the transcript
AIMEE LAGOS: Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Aimee Lagos, the chair of the Board of Directors of Graywolf Press, and I'm so thrilled to be here with all of you tonight. It's an immense honor to be a part of this organization. For over fifty years, Graywolf Press has championed bold literature that challenges conventional narratives and amplifies voices.
Too often silenced. Graywolf publishes necessary authors even when they stand outside the demands of the commercial marketplace. And we support an editorial practice of curiosity, vision, patience, and author care during these uncertain times. Graywolf authors and editors are creating influential books. I'm proud to share some recent recognition of the press's groundbreaking work. Run the Song by Ben Ratliff has been named to the National Book Awards longlist. And Hold Everything by local poet Dobbie Gibson, has won the Poetry Society of America's Four Quartet's Prize.
All of this is only possible because of the strong community around us, made up of people like you, people who show up and take action. Now is the time to be daring, to be bold and not just talk about change, but to make it ourselves. Tonight, we get to hear from three Graywolf authors whose work embodies the press's inventive vision.
I'm so pleased to introduce our first author of the evening, chaun webster.
In his work as a poet and graphic designer. chaun contends with the spatial, temporal and interpretive limitations of writing to represent blackness outside of the regimes of death and dying. His poetry collections, GeNtry!fication: Or the Scene of the Crime and Wail Song: Or Wading in the Water at the End of the World, both received the Minnesota Book Award for poetry.
This evening, we're honored to get an exclusive glimpse into his first work of creative nonfiction, Without Terminus: untraining an archive, an inventive text coming forth from Graywolf in June, 2026. Please join me in welcoming Sean Webster.
CHAUN: Hello. More than 10 years ago now, while interviewing my mother in an attempt to document family history, she told me about how her father, my grandfather, worked as a porter for the Great Northern Railroad for 25 years. And that when he retired, he did not receive pension. He would die shortly after his retirement.
Retirement, which is often meant to signal rest and leisure retirement, which is a story that we tell ourselves about our labor and what will come after it. This story, which came to me so abruptly and as a kind of abbreviation, felt like an open wound. That resisted any sewing up. It was a wound whose doors had needed to pass through.
Time passed, and I wrote other things, and there are a string of failed essays and failed proposals for essays about the economy of exhaustion. Porters were caught in about archival recovery and about loss. What does it mean to know in your bones? Something outside of you is structuring the losses, determining what can be known of you by what is missing from you, and how my disappearance be described.
And Without Terminus: untraining in archive, I don't feel as though I've answered those questions as much as I've attempted to find as many apertures as I can in which to ask them. I am grateful that Graywolf is the platform from which I get to do this inquiry and what was initially an interview with an open wound to be amongst writers who I am deeply informed by.
And also to have the insights of an amazing publisher in Carmen, who I'm now luckily to have been published by twice, tirelessly asking questions of my questions, making them go further than I thought they could. And with that, I'll read a little from Without Terminus and then introduce the next part of our evening.
A black rail worker was born in 1913, served as a porter for the Great Northern Railroad for 25 years, and then retired. He died sometime later in 1913. There was a rail worker. A porter. He served the Great Northern Railroad and died sometime after retirement. A rail worker served as a porter and then retired.
For 25 years, a porter served the Great Northern Railroad. He was born in 1913. He was black, he died. A rail worker was a porter for 25 years. He worked for retirement. He died. A rail worker died after retirement. A black was born a rail worker. A porter for the great northern he served. He retired. A black worker was born a porter for the railroad, and retirement was later.
Later a black worker died. He retired later. For 25 years, a rail worker died for the great northern railroad. Retirement was always after a black serves and rails and dies on the road sometime later. He is born a porter. A black was born, a railroad was born, dying 25 years is sometime black is retired time.
The later born still serve. If a black is born on the railroad, after 25 years, he dies. And the great northern says he served and. Retired. If a black doesn't work, he dies on the railroad. If a black works for the railroad, he dies a great northern death in 1913. Some say blacks are born, porters serving great northern fantasies of retirement.
A rail worker laughs later and dies, some say. Progress is born with the rail. 25 years later, a porter cannot serve. Cannot retire, and so he dies. Black years are born working on some railroad of the great North. The train moves. Black years are still a railroader, cannot retire, so he dies and haunts the railroad.
