basic things for a while. But then I went and saw, I went to Rikovic and walked the floor of the printing plant. There's all these blonde men with blue jumpsuits.

I mean, it was like an umpalumpa type of thing. But I could walk around and I'd see, they printed all the Bibles in Iceland, and I could see like the gilt edges and foil stamping and a leather cover and a ribbon marker and all these beautiful add-ons. I was like, how much does that cost to do? Two cents. How much does that cost? Three cents.

And you realize that all of these things that make books really beautiful cost pennies to do and how it's such a shame when somebody's not spending that extra. six cents to take it from a cheap-looking thing to make something really beautiful. And so we became determined to just invest in cloth and color art inside and foil stamps and all of these things that all the printers are ready to do and willing to do, foldouts and pop-ups and munch boxes. You know, anything that you really can imagine, some printer will be able to do it. Like we just redid, we made this new issue as a trapper keeper,

which is a plastic three-fold ring binding in the middle. You just sent it to our printer and said, can you create something like this? Well, of course, all these methods are still out there. They're still all. The last book I did was made a bamboo. So we have a bamboo cover for Eyes in the Impossible with a dye cut, with the words in the art cut through the bamboo.

Totally affordable, totally doable. totally doable. It's such a beautiful object to hold. And the printers are only too happy to be given the chance to experiment a little bit. And I think if we're going to have physical books survive, you do have to take that extra step. You've got to make these things radically better than looking at a screen. It's an existential moment where if we don't do better, then, you know, bit by bit, People will choose screens because everything is channeled through one object as opposed to having to hold all of these different things and pay for them. But books so far have resisted the digitization. We haven't had the pirating that other industries do.

People are still holding the American hardcover market up, which is really lucky. We're the only country in the world that still prints the number of hard covers that we do. go to Europe and it's quite rare to see hardcover books, which is really too bad. So I collect old books, I collect old Bibles in particular. I'll buy a book just for the spine if I see something really unusual. Anytime I see any kind of really clever bookcraft, you know, or like a parallelogram shaped book or a book with a Z-shaped spine or anything that took handwork, which really means that somebody by hand is doing that. I always buy these things, and then we'll bring him into McSweeney's and the art director,

whose name is Sunrah Thompson. We'll look at it together and see how we could apply it to something with McSweeney's. And then usually these things, they might percolate for a year or two, and then finally we find the right format. We did one recently with woven fabric as the cover, but it's done by machines, but it looks like it's, hand-down, but anything you want to do, they can do. Our Icelandic printer had, when I met them,

they had just printed a limited edition of books with shark skin, like actual sharks that had washed up on the shores of Iceland. Amazing. They wrapped them around hardcovers. They smell terrible, but you can do it. What was the first book you published at McSweeney's? It was Jonathan Lethem called This Shape We're In, and he was very well-established novelist at that point,

but it was a weird book that he gave to us because he was always supporting us. And so we published. And then after that, Lydia Davis's Samuel Johnson is indignant. And Lydia was like a hero to all of us and said we could bring her to a new audience. And so she went along with us for the ride. And I found all those old proofs just the other day.

Like I got to design her cover. And it was a David Byrne photograph that we used for her cover. And so that is just like the dream of dreams. Like you get to publish your hero with another hero's work on the cover and nobody's saying no. And you get to go to Reichovic and check proofs on the printer floor and then come back and get these boxes of this thing that you made. And, you know how it is. Like it's more fun as a publisher or a producer, I think, in a way because you get an unadulterated pleasure of helping somebody else. were and be the presenter of it as opposed to all the complicated feelings of your own stuff,

right? Oh, absolutely. And we get to do it more often. So you can't write as many books as you can publish. Right. No, my dream, honestly, my wife knows this. We've said this for years. If some sort of version of another life for us would be combination movie theater where we get

to show everything we want in a recording studio where, you know, it's affordable and we get to sort of pop in and just. just watch the process sometimes. Wouldn't that be? But we wouldn't have to work. Yeah, yeah. Like, you're just wandering through like a ghost. Because I love seeing iterations in music studio.

I think it's far more interesting as a lie on the wall than being like on a film set, which is, I think, if you have nothing to do, it's the most boring place to be in the world. If you don't have a job, but I think being in a music studio, things move a lot faster, I think. Yeah, miracles happen every day in the music studio.

Yeah. See things go from really mediocre to really great, and you don't know how or why. It's not like anyone had any good idea. Just something happens, and it changes, and all of a sudden, it's good. I was a big Elvis Costello fan, and I remembered when he came back with King of America,

and they did some live tracks on that. Like his original, The Attractions did a few songs, and they were live. And I was like, became one of the first time that I was really aware of the different between what is this band sound live and the studio and as opposed to separate tracks and all that. Where do your musical tastes tend to run?

Well, so when we were kids, it was, we spent all of our summers listening to the Beastie Boys and Run DMC when they came out. We had all the videotapes too, we had everything. And then there was this parallel track of English New Wave, like Elvis Costello and Echo on the Bunnyman, who I saw last week. Oh, great.

