Cloud Cuckoo Land // 3.10.22
Transcript
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Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about reimagining life through creativity and community. Coming to you from Oakland California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
Twenty-two years ago, I sat down at a large rectangular table with fifteen other strangers to learn how to write stories. Our teacher was a 28-year-old named Tony, who’d been awarded a 1-year fellowship to teach at the University of Wisconsin, where I was a student.
But that first day of class, Tony wasn’t there. Our sub was Ron Kuka, the head of the department. Ron would become another very important teacher in my life, and I’ve talked about him in other episodes.
Ron calmly told us that Tony had gone to Mexico over winter break, and he’d just phoned to say that he might not be coming back. He was having such a great time hanging out on the beach that he was no longer sure he wanted to return to Wisconsin winter. Which was too bad, because Tony was a really great writer.
“You should think carefully before becoming a writer,” Ron went on in the same can’t-be-bothered tone. “Even if you’re very good, like Tony, the chances of getting published are small. The chances of making money are even worse. You’ll face rejection for the rest of your lives. You’ll be alone a lot, which is why so many writers throughout history have turned to drink. Or worse.”
“But if you still want to be a writer,” Ron said, brightening a little, “I’m happy to talk to any of you after class about the creative writing major. If you’re lucky, Tony might even come back from Mexico. We’ll just have to wait until next week to see what he decides.”
This was 22 years ago, so the details of this story have faded into the fabric of memory. I can’t remember if Tony really was in Mexico, or if that was all part of Ron’s storytelling magic to show us how conflict and tension could make you wonder what will happen next.
What I do remember is that I switched my major to creative writing that week. A lifetime of frustration, loneliness, and rejection? Sign me up!
Luckily for us, Tony did come back. That class was the best part of my week. Ron hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said Tony was a great writer. Partway through the semester he passed out copies of a short story he’d written called “The Shell Collector.” I’ll never forget the way the story gripped me, how every paragraph and line felt like an act of celebration, how it dropped me right into the fragile solitude of a blind man whose world was more vivid than anything my eyes could see.
It turned out that Tony was also a great teacher. He showed us how to treasure the act of revision, how our terrible first drafts needed to go up in flames so intriguing characters could resurrect from the ashes, how gems could be plucked and polished from the detritus of our sentences.
It was from Tony that I learned how to write a pitch letter, how to submit my work, how to recognize rejection as a signpost on the journey to becoming a writer. I still have the step-by-step guide he gave us titled, “7 Steps to Submitting—or 7 Steps to Depression.”
But the most important thing I learned from Tony was not just how to be a writer, but the kind of writer I wanted to become. And that kind of writer, it turned out, was him.
When my classmates and I turned in stories of thinly veiled memoir with stilted dialogue and mundane plot points, Tony’s feedback was honest, but never unkind. He emphasized craft over giftedness, work ethic over natural talent. We knew our stories were terrible, and yet we felt in his presence a hope that we could become great. He treated us as fellow writers who just happened to be at a different place on the path.
It was clear that he was going places—but he was never showy about his success. That short story he gave us to read was the title story of his debut book, “The Shell Collector,” which was published a year later in 2002.
We knew that Tony was good, and we loved him because he was our teacher, but many years would pass before we understood just how lucky we’d been to learn from him. That he’d go on to become a bestselling author, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a favorite on President Barack Obama’s reading list, a National Book Awards finalist, or that he would win a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Story Prize, the Rome Prize, multiple O. Henry prizes, and so many other awards and honors that I’d be talking for a very long time if I recounted them all here.
If you haven’t guessed it by now, Tony is Anthony, as in Anthony Doerr, whose book Cloud Cuckoo Land came out this past September, and whose Pulitzer-prize winning novel, All The Light We Cannot See, is now being made into a limited series on Netflix.
I rarely reread books—with so many great books I still haven’t read, who has time?—but I’ve read most of Tony’s books multiple times, not just to be inspired, or to enjoy a good story, but to remind myself of the kind of writer I hope to become. On both a story and a sentence level, there is the sense that you are glimpsing rare magic. There are echoes of heaven in his prose, the stirrings of a longing too deep to name. If we could go back to the Garden of Eden and watch it all unfold, I imagine it would feel something like reading Anthony Doerr.
For 22 years, Tony has been the author I recommend to everyone I know. I’ll say it again now: if you’re looking for a great book to read, pick up any of the six that Tony has written. You can thank me later.
The people who don’t take that recommendation are usually the same people who tell me that they don’t read fiction because it’s not useful.
That comment used to really rile me up, and send me on a rant about how great fiction is the truest writing of all—and I haven’t wavered in my conviction that fiction is essential—but the older and busier I get, the more I can understand why so many grownups don’t give themselves permission to read it. I find myself not reading fiction as much as I’d like to because there’s so much in my life or work that feels more urgent. So I asked Tony how he responds when people tell him fiction isn’t useful.
