The best coverage of the Auckland Writers Festival continues right here, as the Spinoff Review of Books devotes the entire week to long, intelligent encounters with guest writers. Today: Holly Walker talks with Chris Kraus, an American writer who worked for newspapers in Wellington before creating the belated smash-hit feminist novel, I Love Dick.

Read more Auckland Writers Festival coverage from the Spinoff here

Chris Kraus’s first novel I Love Dick received a lukewarm reception when it was released in 1997, but has attracted a cult following and been hailed as a feminist classic since its re-release in 2006. As much an art project as a novel (in which every reader participates – try reading it on the train) it consists of love letters written by a character named Chris Kraus and her husband Sylvere Lotringer to a cultural critic named Dick. Yes, those are their real names, and there really was a Dick – British art critic Dick Hebdige was so angry about the book that he outed himself as the model for the character when he spoke out to denounce it. For Kraus, the lines between fiction and non-fiction are blurred at best.

The author of three other novels and two books of nonfiction, Kraus continues to collaborate with her now ex-husband Lotringer on Semiotext(e), the publishing company they co-edit with Hedi El Kholti. Though she was born and lives in the US, she spent her teenage years and early adulthood in Wellington, having Marmite smeared in her hair by the kids at Wellington High in the 1970s, and working full-time as a feature writer for the Sunday Times by the age of 17. At 21 she returned to the US to pursue an art career and spent decades making performance art and experimental films on the fringes of the US and LA art scenes. The recent revival of I Love Dick – a television adaption created by Jill Soloway (Transparent) premieres in the US on May 12 – means Kraus is finally enjoying the wide acclaim she deserves. Her 2006 novel Torpor is about to be re-released and she has a new book coming out in August.

I want to talk about your New Zealand connection. Can you tell me how you came to move to New Zealand with your parents? It must have quite unusual at that time.

It was a total shock. I remember my first day of school, putting on a school uniform, which included white gloves at that time. They rubbed Marmite in my hair – that was my welcome to Wellington! But moving from a blue-collar suburb in Connecticut – this kind of drab and cultureless place where I always got beat up at school and there was no larger world – Wellington seemed like a cosmopolitan paradise.

Why did your parents move here?

Well, the New Zealand Government had just started the Assisted Passage scheme, and my parents were having a hard time with uncovered medical expenses for my sister. And they’d always dreamed of New Zealand as a kind of social-democratic paradise. So they applied, and they were accepted. They emigrated when they were already in their 40s, which was a very brave thing, because at that time there was no going back. Plane tickets were very expensive, the exchange rate was unfavorable – they moved halfway round the world, sight unseen, and were there for good. And New Zealand in the 1970s was so remote and insular! Magazines arrived by ship from overseas, so you read them two or three months after the fact. There was only one TV station, and it shut down at 10 after “God Save The Queen”. The pubs shut at six. In a way, even though there’s a two-decade age difference between Sylvere and me, it was as if we were the same generation, because New Zealand was about that far behind the rest of the world!

And yet I’ve heard you say in another interview that moving to New Zealand saved your life. How so?

Absolutely. For a start, I would never have gone to college if we’d stayed in the US. I’d already more or less stopped attending school – my goal was just to take drugs and live in the park. School in New Zealand was a lot more interesting. The books we read in the 6^th form, people don’t read in the US until graduate school unless they’ve attended elite private schools.

What kinds of books?

Just entire books, rather than textbooks. James Joyce, Eric Hobsbawn, Eveleyn Waugh…

I really loved the descriptions of Wellington in the 70s in I Love Dick: the parties at the BLERTA house, the larger-than-life public figures on the street like Ruffo the schizophrenic artist. When I read them, I had that experience of a nostalgia for a time that I never lived through, which you described looking at art installations of New York in the 1950s. Is that false nostalgia meaningful?

Are you talking about that feeling everybody has of having missed the best thing?

Yes, I think so.

No matter where you look back from, it’s always as if you’ve missed the best thing. We have to be careful, because we’re living right now the best thing that other people are going to look back on! I read a wonderful book recently by the artist Molly Crabapple, called Drawing Blood. She writes about her friends in New York in the early aughts, and she makes it seem like that time was the best thing. It’s a question that really interests me, and I looked at it in my book Where Art Belongs, that feeling people have about the last avant-garde. I wrote a history of a defunct alternative gallery, Tiny Creatures, who from scratch, and with very few art world connections, created their own ‘best thing’. For a while, Tiny Creatures in LA’s Echo Park felt like the centre of the world. The Zurich dadaists did the same thing in the 1910s, hiding out in Zurich to evade the draft in World War One, with the Cabaret Voltaire. What’s really amazing is when any group of artists work together with that intensity and seriousness they can make that place, wherever they are, the centre of the world. Somehow that always ends up radiating out.

