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Ep. 37. Garth Greenwell, Small Rain
143 Plays12 days ago
In today's episode I talk to Garth Greenwell about his novel Small Rain (2024)
Garth Greenwell is the author of three books, most recently Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, his writing on culture appears widely, including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere; he also writes the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
Episode notes:
- Close reading of Raven Leilani's Luster
- George Oppen, 'Stranger's Child'
- T.J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing
Book recs:
- Ivana Sajko, Every Time We Say Goodbye
Follow the show on Instagram and subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here.
Follow Garth @ggreenwell on Bluesky, Instagram, X and Threads; or @garthgreenwell on Substack and Facebook.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction and Apology for Audio Issues
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, just a quick note from me at the top. There were some weird issues with Garth's audio. it kind of goes in and out. It didn't happen at the time of recording, so I didn't know that it was happening, and I've put every filter on this audio that I can, but I apologise for the weirdness of the audio. i hope it's still listenable and you still enjoy it, because this was one of the most thrilling conversations for me. Garth is one of my favourites, please do listen, and I'm sorry for the strange noises, but yeah, hope you enjoy it.
Introduction to 'Books Up Close' Show
00:00:33
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close. I'm Chris Lloyd. This is the close reading show for writers, writers and anyone interested in how texts get made. In today's episode, I talk to Garth Greenwell about his novel Small Rain.
00:00:48
Speaker
We talk about a passage from partway through chapter four. I should say when I started this podcast, like Garth, you were on my list of people I needed to talk to. So I am so happy you are here. You don't know how happy I am.
00:01:02
Speaker
Oh, well, thank you so much for having Of course.
Introduction to Garth Greenwell and His Accomplishments
00:01:05
Speaker
Garth Greenwell is the author of three books, most recently Small Rain, which won the 2025 Penn Fulton Award for Fiction and the Penn Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award.
00:01:14
Speaker
A Guggenheim Fellow, his writing on culture appears widely, including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper's, and elsewhere. He also writes the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought, which is very good. You must subscribe. He is a distinguished writer in residence at New York University.
00:01:29
Speaker
I'm so happy you're here. I want to talk to you. I love your brain. i love your books. So yeah, this is a joy for me. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I've been screaming about your books for so long.
00:01:39
Speaker
If anyone is like, what do I read? i'm like, go read any of these three. Well, bless you. Thank you so much. And I think we've got a lot to say about close reading as well, because you do a lot of this on your sub stack too, of like other people's work. I'm thinking especially of the Raven Leilani essay you wrote. can't remember what magazine that was in, where you read a passage of luster and you do proper close reading of that.
00:02:02
Speaker
passage is very exciting. So when I ask you how you feel about cloaks reading, I feel like you're going have thoughts.
The Infinite Value of Art and Close Reading
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you know, it's funny when you ask me about it.
00:02:12
Speaker
i mean, obviously it's it's sort of ah ah one of the principal activities of my life. You know, I mean, i I feel like my whole life is based on a kind of gamble about you know, a central belief I have that art is a source of value or that art allows us to line up our lives with a source of value. And with the idea that that value is, so far as we're concerned, infinite in the sense that it's it's so on such a scale that if it's not infinite, if infinitude doesn't exist, it might as well be infinite so far as we're concerned. Like no amount of looking...
00:02:53
Speaker
is going to exhaust a Cézanne painting. No amount of reading is going to exhaust a great poem. And it seems to me that the act of close reading, of sort of tuning yourself to a work of art, whether that's a painting or a poem or a piece of music,
00:03:10
Speaker
that that is a way of accessing that value. I mean, it it does feel to me like like one of the sort of higher uses to which we can put our existence, because I think art is um something without which it would be impossible for us to know ourselves, that art is central to humanness.
00:03:36
Speaker
um And therefore, that in both making art and also trying to access this value in art, trying to train our attention on art, we are engaged in one of the activities that allows us the fullest access to and also use of our humanness.
00:03:58
Speaker
whom And Small Rain is really a book about our humanness, right? In so many ways, the body at its limits, time at its strangest.
00:04:10
Speaker
I mean, I like doing these close readings and not necessarily telling listeners everything about the passage, you know, the stuff around it in case they haven't read it.
Discussion of 'Small Rain' and Health Crisis Chapter
00:04:18
Speaker
But do we want to gloss Small Rain briefly so they have context for this passage or do we just jump straight in?
00:04:24
Speaker
How do you feel? Yeah. I mean, I think it's worth saying, you know, this is a book about someone in a profound health crisis, someone who in his early 40s is facing a real possibility that he might not get to leave the hospital. He suffered and a tear in his aorta, and the book chronicles kind of 10 or 12 days that he spends in the cardiovascular i see you And it's probably worth saying about this chapter that you the strangest thing in the novel is um the opening of this fourth chapter or section of the novel in which the narrator just at great length um sort of reads and meditates on a poem. So this is a passage about reading.
00:05:14
Speaker
Yeah.
