Poured Over: Steve Almond on All the Secrets of the World

“And I had to actually give up and say, Okay, maybe I’ll go to the grave not having written a novel, and I don’t have to carry around shame about that. I can just do the kind of writing that I’m maybe better at or that it is my calling to do, and the moment I stopped putting so much pressure on myself and stop making it a big ego drama about me that actually opened up space in my creative life for me to enter the hearts and minds of all these characters who were all keeping secrets from one another.” Steve Almond—bestselling author, co-host of The Dear Sugars podcast, writing teacher—has just published his first novel, All the Secrets of the World, and he joins us on the show to talk about revisiting California in the 80s, keeping empathy for all of his characters, his literary influences (including Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders and Lorrie Moore), share some great writing advice, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Margie and Marc.

Featured Books:

All the Secrets of the World by Steve Almond

William Stoner and the Battle for Inner Life by Steve Almond

Stoner by John Williams

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the host and producer of Poured Over and Steve Almond is here. And I don’t know if you know this, but All the Secrets of the World is actually his first novel. And he’s been around for a bit. He’s written fiction. He’s written nonfiction, Candy Freak, and Against Football, were both best sellers. So you know his name. He was part of the Dear Sugars podcast, with Cheryl Strayed, I mean, he’s taught classes. He’s written lots of short stories. But why write a novel now, Steve?

Steve Almond: Miwa, you’re acting as if this is my first rodeo. This is like my fifth novel. It’s just the first one that wasn’t sucky enough that like this is the first published novel, which by the way, as you know, talking with writers, like your end of the arrangement, the book selling, being able to welcome authors, here’s their new book, it’s so wonderful. That is the golden shimmering tip of the iceberg. And underneath that iceberg is all of the unpublished crap. And not just for like, every writer has that. Or if they don’t, I don’t want to talk about them or think about them. So for me, I spent 30 years slogging my way through pretty terrible books, novels, especially because there was a voice in my head saying, in order to be a real writer with a capital W, you have to write a novel, which I think was a awful superego, narcissistic die back that I didn’t need to be listening to. But also, there was another voice saying, but actually telling a big complicated story with lots of characters and making the reader understand and maybe even love all of those characters and watching them collide. And they’re interdependent trajectories, that’s actually a really cool thing, to immerse a reader and for you, as the writer to be imaginably immersed in a world of a bunch of characters for a longer time, that’s a big challenge. And you should try to do that without making it a station of the cross. But it took me 30 years to get to that point. And I had to actually give up and say, Okay, maybe I’ll go to the grave, not having written a novel, and I don’t have to carry around shame about that I can just do the kind of writing that I’m maybe better at or that it is my calling to do and the moment I stopped putting so much pressure on myself and stop making it a big ego drama about me that actually opened up space in my creative life for me to enter the hearts and minds of all these characters who were all keeping secrets from one another. And that made writing the novel, something that gave me energy rather than something I was pouring endless and fruitless energy into.

B&N: The center of this novel as a young woman called Lo. But there are essentially two families driving this story. There’s the Stallworth family and the Saints family, and they live in Sacramento, California in 1981 and Sacramento in 1981 are very important points. But would you introduce listeners to the characters in this book?

