Interview: George Saunders

George Saunders is a literary giant and personal hero. My experience of adulthood has been synonymous with reading and re-reading his work: his five short story collections, his Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, his children’s books, his nonfiction writing (including his essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone, his writing on the Russian short story in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and his Substack, Story Club with George Saunders). His writing has changed the course of my life (how I think, why I write, my presence in the MFA in which I am writing this). He is the author I, and many people, hold dearest.

So, the thought was terrifying: I might, as an MFA student and EPOCH Editorial Assistant, ask to interview him, and generous person that he is, he might say yes. It would be a gift too great to manage, a sun-swallowing attempt. What if I failed to do it justice?

My heart sank like a stone.

But then, of course, it soared.

So, I wrote him a letter. I explained what his work meant to me, asked for an interview, closed my eyes and clicked send. With characteristic kindness, Saunders accepted, and over the course of several email back-and-forths, we discussed Buddhism, ideas of the self, artmaking (always, and in this moment), living a “good” life, and more.

I don’t claim to have done our conversation justice, but I do claim to be a different person for it, and I do claim gratitude. For this and so much more: thank you, George.

Otis Fuqua: My introduction to your work was kind of unusual: in an undergraduate creative writing course, a professor gave us “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” (which, life-altering), and by way of preamble, told us you are a practicing Buddhist. The (adored) professor may not have intended this, but our introduction to your work was as a “Buddhist Writer.”

What do you think of this description of you as a Buddhist Writer?

George Saunders: I’m good with it.  I was a writer before I was a Buddhist but, in the way I wrote, I was doing things that I would later see were, well…Buddhist. 

For example: trying to be “in” the moment as I was re-reading something I’d written, in a state of mind that was as new as I could manage, that wasn’t full of ideas about that part of the story leftover from yesterday. That sort of thing. An attempt at a “non-conceptual” state. And then the whole task of fiction is often to look deeper (into a character or even into the form you’re choosing to tell your story), and this process can feel similar to the way we might feel in life, as we somehow manage to put some of our judgement aside and just see—just genuinely see—a thing and accept it. Chekhov said something like, “If you show a person who he is, he can change,” and I think this is true, also, of story elements.  So, if we can see our story clearly, we can work with it. 

All of this seems, to me, to have something to do with what we might call a “meditative state”—turning down the monkey-mind a bit and just looking uninflectedly at a thing. To me, that’s a really important part of the editing mindset. And of the “living” mindset, when I can manage it.

I understand Buddhism ultimately to be about seeing things as they really are.  In that sense, anything we attempt to do well will end up being “Buddhist,” although we might not call it that.

OF: I love that. It reminds me of another bit of Chekhovian wisdom: “The task of a writer is not to solve a problem but to state the problem correctly.”

This strikes me as a challenge in two parts: seeing the problem is one thing, stating it is another. Put another way: a writer enters that “meditative state,” and manages (through great effort) to see how things really are, but, being an emotional being, they might not like what they see.

You said something that resonates with this in an early Story Club post (from January 6, 2022): “Here’s a trick I’ve found useful in my writing: when something is bothering me, I do my best to turn directly to it and admit it.”

Have you ever struggled to accept a story for what it is or wanted to become?

GS: Yes—and, truly, I think that’s the whole game: we have an idea and try to “execute” it but then, in the process, the story seems to want to be something else.  So, do we resist and override the actual energy of the story (no, I say) or do we listen to the story and go into that new territory, that may have nothing to do with what we’d planned to say (yes, yes, I say, go there).

OF: In preparing these questions, I’ve been reminded of the breadth of your experience: Chicken Unlimited delivery boy, jug hustler, roofer, knuckle puller, doorman, oil prospector, technical writer, geophysical engineer, professor, storyteller, husband, father. There’s a whole world there—and I know I’m missing plenty.

I was thinking about this, and a few of your Story Club posts got me thinking more:

From February 9, 2023: “I want to make sure I’m working on something big, something that will matter, something that will, somehow, let me get all of what I know and have lived into it…I feel like I’ve experienced so much and yet so little of that is reflected in my body of work so far.”

