The Dad Who Is George Saunders

It's the season finale of PODRE. Congrats to us! To help us go out in style, George Saunders is here. The MacArthur Genius, the Man Booker Award winner, the National Book Award Finalist, the author of LINCOLN IN THE BARDO and TENTH OF DECEMBER and countless other surreal literary bangers. We talk about teaching Russian literature, how to see the best in people, how to write your dream novel, the all-too-human fatherly grief of Abraham Lincoln, and of course, having and being dads.

George is not only very famous and popular, he is a master teacher, storyteller, and unforgettable presence. We hope you enjoy hanging out with him for this very special finale.

And stick around for one last symposium on good dad-ness with cohosts Julian (7) & Nico (3). The next time you hear from us, they'll be older. That's the way with kids.

All of George Saunders' books can be had at a song right here. His excellent substack on writing and the writing life is available here. The awesome audio production of Lincoln in the Bardo is available here and stars an ungodly amount of major actors, from Nick Offerman to Don Cheadle to Susan Sarandon to Ben Stiller to [panting] Bill Hader to Keegan Michael-Keye to Julianne Moore to the author and his family. (Why not just get Lincoln himself?)

An insanely creative 3-D interactive New York Times VR rendition of the book is here.

Then head over to podrepod.com for more information about the show and to sign up for email updates so you never miss an episode or that moment in the near future when we blast out the special patented PODRE secret instructions for how to be the perfect dad.

This is our season one finale, but more bonus episodes are on the way, so keep up with us on Twitter, FB, and Insta, and at PodrePod.com. And of course, PODRE SEASON TWO is right around the corner.

Follow us @podrepod on all the socials to stay tuned in to the frequencies.

Transcript

Speaker A: Hello. We're PODRE. I think you know us.

Chris: Dads. They've been around since the beginning, but what do we really know about them? It's time to start asking questions. I'm Chris Brunt. This is PODRE.

Julian: Nico, you're here. You're here. 

Nico: No. 

Julian: You're here. 

Nico: Putting on pants. 

Julian: Nico, don't... 

Nico: And my underwear and my pants and my shirt... 

Julian: I know, Nico, but you're saying this. Listen, you know what's going to happen after we record this podcast? People are going to start hearing what we're saying, and we're going to start being really famous. It's going to be really fun. But you got to look at this, okay? Then they can hear you better. That's what I'm doing.

Chris: Welcome to the season finale of PODRE. Holy ****. Have we solved fatherhood? I think we have. Are all of our children now securely on the path to righteousness and wisdom and earthly success and spiritual fulfillment? Absolutely, they are. Hang on 1 second. All right, fine. We may have more work to do. There may be more conversations to be had, more questions to ask and stories to tell. So stay tuned all the way to the end of the episode to find out where we go from here. What lies in store for PODRE beyond our debut season? I promise this episode will not cut to black without warning, leaving you to argue amongst yourselves whether I'm alive or dead, whether I finally got what I deserved, or whether I've been redeemed by the love I have for my kids and for you. It's the season finale, and the sensei is here, y'all. We've been talking about him all season long. It's as if we've collectively summoned him to PODRE. Mary Karr. Danny Magariel. Keith Gessen, they've all told you why his work and his teaching matters to them as writers and as human beings. It was time to bring on the man himself and ask him things. And to be honest with you, George Saunders has always had what seemed to me to be an unaccountable level of regard for your host, Chris Brunt. I mean, when I was a student, for part of that time, his quite drunk student, even then, he would say the most shockingly positive things to me, these, like, assurances that he thought highly of my value as a young writer, even as a person. And I'd be like, Are you sure? Like, you're pretty smart. But you do realize that I'm a scumbag, right? I can also tell you that though he didn't play a direct role in my recovery, he's not himself an alcoholic. Or a drug addict. He's a Buddhist and a MacArthur Genius. He was someone who I saw on a pretty much weekly, sometimes daily basis on both sides of my coming into sobriety. So he was someone who witnessed the change in me as it was happening all those gray, snowy Syracuse days. I just remember being three weeks sober, six weeks sober in him. Just kind of generously welcoming me into his glow, into that kind of golden light that he gives off that feels like protection and acceptance and care like blessing that meant the ******* world to me. Then newly sober, trying to allow myself to feel that I'm not totally unworthy of being blessed. Because he wasn't just my teacher. I understand even in 2010, he was a literary hero. I was really lucky. And that those were the last few years that George was still more or less local here in Syracuse, New York. His collection, Tenth of December, came out during my MFA, and he went from being a huge deal fiction writer already to the Time 100 Most Influential People list, going on Colbert and running around with Jeff Tweety. He became a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and after that was the Lincoln book. And it's been nothing but more acclaim and success for him ever since. And I'm so grateful that I got to know him and that he was so kind to me at a very vulnerable time in my life and that he named a character in Lincoln In The Bardo after me. Oh, you didn't know that? Yep. It's true. It's a fairly extensive interview. We talk a lot about writing and teaching at the top. What does writing have to do with fatherhood, you ask. Are you still asking that question this late in PODRE? Everything. It has everything to do with fatherhood. George gives me permission to write my dream novel, which I did indeed begin about two days after this interview occurred, after, like, a year of believing I could never, ever write it. That's the kind of teacher and mentor and person and writer George is. He unlocks the best version of you, the greatest possibilities that lie within you, because that's how he sees you, even if you can't or won't see it yourself. It's a fatherly gift. Okay? Do I have to introduce this person to you? Have you read Tenth of December? Pastoralia? Civil WarLand In Bad Decline? He's a Man Booker winner, a MacArthur Genius. He's the author of nine books, including his newest collection of short stories, liberation Day, available now from Random House. He is, in the words of our friend Mary Karr, the best short story writer in America. He's George Saunders. Coming up next.


Chris: In the it's so amazing to have seen you turn that incredible class that you teach at Syracuse University on the Russian short story into what's now my favorite book on writing A Swim In The Pond In The Rain. But to see the way that you converted that class into a book that anyone can pick up and read. And now you've taken that book and you've converted it into this online community through your Substackk, which, by the way, is called Story Time with George Saunder. Everyone should subscribe to that. It's incredible.

George: Story Club. Story Club, actually.

Chris: Excuse me. What did I say?

George: You said Story Time, which I kind of like better.

Chris: George sorry, Story Club.

George: That gives me an idea for another Substack. Hi, everybody. Today we're reading Isaac Babel. 

Chris: Or a podcast, right? 

George: Yeah.

Chris: It's amazing to have you in my inbox so frequently, right? Most days I wake up and there's a new email from you, a new missive from the Substack, and I get to have you as a teacher again. So you've created this incredible community around this legacy work that you have and this tradition that you've carried on in different formats. And how do you have the energy for this man?

