Téa Obreht, author of SUNRISE

0:00Welcome back to Writer's on Writing. I'm your host, Marie Stone. Today is a delicious day for writers because Taya Obrecht has constructed one of the coolest pieces of a kind of meta-fiction that I have read in a long while. Sunrise Outlast Month in Published by Random House is complicated on every level. It bends and blends genre, spans three different time frames, it raises philosophical questions about stories, myths and legends while using the structure of stories, myths and legends, and who controls them and how they can be twisted into propaganda and the nature and danger of storytelling itself. All of that with edge of your seat mysteries and propulsive narrative defies easy descriptions. And the origin story behind this novel is something I know you're going to want to hear.

1:02Taya is the author of Four Works of Fiction, her debut novel The Tiger's Wife, when the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and an international bestseller. Inland was an instant New York Times bestseller when the Ballard Prize and the BRLA Southwest Book Award. And in 2024, the morning side was a finalist for the inaugural climate fiction prize. She was on the show with me for that book and I really recommend that interview. I'll link to it in the show notes because we spend the first 20 minutes doing a super deep dive into Taya's unique childhood and how it informs her fiction. There's a bunch of stuff in there that I think you'll be interested in that we won't go over again today but that is really useful. Taya was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia and grew up in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States. Her birth in a country that no longer exists will become relevant when we talk about sunrise today. Her work has also been anthologized in the best American short stories and the best American

2:02non-required reading. It's appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Atlantic, all over the place. I won't burden you with her many honors awards and fellowships but they come from places like the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Yorker and the New York Public Library. She did live in Wyoming but I hear she just moved to Ireland where she joins us from today. Taya, over. Welcome back. Hi, it's so lovely to see you. Thanks for having me back. So I first have to ask about the move to Dublin and what prompted it because when I saw you were leaving Wyoming I was so interested in that move. Tell me about it. Yeah, well my husband is from Dublin and we've been married now for 13 years and we've been back and forth very often. We've spent a lot of time here but we're kind of never enough for a place that we're most of his family still lives. And we have kids now and we were looking for a long time for the right sort of the right sign that it was time to spend more of the year here and I was offered a job recently at Manuth University which is just outside of Dublin.

3:05There's a new creative writing program there. Well I guess the creative writing program is not new but the BA is new and they were looking to expand and I was lucky enough to be offered a job and I feel like when a sign like that shows up that's the sign. You know, something happened and we were like there it is. So we're trying to view it as a splitting time. We're here for the school year for me and for the kids and hopefully summer's back in Wyoming which is where my heart lives. I love that. Well I'll be very interested to see how this move informs your fiction because I know place is such an important aspect so that's very cool. It's a little intimidating to be moving to a place that has such a story literary history and has such a very much its own literary history and to sort of be stumbling into that and do like here I am now. What can I, how can this work for me? What is so fun when I open one of your books is I never know where we're going to go and this book from page to page I still never know where we were going to go.

4:08I thought good luck to AI if they're stealing Teo's work to try and write a Teo Oberg novel it just it's completely uniquely of your brain. So hats off. Thank you so much for that. What a compliment. Thank you so much. Well I'll let you take us into it. I want to dive into it quickly. I usually do a lot of preamble questions but I want to dive into this one really quickly because there's so much I think in here rich material for writers to learn from and study. So let's take off right away. Can you take us into this world because you'll do a way better job of it than I will? Oh I'm not sure about that but I'm going to give it a shot. I feel like I'm still learning how to talk about it. This is a novel that's set in the American West and it's about three lives converging and it's set across three different timelines. The first that we start with is in 2024 and it concerns a young woman named Nina who's playing crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. It's a small twin engine plane and her boyfriend is piloting it and when the book starts

5:08when we first meet Nina she is just crashed into a lake. She is the lone survivor. She is 24 years old, a nanny for a rich Manhattan couple and she is an art history grad student so she is the least equipped person to survive the ordeal that she is facing. And she knows it and I think a lot of her storyline is spent sort of contending with the serious nature of what has befallen her and with her combating this inner voice that's telling her that she's not going to make it. As she wanders the wilderness equipped only with a few protein bars and a cell phone that is rapidly running out of both battery and service, well it only cuts into service periodically as some invisible satellite that she imagines flying overhead catches her every so often. She stumbles into what appears to be an abandoned old west mining town which unbeknownst

6:09to her brings her into contact with two other lives. One from 1902, the life of Anton Vargas who was a gunslinger and a dime novel hero who helped found the town and who when we meet him in his timeline is facing a kind of crisis of conscience and also a crisis of health. He's in poor shape and he has come back to the town of Sunrise to reckon with his past and to try to reconnect with a man named preacher. And the other life that Nina bumps into is the life of Cole Collin Yard. He is an amateur historian and a historical reenactor in 2003, a son of Wyoming and a young man who is deeply concerned with the myths coming out of Sunrise which he sees to be sort of his regional responsibility. He's been running the reenactment for a long time and he has just been involved in a scandal at a bar which he's hoping not to think about as he prepares for this year's reenactment,