Tony: There's a great paradox that the path to the stars is through the glitter on the pavement.
Laura: The path to the stars is through the glitter on the pavement.
Tony: The way to understand the universe is to study the journey of one person, Laura Joyce Davis, as she moves through the world. And somehow by rendering the idiosyncratic, utterly unique path that she makes through life, you can draw generalizations that make you feel less alone.
Life is full of generalizations and universal things. One of the failures in a lot of science communication around the pandemic or around vaccines is that it's statistics based, and humans aren't equipped—we just didn't evolve to absorb and filter through all those layers of self into the emotions. What does it mean to be alive during a pandemic? The only way to answer those questions is to tunnel down into the specific experiences of one person. The best way to do that, I think, is through storytelling, by training our imagination to understand that other people are going through similar things as us. And those people on the surface could look entirely disconnected from us. That’s what fiction can do. It could be somebody who lived 400 years ago. It could be somebody who lives in New Guinea. It could be somebody who lives in the future. Somebody whose skin color is totally different than ours. And
fiction is the best way to train our imagination to understand the journeys of other people.
Often with fiction, the argument tends to be, “let me make some economic and useful arguments for why they're important,” so I'll make those, but there are also aesthetic arguments that should be lifted out of the frame of capitalism to answer the question.
I just listened to the productivity episode. You’re amazing. Like I feel so similarly about all that stuff. We can talk about that if you want.
Laura: The productivity episode Tony’s referring to is an episode we released right before the New Year called “Productivity Unhacked,” where we examined the idea that all of our activities need to be useful and goal-oriented to be worthwhile.
Tony: The whole idea that everything we do—even rest—has to somehow pay off for us—rest will make you a better worker in the end. Let's have our nap pods. That whole argument's a little odd. Even if you can't measure it on some efficiency scale, who cares if fiction isn't useful? You know, it's joyful.
Laura: For the joy of it might be my favorite reason of all to read fiction. It’s how I feel when I read Tony’s books. Way back in season 1, in the episode called “One Month In,” I quoted another former teacher of mine, Victor LaValle, saying that “fame doesn’t change who you are; it amplifies who you always were.” Victor deserves an episode of his own, and maybe we’ll get to that. But that quote has stuck with me.
I’ve been telling Tony for the better part of 22 years that he’s who I want to be when I grow up, because Tony isn’t just a fantastic writer. He’s a fantastic human being.
When Tony and I spoke in January, he was just as kind and warm and generous as he was in that first class 22 years ago. Fame hadn’t changed him or made him arrogant. When we spoke in January, Tony was getting ready for a big event, where he’d been asked to get up on stage and speak to a huge audience. It was the first event like that he’d done since before the pandemic.
While I’ll stand by my opinion that Tony’s writing is divinely inspired, Tony himself is quick to point to his humanity.
Tony: yeah, , the real Tony Doerr story, Laura is there's a lot of anxiety hidden in there, like what do people expect me to be? They expect me to be like “Anthony” on stage. If you're a songwriter, you get to go up there and play your album that everybody just listened to. And here you've got to be something else. You write a talk that isn't your book. You're expected—and especially as a fiction writer, to be a kind of performer on stage with skills that are utterly different than your ability to perform on the page.
And also there's a real longing to please everybody that maybe isn't the most helpful and healthy thing. I've heard you explore that yourself, and that perfectionism thing that you talked about in your productivity episode. For sure that's a thing I struggle with too.
Laura: Even when he was starting to get his work published, Tony never could have imagined where life would take him.
Tony: I often felt really insecure about being a dilettante and too many things. I mean, I could just so relate to everything you were saying about being a kid. I was also the third sibling. I was also like, oh, I'm kind of interested in a lot of stuff. When I got to college, I wanted to take every course in the college course catalog. I took Russian and constitutional law and astronomy and nutrition, and I felt like a real person would settle down and get serious about one thing.
Thankfully, I think because I was the third, my parents were just a little tired. I think they were okay letting me just write stories and write for the newspaper and not really have an answer about, like, what are you going to do next?
I've always had this sense that life is short. I lost a good high school friend—I lost him in college—and then a good house painting buddy, who died his first year of college. And maybe that was it. It just felt like, oh my gosh, I'm going to see as much as I can because you never know when life could be snatched from you. I was just determined to be outside as much as I could. And so after college I worked in a fish packing plant and then I went to New Zealand and I worked on a sheep farm. I was at cook in Telluride for a while. And I fell in love with short stories backpacking through New Zealand in between working on this sheep farm, and I carried this book called The Story and Its Writer. It was like a ridiculous book to carry backpacking because it's like 1800 pages, and it's alphabetical. It's like Chinua Achebe to Richard Wright. And it was just this masterclass in studying the range in form of what's available in a short story.
