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Charles H. Fischer: Insightful Journey · Spinning the Light Podcast

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Hello and welcome to two girls in a Pod.
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I am Sharon, I'm Christy and we are very excited to have a guest
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on today. Yes, we would like to welcome
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Charles Fisher, Professor at Community College at Everett
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Community College in Washington and also the author of The
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Eunuch. Welcome.
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Happy to be here ladies. So you know, one of the things
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is, is, as I was saying, one we love to talk about the story of
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how one gets to 1st off becoming a profess.
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You know, how do you make that decision to become a professor?
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Then from professor now you're into being an author.
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So we just want to share a little bit about your journey of
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how you got here. I really do see myself as a
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teacher, even more than a professor.
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I love to be in the classroom and interacting with young
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people talking about great books and probably the origin of that
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was I had a a really wonderful teacher when I was in high
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school. His name was Robert Burroughs
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and he taught a three-year course on Western civilization,
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history and literature and he could really make not only
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history come alive but things like poetry and painting and
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architecture. It was a relatively kind of
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comprehensive and in depth course for a public high school.
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I went to public high school and in northern Minnesota in the
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late 1970s. And so Mr. Burroughs was this,
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just this kind of charismatic and even a dramatic figure.
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The summer between our junior and senior years, he took us to
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Europe. We spent three weeks at
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Cambridge University, taking classes, being exposed to this
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to the wonderful and ancient Oxbridge University system.
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And then we spent another couple of weeks on the continent in
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Paris and Salzburg and Rome, Vienna, and it was just quite a
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quite an experience. And so he kind of awakened in me
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a love for the arms and I think that's really it's really the
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start of it. And then the the next story is
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is is is is my education. But I'll just start with that
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right there for y'all. What a great opportunity.
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Yeah, It was really tremendous. Again, it was.
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It was a it was a public high school and I worked at a Country
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Club as a busboys saved money over the summers to pay for the
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trip. It was an exposure to European
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culture. We spent a lot of time in
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churches and had various architecture, the Romanesque,
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the Gothic, the Rococo. It was really cool.
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It has such a old feel to it, you know, when you're from the
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United States and then you go to Europe and that old culture that
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you just feel everywhere you go, you know, rich history to yes.
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Yeah, rich history and many of the the towns and cities are
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beautiful. Cambridge, England, this
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university town, it has you know 30 some colleges.
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Many of them were built like in the, you know, 14th and 15th
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century. And so it has had this real
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medieval feel and it kind of captured my imagination.
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And of course, at the time I was a big JRR Tolkien fan and was
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reading The Lord of the Rings and was kind of kind of
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fascinated and even kind of a little bit drunk on what we used
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to call Anglophilia or, you know, these Oxford Dons who
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wrote these books. And there was a lot of kind of
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romanticism behind it, My attraction to a life of study at
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a university. And then I was really fortunate
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enough to go to a really nice, really solid liberal arts
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College in southern Minnesota, Saint Olaf College.
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It was just this wonderful place.
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And I studied philosophy and religion and literature there.
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And I just became enamored with the life of the mind and decided
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that I would make, I would try to make a life out of it and go
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to Graduate School and become a a professor.
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And you know kind of against the opposition of my father.
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My father was a businessman, A practical guy.
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He was in banking and he wasn't really supportive.
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He he let me do it and didn't say anything.
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But I I I did kind of feel his displeasure.
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He didn't he didn't really see it as as practical and and
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financially sustainable. And in many ways he was right.
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I spent a long time in Graduate School and various masters and
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pH. DS programs where or I would
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just read and study and learn how to write and it was kind of
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while I was in Graduate School. But as you know this writing
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thing is pretty cool. Maybe I'll give my I'll try my
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hand at fiction someday. So that's kind of when that when
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that began. Well, I was Graduate School in
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in Boston, MA. What are your degrees in 'cause?
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I think sometimes that leads to understanding more where your
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ideas come from. Yeah, I mean my undergraduate
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degree was in philosophy. I kind of minored in religion.
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I was really a religious person as a young guy, as a young man.
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I had a powerful conversion experience to Christianity when
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I was about 15 years old. And then I got involved in some
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of the kind of extreme movements of the Pentecostal church.
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And I I don't want to say it was a bad experience.
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In many ways it was a great experience.
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But it was in the end I found it kind of coercive and narrow and
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and and anti intellectual in a bad way.
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And I left the church in my early 20s and became an agnostic
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kind of an what you'd call an apostate, you know.
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And so, so while I was in great, so I was in as an undergraduate,
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I I was just looking for ways to try to understand not only my
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religious experience in Christianity, but then my
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disaffection, my alienation from it.
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It was this existential conundrum for me, how I how I
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could be swept up into this kind of religious spirit.
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It was very meaningful and powerful at the time.
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And then then I became so disillusioned with it and lost
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my faith and and really kind of entered a a crisis of meaning.
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And I don't know, philosophy helped or not, but that was the
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kind of the idea. And then after that, after a few
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years of kind of working a series of service jobs, I
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decided I want to kind of pursue my academic life.
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And I ended up taking a a master's of theological studies
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degree at the Harvard Divinity School.
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This was in the kind of earlyish 1990s.
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And while I was at Harvard, I was, I was studying ancient
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religion and biblical studies and all this kind of really cool
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stuff. And I had a really good friend
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who was doing a PhD in the yard in a seriology, which is
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basically the study of ancient Mesopotamian cultures.
