David K. Shipler Interprets Interpreters

Summary

The Book Case: David K. Shipler Interprets Interpreters

Episode Release Date: April 24, 2025

Hosts: Charlie Gibson & Kate Gibson
Guest: David K. Shipler
Platform: ABC News
Podcast Series Description: The Book Case explores books outside your usual genre, featuring interviews with best-selling authors, tastemakers, and independent bookstore owners to inspire a deeper hunger for literature.

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Introduction to David K. Shipler

[00:22] Charlie Gibson: Welcomes listeners to another episode of The Book Case and introduces David K. Shipler, an esteemed reporter and author. Shipler, at 83 years old, is renowned for his non-fiction work covering the Middle East, the Soviet Union, civil rights, and human rights. Recently, Shipler has ventured into fiction with his novel, "The Interpreter."

[00:32] Kate Gibson: Expresses enthusiasm about Shipler's transition from non-fiction to fiction and highlights his impressive career, including his Pulitzer Prize win and tenure at The New York Times.

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From Journalism to Fiction: Shipler’s New Endeavor

[02:47] Charlie Gibson: Discusses the inspiration behind "The Interpreter," noting that while Shipler covered the final days of the Vietnam War, he felt fiction would better capture the nuanced experiences of interpreters rather than sticking to strict non-fiction.

[06:06] David Shipler: Explains the genesis of "The Interpreter." After the death of his interpreter friend from Vietnam, Shipler considered adapting his story into a screenplay. Lacking screenplay experience, he chose to write a novel instead. Shipler emphasizes that fiction allows for a deeper exploration of truths that non-fiction might not fully capture.

Notable Quote:
"As a nonfiction writer and as a journalist, I came to feel that there were times and situations where pure nonfiction did not quite reach all of the truth."
— David Shipler [07:37]

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The Role and Trustworthiness of Interpreters

[10:04] David Shipler: Delves into the critical role of interpreters in journalism and government. He introduces the novel’s protagonist, Lan Lanh, an interpreter dedicated to faithfully translating spoken words while maintaining their original meaning and cultural context.

[12:17] David Shipler: Highlights the challenges interpreters face, such as bridging language gaps where direct translations may lack exact equivalents, necessitating creative but accurate interpretation.

Notable Quote:
"If you work with somebody over time you get a sense of the person's honesty because you're in a conversation back and forth with the person you're interviewing through the different languages."
— David Shipler [10:04]

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Ethical Dilemmas and Allegiances in War Reporting

[13:57] David Shipler: Discusses the complex allegiances interpreters navigate, especially in war zones. He draws parallels between historical events, such as the Vietnam War evacuation efforts, and contemporary issues like the end of temporary protected status for Afghans.

[18:23] David Shipler: Explores the motivations behind interpreters choosing to work for foreign correspondents despite potential risks, emphasizing their deep-seated love for their country and desire to convey its true essence to outsiders.

Notable Quote:
"Interpreting his country, no matter for whom, was a gesture of affection."
— David Shipler [20:16]

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Shipler’s Writing Process and Character Development

[24:54] Kate Gibson: Inquires about Shipler’s approach to crafting the novel’s final sentence, intrigued by its impact.

[25:14] David Shipler: Shares insights into his writing process, noting that while he knew how the book would end, the final sentence emerged organically during the writing of the concluding scene. He compares this spontaneity to his experience with short stories, where unexpected developments often enhance the narrative.

Notable Quote:
"Things happen on the page that I don't plan. They come out of the ends of my fingers on the keyboard."
— David Shipler [25:14]

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The Future of Journalism and Writing

[26:28] Charlie Gibson: Wraps up the discussion with Shipler, highlighting his transition from non-fiction to fiction and reflecting on the state of journalism in the modern age.

[27:04] Kate Gibson: Raises concerns about the security and viability of journalism as a career, especially with the decline of traditional news outlets.

[27:24] Charlie Gibson: Affirms the enduring importance of journalism despite industry challenges, emphasizing the necessity of strong writing skills.

Notable Quote:
"Most important thing is knowing how to write, which you need to learn in college."
— Charlie Gibson [27:24]

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Spotlight on Independent Bookstores: Madison Books

[28:54] Kate Gibson: Introduces Sarah Trainor, the owner of Madison Books, a small but vibrant independent bookstore in Seattle’s Madison Park area.

