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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We are talking icons today. It's no exaggeration to say that George Saunders is one of the greatest American short story writers alive right now. His novel Lincoln in the Bardo won the Booker Prize. He's a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine and is also a Professor of Creative Writing at Syracuse. In the fall of 2022, he released his first short story collection in more than a decade. It is called Liberation Day.

There are twisted dystopian tales, a love letter between a grandpa and grandson, and January 6th-like trouble, and so much more. He joined us in the middle of our pledge drive and had some kind words to say about WNYC and somebody else.

George Saunders: Can I just second the notion that you're a national treasure and urge everybody to, during the next 20 minutes, pile on and make you look good by supporting WNYC and you.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for the thumbs up. Appreciate it. I thought we'd start out a little bit from the book, and since we're near Halloween, maybe read the first couple of paragraphs of Ghoul. You can maybe set it up for us and read a bit.

George Saunders: Sure. The setup is weirder than this. We're in a hell-themed theme park, like a haunted house but with quite a bit of money to make it nice. Our narrator, he's a Ghoul and he likes it. He likes his job. The story starts out like this. At noon, Layla wheels over Vat of Lunch. For a sec I can be not-scary, leaning against our plastiform wall meant to resemble human entrails. "Why aren't the old served first?," crabs Leonard, Squatting Ghoul Two, senior to all.

Last week Leonard’s knee went out. We, his fellow Squatting Ghouls, have since been allowing him to sit upon our plastiform Remorseful Demon, which, at this moment, emits one of its periodic Remorse-groans. “Grieve on, foul beast,” I say, per Script. “Foul indeed!,” says Artie, Feuding Ghoul Four. Great guy, always blurting out such quips as, “Brian, you are really on it, in terms of the way you keep casting your eyes fitfully back and forth while squatting!” To which I might reply, “Thanks, Artie, you Feuding Ghouls are also ripping it up. I so admire how, every day, you guys come up with a whole new topic for your Feud!”

Into my paper bowl goes, lunch. A broth with, plopped down in it, a single gleaming Kit Kat. Someday I, too, may be old, knees giving out, some group of Squatting Ghouls as yet unborn, or currently mere Li’l Demons, running around in their bright-red diapers, allowing elder me, kaput like Leonard, to sit on, perhaps, this very same plastiform Remorseful Demon, in that dismal future time. Today, however, all is well. Break Week is nigh.

Alison Stewart: I laughed out loud when I heard 'Artie', Feuding Ghoul Four. You know, Artie.

[laughter]

George Saunders: Yes, of course, Artie.

Alison Stewart: When you're going about writing a short story, you have to create a world quickly, like in this case. How did you go about it in this story?

George Saunders: The honest answer is mostly just by trying to have fun, trying to come up with language that's lively. If you just do that, you'll find yourself making a world pretty quickly out of necessity. You have to supply a lot of details, you have to go into it a little more quickly than you might want to. I think it's mostly, I see my job as making mutual fun. I'm having fun and hopefully, following behind me, you have fun as well. In a sense, we make that world together. I'll blurt out something about this plastiform demon. Suddenly, I brought it into being, and then I have to remember that it's there and add the rest of the world to it. My mantra is just fun. That's the main thing.

Alison Stewart: Sometimes you challenge us a little bit too, we have to figure it out because in the Ghoul, you're like, "Okay, I know where I am." In Elliott Spencer, the short story, the language, it's broken up their brackets a little bit jagged. We get to that the protagonist who is an 89-year-old, whose memory is wiped as part of a program to use poor people, notably people as political protesters. How did you come up with the style of this.

The first line is, "Today is to be, parts of the, part of my, [unintelligible 00:04:39]. Please do, points at parts of me while saying the name of it off our words worth knowing. Finger, wrist," and it goes on like this. Then we have to get into it. How did you come up with this style for this particular story?

George Saunders: Sometimes I'll just have a little thought experiment. My wife and I are Buddhists and I was thinking about this actually incorrect idea that you're trying to have no thoughts. I thought, "Okay, if a person was surgically freed of all thoughts, and the brain was just there, only the operating system, what would their first efforts at communication be like?" I just set myself that challenge, knowing that the language would be weird, and trying to discover what the language was.