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And we were like, really close my friend Jenny Meyer, and she's
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this brilliant young woman. And it was to her I became kind
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of introduced to this, to the ancient Sumerian and Acadian
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cultures, which when I ended up writing the novel that I my that
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my first novel that I actually completed, I set in this ancient
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world that I was introduced to by my friend Jenny, who actually
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did complete her PhD in a seriology and and said this
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wonderful career at various great universities in the
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country. So that's kind of where all that
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started. Nice.
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Well, it kind of sounds like I hear this theme of you just like
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to learn. You like to read, you like to
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kind of broaden your mind. Oh yeah, I tell my students all
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the time that there's really not a real difference between an
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instructor or professor and a student.
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I mean, professors and and teachers.
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We're just we're students too. I but we just have spent more
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time doing it, right? And so I I tried to talk about
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my learning process as a student and you know, share with my
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students what's worked for me, what I find interesting and you
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know, how I try to understand whether it's history or a or a
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poem like the Iliad. I I kind of take them through my
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own learning experience so that they can have an encounter, you
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know, with, you know, great works of art or powerful
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literature. So the director of my
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dissertation said that all all good teachers are good students
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and so and I'm proud of that. I'm not ashamed of being a
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lifelong student. I think we're all lifelong
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students. I think people just don't
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realize it, that, you know, life is always about learning
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something new. Never stops.
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You know. Exactly.
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And it's really interesting, 'cause I think a lot of times
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you'll hear like people and especially students, 'cause
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sometimes I work with students and when they have to do the
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more Old English style of writing, it's very confusing for
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them. Often times they're very turned
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off by it immediately. When you're when you're
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teaching, I've been a literature teacher for 25 years and so when
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I'm teaching a a play by Shakespeare and it's written and
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it's it's considered modern English, but it's really like
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reading a foreign language. You know, this kind of late
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16th, early 17th century English language and we have to kind of
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learn how to translate it. And if we're reading a novel by
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Jane Austen, even her sentences are very long and she's got
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vocabulary strange and so. So when we're approaching this,
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these older works of literature, there isn't a real active
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translation that's going on on the level of language, not just
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the kind of cultural and historical context.
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And so you you kind of have to kind of take the students where
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they are and begin to try to open up these great works of
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art. And then when it kind of clicks
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for them, it's really exciting and kind of wonderful to behold.
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It kind of sounds like that's what it was for you with your
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teacher, that they kind of they clicked with you and then this
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world opened up. It is kind of what the I don't
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want Maybe an epiphany or it's like a revelation or or an
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illumination. All of a sudden you see
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something that previously you didn't see and it feels kind of
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revelatory. It's like when you discover a
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musical style for the first time, whether it's a hip hop or
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jazz, something that maybe is not your natural kind of thing
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to enjoy depending on your kind of cultural background.
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I had that experience with with jazz.
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Jazz can be very alienating and strange to the average listener.
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But I had somebody kind of like like initiate me into it doing
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baby steps, steps. And it really felt like this
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religious experience when I I think it was like John Coltrane
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playing the favorite things and the kind of the pleasure and the
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joy that I that I received from experiencing that piece of
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music, it was kind of transcended, it was powerful.
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And you can have that with so many different things, whether
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it's, you know, architecture or painting, poetry, right?
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That's one of kind of my aspirations as a teacher is to
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try to get my students to have these, to experience the power,
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the beauty and the even profundity of a poem or a novel
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or a painting. It sounds like you, you know,
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you've been really impacted by the arts and that just as a side
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note, do you play any instruments?
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No, I don't. And I think that's one of the
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the. I mean, I I would love to be
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musical. I have no rhythm, I cannot sing
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and don't play any instruments. But I I love, love, love music.
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That desire, I mean writing for me, is just kind of a
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consolation or a complication for my lack of musical ability
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and talent. Oh, OK Well, I think it's
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interesting too, 'cause I think when people leave in, when they
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they don't think of music as something that is very cultural.
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And you know when you listen to music from even around the
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world, how much you learn about those different places just
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through their music. But at the end of the day,
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there's still commonalities in it.
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There's still more commonality in the music.
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And I think it's that's very similar with writing to whether
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it's done, you know, the 16th century, 17th, it doesn't
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matter. There's still a story to be
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told. There's stories to be told and
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it really an ultimate. It's about human experience.
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And I think that I think you really, really got at something
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powerful. I mean, I mean, I I took the,
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you know, introductory Shakespeare course when I was an
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undergraduate, 19 years old. We read your book, obligatory 10
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plays, including Romeo and Juliet.
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And I was like, yeah, you know, they say it's good, but, you
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know, I tried to have an experience with it.
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But you know, I I think I only got so much out of it, maybe 20%
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of what I could have got out of it.
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And then later in my 30s when I was at the University of
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Washington, we had this great Shakespeare professor and he got
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really sick one year and they kind of tapped me to take over
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his class. And I really had not taken
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Shakespeare. So I had to read all these plays
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and kind of get up to speed. I speak Shakespeare really,
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really quickly and all of a sudden I said, Oh my God,
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Shakespeare's is wonderful and great, as everybody says he is.
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But, but, but at this time, I was in my mid 30s and I I knew
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what life was. I had a parent die.
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I'd had my heart broken romantically.
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I knew what it was like to struggle with money.