How were they? They're great. They sound great. Great. It was the worst crowd I've ever seen in any concert in my life. No one moved. Wow. It was like there was some kind of fog over everybody that had paralyzed them.

And I felt like something, it was like a prank. There was 3,000 people without not even moving of the head. And I realized that they only knew a few songs, I think. I see. And it was like lips like sugar came out and then they were interested. and it was too bad. But they sounded great, and Ian McCulloch sounded great.

But then I got into everything. So, like, your album with Johnny Cash came to our magazine when we were all young magazine writers, and that was like a reawakening, the country music for me and an entry point. But, you know, I try to follow as much as I can. I wrote about music for Spin. I had a column for a while.

It was called, and now for a less informed opinion. Yeah. Because I didn't pretend to know anything. outside of what I liked. So I get to write about Kings of Leon before they came out and joined a Newsom. I felt like I was, that's that great place where you get to hear a record

three months before it comes out and maybe tell a few people about it. But I did that only for like a year. I couldn't meet the deadlines. So now I get to just be just a fan. I don't want to have to work at all for sure when I listen to music.

Do you listen to more old music or new music? Well, I still have every record and CD I ever had, and I write on a boat. So I have a little boat under the Golden Gate Bridge. It's just a sailboat, so I go down and I have all my CDs. How many people could fit on this boat? Three outside, one inside. So it just fits me in the underneath.

And I have a little boombox, crappy sound, but it's all I could fit there. And every CD I had from college on is there. And so that ends up being a lot of older music. and then I buy dollar CDs, people that I, like if I see a Mary Well CD that I, it's a dollar here, or I can experiment listening to a lot of Sinait O'Connor lately where it's like every last album she made was great. I can't, it's just impossible and how as well known as she was. I don't think there's a better singer that ever was. I mean, it's just like, I've gone through just like endless deep dives, YouTube and everywhere else, seeing every,

last live performance and there's never anything but perfection and like it's an otherworldly sound to her. She's the only person I think I can think of that I did feel like I knew her but I didn't even was never within 5,000 miles of her and now I get to listen to like a lot of Jim James and my morning jacket and stuff because Jim and I worked with Gary Burden on a movie there was no dialogue based on an old graphic novel called God's Man. And Jim made the music, and I was going to write whatever there was to write. And then Gary passed before it went too far, but he left us as friends. So that was a gift that we got from the ultimate hippie.

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Yeah, I think it depends on, I've written in every book, I guess. Pencil or pen? It doesn't matter. They're teaching tools for me. So if I want to remember how to do something, like how to do a really great character sketch in a short space, then I'll go to somebody who I know does that well. And I'll go back to that book or I'll tear out the page or anything to keep it next to me, have a stack of certain books near me on the boat if I want to have them on. hand. They're all beat up. They're all got salt water and mildew and everything. And I do have a separate collection of like collectible books and plastic and stuff, but I buy a lot of like dollar

or $2 used books so that I can draw and write on them and tear them up because I always think I'm going to be able to find that passage or I'll look at it. I'm like, no, I got to tear this out and just have it next to me, write notes on the back of it. Do you write on the boat? Yeah, that's my office. So during COVID, we never had internet at home, so I can't write near the internet. So I had to get an office outside the house. Explain you can't write near the internet.

Well, like I have a flip phone, right? And so I can't be near the distraction. Do you write longhand? No. I do for all my notes. But when I compose, I compose on a, it's a 1998 MacBook Pro. So it's about 20 pounds. Big screen, and that's never been connected to the internet.

So I bought it. All the software is original. Never updated it. A cracked screen, but it works perfectly. And I don't have to re-learn anything. So I take that out to the boat. And I sit, boat sort of shifts, you know, 10 feet this way, eight feet that way. There's pelicans and sea lions.

Are you at a dock? Are you out in the water? Oh, no. It's on a slip. than a dock. I see. But I have to be really away from any possible distraction. How much time do you spend in the boat? Like a writing day would be eight hours, you know? I mean, then I have to get up and there's no bathroom, so I got a bike around this bay to the porta potty on the other side of the bay, which is not a long bike, but that gets me out and about. I always had trouble with being indoors

all day part of writing. This gets me outside. It's far prettier. And I, and I, don't have any possibility of any interruption. Nobody knows I'm there. Is most of your time writing or thinking? The first couple hours are journaling for procrastination. So I always have to spend two hours wasting time. And that's usually just writing. Is that also on the same device? Or do you write that? Not at the both. But often just same device. And I pretend to write. I'm sitting in the writing position. You got to do that for 80. hours a day for me to get maybe an hour or two hours or work done. I see. I waste a lot of time.

You need that time in that space. Yeah. And then there is always that thing where sometimes you're really composing, you're trying to get something done that day or you've given yourself a crazy deadline because you're angry at wasting all that time. You're like, God damn it, just give me the, you know, let me finish this chapter. Sometimes there's a real deadline. But the being in there the whole time, sometimes like hour six, some crazy, crucial breakthrough happens just because you were there. Yeah, yeah. And it's not going to happen in a crowded place or among all, you know, at dinner.

