Poured Over Double Shot: Madelaine Lucas and Alice Winn

By Miwa Messer / March 16, 2023 at 6:00 am

From the trenches of WWI to the coast of Australia, these two debut novels depict the ubiquity of coming of age, even when the circumstances are drastically different.

In Alice Winn’s In Memoriam, two young men find love and tragedy on the fields of battle. Winn talked with us abouthow the story came into being, the extensive research required to create her characters and their world, her literary influences and more.

Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas follows a young woman through a newfound relationship that alters her perspective on life and the future. Lucas joins us in conversation about location as a character, other novels and writers that weave their way into her work, the music she listens to when writing and more.

Listen in as both talk separately with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.  And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Madyson.

Featured Books (Episode)
In Memoriam by Alice Winn
Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünge
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys
The Friend by Sigrid Nuñez

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
Good-bye to All That by Robert Graves

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and wait until you hear what Alice Winn has done. That’s, you know, I’m just going to start there. Alice, would you introduce yourself and your novel In Memoriam, please?

Alice Winn

Yes, hi, I’m so happy to be here. My name is Alice Winn, I read a novel called In Memoriam, it is about two young men who fall in love against the backdrop of World War One. That’s the kind of shortest pitch I’ve managed.

And I like that short pitch. Because there’s a lot of ground we’re going to cover, spoiler free, though. So, we’re going to talk about sort of big picture stuff, because you’ve done something really wild here. This is part love story; this is epic war story; this never slows down. I read this probably, I read your novel, probably more quickly than I expected to, knowing that it was about.

Well, it’s quite long. But something I really, really cared about was getting it to be incredibly, sort of fast paced. So, the way I write is, I send each draft to a different friend and one of the things I like to kind of keep track of is that my friends will often tell me like, okay, I put the novel down here. And that’s really helpful for me, because then I look at the place where they put the novel down and took a break. And I think, okay, that means that place wasn’t gripping enough and then I go in, and I try and make that transition a bit sharper. And, you know, I really wanted it to be a book that you could kind of gobble up in a couple of days.

Yes, and you’ve succeeded, because that’s exactly— I’ve read it a couple of times now. And that’s exactly how I read it the first time. Second time, I had to read a little more closely because I was prepping for the show, but the first time just for mood and atmosphere and to figure out who you are, I just tore through it. And sometimes I feel slightly guilty saying I tore through a book because I know it took you longer to write it than it took me to read it.

I so appreciate that, that to me is exactly what I was hoping for because I want it to be easy to read even though the topic is really hard to read about in some ways, because it’s so sad. And it’s you know, it’s war. It’s World War One. It was one of the worst wars for soldiers and we’re talking about soldiers. But I wanted it to be kind of not a worthy read. You slogged through.

Yeah, you didn’t make me my cultural vegetables, which I appreciate, because there are times where I’m like, I know, I should read this, because X, Y & Z reasons. And there’s sometimes I just, I want to be dazzled by the language, I want to be dazzled by the characters, I want to be dazzled by the setting. And yeah, we’re talking about a novel about war. I do not want to diminish what these characters go through, or what real life soldiers went through, none of that is happening here. But I think it’s really important to talk about this as a work of art and put it into its context. And one of the things I want to toss out is, I think for listeners who loved A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, I think you need to give In Memoriam a go, I think there’s a lot of what drove A Little Life‘s narrative will feel familiar in this book, even though it’s 1914, 1916, 1918, but I do think I mean, the love story is really satisfying. The friendships are really satisfying, the family relationships are really satisfying. And then you put us in the middle of it.

Well, I think something that other than life does really well, is it. It highlights the ways in which trauma can kind of bond people and you know that I think that is a minimization of everything that A Little Life does. But that’s one of the things that I think people want to read it for, you know, is that there is this wholesome friendship in many ways between those boys. And I think that is something that you see in In Memoriam, I hope one of the things I was trying to get across as the more you fall in love with the friendship the boys have, the better that war part of the narrative functions.

And they’re all so young, that was the thing that I had forgotten from all the things I’ve learned about World War One previously is that these are 18-, 19-year-old kids, the devastation for the troops on all sides, you lost at least a million men in England alone, which is I mean, it’s an astronomical number.

Well, something I think is hard for Americans to really visualize or understand is that in England to this day, and we’ll just in the UK in general, in every tiny village, there is going to be somewhere a war memorial, which has the names of all the young men who died in World War One and World War Two written on it. And for instance, over Christmas, I was in Wales, and I was in this tiny little village of maybe 1000 people, and they had this war memorial, and they had lost 20 young men in World War One. And if you think about a village in Wales of 1000 people with 20 young men dying, I mean, that’s got to be most of their young men. Because the death wasn’t kind of evenly distributed. Demographically, it just it wiped out the young men of the of the country.

And I have to ask, because if you’re watching this on video, you can see that Alice is nowhere near old enough. I’m sorry, I had to go there for a second because I mean…

I feel perfectly old enough, to be fair.

Why not write the story, but at the same time, it’s not necessarily the most obvious choice for a debut novel. I need to know, when did this start? How did this start?

It’s interesting, sort of not quite answering your question, but I just had a, I just had a baby. And I wrote the novel when I was 26, 27, before I had, you know, dreamed of having a child, and I think I really related much more to the 17-year-old boys than I do now. And I remember my editors kept being like, look, you know, you need to think about how the mothers and fathers are feeling here. And I was like, mothers or fathers, shmothers and shfathers. I was with the 17-year-olds. It’s funny, because I really think I wouldn’t write it the same way now. And I think maybe that would make it a worse book. Because now I have really viscerally kind of side with the parents sending the I’m like, no, don’t send them. Whereas I think when I was writing it, I could really kind of get my head into the world view of like, oh, the war is going to be fun, let’s go together, it’s going to like it’s going to be like… I think that is how they felt in 1914. And that’s how I, yeah, I was able to kind of key into that a little bit in a way that I wouldn’t be able to anymore, which is funny, because it was only a few years ago, that doesn’t quite answer your question. I didn’t think of how I came upon it.

Yeah, but I promise we can get there. Because there is a 15-year-old character who you’ll meet later in the book, who really does have that attitude. And I the first time I met that kid, I was like, oh, I hope you duck. And I’m not really giving anything away, because people will meet this kid when they meet him. But the idea of a 15-year-old enlisting because it was what he wanted more than anything in the world and actually, at one point, like his mother gives up trying to keep him from enlisting his uncles, everyone just says, alright, you know, even the guy who’s running the desk where people volunteer, it’s just like, this kid keeps coming back, I can’t stop. And the idea that there’s that kind of momentum and sort of disregard, I mean, a 15-year-old has no concept of what he’s walking into.

You know, I read this wonderful book by Fatima Bhutto, called The Runaways— did you ever hear about it? It was such a wonderful book about the radicalization of Islamic youth and one of the things she does such an amazing job of getting across is the way that you know, teenagers are romantic, and they want to be glorious and important. And it is so easy for older people to manipulate that and make them do whatever they want. And you’ll see that throughout history over and over and over again, the people who are most likely to go and get themselves killed for some grand idea that will probably never really come to pass to our students or young people WWI in In Memoriam is really about that. But it’s a perennially relevant subject, because young people are always going to want to be glorious and important, and that is always going to make them vulnerable.