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I was politically disaffected. I'd seen abuses of power on the
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national level, right. You know, you know, wars that
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the country started that I didn't approve of.
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And all of a sudden, that's all the stuff that Shakespeare
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writes about, all that stuff, right.
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Because I remember teaching Hamlet, which is about a young
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man grieving the death of his father, teaching that play.
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Within a year and a half after my own father died, I went, oh,
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it's all here. It is all here.
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And that's the thing about, you know, these great canonical
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works of art. They're about the human
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experience at, which I think is universal regardless of history
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and culture. And it does make a difference
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when you when you go back and revisit something and you've had
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all those life experiences. Yeah, right.
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Yeah. Because we often experience, you
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know, we were born alone, we die alone, and often we suffer
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alone. But at what I think that great
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art tells us is that you're not alone.
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Other people have gone through everything.
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You've gone through bankruptcy, death of a child.
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These things that are really, really unsettling changes of
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fortune are intrinsic to just being a human being, that it's
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part of the life situation. But when they happen to you,
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it's devastating and and and deeply, deeply confusing, right?
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And. And so to find your experience
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portrayed meaningfully, with nuance and without comforting
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platitudes is a wonderful thing. And doesn't make you wonder why
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we we do have young adults read these classical works.
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And it's impressive because some of them never go back and read
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them again. No, yeah, it's.
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Like I don't know what that meant.
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Yeah, I know. That's the problem with school
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really is that is that is that it's work, right?
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Yeah. It's assigned reading, right.
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And you know, when I'm told to do XI, like to do Y.
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So that's how reading it should be, should be.
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It should be done in secret on the sly.
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You read stuff you're not supposed to read.
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Anything that's assigned by adults automatically can kind of
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turn off young people. It's like it's what's one of the
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difficulties that just kind of built into the teaching
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experience. And so as a teacher, you have to
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find a way around that, cause for them, it's work.
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Why would they listen to me? I'm 16 years old.
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I'm an old man. You know, what do I know?
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So you have to find a way around that kind of opposition that's
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kind of built into the experience.
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Were your parents readers? Yeah, both my parents were big,
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big readers and so and they had a, you know, a big library.
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And they and my my parents weren't like major intellectuals
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or anything, but my mother was an English major and an English
15:02
teacher for a while. When I was about 11 or 12, I
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started reading through my parents library, you know, all
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these books that I probably shouldn't have read that
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weren't, you know, adult content kind of things.
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And these were kind of like the, you know, in 19 sixties, 1970s
15:16
bestseller stuff like, you know, Shogun, James Mitchener, I don't
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know, The Godfather, Mario Puzzo stuff like that.
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And, you know, so I just kind of kind of went through my mom's
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library when I was between the ages of 12 and 15.
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And my parents always had a book.
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Both of them. Always.
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I think that's something that's really interesting is even
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though they, you know, sometimes parents, you know, they lead by
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an example they don't even realize, yeah, my mom was such
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an avid reader as well, and I think all of her kids are all of
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her kids. Yeah, and then she probably did
15:48
like hit you over the head. You need to read more, right.
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It's just it's just something that they did right and.
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We always have trouble for reading too much 'cause we
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weren't doing our chores. Well, yeah, too.
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Well, that's how it's done. It's like when your parents, you
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say mow the lawn or shovel the snow off the sidewalk, that's
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when you sneak up to your room and pull the book off the shelf,
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right? That's way too slack off and
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avoid work. I mean, that's the best way to
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do it. It's.
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Interesting, 'cause what does reading do for you?
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I mean, why? You know, 'cause I mean, we have
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a friend who's such an avid reader, and for her it's it's
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her way to go into other worlds and to, you know, she's having a
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rough day. She gets to escape that.
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Whatever's happening in that moment, what is it for you?
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It's. A way to get out of myself.
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I mean, the older I get, the more I realize that that all my
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problems are stem from myself. You know, the noise that's in my
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head, the stories that are going on in my mind, right?
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That that that voice, it won't ever stop.
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There's a kind of a narcissism there or self absorption, right?
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And so anything I can do to experience the non self the not
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me, whether it's you know, playing cribbage with my wife or
16:57
going for a walk with my dog or reading a book, that's good.
17:01
So there's that. But I also think that reading is
17:04
also you're you're exercising parts of your being your your,
17:08
the intellectual part of your being, the spiritual part of
17:11
yourself, where you're reading about another person's life
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that's portrayed in all that kind of complexity and nuance.
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Right? And so I read a lot of
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philosophy, a lot of history, a lot of fiction, a lot of poetry.
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And I'm just looking for the ways that writers portray the
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human experience, whether it's a poetic or narrative form, so I
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can understand myself better, so I can understand other people
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better, so I can understand this kind of this mysterious and
17:39
often troubling thing that is life.
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But then it's also just a lot of really good fun.
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It's just can be entertainment. It can be distraction.
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There's a lot of pleasure in it. Well, it's so different than
17:48
watching a movie because the movie is somebody else's
17:50
conceptualization of what is right.
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Whereas I think when you read a book, before you even know it,
17:57
you're playing this out in your mind.
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It's it. It's come.
18:00
It comes to life. Yeah, the reader's really
18:03
participating in the experience, this interaction between the the
18:06
words on the page that the author put down and now you're
18:10
taking those words and interpreting and and giving them
18:13
life in your own imagination, right.
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And so the reading experience is, is is in some ways more
18:20
active than, you know, watching a movie or a film.