George: Well, I think yeah, well, it's kind of taking over everything else. But no, I think it's something that happened. I teach less at Syracuse than I used to. Like, when you were there, I was teaching, I think, maybe two semesters or maybe just one. But I'm teaching just the workshop now. So somehow, because of that, I'm kind of looking back at all that teaching much more fondly and realizing how important it was all along. Like, that was something I always did. And I think I kind of was like, oh, I've got to teach today. And then after that, I'll do the real work, which is writing. But then looking back and kind of stored in my body, I can see that the two things were really mingled. While teaching, I'd be going, I can't wait to get back to work. And then when I would write again, I would have that feeling of relief, like, okay, I don't have to talk about it. I can just do it. But then while writing, I picked up things like, oh, yeah, I have to remember to mention to them this phenomenon that I just observed in my own work. So it was a real kind of symbiotic system, and I think I feel kind of grateful to have had that life of teaching. And for me, the whole thing of teaching was always to demystify analysis, because as somebody who wasn't trained and I had to kind of learn it in my own way. And that way seemed to me to have everything to do with how you live. Like you're reading a story, it's you reacting to it out of your kind of moral knapsack. Whatever has happened to you, you're reacting to checkout because of that. That's pretty natural. Anybody can do that. Anyway, all that stuff was kind of I think I missed it, basically, to give you the short answer, I missed teaching. And the Russian Book was a way of getting back to it. And this Substack is too.

Chris: It's like you've taken your teaching in the most public possible way. Right. Like, your teaching has just moved from the campus of Syracuse University now, and now it's everywhere. Right. It's global, and it's incredible.

George: Yeah, I like that idea. I kind of think of Leonard Bernstein a little bit when he was during some of his most productive years he was doing those big this is the symphony kind of stuff, PBS stuff, and.

Chris: The albums he would do that were geared toward children, Story Time with George.

George: Right. It's really good because I think what it does is if a person is inclined at all to insularity, which I think this writing life, you know, it does it to all of us, or if somebody like me who's, who's had some success, it puts you into a bit of a bubble. You can live in a little bit of a bubble. So I really love the idea of saying ritually, reminding myself that stories are supposed to connect with people. They're not just supposed to be a little niche article, that eight people read it. That happens. There are stories where you go, everyone goes, oh, it's so great, and you read it and nothing happens. Well, you have to own that. But I think for me, it's just a little selfish because it helps my writing.

Chris: When you said that, it also made me think of teaching, right. That sometimes you're at the front of the room and you're just like, I don't know, let me just try to say something that sounds reasonably intelligent and I can back away slowly from this. But that's not what you do, George.

George: Sometimes it is, though, Chris, because sometimes especially well, in class at speed. Here's something I learned maybe a third of the way through Syracuse. When I first got there, I was so insecure because I hadn't taught and I hadn't really been properly. I had the MFA or the MA actually, in creative writing, but I had never been an English major. So when I first started, I had this real anxiety to let everybody know that I knew more than they did, or at least as much.

Chris: Sure.

George: So I think there was a lot more heavy editing on people's stories and a lot more kind of tight *** prep before I went in. Like, okay, I'll say these twelve things and then they can just suck it. And then as it went along and I got more confident, I realized, especially with students like Syracuse, at Syracuse, you don't have to do much, actually, you just have to do no harm. So if you could sort of give them a story and it could be a really good one, or it could even be kind of a bad one, when they would hate, then the key move was to go in there and just be quiet a minute and go, all right, what'd you think?

Chris: Yeah.

George: And if you can do that, they'll tell you, and then that's what you work with. So it was much more, I guess, having faith in the process, that when you get a bunch of smart people together who are inclined to read stories, just the reading is going to generate a lot of energy, and then you're kind of doing a little bit of judo. It's sort of like therapy. Why did you think that? Well, that's interesting. Tell me more.

Chris: Yeah, but George, you're being very modest here, because you do a hell of a lot more than that, especially in that Russians class. I remember a day as a student in your seminar of the Russian short story class. And for listeners, this is a class that George has taught since the beginning right?

George: Since the beginning of time. Yes, actually, back in the paleolithic era.

Chris: We would read Chekhov and Tolstoy and Gogol and Babel and just short Russian fiction, and we would break it down and sort of derive what instruction we could to the craft of fiction writing from the example of these stories. And there was a day in that class, there were lots of days like this, but there was one in particular that I always remember because I came up to you afterwards and I said, George, I really want to be a professor when this is all said and done. And I always thought that I'd be able to, but after what you just did today at the front of the room, I'm not sure I don't know that I'll ever be capable of what you just did today. I mean, it was...

George: That's nice to hear.

Chris: Profound and sort of this transcendent experience that we were all having together, and you were guiding us through it, and it was unforgettable. And I remember what you said to me, which was, Chris, I've been teaching this class for 13 years, and I've been teaching these stories for 13 years, and I've been working on this stuff like it didn't look like this 13 years ago. So once again, there was like a heavy dose of modesty to what you're saying, but there was also something really important, which is that you have discipline and you have focus on what you do. And here it is 13 years later, and you have a book and a Substack and a whole global community who are still delving into this exact material because you can deliver something from that.

George: Well, first, I'm so glad you remember it that way, because that's one of the things I was saying when I was touring this book, was that those moments when we would all kind of come together as one and there was no teachers and no students, and sometimes it would just literally crystallize into a moment of silence. Like, wow. Whoa, that was really lovely. But actually, my earlier answer was correct, which is when you go to see Led Zeppelin, let's say, and they do something amazing, they've been doing that thing a lot, and they kind of know what's going to happen next in the audience energy. So with that class to have been through at that point, 13, it wouldn't have been 13 incarnations at 13 years, maybe, say, six incarnations of the class. The benefit the teacher has is, I know kind of what the class is going to think of this particular story. And also I have six times come into that room and try to approach it. So you have a little bit of a knowledge of what's going to happen, and then it doesn't throw you as much. For example, one of the things I loved is when the Story of the Singers by Turgenev was never a class favorite, people kind of resisted it for some valid reasons. The first time I did that, I was like, oh my God, I'm a screw up. They hate me. I gave them a dumb story. By the fifth time, you're like, I know what you're going to say, and I know how I'm going to take that reaction and use it. And I have confidence that you class are going to then be transformed in a way that I understand. But the other thing is this is something that I've learned from teaching those stories, is that it's kind of like in all things, not only in teaching, but you're always assuming something about the other person. I mean, you're standing next to somebody at a bus stop and you're assuming something and it could be, oh, she seems very nice, or oh, that guy's going to rob me. Whatever it is, you're assuming something. Teaching over the long haul has made me really quite confident that I'll get the best out of people because it's there. And conversely, if you know that and you believe it, it'll come out faster. So that means if something goes off the rails in a room, instead of going, either I'm an idiot or they're idiots, you go, oh, interesting. Okay, there's a reason for this. It's a good reason. At the heart of it, they're all right. Now, obviously they're sociopaths, but I mean, generally when you're teaching a lot, you see that one responses to stories are somewhat predictable. In other words, a good story in a good story, the writer has assured that most people are going to react to it the same approximately the same way. That's called craft. And then if you wait, the best part of a person will surface. Now, I don't know if that's even really factually true, but I notice that if you believe it, it happens more often. So in those classes, if somebody said, these stories are so old fashioned, you're like, okay, sure, a person could think that. I used to think that. What is it in particular that makes you think that? Which line? And a certain level, that's a gotcha question. But actually they know and I know that they know which lines made them think it was old fashioned. So you send them back into the story, they produce a line, and suddenly you're in communication. So it's taught me a lot of faith. And when it became bigger on Substack, same thing.

