After reading the story The Shell Collector when it came out in 2002 I xeroxed it and gave it out to everyone I knew. It’s just one of those stories that is so good you want to share it. I find this to be true of everything I’ve read of Anthony Doerr’s. In general his stories tend to run long, almost verging on novella length. I think that’s part of what I love about them- substantial enough to really get into the characters, the scene and the story- with settings that take place all over the globe, allowing the reader a detailed trip through Africa, Lithuania, Germany, China, Idaho, Kansas or Rome. Another thing I love about Doerr’s writing: it’s filled with science. See, this is funny because I don’t really like science and I definitely don’t know anything about science, but if you sneak it into some well written fiction, apparently I’m all over it. The Shell Collector reminds me of a marine biology class from many years ago, but marine biology class was never this good. Doerr’s latest book, Memory Wall is a collection of six stories that examine the role of memory in our life. The characters range from old women at the end of their lives to a couple trying to create life. In the final story, “Afterworld” an elderly woman has seizures that rocket her back to her childhood in an orphanage in Nazi Germany, allowing her to skate through the past and present fluidly. “The River Nemunas” is about a little girl searching for memories of her late immigrant mother through learning how to fish with an old woman. And “Procreate, Generate” is a somewhat simple story of a couple in Idaho trying to get pregnant that has a raw, sincere quality to it. All of the stories deal with our perception of memory and how strongly our present identity is linked to the past. Doerr has an innate ability to write about the sticky, uncomfortability of life in such a beautiful way that a story about an old woman with Alzheimer’s is not merely sad but intriguing and charming.
When we first started Dossier, I had a wish list of writers that I wanted to be involved in the magazine, and contacted Doerr asking him if he wanted to be involved. He mentioned he was looking to be sent to the space station so he could write a piece about it. Well, we couldn’t do that but we’re pleased to tell you that he just contributed an essay on portraiture for our next issue, with images shot by Jessica-Craig Martin. And if there are any other editors out there- he is still looking to go to space. I hope he gets there because I would love to read that essay with all its science bits. Here, Doerr was kind enough to talk a little bit with us about memories, Idaho and the best part of summer.
Katherine Krause: How did you start writing?
Anthony Doerr: I was hammering out stories about my Playmobil pirate ship on my mother’s typewriter when I was nine. I always felt amazed that the books on my shelves were written by human beings, not Gods, that anyone with enough determination and patience and guts could write one. I still feel amazed at that.
Katherine: When you were younger, was there anything else you wanted to be? From your stories it is obvious you have a comprehensive view of science, particularly biology- where does that come from? You write a column on science books for the Boston Globe, would you ever write a book on science yourself?
Anthony: An architect. And a malacologist (someone who studies mollusks). The love for science comes mostly from my mother, who has been a science teacher all her life. And it comes from being outside–I was outside all the time as a kid, climbing trees, fishing, rock climbing, capturing snails in Florida. I’m still outside as much as my life will allow me to be.
Katherine: You write both fiction and non-fiction- is there one that you prefer?
Anthony: I prefer fiction. But sometimes an essay is just waiting there, some spark of an idea for me to fumble after on the page. Often essays come from more practical urges (i.e., a magazine will pay me to write one), but fiction is my truest love, mostly because I find it so challenging and absorbing. Ultimately I just like mucking about with language and feel intensely grateful that I’ve been able to do so in my life.
Katherine: Do you have a specific writing process or ritual? How often and for how long do you write a day?
Anthony: Yep, I rent an office away from my house. I show up in the morning, strap on chainsaw-operator’s earmuffs, turn over a big old-fashioned hourglass, and try to write for two whole turns of the hourglass. Then I let myself take a break to, say, check email and answer interview questions. On good days I can do a lot more than two hours, and on bad days I don’t quite make it through two turns of the hourglass. Those days I’m usually cranky.
Katherine: You’ve said that you end up writing stories that are too long to be short stories or too short to be novels. Is this on purpose or by accident?
Anthony: I think it’s mostly by accident. Stories form slowly on the page for me, in a slow accretion of days, and mostly in one’s subconscious. One can’t always control how large their structures will be. For me, right now, they keep ending up around 50 or 60 or 70 pages.
Katherine: Do you think the novella will a renaissance?
Anthony: That sure would be nice! One likes to think that with iPad and Kindles and such, more and more readers will be willing to take on a nice juicy novella.
Katherine: Why did you choose the theme of memory for your collection of short stories? Did you purposely write these stories to be part of a bigger collection relating to memory or were you just in the memory zone? It seems like a lot of the characters in Memory Wall are isolated or abandoned and their memories are there to comfort them, but you suggest that the memories will also abandon them. What made you start thinking about that? Did someone in your family have Alzheimer’s or Dementia?
