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- [00:01]
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- [00:32]
New Books Network Announcer
Hey NBN listeners. We're running our 2026 New Books Network Audience Survey and we'd love just a few minutes of your time. NBN has been bringing you in depth conversations with authors and scholars for over 15 years. We haven't done a comprehensive audience survey since 2022, and a lot has changed since then. It's time to hear from you again. Here's why we're asking. We want to understand who's listening, what subjects and podcasts you love most, and where you'd like to see us grow. Your responses help us tell NBN's story to the publishers, libraries and institutions we partner with. When we can show that our listeners are serious readers, lifelong learners, and heavy library users, it opens doors to new partnerships, better resources, and ultimately a stronger NBN for everyone. And one more thing, if you leave your email address at the end of the survey, you'll be entered to win a $100 gift card to bookshop.org, a chance to stock up on books while supporting independent bookstores at the same time. The survey takes just five minutes. Your answers are confidential and your email will never be shared. Head to newbooksnetwork.com to take the survey today. We really appreciate your support. Now go take the survey.
- [01:45]
Casey Walker
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:50]
Emily Everett
Hello everyone. Welcome to this is the Place, a podcast series from the Common magazine on the New Books Network. The Common publishes literature and art with a modern sense of place. I'm Emily Everett, managing editor of the magazine and host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Casey Walker about his story Islands, which appears in issue 30 of the Common. Casey Walker's new novel Mexicali is forthcoming from Knopf in 2027. He is also the author of the novel Last Days in Shanghai and has published fiction and essays in the Common, Ninth Letter, the Believer, the New York Times, and El Pais, among others. He holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Princeton University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Casey Walker, thanks for joining us.
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Casey Walker
Thank you so much, Emily. I've been looking forward to this.
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Emily Everett
This is your second time on the podcast.
- [02:41]
Casey Walker
I Know, I was wondering if I got like, a little, like, participation award, Like a little, like a plaque.
- [02:47]
Emily Everett
Yeah, I think we need to send you something.
- [02:49]
Casey Walker
Yeah, like a desk weight.
- [02:52]
Emily Everett
Perfect. Would you just set the scene for our conversation? Describe where you're calling from now.
- [02:58]
Casey Walker
Yes. So I'm in my home office in Portland, Oregon. Office, I think is probably a little bit of a stretch. It is, in fact, a closet. I, at one point during the pandemic, I got rid of, like, half of my clothing so that I could have these bookshelves kind of next to me and have just a place to do any kind of, you know, separate quiet writing away from. From my kids who were home all the time. So I usually was able to get, you know, like an hour or something in the mornings. So, yeah, this. I mean, the. I try to get in here most mornings. It is filled with all of my books for whatever project I'm working on. And then I have to my right out of the camera view my nice little trinket shelf that is full of. The one thing I tend to buy when I go on vacation somewhere or travel somewhere is a little trinket mockup of whatever city that I'm in. So a little miniature Barcelona or a little miniature San Sebastian or a little miniature. These, like, Italian hill towns and stuff. So I have this like, little like, dollhouse kind of Cities of the World on the shelf to my right.
- [04:18]
Emily Everett
That's great. Well, you're in great company because the common. Our offices are also a closet.
- [04:24]
Casey Walker
Yeah.
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Emily Everett
Obviously that's not where I am now, but. But our offices are two conjoined closets. So, like, give us credit. We do have two, but that's wonderful.
- [04:32]
Casey Walker
I know. I thought of once when you told me that we were going to be videoing this too. I was like, well, I could go. I could try to prove to the common audience that I do have one room that has the nice bookshelves and stuff in it. But then, you know, it just seemed like fakery. Like, let's just do it right from the closet, you know, this is where the story was written.
- [04:52]
Emily Everett
Yeah. Let's be honest.
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Casey Walker
Let's be honest about it.
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Emily Everett
I would love to start off with a reading from your story. Would you read the first few paragraphs for us?