A railroad cannot be born unless. A black dies, but such is progress. Somewhere along the railroad, there is a group of blacks building a coffin waiting to be born. Porters, something about the great north requires a black porter dying to retire, but who ends up only dying? Something about the railroad shores up in imagine forward.
It does so by steamrolling through black rail workers. They all die and cannot retire. When a black is born May, the ledger show accounts are payable to the railroad. If you do not have a black worker, imagine the railroad and service and the sound of their dying. Now, you may lay down and retire some say later.
We all retire on some big railroad up in the great north beyond the blacks are dying to find out. Heard that the railroad was a jolly ride that 25 years was a blink. The great north tickling every imaginable fancy to the tune of Black Stein. Some say a train awaits to abduct the black born their years a wrath.
If you should find yourself a black worker for some railroad of the north, 25 years of dying will prove insufficient for retirement. Blacks born dead on the rail, rail and whale, but they never retire. Did he make it out alive? You already know the answer to this question, yet you still are compelled to ask you work with words, which unlike the empty wallets you have inherited, is not a material you can touch.
But you wonder if in reordering this material, you might disrupt what is presuppose. But no new order has ever changed the outcome.
Thank you.
And now I'd like to welcome my fellow Graywolf authors Chloé Caldwell and Joshua Wheeler to the stage for a conversation with Graywolf's director and publisher Carmen Giménez. Carmen is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth and Be Recorder. She served as the publisher of Noemi Press for 20 years before coming to Graywolf.
Chloé Caldwell is the author of Women, the memoir The Red Zone, and the essay collections I'll Tell You in Person and Legs get Led Astray. Her new book Trying, a stirring account of disenfranchised grief and queer reawakening, was published by Graywolf in August. Joshua Wheeler is the author of the essay collection Acid West. His debut novel, The High Heaven, a multi-genre story tracing one woman's quest for faith across the American West during the Space Age will be published by Graywolf in October.
Welcome, Chloé, Joshua, and Carmen.
CARMEN: Thank you to Aimee and chaun for setting the stage for tonight's conversation, and thanks to all of you. Thank you for joining us tonight and giving Graywolf your support and time. I'm so excited to be here with Chloé and Josh to talk about the really brilliant folks.
I'm gonna give you a little brief summary of them and then we're gonna go ahead and jump in. Chloé with the perfect timing of the 10 year anniversary issue of your iconic novella, Women, Trying returns you to the topic of thwarted desire, heartbreak, and its often surprising aftermath. This is a story not often told about infertility and the desire for motherhood. While other books about infertility often end with a medical intervention and a baby, your story is both more unexpected and less resolved. Reflecting on all aspects of trying an intimate journal like fragments.
Josh, The High Heaven is a cinematic epic, deeply rooted in the mid 20th century southwest that spans your protagonist Izzy G's Life, beginning with her escape from a UFO death cult, a wild and wandering existence across Texas and culminates in New Orleans with Izzy's life as a social worker helping clients who experience mindlessness. So I'd love to hear from both of you about the genesis of these stories. Sure.
CHLOE: Well, hi everyone, and thank you. And thank you to Carmen and everyone else. It's really great to be here. Josh and I met on our flight on the way here, so we're old friends now. Well, I think we we're
JOSHUA: friends. Both came from New Orleans. Yeah.
CHLOE: The genesis of my book, I began writing fragments and notes on what I was going through, which was going into the fertility world and once you go into that world. Your lens on life changes a lot and I started to see everything through a very specific perspective. And as a writer, I always want to capture those times. I was very aware, as most people are, that those times in your life are very fleeting. I knew there would be an end and I thought, well, I'm not going to feel this way the same exact way in three years or five years even.
So I began writing down a collection of notes and I always have other books as guides. Some of those were Graywolf books, like The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, Couplets by another Maggie, Maggie Milner, and a lot of Sarah Manguso books. So I knew that I wanted this book to have a lot of white space.
So that was in 2021 that I began recording those fragments. I worked on it for another year. And I started to work with Yuka who had been a previous editor of mine at Soft Skull Press, and we had some conversations about what the book might look like. And from there she acquired it in 2023 and I kept going in that fragmented style.
I had a real vision for it. And once I was working with Yuca and I knew it might be a Graywolf book, I leaned even more into that kind of stylistic structure.