[29:12] Sarah Trainor: Describes Madison Books as Seattle’s smallest bookstore at 402 square feet, highlighting the importance of community support and strategic book stocking based on neighborhood preferences and retailer advice.

[31:46] Kate Gibson: Shares a personal anecdote about working in bookstores, illustrating the deep connection between bookstore staff and the books they recommend.

Notable Quote:
"We have a lot of circulation traffic. That helps enormously."
— Sarah Trainor [29:35]

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Conclusion and Acknowledgments

[33:19] Kate Gibson: Concludes the episode by thanking contributors and encouraging listeners to tune in next week for another engaging conversation.

[33:51] Charlie Gibson: Mentions Farewell and promotional spots while reiterating gratitude towards the production team and contributors.

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Key Takeaways

• David K. Shipler's Transition: Shipler successfully shifts from a distinguished non-fiction career to fiction, leveraging his real-life experiences to enrich his storytelling.

• Importance of Interpreters: The novel underscores the pivotal role interpreters play in bridging cultural and linguistic divides, especially in conflict zones.

• Ethical Challenges: Interpreters often face moral dilemmas, balancing their professional responsibilities with personal loyalties and national allegiances.

• Writing Insights: Shipler emphasizes the organic nature of storytelling in fiction, where characters and narratives develop naturally rather than following a rigid plan.

• State of Journalism: Despite industry downturns, strong writing remains essential, and journalism continues to be a vital field for accurate and impactful storytelling.

• Support for Independent Bookstores: Small bookstores like Madison Books thrive through community engagement, strategic stocking, and personalized customer interactions.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• David Shipler [07:37]:
  "As a nonfiction writer and as a journalist, I came to feel that there were times and situations where pure nonfiction did not quite reach all of the truth."

• David Shipler [10:04]:
  "If you work with somebody over time you get a sense of the person's honesty because you're in a conversation back and forth with the person you're interviewing through the different languages."

• David Shipler [20:16]:
  "Interpreting his country, no matter for whom, was a gesture of affection."

• David Shipler [25:14]:
  "Things happen on the page that I don't plan. They come out of the ends of my fingers on the keyboard."

• Sarah Trainor [29:35]:
  "We have a lot of circulation traffic. That helps enormously."

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Availability: Listeners can find "The Interpreter" and other books mentioned in this episode through the provided episode links on their preferred podcast platform.

Next Episode: Tune in next Thursday for another enlightening conversation with David Shipler as he delves deeper into his literary transition and explores the evolving landscape of journalism.

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Produced by ABC Audio and Good Morning America. Edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Executive Producer: Simone Swink.

Transcript

[Charlie Gibson]

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[David Shipler]

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[Charlie Gibson]

With spicy nether Flame sauce. Now available with a Minecraft movie meal.

[David Shipler]

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[Charlie Gibson]

Well, hello there attentive listeners. It is another episode of the Bookcase and I'm sure you're thrilled to hear that. I'm Charlie Gibson in partnership with Kate.

[Kate Gibson]

Gibson, and I'm equally thrilled to be here and thrilled you are listening. Let's see how many times we can say the word thrilled. But you know, it's a good day. It's a good day. Thursdays are always good days.

[Charlie Gibson]

That's indeed correct. We have David Shipler with us. David Shipler is an extraordinarily accomplished reporter. I know of him in the reporting world. He worked for the New York Times for a considerable period covering in Moscow, in the Middle east and in the last days of the Vietnam War. He, at an advance age, and I think he would forgive me for saying it, he's 83 years old and he has written his first novel. Great accomplishments in the non fiction world, writing about the Middle east, writing about the Soviet Union, writing about civil rights and human rights. But now he's written a novel called the Interpreter and he's going to be with us for the next two weeks because in our conversation with him we were just fascinated by the two parts that he talked about which were Kate.

