Poured Over: Leif Enger on I Cheerfully Refuse

By Jenna Seery / April 2, 2024 at 6:00 am

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger is a big-hearted, hopeful novel that’s part adventure story, part love story — with unforgettable dialogue, characters, and sense of place. Enger joins us to talk about writing dystopian fiction, the importance of setting, world building and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. We end this episode with TBR Topoff recommendations from Marc and Mary.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                  

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.     

Featured Books (Episode):
I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Virgil Wander by Leif Enger
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton
The Summer Guest by Justin Cronin

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Leif Enger. I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation with you. Obviously, I read peace, like a river with a million other people when it first came out. And then of course, there were so brave, young and handsome. And of course, Virgil wander and now here we are, with, I Cheerfully Refuse. I love this title. And I love rainy and I love all of the things that happened to rainy. And it’s a ghost story. It’s an adventure story. It’s a love story. It’s a little different. We’re going to talk about language and place and character and all of these things. But Leif thank you so much for making the time for coming on the show.

Leif Enger

Miwa, it is a total pleasure. And let me say I really enjoy your show. I’ve listened to so many of them over the past couple of years. It’s really been fun.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So Lake Superior is actually where I want to start, though. Because I’ve been reading you long enough to know that place is always the thing. Character too. But I want to start with the place because Lake Superior, Rainy, our guy spends a lot of time in a sailboat on Lake Superior. And, you know, I think for people who live in the Upper Midwest, obviously, they know what Lake Superior is about. I lived on Lake Michigan for a couple of years. And I have to say it was the first time I lived on one of the Great Lakes. I’d grown up on the Atlantic. And that is not the same thing. Oh, that is not I was fully unprepared for sort of the depth and the breadth of a great lake. So can we start with Lake Superior, because that is part of the big beating heart of this book.

Oh, my goodness, it’s, it totally is the beating heart of the book. I mean, it’s one of the world’s great waters, or something like 10% of the Earth’s fresh water on the surface of the earth not including aquifers. Obviously, in Lake Superior, it’s that big. It’s huge. It’s 330 miles across. It’s a long haul. Obviously, it’s not the Atlantic. It’s not salt, it’s fresh. It’s a big enough water that it creates its own weather, it creates its own mythology, Robin and I moved here to Duluth about five years ago, just before my last book came out. And we moved into this tall old house, which is near the university and about six blocks up off the water. And I remember the night we moved in. And we’ve been we’ve been going through Duluth, often it was sort of our town we lived 90 miles away before where this. And so we would come here to you know, go to movies and go to the bookstore and, you know, eaten restaurants down by the water. So we loved it. But the night we moved in. And this still happens by the way, during the shipping season, which is most of the night we moved in a ship came in from somewhere else on the planet at about three in the morning. And when the ships come in, they blow their horns in order to contact the bridge. And the bridge, then this century old bridge has to you know, get the gears most in motion and lift itself 100 feet in the air so that the ship can move through the canal and get into the harbor. And so the voices of these ships, you know, the ships are maybe 1000 feet long if they’re Lakers, they’re carrying, or, and the ship blows its horn and it’s kind of like that noise that you hear in a Godzilla movie. You don’t remember kind of shakes, this thing opens its lungs and blast us right out of bed. I mean, just totally not asleep. Three in the morning and we start laughing because, you know for 30 years, Robin and I wanted to live in a harbor town. And there’s no greater proof of being in a harbor town than a ship’s horn or three in the morning. Welcome to Duluth. So it does seem like a place where kind of anything is possible. It’s just a different world. The lake has this kind of Misty personality, kind of an intense presence. Whatever the lake is doing. That’s the Duluth is in that day. If the lake is wild, and the waves are confused and are rolling in and you’ve got these guys out there on their surfboards in November, because that’s when the gales hit and they’re on their surfboards and they got ice and their beards and they look like spirits walking around on the waves. Really anything seems like it can happen last summer. Here’s a here’s an example. Okay. I’ve done a park point, which is, you know, one of the longest freshwater beaches in the world. It goes on for, you know, seven or eight miles. It’s a great place to go down and fly kites, which I do as often as I can. And I’m down there with a friend of mine who’s this this poet who drives up a couple times a year from St. Paul. We fly kites together and this day, and it was summertime but the fog was just absolutely piling up off the water. and swallowing everything in sight. And we were flying these kites, and there was just enough wind to get the kites in the air. But then of course, you couldn’t see him because they vanish about 30 feet up. So we’re just standing there holding the strings that are going into the sky. And all of a sudden, through the fog, we hear the sound of like running and laughing and jostling and shoving. And this football team runs out of the fog, okay, they’re doing a summer workout. And they’re, and they’re cruising down the beach in their shorts. Most of them didn’t even see us, they didn’t even know we were there, just to old farts in their jackets holding these strings. And the last guy, the guy bringing up the rear, probably looking for a reason not to work too hard, stops and says hello. And he’s like, looks at the strings in our hands. We’re holding these big, like fishing reels ring and then these two white strings just going up into nothing. And he looks kind of squint up into the cloud. And he says, What do you guys do it? And my boyfriend says, Well, we’re fishing. And the kid looks up. And he looks at us. And he says, Well, that’s cool. And then he goes running down the beach. Just a fantastic Lake Superior moment. I don’t know where else that happens.

