← The Read Well Podcast
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating.
- [00:22]
B
Hey, everybody.
- [00:22]
A
Welcome back to this week's episode of the Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I have a special event for you this evening. It's an evening with an author. Tonight we are super blessed to be with Timothy Shafts Knight, the author of the Titanic Survivors Book Club as well as many other books. I think you have seven books in total now, is that correct?
- [00:39]
B
It is, yeah.
- [00:40]
A
Yeah. Doing great. Do you, do you plan on writing another 100 more or you are you, and how's it, how's it going for you over there?
- [00:49]
B
Well, right now I'm trying to decide. I have like a couple of different things going and so we'll see what ends up being completed. But the older you get, the more you realize you don't have this endless amount of time to accomplish all your projects. So you have to start focusing, I guess.
- [01:07]
A
Right? Right.
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B
Yeah.
- [01:08]
A
Well, I have to tell you really quickly why I, why I read your book and how this, all this whole thing came about. Because I want all of the book club members to know I was walking around in Barnes and Noble and this was sitting on the table and I just, the COVID just knocked me off my chair. I thought this was the greatest cover ever. And I love Paris and I love France and so I, I try to go there. I've only been once, but I'm going again in May. Very excited about that. And I thought I gotta, I gotta, I, I, I, I run a book club. I run. So just was speaking to me and I wasn't expecting this story at all. So we're going to dig into this book tonight. I actually named it one. I'm not trying to butter you up, Timothy, but I actually named it on my podcast one of my favorite books of the year that I read this year. So we'll talk about why. But to, to jump into this, I want you all to know who we're, who we're speaking with tonight. Timothy is an accomplished author, teaches, he's the chair of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. I have a special place in my heart for all professors because I'm mar. My wife teaches nursing at one of the bigger colleges here in Utah. And I just love talking to people who love stories. That's what brings us together. Right. It's what's brought us together for. For. Well, ever since we've been humans, we sit around the fire and we talk about stories. And I love that there are still people willing to do that, to talk about what it means to be human. So, yeah, I'm just curious, Timothy, what this book, like, how did you. How did you start or where did you get the idea for this book?
- [02:34]
B
Oh, wow. It's a long story. The book that I wrote before this was called the Perfume Thief, which was also set in Paris. And I. I worked with an editor at Doubleday who I loved. Her name's Margot Schickmanter. And we were just in conversation about. As the Perfume Thief was coming out, I went to New York and we were sitting at. It was still kind of in the throes of COVID And so we were sitting in one of those sidewalk shacks that they. That the restaurants put up. And we spend all afternoon drinking champagne and discussing what was next. And so I was telling her about this, this book that I had in mind, which was actually a book that I'd already written. I had written it before the Perfume Thief and ultimately didn't really finish it. And I kind of got a different ideas about what I wanted to do next. And. And so I was describing it to her and was describing about this concept of people who had tickets to the Titanic but didn't board, and then was describing how this ultimately then led to this silent movie and all of this. And her eyes started kind of glazing over at the silent movie part. And then. So then in further conversation, she really liked some of the idea for the book, but not really the book that I'd already written. And so in various discussions, the book club came to emerge because there was reference to a bookshop in Paris. And that was really what interested her. And she loved the idea of a novel set in this Paris bookshop that I had described. And so the book that I had written that I was going to try to pass off on her, I started over from scratch, basically, and ended up writing about this book club on the kind of. On the suggestion of. Of my editor. So. And at first I was like, okay, I don't. I don't really know how to write that. How do you write a. A book about a book club? And so she ended up sending me a list of books about book clubs. It's. It's really kind of a whole sub genre. And I read. I read the list she sent. And I have to say I didn't really like any of them, except for one. I liked the. And I always forget the title. It's like the, The Literary Potato Peel Pie. Guernsey Literary. Yeah, I loved, I loved that book. But, yeah, so then I was thinking, like, well, for the book club, do, do I make the books up? Like, do I just invent. Which I thought would be fun to do. But then my editor's like, well, now I think the readers would be more invested if they were actual books. And so that I really threw myself into figuring out not just what books they would read and discuss, but I also explored the history of the books and the, and actual additions, since, since the narrator was a bookseller, I thought he would be kind of interested in the physical book itself and its publishing history. And so I spent a lot of time researching a lot of stuff that ultimately didn't even end up in the book. But in that process, the characters kind of emerged and the, the relationships developed, and then this kind of Cyrano de Bergerac type story emerged from all of that. But, but I really started with, with not much. I mean, I, I had the novel that I abandoned, but then just started over from scratching.
- [06:10]
A
In the, in the chat here you have people showing up as fans of the Perfume Thief. So that's good.
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B
That's good.
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A
Fun. Very cool.
- [06:17]
B
Yeah.
