Jenn Delperdang
Growing up in Osakis, Minnesota, Leif Enger worked for Minnesota Public Radio before writing his best selling debut novel, Peace Like a River, which won the book sense Award for Fiction and was named one of the year's best books by Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times for 2001. He lives with his wife in Duluth, Minnesota. We are thrilled to welcome Leif Enger to The First Fifty Pages.
Leif Enger
I'm glad to be here.
Kelsey Patterson
So of course, before we dive into talking about your latest book, I Cheerfully Refuse, we have to take a brief moment to touch on your background in public radio. And as our listeners and subscribers know, we love public radio, and this podcast would not be possible without our collaborative and supportive partnership with Siouxland Public Media. How do you think your experiences at Minnesota Public Radio helped shape you as a writer?
Leif Enger
Oh, in so many ways. And that's such a good question, and it's so much fun to talk about because I was a public radio reporter and producer for 16 years. It was my first experience working with really good editors, working really with any editors. And so, like a lot of writers, when I began, I thought that anything I wrote was basically a sacred text, you know, and so it was startling for me to send my early stories. I was in Bemidji to begin with, which is a small town in northern Minnesota, and I was the northern Minnesota correspondent. And I would send my scripts down to St Paul, down to the mothership, and the editors there would go over them, then they'd call me and say, "What is it with you and adjectives? You've got so many of them and it just isn't how you write a news story." And that was really startling for me, because I had thought that I was just someone to be appreciated and not someone to be instructed. At first I was deeply offended. I was like, "Oh, who do these people think they are to tell me how to write a good sentence?" But of course, they were absolutely right. I was just a I was so filled with with myself, I guess, at the time, and it took about, I don't know, it took maybe a couple of months of hard experiences with editors before I had this stunning realization, which was, "Oh, everything I send them, even the stuff I think is good, comes back to me better." And what I discovered was that writing is at its best when it is a cooperative endeavor.
And then the other thing that really was wonderful about that job was that they sent me all over the place to talk with people I never would have encountered otherwise. And what I discovered was that people viewed the world in different ways than I did. So it was a license to just learn about the world. I felt like I was in school every day. It was a wonderful, great experience. And I think between those things, learning to work with an editor and learning to be intrigued by other people's worldviews, that gave me a leg up in writing fiction.
Jenn Delperdang
Kelsey and I both LOVED this book, and I have to say "loved" in all caps. We need to get that into the transcript that "loved" needs to be in all caps. And we are really excited to talk with you more about this novel. It's receiving high praise from readers and critics alike. Could you share a little more about I Cheerfully Refuse for those listeners who haven't had a chance to read it?
Leif Enger
In 2017, like everyone else, I became familiar with the phrase "alternative fact," and that really troubled me. It seemed like a frontal assault on the world in front of our eyes. And so I began to think that a story might be able to tell us a little bit about where we are headed if go down the road of alternative facts, if we decided that we could be told what to believe about things instead of looking for ourselves and seeing what the truth is. So I began to write a story that turned very quickly into a dystopian tale. And what was sort of nice about this, I didn't actually get started on the book until March of 2020. I'd been making notes for a long time. While I was finishing up the previous book, Virgil Wander, I was also making notes for this. And the notes just accumulated and accumulated until 2020. And then when the pandemic began, and we went into lockdown in March, the second half of March, my wife, Robin, said, "You'll never have a better excuse than this to actually jump in and start writing the book."
I realized as I was working on it, because it was hopeful right from the beginning, even though it was set in a world that had gone the wrong direction, a world in which 16 people basically own everything - which is not all that hard for me to imagine - a world in which justice is dispensed by religious zealots and a length of rope, in which indentured servitude has made a huge comeback… but in order to get through this life, I have to be hopeful. And the best way for me to be hopeful has always been to write a story. And so this voice, this narrative voice of Rainey, who tells our story, his voice was going to be important to me, because I was going to be locked in a room with it for a couple of years. And I don't know about you, but if I'm reading a first person narrative, I better like that person. And I just found Rainey to be incredibly likable and easy to work with. And every day I would come in here to my office, and I felt as if he was waiting for me. And he was a hopeful person: a bass player and house painter, a man who works with his hands, and who plays music, and who needs, above all things, beauty in his life. And he's achieved that. He has a happy life, even though things are pretty rough in that world. But then the sort of inciting event in his life happens, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but about 90 pages in, the story takes a a terrible twist and a violent twist, and Rainy is thrown out onto Lake Superior, which forms the rest of the tale, and it becomes a kind of odyssey through a ruined world towards something he hopes is a better and brighter future.