Which brings me back to Gaunt and Ellwood, our main gents, both of whom I’m very fond of, and we’re not really going to give people lots of spoilers about their individual journeys. Together, they are a wonderful pairing. There’s a lot to love in this particular relationship. But I’m wondering who showed up first?

Let me tell you a little bit about how the idea for the book came up it for me, I was actually trying not to write a novel, I had written three and not been able to find an agent. And I had decided, I had gone to my mentor and she had said, you should write screenplays. She was a screenwriter. So, she was helping me and looking back and forth on screenwriting, and I was procrastinating on her latest round of notes. And I had been reading Robert Graves Goodbye to All That and so I kind of fell into this WWI phase and I went to the same school as Siegfried Sassoon, the famous war poet. So, I thought to myself, I wonder if he ever wrote any poetry in the school newspaper while he was there. And I went and googled around, and he didn’t, because actually, he hated school so that was, that was a dead end. But my old school had uploaded all of the school newspapers and I, you know, this is typical procrastination, as I’m sure you can imagine. I read all of the newspapers from 1913 to 1919. These are student newspapers written by students, for students, and they begin with, you know, it’s prewar, and it’s debating society and cricket reports and poems, and they’re funny, and irreverent and naive, right? These boys think they are going to rule the world because that is what they are being trained to do. And then the war breaks out and they are so excited. And immediately so many of them enlist, you’ve just pages and pages of that. And then they start writing letters back to the school from the front and they’re like, oh, it’s so great. We don’t have to wash, like mom’s not here and then they start dying. And it’s it falls to the boys at the school who you know the 17-year-old boys to write the In Memoriam, the obituaries of their older brothers and their older friends, and you grow to know a boy through just the sheer quantity of in emoriams he’s writing. And then you watch that boy go off and write and you see his letters from the front and the letters from the font start changing as the world progresses, and they become much bleaker. I remember one from about 1915, where a boy writes back to the school and he says, I hadn’t realized until yesterday, what it meant to see your friends dying all around you and then you’ll see him die and then one of his friends writes this adventure. And the whole cycle just continues, and it was just unimaginable. And what was so strange about reading these newspapers is that I have read quite a lot of all literature, but what literature is written usually by someone who went through a trauma and has kind of come out of it and processed and is now trying to explain what they went through to someone who wasn’t there. Because these, these papers were by people who are going through it for people who are going through it, they you know, you are a voyeur when you read them, because they were not writing for anyone else. They’re not literary. They’re just raw. They’re silly in places, there’s something sentimental and saccharine about them often, because it’s just got sort of emotional when I’m talking about it, just really hard reading, I got really swept up in them. I think a lot of me writing the book was just me wanting to get across to sort of translate these newspapers into a story that people would be able to understand so that they would feel the way I felt when I read them.

One of the things I really loved as I was reading is the amount of detail that is, quite frankly, gruesome, there are moments in the battlefield, where it’s very clear, you have done quite a lot of research. And yet, at the same time, for me as the reader, it made the stakes higher for me because I knew what was waiting. And because this was not just two young men trying to figure out their connection to each other and their relationship and everything else. It’s more like there’s this context that is so extraordinary. And hopefully, we will not ever see something quite like that, again, that we seem to be getting closer and closer all the time. I mean, the whole idea was that was going to be the one and then we were going to be done and we were going to figure it out.

Do you know, I don’t remember exactly what year this was, but the first time a journalist called it the First World War was maybe 1918, 1920. Yeah, a long time before World War One. Imagine if we all started calling COVID. Like, the first pandemic of the 21st century, it’s so bleak. You know, they knew they knew that it hadn’t, there was in the 30s there was this real push for, you know, the lasting peace and there are all these countries signing the contracts to promise never, ever ever to fight ever again. But they knew it was just part one, I think.

But also, these boys trying to find language. I mean, we’re all sort of aware of this very Victorian idea of you know, bearing and behavior in Asia, we call it face, right. Like, it’s this whole idea of how you behave and how you comport yourself. And, you know, there are rules to be… and here are these kids living these messy lives and letters and lots of sex. I mean, there’s so much life there as they figure it out. But they also keep saying, well, then when I get married, well.

Because they can’t, you know, it’s 1914, they can’t be together. No, they are going to get married. That’s the plan, you know, all of them are going to marry nice, decent girls. That’s sort of what is accepted.

I think all of those layers of heartbreak, Alice, there’s so many layers of heartbreak in this book, and yet somehow, it’s not overwhelming.

Thank you. I don’t want it to be bleak, you know.

It’s really not. But can we talk about how you took all of that source material, not just the newspapers from your school, and you talk about it in an author’s note at the end of the book. I mean, there’s a lot of research in here. And there’s a lot of, you know, straight up, I was inspired by this particular thing, and I knew it would work for the narrative. And so here’s, you know, something related to it. So, how did that process work for you, as the writer.

I used a ton of primary sources; I don’t really know how I could have written it without using all those sources. In the first draft, basically, whenever anyone was killed they were just sort of shot somewhere in the head or the heart because I was like, well, that’s how you die. And then I read Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel and in that, I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it is just the most brutal and gruesome, mirthless book, people die or are wounded on every page and I was stunned by the sheer variety of the ways you can be I mean, you can be shot in the head and survive and you can be shot in the leg and bleed out in 10 seconds and it’s, you know, I don’t think… we live in, thankfully, quite a peaceful society and so I couldn’t have imagined all of all of the ways in which the violence took place. I absolutely lifted and I took inspiration from many of my primary sources. And I also crafted the narrative around things that I found, for instance, I was very inspired by Vera Brittain, who was a nurse in World War One who wrote Testament of Youth. I kind of almost collaged it together because I felt like I had done all this research and I wanted to translate it into something where people could understand what how I feel when I think about the war without having to read, you know, 1500 books.

But you get so many of the little details too. I mean, I didn’t know that leaving your boots on if you had jungle rot on your feet, which would happen in the trenches, I guess they called a trench foot there.

Yeah, jungle rot. What do they call it? Jungle rot.

15:54

That’s the Vietnam War, okay, but it’s a similar thing, like you were just… your feet were wet all the time, you could never get dry. And so, your skin started to peel off. And you know, here you’ve got characters telling each other, just don’t take your boots off. Just don’t take your boots off. And it’s those tiny details. And yet people die very creatively, but the emotion you’re always right there with the emotion.

As to the details. I think that was something I definitely read for, and Siegfried Sassoon wrote three autobiographical novels and three memoirs, which I think is very egotistical of him. And they were all about the war, pretty much. He talks about how most of the time the war is just very boring. He says something like, you know, I think it all would have been very interesting, being at the front, if I hadn’t been so incredibly uncomfortable all the time. If he hadn’t been in such physical discomfort, he would have been like oh how curious, look, the bones. But instead, he was just like, tired, I’m thirsty. As to emotion, I’m glad that you felt it was close to the surface.

But you’ve still got characters who don’t necessarily know how to express themselves. You’re doing a real balancing act between communicating the emotion to those of us who are reading, but also being true to these guys who really don’t have, we just I mean, I’m sorry, they didn’t have therapy until much later, like, we didn’t even really shellshock was sort of how they described PTSD and people came back really, really, in frightful states, and not just physical states, but also mental and emotional states. And so you’ve got to do this balancing act where you can’t necessarily rely on your characters to tell the truth, but somehow you’ve got to figure it out.