SA: Yeah, so I was interested in the something I experienced growing up in California in the 80s, which is that I was surrounded by people who had a ton of money, and people who didn’t have much money at all I lived in, in South Palo Alto. Now Palo Alto is the town that everybody thinks Silicon Valley and Facebook but as you said, 1981 and actually in the 70s, it was when I was growing up in Palo Alto in South Palo Alto was full a little eichlers. Like the one I grew up in maybe 900 square feet, five of us crammed into it. Next door to us were apartment houses on one side and on the other side, and it was a lower middle class neighborhood. A nice you know, it was fine, wonderful first world it was fine. We were surrounded by downtown Palo Alto and Los Altos Hills, where the driveways were a mile long. And I remember riding my bike like a little Gatsby through downtown Palo Alto with those green lawns shimmering with money and thinking, wow, there is a bigger and richer and more glamorous world out there where I played soccer with these kids. They just seem to move through the world with greater assurance, the ease that prosperity and money brings in America and most other places. So that was in my head and in my psyche for many years. And when I thought about and conceived of the novel, it was clear that I was interested in having two families collide a family the Saenzs who are undocumented. Lorena, the heroine is 13 years old, fiercely intelligent, quite ambitious, but has also received the message her entire life, understandably, from her mother, especially do not make trouble do not become visible because if you become visible that is dangerous for our family as undocumented people at the same time she’s desperate to be seen and regarded and to allow her mind really to sort of its full measure. She gets paired for a science project by a sort of socially conscious do gooder science teacher with Jenny Stallworth, who is blonde, beautiful and wealthy. And the moment that Lorena goes to her house, because again, it’s 1981. They don’t do this in Google Docs. There are no Google Docs. There are no computers, people actually go to people’s houses if they need to plan for the science fair. But the moment Lorena walks into the Stallworth house, she is in another world. She’s tremendously excited by it and both the Stallworth parents take let us say an unnatural interest in her for different reasons. And it’s a kind of seduction I don’t have the exact experience. I’m doing a lot of imagining across gender, across class, across legal status and so forth. But I certainly remember what it was like as a kid who, you know, was middle class, walking into the house of a very wealthy classmate and feeling like, wow, this is another world, there is a different climate in this space. So I won’t give away too much. But basically, all the characters in the book, especially the teenage characters, have secret lives and lots of secrets that they’re keeping from the world and lots of secrets that they’re keeping from themselves. And the thrill of the book for me was seeing those secrets emerge in real time. And all the danger that comes with a secret that gets revealed.

B&N: And you mentioned, obviously stripping out Google Docs and Google Maps and cell phones and taking out all of that technology. But Sacramento for folks who don’t know California, particularly well, there are people who knows San Francisco and Silicon Valley and Marin, and that piece of it. And then there are people, of course, who think Los Angeles entertainment, all of that kind of thing. And then San Diego is sort of its own piece of the state. But Sacramento is the capital of California, but it is very much its own kind of place. Would you give listeners sort of a lay of the land of Sacramento, especially in 1981, because Nancy Reagan appears a couple of times in this book, and she was someone I had not thought about in quite some time, but for the era and the place, it makes perfect sense how she’s worked into this narrative.

SA: I grew up in this era. And I remember the events, Reagan’s assassination is an important event in the early in the novel, I think of the book as being about not small town America, but not the cities like San Francisco or LA that are dream factories that everybody knows that they have their own mythos, there is no Sacramento mythos. I think Dideon, at the beginning of Goodbye to All That I came out of Sacramento in my you know, my little dress and already felt completely overwhelmed by the mythos of New York, she writes in that essay, Sacramento is like much of the state, it’s a huge state, the Central Valley is the same way. It is not fancy. People do not come there and think, Oh, my God, I’m in Sacramento, my life is going to change. It’s geographically very flat. They’re very distinct neighborhoods. And it was quite balkanized, as many cities are, but especially back then, you know, there were sections that were Latino sections. And there were sections that were predominantly white, and you had distinct neighborhoods. And part of what I was trying to get at in the novel is what happens when people leave their lane. What happens when people leave their class and their ethnic enclave, and what happens also when trouble starts, and law enforcement is called in? How are decisions made in ways that we might in this world be able to identify or at least having a discussion where people are conscious of race bias and unconscious bias, those terms didn’t exist, like Google Docs, like computers, back in 1981. And a lot of Reagan’s kind of the spell that he was casting over the country, which I was interested in the Reagan Revolution was the idea of private business will take care of this. Government’s the enemy. It’s the problem except when it comes to law enforcement, because it is the job of the state, essentially, to protect certain people from certain other people, and none of the racial coding there is explicit. But what we’ve seen over the last 30 or 40 years as it has become quite clear, the law enforcement system for most of the history of this country is really designed unconsciously and consciously to protect wealthy white people from people who are poor, people who are disenfranchised, people of color.

B&N: A large part of this book is really about that American mythology. We’re talking about bias. We’re talking about power. We’re talking about interpretations of justice, one of the police officers who is called in to look into the disappearance of Marcus Stallworth, who is Jenny Stallworth’s father, he’s Latino, but he also is chasing a suspect, who is part Honduran American part Salvadoran American, undocumented Latino, and here’s Guerrero making all sorts of judgments about this kid. And I want to have a quick conversation about bias because it’s really interesting to me that Guerrero has decided that Lowe’s brother Tony has done something really terrible and he is in fact, the bad guy. Right? You’ve got a really great line actually, where a defense attorney says Guerrero doesn’t even see his own bias. He just he doesn’t see it. He doesn’t know he knows he’s telling himself his story because he believes he has the right thread of the story, but he has simply decided that this kid who’s ex Navy, yes, he’s undocumented, but he’s ex Navy. And he’s got a complicated story because he’s a complicated kid and he’s not very happy and he’s probably got a lot going on mentally. And yet, he’s the bad guy. Because people in power see the expediency in naming him the bad guy.