It's going to happen because you gave yourself that huge expanse of time. And maybe something, you know, I play music the entire time I work. So maybe something triggers it in the music. Maybe I procrastinate by reading a little bit. something breaks through there, but I wish it were different. And I wish I could be like one of these people that writes for an hour and a half a day and gets enough work done.

I have never been able to do it. I need the entire expanse. Those days, I don't answer the phone. I don't do lunch. I don't see anybody. And at this point, I guess it's not going to change. At the end of the day, do you feel tired from doing that or no? No.

No, I mean, but you do feel like, and this goes for a lot of writers, if you haven't done anything, if you haven't written anything, if you have gotten nothing down, but you've pushed away your family and everything else to have that isolation. You've said no to some friend visiting from out of town,

all of this stuff, because you just got it. And then if you don't get anything done, you just want to punch yourself in the face like all night. So it makes it all the more reason why trying to honor that time, And maybe there's, you know, kind of a, there's a sense of guilt too. Like, boy, there's other people that really work for a living. Like, I really, very lucky to be able to do this.

So, God damn, I get something done. And, you know, I came up through newspapers and magazines where you really didn't have any choice. You had to produce something. So I do think that it's a really, it's a good training for any profession, but for a novelist to have had daily deadlines that were real. and people counting on it and news counting on it and all that. But it is the, this is the happiest work environment I've ever had,

where I'm just so content there. And it's a cradle. I mean, it's called the cradle, my boat. So I renamed it, which you're not supposed to do, but I renamed it. Why are you not supposed to name it? You're not, it's bad luck to rename a boat. Oh, is that true? If you change the name of a boat, it's bad luck.

They say it's a curse. I've not known that. Yeah. But because it rocks all day, it took me months when I was doing it. And at first, I would go down there, get all set up, and fall asleep immediately, and sleep for 90 minutes. Now I'm used to it enough where I can still, I can get work done. But it's so calm. It's so womb-like.

How long have you been using the boat? Maybe five, six years now. I was on a different dock, but now this is the perfect one. It's this rickety old Popeye-like dock under the bridge. And there's just me and a couple fishermen. And that's it. Yeah, it means a shitty. boat. The setting sounds great to allow something to happen. Yeah. I think it's worth it for anybody.

Like, how do you really want to spend your days? Does it have to be in this kind of a environment, that kind of an office? How would you ideally do it? It makes me crazy that it took me this long to really think about it, you know, and seek out and create something that was a little bit more my ideal. Do you have a favorite bookstore? I can't say. There's too many up there. You know, San Francisco's like the,

it's got the most indie bookstores. Could be anywhere in the world. Doesn't have to be in San Francisco. Well, let's go to Paris then. Then it's not, I don't get anyone in SF mad. Shakespeare and Company right near Notre Dame those are old friends of mine. That's the bookstore of my dreams and maybe everybody's.

That's sort of what we modeled our new and National Library of Young Authors on, like just bright colors and books everywhere and no hard edges and old wood and Persian rugs and cats and, you know, all of that stuff. I really don't love the new wave of library design and stuff where it all looks like an airport, you know? It's all like spare. There's only screens. You see a few books somewhere in the distance and then this vast expanse of sort of airport. Looks like an Apple store. Like an Apple store?

Yeah. Not everything has to converge with tech. The things that are apart from tech need to stay apart. And I think there's always this mistake where libraries feel like, okay, we got to be relevant. We have to look like an Apple store. And it's like, no, no, that's actually not why we go to the library. We go because we want something really different. And we want it to be screen free and for most of it.

We want it to be quiet. We want it to be weird. We want it to smell like paper and glue. and leather. And instead, all the new library designs have this airport look, and they hide the books in the basement, and it's so sad. And what I love is that kids really want the tactile. They want soft edges and pillows and fabric and velvet and wood and typewriters.

We have all these typewriters. It's the first thing they all gravitate to the typewriters. This presumption, though, that, oh, kids love screens, we're going to give them more screens. It's such a strange impulse to sort of, to channel everything through this one narrow portal as opposed to saying, painting will be painting.

Books will be books. Tech is fine over here. We don't all have to merge with or be subservient to the tech overlord. We can exist separately over here. And I hope things are sort of trending the other way now that they realize the catastrophe of kids writing with AI and realizing just how bad that is.

But let's see. They've been in the Strand in New York? Of course, yeah. A lot of times. So I spend a lot of time in the Strand. Maybe that's the ultimate one in New York, probably. I go to a lot of sort of the ones adjacent attached to libraries. You know, the friends of this library will have a bookstore.

That's my favorite because those are vast and really cheap. So because I thought libraries were tracking what you checked out, I was mistaken about this for a while during my privacy anti-tech era. So I stopped checking out books. I would go to the abuse bookstore adjacent so I could buy the books instead and do whatever I wanted to them. I'm not a good library patron because I abuse the books. I lose them.

