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In this episode, Jeniffer speaks with Téa Obreht at Warwick's Books. If you're a fan of her other novels, you'll love listening to Téa read a passage from her latest, The Morningside. She talks with Jeniffer about what inspired her to write it, and all the details about how it came about too. Téa also shares details about her writing process and what it all means to her.
Creators & Guests
What is The Premise?
Here on The Premise Jeniffer and Chad Thompson talk to storytellers of all types. From authors to musicians, poets, screenwriters, and comedians we get down to the tiny grain of sand that becomes a pearl—getting to the story behind the storyteller.
>> Jeniffer: Hey there, I'm Jennifer Thompson and today we have a special treat for
you. I will be doing an interview for Warwicks of La
Jolla. Warwick's is one of the oldest bookstores in
the nation and it is fantastic. If you have a chance to go
visit, I recommend it. In fact, buy all of their books.
Every book they have is good, including this one.
Let's begin. Bye. You telling us a little bit about this
book?
>> Téa Obreht: Okay, first of all, thank you so much
for agreeing to do this. thank you so much, Warwicks, for
having me back. this is such a lovely homecoming. Always.
I, ah, see familiar faces and some new faces
and I'm very, very delighted to be here with you all.
so I wrote this book, this book kind of surprised me. I
feel like books are always surprising me. I'm always working on something that I'm
telling my publisher handing in,
and then I kind of go astray and end up writing something
else. but, as per that very
apt description, this book is about, mothers
and daughters and ah, climate, ah,
refuge. And, it follows Sil. She's an eleven
year old climate refugee from a place that's referenced in the book
only as back home. and she
arrives to a half submerged
metropolis called Island City, and her
aunt Enna is the superintendent of this
luxury tower called the Morningside.
and Syl and her mother, who's very
reticent to talk about the past, very tight lipped about
it, they move in with aunt Enna
and, Sil's aunt is a
great deal more, open about both Sil's
heritage and the past and begins telling
her folk tales from back home.
And Sil uses these as a
prism to try to understand the world around her and she
becomes obsessed with the upstairs neighbor, Bezie Duraz,
who is mysterious and lives in the penthouse with
these three huge dogs that might be more than they
appear. so, ah, that's my elevator
pitch and, that usually gets
a laugh, that bond.
>> Jeniffer: That's okay.
>> Téa Obreht: but I wanted to read, just very briefly from the very beginning
of the book. I was so determined to write this in
total chronological order, which I've never done before.
and I was like, right, no time loops this time. Just
write from the beginning of the story through the end of the story.
And then I finished the first draft and realized that actually I did need a
prologue because, everything is time
loops. so the book actually opens with
silver years after the events of the
book, and she's 27 and this is where
we meet her for the first time. I'll just read very briefly.
An old familiar dread was waiting for me this
morning. I couldn't tell where it came from.
It hadn't followed me out of a dream, at least not one
I could remember. But when I got up there it was in
everything the airless heat of the motel
room, the halo of sunlight around the window
shades, the vacant smile of the girl at the front desk
when she took the key from my hand. I thought
it might stay behind when I left the motel, but it
hitched a ride through the desert with me just sitting
there, tightening the world it knew
me so well. When I got to the
train station, I finally gave in and did what I knew
the feeling was after me to do. I looked up my
mother. I hadnt done it in a long time
because the suspense made me sick. Even though what I
imagined I would read was always worse than what was
actually posted. It didnt feel like the
kind of morning for bad news. Quiet,
unusually free of wildfire, smoke, blue and
windless. The train was light, the
platform mostly empty. A few
passengers had drifted out of the station and were
standing in the sun as they looked down the track.
The handful of others like me were clearly there to meet
someone. It was the calmest I'd felt
all week, so I thumbed my
mother's name into the search bar. There was
the brief nervousness that always stopped my breath before the
forums loaded, the dread of something having
changed, some new poisonous derangement.
Usually there was nothing, hadn't been for years.
Today was different. A new picture had
been added to the Bellin case file. It was
not as I always feared it would be, a police
snapshot of Mila's corpse. It was
a Polaroid, taken almost 16 years
before the day we arrived in island city.
In the picture, my mother and I are backlit by the vanishing
sun, standing side by side on Morningside
street. Our suitcases aren't quite out of
view. We're m smiling half heartedly,
hovering just far enough away from each other to make a
comfortable embrace impossible.
My mother looks worn and flustered, standing there in an
old dress of mine that is clearly too long for
her. I'm the tallest eleven year
old you've ever seen.
Gangly, shapeless.
I've got my arms some of the way around my mother's shoulders
and am obviously smiling just to oblige. The person
behind the camera, my aunt Enna, whom I haven't
yet hugged hello. I
remembered the moment the picture was taken and vaguely
remembered seeing the finished result pinned up on our fridge until
it disappeared under months of repopulation program
leaflets. I hadn't seen it since we
escaped and hadn't thought about it in
years. But, here it was, after all this
time, who had put it up and how
the hell had they gotten hold of it? And when?
Here I'd been going about my life, thinking this memory and
this picture were back in the past, somewhere
invulnerable to even the kinds of things I was afraid
of. And yet, for some unknown
while strangers had been peering at it on their
cursory journey through the handful of forms still devoted to
the question of my mother's criminality,
it didn't take me long to feel dizzy enough to faint. When the
vendor walked by, I got a bottle of water from him and drank the
whole thing in one tilt. Then it got
worse. In the background of the
photo, way up the sloping street behind us,
I recognized the unmistakable form of Bezie
Duraz. She was just starting up the
hill, and her three dogs, rangy
silhouettes, black as the gaps between stars, were
out ahead of her. Whatever I remembered of this
photo, Bezie Duraz certainly wasn't part of it.
Neither were the dogs. How funny, I
thought. Here I'd had a very different,
very specific memory of the first time I saw her. And
all the while this picture had been out there, confirming an
entirely incompatible truth.