No, I honestly can’t think of another place. But then again, I’m more of a city person. And part of what I love about I cheerfully refuse is you’ve given us a landscape that’s familiar enough, in some way. Mostly because the people are the people. We may as well be on Mars in a way. I mean, this is sort of the the freest you’ve been to create a world and obviously, there are bits of mythology and all of the previous books, and they’re, you know, miracles, however you want to describe it. You’ve written a novel that nods to the dystopian, which was not a thing I ever associated with you. And and this is still very much a life hunger novel. This is not this is you’ve not written The Hunger Games. But the language and the character, it’s like, we’re one step removed from virtual wonder, here we are in that community, where things are going a little off the rails, because how is anyone making any money? And how do you live in a place like that? That’s gorgeous. But what do you do for work, right? And now we’re kind of in this Well, you never tell us what yours is, you sort of let us just kind of say, Okay, we’re here. And there are hints that the world is change. But the language you create an entirely new language, and it’s feels a little Shakespearean. It feels a little Herman Melville, there’s there’s a lot sort of, well,

I’ll take Shakespeare and Melville, I mean, okay. You know, you talk about the not expecting a dystopia. And I never expected to write a dystopia, right. But then this, this phrase kind of came into being in early 2017, called alternative facts. At that point, I started making notes. Because that seemed like, it seemed like a statement of intent to devalue the truth we all see outside our windows, and to devalue what we all know, and what we, you know, and then to stick by that until that becomes reality. And, and then I felt like, well, someone’s trying to make a dystopian front of my eyes. So in that case, how about if I write a novel that just takes place? Some decades out? I don’t know exactly how many. I was thinking in my mind 30 or 40 years. But it could be longer could be shorter. Years ago, I remember reading this great set of views by George Saunders called Civil War land and bad decline.

I remember, that first start that titular story, where you’re just like, oh, okay, I’m here, I’m in? Oh,

Absolutely. I mean, that’s one of those books, I have to go back to and read every 18 months or so, because it seems so prescient. And it’s also dropped out funny. You know, it’s just one of the funnier books I’ve ever read. And yet, it’s incredibly sobering. And it’s filled with, you know, cruelty interspersed with these, these acts of just breathtaking empathy. And, and I read that and I thought, Oh, he never really explains how the world came to be what it is. I love that. He doesn’t explain it. And the reason he doesn’t have to is because elements of that are already in process. Things are already happening outside of our windows, all you have to do is is be willing to, to look at what could be and then and then write about it as though it had happened. And I loved that. That seemed really revolutionary to me. I don’t know if it was I’m not wise We enough read to know that for sure, but it seemed, it seemed like something different. And I loved it. And I, I wanted to do something that would you know, as this book is nothing like civil war land. But I did take some things that I learned from reading that book and try to employ them here. Yeah, like what? Oh, well, just that whole thing about not having to explain. Yeah, it’s kind of delightful to work with stuff that look, can anybody really not imagine what it would be like if 16 families owned everything? We can all imagine that. That way fast. That’s an easy thing. And then what would happen if that were the case, while your infrastructure would start to fall off the map, and your communications would start to fall off the map, the internet would get really, really wide and really, really shallow. Until it just wasn’t worth having anymore. You know, Rainey at one point says, Well, Mark, and I we were, we were early abandoners. And he’s talking about digital technology. And there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not tempted by that. I mean, how can you not be tempted?