18:23
There's film is entertainment and there's film is art, right?
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And then there's all the stuff kind of in between that's both
18:28
entertainment and art. And and I like all three
18:30
different kind of levels of the cinematic experience.
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But you know what? I want to BLOB out on the on the
18:37
on the couch after a hard day at work, I I might watch some
18:39
cheesy comedy where I don't have to think at all.
18:42
And it's it's like it's the equivalent equivalent of like
18:44
smoking a joint or something, right.
18:46
I want to anesthetize myself, right.
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But if I want to watch a a film by Kurosawa or the French
18:52
director Truffaut, you know, that's going to require me to be
18:55
really kind of present and kind of watch what the film makers
18:58
doing as an artist. And there's there's just there's
19:00
different levels to kind of appreciate, appreciate it,
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right. I feel more satisfied or fuller
19:06
after an experience with film or reading where I have to do a
19:09
little bit of the work. And you know, in writing your
19:11
book, so you when you sit down to write, you have an idea, you
19:16
kind of conceptualize what it is that this work is going to mean
19:19
to you. Do you have conversations with
19:23
people who have read your book and see because they're going to
19:26
have a maybe a different interpretation or the feel of
19:29
the book that might be feel very different to them versus for
19:32
you? Is that what you're looking for?
19:34
Are you trying to have them see this these characters more the
19:39
way that you conceptualize them well?
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When I wrote the book, I I I wasn't really thinking about my
19:44
audience that much. In fact, the only audience I was
19:47
really writing for was myself. I wanted to write the book that
19:50
I always wanted to read. I wanted to write the book that
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I I would go to the bookstore or the library, the book that
19:55
wasn't on the shelf. I wanted that book, right?
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So initially the audience was me, so I was writing towards my
20:02
case. Things that I like using the
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language that I found intriguing, the mood and the
20:07
tone. And the book is kind of a dark
20:10
comedy. There's lots, there's some
20:11
satire in it, parody, that kind of thing.
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And that that was when I was writing the book in my I really
20:16
wrote it between age, like 40 and age 52 or something like
20:20
that. So I was a different person back
20:22
then in my 40s, and I kind of, I kind of liked that kind of
20:24
darker comedic look at the human experience.
20:27
So I was kind of constructing my own narrative around that mood,
20:30
that tone then, And so it's just what I liked, right?
20:34
But lo and behold, you know, once they got published, there's
20:36
a lot of different kind of readers out there, and people
20:39
see things differently. I've I've had people read the
20:41
book and didn't didn't see it as a comedy at all, didn't find any
20:44
of the humor attractive or even present on the page.
20:47
And that kind of surprised me. A lot of people thought the book
20:50
was darker. Well, the book is kind of dark.
20:52
It's a hard look at a very difficult subject.
20:55
So a lot of human suffering in it and kind of a absurdist kind
20:58
of dark take on that human suffering.
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And that's not everybody's cup of tea.
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And I was aware that there would be a lot of different kind of
21:04
reader response. I knew that there was an
21:06
audience out there for the book. So I mean, the people that like
21:09
the book really, really like it a lot.
21:11
But then there's people that are turned off by people who don't
21:13
get it. People go, well, it's all right,
21:15
whatever, you know? So you do the whole kind of
21:17
spectrum from negative to positive is what you're going to
21:20
find. Well, I think you'd find that
21:23
with any literature, you know, you either have those that
21:26
extremely, I mean, when you look at people who love Shakespeare
21:29
and other people are going to say, Oh my God, please don't
21:31
make me have to open that book one more time.
21:32
Yeah. Right.
21:33
It's windows in between, you say.
21:34
I kind of get it's not too bad, You're right.
21:37
And that's the beauty of anything that's in the arts.
21:40
I think that's the beauty of it, because each person who
21:43
experiences it is having a different experience.
21:46
There's. Something with everyone.
21:47
Exactly. Yeah, maybe something for
21:49
everyone. I once read a novel, say that as
21:51
a as a writer, you only read, you only really need about 7 or
21:54
8 good readers. And by that he meant like, you
21:57
know, a reader that would kind of try to understand what you
22:00
were trying to do or what were your intentions as an artist, as
22:04
a writer, what were you trying to achieve?
22:07
So you're thinking about kind of genre, you know, how serious is
22:10
this, you know? Do they have something to say
22:12
about your subject and then and judge whether you executed on it
22:16
or not? Because not everybody's going to
22:19
kind of understand what what, what are the intentions of the
22:22
writer here? What did they try to do and did
22:23
they succeed in doing it? But those.
22:26
But those readers are out there and and you're kind of writing
22:30
for those readers, someone who's going to kind of get what you're
22:32
trying to do, and then you have to accept their verdict, whether
22:36
it's pro or con. So you've read in the book, of
22:40
course, being the author. Do you ever think to yourself,
22:43
you know, in 10 years if I go back and read the book, because
22:46
in 10 years you're going to be a different Charles.
22:48
I mean, we, we continue to evolve and do all of these
22:51
things. Do you think that you'll have
22:53
the same love of the novel? Do you think he'd be more
22:55
critical of? What do you think?
22:58
Well, I I've actually finished the book 10 years ago and then
23:02
it took about 5-6 years to find a publisher and then the
23:06
publisher put it on a schedule. And then once that, once it got
23:10
accepted by the gabbro head by my, it's a small press.