Close Reading and Its Importance
00:05:15
Speaker
And I thought, you know, this is a close reading show where we talk about close reading. so why not do a close reading of a passage about reading? I thought, you know, let's just go meta or, you know, go go greg or go home. um so yeah, I'd love if you could read it for us. This passage would be great.
00:05:31
Speaker
Sure. And maybe also to know that the narrator in his past taught high school. And so he's thinking here about teaching poems to his high school students.
00:05:43
Speaker
Read it again, i would tell my students. Read it more slowly. When they looked up, baffled by a poem, a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, maybe, whom I loved, baffled not because anything was difficult or unclear, but because nothing seemed to happen.
00:06:00
Speaker
Because they almost always thought and sometimes said, what was the point? Read it again. Read it more slowly. That was the whole of my pedagogy when I taught my students, who were pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time, which is a terrible way to live, dehumanizing. it disfigures existence.
00:06:29
Speaker
But it was difficult to defend the alternative, to justify it in terms of outcomes and deliverables, costs and benefits. It was indefensible by that logic. Its value lay in demonstrating the possibility of other logics, other relationships to value. I mean, other ways to live.
00:06:48
Speaker
The point was to perceive reality, I wanted to tell them. To see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention. The value of poems is tuning us to a different frequency of existence.
00:07:04
Speaker
But that knowledge is experiential. You can't explain it or demonstrate it or guarantee it. You can only try to tempt students toward it, entice them. And that had become harder and harder over the years when I taught high school, which were the years when everyone got smartphones. When I started, they were novelties, prestige items. And when I finished, they were ubiquitous.
00:07:28
Speaker
It had become more difficult for me too to find my way back to poems, to the mind space of poems.
The Significance of Sentences in Writing
00:07:35
Speaker
I'm on my phone as much as anybody else, scrolling and liking, atomizing my attention.
00:07:42
Speaker
Thank you so much. I recognize this. ah Teaching people about reading. There's so much I want to say about this. And a few friends who are told I told was doing this today, they're like, we want to ask about sentences.
00:07:57
Speaker
I feel like more than anyone, more than any writer I know at the moment, like you care about the sentence at as a unit, right? In the way that poets talk about the line, i feel like Garth Greenwell cares about the sentence.
00:08:11
Speaker
And this book, probably more than the other two, although, i don't know, maybe we could debate that, like the the length of the sentences in this book are ah really kind of unfolding. And part of that is mirroring thought, right, for much of this book, because he's so in his head, right, this guy in the bed. But it's also...
00:08:30
Speaker
mirroring other kinds of I don't know ah kind of like ongoingness right he's he's thinking and he's rethinking and he's questioning and I just want to ask you a about how you approach the long sentence like as a writer like how you are holding that in your brain and on the page we'll talk more about how you write later but like how you're thinking about the length of sentence Yeah, you know, I mean, when I'm writing, when I'm drafting, there's really not a lot of thinking happening or not a lot of propositional thinking happening. You know, I mean, one of the crucial things for me about close reading is that I think close reading is an artist's education, like close engagement with works of art that seem to us great.
00:09:16
Speaker
Like that is where we get our education. And in some way, when I'm, you know, reading somebody else's work or or writing about someone else's work, I'm hyper analytical in a way that is the opposite of how I am when I write. When I write, there's something that feels much more corporeal You know, it feels much more as though i am trying to find a way to like move through a space with a certain kind of balance. And it really does feel to me like a collaboration. I mean, it's not that I have this sort of sovereign will and intelligence that is going to say what it intends to say in a certain sort of formal way.
00:10:00
Speaker
scheme It's instead that I'm trying very hard to feel the the the energy of a sentence and to, in some way, take my marks from the sentence itself. So there, you know, and that sounds very, maybe mystical, but in fact, I think it's very concrete. Like, I mean, one, the energy of the syntax, just because of how English works, like with each word you put down, the field of choice radically narrows.
00:10:33
Speaker
And it comes to like, just in terms of like, what part of speech could follow. And so there comes a point in a sentence where, you know, the decision becomes, and again, decision feels too heady. It's like a ah bodily movement, do you want the pleasure of sort of going where the sentence wants to go? Or do you want the pleasure of somehow escaping that desire of the sentence, like on a purely syntactical level?
00:11:01
Speaker
But then there's also the fact that because of all the close reading I've done, because of, you know, in aesthetic formation, which has meant spending hundreds if or thousands of hours with Baldwin and James and memorizing Shakespeare sonnets and reading Wallace Stevens and studying with poets like Carl Phillips and Frank Bedard and Jory Graham, certain movements in language, certain patterns of language are magnetized.
00:11:31
Speaker
And there's a way that that tradition or the multiple traditions in which my aesthetic formation has occurred that those traditions exert a pressure
Writing as a Collaboration with Language
00:11:43
Speaker
on the sentence. There are certain patterns of language that I'm drawn to because of the formation that I've had. And those are things that I really welcome, that the sentence then becomes a collaboration.