Laura: That book, The Story and Its Writer, was the required textbook for Tony's class, and it's still on my shelf all these years later. It's a collection that I've come back to often over the years, that I've even hefted on a few trips of my own, each time aspiring to get through the entire thing the way Tony did.
Tony: Because you can read a story usually in a single sitting, there's a real emotional impact to them that doesn't exist necessarily in novels.
I love long-form narratives. There's something really intellectually and emotionally fascinating to me about that short form. All that time I knew I was the only one of my friends, like, kind of reading and writing in the background, kind of secretly all the time. I thought maybe that was something I secretly wanted to try, but like you know so well, there's no like magic key to some kingdom. You can't go get a degree, like an MFA degree, and suddenly you're allowed to practice, suddenly you're official, like you get hired as a writer. So I've just always had this kind of imposter syndrome. Maybe that's the real story.
Laura: It was during those years of traveling and learning what it meant to call himself a writer that Tony wrote the short story that he gave to my college creative writing class—and the seven other stories of his debut book, a short story collection called The Shell Collector. All these years later, The Shell Collector is still one of my favorites. It's rare that I meet anyone who isn't captured by its magic.
Tony: And so in The Shell Collector, I just wanted to see if I could go around the world, like move to these places I had traveled and tell stories that take place in Lithuania and Kenya and in Montana, and all these places that I was kind of falling in love with in my twenties. Each of them was a hymn to nature at the same time, trying to slow down and use language to translate this big untranslatable thing that is the world out there.
Then there's all this commercial pressure on you to write a novel. And I'm like, “well, that's a natural thing a person does.”
Laura: Two years after The Shell Collector was published, Tony published his first novel, About Grace—
Tony: —about this hydrologist, this guy who studies snow, who has these dreams very occasionally in life that end up coming true, so there is an element of magic. The seed is this guy, Wilson Bentley, who took pictures of snow. He was one of the first people to ever put a snowflake and take a film photograph of it. And it's so unbelievably complicated because there's heat coming from the lamp. He died of pneumonia while trying to take pictures of snowflakes. He's this Vermont farmer. All his neighbors thought he was utterly crazy, but here he was just chasing beauty, really, just trying to preserve these such ephemeral things of snow crystals and take photographs of them.
Then I got lucky enough, we won this prize to go to Rome, Italy, with these brand new twins. On the day my wife gave birth, we found out about this fellowship, and they sent us to Rome for a year with these brand new babies. I was supposed to be working on All The Light We Cannot See there, but I got so into Rome, just overwhelmed, that this daily journal that I keep that's usually just a couple of paragraphs about what I'm reading or something, just started to fill page after page of Rome and all the stuff I was learning and seeing. I never lived in that big of a city before, or that old of a city before. And there's stories on every street corner, and layers that you can unpack for the rest of your life. “One life is not enough” is what they say about Rome. So I just accidentally really wrote through my notebooks, this little book about our year there.
Laura: That little book he wrote is a memoir called Four Seasons in Rome. It's A delightful contemplation on writing, parenting, and life, a love letter to Rome.
While Tony was working on All The Light We Cannot See, he found his way back to his love for the short story in a collection called Memory Wall, that came out in 2010 . . .
Tony: . . . a series of stories all around memory. My grandmother came to live with us when I was 14 and when she was diagnosed with a disease called Alzheimer's disease that I had never heard of, all I knew it was that I watched this thing kind of eat my grandmother’s self over the course of my high school career. Of course, I was too self-absorbed really to understand the pain my mom and dad were going through and that my grandmother was going through when she'd have these little surfaces of awareness.
So in my thirties and forties, I started to kind of think through like, what does memory mean? Everything that comprises ourself depends on us being able to remember who we are.
Laura: Seven more years would pass before Tony would publish another book, one that would change his life forever. Because this is the funny thing about success: Tony's writing had been critically acclaimed for more than a decade. He'd published in top magazines like The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review. He'd won coveted literary awards that writers dream of. All The Light We Cannot See took him 10 years to complete, and when it topped The New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for months, Anthony Doerr suddenly became famous. But All The Light was his fifth book.
Tony: I get a sense of what it might be like to be a parent with one very famous child, because everybody just thinks that's your only child. Like, “oh, All the Light,” or a lot of people are like, “oh, Cloud Cuckoo Land, his second book.” And I'm like, “well, it's actually my sixth book.” It does really tie into what we were talking about with success. For me, success is trying to execute your vision on the page and maybe finishing it. That's the biggest success.
Laura: One of the most helpful lessons I've ever learned came in a season that looked a lot like Tony's early years as a writer. I’d lost several people close to me in quick succession, and I was struggling to find my path as a writer. The lesson I learned was this: the thing that I thought was my weakness, was actually a strength that I could develop, the perspective on the world that was unique to me. For me, that weakness-turned-superpower was my capacity for feeling, an emotional tank that could fill up and sink me into depression—but that could also lend me empathy and understanding for just about anyone I meet.
