Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of SOURLAND

0:00Welcome to Writer's Unwriting, the award-winning podcast that covers the art, craft, and business of writing. I'm your host, Barbara de Marco Barrett. My guest today is Ariel de Gato Dixon. Ariel was born in Trenton, New Jersey and is the author of the novel Sour Land and don't say we didn't warn you. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she teaches writing and works in farming. Ariel joins me on the show to talk about why she chose Humboldt County in Northern California as the setting for Sour Land. Writing side characters, naming characters, how much she knew before she started writing, what she does when she hits a wall, and how she comes up with her stellar verbs because, in my opinion, she is the verb queen.

1:06I hope you enjoy my interview with Ariel de Gato Dixon, author of Sour Land. Ariel, so happy to have you with me. I read Sour Land, I listened to Sour Land, and we'll get into Sour Land. And now I have the print copies, but before we get to the book, I want to hear your path to writing fiction. Sure. Well, first thanks for having me on. I actually just got done listening to Douglas Stewart's episode. I was sure. Yeah. Yeah. Path to writing Sour Land. This novel was my second novel. It took a couple more years and the first one did. I, in some ways, took a pretty traditional path on my writing journey. I studied creative writing in undergrad out in California, though I was not a great student, I would say. I was enjoying being in California unless being in a classroom. Oh, when? Where were you?

2:07I was at USC in Los Angeles. Oh sure. I did my MFA in Idaho at Boise State, and it's a really small program about eight of us total, one of the person in my year, and that's when I started sort of getting serious about the work. I ultimately had a mentor in my professor, Brady Udall, who I admire very much, and we now have the same agent, and things kind of snowballed pretty quickly off of like a thesis. I'm sure this is a familiar tale in some ways. And that was all wonderful, and I was very green and figuring out how the industry worked, and how to even write a novel, and then I came to this book. And it was a lot harder, I think, every book teaches you kind of how to write it as you're doing it. And I think I went in thinking I knew exactly what was going to happen. I wanted to write a book about a lead from in Northern California.

3:10I wanted to write a novel that had alternating points of view, I had a sense of this kind of three main cast of characters in Sapphire, who owns and runs this wheat farm, and Fizz and Frankie. And then of course, when I actually sat down to put them into motion, it was a lot harder to do. So it took some years. I think this is a novel that had like probably 700 plus pages, and it got sheared down to its slimmer sub-300 form now. And it took time. My editor who acquired the novel, had moved houses, so the process kind of slowed down, and I was ultimately really grateful for that. I think it was the time I needed to figure out the novel I wanted to write. So do you remember the moment when you knew that Sauriland was a book you had to write? I mean, was there like something that happened or you know, just things came together and you

4:16went, this is it? I think so. I think it was two things for me really. And it's a big part of what the novel is bringing together. One is I got into farming and it's a novel about that in a lot of ways. And I also kind of became tangentially involved in like this last underground weed network in New York and had some friends who were working in that industry and just had really crazy stories about double crosses, about living life in cash, the characters that you meet when you're trying to run a business on the slide that's worth a lot of money. And just isn't like the first book I wrote, I'm so drawn to sub-cultures. I'm drawn to the people in them who are kind of making their own roles on how to live life and what is their own personal code of what a good life is and an honorable life. So ultimately my time in farming, I work in dairy farming so a little bit different

5:23than the world of illicit weed. But I think it really formed the labor of like spending your time outside of trying to cultivate another species. And then also wanting to have a preservative place to put the stories from these kind of last weed renegades out there and knowing that they love to tell their stories but not many of them are writing them down. So this was like a novel that could kind of do that and be preservative in that way too. So talk about farming, talk about how you got into it. Yeah, I did not come from a farming background. My mother's side family reporter, he gets me grew up in Trent, New Jersey where I'm from. My dad's out of the family are, you know, mainline Philadelphia wasps. It is not in our blood in any way. But around the beginning of the pandemic, I had moved back to New Jersey from Idaho and my best friend from high school was working