I don't bring them back. It's just like a weird genetic flaw. So I realized I'm not going to be. good for you. I'm going to save you from me. I'm just going to buy the books instead. And then I'll go through them and then I end up donating them back a year later. How's your relationship to magazines different than your relationship to books? I grew up as a magazine kid more than anything else. And I remember being 15 when I subscribed to the Village Voice out of Chicago suburbs. I think I know I was the only subscriber

in my town. And that was just like access to a world I otherwise would never know. And then when Spin started, I subscribed to Spin and Rolling Stone. And I thought it was very cool. Like I was,

I had a track where I was going to be a music writer. That was what I loved to do and get to see free shows. And I did it all through college and got to see all these bands in small venues when they were coming up. At these days, most of my favorite magazines, they don't exist or they're shadows of, I mean, there's a handful that are holding tight. But I will say, like, we do have, in our workshops,

we have zine-making classes now. So we have a whole section where it's like staples, glue, paper. Every week, every Friday, there's a zine-making class. Dozens of kids all ages. Zines are sort of completely having a rebirth among these kids that have too much digital cells. They don't want to do blogs. They don't want to, I mean, some of them, I guess, do TikToks. But like, if you offer a zine class, it's so exotic to them that I think that these things sort of like vinyl have a chance of coming back. Especially if you just make space for it. Give them the paper.

Give them the staplers. Have a copier. And you won't be disappointed. Do you have any rituals before you write? So I wake up. I read for about an hour and a half with coffee. Almost always books by dead people. It's just more calming for me, an old book.

And usually something really off topic, like the history of shipwrecks on the Pacific Coast. Like, that's my favorite recent book. And then after that, if I feel really ready, then I go down to the boat and put on, there's an album by Sheney O'Connor that's like Irish standards. and that's my first record always.

I have to listen to the whole thing and write journal or whatever, procrastinate. And then I'm usually ready to pretend to try to get something done. And that's as much of a ritual as I've had. I've never been too much of a ritual person, but when I discovered reading in the morning, and I would recommend this to anybody,

I would fall asleep at night, like reading it late at night, at 10 minutes and I'd be asleep. But in the morning, I'm sharp, coffee's coming on, three cups of coffee, an hour and a half of reading, and you just feel like the most then person alive. I wish I'd discovered that 30 years ago and would have read a lot more. It puts me in the exact right frame of mind. And without it, in the last few weeks, I had an internet connection.

That's a long story, but I usually don't. But I've had one in the morning. and I get online right away. It's been a fucking disaster. Just wretched. I'm a totally different person, wasting time, stupid forms about nothing that matters. At best, I'm watching old concerts,

but it's just night and day. We realize if you do that to kids, too, if you give them the choice or give them a connection with everything that's ever been in the world and every movie that was ever made, they're going to go there. But if you set aside space and time and say this is our reading period or whatever, then they will use it.

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Nicotine is an addictive chemical. When you sit down to write, do you expect a certain outcome at the end of the day or no? Usually I have something I'm trying to do, you know, like there's writers that have a word count they're shooting for, just to keep themselves generally on pace. So you might say 500 words or 1,000 words, which is really not that much.

Sometimes you give a deadline to a friend to give back to you. So you say, or I'll say to my wife, like, I'm giving you this chapter at the end of the day, forced me to do it, hold me to it, yell at me if I don't get it. So you're often employing friends and family to keep you on target. And that goes back to the community part of it.

It's like, you know, so much your writing is actually talking. You're not always alone. And if you're stuck, you call up a friend, or you go for a walk with somebody, you say, I'm working this out. Does this make any sense? Or am I on to something here? Or if you're writing a novel,

you give chapters as you go to, a receiver, I call them, somebody that's dedicated. How many people do you have like that, that you could share a chapter with? Maybe 10, 15? That's a lot. Been around a while. Oh, that's great, though.

All the people I came up with, and we all do it for each other. Yeah. Like, I'm stuck. Can we trade for a few months? Yeah. And you give me yours and I'll give you yours. But that's where you lean a little bit on somebody.

And they're going to see things that you won't see. They're going to push you through a rough patch. They're going to say, no, just keep going. You're not stuck. Keep going. Just keep doing exactly what you're doing. That's how I finished my first book. I gave one section.

every few weeks to my editor, this guy, Jeff Kloskey. And he's like, you're on making sense, keep going. He never edited a word until the end. And I so recommend that to everybody. It's my first bit of advice for anybody trying to finish a first book, have a receiver. Somebody that's just there, reads it, doesn't judge. And unless it's catastrophic, says keep going.

And you'll get to the end that way, much more so if you're just alone spinning. On a hilltop somewhere like the Unabomber. Like you really need to be in conversation with people and let them pull you through. Do you write every day? Every day that's a writing day I write. Today is a non-writing day.

But on a writing day, I don't see anything. I don't do anything. How many writing days are there in a year? These days, probably 250, you know? Good amount. Yeah. It wasn't that way. I used to write in the middle of the night

because I was working during the day, but these days, because I can do just that, and I'm not needed, my kids are older and all that stuff. Yeah, it feels beyond luxurious. You feel crazy guilt sometimes. When it goes good, do you get excited? Do you have a good feeling? The rest of that night is euphoric.

