Gil Adamson and David Wroblewski in Conversation
Dave Weich, Powells.com
Two predictions: The Outlander will win at least one major award. And The
Story of Edgar Sawtelle will find a home on bestseller lists.
When we discovered these two remarkable debut novels and decided to feature
them together in Indiespensable, Powell's subscription club, someone on staff proposed a joint interview with the authors. Great idea, right?
Except, wait: What did David and Gil have in common aside from a publisher
(Ecco) and books coming out within weeks of one another?
Gil (short for Gillian and pronounced the same as Jill) had previously
written two books of poetry and a collection of short stories. Wroblewski
(sounds like robe-less-ski) spent 25 years in software development before
publishing this, his first book.
And yet The Outlander and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle share more than you
might imagine: runaways, ghostly visions, improvised outdoor survival,
scenes rendered so powerfully you may forget you're reading fiction (you may
forget you're reading, altogether), and characters that linger long after
you close the book.
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"A stately, wonderfully written debut novel... [Wroblewski] takes an intense interest in his characters; takes pains to invest emotion and rough understanding in them; and sets them in motion with graceful language... a boon for dog lovers, and for fans of storytelling that eschews flash. Highly recommended." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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"Enriched by vivid language that reflects Adamson's background as a poet, Outlander is a riveting tale of a woman's thirst for freedom. (Grade: A-)" Entertainment Weekly"A remarkable first novel, full of verve, beautifully written, and with all the panache of a great adventure." Michael Ondaatje
Dave: Okay, to start: You're professional writers. We're talking today
because of your skill with words and language. And yet, Gil, your novel's
protagonist can't read. David, yours can't speak. What gives?
David Wroblewski: Interesting question.
Even before the book was written, I was interested in a character that had a
close connection with animals. I had been thinking about that for a while
when I had very minor oral surgery — very minor. But afterwards, for about a
week, it was difficult to talk. One thing I learned from that experience is
that not talking turns you into an observer, to a tremendous degree. If you
don't talk for a week, your relationship to the world changes. That was the
genesis for Edgar's muteness.
And one thing about a character that can't talk: If they're going to exist
in the world at all, they have to act. They have to do things. That
resonated for me, both with the idea of a character that has a connection
with dogs, and also with the plot of the story in my head, in which the
character has to act and can't act, both at the same time.
Gil Adamson: Why would I make this girl unable to write? Partly for
historical accuracy. My grandmother, for instance, grew up with three
brothers and one sister. The assumption was that there was no point in
educating her. She knew how to read — she was taught how to read at home —
so why would you bother with more? She wouldn't need to work. She was going
to get married and raise children. For that you didn't need any kind of
higher education.
I extended that a bit and wondered, What would happen to a neglected child
if everyone figured she had had enough education, but in fact nobody had
made the effort to find out?
I was speaking to the neglect of the character, and how you deal with a
deficiency in yourself.
I know a number of people who've had severe dyslexia, serious problems with
reading, and they've overcome it in a big way. They are masters of
subterfuge, of self-protection. They will presuppose a situation in which
they're going to have to read something in front of people; before you even
know what has happened, they will steer you away from it. Out of
self-protection. That's where it came from.
Dave: It probably won't shock you to learn that you're not the youngest
debut novelists we've ever featured. How did living a bit before publishing
these books impact your eventual subject matter? How did you come to these
stories?
Adamson: I'd been reading a lot of what I would call "literary Westerns."
Most were American. I'm Canadian, and it's a little unusual for Canadians to
read quite as much American fiction as I was. I'd been reading Cormac
McCarthy. And there's a book published in Canada called The Englishman's
Boy. Clearly, the author went to school on the same literature as I did. I
found it so rich, and the writing so fascinating and good, that it had me
starting to think about Western-but-not-Western: a visit with the thing that
makes Westerns work. When they work, why they work.
So I'd been reading very similar books, and I found myself starting to do a
lot of research. As I say, writers follow their nose, and they read very odd
books. I found myself reading a series called The Foxfire Books. Nonfiction,
individual chapters, interviewing old folks in Appalachia about how you do
everything: how you survive, how you live, how you skin a hog, how you build
a cabin, how you make soap. Not only was the information fascinating, but
because it was in the language of interview, the language of the individual
people, it was completely captivating.