- [06:17]
A
All right, so here's, here's what, here's what sort of got me going. I, I have a lot of books in my to be read pile, like we all do. And you know how you, like, open up a book and you read the first couple sentences and you're like, okay. And you're trying to get a feel for it or whatever. It was late at night when I picked up this book because I had it sitting on my nightstand with a bunch of other books that I wanted to read. And I started going through the first couple pages here and what hits you pretty fast. And I, I, I, I've got to be honest, I haven't read the other books yet. So I, now I'm like, man, I got six more books I gotta read. But what caught me about this book was that it, I don't know, I'm not very good with words. It's just this very sort of velvety, lush way of writing. Like, have you, I think you've been described as that kind of writer before, right? You've just got this really, I don't know, I felt like I was in Paris. So, like, at night I was like, okay, this is the book I need because I'm I'm pretty stressed right now and I'm like, I just want to, like, sit and be in my reading chair and go to Paris. And I liked the idea of kind of hanging out with all these random, interesting characters in this book club. Right. So what I wasn't expecting, and I'm not going to give anybody spoilers here, but this is a book that is sort of hinging on, on the lives of three major characters, Zinnia, Yorick and Hayes. Now, let's talk about for just a minute, Timothy, and why that name is so important in the book. Right. Alas, poor Yorick. So another thing that is great about this specific book here is there are many, many, many references to other great works of art, literature, poetry. And so it's really fun because you're being pulled into Shakespeare all of the time. But tell us why you, you gave the main protagonist the name Yorick?
- [07:59]
B
You know, the way I remember it is I was kind of casting about for names and I happen to have, I don't know if you know, the work of Edward Gorey. I'm a big fan of his from the time I was a little kid. His work takes on the style of kind of Victorian children's books, basically, but they're, they're quite morbid and so, but comically so. And so one of his collections is called the Gashly Crumb Tinies. And so, yeah, it's an abc what they call it AB Sedarian. And so A is for. And then, and it depict each, each letter depicts a character, a child who suffers some kind of perverse demise. And so I have the collection of magnets. Like each magnet is the different character that I have on the side in my refrigerator. And so I pace around a lot when I walk and I, I, I have my computer set up on the kitchen counter. And so I was wandering around and then I thought, oh, well, maybe, maybe there's a character name among these Edward Gorey characters. And indeed, Y is for Yorick, whose head was bashed in, I think is what it is. And so, and Z is for Zilla, who drank too much gin. And so from that Y. And even though I changed the Zilla to Zinnia, ultimately, but those are kind of, I was grasping for names and those leapt out at me. And then once, once I had Yorick, then, you know, of course the history of the name all came flowing forth and the idea of how that could inform his very character and kind of speak to who he is and who he became and his history. And so, and so that was, that was in that naming ended up being pretty integral to the book in a way that it isn't always. So.
- [09:50]
A
Yeah, I thought so too. So, so again, I'm not going to give any spoilers here, but let's talk about Yorick himself. So Yorick is a character that is never actually alive in the play Hamlet by Shakespeare, right? And Yorick is this fantastic character because if you've read Hamlet, you, you know that it's a, it's a sort of a play that contemplates death, and he's kind of dealing with the idea of revenge and murder in an intellectual way. But then there's this whole graveyard scene, right? And in the graveyard scene, the skull is sort of pulled out of the grave crown, and it's Yorick's skull. And Yorick is a jester who was, you know, the court jester from many, many years before when Hamlet was a little boy. And he's like, oh, my gosh, I know this guy. This is alas, poor York. And all of a sudden, death becomes very real. And the idea is that death is sort of a great leveler in Hamlet, right? Everybody's going to die. Whether you're a king or you're a jester, we're all going to be leveled at the end. And so I feel like, I think Flick is a really important book or name in this book because this book deals with love, it deals with death, it deals with sort of the, the ide. To make the most of what you got while you're here. Make sense of it. All right? But I, I just, I, I, I loved all the connections to Hamlet there. I don't know if you were trying to go that deep with it or, or, or what, but do you have any thoughts around that?
- [11:06]
B
Well, and, and from that name emerged York's childhood, which is, he's the child of a Shakespearean actor who ends up leaving his family to go to, to London to, to the stage. And, and so that ultimately helped me make connections towards his own childhood living backstage eventually, and which would bring him to, to London and then ultimately to work on the Titanic. And so, so he wasn't necessarily seeking to build too many parallels to Hamlet so much as the skull itself, you know, and, and, and the, and it, how ultimately Yorick is, is a classic prop. I mean, how, if you, if you imagine a picture of Hamlet, you see him holding that skull. And so that was kind of what captivated me, was the iconography really, of the play that has emerged and how that would Inform Yorick's sense of self, even in his sense of life and death.
- [12:10]
A
Yeah, I really like. I really liked the character Yorick. He's a. I'm an only child, right? And so I have, like, I live in my head a lot. I read books a lot. And I feel. I feel a lot of connection with York because, well, he. He's definitely in his head a lot, you know, and he's trying to figure out who he is and why he's not good enough or where he fits in life. And so it's just a very relatable character, at least for me. I don't know. So.
- [12:34]
B
Yeah.
- [12:35]
A
Okay. Well, you teach creative writing, and I wonder if you could tell us. I mean, if you. If you could teach one course and that was it, and.
- [12:44]
B
And.
- [12:44]
A
And you had to, like, you know, share the message of how to create a good story or what makes a good story. Right? Like, what makes a great book a great book.