00:11:57
Speaker
Because I do believe this cliche about art making, that sort of the work of art, if art making is going well, the work of art is smarter than the individual intelligence of the artist.
00:12:10
Speaker
And it's because of these, you know, this pressure of language, this pressure of tradition, that that can happen. So I feel very much that a sentence, I mean, obviously, I am writing it, my will is engaged.
00:12:23
Speaker
But also, it is something that is sort of leading me forward. And also, for me, it is not just the unit of composition, but also like the equipment of navigation.
00:12:37
Speaker
So sometimes I think of sentences as like heat-seeking devices that are sort of turning towards the place of greatest intensity.
00:12:48
Speaker
And i often don't know very much, if anything, about what I'm going to be writing after this sentence. You know, the the act of discovery of fiction making happens at the level of the sentence and within the sentence for me.
00:13:04
Speaker
Wow. And that's interesting because in this passage, which the first time I read it, I marked it because I was just like, it it was in my brain. And I was like, oh, I wonder what wonder which bits I marked. And I went back to i was like, a oh,
00:13:17
Speaker
This sentence is almost teaching us, teaching is maybe a strong word, but how to even read this book, right? Like read it again, i would tell my students, read it more slowly. so we've got already a repetition. And there's another read it again, read it more slowly in the next sentence. So repetition is like a real key thing.
00:13:34
Speaker
again, I don't want to say device because that sounds too strategic, but a key feature of this narrator's thinking and speech. But even read it again, i would tell my students, read it more slowly. When they looked up, baffled by a poem, a poem by Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop maybe, whom I loved.
00:13:50
Speaker
Baffled, like the turns of thought, as you say, like this heat seeking, which I really like as an image, moving through where kind of with his thoughts, it's like sometimes he's thinking aloud, sometimes he's telling us.
00:14:03
Speaker
I imagine it in different ways sometimes that it's like he's making sense of it to himself as well as to us. But I love that those early turns, like read it more slowly. a poem by Bishop, maybe, whom I loved, baffled. Like there is rhythm here too.
00:14:19
Speaker
And the turn. and it And it feels like you as author, whether, you know, you Garth or like author big A is saying, could you slow down? is not something you can rush through.
00:14:31
Speaker
For sure. Yeah. I mean, and that, you know, that that was something that was brought home to me very early, kind of in my literary education, that relationship between, you know, I guess, attempting to get beyond a kind of instrumental approach to a literary text or and or a kind of extractive approach, like, oh, there is some meaning here I need to get out, which then I can sort of carry with me. And instead, understanding that the meaning of a poem,
00:15:01
Speaker
is the experience of the poem and that it can't be extracted and that it can't be instrumentalized, that instead the value of poems comes in there allowing us access to a different mode of being as opposed to some paraphrasable little nugget of wisdom we could carry with us.
00:15:23
Speaker
And I guess, you know, very early on, I wasn't thinking about this, but like, you know, one of my earliest beliefs about poems comes from Elizabeth Bishop, who, you know, in an early essay, like quoted or found, or or maybe it wasn't an essay, but she found this quote somewhere. I feel like it was in a review Gosh, when I was in graduate school, I could have given you the citation, but I feel like she found this idea in like a review of an anthology of metaphysical poets.
00:15:55
Speaker
And it's the idea that a poem doesn't present a thought, but instead of mind thinking. And that, you know, that idea that sort of the ideal is to present not thought as something fixed and portable, but instead thought as an activity, as a movement, is something that's very appealing to me. And I think those repetitions, the way that a sentence can fall back on itself and then move forward and be, you can feel that it's exploring and trying different possibilities,
00:16:25
Speaker
You know, I think sometimes to some readers that can feel like messiness. And I understand that. And it's something that, you know, when I go back and read my first novel, you know, to me, like the sentences I'm writing now are clearly related to those. that It's not like it's a different writer. Right.
00:16:44
Speaker
that Those sentences are much more poised and formal. And there was a way that I did feel, again, I would never have put this in propositions, but that I was looking for, in small reign, like a different kind of movement.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yes. Something that was looser and more capacious and maybe capable of more surprise. You know, I wanted like more apertures in the sentences, more places where something foreign to the sentence or to what the sentence thought it was could kind of break into the sentence.
The Role of Pedagogy in Understanding Literature
00:17:17
Speaker
e And that like kind of mirrors the narrator's experience, right? like He is lying in bed, unable to move, do anything, really see people. like It's set during COVID as well, right? that So like his aperture is also like this, like contracting hopefully all the time in that he's thinking about his partner, then he's thinking about poetry, then he's thinking about music or like the state of...
00:17:44
Speaker
you know, social relations in some parts. And to so to have that kind of mirrored at the sentence level that, you know, this sentence could go, could go another way, even the way he, you know, in that line, baffled not because anything was difficult or unclear, but because nothing seemed to happen because they almost thought and sometimes said, i like that little ah balancing, always thought, sometimes said, what was the point?