[Kate Gibson]

Journalism and his new book the Interpreter. But he is, he was one of those minds that you can fall down the rabbit hole of his mind. And we sort of did. He's got, I mean, you know, I don't know, I don't throw the term wisdom around lately, but he has some great wisdom. And there were lots of things I wanted to ask him about. I mean, right away I wanted to ask him about, you know, does he recommend people be journalists now? I also wanted to ask him what it was like to take his hand at fiction after so many years of nonfiction. Plus he has one of those, like you open his Wikipedia page and it's a little bit like he started at a desk and then he started, you know, and then he was a journalist for the New York Times. Then he ran the Israeli bureau of the New York Times and then he taught at Princeton and then he won the Pulitzer. Like he's got a cv, it's no joke. And so this novel also has some game. And I loved, I loved the way he writes so I was blown away that when he took his hand at fiction the way he did with this book, that he knocked it out of the park as much as he did. I think I mixed up a few metaphors. You did. So sorry to David. Sorry to David K. Shifler for that one. He would not be pleased.

[Charlie Gibson]

The book is the Interpreter. It is based somewhat a good bit, I guess, on the experiences that he had covering the latter days of the Vietnam War. And it's very interesting that he didn't do this in a non fiction sense the way he had done other books and posts that he had had, but he felt that he really, in only a year and a half in Vietnam, didn't really have enough of a feel for the country to be able to really write something in the nonfiction sense. So it's loosely based on the interpreter that he had on his experiences when he was there. There are some real names of characters of people who were in Vietnam at the latter days of the war. It's a really, really good book, really well written. And, you know, it really made me think a lot about the roles of interpreters and really how critical they can be for the reporters or for the government officials or for whomever they may work.

[Kate Gibson]

This book made me think about in film school. We talked about whether or not a documentary could ever have a truly neutral perspective. And in some ways, as an interpreter, you can't have a neutral perspective because there are language gaps in between. Whatever language you're interpreting, whatever language you're interpreting into will be missing the word for blank. I mean, take your pick. And so you have to figure out how to fill in those blanks and still bring the true meaning of the content of what you're translating. It's, it's. This book was fascinating to me on many levels. And on top of that, it's beautifully.

[Charlie Gibson]

Written, it's a good story. And as you say, it does raise some really interesting questions about interpreters who play really key roles. I know when I was at abc, I thought a lot about, and indeed reporters talked to me about interpreters that they had in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and also many, many years ago when Ted Koppel and Steve Bell were reporting from Vietnam and they had interpreters with whom they worked. And we talked a lot about that. Anyway, the book is the Interpreter. It is a very good story. It is, I think, a wonderful nuance version of how interpreters work and their importance and what influence they may have on the people for whom they interpret. So we'll talk about that this week with David Shipler. And then we talked a lot about somebody who has been in the non fiction world all of his life. As I say, at the age of 83, turning to writing his first novel and what that meant. And as I, as we have said so often, this podcast has become for us a masterclass in writing. And I think who better to address a masterclass than David Shipler as he talks about the transition that he had to make from non fiction to fiction with this book. David Shipler, it is a pleasure to have you in the bookcase. I am struck that you have had such success in the non fiction world and you decide now, being a person of some age, that you will turn to that. That you will turn to fiction. Why did you feel this is a story that needed to be fictionalized? A and B, I would suspect that's a real turn for you to move from the nonfiction world into writing a fiction book at this point in your career.

[David Shipler]

What happened was that the interpreter I worked with most closely in Vietnam, a wonderful guy, and we became friends, died several years ago. And I was quoted in the New York Times a little bit. I got a call from a film producer suggesting I write a screenplay about him. And I had actually never done a screenplay, and I have no idea how to write a screenplay. But the idea, you know, like most good ideas, kind of fluttered around outside there for a while and kept, you know, kind of coming back to me. And I thought, well, I know how to write prose. Why don't I try that? So that's what I did. And, you know, as a nonfiction writer and as a journalist, I came to feel that there were times and situations where pure nonfiction did not quite reach all of the truth, that there was an element of reality that you had to dig more deeply to put on the page. And we know that from great literature. This is not great literature, for sure, my book. But we know that from the great literature. We know that from Shakespeare, we know that from the Greek tragedies. We know that from the Great Gatsby, which has just celebrated its 100th anniversary. And we know that from more modern literature, too, that there's a truth, there's an element of reality that a writer can get at and reach that you can't necessarily put in footnotes.

[Kate Gibson]

Okay, so you say, I'm going to take a shot at doing this in prose. Was that intimidating to you?