Chris: Yeah. That you don't have to do too much because you're being met at a level of engagement.

George: Yeah. And that's true. It seems like it's true. Well, it's true if you assume it's true and you keep assuming it's true, and at some point, sometimes it never happens at Syracuse, but well, I guess it has, where someone isn't going to meet you. But what the nice thing about teaching at Syracuse is sometimes they meet you eight years later. Like, I've had people reach out and say, you know, I really didn't get it when I was there. I didn't like what you did to my stories, or blah, blah, blah, and then eight years later, or sometimes it still doesn't make sense, but thanks for trying.

Chris: That's pretty good, because there's a real vulnerability there to going in with that mindset that I'm going to meet them at a certain point, and then they have to come the rest of the way. And I think that they will. And I'm not going to defend myself, and I'm not going to try to come over the top with too much control and sort of over determining this experience for them. But that's what makes the book so wonderful, George. You somehow captured that same spirit in your prose, and it's in the swim, in the pond, in the rain, which is what makes it a worthy successor to the class. Well, of course, this is a fatherhood podcast, George, so I am going to have to, at some point, ask you about Lincoln and the Bardo. But before I get there, I've been dying to ask you this all week long. I was reading your interviews that you'd given when the book came out about the novel, reading about how you'd sort of been carrying this idea with you for like, 20 years before you really kind of dove all the way in and committed to it. Which reminded me of the way Roth used to talk about American Pastoral, what I think is his masterpiece. But it made me wonder if right now there's a kind of book for you that you want to write, but you sort of don't know if you can or you don't yet know how. I have a book like that for years. For me. It's Chronicles Of a Death Foretold by Marquez. Every time I read that book, I go, oh, I got to do this. I got to write my sort of version of this with these kind of constraints. And I don't have a single iota of capability to write that.

George: Well, you have the love that you have for it, and that's a lot, because with Lincoln, that feeling you just described as what I had was like, oh, God, I have to. And then part of my mind was going, well, you can't. All right, but the I have to is really a strong thing, because I think if you just take that concept and turn it a little bit, it means you have a lot of ideas of how to do it. Actually, as soon as the permission clicks on those ideas, the I have to becomes, oh, I know how to that's what was with Lincoln. That was really true once I said, yeah, I'm just going to do it. Hell with it, then suddenly all that excitement wasn't coming from nowhere. It was a form of aesthetic desire or something like that. Aesthetic plan. But I don't have one right now. I have maybe an Aspiration to do something in my mind. It's just something big, like something that has a lot of voices in it. But I know that for me, I need a lot more than that to start. I need something more specific. So I don't really have that LinkedIn thing was sort of a I hope it wasn't a once in a lifetime thing, but it was definitely a 20 year nagging thing. And I don't think I have anything like that necessarily. But I think one thing that for me, what happens is I go back and read old stuff. It just kind of bugs you. Like, for me, there's something about the focus on negative turns that my writing has, and I think I can justify it. I understand it and I feel it, but I also at this stage of life, I'm kind of like, Why? How is it that Chekhov can write ten books, ten stories in in a book and not have anybody get killed?

Chris: There's some one murder, kidnapping...

George: And I think it's subtlety is the answer. But that subtlety also means a kind of an advanced view of people. So you could be you see two people and you instantly pick up on their essential qualities, and you don't have to make anything extreme happen because your view is so precise. That's something that I would aspire to be I was going to say a gentler writer, but I don't know if that's really true, because part of me actually thinks I don't really feel gently about this world that much. Really, in my heart, regardless of how I present publicly, I have a fairly bleak view of things. But yeah, so some bigger and gentler would be good, but I just don't want to put anybody to sleep. Yeah, but that Marquez book, let me just go back to that for a second. The thing that excites you about it is it what is it that when you think about a book like that, what is it?

Chris: Well, it feels like the physics of it are impossible, and yet it's happening beautifully right before your eyes because it's so short. It's like 100 pages of just like, he doused kerosene and lit it on fire. And it's for me, that's the experience of reading it. It's just all the way through. It's just a full flame. And yet he tells you on page ten exactly what's going to happen, who's going to do it. There's no real mystery, and there's not even suspense. And yet every page feels unbearably suspenseful.

George: Yeah, that's right.

Chris: And it's also like one of the most cheeky, omniscient narrators of a relatively contemporary novel.

George: Right.

Chris: Like, he just goes into everyone's head at will and you barely even notice. And it just feels like one of those books where the writer has really just gone, like, no hands anymore. Like I'm doing something, a magic trick.

George: That is yeah, I thought you hit on it. The fact that he gives the whole plot away early is such a great... 

Chris: Yeah. Really early. I went in and I sort of tried to outline it just to see, and it's within 21 pages, you know everything that's going to happen and why it happens.

George: That's cool, because then all the kind of usual crutches that we use, they get kicked out. You're not holding any of the traditional suspense. So then what do you make your book out of? That's really cool. Yeah.

Chris: I love that you talked about permission, because it feels like when I think about that book, I think, I want to write a book like that. But I don't know if I'm the person, like the kind of writer I am. I have all the wrong tools and none of the right ones to write that kind of book. But then I think, well, then why am I so obsessed with wanting to do this? What is the desire about? And which should I sort of give more weight?

George: Well, and also this is something that really rings my bell because that's exactly what I said all those years before Lincoln, and at some point I thought, wait a minute. Oh, interesting that you're so sure about what your gifts are. I would never tell a student to be sure of his gifts. I would say, you don't know. You're trying to find out. And then it's almost like I'm trying to think. I almost have, like, a survivor type metaphor. But if somebody throws you out into the wilderness of a new book and takes away all your tools, new tools will arise. So I think that's actually, for me, an ongoing thing is you always think you know what you're good at, and you certainly always know what you're comfortable doing. And the trick, especially as you get further along lifespan, is how do you make sure you're not just saying that? How do you really force yourself into new territory? And that's hard. It's easy to talk about, but to actually do it is a real because you have to kind of like, risk humiliation, actually. You have to risk failure and all that kind of stuff, but without it, it's death.

Chris: Well, and you certainly did that with your novel, right? You'd never written a novel before. You'd never written that with such a straight historical focus before. And look what happened. What happened with this book.