7:12an activity that is interrupted by the arrival of a young woman in his life who has questions about Anton Vargas and the validity of the history that he has been reenacting for the majority of his life. Yeah, good job. Thanks. That is not easy to do. And we should say that it's drawing from traditions in Western time store novels, historical fiction, mystery, literary fiction. It's just this genre mashup that will start to pick apart and a mashup of timelines. So yeah, it's ambitious. Let's say it's ambitious. Thank you. So let's talk about the origin story of this because I love what I've heard about this origin story which is that I hear that you have like ten different ideas going on in your brain kind of all at the same time. So you had a bunch of different ideas that maybe abandoned or novels put on the back burner that you assembled together to make this happen.

8:13So take us into this origin story for the book. Yeah, this has been a funny one to work on. I started writing about Anton Vargas more than ten years ago in 2015. I was spending a lot of time out west. I was reading a lot of time store novels. I was very interested in the western as sort of a mechanism of propaganda. And in particular, these sort of early origins of it in the lives of people like Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickock. And I wanted to spend time with a character who had been part of this project of incursion and nationalism and who had sort of bought into his own myth but was now struggling with a couple of different aspects of his life as he came to what he understood to be the end of it. And I tried it once. I tried it twice. I was very attached to the character and the other people in his life. But for some reason it wasn't working.

9:13And I put it aside. You know, I put it in the drawer and wrote inland with the research that I had done for the novel went on to write inland, which I think was the correct order. It turns out. But I never really stopped thinking about Anton Vargas. I never stopped hoping that I would be able to pull that novel out and revive it and sort of find the solution for what had been missing from those early drafts. And in the meantime, you know, wrote other books, wrote the Morningside after inland, started a couple of different projects. As you said, I always have a few. I have a couple of short stories going and then, you know, there's always some brilliant flash where I'm like, that must be the next novel. And then I'll get, you know, 40 pages into it and find out, oh, that's not the next novel. But I had started this other project that I suspected was going to be a novella about a young woman who gets shipwrecked on a tropical island. And I was finding that I was struggling with that one too. Because I didn't know much about the island and I didn't know much about the girl.

10:16And working on the island wasn't revealing more about the girl and working on the girl wasn't revealing more about the island. But I knew that she was going to find something on that island that led her into a book within a book. It is the same thing that she finds in this book. And at one point, I realized that what was missing from the Vargas story was a reader of the dime novel or something adjacent to the dime novel of which Vargas was a part. That if he was going to be a dime novel here, there had to be a reader for him that wasn't just the reader of the actual book, the actual text out here in this world, but he had to have a reader in the world of the book as well. And the minute I had that revelation, Nina fell out of that other project and into this one. And the thing that she finds, what she was supposed to find on the tropical island became the thing

11:17that she finds in the Wyoming Mountains in this book. And I had also been working on a short story. I had just begun a short story about a young man in Wyoming who is involved in a sorted incident in a bar. And they all lit up the same color. It's a funny way to say it, but that's sort of how it felt and that's how I remember it internally, them all just sort of like lighting up one by one together. And I realized that these three stories belong together that they were part of the same book and that their destiny was to light each other up in this one piece together instead of a cross a couple of different projects. And it's not the first time it's happened to me that sometimes happens with scenes and short stories or even scenes and novels, but it was the first time that it happened on this scale that it was three different projects that were actually intended, that were bound for the same book. Yeah. The last time we talked, we spent a lot of time talking about these 1200 pages.

12:19Maybe it was more 1500 pages that you had thrown away. And sort of how cathartic that was and how you knew you had to do it. I mean, I'll refer people back to that conversation because it was really very interesting. But as I was reading the origin story of this, I was wondering if any of those thrown out pages were part of this book. Yeah. They were the first two drafts of Vargas' story were part of that book. And then there was an additional text that we won't talk about ever again that just deserves to sort of be stomped from memory. Um, yeah, never know. I feel like, well, about this one I do. But yeah, Vargas was part of that page count that went away and now has has miraculously come back. I love that. Yeah, we had a talk about the importance of, a, the importance of just writing 1500 pages that is important for your writing life anyway.

13:20And the importance of never really throwing anything away. Just don't, don't burn it. You never know. Yeah, exactly. Like they say in the Master of Margarita, manuscripts don't burn. And, uh, and boy, is that, has that turned out to be true? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I always like to talk about the time, a book, a time in the world that books are born into. And I think this is so interesting because there's such a battle and it has been a battle over the soul of America and who gets to tell America's story. And can we sanitize out the ugly bits? And are we the defenders of democracy and justice, which has been our narrative or some people's narrative for 250 years or is it something else? Is it more complicated and nuanced? And this novel just wax at that mole that keeps popping up. So I, you know, I just think it's both a timely and timeless tale and interesting to be written both as an insider or resident, you know, of Wyoming. And you've been there for a very long time.