I want to go back to Rainy for a second because I love this guy. And I love his voice. Thank you. And he’s a very sort of gentle soul. Yeah. And he’s very much of your sort of orbit. He does ground me in your sort of angriness really does? No, he does. And I really Yeah, the minute he got on the boat, I was like, okay, pal, where are we going? What’s happening and the way you talk about the islands, and the slates and the language that you use to describe the weather, all of it just made sense. And, again, I haven’t spent time on Lake Superior. And you know, we’re not quite at the dystopian level of I cheerfully refused, right. But I felt really grounded in his story. And there’s some great characters that we meet along the way who are wonderful and lovely. And there’s some people where I’m like, Dude, do not open that. You open that door. And I mean, we read you for character, we read you for a sense of place. I mean, and the lake is its own country. It is absolutely its own country with its own rules.

That’s very much what you feel. We’re not in dystopian times now. But Robin and I spent 15 summers, being on the lake as much as we could we, at one point, bought a big old boat, and heavy old thing that could stand up to the waves in the wind. And we spent 15 summers just exploring, hopefully the Apostle Islands, but sometimes beyond. And the lake does feel like its own country. When you’re out there. You know, you get, you get to some of the outer islands, and you look around and you’re the only boat you can see. Yeah. And the islands have this wildness. They’re protected Lakeshore, so development on them. And you go past those kind of sawgrass dunes on the on the, you know, the lake side of the islands. And it’s like, you really feel like there’s just nobody out there. And if you get yourself in trouble, you got to get yourself out. That’s why you buy a heavy boat you’ve got to have that will stand up to the incredible storms that can form in a big hurry on Lake Superior. But it does. It feels very much like its own country.

But Rainy too. He He’s so isolated in his world, even before he sets out like the boat is the thing that ultimately saves him. I’m not giving anything away by that because there are lots of different levels of that, but he’s a little lost already.

I think he is. I mean, I think he’s a character. Look, he’s Rainy’s history is that he grew up in a family of, you know, kind of hard working non reading people. illiteracy is a problem in this future world, you know, and he knows how to, to read, but he doesn’t do it. You know, he says, you know of his youth that he knew how to read. He was taught, taught to read but he just he just never did. It wasn’t practical things. And then when he meets Lark in the library, not because he goes there to read but because it’s a warm place, that where you can go to eat a cheese sandwich, you know, hiding from study, Carol basically. And one day while he’s there, he hears this voice and it’s the voice of a of a librarian at the information desk answering questions. And he cranes around but he can’t see her because she’s out of his view. When he can hear that voice and that voice is it’s compelling to him. He is struck by her care when she is talking to people when she is making recommendations, trying to help them find what they’re looking for. And that voice just makes him feel good. At ease, and it makes him feel happy. And then he starts paying attention to what she’s actually saying. And so she’ll recommend a novel to someone, or he’ll recommend this or that work of nonfiction. And he starts to be to think, well, if these if these works have written history or fiction are so important to her and to, to other people who are looking for them, maybe they’d be important to me. So he starts, he writes them all down, he’s got a stub of pencil and, and he writes down whatever she says. And then he goes into the actual shelves in the library and finds the books and starts checking them out. And it changes his life, it opens his world, it, it kind of enlivens his capacity for love, and that that makes him a larger person. But I think always, as far as we can tell, he’s still that kid in some ways. Who, who hasn’t quite found his way, who relies on on lark, I kind of love that he, you know, sometimes things surprise you when you’re writing them. And yeah, I was here was, was that he kind of fell in love with her before he ever saw. And just heard her voice. And he heard her kindness and he was so drawn to it. I sort of love that about him that he had the capacity to fall for someone based on how she sounded.

Also sounds like a dude who worked in radio for a really long time.

Radio is important to some of us.

It is, radio is very important. But I love the idea that that’s where the connection comes that the words are there first. I mean, obviously you and I are book people. And when your book people you are slightly touched. Say it, I’m just going to say no, you know this to be true. We are just slightly touch. Yes. But the idea that, that kind of magic, right? You’ve talked about magic in the past and how it shows up when you really really need it. Even though you’re playing in terrain, that is not all that familiar, but not all that unfamiliar. There are these moments of magic, and sometimes it’s picking the right song and being able to play the right song when you’re facing a very, very bad guy. You pull in these moments where it’s like, Oh, right. That’s who we are. Right. And it’s not nostalgia.