How did you come to be a journalist for the Sunday Times and the Evening Post so young? I think you were still a teenager when you started working there.

Well, at that time, the Wellington Publishing Company offered a scholarship to Victoria students, that came with a job for a year. So in my second year at university, I won the scholarship, and I got a little bit of money and a job for a year. I started right away as a feature writer on the Sunday Times, which was fantastic! I liked it so much that they let me work full time. And then I stayed. It was a dream job for a writer, and a job that doesn’t really exist anymore. To be a journalist now is like wanting to be an artist or writer – there’s hardly a viable way to support yourself from the proceeds. But journalism is tremendously exciting for anyone with a sense of adventure, who wants to investigate, poke into things they’re curious about, and explore.

And yet after a few years you decided to move back to the States.

Right. When I was 21 I had a good job as TV critic for the Evening Post, a nice apartment, nice clothes, a nice car, and I looked at my life and thought “oh, this is the life I’ll be living when I’m 41”! When really, I wanted to be an artist. I couldn’t quite give that all up and go live in a Wellington squat, so like everyone else, I went overseas. First to London, which didn’t work out. And then to New York, since I still had a US passport. And there I stayed.

And what was that like, that transition back from Wellington, which saw itself as this cosmopolitan place but really wasn’t, to a truly cosmopolitan city with a thriving art scene in New York?

It was really terrifying. In Wellington there used to be this great Friday night ritual of drinking and shopping – everyone walking around totally bombed. I knew right away in New York, “you can’t do this here!” It took a long time to figure out how the system works, and how friendships and art networks are all so tied into where you attended college. I hadn’t gone to college with any of these people. There’s a truism that says that if you’re coming from an outsider place, it’s always going to take you ten years longer to get established, and if you’re a woman, you add another ten years to that. I think I’m a really good example. When I went to New York I was an avid spectator of all kinds of art and culture, but very much from an outsider place. I spent a lot of time alone, going to art shows and readings and movies. Finally I met the poet Jeff Wright when we were both office temping, and he introduced me to the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, that became my first social network. Even though I wasn’t a poet.

So you became first an artist, and a filmmaker, before you were a writer.

It was a pretty jagged path! I remember when I was a student in Wellington at Victoria. I was very shy, like everybody is at that age, and I was in a writing class, and I asked the question “how do you know what to write about?” And the teacher said “if you have to ask that question, you’re not a writer at all”. That put me off for about 20 years. Although really, I think it’s the only question. First I tried being an actress, but it was suggested that maybe I was too analytical to be an actress. So I tried being a director, and then in the 80s, I started making experimental films. I made about eight of them, and finally the feature film that I made in New Zealand, Gravity & Grace, that was finished in 1996. Throughout that time, I was hardly writing. But when Gravity & Grace crashed and burned as a commercial proposition, I started writing the letters to Dick. And writing those letters opened a door. It all came back: the intense focus of the reporter’s room, where you have only two hours to write 600 or 800 words on a deadline. No time for the anguish of the blank page! You just sit down and do it. So that’s what I started to do.

As I was preparing for this interview I was thinking about something you wrote in I Love Dick. You said the sheer fact of women talking and being paradoxical and self-destructive in public was the most revolutionary thing in the world. Then you said “I could be 20 years too late but epiphanies don’t always synchronize with style.” Given the surge in popularity of I Love Dick recently, do you think you were actually 20 years too early?

I mean, I wouldn’t say 20 years too early because plenty of other people were saying the same thing at the time, and had said it decades or maybe even centuries before. It seems less necessary now, because there’s been such a cultural shift in since the book was published. Women have become so much more present in the culture, to the point where we almost have parity.

You think so?

Yes, almost. Relatively. The culture has changed in so many ways. Hedi El Kholti, the managing editor of Semiotext(e), made the decision to republish the book in 2006 in a classic edition. And when it came out then, it was as if it were being published for the first time. It was picked up by another generation of readers and writers, and it fell right into that moment when a lot of really brilliant younger writers were writing blogs. In a sense, blogs are the same as zines, but they can travel a lot further and have a much wider reach. So there was already this incredible, young, female zine movement in the mid aughts, and the book fell right into that. People like Emily Gould, Ariana Reines, Jackie Wang, and Kate Zambreno hadn’t yet published their first books, but their blogs were very well followed, and when they picked up on I Love Dick, its audience metastasised. The audience grew very quickly, in a much different way than it could have in 1997. Some of the sentiments expressed in the book, particularly pertaining to gender, spoke to things that these writers were dealing with in their own work. So the book entered a dialogue with another generation, and that gave it a new life.