- [12:53]
B
Well, you know, I don't tend to go into the classroom with the list of things to do, but I do go in with this, with topics of conversation, basically things that I think writers should think about when they're writing. But I try not to be too terribly prescriptive. I think I do emphasize voice a lot of. I think that, you know, there's. There are any number of formulas you can follow, any number of books that advise you exactly how to write a story and how to write a novel. But ultimately, I think I want my students to develop something unique about how they tell the story and in a way to distinguish the text really, from what other people are writing. Because you. If you have an individual voice, then it's your own. If you're writing without voice, if you're just writing according to formula, then you just sound like every other book. And for some writers, that's what they want. That the idea is to just write, to be published or write what they know. A lot of readers are seeking. But fortunately, there's this kind of perversion among publishers that they sometimes want to write something that they're not sure is going to sell or connect. You know, they. That a lot of editors do want to take risks or they. They want something that's fresh. They want to be. They want to be excited, like I said, by voice, by imagination, by perspective. And sometimes that makes a book inaccessible to a certain degree, because not everybody. Not every reader is like your. Your readers in this club, or they want to pause at a paragraph or examine a sentence or think about language. A lot of readers prefer a book that's highly skimmable, I think. And so. And I don't really write that kind of book, and I don't really encourage people to write that kind of book because I. I don't know how to, like, I don't know how to divorce myself from that process. And as a result, you know, writers who do indulge in that kind of language are sometimes criticized for that as well, because it isn't quite the easy read that people want. And so, yes, I do try to kind of bring in these conversations about having an original voice, telling the story in an original way, in an imaginative way, but at the same time capturing the attention of readers and maintaining it, which involves some level of convention and formula. And so it's really like so much of the classes, in the classes that I teach that we talk about is calculating and navigating the parameters, you know, in terms of how much is indulgence and how much is artistry, how much is poetry, how much is storytelling, and. And what do all of those things mean? And so it comes down to just really writing from your heart and soul, I think. And that. That. I think the more that a student writer can connect with their own, well, their sense of what they themselves would want to read and figuring out how to emulate that in a way that is nonetheless uniquely their own. So, yeah, so, like in my class, so I teach it at our program, we don't have a Master's of Fine Arts. We had a PhD in English with a creative dissertation. So we accept students who are then ultimately then writing like a collection of poetry for their dissertation or a collection of stories or a novel. So in the class that I taught yesterday, we talked about the difference between sentiment and sentimentality and tried to kind of parse out what those differences might be and how we want to write with sentiment. We want to capture the emotions and imagination of our readers and the hearts of our readers. But we don't want to be exploitative or being accused of exploitative or we don't want to be maudlin, but we don't always know the line, right? So sometimes we're inching right up to it. Sometimes we go past it, so, you know, or sometimes we don't go far enough. These are the kinds of things, I guess, that we. That we toss around and with the idea that each individual writer can draw their own conclusions about what works best for them. But ultimately, you don't know. I mean, you just. You just kind of have to write and follow your gut instinct and Then once you feel like you've gotten a draft of either a story or a novel, and you start over at the beginning, and then you enhance or you subtract or, you know, reevaluate or even rewrite and rework.
- [17:33]
A
Yeah. Voice is one of those things where I. I don't know. I don't know how you define it, but, like, you. I know, you know, when you read it, right? You can. You can just, like, feel. I think that's why I liked this book so much. It is that I just felt like I was sitting in a Paris cafe or that I was, you know, like, late at night and, you know, having a glass of gin or whatever with these people and just. You can. It's just really nice to be in Paris with this book. But it's also a book that is. I feel like it's very character driven, which is. Which is nice because I think when books are character driven, you get to see a little more of yourself versus just like, car explosion, spy trap, you know, and it's like we're just going from plot point to plot point here. It's like we're watching people as they're, like, dealing with some key things. Love, mortality, and a few other things. And so, yeah, the voice is definitely here. And so for all of you guys who are looking for a book that's, like, really nice to read in the evenings after a long day at work, I just. I would go check this book out. So do you feel like. Do you feel like that Voice is for you, is somewhat consistent through your other books, Timothy, or do you feel like each book has its own. Sort of. Because you mentioned the other one is about Paris as well. But I don't know. What do you think?
- [18:45]
B
I think if you've read one, you've read them all. Okay. Because I remember I was an art history student, and as an undergraduate I took. I was an art history minor. And I remember professor showing us the paintings of Mars Prendergast, I think was his name. And they're quite lovely, like, kind of little dots for faces, but they're city scenes and. And. Or park scenes, but a lot of group scenes and. And a lot of the same colors throughout. But I was captivated by each and every one. But by. But my art history professor, who also was captivated by them, said that the criticism was that you've seen one, Pentagrass, you've seen them all. But nonetheless, I. You know, that's. I think that probably I'm very visual oriented. I grew up Watching Move. Just loving movies, especially old movies. I love cinematography and light and framing, and that was what kind of caught in my brain. And so when I started writing and thinking about writing, I was also situating it. And a filmmaker, when they're making a movie, they could accomplish so much in one frame. Right. Because you have the set designer expressing themselves and the. And the costumes and the lighting and. And the sound. I mean, all of that is happening at once, but the writer has to describe all of those elements in order for it to work. And so that's kind of where I get into trouble. That can kind of. That. That does slow things down a little bit. And it's not this instantaneous response that the reader has. You have to build that emotional response, that visual effect, those sounds. And so, yes, it's a kind of combination of seeing it so vividly in my head and then wanting to describe it. But then as you're putting it into words, the shape, even the shape of the word sometimes has an influence in what you're writing or the sound of the word or the rhythm of the word next to the other words. And so you've got this sometimes. Sometimes it's graceful, sometimes it's a collision of. Of language and imagery. And I think that's part of the reason I take delight in writing like it does. It's not a chore to me. You know, it's not something I'm trying to rush through. I spent a lot of time with one paragraph, moving things around, reshaping, reconfiguring. I'd probably. I'd probably be better off if I just wrote it and left it alone to some degree, but I don't take any real pleasure in that. So.