14:21And this, you know, immigrant perspective that you have on the US, it just feels like a novel only you could have written. I'm very, very flattered. You know, I think as an immigrant, I struggle and a lot of immigrant writers that I know also struggle with this, with the question of what you're allowed to write about, you know, it often seems like what you're supposed to write about is your immigrant experience cloaked, maybe in a little bit of auto fiction, but definitely speaking to, you know, your corner of it. It's taken me a long time to contend with the fact that Western history and sort of the battle between the myth and the reality of the American West as experienced by settlers has been something that I've been interested in since I was a kid, you know, I grew up on Westerns. My grandparents in the former Yugoslavia loved them. It was a way that they knew America, you know, it was a way that I came to know it obliquely

15:22through them, you know, and through their love of the genre. And I felt drawn to the West throughout my life in America and to the point where, you know, it took me a long time to get to Wyoming even as a tourist because it felt like such a, it felt like such a place of pilgrimage, you know. So if you told me years ago that it's a place that I would end up living in and writing about as much as I have, I don't think I would have believed you. It felt unreachable, you know, that particular kind of spiritual and psychological journey. But it has been intensely tied to my experience as an immigrant and to my experience of what America is to my journey to crack open that question. There's a line from a wonderful Camille Dungee poem, America, I will never stop trying to understand you and I feel that way as an outsider. And I think that approaching that chasm between myth and history is what has turned me into

16:33more of an insider as well. Like I think that's also what has made me less of an immigrant and more of an immigrant. Well, I mean, immigrants are Americans, but has made me less of my former identity and more American as I've advanced toward those questions. If that makes sense. Totally makes sense. Well, let's pick apart the three sections because they draw from very different literary traditions that you then have to both adhere to the rules of, bend the rules of, make mesh together in one coherent, seamless narrative. None of this can be easy. So Nina's section and I'm always interested in how writers get into a novel and I was just rereading over and over the first couple of pages of this novel and how you accessed her, which is sort of from this swooped up outside. Now we see her in this kind of cinematic, interesting way and she's, you know, she's not Icarus because she didn't fly too close to the sun, but we're evoking sort of this

17:36mythology of this woman falling out of the sky on the first couple of pages. And so, you know, just from the very beginning you're teaching us how to read this book and that, you know, we're entering a new kind of story. So you had pages, obviously you had Nina for a long time in a totally different iteration, but then you had to morph and meld this story to adhere to, you know, this larger structure that you came up with. So maybe we just unpack a little bit her section, getting to know her, getting to know the structure of that first section of the book, which is wholly different than the structure of the other parts of the book. And maybe I'm bombarding you with too many questions here. So I'll just shut up. Not at all. This is this great. And in the meantime, I've noticed that I'm nodding frantically, which is, which is great for an auditorium. We're listening on it. Oh, sorry, everyone. Yeah. It's an interesting experience. I had been with her for a very long time, but I also felt like I didn't know her.

18:38And once I figured out that these three stories were going into the same book together and the correct order, she was always going to be the first person on the page because her ordeal felt the most immediate and the most life or death, which it is. And in previous iterations of her story, I had attempted to write the crash. It was a submarine crash for a while, then it was sort of set in the future, and it was some sort of dreddable. And then finally, when I realized that it was going to be a plane, the practical aspects of it became much firmer to me. But the more I tried to write the moments of the crash, the more it failed. And so I realized at a certain point, pretty quickly, once they all came together, that she was just going to appear in the water, that the reader was going to join her after

19:38the crash, that whatever that her storyline, whoever she is proceeding the crash is going to have to exist only in the light of the fact that she is now a survivor of another kind, the survivor of this deeply traumatic incident. And so the incident itself didn't matter what mattered was who she becomes the minute she surfaces from that water. And so the book begins with the act of her in this new life. You know, she's just coming to in the water. And I don't know about you, but certainly that's been my experience with the thankfully few truly traumatic physical incidents that I've had. You don't really remember the incident before. You remember the moment of sort of coming to after and being like, something is different, something is different and deadly. And so yeah, she awakens from the water and is immediately thrown into the challenge

20:40of trying to survive. She is not equipped for anything she faces. And what I wanted the reader to experience was this sort of gradual dawning on her of how very dire her predicament is. When she washes up on shore, she's thinking about sort of, how am I going to rescue this day, right? Like there were plans for the day. And she was supposed to, you know, they were supposed to do this very quick flight. They were supposed to go to this restaurant that she's been wanting to go to for a really, really long time. You know, she's going to put the bill. She's made a lot of arrangements for how she's going to be able to afford this dining experience, which is something that she feels is like very precious to her. And she's trying to figure out how this day is going to be salvaged. And in reality, she has no idea where she is. And nobody knows, nobody else knows where she is either. Because the flight plan filed with the correct authorities in order to be able to determine