Has it worked out the way you’d hoped for women artists and writers? You say that there’s almost parity now, but do you think that women who are being themselves in public, and using their interior lives to make art are being fully understood and recognised for that work now, better than those you describe in the book who were doing it in the 1970s?

Well, it’s a good question. When I wrote the book, I was aware that women doing that kind of work – the second wave feminists – hadn’t been sufficiently recognized. Thankfully, that’s changed – there have been dozens of museum shows correcting that misperception. When the Museum of Contemporary Art showed Carl Andre’s work in Los Angeles, dozens of women showed up to represent Ana Mendieta. I was curious, and angry, about the lack of recognition of that generation women as artists – if they weren’t ridiculed, they were lumped together as ‘feminist artists’ – and many of them had just disappeared. Shulamith Firestone got it when she renounced the opportunity to be a ‘professional feminist.’ These women lived their lives and did their work at great personal cost. And their vision of feminism went way beyond gender parity – it was a re-visioning of the world.

Still, it’s not exactly as if I was on a feminist crusade when I wrote the book. When I began writing the book, my only goal was to sleep with Dick! And within the course of the book, that hope was realised, but like a lot of hopes, it wasn’t necessarily what it was cracked up to be! I wanted to understand why I wanted to sleep with Dick, and at the same time, I was trying to understand things about rural poverty, schizophrenia, the Guatemalan Civil wars, cultural isolation. You could say that that the gender question has played out quite well. Have all these things been resolved since 1997? Not so much.

What’s it been like, having your earlier novels reissued and revisiting the content like this in interviews and festival appearances and so on, when you finished working on them and thinking about the ideas such a long time ago?

Well, I can’t complain! You write a book because you want people to read it, and if people are reading it 20 years later, what more could you ask? I’m very happy that they’re reading it, and I don’t mind re-engaging with the questions raised in the book, but at the same time, I don’t want to get stuck there. I’ve moved on to other things – I just finished a biography of Kathy Acker that will be published in August. But this June, Torpor, the third novel in the I Love Dick trilogy, will be published by Profile Books in the UK, and I’m thrilled about that. Torpor is like the prequel to I Love Dick. When I started writing I Love Dick, I knew that it would be a trilogy. There were just too many questions to cover in one book. And the big, floating question behind I Love Dick is, what could possibly make a married couple collaborate on love letters to a third person? What is it with this couple? And in Torpor, the Chris and Sylvere characters become Sylvie and Jerome and it goes deep into the backstory of both of those characters.

I’ve just been reading Torpor, and really enjoying it.

Oh, that’s good! It’s more personal than I Love Dick, even though paradoxically, it’s written in the third person. People always talk about I Love Dick being so revealing and confessional, but it never seemed that personal to me. I mean, it’s so incredibly cliché! It’s so stereotypical that it could be anyone. Torpor is much more particular to the people. It examines historical trauma, both in Jerome’s past as a child survivor of the holocaust, and in the eastern Europe of the early 1990s that they’re traveling through – the devastation of the IMF’s ‘shock therapy’ in countries like Romania, where they are ridiculously, futilely, trying to adopt an orphan. The book is also a comedy, but a much darker kind. And in order to write that kind of dark comedy, I had to reveal a lot more about the two characters.

Yes. And actually I want to ask you about the decision to write about a real relationship, albeit fictionalised. What are the moral considerations in deciding what to share about somebody else’s story?

Well, there were two different cases. In I Love Dick, Dick’s surname is never revealed and all the identifying details about him were changed. Only later, when Dick Hebdige outed himself as the model in order to denounce the book, did his name appear. Still, I was careful never to write anything about the Dick character that Dick Hebdige hadn’t already publicly revealed about himself, in his interviews and writings.

Many women have been written about by male writers, probably without permission.

Yeah, you’re right. And writing always originates from real life, no matter how much it’s transposed.

The question ‘who gets to speak, and why?’ – do you still see that as the only question?

It’s more urgent than ever. The culture gap is wider than ever, and who gets to speak are the people who’ve been to all the right schools, who have grown up in culturally-informed families, who have social connections, etcetera, etcetera.