6:30on a small dairy farm in central New Jersey. And not many people think of New Jersey as the farming destination. But in the part of state, I'm from central Jersey, and it's out of Jersey, there are many, many farms. So during the pandemic, I was just kind of hanging around a lot. I liked kind of seeing what she was up to. I like seeing the animals they cared for. They'd dairy cows, they had pigs, goats, chickens. And it was kind of magical to have this access to this kind of dirtier, grittier world that I had not grown up in and was kind of scared of. But as most farms do, they needed help when it came to the summertime that year. And I had just kept finding more excuses to hang out. And finally, it was like, all right, I won't give it a try. I started milking cows getting up very early, getting very dirty, getting acquainted with like animal shit, being a pretty regular part of my life. And I just loved it. It was

7:36hard. And I liked being scared, but then having like no other outlet, but to get things done. So it's kind of a, there's no one really else to call. You can't like send the email tomorrow instead. It's just like a tram to get stuff. You have to get unstuck. And that was huge. I think it really changed my life. And made me feel physically stronger, braver. And it's like a perk that I get to hang around with very cute giant animals every weekend. These days. You know, you mentioned the tractor. And I remember it's seen in Sauerland. We're Frankie. Almost gets filled by a tractor. Have you had to deal with things like that? Oh my God. It was so real. I'm like, oh no. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's like a early scene in the novel where she's collecting bailing twine. So when you're giving out hay, you've got to collect kind of all the refuse. And it gets stuck in the

8:42axle of a tractor and kind of throws her off. And most tractors will turn off once a driver's not seat, but most farms are also kind of covered in broken things. And that's especially the case in this farm, Sauerland. So she kind of gets into a tug of war with the tractor itself and is being kind of hauled into its back wheels. And this is based on not my near miss, but my good friends near miss who I worked with at this farm in New Jersey. And yeah, like near death or near main, main experience are really prevalent both in this novel and in like, infarming. It's a question that I've asked the farmers that I've worked with a lot when I was sort of gathering more stories. Just about the crazy things that they've survived. And the thing that's funny to me is that they all have stories like this, whether it's like getting kicked in the head by a cow and sort of waking up in the gutter or a giant water tanker like hovering over someone's head by a few feet, all kinds of

9:50things. But they always say it with a real nonchalant kind of throw away like, yes, another day on the farm, yeah, what are you going to do? It happens. I'm still impressed by it five-ish plus years into farming. Collecting all the stories has made me be very careful, but yet you can't control big animals. There's like lots of machinery. This past winter I worked early mornings at the farm where the temperature was like negative 10. Like things don't work right in those conditions. And so if you're like even just a little bit tired or not paying attention, things can go really wrong. Stuff can fall on you. You can fall into things. I've been electrocuted by fences many times. But I feel a perverse sense of pride I think a little bit. And I think it's made me tougher and feel

10:51more confident in like engaging in the physical world. And taking less seriously the things that are in the not so physical, brighterly area around sometimes. Well, I love this setting and I was curious about the era you set the novel and talk about that. Yeah, that's a good question. I had said it in it's basically like the earliest 2000s into maybe around like 2013 plus give or take. And the intention was these are years leading up to legalization in California. And I remember being in California from 2008 to 2016 about so similar overlap mostly down in LA, though I did spend some time up north. And the mood around legalization

11:51from everyone that I knew who were like partaking in the world of weed, let's say, was very pro legalization. But what I learned in digging a little bit deeper and especially in researching and talking to people in this business for the novel was they were not there's they could be the growers and sellers and pervaders of this crop. But actually having things not on the books was helpful and they called it sort of like a federal price setting program. If it stays illegal, it's really good for their bottom line. I think that there's a big fear of red tape and bureaucracy that you have to kind of register your business and what does it invite. And I think that there's some truth to that. I think about like the business of weed now. I just wrote about this for a piece in dirt magazine. I had interviewed the former