Jenn Delperdang
Yeah, if you don't want to read this book after hearing that, then I don't have hope for you, right? That was fantastic. Your characters in this book, they are wonderfully written, and you can, as a reader, you feel the attention and the infinite care that you spent in bringing them to life. You even found the humanity of the antagonist in the story. And, originally, when I was writing these thoughts down, I used the word villain, but I didn't think villain was the right word for Warrick, because... I don't, he is bad. He's the antagonist. I can't, you know... not the villain. There are points that I liked about him, because you help us to see the humanity in him. So, yeah, you know, I'm a sucker for a character driven story, and this one was top notch.
Leif Enger
Yeah, thank you. And you know, Warrick the villain, or antagonist - you're right, that's a better word - I really loved him. I really did. I sort of knew that was going to happen, because it always does. But what always happens to me is that when I'm writing someone, I'm trying to write someone who's really pretty terrible, right? And he's quite terrible. He's quite terrible, but as I got to know him a little bit.... When I was kind of auditioning Warrick in my pages…. This is a way I work. I write morning pages like Julia Cameron writes about in The Artist's Way, and one thing I do in the pages is I audition characters that I think might be useful in a story. And that just means I kind of interview them as if I were still a journalist, and I listened for their responses. The longer I wrote about Warrick in the morning pages, the more I came to like him. It's just like when you're interviewing someone and you think, "Well, I'm not going to have anything in common with this dude. Here's someone I probably am not going to be able to stand." And you ask him questions for five or six minutes, and that's all it takes to sort of say, "Oh man, I kind of like this guy. I mean, I don't agree with him about anything, but, but I kind of like this guy." Or, "this person has something that I need more of in my own life," depending on who it is and what they're saying. But that happens with fictional people, too. That happens for me whenever I'm writing a story and the necessity arises for an antagonist. And It's not that I want them to win. It's not that I have that particular thing going on. But what happens is I come to understand them, and, inevitably, I come to like them.
You know, Mary Oliver wrote about the attention that becomes devotion. That's kind of what happens with your characters. You just pay attention. You look at them. You see what has made them the way they are... it was a decision that he made 42 years earlier to sacrifice sleep for revenge. I still don't know exactly what form that took, but it would really be fun to write about it and find out.
Kelsey Patterson
So while reading, I was captivated by the lyrical phrases you titled each chapter with and the brilliant way you just incorporated them into the text. What motivated you to frame and write each chapter in this fashion? Or had you already written the text and pulled out your favorite phrases for the naming process in some way?
Leif Enger
Look, I learned a trick a long time ago from Cormac McCarthy's book, Blood Meridian. In that book, he does a really old fashioned thing: Instead of having one chapter title, there's a bunch of little phrases separated by ellipses, and it just gives you a hint of what's coming in this book. It's something they used to do in the 19th century with novels. They would just give you these little phrases, like, "A vampire bat... A dark cave..." and so he gives you this hint of what's coming. And so what I realized is that… I don't know if he did this for himself or not, but what that did for me as a writer was it gave me a little clue as to how to rent my way forward in a story. So at the beginning of every chapter, I would write a dozen phrases, just so I knew where the chapter was going, and the phrases all then would crop up as I was working, and then I would take the most evocative, or the most mellifluous, the best phrase from that bunch, and I would just take that and use it as the title. But all of those things, I mean, that was a really fun way to go, and I've done it for my last several books, because it's such a helpful writing tool. I don't like to outline. I mean, I like to know that I've got four or five spins in the plot, and I write towards those. But then chapter by chapter, it's very helpful. Instead of writing a 3-page outline for a 12-page chapter, just write a dozen phrases at the top of a page and use that as a roadmap to get through the chapter. And I found that to be really helpful, and I think maybe it gives a sense of action and of unfolding narrative. You don't want to get stalled. And that's a tool that helps me to not get stalled in the story.