CARMEN: And it was the kind of book that you were also making those discoveries. As you're writing it, you were writing a book in real time.
CHLOE: Yeah. So I teach writing as does Josh. And because of that, I get tired of the writing rules and the questions that my students ask me like, Am I allowed to do this and can I do this? And they tend to forget that it's creative writing, so I started to break all of those rules in my book. And, one of those rules is, Don't write memoir in real time. You wanna wait to have perspective of 20 years. And I didn't want that for this book because if I did that, I wouldn't have the book. And B, it would be a completely different book.
JOSHUA: There's that, uh, great novel Tristram Shandy, which is about a guy trying to write his life, but he has trouble because stuff keeps happening to him and he can't get it all written down fast enough. That's kind of what it sounds like Chloe was going through there.
CHLOE: No, that guy is me. Yeah.
JOSHUA: You wanna start at the beginning, but the present keeps happening. Mm-hmm.
CHLOE: Yeah. And you have to stop somewhere. And that would be a conversation I would have with Yuka toward the end of the process of, should I include this? 'Cause this just happened. And she was like, We should probably find an ending point because you're gonna have to finish the book at some point. And there's always a deadline to work with.
JOSHUA: Yeah, with, with, with The High Heaven, it was kind of a situation where I didn't quite finish the first book. My first book, Acid West, was a collection of essays about southern New Mexico, where I'm from. And there was a story that I always wanted to tell in that book, which was about how my family on the cattle ranch in southern New Mexico, they were always bringing wanderers and strangers onto the ranch, mostly because they needed help, but also because they ran a church at the ranch and they really wanted to be of service to their community. And one of the people that they brought in at one point was this young woman who had left this cult, which had been disbanded because they had been caught mummifying the bodies of dead members so that they would be resurrected by the spaceship that was gonna pick them up in 1969.
And so I grew up hearing this story about this, this young woman that lived on the ranch for a number of years. They called her the cult lady. That was her name. And they always said, she would go around picking dandelions. She loved to eat dandelions. And so I just had this in my head for a long time that there was this cult lady who liked to eat dandelions, and I wanted to write about it in Acid West.
But as you know, you can't shove everything into one book. Right. It all spills over into the next book. And I decided that after looking into it some and talking to people, that it was gonna be hard to write nonfiction about this because it involved people's lives that were close to me, but also it was really difficult to find out details about the cult, like hard facts. Then I decided I, I'll just make it up. And then I did, and Carmen, was kind enough to say, I think that you have a book. And, and so we made it and I'm very, very happy that we did.
CHLOE: It seems like it would've been a fact-checking nightmare if you had done it as nonfiction, right?
JOSHUA: Yeah. Notoriously it's difficult to fact-check aliens. You try and hunt them down and they just slip away and you can't ever quite, quite get 'em to give you the right words.
CHLOE: Well, I’ve never written about aliens, but maybe I should.
JOSHUA: There's actually not any aliens in my book. There's just the threat of aliens. In some ways aliens take the place of like a god in my book. They're ever present, omnipresent, but you can't actually see 'em or prove their existence, but they have their hands in everything, you know?
CHLOE: Our books are so different, but I think it's interesting that you paired us like for those reasons. And there are some overlaps. Graywolf sends you a questionnaire of how to describe your book. In six words or something like that? And apparently we both wrote a lot of the same words and we, we wrote the word absurd. We both wrote unique and maybe some other ones.
JOSHUA: For a couple of writers, we don't know that many words actually. But I think that's true. I mean, I found in your book, though it's dealing with very difficult things, there's a lot of humor in it. And I found that humor to be incredibly compelling and it's often humor that's focused on the absurd. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like you're very great at recognizing moments where there's something absurd going on. And laying it out for the reader in a very clear way that is, disarming.
Mm-hmm. And because it's disarming, then it's also humorous. Mm-hmm. And so I think maybe that's something that I'm interested in doing too, but that I recognized in your work and found really compelling.
CHLOE: I like bringing in modern-day technology, into my books, just because so much of it is really ridiculous. Like in my book, there's people having a breakup on Venmo and just the way we all live now. Like you're in the fertility world and you look at some website having to do with fertility and then three months go by and it's not on your mind and you get an email of like, there's a discount. Buy one, get one on sperm or something like that. So it's just like these ridiculous details that I think a lot of writers overlook. I know my students say, Is this important? Does this matter? Why should I put this in? And those are the things I really like to make sure are illuminated in my book.