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Casey Walker
Absolutely. So this is islands. 12 years ago in waters off the Azores, my father was thrown overboard on a whale watching skiff, and my mother thought she could save him. The trip had been my mother's dream. She hadn't seen the islands since she was a child visiting her grandparents, my father's overconfidence about boating in bad weather, an unanticipated storm surge, a possibly intoxicated boat pilot. That was the tragedy of my mother's ancestral homecoming. No bodies were ever recovered. In lieu of caskets, the funeral director set up an oversized portrait taken on my parents wedding day. That young couple, with expressions formally posed, was all but unrecognizable to me. I was in college when it happened. I had declined, actually refused my mother's offer to go to the Azores with them. It would have meant a lot to her to show me that place. But at 18, I regarded being stranded with my parents on a mid Atlantic island as nothing more than a punishment. My twin brothers hadn't been included at all. They were still in middle school. Dad's sister had come into the city to watch them. She was the one who'd had to deliver the news. Years later I still felt guilty that I wasn't with my brothers when they heard the administrative aftermath of my parents deaths. The years long settling of accounts had a way of prolonging them in the act of dying. Lawyers told me the Riverside Drive apartment would have to be sold to settle our parents debts, which were to my immense surprise, considerable. They'd always seemed to me like cautious people. But I suppose New York City has a way of compelling people to live above their heads, awaiting tomorrow's windfall. And in the end my parents proved as susceptible as anyone else to a belief in the rich future. My brothers went to live with dad's sister in Connecticut, where they remained through high school. What was left of my parents estate after liquidated retirement accounts and a failed lawsuit against the holding company of the Azorean Hotel that owned the boat was a vacation house in Maine.
- [07:09]
Emily Everett
Thanks for reading that. I wonder if you could summarize for our listeners who may not have read your story yet, just describe what the piece is about.
- [07:19]
Casey Walker
Sure. So the piece is about a group of three brothers who are going to the family house in Maine, the kind of the family summer house for the last time before the house is going to be sold. And one of the brothers, the oldest one who narrates the story brings his wife who's pregnant, very pregnant, like on the verge of having their first child. And so he's reckoning with selling this kind of last piece of the familial kind of memory and the memory of of their parents in these summers that they all spent together as a family while he's about to start a new family himself and his younger Brothers, twin brothers. You know, each one of them has kind of mixed feelings about whether the house should be sold at all, whether they should have held on to it. And there's a kind of resentment brewing, I think, between the three of them, I think partly based on the circumstances of how of it all having come to this, but then a lot of also kind of deeper seated resentments that are coming to the surface about all the ways their lives have kind of diverged since the death of their parents, left in this kind of wake, I think, of disconnection between them. So the story takes place in that. In that kind of present frame. And then. And then the kind of psychological pressure, I guess, of this last trip to the house for the narrator kind of starts to bring back all these kind of histories of his memories of the place and the summers he spent there, especially involving a kind of girlfriend that he had, of a summer relationship that he had over the course of a few consecutive summers when he was in high school.
- [09:30]
Emily Everett
That's perfect. A perfect summary. I know from conversations we've had that this story has been gestating for many, many years. So let's talk about its conception. What inspired you to start work on it? How did the first draft come together? Where did these ideas start? To meet each other?