Some stranger whose name I did not
know and face I would never see had held
all of us together in the palm of their hand. Bessie, my
mother, me, even Enna. Off screen,
the only person absent from the scene, fittingly enough,
was Mila, of course. Also
fittingly enough, she was the only person the people commenting on the
picture really cared about. They couldn't put any of it
together. The furthest they could get with it was,
isn't this the woman from the Bellin case? Which earned them
a smattering of replies from strangers.
For the first time in years, I thought about adding my
two cent. What harm would it do to chime in to
write something like, you don't have the first clue?
There were plenty of anonymous comments.
Nothing would set mine apart, nothing would point back to
me. But then the loudspeaker crackled
to life, announcing the coming train, and I xed out of the
forum, stood, and went forward with my little sign.
Thank you.
>> Jeniffer: That opening for me was so incredible to read, and I
had never read any of your books, so this was such a
treat to open to this, and I want to start at the
beginning, you did something that was
so palpable, in that first. Those
first words, those moments
when you wake up, like in a weird hotel room and the
light around the window, I felt that. That
feeling of dread, that feeling of, like there's something
not right. This darkness that's tugging at you.
And to create that feeling
just drew me in. So, well
done.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you. Thank you very much.
>> Jeniffer: So I wanted to ask you about this. Well, actually, I'm gonna
hold this question. It's about memory. First, I want to ask you, where
did you get the idea to write this book?
>> Téa Obreht: from several different places kind of all at
once. M and so I'll try to
answer that question as succinctly as possible. I feel like I'm still sort
of learning how to talk about the book. And part
of that is trying to figure out a succinct way
to answer this question. so
my husband and I met and lived in New York for eight
years. it's the longest I'd lived anywhere.
And, we began to leave it, and then when the pandemic
hit, we left it full time, kind of in a hurry,
as most people did. and. Or, I mean, most people
who left. Not most people. Most people did not leave in New York.
I think you can find many of them still live there.
succinct is going great.
So, I had
wanted to write about urban living in,
particular in a metropolis like New
York. I'd grown up in cities all my life, but one of the things
that has happened to me continuously is an inability to write
about a place when I'm living in it. So the moment we got to
Wyoming, I was like, yeah, God, New York.
there had been. I had struggled for a long time with the
feeling that I didn't quite know the city very
well, even though I'd lived there for a long time.
kind of because I'm an immigrant. I've lived
here now for 23 years, but I still feel sort of like a stranger in
a strange land, which I think is quite common for
immigrants. And, there is the sense that you don't
quite know all of it. You can't quite
get all the way into a place.
and so I always felt like I did not know the city very
well. And people, you moved to New York, people are always telling you,
like, you missed its heyday. Like, its heyday was in the seventies or
the eighties, and, like, so you'll never really know it. So that really contributes
to it. But there were a lot of these sort of
small moments that I realized after we
left really belonged to me.
Like the experience of having a developer tear
down part of the jewish seminary on our street
and build an enormous luxury tower.
or like the experience of seeing this
tiny elderly woman, in the street one day,
walking three huge rottweilers on a chain,
sort of like in the middle of the sunset, just walking
them. and I realized that that was my New
York.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Téa Obreht: and I tried to put them
together first into a short story, and the first image
that popped out at me was this mother and daughter walking hand in
hand, down a dark street towards
a building that was half lit. and
in the street was water, which was clearly
the tide. and so everything came from that
image.
>> Jeniffer: A vision.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah, a vision. Like, it always. I feel like it always
starts with a bit of a vision for me. Just a
moment that I want to ask questions about.
>> Jeniffer: And you just keep exploring.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: And what I loved so much about this book, too, is it was so clearly
in New York, in Manhattan, and I could.
Could just picture it. I felt like I was really in
Manhattan, and
I was experiencing this post
apocalyptic, you know, climate change had
really sunken the lower east side
and taken over, and I was so there. What
I loved most about it, and we'll still get back to memory, by the way, I haven't forgotten
that. yes. What I
loved most about it was it was from the perspective of
this young girl. Right? So
we get to see it through her eyes and her
world, which was so
apocalyptic. Like, there's no food, there's not enough
for anyone. Like, the living conditions are so
difficult.
Did you know from the very beginning that it was her story?
>> Téa Obreht: I knew from the very beginning that it was, the
story of a person young enough
to not be able to assess
the world accurately
or quote unquote accurately.
>> Jeniffer: which is what I really love the most about it, is, like, I started
to figure out that, oh, it's because she's so young that we're seeing
it this way.
>> Téa Obreht: I think it, she's sort of. She's at that age
where she's, you know, her mother is the center of her world, but her
mother isn't giving her a lot of stories, and she isn't giving her a lot
of context. And so
Sil is trying very hard throughout the book
to build her own context for what, you
know, for what this new society is that she's come
to, for what the past is made of. and
what's truth and what's fiction
and, you know, what's exaggeration. And,
she kind of settles on this
notion, as a result of her
aunt's storytelling,
that only she sees certain aspects of the
world for what they really are, which is like a very
eleven year old thing to be. But I
think it's also a kind of
wishful thinking, on the part
of people who arrive in new places that they've
brought with them the mechanism
to understand where they've come.
>> Téa Obreht: so, yeah, well, and it just.
>> Jeniffer: Felt like everyone must be living in these terrible
conditions. And then very slowly we start to realize, oh, no,
it's just her family, it's the immigrant, it's the
refugee, and there are people who have plenty,
their dogs have more than she has. And the way that that
unfolded was just brilliant.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
>> Jeniffer: The whole book I found to be really brilliant.
So I want to get back to memory, though, because
I had so many experiences that felt so personal
in this book. Of course it is. It's coming from your head, so it's very
personal. But this idea of having this
memory that's yours, and
then you start to realize, my memory is wrong.
So those feelings for this, you know, she's
older, but there's a couple times in the book where she
realizes that she's wrong and her memory is wrong. Talk to us
about where this, where this comes from for you.