SA: I mean, a lot of this comes from having been an investigative reporter. When I was down in Miami, I did a big series of about a guy Luis Diaz, who was a Cuban American immigrant, there was a huge case serial sexual assaults and the bird road rapist was the moniker that the suspect was given in the media circus that surrounded these cases, there was incredible conscious and unconscious pressure to solve that case on the police to find the guy and Luis Diaz did not match the description of the suspect. There was no physical evidence, he had rock solid alibis, but there was just enough to make the case against me, he spent 26 years in prison before DNA evidence got him out. And I wrote about the case when he’d been in prison for I think, about 15 or 17 years. I think what I was interested in since this is a social novel is not flattening anybody out. But trying to portray the ways in which we do not see our own bias. Guerrero looks at Tony Saenz, Lorraine’s brother and sees a version of himself, the version of himself that might have turned to crime that was already on the way to turning to crime. It’s a way of kind of exercising that part of himself, making sure that he’s put behind bars. And I don’t think he understands this at all, that there’s a part of him that sort of needs Tony to be guilty, because that will be putting the part of himself that might have ended up in that situation in jail, not allowing them to roam the streets. But I don’t think any of us really can see our own bias. We’re stuck deep in our own story, Nancy Reagan, she was a figure of some derision. In my household and in my psyche. I thought, Oh, here’s this Gucci obsessed kind of modern Marie Antoinette with her astrological nonsense. And as I wrote the book, what started to happen, Miwa, was I got more and more interested in Wait a second if I stopped flattening people out. And I really think about Nancy Reagan. Yes, her behavior is sort of monstrously naive, and it has these awful unintended consequences. But also, she’s a wife who deeply loves and believes in her husband and thinks it’s his destiny to run the country and she sees him get shot. And she is traumatized by that. And she will adopt any magical belief system that she believes she can keep her husband safe. So there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to just write her off. And I don’t want to write Guerrero off either. He’s not a corrupt cop. He’s like all of us. He’s a flawed person. And to his credit, once he sees some of the errors of the his way he and Lorena, I mean, Lorena really forces them to with her Guile, her intelligence and so forth. But he is able to do something that not a lot of people can do, which is to admit, I’ve been telling myself the wrong story. I have made mistakes, and I need to make amends.

B&N: And also this is a 13-year-old girl that it was perfectly happy to ignore until he really realized that and he had crossed the wrong path.

SA: Exactly. That’s to me. That’s the buzz of the book for me was that she’s one point Guerreros cousin who’s a little bit smarter than him and can see that he’s caught up in a larger pressure system says, Man, what a junkyard dog she turned out to be. And it’s like my favorite line in the book, because that’s it. She is like Jane Eyre, she’s like any great heroine, she has to be smarter, and more determined and more stubborn. Because there’s so many things stacked against her and thinking about how she is going to do what she needs to do and get the adult world and enlist the adult world to help her out was so pleasurable. I adored her by the end of the book, not because she’s some shining Angel, she’s a flawed, complicated person who has her own complicity in the events that unfold. But I so love that she just refused to give up and everybody’s under estimating her and she absolutely refuses to be put in the boxes that they’re trying to put her in, she just keeps kicking her way out.

B&N: Lo is a really great character. The way you talk about this piece of our society at this moment in our history, where there is some corruption at different levels, there is bad behavior on the part of more than one adult, there’s an edge of, danger might be overstating it, but there is kind of a darkness to this moment in our collective memory, our collective history, however, we want to call it and that’s partially because we have not yet learned the language for things that we’re now essentially refuse to tolerate as a society, whether it’s racism or sexism, and even then we still have so far to go. But compared to where we were, you’ve essentially written historical fiction. 1981 was a really long time ago.