For Tony, it was that insecurity that he was a dilettante, that ability to relentlessly follow his many interests that developed the skills that would make him a master storyteller and a highly skilled researcher with a seemingly endless well of material.
One of the things I appreciate most about Tony's writing is that he can resurrect gorgeous stories from histories that I didn't even know I was interested in. That's what great writing can do. It can take us places that we didn't know we wanted to go. It can make our world bigger.
While Tony was researching and writing All the Light We Cannot See, he kept coming across accounts of walls, whole histories that felt eerily familiar.
Tony: A lot of it is set in this town called Saint-Milo in Brittany, France, this little walled medieval town that played a kind of significant role in the summer of 1944 in the invasion by primarily American, but also British and Canadian troops, and the allies stormed through Normandy and then Brittany and entered Paris. There's about a kilometer and a half of walls and they formed part of Hitler's vast, insane, crazy, tyrannical project to build something called the Atlantic wall, which is like all the way down, it goes from Norway, Denmark, all the way to the Franco-Spanish border. It's like 2000 kilometers of fortifications.
Crazy megalomaniacs apparently like to build walls.
Texts that talked about the history of walls and medieval walls—not all of them, but many of them—have mentioned the walls of Constantinople.
I just found a 15th century drawing on the walls of Constantinople. I knew nothing about Constantinople or really Istanbul. I just knew that we didn't get taught that in school. Western civilization in my high school, we got to the end of the Roman empire, and then we just zoomed forward like 1100 years into the Renaissance. And the implication was, “oh nothing happened. It was the dark ages, the middle ages, whatever, and who cares?” And I love to use my work as a way to try to rectify one of my 10 million ignorances about everything. So I just was like, I want to learn more about these walls. There was something kind of subconscious that appealed to me about that.
I had finished All the Light in 2014, starting to read a lot about walls right as a presidential candidate is walking around the United States leading crowds in chants of “build that wall.”
There's something really emotional about walls too. Popular historians have argued—and they could be wrong—that walls really helped enable the rise of private property, inequality, even the patriarchy . . . this idea that as soon as you build this new technology of walls, you can head out to other walled cities, steal their stuff, and accumulate wealth. And then you worry about what happens to that wealth when you die. So you build the patriarchy to pass that down to the next generation. Some of that might be a little exaggerated, but there's something in there that's interesting to me too.
Laura: He began exploring not just literal walls, but metaphorical ones, and behind those walls were the questions that echo throughout all of his work, questions you've heard us ask here on Shelter in Place, too: what does it mean to live well when the world is broken? When our walls are crumbling faster than we can rebuild them? When the technology that connects us instead leaves us feeling alone?
Tony: All the Light was a story about radio and this new disruptive technology that can arrive—that did arrive—and can pass through walls, and carry voices into the living rooms of people, It really changed the way the truth, what the truth was in the early 20th century. And nobody was better at exploiting that than the Third Reich.
So as I started reading about the walls of Constantanople, I realize there's another huge, new, disruptive technology—gunpowder—that arrives in the 15th century, that can travel through walls. And you know, it's always young people who notice the power of new technologies. And there's this young Ottoman Sultan named Mehmed the second, and he's 19, and he orders these enormous guns to be built and dragged to the walls of Constantinople, which has stood for 1100 years. They've withstood 23 sieges successfully, and they've allowed the city to accumulate insane wealth. There's like acres upon acres of gold vaulting in the ceiling of the Hagia Sophia. And there's also libraries. There's real manuscript wealth in this city as copies of Sophocles and Escalas and Sappho have decayed all over north Africa and Europe, these last final copies are preserved being copied every a hundred years or so by monks or nuns inside the city of Constantinople.
So here comes these big cannons, psychological physical weapons. There's a book culture that is about to spill out of these ruptured walls into Europe and sow the seeds of the Renaissance. The printing press and the compass are kind of all arriving around at the exact same time. So there's this whole new world of technology kind of opening up.
And so I started to think, what other times saw massive disruptive technologies arrive and really change existing power structures? And so immediately I settled on now.
The rapid change between your and my childhood and our kids' childhoods with these devices in their hands is so overwhelming—the way the pandemic accelerated some of that, the way they were able in a positive way to play video games and communicate with their friends during the pandemics as if they were in the same room.
So I was really grateful for some of those technologies. But also, would I have become a writer if I had every movie ever made in my pocket sitting there in my bedroom? I don't know. A lot of playing around with language and reading came because I had nothing else to do.
So I worry about all that stuff. So I just wanted to explore some of that.
And of course, climate change is a great accelerator of a lot of this stuff, the chaos that will continue to arrive in our communities, whether it's wildfire smoke or floods or fires or tornadoes or cold snaps or heat waves, all of these things that will challenge cities around the world in the decades to come, I feel like that's a real pressure. So I wanted to explore that.