00:18:10
Speaker
And I went like, to me, there's also like a little wink there about, like this book, right? Like sure this is not a book of action, shall we say, how much readers have taken, this book is such like ah an immersive experience. If you read it, you're kind of in it.
00:18:26
Speaker
i don't think I came up for air when I was reading. I read like each section at a time and kind of stopped. Cause was like, I think I need to put my head out of a window. I feel so immersed in a man's body. So I think there's like, there's a kind of funniness of being there being like, nothing seems to be happening. And then the very next line is read it again.
00:18:43
Speaker
read it more slowly. And you're like, ah I feel like I'm being taught here to read. I think, you know, most texts do that, right? They teach you how to read them in a way or kind of give you a, at least a map of how you could read it. Sure.
00:18:58
Speaker
And like, and that's when he said, that was the whole of my pedagogy. When I taught my students who are pressured everywhere else to be more efficient, to take in information more quickly, to make each moment count, to instrumentalize time,
00:19:09
Speaker
that two two, two, two, right? He's getting, this it almost sounds like a like an argument he's had to make the before. Yeah. Right. Like this is the this is his like, let me tell you it. Yeah, well, this is his, I mean, it's his sort of indication of the humanities. I mean, it it is where this becomes a little polemical and you sense that he is speaking into kind of argument.
00:19:35
Speaker
yeah you It was important to me in this long, because because this is nestled in this long reading of a very short poem by the American poet George Oppen. It was important to me somehow, even though this guy is alone in his hospital bed, and like this isn't one of those poems that he's taught a lot. like This is a poem that he has kept very close to him, in part because it's so mysterious. He knows his students would just be baffled by it. He doesn't know how to teach it And yet I wanted somehow to give the sense that like, even when we're alone in bed, you know, engage, I mean, there's a way in which the reading of a poem sort of at this pitch is an act of such intimacy that,
00:20:21
Speaker
And yet it's also relational. So, I mean, as he's reading a poem, like his students and these conversations that he's had over years with his students, that has become part of his reading. So in some sense, you know, there is a social aspect. Yeah. Even though there's nobody there for him to talk to, you know, he's talking with all of these people that he sort of carries within himself and brings therefore to his reading of of any poem.
00:20:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I think, I mean, the idea of teaching as well, right? Like, the this isn't just, I'm a writer and I'm sharing my work in different spaces, but, like, he's he's always sharing work, right? He's trying to get other, he's trying to bring other people in, right? that's That's what we do as teachers, right? It's like, hey, there's this text, I need you to understand it in some way or take something from it, right? And pedagogy runs through all of your three novels, right? Like, if it's the same narrator, if it's not, i whatever we can have that discussion or not but the idea of teaching of kind of reaching out to the other in a relationship of I have something I know or think about and want you to also think about it runs through these three books in such like an interesting way like this is the one where I guess the narrator is most explicit about like this is what I want to do in teaching yeah and the thing he wants to do more than anything else is like I can't actually tell you
00:21:45
Speaker
Right. um but You can't explain it, demonstrate it or guarantee it. You can only try to tempt students towards entice them. Those two were tempted, entice. Like this is about desire, right? Like this is about and desire and teaching also runs through cleanness.
00:22:03
Speaker
that's situation That's a thing for another day. Yeah, I'm interested in those kind of words, right? Like in this early part, he's really talking about information, instrumentalization, dehumanization, these very like heavy words. But the shift is towards actually to pull someone in, you can only just like draw them. Like there is desire. here there's there's There's a subtlety that I'm really interested in.
00:22:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I mean, you know, this is something about teaching the humanities, and it's why it's so hard to defend the humanities in these conversations that take as normative the kinds of sort of skills and and measurable abilities that pertain in cut STEM classes, say. Yeah.
Defending the Humanities and Their Role in Education
00:22:50
Speaker
Whereas in the human and like, I think, you one of the tragic things that has happened, at least in the United States, is that humanities departments have tried to make arguments justifying themselves in those terms.
00:23:06
Speaker
And I feel like once you start trying to use those terms, you've given up the game because the humanities are about something else. I mean, the humanities are about trying to understand Like, what is the point of being a human being? Like, what is, you know, the end in the sense of the goal, the telos of our existence? And how can we achieve that?
00:23:31
Speaker
It's about a way of being. And so, you know, as opposed to a way of a kind of instrumental knowledge that allows us to manipulate the world in a certain way, that's not what the humanities are about. And so I do think the most powerful thing, when I think of the teachers who have been most powerful for me, I mean, they certainly, they taught me lots, you know, they taught me lots of information, but much more than that, they modeled for me a way of being.
00:23:56
Speaker
they They modeled for me, they revealed to me some potential for meaning in human life that I was not aware it was there.
00:24:08
Speaker
And that's what the humanities are about. They're about, you know, equipping students to live lives that feel meaningful to them. And when I look around at the chaos and disorder of the world, I mean, it seems to me that what we are suffering from is a crisis meaning, of that sense of meaning, and the kind of, very often, a kind of ambition for measurable you know wealth, measurable prestige, measurable power that is actually expressive of just an absolute despair about real meaning right and about the possibility of it.