>> Téa Obreht: That's a great, that's a great question. I think it
comes from, you know, this sort of. So much
of the book is about storytelling and kind of
the way people decide to frame things for
themselves. And Sil
is very invested. Like, her whole vision of her
childhood, I think, is very centered,
around a particular way of looking at these moments, a
particular way of looking at her mother, of looking at,
the, the journey that they've taken together and the parts of the journey that
they weren't able to take together because there's a thing that happens about
halfway well, two thirds of the way through the book that
rifts them. That's, all
I'll say, well
done.
and so this, this
feeling of, you know, I think it's a very destabilizing feeling and it's
probably one that we all share. Right. This, this idea of
I, I thought I knew something and I
kind of reinforced it for myself.
Maybe. Maybe it's a story that you've
heard. I've certainly had this experience
where, like a parent or a family member
tells you a story about
something that you did not attend, like, that you didn't
witness, and then suddenly you were forming this memory about it.
And this is definitely how it happened. Right. And then evidence search
surfaces from some other participant,
or even in my case, occasionally this has happened where
the person who was telling you the story initially is just like, oh, no, no,
no. It actually went like this, and she's, like, changed it around
on me. Now what? M so
just the instability of memory
and how, invested we are in sort
of trying to keep it, like, a very
tight hold on it. But
actually, m it's very ephemeral. It's all
very ephemeral. And reality is kind of ephemeral,
and even rules in this world and in our world are
ephemeral, right? Like, this is a world
in which people aren't really supposed to eat meat, and yet it turns out
in the book that, like, quite a lot of people eat meat all the time. They avail
themselves of it because they can. And, so I think, yeah,
I think that's sort of all dovetailed in the
book.
>> Jeniffer: One of the other things I really loved about it was
mother, who, by the way, doesn't have a name. Did I miss her
name? She doesn't have a name.
>> Téa Obreht: She doesn't have a name.
>> Jeniffer: Was there a reason for this that we didn't get a name for
her?
>> Téa Obreht: I think it's that sill sort of just sees her as mother.
>> Jeniffer: So that's it. Through her eyes.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: So when you're writing a, coming of age story for adults,
and your character is eleven, was
it difficult to write smart?
Smartly. Right. But keep
that naivety and that sense
of wonder, that childlike wonder. Did you have to,
like, check yourself sometimes and not go too
much into making it sound too
adults?
>> Téa Obreht: I actually had to check myself first. in the first
draft, I actually did write
chronologically from start to finish.
and everything that in the first draft was very
messy, but all the sort of moving
parts of the book emerged in it, which was a huge surprise,
and which is one of the first signs for me that something is working.
but that draft
sneered at sil a lot,
kind of because I was trying to
navigate that space between a very
young person's vision of the world and give
the reader a bit of room to feel out the
reality and be able to. To suss it out in their
own time, in their own context. and the
result was that she
was, you know, she was overly precocious and she was sort of
overly anxious about all these things. And it was very obvious.
And the book didn't take a very
kind lens to her.
But then I found that what it was actually missing
was the prologue. M and this
cast of an older person looking back
quite generously on themselves. And I think it was
that this idea of, like, being able
to look back at yourself when you were young and be like, you might
have been mistaken, but you
weren't foolish. Like, it makes total
sense that this is what you thought and maybe you weren't
mistaken at all. Right.
And so I think in many ways people have been,
there's been some discussion here and there about, like, whether
the book is ya because it features a
protagonist of this age, but I don't think it is because it
looks, ah, through this older lens,
very kindly on a young person who is also
interested in their relationship with their parent,
and interested in sort of understanding their parent
better.
>> Jeniffer: Absolutely not. Ya.
No, I never thought it was a ya. And I thought, oh, it's so well done
that we really do. She is so naive
and she is eleven, and we love her so
much. Her relationship with her mother,
I think. I mean, I know that you had a baby, you
were just having a baby when you wrote this book,
weren't yet in a relationship, and your daughter's too. Right.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: So, I mean, but what I found
so incredible was, so the
mother is trying to protect the daughter by
not giving her information. So what this does
is it confuses the daughter and makes her want to protect the
mom.
>> Téa Obreht: Right.
>> Jeniffer: So they're in this relationship where they're not sharing enough
information. They're hiding things from each other to protect each
other. Talk to us more about where this comes from
for you.
>> Téa Obreht: This comes from very close to the bone.
I found, I don't know if it was a result
of, my particular family and the particular
circumstances under which we left the former
Yugoslavia, or the sort of cultural
shape of families in the
balkans.
>> Jeniffer: May I ask how old you were when you left?
>> Téa Obreht: I was seven when we left.
>> Jeniffer: Okay.
>> Téa Obreht: and twelve when we came to the states. Like twelve and a half.
>> Jeniffer: So very similar to sill
turns.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah. so. And don't think that
didn't occur to me afterwards. I was like, oh, that's
close. but there was this
sense, you know, of the war was
happening. people were getting dispatches from
home that were horrific. And the
idea was like, just don't let her know
all the things that are happening. But of course, and I think the book
is very much, about this, too.
Adults don't do a stellar job of
hiding things from kids. Right. Of like, managing their own stress
in like, particularly horrific situations. Right.
Like, And it was noticeable to
me that my grandmother had an
actual nervous breakdown because she didn't know if
people that she loved were alive or dead under
shelling in moster, you know.
and I think that
effort to protect, Yeah.
That sort of circularity that you're talking about, I think
it came from a very
surprisingly personal place.
because that dynamic of sort of. I just don't want you to be
stressed by this is very
much the circumstance
under which I grew up.
>> Téa Obreht: No.
>> Jeniffer: Experience.
Fantastic.
There's so much magic too, and fantasy in this book,
which I think is one of the reasons why I love it so much. It's so well done
and you're so generous to the reader. She gives us
so much opportunity to make our own decisions about
what happens and what's true and what's not
true. Talk to us about
the m mythology and some of the
lore that creeps into this book.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you. Thank you.