Laura: This past September, Tony published his sixth book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, a novel that follows five characters in the past, present, and future.
Tony: So I start with those two characters, Anna, a girl inside the walls and Omeir, this boy outside the walls who has a real affinity for animals. I have two characters in the present—Zeno, this older translator and Seymour, this really sensitive kid who is really upset about the ravages of the natural world. And then I've got a girl in the future. Her name is Konstance. And each of them finds this book that Anna saves from the wounds of a moldering old library in Constantinople.
Laura: Last year, we called our season two of Shelter in Place “Pandemic Odyssey” because as we were making episodes, our family was traveling from California to Massachusetts and back again, trying to find our way home.
We've called season three of Shelter in Place “In Search of Home,” because even though we're back in our physical home, we've often felt a sense of displacement.
The Odyssey is a book that Tony has thought a lot about too. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a book full of characters on their own Odysseys in search of home. They grapple with the same central question that we do: how can we live well in a world that we know is not right?
Tony: There's this theme of nostos, which is this Greek word meaning homecoming, really. It's the root of our English word “nostalgia.” So I'm playing with nostos a lot. It's really the story of The Odyssey, the great circular archetypal pattern of you leave home, you have adventures, you returned changed.
And I'm playing with that throughout the—really the novel’s kind of a series of circles inside circles inside circles. And each of the characters reads this book called Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is sort of a silly fool’s journey version of that same quest for home.
I think my journey has been trying to accept things about myself and about the world around me. And Cloud Cuckoo Land, in Greek mythology in Aristophanes's 2,400 years ago, he writes this play about these two idiots who decided to leave Athens and form a better place in the sky with the help of the birds. They call it Νεϕελοκοκκυγία and there'll be a place with no more restrictions and everybody will be free. And of course once they build it, like all utopian narratives, it doesn't quite work out to be the utopia they think it will be.
But I think we've been taught a lot by advertising and capitalism and culture to look for other things to bring us happiness. You know, if you can just get to Bora Bora, you'll be happy. If you can just buy this luxury handbag, happiness will arrive. And often we're urged go on that journey—usually a journey of consumption—and you'll reach Cloud Cuckoo Land. And I think what I'm trying to understand in this book, the ultimate path of each of the five characters, is this place that we have in this moment that we're alive is as good as it's going to get. You and I are as young as we're ever going to be right now. And this world is as whole as it's ever going to be.
Laura: One of the enduring themes of Shelter in Place that we've explored often is escaping not out of life, but into it. Don't get me wrong. I feel that desire to escape off to some Cloud Cuckoo Land often but I think Tony's right. Contentment isn't somewhere else. It's something we have to find right here—even when that task feels hopeless or impossible,
Tony: All my work, I think, is in some way a kind of a hymn of praise to this pulsing, staggering, clattering thing that is the world out there.
And I wanted to show each of these characters go on this journey of acceptance, where each of them dreams of a kind of Cloud Cuckoo Land, and then comes to an acceptance. They have to kind of accept home. And I hope the reader’s journey is that there is not going to be some other planet that humans get to travel to that’ll be an untrammeled wilderness so we can start over again. This is it. And these little small acts of stewardship and care that we can make for each other and for the planet and for stories—those are going to help us and help our grandkids feel more at home here.
Laura: Our search for home here at Shelter in Place has been personal, but it's been global, too. Like Tony, we're thinking about what it means that our home in California now has a fire season, that the engine of capitalism has us hurtling toward more consumption at the expense of others.
Tony: The planet is undergoing twin crises, and one doesn't get talked about enough and that's the biodiversity crisis. We're losing so many wild creatures, many of which we haven't even identified, especially in the deep water oceans. We're losing dozens and dozens of species every day that we didn't even really know they were there.
It ties in with the themes of connection. We cannot exist as the only species on the planet. The whole idea is totally absurd. Americans in particular gets stuck in this idea of individualism, like the male cowboy out of the rage, you know, alone with his cattle, but that's ridiculous. There's this vast life support system that sustains us on this planet. We are the natural world. We're always interacting with it—whether or not we want to believe we are not.
Technology often seals us off from that. We have these slick little devices that we're communicating on right now, that seem like almost as if we're communicating via magic. And those conveniences can sometimes really obscure the infrastructure that's needed to support this, the energy that’s running some servers so that you and I can have this conversation.
So my fear is that we continue to feel more and more disconnected from the world around us and forget that the loss of whatever 18 different species of bugs in Australia this year. We think, “well, that's not going to affect us,” but the world needs this really rich, totally deeply interwoven fabric of all these living creatures, working and supporting each other for us to survive. And to keep plucking them out and think the whole fabric of this whole mosaic isn't going to fall apart is a little worrisome. I'm definitely afraid about that.