You rush to work the next day. Or if you show something to a trusted reader, and they're like, this is really coming again. Then you're just, that's jet fuel, you know. And that's another reason why you include people. Because if they get excited, that redoubles your own energy, you're a dedication, your confidence in it. Is there a momentum that builds as well? Like if you have a couple of good days in a road, is it easy to ride that?

100%. Yeah. Famously, Ray Bradbury down here in L.A., you know how he finished Fahrenheit 4.51? Yeah. He was broke and he had a family. and he had some job, but they had public typewriters at the LA Public Library in the basement,

I think, 10 cents for an hour. And he had just enough to like put in two hours a day maybe of typewriter time. And because he was on the clock and he was broke, he wrote that thing in like two weeks, you know? Wow. And the momentum, and that's why you read it,

it's like a really furious, passionate book, but some of that is the, driven by that urgency and the limitations of this typewriter. So sometimes some of the books that we love the most were written in short spans of time because you're capturing a real moment and there's even a fury of energy that you get that you don't necessarily get if you can get it,

but it's a lot harder if you spend seven years on something because to capture the lightness that comes in as sort of the coherence that comes from art made in the crucible of a short amount of time and high you know even a mad kind of period of your life sometimes those things the best art is made as opposed to you know they say right drunk at it sober have you ever heard that yes so true and you have to be able to go on on these wild flights and then recognize that you need to leave that alone, fix the grammar, but let it be. Because what really connects with people, I think, more than anything, are those flights of just untamed stream of consciousness or passion and the

stuff that's most risky and most embarrassing. And the stuff that you or maybe a timid editor would say you really shouldn't put that on paper. That's the stuff you have to leave. Yeah. You know. Do you only work on one thing at a time? Oh, no, always many things. is it? Yeah. Until the end, when I'm on the finishing stage, then it's the one thing. But I'm taking notes on many things every day. Like I'll see a bird. I'll be like, well, that's, that, I was writing a picture book about a bird like that. I just had an idea that'll go with the bird. And then once you're getting to the very end, the last six months or so, then it's pretty much just the one. Is there some part of the craft of writing that you had trouble

with that you feel like you're getting better at. Yeah. Knowing if it'll make any sense at all. Maybe the first six, five, six books, you have no idea that it'll cohere. There's no lesson. There's no structure that you can count on. It's not like a verse, verse, chorus,

you know, there's no, it's, every novel is wildly different from every other one. Yeah. And especially when nonfiction, it's really unpredictable whether you have something or not or you can make something compelling out of something that happens, some moment in time. But now, having been through it 12 novels or whatever I'm at,

you get to a point of, it's not ever mastery, but you're closer to knowing the path, you know, before you start. But then again, to make it really interesting, book, you're starting over. You're doing something drastically new. I have to be interested in the form of something new, something that I haven't done before. So I'm working on something now that has a really different structure than something and anything I've done before, and it could be terrible. But I know better that I could finish it no matter what. I don't know if it'll be any good, but at a certain point you know how to finish almost anything, let's say. How much of your first draft

will end up in the final book. The raw material is all there, most of it. But you've ideally fixed every sentence, you know? My first drafts are not, are very rough. Are they longer or no? You know, a really good writer, your final draft is shorter than your first, right? Because you've distilled.

You ever hear that phrase? Like, I didn't have enough time to make this shorter. And it's like, if you're doing your job well, Yeah. You are cutting out the fat. You're making it lean as self. I did just finish a book for all ages where I cut 100 pages in three weeks. And it was so much better.

Yeah. And it was a gift to the poor reader that was going to have to slog through this overlong book. But other people were ready to sign off on it. And I read it late in the game. And I was like, this just, it's undisciplined. And you know how it's such, no one teaches you that. Yeah. If you see real discipline in film in particular and really tight editing,

it's just such pleasure. And then if you see it, something drag or a little bit lazy or a little bit too forgiving of some long, languorous take, thinking like, why am I more bored than I've ever been in my life just because this one take is like, you know, a minute and a half long? But the discipline, it's a gift to your audience to say, I respect your time. I'm going to make this tight. It's like not God is in the details, but there should be some equivalent phrase

that's just like the gift of a very tightly edited work of art. It seems at odds with the loose, hippie magic of art to spend so much attention on constraint and discipline and leanness, but it does really matter, right? Makes a difference. Yeah. If you have a story in mind, Can that story be told many different ways?

This is the eternal question every day. Honest a guy. I've got, let's talk about like this, I went to Kitty Hawk. I love flight. I love experimental flight. I do a lot of different, like, weird stuff. And I love experimental flyers, people that will invent a new jet pack or whatever. So I went to Kitty Hawk to pay pilgrimage to the Wright brothers

and the Kill Devil Hills and the Dunes. And I met this guy that teaches hang gliding, and I learned some hang gliding. And I just had so much, such a rich culture there. They called themselves Doonies. All the teachers and these young men, and he's the elder statesman, and he teaches them how to teach others,

and they're all hanging out on these dunes with these beautiful, brightly colored kites. And if you've ever hang glided a little bit, It's easy and safe to do it just on a hill. It's just a kite. No machinery. And it's silent, yes? Silent. Artedly silent.