Yes. And I think, especially with some of these characters, you know, they don’t necessarily know themselves that well. And I think this is true, whenever you’re talking about queer narratives, you know, I think there are some people who know exactly what they want from a very young age. But I think a very common queer experience is feeling this uncertainty and confusion and, you know, you might write off the way you’re feeling is not really being serious or not really being real. And I think that’s even more true in a time when it’s considered, you know, acceptable to mess around with another boy in the dark, but completely unacceptable to ever talk about it or to, you know, act on it in any way beyond sort of a playful fumble at boarding school.

Yeah. And homosexuality was still illegal at this point.

It was illegal until well, I think, 1967 in England,

I mean, right there. I mean, these are boys who are being raised to run the world and yet and for some of them have to deny a huge piece of who they are simply because someone else has decided that they’re illegal or they’re wrong or something like that. But there’s also, we have to talk about the antisemitism because one of the boys is German and Jewish.

No, so Gaunt is half German. Ellwood is Jewish, sort of, he’s not, he’s not really culturally or religiously Jewish. His mother’s family is Jewish, but they converted some time before. Gaunt and Ellwood, I kind of I got this, sort of DNA from Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, who were friends and Robert Graves was half German and Siegfried Sassoon was culturally, sort of ethnically Jewish, but culturally Christian, actually, he later converted to Catholicism, in fact, but I really liked how that worked out because it means that they’re both others in this you know, they can both sort of pass, right. And Ellwood, for instance. He’s Jewish, but he’s very popular and sometimes it’ll come out and someone would call him a Jew and it comes out there’s unexpected moments. But most of the time, he’s in with the in crowd and with Gaunt, you know, its the same kind of thing because he can kind of slip in and out. But I think that that must be something that bonds them, they’re both sort of hiding something. They’re both in and out at the same time, they’re outsider insiders,

Watching the two of them navigate all of these minefields, which is a terrible metaphor to use, talking about when they’re at school, not yet on the battlefield. These are big things and I mean, Gaunt even is sort of goaded by his own family into enlisting before he wants to.

Yes, he is, well, because his mother is German. And so, she feels under immense pressure. Because, you know, it doesn’t look very patriotic to be German and have a son who’s a strapping young lad of six foot two and hasn’t enlisted yet and Gaunt, I wouldn’t call him a full-on pacifist, but he has pacifist leanings and he certainly thinks this war is foolish, and he does not think it will benefit the Empire. I want to stress, you know, I wanted to make them of their time. So, for instance, when you talk about antisemitism, there are plenty of times I think, when Gaunt, you know, shows himself to be slightly antisemitic in ways that I think on it well-meaning, you know, he kind of, he’s always telling me when Ellwood encounters small moments of antisemitism, Gaunt is always telling him that it’s in his head and you know, you shouldn’t worry about that. They both, I think, really firmly believe in the British Empire is a good thing for most of the book. And I think that does start to shift, especially for Gaunt, because he always was a little bit more open to the idea of progress. I didn’t want them to be, you know, 2023 schoolboys who have put 100 years ago, I wanted them to have the right kind of that, you know, to an extent to have the politics that would make sense for them to have. And so yeah, so Gaunt, I think he comes to question the idea of empire, but his initial reason for thinking the war is wrong is that he thinks it will weaken the British Empire.

There are such products of their time, they really, really are these boys, I had a moment and you and I are talking about this before I hit record, there’s a moment and we’re not going to tell you which boy, it happens to because we’re staying away from spoilers, but he’s back temporarily in England from the front. And because he’s not wearing a uniform, this woman on the train decides that he’s a coward and he’s not fighting and gives him a white feather. And I snarled with him when he snarled at this woman and made her drop the feather. But that made my skin crawl? Hmm. And I know it’s based, in fact.

You know, I’m struggling to remember where I read that. But I do remember reading a first-hand account somewhere where someone talked about being on leave, and how they quickly learned, you have to wear your uniform on leave, because otherwise people think that you haven’t signed up. You know, and I think what that shows, or what I, you know, saw when I read that that first-hand account, was this disconnect between what people in England think is going on and what the soldiers are experiencing. And you see this as well, in All Quiet on the Western Front. In the book, there’s this, for me, I think the most meaningful section of the book is when Paul goes on leave and he goes to this beer garden, and hangs out, has a beer with a bunch of old men. And they’re all talking about, you know, war aims and how to defeat the opposite side and blah, blah, blah. And he thinks to himself, gosh, that, you know, these men don’t realize that this is what life is about sitting in a beer garden and having a glass of beer. That’s what life is about. And why are they talking about the war? Why are they wasting their time? I’m the only one who understand and he’s 18. Right, you know, and I think something I saw again, and again and again, in contemporary sources was when men were on leave, or when they were injured, or even when they were so injured, that they couldn’t go back. They express over and over again, this craving to be back at the front. Because when they’re in England, they just feel completely isolated and disconnected. And as if they’re like living in this alien world when no one everyone’s talking about, you know, food shortages and how difficult it is to get good servants these days and it’s just completely foreign to their experience.

You have a great, great line that I love. And I’m not going to tell people who it’s in direct relation to but the line is “England was filthy with ignorance and the trenches were clean by comparison.” I mean, just even these moments where you’re talking about sort of how filthy and how wretched the front is, versus, you know, here’s a sandwich I can’t even imagine what it must do to human being to have sort of this experience they carry around that they don’t have the language to describe.

Well, absolutely. And I think one of the reasons they don’t have the language is that this, this was a really new way of conducting warfare. Right? You know, in World War One, the basic problem was that, you know, as what historians always say that defensive was so much more powerful than the offensive. So, what would happen is, you know, you attack the enemy line, they absolutely just kill all of you. And then the few of you who have survived, go back to your line, and then they the enemy attack you, and then you just, you know, mow them down. And you know, that if you look at the front, the front line, the Western Front, it barely budges for about four years, it just doesn’t really move. So, these enormous battles with only the Battle of the Somme, you know, it had close to 60,000 British casualties on the first day alone, and it, you know, I think it was a matter of meters of land, in terms of how much was won.

And the boys keep coming back to saying they’re tired. It doesn’t matter where they are in the hierarchy. I mean, 18-year-olds are captains because there’s no one else. And I mean, they’re walking around just saying, I’m tired, I’m tired. And obviously, there is so much more to it, and we bring our understanding of PTSD and other things to it. But you do you keep them firmly in their moment, in their time, in their sort of point of view. And it feels a little bit like a magic act, because honestly, you did not drop a pair of teenagers in from 2023, which we thank you for. But are you just leaning into the research? Are you leaning into Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry? I mean, I’m assuming at some point you read like Pat Barker’s Regeneration. Yeah, Bird Song, the Sebastian Faulks. There’s a lot of great literature that’s come out of World War One. Certainly. I mean, you know, Farewell to Arms— hi. But for you working now, let’s talk about the magic act for a second. How do you construct this world?

Well, that’s sort of interesting question. I wrote most of the book very, very fast— in about two weeks.

I’m sorry, what? I have a galley right here. Hold on, hold on, hold on. So you’re telling me you had a draft? Okay. Let’s take out the historical note for a second. Let’s take out the acknowledgments. Okay, my galley gets us to 375 pages. So you whacked out a draft?