23:13
And why is that? In Minnesota, once it got
23:15
accepted, I had to wait two or three years and there was COVID.
23:19
So when the book finally came out, came out in 2023 and I I
23:24
basically had finished it in 2014.
23:27
So there'd been almost 10 years between when I was kind of done
23:31
with the book. Of course, I did some little bit
23:33
more revision and a lot of editing to get it published
23:36
right. So there's a tremendous distance
23:38
between me and the book right now.
23:39
So when I pick up the book and read it now, I don't even, yeah,
23:42
I am a different Charles. I'm not the person who wrote the
23:45
book. And so part of my reactions,
23:47
like, how did I do this and where did this come from?
23:52
Right. And I have to say, for the most
23:55
part, I'm very pleased with with it.
23:57
I read it right now. It's not the book I would write
23:59
now. OK.
24:00
OK. I'm not that person.
24:03
If you were going to write a book now, what would it be?
24:06
Well, I am writing a book right now.
24:08
I'm almost done. My second novel, and it's quite
24:10
different in some ways in in in some ways it's so my first book,
24:14
I mean, we really talked about what it's about the the it's
24:17
called the Eunuch. It's a it's a kind of AI.
24:20
Describe it as an erotic tragedy.
24:23
And it's based on a series of Forged It's it's based on these
24:27
tablets that were unearthed, these these cuneiform tablets
24:31
that were unearthed during the Iraq War.
24:33
And the novel is a forgery, A forged translation of those
24:36
tablets. So the setups look kind of
24:38
complicated. But it reads like a historical
24:40
novel written by a eunuch. The narrator's name is Nergal
24:44
and he's the he's the chief harem scribe and the the king of
24:48
Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, the second's harem.
24:51
And he's telling the story of life he's trying to give it.
24:54
Give us a behind the scenes look at the court of Nebuchadnezzar
24:57
of Babylon in the days that are running up to this big war.
25:01
Nebuchadnezzar is famous for invading Judah right and sacking
25:05
Jerusalem and and and destroying the temple and and then the
25:10
Babylonian captivity where they deported, you know, 10s of
25:15
thousands of Jews to Babylon to live in exile and work for the
25:18
king. So the the, the novel's a story
25:20
of this war that happens in the Middle East, the lead up and all
25:25
the kind of machinations by the priests and the counselors that
25:28
the eunuch is Privy to because he's so close to the king.
25:32
But it's also a love story. He falls in love with one of the
25:35
harem girls whom the king is also infatuated with.
25:38
So there's a love triangle a throuple if you will, to use the
25:42
kids talk about these days. So, so, so that was the that was
25:46
the thing. And the novel I'm writing right
25:48
now is about a a young man who spends too much time on the
25:52
Internet. OK.
25:55
What made you decide to write the eunuch from that perspective
25:59
of the eunuch? All right, so I was born in
26:04
1961. So that means I'm a I'm a I'm a
26:07
I'm on the very tail end of the baby bloomers.
26:10
And I don't. Even though I grew up in
26:12
Bloomberg culture, I'm generalizing here.
26:15
I mean, I didn't have a draft number for the Vietnam War.
26:19
You know, when the Vietnam War I ended, I was 14.
26:22
I didn't really go through the 60s.
26:23
And that the, you know, the political and sexual revolution
26:26
that went on, you know, watched it from afar as a young, you
26:29
know, you know, at 8-9 years old, right.
26:32
It's all kind of the tail end of this generation, right?
26:35
When I started reading Seriously, I I read the writers
26:38
of my grandparents and my father's and my mother's
26:41
generation, mostly Jewish writers, guys like Saul Bellow,
26:45
Norman Mailer, Philip Roth. These kind of male writers of
26:50
the silent generation, right. And and these guys were
26:55
prolific, brilliant. I called them the quote UN quote
27:00
the big swinging Dicks of the World War 2 and post war
27:03
generation and so and so they were kind of confident brass
27:07
they were a little bit they were they were sexist or they were
27:10
more than a little bit sexist in some cases right it's a lot of
27:13
their social attitudes were very were very kind of antiquated but
27:16
it but nevertheless they were brilliant wrote well you know
27:19
we're great writers right and I knew that I I couldn't write
27:22
like that right. I was just from a different
27:23
generation and different experience where the woman's
27:26
movement had really happened and, you know, the gay rights
27:29
movement. And now we have everything
27:30
that's going on with the LPGDQ movement, right?
27:34
And I'm very sympathetic to all that.
27:35
I'm also a simple fact to the feminist movement.
27:38
So I couldn't really write for the position of a hardcore.
27:42
We know what they call a cisgender, heteronormative male
27:44
right. That wasn't going to apply,
27:45
right, Which I understand, you know, you know, the movement, at
27:50
least in the academic circles that I inhabit, is about kind of
27:54
decentering, right. The white male voice, right.
27:57
You know, for good and for Elle, right.
27:59
So as a kind of a white male writer, I go, well, how am I
28:02
going to be able to write a story about love and sex and
28:06
power without sounding like an asshole?
28:08
So I adopted this position of this powerless individual as a
28:11
way to kind of around that that problem that that's just one of
28:16
the reasons. OK.
28:17
Well, it's interesting because in the book you really very much
28:19
see that hierarchy and that perception from somebody at the
28:24
bottom looking at it and where their place is.
28:27
And, you know, always equate it to, you know, like when you have
28:31
a business, a corporation or whatever, you know, the support
28:35
staff or those at the bottom get very little recognition even
28:39
though they do a lot, you know, right.