12:51mini kingpin and Brooklyn that I had worked with. And he's talked about like it feels like big donalds in the world of weed now that it's like a lot of candy flavored stuff for kids being produced by multi-million dollar conglomerates. And there's not really a passion for the craft of things. And I think that is kind of sad that that way of life for all of its injustices and violence. Like there's a subset I think of Puris who just want to like have communion with the psychedelic plant and raise it right. That way of life is really bundling. Yeah, it's interesting because I was thinking you know all the ways that would change your full-reset today. I mean you know with legalization there's still the renegade farms out there but it would still be a whole different thing. Yeah I think I know I was just actually in Humboldt where the novel is set back in 2024 I think. I was staying at an off-grid cabin on a weed

13:56farm that was just solar run. So the power went out often and it was kind of spooky down these unmarked dirt roads. But I think there is a real shift in it being not so many small-time farmers and a lot more bigger companies, foreign companies. And that comes with some problems. There's less care for the environmental impact. There's greater greed and violence. Yeah I think it's like a really sticky topic and I was glad to not set it now. I think there is something more interesting in being in kind of the dying days of the pre-legalization days. Yeah. So Frankie our protagonist is a former ballet dancer. Why? Why that? I mean I love that. Yeah. You know such a personality but

14:58of course I wonder why. Yeah. I want another great old friend of mine grew up doing ballet. I would go and see her in the Nutcracker pretty much every winter growing up. So I've seen it I don't know 20 times. I really admire about her and I think Frankie like a real personal discipline and I think an ability to like do really hard things repeatedly and hold yourself to that standard. And I think that's not something that I that would come as easily to me especially in interfacing with like the authority structures of ballet. But she was a big inspiration for this character and I wanted a character in Frankie that was going to be put on this kind of outlaw in this outlaw world where the rules are more personal. There's of course

16:06there are your own codes in like weed country but I think being cast out of like the safety of a very strict system and way of being and kind of have to go get dirty. And when I think of like a ballerina a prima ballerina now going to like shovel a bunch of manure. I think to me the tension and that is interesting. And then also she could be like really good at it like that those things could transfer that one is not necessarily more refined than the other except in image. Yeah well you mentioned tension and there's tension throughout the book. And I'm always curious if writers are thinking stakes before they start writing like when you maybe before you started writing the book where you think well what are the stakes in this novel. I mean do you think that way and how can I keep the tension going and is this stake going to get solved and there'll be another one to take its place or how do you think about that. I think I should say I really admire

17:17books that like fine tension in other ways than plot like I read a Rachel Cust book or sure and I really admire that like I wish that that's the sort of writing I could do. So at first when I started earlier drafts of this book my intention was to like really not care about plot and the tensions inherent in a plotier type book but like that just didn't happen. I think writing towards moments of like yeah near death experiences on the farm or tension between characters who are soon to be X's or arrivals in love in business. So against my intention the book became quickly filled with various tensions. One you're in like an illegal setting and that's going to breed its own like central questions for a reader like will these people get caught. I think also there's tension in farming because tension is like expectation right it's like a question

18:21of what if being posed and the what if a farming is like will you gather the milk today without incident will the plant that you've sewn be able to be reaped what will the weather be dying. And I think that even at those daily sort of more mundane points of tension they just filled the book when I started writing the place in the people. When I become really conscious of it is when I started to get bored in writing and then I know like where can I go to sort of put these characters in more acute situations or push them deeper into like the tensions of the novel. And then in editing I think I will overwrite a lot in drafts and then have to go back and really carve away. Then I'm thinking a lot more consciously about sort of the ebbs and flows of higher points of tension and then building that falling and then building again towards it. And the books that I

19:28really love to read also I mean as much as I love a Rachel Cusk book I do love plot driven novels and I want to get lost in a story and be enveloped in a place and it's it's dangerous. So let's what I was going for at least consciously towards yet. So when you it sounds like I mean I think writers are either kind of minimalist and need to add in after they have a draft or they are maximalist is that something and have to cut back. How do you decide what to cut back? I mean because you're so close to the story do you have readers? Do you just have a sharpen sense of when there's just too much here and this is just slowing things down. I mean what are you looking for and how are you doing that? I think readers are really helpful especially when you just sat with a draft. So long for me I don't really share my writing or talk much about it until I feel like I