- [09:51]
Casey Walker
Yeah, I mean, it started in some ways pretty autobiographically. I mean, this was years ago. I was in graduate school. This is 2013, probably. I wrote the first draft of this and I had been thinking about. I had probably just come back from. For many years running, probably for the last, oh, gosh, 15, almost 20 years now, a group of friends have all been kind of meeting at the same house in Maine. It's owned by the parents of a friend of mine. And so I'm. I'll go, My wife goes, my brother, you know, his friends, his friends from college. I mean, it's usually this kind of big group of people going up to this house for a week. And it's changed pretty dramatically from, know, the early year, kind of post college years, which were fairly debauched. And we're dragging, you know, bags full of recycled beer cans out at the end of the weekend to now everybody has kids. And it's fairly. It's just a lot of people sitting out on a deck looking at a marsh quietly and hoping that the kids go run around together long enough that we can like, have part of a conversation. And so I think I had probably just come back from that trip. My wife at the time was pregnant with our first daughter, who is now in middle school. So that's about how long it took this story to come together. And I was thinking a lot, just the anxiety of kind of impending parenthood and sort of what it means to become a parent. And I think the thing that had really settled on me that. That is very much still in the story is the idea that there's all kinds of things that you can kind of take up in. Failing at them is not really any big deal. If you want to learn Spanish and you spend a couple years at it and you still can't get beyond pleasantries, you don't feel great. But the failure isn't a moral failure. If you try to play an instrument for a couple years and you fail at that, or you feel you fail at it, you abandon it, there's always that kind of Samuel Beckett kind of try fail again, fail better kind of thing. You write a novel and it doesn't work, or it's not very good, or nobody likes it. It's not a moral failure. But then I was really thinking about this aspect of entering into parenthood where it's like, if you do this badly, it really is a moral failure, and it's a mark on your character, and it's a mark on, you know, at least that's the way I was thinking of it. Right. And I was entering into this thing where there's a couple lines in the story about the idea of parenthood being like a kiln sort of superheated that might expose cracks in your own character. And that was just a real worry of mine. So a lot of the story kind of began with, you know, the house in Maine was set and these anxieties about parenthood were said. And then so many of the other details of it kind of evolved out of pulling on the various kind of strings and figuring out what other kind of, you know, latent tensions and stuff were hiding underneath that story. Like, why would you be so anxious about this? And what's driving that? And where is that coming from? And how does that relate to the place where you are, which is, you know, in some ways, like, coastal Maine in the summer is about as idyllic as it gets, really. So it was a lot of those sort of tensions and then trying to figure out how I could craft a story out of them.
- [13:32]
Emily Everett
Yeah, there's a fun irony there because, as you say, it is quite idyllic. And the idea of one last family trip together to this place that should have a lot of happy family memories, that sounds like it would be a happy trip. But we kind of know right from the start that that is not where we're heading. Yeah, that's good irony. So you had the unique punishment of getting notes on this story, not just from me, but also from Jen Acker, our editor in chief, who is such a sharp, insightful editor, and she's always really pushing me to push stories a little farther. Can you talk about how the story changed through edits maybe as much as you can without giving away the ending or anything?
- [14:12]
Casey Walker
Sure, yeah. This is, as you had mentioned, kind of in the intro, you know, my second go around with the Common. So this time I. I knew that you were gonna. I knew to expect the full sort of editorial workup. And I mean, at this point in my, you know, writing life, I've had all kinds of different editorial experiences from, you know, pretty pro forma stuff where you send in a story and they're like, great, we'll get you some copy edits. And that's kind of the end. I have. The. The Common is unique in terms of. I just think the. It's the combination of the absolute attention to every last detail of the stories that they're publishing, but also a really sharp and accurate editorial vision for it. Because I think you can get people who want to get into the weeds of your story that you don't agree with or you feel like are just trying to rewrite it in their own mold. And the Common is really a place where you're going to be put through your paces. But it really is, I think, and I have felt it is very in service of the story that I'm trying to tell. Not in other words, there's not some sort of Platonic ideal of a Common story that we're trying to turn you into. There's not like a sort of Gordon Lish thing where it doesn't matter what the input is, the output is always a Gordon Lish story. You know, it feels to me like. So, yeah, like the Common was really trying to work through, like, what would be the best vision for the story from the point of view of the person who wrote it. And even if those were things that I was not yet able to articulate. So I, you know, I. We went through. I lost count. I don't know. Do you remember we went through many drafts together, Maybe five. It was many. But I think. And I. And I, you know, I had said this to Jen, you know, the real challenge of the story, I think the reason I'm kind of hung around for so long, it's not my I don't think it's necessarily my normal practice to be like, yeah, I wrote this story 14 years ago. And it was 14 years between first draft and a publication is, you know, a fairly significant lag for this one in particular. I think there were just a lot of architectural elements that needed to be mutually reinforcing. There is the story about anxiety about parenthood. There's the story about a kind of, you know, sense