21:43where she's ended up. The only person who knows where she's supposed to go is driving across the mountains and hasn't arrived at their destination yet. And so the layers of her absence from the life she's supposed to be living are dense. Yeah. Yeah. And so her waiting through that makes up the bulk of sort of the first movement of the book where she she realizes, I'm alone. I have no idea where I am or what to do. And hopefully that the expansion of that awareness is something that grabs the reader and forces them to contend with, well, what would I do with my minus similar situation? Probably go through the same mental process. And then the other challenge from a craft perspective, as I began to get to know her, was that she didn't have anyone to talk to. You know, she was alone. And one of the main mechanisms for getting a character to reveal themselves is having

22:43them interact with other people. And she's entirely alone. So the only person she's interacting with really is herself. And that was how her inner voice and sort of the way she talks to herself, the particular character, stands that she has on herself and where she might have learned it, revealed themselves too. And for my bond with her as a writer who'd been trying to figure her out for a long time, that was an enormously rewarding experience because she finally became who she really was, who she was supposed to be in this book. Is there a moment that you can remember as writer that unlocked her for you, something she did, something she thought, some element of her backstory that is like, now I get her, you know, that she's wholly unique? Yes, it was the revelation. And it came after the first draft, the revelation that she was an art history grad student and that her area of study was Dutch Golden Age Vanitas.

23:45And she was somebody who was sort of externally obsessed with death. And that obsession had actually been rooted in her reaction to a story that existed in the book from its very first draft, which was the story that her mother tells her about the survivor of a Bosnian playing crash from the 1970s. And she's had this story that sort of appeared on the page in the very first draft and it's sat there waiting, you know, for this other revelation about her character and sort of those two details of her background combined into who she is. She's somebody who's used to observing the details of the world, sorry, sorry, someone who's used to observing the details of a fictional world, the world of paintings. She's used to interpreting them. She scans them and scours them for details of, you know, what a person's life was like

24:46in order for these death portraits to mean something to them. But she isn't used to scanning the world that she finds herself in now. And so it is wholly illegible to her. And she's struggling for legibility. That was a crucial moment in the development of her character and who she ended up being. Did you write this during the pandemic, any of this during the pandemic or is this not it? Because I asked that because it feels the isolation, the how the hell did I get into this situation, the aloneness, all of it just felt a little bit pandemicy, you know, pandemic adjacent of what we were all kind of going through. And I'm always interested to see what artists did with that psychological time period in their lives. And I was just wondering now that some of these novels are coming out from that time period if you feel like any of that informed what your characters were enduring.

25:49That's a great question. She was, I mean, the original idea for the story did come to me during the pandemic or rather I started writing it during the pandemic. I did start writing her for the first time in 2020. Her, but this book, this is something that I should say after having thought about these characters for a really long time, this book came together in a year, which was wild, a wild and untrustworthy ride for me. And every time I sort of looked back at it and I was like, oh, wow, the pages are really accumulating. You're doing this very, very quickly. Are you going to turn it into your editor? Are you going to turn it into your agent? Like surely you should sit with this for five years minimum. And it took sort of going back through previous drafts to be like, this is a character you've been working on for 10 years. You know this material. This is somebody you've been thinking about for, you know, five to six years in the case of Nina. You know this, you know, you know what you're trying to do here. And sort of it took that conviction of longevity in my life to assure me that the fact that

26:55this draft came together real fast was okay. Because normally I would, I would take years and I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. The years are just for, yeah, it's, it's lumpy, right? I've had it. It's really lumpy. Lumpy is, is the correct, is the correct work? Yes. Yes. Yeah. And getting to know this town, I mean, Sunrise is this old mining town and it's really a character in and of itself in the book and getting to know it and peeling back the layers of time and how people have acted upon this place. And so getting to know it through her eyes is so freaking creepy. I mean, you know, it's just this abandoned creepy ghost town which I think, you know, you bring the weight of other stories that we all have absorbed either through Dimestore novels or Westerns on TV or we've been to these places. So you have the weight of that collective unconscious weighing down on your reader that you

27:59can then, I think you can just use that as a platform of like reader, you know, you know the deal here and then expand on it. But I was wondering if you could just spend a moment talking about bringing that town to life over and over again because your sense of place obviously is so strong in here. Thank you so much. Yeah. A lot of time Wyoming is a very depopulated state. It's the least populist state in the Union still and there are these vast, vast distances between even inhabited places and there are even faster distances between places that used to be inhabited in the past and are now sort of lying dormant or abandoned and there are many of them. And I'm fascinated with places like that probably because of the way I grew up, you know, we travel a lot. We lived in a lot of places where there was an ancient history that underlaid modern history. And so any place that, you know, like show me a shattered window and I'm just thrilled.