Laura: But this is what I love about Tony and about his writing too. He's real about the challenges we face. He's not advocating for a quest to utopia. He doesn't deny the world's brokenness, but he chooses hope. Anyway,
Tony: Yeah, I've got a lot of hopes for this world. I think renewables, even as recently as like five or six years ago, the story of the path out of this carbon-based lifestyle was that “it's going to be painful. It's going to suck when we get rid of all these awesome things like gas-powered air conditioning and sports cars,” or whatever—whatever people love, you know, air travel. But renewables have become so inexpensive that it's actually much cheaper right now for us to invest wholeheartedly in them than deal with not only the cost of burning gas to move stuff around the planet, but also all of the cost of the damages that's going to cost us later.
One of my biggest hopes is that we can make that transition. It seems to be happening a lot more quickly than anybody expected. And that maybe there is this kind of Cloud Cuckoo Land-ish world in which we can still keep our homes cool and warm, and we can still move around with some ease. Maybe a little less activity on the planet is a good thing, but maybe we can still move around a little bit and visit each other without costing as much pain to our kids and our grandkids as we're doing right now.
Laura: Many years ago when I published my very first story, I reached out to Tony to share the news. Even before I'd finished the email, I was plagued by self-doubt. “It's just a small journal,” I told him. I'm sure it's not that big of a deal.
He wrote me back: “I'm thrilled for you. And I completely understand about the self-doubt. Pretty soon, no magazine will seem big enough to you, I promise. Just keep writing new pieces and enjoy the fact that you'll be finding readers who are strangers.”
I've always remembered that advice. I thought about it often in those early days of Shelter in Place when it was a delight, just to be writing new pieces, and occasionally—on the very good days—hearing from strangers who had resonated with what I was making. I asked him if after everything he's accomplished, he still faces rejection or imposter syndrome or compares himself to others (the pitfalls I've most often fallen into).
Tony: Oh, absolutely. All the praise slides off immediately because you know it's false—deep in your soul, your corroded soul, you know they're wrong about all that.
The competitive stuff, I don't have as much. Like, Hanya Yanagihara, she's an amazing writer and a friend. And I'm just genuinely just so pumped for her that her new book is out. She's so cool. Like, I hope she wins every prize and gets every amazing review.
That stuff doesn't affect me as much as a bad review, because when somebody articulates something about your work, that's negative, it almost always sticks for me because I'm like, they're right. They articulated one of my insecurities.
I'm kind of lucky that I got started at a time when the publicist cut out the stuff from papers and magazines and mailed it to you and I didn't grow up with this thing that I saw worried about young people, where you have instant feedback on everything. I've posted a picture of myself on the internet, which kids are doing all the time. And then you're getting feedback on your own appearance. Like that's whack! Companies are making tons of money off that. Of course, you're going to go check to see if people are putting a heart on your appearance or gauging how you look. So I'm grateful that I had kind of built my neural pathways before that whole thing got built. But especially when the book is first out, I Google Cloud Cuckoo Land and see what's going on. And it had, like the cover on The New York Times book review. It had some really nice reviews, but there was a bad review in The Washington Post. And that came out the day of my first in-person event in Seattle. And I was already way more scared of COVID than I realized in the airport. It was my first time moving through airports. I was wearing a double mask, so it's like hard for me to breathe. And I read like the first two sentences or something and I closed it—but that was like near panic attack level. And I'm like, “well, you're an idiot. Like why are you letting that get in your head?”
But I'm almost 50 now. And even now I still have that vulnerability. And so you just have to say, when am I strong enough to take this in? Probably never. And that's okay. A good bad review can help you get better, but you have to be so strong and able to kind of deal with that. And it's so easy for people to just vent anger on the Internet that for the most part,
it's just much healthier to remember joy in life doesn't really ever come from the Internet. It comes from, like, going outside and throwing the ball around with your kids, trudging through the snow.
Laura: One of the questions that we ask often, both in episodes and in the teaching and training we do is why create, I asked Tony why he creates and if his answer to that question has changed over time.
Tony: I think at the beginning, a lot of it comes from death anxiety. Like just trying to make something that won't get erased because you're so afraid of getting erased.
Maybe the biggest and hardest thing for each of us to accept is that we're going to die. And that's scary. It's so scary. We're here for such an incredibly short amount of time. It’s only natural to want to make your mark on this place—especially when you start to understand everything gets erased. It's such an exception that anything lasts at all. If you just pick up a fossil of a brachiopod from 250 billion years ago, and you’re like, how did this one animal get preserved when all the others are lost? All of these lives are just always being built and erased and rebuilt into something else.
And yet is that super beautiful? If you can start to try to accept it, to be a tiny little ribbon in this humongous cycle of destruction and creation—isn’t that kind of a beautiful thing? I don't know if that means I'm going to be really terrified on my death bed or not, but I try at least consciously to think about that every once in a while.
