Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel Lucy by the Sea, available from Random House.

Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Oh William!; Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine.

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Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc.

Subscribe to Brad Listi’s email newsletter.

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Merch

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Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Kate Folk is the author of the debut story collection Out There, available from Random House.

Folk has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Zyzzyva. She’s received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco.

***

Otherppl with Brad Listi is a weekly literary podcast featuring in-depth interviews with today’s leading writers.

Launched in 2011. Books. Literature. Writing. Publishing. Authors. Screenwriters. Etc.

Available where podcasts are available: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, iHeart Radio, etc.

Subscribe to Brad Listi’s email newsletter.

Support the show on Patreon

Merch

@otherppl

Instagram

YouTube

Email the show: letters [at] otherppl [dot] com

The podcast is a proud affiliate partner of Bookshop, working to support local, independent bookstores.

Now playing on Otherppl, a conversation with George Saunders. His new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is available from Random House.

This is George’s second time on the program. He first appeared in Episode 100, on August 29, 2012.

Saunders is the author of eleven books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. The audiobook for Lincoln in the Bardo, which featured a cast of 166 actors, won the 2018 Audie Award for best audiobook.

His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992. The short story collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award, and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection).

He has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In support of his work, he has appeared on The Colbert Report, Late Night with David Letterman, All Things Considered, and The Diane Rehm Show.

Saunders was born in Amarillo, Texas and raised in Oak Forest, Illinois. He has a degree in Geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines and has worked as a geophysical prospector in Indonesia, a roofer in Chicago, a doorman in Beverly Hills, and a technical writer in Rochester, New York. He has taught, since 1997, in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.

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Now playing on the Otherppl with Brad Listi podcast, a conversation with Lindsey Lee Johnson . Her debut novel, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, is available from Random House.

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Don’t second novels always tank?

Thanks for getting straight to the point. There have to be exceptions for rules to be proven, right? Knowing a second book would not be greeted like a sparkly fresh debut all I could do was put some extra effort and ambition into the effort. Five years and 465 pages later you’ll have to be the judge!

You’ll never make a Thirty Under Thirty list.

I know. I was 45 when I sold my first book and now I’m 52. My husband wants to know how many books I’ll write so he can figure out how early he can retire. I tell him at least two.

“It was in the first place, after the strangest fashion, a sense of the extraordinary way in which the most benign conditions of light and air, of sky and sea, the most beautiful English summer conceivable, mixed themselves with all the violence of action and passion. . . . Never were desperate doings so blandly lighted up as by the two unforgettable months that I was to spend so much of in looking over from the old rampart of a little high-perched Sussex town at the bright blue streak of the Channel.”  — Henry James, “Within the Rim”

The town of Rye rose from the flat marshes like an island, its tumbled pyramid of red-tiled roofs glowing in the slanting evening light. The high Sussex bluffs were a massive, unbroken line of shadow from east to west, the fields breathed out the heat of the day, and the sea was a sheet of hammered pewter. Standing at the tall French windows, Hugh Grange held his breath in a vain attempt to suspend the moment in time as he used to do when he was a little boy, in this same, slightly shabby drawing room, and the lighting of the lamps had been the signal for his aunt to send him to bed. He smiled now to think of how long and late those summer evenings had run and how he had always complained bitterly until he was allowed to stay up well beyond bedtime. Small boys, he now knew, were inveterate fraudsters and begged, pleaded, and cajoled for added rights and treats with innocent eyes and black hearts.

My dad died on the night my bathwater ran with an electric current in it. Or maybe it was the other way around. My water ran electric on the night my father died. In some ways that sounds better, more poetic, I guess. For one thing, it scans. Ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba-duh ba- duh ba-duh ba-duh. But it isn’t truly accurate as to what it felt like at the time. It felt more like the first way.

Do you know what happens in your stories before you start?

No. Not at all. I don’t know anything. The last story I wrote, “A Country Where You Once Lived,” began life as a story about a young woman who is going to her grandparent’s sixtieth wedding anniversary celebration. In the course of what I wrote, it turns out that she is having a romance with much older man whose third floor apartment she rents. And I wrote and wrote and wrote about this young woman. Wrote about her parents. Wrote about her uncle and his two kids. But more and more I would find my mind drifting to the man with whom she was sleeping, the guy whose third floor she occupied. And I started wondering what his deal was. And over the course of some months, the balance tipped and the story became his – and the original young woman just makes an appearance for a Skype sex scene.

“The human imagination is inexhaustible, and why should we expect the creative vision that invented astronaut ice cream and God to settle for standard penis/vagina fare? Once you have the basics down, you’ll find there’s a whole world of erotic variations for you to explore–all it takes is an open mind and a junior-high-school (or equivalent) education.

Take fetishes, for example–sexuality’s big tent. Show a man with a shoe fetish a woman in high heels, and he will drop to his knees to kiss the patent leather. Remove the shoe, and a foot fetishist will jump in to worship every little piggy on that most intoxicating of extremities. Remove the foot and an acrotomophile stands ready to play tribute to that heavenly absence, the amputation. In fact, there isn’t a body part, inanimate object, or idea that someone hasn’t found a way to eroticize–one person’s excuse to park in the handicapped spot is another person’s masturbatory temple.”–Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk by the Association for the Betterment of Sex (Scott Jacobson, Todd Levin, Jason Roeder, Mike Sacks and Ted Travelstead), p.126

Imagine that you inherited a large apartment house where a core of tenants pays enough rent to cover all your costs and then some.