29:03You know, show me a boarded up house. Great. So I think that that eeriness and that strangeness of not knowing the entire history of a community but seeing its bones still standing up, there's something gothic about it and there's something occult about it and something of the memorial of it as well, you know. And it's also the idea of a ghost town, a place that used to be thriving but now it has fallen silent. You know, it's inherently full of ghosts. There's something captivating about it for everyone and the history of its abandonment comes to supplant everything else about the region. You know what I mean? Like there's this place. You can see a couple of buildings left over. Let's go there and like look at those buildings together and imagine what it was like before the event, right? And then there's the mythology of the event which comes to supersede everything else.

30:06So it's in cities in many different ways and it's especially in cities when you think about it as like a colonial, as an aspect of a colonial time and a colonial project because this failure on the part of the settlers, right, comes to be the thing by which the region is known. And it eats all the history that precedes it and what you have is this sort of monument to all the failure of human enterprise. Like, wow, these dreams were crushed and everything that preceded that, you know, native life there, the names of the landscape given by native people, all that falls to the shadow of the ghost town. So I think, yeah, there's the mystery and the draw of these places casts a powerful spell. I wanted to hopefully capture that and especially to capture it for a character. And we first see sunrise, the town of sunrise, it's through Nina's eyes and she has no idea what it is or how long it's been abandoned or like how close it is to the other nearest

31:10place, you know, there's kind of a road, but how old is it? And it fails to be legible to her. She doesn't know how long, you know, how long it's been since these farm implements were in use. So I think that it would create an aura of deep unease for anyone to be dropped into a situation like that. And I do mean drops and literally dropped. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you have to walk such a careful line, you know, because some of the things that happened to her falling out of the sky and falling into this lake and it has almost a fairy tale quality to it right there that it's right on the edge of credulity in a delicious way because that's also teaching us how to read it, right? That it's plausible, but you also have to stretch a little bit, which is how just the novel is. She's her own myth, right? She becomes her own kind of legend. Totally. She's an unwilling participant in her own myth. And that is sort of what survivor stories, especially the stories of people who have survived

32:16playing crashes tend to be, you know, you're this sort of unwilling and unwitting participant in something that is so horrifying, is so horrifying for any person who takes a plane, right? Like horrifying to conceive of in any way. There's the horror of the ordeal as it's happening and then the horror of the hours or days of survival. And every single survivor account I read or listened to was something out of myth. You know, the answer was always I had no idea where I was. I had no idea what I was going to do, but then it turns out that there are these sort of pieces of one's history that enable you to survive, right? And they are so unlikely that it's a one and a million chance. It's always a one and a million chance. So yeah, they are kind of myths in and of themselves. We'll be back with more from Taya Obrek talking about sunrise in just a moment.

33:21You're listening to writers on writing. If you're new to the podcast or you haven't done so, I'd love to invite you onto our Patreon page. If you're enjoying the show, if you've learned any tips that have helped in your own writing practice or you just enjoyed these behind the scenes talks of how books get made, this is your chance to support the show. Any amount helps us out. You can find us at patreon.com slash writers on writing. And I'd love to take this opportunity to call out a few of our longstanding dedicated patrons who have helped support the show, Richard Polt, Deborah Cross, Candy Sorry, Gloria Sipka, Lisa Kublo, Stephanie King. Your support has gone a long way and has helped us do what we do. From Patreon, you will find book giveaways. You will see that we support our audience members who have published books of their own. We spotlight them every week. We do some writing prompts and writing tips. It's a great way for us to keep in touch with you and you to keep in touch with us. And if you're interested in purchasing a copy of Taya's book or any of the books for

34:24our past guests, consider doing that on bookshop.org. Your book dollars go to support independent bookstores. A little goes to help out the show. You can shop at bookshop.org slash shop slash writers on writing. Let's get back to it with Taya Obrek talking about sunrise. And then we go into the section of the actual western. So now we're kind of jumping genres. First of all, let's just talk about what your office looks like. So I know this came together very fast, but it's a big cast of characters. It's a big timeline. A lot of things to keep track of. And everybody has their own secrets and everybody has their own storylines and everybody has their own backstories. It's so overwhelming as a writer, I would think, but apparently it came together really fast. But tell me just organizationally, are you a scriptener person? Are you a crime scene, you know, those big bulletin boards where you are and on the bullets and going all over the place?

35:25I'm a very visual person and it's been challenging to write the last two books because I don't have an office or rather I didn't have an office in Wyoming because we lived in a very tiny condo and I would work at the public library. Shout out to the Teton County Public Library, which was my home for many, many years. But it was a very useful place to work because I'm now the kind of person who needs the structure of other people in order to concentrate. But it didn't allow for the use of, you know, an external whiteboard which is the thing I most crave. I like to get a wall and like stick things on it. So I kind of had to do a shorthand on the computer and just have files in which the timelines were running across word document pages. I mean, this was really the most analog and probably worst imaginable way to organize this. The thing that I found really helped me was to conceive of this as three separate books which were required in order to make one book.