And with this book in particular, I made sure to keep them on a page alone, just so the reader also had to just sit with it for a moment.
CARMEN: You both did different kinds of research. Can you both talk a little bit about how that became a part of the project and maybe what it brought to the project, because I think sometimes we make discoveries as we're going along. And it sounds like maybe some of this advertising gave you some context.
JOSHUA: Yeah. I like to break my days as a writer up into gathering and arranging, and the gathering days are where I'm just finding stuff. I'm looking stuff up. I'm in archives, I'm reading other people's books. I'm just gathering, and those are the days that I love. Those are the days that I'm out there on a treasure hunt finding the really great stuff, the absurd stuff. Carmen was my editor on this book, but also was my teacher in grad school many years ago. And Carmen likes to put these stars, these big stars next to stuff in the margins.
And I'm always looking for something that Carmen might star, you know, like that's what I'm trying to get always is a star from Carmen. Those are the gathering days where you're just gathering up as much as you can. And then, the days that I'm actually writing, I call arranging days, and that's where I'm taking all the stuff I've gathered and just trying to put it into some kind of constellation that makes sense or that makes something that is compelling to me or might be compelling to other people.
And I kind of trick myself in that way into thinking that I'm not actually doing any writing. I'm just gathering or I'm arranging. For this book I was doing a lot of research about the space race. So really researching the Apollo missions and the different ways that that regular people responded to those, which also led me to researching the evolution of television.
Because the Apollo moonshot and television in the mid sixties and seventies really evolved together. TV was sort of engineered to show the space race better and the space race was sort of engineered to look better on TV. And these two technologies that were meant to collapse time and distance for humans in transcendent ways, had this parallel journey that I was fascinated by. And so I spent a lot of time researching television and rockets, for this book.
CHLOE: So when you gather the research, do you have a document for research and then later you try to weave in what works into the book?
JOSHUA: I call 'em piles. I have piles. Sometimes they're documents, sometimes they're literal piles of stuff. For this book, I had a lot of Life magazines because it's a period book that starts in 1947 and goes all the way through 2024.
I come from a ranching family that got very good at hoarding. You know, like you never knew when you were gonna need this little piece of barbed wire or this hinge from a door, and so you just collected piles of junk that might be useful at some point, and that's kind of what I do in, in my gathering, is I'm just adding to the hoard.
CHLOE: I relate to the hoarding aspect. I think I hoard in a different way, with quotes from people and books. My research phase is more like reading a lot on the internet. Like I read Reddit a lot because people say really absurdist things there and also really smart things. Discord. Groups on Discord were big.
For me, the researching is definitely reading what other narratives are out there and how is mine the same and how is it different? And then I know when I brought the book to Graywolf, I was able to say, well, I've read a dozen other books on this topic and here's why mine has a different angle.
CARMEN: What is your favorite part of your own book?
JOSHUA: Well, I mean, we're talking about Reddit threads. There is a Reddit thread in my book. In the last part of the book, the, the main character ends up, uh, counseling people who've lost the ability to see the moon. Oh, wow. And so it kind of becomes a cultural phenomenon that there are these people in New Orleans who can't see the moon so sad. And it is sad. Right. But of course, Reddit picks up on it in the book. Yeah. And so people start discussing it on Reddit, and it was fun to write a fictional Reddit thread where people were discussing what it's like for people not to be able to see the moon. There's a lot of good puns in there, about the moon. So I enjoyed that part.
CHLOE: It's an interesting question. There's certain pages that I like because. They are sort of random. And that was called out in a review of mine in The Brooklyn Rail where they said, this page is chaotic. And then they said, It's chaotic even for Chloe Caldwell. And, it's so funny because I remember asking Yuka if we should cut that page because it was completely random and she had some thoughts on why we should keep it. So I like that page. I don't know what page it is. But if you read the book, it has ice cream in it.
I really like Act Three, which when I was writing it, I didn't know was going to be called Act Three or an act at all. But I think that that act really . . . the voice changes a little and it sort of comes alive, and the form breaks and changes. And when I was narrating the audiobook, I could feel that and I could feel the writing change and I could feel the way my life changes in real life and on the page.