>> Jeniffer: Well, it doesn't creep in. It's a big character.
>> Téa Obreht: And then it kind of creeps and grows. No, you're right. Like creeping.
I think it kind of, I think the extent to which it
kind of, I see it. It's funny that you said creeping because
I do it visualize it as like a vine
that's, that's growing inside the book all the time. Like
it sort of starts with a big moment at the beginning, and then it kind
of, its tendrils wrap around everything.
>> Jeniffer: there's a well, and I'm gonna interrupt you.
>> Téa Obreht: No, please.
>> Jeniffer: The way you did it is so perfect because it's just a
story that's told. And then throughout, you're like,
oh, I'm starting. Oh.
You know. And you're calling back to this story
that's now taking a bigger place on
the stage.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you. Thank you.
>> Jeniffer: I interrupted you. I'm so sorry.
>> Téa Obreht: No, this is lovely. No, no, no. I believe
that conversations, we interrupt each other to be like. And
also, no, it's a, I have a two year old. I
interrupt people all the time.
so the main
folk tale in the middle of this story
is the myth of the vila. the vila is a
figure of slavic mythology and folklore. she's a
nymph of, woodlands,
rivers, mountains. she's the kind of
spirit of, the divine
feminine in nature. She's a
powerful entity, but
she's fickle. she's not
exactly malevolent, but she's out for herself.
and in slavic mythology, she often
stands in opposition to sort of the
abrahamic efforts of the new
kingdom, of the Slavs.
Right. so she's
there to represent nature. She speaks for the trees.
and, aunt Anna tells sil a
story about this. This entity. and
I think everything that sil does,
and every way that she begins to interpret the world comes
from this newfound myth. Right. Because she has had no
other stories before that. And
so this is kind of a foundational story for her,
for understanding her past.
>> Jeniffer: Well, her culture. She's given so much
all at once, from having no history
to suddenly this, like, richness. And
it's. The storytelling of Aunt Enna is such a beautiful
part of the story, and she's such a lovely
character. In fact, I just forgot what I was
going to ask because I was getting excited about Aunt Anna.
Oh, I remember place, the sense of place
in this book. So you do something that I
found very interesting. You never
name anything, but I know exactly where we are, you
know, and we're talking about climate crisis in the
future. We're talking about wildfires and flooding.
And no matter where we were in the story, I could picture it in
my mind. And their home and their language
is ours, so you never say in our.
Whatever the language is, it isn't a language. And then we say
in ours. It was very personal,
but again, it was generosity to the reader in some ways.
Was that intentional, to let them bring
bare immigrant experience to the story? Was that
your purpose, or.
>> Téa Obreht: It really was. And it's sort of. I. One of the
reasons that I write fiction, is that I
love making things up. I love the
freedom of invention, and I think it
enables me. I'm useless at nonfiction because
I will often come to sort of points in a
nonfiction narrative and be like, well, that doesn't. That's boring, or,
like, that doesn't serve the story. so
I often find myself
inventing place, like, basing
settings very closely on something real, but
then kind of, you know, putting it
adjacent to that reality and being
like, well, you know, that neighborhood is a little bit different,
you know. and I think
in the case of this book,
that invention allowed me to kind of
lean as much as I could because,
like, every immigrant experience is obviously very different. But there
are some universalities to being a stranger in a strange
land, you know, to being.
To entering a culture that is not legible to
you and struggling to do so and entering a
setting that is not legible to you and trying to discover it and
make it your own and see which parts of it can be made to
belong to you. there is a universality to that
experience, kind of no matter who you are and
kind of no matter where you go. Right. Like, you don't just have
to end up in the us, for that to be the case.
And, so, yeah, I think that it
tilted toward that kind of naturally, on its own.
And it felt right.
>> Jeniffer: Nice. Nice. Well, it felt right to me, too.
And again, like, I could picture it.
Everything I imagined was because I was adding to
the story, my experiences. And so for someone
else, you're going to see a different place in your
mind's eye. And so that was really beautiful. Even home.
You know where home was. I have my idea of where it was.
And you all will have your own idea.
Let's talk about sil just a little bit more. I
feel like I could sit here and talk to you for hours.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you. I'm having the most wonderful time. Please, let's talk for
hours. I love it.
>> Jeniffer: So sil has a technique, a calming technique that she
uses. Do you want to talk about that or do you think it's giving away too much?
>> Téa Obreht: Syl does have a calming technique. there's, well, there's a couple of.
There's a couple of things that still does that are also
very personal.
in this mode, of
protecting her mother, she has developed
a habit of leaving out
talismans, that are
intended to create a kind
of, circle of protection around the
person she loves the most. And of course, her mother doesn't know about this,
and she doesn't quite. She spends a lot of the book not knowing
how to invite her mother into her own knowledge and her
own experience of the world.
>> Jeniffer: But she wants to. She wants to. She's just afraid.
>> Téa Obreht: Exactly. Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: Ah, being rejected.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah, totally, totally. And, being
rejected kind of wholesale, you know, like, for the person that she
is. So, she, you know, she
starts out when she arrives in island City. She's sort of
very determined that she's not going to do this protection business anymore. She left
that all behind in the last place. They were
paraiso. And she's, she's just not
doing it anymore. But, like, very quickly, she
begins to get that kind of, urge, that
compulsion, one might even say
to organized talismans. And
she counts them one, two, three. And, it's a calming
device for her. you know,
if she were as far into her
mental health journey as I am, perhaps she would.
She would know to call it a grounding technique. But alas, she does
not have that vocabulary, which is
also part of the journey of the book.
so, yeah, that's what she does. And she believes that
she sort of has this power, and not just this power, but this
obligation, and I think it exudes a tremendous burden
on her.
>> Jeniffer: Absolutely.
>> Téa Obreht: That she can't share with anyone.
>> Jeniffer: Absolutely. Yeah.
