Anthony Doerr’s gifts as an author are anchored by his thrifty nature as a discerning purveyor of language. Never losing site of the subtle tones that come to warm the people and places that inhabit his stories, Doerr treats each word as though it were valuable; in essence almost viewing them the same way that someone might view spending a hard-earned paycheck. While never overburdening his narratives with effusive passing words or beautiful alliteration for the sake of the work itself, each paragraph sits farther down the line of his characters’ respective appearances and disappearances into the tales, so delicately chosen that one gets the impression the Boise-based writer must indubitably anguish over the editing process.
This must surely be the case with Doerr’s latest book, “Memory Wall.” The collection of six short stories spans 242 pages of expressly intent character development and evaporation; the central theme of the book revolving around the notions of remembrance and what happens when the mind’s delicate circuitry is held accountable in stacking the interactions that comprise a lifetime.
Recently, the 2010 Guggenheim Fellow and New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award winner fielded questions from the senior editorial staff at RootSpeak in regard to his process, his notions on technology’s impact on modern publishing and his wish-list of drinking buddies in the literary world.
RS: Perhaps more so than any of your contemporaries, your work is filled with an incredibly warm and humanist approach to what might sometimes be considered the unemotive areas of technological application and human advancement. What initially planted these seeds in your writing?
AD: I’ve always been interested in technology, but it wasn’t until I lived for a year in Italy that I began to really consider it and try to fold my questions about it into my work. Really what I’ve become interested in is what some anthropologists call “the fallacy of advancement.” The subtext of every “western civilization” class I ever sat through as a kid seemed to be that progress is a curve that sweeps ever upward. With each passing year, we were meant to believe, human lives got better, faster, richer, stronger. First we had caves and clubs, then we had agriculture, then we had cities, and now we America: a Shangri-La of soft toilet paper, space shuttles, and bombs that could blow up planets. We were a “superpower.” And implicit in those lessons was the idea that human cultures continually get more civilized, that bows and arrows equal savagery, and literacy and agribusiness equal civilization. But in Rome I learned that two thousand years ago humans may have actually been better at certain technologies, things like cheese-making or masonry, or chariot-making, or city planning, or cement-making. So I’m interested in using my writing to ask questions about the impacts of technology: are we really advancing? Or, more accurately, is “advancement” the right paradigm to use when we think about human societies?
RS: With Memory Wall, and specifically in reference to the title story that begins the collection, was there a catalyst that launched you into wanting to write an entire series around the implications of remembrance?
AD: Yep, there was a specific catalyst for this book, but it wasn’t the title story; by the time I wrote that, I already had the book in mind. The first story I wrote for Memory Wall is actually the third story in the table of contents, “Village 113.” We were living in Rome then, and I was reading a piece Peter Hessler wrote about the Three Gorges Dam, and one number stayed with me: the dam is about 1.4 miles long. Superimpose it over Rome, and it would reach from the edge of the Colosseum to the edge of the Piazza del Popolo, dwarfing the entire historic center. I realized I was buying diapers and drinking chianti and reading Pliny the Elder while five thousand miles away the world was changing in huge, irrevocable ways. At some point I decided to try to merge the two experiences: the ways in which memory is continually being submerged, and my own continuing failures to adequately understand the larger world.
RS: Now correct us if we’re wrong, but wasn’t the title story originally published to wide acclaim in an issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern? How did that come about?
AD: A year and a half ago, McSweeney’s asked a group of writers to travel somewhere in the world and envision that place in the year 2024. I had been reading a bit about memory and neurology at that point, and so, serendipitously, McSweeney’s offered me a great opportunity to intersect my interests in fossils in South Africa and the idea that maybe someday soon we will be able to locate specific memories in the brain.
RS: Recently we saw you speaking about the future possibilities for writers of short stories and essays. In what ways do you think the publishing realm may have to adapt and change in the face of iBooks and other digital platforms?