20:32have a pretty polished draft. I just don't want to get thrown off course. I feel like there's a there's like an inner barometer that is like at work and once other people are introduced you have to fight harder to keep it you know straight and but of course like eventually other people are going to need to see it and hopefully they will weigh in and you know be able to identify where things are lagging or where it feels indulgent on my part because I think writers can have a lot of fun going off on tangents and some are really useful some are only useful on background and don't need to be on the page. I think I would identify as kind of a maximalist like both on the sentence level. I really I care about the beauty of every sentence. I started my love of writing with like poetry and songwriting and it can be kind of painstaking to bring that to a novel where

21:36there's many many lines so trying to get everyone just the way you want it is tiring but in this novel like I said there were hundreds of pages of material and it's a big world like the world of northern California and especially a novel that's trading off points of you. I think it kind of feels like two novels in one in a way so like there's a lot of space that there was to fill and then I had fun filling but my readers were important in the reality check of like where am I sort of hitting the same beat more than once what feels outside of the scope of the novel and my editor was helpful that way too but I feel pretty good about cutting like I feel like a twinge when it happens or it might take me a minute to come around but I don't feel too precious about letting things go because I know it will be sleeker the more things that get cut away and

22:41it's kind of exhilarating I think to just like slash and burn a little bit so luckily I don't have I don't feel too badly about things getting shredded a little bit. When you slash and burn do you keep it do you keep them in a file? Definitely yeah I have like a a document called like the junkyard for each project and everything goes to live there and I was just telling some writing students recently that I think in the last round of edits for this novel where you're really not even supposed to put that many words or additions in there's just something of kind of penultimate line in the last chapters that I just was like trying to hit right and I went back into that scrapier document and found something I'd cut like two years before and it was like the phrase that I needed so I'm a big believer in saving that and you just don't know what will be useful. Yeah. Before we bring Ariel back on a few words about Patreon if you enjoy

23:44writers and writing and you've seen it help you along your writing path or maybe you just love to listen to authors talk about their books and writing. Patreon is a great way of supporting the show and any amount helps. We offer perks such as book giveaways writing tips and prompts, bonus episodes and the opportunity to ask questions of the authors and agents we talk to. Please visit patreon.com slash writers on writing. Another great way to support the show and the authors we feature and indie bookstores is by shopping at bookshop.org. Our affiliate store is at bookshop.org slash shop slash writers on writing. Now let's return to Ariel, Delgado, Dixon. It's interesting you mentioned poetry and songwriting because I listened to the book and then it was sent to me and I didn't read it in print but I listened to the entire thing and when I got home one day because usually I'll my walk so I'll listen to books. I wrote down her verbs

24:50and it makes me want to read it again to underline those verbs because you know you just have a way with with verbs okay I mean verbs are so difficult. We talk about this in class with my students a lot like you know why are you using adverbs find a better verb and talk about verbs. Listen Barbara that is the greatest question you could ever greatest prompt you could give me. I love talking about verbs. This is an adj I give to my students all the time the power of a good verb. Yeah yeah I just I don't know what it is maybe it's the economy of them or the slight adjustments in meaning that choosing the right verb can do. I just find it's a great way to shape a sentence it's like a time for your personal style as a writer I think to sort of be on display and it's like when I'm listening to a book or reading a book when I'm really dazzled it's

25:51usually like a verb deployed and so right way that I'm like yeah that's a good one but I just I think that's where I look to a lot to try and be precise I think trying to get things right as I am hearing them and feel them what I'm going for I think the best adjustments I can do towards precision is in verbs. Does that happen in a first draft or is that something that happens somewhat in a first draft but then in a revision another revision I mean how does that go for yours that just one of your gifts that you know they're just there and you just grab them and um I get lucky sometimes I think I get lucky I in my first drafts I really try and polish as I go I try to get too caught up but I do spend a lot of time at the sentence level

26:51as I go and I think the most important thing for me in any sort of whether it's a short story nonfiction novel is like identifying the register that I'm going for the like voice of the the text not just a character or the narration but there's like a register that I'm looking for and once I have found it then the sentence I think sentences I think come a lot easier like I I've located myself in the language that I'm going for in the voice um so yeah it's a lot in early drafts and then some more shaping in later drafts but I think a lot does happen up front um my partner is a writer and I think works very differently and is really great at drafting like dozens of dozens of drafts and having a line of mark that's like okay and then something happens here and then she'll go back and do that but I I feel like I'll lose track of something if I leave it so I spend a lot of time at the sentence level up front and then keep adjusting as I go.