Well, I want to talk a little bit about you
and your writing.
>> Téa Obreht: Okay.
>> Jeniffer: Unless there's something else you want to talk about. The book.
>> Téa Obreht: No, no, no. This is. This is great.
>> Jeniffer: It's just so good, though. I just love it so much. I can't wait for
your next book.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you so much. This is so lovely. Thank you. What a
lovely. Thank you very much. You're being very generous to me. I really appreciate
it.
>> Jeniffer: While I was reading the book, I was like, oh, she must know
how incredibly brilliant this book is. You're
very kind, and you're either incredibly humble
or I. You don't
realize just how brilliant it is.
>> Téa Obreht: I felt. I think I navigated.
>> Jeniffer: Did you feel magic?
>> Téa Obreht: I felt. I felt, yes, I felt certain things
about it that felt. I think you can hit a place in your
writing where you're like, this is real. This
is coming from some real place, you know?
you become a conduit for something
that is working under the surface, and you
find you stumble through trial
and for me, trial and error, into the correct
mechanism of delivery to invite somebody else into
it. And you can feel when that
happens. And I felt it at
points in this book, and that made me feel like I was doing
something right.
>> Jeniffer: Nice.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you.
>> Jeniffer: That is so cool. So I'm m gonna tell you, I
actually tracked the beats.
>> Téa Obreht: Okay.
>> Jeniffer: Because they were so well done. I started writing them down
this page. Oh, this happens. And the stakes are here.
And then, you know, all of the things that I felt were
the beats in the book. So when you
were writing it, you just said you would be maybe
going down a wrong path and you'd be like, mmm m. And then you have to back
up, and then you hit the beat and you know it.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: Does it happen in the rewrite or do you get the
beats?
Okay, talk to us about how, you know, you have the right
beats.
>> Téa Obreht: Everything.
>> Jeniffer: The right pacing.
>> Téa Obreht: Everything happens for me in the. In the rewrite. So for this
one, I used to be the kind of writer who would write very, very
slowly and meticulously, like the. You know, and if
I didn't have the sentence right, I wouldn't move on from
it. And then it would just be, like, weeks and weeks and weeks.
>> Jeniffer: That sounds like a paragraph.
>> Téa Obreht: It was really, you know, it was a long, long
journey into hell. and.
But, the thing I discovered, and I, you know, I did
this as, like, a fledgling, like, a hatchling writer, because I
didn't realize, like, oh, my girl. Like, all that's going in
the trash. Like, you have perfect
sentences. Like, it doesn't. That's not gonna
be there.
>> Jeniffer: and then they become your darlings, and you have a really hard time killing
them.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah, it's really true. It's really true. And you're
sort of like, I'll put that.
And I'll never feel this way about a sentence again. And it's true.
So, as I've grown
as a writer, I've learned to adopt
the very messy first draft. It is a
lifesaver for me. And so the beats of this
book, I think I said it earlier, and I apologize if
I'm repeating myself, but the beats of this book,
sort of arrived in the correct order, and I was
like, amazing. I have event. There's a moth. Oh, no. I have the
correct events. They're in the right order, but I have
absolutely no idea of the emotional
condition or the relationships between the participants
in these events. Like, I have no clue.
and that's always my journey in the second draft. So, like,
the generative stuff gets out of the way. I hate the generative phase.
We're done now we have something to shape. That's great. and
then I sort of.
Then the part of trial and error comes,
and it's sort of trying to find, is this the right
voice? what is the psychological
condition of the person experiencing these events?
That, to me, is paramount, and
that, to me, is the thing that
most explicitly belongs to the form
of prose and
poetry in nonfiction. Right. Like,
writing itself enables you to enter another
person's consciousness and to inhabit, to wear
that person like a suit.
And that sounds manic.
and that's the real. It's not just that it's a
red apple. It's a red apple seen by a
person in a particular emotional
state, and that makes it a
beautiful red apple, or, you know,
a blighted red apple, or, you know,
or an inconvenient red apple. That
lens of self and consciousness
is everything. And for me, that happens in the
second draft. And,
is the place where I can sort of be like, oh, whoops.
Went way too far down the wrong path.
Gotta get back to the crossroads where it was right and kind of
back up and do it again.
>> Jeniffer: And so many people give up because they don't feel that
yet. I'm a writer, at least I'm trying
to be. And there are those moments where I've got
the perfect sentences, but I'm like, yeah, it's
missing something. And it's so easy to give up on the characters and
walk away from it and feel like this isn't working. When do you know it's
working?
>> Téa Obreht: That's a great question.
when you. I don't know how to. I don't know how to. When you. When it, when
it doesn't feel like writing, when it feels like it is just
like, it is just. It crosses that barrier.
Sorry, that barrier of illusion for you,
and you're just like, right. It is this,
For me, it's a feeling, for other
people, you know, like, I know many
writers who will sort of read their work aloud
and it's not real until it hits a particular kind of
rhythm in the ear. I write at a library, so I
can't read aloud when I'm just sitting there
muttering to myself. so, yeah, it's a
different thing for different people, but
many m writers have shared with me, and I'm sure that you
must have had this experience at times when it's working for
you, that it's just like. You just know. I know it
sounds. I know it sounds. I know how that sounds. But you just
know.
>> Jeniffer: You just know.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah.
>> Jeniffer: And there's this excitement.
>> Téa Obreht: Yes.
>> Jeniffer: It's incredible.
>> Téa Obreht: There's an electricity to it that's like.
>> Jeniffer: Absolutely.
>> Téa Obreht: And for me, it comes with like a.
Sorry.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah. Say it again.
>> Téa Obreht: Like love.
>> Jeniffer: It is like love.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah, it is like love. Yeah. It is that kind of
sensation of,
>> Téa Obreht: Crossing an intellectual barrier and being like this is something that
is beyond
me. Like, I'm not actually a participant in this anymore. It just
is. It exists by itself.