George: Right? Because you know what? The reason I was afraid to do that is because if you could drop it in my head a week before I started was okay, look, you've made a nice life for yourself, which you relish by being a bit of a smart *** and always being a little bit futuristic or whatever. Contemporary languages and all that kind of stuff. So therefore don't try it. Okay, so that's where I was. But the downside of that is you're stopped. Then there's something you want to do that you're too afraid to do. As we know from being eight years old on the diving board, that's a crappy feeling. But then if you leap, if you try it, one in what we do, it's private, so no one has to know about it. You can always throw it away. But then also that feeling of you just have to find different ways of coping with that anxiety. So, for example, in that book, there were times the early drafts were way too straight and earnest, and therefore they weren't very compelling. So then I thought, okay, well, sort of like if you're cooking something, it's not spicy enough. Well, you put in spice. So then I could kind of turn to my toolbox that I'd used before and go, okay, how do I spice this up a little bit? So you leaven it. But I guess what I'm saying is, if you're afraid of something in writing, that's not a problem. You should be afraid of failing and being boring. So the fear that you feel before a project or in the middle of it is really useful because it tells you what you need to do. So if I was afraid in that book of being too earnest, then the obvious advice is don't be too earnest. Adjust.

Chris: Well, I remember emailing you after I had begun reading Lincoln and the Bardo for the first time. I reached out to you because I just wanted you to know that I was reading the book with my newborn son in a bassinet next to me every night as I would sort of lay down and get in bed and start reading. And I remember telling you that once it got to the point where Lincoln is coming into the crypt and opening up the sick box and wanting to embrace his son, I could only read like one sentence a night, and then I would have to close the book and pick up Borges, and it was just so wrenching. No, I mean, I did read it. I did read it, but I had to go very slowly because I could only take so much. It was so wrenching and harrowing. But I just read it again and I had a very different experience reading it, and it's still wrenching. It's still every bit as heartbreaking to see Lincoln in the midst of this grief. But this time, and I don't know why this is, but my reaction was to find a certain amount of consolation in that Willie still exists and that even though Lincoln doesn't know that, even. Though he can't be sure, and he's still very much like, on the other side of the wall. I felt like I was wanting to go there emotionally, that like, well, no, he's still himself. He still exists, even in this new form, in this new dimension of reality. And I felt, as a father, I think I felt consoled by that in a way that I didn't the first time I read it, when I was like a very raw and sleep deprived brand new father.

George: That's a nice reading. I love that reading. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is I could never write that book until our kids were grown. I mean, I think it was part of the reason I waited. I sometimes will still have these really vivid dreams of our kids when they were like right around four to six that age, for some reason. And in the dream, it's just like it was it's amazing. Your brain must just save all that stuff. Then I wake up and there's just a really weird, I mean, kind of harrowing moment of readjustment and going, wait a minute. Oh, no, they're really not that age anymore. But somehow it must imprint on your brain. So I think in a certain way, I don't know, as you get older, you see that people that you love are always there. Actually. I don't mean that any kind of hallmark way, but I mean, if you to the extent that somebody you love has imprinted on your neurology, it's always true as long as you're in existence. So I think that's a nice reading that you have.

Chris: It's thinking about deciding after all of those years that it was, you know, finally time to write this book and going to this this particular incident in Lincoln's life. And I was trying to kind of get in your head and and think think my way through that problem. Right. And it made sense to me that you would go to grief because Lincoln is such an imposing, such an impossible figure to try to imagine his mind and his internal dynamics, and yet well, here's something that's relatively universal, right. Hopefully not a universal experience, but at least universally relatable. So I wondered if that was your sort of strategic entry point. It's hard to imagine Lincoln, but I can imagine a father who has just lost a child and in some way that's making him sort of shrinking him down to a mortal dimension.

George: Yeah, what you're saying is just right. Although it was sort of reversed, which was I just heard that story that he had done that, and so instantly I saw him, just as you described, as somebody who, in the middle of war, leaves the White House and goes over there and is himself for a couple of minutes. So that was the appeal of it. And then actually, when I got into it, what I was interesting was it's a sleight of hand because grief is just exactly the same as love. They're just two sides of the same coin. So if you love deeply and the thing gets taken away, you grieve deeply and there's no difference. It's absolutely a continuum. So in representing him, I really just had to represent love for a child, which that was easy. So you sort of say, oh, by the way, Willie is not there anymore. And then you do a bunch of writing about what Lincoln and others admired about him and suddenly then you are writing about grief. It's the same if you go to great lengths to describe why you love somebody and you do it really well and you do it with a lot of feeling and then you say, oh, and that person left me. You got it. You've got the grief of being abandoned just like that.

Chris: Yeah. But what makes the novel kick into gear is that even though it begins with his grief being this very recognizable, relatable, powerful human emotion, it is itself extraordinary in the context of the Bardo, right? Because there's that wonderful sequence where all of the other I forget what we're supposed to call them, the shades, right? All of the other souls are saying, like, we've never seen this before. Like all the touching. This is extraordinary. Right? And Willie, in turn, becomes a sort of celebrity among them because they don't know that his dad's the president. They don't care about that. But they're like, Boy, his grief is really something. Are you saying?

George: And he's alive. Yeah. That was a big turning point for me because I had gotten sort of that first bit written and I couldn't quite figure out what the next step was. And often, like in fiction, it's kind of like, well, there's a thing and there's a reaction to the thing. And if you get the reaction right, you get sort of double value. And I was sort of stalled like Lincoln had been there and left. And I'm like, okay, so now what's the next beat? And I was trying to generate the next thing at a time when I wasn't thinking about it. And that exact word celebrity came up. Yeah, he's a big shot now because why? Well, because they adore the living. They so much want to be back there that these living people who never pay any attention to them, never respect them anymore. One of those guys came in. It's like if some famous person came in and walked up to you and said Hi. And all your friends would go, oh, my God, how does Chris know whoever I remember I was somewhere where I couldn't write at the time. But just that little idea like, oh, yeah, okay, so he's now a celebrity. That's enough to go.

Chris: And the way that you're describing it, right, it really puts a fine point on the idea that this book is about desire. It's about the desire of course, of Lincoln to have one more moment with his son and for his son to not be gone, but it's also about the desire of all the souls and the bardo as they're caught in this loop. But I wonder about your desire as a writer and tackling this subject matter, not on the kind of world historic level, not with big, scary Lincoln, but just as a father and as an artist approaching this material, wanting to delve into the problem of this kind of loss and the question of an afterlife.

George: Well, if I'm being real honest, Chris, the first thing was scale. What I really wanted was scale and earnestness. I wanted to be able to broaden my stance a little bit outside of what it normally was in stories at that point. In a certain way, I was kind of cringy about the grief. I was like, oh, God, that could be schmaltzy. And I didn't want to do Lincoln for sure. That's another one. But those are like earlier I mentioned being aware of your fears, so I was afraid of being schmaltzy, and I was afraid of being sentimental. So those give you kind of aesthetic guideposts, like, okay, so how do I show Lincoln without being schmaltzy? And the book kind of goes, yeah, good question. That's called craft. Okay, how do I write about the death of a child without being modeling? The book goes, yeah, I feel for you. Good luck with that. But it does give you sort of aesthetic so once I got into it, I almost felt like I stumbled into the beauty of that grief in the process of trying to be earnest and make scale. That's really true. And then, because that wasn't my goal, I could sort of avoid it if I want. I didn't have to go full on grieving father. I could just say, well, okay, this is part of it. I can show as much of it as I can get away with showing, and then I can move on to something else. It was an interesting process. When I look back on it now, I was so sure of myself at the time. Maybe it was that 20 years of waiting, but I would go into the writing room just like, I'm not worried about anything. I'm going to sit down and put in four or 5 hours, and I know I'm going to make progress. And I would every day. It was just like, kind of magical, but very working. Like but it was really you always hear people talking about, oh, the book just took me over. I'm like, no, it didn't. But this one kind of flew right.