Life is good.  You could retire on the income and live well, but there’s a catch.  You’re not that old and it occurs to you that now and then one of those tenants dies.  You can’t wait them out; you need to replace a few now and then, and there’s no guarantee that the replacements will pay as steadily as the tenants before them.

We all know writing can be tough. So every once in a while, you probably surf around the Interwebs, looking for funny sites to distract yourself from your cursor blinking on your blank Word doc. Maybe in one of those comedic searches you’ve even run into a much-loved site called Pets Who Want To Kill Themselves. Maybe you’ve chuckled at a huge black terrier stuffed into a squirrel costume, or a chihuahua dressed as a turkey. And maybe, just maybe, you laughed.

Well prepare to chuckle again- WordHustler turned the mastermind behind this hilarious site, writer Duncan Birmingham, loose on WordHustlerInk to interview his most challenging subject yet: himself. Birmingham is a successful screenwriter who managed to turn his popular blog into an even-more popular humor book published by Random House! How did he do it? What’s the secret? And, most importantly, how did they get those boxing gloves on that pit bull?

WordHustler Duncan: Duncan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Can you tell our readers how this book deal came about?

Real Duncan: Sure, Duncan. I spent three years slaving away on a novel nobody would publish. A year later I started a blog with photos of pets dressed in sombreros and R-rated captions and I got a book deal within the month.

WHD: Why pets?

RD: Mailer, DeLillo, Roth; they’ve all focused on the human condition in America. I thought it was time that a writer was brave enough to tackle the pet condition in a post 9/11 America.

WHD: Oh boy, is this really going to be that kind of interview? Seriously, what made you start this blog?

RD: I’d gotten a couple holidays cards with the family pet all dressed-up in antlers or a Santa’s hat and just looking like they wanted to bite someone’s face off. Those are the only holiday cards I keep on my fridge all year long. I found similar photos on the internet, came up with a title that made me laugh and started a tumblr site-which is very easy even for a Luddite like me-where I linked to the photos and did little captions. Pretty soon people were sending me their own pet photos.

WHD: What kind of pet do you have?

RD: Currently, none. I’m allergic to cats but am ramping up to get my first dog. I’m researching breeds now. I have to be content to dress up my friends’ pets for now.

WHD: But you hate dressing up pets?

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RD: Wrong! I love it. The Pets Who Want To Kill Themselves ethos is that I like to poke fun, but deep down I know that pets who are dressed-up, toted around in baby backpacks, married off and groomed into ninja turtles are probably the most beloved pets of all. When looking for the perfect photo submission, the term I use is “over-loved.”

WHD: Do you think a blog is a good way to get a book agent’s or a publisher’s attention?

RD: It depends on the type of book. My book deal came around the same time as a few other blog-to-book deals (This Is Why You’re Fat, F*ck You Penguin) and so my blog got a lot of attention in these articles proclaiming the death knell of publishing. So certainly for a concept that is humor-based and doesn’t have a lot of text or has an interactive element, the blog is a great way to get attention. Otherwise, I think a blog can be helpful as a way to build a fan base and get your name out there. Certainly there are many examples for non-fiction writers getting traction for their work from their blogs. For fiction writers, it seems a little trickier.

WHD: What was the process for you?

RD: It all happened very fast. Most of the photos are submissions that were emailed to me, but a few were photos I sought out on a Flickr or pet sites and requested the owner let me use. Some people heard the title and shut me down cold, but most had a sense of humor about it, were excited to show off their pets and were very sweet and encouraging about the whole endeavor. So basically, I combed through hundreds of photos and weeded out the best 160 for the book. The tough part was resisting posting a lot of them on the blog first cause they’re just so good you can’t wait to show them off.

When it came time to caption the photos, I read lots of Vice Do’s and Don’ts , dug up my The Far Side collections for inspiration and tried to think of each photograph like a one-panel cartoon. Some of the captions are omniscient narrator, but most are the pets speaking with emotions that range from suicidal to sardonic. I’m a method writer, so I was sleeping on the floor and crawling around on all fours for weeks while writing this thing.

WHD: You write for film and TV as your day job. Is there a Pets Who Want To Kill Themselves movie in the works?

RD: It’s very hush-hush, but yes I do have a script that’s kind of The Incredible Journey meets The Night Porter-type thing with tons of franchise tie-in potential. We’re out to talent now. I’m legally obligated to keep quiet, but let’s just say we’re hoping to get a certain leading man whose name rhymes with Dom Grooze. Arrggh, I’m such a blabbermouth.

Well this blabbermouth sure seems to be full of good info! Thanks to Duncan for the spectacular introspection required to delve into the depths of one’s own soul. What are you doing to market your own work in an original and attention-getting way? Take some time to not only perfect your projects, but your writing personality, because that’s what really catches that agent or editor’s eye.

But, as we all know, writing has gone to the dogs.