- [21:23]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So one of the questions in the. In the club here so far is there's a lot of history in this book. I mean, do you have a sense of wanting to connect people with history in your books? What's your thought there?
- [21:35]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, like, I do a ton of research. I mentioned I was researching these books the characters read and discuss and physically interact with. But I also. It's 1913, and so the characters are kind of leaning into World War I. And so that took a great deal of research. And you want to capture certain aspects of World War I, but in a unique way. Like, so I was always looking for details that I didn't know that I felt like were not fully exploited or, you know, like a new perspective for these characters. Experience this particular moment in Paris. You kind of have to learn Then the world as it was, and then you have to learn all the nooks and crannies of it and navigate and find and. And consider, because you want it. You want it to be historically accurate, but at the same time, you want it to be unique and. And sometimes, like. So I don't. I don't read French. I mean, my phone will help me with Google Translator and such. So I'm limited to some degree in terms of French history, as has been written in English or translated into English. And so that presented some challenges in thinking about World War I, because I knew. I got the idea that it seemed apropos that York would become a war censor. Right. And so I really wanted to figure out, well, what did that mean literally and physically for York? Like, where did he go? What did that detail? What were his tools? What was the atmosphere, what was the workplace? But there's nothing out there. You know, there's no description of that that I could find. And so I took what descriptions I could find in terms of the role of the war sensor and what was happening in the product and all of that, and then used imagination to fill it in. And so in some instances, what I'm describing is kind of a literal representation of something I discovered in my research, and in other ways, it's somewhat of a. An imagined, but imagined on the basis of a fact. So I was always looking for just enough fact that I could spin fiction from. You know, I didn't want to venture too far from fact, but at the same time, I. At the same time I did, you know.
- [24:03]
A
Yeah, there's a lot of really great little details in this book, like. And I haven't gone through to see if some of these things actually happen or not, but, for example, in York's work as a wartime sensor, they're dabbing the pen on their tongue to keep the nib moist, and they're getting poisoned from it. Is that something that actually happened?
- [24:19]
B
Yeah, that's a real detail, as far as I know, because that's the other thing is when you're looking for obscure history, or sometimes looking at the history books of the day or history books from deep in the past and which might not be properly representative of the facts that we assume now. You know, after years and years of research, our sense of the history changes. And so that's another thing you're kind of dealing with when you're writing fiction from history is just this sense that the documents have altered and changed and have been revised throughout the decades.
- [24:59]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I'D like to read. I've got two quotes here I'd like to read tonight to the group. I think this will kind of get us into the next phase. But there's this. There's this beautiful relationship happening between three characters. A major theme in this book is love and how we deal with love. Not only of. Of love of other people, but love of self and so on. But there's a character in here named Zinnia. She's sort of a wealthy daughter of a chocolatier or a confectioner, and she's just this very extravagant sort of female character. And she's speaking to the protagonist. His name's Yorick, who is, like, physically broken, sort of mentally struggles with himself. But he loves his bookstore. He bought a bookstore in Paris. This is why you guys should all read this book, because you like bookstores, right? But Zinnia says a really great line in this book to York. She says, I know so much more about you than you could ever tell me. Zinnia said, just from the books on your shelves and the order that they're in. So I love that. One, because it kind of speaks to my heart as a book person. But two, because this book itself is full of so many references. And I felt like I got to know you a little bit because you're referencing Rimbaud and poetry and Shakespeare and just a lot of really fun things. I don't know. What's your thought about that? The fact that our books are a representation of us and who we are. And, I mean, I'm always talking to people in our community that, like, life is short. Just read the books that you love. Stop reading the books that you hate. Right. Like, not every book is good. So surround yourself with. With books that move you, that are part of you. I don't. What do you think about that?