And from April 20th, 2023: “The reason I felt (and still feel, really) that I could make a story out of anything was because anything, written clearly, is saying something—it’s putting something into play.”

All of this taken together asks a kind of slippery question: If you can make a story out of anything, and you’ve experienced things you want to see reflected in your body of work that aren’t yet, what gets in the way? Why is it not as easy as “experience Thing A, write story that includes Thing A”?

GS: Well, the thing is (for me, anyway) the depiction of that Thing is not really the point.  Like, I worked as a roofer but I don’t see any innate value in writing “about” that (documenting that). Some people might want to do that, but I’ve found I don’t have a real gift for, or interest in, that.

So, what am I trying to do? I think I’m trying to represent, in a made-up story, something that I’ve gleaned from all of that experience, but I don’t know what that thing is going to be when I start (and not even along the way, really). 

So, for me, the challenge is: pick a story (a fictive matrix, you know) that will, I hope, allow some of that experience to be reflected out on to it.  But it’s hard to say what will and what won’t work in this capacity. The best, for me, is when I pick some random-ass idea, just because it seems fun and then, in the process of fleshing out that idea, something that rings true from my experiences suddenly shows up, in a new or unexpected way.

“Sea Oak” was like that. I started out just trying to have some fun with the idea of a male strip club and, next thing I knew, I was saying exactly what I meant (but did not know I knew) about the essence of capitalism. In a sense, I taught myself what I thought.

OF: That “I taught myself what I thought” feels like the perfect articulation of what a lot of writers sometimes mean when they talk about writing as therapeutic and healing.

What do you think of writing—fiction, specifically—as a form of self-therapy?

GS: Honestly, no, except that, when I’m doing it, I feel more mentally healthy. But it’s not the content of the piece, or “what I discover about myself” that’s doing the healing—it’s the process of working itself.  I think this has to do with the state of mind I’m in when working, which is more like “reacting” than anything else—so the monkey-mind goes quiet(er).  There’s also that special thrill of having something specific and real-feeling come out of what was originally just…a bunch of inchoate typing. That always puts me in a good mood, when I sense things going in that direction.

OF: In your (awesome) 2018 GQ interview with Jeff Tweedy, you mention that “one of the things I talk about with my students is you don’t get to eradicate any part of yourself. You can’t alter your fundamental voice. Everything in terms of structure and form is just a way of making that part of yourself play nicely with the other part.”

This fascinates me, because there is also the aspect of fiction writing that is self-receding. That is, through the process of revision, a story develops a self of its own, with an intelligence greater than and separate from its author. So a story both comes from and diminishes the writer’s self.

All of which begs a kind of mystical question: the part of a story’s “self” that is separate from its author, the story’s self unto itself, what is that?

GS: Wow, right, great question. 

Let’s approach it this way. What part of us impedes good fiction writing? I’d say: the controlling part, the part that knows in advance, the part that wants to preach and demonstrate and lecture. 

What part of us leads to good fiction writing? Well…the part that’s not that. 

If I, right now, wrote out a list of my (let’s say) political beliefs—you’re going to get a list of pretty typical, old dude, views. Whereas, if you let me write a short story for eight months, the person reflected there will be…better. More original, more interesting, more open, more ambiguous and self-contradictory.

The corny way of saying it is that that second self has access to some sort of universal truth.  The first self is bounded by relative, personal truth.

But the pisser is, you have to use all of your relative stuff—your mind, your experience, your voice (your defects, hiccups, and bad tendencies) to gain access to the universal stuff.  You can’t just step around them. It’s hard to explain. It’s almost as if you need those things to generate a text but then, in working with that text, you start using…something else. Whatever it is that becomes available to us when our minds go a little quiet. For me, it has to do with that feeling of reacting to an existing text, that quick feeling that arises, that isn’t really “thinking.” That’s a wise part of the mind, somehow.   

