Richard Russo

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, two short story collections, and the memoir Elsewhere. His novel Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002. His new collection of essays, the Destiny Thief, comes out in May. Thanks for coming in.

Richard Russo:

Great to be here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting that I have this book of your essays in my hand because I had just finished a book of essays that I believe were by Neil Gaiman and really an interesting, I guess look over his life as a writer because he had done some reviews, he had done some pieces for other people's books, and yours was actually an interesting kind of time capsule of your life as well, but in a slightly different way.

Richard Russo:

Yeah, yeah, I haven't read the Gaiman, but there are a fair number of books that are coming out right now with writers who are maybe not quite as long in the tooth as I am, but writers who have been writing for a while. So there's the Neil Gaiman and Ann Patchett had a wonderful book of essays. This is the story of a happy marriage that came out a few years ago. And now Laurie Moore had a book that just came out, I think this week or last week too, that looks at her life as a fiction writer but also as an essayist and book reviewer. And it's getting a lot of attention too. So there's something in the water, I guess, that's causing writers who have been at it for a while to take a step back and, you know, try to try to figure out if there has been some sort of. Some sort of pattern. And of course, that's. This book is called the Destiny Thief. And it's really about that. As I look back on my life as a writer, it just seems also, just so incredibly improbable, all of it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So the Destiny Thief, when you wrote about that, you were kind of contrasting your life with the right of another. The life of another individual who was also a writer. And at least in theory at the time, it seemed like might be the one who had the success. And you were known as the one who's gonna be the teacher.

Richard Russo:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And then somehow something shifted and you had this success as a writer.

Richard Russo:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And I believe something about. He called you up to apologize for a drunk dial one night, and you said, well, thank you for your apology, but you didn't drunk dial me.

Richard Russo:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me a bit about that.

Richard Russo:

Well, there was this. I gave him a fictional. I gave him a fictional name because I didn't want him to be embarrassed by anything that I might be recounting in this particular essay. But I remember, I mean, I was at that point we were both students at the University of Arizona taking a workshop class together. But I was almost finished with my PhD and I had only discovered then, at pushing 30, that I thought. Thought I might want to be a writer. And I expected the director of creative writing. When I told him I was interested, I expected him to put me in this graduate level writing workshop. There was a very strong one at the time at the University of Arizona. I expected to be in with other graduate students, but he took one look at my writing and said, no, no, I think not. And he put me in this undergraduate, sophomore, undergraduate class. Everybody in it was at least 10 years younger than I was. And there was this one. This one really, really talented young man who was writing this rock and roll novel. And it was so good. And I was so jealous because he had. He had, at that, at a fairly tender age, discovered not only what he wanted to do with his life, but what really mattered to him. He seemed to have a great read on his. On what his subject matter might be. And he was just. He was just, despite being 10 years younger, was just miles ahead. And I could tell it. And I think that the instructor in the class recognized that talent and where he was in the overall scheme of things. And I think every other student in the class did, too. He was the star. And as I did, I did get better. And ultimately I got into the graduate workshop. But I don't think that there was a time during that, my entire apprenticeship at the University of Arizona. I don't think that there was ever a time when, if you had taken a poll of the participants in the workshop and asked them, who 10 years from now, 20 years, 30 years from now is not only going to be writing, but maybe writing successfully, who's got a career? I don't think I would have appeared on any of those lists, starting with that first sophomore class. And so I was. As I was thinking about all of this, I just kept thinking about this one incredibly talented young writer who did get in touch with me years, years later. And he was. And he was puzzled by exactly the same things that I was puzzled by. You know, how could this have happened? What kind of cosmic joke has just been perpetrated here? As if I could, you know, as if I would know or as if I could explain it to him.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, at least you took it that way. And not, well, of course I would have been good. I don't know why you even questioned this.