27:54Did you get that from poetry from studying poetry or writing poetry? Maybe so I um the one class that I really did spend a lot of time enjoying at USC as an undergrad there are a couple but one of my favorites was a poetry class that I took with the poet Cecilia Wallach and um it just I think like her love of language the line level she's a big uh Leonard Cohen fan I remember I just it made it made perfect sense to me the things that I love about um music and lyrics and in poems and in great fiction that I love is just finding a way to carve out words to really about something precise like really nail something and um poetry is like a great training ground for that I um that really was my first love and undergrad I don't think I wrote my first full short story till I got to grad school um but yeah I think that was that in song writing I think

28:58every word counts yeah every word counts I know I'm always harping on poetry with students you know like by books of poetry so you can pick them up and be inspired and feel language right? yeah absolutely like and everyone feel I think when we read poetry my my creative writing classes I can feel it when students you know encounter a line that just says something that they've always felt and now have had articulated and that's like what I'm so much of what we're looking for in art and um I just think yeah I I can't say enough about verbs line level language specificity that's yeah yeah yeah yeah no I'm gonna read the print because what I want to do is circle them you know it's like and just study what you've done here because yeah I mean it's like reverbs gotta talk about verbs but I wanted to talk about names too because um

30:01sapphire is sourlands sort of maven right and what a great name how did you come to name sapphire yeah that's a good question I think she was the first person first character that I named years ago now when I first started um I think I was looking for something different in like a hippie-ish way but not being so far out that it would be too much and um it's like kind of revealed earlier on in the novel that it's not really her name um which I didn't really know until I started even writing that scene but uh I think uh it says it's somewhere in the novel too but she's you know it's like a hard rock and beautiful and cutting and I think um instinctually I came to that name and and it just so happened that I I think was pretty fitting for her character too

31:02oh yeah what a great name and plus the color sapphire yeah it's just so evocative um so she goes missing and we're not gonna talk about what happens to her but then at the end um things are tied up in a way that makes sense and I wondered if you knew when you when you began if that's how the book was gonna end did you have the ending did you have like beats or plot points or the ending before you began or at some point during the writing how did that how does that go for you how much do you need to know I um I have I think I my plot my outlining for novel is similar to how I travel which is like I have a couple things that I know I want to do but I'm not really sure when I'm gonna do them or quite how they'll all string together um so I knew early on that sapphire would go missing and that her role in this book and to the characters was really to kind of be this force

32:08that has set these things into motion but then ultimately like avoid that they're kind of orbiting around and now having to exist without fizz and Frankie and um trying to see like what do you do when your kind of gravity your center of gravity is gone and um and no one is there to watch you and take account what does that unleash and um I didn't know exactly how the ending would go uh I kind of switched around a lot I think as I was writing I don't need to know I think it's better almost that I don't know the ending too well that said this has happened now enough times that I think it's um more than just a coincidence somewhere along the way in the first novel this novel and some stories that have written the last line came to me earlier on before I even quite knew how it would fit and um that is like I maybe it's again like the interest in language but the last line will come to

33:14me even if I don't quite know the events around it and I write towards that last line and um now I have to look yeah that's my that's my one guiding light towards the end that's a john Irving thing right yeah he needs the last line of a book before he can begin it's like I think yeah you know if I think if I'm halfway through a draft or something and I'm starting to pay attention like I should be getting you know telegraphed the last line from somewhere at some point and if I'm getting really deep in and it's not happening I kind of superstitiously take that as a maybe a bad sign that I've taken a wrong turn but um it feels good when like the line comes and then I'm like okay all right then I've got somewhere to redirect the comments a little bit right recalibrate right yeah exactly um what about side characters because they're many and they all seem important to the story I don't

