The Passage

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 pagesPolishing first lines to a high shineThe benefits of writing an entire manuscript longhandUsing voice memos and photos as notesStorytelling and the art of stand-up comedyCutting the “throat clearing” from early draftsIsaac’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 animalsThe multiple scrapped projects he wrote between his debut novel, The Library at Mount Char, and BlacktailHis wife as his trusted first readerThe checklist he created and reviews drafts againstThe 80,000 words he spent trying to crack the first chapter of Mount Char that ended up on the cutting room floorThe 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 WilliamsScott'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-Eyeforgotten daughteralone and childlessmate of noneclaims 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 bookResearching the history of commercial whaling in the 1840sTaking inspiration from poetsThe luxury of writing as a graduate studentCreative nonfiction writing exercisesWriting while runningBathsheba’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 YaleFinding Trudeau's crude early strips on his first day in the archives, and the doubts it raised about taking on the projectThe value of a good paper trail, and how phones, email, and texting have made biographers' jobs harderHis first biography of a living person, and why dead subjects are easier to write aboutApproaching his biography as if he were writing a nineteenth century novel, with his subject’s story as a bildungsromanHis membership in the Biographers International Organization and why biography is a relational problem before it's a writing problemRobert Caro's Working, and copying Caro's trick of standing in a place at the exact hour his subject would have been thereJosh'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!”

Rich Larson reads the opening passage of “In the Hours Preceding the Fall of Tau-Sants,” a cyberpunk-flavored short story published by the online magazine Reactor and available to read for free at reactormag.com. “In the Hours…” follows two operatives that arrive in a rain-drenched city to commission a mysterious weapon. Rich talks to Jon and Cory about:Dropping readers into a scene “as late as possible”Coining a phrase like “quantic canal” first for how it sounds, then reverse-engineering its meaning for the storyA bus ride in France that inspired the story's mood, before any plot existedWorking on five to seven short stories simultaneously and sometimes using a rolled die to decide which project to work onPublishing prolifically (nearly 200 stories in the last 15 years) rather than polishing rare, perfect stories, and the peace he’s made with that tradeoffHow this story became the “test palette” for a science fiction novel set in the same universe that Rich is currently writing