00:24:46
Speaker
like But even in this moment, right, like there's some real alliteration of that D sound that i didn't hear I didn't see on the page until you read it aloud, but like dehumanizing, difficult, defend, deliverables, right? It was indefensible, demonstrating, like it really gets quite heavy with those Ds, right? Like this, as as his force kind of like ups, it was indefensible by that logic. Its value lay in demonstrating the possibility of other logics.
00:25:12
Speaker
And then it almost like, the air comes out of that anger, other relationships to value. i mean, other ways to live like that. I mean, it's like a really like that's so the narrator of this book, right? They're like, I'm telling you this really strong argument, but actually what I mean is actually this, this other thing, this other way more profound thing.
00:25:32
Speaker
i just love that. I mean that, that you allow the sentence to kind of change and unfold as, as the narrator would think it. I like that reading a lot. I mean, i I do think one of the dramas in the book is sort of the narrator, you know, who has been schooled in this kind of instrumental reasoning, this debate, you know, there's stuff in the book about his father having been an attorney and, you know he's been schooled in these ways of relation that he thinks are super problematic and doesn't want. And I do think there's a way that he repeatedly in the book says,
00:26:09
Speaker
you know finds himself arguing and then reminding himself that actually he wants a kind of thinking... that escapes argument. Like he wants a different, that actually the kind of fixity and calcification that happens the moment you step into a debate, um that's what he wants to get past, you know?
00:26:33
Speaker
So yeah, I like the way you put that. There is this kind of, I think repeatedly in the book, this sort of rhetorical inflation of a kind of argumentative style, and then sort of that inflation is popped or pricked, and it deflates back into this truer space of exploration or bewilderment.
00:26:56
Speaker
Yeah. It's those little human moments where you'd see the narrator not as someone who's kind of railing against something or kind of lecturing us, but rather... It's like, no, I'm just trying to get at the best way of saying this.
00:27:09
Speaker
Yeah. And not sure every novel allows prose to do that. Right. I'm not sure. i had this conversation with ah Sasha Debevec McKinney about her poems and she writes very long lines. And I was asking her about like the long line versus the short line and and what a long line can hold.
00:27:27
Speaker
And she said, like, oh, I feel much safer with the long line, right? Because she's like, there's just so much you can, like, put in there. Whereas if you've got three words on the line, like, you're really exposed. And and as we were kind of talking back and forth about that. But for me, there's always something, like, riskier about, like, letting something spread out and trusting that the reader can sit with it and let it flow, right? I always think about the, um not to get too theory, but, you know, the kind of, like, Derrida idea that meaning only comes...
00:27:54
Speaker
like retrospectively at the end of the sentence, right? You have to keep reading to the very end and only then can you make sense of the whole thing you've just done. So yeah you're always in suspense as you read. yeah His point is the language is always in suspense until the end and then it's the end, right? yeah um That's a dumbed-down version of Derek, our listeners.
00:28:10
Speaker
But you know what I mean? And I think there's a There's an interesting way that some of these sentences, they go one way and then you you turn it another way and you're like, oh I needed that ending, actually. I needed it to string out for so long in order to get that payoff, if you like, quote unquote.
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, and I do think, you know it's funny because for so long, certainly North American prose has been governed by, know, sort of the strunken white strictures of economy, economy, economy, economy or like, you know, Hemingway's those stupid ideas that people take from Hemingway that he obviously didn't follow himself about like cutting adverbs, you know, ah active, et cetera, which, you know, mean, that can be productive of really extraordinary writing. Like I think Hemingway is one of the great stylists in English, but there's also, there is, i think that alternative value of a kind of copiousness and the kind of thinking that comes from,
00:29:12
Speaker
as you say, sort of in this movement. But there is also irony. I mean, I'm i'm quite ah drawn or compelled by sort of both extremes. And there is a kind of irony that, you know there's all of this language flowing out about this poem by George Oppen, who is very much someone who, you know, the poems are concentrated. They're sort of etched out of silence. You know, every word counts. There's not and there's not a spare word.
00:29:43
Speaker
um So I hope that the book, you know, as in sort of of all of the thinking I do about art, you know, I'm always trying to find ways to remind myself that art is always bigger than anything we can say about it. And that like any idea I have about art, actually, i love art that embodies, you know, the opposite value and that that is the world we want to live in, you know, which is also something like when I was in graduate school, I felt so surrounded by polemics about what poetry should be or shouldn't be, et cetera. And all of that is so stupid, you know? I mean, of course, like we want to live in a world where
00:30:17
Speaker
Poetry is always escaping our ideas about it, you know. um man Yeah. and And that the point was to perceive reality, I wanted to tell them.