And you feel it's the closest thing to being a bird, even for 20 feet of just being aloft. And I was like, is this a novel? Is this a movie about? Is this nonfiction piece about this culture of people? Is it a short story? So some things arrive you know right away. That one, I've sat for five years now. I've gone back twice, done a tandem flight, you know, all the way where a plane pulls you up and then lets you go 3,000 feet up.

I still don't know what to do with this. Yeah. And I take notes. Just from your experience, will there be a breakthrough moment where it's like, aha? It should be. I know exactly what to do that. Where the fuck has it been? It's just waiting for that.

And waiting for it. So that's like contrapasto, this book, 20 years of notes, waiting for the structure to arrive. What was the key? I think just like I wanted it to be about their whole lives, but I was bored thinking about having to describe every year, allowing yourself to jump 10 years each time was just such a simple thing, but I hadn't occurred to me. It's always a simple thing.

I know. I felt so dumb when it popped into my head. It's not like no one's ever done it before, but it liberated me. Suddenly all the baggage was, you know, it's like a hot air balloon where you dump the sandbags off and you're alone. So great.

And I think so much of the time you are, you're losing things as opposed to putting more in. Yeah. The solution often is less. Do you always want there to be a moral at the end of the story? No. And there are themes and ideas and all of these things woven into a novel. But it's a form where these things come and go

and the flow of a vast neandering river that you're traveling down and you don't get out of the river and say, oh, I know, I should always be barefoot now. You know, like some, but these days, there is a little bit more that's been sort of entering into the, what do you want readers to take away? It's just like it's everywhere now, especially when with picture books, I write books for kids too. And Maurice Sendak was a guy that Spike and I used to work with. And he was so adamant about that books should not have morals. And for kids, too, even though he did some that had kind of some messages, but it's a different form. I don't think that a moral and a work of art are sort of like can coexist. When you're sitting in the boat, do you feel like you're making it or do you feel like

you're finding it. I would say they're both everyday occurrences. You definitely know sometimes I have to flesh out this character. This is the, I'm doing this today no matter what. And in doing that, you realize, like, oh, they had this stepfather that they used to live with. And he was in the Merchant Marine. This thing just like pops into the page all of a sudden. And there's nothing better, really.

I know the characters in this new book that I had no. not planned on at all. That, like, they're there suddenly, because I'm typing. I'm really not a mystical, like, I'm not superstitious or anything. I really feel like generally we're in control of what we're doing there, but sometimes things you are catching up to what's going on in your head, and you can just barely type it fast enough. And those are really fun.

And those characters actually become really different in your mind, and kind of more beloved because they arrived unannounced, and without much of your own doing. There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo, and reveal meaning over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention.

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A short passage is read, a single phrase is held. Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for insight to surface naturally. Lectio 365 brings that ancient rhythm into the present moment. Designed for modern life, it offers brief, guided, scriptural reflections throughout the day, to begin with intention, pause at midday, and wind down at night. The readings are less about information gathering, and more for returning to wisdom again and again, letting familiar words meet new moments.

A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady, and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always. Learn more at lectio-365.com. Have you had any mentors? Always. So I've been looking through all these old papers,

and I had a high school teacher named Peter Ferry, who was just like my favorite guy and really funny guy. You know the teachers that like Monty Python, when you are obsessed with Monty Python, like forever, that's your guy. And so we stayed in touch. And even when I started writing books, I would send him each book before it came out. So he could grade it. Great.

I found all my manuscripts from Peter Ferry the other day. And he'd write all these notes and he always tell the truth and he was hard on me here and there. There was always like firm about things. At that point, he was writing his own books. He wrote a number of novels that were published. and then he would do something that I recommend to anybody. He would write out all of his favorite lines from the manuscript and give it back to you.

And through his eyes to see what he had noticed and then the love that took him to put it all back in handwriting, somebody, a peer of mine, did this a couple days ago in an email, and I was like, oh my God, I never had anyone but Mr. Ferry do this. But everybody should do it. And it made me think, I have to do this with friends, too because it's different than just saying good job. It makes it 10 times better.

And you're like, oh, yeah, I forgot that. I did that. So he did that until, you know, he passed away a few years ago. But I still have a few of my old teachers in my life, including my fifth grade teacher who made us write a book. And I'm going to see her in Chicago in about a month. Great. So it's mostly teachers that I stayed close with,

especially when my parents passed, like they became some of the crucial. adults in my life that kept in touch on purpose and we're sort of careful to present that continuity with home. That's one of the reasons why we have these organizations that are teachers supporting organizations. We try to give more volunteers in the classrooms to help public school teachers in our era. Have you ever read something you wrote a long time ago and realize that it means something different than you thought it meant when you wrote it? Yeah. Or you don't remember it at all. Yeah, yeah, like it never happened.