SA: Yeah, I think of it as recent historical fiction. I think that’s just right that I was fascinated in with Reagan because he was spinning a larger national story. And that story was we’re a mansion on the hill. We are a shining example. And nobody stopped in that era and said hold on a second, who owns that mansion? Who cleans that mansion who gets arrested if somebody is found on the grounds of that mansion, who’s not supposed to be there. As I was writing the book, I wrote it in two bursts. The first was before the 2016 election, and then I got swept away by other projects and a kind of psychosis, frankly, after that election, and then I wrote the second half in 2018-2019. At that point, it was clear to me, especially the way I was writing about undocumented people, and how the American Dream is criminalized for certain populations. At that point, it was very clear to me like you have written a piece of historical fiction that is still alive, because there are young kids coming up from the country that Lorena’s family is from our both her mother and father coming up from Central America, who are clearly only leaving home because circumstances there are so dangerous, and they’re already traumatized. They’ve come 1000 miles through Central America and Mexico, and now they’re on the US border, and they’re being met by agents of the United States who are taking these young kids away from their parents. That is just permanent trauma for everybody in that family system, regardless of what your political views are what I’ve described as a child and a whole family system, that is suffering profound trauma that is carried out in our names with our tax dollar money by the US government. So it was clear to me that what I was up to, in part, which is writing about how that American Dream, which drives every single immigrant who comes to this country, the criminalizing of that American Dream is something we just aren’t talking about in the immigration debate. We love to have the talk about how wonderful America is and all the opportunity that affords we love to have the talk about how there are laws, and we’re a nation of laws. But we don’t like to have the talk about how everybody who wants to come to this country, regardless of where it’s from, is in pursuit of the American dream, if our response is to put them in jail is to say, well, the American Dream is actually a criminal act. So I was quite aware, as I was watching events unfold that, while it was historical fiction, it was echoing very loud in my ear.

B&N: Well, and fiction should show us who we are, right? That’s how I prefer to read, I’d like to expand my world.

SA: At the end of this book, I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler alert. But Reagan really did give a law and order speech was one of his first major speeches. And he really did say something that is still alive, we’re still arbitrating this as a culture and as a people, which is do people commit crime because they’re evil? Are there certain people who are just bound to commit crime because they’re evil? And the good people have to be protected from them? Or is it something more complicated, which is, under particular circumstances, if you’re desperate, if you don’t have opportunity elsewhere, is our human capacity pointed towards bad behavior? The reason Guerrero is an interesting character is because he’s somebody who was saved by law enforcement, at least for a time, but he was on the path because he didn’t see another path towards criminal behavior. And that’s part of as you were talking about part of why he overcompensates in the way that he investigates the Death Valley killer case that he gets assigned.

B&N: You wrote the book in two bursts, it’s set up in five pieces. So can we talk about the structure for a second, because this is really important. You’ve got the two families, you’ve got the police, there is a piece of the story that you and I are not gonna mention, because it is, it’s wild. And readers need to experience it on their own. There was a moment where the story goes where the story needs to go in this case, and it was not at all what I expected. But that said, I do want to talk about the structure for a second. So are you working on each of these pieces as a separate because you’re known for short stories. I’m not saying each section reads like a short story by any stretch of the imagination. But I’m just trying to understand what it’s like for you, as the writer to flip novels are not just expanded short stories. And sections of novels are not just expanded short stories. So can we talk about that difference in craft for a second?

SA: The reason that I divided it into five books is precisely what you are picking up on. These are different kinds of reading experiences. The first 80-100 pages is a kind of domestic drama. It’s centered around young female protagonist, it’s really about family and the secrets that are kept and elicit urges, and so forth. And then it shifts gears. And the second book is really a police procedural, and then it shifts gears again. Now I can, as the author say, but I’m interested in systems of belief. I’m interested in science and astronomy compared to astrology or religion, faith versus science. And that’s what’s happening. I’m setting up that contrast. But that’s not the way readers read. Readers read to be with the characters in a certain sense with the language. What I think I was doing after having failed that so many different kinds of novels was saying, Well, I want this book to be big. I want it to be a social novel. And that means I want to have the latitude, the room, to explore lots of different worlds the world of scorpions the world of Austin. analogy, the world of the border, the world of Sacramento and the world of wealth, the world of people who are living much closer to the margins. And in order to be able to do that, in a certain sense, I also want to have the latitude to write in different modes. That’s a controversial decision. Because I feel like the safer thing to do is to stay in one point of view and one world but the social novelist is trying to dramatize what happens when different parts of a culture and a society collide. That’s been the job since Les Mis, you know, Hugo, through Dickens, all those great novels, they’re really about characters who are located all kinds of different places within the society socio economically who are colliding in one way or another and changing one another’s fates. It’s true of Steinbeck, right, the great American social novelist, so maybe that’s a pretentious effort. But that’s the reason why I wanted to write in different ways so that I could investigate what is it like to be a police officer, which I knew a little bit from having done a lot of reporting as an investigative reporter. And rather than flattening out Guerrero and having him just viewed through Lorena’s eyes, I wanted to go inside his heart and mind and understand what shaped him and why he makes the decisions he makes. And the same thing is true of old Nancy Reagan. I wanted to get inside of that character so that I didn’t flatten anybody out. Because to me, that’s the most dispiriting thing when I read a book where I know that one person story has been sort of their version is given such hugely preferential treatment. In a short story, I’m okay with that Miwa, but in a novel that really is trying to get at how people can act in good faith and still do things that are completely calamitous. I felt like I had to get inside all of the characters and in getting inside them I wanted to get inside their world, the police procedurals, not something I ever thought I would write. But if I’m going to understand the world that Guerrero lives in, in the incentives and the judgment, and the goal that he’s trying to fulfill and who his boss is, and what his boss’s agenda is, I have to go inside that world completely. I can’t just do it halfway.