I sat down and asked myself, "You've written short stories. Can you write
anything longer? Longer than, say, 60 pages? Let's find out."
I took what I'd been drowning myself in, and I used a poem from one of my
books as an outline. Those two elements went together in such a way that the
story took care of itself.
Luckily, over the many years it took me to write the book, I didn't lose
interest. I don't know if that says something about me.
Wroblewski: I grew up in the middle of dairy country in Wisconsin, about as
far from any major metropolitan area as you can get. I always assumed I was
going to be an actor. I don't know why. I didn't have any reason to think
that. In fact, when I finally did try it, when I was in college, I was
really bad at it and didn't enjoy it.
But for some reason I'd always been interested in acting and theater, and I
paid special attention to those things in my English classes. I paid a lot
of attention when we went through Shakespeare, various plays and sonnets.
But I spent most of my creative time in high school writing; that was the
outlet available to me at the time.
I set writing aside when I went into theater, and then I set theater aside
and subsequently had about a 25-year career in software development. Which,
by the way, is a very creative field. I equate it more to kinetic sculpture
than anything else, as an activity.
People think it's about mathematics. It's not at all about that. It's a
different kind of clay, but it's just clay, and it teaches you a lot about
building big intellectual structures and keeping them in your head, trying
to figure out how they work, and understanding that they can work in one
area and break in another. It's a good discipline for writing novels.
Adamson: David, you and I have talked about this before because my brother
is a coder. I have absolutely no facility with math but, having a brother
like that who insists on sharing his love of it with me, I see him sit down
and he looks at code the way we read text. He has very strong opinions about
the grace of code.
Wroblewski: Absolutely.
Adamson: He's got a real job, where he turns up at nine and leaves around
nine. It's keeping him away from the thing he likes to do, which is to write
code. We had a talk the other day, and I found myself giving him advice that
I would give to an artist: You have to make financial sacrifices in order to
do what you like because what you like isn't going to pay for a long time.
Blah blah blah.
It's a very funny thing, actually, but David is right: It's not what we tend
to think, ones, zeros, math, and all that. Once it becomes as complex as it
has become.
Wroblewski: That's interesting to hear because I do think a lot of the same
advice applies, at least at a process level.
When you're making something big, whether it's long-form fiction or a big
piece of software, whatever that is, you're having a very intimate and
extended conversation with the work materials themselves. Generally, when
they're half-finished, they're talking back to you and saying, "Listen to
me. I'm not going to be able to do what you want me to do. I'm going to have
to do something else. You can either help me do that, or we're going to be
fighting for the next couple years." Software teaches you to pay attention
like that.
In terms of process, that's where I came from. But in terms of subject
matter, it seemed natural for whatever bizarre reason to connect my interest
in theater, at least as an observer, and my interest in dogs, in the form of
this particular story.
Dave: David, you mentioned Shakespeare. Critics often reference him in
relation to Edgar Sawtelle, Hamlet in particular. I'm curious how much his
work, or that one play, was on your mind as you were plotting and writing
the book.
Wroblewski: Hamlet was the initial reference point for the story. Very early
on, that was a conscious decision. But I quickly began to subvert that as
much as I could.
The word "retelling" comes up, but I'm very uncomfortable with it. I think
of the story not as retelling but as evoking Hamlet. I was trying to draw on
the much larger traditions of Shakespearean drama, things like the chaos of
the elements, how weather and more elemental forces play a role in those
stories. Witches, ghosts, haunting, poison — all those things appear in a
lot of Shakespeare.
I appreciate that you said Shakespeare first and Hamlet second because
that's the right priority. So the short answer is, yes, part of the original
concept was: Take that story, place it in northern Wisconsin, and make dogs
the stakes of the story. I grew up around a lot of dogs and have a lifelong
connection to dogs.
Dave: Mary and Edgar both hear voices and experience visions. In The
Outlander, Gil, we read about ghost stories and the miners' superstitions.
For isolated moments in Edgar Sawtelle, David, we occupy the mind of a dog;
and then there's the enigmatic character of Ida Paine.
What was it like to incorporate elements beyond reason and rationale into
what are otherwise predominantly realistic novels?
Adamson: It was fun. There's something delicious about imagining a moment
like that and not having to suffer the event, yourself. In the case of my
book, it very slightly altered the tenor, as you say, of what is otherwise a
very realistic book, and lifted it off the ground a bit.