Well, most of it, most of it. The book is I think about 100,000 words. Okay. And I wrote the first 60 or 70,000 in 2 weeks.. Yes, very, very fast. Sort of feverishly, okay, really, really, really easily. You know, and I had grown up knowing a lot about the trenches, reading a lot of war poetry, reading, you know, and all these things. And so, and obviously, I knew about boarding school. So, the first, you know, 70% of the book, it felt very easy. I just kind of I wrote what happened, and I already knew roughly what context they were in. And then around that point, I got to a few places a few worlds that I didn’t know as well. You know, I don’t want to be specific about things. But you know, I, for instance, if I was writing a battle scene, I had to know a lot more about that specific battle. And so, I just got really stuck. And then I was also very stuck at the ending, I took a sort of reading break, I just read for about a summer and monologued to all my friends about the war, the Great War, the War of 1914, then I finished it up after the summer, and then I edited it for a little over a year. And as I said, I edited it by, you know, I would send it to a friend, they will tell me everything that was wrong with it, I would fix it all. And I’d send it to the next friend. And they’d be like, well, this is what’s wrong with it. And I just did that, you know, 15 times.

I think that’s a really great idea, actually just getting you know, if it works for you to get that much input. I think that’s really cool.

I love, I mean, I’m so lucky, because I have friends who are really, I mean, that they’re fast readers. So that’s one thing, you know, I think, I think you couldn’t do this if your friends all took three or four months to get back to you. But my friends would come back to me in a matter of days or weeks, and I just really trusted their judgment. And, you know, each friend would bring something new to the table, you know, and I’m not Jewish, for instance, but it was really helpful to have my friends who are Jewish, you know, say things like, you know, this, this remark that so and so, you know, made would probably make Ellwood feel so… you know, that kind of thing is really, really helpful. And yeah, I feel like I feel like the way I write is very, you know, in some ways collaborative. I have to talk about ideas.

As the reader I benefited greatly from your need to talk about your ideas. So please keep doing that. There is a moment where one of our characters ends up in a POW camp, and I did have a moment Where I was like, oh, no, is everything going to slow down? Because, I mean, it’s a war camp and things have happened. And, you know, lots has happened at this point. And then you give us an attempted escape, for which I am deeply grateful. But can we talk about that piece of it too, because I think you have so many characters who keep saying, well, the Hague Convention will protect us the Hague Convention, like, these are young men who believe in the rule of law, they believe in being gentlemanly they believe in, you know, behaving properly. And if you have standards, people will meet you at standards and everything is blown to bits.

One book I read, that really made an impact on me was a book of essays by a man called Charles Edward Montague, who was in his 50s, when the war broke out, he didn’t really believe in the war, he was a journalist, and he, he dyed his hair black, so that he could sign up pretending to be younger than he was, because he felt as if it wasn’t fair, I think, I think it was the he didn’t feel like it was fair that only young people should go fight, you know, he wanted to be to kind of stand in solidarity with the, with the youth. And he’s a really good writer. And he wrote, these sort of like, Atlantic think piece style articles about what the war had done to, you know, Edwardian society, essentially. And they are such interesting, interesting essays. And one of the things that they really hammered home for me was how similar the prewar society was, in many ways to ours, because now I was writing this pre pandemic. And I wonder if this is less relevant now, but England had not had total war since the Napoleonic Wars. So it had been 100 years of relative peace, I don’t want to say total, because of course, they had been involved in the Crimea and Boer War or colonialism, etc. But in terms of like, if you are a British citizen living in Britain, has been peaceful for 100 years. I can’t this image at one point about how before the war, we had this feeling that all of our institutions were like this bedrock that we could run wildly about on top of and nothing would ever shake it. And then after the war, you realize that the entire ground you had been walking on throughout your entire life was in fact, justice and you could, you could just break through, and everything could fall apart at any moment. Another thing that I read was Vera Brittain quoted Daniel Deronda, which is George Eliot and there’s this quote, that she quotes, which is about how there comes a time in many people’s lives when the events of newspapers come out of the newspaper and into their own personal life. I mean, it’s much better phrase than that. I think that in 2019, that felt really, really relevant. You know, there was this sense, I suppose, in a way that that’s an exposure of privilege. You know, I’m not saying politics didn’t affect anyone. But certainly, things like war felt like something from history book, I think, I think the pandemic when it first happened, you know, there was this sort of shock of like, well, how can something be happening to us? Like, how can something on this scale be happening to us, we are post history, and I think that’s exactly how these boys felt, you know, they felt sort of important that this land war in Europe was happening in their lifetime, but also in disbelief, which I think is exactly how we would feel if we suddenly had to go and start bayonetting people.

I think, honestly, people forget, no matter where they are in time that history is not like the wildly distant past. It’s really not. It’s, you know, when you see black and white photos of say, the civil rights movement in America, like those people are still alive. The ones that didn’t get assassinated, like they’re still alive, and you’re having Sunday dinner. And I just, there are moments like that, where you just look at things and go, okay, okay, and the nature of war has evolved. I mean, now we use drones, and we use planes. And obviously, the technology that was so new in World War One was gas, which is a barbaric way to die really hard and also machine guns, these machine guns were literally ripping people apart.

They’re pretty full on if you watched the new All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix, it’s set in the latter half the war, my book really takes place. 1914, 1915, 1916. And, you know, the technology evolved rapidly as well, that I mean, when the war begins, these men, they don’t have metal helmets, they are wearing cloth hats, everything kind of evolves. But if you watch that film, which I’m not sure I can… it’s a beautiful, really, really amazing film. It’s kind of shot like a horror film. It’s really hard to watch. But there’s this scene with a tank and it’s the first time any of these characters have ever seen a tank and you kind of really feel the horror of like this, this completely alien technology coming on to the field. But yeah, I mean, there was a lot of military innovation, I think happening in this time period that had not really been seen before. And I think, you know, Ellwood, especially because he’s, he’s, you know, he’s quite romantic and boyish. He reads a lot of Tennyson and I think he thinks that it’s going to be kind of like Agincourt and he’s going to ride in on a horse and, you know, save Gaunt’s life and then they’ll make out in a trench. I think he just doesn’t know what he’s in for.

He’s a very sweet boy. He’s a very, very sweet young man, but…

I actually wouldn’t call him sweet. I have to say, I think he’s, I think he’s a bit of a twat.

But I know I mean; I do see what you’re saying.

He’s a smug entitled, you know, and I love him. And I think he’s at his best around Gaunt, who’s his best friend. And I think that’s part of what makes the kind of hint of romance between them in their friendship work is that you kind of think, oh, gosh, you know, Ellwood is kind of so obnoxious around a lot of people that with Gaunt, you can see this better version of him that could come out.

Better version of him, but also honestly, I think teenagers. I’m very fond of teenagers in general, because they’re just, they’re like baby giraffes. They don’t know anything. They just, they’re all limbs and they’re just, they say ridiculous things and do ridiculous things. But Ellwood really does redeem himself for me as a reader.

I’m glad to hear you say that. I think he’s probably my favorite character, I think because he is so flawed, I find him, you know, endearing as you say.