Jenn Delperdang
And as a reader, it pushes you forward. Like, right? You get to the end of a chapter and you read that line, and you're like, "Well, I gotta keep going. I have to know, I have to keep going. One more chapter. One more chapter."
Leif Enger
Yeah, momentum is everything.
Kelsey Patterson
So in an interview you did with Next Avenue, you mentioned that you're a reader first and tend to write the story you'd most want to settle in with for the evening. What kind of story is your favorite story to write?
Leif Enger
I like something with a good overarching plot, you know, and kind of a simple plot. I don't like plots that are overly complicated, because then I get lost, and I start treading water, and sometimes I give up, as a reader, on the plot that is too complex. I really like a plot that's fairly simple, that can be boiled down into a sentence or two. You know, that's certainly the case with I Cheerfully Refuse. But I think that has to be mixed with a character driven book as well. If a book is just all plot and doesn't have someone that I can really read for, and an antagonist that I also like reading about...
You know, I mentioned the Cormac McCarthy book, Blood Meridian. Part of what really drove me through that story was the character of The Judge, who is probably not entirely human, and who is very mysterious and also absolutely gripping as a character. The first time you see The Judge... maybe I'm wrong about this. In my memory - I haven't read that book in a couple of decades - but when I read it, I remember that the first time I saw the judge, he's this character who appears, he's massive, he's naked, he's in the middle of the desert, and he's sitting cross legged on the desert floor and, and this long sort of wagon train, not a wagon train, but a long line of sort of scalp hunters, terrible people, are moving through the desert, and they come across this, this naked figure who is just like waiting for them, like he's always been there, and he'll always be there. And, and I remember just being compelled by this character, and this is the antagonist, and he is the reason I finished that book. He's the reason I kept reading. What is The Judge going to say next? I adored him.
And so I really want there to be characters that are just on the edge of reality, and sometimes are going in the opposite direction from reality, and then contrast those with characters that we all know, that we maybe are, characters who are incredibly human. I want all of that. I want the story that is unputdownable, and I want the characters that I love. Moreover, I want a place, a sense of place, and it needs to be someplace I love so much I never want to leave. Lake Superior is that for me.
Jenn Delperdang
We often hear from readers that aren't familiar with dystopian fiction that the hope and optimism found in the genre is often unexpected, but at the same time, this is what draws readers back to these stories. Do you have a favorite part in I Cheerfully Refuse, without giving away spoilers, where hope is reflected?
Leif Enger
I do. For me, one of the good moments in the story, and it was such a delight when it occurred because I didn't see it coming until it came out on the page, is when Sol, who is this young, this nine year old, illiterate girl who joins Rainy on his sailboat. There's a time when he is trying to teach her to write her name. She's never learned the letters. She regards letters and words as a kind of wicked magic, a kind of black magic. She says "It's not for me." He tries to teach her to write her name, which is just Sol, and she doesn't. She refuses to do it. She’s terrified. She's afraid of it. And then once they are on the ship and they're being held in different places, there's a moment when Rainey receives a note in his cell, and it's a note from Sol. He doesn't know what happened to her. He doesn't know if she's all right. He doesn't know if she's safe on the ship. He has no idea what condition she's in. And she sends a slip of paper with just her name written on it: Sol. And that means everything to Rainy because it not only means that she's all right, it means that something in her has decided it is worth embracing the letters. It's worth embracing the idea that it might be all right to learn to read. And I, I just loved it when that happened, and it really felt like a gift. And it felt like, "Okay, now the world can be hopeful for Rainey, in a way it wasn't before." And it really propped me up. It made me feel great. It made me feel like Rainey was in my office, swinging his lantern around.