>> Jeniffer: Absolutely, yeah. You write in a
library exclusively?
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah. Well, I live in a very small
condo, with a very loud,
very, involved two year old,
toddler. And, she has necessitated my
move to the library for writing purposes.
So. Yeah, I work at the Teton county library. I have my chair. If
my chair is occupied, I get very distressed.
>> Jeniffer: Yes, yes.
>> Téa Obreht: And I sort of glare at them.
>> Jeniffer: Excuse me, this is my chair.
>> Téa Obreht: Sort of sitting kind of uncomfortably close
for a long time. yeah.
>> Jeniffer: I was working on a novel once, and there was this Little Coffee
shop down the, like two blocks from my house. And every day I would go down
and I would sit in the same chair and I would write for 2 hours and I'd go home, and
if someone was sitting in my chair, I would literally stand and wait for them to
leave. The coffee shop closed and I never finished
the novel.
>> Téa Obreht: Oh, my God.
>> Jeniffer: That's all on me. I get that. But that happened.
>> Téa Obreht: No, but it's a real thing because there's actually.
I do think that your Writing Environment serves as a kind
of portal. Right?
>> Jeniffer: Totally.
>> Téa Obreht: You place yourself in this
physical situation that enables you to
remove yourself from your body
and go into this space where you are just
dealing with words and you're kind of uninhabited and
uninhibited, you know, both. And it
does take a really particular. You have to feel a certain way
in this world. It's kind of like the matrix, right? Like, you have to be safe
and in that seat and there has to be someone looking out for
you in order for you to go and, like, navigate safely through the
matrix. And it's true, like, if you.
If your environment is changed. I mean, I
know people who can write anywhere, but I'm not
one of those people. And the vast majority of writers I know are not
those people. They, like, have to have these very particular conditions
for that departure from the south.
>> Téa Obreht: I'm so sorry that the coffee shop closed and
took your novel from you. That is that.
>> Jeniffer: I'll get back to it. I'm going to find the right coffee shop.
>> Téa Obreht: Yes. Maybe what you're looking for is a
library.
>> Jeniffer: You know what? You may be right. I like
this.
I think it's time to open up questions to our lovely
audience.
>> Téa Obreht: You.
>> Speaker C: In the second round, it's a two part question.
How long do you typically work on a book?
And how hard is it
to let go of all those characters?
>> Jeniffer: When you're done, do you mind repeating the question? This
is going to be on a podcast, by the way, so I will.
>> Téa Obreht: Totally repeat the question. so the question was, how long do
I typically work on a book and then how hard is it to let
go of the characters once it's done? I
have found that my sort of cycle for a book is
typically around three years. that's been
the case sort of once I find the right
material, that's its
lifespan. Somehow I don't know how
because the three books that I've written are
pretty different in length. One is like 450 pages, one is
like 350. And this one is, you know, I think it. It's
like 270. So, it is.
And one, like, involved, like, a tremendous amount of research. And one,
you know, and two didn't. And so, so. But somehow it all
boils down to three years. and I wonder if that's
sort of. I do believe that the act of writing a
book changes fundamentally the person that you are. Like, you're one
person going in and you're like another person coming out because you've gone
through this process of dealing with these
characters, navigating language, interrogating the
emotional and psychological experiences that led you
to down this path of narrative. and
so I wonder if, for me, that's the
cycle, right? Like, by the time three years, and it's like, I'm done
with it. you know, for someone like Donna tartt,
that cycle is ten years. And, like. And it's,
really interesting because I've
spoken to lots of writing, not to donna tark,
but, I've spoken to lots of writers who
have very short cycle, about a year and a half,
and writers who are like, it's eight. It's eight every time. But
there's real consistency in it from
book to book. And that's an interesting phenomenon, I
think. and then characters
are. It's a very emotional thing to
give up the book and sort of
send it out and be like, I guess this is
goodbye. Now
you are something else. yeah, it's a
very emotional experience. And I definitely feel. I feel sort of a
slump the end of. At the end of it, I do
become, like, a little depressed. And in particular, for my
second book, inland, which I
wrote, I felt that
book, I was with those characters
still when I had to let them go. and
that was a hard one. That was a really hard one.
yes. Hi. And then we'll go to mark.
Yeah.
>> Speaker C: From listening to you talk about how you write
and what you're writing about, and from an
interview that I read with you, I think
when inland came out, kind of feel
like. You almost feel like these books take on a life of
their own and they actually become
an entity and
they start to show you where, you know, which
direction you're supposed to go. Have I
interpreted that correctly? You feel that about
your books?
>> Téa Obreht: I do. and the question was,
do I feel that the books become kind
of an independent entity as they're being
written? Yeah, absolutely. I think,
you work on a book and then it starts to work on you.
and I think that that's the case also
with books that I read. Right. Like, a
book comes into your life, at the right time,
sometimes at the wrong time, and it can have this
completely mind altering effect on
you. and then you don't revisit it for,
like, ten years, and, like, you come back as a different
person and you have this interaction with it again.
whether writing or reading, it's a deeply
interactive experience.
>> Speaker C: I just recently reread the tiger's wife, and the
first time I read it, when it first came out, I had had
a horrible, horrible accident and had a terrible
surgery while I was reading it.
>> Jeniffer: Oh, my God.
>> Speaker C: So I was sort of seeing it, I think, through
a lens of trauma.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah.
>> Speaker C: Physical trauma, a lot of pain. And it was
very different when I read it just a couple of months ago.
I enjoyed it a lot more.
>> Téa Obreht: Amazing. I'm so glad to hear
I see you here in. Ok.
>> Speaker C: But it, seemed to resonate with me in a very
different way.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah. And I think, you know,
the only issue with that is that you can never
really revisit a book that you've written.
Right? Like, you only write it the one time.
>> Jeniffer: Right.