Chris: Out of my fingertips.

George: Right? This one didn't do that. But it did feel like if I just shut up a little bit, I remember being really working hard not to have too much excitement or too many ideas about it, like it was happening. I just had to shut up and not try to guide it or not suddenly decide to tack on some whole new sometimes when things are going well, you get a little ambitious. I was like, no, just relax. Just let the book talk to you and don't get revved up about it. And that seemed to work.

Chris: It sure did. It's a phenomenon, this passage. It's tributed to someone named Rosemalan, mrs. Rosemalan. It's the Essay Upon the Loss of a Child. It's early in the novel and I was so struck by the passage that I looked her up and I couldn't find anything about her. And I thought, oh, maybe this is one of George's apocryphal, like his invented people. And then I saw that Mary Karr, recent guest on PODRE, had read that part in the audiobook.

George: Oh, yeah.

Chris: And then I started reading all of the other cast listings and I'd forgotten what an incredible production that was. Amazing talent. So what about this passage, though? Do you remember this? It's from something called Essay upon the Loss of a Child, and it really just crystallizes the problem so beautifully. Do you want me to refresh your memory? Should I?

George: Sure, yeah.

Chris: I can't read it as well as Mary did, I'm sure. One feels such love for the little ones, such anticipation that all that is lovely in life will be known by them. Such fondness for that set of attributes manifested uniquely in each mannerisms of bravado of vulnerability, habits of speech and mispronouncement and so forth. The smell of the hair and head, the feel of the tiny hand in yours. And then the little one is gone, taken. One is thunderstruck that such a brutal violation has occurred in what had previously seemed a benevolent world, from nothingness there arose great love. Now its source nullified that love, searching and sick converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable.

George: Not bad.

Chris: I hear George Saunders in there. You made that up, didn't you?

George: Yeah. That was one of the really wonderful discoveries of the book is that once I realized I was going to give myself permission to make up historical narrators it was amazing, one, how useful that was, but also how many new voices. You could come up with how sophisticated the ideas could be once you allowed yourself to dress it up in that 19th century prose. That was really a revelation. And then I had to, of course, be a little careful to not overdo it, but it was rhetorically, really. Interesting to say. I'm going to try to hide my voice in this thing, but also I'm going to go up into a higher register than we allow ourselves in the 21st century. Nobody writes like that anymore, but we can. And actually when we do, it gives us different rooms to play around in.

Chris: Yeah. In the Union Citadel, Memories and Impressions by Joe Brunt. George, I just been waiting a long time to say thank you. It's an honor to...

George: You're very welcome.

Chris: Be named, to have a character named after me in your novel. Mary reading that passage and then led me to looking at the rest of the cast list and I saw that your daughters had read. I saw that Paula was Mary Lincoln. Very nice touch. And I also saw a George Saunders Senior. Was that?

George: That's my dad. Yeah. 

Chris: That's your dad. 

George: And my mom is Joan. My sister's read and that was the most fun part was to say we need 166 people and some of my dear friends from high school. And it was fun. And for me, I really loved having that kind of document of all those people I love reading the book and engaging with your work. 

Chris: It must have been interesting to have your father reading.

George: He nailed it in one take. He did it remotely. He was in New Orleans and Kelly was in LA. And she called me and said, yeah, your dad just got in there and just did it. Then he just left the room like mic drop.

Chris: What did your father do? What was his career?

George: He did a lot of things, for a while he was a collection agency for household finance, so he'd have to go in and repossess stuff. And then he sold flood controls, which were a thing that apartment buildings would buy to make sure that the basements didn't flood. And then for most of my childhood he worked for a company called Peterson Coal in Chicago. And he worked his way up from I think he serviced boilers and then he worked his way up to the vice president of this company. He was a salesman for most of my childhood. He would go to the different apartments and try to convince them to buy coal from Peterson.

Chris: That all sounds like sort of borderline tough guy stuff, right? Like boilers and collections and repo. Was he a tough guy?

George: He's tough. I mean, he's tough in always I think he was physically a fighter when he was young. Mentally very tough. One time when we were living in Amarillo, I came in from somewhere, it was one of those rare, like, panhandle ice storms. And I come in and he's looking through the mail, but he's holding onto one arm, kind of throwing the mail over with that arm. And I look and there's blood on his shirt and there's something like his bone is sticking up like I can actually see a lump in this shirt. I said, dad, what happened? He goes, Fell on the ice. I broke my arm. Does it hurt? Oh, yeah. Are you going to the doctor? Yeah, I went I got to go back in an hour and they're going to rebreak it. You want me to drive you? No, I have the other arm. There's another time. For a while there, when I was in college, he ran a it was in a place called Rosebud, New Mexico. Out in the middle of nowhere and he designed and built kind of a gas station for oil rigs. So he didn't know anything about this, and he researched it and figured out how to build this kind of waste station for oil rigs. And it really was just I mean, it was in the middle of the plains, so I was out there on one of the breaks from school cold. I mean, like that kind of New Mexico, ten below windy, and he's out in the yard and the water pipes had frozen and these were kind of like it was a trailer. So like PVC pipes, you know, they didn't bury deep enough. So he's out there he's in a windbreaker, by the way, and he's dug a trench over these pipes and he's got a welding torch and he's just heating the pipe up so we can have water. And he's out there for like he's just kind of impervious to pain. And I said, do you want me to take a shift? No, I got it. No problem. Is it cold? Yeah, it's cold, but this has to get done. He's a tough guy, but also very tender hearted guy, really a sweetheart and very caring.

Chris: What do you sort of attribute to him that you sort of body forth into the world either as a parent or just as a man? What do you go, oh, that's my dad?

George: Yeah, well, definitely. He was a great performer, great storyteller. And when he would come to, he'd come home or something and there are people there, everybody would be like, oh, boy, George is here. So he would tell these story, and the stories were very much I mean, this is definitely a different they were funny. They had a lot of love in them, but they were dark as hell. He would be down in the city. He worked in this coal business and so he'd see all kinds of people, and I always felt like he was amused by them. He had a kind of a powerful personality that could tolerate a lot of dissent. He didn't mind people. He liked them. And so when he'd come home and tell these stories, a lot of that was a fascination with the dark side of human nature, for sure, but kind of an amusement ad, like, oh, boy, you're not going to believe this one. So that felt really powerful to me, that he could be in these situations that other people like, he had a gun held to his head one time for quite a long time in a basement of one of his buildings. He had his car almost overturned in a riot. But he would come home and tell these stories with a kind of bemused, I'm glad that happened to me quality that was really instructive.