So that part, that's really fun for me. And I like how some pages are long and stream of consciousness and other ones, there's a couple pages that just have one sentence.
JOSHUA: At the beginning of your book, I guess it's an epigraph from your dad, which is also something that comes up later in your book. And it's my favorite part of your book. It's so good. It's, You get good at what you do. And I just love that so much and I think about it all the time now.
CHLOE: Thank you. Yeah, you can apply it to anything, which is what's so great. So you can say, if you write, you get good at writing and as my dad would say, if you look at your phone, you get really good at looking at your phone. And that helped me. I didn't go to school for writing and I didn't get an MFA, I didn't go to college, and that was really helpful for me. He's like, if you write, you'll get good, you know? And he played guitar and he would say it to his students, if you practice, you're gonna get really good at guitar. And if you don't practice, you get really good at not practicing.
JOSHUA: It's like, it's like the working man's "practice makes perfect." But it's so . . . for some reason it's so much better. You get good at what you do. Yeah. It just, it makes so much sense. And I think about it all the time after I read it in your book.
CHLOE: A lot of people have been saying that to me. I just, I love how it's like a fill in the blank game and it really helps you change your things in your life. You're like, okay, I've been getting really good at looking at Instagram. I have a PhD in that.
CARMEN: I'm just thinking about your idea of arranging and your book was a big process of arranging, and yours was also this kind of intuitive, right? It's almost like a jazz type of arrangement. Can you both talk a little bit about arrangement and working with Yuka, I'm sort of embarrassed to say, can you talk about your really great editor?
CHLOE: Well, Yuka hates when I talk about her, because she thinks I give her too much credit because I think she's a genius at what she does. And this is my second book with her. So we have this kind of understanding and she knows how I work and I know how she works. So that was really, really lovely to experience. But I like what you said about it being intuitive and kind of like jazz.
I like the arranging aspect. I think it's really fun to move things around and I think of it as collaging a little bit, like copy and pasting. So that's really fun and playing with juxtaposition that way. So when I took it to Yuka, a lot of the fragments had been revised many times. It was really Act Three that became kind of a mess, and I wrote another probably 15,000 words that we ended up cutting because we both had a vision for it being a more slim book.
The original title of the book was actually, called Orphaned Passages because with my previous book, The Red Zone, Yuka had told me, You have some orphaned passages that we should either elaborate on or need to be cut. But I took it as a bit of a challenge and I was like, well, what if I did a whole book of orphaned passages? Wouldn't that be cool? So it was called Orphaned Passages: Notes on Trying. So she let me keep that feeling. I wanted a lot of the passages just floating in space, but at the same time she had me add context when things got confusing.
JOSHUA: My book has a really simple structure. It starts at the beginning of Izzy's life, and it goes to the end of her life. That structure is simple, but I had another teacher at New Mexico State at the same time that I was there when Carmen was my teacher. Her name was Sheila Black.
And Sheila, she told me, she said, Josh, you're a chaotic writer. She was like, your chaos is all over the place, and she was like, one day you should rewrite a Shakespeare play or something because he has good structure and you can just use that. And, that was always in the back of my head.
So when I went to write this novel, I was like, I need the simplest structure possible. So I just started at the beginning and went to the end. But I did do a lot of complicated stuff along the way, I think, and for that it was very useful to have the greatest editor in the history of the world, who's Carmen Giménez. And I've heard this from other people too. I'm not the only one who says this about Carmen, her work on the book was just amazing. She dove into it right away and completely changed my mind about what kind of book it was.
And we started talking about it being a folk tale at one point. Which was super important for me to understand that that kind of storytelling could emerge from, from what I was trying to do. And, Carmen would say this character's not good enough, it needs to be better. So I would spend time on that. I would get good at that character by, doing more work on that character.
And I got to come to the Graywolf Gala last year. The 50th anniversary gala, which was really amazing and we had a great night. But the day after we went back to the Graywolf office and Carmen got out post-it notes and used up a whole stack of post-it notes, writing all the themes of my book and sticking the post-it notes all over her office.
So I have these pictures of just like, it looks, like a film about a person who's losing their mind, but yeah. It was me and Carmen breaking down the themes of the book in ways that I had not been able to do, and having those post-it notes and seeing them in that way. And, I keep those post-it notes right next to me on my desk now because they remind me that it's possible to take something apart, look at it a new and make it better.