B&N: So when you’re talking about having written into bursts as well. Are we talking that there’s a linear draft that you just sort of put aside and came back to a couple of years later after different projects? Or are you writing set pieces, and then deciding where and how they need to connect?

SA: I am notoriously awful at plot. I mean, I have many bad novels that will prove that. So I am not somebody who has a very structured outline. But this was the first novel where I had a clear sense that I knew what I wanted to have happen. I knew that I wanted Lorena and Guerrero these two characters who seemed to have nothing in common who are naturally antagonists. I knew they were going to need each other. I knew that Lorena who was missing a father, in a sense, needed Guerreros help. And he also needed her help, and that they were going to have to wind up together making their way towards a fate that I did have in mind, what I did is I played a little trick on myself, at the end of Book Three, I put Lorena in a place that it is absolutely mind blowingly inconceivable that she could actually wind up. And that was the downpayment that I put on the second half of the book, once I had put her in a place where there was no way logically that she should be able to get then I had the delight of trying to figure out how this junkyard dog was going to chew her way out of all the boxes that she was in and make her way down and get herself to the place that I had put her at the end of Book Three. So that for me was kind of forced me to write the second half after I had my 2016 freakout. And when I came back and read the first three books, I was like, Oh, yes, I’ve got to finish this up. There’s no question we have to understand both how Lorena gets there? And also, is she going to be able to save the day? Or at least save herself?

B&N: What was the biggest surprise for you? As you were working on All the Secrets of the World? Was it a moment or was it a character? Or was it just…

SA: We’ll I’ll tell you about a moment that kind of freaked me out. But in a good way, I guess. Because ideally, like part of the problem with all these bad novels I keep mentioning is that I was shoving the characters around hoping they would bump into the big ticket items like that was my approach instead, you know, hoped they would bump into conflict and self revelation and Epiphany. But I was just getting exhausted and they were not helping me out. They were not acting on their own. What you always want is to feel as a writer that you’re being pulled through and you’re being pulled through by the will of the characters which is discovered out of whatever your own artistic unconscious may be. But I know that there was a moment as I was writing the change the trajectory and it was early in the book when Marcus Stallworth is the dad of this wealthy family is noticed how smart Lorena is and he’s really taken by that he understands that she has the mind of a scientist already at age 13. And he really sees that and she of course is tremendously excited to be seen in that way. But as he’s driving her home, he stops and he needs to reach across the car in order to unlock the door because his jeep is, you know, sort of banged up as he does the hair on his forearms, brushes against the skin that’s exposed and her belly, and there is just a moment of charge between them really almost like an electrical charge. That was a surprise to me, I did not expect for obvious reasons that there would be this kind of unexpected erotic libidinal charge between them. They’re all good, very problematic to use the term we would never have used to 1981. It’s quite troubling. And it was troubling to me. But I also knew that it happened, and that that was also a part of their relationship, that there’s a tremendous amount of excitement and kinship, that they feel for one another. As fellow scientists, his seeing her intelligence is trusting her and feeling more at home in talking with her than he does, for instance, with his own kids. But that there was something also very dangerous and unwholesome when I discovered that I was sort of alarmed, but I also was like, there’s energy there. And your job as a novelist, especially as a novelist is to follow the energy, especially if it leads in a dark direction.