I mean, I think more than nostalgia. I think it’s an optimism. Yeah, I was talking to my son about optimism. And I was trying to make the point that anything that you pour effort into something of optimism, even if you’re not out there, like a Pollyanna is playing the glad game or doing whatever, if you’re working hard and you’re interested, then you are inherently optimistic. And my son Reed who lives in New Jersey said I would qualify it in one way I think it is effort in the service of love. I really, I really liked that. I thought that that put a fine point on it, because we do have a lot of people working really hard for motives that are fantastic.

I think there’s a line too, between optimism and hope. Yes, I think and hope sometimes can be harder. And hope is more of a discipline, I think than optimism, optimism. I love your son’s definition. I think that is absolutely spot on and yet rainy. He’s his own sort of messy human. And I love this. I didn’t ever feel like Rainy was sort of ahead of the story. Because I mean, obviously, it’s you’re telling it so we know we’re in the right hands, but I never felt like he suddenly understood something that maybe he wouldn’t have. He gets himself into some situations. He gets himself into some situation.

He makes a lot of mistakes. So he’s a mess. And who wouldn’t be I mean, just writing a book like this is a messy operation. I sometimes felt like, like every morning I would I would get up and come to my office and it felt like going down to a shoreline and there’s a boat shallows and it’s you know, there’s ropes everywhere in the sail is a mess in the cockpit and it was always every day a matter of climbing in and bailing out the water and coiling the ropes and doing whatever you’re going to with the sale and getting it going. It was a messy process but it was also the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book. Absolutely.

I think that shows I think even when Rainy gets stuck in bits there’s something he discovers in the in the boat that has been left there by someone else. Yeah. And I can imagine the look on his face. Poor guy.

He didn’t ask for that except…

no he did not.

What he did with the boarder that arrives

But it’s so organic the way everyone comes together and the way some people disappear or are the ways some people leave and come back this cast, it’s not a huge cast. But everyone has sort of their turn. And it feels like there’s a community.

The fun part about writing is that you get to write what you want in your life. Right? I’ve always found it sort of difficult to make friends or have like a community that I was part of that just is not super easy for me. But I dream about it. Dreaming about it all the time. years ago, Robert and I were we used to watch Notting Hill a lot.

Oh, that movie. Yes. I know which one you’re talking about? Terrific.

Romantic comedy. Hugh Grant, Julia Roberts, how do you lose? But there’s the best scenes in that are not the romantic scenes, the best scenes of that movie are sitting around the table with this group of friends and the kinds of conversations they have. And we used to watch that movie now. And then a couple times a year, we’d watch that around. Can we have that? And so the answer might be no. I mean, that’s nothing we’ve managed to find out all that often. Sometimes, sometimes. I would love for that to be a regular feature of everybody’s life. And I like to write community. I like to write groups of friends. I like to write those, those gatherings, you know, Mark’s birthday party in the backyard was enormous fun to write. And, and so I made sure that I wrote little bits, and scenes of community even late in the game when things get just really dark as hell for Rainy. There’s still ways that he can find community and I love doing that.

How much of this book though comes out of some of the legwork for virtual wonder there might be folks who don’t know that you actually ditched an entire first draft of Virgil Wander because you couldn’t get the voice? And the thing about I Cheerfully Refuse, I was immediately in because the voice Oh, thank you, and what you were doing with language, I’m still so excited about what you were doing with language. And I don’t want to spoil it for listeners, because again, it is that sort of mix of Shakespearean but not It’s not like Blade Runner either. It’s but you are doing something and creating this world where dialogue changes, and yet, I know like for instance, Quixote right, there’s multiple references to Don Quixote, but the way they’re deployed is so good. And have I ever finished Don Quixote? No, it’s right there with Middlemarch. And one of those I know I need to do it, and I just have not done it yet. Someday I will. But they’re the kinds of references that you can just get, I think, even if you haven’t read them.