And Carmen was able to help me do that in, in, in ways that I'm gonna be grateful for forever and ever.
CARMEN: It's easy when you're working with two very brilliant writers and I think bringing you both, was so significant. I, I don't think the authors know just how much the whole team is cheering on and so excited when you get reviews.
I mean, people lost their mind when Yuka brought your book. Like honestly, it was very, very exciting and I always think about, as a writer, that there are lessons that you learn about yourself and about yourself as a writer. And I'm also thinking about you both moving between genres and I wonder, is there another novel in the works? Like, what do you wanna do next? And, and what is it that you learn from this process that's gonna take you to the next work?
CHLOE: Well, I like that your book is described as multi-genre. I think that that's really cool. I wanna do one of those. I try to do that in ways, whereas all my books are similar but different. And I always have a pretty strong idea of what genre that one is. Not that I believe in genre by any means, but it does help you get to the end of the book. I've been definitely dabbling. I like autofiction a lot. I love it actually. So that's what I am working on right now.
But I think this book taught me to really trust my instincts, so for example. When the book came out or it was in print, Yuka would send me these notes that would say, Did you notice that you have a theme of hills, and I'd be like, no, not at all. And she said, well, you mentioned a hill in these four different parts. Things like that I think are really interesting and beautiful. It also happened to me with the color green ended up being this kind of like theme and metaphor that I didn't do on purpose. I have my students sometimes search words and see how many they have. So if you search the word purple and you're like, why do I have 47 purples in here? And maybe that's meaningful.
JOSHUA: Carmen definitely did that for me. On a couple words, I don't remember what they were, but there was, I think there was a lot of me saying like some, or there was some kind of imprecision that, that I was doing a lot, which we had to really work on getting out of there.
CHLOE: It's fun to find your tics and like things that you accidentally do all the time, and then it's fun to find things that you've been writing subconsciously. So I think this book for me, was a lot of subconscious stuff and now I look at it, I think that's what's so interesting about putting a book in the world is that reviewers see things that I would never have put together.
They see metaphors that I did not do intentionally and they see coincidences. So I think with this book, I really learned to trust the writing and trust myself. The author Sheila Heti, who I've taken a couple classes with, she has this quote, You are your own authority and there's no teacher above you or professor or opinion, you can actually be like, make the executive decisions about your book. So if you say, like in my case my book needs to have a green spine. You know, like that, things like that. Or like my book is going to be fragmented and not waiting for approval from someone else and trusting that your instinct on your own book is the right instinct.
JOSHUA: I told Carmen when we started talking about the cover of my book, I was like, I don't want a moon anywhere on that book. And now it's got like a thousand moons on it. And, I think it's, it turned out all right. On the one hand, when you ask about what we're doing next, I, want to say I put it all into this book. You have to buy this one. There's not gonna be another one. I did everything I possibly could. I really almost killed myself writing this book, so get this one.
But I do have some ideas that I might pursue at some point. All I know for sure is I'll, I'll be writing about New Mexico, New Mexico's where I'm from. It's where my family's been a long time. It's a place that lives deep in my soul. And, I live in New Orleans now, but. I wait for the day when I can return to New Mexico.
I've got some more historical stuff that I want to explore. I've been working on a nonfiction project that's about the forests of New Mexico. A lot of people don't realize that New Mexico is not just a desert. It's heavily forested and it's got some of the most interesting forests in the country.
And I wrote a, piece for Alta magazine, maybe about a year ago, about the legacy of Smokey Bear, which comes out of New Mexico. The actual original Smokey Bear Club Cub, the living symbol was found in a burning tree not far from where the first atomic bomb was tested. So it's a very interesting place and, I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do next, but I do know that I will spend my entire life trying to communicate to people how weird and beautiful New Mexico is.
CHLOE: We were talking earlier, right before we came on, about how treating every book like it's your last, I've heard a lot of students say.
Should I save this for my next book or save this topic or this sentence and something I learned. I forget which writer I heard. Say this was like, give everything to the book you have in front of you. I think it actually, it was Yuka. She said don't, you don't wanna hoard things, you wanna give it your all at the time. Instead of operating from like scarcity mindset.