Now I think I understand I might be creating because I just want to sing blessings of all these things I see around me, this brilliant energy you feel when you step outside on, say, a winter day, and there's glitter in the snow. And you're like, oh, it's back. That feeling of like, look at this place! Look at the frost on the window right now. I get to see that!
All that's made sweet because we're going to die. You know, the pressure of our mortality is what increases that sweetness tenfold. So I think now I'm just making the things as a practice to try to appreciate all the blessings of being here. I think that's why I create.
Laura: If you look back at Tony's earliest writing, it's clear that he's been grappling with these questions for a very long time. I asked Tony, if there was anything that he wishes that he could tell that younger version of himself that he knows now that he wishes he'd known, then
Tony: Make sure you get outside of your day. Make sure you try to keep a few good friends close to you. When you have kids, try not to lose your friendships, because you know, especially with twins—but as you know, with three kids—it's pretty easy to get so busy during the day, that just getting them fed and into bed is enough.
And now that they're seniors in high school, I'm starting to see that some of my friends have been better about cultivating them and I have. And often like somebody’s drinking. I'm like, “well, I can't go. ‘Cause I gotta work. I gotta think clearly tomorrow.” You know, I would make these lists, like every day, you're gonna make sure you open a file on your computer for four hours, and don't allow yourself to read or eat a doughnut until you've finished that work. And sometimes, you know, that discipline can serve you. But sometimes it kind of makes you a boring and frustrated person a little bit.
There's so much to learn from Shauna. And this is a generalization, but women's friendships seem to actually talk about what's going on in their lives a little more. So I would say, use my wife more as an example of how to be present, and to live with a little bit of clutter if a friend comes over. You can postpone all these things you wanted to get done and actually look that person in the eye and ask her how she's doing.
I hope I'm kind of entering a little less anxious phase in terms of working, where I think instead of worrying so much about will anybody like this, maybe I can just take pleasure in the making of it. And know that, you know, if I ever managed to finish it, that's okay. But if I don't, I'm going to survive, because I have a strong marriage and I have friendships and I have a good practice in my day on how to get outside and try to stay a little bit healthy, and forgive myself if I don't get in a walk or run at the end of the day. And I've learned a lot. You know, I used to be so hard on myself. I'm like, I'm going to watch a movie tonight or something that I should be reading some Tolstoy. That'll make me a better writer. But now it's okay. Sometimes it's just say like, I'm just going to watch a show tonight. I'm tired. That's okay.
Laura: I think about this advice every time I find myself working late into the evening. I'm in a season of life where that happens more often than I’d like. But I'm also in a time where I'm more aware than ever of how those little moments of connection can make all the difference.
The other day I surprised my kids when I started jumping on the trampoline without them, which delighted my five-year-old Mattéa. Or when my daughter Grace asked me if she could join me when I was finally sneaking out for a run. I reluctantly said yes, only to realize that those 15 minutes plodding down the sidewalk were the best connection that we'd had all week. The moments lying next to my son on his bunk bed, listening in the dark to the dreams that he never seems to speak in the daylight.
I realized that maybe Cloud Cuckoo Land isn't somewhere else. Maybe it's in these moments where we can stop long enough to sing our own hymns to nature, to speak blessings on the people around us.
Tony was my teacher 22 years ago for a single semester. But over the years, he's guided me at key moments as I've wrestled with that why create question myself. Sometimes years would pass before something would prompt me to reach out, and each time I was sure he wouldn't remember me or that he got into famous to write me back. Each time he proved me wrong and gave me some encouragement that kept me writing, even though that journey had been every bit as full of rejection and self doubt as predicted.
In the fall of 2019, when I was just beginning to learn about podcasting and coming out of nearly 20 years of feeling like I had gotten close, but never quite reached my goals of making it as a fiction writer, I reached out once again when my writing group decided to meet up in Boise for a week. That weekend, Tony and I went for a hike in the Boise foothills. I told Tony about the agents and editors who had liked my work, but not enough to take it on, about the two decades where I'd had some big successes, but never a book deal. He said, “well, I believe in you, Laura.” And I knew he meant it, which meant everything.
So I asked him if he had any advice for me now in this very different season of life that neither of us could have imagined back in that first creative writing workshop.
Tony: Oh, just that you're doing such a great job, Laura, and I'm so happy for you. I know that you're putting so much pressure on yourself in 80 different realms, and you're making this super cool thing. You've gone on this adventure. You've made this really complex transition, which is so unbelievably pinned to the moment of the pandemic—like March of 2020, you start this new adventure. And if you weigh it by, like, do I have 10 million listeners by a certain date—that kind of thinking, which we're trained to think about our whole upbringing—those kinds of metrics of measuring success always lead to unhappiness because you just always want more. Like who's landmarks are those? Those things are changing so fast. And if you get too attached to them you just kind of set yourself up for unhappiness. And then just remember that maybe the next episode you make will reach one person and really, really affect her. Or if you want to use those other metrics, maybe it'll reach Barack Obama and he'll tweet about it or something. You just never know. But you've got to make the stuff to make it for the joy and the exploration of making it, and detach yourself as much as you can from results.