of guilt and loss, about a past relationship. There's the story of the relationship between the older brother and his. And his two younger twin brothers. The twin brothers have a bond that he doesn't necessarily share. He has also been kind of forced into a parental role with them that they kind of everybody mutually resents. And then you have the orphaning, the death of the parents and. And kind of financial straits and the way all of those things. In order for a story of 7,500 words to encompass them all, they have to be architecturally mutually reinforcing so that the thematic and emotional questions being asked in each part of those are speaking to other parts of the story too. Otherwise, it just seems too siloed and episodic. And I think the thing that took me forever was trying to figure out how nothing in the story felt like. Would feel like an outlier. That the relationship that he felt with the brothers related to the anxiety about parenthood, related to the, you know, the loss of the parents, related to this other story in the past about this relationship gone wrong when he was in high school. And I think it was really you and Jen that pushed me to articulate the kind of structure of the story in that way. And it came down to adding more scenes too, really. I mean, adding one kind of pretty dramatic and crucial scene to it involving the mother and the parents that I think really finally kind of exposed the. The structure of the story to me in a way that made it all make sense. But I think without being pushed and pushed and pushed to articulate that the story would have just continued to kind of droop. I would've had this kind of continued frustration. I would pull it out every couple years, try to work on it. I love that house. I love that place in Maine. I love the memories of it. There were these aspects of the story that I really wanted to preserve, and I could not fit it together until you and Jen really showed me how it could be done. And, you know, I. Even though that story had been on my desk and in my computer for a decade, it was the. You know, I think it was the Pages that I wrote in a week or two with. With the Commons kind of guidance that really made it, I think, work and pull together. I wrote a little song to remind you. Choice hotels get you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all.
- [19:55]
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- [19:58]
Casey Walker
Cocktails up here. Feel just right. Ms. Cambria.
- [20:02]
Emily Everett
Amazing.
- [20:04]
Casey Walker
All right. Bring a date, your team, or even your mom. Book direct@ChoiceHotels.com. see you on the roof.
- [20:16]
Emily Everett
It's really interesting. Yeah. If you saw just, like, a heavy look of despair on my face while you were talking, it's because, like, what you're describing, where, like, the threads still feel kind of separate and they haven't gelled together yet, is the problem I'm having with the novel I'm working on now. So. But you're giving me hope. Like, maybe there's just, like, one or two key scenes that will just, like, tie those things together.
- [20:39]
Casey Walker
Well, I think so much of the time what is happening is that there is a kind of subterranean, you know, mycelium like, connection between all of those things, but it's just so underground that even you, the writer, don't necessarily see it yet. Right. Like, and. And you know it because you keep trying to. You're like, well, this doesn't fit. And usually when something doesn't fit, it's very easy to just cut it out. You're like, oh, okay. Like, that doesn't work. That's what was holding me back. And then you cut it and you move in this new direction and everything feels better. And so you know what's right. Sometimes those things where you're just like, you know, you need to hold on to this. You know, you need to hold on to all these aspects of the story, and cutting them starts to make things feel lopsided or you're not interested in the story anymore. It doesn't work. But you can't say yet why these three things are connected. The. There's something in your subconscious. There's something there in a root system that you just haven't exposed to yourself yet. But I think that, to me, is the beauty of an editorial process, is because that is often the thing that an editor can articulate for you or can help you see in your work, these kind of subterranean connections that, to you were almost. They were intuitive in a way, or they had a. They had a psychological necessity to you that you couldn't even give a name to yet, but somebody else can name it for you. And then once they've named it for you. Then you see, like, oh, my. Actually, my brain was working on this and there was a connection. I just wasn't able to articulate what that connection was yet. So I don't know. I really. The editorial process with a good editor will always make your stories more legible to you. And I think that's the part you really have to be open to. I mean, I think it's just, you know, you go through an MFA program and there's so many writers who come through, successful writers, and just given reams of bad advice about, like, you don't have to listen to anybody. You don't, you know, the book's done, the story's done when I say it's done. I put that thing on my editor's desk and I didn't take a single edit. They get, you know, that kind of thing. And it all sounds, you know, sort of like tough and artistically rigorous and like the only way to. To. To, you know, serve your best artistic genius is to not listen to any of these other dimwits. But I just think that that is not. I just think that's all. I just think that's not true. I just think that's like a romantic illusion. And it's so self flattering, too. I've always felt, you know, I'm at the point now where it's like, if I don't get enough pushback on something that I've given to an editor, then I'm mistrustful. Like, I want to have a. I want to have a back and forth about it. Not because they're always right. I mean, even if I. But if I'm forced to articulate why I think they're wrong or why I think that my way is better, then I'm just. It's. I'm also again, in. In the world of explaining to myself what it is I think I'm doing and coming up with better articulations of that. Which makes you a better writer, both for that piece than future ones.