28:41
Yeah, I mean. Yeah.
28:43
So, I mean, I was, I was interested in powerlessness in
28:45
part because I was a graduate student for 10 years in my 30s.
28:49
You know, I lived in a one room rental with a hot plate and the
28:53
bathroom down the hall had no money, had no car, no life
28:57
insurance, right. And you know, and very little
29:00
status. And I was in my, you know early
29:03
to mid 30s the universities of tremendously hierarchical place
29:10
lots lot of hierarchy in American colleges and
29:13
universities and yet on the other hand they proclaim
29:16
themselves to be the most kind of egalitarian and progressive
29:20
and forward thinking institutions.
29:22
So the politics and most universities that I attended are
29:25
all kind of right on left progressive politics, right
29:29
politics, which I'm sympathetic to and understand.
29:33
Yet these places are, are, are, are relatively in elite
29:36
institutions, right, with a tremendous amount of hierarchy
29:40
and that kind of dissonance between the kind of official
29:43
politics and ideology of most progressive colleges.
29:46
And then the reality of the kind of power dynamics for those who
29:50
work in it, that dissonance, that kind of contradiction.
29:53
You can even call it a kind of a hypocrisy, really.
29:55
Well, you know, I felt in my bones.
29:58
And so I was looking for a way to write about that with without
30:01
writing what they call a campus novel.
30:03
I didn't want to write a college novel.
30:05
Who cares what I didn't want to write?
30:07
Who cares about a graduate student, you know, complaining
30:09
about his lot? I chose to do the PhD.
30:11
This is what I wanted to do, so I didn't want to.
30:13
I didn't want to write about that experience directly, so I
30:16
was looking for like an analog. OK.
30:20
Well, I think it's interesting because I think reading the book
30:22
and then listening to how you described it for yourself, you
30:26
know, I mean I think you then conceptualize the book in a very
30:29
different way maybe then and and so maybe it's that kind of that
30:34
teaching theme. Because I think if you go and
30:36
you read the book and you don't under you're kind of trying to
30:38
figure out what is the whole purpose of the book.
30:41
You know, I mean, I think you can see the hierarchy in it and
30:43
you can see all those things in that power struggle, that love
30:47
triangle, all of those things. And even sometimes where you
30:51
find those people that become your the people that encourage
30:55
you or nurture you or whatever that is, whatever would you want
30:59
to use for it. And I think it does kind of
31:02
mimic life in a way, you know. But I think listening to you
31:07
talk about what your premise was really kind of brings that,
31:11
brings the novel more to this place of understanding.
31:16
Yeah, I mean one way that people talk about historical novels and
31:20
and my novel is a historical novel with quotation marks on
31:23
it. It's not a directly historical
31:24
novel, but it reads like a historical novel.
31:27
Historical novels are are often these kind of coded narratives
31:30
about the present. And when I was writing about
31:33
Babylon, I was really thinking about the United States as a
31:35
kind of modern Babylon, a powerful, decadent empire in
31:40
decline. And when I was writing about
31:42
Babylon's war on Judah, I was really writing about the United
31:45
States wars in the Mideast, in particular the war of Iraq.
31:48
And that began in March of 2003, right?
31:51
So I was writing about this powerful imperial power that was
31:55
invading a smaller nation, and I was trying to kind of figure
31:58
out, well, what could go wrong, right?
32:00
We're going to invade this little country called Iraq.
32:02
What possibly could go wrong? And we kind of seen the
32:05
consequences of that invasion play out in a very negative way
32:08
in the last 20 or still years. So I had that kind of picture in
32:13
my mind that I wasn't, I was going to write, I wasn't going
32:15
to write about being in Graduate School and the war in Iraq
32:19
directly, but I was going to find a code about it.
32:21
So I wrote about another empire in decline, Babylon, which is
32:24
this kind of power. It's a powerful trope or
32:26
metaphor for kind of a powerful, decadent, politically oppressive
32:31
empire, right. You know, the same way that Rome
32:34
kind of plays that same role as well.
32:36
Babylon was always kind of seen as the antithesis of Jerusalem,
32:41
which was the center of Judaism and Christianity and now Islam,
32:44
right? So you've got these, these
32:46
monotheistic religions that teach us to love our neighbor
32:49
and care for the poor and the widow, right?
32:51
And then you have these. Then then you have the opposite
32:53
of that, which is this kind of Babylon, which is a powerful
32:56
political state that's basically run on Darwinian red tooth and
33:01
claw values, right? Power and akrandisement and and
33:05
wealth and status, right? And violence, right.
33:08
So I'll try to write about all those things through this story
33:11
of Babylon and and the eunuch and the king and the Isheram.
33:15
Right. So you know, after you completed
33:18
this novel and you know, you kind of got to sit back, you
33:22
know, it was completed, it was published and stuff.
33:25
What was your biggest take away from it?
33:27
As Charles, you know, not necessarily the author, but as
33:32
you? I don't know.
33:33
It's a it was a real kind of mixed experience.
33:35
Once you're done with a big project that has been like your
33:38
life focus, that has given your day-to-day life a tremendous
33:41
amount of meaning. There's a there's an emptiness
33:44
there. There's a loss like, well, what
33:47
am I going to do now? Or I need, I need something to
33:49
kind of fill this role that this, the writing of this book
33:52
has played in my life for so long.