If there's a way to just say, “every day I explored and asked some questions and got tired, and was as kind as I could be to people, but I also got grouchy at one point. That's okay.” I don't always live up to that and can be quite hard on myself. I'm like, I didn't work today. Oh, Christmas break passed and I'm barely wrote anything. But to try to say, you know, each time you get a chance to talk to somebody through the podcast, you have this amazing opportunity to learn something and feel a little bit less alone. And that's pretty cool.
And just look at this thing you built, like you're doing good. And all these questions you're asking yourself and the whole Kasama thing. Like that's just cool. It's really cool. You're making a difference in all these young podcasters’ lives, and you're spreading really important stories. That's really beautiful.”
Laura: I asked Tony to read a short section from Cloud Cuckoo Land. It's a scene that happens late in the book and what you need to know going in is that it takes place in a rural ramshackle library and the mountains of Idaho. And the main character in this scene is Zeno, a Korean war vet in his eighties who's helping five fifth graders put on a play of cloud cuckoo land, an ancient Greek text by an unknown author who supposedly wrote the story to keep his dying niece alive.
Tony: He should have told Rex he loved him. He should have told him at camp five. He should have told him in London, he should have told Hillary, and Mrs. Boydstun, and every valley county woman he went on a miserable date with.
He should have risked more. It had taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years is enough. In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you're this age, you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.
Rachel flaps her hand, whispers “Stop,” and fans the pages of her script. “Mr. Ninis? The two really messed up folios, the one with the wild onions, and the dancing? I think we have them in the wrong place. Those don't happen in Cloud Cuckoo Land — they happen back in Arkadia.”
“What,” says, Alex, “are you talking about?”
“Quietly,” whispers Zeno. “Please.”
“It's the niece,” whispers Rachel. “We're forgetting about the niece. If what really matters like Mr. Ninis said, is that the story gets passed on— that it was sent in pieces to a dying girl far away—why would Aethon choose to stay up in the stars and live forever?”
Olivia-the-goddess crouches beside Rachel in her sequined dress. “Aethon doesn't read to the end of the book?”
“That's how he writes his story on the tablets,” says Rachel. “How they get buried in the tomb with him. Because he doesn't stay in cloud cuckoo land. He chooses . . . what's the word, Mr. Ninis?”
The beating of hearts, the blinking of eyes. Zeno sees himself walk out onto the frozen lake. He sees Rex in the rainy light of the tea room, one hand trembling over his saucer. The children gaze down at your scripts.
“You mean,” says Alex, “Aethon goes home.”
Laura: Before Cloud Cuckoo Land was published, Tony's publisher sent an ARC—an advanced reader copy—to booksellers, librarians, and a few select readers, including me. In the front of the ARC, Tony included a handwritten note that says this:
“I tried to pour all of my love for our astonishing, green, wounded world into this novel. There are children here, and teachers, and libraries large and small, and two broken oxen, and a great grey owl—but primarily, this is a book about our planet, in itself a vast library—and the stories that connect us.”
Finishing Cloud Cuckoo Land felt a lot like snapping the final pieces of a complicated jigsaw puzzle into place. Except that when I finished , I did something I've never done before. I immediately flipped back to the first page and started reading again because that's what great fiction can do. It can bring us so far inside the stories of people we've never met
People from 400 years ago, or even from the future and somehow bringing to life, what statistics and dates never can. It can make us feel more connected and less alone. It's the best kind of escape I know. Not out of life, but deeper into it. I hope you've enjoyed this conversation with Anthony Doerr as much as I did. And I hope you'll head to your local library or bookstore and pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land or one of the other five wonderful books that Tony has written. I'd love to hear what you think of them.
I'll include links to all of them in our show notes for today and the main. Here's to our astonishing green wounded world and the stories that connect us.
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What you heard in this episode was an edited version of a much longer conversation between Tony and me. As a monthly supporter, you’ll get access to the unedited conversation.
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As always, if you listen to the very end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our little easter egg to thank you for sticking around. But first, I want to share with you another literary-minded podcast that I love, Wild Precious Life. Here’s what it sounds like.
// Wild Precious Life trailer //
End Credits:
The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Melissa Lent is our project manager, Sarah Edgell is our design director, Nate Davis is our creative director, and as always, I’m your host and executive producer.
Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.
And now if you’re still listening, here’s a little outtake.
OUTTAKE
Tony: I’m always shocked that anyone wants to read anything I’ve written. I'm like, well, I don't know. I'm just making stuff alone at my standup desk here in Idaho. You know, I always feel like any minute the calls is going to come and they'll be like, “actually, those awards are supposed to go to Rachel Cusk, and you've lost out,” and I'll be like, “yeah, that's right. That's absolutely what should happen.”