There's a delicious darkness to fairy tales and tales of ghosts and giants,
the very slightly bent-out-of-shape reality you see. I enjoyed bringing that
into the story.
But also, I didn't know if I was writing a novel. I was very much just
pleasing myself. I don't know how conscious it was; it was kind of a bedtime
story I wanted to tell myself.
Wroblewski: I love that: a bedtime story you wanted to tell yourself.
Dave: Do we give ourselves different permissions when we tell stories on
paper? You might feel self-conscious talking to someone face-to-face about a
vision, whether you were describing your own or someone else's.
Adamson: Definitely. And there's also the ability, for the writer, to work
on the telling until its inherent vulnerability is minimized. I don't think
you can remove the potential for people to simply not believe it or not go
with it, but if you write it well enough you can convince people that up is
down and life is happening on Mars.
That's the nature of the beast. You, yourself, would have trouble coming up
with whoppers like this, but if you write it, and you write it in a way that
draws people in, you can get away with a lot.
In Edgar, the description of the ghost made of rain is just wicked because
it's so realistic. It's a realistic vision, which is a neat thing.
Wroblewski: When I read a book, I want to live a life I couldn't possibly
live otherwise, so I feel very reactionary about strict realism and the
dogma around it that I encounter sometimes. There were a certain set of
freedoms granted to me, given the genesis of this story, the allusion to
Hamlet and ghosts and so on. But I think it's interesting to start with what
you like to read, because we write what we like to read.
Adamson: Yes.
Wroblewski: Realism is only one tool that you use among many. I tend to
think of it as imaginative fiction, using realism as a tool when necessary.
Dave: Your novels both feature runaways. Who comes to mind when you think of
literary runaways? Does one in particular stand out?
Adamson: I'm reading Huckleberry Finn at the moment. That's the classic.
I'd never read the book before, but I know it intimately because my father
read it to me when I was very young. I remember that it had this terrible,
strong quality. I suppose it got deep into my brain. I'm basically reading
it now for the first time, again. That's the one I think of.
Wroblewski: That's also the first one that comes to mind for me. Although in
the case of Edgar Sawtelle, the more explicit reference is to Mowgli in The
Jungle Book, which isn't exactly a runaway story. It's more of a lost child
story, but it's the one that Edgar chooses as his own reference point for
what's going on.
Adamson: It's interesting that those are both debatably children's stories.
Maybe less so Huckleberry Finn, but it seemed to work on me as a kid.
Dave: If a customer is standing in our checkout line with your book and one
other, what other book would most excite you to discover in that customer's
hand? And you're not allowed to pick a book by the other author on this
call.
Wroblewski: I happen to be reading Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen right now, and it's wonderful. It's the kind of writing — lush, Victorian prose — that I'm not sure could even be published anymore. It's just a delight.
Adamson: That's a very hard question. Writers read for such peculiar
reasons, and we read with the nuts and bolts in mind.
I guess I'd have to pick a book by Howard Akler called The City Man. It's
the story of a newspaper man in Toronto who is, for various reasons, fresh
off a mental breakdown. He's sent on a job to investigate pickpocketing
gangs.
It doesn't sound exciting, but it's the most amazing story, the way it's
written. And the story itself is beautiful. The writing is completely
different from my own. It's a tidy little gem, and it makes you want to be
in that city at that time with those people.
Dave: Both of your novels dwell on the distinction between wildness and
domestication. We see dogs and horses that exist somewhere on the spectrum
between wild and domesticated, but the real conflicts in both novels stem in
part from where the people fall on that spectrum.
Wroblewski: Certainly in the case of Edgar, that was very much on my mind.
You can't talk much about dogs without almost immediately getting to this
question: What is the difference between the wild form of a dog and the
domesticated form of a dog? If you follow that just a little ways, which I
love to do — I'm sort of a junkie on dog science and all the great books of
dog nonfiction out there — you see that those barriers in terms of behavior
evaporate.
It's very hard to point to one trait and say, "This means you're a domestic.
This means you're not." And in fact our connection as human beings to dogs,
and what we call domestication, goes back so far that we don't even know
when it began. It certainly began before domiciles existed, so the word
domestic is sort of a misnomer. The word that gets used in the scientific
literature now, which I find interesting, is co-evolution.