>> Téa Obreht: And you can't have that relationship with it again. And
I have a very difficult time
revisiting my books a couple of years on
because it feels. I feel like
I can't get back in touch with them. You know what I mean? Like, it's sort
of like the end of a breakup where you're just like, oh, right. We're not supposed to, like, hug
or anything. We're just supposed to be like, hello, we're having coffee. Like,
it's a totally different dynamic shift.
so, yeah, thank you for sharing that with me.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Téa Obreht: So, Kim Stanley Robinson also wrote a book set
in a submerged New York, and typical of him, it's
much more politics and sociology.
What do you think are the advantages for a
writer? To set a story in a familiar setting
that is set a little bit askew?
That's a great question. the question was, what are
the advantages to a writer?
>> Téa Obreht: what are the advantages of setting a story in a familiar
setting? But the sort of setting
elements are, ah, a little bit askew.
Oh, my gosh. There are so there. There are many, you know,
I, think, you know, it. I think
there's a great trust to be placed in the
reader when you're. When
you're sort of inventing a world that's like
adjacent. and
as you were saying, you know, you bring, you trust the
reader to bring their own stuff
to the narrative.
and one of the advantages that I found
to writing this particular book from an eleven year
old's point of view was that
she didn't understand the world anyway.
And so the things that I was very interested in writing about, like
systems that are failing in this particular world, I
didn't want to write about one great
apocalyptic event that wipes out everything and we sort
of have to start society over. I wanted to write
about an accumulation of
bureaucratic incompetencies and just like a general
slide into, into
mundane horrors.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Téa Obreht: because that is, you know, there are several apocalypses going
on in the world at any given moment and many of them
have that at their heart, you know. And
so I wanted the strangeness
of it and
for lack of a better word, the dystopian nature of it, to
be visible to sil but not
legible to her. She's trying to figure
out, you know, what is this system? What is this
repopulation program that I'm really part of? You know, like where is the
food? How does this function? but she doesn't
really, the reader doesn't really need access
to the particulars of it because
still doesn't have access to the particulars of it. And
frankly I barely understand how our society
functions even in the everyday. So, so
yeah, I think there was a great advantage to sort of
those things being kind of opaque. I'm very interested in the work
that people do when, when they
world build to great detail. Right. you
know, you can, like I love tolkien. Like
I love that there's. That he made up languages and that
he felt that he needed to do that work to access
the world and that not only did he need to do the
work, but he wanted the reader to have access to it
too. That's amazing. but
in the context of an eleven year old
navigating that part of her life in a new
society, it felt like that should be
removed.
>> Téa Obreht: And I'm not sure that I answered your question mark,
but I hope I answered part of it.
Pretty open ended question.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah.
>> Téa Obreht: Fantastic. Thank you.
Just like my media training prepared me for us.
Yes, thank you.
>> Speaker C: So I wanted to follow up on your idea
that you can never go back to the book that
you've written, but you wrote
this as a short story in the
Decameron tale from the New York
Times. And I read it recently
because of this talk, and I
was completely fascinated
because the essence of the story is there.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah.
>> Speaker C: But it's also not. It is very different.
So when you were
approached to write that short
story, were you already thinking
about writing the novel? And so I'll
just sort of
write this out and we'll see what
happens. Or did the short
story bring into a novel
that you were interested in writing?
>> Téa Obreht: That's a great question, and thank you so much for it. The question
was, in light of my comment that
one cannot revisit, one's work,
being pointed out that I actually wrote this as a short story. No, you're
right. as a short story first, and then, that it
became a novel. And sort of asking about the
trajectory for that. So I actually. So I
had these ideas in my mind
as part of what would become a novel.
And when the Decameron project came, this
is something that the, New York Times magazine did sort
of, as an homage to the original
Decameron, which was like, well, you know, in Renaissance
Italy, they sat around, and during the plague times, they told
stories and put it into a compendium. People are nodding.
They know. So,
I kind of. They came, they said, will
you write something that captures the mood of this moment? And I had these
ideas swirling around in my head as part of a novel, and I hadn't
sat down to write them yet. And I thought, I'm going to.
I'm going to do this as a short story to see what's there,
to see what comes out. Because I had the building, the mother and
daughter, the woman and the dogs, and
I was like, there's something here. and put
it into the shortest possible.
Shortest story form I could imagine. 1500
words. That was the limit. and it acted as a
kind of a stress test. I was like, what will
emerge? And the character of Mila suddenly
appeared, and
she came out of nowhere. And then there was this friend in
the park who sort of became may.
And I also recently reread the short story,
and I was shocked at how different it was,
because I had thought that it was interesting and
the names were different, and actually the roles were different
of the girls. so that,
yeah, it was a surprise to me to go back to it, and
see how far I had sort of wandered into the
woods. But, yeah, the intent was,
let's see if there's something there. And the short story
produced more questions than answers. And that,
to me, is always a good sign that there's some sort of fertile ground
to be had there. M thank
you.
>> Jeniffer: That was a great question.
>> Téa Obreht: There's a hand here. the denim
jacket.
>> Jeniffer: Okay.
>> Speaker D: I'm so glad that we were walking by.
>> Téa Obreht: Thanks for wandering in and letting us lure you in.
>> Speaker D: And, you know, I just said, you know, I like
this person. We're gonna come in and send the kids back to the
hotel.
>> Téa Obreht: Amazing.
>> Speaker D: And the more you talked about the story,
I think it was, you know, you mentioned
this fantasy, sort of, and my husband
and I like fantasy a lot. That genre.
>> Téa Obreht: Amazing.
>> Speaker D: That's interesting. And then you mentioned,
kind of eastern european,
slavic fairies and God.
>> Jeniffer: And we both looked at each other.
>> Speaker D: And said, a, character from
another book. And, so I'm really interested.
And then my husband said, I think.
>> Téa Obreht: We gotta get this book, too.
>> Speaker D: I'm interested to know, like, do you have
interest in reading fantasy? Or where did this come from?
Or then you started talking about Tolkien, which,
you know, everyone loves, but do you have you read more
the eastern or the
slavic would you call
myths and things like that fascinate us a little
bit?