- [26:34]
B
I mean, I've even been known to stop reading a book I've been in love with. You know, you put it down and then, you know, and it's. It seems to have kind of done what it needs to do for me, because I may not pick it back up. But. But yeah, you can see just. Just the room I'm in. And. And I. And I think you. Yeah, I think you probably could learn or. I don't know that you could necessarily learn anything about me by looking at this library. But. But I. I can tell you something about what they mean about me, even the books that I haven't read. You know, that there's something. There's. There is kind of a story behind every book. Yeah. You know, whether I picked it up, you know, at a secondhand shop, whether somebody gave it to me, whether it's signed. One of the units that I do in my writing classes is to bring in books that incorporate what we call extra literary details, basically. So you might be a book that has a lot of footnotes or a book that has. That is told in recipes or, you know, like, has some kind of detail that isn't typically thought of as narrative, and that might even be visuals, you know, and illustrations and such. And there's a book by Leanne Shapton, which is a very long title, which I can't remember, but it's. It. It presents as an auction catalog. And so basically it's. It's full of photographs and descriptions of the objects in the photographs, and it documents a breakup between the two main characters and through this. This. This sale of their. Of their personal items. And I. I've come to know the editor of that book, a woman named Sarah Crichton, and that was published. She. She had an imprint under her own name with Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for a while, and she published that book. And. And so I had her sign it for me. And she wrote this very sweet inscription that just really touched my heart. And I brought the book to. To my class, and at some point, I've misplaced it. And so that. And I. I just can't stop thinking about this lost book, even though I, you know, I always have the memory of it. And, you know, it's. It's. I can get a different book and I can try to fake, you know, whatever message, whatever sentiment Sarah had written in it. But. But I think that's. That speaks to just kind of this investment that we have, not just in the story, but just in the physical presence of the books themselves and how they come to be. This beyond a document, but like a monument to a reading experience or. Or some kind of relationship, literary relationship. And so in writing about a bookstore, I could fill the shop with all of these details. And it was. Yeah, it was like a kid in a candy shop. Right. I was just kind of thinking, and I decided, well, it's not. It's a. It's a new bookstore, but also a rare bookstore. And so. And that involved also exploring the history of bookselling at that particular time in Paris, which has its own family, fascinating history. And it's also interesting to. Just to look at writers and publishing and book selling, which seems like it would be radically different than it is today, considering how books are consumed now. But it's not radically different, really. I mean, there's a lot of parallels and similarities that I was kind of fascinated by as well. And so. So there's something that, you know, there's something about the physical book that just endures. And, I mean, and it hasn't for a thousand years. You know, that's. The printing press was actually not invented by Gutenberg. It was just enhanced by Gutenberg and made hugely successful. But it originated, you know, in Southeast Asia and China and Korea. And so the book has endured, and I believe it will continue to endure. Meanwhile, you know, something like Twitter has come and gone within the last 10 years. Right. I mean, it still exists, of course. Course. But our tastes have changed, and we move from one thing to the next. That's always going to be the thing that's announced is, you know, this is the thing that's. That's the new thing that's going to attract everyone's attention. It's going to consume everyone's time. But meanwhile, the book just endures and endures and endures. Ultimately, then, that. That story of York and his bookshop informed this triangle that emerges with Haze and Zinnia. And I guess it's not even really a triangle, it's a kind of circle, that romantic circle, in a sense. And then the books play a part in that, too. And reading and the act of reading versus the act of not reading and how. How these characters communicate through books as well and through story. Yeah.
- [31:11]
A
Yeah. Nice. Hey, we just sold one of your books. That's awesome. I have a little bookstore online, and we're selling your books over there. That's great. So this is great, because one of the things I liked is Yorick has this immense love for books himself. And so as he's walking through the shop, Yorick sort of makes me laugh because he's like the world's best bookstore owner and at the same time, the world's worst bookstore owner. Right. Like, because he's like. Like he forgets to open the bookstore, and he gets. If he's moody, he's like, just whatever. But what I love about him is that he stands in the aisles and he. He can almost hear the voices of all of the narrators. Right. Like, he appreciates the fact that he's surrounded by friends and that he can exist here. Well, and I just relate to that. So it made me feel like a kid in a candy store, too, which is really great. Very nice. I found that book you were talking about important artifacts and Personal property from the collection of Lenore Doula. And the title is massively long.
- [32:10]
B
Wow.
- [32:10]
A
Yeah.
- [32:11]
B
Okay. There you go. It's really cool. It's a very charming book. And it's. Yeah. And it's unique in the way that it's. It tells its story through these. Through these objects. Because that's another lesson we have in my class as we talk about significant objects and their role in characters lives. And so we look at the significant object in literary history. There's like a terrific description in the. It's kind of like a prologue, if you remember, in the Scarlet Letter, where a character is. Is an archivist, I think, and he's looking through old materials and he finds the Scarlet Letter, but he doesn't know what it is. And then, of course, the story tells us the origins of the letter, but the way he describes this discovery of this embroidered. This piece of embroidery that is embroidered in a way that people don't embroider anymore. So, you know, it's just this very beautiful paragraph about this object and the handling of this object that ultimately is such an important part of these characters lives beyond the.
- [33:11]
A
That reminds me of a book by Tim o'. Brien. It's called the Things They Carried. Yeah, Things They Carried is a book about the Vietnam soldiers and the things that they carried that kind of anchored them to life and being human while they were out being unhuman. Right. And it's this beautiful experience. Hard book to read, but, you know, good. While we're here, I want to read the next quote that I really liked, because there's a lot that this book. I mean, Paris is the city of love, right. And there is a love circle. I thought that was really nice how you define that between Zinnia, Hayes and Yorick, the three major characters. You have to read the book to know why it's kind of a circle. But on page 154, there's this really nice passage I liked about love. And one of the characters is feeling a little left out of the love circle. We'll just. We'll just say that, right, Says, I guzzled champagne right from the bottle and sank low into the silk pillows. I thought not only of Zinnia and Hayes in their balcony, but of the opera itself, its story of death and heartbreak. Their love, Hayes and Zinnias, and even the fictional characters on the stage was genuine. Mine wasn't. My shop was full of the love stories of men and women. But most of the stories of men loving men and women loving women were in medical textbooks and Criminal records. So this book is great because it's. It's that passage itself, I feel like, does a really good job of exploring what it's like to be in this love circle for the characters again. You'll. You'll understand it when you read it, the different avenues of love that it explores, why love is hard, why love is mysterious, all that stuff. But I wanted to read that passage and then ask you. I mean, this book has. It's got. It's got sort of a Shakespearean element to it.
