The Passage

Lydia Millet reads from Fair Ones: A Double Novel, her experimentally-structured story of two women navigating the sudden and unexpected death of their best friend. During our conversation, the Pulitzer- and National Book Award-nominated author reflects on her evolution as a writer and chats with Jon and Cory about:
How she and her publisher decided on "A Double Novel" (and the many alternatives they considered)
Her love of dialogue (and how much she hates reading it outloud)
The increasing influence of pop culture on her writing
Her obsession with fonts
Writing exclusively outdoors

Lydia's passage, from Fair Ones:
“Let yourself go,” said Jen. “It’s your turn to be a leaf. Or, like, the plastic bag in that egregiously overrated movie from the nineties. The pedophile fantasy dressed up as cinematic art? With the rose motif? You can just float there, like the bag. Swirling in an updraft. In a super-obvious yet oh-so-gritty metaphor.”
We headed to the men’s room with Jase and Patrice, where, as always, there was no line. Locked ourselves in and consumed.
[...]
Just don’t be rude, I warned myself. [...] But my own potential rudeness sat on my shoulder like a gremlin.
At the same time, I did feel like a floating plastic bag. I was a floating plastic bag, indifferent to the breeze that carried me. The bag was thin, and sometimes full of air, but had the imperviousness of plastic—it would last, it would go on and on, though it tumbled and soared. It might snag on a tree or bush, but there it was.
I was several metaphors at once, and it wasn’t a problem for me.
The gremlin was only a figment.
On Jase’s coke I wasn’t bothered by any of the conversations. When Elise touched on the event, I gave the appearance of listening. Though, in reality, I felt apart from it and supernatural. A superhero. The plastic bag was a miracle! Who had made it? Who had made me?
If Claire had been a bag she’d be floating there too. Or we might be snagged together in a tree. A green tree, I thought, with squirrels and nuts and birds . . . slowly shedding our plastic bodies, shedding and shredding. Filmy tatters we’d be, across the bare winters. But there, perhaps, for all eternity.
Or at least, till someone cut down the tree.

Isaac Fitzgerald reads from American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, his memoir about following in the footsteps of one of America’s great folk heroes. In this episode, we discuss the book’s opening passage, learning how to write, and how walking became a way to write about family, loneliness, and home. Isaac also talks to Jon and Cory about:
Putting “tension" in the bank to keep readers turning pages
Polishing first lines to a high shine
The benefits of writing an entire manuscript longhand
Using voice memos and photos as notes
Storytelling and the art of stand-up comedy
Cutting the “throat clearing” from early drafts
Isaac’s passage, from American Rambler:
I’ve been drinking a bit less and praying a lot more than I used to.
Now, that’s not to say I’m drinking less than most people—I’m not—nor that a doctor would sign off on my lifestyle as a healthy one—they wouldn’t—but self-betterment has to start somewhere, and for me that means choosing sobriety occasionally. More often than I’m used to, which is to say more often than any sane person living in these modern times would want to.
As for the praying? It’s not that I’m praying some saintly amount, but it’s another habit I’m developing, a healthier one. Like most of my habits, I picked this one up from my parents—only to abandon it for decades—taking prayer out on semi-rare occasions like car accidents, late rent payments, or particularly bad hangovers. But over the past few years I’ve found myself doing it more and more, and not only when I’m in trouble. Sometimes in moments of happiness. Other times, contentment. Every once in a rare while, during a moment of peace, I find myself with my knees in the dirt reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
Which is what I’m doing right now—though it should be noted that I’m on my knees because I’m hiding behind a bush, and that this is very much one of those vintage “Oh shit, I’m in trouble” prayers, not one of contentment or peace.
On top of all that, yes, I’m sober at the moment, though I’d rather not be, as I’m trying to avoid a railway police officer—known as a bull—who is slowly but steadily heading my way, and the stress of the situation is getting to me.
In my mind, I put an emphasis on “And forgive us our trespasses . . .”

Scott Hawkins reads from Blacktail, a dark fantasy in which a wolf seeks revenge on humanity for the death of his house dog mate. In this episode, we unpack a passage from the opening chapter, told from the perspective of a lynx, that sets up our introduction to the book’s titular character. Scott chats with Jon and Cory about:

Writing from the perspective of animals
The multiple scrapped projects he wrote between his debut novel, The Library at Mount Char, and Blacktail
His wife as his trusted first reader
The checklist he created and reviews drafts against
The 80,000 words he spent trying to crack the first chapter of Mount Char that ended up on the cutting room floor
The storyline Mount Char borrows from The Godfather (as well as King Lear)
His time at the Taos Toolbox writing workshop with Nancy Kress and Walter Jon Williams

Scott's passage, from Blacktail (sorry, the whole passage wouldn't fit so it was edited slightly for length):