00:30:28
Speaker
To see things that are only visible at a different speed, a different pitch of attention, a different frequency of existence. And that, you know, that kind of links to what you're saying there. This kind of, this is about like another mode altogether. Like the question you're asking is wrong. Like we're we're talking in a different, we're talking about different things in different ways. Yeah. i As my, one of my colleagues says, you you got the wrong end of the wrong stick, right? Yeah.
00:30:53
Speaker
It's just a whole other thing. And obviously this section is all about poetry, right? And the narrator really cares about poetry. But as you just kind of hinted at, like the your prose is very much different from that.
00:31:04
Speaker
and And much of what he's saying here is that poetry takes us elsewhere. But i met you must imagine prose does that too? Or do you think prose and poetry are operating in?
00:31:15
Speaker
No, and I think this is true of of any work of art. yeah um So, you know, poetry, the narrator is a poet. He thinks a lot about poetry.
00:31:26
Speaker
um So that's, and he teaches poetry. So, but he also does think about visual art. And then especially he thinks about music. Yeah. And um so, no, I mean, that's I think he would make that claim. I would certainly make that claim about art in general. And I just think that it's like the the small poem is this little little just like this little case study, if you like, of like the way that that this one thing can open a whole other world. Right. To the people reading.
00:31:55
Speaker
But then, but by the end of the passage, he says, he talks about the students and their phones. It'd become more difficult for me, too, to find my way back to poems, to the mind space of poems.
00:32:08
Speaker
And I mentioned that idea that, you know, this isn't like an age thing, right? This isn't like, oh, the kids these days and their phones. But it's like, we're we're all, we've all been hijacked.
00:32:18
Speaker
so or rewired to this different kind of interaction scrolling liking attention atomization but the how does one find one's way back to a poem right is is the question is is it just reading slowly is it close reading is it do you know mean like what what does the narrator think about the mind space of poems how does one get there for him I do think mainly it is like putting your phone in a different room and sitting with a pole and
00:32:51
Speaker
and you know and And being patient with yourself as your mind sort of scuttles around looking for you know whatever dopamine triggers you can find and then slowly settles into a poem. I do think that's it. Or going to a museum without your phone and sitting for an hour in front of a painting. Or going to, you know, I'm in Iowa City now, but I spent the last semester in New York. And when I'm in New York,
00:33:19
Speaker
you know I go to the opera as often as I can. and it is and I always sit in the balcony, in the first row of the balcony, so I can see down into the orchestra. And it is just amazing to me.
00:33:32
Speaker
And it makes me sad and angry. And some I want to be that old guy sort of shouting. Although, actually, it's old people who are the worst about this, at least at the opera. you know People who are on their phones like during the opera. During?
00:33:47
Speaker
During the opera. And, you know, and of course the screen, know, you see it just lights up. And so you see these lit screens down there and yeah, and that those aren't kids. Like those are people who are older than I am for the most part.
00:34:00
Speaker
And I do think just like put away your phone and just sit and, you know, experience something that is not controlled by your scrolling or your swiping.
00:34:13
Speaker
And give yourself up to it like that experience. I think it's so crucial. Like if we really lose that and lose our capacity for that, I mean, I think we will be something we won't recognize.
00:34:27
Speaker
um And I find that, well, I mean, for lots of people, that's the goal, you know, I mean, to sort of be transhuman, to sort of escape the human being. that's not my goal it it fills me with terror and dread I guess or just maybe even not terror but like just like deep deep sadness yeah deep sadness I do enough ranting about generative AI but the the humanness is the thing that the narrator is telling us to to focus on right like humanness is both the cause of this piece of art right like it's where the art came from but it's also the thing that it take that the art takes us towards right
Art's Transformative Power on Perception
00:35:07
Speaker
Right. yeah Like if you can sit with it, you might find other ways to live. There may be other ways of seeing, thinking, doing, being, living. And that is like this fundamental transformation.
00:35:18
Speaker
Right. It's a thing. And I guess that's what you're saying, like, but like give yourself over to work about. That's about like giving up something. Right. Giving up agency, giving up control or comfort or whatever. And I think that's scary for some people.
00:35:32
Speaker
Sure, of course it is. I mean, you know, and in the opera, in any sort of experience in theater, I mean, you know, you might have a bad experience. Like that happens all the time and then you're just stuck, you know? and you know, if you're having a bad experience of Tristan and Gisolda, you're stuck for a really long time. and you But that's also part of humanness. You know, i mean, another thing that I think, ah you know, and I feel this, especially in the United States, you know,
00:36:00
Speaker
I remember i'd be quite literally my father, my father who grew up dirt poor on a tobacco farm and then became an attorney. You know, he used to just one of the earliest things I can remember him saying to me is like, it's like there's no point doing something if you're not going to be the best at it.
00:36:16
Speaker
And like that's such a horrifying way to live. Because actually, someone was saying something about this to me the other day, like like trying to say, oh, but I was saying something about art. And he said, oh, but if you believe that about art, then you know there's no difference between a ah kid playing with crayons and Cezanne And I was like, well, look, like obviously there's a difference and it's important to hold on to the difference in certain kinds of thinking. But in another way, no, I mean, art making is art making and it doesn't matter if you're bad at it.