When we hooked up with wolves, everybody changed. We know it was wolves, and
wolves became this other species that we call dogs. It seems almost
inevitable that the people involved, or whatever you want to call "people"
at that point because it could be a hundred thousand years ago or more, they
changed, too, in different ways.
We talk about dogs as if human beings brought them in out of the wild and
did them this great favor of domesticating them, but that relationship much
more likely was of mutual benefit, and both parties changed in the process.
To me, that's a metaphor that has no limit, and a lot of the story I was
trying to write explored that metaphor in terms of the human beings and in
terms of the animals, and explored the idea that wildness and domestication
appear in both.
Adamson: That's really neat. And it makes me think of the difference between
dogs, which I've always assumed came to humans for their own reasons, and
horses. If humans hadn't learned how to domesticate horses, they never would
have come near humans. Ultimately, though, you wind up with these unusually
well-tuned and very affectionate human-horse relationships. A tremendous
amount of training has to go on. The human has to be trained as well as the
horse.
There's a woman who's all over YouTube at the moment. She rides bareback and
without a bridle, which in itself is pretty unusual. And the thing that
keeps striking me, when I see it, is how amazingly trained the horse is. The
horse is the star. There must be a bottomless education that goes on between
them to do this one simple thing: ride around in a circle, change direction,
stop, gallop, and kneel, all without a bridle.
Dave: It reminds me of Edgar with his dogs, such finely tuned communication.
Literally: simply tensing your thigh and having the horse react to its
meaning.
Adamson: The horse has to know what it means.
Dave: You need an outward communication, but the definition has to be shared
and understood.
Wroblewski: This gets back to the very first question that you asked about
language. In the world of dog training, at least, a common metaphor is
"constructing a private language" between the person and the dog. Training
is the outward form, but the inward form is the construction of a language,
with which to say what is important between the two of them. That's probably
the most accurate way of describing what training is.
Dave: Gil, I want to ask about Mary. You never exonerate her for the murder
she commits. Judgment falls outside the scope of the novel. What challenges
did that pose, or how did you walk that line?
Adamson: It's been interesting to see reviews and descriptions of the book.
People will say that she has killed her husband, "who was a brute." Or he
was "beastly."
He's not a nice guy at all, but what she's done is wrong. She knows it. It's
part of the reason she's suffering. She knows she can't exonerate herself;
neither is she interested in doing that.
For me, that was the whole question. We've all done bad things. Perhaps we
haven't killed anyone with a shotgun, but how do you deal with the fact that
you have made drastic errors in your life?
There's a Woody Allen film; I guess it's Crimes and Misdemeanors. At the
end, as is common with Allen, there's a philosophical discussion between two
characters. If you've done something horrid — and one of them has killed his
girlfriend — does God see? Does God know, or do you get away with it? They
have a very interesting back-and-forth, coming from two different
perspectives.
I think it's an unanswerable question. I had no interest in making her a
woman who fought back against a terrible guy and did something justified. To
me, it is much more interesting that she carries this crime with her and
doesn't let herself off the hook. I had no interest in letting her off the
hook.
But because readers like her, you worry about this person, you want it to be
justifiable. Maybe he was a horrid person. That's sort of the nature of
fiction. Shakespeare is full of unsympathetic characters, and yet you do get
very involved in their stories and you do worry about them.
There's an amazing book by Cormac McCarthy called Child of God. The main
character is just a freak. A monster. And you're scared to death for him.
It's the nature of the reading experience and probably the nature of the
writing experience that you don't have to be engaged with a perfect
creature. Much more interesting if they're unresolved.
Wroblewski: It may be more difficult to engage with a perfect creature,
since we're imperfect.
Adamson: Yes. The white hot elements of literature are about that whole
discomfort.
Dave: In the process of working on these books, what was the last part you
wrote to your satisfaction?
Adamson: Um...
Dave: Define satisfaction as loosely as you please.
Adamson: I don't mind the last line of my book. I fell across it and sort of
went, "Oh. You're done. Stop now."
Dave: Did you actually write it last?
Adamson: I wrote the book sequentially. I started at the beginning, and I
just kept telling myself the story until it came to an organic end. Then I
stopped.