The snow stopped shortly after dawn. The sky remained gray, though. A faint disk of white sun glowed behind towering clouds. Hate didn’t mind. He liked things gloomy.
He hadn’t gone far before he encountered the first of the scent poems that marked the boundary of the wolf lands. He sniffed it idly, sighed. When marking his own lands he would usually keep it simple, something like “Mine. Leave or die.” The damn wolves, though . . . they always had to make a production of everything. It was even worse than their singing. This one said:
White-Eye
forgotten daughter
alone and childless
mate of none
claims these lands.
None other may hunt here.
Yup, Hate thought. That’s wolves for you. Why just get to the point if you can whine first? He sniffed closer. This mark was old—last winter or thereabouts. Last he’d heard, White-Eye was still mateless. But she had borne a litter in the spring, a male and three females. That, in no small part, was why Hate had not been sleeping well, why he had been looking up the mountain when the gunshots rang out. White-Eye alone was bad enough. But with a pack behind her . . . a young pack . . .
[...]
When Hate first came to this patch of forest, he was young, cocky. Not content to take his share of the rabbits and leave well enough alone, he challenged White-Eye for the mountain one fine spring day. White-Eye subjugated him, leaving a shredded right ear that flopped when he walked. For a while he thought he might lose an eye as well, but in the end it healed. Sometimes, on cold nights when he couldn’t sleep he lay and wondered about that day. Why had she not killed him?
He didn’t know.
At any rate, he had not tried her again. Instead, he comforted himself with the knowledge that White-Eye was the last of her kind around here and, for all he knew, everywhere else. She would not live forever. He could afford to be patient. He had guile, and Guile as well. Eventually the mountain would belong to them, to their kittens.
But now . . . it seemed he had miscalculated the degree of White-Eye’s desperation. The rumor was that she had lowered herself to mate with a house dog, some mongrel slave who’d been drawn to the wild lands by the scent of her estrus. As far as he knew, though, no one had ever caught scent of the father.
[...]
Alone, White-Eye could live well enough off the meat that dwelled on her hill. She had no reason to challenge him. But with four more mouths to feed it was inevitable that she invade Hate’s valley.
He remembered her tooth shredding his right ear, the sting of it. Hot murder boiled up from his belly. His claws thrummed.

Bathsheba Demuth reads from Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, billed as the first comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic lands and waters that stretch from Russia to Canada. In this episode, we discuss a passage about walruses and the challenges of writing about nontraditional history subjects. Bathsheba talks to Jon and Cory about: 
Turning an academic dissertation paper into a trade history book
Researching the history of commercial whaling in the 1840s
Taking inspiration from poets
The luxury of writing as a graduate student
Creative nonfiction writing exercises
Writing while running

Bathsheba’s passage, from Floating Coast:

Walruses are coastline embodied. They cannot eat without the sea, feeding a hundred or more feet underwater, where they root beds of clams and benthic worms from the mud. But they must breed and birth in the air. So the herds slide and wallow between, riding the edge of the sea ice south in autumn, then north through the Bering Strait in summer, sometimes leaving the ice to flop onto patches of sandy earth. Like whales, they concentrate rich seas in their bodies—over a ton for females, more than two tons for males. Walruses are not as fat as bowheads; the mussels they eat take their cut of the sunlight. But beneath inches of furrowed skin, a third of a walrus’s body weight is blubber. They do labor no person can, transforming submarine muck into useful tissue and hauling it to shore, drawing a line of energy from the sea onto the solid world.

Joshua Kendall reads from Trudeau & Doonesbury, his new biography of Garry Trudeau, the famously press-shy Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. In this episode, we discuss a passage outlining the sexism found in strips Trudeau created during his undergraduate years as well as his evolution into more progressive, feminist politics as he reached the national stage. Josh talks to Jon and Cory about:
Mining the two hundred boxes of papers that Trudeau had donated to Yale
Finding Trudeau's crude early strips on his first day in the archives, and the doubts it raised about taking on the project
The value of a good paper trail, and how phones, email, and texting have made biographers' jobs harder
His first biography of a living person, and why dead subjects are easier to write about
Approaching his biography as if he were writing a nineteenth century novel, with his subject’s story as a bildungsroman
His membership in the Biographers International Organization and why biography is a relational problem before it's a writing problem
Robert Caro's Working, and copying Caro's trick of standing in a place at the exact hour his subject would have been there

Josh's passage:
Trudeau himself would soon be shocked and disgusted by the blatant misogyny of his earliest strips. And within a few years of finishing Yale, he would be open about his own boorishness as an undergraduate. As he told journalist Katie Leishman in 1975, “I was singled out as the number one male chauvinist pig on campus. The woman had documented proof—you know, they'd print something about me and then submit a cartoon I'd drawn as People's Exhibit A. Of course, they were right. If you read those strips now, they'd turn your stomach. I did a lot of soul-searching and reading.” In September 72, Trudeau created the character of Joanie Caucus, who, he added, enabled him to address “women's problems in the context of real women.”
But the sexism of Trudeau's earliest strips would eventually be mostly forgotten. In 1989, Emily Bazelon—the scribe for The New York Times Magazine was then a first year student at Yale— worked on a book of essays commemorating the twentieth anniversary of coeducation. “I stuck in a bunch of strips from Doonesbury,” she tells me. “It was a relief and very exciting to see his feminist sensibility,” she adds. When I allude to the earlier crude strips in bull tales about Mike's dating woes, Bazelon admits, “Well, I never knew about those!”