[David Shipler]

Well, it was exciting and daunting, and I had no idea until I was very, very far into it whether there would be a book. It's It's a, it's. But that's also true with non fiction books too, I've found. Actually, you know, you get. You have to get really far into it before you're confident that you're on the right track. And this is going to produce something worthwhile with this book. The Interpreter. I drew a lot from my own experience, even though the characters are fictionalized and the interpreter himself is quite invented, even though some of the elements of his story are real and some of the events in the book did happen. So I had that kind of skeletal form, so to speak, and it was chronological. So it begins a year and a half before the end of the Vietnam War. And it goes on and it builds to a sense of tension toward the end. So all of that kind of came together in a way that was very satisfying to me. It wasn't scary, it was liberating in one sense. Because in fiction, guess what? You can make up quotes. I mean, I once went into the home of a friend of mine, Alfred Urie, who wrote Driving Miss Daisy, and he was sitting at his table with a laptop with not a single piece of paper there. I said, alfred, he was writing a screenplay. I said, alfred, you are in a different line of work for me. So it's all. It comes out of your head and it taps parts of your brain that you really didn't know.

[Charlie Gibson]

Were very active when I was at abc. This is a question that went through my mind a lot because we used interpreters for our reporters in so many different areas of the world, and particularly in war zones. And Katie asks a question a lot about how much can we trust the narrator? When we did a show recently on the Great Gatsby, she asked, how much can we trust Nick Carraway? And I always thought, how much can we trust the interpreters that we're using and what are their loyalties and are they precisely translating?

[David Shipler]

It's a very good point, Charlie. And yes, it's always in my mind. I've worked with interpreters in lots of different countries. Some are better than others and some are more trustworthy than others. The character I've created in this book is, he believes, faithful to the integrity of the words that are being spoken to him and that he is changing into English and he's a fluent English speaker. He's poetic. In fact, the correspondent does get a little suspicious that the poetry that the interpreter, whose name is Lan L A N H manages to give him in English is embellished. Could all Vietnamese really be that poetic? Are all peasants out in the rice fields, dodging the war, able to talk in metaphors the way all of these folks do. The interpreter encounters a communist agent, an uncover undercover communist agent who challenges him about his translations because the agent would like him to translate in an anti American way and a pro communist way. And Lon is very determined not to do that. So yes, it's, it's an issue. But I, I think that if you work with somebody over time you get to a sense of the person's honesty because you're in a conversation back and forth with the person you're interviewing through the different languages. And I think you can, you can kind of tell if things are being distorted to a point. So you do, you do have to trust the interpreter. It's very important.

[Kate Gibson]

But you also, I think, have to make up for language gaps. I mean, it's something that I learned when we were working at PBS and we were translating. There's a large Somali population in Minnesota, where I'm from, and we were making a documentary about adverse childhood experiences and we realized that there is no word for depression in Somali. Now try to explain, you know, try to come up with a word for depression in somebody else's language without adding a certain amount of poetry to it.

[David Shipler]

I think you're right about that. I would certainly accept an interpreter's translating into good English. You know, if the person is speaking well and grammatically in his or her own language, then it should be translated into good English. And at one point I have my interpreter, my fictional interpreter, say something to the effect is I translate the words, but I translate the meanings above the words. And I think that's where your example comes in. If there is no word for depression, then, but there is a concept of it, at least then, and the person is describing that concept, then the translator is free to use the word depression. I would say the other aspect of this is proper grammar, because if you need an interpreter who speaks really good English, proper grammar, and if the person who's you're interviewing is speaking proper grammar in their own language, then you want the translation to come out grammatically too. So it's, it's a very. Being an interpreter is a very high level skill and it's not so easy to find people who you can do it.

[Kate Gibson]

Well, it is in some ways the definition of a thankless job. And very rarely are they rescued and they often have to fight for their rescue, depending on which side wins whatever conflict the interpreter may be hoping to translate. Why? Why be an interpreter? What drives an interpreter?