34:17know that any could go away um but how do you go about deciding about side characters or is that just sort of an organic process like I need somebody to do this now or you know and then naming them too I mean some of them had really unusual names like what gentle Travis my son's name Travis and some like he's gentle too you know yeah most Travis's I've met her yeah um yeah I I love a side character I I love people I love um hearing their weirdness and their stories and to me side characters are where like so many of the little magical tuff's collected from the world can live and exist um in this now well there's many side characters there's Pierre who's like a middleman who is kind of loosely based on this Brooklyn kingpin that I knew um who's kind of uh

35:23larger than life uh well connected um who also has a penchant for like going to restaurants and ordering everything on the menu and making everyone go with them um there's gentle Travis as you said a name borrowed from a friend of mine um but I love the side character and naming them because fun but also I think functional for this collaborative world of growing weed I mean it's a really transient business I think not only do the farms themselves tend to turn over a lot um because they're either busted or they get robbed or they lose their money they move on um but the people who go to work there uh trimmers and tenders sometimes come for just one season ever um and that's true in the farming that I do as well I was just talking to a farmer friend about like a lot of people will do you know one farming job in the summer and that's great that I mean the business kind of needs

36:25that but um it means that there's a lot of turn of people and starting over explaining things and if you're someone who's lasted more than a couple of years it's kind of noteworthy and to me the question is when I meet those people um whether on the weed side of things or the dairy side is you know why have you stayed when so many people have it and um it's a really particular type of person that gets involved in either business they need uh look a little bit of love of danger because there's risk involved um neither necessarily pays very well so there's like a real choice you're making to be using your body in this world in this intense way for not very much money and pretty thanklessly and I think what I found is that type of person doesn't really want to be in the straight world in the same sense or in you know in doing the cubicle thing um there's like

37:25a certain autonomy and immediacy they're looking for and um I just find those types of people really captivating and I don't think they always know their own magnetism for for working in that world so that's all to say that side characters is my own way of kind of paying some tribute and captains of their wild stories um yeah and there there is a real sense of community like it it forms like this you know where everybody gathers for meals and you know that there's a real attraction there why it could be really cool thing to do you know yeah I think so and in this version in sowerland um I think it's like a more benevolent version than a lot of weed farms one because I think it's kind of calling back to a different era where there was a more you know a communal kitchen and um sort of a common-unesque lifestyle um and that's true of like Northern

38:30California it was um industry-wise like lumberjacks and then sort of back to the land movement and now it's weed and um that's kind of felt I think through the different generations of people who have been there um but there are many farms where like it's a lot darker um there's so many stories about people getting stiff um their money or uh worse I mean um Northern California or humble in particular has um the highest per capita missing persons of any county in California and um people can really disappear and fall off the map there it's really off-grid it's um inhospitable terrain for grand bigger development um once you go inland um and people are really private they don't want you in their business or on their land so if you do happen to get past all of those barriers and end up for a season um in this realm like you're with these people all the time you're

39:31sleeping with them next to them you're maybe sleeping with them actually um you're eating together you're working together sweating together risking your life um and that's just an immediate bond um but also I think the potential for betrayal is then so much higher right um what about um Mariah yeah where did she come from um because she has some trouble she has some trouble in the book she does um so Mariah is sort of like the newest newbie on the farm young uh has come off a lot of traveling in his founder self um in this place where everyone else seems to know already that you're not supposed to ask too many questions and um she is not wise to that and asks too many questions and wants to be too involved and um it's just a naive character but um one of the things

40:33that became apparent to me while writing in sort of reflecting the cycle of life that can happen on a farm is like if sapphires kind of like this end stage bloom let's say and um has lived a whole life on this place and fizz and frankie are sort of coming up um then Mariah is kind of a glimpse at the beginning um before you are jaded when you first arrive and it's like exciting and endless possibility and you feel cool and mysterious and powerful to be in this kind of outlaw lifestyle um and I think it's before the wind has been taken out of your sales a bit and you've gotten a little too dirty and um it was fun writing someone seeing something seeing this world new and not just being strictly frightened or opportunistic but like idealistic I think I think that