Yeah. Honestly, if you had given us sort of these stereotypical well-behaved children who are then, you know, sent off to horrible fate, I don’t think you would write that book. I just, I don’t see you…

You know, I think Ellwood begins the novel on top of the world. You know, he’s handsome, he’s rich, he’s popular, he’s clever, he’s good at sport. It’s all working out, he just has everything in the world to play for, you know, everything to lose. And I think he, he doesn’t really know that he has so much to lose. I think he just takes it all for granted. You know?

He does and but because he’s 17,18 years old. If he were, you know, much older and behaving like this, I would not have the same your sympathy for him.

No, he’s very naive.

And that’s, I think that’s the thing. You know, he’s as much as you say, he’s this sort of snotty know it all I’m just like, well, I know more than he does, because I’ve read the book. And I think that’s what does it for me. But you know, Maggie O’Farrell loves In Memoriam. She’s the bomb. And I will say I was noodling around on your Instagram, and you love Vladimir. Oh, yeah. That book is great. So, I’m beginning to think you read for voice the way I read for voice, which is I need like, that’s the thing that holds me and I do feel like the voice of In Memoriam was just it was, you know, it’s like, yeah, it’s just this…

Thank you. Well, I don’t think… I can’t— I’m like, do I have a voice?

Yeah, you do. Actually, you know, voice doesn’t always have to be flashy. And I think there’s some people who are like, well, I have to key into one person. And it just, no, you can trust the sort of third person omniscient. I stayed with you even in the battle scenes, right? I needed the battle scenes. For context. It wasn’t enough. As much as I love the boys. As much as I love Ellwood and Gaunt, I needed all of the other bits as well, because the stakes are so high. The stakes are really impossibly high. I mean, a lot of it was gory.

I think in some ways, it’s easier to read than it. You know, when I watched All Quiet on the Western Front the film, and I don’t actually think it’s gorier than my book because my book has incredible amounts of violence. But there’s something about reading it. It’s not visual, I think it makes it slightly easier to handle maybe I don’t know. I mean, I found that film really, really, really hard to really sad to watch.

Yeah, I’m not sure I’m there right now. Not sure. I know. It’s supposed to be very, very good. But I’m, I’m not entirely sure.

Yeah, the goal was mainly lifted, as I said, from you know, I didn’t make up ways that people were injured. I just, I just found them, which is pretty horrible when you think about it.

Okay. But we’ve talked about the research, we’ve talked about the literature that preceded you. And I’m trying to bring in Maggie a little bit, and Julia and Vladimir a little bit only because I’m curious to know some of the other writers who helped sort of shaped you because we know, we see the guardrails that you put in for yourself, right, writing In Memoriam like, we can see all of that. But Alice Winn, the writer because I think you’ve wanted to do this for a while, I think this is something you’ve been thinking about not just writing. I mean, you said you wrote three novels. So, you’ve written three novels. By the time you were 26, 27, but not very good ones. Yeah, that’s okay. You sat down and you did the work, doesn’t mean you didn’t do the work, but who are some of the writers who helped get you on the page?

I think there’s so many it’s really hard to list. James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Just the prose, the level of his process is so extraordinary. And then I also think Anna Karenina is one of the best books I’ve ever read except for the bit about the peasants loving their work and how great that is for them. That bit is quite boring, but that’s about 30 pages and apart from that, it’s really very good. It’s so I think Evelyn Waugh was a was an influence for this book. I wouldn’t say he’s going to be influence for every book, but for this book. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller was maybe less of an inspiration exactly for this book, but it’s just one of my favorites. And I think I’ve always really loved sort of British drawing room literature, you know, Noel Coward and even you know, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, kind of books. I especially like books that are sort of darkly funny about sort of elitist upper class British people being mean to each other. I’ve always liked those kinds of books. And I don’t know that In Memoriam is kind of in that same spirit but I imagine if you have read those books, you would see traces of them in In Memoriam as well.

I’ve read some I’ve read some and I do. Yes. You did the thing you set out to do. I think especially if I think about some of the dialogue between some of the boys, there’s also Maude.

Yeah, she’s so she’s Gaunt’s twin sister and she is I mean, In the same way that Gaunt has his DNA in Robert Graves, Maude has her DNA in in Vera Brittain whose book was just so wonderful, and also Vera Brittain is such a character. I mean, she’s, she’s this very beautiful feminist. And we know she’s beautiful, because she repeatedly tells you. She’s very politically active. She’s sort of closer friends with the men in her life than the women her life which is very bad luck, because obviously they all go off and get killed. But I drew on her a lot for moment because Maude is this character who she’s never really understood why she can’t be closer friends with her brother, and she’s friends with Ellwood, but there’s something there’s something wrong, right in this kind of trio of friendship and she knows her something off, but she doesn’t know what it is and she feels left out. She’s also not someone who would mope or feel sorry for her, like she’s got stuff to do. She’s busy. You know, she enlists to be a nurse secretly she does that secretly without telling her parents, she has a 1914 feminist, which is very kind of different from a modern feminist. But I really like her as a character. I think she gets a little bit sidelined in some ways by the narrative, because we’re basically in Gaunt and Ellwood’s head most of the time, and they are both a little bit sexist. And so we never really get to see Maude’s side of things. And I think, you know, I tried to get across how frustrating she finds that and how, you know, she’s kind of at the margins of the story being like, pay attention to me, I’m very important, and there’s not, you know, they aren’t giving her the time of day and in a lot of ways,

But I think it works for what you need to do. I mean, I’m very fond of her. But she fills the space she needs to fill in all the right ways. But she even says it later in the book, which is like well, this is what I’m off to do. And I’m just, my eyes got really big. I was like oh dear Maude has plans, Maude has plans, but yeah, and this is not necessarily her moment. Do we see Maude again, at any point? Have you started working on a new thing?

You mean— the sequel? Maude the sequel?

Not necessarily a sequel, but I mean, maybe the spirit of Maude. Are you working on a new book?

I am working on a new book, but it’s going just— it could not be getting worse. It’s going really, really badly. I’ve written a first draft. I don’t like it. No, it’s completely different. It’s Arthurian legend. Yeah, yeah. So no, there’s no, there’s no Maude there. I mean, to be fair, if you read this book, and you like the character of Maude, there is a book I would strongly recommend as a nonfiction about the women of England, like during the war, and after the war is called Surplus Women, by Virginia Nicholson and it’s just the story of these, like these extra women because you know, a million men die, right? And then there’s a million women who can’t find partners, and no one knows what to do about that. And then, you know, it’s a really fascinating and actually, overall kind of inspiring story of how these women ended up spearheading, you know, the feminist movement, that we all benefit from. So yeah, I would have liked to have given more space to Maude because I think her experience is fascinating. I was so interested in Vera Brittain’s account of the war, and other women’s accounts of the war. The story is, in some ways, it’s a little claustrophobic in that it is just these two very young, very sheltered boys take on the war. So you know, there wasn’t space for her to have much more.

Bt you still told exactly the story we needed to read. Thank you, but it’s really what it comes down to. Alice Winn thank you so much, In Memoriam is out now.

Thank you so much, it’s so lovely being here.

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Madelaine Lucas is a musician, and a teacher and a novelist and wait until you hear about Thirst for Salt. This is her debut. It is a trade paperback original. And yes, I’m saying that at the top of the show, because it means it’s a little less expensive than some things. Anyway, everyone should go out and get it now. But we are going to talk about your nameless narrator and a few other things. But Madelaine would you introduce yourself and the book to listeners, please?