Anthony: When I was in high school, my grandmother began to act in confusing ways, and even endanger herself, so Mom and Dad brought her from Toledo to Cleveland to live with us. She quickly deteriorated; she couldn’t remember my parents’ names; she always worried about where her purse was. In the evenings she’d sit at the kitchen table and ask, over and over, to be taken home. And at night she’d stand in the hall and call names and addresses into the dark. I remember that my mom had to bathe her–my mother, bathing her mother. And yet, most days, Grandma could still crush me at gin-rummy! When the burden got to be too much for my folks, and they started looking for homes for Grandma, was the first time I’d heard of Alzheimer’s. What a strange and terrible disease. Then, though I was too young to appreciate what my parents (especially my mother) were going through, I did learn in some fundamental way that our identities are absolutely and irrevocably tied up in memory. Lose your memories, lose yourself. This new book is in many ways an attempt to being to understand my parents’ pain, and to investigate the role memory plays in the lives of all of us as we grow up, age, and cope with grief.
Katherine: The title story has a science fiction slant- is that a genre you are attracted to or would write more of?
Anthony: Mainly I’m interested in things I think are fascinating. Like parachutes and people who eat songbirds and pretty little snails that can poison big, strong adult humans and kill them. That particular story came out of an assignment from McSweeney’s to write a story set in the near-future. The conceit of the memory cartridges–that someday doctors might record our memories–is actually something neuroscientists are beginning to work on. Is is science fiction? Ultimately, I don’t mind either way–that’s for a critic to decide.
Katherine: There is one story in Memory Wall set in Idaho, but the rest take place all over the world- did you have a connection to each of these places? Lithuania, South Africa, Germany, Ohio, Kansas, China…
Anthony: Yes. Travel fuels my work and I keep a journal everywhere I go. I find I can write better, see more clearly, and think more largely when I get out of my habits and put myself in unfamiliar situations. I was in Germany on book tour, Lithuania working with teachers, Kansas to give a reading, etc… I don’t always know that I’m going to set a story somewhere until long after I’ve returned, but for me a chief pleasure of reading and writing is feeling transported–is taking a reader to another place, and showing it to her in all its beauty and weather and heartache. So traveling and reading and writing are all very similar endeavors for me, all ways to try to live a meaningful life.
Katherine: How did you end up in Idaho?
Anthony: I fell in love with a woman who grew up in Boise.
Katherine: What are you working on next?
Anthony: A novel about the power and magic of radio, set during World War II, when radio was both helping drive the German expansion and–eventually–bringing it down.
Katherine: As far as being a writer, did you ever have an “I made it” moment and if so, what was it? (For example a friend said his was when he heard his song turned into musak in an elevator.)
Anthony: Well, I don’t really feel like I’ve “made it,” mostly because writing remains so damn hard for me, but twice I’ve seen strangers holding my book on airplanes. That’s sort of staggering to me. And not so long ago I took my kids to a swimming pool and there was a woman there reading one of my books in a chaise lounge. We swam for an hour or so and she read that whole time and then we left and she was still reading. That felt pretty great.
Katherine: What are you reading right now? What are you reading next?
Anthony: I’m reading a manuscript of Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories, which will be published next year. And after that I’m going to read David Mitchell’s new novel. (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.)
Katherine: If you had to pick five books for a desert island, what would they be? What’s the one book that gives you the most inspiration?
Anthony: Moby Dick, by Melville. Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy. The Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson. Dubliners, by Joyce. And for my fifth and last book, I’d cheat and bring one of those massively thick anthologies of short stories, The Story and Its Writer by Anne Charters. Sixteen hundred onionskin pages, one hundred and fifteen short stories, three pounds. The stories in that particular book are arranged alphabetically by their writers: Chinua Achebe to Richard Wright, and reading it I learned so much about how flexible stories can be, how so many different minds from so many different times and cultures have used to it stretch the form. That particular anthology is, bar none, the most inspiring book on my shelves.
Katherine: What’s the last good exhibit you saw?
Anthony: I was at MOMA a few weeks ago and found myself mesmerized by Kara Walker’s gigantic installation of paper cutouts in the atrium. It’s called: Gone: An Historical Romance of A Civil War as It Occured b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. I don’t even know all that much about Gone with the Wind and yet still Walker’s huge mural held my attention for a long time: the comic grotesquerie of it, the questions about race that it asks, and the technical skill!
Katherine: Tell us something you love about Boise, Idaho.
Anthony: I love to float the Boise River right through the center of town in a big inflatable raft with my six-year-old twin sons. We eat sunflower seeds and I listen to them tell me what they see.
Katherine: What’s your favorite thing about summer?
Anthony: Finding myself in lots of good situations to look at the stars.