[David Shipler]

This is A really important point, especially right at this moment, when Trump has ended temporary protected status for thousands and thousands of Afghans, many of whom came to the United States to flee the Taliban after working for Americans, American journalists, the American military, the American Foreign Service, and so forth, and with their families. So they're very vulnerable. They're not going to be in a very safe position if they're returned to Afghanistan, many of them. In Vietnam, there was a whole effort 50 years ago. Now we're just at the anniversary, a whole effort to help Vietnamese who worked with Americans to get out before the North Vietnamese came and took over Saigon. It was done secretly by the US Embassy, mostly by the CIA and some recalcitrant Foreign Service officers, because the US Ambassador at the time, Graham Martin, was adamantly opposed to an evacuation. He thought that that would signal defeat. Well, you know, we. We in the South Vietnamese were on the cusp of defeat. I mean, that was simply being realistic. So they had to do it secretly. And people got out with very little, you know, in terms of their possessions, but they. Many have prospered very well in the United States. So I think that, you know, to go back to your. To your concern or your point, I think we have to understand that some people in some countries rise above the neat categories of allegiance that are imposed on them by war in the Middle east and the. And in Vietnam, the people I worked with transcended the politics. They saw the human and the political and sociological issues through a different lens from most of the partisans who were citizens of their countries. This created for them, and it creates for my character in this book, a very uncomfortable position. Now, the guy in my book flirted with different categories of allegiance. He grew up in Hanoi before the French War, and he tried to join the Viet Minh. He went out into the countryside and volunteered at, you know, at a young age, age 12 or whatever. This is true, by the way. This. It did happen to the guy I worked with. He told me this story. So this kid, my friend, my real friend, and my fictional friend both went out into the jungle, and they got in contact with the Viet Minh. And the leader of the Viet Minh unit said to him, you want to help your country? He said, yes, yes, then go back and finish school. So this interpreter did try to fit in with some category. He also helped friends who staged a coup or tried to stage a coup as a failed coup to overthrow the Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem. This is also true about the real guy, and he did land in jail for that. He was an interpreter for General Westmoreland, the American military commander. This is also true about the real guy. So I've taken some of the real guys stories and use them, embellish them, true, fictionalize them, but, but I've used them because they were so telling about the difficulties of moving through a complicated landscape of allegiances and, you know, kind of shadowy commitments and categories of belonging that a war imposes and especially a civil war, which is what the Vietnam War was. It was a, it was a kind of a civil war. It was an anti colonialist war too. It's a complicated life for somebody who does this.

[Kate Gibson]

All right, don't get out of that chair. Or if you're driving, don't get out of your car. We will have more with the great David Casey.

[Charlie Gibson]

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[Kate Gibson]

Race the rudders. Race the sails.

[David Shipler]

Race the sails.

[Charlie Gibson]

Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching.

[Kate Gibson]

Over. Roger, wait.

[David Shipler]

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[Charlie Gibson]

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[David Shipler]

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[Charlie Gibson]

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[Charlie Gibson]

Lon's allegiance is to the country. As you wrote, my allegiance is to that country. That country that crosses the boundaries between the labels. It is to the people and their essence. So why would Lon cast his lot translating for an American newspaper?

[David Shipler]

Well, that's a good question. It's not one I can answer very readily without asking Lan, my fictional character, because I don't explain everything. I know him well, the fictional character. I know him better than I know anybody in real life. And this is one thing I've discovered about writing fiction. You get to know your characters more deeply than you know anyone in. In your life, because you're inside their heads. You know their backstories. They don't have any secrets from you. But nevertheless, as real as they become, there's always an element of ambiguity about people and what motivates them. My feeling about this character is that he enjoyed interpreting his country because he loved his country. So interpreting his country, no matter for whom, was a gesture of affection. And, of course, a good interpreter, as every foreign correspondent knows and every military man or woman knows also, working overseas, a good interpreter interprets not only the words, but the culture. A lot of interpreters enjoy the ability to stand aside a little bit and look at their country. The people I've worked with in various places have been observers as well as interpreters. They look at their own countries, and it's kind of exciting for some of them to see their own countries through the eyes of outsiders who have come with fresh perceptions and in a fresh view, you know, at one point, Lon says to the correspondent, the American correspondent who is doing what we used to call saving string. That is, you know, you. You meet somebody, you get a little information, but you don't write about it. You save it for a bigger story. So he, you know, he says to the correspondent, but what you see at first with your own eyes is most accurate, so you should write immediately what you see. Now, that particular advice in real life was actually given to me not by my Vietnamese interpreter, but by a Soviet writer named Andrea Amalric, whom I met two weeks after I arrived in Moscow. And he said, have you written your first story at about the Soviet Union? I said, I just got here. I don't know anything. He said, oh, no, no. He said, no, your first impressions are the most accurate. So I've kind of transposed that and put it onto this Vietnamese interpreter character I created, because my fictional character would definitely have said that.