- [23:58]
Emily Everett
Yep. You're giving me hope. I just need to wait till I'm in the editorial phase.
- [24:03]
Casey Walker
Yeah, it's there, Emily. I promise you. It's there. You know, it's there. You just don't know why, you know?
- [24:10]
Emily Everett
Yeah. The annoying thing is how much work I'm going to have to do to figure it out.
- [24:15]
Casey Walker
Well, yeah, but I mean, that's. That's again. I mean, I know that we've talked about this before, but I also think that that's the work of, you know, that that is the interesting work that we're doing in. In a piece of writing is you're. You're writing it to find out the thing that you don't know about it. And what's annoying about that is you get to the end and you're like, oh, that's what this was about. Well, shit, now I got to go back and put in the thing that I only found out at the end of my little journey here and make it seem like it was there all along. But, you know, it would be better if it was if you just knew at the beginning what you know at the end. But. But then that's just not how the process. That's just not how it works.
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Emily Everett
Yeah. I can't decide if you just ruined my next question or just, like, set. Set it up perfectly. But my next question, I was going to read back to you a quote that you said when you were on the podcast five years ago.
- [25:13]
Casey Walker
Yeah, great.
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Emily Everett
So, like I said before, this is your second time on the podcast. You have the distinct honor of being the first person to ever be on the podcast twice. And I'll just tell our listeners that you and I have basically become great friends after we talked for the first podcast. Like, we became friends live on the air.
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Casey Walker
That's right.
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Emily Everett
And it was five years ago this month. And I went back to look at your first podcast and I found this quote that I had pulled out for promo. So I was going to read you this quote and see what you think about what, 2021. Casey. Like, did he know what he was talking about? But it's basically what you exactly just said. So the quote is, you said, I never think a story is done until it's eluded. Whatever my initial idea of it was, until something appears in it that I wasn't expecting. So I was kind of curious what you thought about that, either in context of this story or just about, I don't know, your writing in general.
- [26:02]
Casey Walker
No, I think I. Yeah, now. Now I have the pleasure of agreeing with myself. I was thinking, like, if you told me that was by another writer, then I could have, like, I could have. I could have slowly demolished it. Been like, that guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I think, you know, I. I think for me, it is really. I, you know, it was. It was a couple years after that that I read what is still my favorite kind of book on the craft of writing. George Saunders book, A Swimming upon in the Rain. And in it, I mean, he keeps coming back to this quote that is kind of apocryphally attributed to Einstein, but that probably Einstein didn't say. And it's just that no problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception. So basically, the questions essentially that you're able to ask at the outset about a problem, you know, if the problem is really a difficult one, you're going to have to explode some way of thinking about it to get to what the actual solution is. And he keeps coming back to that as a model for writing too, for like using these, you know, it's. It's kind of using writing as a, like an investigative act. You're, you're kind of plumbing these things to find out what, what it is you don't actually know. And for me, it's just like every time if I can get the story through, it just happens very rarely that I can get the story through to the end with my original conception of it. And I'm always waiting for those moments when, you know, a character appears that was not in my outline, it was not in my idea, or when, you know, some, some shift in the weather starts to happen and you're like, that was not what I anticipated. That's not where I thought the story was going. That's not what I thought this was about. And I tend to think that you can outline as much as you want, you can make the best possible itinerary, but it's a little like, it's like reading the guidebook before you go to somewhere beautiful, right? Like, it's like reading the guidebook before you go to Lisbon. And if you just get there and just try to check off everything in the guidebook, that's one kind of trip. But the much better one, right, is to, like, if you saw like a little weird tile shop down an alley or you popped into a, you know, one of like 150 year old restaurant that you didn't know existed. That's just a bunch of, you know, wizened old regulars looking at you wrong when you walk in. Like, those are kind of the places you want to be, but they weren't on your map, they weren't on your itinerary. But that becomes kind of the core of your experience is these unanticipated kind of encounters. So, yeah, I either agree with myself or my thinking has not at all evolved in five years.