B&N: I want to go to something you said in a different book of yours. It’s William Stoner in the Battle for Inner Life. You’re a huge fan of John Wayne’s Stoner, which is a very different novel of yours. But there’s this line about storytelling, you have storytelling, it’s not some mystical pursuit. It’s mostly about building psychologically and emotionally reliable ramps to moments that matter and then slowing down. And it’s the slowing down piece that I found really interesting. And as you mentioned, plot previously had not been your strength, but there is a lot that happens in All the Secrets of the World. And yeah, part of it is there’s a lot of disturbing stuff that happens. Yep. But again, it comes back to as you were saying systems of belief and the collision of people that happen. And I think also setting this book in 81, when we genuinely did not have a lot of the language that we have now to describe circumstances and behaviors, and what is acceptable and what is not and all of this, that this is a very specific world experience that belongs to this time and this place.

SA: Right, what I mean by that slowing down is it’s really almost mechanical, I think we come to the keyboard, sort of hoping that we’ll encounter the danger of the characters realizing something about themselves that they didn’t know before that moment I described where Marcus reaches across the car, and there’s the contact of his forearm. And Lorraine has stomach, the skin, there is one of those moments where they both realize something quite dangerous and terrifying. And your job in those moments is not to race, it’s to slow down and stay in that space. And there’s a mechanical reason for that if you can’t move on to the next event. And I mean this both the characters and the author, if you can keep yourself from leaping ahead to the next thing. And just sort of glancing down the alley of danger, if you actually stop and force yourself to stare at it, your attention has to fix on what’s going on. And slowing down mechanically means that the attention has to turn somewhere else, it turns to the world around those characters immediately and the world inside of them. And that’s what’s to me always really gratifying when characters are placed in an emotionally or psychologically dangerous circumstance. And then the author doesn’t race away from it. Because I feel like in our civilian lives, we’re constantly when we reach a dangerous, awkward moment where we might get angry, or we might get heartbroken, our tendency is to rush on and to not slow down. And I go to fiction, so that I can actually experience those vicarious forms of ruin and confusion and doubt, which are very familiar to me. But I spend my life away from the page trying to avoid and I don’t think it does us much good because we know that those dangers exist, we’re just not honoring them and paying attention to them. So that’s what I think good writing is for is to force us into that danger.

B&N: Well, to force us into the danger, but also to afford us the ability to make a better or different decision. I think that’s part of you and a lot of your work, whether it’s your essays or your short stories or whatnot, you do to a certain extent find a way to write about morality. Yeah, in many ways, all the secrets of the world is a morality play. You are passing judgment on people who do terrible things without a doubt. But you’re also passing judgment on systems that don’t work in favor of certain people very specifically, because of their background, the color of their skin, their class, any number of things that do not work for them. And there are other characters that I wouldn’t say they get off scot free because they have to live in their own skins and they have to continue to be who they are, but from a distance. They look fine and remarry and people go on and they have lives and they do things and they do kind of what you would expect but they don’t actively cause damage to other humans or their communities or anything else, they just go on to do a thing.

SA: Well, there was initially a very prominent Narrator In early drafts and even the galley, I made a whole bunch of cuts to because it became clear to me that that narrator was trying to sort of mouth the lesson that the characters were dramatizing. And I didn’t need to allow that up. And that was really important because it’s true that all the characters here have secrets and all of the mess up in particular ways. Lorena, who I so admire, for reasons I completely understand says things that are really unwise, and that come back to haunt her and her family. The way I would put it is, it is the job of the writer to force the reader against their will sometimes to forgive everybody. And you know, there are characters here who it’s harder for me to forgive Rosemary Stallworth was hard for me to forgive, but I don’t look at her as somebody who is destructive so much as she’s damaged, something in her capacity to love has been distorted into evil. But it didn’t start as evil. It started as some version of love that curdled into destructiveness because she wasn’t able to be honest about how she really felt and the life that she wanted to lead and how to authentically connect with people, the reader can make whatever judgments they want. But as the author, the feeling I needed to have towards all the characters was that I felt whatever they suffered, even if they deserved it, I felt for them as human beings. And I understood why they’d made the decisions they made. That’s part of the reason that the point of view is so generous and moves away from Lorena, because I think it can be easy to get into a radically subjective view of the world that always misses what the author should be able to see, which is everybody’s doing their best, and everybody is damaged in different ways. And that damage sometimes spills out onto the world. But it is nobody’s intention to simply be an evil or mean person. We’re all the heroes and the victims in our own stories. It’s like the dark matter that I talk about, at the end of the book, we all have this dark matter inside of us. The question is how much of it we’ll be able to sort of reckon with and admit to, then we get slightly better at not being destructive towards the people around us and figuring out a way to execute our love and compassion in the world. But that’s really hard. Jesus in the Beatitudes makes it sound like a piece of cake, but it actually winds up being very hard to treat people around you really well and compassionately especially not just if you love them, but because you love them.

