Carol Edgarian is an award-winning novelist, essayist, teacher and editor. Her novels include The New York Times bestseller, Three Stages of Amazement and the international bestseller, Rise the Euphrates. With her husband, Tom Jenks, she co-founded the nonprofit Narrative, a leading digital publisher of fiction, poetry, essays and art. Her new book Vera is just out. Listen in and read along as we discuss her advice to a young writer.
Carol: Hi Marion. How are you? It’s wonderful to be here.
Marion: I’m good. It’s so great to have you here. And my listeners are writers, so let’s frame our conversation today to help them with their own careers and ambitions. Your articles and essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, NPRW to name a few, but I’ve read that soon out of college, you were a freelance copywriter, speech writer and PR consultant for various high tech and retail companies. Since my listeners are writers, they want to know how to utilize what they do now to become what they envision later. So let’s help them. What benefits can you name from your early writing experience that got you where we are today?
Carol: Well, first of all, writers are my favorite people, so hello everyone, and a few things. But the first thing I would say is an awareness that it’s a long apprenticeship and to love that apprenticeship. What I often tell my students is to think you’re going to get published, a book published, you really have to go in with the mindset of picking up a violin with the aspiration of wanting to play in Carnegie Hall. That it’s going to take years and years of practice and doing those scales and trying, and failing. And most importantly, reading everything you can get your hands on, to read widely and to see what resonates for you. And then to reread that and really start to take things apart scene by scene, by scene, in the works of accomplished writers and see how that starts to get into your blood, into your muscle memory. So that’s the first thing, is just to really love the doing of it. Even more so than what the accomplishment, the final publication.
I mean, the writers I know who’ve been published widely will all say, and I certainly feel this, that the real ecstasy is getting it right on the page. Like those days, when you just … You’ve circling, and circling, and circling around a scene or a moment and you can’t get it and you’re just going crazy. And then finally something locks into place and you can say, oh yeah, that’s it. And then onto the next puzzle, irreconcilable puzzle, that is the gift and torture of writing.
Marion: “The gift and torture.” Yeah. On your website, I found this lovely letter that you wrote, advice to a young writer. And I picked out a couple of things from there that I thought we’d talk about before we move on to talking about your new book. You say in your advice to a young writer, you say, “Practice telling stories, not just on the page, but aloud.” And I love that. We get that opportunity at the dinner table, we get that opportunity when we’re walking down the street with a friend. But I’m not sure that young writers think about practice and the telling of the tale being as important as the time at the table. So what about that telling of the tale? How important is it to take every opportunity you can to practice telling your stories?
Carol: I think it’s essential. It’s something I still do. I have a friend I take walks with on the weekend and she often will use part of the walk to talk about her life. And if I’m not in some kind of a place of wondering about what’s going on in my life, I’ll talk what’s going on with my characters. And what happens when you tell the story, any story, if you really pay attention to what’s going on with your listener, their face, where they’re leaning in, where they become alive, where your voice becomes really engaged. Then on the page, when you take that onto the page, you become much colder to the material and you go directly for the story that’s got energy, that’s got pulse. One of the great things is to watch the way children tell stories. They have an innate sense of conflict and plot. They go right to the jugular of something.
And we sort of lose that in the dressing of language and sort of the throat clearing. And it’s really important to practice telling a story and engaging your listener because at the end of the day, there’s so much vying for folks’ attention. And you want to be able to say here, take my hand. I’m going to lead you down a really interesting path. It’s going to have curves in it. It’s going to inspire you. It’s going to entertain you. It’s going to maybe teach you a few things and I’m not going to let go of your hand. You can trust me. And that’s the kind of storyteller you want to be.
Marion: Yeah, it is. The children advice is wonderful. You say in this letter to a young writer that they’re deadly good without an ounce of sentimentality. And that’s just so true. Children know, and of course, when they see any delight on your face or any curiosity, they keep going. They just dig in. They lean in because they know this is where the transaction lies. They understand that innately, they have your attention. And I think we lose that as we get older, looking to convince people that it’s a good story, as opposed to taking our cues from the listener. And of course, when you’re crafting a story, if you’ve got a listener, like your walking partner, I too have a walking partner. She also is a writer, we do talk about our work. To get her to laugh, it’s like working the greatest room in Vegas.
Carol: It’s gold.
Marion: When she laughs, I’m like, yes, that’s a good line. That one stays on a page.
Carol: Exactly. Or when you say something, that’s got the tension and you hear the … Or the moment. I mean, that’s what writers do. We tell stories. And when I get together with my writer friends, that’s all we do. We trade stories. It’s really how we make sense of our lives. But I would also say for non-writers, we’re always needing to get back to the campfire and to sit around and tell the story of our days to make sense of them, to find the essential connections.
Marion: Absolutely. And you built one whopping campfire in 2003, when you and your husband, Tom Jenks founded the nonprofit, Narrative. It’s a digital publisher. It’s global. I think it was the first to be so, or it’s certainly among the first.