- [29:20]
Emily Everett
Well, it seems to still be working for you. On that topic, let's talk about your new book. It just sold to what I suspect is probably your dream publisher after quite a Long journey.
- [29:35]
Casey Walker
Yeah. I think you get the. You get in, you get the contract, you sign the contract with Knopf, and that's a happy. Certainly a happy day. And I think if I had known, I will put it this way, if I had known that that was the end result that I was tending towards, it could have saved me many long dark nights of, like, in Year eight or something, of writing the book.
- [30:02]
Emily Everett
Well, before you tell us about its journey, maybe you can give us the pitch of the book.
- [30:07]
Casey Walker
Oh, great. Yeah. So the novel is called Mexicali, and it is set mostly in the town of Mexicali, which is in Baja California. It's a real place. I had a former agent who, I think the kindest thing he said about the draft that I had given him many years ago was that he really liked the town that I had invented and that I had to gently explain that I was not. I couldn't even take credit for that. The town was real. I was just describing it. So I grew up in a little border town in the Imperial Valley, in the border between California and Mexico. My town was El Centro. The town across the border is Mexicali. My family's been out there for. Since basically the inception of those towns because they only kind of came in when, with these big irrigation works built off the Colorado River. So Mexicali takes place in the kind of early 20th century as these border towns are rising kind of right across from each other in California and Mexico. And it's essentially about the twin children of this kind of border ne' er do. Well, named Odd Slade, his twin children come out to the border looking for him, and they find that he basically runs the biggest and wildest and most successful cabaret in Mexicali. So, you know, they've been kind of back in Texas with no money, scrounging everything together, and they find out that their father is kind of running this empire out on the border. So from there, the story just kind of builds into the life of a border town in 1915, 1920, 1930 in Mexico, and all of the kind of political upheaval and the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution. And this is the time where the United States is putting in this vast Prohibition empire. So it's just prohibition of alcohol, prohibition of gambling, prohibition of dancing, bare knuckle boxing, all kinds of horse racing, gambling, brothels, anything they banned essentially, in California. And the United States migrated south of the border and migrated south of the border, I should add, with usually American ownership. So that Americans were setting up on Mexican soil to sell back to Americans things that Americans were coming to Mexico looking for that they could then subsequently blame on Mexico itself, which is a pattern that continues to this day. So that, in a way, I think, partly because it was historical and because I felt like I knew so little about so many of the other histories that it touched on, particularly Mexican political history and Mexican Revolution history, which, even though I grew up in this border town, nobody ever taught me a thing about this stuff. You don't learn this in an American school, no matter how proximate you are to that history and no matter how much you're sort of living out in the space. So a lot of it. The book took me, you know, 10, 12 years to write. And so much of it is like the historical, the research, and also just the thing that you and I were just talking about, about how you fit all the pieces together so that nothing feels like kind of a sideline, that it feels like you're building an architectural structure that will. That will stand.
- [34:05]
Emily Everett
Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm so curious to hear about your edits when they come in. But do you want to say anything about working on something that long, how you kind of stay in it?