33:54
And then as you're writing it, you're having all sorts of
33:56
fantasies about the reception of the book, you know, fearing its
34:00
failure, of course. But then you've got these kind
34:02
of delusional fantasies of its success and what it's, Oh, it's
34:05
going to change your life. I think the experience for a lot
34:08
of writers, certainly in my case, that the publication of my
34:11
book was more of a whimper than a bang.
34:13
You know, it ended. It ended in A and then with a
34:15
bang and hit it with a whimper, right.
34:17
So, I mean, I've gotten a lot of people to read the book and I've
34:19
had some good feedback, but there's just so many novels that
34:22
are published every year and it's really hard to get people
34:25
to to to pay attention, to look at it, to read it, to review it,
34:28
right. So you have to kind of deal with
34:29
that and and and you have to realize that really the most
34:32
important thing in something like this is the is the actual
34:34
project itself, the writing of it.
34:37
You know, it's a cliche that the journey is really more important
34:40
to destination. You know, the publication of the
34:42
book, like, you know, didn't radically change my life at all.
34:45
But it gave me, I did give me a sense of kind of satisfaction
34:48
that I I completed a long term project.
34:51
I fulfilled an ambition that I had for a long time and writing
34:55
it all was actually really, really difficult to do, much
34:58
harder than I thought it would be.
35:00
And you know, I'm kind of glad it's over with.
35:04
Was it like the IT started the bug that that you wanted to go
35:09
on and write more after that? Or was that always the plan
35:12
before you even wrote this one that you knew you wanted to
35:15
continue to write after this? Well, yeah, I mean, I thought I
35:18
would continue to write after that, but it's really hard to
35:21
find a a project or to conceive of an idea that has legs.
35:24
And So what? What at least happened in my
35:26
case, I started two or three other projects that didn't
35:29
really get anywhere beyond the 1st 10 pages.
35:33
Right, the 1st 15 pages. And I realized wow, it's
35:36
actually kind of it's like it's like you know when lightning
35:40
strikes when you when you get an idea for a book that has legs
35:44
that that that you're going to have enough energy and will to
35:49
stick with it day after day after day through the hard parts
35:53
of writing. You know when you when you when
35:54
you got writer's block and we can't really figure out what's
35:56
going to happen next right. To kind of push through that and
36:00
and and complete a project, I took that for granted 'cause
36:03
then I 'cause. I had a couple ideas that just
36:04
didn't go anywhere. And they were good ideas and
36:07
they're books that I wanted to write and maybe one of them
36:09
might end up someplace someday, but I I don't know.
36:12
It might not. It probably won't.
36:14
So I realized that actually finding an idea, something like
36:16
the Eunuch, it's Diana Harem, who's the body Man, essentially
36:20
the Nebuchadnezzar. That was an idea that that I was
36:23
kind of smitten with and drunk on long enough to kind of to
36:28
spend 10 years. And I wrote every day I worked
36:32
on it. That's all I thought about for
36:34
10 years and wrote every day from 2:00 to 4:00 hours, right.
36:39
It was a kind of obsession. I discovered that experience is
36:42
kind of difficult to replicate, although many riders do that and
36:46
and produce 10/15/20 dollars in their lifetime.
36:49
These are extraordinary, exceptional people.
36:52
And so I'm envious of that kind of rider.
36:54
But I eventually did find a project two or three years after
36:58
I was done riding the eunuch that I stuck with and where the
37:02
idea and the execution of it was it attractive enough and
37:06
challenging enough to me to kind of stick with it.
37:08
And that's the second book. But in some ways it's much less
37:11
ambitious than the first book. It's going to be smaller and was
37:15
easier to write. Well, it is kind of interesting
37:18
because, you know, I think it all, it's all a journey and I
37:21
think for a lot of people, you know, it's funny.
37:23
I just, you're the only some author I've heard say that, you
37:27
know, they have these grandiose ideas and then, you know,
37:30
sometimes it doesn't work out the way they want it to work
37:33
out. And but understanding that the
37:35
journey of writing the book, there was growth in that there
37:38
was a challenge. Yeah.
37:41
And I don't know, maybe some authors, it's more about, you
37:44
know, there's this expectation that they have to publish, you
37:48
have a deadline. You have to publish.
37:51
So I wonder even with them does some of that passion and some of
37:56
that drive really that internal drive more go away with that
38:01
versus writing a novel because it's something that you really
38:05
want to do and it's not amount some other deadliner.
38:08
Yeah, I. Mean there's a lot of writers
38:10
are just total pros. You know, they got the deadline,
38:13
they have the contract for two or three books or whatever, and
38:15
they're just going to produce 500 to 1000 words a day.
38:19
They get it every day. They produce 500 to 1000 words.
38:22
And if you do that, you'll have a book done in a year or two or
38:25
at least a manuscript, right. They're they're they're prose,
38:28
man. And and and and a lot of writers
38:29
are like that. And that's very admirable,
38:32
right? Do that.
38:34
But I I have a full time job that I take very seriously and
38:39
so it's hard to find time to write, you know, with my
38:41
teaching schedule. I've gotten more serious about
38:44
my teaching in the last 10 years, you know, so there's
38:48
there's that. But I think part of it is, I
38:51
mean, I had a really good friend that wanted to be a novelist,
38:54
and he was talented, went to a really good MFA program in New
38:58
York, and he never published anything.