00:36:47
Speaker
Like it is better for you 100% to, you know, make a bad drawing or write a bad poem than to spend an hour scrolling on your phone. Like one of those is an expression of humanness and the other one is a kind of relinquishing of humanness And it's the way another sort of interesting argument I got in a friend, you know, there's there's a a lot of people sort of arguing like, oh, AI art actually isn't better. It's that when we think something is AR, we is AI made made by AI, we degrade it, we judge it more harshly.
00:37:25
Speaker
And I was like, well, that just seems obviously false to me. like like but But it's the wrong question. Like, is it better or worse? Like, of course, there's lots of human-made art that's atrocious. yeah But it's atrocious in such interesting ways. you know And AI art is all bad in the same way.
00:37:45
Speaker
And there's something in that, too. Like, I would so much rather... live in a world of atrocious art that is expressive of humanness than in the world of, you know, ai slick competence. Yeah. Like, so I just, I feel like, again, that's another kind of debate that we fall into. And it's like the minute you fall into the debate of like, is a art worse or better than human made art?
00:38:12
Speaker
Like that question actually is giving up the game. Like you can't, allow yourself to engage with that question because the real point is lost in that question.
00:38:23
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Everyone, we need to refuse the questions, but this is like, yeah, you cannot let that question set the terms of the dialogue. Yeah. Yeah. yeah You're right. I get that.
00:38:35
Speaker
This is helpful. This is helpful, from my brain, Garth. Thank you. Because I feel like I spend all of my days fighting people about this. So these this is useful to me. i want to use this as a segue, an awkward segue into your writing practice.
00:38:50
Speaker
I want to know, yeah, do you do you always write in the same way? Do you write by hand Are you in the same spot in your house, the same time of day? like Do you have any of that kind of structure are you writing differently, depending?
Greenwell's Writing Routine and Discipline
00:39:02
Speaker
So I do have that structure when I'm working on a novel. When I'm working on a novel, well, so I only write fiction by hand. Okay. And that's really crucial to sort of write by hand.
00:39:16
Speaker
No screens anywhere. Where I am right now, which is in my studio in my house in Iowa City, is where I usually do work, but sometimes I'll go to a cafe or something.
00:39:28
Speaker
And it also, like, when I'm working on a novel, it's the first thing I do. So... And I don't have any rules for myself about how much I have to write it because I feel like that's really not in my control.
00:39:42
Speaker
i do have rules about how much time i spend. So like basically the rule is like my ass has to be in the chair for a certain amount of time. And if that happens, it doesn't matter if I've written a word or not. But so long as I've been in my chair with my notebook open and I haven't been doing anything else, like I've done my job, like I've done my work for the day.
00:40:03
Speaker
So that's all yeah that's all part of a writing routine. I like writing at home where I have this big L-shaped desk. And on either end, there is a bed for my cats.
00:40:18
Speaker
And most mornings, ah most actually not just mornings, like pretty much the whole day, like I'm working at my desk and my two cats are sleeping their beds. next to me and that for me and my partner who's in spain right now but um my partner is upstairs in his studio working and like that for me is happiness you know to be in that situation it sounds ideal and like the light is coming through those windows i can see you've got beautiful trees outside it's it looks pretty idyllic it's pretty nice whereas my cat just won't sleep he'll just like sit on me or like stand on the keyboard or you know he's very he wants to be involved in everything
00:40:56
Speaker
That's also fine. when they were i have these I was just looking at a photo. that Well, because this semester, when I was in New York, it was the longest I've ever been separated from my cats. And so I would just look on my phone at photos of them.
00:41:10
Speaker
And one of the first photos of them, we adopted them during the pandemic when they were babies when we adopted them. And they're both on my lap and I have my notebook. I'm writing like the very first pages of Small Rain and like, and they're, you know, playing, trying to grab my pen and playing with each other.
00:41:30
Speaker
And that also is happiness. just I love this. Yeah. Do you care about the notebook? Do you care about the pen? You know, I used to very much. So I started writing prose when I was in Bulgaria where I taught for four years.
00:41:47
Speaker
And I was very addicted. So on I walked to work every morning, which was like a mile, mostly ah along this main sort of boulevard.
00:41:58
Speaker
And there were these little shops, these sort of shacks along the way. And there was a stationary place, which was where kids would buy school supplies.
00:42:09
Speaker
And I got these, I've got like the cheapest possible little ring bound notebook that had like these pictures of like, you know, like kitsch, cliche, Bulgaria scenes. And it said, Nascita Bulgaria on it, our Bulgaria.
00:42:25
Speaker
And so it had, I had to write in that notebook. And then there was a pen that you cannot get in the United States. that I loved. i it was so cheap. You it was like both of those things were very cheap, but that was crucial.