- [34:18]
Casey Walker
Yeah. I mean, that is a difficult thing. And I think especially sort of year after year, you can start to feel a little bit, you know, locked into one voice or one world or one place. I mean, I think the real difficulty for me was, you know, sort of, you know, one of the things I've always loved about the Common, both as a reader and as a contributor to it, is how focused on place it is. Obviously, that's the remit of the whole journal. Right. And conjuring the place for me, you know, I. I grew up there, so it was like. That was just. That was just pure joy and pleasure and just like, remembering, you know, the hot summers in the desert and remembering warm winters in the desert and, you know, the plants and the landscapes and the horizons and the animal life and the. You know, so much of that. The kind of poetry of the desert, you know, conjuring the world of it, and then also thinking about, you know, this. This kind of world of. Of. Of border kind of vice and things of dubious legality and stuff. It's something I also grew up around, too. You know, even as a. As a. As a teenager, you know, the. The place you go if you're gonna, you know, sneak off of. Sneak off on a Friday night and you wanna go have some tacos and some beer and you can't legally drink in the United States, but you can certainly cross into Mexico. And in those days you could do it without a passport and nobody needed to know. And there were all kinds of. There's all kinds of trouble you could get into south of the border, and people did. And being able to write about that world was, again, intensely pleasurable. The difficulty was then trying to find the story that you can tell in that world that feels like it best kind of exploits the possibilities of the world that you've created. I think one of the real risks of historical fiction or fiction set in history is I thought of as the kind of the Forrest Gump problem, where you essentially get your character and you try to route them through every major historical event until it looks ridiculous. I mean, at least in the case of Forrest Gump, you know, it's a comic conceit, but, you know, you can run into the same problem if you're trying to do a dramatic work too. You're just like, oh, I want to get this event. So I'm going to stick my character in that, in that. And it starts to look. It just starts to look ludicrous. So I think finding the. The way that you can tell a story in that backdrop, that also tells you something about all of the possibilities of that world in time and place. That, in a way, I think, was what took me so long. It is a long novel. It's a kind of multi generational saga. And that was kind of deliberately. But what took me a long time was figuring out the kind of the incidents that made the most sense, that it told you something about these characters in this world, not just about the world that I was. That I was writing about. So. So it was just endless amounts of, you know, writing somebody into a dead end and then having to back them out again and write them into another thing until it all, you know, eventually came together. And it's not. It's nice to be able to describe it now, like a little bit in hindsight, like, as though I have, like, tackled these problems. Whereas if we had had this conversation in, you know, 2021, when I was, you know, deeply mired in the book and not sure if there was ever a way, a pathway I was going to hack through this particular jungle, I think that would have been an additional note of despair in my voice about it. Now it just seems like a humorous folly.
- [38:37]
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- [39:07]
Emily Everett
Yeah, I feel like I've been hearing a lot of stories like this. It reminds me a lot of. We published an excerpt from a novel that came out this past year that was by Lucas Schaeffer. It's called the Slip. I think I may have mentioned it to you. It's a very long novel, and Lucas worked on it for, I think, 10 or 12 years. And it had started as a story collection and evolved into kind of like a novel with lots of, like, a wide cast of characters and stuff. But it also. It's set in Austin and also deals with all these sort of, like, fringe characters. It's set around a boxing gym. And it feels like. I feel like your book has similar energy, even though I haven't read yours yet.
- [39:43]
Casey Walker
Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, it sounds great. I mean, it's not necessarily, you know. You know, the trouble that you can get into is also these things where if you're, like, locked in a room with your. With your own musings and imaginations, and as they grow longer and longer and longer, you can also get into this world where you kind of start to outsmart yourself and you get very clever and you think of all these. You know, the biggest dead ends for me were all the kind of structural conceits I came up with to hold the novel together, where I was jumping around in time and, you know, rerouting the narrative through various characters, voices and trying these kind of. Um. Sometimes I had sections that were in present tense and add some stuff that was kind of free and direct discourse. And I had, you know, first person stuff. And it was. And at a certain point, that becomes. You know, I think I realized that I was doing that. That there was a kind of avoidance going on where I wasn't. I wasn't just sort of trusting the material of the story to unfold in a way that would be compelling. And I was kind of juggling and doing a lot of party tricks to cover up for this kind of insecurity about it. And at a certain point, you know, I had an agent who was just like, have you ever considered. It's like, you know, eight years into a project, have you Ever considered putting your novel in chronological order? I was like, you know, fascinating idea. Tell me more about this idea of chronology of chronological order. And in a way, Right, because you think you're writing pulp fiction or something, you know, like. I know, but I have this. This delicate, you know, this castle that I've built in air and all these parts where they. It's like. And really, like, what happens if you just tell this story straight through from beginning to end. And if the story isn't compelling, told straight through, beginning to end, it's also not going to be compelling, chopped up and told in a different way. And so then, you know, I sort of went back, put it back in chronological order again. And that was really the saving grace of him. And then that now it just. It unfolds to what feels like to me pretty, Pretty seamlessly as we move from, you know, the beginning in the, you know, like 1905 to the end, which is in about 1929. And we just cover that quarter century straight through. And it works immensely better. And I just, you know, I just kind of gone stir crazy, I think, with the material could also be that I was just trying to amuse myself a little bit too, you know, like, you're so long in a project and in the same world that you're like, well, maybe I'll interest myself again if I dress it up in this way.