Finally I want to ask about Katherine Mansfield, because I loved the passages in I Love Dick about her and the connection you found to her work. A fantastic graphic novel was published last year by a New Zealander called Sarah Laing, called Mansfield and Me, where she set her own writing experience alongside Katherine Mansfield’s. It sort of seems like Mansfield has become the patron saint of New Zealand women writers, so many look to her to situate their work and look for connections between themselves and her.

Well yes, and surely Janet Frame as well. Absolutely. I think all writers do that. There are certain writers who make you become a writer. There’s a kinship with that other writer. It’s a really important connection. You read this person’s work and it changes your life in some fundamental way, and it opens something up, it opens a door, and you become a writer yourself.

Chris Kraus will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival in a solo session chaired by Australian hack Kevin Rabalais on Saturday, May 20, at 3pm; with Bill Manhire and other writers, each giving a 10-minute reading, on Sunday, May 21, at 10.30am; and she delivers a lecture on art practice later that day at 1.3opm. She will also be talking in Wellington, at the City Gallery, on Monday May 22, 6pm.

Her celebrated novel I Love Dick is available at Unity Books.

The very best coverage of the Auckland Writers Festival – the most expansive, the most intelligent – is right here, as the Spinoff Review of Books devotes the entire week to encounters with guest writers. Today: Hera Lindsay Bird talks with George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo, the stand-out novel of 2017.

Read more Auckland Writers Festival coverage from the Spinoff here

I first started reading George Saunders because someone told me to. I don’t always read what other people tell me to read, because there are only so many unhappy marriages one person can take. But on the cover of Tenth of December, Saunders’s 2013 short story collection, there is a quote by Jon McGregor which goes: “These stories are so good they make me want to punch myself in the face with delight.”

So I read Tenth of December, and not only did I punch myself in the face, I went on to punch the faces of all my friends and family. I punched children. I punched teachers. I burned down the city hospital. I found an old horse by the side of the road and pushed, until it toppled sideways into the grass. What I am trying to say is: I love George Saunders’s writing very much.

There is a tendency when speaking about George Saunders to get over the top. It’s not just me, it’s everyone else, too. The last writer that made people produce so much collective mouth-foam was David Foster Wallace, who said of Saunders: “I think he’s the best short-story writer in English alive”, which is the kind of thing I’m glad I didn’t know beforehand because I’m suspicious of the kind of people who get described as being the best alive at anything. In my experience, when people say someone is the best alive, what they’re really saying is that the aforementioned person is both depressing and intelligent.

To be fair, George Saunders is intelligent. He won the McArthur Genius grant, and you don’t get that for eating yoghurt with a fork. But his stories are also very funny, and err on the side of hope. But was David Foster Wallace correct? Is George Saunders really the best short story writer alive? Is it fair at all to make such lofty pronouncements when we all know that taste is subjective, and engaging in literary hierarchies is boring and elitist? Yes, he probably is.

I work in a bookshop, and try and recommend George Saunders to as many people as possible, but it’s hard work. Nobody buys George Saunders, because he’s a hard sell, and I’m a terrible salesperson. I hear myself saying “these stories are good…………one of them is set in a theme park for…. caveman??? They’re kind of ‘high concept’ and…. about violence & capitalism, but narrated by a republican mom driving her children around while trying to instill in them a sense of the magic of Autumn.”

And then people leave the bookstore with the new Jonathan Franzen instead.

People also don’t buy George Saunders because George Saunders writes short stories, and nobody really likes short stories except for other people who also write short stories. But George Saunders has written a novel this time, and the world is finally paying attention.

The novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is about the death of Lincoln’s son, whose ghost becomes stuck in a kind of purgatory, ie trapped in cemetery land. All the other ghosts feel sorry for him and try to get him out. I loved it very much. It’s a lot more complicated than that. You can look up the synopsis yourself.

When I found out George Saunders was coming to the AWF, I demanded Steve Braunias get me his phone number. I promised Steve I wouldn’t just ask him heaps of boring questions about literary technique, and then I accidentally asked him a lot of boring questions about literary technique. Luckily George Saunders is good at answering boring questions about literary technique, in an unliterary and non-boring way.

HLB: George Saunders! How are you?

GS: Good, I just came off the tour and I’m trying to become a person again

Yes I’ve noticed you’ve been doing millions of interviews. Are you losing your mind yet?

Oh my god, uh … It’s been easier this time. I’m kind of trying to have fun, trying to not let it get me negative. I’m getting a little repetitious which is an occupational hazard. I kept waiting for it to get difficult, but it’s kind of been all right so far. How are you doing?

I’m good, it’s 8 o’clock in the morning over here so if I sound scrambled it’s because I’m just waking up.

Oh that’s all right. I’m like that all the time because I’m 58.