Madelaine Lucas

Sure. Well, first of all, I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. My name is Madelaine Lucas. I’m the author of the debut novel Thirst for Salt. I was born in Melbourne, Australia and raised mainly in Sydney as the daughter of a visual artist and a musician. And I spent my 20s performing as a singer songwriter in Sydney before I moved to New York in 2015, to get my MFA at Columbia University, where I now teach fiction and the graduate and undergraduate writing programs and I’m also a senior editor of the literary annual Noon.

And on top of that you found time to write a novel. I just want to point this out, you found time to write and there’s a lot happening there. When did you start working on this book? And can we talk about your nameless narrator?

Sure. So honestly, it did take a long time, the seed of Thirst for Salt started about 10 years ago, when I first wrote a short story about a 24 year old woman, her older boyfriend and their dog, yeah, within 2013 when I was finishing my undergraduate degree, and then after I moved to New York, I kind of just found myself drawn back to these characters and also drawn back to this place, this Australian coastal landscape. And as for the namelessness, I think when I was reading this novel, what I really wanted was to create a really strong sense of intimacy between the reader and the narrator. I wanted you to really feel like you were inside her consciousness and so whenever I tried to name her or thinking, think about naming her, I felt it just put us a little bit removed from her own experience, from her own interior walls. And I think that there’s a particular charge that comes with anonymity as well. I think it allows the possibility for the reader to imagine themselves into her experience in a different way. Also potentially play with the line between how much of this is autobiographical. How much of it is fiction? I mean, I will say it really is a novel. But I liked that that was that. Yeah, that charge, that possibility that allows the reader to wonder.

Can we talk about the landscape for a second? Can you describe it for listeners who haven’t seen it firsthand?

So, Thirst for Salt is set in a fictional Australian beach town called Sailor’s Beach, but it is really based on this area on the south coast of New South Wales. The bay area where I spend a lot of time on holidays with friends and family when I was a kid. And it’s really different from I think what a lot of people picture as an Australian beach landscape. It’s not a sunny paradise, it’s kind of more wild. The weather is very changeable, it’s often very stormy, even in the summertime. So I guess it’s closer to maybe like, I feel like the novel takes place in a space that feels closer to maybe like Montauk in winter than what you picture of an Australian beach town.

And so, part of why I want to bring that up is I love the landscape and I love the sense of place. And I love the fact that we have a nameless narrator, all of these elements. It’s broody. It’s a little claustrophobic and points, the emotional landscape of this book is really quite great. I just want to talk to you about where that comes from. Because it’s not an easy world to create. And, you know, regular listeners will know I have this thing about world building doesn’t just belong in science fiction and fantasy. Every novel builds a world and sometimes it’s, you know, suburban wherever or in your case. It’s this wild, rugged coastline, which, I mean, I grew up in New England, it makes me think of a lot of New England kind of beaches, right? Where it’s great and craggy. And like the water is a weird color. It’s mostly green, and you’re like, okay, but how did you create the mood of this place? The emotion of this place?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I’m really drawn to novels; workplace plays a major role and is almost like a character itself. I guess it’s like you said, I was interested in a landscape that would maybe, you know, reflect on the kind of core relationship that’s at the heart of the novel, this kind of bond between the interior world and the exterior world. And as for the kind of claustrophobic nature, one of the things that I really wanted to articulate in the novel and explore is that kind of first experience of adult intimacy that relationship when maybe you’re living with someone for the very first time, and you are really collaborating and building a world together, I think that I did really want to show the ways that that can often feel quite insular, I guess like, you know, we often joke about it as being a nesting phase. Yeah, but it’s funny. I mean, I totally agree and I say that to my students all the time that world building is like for all novels. And so, I really wanted the novel to have that feeling when you opened it up, that you were really being transported. And I think, honestly, some of that also came from my own longing, I think of the novel as being quite charged by my own homesickness, like living away from Australia for the first time and really wanting to write myself back into those spaces. And even though I grew up in Sydney, which is, you know, a city, yes, we have access to the coast and the beach, but it still is a city. I think the things that I missed most about Australia, like, you know, the calls of morning birds, that smell of eucalyptus and salt on the breeze, they were all really encapsulated by that South Coast landscape. I felt like that was what I missed the most.

Homesickness and nostalgia kind of go hand in hand, and nostalgia isn’t necessarily a good thing. In some cases, we get nostalgic for weird things. And I sort of feel like, you know, we’ve got our narrator who’s building this world. And she did, I will totally own it. She had moments where she annoyed me, but she’s 24 and I remember being really annoying at 24, too. So, the honesty of what she’s doing. She’s not at all perfect. I really like her a lot. I think her relationship with her mother is really interesting. I think what she’s trying to do with this dude, Jude is really interesting. She thinks she knows more than she does.

Yeah, I think that was part of the reason why it felt really important to me that the storytelling was retrospective. You know, when I was working on this novel, I worked on it for a long time. And you know, was workshopping parts of it when I was at Columbia. And I had comments multiple times of like, why don’t you just tell the story of that year as the 24-year-old narrator, because that’s where the main action happened, the heart of the story was, but I think that that would have really changed the tone of the novel. And there wouldn’t be that kind of longing, that charge of nostalgia, or maybe the question of what could have been, that wouldn’t have been possible if it was told in the present tense. And I also wanted her to have the ability to reflect, you know, to question some of the choices she made when she was 24. Having that realization now that maybe she thought she knew more than she did at the time,

There’s also a timelessness. You know, we drift back and forth from her interior landscape into the actual landscape. Sometimes we get a bit of what other people are thinking just enough, but her mom, there’s a bit of a parallel track between their stories. And I want to play with this for a second, because it’s clearly something. I mean, honestly, at 24, I was not thinking about settling down— that that was not, no. But we’ve got a character in the present day who is thinking, oh, wait, this is, I do want to settle down. I do. And it’s and it sort of suggested that she’s, you know, had slightly complicated childhood.

Yeah, definitely. Something I was thinking about a lot was, you know, the way our parents’ love story informs the choices that we make in relationships. And I feel like, at least in my experience, that’s especially true with mothers and daughters. And I think that, you know, the narrator is really informed by the stories that her mother tells her about love, and the experience her mother had at becoming a mother at 24, the age, the narrator is when she meets this guy, Jude. And I think that, you know, the narrator did have a kind of disruptive, transient childhood. And I think sometimes when there’s a rupture in your family, when you’re very young, there can be this kind of compulsion, to go back to fall into the same patterns, maybe thinking that you could redo the story and tell it over and make different choices and kind of like, fix that core wound. But also, sometimes I think we’re drawn back into these patterns, and we don’t even necessarily realize it. So that was something I was thinking a lot. And that’s part of the reason why there are kind of these parallels between her and her mother.

I think it’s also just fun to play with. I mean, there are moments in the book where I felt like, you could have been writing about the 1950s. And you could have been writing about, you know, or the seven days or whatnot, that there was a certain timelessness to this world, which I really like no one cell phone is pinging in the middle of a conversation, which I appreciate. And I think there’s sort of this sense of discovery and serendipity and wildness in a way that you can’t have when someone’s sitting on their iPad.