Everybody understands that. That romantic, that madman goes off with Sancho Panza and tilting at windmills. I mean, that’s just part of the culture. Everybody knows that whether or not they’ve ever read the book. And so that was really, really easy to work with and really fun to work with. And then if you have read through the end, I mean, a refer to that. And the ending is such a disappointment to Rainy. Because Quixote is not really a madman in the final payments. And that’s enormously disappointing. Who would read that? You know, if he weren’t a madman, but no, he renounces it all at the end, what a what a disappointment. He becomes, in his sanity at the end, just before he dies, that really is a bummer for Rainy I kind of get it I kind of understand it, but Rainy can’t bear it. He’s a little bit of an idealist about his Quixote.

He is he’s also a little bit of an idealist about a lot of things, but in a way, where he very kind of quietly sticks his ground without realizing he’s quietly sticking his ground. I think you’re right. But Quixote is part of this mythology, right? Like, we know when we’re reading one of your novels that there is going to be this sort of worldview, call it mythology, however, you want to just cry, I’m going to stick to mythology, because that works for me. And mythologies is a word that I just like, for instance, family mythology, I’m like, yes, we’ve all heard the stories of our own families where you’re like, okay, okay, okay. I do not believe one word of that. But cool. You keep telling that story. Every Sunday night, that’s great. We need that. We do. We absolutely do. And we can, you know, take the bits that are useful and leave the bits that are behind but the mythology of Randy’s world. And there’s a very bad dude that readers will meet. And one of the things I love about it, though, is he’s threatening because he’s so quiet and everyone’s just a little scared of him. He’s not running around crashing furniture or, you know, whipping out pistols or anything like that. He’s just one of those dudes who’s really scary because he’s just who he is.

Yeah, and I think that there are people like that and, and yet he’s he’s also also I think, a product of of the mythology that’s always running around up here. I like the word mythology as well, where would we be without it, you know, stories that, that stick and that’s why they’re myths. And every time I, I think probably most writers are this way. But every time I sit down to start a project, and the first sort of blocks of stories start being visible, you know, when you’re when you’re, when you’re breaking the yard or whatever, and there’s no stone and you always hope that the thing you uncover is going to be Stonehedge, you always hope that it’s going to be that something that that is really well constructed, and, and will stand for a long time you really hope. And one way to sort of urge yourself in that direction is to is to immerse yourself in stories that that are like that old stories, newer stories that the kind of have the venerable feel, the feel of architecture, I always try to stay around stories like that,

you know, in the past, you’ve talked about and Tyler and Nick Hornby and Michael Shavon, I was just thinking of Cavalier and clay actually, as you were talking, it’s an early ShaVonne. But again, the world building in that book, right is, I mean, every brick is in place. So many

books, even going all the way back to the mysteries of Pittsburgh, you know, yeah, there too. It’s, it’s another world of Pittsburgh, it’s another world and, and there’s the Cloud Factory, you know, that? That too? I mean, I remember reading that. And in my 20s, and just thinking, Oh, no. How can anybody be this good this young, it should have discouraged me, but it didn’t really, I mean, it just made me outrageously happy, like most of his novels. And

one of the things I love about that thread too, with all of those writers is exactly that. They write with a lot of joy. And you do as well, even when stuff goes off the rails, let’s put it that way, there’s still a lot of joy inherent in the story, you have a lot of faith in your characters.

Oh, I do. And I and I never write a character I don’t really love, right. I mean, I don’t admire all, but I love them all, I really do. And otherwise, I don’t know how you write somebody fairly, you know, or with authenticity, if they’re, if they’re, they’re only there to be, you know, like a tool in the plot, or to further momentum or, or whatever that might be, you mentioned joy. And honestly, I think I’m only doing this because I get so much joy out of it. That’s really the only because, you know, every every paragraph, and I love talking in terms of paragraphs, because that’s such a beautiful little, little handful of sentences, a paragraph has to a move your move your story along. It has to serve a dramatic purpose. It needs elements of story and character and you know, momentum. But then it also has to create some weather it has to create, I think, for the reader, some kind of an atmosphere, because during a long book, you’re going to want people to feel joyful, you’re going to want them to feel heartbroken, you’re going to need them to sometimes have the sensation of what it’s like to sense that mourning is going to come after a long terrible night, you know, that kind of rent feeling that you get, you’re going to need them to feel a lot of things, right. And that’s where the real fun part comes in. Because my books tend to land after a long absence, you know, and that’s why it takes me so long. Because I want the weather to be right and all these paragraphs.