The first few weeks is just, let's try to come up with an original-sounding language. Then after that, it's like, who's speaking here? From that, that's where you get the whole world built out. Once you've made the funny language or the strange language, you try to determine who's speaking it. As you're suggesting, part of the fun of that is, I don't really know, either, at first. I'm really just figuring it out.

Then my theory is that that means that you and I, the writer and the reader, are going to be joined together in mutual befuddlement for a little bit. I'm going a little bit ahead of you, I'm working really hard to make this world coherent, but also to go a little faster than you're comfortable with. Then, if you follow me, there's a feeling of mutual adventure and hopefully, mutual respect [unintelligible 00:06:10].

Alison Stewart: My guest is George Saunders. The new collection of stories is called Liberation Day. It is out now. There's one called Love Letter and it's written from the perspective of a grandfather to his grandson in an unspecified year in the 2020s. Possibly could be read to be inspired by January 6th. I'll ask straight up, when did you write the story?

George Saunders: I wrote it very soon after-- Actually, I think I don't remember, but I think it's actually before the election, maybe. Certainly, in that same spirit of just being a person of a certain age, he was like, "We actually could lose this democracy. It could actually happen in my lifetime. What am I doing about it?" It was unusual for me, and that it came out of a real, just a genuine feeling of political agitation or mourning.

I just put that down on the page and enjoyed the honesty of it, and then waited for that person to become somewhat different from me. He's a little more cautious than I hope I will be in that situation. It felt really good to just turn to the elephant in the room and say, "Wow, this country that I've loved so much might actually change forever." It actually might in my lifetime.

Alison Stewart: How is the grandfather feeling in the story, when we first meet him?

George Saunders: He's got a grandson who's contemplating taking some action against this authoritarian regime. I think the grandfather just feels so much love for the kid, that he doesn't want him to be at risk. He doesn't want his grandson to be a hero, he just wants him to keep his head down and enjoy such pleasures as he can, which, in a certain way, it's a sensible idea, especially if things have gotten out of control. That's the beginning.

He's just trying to quietly advise this kid he loves very much, trying to give him the long view, like, "I know, you're young, some of your friends are in trouble, you want to help them, but let me tell you from my vantage point, just keep your head down. Then, the life will give you certain pleasures that you won't get if you're in prison or you're--" That's the starting place.

Alison Stewart: There is a laugh-out-loud story called 'A thing at work'. These two women, who just want to get at each other, and we hear their inner monologue. They're very different. We also realize that almost all the characters in this story really care what other people think about them. First of all, what did you want to get out of office dynamics?

George Saunders: I had about eight years of office dynamics in Rochester. I had really rich years where our kids were [unintelligible 00:08:54]. We only had one car, and I was biking to work. I was a tech writer, but I did a lot of photocopying [laughs]. Also, I was in charge of the title pages, so that was a pretty heavy burden. I just noticed that in that situation, people, even in that small kingdom, you're forced to fight for your terrain. If you're somehow perceived to be less important, you might be treated badly, and if certain things happen, you could be let go.

I was just trying to get at that, that even in that small, almost homely environment with 15 employees, you still sometimes end up fighting for the scraps. For me, the plot engine is often just show somebody thinking for a few pages. If you get somebody thinking in a convincing way, the plot is almost sure to happen. Somebody is phobic of spiders, and you hear her talking about it for three pages. All you need is a spider and you got plots. That was part of that. It was just to get to know those three people and then wait for the moment when they started butting heads a little bit.

Alison Stewart: You're also poking at class in this story.

George Saunders: Yes, yes, because one of the characters is somewhat "lower class" than the others and that's all well and good until trouble starts, and then she's quite disposable. She's also not a perfect person. She's fireable. I guess in the end, my hope is that you really feel it when she gets fired. You could see, "Yes, she's somewhat of an obnoxious person. She's stolen from her job. She self-justifies." I wanted all that to be in play and then also for your heart to break a little bit when she is sent out into the street.

That's something that fiction can do is it reminds us how multiply we can feel at any moment. I think in real life and certainly on social media life, we're inclined to be one strong opinion we've got to take on something. That's okay, but then fiction can show us that we're capable of many, many different and contradictory feelings at once. I would contend that we're actually more powerful and more wise in that wide-open state that fiction can sometimes put us into.