B&N: You talked about Steinbeck, you talked about Dickens in the context of social novelists. But if there were some of your other influences as a writer.

SA: Well, certainly Vonnegut I was mad about his books when I was very young. And you talked about morality. And but you know, I admit, I’m kind of a heartbroken idealist. I sort of want the world to be a certain way. And when it isn’t, I get upset about it. The best thing I do is maybe write lousy fiction about it. The worst thing I do is much worse than that. I complain and I act destructively, but he’s an author who for me was kind of a lodestar. Certainly Stoner was important. You know, when I was writing All the Secrets of the World, I picked up A Burning by Megha Majumdar and you know, you could have knocked me over with a feather. And it was just the feeling of this is another author who is going big in the way that I was trying to go big and all the secrets of the world to say, Look, she is writing a social novel, even though it’s an audacious thing to consider. She needs to go into all of these characters deeply and do the deep character work that allows you to understand why they behave as they do and to forgive them the mistakes that they make. So that was certainly inspiring to see that in a contemporary writer, and I have a feeling just generally. I love Meg Wolitzer’s work. I adore James Baldwin, you know, I have a long list of writers who I kind of returned to Lorrie Moore as a short story writer or George Saunders that I kind of returned to over and over again for inspiration, but my general feeling is like, and I tried to say this to my students, especially if you want to do this marathon because nobody who wants to have a successful writing career, you probably know this better than anyone. It’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon and you’ve got a carbo load. And your carbo loading for this marathon is you’ve got to read, and you have to read writers who you really admire and who you don’t want to necessarily copy what they do, but you want to feel that you’re writing something that might someday be in conversation with what they’ve written.

B&N: Speaking of your students, you’ve been teaching for a long time at lots of different levels in lots of different ways, too. So what have you learned from your students?

SA: I mean, the central thing that I learned again, and again, how choked people are with doubt when they try to do something squishy as creative writing and I say that because almost every student who I have if they would write simply indirectly, about the things that they feel the most deeply about, would write a great piece. But what I observe it’s my job, I guess to observe as a teacher is all the ways that the ego drama of Am I a good enough writer, is the reader entertained, are they going to stay with me get in the way of writing simply indirectly about the things that matter to them the most. It’s as if they don’t feel that’s enough anymore. After many years of observing, I think it’s because and this is another area that you’re an expert in. Writers now travel with a permanent sense of anxiety that they live in the shadow of TVs and movies that we live in an era in which visual storytelling is 99% of the oxygen that gets sucked up by audiences. And there’s only this tiny little space where specks of ink on a piece of paper might actually engage the reader enough that they’ll do the work of making the movie in their head. And I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s overstating the case. But I think writers, especially younger writers, have grown up in a world where screens are everywhere, and books are increasingly marginalized. And the act of reading that sustained attention has been supplanted by the kind of narrative flitting around that happens on the internet. And that anxiety lives with authors today in ways that makes them constantly leap into scene or try to sort of foreground action, they don’t build those emotional and psychological ramps to moments that matter. And then slow down, that process feels like wait a second, I’ll lose them. If I engage in any exposition, the reader is going to run howling in the other direction. If I introduce a narrator to sort of preside over the action and guide the reader. That won’t be thrilling enough, the reader needs a scene. This is the kind of persistent anxiety that I experienced when I read these pieces. And the result is almost always that the reader ends up confused. They end up in a state that I call unproductive bewilderment. That is they’re trying to figure out what the characters already know. But the reason that a story is exciting is because it’s a way of engaging with our bewilderment about why we’re born into a particular story, or how we’re going to survive the sorrow of our childhood, or why we engineer disastrous relationships, or why we lose people to death or illness or because they leave us these are genuinely bewildering experiences. And we need literature to be the one place where we can slow down and spend time with characters who are in the same struggle and not feel so alone with it. And that is what I want students to understand and have faith in, they sit down at the keyboard, because some bewilderment has brought them there. And there’s some story they want to write that commemorates and engages in that bewilderment doesn’t have to push it away, or make it all better, but really tries to understand it and just sit with it. That’s what I’m always wanting to say to them. Trust your story, please trust your story.