But I like this idea of subdividing what we’re calling “the self.” If we watch our mind for even a few minutes, we become aware that, as Whitman said, we are large, we contain multitudes. We’re just in the habit of classifying all of that mental stuff as our “self”—our one self.  But that’s a fiction in itself, one that we create over and over but that sometime gets us in trouble, because it’s essentially false. 

OF: I’m curious about that second self, with access to some sort of universal truth. It seems to have a collectivistic quality. A lot of artists talk about an experience of otherworldliness, with ideas (often the best ones) coming from a place external to what they think of as their “self.”

Not to get too metaphysical, but do you think there are parts of ourselves that don’t belong to ourselves?

GS: That, I really don’t know, but what it feels like to me is that we do have some kind of line on truth, that our normal jumpy mind obscures, since it wants to cloak everything in ideas. 

Now, what do I mean by “truth?” Not sure. In Buddhism they talk about the idea that the sun is always present but sometimes gets obscured by clouds. I think that, in this metaphor, “clouds” would be, you know, ordinary thought and chatter. When that goes quiet, what’s left?

In revision, it works in a weird way. I feel like I’m taking out the chatter (the habitual, the lazy or too-familiar sentence constructions, and so on) and also steering toward the most efficient version of the thing. All of this feels like working against habit, somehow. And then the result just feels…more undeniable. It has the ring of truth, which means, somehow: the reader, convinced, keeps reading.

So, honestly, I don’t know—except that, by way of experience, I feel like I do know, that when I work through a piece, it gets better—more honest, more fun, harder to refute.  It gets into a reader in a way that makes it feel like part of her experience, maybe?

But also: we don’t have to be able to fully explain it, to be able to participate in it.

OF: In your February 29, 2024 post, on being a public figure and a writer, you say: “Generally, whenever I get a chance to do something public and potentially risky/fun, I feel, ‘Oh, sure, why not—life is short.’ (I also have a lot of confidence in my artistic practice’s ability to stay clean and pure and functional, no matter what’s happening in my public life.)”

Is it a difficult thing to quiet the mind with so many voices around—people who have read your work, heard you speak—and who are, in a sense, looking over your shoulder with readerly expectations? As a public figure, how do you keep your artistic practice pure?

GS: Honestly (and I think this might have to do with having trained myself to write at work all those years ago), external stuff doesn’t really mess with my writing much.  As soon as I sit down and just mentally say, “Time to work,” my taste sort of flares up and I’m good to go.

I think so, anyway.

Time is an issue, for sure, and self-discipline. Teaching and talking about writing can be a problem—I often sit down to work and recall all the advice I’ve been giving and just feel, “Yikes, that was all wrong.” Or I sometimes find myself hearing myself say, you know, “It’s all about causality”—and that’s a buzz-kill. Because, in the moment of writing, actual writing, it’s not “all about” anything.

Although, in truth, if having a public life was messing with my work, part of that effect would be that I probably couldn’t see it. 😊

OF: Changing gears, in your May 5, 2024 post, regarding the historical sources in Lincoln in the Bardo:

…the thing I needed was...too long. There was no neat summary of it in any of the historical texts. So, including that bit would have entailed dropping in some big, honker, four-page, verbatim bit that would have broken the spell and looked weird on the page—the other excerpts, I’d been keeping around 1-10 lines long.

Again—necessity proving the mother of invention—it occurred to me that I might just, you know, summarize it, in my own words.

And again, Me #2 had a little talk with Me #1:         

     Me #1: “Can I do that?  Invent historical sources?”

     Me #2: “Again, it’s your book.”

So, I gave myself permission to invent, out of whole cloth, whatever historical texts floated my boat.

To be clear, I agree with Me #2. But I do think Me #1 has good reason for his doubt. To invent historical sources and set them beside real ones without distinguishing between the two, it raises questions about the historical record (i.e. Does this diminish its overall authority? Is there such a thing as “the sanctity of the historic record,” or is that pedantic?).

Can you slow down that interaction between Me #1 and Me #2 for us?