Alison Stewart: Something that that story made me think about is, when in the moment in your life are you just going to stop caring what other people think?

[laughter]

George Saunders: Exactly. If you're me, the answer is not yet. Isn't it?

Alison Stewart: Depends. I have to catch me on a certain day. Some days I guess I've gotten to the age where I'm like, "Man, no more blapes left to give." Other days, that's not.

George Saunders: No. I know. It's so sweet, really. One of the things that's in the book, it's just that idea that every religion, everything tells us minimize the self, get away from the self, understand the self correctly. At the end of the day, it's kind of sweet to have a self. It's one of the most addictive things there is, to try to position yourself well vis-a-vis other people and to accomplish things.

The book was, for me, interesting to say, on the one hand, the self is the problem, and then on the other, the self is the gift. That's the Chekhovian model. You say thing A, which is true and you prove it, and then you put thing B, which contradicts thing A, you prove that. Then you turn to Chekhov and you say, "Which one is true, Anton?" He goes, "Duh, both." The beautiful contradiction.

Alison Stewart: My guest is George Saunders. The name of his new collection of short stories is called Liberation Day. It is out now. Now, the first story is not so short, Liberation Day. The title story is the longest in the collection. The main character has had his memory removed and is pinned to the wall like a puppet to perform and reenact Custer's last stand. It gets pretty wacky. [chuckles]

George Saunders: I don't know. That sounds like a pretty typical story.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] When you think about-- first of all, aside from its length, why did you want this to be the introductory story and the title story?

George Saunders: Once I got it finished, it seemed like a good way to wind up the spring, to introduce a lot of the themes that were going to be in the rest of the book. It just felt like what I do with these stories, I line them all up at the end and put them on index cards, and move them around kind of like Rubik's cube. Just seem like the best way to step across the transform a little boldly.

Alison Stewart: What does writing dystopian fiction allow you to explore that you might not be able to in some of the other stories?

George Saunders: I think it's mostly a way of breaking a certain habit I have. When I was younger, I was a big Hemingway guy, so I had a, I don't know, a habitual realist stance that didn't really serve me well. It didn't let me use my gifts and it also didn't let me explore. When I put something in a weird place and a weird setting, it just confuses me a little bit. It gives me a lot of voice to play with. Mostly, it means that I can't be Hemingway light.

When you go into comedic mode, it just opens up certain things in my mind. Then, again, what it does is it makes me unsure of what I'm doing. Donald Barthelme had that great line about the writer is that person who, embarking on her task, has no idea what to do. To be in a position where you really don't have an agenda, you don't have a political intention, you don't have any idea about theme, you're just playing. I think that makes a real hospitable place for the reader to follow you in. Again, instead of me pulling up the dump truck of my ideas and plopping it on you, it's the two of us wandering into unknown territory together.

In the best case, the result can be, you as a reader are looking at me as a writer and together we're saying, "Is this how it is? Oh, it is, isn't it? Oh, wow. It's hard in this world." Somehow, through that communion that we have together, the jokes and the surprises and so on, I think it's just a light mutual reassurance of the other person's reality. Even in times like these, I think that's quite a lot to do. If I can touch you and you can say, "I feel like there's somebody out there who's having a similar experience to me," that's not so bad for eight or nine pages or 60 or whatever.

Alison Stewart: Last year, you launched a newsletter on Substack called Story Club with George Saunders. On the front page of the Substack is a photo of what you call your little writing shed in the hills in California. When you look at the photo, it is in fact a tiny shed.

George Saunders: It's a tough shed, actually.

Alison Stewart: It's a tough shed. Is that where you truly write?

George Saunders: It truly is. I'd say it's up on a hill behind the house and the internet doesn't work so well up there. It's a great place to work. I wrote A Swim in a Pond in the Rain there and I wrote most of book up there. It's great.

Alison Stewart: That was author George Saunders on his new short story collection, Liberation Day, his first in a decade.

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Alison Stewart: Next, we'll finish up the show with another iconic writer, Isabel Allende, whose new novel tackles immigration and displacement from Nazi Germany to today. This is All Of It.

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