- [42:45]
Emily Everett
Yeah, I fear I'm at that stage
- [42:47]
Casey Walker
with my novel chronology, Emily.
- [42:52]
Emily Everett
Yeah, no, I have never dabbled in trying to write things backwards or anything. Well, since we're talking about sort of being in the muddy middle of a book draft, I wonder how much you want to talk about what you're working on now or what's next.
- [43:10]
Casey Walker
Yeah, I have had, I mean, you know, this from. From your own novel publication history. It's also sort of why I hesitated a little bit, like, thinking about how long it took me to write the. To write Mexicali. Because, you know, I know that I started it. I remember writing the first words of it, and I was in an apartment in Brooklyn in 2012, and I know that now it's 2026, and I'm awaiting the kind of last draft of it to come back for my editor. So, you know, that's 14 years of time. But as you know from writing a novel, there's also these long periods where you're just waiting for somebody else to read it. You're giving it to an agent,
- [43:57]
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- [43:57]
Casey Walker
then the agent, especially if it's a long book, I mean, that's Going to be a few months and then you get it back and you're like, okay, do I want to dive into this another edit right away? Do I need a little bit of time to process what these notes are saying to me and think through that? So you get these kind of long periods. So it's like that over that close to that 14 years, I might have, you know, six months where I'm just waiting for somebody to read it or I'm just, you know, or the book is out. You know, I went through, you know, over the course of it, like I changed agents. Like there was just. There was time where you're just kind of sitting with a manuscript on somebody else's desk. So during that time, I had always, you know, I had long been conceiving, you know, another project. And you kind of feel like, I don't know if you have this when you're really kind of getting stuck in a book, but you start up, your eyes start to wander to this other future projects.
- [44:56]
Emily Everett
I'm too much of a type a control freak for that.
- [45:01]
Casey Walker
I basically had this in the notes app on my phone. I just had all these notes and musings and thoughts that I was building up about another novel. So I'm in the early stages of trying to pull those notes into some scenes and into. Into a new novel structure. But that one, you know, we, we, you know, the common has that relationship with the Disquiet conference in. In Lisbon. You and I have hung out in Lisbon. You know, my feelings about Lisbon. I've had a novel. I've had a novel set in Lisbon in the back of my head for a really long time and then just kind of figuring out a way to approach it. And, you know, I have on my mom's side of the family and kind of these Portuguese relations and ancestry and been kind of going back and reading into that a little bit more. So. I have a novel project set mostly in contemporary Lisbon with some kind of. A story drawing it back into the past as well. Basically based on kind of unearthing this manuscript from a very reclusive and mysterious poetry that's mostly just gestural at this point. I mean, I have a lot of writing towards it, but I'm kind of waiting for the Mexicali stuff to settle before I can really fully dive into it.
- [46:57]
Emily Everett
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's always our last question. We always ask people what's next and then we leave them. So. Thank you for telling us about your book that's coming out, your book that is in the very early stages and thanks so much for joining us to talk about Islands. I love that story. I'm so glad it's in the Common. I'm so glad we got to work together again and that we got to have you as a repeat guest on the podcast.
- [47:20]
Casey Walker
All of that is fantastic and feels fantastic to me and again my sincere appreciation to you and to Jen for all of the work that you did on that story and the the version of it that is published in the Common is by far the best version of that story that has ever existed and is not something that I could have gotten to. I would not have arrived at that place without without working with you and Jen for certain. I mean just for sure.
- [47:50]
Emily Everett
So yeah, I'm so glad that's the that's the fun part of our job.
- [47:54]
Casey Walker
Yeah.
- [47:55]
Emily Everett
Listeners, you can read Casey's story and subscribe to the latest issue@thecommononline.org Sam.