Jenn Delperdang
In this not too distant future, reading has fallen out of favor, shall we say? Literature is not valued by this society any longer. But I found that the characters that bring the most hope and humanity to this story, well, I'm assuming, are readers right? There's a thread that connects these strangers through the story, whether that is literature, music or even oral traditions, reading to people. And through the story they find their shared humanity. And one of my favorite lines, and it's actually the chapter of the book. So it's the whole chapter, "When a flame is lit, move toward it." It's a beautiful description about what it is like to fall in love with reading and stories. I'd love to hear where the inspiration came for you, for that line, for that part of the story. Can you talk about that a little bit, "when the flame is lit, move toward it"?
Leif Enger
You know, the flame gets lit for all of us in different ways and at different times. For me, it happened quite young. I mean, I'm the youngest of four, so I grew up in a house where I was always listening to stories I didn't understand. Because when you're, you know, when you're two, and your older brother is 12, and your mom is trying to read you stories that have to work for all of you, in some ways that gives you a leg up, I think, because you're exposed to things that are maybe great for a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old. And then there's you. So, I think when you're young, when you're very young, there's a sense in which any story that you read or you hear is true to you.
I remember hearing and believing the creation story, the six-day creation where God creates the heavens and the earth, and it takes him six days. At the end of every day's tasks, he looks at his work and he sees that it's good. Then the next day he does the next thing, and then on the seventh day he rests. And that was a great story, and I knew it because mom would read to us from Genesis or a little bit later. I had an illustrated children's Bible, and I remember some of the images from that drawn like a comic book. And so that's a great story, and I knew it was true, but I also knew from a picture book I had that the world was was basically a lifeless planet, a lump of of rock hanging in the sky, until one day, a hole opened in in the lifeless rock and and turned into a cave, a deep cave, and out of the cave came a buffalo, a red buffalo, a bison, and it stepped out of the hole and and walked across the world. And as it walked, grasses began to grow up out of the ground, and trees grew up out of the ground, and a wind blew, and suddenly the grasses and the trees were full of birds, and the birds were singing. And then the buffalo, seeing all this, turns around and returns to the cave that he first came out of, and he calls to the cave, and people come out of it, and they are the first people, and like the birds they're singing as they come out. And so that was another creation story, and I knew that one was true, and it didn't, for me at five or six, come into conflict at all with the six-day creation that I had heard about. It just existed alongside it. And I think that what got into me kind of early was this idea that stories tell you the truth in some way, and their common denominator is beauty. They're both beautiful stories, and beauty might be the universal human need. It's what we have to have in order to live satisfactory lives. We need some beauty. And stories, I think, deliver that to us in a way that almost nothing else can.
So a flame was lit before I can really remember, and what was really kind of lovely about writing about Rainey was that here's a guy in whom that flame was not lit until he was in his late 20s, and it wasn't lit from any kind of inner nobility. It was lit because he had fallen in love with the voice of a librarian that he couldn't even see at first. And he wanted to be able to have something to say to her, something to talk to her about. So he began to read everything that he overhears her talking about to other people. And then the last thing he expects is what happens, and he falls in love with reading itself at the age of 28, and he just begins to devour books as fast as he can go. It was so enjoyable to write about a man for whom that's the experience. That's how his flame gets lit and he moves toward it, and he never stops.
Kelsey Patterson
There is like a book within a book storyline at play in this novel with the coveted advanced reader copy Lark obtains of Molly Thorns I Cheerfully Refuse. And that feels like that is part of her flame, that, you know, this is the author that just does something for her. Like Lark, do you have an author that just does something for you?
Leif Enger
Actually, there are two or three, if I may? The very first one was certainly Kenneth Graham, who wrote The Wind in the Willows. I remember that book specifically because my third-grade teacher recommended it to me, and then later read it aloud to the class. And that story, I had that scholastic version... do you remember buying books in school, and they were, you know, they had a little catalog, and you put a check mark by the ones that you wanted to buy?