I’ve just finished listening to the audiobook for Lincoln in the Bardo which I loved. It has a huge cast of voice actors including Nick Offerman and David Sedaris and Miranda July. Were you involved in the process of putting it together?

Yeah, a little bit. I had proposed it as a way of avoiding reading the whole thing myself because I had that feeling of like, I just couldn’t imagine reading nine hours of faux 19th century voices.

I heard you are making it into a movie. It must be weird for you trying to translate your work into a visual medium because your stories are so intent on capturing people’s inner voices and weird linguistic tics. How do you represent that onscreen?

Yeah, I’ve been on and off trying to get movies made for 20 years and you’ve kind of capsulised the problem, which is that they look like movies, they read like movies and when you actually go to make them it turns out they aren’t. Mostly with all this stuff I kind of feel like you don’t really know until you try. I don’t know how you work as a poet but I never have an idea of how to proceed until I start, and then you see that the form is talking to you a little bit and kind of nudging you in this direction or that.

I think the same thing with this movie stuff. I feel like in fiction, there are always conventional ways of doing things and I tend to kind of cringe at those a little bit. One thing I’ve learned over the years is to trust my cringing, so whenever I’m writing and there’s a cringey kind of familiarity or banality – it’s a sudden lurch away from that which usually guides me. I think it would be the same thing with the movie. Just see what feels lame and then try not to do that. I mean that’s my whole writing principle.

In interviews about writing process you talk a lot about intuition and being comfortable with being unsure. Have you found yourself over the years needing to make yourself unsurer on purpose?

Yeah, I mean if you’ve written for a number of years you’ve trod over certain material and so you have to kind of avoid that stuff, but you know it’s funny, I think I’m actually getting better at being unsure because … I don’t know if I’m reading more or getting a little smarter but I’m a lot more sure of how empty my knowledge is now. I think when I was younger I had such a strong set of attractions and aversions in terms of prose that I was kind of not very doubtful. And now I’m kind of getting into new enough territory that I don’t know what to do any more. It’s actually getting easier. I think I burned through a lot of my early prejudices about prose. And the other thing that’s happened is that I’ve either written or lived my way out of a certain kind of kneejerk negativity that I used to have in place, which is good, but then also suddenly it leaves me really unsure of how to proceed.

Like in this last book I think I got into some places that were kind of new tonalities for me. I’m still pretty unsure, although the thing is when you’re on tour like I have been you talk so much shit that you start you hypnotise yourself into thinking that you do know, but what I find is that when I sit down, there’s that old muscle memory of nudging yourself into that place where you’re not sure – it kind of takes over.

I think I’m talking like it’s 8 o’clock here in the morning, too, sorry I’m a little vague.

One of the things I loved about Lincoln in the Bardo is that it’s a deeply emotive book, but you’ve also included a lot of weird grotesqueness in your vision of the afterlife, and incongruous rules about ghost life. Did you have lots of ideas about the afterlife you had to discard?

If I have those rules I try to be really difficult about them because those are rules you make up consciously, and it seemed to me that a work of fiction or a poem is like a dynamic system, it’s already talking to itself and talking to the reader, and the reader’s expectations and dread. I think my thing was to try and trust those rules would show up very naturally in the course of things and partly what I liked about that was, just this notion that if you had an afterlife that was orderly it wouldn’t really be the afterlife. My thought is that, whatever happens after death, we’re not prepped for it. It’s something very strange. It’s like when you go to a theme park and you look at a rollercoaster and you think oh yeah, we could go on that rollercoaster and then when you’re on it you’re like oh shit, my imagination is too … impoverished.

So anyway, that was the game. I wanted the afterlife I made to not be too tidy and certainly not to be, in line with some pre-existing religious situation, because then it might sound like I was advocating for … or if nothing else it would be so over controlled. Part of that was to say I don’t know the rules and if I start to know I should kick a little bit and see if I can loosen it up. Also, this might be a little too boring and technical, but there were ways in which the plot itself, or the story needs would sort of vacuum-form the rules of the universe.

So for example there was this arbitrary rule that kids can’t be in the bardo for very long or else they get demonic. That just sort of evolved because I needed some pressure on Willie to leave. So in that sense the world rule came out of a plot need, and then you kind of look at it and go oh that’s kind of cool, this arbitrary god that would make a stupid rule like that and then you think are there any real word corollaries? Are there any rules in the real world that are arbitrary and cruel? Yeah, there are a million of them. Like if someone gets born with a terrible illness.