36:28And so not to, in the first couple of drafts, not to think about the connections that were bridging them, but to just write them as individual pieces and see what blood through, I guess with me is the conduit from one draft to the next. And that became the only way to do it because they're stylistically very different as well. Nina's section is sort of in like a very, it's in third person, but it's very, very close. And this modern consciousness unspooling as it realizes the trouble that it's in. And then the Vargas section is, it's a western and it's written kind of a noir style. It's very, very punchy. And the person writing it, who is not me, but who is a character in the book, ah-ha. Twist is very, very passionate about this character. So that's supposed to bleed through as well. So I wanted to separate them stylistically and what it required was the separation of them, especially in the first few drafts physically as well. So they would be in different documents in entirely different places on the computer,

37:31which I also find helps. And that's how they were, that's how they were written. And did you feel you had to adhere to the constraints of those genres in writing it? And then, I mean, it felt like you had the, the rules of the western and the rules of the mystery. And then you played with them and then you just messed around with them of like, you think you know a myth and then I'm going to turn it on its head a little bit. I did. I had, and I had a lot of fun with it. I mean, this was a book that was really, really fun to write because in particular with the western, the foundations of it, I had studied them for so long as a genre and as a mode of propaganda and as a mode of myth making and person making, you know, once I got in there, I found that I could really play and and hopefully spoof some of it, hopefully honor some of it. And that spoofing and honoring actually came, I think, as a result of Vargas' character

38:35and finding out who he really was because he's someone who has taken himself very, very seriously in the past, but has now come back to a place to be among people who knew him back when and they don't take him very seriously at all. You know, his friend Fred Kipling who ends up being a major character in this book, even though he starts out seeming like he'll be a minor character. He has very little, very little reverence for Vargas and what holds them together is this nostalgia. And I wanted nostalgia to be a really key thing in that section as well. It's something that allows the landscape to really shine because he's nostalgic for the landscape, for a landscape that he knows even though Nina doesn't. So our first encounter with a landscape is through Nina. She doesn't know it. She's terrified of it. He knows it like the back of his hand. He loves it and has missed it. And that becomes the opportunity then to sort of for the reader to grow more comfortable with it as well. So yeah. That's what I thought was so interesting about your place because the reader and your relationship

39:39with the place completely changes even though it's the same place as we get to know it over and over again. It's so funny because I was reading this and I was like, I read it over the course of like a week, five days, something like that. And I was like, is it the same book where we're in Manhattan in this Tony condo with these rich people and the same book where we're also underground with this whatever. I mean, there are so many vivid, vivid set pieces in here that light up your brain and you're like, how did those two scenes go in the same 300 pages? That's a miracle. And then I was thinking how you do your transitions because you do have just these beautiful, beautiful set pieces. But the connective tissue is hard. And I think, you know, for readers, you don't ideally notice all the connective tissue between scenes. But for a writer in this book in particular to make those transitions in all of these story

40:40lines would be a challenge. It was. There were a lot of questions once I had written the first draft about how it was going to come together and how much was going to be asked of the reader to put together. Because there are five books, that's a book there, but there are five books within it. And the structure is ABCBA. So you climb in and you climb out. And for a long time, it has like the distances between the stories are too great to spend 70 pages on one character and then be ripped away and spend 70 pages with another character and then to spend 100 pages in the middle narrative where you're not released at all. And then be shot back out into Vargas' story. I don't know that this is going to fly. Those are massive, massive amounts of pages to be away from story lines that are crucial to understanding the whole thing.

41:40And I was like, maybe it's ABCABC, ABCABC, ABCABC. That maybe we sort of keep cycling back through. And I tried it, sort of I tried rearranging, but it was too choppy. The characters really needed time to settle into their narratives to be who they were. And so then what it felt to was like, okay, where are the joints here where you can really enter and exit knowledge of these characters? How can you leave the reader with a resounding enough impression of this moment or this predicament so that they will remember the feeling of being with this character and the stakes of this character when they finally make their way back? And it was very, very uncomfortable to have to make that call to be like, yeah, like maybe for some readers, once they leave Nina or once they leave Vargas and see that there's a third person here, maybe they'll be like, I'm out.