Carol: It was, yeah.
Marion: I think it was the first and it’s free. And it publishes hundreds of artists each year. It’s got this astonishing digital library of thousands of works of literature by celebrated authors and emerging writers, which I just love. And it takes submissions. So it seems to me, you’re maybe uniquely positioned to talk a little bit about the benefit of the inclusion of diverse voices in what we read and what that might be. I mean, you come into Narrative, we find everybody. So what are we getting when we get that diversity of voice around the campfire?
Carol: If we’re going to talk about human experience, human connection, we have to have everybody at the table. We have to have a diversity of voices, of ages, of orientation. And we need to think outside of this country, we need to think globally, what is the shared human experience? And of course, in story, that immediately goes to the specificity of the writer’s experience and the writer’s story. So one of the things at Narrative that we’ve done, we’re going to mark 18 years in September, is to bring forward new voices. So from Javier Zamora to Natalie Diaz, to Ocean Vuong to Minjun Lee’s first story was published in Narrative. She was our first Narrative prize winner. So all these writers are essential. Their voices are essential for us to understand this time, and I would assert all time.
Carol: So interestingly, we’re just in the middle of evaluating for our high school poetry contest. And we’ve heard from young writers in 11 countries, 37 states, 184 cities around the world, little pockets of India, of the Philippines, in Africa. How did this global community find us? Well, they found us because they’re teachers. Teachers use the Narrative library to teach literature from college, down to middle school, around the world. And they’re looking for stories that talk to their students and reflect their students and readers of all ages, their experience. Because that’s how we know each other, that’s how we connect. I mean, so much of the news of the day is about division and certainly that is the issue of our time. One issue of our time in this pandemic, in this era of extremes and disaster. But it’s also a moment where there’s an opportunity for writers to reflect what is common among us and what is universal. And of course in my mind that always comes back to the human heart. And we are each a complexity of ambition of foolishness, of desire and vulnerability.
Marion: Yes we are. And some of us really like baseball too.
Carol: Some of us really like baseball.
Marion: That’s a beautiful compilation of what we are. And I think that, you mentioned this global pandemic, you mentioned the disasters we face and the pandemic is not the only one. Of course there are civil wars. There’s just terrible immigration stories going on all over the country. People shutting each other out, people slaughtering each other for what they believe. And I was really struck when I looked and you talk about in that advice to a young writer, you talk about take the stories apart like a butcher cutting meat from a bone. Love the stories, but don’t hold them as precious, take them apart. So I was taking apart your books and I was reading them and we’ve got your novels to include, The Three Stages of Amazement, which takes place in the 2008 financial collapse. And your huge international bestseller Rise the Euphrates, which takes place in the 1915 slaughter of Armenians by the Turks. And in Vera, your brand new book, we witness the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
So it doesn’t require all that much taking apart to see that you staged things in at least these three books in some fairly terrible times. So talk to us. I suspect it’s not as simple as you being drawn to tragedy, but why is that a great place to put people? Does it reveal character better than any place else? Is this just what fascinates you? Talk to us about the settings of these books.
Carol: Well, I just want to say for Rise the Euphrates, the grandmother survived the genocide, but it’s really set in America in the 1960s, 70s, and multiple generations. But to your point Marion, I’m always looking for some kind of nexus between the political, historic change and characters who are bent on reinvention. It’s interesting when I hear three cataclysmic moments of these books. What I would say to that is in catastrophe, in crisis, character gets revealed. We show up. We show up or we don’t show up who and what rises. Those questions are interesting to me, to look at in fiction. And of course, if you have characters who are complex, nuanced, some rise to the occasion and some don’t. And I think that’s a moment that reaps surprises for a reader I hope.
Marion: Yeah, I think it does. And do you think that’s part of our jobs as writers too, to feel what’s coming? I mean, are we like those dogs in the time of natural disasters who start to get agitated as they feel something coming days in advance? Are we supposed to read the airwaves? Writers ask me this all the time. I work with lots and lots of writers and they say, how do I know what will sell in three years? And I say, well, that’s not quite the question. But what do you say when people say to you, am I supposed to know what’s coming in the large sense? Do you feel that’s part of our job?
Carol: I feel that for fiction to be successful, it has to read as news of the day. It has to feel to a reader like this is important in my life. This journey I’m going to go on is going to reap all kinds of rewards, but that essential urgency of you’ve got to read this. This is important. It can’t just be the writer’s wish. What I would say to, and I get asked that question a lot, do I need to look ahead? No, what you need to do is find within you, those questions that feel urgent and then look for a story that will allow you to bring that fuel, but will connect in a universal way to as many readers as possible. It’s not just your story. It has to be our story ultimately.