Well, weather and voice right, like weather and voice to me are not things you can separate. Probably. And I’m not just talking about whether or not you read the book in the first person or close third or whatever. It’s just the voice of the narrative. And you know, like I said earlier, you throughout the first draft of virtual wonder because you didn’t get the voice. The voice was all wrong. Shoe. When did Rainey show up? I mean, I cheerfully refuse. Are we really starting with Lake Superior? Are we starting with rainy and Lake Superior? Rainy came first,

First, I knew it would be on Lake Superior because by then we moved here and, and I had this thing in my head. Many years ago, the first time I sailed on Lake Superior, I was with my brother in law, and a friend of his and they invited me to go sailing with them on the boat. And at that point, I thought, Oh, this is a place I have to write about. This is a that I need to make use of at some point. All kinds of crazy things happened in that seven days. And the first thing that came to my head with this book was Rainy in the library, hearing the voice of a librarian that he couldn’t see but who was deeply attractive to him. And so I wrote that scene and honestly didn’t change really a word of it. I mean, from the first draft to the last, because that was that was where the book started for me, that love story. And it’s a once I had that and then the rest of it made itself kind of plan.

I do love Lark as character, we’re not ignoring her. She is remarkable in a million different kinds of ways. She’s also a bookseller. So you know, there’s always going to be an affinity there. Oh, yeah. But the idea that their relationship is grounded in words first, yeah.

That tells you something about how far Rainy had to come. And also about a willing Lark was to see him as something more than his origins. I love that about her book, people in my experience tend to be people whose worldview is constrained and can accommodate a lot of different kinds of people and a lot of different ideas. And it was really fun to write about this person who starts out as a librarian, and then when they move out of Duluth, and they move up the shore to Ice Bridge she becomes a bookseller almost by accident.

I’ve heard that story before.

Yes, I know. That’s how most most people become booksellers. I think it’s, it’s almost by accident. I, I love the idea that books themselves are a kind of contraband. Not entirely illegal, but kind of frowned on. When the book begins, we find out that the country has just elected its first sort of proudly illiterate president. A guy who really sees that this is in his favor. He’s never been spoiled by words. And it doesn’t strike me as as all that unlikely. Even though I wrote it as a kind of joke. It turned out to be something that doesn’t seem possible.

Isn’t that part of the power of story, though? Because I mean, ultimately, how many guy leaves on a trip? guy walks in a bar guy meets a stranger on the road? I mean, when you strip it down to the mythology, right, if you strip story down to its very basic elements, guy falls in love. Yeah. guy’s life changes. And obviously, since we’re talking about Randy, that’s why I’m using guy but obviously, it can be anyone. And I just I love the idea that there are sort of storytelling there. universalities of story, right? Where it doesn’t matter whether I’m from Boston, and you’re from the tiny town that you’re from, that’s what 1700 people.

Yes, it’s still that little. I think it’s 1200 and some It’s really small. It’s a good place to grow up.

And you’ve got the run of the land. And I mean, my brother and I sort of had the run of woods behind the house kind of thing. And, you know, Mom would ring a bell when it was time to come home, but to have access to that sort of natural world, and it could be that connected to the natural world and being paid sort of paying attention to where the clouds are. Just watching Rainy figure out how he fits into a world that has no rules, right? There is no sort of social contract anymore. No, there’s not wild watching him figure out I mean, money doesn’t exist, and but he can still make music.

Yeah. And actually, he was taught by a man to play bass. Who said, first do no harm, right, as a bass player, your job is to first do no harm. When I started playing the electric bass, that was what my brother in law taught me. The form rule. First, do no harm. And what he meant was, you don’t you don’t hijack the song. You don’t mess up the groove. Your job is to lock in to the to the drummer and not try to take the spotlight. You support the sun your bass player, that’s what you do. I love that. I love that about the electric bass. And I loved how it also once you began to understand it, like, does he understand not only his job as kind of a foundational part of the song, but one that really can’t be heard by most people. You don’t really hear the bass in most songs. You just sort of feel it. Yep, it kind of hits you here rather than here. But it’s absolutely necessary. Rainy starts to understand that and to understand how that fits in other parts of his world as well. But there are people who are comforted by deep tones. Early in the story. There’s a character that sometimes just shows up at Rainy and Lark’s house, in order to be comforted by Rainy playing the bass, because he needs it. It helps him It centers him. There are mythologies in which the world is created countless eons ago, by deep bass tones, and it’s like the mother used to say the music of the spheres and radii he hasn’t run into all those, but he senses it, he understands that at some level that is true. And so that’s his, that’s his form of creativity and, and one of his forms of joy.