42:44And it's a continuous problem for any writer, I think, to have to face the fact that somebody the person who's going to be experiencing this is not someone you can control. It's not someone you can sort of appear out of the book and be like, oh, just hang in there. I promise it's going to come back. It's a leap of faith from writer to reader and it's asking a leap of faith from the reader to the writer. You're holding hands across this chasm of the book and being like, will you come with me? Come, please stay. And so much of it is the hope that the reader will follow you and that the places where you're breaking away from them are places that will still entice them to read on. I was thinking that is where the thriller mystery aspect of this comes in because the other thing that I wanted to mention about the book is that it's just very compulsive reading. And so it's exploring all of these complicated ideas about narrative and storytelling and

43:45what to believe and propaganda and storytelling and all these kind of philosophical questions. But at the same time, it's a real page turner. So you can't wait. I couldn't, I mean, there was no point for me that I was like, I'm not following along on this. I mean, I was, I was all in for the ride and it was a full ride until the last page. So I think you also managed to embed all of these cliff hangers in addition to doing all of the other tap dancing that you were doing. So that's, that's not easy either. Thank you so much. That is really gratifying to hear. And I think, you know, as a teacher and as a crafts person, I'm always hammering home the importance of studying the mystery genre to my students and to myself. I think there's sort of an artificial and kind of labored division between genres, you know, literary fiction has a tendency to look down on, on romance, on mystery, on thrillers.

44:51And there's a tremendous amount to be learned from the craft of those literatures. And often the divide between them is a lot more porous than we would like to pretend as we artificially construct it. So I was really thrilled for the opportunity to get to use some of those techniques and to see if they worked in a piece like this one, which was already, you know, which was already asking a lot of the reader in terms of switching voice and switching perspective and switching time. And really, you know, I think relied on the thrill of those techniques to keep the reader going on. Yeah. If it could be pulled off, it could only be pulled off this one way. And I'm really, really deeply gratified to hear from you that it worked for you. How was your agent's publisher response?

45:51I assume that you've got, you know, this novel has, don't try this at home kids written all over it. But you obviously have a track record of like, it's Tay, I just, she's fine. Go with it. But I can imagine some publishers being like, what? I don't know. Where do we put this on the bookshelf? It was interesting. My agent is always, is always really game. And I think one of the great gifts of my career so far has been that I've worked with folks who are like, yeah, okay. Whenever I come to them, I'm like, that's a Western with camels. They're like, great. All right. And then, you know, it's about a building with a haunted villa in it, maybe. And, you know, there's a war criminal who comes in and they're like, sure, all right. And that has been, that has been a tremendous gift to me personally and also, and also professional. But I do think Westerns, Westerns have a very particular kind of like, you know,

46:53in many, across many different mediums, you know, when it's a film and it's a Western people are like, there's a tendency to think about Westerns in particular, I think, is outmoded, even when they were in fashion, they were, you know, yes. And, yes, and still have that kind of stance toward them. And so I took a great care to say to people as I, as I pushed it across the table to them, like, it's looking, it seems like a Western. But give it a shot. It's not really a Western. It's more like, who knows, you know, a mashup of all these different things as, as you said, it's just, just give it a, the Western is only one part of it. Give it a chance. And so I, I was fortunate to have people, you know, the people who make these decisions to be like, yeah, okay, we'll, we'll move on. And the amazing thing is I heard you did not know the, I mean, we won't give away the end, but you did not know the end. And so it also has this wonderful quality of keeping secrets from the reader that maybe you are also keeping from yourself, because everybody has a lot of secrets in this book.

47:57And the reveal of information, again, I don't know how you all did this in a word document, but good job on that. But it's a lot of stuff to keep straight. And yeah, the dissemination of information is really complicated. I should say that I worked with magnificent editor, with a magnificent editorial team in Sarah Birmingham and, and Azraff Khan, who read several drafts of this. And we all sort of sat around looking at it together and trying to, because you really, the main difficulty of reading for edits and asking for an edit is that no matter how good an editor is or how good a reader is, you only get the first read once, you know, and then, and even myself, like I've been writing for a long time, I've been a teacher for a long time, but I know that my impressions of a text are informed by having read it previously. So you know, you have memories of a character who's maybe gone away or a moment that doesn't exist anymore, and they feed into your impression of it a second time.

49:01And so I think we were all sort of on the same page about trying as hard as we could to have a clean read the second time through. Is it working now? Like do we need more of this or less of this or how, you know, and one of the challenges was there are several moments in the book, how do I put this? There are several scenes in the book that bring the reader right up to the crucial moment and no further. And the challenge became, how close is too close for the effect that the book wants to have, and then how much closer can we bring it without without starting to dip into, without starting to dip into certain details that then break that spell. And I had a magnificent, I've been working with them for a couple of books now, copy editor at random house called Cara Du Bois, and they, you know, went through the timeline with me and were like, if this is happening on day three,