No, that’s definitely true. You know, the novel is never really explicitly set in like, one year or one time. But in my mind, I think of it as being set around 2012, which is the time that I personally think about, as this kind of last moment before technology completely permeated every aspect of our lives. And I think maybe in the US might have happened a couple years earlier, maybe in like 2010, but definitely in Australia and parts of Australia. In 2012, there were still people who didn’t have iPhones, you know what I mean? And I think also having a kind of a Gen X character, like Jude allowed me to resist that impulse of technology as well, because he just has a different relationship to it than our narrator does. But yeah, I think kind of creating that timelessness. And also, that sense of isolation, to me, It makes the story more poignant, because I think that it’s less accessible to her, you know, if there’d been records at that time on Instagram, or what have you a million photos on her phone. I don’t know if it had the same charge of this feeling of a time and a place that you just really can’t go back to.

You know, your book reminds me of a little bit. I might be dating myself at Rain by Kirsty Gunn, did you?

Oh, I love that book.

Right. That’s I was thinking a lot about those kids as I was reading Thirst for Salt. She does a similar thing with that sort of landscape of memory and grief, and time and timelessness and sort of blowing it up. I mean, again, novel is a vehicle for looking at the passage of time, like exactly, this is the really fundamental piece of, it’s great when you get a story out of it. And we do get a story, I don’t want to say that there isn’t a word, we’re definitely staying away from plot points, let’s put it that way. But to create the mood that goes with it, and especially you know, if I think about TikTok, as well, and watching people respond to the world, and the characters and the words and the language, or all of that. It’s just you spend a lot of time in the book to talking about books like The Lover by Marguerite Duras and again, I see echoes of Voyage in the Dark that Jean Rhys. He sent me looking off for that one, I couldn’t find my copy of that I did find my copy of After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. So, Thirst for Salt just sits in this very sort of deliberate world and I can see the echoes of the women that have come before. But can we talk about some of your other literary influences? Because I know I’m missing some.

Yeah, thank you so much for picking up on that connection with Rain. I mean, I really admire the language of that book. I did read it while I was writing Thirst for Salt, it devastated me, but really just so incredible on a sentence level, which is something that always really excites me. Yes, The Lover comes up in Thirst for Salt, as does Jean Rhys and I think I was thinking about those books. A lot of the traditional female coming of age stories with kind of quite unconventional heroines in some way, both books as well involve relationships with older men, which is something you know that’s at the heart of Thirst for Salt too. Another huge influence when I was working on the book was Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. I read it probably about three times over the course of writing the novel. And I think that she does so well what we were talking about before in terms of world building, of creating a sense of not only this, this town and this place, but also this home, which is at the center of the story, you know, Housekeeping, like Thirst for Salt and a lot of ways is really driven by female relationships. Even though there is a romantic relationship with a man at the core of my novel. I feel like the narrator is so influenced by the women in her life by her mother, Jude’s older friend, her housemates looking for these different models of like, how a woman should be or how to live her life. So Housekeeping, yeah, it was a big influence. And again, thinking about longing, absence, abandonment, how these things you know, shaped the way we inhabit a house, as well as like the world.

And also, grief is a shapeshifter. It really like it doesn’t show up in the same way for everyone. It doesn’t. It ebbs and it flows like, grief is its own character in a lot of ways. And I think everyone’s response to it. I mean, there’s some moments to with our narrator where I’m like, Oh, you’re still you haven’t quite figured out what this means for you. And but it’s fabulous to be there. In that moment. We don’t often get to sit like novels. Yes, they do allow us in certain cases to sit with it, but to watch a character actually go through the process and have these realizations that she gets. I mean, it’s a little bit like the sisters, the young, the young girls in Housekeeping where, you know, we see this divergent path, right, but you kind of need two characters to do it. Whereas, you know, with our narrator.

That’s so interesting because I think you’re right in Housekeeping, the two sisters kind of symbolize this forking path. But with my narrator, she has a much, much younger brother. But obviously, his experiences that are very different from hers. But it’s almost like she has that forking path within herself. And she’s always kind of haunted by the specter of that other life, the life not lived or not chosen.

I would be remiss if I do not bring in King. I’m a dog person, but I would be remiss if we didn’t bring him up. But there’s also a connection between our narrator and Jude, certainly, but I’m going to use this to talk about yet another book, Sigrid Nunez, The Friend, which you have talked about in other interviews, that it’s been an influence for you as well and it’s a book that I love. And one of the things I love about how you talk about this book, is that you find it incredibly comforting. I think this is kind of an important point to make, because you cover a little bit of similar trajectory in terms of grief and loss. And yeah, I mean, you wrote a great dog.

Thank you so much. That is so important to me. And I really did want him to feel like a character.

You did. It’s almost like you’re in conversation a little bit with the way new news covers grief and loss and memory. So can we bring that into the conversation?

Yeah, definitely. Thank you for saying that as well, like that. The Friend is such a special important book to me. Again, it’s one I’ve returned to many times, also a dog person, obviously, I think, you know, the King character existed, and Thirst for Salt from the very beginning. As I mentioned before, from that very first short story I wrote about these people, you know, one of the things I was interested in looking at in the novel, religious was loved as a profound, you know, one of the most important experiences we can have in our lives. And for that reason, I wanted it to contain relationships that weren’t romantic, because I just don’t think that we can learn everything about love. From a romantic sexual relationship. Yes, the narrative mother’s important but so is this connection that she feels with King, a dog that her and Jude find and adopt speaking to my own experiences, that is really one of the most significant relationships I’ve kind of had in my life with dogs, I think it’s the closest we can kind of get to a feeling of love that’s unconditional. And I think that’s something that Nunez articulates so well. And even though The Friend does deal with some heavy subject matter, and it is largely dwelling on grief, I think what I find comforting about it is that it really reaffirms the value in loving and giving yourself over to love even when you know, love means risking loss, whether that’s with animals or with people.

Writing can so often be the search for home, right? Like you our attempt, whether it’s a mood or an emotion, or a cast of characters are placed, writing is representative of the search for home without a doubt. And the idea that love can be difficult or hard or heartbreaking or whatnot. Like you can’t separate home and look, his home unfortunately can also sometimes be the absence of love, like the absolute rock bottom absence of it. And, you know, time and home and love. It’s just like, oh, big, huge, big ideas caught in this very tightly written. I have my galley here, hold on how many pages this is. It’s 266 pages. It’s tiny. It’s tiny. I want to talk about craft with you, though for a second because it would have been very easy for this book to be a much larger, longer novel. And I suspect that you are as much a rewriter as a writer. Can we talk about your craft though?

Yeah, it’s funny, because originally, I had conceived of this story as being a linked short story collection. So the idea of making it even longer than it is, yeah, that would have been harder for me, I think and more challenging. I am really an obsessive rewriter I rewrite as I go, I retype as I go as well, rhythm and sound are so important to me. And so, I feel like when I am reworking a scene, I really need to start from the top to kind of get myself into that rhythm or that mood. So yeah, I think for me, it started as these stories and the link short story form is one that I love and deeply admire. But I think I got to a point where it felt like I was kind of trying to tie all these little pieces up in these like neat little perfect past packages. And I think it was holding me back because it let me to maybe kind of escape out of moments of tension, rather than having to force myself to dwell on them, I could just kind of be like, okay, that story’s over now, move on to the next one. So I think I had the realization in about 2018, after I’d sort of been working on these stories during my MFA, that it needed to be a novel. And, honestly, it was pretty devastating realization, because I’d been really trying to perfect those stories for a long time. So I cried about it. And then two days later, I started again, from the beginning. And that involves a lot of cutting up pieces and moving them around on the floor.