But for me it’s all process. I try to go in and say to the book very humbly, you tell me, you tell me what you want me to do, and that works out better for me, because my preplanning brain is very very pedestrian and it makes boring shit. But if I surrender to the book and trust that the process will tell me how to become complex I’m a happier camper.

The other thing is I have this principle which is not exactly a principle, but is kind of an internalised principle that if you put an element into a work, then the perfect work of art is one in which that element always escalates. So for example if I introduce the idea that these ghosts will have, uh, physical manifestations of whatever neurosis they had in life – early on those were all physical manifestations like Vollman’s penis, so at some point I thought, if I’m introducing new ghosts that riff is getting a little tired because it’s a little linear. Everyone has a physical manifestation, so this principle of escalation says is there some other form of manifestation that isn’t, strictly speaking, physical? And if so, that would be a more beautiful pattern.

Like let’s say you have a world where there’s a bunch of cutlery on a table, and the cutlery is alive and at some point whenever someone says something in a certain vein, all the cutlery starts to quiver with excitement. A shaking metallic noise, right? So now we have several pages of that, someone says something with which the cutlery agrees, and it trembles. Then if you keep just doing that, I’m saying you failed in escalation. But if you say, OK, now what’s the next point on that curve? Maybe the spoon gets up and actually does a dance. It stands up on edge and spins. So now what does that mean? Well, who the fuck knows what that means? But we understand it as an escalation of the primary condition.

You teach creative writing at Syracuse University. What have you learned from teaching other people how to write?

One thing is the extent of the mystery. We can have these talks about “craft” as we call it here, and they’re good as far as they go, but they’re really not sufficient to express why this writer is interesting and this one isn’t. So it’s like a form of ritual humility, talking about it. But for me, selfishly, what’s nice is, every year we get these six really talented fiction writers who are off the charts they’re so good, and just to be an older person, reminded that talent doesn’t diminish over generations. Every generation is alive equally and that’s good for me because there’s such a tendency when you’re old and you’ve written a while, and you had some success, you think you have some kind of insider line on what art is, and it’s really wonderful to get reminded every year that it’s always going to take different forms. And you as an individual don’t have a monopoly on it.

And you know just that kind of common project of getting together with people who are as strange as you are and talking about these kinds of inexpressible things, or at least trying to, it strikes me as kind of monastic in the best sense. Like to keep going back to this ineffable thing and trying to do it better is, I think, really good for a person’s humility. And happiness. Or something like that.

You met your wife in a creative writing program and got married three weeks later. Do you read each other’s work still?

Well actually we fell for each other before we’d read each other’s stuff, we weren’t even in the same class. She has been so helpful to me because she knows me really well, beyond anybody, so she can kind of just tell when I’m phoning it in a little bit, or I’ve got to an ending in a story and haven’t really had the guts to look into it. She will critique me just with an eyebrow basically.

Your stories are often about people changing their minds, or being at a crossroads in their life where they could be open to change, or persuasion. Do you still think persuasion is possible in this political climate and how do we go about it?

Yeah, I think it is, I think it is actually. Over here it feels like this stuff all came up because we gave up on persuasion, you know. There was a big kind of polarization between the left and the right that I think a lot of people didn’t even recognize was happening, on both sides, it just happened and we were okay with it. And then you get down to this Trump thing and not only was there this incredible misunderstanding about the possibility of him being elected, but now there’s not really a vocabulary with which to talk about it – that’s the really strange thing.

I have a lot of people in my extended family who voted for Trump and I love them and they love me and we get along, but when you get into the political thing there’s just no common vocabulary anymore for talking about what would we like our country to be. My perception as a writer is that whenever you go there it falls into these very media infused ways of speaking – I’m a leftist so I have my way of talking about it, the right wing has their way of talking about it, and it’s kind of bizarre, it’s kind of robotic. A three-dimensional person in the political sphere suddenly starts talking in jargon, and you can track where the jargon comes from. It’s very easy.

So, I think I am more enthusiastic about fiction than I’ve been in a long time. I mean I was always pretty enthusiastic about it, but now I’m really feeling like it’s the one way where you can induce commonality in the guise of a made up individual person, and a lot of people can look at that person and feel empathy and sympathy without characterizing that person as part of a group or politicizing it. I’m definitely speaking optimistically.

The other part of me says I just did a 24-city book tour here and I don’t know how many Trump supporters came. I don’t know actually, but probably not very many. You can make these fictive scale models of the universe that are supposed to create empathy but if people aren’t reading them then I don’t know.