50:02it can't also be happening on day four, right? Like let's check our pages against each other. And so this information, the dissemination of information became something that we were all sort of tracking as we as we went through the book together edit after edit. And the book is really born in the edits and I believe this with my whole heart I've always believed. But the ending was something that yeah, that really, really shocked me because normally I get through about two thirds of the way through a book and I know how it's going to end. And then I have something to aim for. And it's really important for the way I sort of conceive of the closure of it. There's this feeling of like funneling toward a goal. And even if I don't, if we don't end up at that ending, at least we were aiming and we ended up sort of in the general direction. And you know, we learned things along the way and now here, when we're here, but with this end, I knew that the three storylines were going to converge. And I had a vague sense of how that convergence of what the substance of the

51:13convergence was going to require. But I found myself, you know, getting getting closer and closer and it was like, well, we've got to be within 50 pages at the end. And you have no idea how you're going to close it out. And all you're within 30 pages, you can tell, you know, you can tell you can smell the water of the ending somewhere. But you don't really. And then the most extraordinary thing happened, Nina, with whom we're with at the end, which is not as boiler because you can see it when you have the table of content. Anything that's printed in the book that's easily available to the reader within within three seconds, I've decided is not as boiler. Star game. Yeah. But, you know, to sort of follow Nina into the last moments of the book and to follow her into the final two, the final three encounters as this sort of hallucinatory, you know, she's starving and it's really the end. Episodes plays out was was was a giant surprise to me. Like I had

52:18no idea that she was that she was going to do that. That was going to befall her in quite the way that it did. And, and the other thing that was extraordinary is that there were there were a couple of elements of Nina's character and certain things that Nina does that she's brought into this moment of survival from her childhood that serve as really significant tools in in the end. And they surprised me too. You know, it was something that was laid out for the character. So this was the first time that I found myself experiencing that thing that other writers talk about that I've never experienced, which was like let the character show you everything, let them, you know, like follow them into this abyss, just follow them. And I really did. And it was extraordinary. It was it was a very new feeling for me. It was something that I couldn't help but do. Yeah, it was incredible to have this new thing happen for me as a as a writer who really likes to control, you know, at every facet of

53:22how we get to the end and what what happens and sort of it was a new and I had a had a fantastic time. It was new and really fun. So fun. And obviously the goal of any piece of fiction is character change, right? And so we just get this beautiful. If you go back to read the first pages and you read the last pages together, there's a resonance and there's just this beautiful arc of her character, which all of the characters go through their own little arcs. But hers is this wonderful sort of rainbow of experience. And it's really lovely. So the reals to be there as the book did it on its own. Thank you so much. That's how you know it's working. You teach a lot and you've you've done four novels now and you've been through the trenches of throwing pages away and resurrecting pages from the dead. Is there writing advice that we should have talked about that we didn't today? We also did a lot of writing advice in the last show. So like I said, I'll link to that. But if there's other things you can leave us with, I'd love it. I know that last time I talked about sort of the absence

54:28of waste of drafts that there's no such thing as a waste of draft and that that really every piece of writing you do is significant. And I still hold to that very, very dearly. I cleave to that. But I think that something I've learned with this book is that really, if someone is staying with you, if a character has stayed with you or if a scene or an event has stayed with you and they're not letting go. And it's been two years, three years, you know, five, ten. There's a reason why they're continuing to tap on your shoulder. And it doesn't have to do. I was worried for a long time that it had to do with ego that it was, you know, this sort of like, oh well, like you failed to bring that book to a close. And so there's some part of you that's that's called back to it because it feels like you're supposed to resolve this failing. But in reality, I think these are

55:32pieces of your subconscious that want to live in their final forms, you know, and you owe them, their return to the forefront of your mind since they were so, since they waited so long. And I I feel that so, so deeply with this book, I can't believe that I got to write Vargas' story in the end and that he fought his way through the lagmire of my brain into existence for readers. Man, I'm really grateful. And I feel a sense of closure that's really moving to me. And yeah, so if they're there tapping away, you should, you should listen, you should let them, let them keep tapping away your shoulder. It's another way that the form of the novel mirrors the content and the writing process that you did to bring these characters to life also kind of mirrors the content and form of the novel itself, right? I think so. I think I'm realizing that even just as in

56:33course of this conversation, which is delightful and thing to realize and a realization to be brought to, I really, yeah, I really think so. And that is just a sign that it was the novel only you could have written and the novel that had to be written. I mean, I, you know, I think some of these demons probably had to be expunished in order to move on to the next thing. So I love that they didn't leave you alone. And I really, really appreciate having the opportunity to talk about these things and to not feel a terribly corny about them even Teo Obrecht, thank you so much. This was so much fun. I'm really grateful to you. That was Teo Obrecht. The book is Sunrise. It's out available now published by Random House. In addition to our Patreon page, you can always visit our websites. The show's website is

57:34writersonwriting.com. Barbers is put on fire.com. Find this Marie Stone to ours in Marie.com. You can always subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform. As always, our fantastic music and sound design was provided by Travis Barrett. You can find more typewriter music on Spotify under just my type. That's all the time we have for today. Tune in next week. Thanks so much for joining me. Have a great day.