- [34:49]
B
There's a bit of a.
- [34:50]
A
That tragic Shakespearean thing for York. Right. You want him to, like, find his love and his passion, and you'll have to read to see if he does in that. I wanted to ask you why. Why write about love? Why. Why make a whole book so wrapped up in this process of love?
- [35:08]
B
Well, that's so central to so much fiction. Right, right. And the unreconciled or, you know, the. The impossible and the. And the complexities of. Of connecting with other people and. And loving someone who loves someone else. Who loves someone else and just these. And how fiction books, movies, actually contribute to what is so often an illusion of love. Right. An illusion of romance. And I mean, that's been written about a million times, of course, you know, is like the characters who want the romance, like. Like in the operas or in the books that they read with the poetry that they read. And. And so it's. Yeah, I guess I'm not sure ultimately how that came to be, except that I do think the characters started coming together. Well, I guess I should say that I didn't know where the book began initially. Now it seems like it. It begins in a place that should be obvious for it to begin, which is with the first meeting of the, you know, the Titanic survivors. And. But at first I was kind of thought, well, I'm going to start with Yorick, talking about his childhood and how he came to have his name and how he came to le. Because he's. He grew up. He's a child of Nebraska. How did he come to. To Europe? And so I'm writing all of that and I'm. I'm riding in towards Paris. And of course, no love. No love. No love. And then when I figured out that they all needed to be meeting, that he needed to be meeting these people, that's when the love blossomed. That's when he noticed these characters and they started connecting and kind of flirting and. And somewhere in there, this cons. This kind of Cyrano de Bergerac like, story emerged that would also then need to kind of hinge on affectionate communication. So. But I do want to mention too, you're going to Paris. So. So when I wrote the Perfume Thief, which is set in Paris, everything was so topsy turvy during the war. I didn't spend a lot of time figuring out where anybody was. I just kind of like, there was a nightclub and there was a perfume shop, and that was about it. And whereas here with this book, I, for some reason, I felt compelled to really figure everything out. Exactly. So I kind of figured out where the bookshop was, figured out how, how he would get from one. Like, if he. In that, that section that you read, he's at the opera. So I wanted to figure out, well, how would he get there? How long would it take him? What train would he take? And, and so all of these particulars of travel, I was able to kind of figure out and even time. And, and even though it's ultimately, it really didn't matter. It didn't. I didn't have to convey to any real time clock or anything like that or, or any particulars of, of transport, but that my knowing that somehow contributed to the character of the novel and the texture of it.
- [38:16]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, I love. I think that's part of it. Like, again, you feel like you're just walking around with these characters and you're. You're a part of what they're experiencing. We got a couple questions coming in here. So the first one from Edie herself is asking, the titles of your books are so vivid, engaging, interesting. How do you come up with them?
- [38:35]
B
Well, I should tell you that this. The title of this book was not my own. And this was because the book club wasn't even part of my proposal. And it was at one point when my, my editor called me and she's like, well, we were talking. We were discussing this with, with a colleague and we thought about like, you know, we like the idea of the, of the, of the bookstore and what if there's a book club? And like, what if it's just like the, the Titanic book club? And so then I ended up tagging on the survivors part just to make it a little more quirky, I guess, but. And I think the Perfume Thief actually came before anything else, too. I mean, that was a concept that I ended up drawing from just because I liked the sounds of it. And so, yeah, so sometimes they come very easily and sometimes they come very early, and sometimes I don't have one for a very long time. So, and sometimes they're the wrong ones. Sometimes there's been a few that have been changed over the years.
- [39:30]
A
Next question. This is a writing question. Do you outline. So essentially, are you a plotter or are you a panther? Timothy?
- [39:36]
B
I do a little bit of both. I like to have some kind of concept, like, when I actually start, like when I'm writing the first chapters, I don't know where it's going. Like I said, you know, the. I started the wrong place with Titanic and eventually had to find my way there. And once I found my way there, it was actually helpful to have some sense of what would happen next, especially since this was. I was writing from, you know, about history. You know, I had to figure out some level of pacing in terms of where they were going to be in relationship to the war and then what that would mean to their lives. And so, but the outline changes all the time. So I, I don't adhere to any kind of structure in that regard. So. But, but it's helpful to have a little bit of a, a through line. I decided that I, I, I, so I, you know, the movie Jules and Jim, I watched that to try to get a sense of how much time I needed to spend developing the love story. How much, how much did I need to explain that process of falling in love, and how much did the reader need in order to appreciate that. And so I thought, well, Jules and Jim will tell me. We'll have the answer for that. So I watched it, and I literally, like, would pause it and write out each scene, but then I didn't do anything with it. It's not like I didn't follow that or anything at all. Just. But just doing that and just having that before me helped me a great deal. So it's ultimately just an exercise that helped me kind of wrap my brain around how these characters would proceed.