I found stuff that I don't remember. I have no recollection of writing it. I mean, from my 20s and 30s. No recollection of writing it, no idea what I was writing. I don't know where it went. I don't know what the game of it or why I abandoned it. But there was some good stuff. So sometimes, you know, you do borrow things from these abandoned drafts.

But at best, art, you don't always know what you're getting at. And if it's coming from the deepest, most subliminal kind of, bone-deep place within you, then you get into like dream storytelling and, you know, the kind of stuff you do when you're, when you aren't awake. And then that's, that's some of the most interesting stuff. And why is it that I'm writing this scene that takes place underwater and it's a, you can't question it sometimes. And sometimes that's the storytelling that I think is most resonant with people. And that's why David Lynch, he's the perfect exemplar of this. I'm sure he has no idea why he did certain things.

And it wasn't coming from the intellectual part of himself. It was coming from, like, I don't know, there's going to be this black lacquered box, and then there's a key. And I guess the key. And he can describe it perfectly, but has no idea why. And then there's tiny people that are behind the diner, and they come out. Like, these are all dream things that he didn't question, that he realized in three-dimensional space and on film.

And we know exactly what he's doing. He's the only sort of real dream. artist, I think, out there in film. And why is it? Everybody else constrains it and puts it into a more rational form. Maybe even well prior to him, you know? For sure. You know, why is there a dead person in the restaurant over there, like that kind of stuff? But in a dream, every day, a dream will give that to you. So I think, you know, when you're, you've got to allow that. You don't have to know why. Don't have to know why. And I was telling, I speak to high school kids.

I was in a class last week. And they were like, well, so what kind of philosophy guides you as you wrote the circle? This is a book about like a tech dystopia. He said, you know, like stoicism or, you know. And I said, no, don't ever believe when you go to college or whatever, there's no, we're not being guided by some theory. It's not on a grid, you know. if your college professor tells you that this story has a lot of red in it

because he was influenced by a grandfather that was a Soviet dissident, no, he just put red in. He has no idea. There were flowers in the room or, no idea. All of these things are coming from a much more subliminal place. And so this sort of hyper-intellectualization and analysis of it is something that you can do as an undergrad to pass the time, but it doesn't mean the artist has any awareness.

and shouldn't. And so I like to sort of liberate high school kids from that. And of course, sometimes their teachers are horrified that I'm saying much of what they're reading and analyzing is made up. It's made up. It's just make work. Do you ever start projects and not finish them? Always. 92% of the time. Really? A lot. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times you're waiting for somebody to tell you it's a bad idea. And then sometimes somebody else will do it in the meantime before you've finished. Sometimes you just can't get to it and it takes you 20 years. And very often you yourself will realize ideally as quickly as possible that between three in the morning when you wrote it down and nine in the morning when you see the note by the bed, how stupid it is. But yeah, I tend to sort of

going in a lot of directions at once and trying to find a lot of. find time and reason to focus on the one thing and get it finished, but I don't know what you'd call it. I mean, I'm sure it's diagnosable now, has never been diagnosed with anything, and nor do I want to be. I think that I finish plenty enough, and I always tell people like, there's just no shame in 100 abandoned projects. As long as you're getting that 101st one finished, they say we've got 40,000 thoughts a day, right? So I for sure believe that. I definitely have counted them.

It's a lot, but I love being told not that one. And then I'm like, oh, thank God. And then I can move on. And it's only when knowledgeable people will say, oh, that's pretty good. Then you're like, oh, fuck, I might have to do this. You know, even if it's like outside of the realm of writing, you know, we had this idea for,

this thing called Art and Water, and it's like a free MFA art school. It'll be in a peer in San Francisco. And I was upset by how art school is $100,000 a year now. No one I know can pay this. So I say, well, why don't we take mentors, teach aspiring artists for free, everybody shares space, studios, and all together.

So I pitched this for five years to different people and nobody told me it was a dumb idea. And so I was never free of it. And so now it's going to happen because people joined up, and now it'll be open later on the summer. So it would be like 50 artists all sharing. Great. Studio space and teaching each other and no money exchanged.

So you have to come down and see it. It'll be a thing. Tell me more about your thoughts on education in general. Well, this has been the sphere. We've been in with our non-profits since 2002. I went to public schools all the way through college, so I think school should be free, and I think the teachers should be better paid.

Those are the two main things. It could be under a tree. It could be anywhere as long as you're motivating and paying those teachers. It all comes down to teachers and paying them better. So we have a bill before Congress right now where it would set a $60,000 minimum for all teachers in the U.S. and then, as you can imagine, that's not going anywhere super fast. But I think more than ever,

now that they're chasing teachers out of the classroom by banning their books and arresting them for handing out the right these certain books. My books have been banned all over the country. Really? Yeah, we did a whole documentary. Matt Stone funded it, actually. It was directed by Arthur Bradford called You Be Destroyed, and I had a book called The Circle.