>> Téa Obreht: So, yeah, I was wondering if you.
>> Speaker D: Can tell us about your interest in fantasy or your that kind
of work.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah, absolutely. So the question was about my interest in fantasy,
and, I'm so glad y'all came in. Thank you so
much. you were very kind to let me lure you in
through the door as you were standing outside looking at the poster.
so I grew up, I grew up on a very serious
diet of folklore, of
slavic, myth, and, the serbian
epic poems, russian
mythology, the tales of
Baba yaga, whom we call Babaroga, but she's sort of
the same character, and her whole cycle. And
Vasilissa the wise, and, like, all these
characters,
who were just really the
backbone of my upbringing.
so I grew up on that. And then when we left
Yugoslavia, we moved to. First to
Cyprus and then to Egypt. And then
I grew up in that
tradition of mythology, which is an
extraordinary. I mean, like, the myths of ancient
Egypt, and then also the history of Egypt. And the way
that that's metabolized is narrative. is
fascinating. And I found it to dovetail
really nicely with slavic mythology, because
a lot of it is about these very
fickle gods, and
also very fickle monsters. And, so by the
time I arrived in the states and
started reading fantasy,
Tolkien, but also Alexander
Lloyd, I don't know if people. Yeah, some people are
nodding. Some people are not. The pride day the chronicles of Pride
Day Narnia, was huge for
me. which is interesting. And then you sort
of grow up and you're like, wow, these are very, very different
mythological structures, very,
different pursuits. Cs Lewis and Jenner
Tolkien, that, you know, Tamora
Pierce was huge for me as a kid.
So, I did grow up in
this cycle that was folklore straight into
fantasy. and I don't know,
it's a real. I don't
read enough of it now. it's a
real shame that
the genre divide is so
extreme and so sort of supported by
academic structures and
publishing, structures as well, that, you
know, I'm
supposed to. As a person who teaches in a master
of fine arts, I am often discouraged from teaching
fantasy, even though it is an extremely
instructive form. so, yeah,
I'm just gonna comment. No, come on in.
>> Speaker D: I'm a high school teacher, and I find that that is
a genre that we're introducing to get
more kids to read.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah, yeah.
>> Speaker D: And, you know. so I don't know. And I was
wondering, where does. Where will this book fit? Would you be in the
fantasy files or will it be on the.
Could it be in both? You know, and how cool that
it bridges both of the worlds.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you for that. I hope it would. I hope it would be in both. I think
it's. I think it's sort of a straight from m for me
especially. It's like a genre bending situation.
and, I would be very flattered to have
it, you know, cross lines that
way and have people feel that way about it.
Thank you.
>> Jeniffer: I think we have time for one more question.
>> Téa Obreht: Thank you so much. I'm just like, answering for, like.
>> Jeniffer: No, it's wonderful. I feel bad cutting all you off. I see all
hands.
>> Téa Obreht: Yes.
Are there any camels in this book? There are
no camels in this book, unfortunately. I'm sorry,
but not for want of trying
and not for want of love of camels,
I'm actually working on. I'm working on a treatment
for. There's hope that inland might
still become, a series.
I'm working on a treatment right now. I hope to be
knee deep in camels for. For many years to
come. So thank you.
I think there might be more.
>> Jeniffer: Just gonna say that.
>> Téa Obreht: Yeah, that was a quick one.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah, totally.
>> Téa Obreht: historical fiction with a touch of magical realism, which is totally
my genre. I was wondering, was it hard
or intimidating for you to kind of switch gears into more
of a future? It
was really the question was about whether it was, given that I write
that I've written mostly historical fiction in the past, was
it intimidating to switch gears into a
future setting? It really was, because, I feel like
there is, a whole
swath of writers who are working exclusively
at that crossroads of sort of
speculative, new
weird, which is a term I recently learned. you
know, not high fantasy,
but kind of magically twisty.
And so, it was
very intimidating to venture into that, especially because
the world building in those novels can be
so extraordinary. and
I world built in this novel for myself to
understand how to navigate it. But then I took a lot of that
away because I didn't want sill to have
access to it and I didn't want the reader to have access to it either.
And that felt sort of, like a bit of a
transgression, but it felt like a necessary one, and I'll defend
it to the death. So I think I was, you
know, I did feel it felt,
The storytelling felt organic, but then
the sort of the genre bending felt. Felt,
Yeah, I was nervous. I'm still nervous.
You built a structure and then you
removed it and let the stories stand up. That
status.
>> Jeniffer: Yeah, we got to be careful. We're going to be here
all night.
Okay, one more.
>> Speaker C: I understand the
concept of not wanting to revisit the
world you've created.
How does it feel to you to be working on,
a movie or series of inland because
that's in contradiction
to your
feelings.
>> Téa Obreht: that's a great, that's a great question. The question was,
how do I feel about sort of revisiting inland through the
prisma? I feel like it's a different beast
because it's a medium that's completely foreign
to me, and I'm m not navigating it with the
same tools. I feel like I'm
learning how to write and I'm simply
in a totally different way because script
writing is different. All the stuff
that you access, as a writer was just like, I'm going to
set. I'm going to set the scene. I'm going to have a
person's emotions come out in their mind. You have
to be thinking of the actors. You have to be thinking of.
You're navigating a totally different way of
communicating information.
>> Speaker C: Does the actor or actress look the way
you intended?
>> Téa Obreht: I don't know yet. It's all still in my mind.
So they still do.
>> Speaker C: Did you retain that right?
>> Téa Obreht: No, I don't think. I don't think anyone does. I think it's
all once you send it out there, it sort of becomes its own. Its
own animal. Just like the writing.
>> Jeniffer: But I bet you have a picture in your mind.
Exactly. Thank you, everyone, so much
for coming. And thank you.
>> Téa Obreht: This is such a joy. Thank you so much for your questions, and thank
you all for coming, really.