Chris: This is great material. Yeah.

George: Just glad I lived through that. It's less boring than not. And then also, he had a really interesting way because he was really, I think, a tough person, but he also was really merciful. He had a lot of curiosity about why people do what they do. And he was always forgiving like, someone could really offend him, and he didn't have that reflexive kind of, I'm going to get that guy. He was just like, oh, that's too bad. He must be going through a lot. So all those things were there, and he still has that. He's 83, 84 something. So that's instructive, for sure.

Chris: What has he made of your career and back when you sort of really took a hard turn in your professional life, from geothermal engineering to fiction writing and being a college professor?

George: Well, that's an example of what I love about him. I was in Amarillo, and I was really kind of circling the drain. I was working at an apartment complex, a job he got me, and I'd quit the oil job. And as the months ticked by, I was becoming less and less employable in that field that they'd worked hard to get me educated in. And so at one point, I was going back to school at West Texas State, and I got a student loan, and the tuition was lower than I thought, so I bought my niece a Teddy Ruxpin doll.

Chris: I had one of those. 

Geoge: Did you? They're pretty cool. And I bought myself a four track TIAC tape recorder. So I recorded an a capella version of Amazing Grace. And that same week, I got my first story accepted at, I think, Northwest Review or something. So I've got to imagine that my dad is wondering what the heck I'm up to. But he comes in, I said, oh, dad, I got a story published. And listen to this. And I played in the song, and you could just sort of see him going, all right, maybe he can do it. Maybe he knows something about his inclinations and talents that I don't know. Which, again, at that point, I was maybe 26 or something, and I think any reasonable parent would have been a little concerned. I was definitely adrift, but I picked up on that quality of he blessed it, basically, all right, you do what you got to do. Since then, he's been a big supporter, and he always enjoys any news that we have, and he's just sweetly interested in it, which I love.

Chris: Yeah. And what about your daughters? Do they ever talk to you about your work? Do they read your stories and novels?

George: I mean, our household, I don't know if you remember, but we were big on I mean, we didn't even realize that how much storytelling was sort of in our air. We would sit down, have movie night, and always be talking the mechanics of it. And then they were always around you guys, all the students.

Chris: Story Club at the Saunders household.

George: Yeah, pretty much.

George: And then we had that house on Scott. There was always parties and they always admired all these students and everything. So I think we talk about it and they're both really good writers. Her book is so wonderful and we're always kind of storytelling together and talking about it. And I don't think we even realized until later that it was so omnipresent in the house.

Chris: Because it's water to a fish, right?

George: Right because Paula and I met we met at Syracuse. And I remember going on early dates with her, just feverishly debating this novel and that novel, Robert Stone, I don't think we would have even thought it was strange date talk. It was just what we should. You and Chanelle must be like that.

Chris: I was going to say I have a pretty similar dynamic in my marriage. Right. We met at the same place that you met Paula, the romantic confines of Syracuse. Yeah. Julian recently, I asked him what he was going to be when he grew up, and he said, well, it starts with an F. And I said, okay, so we're talking firefighter. No, we're talking whatever. I start going through all the typical occupations to start with F, and I'm not getting anywhere with them. And finally I give up and I say, Come on, you got to give me something. And he goes, well, the first word is famous. And I was like, well, of course, that's your personality. No matter what you're going to be, it's going to be a famous that. And then finally he reveals, he says, I'm going to be a famous writer like you. And I was like, Well, I got bad news for you, bud.

George: Aw. 

Chris: I'm not famous yet. 

George: But I think they say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. So if the parents prioritize something and love something I think both our daughters had periods where they were like, no, I don't want to be a writer. But then when there's something that's that intrinsic to what you're doing as a family, and they've seen us working hard over the years.

Chris: I don't know if my kids are going to be a writer, but definitely the storytelling and just love of language and talking, right, and being able to do things with words, that is always just from day one has been there with them.

George: When Juno Diaz was at Syracuse, he said something I've never forgotten, which was he thought that writers came out of environments where they learned early that language was power. So in his case, he was, I think, the best English speaker in his family, at least at first. And he was sent on errands, go to the store. So he was younger, but he was very powerful. And I think in my family as a kid, that was always a big thing. To be able to hold the floor with a joke or explain yourself in a burst of articulate passion was a big deal. Or like in a neighborhood, to be able to do a George Carlin monologue from memory was power. And then I think our kids picked up that same thing. When you hear your parents admiring something that's really big. I remember watching my dad literally slide off the couch with laughter, watching Monty Python, and that in some complicated way that's like, oh, that's powerful. John Cleese just made your dad fall off the couch. That's pretty good. And I think with our kids, we were always talking about the students work and this new novel and, no, that's not a valid approach to fiction. And they're both so amazingly articulate about writing and so well read, and, like we did, they're living by it. That's what they love.

Chris: I remember you talking in class about waking up before your daughters, before you began teaching, right. And you had these other jobs where you had to be, you know, in the office at 08:00 A.m., 09:00 A.m.. And you also had your daughters who were young, and you had to get them to school, and you would wake up early and sit at the kitchen table and work on the story that day. And I think about that a lot, especially when my children wake me up at, like, 530 in the morning, and I think, how early does George get up? Like, what is that? 04:00 a.m. But just I wanted to also have time to ask you about the sort of struggle of being a writer parent, especially when your kids are younger and when they're in school.

George: Oh, God.

Chris: And it's like you're I just read The Falls again. It was a blast from the past. But I love that story so much. And the character of Cummings, right, who's this sort of grandiose, kind of self diluting ball of ambition. But it's cringing how relatable he is at the same time. And it made me think about how he's the manchild, right? He lives at home with his mom. He's 40 years old, and he's drawn in contrast to Morse, who is a father. And it made me think about just sort of ambition and parenting and how our ambitions only grow when we have a family, because now we need to provide, we need to have this thing to give our children, and yet they make it harder to achieve our ambitions.

George: Because yeah, Cummings had plenty of writing time. Yeah. No, for me, it was interesting because the first thing that happened after we had kids was I felt like I suddenly had much more interest in the world than I had before or before we had kids. I was, I think, a pretty good person, but kind of just automatically I wasn't particularly decadent or I just was a self regulated person. But if you'd ask me why, I don't think I could have explained it. I don't know. I'm just trying to be nice. I don't know, whatever. But then when our kids were born, it became like a light one. I'm like, oh, my God, so if other people adore their kids and wife as much as I do, that explains it. That explains everything. Explains conflict. Because if somebody's threatening your wife and kids, or it explains how people can work 50 years in a job they don't like very much, but make it okay. It explained everything. And when you started looking around, like, okay, that that guy at the bus stop there who looks a little weird, who I normally wouldn't even think about, wait a minute, he had a mom, he had a dad. So all that kind of stuff came alive for me, and that so overwhelmed the loss of time that I didn't even notice it for a while. That meant that everything I was writing suddenly had a lot more oomph and humanity. Yeah. From that mindset, everything is interesting. Even the smallest human interaction is literary, if that's the basis, because it's sort.