We can still be joyful at the end of the world. I’m going to choose to believe that I think we have a duty to be joyful. I also have books. I have books and story and writers and characters that surprise me and delight me and maybe poke me a little bit in the shoulder and say, well, what do you actually think? And, you know, as a bookseller, you do, there is a slight tendency to talk about fictional characters, like they’re real people. And other book people, it makes perfect sense. And then to strangers. They’re kind of like, are you okay? Do you miss this world?

Well, no, because I’m in it. Okay. I mean, we live, like I said, six blocks off the water. It’s not close enough to see the lake from the living room window. But if I go up to the third floor, in the wintertime, when the leaves are off the trees, and I go to Robin’s quilting studio and look out the window, I can see Lake Superior. When I go outside, every time I hit across the street, I look down the hill, and there’s the water. I feel very much like, like, I’m in that world all the time. And, you know, it’s better than Rainy’s in that everything hasn’t fallen apart. And I don’t want that to happen. But on the other hand, this still has the beauty of that world and the book that’s a beautiful world is crazy — kind of off center, screwed up world is gorgeous. And I loved being in it. I mean, I didn’t I wasn’t in a hurry to finish because I just love being in it. It was it was enjoyable to write about and the water is. Man, it’s just life itself. You know? The lake is like a local deity.

Yeah. I mean, isn’t that what artists for though? I mean, aren’t we supposed to be asking these questions and saying what if and where do we go? And how do we do this on? Like, how do we imagine the thing that feels unimaginable? Yeah, right. Again, this goes back to mythology. kid dies. parents die. Yeah. You know, how do we process what our experience of the world is? And what does it mean to move forward when we don’t actually know what that looks like?

Oh, yeah, terrifying, right. But that’s kind of the that’s the fun of this job is that you get to go out. And, and everything looks dark. Maybe optimism only means something when, when you first go out and admit to yourself, oh, everything is dark and painful as hell. Maybe only then can you reach into your pocket and light a match, you know, the matches are in there. But if you don’t admit it’s dark outside, you’re never gonna reach in your pocket. And for me what writing a book like this was for at a time when, you know, when things seemed to be going in so many unfriendly directions at once. It was just a way of lighting a match. And going forward through the dark to see where the path lead and then maybe lighting another one from that one when it I found it to be a very joyful and pleasurable experience. I completely enjoyed writing this.

Aren’t you kind of a legendary outliner too? Don’t you have a little bit of a roadmap?

Well, no, I mean, I do I have an outline. But basically, it’s, I know where I think the story is going to end, okay. I know where I’m going to put in kind of a, you know, you get 80 or 90 pages in kind of need a spin, you got to spin things in different direction. Because otherwise it will start to seem tedious, and you set yourself up for that famous baggy middle that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. So what I usually have in mind is an ending, which may or may not be the one in this case, it wasn’t the one that I wrote an ending in mind. Okay. And then I had a spin in mind for about a third of the way through. And I had that that glorious romance at the beginning with Rainy and Lark, and that’s what I had when I started. And I by the way, I started me on the day, we went into lockdown in Minnesota. Making notes for you know, I don’t know, year and a half and then the day we went into lockdown. Robin just said, Well, this is your chance. Go for it. Actually, start the book. And I thought, Man, she’s 100%. So I started and I wrote the first draft in about three months, which for me is terribly fast. Right, right. But then of course, I did rewrite it for two and a half years after that.

Yeah, but I think you’ve always been one of those writers where the writing is actually the rewriting, and especially having now read it twice. I feel like there’s no way this could have been written quickly. There’s too much detail That’s true to the world and the characters, there’s too much language that you have clearly created. And it works so well that that’s not, hey, I’m gonna go get a quart of milk and a bag of oranges and come back. And the rest of my grocery list is the outline for an entirely new world.