I don't know how common that is. I was at a writers' festival a few days
ago, and two novelists were talking about how they write their novels in
chunks — maybe they'll write the middle first, then the beginning, and then
they make the connective tissue between the two main pieces of meat. I'd be
uncomfortable doing that because I'd be afraid that the connections wouldn't
be strong enough.
Wroblewski: I've been through so many drafts of this book that in the end I
didn't have a linear experience of it. Of the novel's five parts, though,
the section that probably fits your question best is the fourth, which is
called "Chequamegon," where Edgar runs off. That was a real delight for me
to write.
It was the section of the book that I knew the least about, and yet it had
the most well-defined beginning and end points. I knew that it began when
Edgar stepped off the property and it ended when he stepped back on. I knew
that I wanted him to find a certain set of meanings in the world while he
was away, but I was open to almost anything happening during that time.
It was a blast to write because of its simple structure. I was able to go
with the events rather than having to coordinate a lot of plot.
Dave: Before I let you go, do you have a question for each other? Something
you're curious about?
Adamson: I do. This is a question I'm asking a lot of people. The Outlander
is my fourth book — I have two books of poetry and a book of short stories —
so I've done this before: I've published a book and got back to writing. But
for some reason I can't remember how to do it.
My question to you, David, is: How do you expect yourself to get back to
writing? Or have you already started up again?
Wroblewski: I'm in that process right now. I'm trying to get another novel
launched.
Part of the difficulty is that I spent so long writing this book that it
became a lifestyle and not a project.
Adamson: Yes.
Wroblewski: There were all the drafts that came before and always more
drafts to come. In fact it's very strange now to know that it's done. I
can't go back and revise. I've had to be very careful about opening up the
advance reader edition because I know that the moment I do I'm going to go
into revision mode.
I'm glad we stopped when we did, but starting from scratch means having no
previous drafts to work on, just a bunch of amorphous ideas. All I can think
to do is to trust to engage the material. Make some clay and start playing
with it. See what happens.
Adamson: And just have fun, right? The trick is to find your way back.
Wroblewski: The temptation is to treat the early stages of the process with
the same sort of rigor that you treated the last stages of the process. That
doesn't work. It backfires immediately. Your inner child goes into
rebellion. You have to relearn how to do things in a very open way, even if
you have very specific goals and you imagine very specific outcomes for the
story.
It's this strange mix of knowing exactly what's going to happen and having
no idea what's going to happen. Some points are completely tangible and
absolutely cinematic in my mind, and then there are vast stretches that are
completely blank.
Adamson: Me, too.
Wroblewski: And both extremes are bad, right? I want to bring them both
toward the middle. I know my experience with Edgar was that when I got to
those scenes I knew to the minutest detail what they would be like, they
didn't turn out that way at all.
It's an exercise in mental flexibility, but I've only done this once. I'm
starting out on book number two, so I'm really in no position to answer this
question. I'll let you know in a couple years.
Dave: Very good. And since it's only fair that Gil need not be in a position
to answer your question, David, that really opens up the options.
Wroblewski: I do have a question. What did you learn about Mary as you wrote
the book that you didn't know about her when you started? Or, what do you
think Mary learned about herself over the course of the story?
Adamson: It's very similar. Mary started off in a poem called "Mary." Other
people seem to like it, but it didn't work as a poem, I felt. In retrospect,
my dissatisfaction with the poem is that I wasn't finished with the story.
The Mary in the poem is far more horrible, quite crazy, far more negative,
and her story winds up in a completely different place.
I had full intention of writing a more complete story of that person, but
within a chapter or two she was completely changing, partly because I knew I
couldn't live with that character for very long. It became pretty obvious.
And also because the more you write, the more the story asserts its own
logic, and the logic dictated a change.
I learned great affection for her. I started off with not much affection for
the poem's character, and by the time I was done I loved all my characters,
the crazy and the nutty and Mary, who has her problems.
She learns many skills over the course of the novel to keep herself alive.
She learns to be part of the world she's now in, the world of the
wilderness. But she also learns that she's capable. She started off, at some
level, helpless in her mind and helpless emotionally. By the time she's
done, she's pretty well on her own two feet.
That was a great joy for me, to end up there, starting off where I did and
starting off where she did.
David Wroblewski and Gil Adamson spoke by telephone on April 23, 2008.
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