GS: To me, the answer is those words on the title page: “A Novel.” That’s it. That tells the reader that everything contained therein is for the purpose of producing, well, “novelistic effects.” In a work of non-fiction (or a political speech) no, no, a thousand times no. But in a novel—I see it as a form of high-level play. The game is to produce higher-level truths by way of a web of possibly invented things. 

But I think it would be a mistake to think that a novel is part of “the historical record.” We read and love Shakespeare but don’t particularly count on him to tell us about the real lives of ancient British royalty. He’s riffing on those stories, with the intention of hitting some deeper, eternal chords.

We can see the danger in this idea though. JD Vance admitting that he was inventing the idea of people eating pets, in order to “demonstrate a larger issue,” for example—well, that’s very close to what a fiction writer does. But a fiction writer does it within a very special, delineated place, called “a work of fiction.” That’s an important distinction. And one that cultured people have to be able to make.

Another thing—as I was writing that book, I had an internal code, that none of the invention would contradict known facts.  I was inventing in order to pithily represent extant views, we might say. So, I would have disallowed myself, say, inventing a lover for Lincoln on the way to the graveyard, because we know that didn’t happen. No secret communiques between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis that we know didn’t occur. And so on.

The fundamental thing in the book—that Lincoln visited the crypt to somehow interact with his son’s body—is largely agreed, by historians, to be “true.”  The exact nature of those interactions, I invented. 

But again: play. 

I think we artists have to work very hard to defend the sanctity of play.

OF: Turning again to Story Club, part of your April 7, 2022 post (in the run-up to the publication of Liberation Day) has been echoing in my head since I read it:

On the relative scale, having a book done is a good thing—a solid accomplishment, that gives me the feeling that I’ve at least done something productive with my time. And I wouldn’t want to discount that—it feels very rich and very good. It’s a good thing to try and a good thing if one is lucky enough to succeed.

On the other hand, the more I go through the cycle, the more clearly I see it as a sort of frenetic, empty activity. I don’t mean empty as in “worthless,” but maybe as “meaningful only within a certain fleeting context.” As Leonard Cohen once wrote in his journal: “Back in Montreal. As for the past, children, Roshi, songs, Greece, Los Angeles. What was that all about?”

Such a complicated emotional bouquet. There’s affirmation for sure, in that “having a book done is a good thing,” but there is a deep almost squirminess around that “frenetic, empty activity.” I get an image here of a beloved rockstar lowering their sunglasses and saying “it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, kid.” Sage wisdom, perhaps hard to hear.

What is the “certain fleeting context” in which the cycle of writing and publishing books is meaningful? To ask Leonard Cohen’s question: What was that all about?

GS: Here, I’d invoke “absolute” vs. “relative.”

On the relative scale, if a person has ambition and a dream and all of that, I think he or she has to go for it. It’s fun, it’s positive, to make something of one’s talent. And it can be disastrous to ignore ambition and dreams and so on. And all along the way, there are (there really are) deep pleasures and if one doesn’t go for it, all along the way, there will be displeasures. Even if one tries and fails, that’s noble and enriching and, in its own way, “fun.” And a person like me would have to be an idiot not to appreciate and enjoy all the good luck I’ve had and also, importantly, the fact that my work has inflected people, sometimes, in a positive way.

On the other hand, success doesn’t do what I, rather stupidly, thought, or felt, that it might do when I was young: it doesn’t eradicate the truth of death or the strange heartbreak of realizing that I and everyone and everything I love, is fleeting. A work of art doesn’t “last forever.” It doesn’t solve things once and for all. It only lasts as long as there are people to read it and who are reading it within a context that (still) renders it meaningful.

And we can’t know if, or for how long, those conditions will pertain.

And beyond that: we rush around, we aspire, we work so hard, we make something really special, and that is received and appreciated by people: great, so great. But then the entire shebang: the thing appreciated, the people who appreciated it, the context within which it was appreciated (was deemed relevant, moving, timely, important)—that all fades away. 

It really does, for sure.

That’s no reason for despair (it is what it is) but I completely understand Cohen, toward the end of his life, looking back at all of those creative, ambitious, former Leonards, dashing around, feeling crushed or proud, triumphant or beaten, and saying (and I imagine him saying this, Buddhist that he was, in a tone of wonder): “What was all that about?”