Chris: Of redefining the stakes of everything that you see happening around you.

George: Exactly. Before, I would think, well, I don't know. Okay, this guy falls off a cliff. Big deal. Okay, does that make any plot? But then when you think about, oh, wait a minute, somebody you love getting a small paper cut is a big deal. So it's absolutely about the king died.

Chris: And the queen died from grief. Right?

George: Exactly. Right. That's exactly it. So that was a big deal. And then I think, for me, I have a really high metabolism, so I could work late at night, I could ride on the bus, I would get up early sometimes there's a whole different period. Like, there was one period where I was teaching guitar, and if somebody didn't show up, that meant an hour that I could go over to the coffee shop and do something. So I was pretty driven in that way, and I never really felt I think Paula probably felt it more than I did because she was home. And so for her, the choice was starker. It was, I can be with my kids and do this, or I can find a way to maybe take them to daycare, or I can try to write while they're here. And that's a harder choice for me. I was mostly at work, so if I was shortchanging anybody or hiding from anybody, it was my employer, which I could sort of morally justify. That easier. It's a big challenge. And the thing is, it happens just at the time when as writers, we're trying to learn our craft, and often just at the moment, we're realizing how many hours it takes to do that. When you're 21, you think, yeah, I'll just sit down and write my novel this week. And then once you get into it, you're like, oh, my God, this is.

Chris: A really I need 10 hours a day now.

George: 10 hours a day, and you're not going to get every day. And that's difficult. I think that's just the way it is. Especially when you get out of grad school. There's just that period where you've got the ticking clock of, I guess, needing to make a living and needing to provide. And for us it was very much I just didn't want to be a starving artist. I didn't want to be a starving father. I didn't want my kids to be too conspicuously feeling our limitations. So you got that and then you've got this incredible uphill thing of trying to learn how to do what you're doing. And here, I don't know if I should blame the culture, but I like to. There isn't really, I would say, enough respect for artists and or there's too much shame in not having money to allow there to be a class of people who are just in their thirty s and full time artists, or mostly full time artists. I think Toni Morrison said when she was young, there wasn't a shame around being poor. It was just what you were. You just didn't have much. But I think in our culture, it's really difficult to raise kids and not have enough. The want is felt pretty keenly. So it's a conundrum. And I think when we send our graduates off, I'm always like, yeah, you're in for some rough times because if we did our job right at Syracuse, you just realize how hard this **** is and how much it's going to take you, and the world is calling and your family is calling, and that's it. So the trick is just try to hammer out a ledge for yourself, either by teaching or something that doesn't take all your time, and then hopefully you get a breakthrough of some kind, but it's not a given.

Chris: Chanelle and I are headed down to New Orleans next week, and we haven't been back in many years, since our kids were born, but when we lived there, it was right after Syracuse, and we were so broke, we were beyond broke and we didn't have any money. And we were pretty happy to just go to Audubon Park and lay around for free and worry about our writing and worry about our books and all of that. So it's going to be nice to go down there with the boys and experience the city as a family and sort of have that sort of juxtaposition with us in our minds about the decade of life that has transpired since then.

George: Those are sweet periods. I remember when Paula and I were living in Pittsford, New York, and I was working at the engineering company and she was home and working and she was teaching also a lot. And there is that feeling of like, okay, so we're kind of throwing down on the side of literature and we're going to even though relative to our peers, we had a small house, but somehow you were kind of safe under the tent of literature and you felt you were part of that lineage. That long lineage, and that was like, that period of dreaming is really rich. We look back, and the kids were little, and just that feeling of really truly having something to live for, that was beautiful.

Chris: I just want to circle back to one thing that you said before about when your kids are born in this sort of sort of restructuring of the way you see the world and the way you see humanity and the stakes that everyone is constantly enduring. I thought about how before I had kids, I just was not really interested in them. Like, I didn't really notice them that much. They didn't really seem relevant to me in my life as, like, a 29 year old dude. They just weren't in my purview. And then when I had my first, I suddenly just became hyper aware of kids all the time. Feeling like if you're at the grocery store and there's a little baby just crying or a little kid throwing a tantrum and you see their parents are frustrated and yelling at them, I would just feel these feelings of feels like it's more my responsibility now. I can't not see other people's kids as these people whose well being is somehow bound up with mine. And that's the end of that story, right? That's the end of the falls. That's the dilemma that your protagonist, Morse, is facing, right? He knows as a father what it means to love your child. And he imagines that these two girls, who he's never seen before and will never see again, who are about to plunge to their deaths down this waterfall in the canoe, he knows that they have a mother who will be destroyed if anything happens to them. The final movement of the story is to just give him that dilemma and then see what happens. And there's this beautiful moment where he just almost just sort of just jumps over the top of it, right? He doesn't even think through it. He just, like, thought just converts into action, right? The friction of it all, where he says, well, I'm a father. I have children. I have to be there for them. But then there's these strange children over here who need me right now. And instead of working it out on some kind of moral calculus, he just splashes into the river.

George: Yeah, this is actually what happens. People in that situation often will, and if they live, they report back to feeling this transcendent, like leaving behind of the self in those moments. There was a guy who dove into the Potomac. There was a plane crash there many years ago, and a guy dove in and saved a bunch of people, and he said it was just he wasn't there anymore. He was sort of out of his ego or something like that.

Chris: But it happens to Morse the parent. It happens to Morse the father, not Cummings the manchild. Right? He takes a right turn and ends up in a cornfield.

George: Yeah. It's kind of like if you're a parent, you've been predisposed tens of thousands of times towards choosing your child over yourself. And it's pretty easy. Most times it's natural. So I think once for me, there was this thing like, okay, when I was at Syracuse, I had this idea of myself, of like I mean, it's embarrassing, but I was going to be famous for sure. I was going to be super cool. I was going to be like Keroac and Hemingway, always traveling around and doing cool things. In other words, the idea was that fame or accomplishment would make it so you never had to be uncool again. You always were going to be saying the right thing, doing the right thing, looking good with friends, with the right people, whatever. I don't know. So then real life as a parent, and especially in my experience, a parent with not much money, you're constantly being that person you didn't want to be. You're the guy with the pot belly in the ponytail at the photocopy or being Berated or whatever. And that happens a lot. And it's okay. It's actually really good, I think, to be kind of knocked out of that sense of pride. So I think with Morris, the idea was that he had already experienced stepping out of himself many, many times, and Cummings maybe hadn't. He's a pretty exaggerated version. So for him, the path is always self protection and just steering away from that stupid river, that river is bugging him. His attention goes to the girls for the reasons you named their kids. They're like his kids, aren't they? They are. And yet they're not my kids. Right, but and in that moment, he jumps, you know, because he's because he's done it a million times before. A million times before he's recognized that his intuitive desire to self protect is actually not right. He's done that with respect to his kid. Well, now he's doing it with respect to somebody else's kid. Something like that. That's an after the fact analysis.