[Charlie Gibson]

One of the things that. One of the lines that really struck me, and I've forgotten who said it, was that history begins when the reporter arrives there, that his experience or her experience really starts when they're there, and they're going to be there for a finite period of time, Whereas the interpreter goes way back and has a history in the country. Et Cetera. So it occurs to me, is it incumbent upon the interpreter to fill in the blanks for that reporter? And how does that influence the reporter?

[David Shipler]

Boy, that's a really good question, Charlie. That's a good question. Actually, all your questions, both of you, have been good questions. Well, history.

[Charlie Gibson]

That'll make it into the show.

[David Shipler]

Well, it's true. I'm telling you.

[Kate Gibson]

Yeah, man.

[David Shipler]

History begins the day you arrive in the country. And I think. I don't remember who I had saying that in the book, but it was. It's something that I've thought for a long time. And it's a disadvantage because unless you really prepare well, you are at a handicap because nothing that happens today doesn't have a precursor. Everything has a history. So, yes, they. Interpreters can fill in those gaps. So it's very important to have somebody who is well versed in the history and is not afraid to tell you about it because, you know, there's. It's a. There's a. There's a kind of a boss employee relationship there. I mean, the correspondent or the bureau is hiring the interpreter. The interpreter doesn't want to be too forward and be too critical or correct too adamantly because, you know, then the relationship might get soured. But I always asked a lot of questions of my interpreters and tried to get them to fill in the blanks for me.

[Kate Gibson]

I wanted to ask about. Without giving anything away, I wanted to ask about the last sentence. The last sentence, because the last sentence knocked me out. And I wanted to know when you came up with the last sentence. And I wanted to know if you wrote towards it at any point or when you were writing. You were like, ooh, I've got a last sentence. And it's really good.

[David Shipler]

I did know how the book ended, which is different from. I'm working on another novel, actually. And I don't know how it ends, which might be a problem down the road. But I did know how that book ended. And I. But I didn't know what the last sentence was until I was actually writing it, writing that scene. And actually, that. That's been my experience all along in writing fiction. I don't. Things happen on the page that I don't plan. I mean, I don't really think ahead that well about these stories. I've written a bunch of short stories too, and there's a. My agent has a book of them out, hoping to find a publisher and the same thing there. It's almost as if they come out of the ends of my fingers on the keyboard. So I'll be writing a scene, and something comes to me while I'm writing that I hadn't thought of before. Now, sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't work, but often it works better than you'd think. And why this happens, how this happens in the brain, I have absolutely no idea.

[Charlie Gibson]

David Shipler, the book is the Interpreter, just out. And as I said, next week we'll be talking to David about what it's like to turn from a very successful career writing nonfiction to fiction and also about journalism. And whether this is a field, Kate, that is worth going into now.

[Kate Gibson]

Yeah. And whether it's. And whether or not it's a secure field that you can go into now on top of that. So I really enjoyed talking to him about what journalism means today and what going into the profession means today, because, man, it's not easy on so many.

[Charlie Gibson]

Levels with the shrinking number of newspapers, with television stations and networks cutting back. But it is still, I believe, so worthwhile and so necessary in this day and age.

[Kate Gibson]

But how do you cut your teeth if there are no local papers anymore? I mean, how do, once you graduate from college, do you cut your teeth?

[Charlie Gibson]

You work for a small paper, if you can do it and learn your craft as you go. Maybe you go to journalism school. But most important thing is knowing how to write, which you need to learn in college. And then. And even if you want broadcasting, writing is absolutely critical. When I was at ABC and doing the evening news, I knew the good writers that we on our staff from, the ones that you had to edit. You just, you know it, you know it. And it's really critical that reporters know how to write and write well.

[Kate Gibson]

It didn't make it into the conversation, but we were talking. He said his granddaughter's interested in going to journalism, and she asked him what she should do. And he said, you should have a schedule of just everything. You should be taking biology and the classics and humanities and history, because you have to know as much as you can about just about everything to write about it accurately. And I thought that was really interesting as well.