41:36can be a fun character to write and kind of pins the other characters to the wall a little bit they have in in dealing with the newbie you kind of have to face um your own the own ways the ways that you've also aged and become jaded over time and like that you were this new person wants to and what happened um her I got a big inspiration for her character um I reread during the course writing the novel uh Edith Warton's Ethan From and um I was thinking about convalescence that way I also had like my own weird like freak health incident um that like put me out of commission for a couple months and so I had like this downtime and um that's when I started kind of connecting to Mariah and her potential fate let's say and uh thinking about what significant setbacks in life

42:37what that can potentially free you up to be capable of after and also what it brings out in the people that are taking care of her yeah definitely which is a different part of their characters that I'm like oh they do that okay yeah yeah I think um that was a surprise to me too in writing like and I think important to see not just these people fizz and Frankie who are like these rivals um births affairs affections and the farm but when they are slipped into a role totally different than what this farm is convalescent like this kind of caretaking position what does that awaken for them people who have like sought that kind of caretaking before or needed it and didn't get it and um I think so much comes out in people when they're faced with different types of crises and there's a difference to between being at the center of a crisis and being you know tending to it on the outside and people react in really unexpected ways um and it was fun to sort of put them into

43:44motion and see what they might do mm-hmm you mentioned reading Ethan from and I'm curious if there were other books that were maybe influential during the writing of this or just in your development as a writer um if there are books you go back to and reread yeah I um for this novel I read a lot but from kind of some unusual sources um one is a nonfiction book um by Emily Brady called Humboldt that just kind of isolated so much of the tensions in this world but on a weirder level there was a book um that was a self published memoir slash fictionalized memoir potentially it was self published on amazon I think and um that's like a research trove that I go to a lot as people self published work because just like the people you encounter in my everyone has crazy stories all the time most people want to write them down um but some people do and it the

44:49goal or the end game is not necessarily to get published or they're not published along the way but um their stories are there and interesting and um reading about people's experience in this world was a huge inspiration for the book um what was the book this self published book yeah it's called actually have it right on my desk it's called Tales of the End World Triangle um yeah and um there's a lot of great uh longer form nonfiction about the subject to one's called West Coast Smoke um that inspired a lot the section of the novel it takes place in northern Idaho there was like a a group of young guys in deep north Idaho that were smuggling weed over the border from Canada and they kind of developed their own drug ring in like their early 20s and just dealing in millions in millions of dollars um there was like a pizza delivery drug ring uh there was I mean all kinds of weird things have

45:51happened in the world of weed and um yeah so like gathering that resource material was hugely helpful I think on like a a broader influential level um I'm a big fan of ritual cushioners I think the flame thrower was helpful and I owe something that I had read like twice over the course of writing the novel um I also loved uh this great book called Half Bro Courses um I think it's Jeanette Walls maybe uh yeah yeah yeah and um another great book that came out in 2022 by a person who since become a friend because I loved her book so much is called Pig Years by Ellen Gatos it's a nonfiction book where she's collected basically a decade plus of her diaries and um in farming in small town uh new England and writing about her experience in on farms and she's a beautiful writer and insightful and brilliant at putting farming and

46:54humanity in proximity and what they do to each other um that was a big one that was like felt very felt very spiritually right for the spirit of a novel um but there are there are so many I um I have just stacks of many books around me right now but I think a lot of nonfiction was helpful in writing this for some reason I think um that's what I was really drawn to a lot of the time so when you were finished with the book and the book is you know at the publisher what were you hoping or do you hope readers take away from Sauerland do you think of it that way like I really hope that this comes through or um um I think that there's like things I hope people will pick up on like I'm really grateful that you were um listening to the verbs like little things like that where I think writers spend so much time most people are speeding through

48:00sentences so it's nice it's nice that people like align um in terms of like a larger like message or anything I don't think I'm thinking about it in that way I think what's most important to me is like no one is really evil in this book um like bad things are done betrayals have happened violence occurs but I think that there's like even in the meanest characters acting most wildly there's you know bits of humanity and sources of humanity um and so I think if anything my hope is that you know the gray area is sometimes uncomfortable to sit in this world of like illegality there's lots of harm done there's also like many beautiful things that have come out of it and interesting people and um there's not really a way to pass like a value judgment and I think