I think one of the reasons we’ve got to this path in the states is that for as long as I can remember , there’s been an anti-intellectual, anti-art sort of cloud, that we’ve all operated under- even people like me never believed in anything really. There was always this kind of feeling like don’t mind us, we’re just over here with our berets on you know, doing this masturbatory thing. But then you see that so much of the Trump movement has to do with people who are in poor relation to language, who don’t know how to hear propaganda when they hear it, who are not in their habit of, how do I say this? Specification. Like they talk about immigrants. Well the literary habit of mine is to say “which immigrant?” you know, show me one. Let me hear her name. Let me look at her shoes. I haven’t quite been able to articulate it but I know that the gradual marginalization of the artistic is somehow contributory to this big sad thing going on over here.

It must have been really weird starting to write this, or continuing to write this book, about classic American values and Lincoln. Do you think that the political context of the world has affected the way people are reading this book?

Very much, and it was totally accidentally, because it was done before Trump came onto the scene, but when it first came out there was a review that said it was a perfectly wrong book for its time. But ever since then it’s actually been an advantage that the book came out when it did. Because you can’t help it, you do everything here in a Trump context, you wash your hands in a Trump context, whatever you do Trump comes into it. At first I thought, oh my god what terrible timing, but when I was on the road, people were so hungry for, I don’t know what you call it, but just basic human ideas, like what is happening here, how do we behave, what should we do, and I think that somehow this material did resonate with people. I think people are tired of the kind of snarky, telegraphic thing which always puts you in opposition to other people and I think the notion of settling into something a little more comfortable with ambiguity was nice for people.

And then also Lincoln, you know, a guy who came a long way in a short time, and he did it by being more curious about other people, and more willing to revise his ideas about slavery. I was happy to have finished it when I did because so many writers here are like what should I do? what should I do? and I felt like I did it, I did the best I could, I spent the best part of four years trying to make this really deep work of art. That’s what I got, you know. I can tweet about trump but you know that’s not …

Do you remember what the last big thing you changed your mind about was? Have you had many moments where you’ve done a complete 180?

Yeah, I mean actually I think I’m doing it now. My understanding of the Trump phenomenon is something that’s evolving every day, trying to, get as much complexity in there as I can. For example looking at the people in my family who voted for him and really trying to understand why it seemed like a good idea to them. And I’m trying to think about their economic context and their educational context and all that. And I’m actually seeing that – what I think Trump did is usurped a lot of progressive ideas. So for example, your typical American town has gone right down the shitter in the last 30 years, it really has, so people feel less secure. And that was my mantra a few years ago, and it was very progressive, Trump kind of swept in and claimed that, in a certain way, and he locked in a bunch of nationalist and racist ideas and so on.

But I guess I’m saying I’m trying to change my mind. Or not change my mind but make my mind smarter about what’s actually happened here. Rather than saying we’re fucked, people are so stupid, trying to lift myself out of that ditch of self-certainty and say, OK, let me do a writer’s job, which is to talk to people and see if I can actually do that imaginative leap where I’m seeing the world from the mind of a Trump supporter. That’s something that I’ve changed my mind on. I’m not sure if that’s big enough. Isn’t it funny though, because to talk about it is easy, but to actually do it is a little harder you know.

Your books are in some ways about the weirdest excesses of America, pushed to their logical extremes. But there’s also obviously a deep fondness and enjoyment in the absurdity of the US. Do you like the campness of America? Do you go to theme parks and all the rest of it?

Oh yeah, I love it. I mean I’ve travelled some, but this is really my home, and I love every part of it. And if I don’t love a part of it, that’s on me, as a novelist or fiction writer. It’s my job to be really fond of my country just as it is. I don’t mean uncritical, but as you’re saying, you should go into these weird places. In the 60s they used to use that phrase “dig it” and I liked that as a phrase, because it doesn’t necessarily mean you like it, but it means you’re opening yourself up to it and you’re saying oh well this is a weird thing, but … Yeah I’m a real Americana kind of fan, and this Trump this is part of it. I mean in a certain way it’s like this crazy kind of xenophobic nationalistic thing, this anti-women thing, this anti-gay thing, it’s always been America. Mostly it’s been a struggle. But for the last 8 years it was a little bit down. Well now it rears its head again but it’s not like this is 100% new, it’s been there all long, and if you really track American history you can see it. Have you been over here before?

My stepdad was from LA so we visited once. My only experience of America is like Universal Studios and Hard Rock Café and all that stuff.

You got it then. If nothing else, you gotta admit it’s pretty energetic. It’s like if you gave human beings a lot of time and a lot of money what would they come up with and it’s like, whoa … I’m kind of still studying it you know.