AD: I’m pretty excited about the possibilities of e-readers. Maybe readers will be more willing to try short fiction if they can purchase stories individually, rather than in a collection, for example. Or maybe the whole idea of a “collection” of short stories, a book arranged in sequence by an author, will change, in much the way iTunes has really altered the importance of albums. Maybe soon readers will assemble their own story anthologies, in the way music fans build playlists. And what about longer forms? Will publishers be more willing to publish eighty-page novellas as stand-alone e-books? How will the fictional forms change for those of us who work with them? I’m still a dedicated reader of printed books, but I have to admit there’s something miraculous about being able to carry the complete works of Shakespeare on a little slip of of metal and glass in one’s shirt pocket.
RS: Because writing is such a relative and non-linear process to the respective author, how do you fill your cup with new ideas and notions; basically the creative fuel that gets you where you need to be in your stories?
AD: The best way for me to stay creative is to stay open. I try to say yes to invitations to places, to say yes to things I at first don’t want to do. I try to read everything I can get my hands on, the stranger the better. I try to watch weird movies. I try to take different routes to work and school. Mostly the key is to stay open enough, and comfortable enough with oneself, that one is looking outward, away from the self, into other places, other lives, other people.
RS: What role do you believe the modern wordsmith now plays in our hi-def, blue ray, media-centric culture?
AD: That’s a great question, and I don’t have a good answer. I believe that the human appetite for narrative has remained constant–we always have loved stories. Now, though, many of us turn to video games and films for those stories, rather than to pulp novels or the Saturday Evening Post. Do I believe books will die? No. The magic of books–their ability to transport a reader into another consciousness–should never be underestimated.
RS: Do you have a personal credo or credence that defines any sort of perceived responsibility to your craft as a writer?
AD: I believe in generosity. If a reader is going to be nice enough to spend a few hours with one of my books, I owe it to her to be as careful, in control, and generous as I can with my work. There are too many great books out there, books far better than mine, and I need to reward my reader’s attention by making every single sentence as clear and careful and vivid as I can make it.
RS: How has the critical acclaim affected your artistry? Is there now a higher expectation placed upon you or is there a freedom that affords you an even greater mobility?
AD: When you first start out, you don’t believe anyone will read your work, maybe not even your mom. There’s a certain freedom in that, and it’s a reason I like reading a writer’s first book–often first books offer a very pure—if not always the most polished—window into who a writer is. But if you’re lucky enough to find some success, and you find a few readers, then you owe it to them to keep pushing yourself, keep reinventing your work. So, in a sense, there is both more responsibility and more freedom. The truth about critical praise is that it all quickly rinses off. It’s the criticism that sticks with you. When it’s done well, it can help you learn, can help you get better at your work.
RS: What does your home state of Idaho offer that ensures no other place could ever compare?
AD: Every place in the world, if you spend enough time in it, shows its own particular beauty to you. But Idaho is one of those places that is obviously beautiful: the mountains, the rivers, the canyons. Its beauty is in my face all the time. So there’s the pleasure that comes with raising kids in a place that has not been entirely populated yet, in a place where they can pick morels and catch trout and swim in (mostly) clean lakes. And then there’s the people here: friendly, supportive, real. They help me keep the tiny corner of our culture that is the literary world in proper perspective.
RS: If you could choose two writers with whom you could sit down to share a bottle of whiskey and some heated conversation, who would you pick?
AD: Hmm, well I’d have to choose Cormac McCarthy as one of them. I think I’d be afraid of him, because I admire his work so much, but I’d like to hear him talk. I don’t think I’d say very much. And am I allowed to bring back people from the dead? Then I’d choose Melville. Or Virginia Woolf. I’d just listen to them, and follow them around for as long as they’d let me.
Anthony Doerr’s “Memory Wall” is available now.
Nicholas M.H. | RootSpeak Staff
Nicholas M.H. is one of the founders of both RootSpeak and the site's parent publisher, Truth&Rights Collective. Between giving his fellow editors a hard time, he fills the remaining hours of each day with his own writing and excursions into the worlds of media cooperatives and creative consulting for various inspired upstarts.
Read more by Nicholas M.H. on RootSpeak