Chris: George, it's stories like that that makes reading you such a deepening experience as a human being, not just as someone who wants to write, but is trying to be just a little bit better today. Try to be a little more like Morse in that moment, a little less like Cummings every time. Not all the way to the Lincoln end of the spectrum, but at least Morse, if I can just hit a good Morse level today. Yeah, it's your writing and it's your teaching and it's your example from all of these years and in all of these different... 

George: Wow. Thank you so much for being so generous to say all that. I appreciate it. You mean a lot to me, too, and I hope to see you in person again someday soon, this fall, maybe.

Chris: Thanks, George. Thanks so much for your time today.

George: Thank you. Great talking to you.

Chris: Okay. Take care.

George: Okay.

Chris: I have a question for you guys. What do you guys think a good dad is like?

Julian: I feel like we've already had this conversation.

Chris: Well, let's have it again, because this is a podcast that's partly about dads and what dads are like. So what do you think a good dad is?

Julian: A good dad is about giving their kids whatever they want.

Chris: Really? A good dad lets their kids eat candy for breakfast and doesn't care if they don't grow big and strong and doesn't care if their teeth fall out.

Speaker A: No. A dad. The dad, before they give them any candy, they say, think about this, kid. Let's see if you have this candy. You'll be big and strong, and it's very yummy, but you have to eat more vitamins. So do you want to eat this candy? And the kid says yes.

Chris: But you know what? It's really easy to say yes when a kid wants candy. It's always not always easy to be a good dad. So what do you think are the hard parts about being a good dad?

Nico: I'm a teacher. 

Julian: Saying, I don't know.

Chris: Saying I don't know.

Julian: Saying, I don't know, kid.

Chris: I don't know, kid. I don't know that kid. Who is that kid?

Julian: Hey. I'm saying no. You cannot do that ever again. And you lose dessert for 150,000 nights.

Chris: A dad's about more than just saying yes or no, right?

Julian: Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.

Chris: Do you want your dad to have fun with you? To do things with you that are fun?

Julian: Yes. 

Nico: I'm a teacher.

Chris: Nico you're a teacher?

Nico: Yeah.

Chris: I'm a teacher, too.

Nico: Me, too.

Nico: Me, too. 

Chris: Do you want your dad to listen to you?

Julian: Yeah. 

Nico: And your mom to listen to you, too?

Chris: Yeah. And your mom to listen to you, too. Do you want your dad to teach you things, Julian?

Julian: Oh, yes. Like one plus 10 billion trillion.

Chris: Yeah, like one plus 10 billion trillion.

Julian: Trillion.

Chris: Do you want your dad to believe in you and help you believe in yourself?

Julian: Yes.

Chris: To be someone you can trust.

Julian: Hey, what are you doing with Nico, Dad?

Chris: You want to dance? Come here.

Julian: Keep talking.

Chris: What do we want to say to our audience this season? What do we what do we hope people heard from the first season of PODRE?

Julian: I hope people heard that there's gonna be a thousand hundred billion trillion more seasons coming out. 

Chris: Well, you heard him. There's going to be a hundred thousand billion more seasons coming up. Before we go, I want to see if I can round up a little bit of what we've heard so far on PODRE. You know, when George talks about his practice as a writer and as a teacher of writing, if you listen closely, I think he's also describing the work of parenting. Letting fear inform you rather than control you. Having the patience to let others meet you where they are getting past the ego to a place where action is not only possible, but natural and necessary. To great writers, books are living things, sacred things that have to be nurtured into existence and dealt with honestly, honored in their individuality, and ultimately let go, hopefully, to thrive and mean something out there in the world. All right, I'll stop extending the analogy there, but you get it. George Saunders is our national sage of tenderness, of patience, the kind of humility that allows you to step out of yourself and act on behalf of others. It's no wonder that so many of his most memorable characters are fathers. See whether they themselves are parents or not, I think artists have something to teach us about fatherhood and parenting, because it's the job of artists to see us clearly in all of our flaws and all of our history and all of our beauty and point a way through the darkness. So that's my vision for PODRE now and forever. A show and a community where artists and thinkers come on and discuss their work and their experience and what that's shown them about how to see more clearly and live more tenderly for their kids, for themselves, for all of us. 

Chris: Let's say a nursery rhyme for Julian.

Julian: What?

Chris: Hickory dickory dock. The mouse went up the clock. The clock struck one, the mouse fell down. Hickory dickory dock. Dong. 

Nico: Do that again.

Chris: Okay. How about, Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after.

Julian: Dad. You do both to me, you do both to me.

Chris: Hey, that's our finale. Thanks to George Saunders, thanks to all of our guests this season, and thanks to you, to everyone who's listened to PODRE this first season. Y'all it's been an amazing experience to make this show and have the conversations we've had with all of these incredible guests, and also to hear from so many of you, to hear about your family experiences, good and bad, hilarious, tragic, and just plain weird, and the people in your lives that matter to you. It's been a deeply meaningful experience for me as your host, and I hope it's kept you company on your drive to work after you drop the kids off or on your train ride home, or as you lay on the floor next to your toddler's crib waiting for them to stop talking and stop asking for things and fall the **** asleep. I'll be honest with you. This show almost didn't make it off the ground when it was still in its infancy. I was working with a creative partner, a producer, who's super talented and accomplished and was responsible for all of the production. But pretty early on, he or we, broke up. Guys, I am a writer and a teacher. Those are my entire suite of skills. I didn't know the first thing about sound, about editing and mastering and cutting things together and all that digital wizardry, but, hey, we did it. We made a show. And it's a little rough around the edges, maybe. Sure, it sometimes lacks that high gloss Spielbergian Hollywood finish. I'm not saying my original partner was Steven Spielberg. I'm also not saying it wasn't. But it came together nonetheless. And I'm proud of it. And I'm very grateful to you for coming along for the ride. And we're not finished. There will be a season two of PODRE. We got some heavy hitters lined up already, some people you're going to recognize and, frankly, be very hyped to see coming on the show. And I'll be providing plenty of bonus episodes and other kinds of material to tide you over until that new season gets here. So stay with us and keep in touch. One last thing. For season two, all of the NATFITOIA awards are going to be listener nominated. So keep those coming. Write to us at chris@PODREpod.com and submit those stories about the dads in your life who are not terrible in at least one instance. Maybe we'll get the old man in your life on the show in the next run. All right? I don't have a tagline. I have Julian. See you next time. 

Chris: Should we sign off? How do you want to sign off? How do you want to be like? What's your goodbye message to your audience?

Julian: Bye, people. You've been a great audience. Peace out, bye.

Chris: PODRE is created and produced by me, Chris Brunt. Original artwork for the show is by David Wojo. Special thanks to Brad Franco, and Julian and Nico Benz-Brunt.