Whose writing do you owe the greatest debt of gratitude to?

That’s a great question. I will give you the answers and some of them are writers I don’t like any more, but you know how that works. It was Ayn Rand, cause I wasn’t even going to go to college and then I read Atlas Shrugged and it was just the fact of its bookness that made me go oh my god, I read a book, I could go to college.

And then after that Hemingway. Just for those early books. At a time where the sentences are so tight and there’s so much sensual detail in them. He was big for me. And after that, Raymond Carver and Tobias Woolf, they were both at Syracuse around the same time that I was, and then maybe Isaac Babel, I’m kind of thinking in order here, and Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye was huge for me.

I think if I was being honest I’d have to add Monty Python to that list because that was the link between the literary and my actual life and how humour worked.

Then there was a Chicago writer called Stuart Dybek who was really important to me. He wrote stories set in my dad’s neighbourhood and also made one of the bridges: like, so real life is here, here’s a story about real life. Ah!

And you always have to throw in Shakespeare, but that would actually be true, like before I went to grad school I had never read Shakespeare, and I took a class at West Texas State University with this wonderful woman who really taught us how to read those plays and encouraged us not to be intimidated by them, and she’d kind of take them apart, a speech at a time. That was really liberating in the sense that you thought, how do I say it? That Shakespeare’s prose also described our time, there’s no limit to the kind of prose you could write that would be contemporary.

In Shakespeare’s time we think of the play as being the most democratic form of entertainment, and then the novel, and now people say it’s TV. What do you think about that? Are you a TV watcher?

I am and I’m also writing stuff for TV now but, for me, what I’m interested in is how could I make prose like a novel or a short story the most democratic form, but without giving up its special powers you know? Like I think TV is pretty good, but for me TV never does what an Isaac Babel story or a Gogol story, or, you know, EE Cummings does. It just doesn’t do the same thing and I think what prose does uniquely is really important. I think the closest thing to real empathy is when you’re reading another person who is writing with great nuance and passion. It does something to your brain. I think it makes you more aware that other people are real. So I like individual forms, and I think they’re really great, but for me my home is always going to be prose I think.

And then the question that’s very alive for me now is, I’ve been writing all these years and only in the last two books did I really get an audience, and I think about a third of the people who buy my books don’t like them. So the question in my mind is, is there a way my prose could become more democratic without getting dumb, dumber, or another way of asking is, is there something in my writing that is habitually exclusive to people that doesn’t need to be? Dickens doesn’t exclude people. Shakespeare doesn’t exclude many people. The Toni Morris of Beloved doesn’t exclude many people. So that’s what I’m wrestling with, how I can stay funny and a little dark but at the same time make the gates a little bigger.

Did you spend a lot of time hanging around in graveyards in order to write this book?

I went three times, to the Oakhill cemetery and the first few times were really exciting because it was like I’m going to get all this down, I’m going to use every tree and every bush, and then the third time it was a buzzkill because I had already started and I was deep into the book and I could feel that the actual graveyard would cramp my style a little bit, like which is interesting because I think I grew up with the idea that the novel was almost a documentary medium. You had the actual world in it and actual place names, and part of its function was to represent the real world. But when I got into it, I found out for me anyway that it’s primarily a dramatic form, so all of your loyalty has to be to the drama, not the particularity of the actual form.

So in other words, I needed the characters to walk from point A to point B and they need to see certain things. Now, do I have to make them see the things they would actually see? Or do I let them see the things that would make the story more beautiful. You have to answer the second thing, so basically you end up jettisoning the whole graveyard and making up your own. It’s funny – there’s a thing here now where, there was an article in the Washington Post, where the caretakers report that two or three people coming to the graveyard every day to read the book at the location. So I thought that was kind of cool. But then the caretaker listed a bunch of things from the book and he was like none of that is real he made it all up. I kind of felt a little bit sad about that. I don’t know how to describe it, but you’re either a photorealist or you’re a dramatist.

I think we have to be beauty makers. Especially these days because we have so many ways of representing the real, to be formal inventors is maybe the last bit of ground that is going to be left for us. To make these dramatic shapes that are kind of their own little animals and may or may not have any relation to the literal facts of the world but have a real relation to the kind of transcendent facts of the world.

George Saunders will appear at the Auckland Writers Festival on Friday, May 19, at 1pm, reading from his work alongside other writers; on Saturday, May 20, at 12pm, in a solo session chaired by Paula Morris; and his short story workshop on Sunday, May 21, at 9am, is completely sold out.

His novel Lincoln in the Bardo and collection of short stories Tenth of December are available at Unity Books.