39:00
He had a lot of incomplete manuscripts that never, they
39:03
never finished. And he said part of his problem
39:06
is that he was doing it because he wanted to be seen as a
39:09
novelist. He wanted to be a novelist as
39:12
opposed to writing the project that he was on.
39:15
So he wanted the identity of the novelist.
39:18
Oh. OK.
39:19
And. And that's a trap that many of
39:21
us fall into that, hey, it'd be cool to be a novelist.
39:24
It'd be really it's prestigious. Well, you know.
39:26
Or it used to be and maybe I can get a little bit of fame, a
39:29
little bit of money. It's deeply to, you know, for
39:32
some of us to be a novelist is this deeply seductive identity.
39:36
Right. At least for this my friend, he,
39:39
he said that was a trap for him because the writing of the
39:42
novels, it's a different thing. You you, you have to.
39:45
It has to be about. It has to be about.
39:47
I really want to become a better writer.
39:48
I want to become a good writer. I really want to work on my
39:51
style. I really want to learn how to do
39:52
this and become really, really good at it, right.
39:55
But there's and I think that's the thing that that drove me.
39:58
I just wanted to be good at it. I was not necessarily a natural.
40:03
So it took a long time. So I spent my time trying to get
40:05
trying to get better. And that and that.
40:07
That sustained me. It's really good to hear your
40:11
insight and perspective on that, because I think it's true.
40:14
A lot of times maybe somebody comes up with the idea that they
40:17
want to write and have something like that.
40:20
But if they're so enamored with the idea of the success of the
40:24
book that, you know, I I think it's interesting that you talk
40:27
about how much you gleaned from the writing of it and that that
40:30
was, you know, sort of the rewarding part for you.
40:34
That's really cool. 'Cause when you start, you're
40:36
not an artist. You're you're aspiring to be an
40:39
artist, right? But in order to be an artist,
40:41
you have to learn your craft and and novel writing, you have to
40:44
be pretty good at about 11:50 different things.
40:47
You know, dialogue, exposition, description.
40:51
You need to come up with some sort of plot.
40:54
You need a voice and a tone, right?
40:56
You need to kind of create something that's plausibly 3
40:58
dimensional. They're all these skills and and
41:00
when I started out I was, I was probably pretty good at maybe
41:03
two of them or three of them. And there's ten other things
41:06
that I had to learn how to do that weren't natural to me.
41:10
Too, if something's not resonating with you and it's one
41:13
of those things that feels forced, you would probably have
41:17
a lot of incomplete manuscripts or incomplete anything.
41:21
I don't care what it is. If if it's not truly resonating
41:24
with you and it's not something that you would sit there and
41:27
say, this is something I would read or those kind of things I
41:30
think that we set ourselves up to not complete.
41:34
I'm looking at some of my failed manuscripts that are, you know,
41:38
in my drawer right now. You know, there's parts of it I
41:41
think are OK, but some of a lot of it just is pretty bad.
41:44
It's just not any good. And I don't have the energy to
41:47
rewrite or revise. Right.
41:49
And to make them better. Right.
41:51
And writers talk about this all the time that, you know, I
41:53
think, I think it was Bret Easton Ellis says that we all
41:55
have like 30,000 really bad words in all of us that that
41:58
have to come out. And in my case, it was more like
42:01
300,000 bad words, right. Or, you know, when you're when
42:04
you're learning to write, you're just producing all this stuff.
42:06
That's just it's, you know, it might be at best, it's like, OK,
42:10
but when you go back and you look at it go, this is all
42:12
pretty bad. And so you have to kind of, you
42:14
have to be willing to endure that kind of humiliation of just
42:17
being really bad at it for a long, for a long time.
42:21
Right, You know. I was bad at it for a very long
42:24
time. Really, I tell my clients all
42:26
the time, life is practice and everything we do, we have to
42:28
practice it daily in order to get better at it.
42:31
Yeah, just to get like pretty good at it, right?
42:33
Just to get like, OK and kind of passable, right.
42:36
I think I'm pretty good. I think I'm passable as a
42:38
writer, right. But it but it, you know, it took
42:40
ten years of hard work. You know, I'm not a, I'm not a
42:43
prodigy and I'm certainly no genius, right.
42:46
I just worked at it really hard and persevered.
42:49
Well, wonderful and hopefully other people will persevere.
42:53
Thank you so much for being on and for sharing these words of
42:57
wisdoms. Hopefully other people who are
42:59
listening and want to be a writer get some ideas and for
43:02
our audience. Out there if you have not read
43:05
the book. Here's the unit.
43:06
You can find it on Amazon and I would imagine other bookstores,
43:10
but you know, Amazon is the place to go.
43:13
But anyway, take time, read it and send in a review, you know.
43:18
And once again, thank you so much for joining us.
43:21
We truly appreciated it. And for our audience out there,
43:25
thank you. Remember, you can follow us on.
43:29
Yes, you can find us on YouTube adventures The 2 Girls in a Pod.
43:32
You can find us at 2 Girls in a pod.com and we are also on all
43:37
of the listening platforms. That you get your podcasts on
43:40
and we have a Facebook page as well.
43:42
Yes, please. Feel free to follow subscribe.
43:45
Yes. Thank you so much and we will be
43:47
back next. Week.
43:49
We appreciate you coming on today, Charles.
43:51
Yes. Thank you so much.
43:53
Thanks, ladies. Enjoy the conversation.