49:03that's what's most important to me and the things that I write about it's like there are many ways to make a meaningful life yeah well what about let's we haven't talked about perfectionism um what's your relationship with perfectionism as regards writing this is a good question I think my my instinct is to say like I'm really not a perfectionist and I think mostly that's true but that's not to say I don't have uh strong pull towards control over the work in some ways like um I know that it'll never things will never quite be perfect my agent told me once and I think about it all the time that she has writers um who are very decorated and much more well-known and um than I am but they still will see their books and bookstores and uh you know wish that they had

50:05a pencil to do a little editing so I'm okay with the fact that in some ways a novel will be a time capsule for the writer at that time um where I think I struggle giving up control which is a type of frowl-ly perfectionism is I think in like last stage things you know getting like the cover rate and all the little things that it going out into the world where I no longer have quite the same say or power and um what I love about writing novels is the total aesthetic control of the world I mean you have an infinite budget to make things exactly as you want them to be and um I love that I think in another life I would have loved to try like directing and in doing film or something because I love the conjuring of like these little worlds and um I think it's harder when you leave the role of like writer who is doing the conjuring and the say so of all

51:06these things and are kind of shifting gears into a different relationship to the book where you're you know trying to hand it to people and um you can't really control that part I think that that's harder but I will say that between my first and second book I think that I've gotten better at like it's just going out there and what happens um between the book and the readers none of my business to some degree yeah and also readers take what they will right and they go oh yeah you were writing about this and in your going I didn't know I was writing about that yeah my first book I remember my I would get some texts from family members being like oh my god I love that part that you wrote about like me or like are on you whatever I'm like I don't that's what was not really my goal but you must have seen that. Thank you. I'm curious in quote well a couple of things before we close one is what do you do when you hit a

52:09wall what do you do when you are at this place where you go I don't know yeah where do I go from here uh you never hit those places oh no I'm hitting walls all the time um I think for me it's a combination of like um going back to like the source material so like the initial nugget of the thing that made me want to write about it um whether that's like a story or an image or um I think like you got to go back to that origin and like find the spark and keep it alive and then um I think like toggling approaches like sometimes the actual writing sentence by sentence is really not happening but what I can do is like do more research or I can go back and edit something from a previous draft I can like free write some ideas of what I want to do but I think when

53:12I'm really in it and working on something hard you just have to like keep kind of one hand on it at all times even if it's not um the sentence by sentence writing like what else how else can I get around it and and I think this past novel especially I started keeping like a journal just for that was just about writing the novel and how things were going and where thoughts could live and um it was always after like really bad runs of like feeling like I wasn't getting very far with it and things were feeling really mysterious and hopeless that like a big breakthrough followed at times and just yeah keeping keeping one hand on it all all throughout yeah yeah well in closing anything any tips or words of wisdom for the writers who are listening um maybe we haven't talked about yeah I think I think what feels true to me more and more especially in like a very

54:22changing industry changing time challenging time um is that there are so many things beyond our control as like artists and writers um but the thing that is not out of our control is the work itself and like only you can make the thing that you're wanting to make and so like I think follow your obsession and strangeness and weirdness and like then it can live forever in its way and um to me that is the kind of ultimate and only promised upside is is doing that so I try I mean some days are better than others but I try um well I so enjoyed Sareland thank you for writing it thank you for reading it yeah and thanks for being here with me today I really have enjoyed this thank you thank you so much for having me that was Ariel delgado Dixon author Sareland thank you so much for taking the time to listen and a huge thanks to our patrons supporters who helped to make this show possible you can check

55:27out our archival shows at writersonwriting.com my sub-stack page is on sub-stack at Penn on Fire where you'll find Q&As with authors and writings on craft as always thank you Travis Barrett for your music and sound editing there's more typewriter music on Spotify under the artist just my type there are no lyrics it's perfect to use this background music for writing. Travis also has the original music on Spotify under his name Travis Barrett you can reach him at Travis Barrett gmail.com thank you for listening and remember stay in the chair