Okay, because I just had a moment of structurally you’re going from a story collection, like the amount of rewriting that happens, and the amount of material that you sort of have to throw away maybe not literally, but it certainly metaphorically that you have to throw away so you can reset your brain and start over is, I’m just gonna shake my head for a second. I’m having a moment of the amount of work that that is, I mean, it’s certainly paid off for reader.

You can see why I cried about it.

Yes, yes, I am a big believer in recycling, which is something I learned from Diane Williams, who’s the editor at Noon, where I work as a Senior Editor. And she always says, no good language should be wasted, because it’s so hard won. And I really believe that. So even though, you know, a lot had to be refigured I was able to kind of hold on to sentences or images that were important to me. And there are sections of the novel that are almost exactly the same from the original short stories that I wrote, a lot of it was cutting up the pieces, and making bridges between them.

And speaking of bridges, you also teach, you have been a musician, I’m assuming music is still very unique, music is not something you just walk away from and decide to do something else. Can we talk about the intersection of your life, though, as a novelist, and a teacher? And a musician? Because obviously, yes, there are some pieces that are very sort of clearly connected. And then there are other pieces that I think, feed each other in different ways.

Yeah. So I guess, you know, when I kind of made the decision to focus more on writing, I was thinking in larger times about the kind of lifestyle that I wanted to live, I’d grown up with two working artists as parents, my mother is a painter, a visual artist, and my father is a musician. So I kind of experienced these two different creative worlds a little bit while I was growing up. And I knew that ultimately, I think I wanted a life that had a little bit more stability, which I now think is funny, because this is one of those decisions you make when you’re you know, my narrative edge in the novel when you’re 24. And you’re like, oh,

I want a more stable life.

I’ll get an MFA in writing, which I think, speaks so much to the way that I grew up. But to me, that was like a stable conventional choice, because it was like structured in academia, you know, and I was like, Oh, I can teach this is a great decision. But it was a great decision. I feel so fortunate that I get to spend my days talking to other writers about craft, I really do think that I’m one of those teachers, that teachers what I myself need to learn, I need to remember, I think it holds you accountable as well. Because if you’re kind of talking the talk, you feel like you also have to be continuing to create in your own time to be able to give that back to the students, you know, they feed the world as well. Yeah. And as far as music and writing. There’s such different forms. But I think to me, it all comes from the same place. And it’s all kind of born out of the same desire. So it’s just putting it on the page instead of like, putting it to music.

Are you listening to music while you write, though? Because I mean, some people can do that, and some people can’t. And some people you know, everyone has their thing.

Yes, actually, that’s a great question. Thirst for Salt was entirely written to a soundtrack of the musician Grouper a Portland based musician. It was the only thing that I could write to while I was talking in the novel, how music is so atmospheric, so textural, but really emotive as well, it wasn’t kind of abstract or instrumental. I think there’s a lot of a lot of feeling and a lot of emotion in those songs. And so for me, that was crucial and maintaining the mood and feeling of the novel while I was working on it for a period of time. And, you know, every day I would go to my desk, and I would listen to the same four albums in a row. And it because it was almost like kind of hypnotism, you know, a way of like accessing that space. And even now, if I hear the opening chords of like this fast track on this record, I can kind of feel my mind like, go to this place and start to focus and narrow.

Does that mean you have a new soundtrack for a new project because I assume you’re working on a new book?

Well, fortunately, Grouper keeps making records, which is really great for me. And she put out a new record around the time I finished the last draft the novel. So I was like, Okay, great. Maybe this will be the soundtrack for my next project.

Excellent. What have you learned from your students about writing?

Oh, wow, that’s such a great question and so hard to answer. You know, one of the most important things that comes out of my conversations with my students is it just really reminds me why I was drawn to do this in the first place. It’s easy to forget that the things you’ve achieved when once dreams, and to even start taking things for granted, but speaking with my students, especially my youngest students, who are really at the beginning of their creative practice, I just really admire their enthusiasm, their vulnerability, yeah, what they bring to the page that they work, I find that really inspiring.

Do you miss these characters?

It’s hard. I feel like you have a relationship with your fictional characters that is, to me very similar in a lot of ways to your relationships with real people, you spend so much time with them? That I think, you know, I do have ideas for a new novel, but it’s almost like I’m not quite ready to let these relationships go yet. It’s going to take me a little while till I can feel like open to these new people in the same way.

Yeah. Now I got that. Did our narrator surprise you though? There are a couple moments early in her relationship with Jude where I was like, Well, of course. You know what I’m dancing around. But did she ever just do something where you thought, hey, wait a minute, where did that come from?

I think it was difficult actually, to allow her to make those moves. That was surprising, because when I started writing the novel, it’s not autobiographical at all in its plot. But so much of her thoughts and feelings were based on my own, that sometimes it was difficult to think about the decision that she would make versus the decision that I would make. I think that those surprising moves, were a product of many drops, and maybe allowing her to take a few more risks, or make some surprising, maybe not so great decisions. I always think about this thing that which I’m sure I’m gonna butcher. But Milan Kundera said something about his characters. I think he said his characters have walked through doors that he himself circumnavigated and I suppose that’s one way I think about my unnamed narrator.

Well, you have to start somewhere. I mean, you do have to start somewhere. But I do like even writers I look at with like, hugely established careers with multiple projects under their belts kind of thing, whether it’s a combination of you know, film and books, and whatever, I just, I do think people come back to ideas over and over again. And sometimes they’re just in conversation with their own earlier work and showing their own evolution. I just, I think, you know, noodling through whatever is bugging us on the page is a hugely human response to how and where and when we live. And I think there’s a reason that telling stories was the first human thing that anyone ever actually did. I think it’s the best way we know to stay connected to anything, you know, and not just our own brands. But everyone has a starting point. And it doesn’t always have to be autobiography. That is the one thing I do want to stress. Like, this is not autofiction. This is a really great novel, about landscape and memory, and all sorts of stuff that we don’t necessarily get a chance to talk about, in ways that we’re talking about now. So, before I let you go, though, can I ask what you’ve been reading lately? And what you’ve been teaching lately? And because I feel like you read for language and voice first?

Yes, that’s very true. I love to read deeply on a sentence level. And again, I think I was always really drawn to language but working at Noon for the last few years, I think, you know, it’s certainly become more of my life and my practice. Recently, I just finished reading Couplets which came out this week, which I loved, you know, it’s such a great example of how to really amass someone in a consciousness that again, was you know, about something that I think that I was trying to grapple with and plus the fold a bit too about this idea of like the second coming of age or the second first love was a line that really stayed with me in that book, Couplets, you know, took me by the reins, and I tore through it, so that was really exciting to me.

We’ll drop Couplets and the author into the notes for the show. I knew this would happen I knew we were going to bump up against time, Madelaine Lucas, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over— Thirst for Salt is out now. I’m just gonna say it again it’s a trade paperback original everyone should just read it now.

thank you so much Miwa, this is such a pleasure.