When you said it exactly they were, the rewriting is the writing. And the rewriting is where the real work happens, you see that, that your vibe is wrong in a particular paragraph, and you switch out some words and you take out some stuff, usually it’s taking out, I tend to overwrite and then take out your ramp up or ramp down the sort of motion that you want to have flowing underneath the text. And, and that for me, I mean, I know that other there are other writers who, who managed to do all that and do it swiftly. For me, it just takes a long time, I’ve had to learn to accept that.

You know, Calvin Trillin has this old, very, very old and may not even be in print anymore called Deadline Poet. And it’s kind of a memoir of his work in journalism. And did you ever formally study poetry? I don’t think you did. Right? You really did come out of okay. And this is the thing and I keep coming back to your, you know, almost 20 years at Minnesota Public Radio, because when you’re talking to that many people, you get a sense of language and a rhythm of language that’s really hard to replicate. And you know, this too, you read enough where you know, when you’re reading dialogue that just doesn’t quite swing, and you’re like, oh, yeah, I see what you’re trying to do, and it’s not working. And here, though, you have, you found a way to replicate patterns of speech, without all of our likes, and ohms. And you know, all of the stuff that makes us truly human, right. But there’s a rhythm there that I really do think comes out of interviewing people. And I’m not saying that just because I do this, on the side, being a bookseller. But when you’re around people listening that much, it’s hard to let go of patterns of speech.

Well, and especially the law, if you’re like, I was in radio that time, yeah, when I write dialogue that works. It comes directly out of that experience of interviewing people. And the other great thing about being a journalist first, was that you never quite lose then that journalistic privilege that you have to just go up to somebody that you’re watching and ask him a question. Or I was a journalist, I never, ever would have even thought you could do that, hey, tell me how this works. What are you doing? How long have you been doing this thing? Do you like it does this before you, and then you’re a journalist, and that’s your job. And if I can find out anything I want? Well, I quit journalism a long time ago. But I never stopped doing that. You can just go up to people and have a conversation. And, and, and people enjoy it. And good things come out of it. Good dialogue comes from it.

And having read it carefully, oh, the dialogue just snaps. It is really, it is good. It is so good. Even there’s a young girl who shows up and she is an actual young girl and not a 14 year old disguised as a tiny person, you know, this has happened, I’m telling you, you know, this is you’ve read those notes. And everyone just has their moment. And this world is, oh, it’s delightful. But it is it’s details and dialogue and a little bit of pacing, but it’s character in place and all of the things that you get to get lost in.

That makes me want to ask you a question. You probably read more than anybody I know. You read a lot. I listened to a lot of your interviews, and you are not reading in a surface. Well, you’re not skimming, you’re really paying attention to these books. And so I guess my question is, what is it about a book that gets your attention and actually sweeps you away? Because what I’m reading I finish a third of the books that I start if I’m right, because they do sweep me up and I just too old to waste time with books. I’m not gonna lie. But what is it that does that for you?

For me, and I’m going to preface this with I wish we could start a movement. Where all of the people who feel like they have to finish a book that they’ve started that they don’t like, can just walk away, there’s a book for everyone pass it on to someone else. If it is not swinging for you just do not waste your time because there’s always something coming along. So we’re gonna start that movement. You and I and we’re gonna go from there. For me it is. It’s kind of I know it when I see it. And I think that translates to voice. And if there’s a voice that I am willing to trust, ie follow wherever it takes me. There are times where I’ve had manuscripts dropped in front of me and I understand what the writer is trying to do. But if I see the seams I get a little itchy. Yeah And there are plenty of times where I finished things that I might not be in love with, because I did mention bookseller high job, but the things that I really, really love and the things that sort of stick with me over time, and I’ve been doing this for more than a minute, so actually my sort of the context that I have for the business and the kinds of books that I read, I mean, there’s some old Barry, Hannah and Tom McGuane rattle around in the back of my brain. All right, I knew this would happen. I knew we would run long. I knew we could go longer. Actually, we could probably do this whole lot longer. But you have another book to write at some point. I have a couple more interviews to do. And we’re just going to have a grand old time letting people listen to the show. This was so much fun life anger. Thank you so much. I Cheerfully Refuse is out if somehow you have not read Virgil Wander or So Young, Brave and Handsome or Peace Like a River, please tell me you’ve read Peace Like a River. By all means. Thank you so much.

Miwa. What a pleasure. Thanks for having me. I look forward to talking with you more.