B&N: So what’s next for you?

SA: Well, good question. I’m at work on a craft book. Or I should say, I am gathering together all of the lectures and essays and stuff that I have been saying to my students for 30 years. And I’m tired of saying over and over and feel like maybe it would be useful to be able to say the scale this up and say it to lots of people who are struggling to create stories, or just to create in general, in my head, it’s called Truth is the arrow, and mercy is the bow. And it’s something like a literary DIY kit for the creation of stories, because I don’t want it to just be like, here’s point of view, there’s lots of books that cover that I’ve always been interested in how human beings need stories to figure out the life they’re living to understand the life they’re living, and in crucial moments to forgive the mistakes they’ve made in their life, and also to make meaning to understand the meaning of their experience. I think it’s a standard part of the human arrangement. And I’m interested in a craft book that can identify stuff that I see very clearly as a teacher who sees, you know, an endless stream of student manuscripts, like people jumping into scene, leaving the reader behind, or people hiding the story. But I’m also interested in writing about the psychological and emotional, internal stuff that keeps people from doing better work. And a lot of that has to do with I think we want to discover the truth. But we’re also terrified of identifying it, of what it might mean for people around us. And so truth is the arrow, but you need a really powerful bow and mercy is the bone you have to forgive everybody involved and forgive yourself for the need to tell the story and try to understand it. And that’s a lot of what holds people back both from writing nonfiction, but even from writing fiction, there’s a part of them that has been told directly and indirectly, in many ways, especially if they’re from a marginalized community. Your story doesn’t matter and it’s dangerous to say it and you’re going to be punished for saying it.

B&N: Let’s let that slip by the wayside. There’s lots of stuff that has evolved over time. And I would love to just see more voices yelling, not yelling it don’t care just more voices in a genuine diversity. Hopefully we’re making progress. Sometimes it feels like we are in sometimes it feels like we’re stuck in gear.

SA: Yep, even regressing. I guess everybody’s in a different story. I think about this a lot for obvious reasons. When I started writing all the secrets of the world, I could have stayed within my own experience as a writer, as a Jewish middle class, upper middle class person of tremendous privilege, a guy born very lucky born on third base. And I really think it’s important. And I realized this when I was writing about a burning, I was really inspired by that book, I wrote this essay, and I was trying to talk about and understand what a social novel is. And one of the basic questions that you really should be thinking about is whose story am I telling? Where is my attention going? Who am I paying attention to in the world, and I completely applaud the overdue conversation about representation and about own voices that the stories that would be told about undocumented people, for instance, should be told by people who have lived those experiences. But as a writer, I also have to go where I believe the energy is and where I feel like I start to love and understanding get curious about characters. And for me, one of the fundamental questions that we should ask is, Who am I paying attention to? Whose story do I want the world to read about? Whose world do I want to have the reader enter? I wasn’t thinking about any of this. When I was writing the story, I was just chasing the story. But I was reflecting on it when I sort of stepped back and said, My God, you have not written another story about some angsty Jewish guy in middle age, you know, trying to work through his marital hassles, you have stepped away outside of your own experience. And there are real risks to doing. So I hope I did so in a way that is sensitive, and on behalf of understanding all the characters, but I also get that there’s a risk associated with it. And I’m okay with that. I would rather do that. So that at least we’re having a conversation about how undocumented people live in this country, what it means to want to come to this country from a Central American country, and what you might be up against and what you might face, at least we’re having that conversation. And I think it’s important for people who are in positions like mine of tremendous privilege that they think well, okay, it’s great to write about your own experience, but it’s also part of the job of literature to say, can you enlarge your moral imagination enough to imagine how other people live, the dangers that they face that you have been lucky enough to not have to face, I think that comes partly out of being a journalist for many years, as well, where you are forced by professional duty to be in the world of people who are in a lot of trouble and very vulnerable. But to me, that is part of your job. Part of what you should be doing with all your privilege is focusing your attention on people whose lives do not enjoy the same kind of ease and comfort as yours does. Whether I did that successfully, the readers and reviewers get to decide but I think part of the reason that I felt called to write all the secrets of the world is nobody needs to hear any more about my particular life. I’m doing just fine.

B&N: That seems like a really good place to end. So Steve Almond, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. All the Secrets of the World is out now and we’ll keep an eye out for that craft book.

SA: All right, thank you. It’s great talking with you.