I had the Scholastic paperback and I remember bringing it home from school and carrying it into my room, because I think I had been sent there, and reading those opening pages in which there's a mole, and the mole is underground, and it's spring, and he's just awakened from whatever hibernation, and he feels the call of the outside world. He feels the call of the sunshine, and he starts tunneling up, not really understanding what he's doing. And the moment that his face breaks out into the sunlight, he's in the meadow, and there are grasses all around him, and there's a breeze in the grasses, and, if he listens, he can hear the flowing of a river not far away. And then before he knows it, he's up and he's running toward the river through the meadow. And I remember, just at that point, I wasn't in my room anymore. I was just in the meadow, and there's the river, and then, of course, it's the water rat and the rowboat and the picnic. And, honest to God, I mean, it just swept me away. And I read that book time and time and time again. I can't tell you how many times I read that story. And it worked every time. It was just, it was that that book is like time travel. It's like a spell that is cast. And so that flame was really lit, and I was, I was eight years old, and that's a good time to have it lit. That's a really good time.
Other authors who do that same thing for me to this day... certain novels by Larry McMurtry, who famously wrote the Lonesome Dove series, and those are great stories. But the ones that work even better for me are his Texas novels that take place in the '50s and '60s: All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, The Last Picture Show, Texasville, some of those, some of the stories. His writing style is so conversational. It's so informal. It's first person,and it really just feels like you're having a conversation with the most interesting person you've met in a long time. And so there are times I just have to go back and read one of those books at least once a year in order to reconnect with that and get the flame lit again. So McMurtry is certainly one of them. Charles Portis is the same way for me, The Dog of the South. True Grit, of course, is one of the great novels in the English language. Yeah, those voices, certainly.
Jenn Delperdang
At one point in the story, Rainey complains to Lark about the last pages of Don Quixote, and Lark defends the author by saying, "Sometimes no right ending can be found." Do you think that's true, and do you struggle when writing to find the right endings for your works?
Leif Enger
Oh, I always struggle with the ending. I do. Endings are hard. I think it's the novel Get Shorty, that Elmore Leonard novel, where the last line of the book is, "Endings. Man, they're harder than they look." But the endings are all important. I mean, you have to, you have to hit it. And they can't necessarily be the big, dramatic splash that you might want. Sometimes they have to pull back. Sometimes they have to approach the edge of the cliff and then pull back with humility or with humor. Sometimes that's what you have to do. Most of the time, what I have to do is avoid melodrama if I can.
Kelsey Patterson
We focus a lot on the power of stories here at The First Fifty Pages, and a conversation that Rainy and Sol have towards the end of I Cheerfully Refuse really captures that. I think it reads, Words are one way we leave tracks in the world. Sol, maybe one day you will write a book, and people will read it like I've been reading to you, and they will know that you were here and a little bit about what you were like years from now." What do you hope the tracks you've left in the world say about you and what you were like?
Leif Enger
Oh, goodness. That's a terrifying thing to contemplate. I hope that anybody who stumbles across one of my books in a garage sale in 40 years will read it and just get, you know, if it takes them 10 hours to read, I hope that they feel elevated, or they feel lifted, or they feel happy for that 10 hours. I think that's all a book can really, really hope for, is to give someone a really pleasant experience, because then we remember those pleasant experiences, and they reverberate out into our futures.
Jenn Delperdang
Endings are hard, but you nailed that one. We have to thank you for your time today. It has been a joy and a pleasure to talk with you about this book. We get asked a lot, "What are you reading?" "What have you read?" "Anything good lately?" And I know this is on the top of our list to share with people now.
Leif Enger
Oh, that is really nice to hear. And you know, one of the really unexpected benefits of writing books is that you get to meet people who like to read, and there's just nothing more fun than talking to fellow readers. My favorite part of what happens outside of my little writing office here is getting to talk to people about books and about what gets them going, what revs them up, what makes their engine turn. You know, that's the most glorious part. So thank you for letting me come on your podcast. I appreciate it.
Kelsey Patterson
Thank you. And we had to, you know, interview a fellow garage sale enthusiast. As soon as you said that you get sucked into stopping every time you see a canoe. I was like, that was my whole childhood, because I grew up just maybe, like, a couple hours from Duluth in northern Wisconsin. And I was like, those are some of the best garage sales.
