She thinks I approached her out of the blue. She thinks I wanted to interview her out of the kindness of my heart. The truth is this: ulterior motives.  I must confess that I’m interested in the convergence of several elements in her work (emphasis on several): exotic locale (China, in this case), the thematic rubbing up against each other of missionary zeal (whether secular missionary zeal as found in Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder or sacred missionary zeal which you’ll find in Virginia’s book) with contemporary mores, and the fact that both Virginia and I showed up a little later than usual on the publishing field, despite our lengthy, lengthy, lengthy histories in writing without an audience. And Virginia and I have the same publisher (Unbridled Books). She sounded pretty interesting to me!

A man tipped back his head and thrust a flaming stick into his open mouth. A blind charmer blew into his flute, and snakes stood upright like question marks. A giant swallowed a bucket of nails until his belly sagged under the groaning weight. Thick men clad in bright loincloths and boots circled, charged, and gripped oiled biceps, struggling to fell one another like massive, entwined oaks. Other sportsmen appeared to be flicking some sort of animal bone at a target with the goal of trying to knock yet more animal bones away while nearby an archery contest looked ready to commence. It all appeared good fun, this field day on the edge of a cliff. The Reverend felt he just might like to join in. But as he strode forward, the crowd parted and shuffled anxiously to keep out of his way.

Is it self-indulgent to quote myself? Probably. But do I get credit for being self-aware enough to acknowledge that I recognize this? I pose these questions because my job today is to riff in a most biased fashion on Wheatyard the debut novel by good friend Pete Anderson.

Which I will do now. Promise.

Debut novels are, by their nature, both self-indulgent and self-aware as well. Self-indulgent because who said that anyone has any right to assume anyone cares about anything writers have to say? And yet self-aware because without at least some level of self-awareness, all debut novels would tell the same story again and again–someone meets someone, someone leaves someone, someone’s family is fucked-up, someone finds redemption–but bring nothing new to the table. Or the Kindle if that’s your thing.

HOST (V.O.)

Eugene, Oregon!

Ext. Midday. Rain pummels a tiny little city while the homeless runaways with face tattoos still sit in the open on the corner outside of Voo Doo Donuts, demanding baked goods from passersby.

I was driving to Adelanto listening to some comedy radio show. There’s nothing in Adelanto. At least nothing anybody wants. Just a collection of old cracked streets and faded one-story businesses. The people on the radio show were asking the audience:  What would people find in your drawers if you died unexpectedly? Your closet? They weren’t interested in the collection of Christmas sweaters or the stacks of family albums—they were interested in the dirty things, the things you don’t want anybody to see or know about. The naked pictures. The sex toys. The raunchy.

The first time I had a full-blown episode of depression I was seven years old. I knew that this was odd, but I was used to oddity. My sister had taught me to read when I was two, so I had become a parlor trick prodigy, marched in and out of rooms at my elementary school and made to read aloud to the “big boys and girls.”  I had the vague uncomfortable sense that I was being used to shame these kids, so I tried to underplay my performance. In return I was petted, praised, invited to eat my lunch with the huge sixth graders and generally protected.

This story, I swear, has a happy ending.

I’ll start here, though it’s not the beginning: My father is banging on the wall with his cane.

It was ten a.m. and already the temperature was ninety-seven degrees. Waiting at a stop light in Scottsdale at a very affluent intersection, I could see the heat rising off the asphalt like a moiré. Arizona heat, even in its infant stages before the temperature hits one hundred degrees, is unforgivable. It makes you feel like a piece of meat about to be thrown on a grill. Even I was sweating, sitting in my air-conditioned car that hadn’t yet been able to recover from the hours it had been baking in the driveway since sunrise.  I had nothing to complain about, however, because directly across the street on the corner was a short man holding a giant sign for a shoe and luggage repair shop in the strip mall behind him. His head was tucked under the crook of one arm, trying desperately to shield himself from the relentless, white heat.

Well, Library Boy,  I’m surprised you had the stomach to show up for this, given the—well, maybe you should explain.  Anything you’d like to tell the readers about the person who wrote this book called The World’s Strongest Librarian?  Like, oh, I don’t know, about the librarian in Tennessee who can deadlift more than you can?

Like many writers, I have a complicated relationship with social networking. I’m a loner who loves people, an introvert who craves attention, an exhibitionist who isn’t always comfortable in public discourse. The Internet allows people like me to meet many of these needs without ever leaving the house. It sounds ideal, but there has always been a dark side to the ease of communication online. And I haven’t always been wise to its dangers.

Caroline Leavitt is silly and weird. I know this because I interviewed her here about her last novel, Pictures of You, but here I am again.  Is This Tomorrow is her second novel with Algonquin, the employees of which she refers to as “the gods and goddesses” of publishing. The novel centers on 1950s Jewish divorcée Ava Lark and her 12 year old son, Lewis, who move into an unwelcoming suburb, where Lewis quickly befriends the only two other fatherless kids on the block, Jimmy and Rose. But when Jimmy vanishes, Ava is targeted, Lewis grows up directionless, and Rose is convinced her brother is still alive. But what really happened that day, and should the truth of it really be told?

Thanks, Caroline for letting me pepper you with questions.

She came home to find him in her kitchen. She was in no mood, having spent the whole morning arguing with a lawyer, but there he was, her son’s best friend, Jimmy Rearson, a twelve- year-old kid home from school at three on a Wednesday afternoon with too-long hair and a crush on her, reading all the ingredients on the back of a Duncan Hines Lemon Supreme cake mix, tapping the box with a finger. “Adjust temperature for high altitudes,” he said, as if it really mattered. She felt a pang for him, a boy so lonely he feigned interest in how many eggs and how much sugar a cake might need. He leaned over unabashedly and turned on her radio, and there was Elvis crooning “Heartbreak Hotel,” the words splashing into the kitchen.

Short stories can be as satisfying to read as longer fiction, but I usually prefer them one at a time. Collections, for me, can be difficult to get through. I have to really like a writer’s voice to stick with it through story after story where the characters, settings and themes will likely change but the voice, probably, will not. That consistency of voice – necessary, pleasurable in a novel—can be relentless in a collection.

Your new book is titled not Do Animals Grieve? or A Few Big-Brained Mammals Grieve Once in a While but How Animals Grieve.  How come?

I wanted to telegraph what we now understand: a wide variety of animals mourn when a loved one dies. Scientists have known for years about elephants who stroke the bones of the dead, and chimpanzees who become greatly distressed at the body of a loved one.  And very recently, we’ve learned from up-close observations new details about how these big-brained mammals and others, like dolphins, grieve in the wild.

The warm-blooded saint
and the icy blue killer
met one day on
the path of dust.
They stole from each
other, vitality and
secrets—they embraced
In the null gray morning.