- [41:06]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Okay. The next question was, how do you choose place in quotes, your primary setting of your books and stories? Do you have a personal connection with each of these settings?
- [41:19]
B
Well, so my first books, so, like, my very first book was literally. I literally pictured the farm I grew up on. And so that very. That was very familiar. That was rural Nebraska. And the stories that I was drawing from were stories from my childhood. I set the second book in the same town. It's my childhood town, but also a fictional town. So fictionalization of that. Those places were very familiar to me, but nonetheless filtered through my imagination, maybe almost distorted or perverted through my imagination to some degree. But, yeah, I was drawing from rural Nebraska to some degree, but also from, like, Faulkner's south, you know, and the small towns of, you know, Catherine M. Porter and the Southern writers. Right. Loved. You know, I was really kind of in college. Well, and even Virginia Woolf, you know, the. Those. Those modernist writers. I really sought to emulate their writing style and. And their visual effects and their narrative approaches. Yeah. So I guess when I started writing historical fiction, then, you know, you have to draw from. From the past, from document, from photographs. And so that was a somewhat different approach, especially when I got to. To Paris, you know, and figuring out that world that I don't live in.
- [42:52]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I'd love to talk for just a minute about the process of reading. I mean, that's what our group is about. How do you enjoy a book? Well, and I'm just curious, like, what are your. What are your habits around reading? If you. If you could give anybody tips on how to get more out of a book, what would you say? And I asked this because my wife just mentioned a few days ago she was watching some. Something on YouTube about how, I mean, our kids are no longer able to spell. We're not reading books anymore. It's this big epidemic in the collegiate setting. Even kids can't spell there. Maybe you're seeing some of that in the English department. I have no idea, but that we're trying to bring that love of reading and keep it here. And what's your thought about how to continue the. The permanence of the physical book and how to enjoy it?
- [43:36]
B
I don't know. I mean, it's. I think, to some degree, I think you either are kind of into it or not, you know, and it's hard to teach appreciation of something if there's not some germ of it. But, of course, we hear stories all the time of people who discover things through their teachers or they have to be led in a certain way. And so obviously, when I am teaching writing and teaching literature, I do hope to inspire just a general love for books. And you do hear from students who say that they do return to a book that they were assigned in my class or they remember affectionately something about that reading experience. And so, I don't know. It's. I've been. So I took over as editor, Perry Schooner, which is one of the five oldest literary quarterlies in the nation. It started publishing in 1927, and I just took over as editor in June. And we're so in. So we're about to celebrate our centennial. So our spring 27 issue will be our 100 year birthday. And so I've been delving into the archive and that's just been so endlessly fascinating and delicious. And so I've been focusing on the 60s right now. And so I see who we've published and I type their name into Google. And sometimes you find stuff, sometimes you don't. But you find all these writers who I've never heard of, whose books are all out of print, but who had these rich literary lives and were producing this material that was captivating the imagination of other readers and in some instances were bestsellers, but have since, you know, not just gone out of fashion, but gone out of print. And in some instances, you can't even find a copy of some of these books if even if you wanted to through secondhand stores. So I think that says something very rich about not just our engagement with reading, but as writers, our engagement with our imagination, with our instincts with words, and how perennially rewarding that is in that relationship between reader and writer. I think what we get kind of caught up in sometimes is the best or the classic or here's the list of recommendations and where sometimes an active reading is simply picking up a book, taking a risk, maybe hating it and not continuing to read it, or maybe continuing to hate read it. Or that your relationship with reading doesn't have to be just about falling in love with the characters, but just actively engaging your. Your brain, your imagination.
- [46:13]
A
Yeah, there are certain books that I love and I can't explain why, and I made the analogy a little while ago that a book really is like a friend. The first time that you meet somebody, you don't know anything about them. And so you kind of start surface level and you learn about where you're from. How many kids do you have, what do you do for work? But then sometimes you're like, this guy is really weirding me out. I'm just going to like politely cut this off and we're going to leave another. People like this, this person is like, we're connecting and I don't know why, but we're cl. And then you. You end up having coffee every week and now it's your best friends a year later. You know, you don't know. We're all different. That's why there are so many different kinds of books. I do get a little frustrated when people like, these are the 100 books you must read before you die. I'm like, really? Like, how about you just follow. Yeah. All your curiosity. Because you know, what Edie likes is different than What Mike likes just like, learn to listen to this thing. It's your heart.
- [47:04]
B
Well, and even the, the end of the year, like lists and awards and all of that, nobody has read every book that's been published this year. And so it's just the, it's just a list of the books that they like, that they happen to have read, which is a very small percentage of the book. So there's so much to be discovered. And when I was in graduate school, there was a secondhand bookstore that we went to all the time. So this would have been before the Internet, when you could kind of make, you know, find things a little more easily, but you would just go in and you would just not with any intention of looking for anything in particular. You're just browsing the shelves, look, reading the descriptions on the flat copy or, or even sometimes buying a book just because you liked the COVID or, or you like the description of it or something. And sometimes that wouldn't. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, sometimes wouldn't work out, but, but, but sometimes you would, you would return then for the, all the other books that that author wrote.