00:42:40
Speaker
I still write and with with cheap materials. It's important to me to write with cheap materials um and in like spiral bound notebooks. not and Sometimes people will give me gifts and they'll give me some like fancy, beautiful notebook. And I always say, oh, thank you so much. It's so beautiful. And I know I will never write in it. Like I can't imagine using something like that That's so funny. I had this same conversation with Fatima Butoh, but not because she has a she's a very different taste in books, but she likes the notebook she likes. And people will always give a notebook. She's like, I don't know what to tell you, but I'm never using this. Like, it's just going to go on the pile with the other notebooks.
00:43:19
Speaker
My partner is also addicted to notebooks, but he loves, i mean, he has drawer folds of notebooks of all different types. Anywhere he goes, he wants to buy a notebook and he does, he's always using them. Like he just, I can't do that though.
00:43:36
Speaker
I wanted to ask, obviously you teach and you teach literature and writing. Do you have any prompts or exercises that you do with students that you think listeners might benefit from?
00:43:48
Speaker
Well, you know, I really, i don't do many exercises. It's funny. I feel like I did more when I was teaching poetry than when I'm teaching prose. I've always been jealous of visual artists who have, you know, they're able to sketch.
00:44:05
Speaker
see That's something that I've always just been hugely jealous of, that they can open up a notebook and sketch. And so I do tell my students a kind of sketching exercise, which which is, know, it's just you sit down with your notebook or a sheet of paper, you make five columns, one for each of the senses, and you just record sensory details.
00:44:28
Speaker
And it is a way of sort of making a snapshot. And it was very helpful to me when I was working on cleanness, because my first novel I wrote and finished while I was in Bulgaria. But cleanness, I wrote about half of that in the United States.
00:44:43
Speaker
And I found um I would get blocked because I couldn't, for whatever reason, you know so much of that book is invented, but I could not invent anything about place.
00:44:56
Speaker
like It felt like a violation. you but in such a stupid way, like I would think, oh, I don't remember what this particular street corner smelled like 2 a.m. m And I'd be like, just like...
00:45:10
Speaker
whatever, somebody's smoking a cigarette or somebody's, you know, or there's like somebody selling roasted nuts or whatever, you know, but I just couldn't do it. And so when I would go to Bulgaria every year and spend a month or two, and I would just go to places that I knew I was going to write about, and I would just like fill pages of sensory detail. And that then I was able to draw on when I was writing those stories.
00:45:35
Speaker
That's amazing. I will be trying that. Okay, one question. do you have any good books or essays on writing practice that you go to or recommend? Are there ones that you think about?
00:45:46
Speaker
You know, the the best book about kind of creative engagement that I know is actually not about writing. It's not even about art making. It's by an an art historian and critic, T.J. Clark.
00:46:04
Speaker
And the book is called The Sight of Death. And that's maybe the most inspiring book I know. It's a book of close reading. It's it's a book of he's just looking for a very long time at these Poussin paintings.
00:46:21
Speaker
um But that is a book I turn to when I want to feel inspired about the possibilities of art and of making art. Amazing. The question to end that I ask everyone is what other books do you want to recommend? They can be old things, new things, stuff not yet out.
00:46:39
Speaker
What are the books that you want to thrust into listeners' hands? You know, with my sub stack, I have a book club. And every other month we meet and we talk about a new book, which sometimes is a book that I've read and am excited to share and think about with other people. And sometimes it's a book that's new to me, but that for whatever reason i want to read.
00:47:00
Speaker
And we are reading in June next month, a book by a Croatian writer named Ivana Saiko. that's called Every Time We Say Goodbye. And I've been hearing sort of murmurs about this writer um from European friends. Like she's starting, she just won a big German prize. She lives in Berlin. And so I feel like people are talking about her in Europe, but like as always in North America, we're being very slow about it. um She has two books available in English published in North America by the very small, wonderful, but very, very small press, Bibliosis.
00:47:40
Speaker
And we're of reading her most recent book to be published here, which is called Every Time We Say Goodbye in English. It's actually called Little Deaths in Croatian. This book, I think it is extraordinary. Every chapter is a single sentence.
00:47:56
Speaker
um Which I could imagine feeling hokey, but I find these sentences just electrifying. And really, like it's been a long time since I have read a writer new to me and just sort of felt like the top of my head was coming off, like I was so excited.
00:48:12
Speaker
So Ivana Saiko, every time we say goodbye. That's an amazing recommendation. Yeah. I'm already a excited. Long sentences, single sentence. Yeah, I'm in You sold me.
00:48:25
Speaker
Garth, thank you so much for your time today. i really, really appreciate it. oh it's been such a pleasure. Thank you again for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you liked this one, maybe go back to episode 23 with Salim Haddad for some very different queer fiction, but also of a person making an argument out loud. Or go to episode 26 with Sasha Debevet McKinney, who I mentioned in the episode for her poetry where we talk about line length.
00:48:51
Speaker
Please subscribe to the show if you haven't already. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or on YouTube. Share with people in all the places. Follow the show and me on Instagram. You can get show transcripts and more information on the sub stack. The show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Hertfordshire.