Another way to say it: you climb a mountain. It’s hard and takes all your cleverness—takes all you’ve got. It’s fun, fulfilling, a real rush. 

Then, from that mountain, you see another one.

It makes sense to go climb that new mountain, yes. But, for me, this latter career stuff involves the realization that there will always be another mountain. So, there are two ways to do it: one way is to feel, incorrectly, that there will someday come a mountain that will cure you of all future mountains. A better way is to say, “It’s fun, climbing mountains, and I’ll likely, I hope, be climbing various mountains until the day I die—but that’s not the point. That is only a pleasurable, positive activity, but the fundamental struggles of being alive and impermanent—we could climb ten thousand more mountains and never figure those struggles out.” 

So, it’s about mindset and that battle gets fought every day, at the writing desk and then afterward. And it’s about, I’d say, intention: the intention to use all of that climbing in service of figuring out the bigger things.

OF: Wow. Not a follow up, but thank you for that.

GS: 😊

OF: On December 2nd, 2021, in your first Story Club post ever, you described a feeling of literary concern:

Increasingly, creative writing is understood to be a sort of adorable, niche venture, relegated, mostly to MFA programs. But, in my view, this underestimates the essential importance of storytelling to a culture.

At present, we seem to be suffering from a widespread failure of literary imagination. We have become worse at imagining the experiences of other people, less inclined to credit these experiences as being as valid and real as our own.

Three years later, on the heels of a (my view) devastating U.S. election, I wonder how you feel about this statement.

GS: I think I was right. It’s a big topic and I’m still thinking through it. But everything we do depends on our view. How are things out there? What’s happening?  We can’t know—the world is too vast—but we have imagination to help us. Literature trains the imagination. A dearth of literature (a culture that is not actively literary) leads to a flat, inadequate picture of reality.

In our time, the literary imagination is being trammeled and transformed by capital—by big corporate interests, in entertainment, advertising, and politics—and what is often produced is, to use a technical phrase, bullshit. Bullshit with an agenda. It’s smooth, it looks and sounds and feels, sort of, like art, or like the products of an art-honoring culture, but there’s the stink of money all over it.  Money and the banality that seeking after money (after clicks, Likes, the seeking of cultural capital) can produce. It is mediocre and full of trite, lazy values. And this pervasive force is coming for “real” literature, because we writers are in that product up to our ears, as everyone is. It’s a form of propaganda, really, and it leads to people not being able to distinguish bullshit from truth.

Being trained to read and write literature works against this, because this trains us to feel a lie, in the quality of the prose. It also trains us to be comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction and to be suspicious of a too-neat view of things.

Like the one I’ve just put forth above.

OF: Last question: Is fiction too small and slow a tool for the big and fast challenges of today?

GS: Well, it might, in this cultural moment, be too niche. That is: it might be the case that not enough people are conversant in fiction for it to be transformative.

But I also think—I mean, I think this every day—that we don’t want to get too prescriptive or sure about what fiction (what art) does, or should do, or must do.  It’s just a good thing, in and of itself.  (If someone could prove to me that fiction had no political impact at all, I’d still write it.)

Art is always saying, “Don’t fence me in” and our current tendency (which I very much participate in) to tout art as a cure or balm for something is potentially too restrictive. 

Also, honestly: the challenges of today are the same old challenges, in new clothing.  For me, it’s all about the fact that we think we are separate from the rest of reality and so we defend ourselves (and that’s the seed of violence). Stuck in our individual minds, we work on behalf of ourselves and, in this, turn away from the fact that all of those other people are also stuck in their minds, fighting for themselves (and that’s the seed of non-love, of anti-compassion). These are things that art deals with, at its best, I think.

So, I say: make beautiful art to the best of your ability and send it out into the world not entirely sure what it will or will not do, and hope for the best.

And part of the reason for this is that the process of making art—of trying to make it be truthful and transcendent and all of that—it can change the artist himself.