- [48:02]
A
Yeah, that's the beauty of a bookstore and books is you, you, you walk in maybe a little weary of life or whatever, and you, you hope to be surprised, and sometimes you are. And, and definitely that was the case for me with this book. I, I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed it and sort of the experience of the book itself. Had a question here.
- [48:21]
B
Quickly.
- [48:21]
A
We've got just a few minutes left. It says in book Club, we discussed the concept that once a book is written, it's out of the author. Author's control of how people perceive the story. Have you ever written a book or story and been surprised by the reader's perceptions? I mean, do you feel like it gets changed much?
- [48:37]
B
No, I, you know, sometimes I accidentally stumble into like, consumer reviews on websites and, and sometimes it's. And you'll, you'll get like, somebody will give you the five stars, somebody will give you a one star. And sometimes it's. It's kind of interesting to see why they gave you that one star. And it's not that I'm surprised by their perception of it. I'm surprised by how they read it, you know, and like, like, what did they think they were going to get from this book when they were going into it, wanting this? You know, and so, I mean, I don't spend a lot of time reading these kinds of things, but sometimes you do fall across them. And so, but it's. I Know, what's really exciting is when somebody knows exactly. I mean, like they can detail. They really kind of capture what. And articulate what I may have been after. Although I'm never really necessarily after anything. You know, I just write and then follow my. Just follow my subconscious, I guess. Right. Books are often. We're in conversation with our unconscious to a certain degree.
- [49:45]
A
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's interesting to me how we bring ourselves to a book and you might hate a book, and then three years later something's happened to you and you. And now you love that book because you're a different person. Yeah. So that's something to be aware of. We got two more questions here, so I'll be somewhat quick about these. The first one is if someone me wanted to get started learning how to write just for fun, where's a good place to start any types of courses? What would you suggest?
- [50:12]
B
Oh, I think just start writing. I mean, just like sit down, don't. Don't have any expectations for yourself. Just, you know, start with an image or start with a memory. E.L. doctorow writes about how he started the novel Ragtime. He was stuck. He couldn't figure out what to write. His typewriter and his desk faced a wall. So he started writing about the wallpaper, I think is how he described it. And then his imagination. Then he kind of looked out the window and he started writing about the street. And that's exactly how the book starts. Arts, too. And so. And ultimately from that emerged this incredibly rich historical novel that just became an instant classic. So, yeah, you just have to follow your imagination, follow your heart.
- [50:53]
A
Yeah, one of those things. Writing is one of those things where you just kind of have to do it. You know, it's like. It's like learning to speak a language. Like you can read about it all day long, but until you try speaking French, you're never going to speak French. You just got to start sounding weird.
- [51:05]
B
Right. Well. And there's no wrong way to do it. You know, there's all kinds of varieties of approaches the writers have taken, and people will try to tell you that there's a right and wrong way to do it because they. Yeah, maybe they want to sell you a course, but the idea is that you, like I said before, about voice is like trying to find that voice and remaining true to it.
- [51:27]
A
Yeah.
- [51:28]
B
Yeah.
- [51:28]
A
Nice. Excellent. Well, I know we're just about out of time, so just to wrap up quickly. So I. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation tonight. We had a chance to talk about Timothy's book The Titanic Survivors Book Club. And before we finish up, is there anything you want to share with people? Any, any, any websites you want to send them to or. I don't know, how can they learn more about you and your work, Timothy?
- [51:51]
B
Gosh, I don't know that there's that much to know. I mean, I think that you could follow me on Instagram because I, I, I post some literary stuff. I post a lot of selfies with a martini, but I also post drawings, I draw cartoons I make. Years and years ago I got the habit of, of crumpling up candy wrappers and making little dresses out of them and drawing movie stars around them. So that's my preoccupation. It's a very weird habit that I have on the side of just drawing like Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich wearing these crumpled up candy wrappers.
- [52:28]
A
Well, I, I guess one last question for you. If you were to be on a desert island and you could only bring five authors or five books with you, who would those, who would those authors or books be?
- [52:39]
B
Oh, you know, like I said, the modernists I love. So I've read a lot of William Faulkner over and over and the writers who are inspired by the modernists, like Toni Morrison, you know, she has lots of books and they're all rich and worth reading and so, and, and all of my students go on to publish work like a few of them have published in the last couple of years. Scott Guild wrote this book called Plastic, which is very perverse but also just thoroughly enjoyable. A book called the Gulf by Rachel Cochran. My student Emily Danforth has a new book coming out. She wrote a book called the Miseducation of Cameron Post many years ago that they made a movie, a Sundance award winning movie of and, and she has a new book coming out. So yeah, that's send me all my students books.
- [53:25]
A
I love it. I love it. Very good. Excellent. Timothy, thank you so much for spending that time with us tonight. We appreciate you greatly. And for everybody that's listening, just keep up with the concept of reading for yourself and enjoying. Books are such a treasure. As always, remember to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. See you all next time. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well podcast.