Marion: Yeah. I phrase it frequently, what are you really interested in? I had a friend who honored me by asking me to help him in his last days. And we planned how and where he would die. This is not an assisted suicide story at all. It’s just, he just knew he wanted to die at home. And we did everything to make sure that that happened. And it got me very interested in how much help one person can be to another. So when I tell this to the writers I work with, I say, I don’t want to write the literal piece of walking Richard home. I want to write the piece that gets at the question that interests me because that’s going to really provoke me to think. And I found that in Vera, this is a very richly imagined book, but it’s almost eerie in this time of COVID, in this all encompassing disaster, how much we are talking about the pod of people that you make and value and go through something with.
As I was reading the book, when your publisher sent it to me, let’s say it was a month or two ago. I kept looking around going how did she know that this pod thing would be so, and then of course I realized you didn’t. But you were asking questions of yourself about what you value. And we have this pod of people in Vera that takes us on a very unlikely series of friendships, but allows us to see the value of that grouping. So just riff a little bit more about that. I mean, you obviously didn’t know this was coming, but do you take some satisfaction knowing that you’re helping us really value the small group of people on whom we depend during this terrible time?
Carol: Well, I finished the book in January of 2020 so I truly did not know what was coming, but I’ll tell you what I was thinking about when I started the book. I had been collecting books on the 1906 earthquake. I had read up on it. I was fascinated by it in part because I live in San Francisco, but also this idea that within the space of a minute, an entire society can collapse. That was interesting to me. I didn’t know where I would use it, but in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, it struck me that our society was in a precarious state. That the norms were being trampled upon. The norms that for generations had been agreed upon the things that a deep sort of seismic level were shifting. And I started to think about where to place the story to really talk about that. And I also had this idea of writing an adventure story that featured a whip smart 15 year old girl who is contrary.
She’s neither winning in the way of 1906 young ladies. She’s the daughter of the most successful madam on the Barbary coast, but she’s not even being raised by her mother. She’s being raised by a foster mother who has her own problems, gambling and drinking, and who doesn’t really know her or even like her. So here we have a character, Vera, who is from birth an outsider. She is housed, but essentially without a family. And of course, this is all before the quake. Once the quake hits she’s truly on her own and not just on her own, but responsible for a whole group of people to help them survive.
And that allowed me the room to really talk about societal structures and characters who are even pre quake marginalized, and yet who show up for Vera and Vera for them and they form these bonds. But also to your point about sort of finding root in catastrophe, it was also my intention to really write a story that is a romp, that is an entertainment. All that is at play, but ultimately I hope the humor and the spark of Vera’s sort of life force is what pulls the reader through.
Marion: I think it does. And I love the fact that you use the word romp for the book. I wasn’t sure if that would upset you. It is a great big romp through the capacity of humans to help one another. Well, we’ve got everybody there. We’ve got Enrico Caruso, we’ve got everybody. They’re just going to have to read the book to meet everybody that you get to meet, but it is a romp and it’s a romp backed by enormous amount of research. So as we sort of wind this down, you talked about collecting books on the 1906 earthquake, but to build this romp, you had to build it on some facts and you had to be factual. The size of the quake. Maybe you could just review for people, just what happened in that minute. And also then just talk a little bit about the research that you did.
I think it’s always reassuring to people that works of literature don’t just drop from the sky into your soul and come out of your fingers. That there’s research work that gets done even with fiction, even with memoir, even with fill in the blank. So talk a little bit more about the … You collected some books, but what else did you have to do to report on that terrible minute and its aftermath?
Carol: Well, there’s so much I could say on that topic. I go very deep into research in part because I’m looking for story and I’m looking for what sticks in my imagination and will grow. So I spent two years researching this book, diving really deep into firsthand accounts from 1906, but also what books existed, many, many, many photographs. And I get saturated with the research and then I willfully forget it so that what’s left are breadcrumbs. And from those breadcrumbs, I have to build a world, but for fiction to work where you’re specific, you have to be right. And you have to be right, if you’re writing about a certain time and this idea of historical fiction, well, yesterday was history. So if I’m writing about yesterday, I better be right in terms of my specifics, not just time, place setting moments, but also in terms of the human interaction.
And I was saying to someone the other day, we certainly drive faster cars than we did in 1906, but the human animal hasn’t been reinvented. So whether the story takes place in 1906 or today, we’re full of this contradiction and we’re full of folly. And I really like to show both the shadow and the light and the folly, because that vulnerability is in all of us. And that’s something that readers can connect with. So in terms of fact though, in terms of research, I love going down that rabbit hole. I think something that makes me a writer in part is I like to learn about new things. I like to go places and just learn enough to be dangerous.
Marion: And if you don’t put out a t-shirt that says that and sell it at Narrative, I don’t know why not. That’s beautiful. We’ll wrap it up there. Thank you, Carol. That’s a great quote. Well, good luck with the book.
Carol : Thank you Marion.
Marion: You’re so welcome. That was Carol Edgarian. You can reach her at caroledgarian dot com. Get her new novel Vera, wherever books are sold. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Over It Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing, visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening.
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author photo by Luck Jenks