[Charlie Gibson]

Anyway, next week, that's David Shipler again. And I think the latter part of this conversation is also just as interesting as this week. We do have a bookstore for you this week. It's my local bookstore, Madison Books, in the Madison park area of Seattle. And one of the owners is Sarah Trainor. It's a tiny bookstore, tiny but mighty. So here's our conversation with Sarah Traynor about Madison Books. Sarah Traynor of Madison Street Books. We're fascinated by little bookstores. And you are little. What's your square footage? Do you know?

[Sarah Trainor]

Oh my goodness, we are so little. When Nook and Cranny moved to a larger space, the owner said, and now officially you are the smallest bookstore in Seattle. Which is true. We are 402 square feet and that may possibly include the bathroom.

[Charlie Gibson]

So I mean, people who were thinking, you know, I'd love to open a bookstore, can they think small?

[Sarah Trainor]

We have an incredible community, so they very intentionally support our bookstore. And then also it's a very pedestrian friendly neighborhood. And so we just get a lot of circulating traffic. So that helps enormously.

[Kate Gibson]

But how do you strategize? You must be having to gather data on your customer base in order to strategize what to stock. Is that true?

[Sarah Trainor]

Yes. And that is where reps are so, so helpful. They can help you go through and say, well, this is what we think will go, will sell really well. This is what we think is going to sell really well nationally versus here's what we think might sell in your neighborhood. So we take a lot of advice because they are fantastic. That helps a lot. But then to your point, we also take a look at the neighborhood and what's selling well. What do people want?

[Charlie Gibson]

So you can't stock 10 of a book. You have to be replenishing, it would seem to me all the time.

[Sarah Trainor]

We do stock 10 of a book, but we have to think really hard before we do that. We certainly don't do it with everything. Often what you hear about our store, when you're looking at the reviews or the comments are tiny but mighty, or this tiny jewel of a bookstore. And that's really how it feels to us. It's this tiny jewel of a bookstore. Of our team of people who work there, we all know this talk really, really well. It gives you an enormous sense of what you have in each space in the bookstore, in each section. You can make good recommendations because you know it so well and you have time to relate to customers. I feel like I would compare it to the descriptions of an old fashioned French cheese shop where you go, you queue, you wait for the person behind the counter and then you have a long conversation about what kind of cheese you want, when you want to eat it, et cetera, et cetera. And it's very similar to that.

[Kate Gibson]

I worked at a bookstore for a while and it is a rush. You start to think of the books that you recommend on a regular basis as my books. So when, you know, when somebody goes to the counter and they have, for instance, of my, one of my books, for instance, was Niel Williams this Is Happiness or Richard Osmond's Thursday Murder Club. And so when they would come out, like when they would come to the cash registers, the person working the cash register would be like, oh, did Kate help you today?

[Sarah Trainor]

That is phenomenal. I had someone come in and say I had recommended the Barn after reading in the fall, and it is a.

[Kate Gibson]

I love the Barn.

[Sarah Trainor]

It's an incredible book, but a really tough read and not for everyone.

[Kate Gibson]

Yes.

[Sarah Trainor]

And I had someone come back and say it changed the way he thought about life in the U.S. that was incredible. That was amazing. That's what you want.

[Kate Gibson]

Summer is coming. What are you really excited about this summer?

[Sarah Trainor]

Well, you got the resident nonfiction reader. Most of the rest of the team reads mysteries, fiction. I read fiction, but I also, I do a lot of nonfiction. So I am currently deep into Is a River Alive by Robert McFarlane and I am so excited. It is an advanced reader copy and I'm double checking. It comes out in May.

[Kate Gibson]

Sarah Trainor of Madison Books on Madison street in Madison Park, Washington. I want to thank you for two reasons. One, for being a great independent bookstore owner and for two, being patient and kind enough to serve my father when he comes in the store. I always think anybody who has my father as a regular customer deserves either the Nobel Peace Prize or some sort of formal, tacky sign off cake. I'm sorry. Okay. So anyway, thank you.

[Sarah Trainor]

Absolutely. My pleasure.

[Charlie Gibson]

All right. Sarah Trainor of Madison Books in the Madison park area of Seattle. We're going to finish with the folks who make this podcast possible. And again, we do want to urge you next week to listen in to David Shipler.

[Kate Gibson]

The Book Case with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kohlberg, Arielle Chester at Good Morning America, and Josh Cohan from ABC Audio. Follow the bookcase wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to listen, rate and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode, we have them linked in the episode. Description.

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