JOSHUA: If I have a good idea, I wait until I have five other good ideas to combine it with before I say, Okay, it's good enough to actually do, but yeah, I'm, I'm a big proponent of like, don't wait around. You know, if you've got the idea, put it in there, pack it all in there. I'm a maximalist, you know, get it all in there.
CARMEN: I'll ask one last question. Can you talk a little bit about the writers who were coming along with you on the journey of writing your book. You both mentioned a couple writers. I'd love to hear some more. Yeah. Especially if they're Graywolf authors.
CHLOE: Well, one I saw today at the office, well, I didn't see the person, I saw the book, The Art of Waiting by a Belle Boggs was a really big influence on me. I remember when I first saw it and I just liked the title. This is like over a decade ago. And then I think it was out of print perhaps, and came back into print.
And I had read an excerpt, I think in Orion magazine by Belle Boggs, and there was a comment. Under the article and that comment from that random person made it into my book, actually. Yeah. And I had written Belle Boggs like a fan email and just said, I loved your book. Thank you. It's really helpful for me.
And she responded. So, I really liked The Art of Waiting. I love Leslie Jamison, who I did my book launch with last month. Maggie Nelson, of course. I like Paul Lisicky a lot. I like his fragmented memoir style. The Narrow Door specifically.
JOSHUA: Well, my very first creative writing teacher in college was Percival Everett.
And, oh, you've heard of him? I was in school out at USC and he was a young professor at the time, and he was just the coolest guy I'd ever met. And I took several classes with him and forced him to allow me to play squash with him. And he beat me very bad 'cause I didn't know what squash was.
I just wanted to hang out with him. But he's written some great westerns. That Graywolf published Assumption, God's Country, Half an Inch of Water, American Desert. Those were all important westerns for me. Somebody just today described the book as True Grit meets Philip K. Dick.
Charles Portis is a writer that I admire a lot. Philip K Dick. Very different kind of writer, but also a writer that I admire a lot. I was thinking a lot about Annie Proulx, who writes these great westerns. She's writing about a different part of the country, but I was thinking a lot about those and I was thinking about older books.
There's a whole middle part of the book, which rifts on the picaresque genre. So I was thinking of a lot of picaesque like Don Quixote. Those travel adventure books that I loved. And then Southern Gothic writers, like Harry Crews or Barry Hannah. More contemporary writers that, I really enjoy.
Again, like with ideas or anything else, I hoard lots of different writers and I pull all of their influences into the book if I can. Yeah.
CHLOE: A big editing process that I go through with Yuka is cutting quotes from other people because I tend to rely on them a bit. But I'm like, well, these authors kind of back me up, you know, it makes me feel like supported and I like having a chorus of voices of other, other writers, because that's how I became a writer, and that's what's influencing the book.
CARMEN: Thank you both so much for joining us tonight and for talking about your amazing books.
JOSHUA: Thank you for having us. Thank you. Absolute pleasure.
ED MCcCONAGHAY: Wow. Wow. That was terrific. That was a great, great conversation. Two brilliant writers, amazing pieces of art. And the relationship that it takes with a great publishing company that can help produce those works of art and get them outta the marketplace where they can make a difference.
Thanks, Chloé. Thanks Josh. Thanks Carmen and chaun. chaun, your work was beautiful. Thank you.
Hi everybody. I'm Ed McConaghay. I am a board member and a longtime fan. I'm chair of the development committee at Graywolf Press, and it's an honor to be here with you supporting this incredible mission that I believe in fully and have done so for more than 30 years.
At this point, I'm a big supporter of this organization and what it does, and I'll bet that you have the same feelings. And the same support and love for this organization and its mission the way that I do. So, as a reminder, Graywolf Press is a 501(c)3 organization, and that means that its nonprofit status enables us to take risks on writers such as Max Porter, a longtime famous writer at Graywolf, an author who published his debut book with Graywolf back in 2016.
That's pretty close to 10 years ago and the acquisition came years before that. Among his many accolades in recent years, his books, Shy and Grief Is a Thing with Feathers are becoming major cultural forces even today with the making of film, adaptations of each book, both of which are coming this fall long before this success.
Our donors and supporters, people like you, made it possible to acquire Max's works books with staying power that continue to make an impact years and years after they're acquired and after they've been published, sometimes years after we ever thought it would be possible. Thank you.
AIMEE: Thank you for being here tonight. Let's keep Graywolf wild and keep literature alive together.