It now is on the banned list. Do you know why they banned it? Yeah, so it's about, you know, they assigned it in high school because it's about the dangers of technology and social media and a lot of things. But there's three very awkward. intimacy scenes that are meant to be so awkward and about how, like in one case, during a romantic encounter, the male of the two wants her to rate him as they go along, you know, because he's so insecure and he wants everything to be measurable and datified. So they're not like sexy scenes,

but they're in a book that's often assigned in high school. So that's often what they're banning, his intimacy in a book that's given to kids. Meanwhile, these kids all have phones. They have access to every piece of pornography that's ever been made by humankind, but they're worried about the three scenes and the novel. So they ban this book in Rapid City, South Dakota, and they didn't just ban it, but they destroyed them all.

They pulled them out of libraries, and they've never been seen again. Wow. And so that's why they were marked to be destroyed on the official documents. Wow. So that's what we called, and we went back to South Dakota many times, and Arthur, the director filmed students and parents and teachers

and to examine how these things happened. And it turns out there was nobody in the town that objected to any of the books. Not one authentic complaint. But because there had been a new Christian school board loaded in, headed up by a woman with seven kids, none of whom were in the public schools. They were all sent to Christian. schools. But because of this culture of sort of maybe preemptive censorship, they took all these semi-controversial books off the shelves so as not to stir up any trouble. These are the

principals of the schools. And then the kids found out about it. They were enraged. They felt stolen from and condescended to. And so we partnered with the local independent bookstore Mitzis and said, if we'll pay for it, will you offer all five banned books? There are five of them to any kid that comes in in high school. So they did it. We're still doing it to this day, three years later. You walk in, and so far more kids have read these books,

and they all have them at home now, whereas they wouldn't. Then had they not banned them. But it does teach you, like, so much of censorship is not coming down from on high, but it's preemptive. It's like the powers that be saying, just avoid trouble in case it's coming or in case the school board objects. Let's just preemptively take these books off the list. But it was really enlightening, amazing to see these kids stand up for the right to read freely, and got to see a really great part of the world.

Like Rapid City, South Dakota is an awesome town. It's right near Mount Rushmore in the badlands, and so there's a lot to see there. It's a great story. Isn't that crazy? Amazing. book banning has no fans. Even Maga people, the farthest, there's very few Americans on any part of this political spectrum that want to censor books. Anytime we had a town hall or anything,

everybody can come any side of this debate. Not one person came from the town to say, let's ban books. So then the next school board election, they voted out all the lunatics. They voted back in a bunch of moderates, and now things are back to normal. So it gives you hope.

If any collector, it is well informed and they show up, chances are you're not going to have a hijacking by these the right-wing extremists, but you do have to vote and you've got to be informed. What are your thoughts on free speech? I mean, I'm an absolutist, you know. I even did this in the schools and in Rapid City, I was like, what's the one book you would bat? Because there's got to be one, right?

And I always want some kid to say, mind comf, like, Comf, like that's one that doesn't belong. They know the trick. Because if everybody has a right to ban one book, and it sounds good in theory, like, well, just one book out of 200,000. Well, that library is empty very quickly. So we're at the point where there's more banned books

than in any time in history, and it's doubling every year. And it's because of technology and these banned lists that are shared from community to community. And then this culture of radical conservative But it'll swing around again, but in the meantime, it's really rough on librarians. And it makes a hard, low-paying job much harder.

Tell me about your editing process. I'm pretty fierce, I guess. In newspapers and magazines, you know, like, there's never an unexamined sentence. Everything is subject to be chopped up, and you get a thick skin. you can't be precious about much. And now, you know, writing your own books, you could be precious if you'd like to be, but you get very good at listening to editors

and the humility of giving yourself to editing. And then you also become a very good self-editor, especially if you're editing other people. I always think you've got to edit other people's books to be a good self-editor. And not just, I like it, I don't like it, but how could this be better? You know, I know what you're trying to do here.

So I was an editor for about 10 years before I ever wrote a book. So it's a great training. Tony Morrison was an editor. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. She was a big editor at Random House. And then she wrote Beloved. And so I recommended it as a start and as an ongoing practice.

Are there any popular rules or ideas about writing that you disagree with? All of them. When you say rules about writing, that's a terrible phrase to utter. There can be no rules about writing. And this is how we discourage generations of young people from writing is when we say, here's your five paragraphs, here's your this, here's your opening this, and then have fun writing, be inspired. We're just going to, like, hold you to, like, box you in everywhere you can possibly imagine.

if we wonder why they don't consider themselves creative or good writers or whatever, and then you give them the five-paragraph essay, that is exactly how you kill every generation's interest in writing, is the five-paragraph essay. It needs to be obliterated. And you'll see everything open up, the sky open up, everything, all these kids are feeling free of those shackles. But all of the tropes are wrong.

Write what you know is a terrible canard that is misunderstood. people have taken it to mean that if you grew up in a suburb and your dad was a mailman, then that's what you should write. There's a bunch of novels about suburban mailman. And it doesn't mean that at all. And you should never be constrained by just the things you know. How about learn some things and then write about those things? How about the book being bigger than yourself?

Anytime you hear a rule, take it with a grain of salt. Maybe it's good advice. But generally speaking, it's to be ignored immediately. when it's presented to you. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragameter?

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