Richard Russo:

Yeah, but that, you know, that's what people do. I mean, people. Most people, I think they. It's, you know, they get to a certain point, if they've been fortunate, if they've had some success, you know, the story that they kind of want to write or rewrite is, oh, you know, it was all hard work, and it was all. It was all, you know, it was all talent and hard work. And. And they want to suggest that they knew it all along and that it was only a matter of time for things to play out. And I think a much more honest assessment of success, certainly my success. I don't want to speak for everybody here, but my own sense is that if I got to do this all over again without the knowledge of what has happened to me, but if I had the same opportunities another 99 times to round it off to a full hundred, the other 99 wouldn't turn out anything like. Like this one. There are just too many variables. You know, you make too many mistakes. Sometimes you get things right, but just as often you get things wrong and you change something and you change everything. So, yeah, my part of the reason that destiny fascinates me so much, the whole idea of destiny, is that. You get the sense when you're looking at things through one end of the telescope when you're young and you're looking at all the things that could happen and you see how many moving parts there are. But then you get a little older and you're looking at things through the other end of the telescope and it all seems kind of inevitable. Well, of course it isn't. It isn't. The other view is probably closer to the truth.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I particularly enjoyed the story of the gravestone and the toilet because I think it shows this interesting challenge that there is these days with having a sense of humor and perhaps a little bit of irreverence about oneself and one's writing.

Richard Russo:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Because what you were describing was. And I'm going to let you tell this story because I found it very, very funny. And I read it to the person who was with me and he also found it very funny. But you were describing something that other people in your family didn't really find all that humorous at all. But every time you would look at this situation, you would crack yourself up.

Richard Russo:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And so part of what you say is that it's kind of about your ability to help other people see your way of looking at things, not trying to be funny, but just present it in a way so that other people understand the humor.

Richard Russo:

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me about that story.

Richard Russo:

Well, the story. The story starts out true. There's some embellishment later on, but the story starts out as true. When we moved to Maine, we bought this house that had two features that over the years were interesting. There was this apple tree out in the backyard that grew every year and dropped these poisonous worm infested green apples out there that I used to mow around on my riding mower. And what was interesting was at the base of the tree there was this gravestone and it was filled out. Someone had intended to use this gravestone. And apparently there was a stone cutter who'd lived in the house many, many, many years ago. And I never did find out why the gravestone didn't get used, but there it was, leaning up against this kind of poisonous apple tree. It was as if the gravestone was in some way poisoning the tree, just guaranteeing that every year you'd get this harvest of really disgusting poisonous green apples. And there was an inscription. We know who the person was who died. And he was a Syrian, I believe. And how he ended up in Maine, we don't know. But there was this. And it was a kind of. Some of the details were kind of comic on the. Or to Me. Anyway, they were kind of comic. But. So here's this kind of emblem of death itself. There's a gravestone in the middle of our backyard. And to almost anybody, this thing would have been a symbol that we saw every day, a symbol of our own mortality. And why in the world, number one, would you leave it there? And when we tried to sell the house, you know, people would come by and they would see that and decide they didn't want the house on the basis of the gravestone. You know, they really. Most people see that symbol and it just. And it reminds them of what we don't want to be reminded of, the fact that we're all going to die. What to me was interesting about that was that it didn't affect me that way at all. You know, I just. So what? So it was a gravestone. I didn't really believe that it was poisoning the apples in the tree, nor did it particularly bother me that this. That this Syrian, young Syrian man had somehow come to Maine and died there. Didn't bother me at all that his stone was leaning up against my. My apple tree. Didn't bother me as I was riding around it. And after. After a very short time, I just learned not to see it. It just did not register on my writerly imagination at all. Until one day we were doing some renovations on the house, and in order to put some tile down in the three quarter bath, we had to pull up the commode. I say we, the people we hired had to pull up the commode. And for a day or two, while they were working on the bathroom, out there on the back deck sat the commode. Nothing else is there, no folding chairs. It was late in the autumn. We brought everything back in here. Right in the middle of the back deck was this commode. Open. Leaves were falling, swirling out of the sky into the commode. And when I was sitting there in. In my office writing, every now and then I would look up and I would see the gravestone in the distance and right in front of the gravestone, the commode. And it just cracked me up every time. And when my. My kids came home, my daughters came home, I would say, look at that, you know, and my. My wife the same way. And they just kind of squinted at it and didn understand really, why it just tickled me so. But the essay. The essay is. Is really about that for a writer, that. Which slows you down, whatever. Whatever it is, because I was able to look at that gravestone. Something that really caused other People to slow down, you know, somebody who was thinking about buying the house and was. And was. And liked everything about it, but then saw that gravestone and just. And it stopped them right in their tracks. They couldn't, they couldn't go any farther. I learned that. I learned not to see that at all. But put the, but put the comic thing, put the, Put the commode right in front of it. And now suddenly my imagination is just in, in full bloom. I've got, I've got all kinds of, of, of possibilities for fiction. And that's. And, and, and I think that day I probably already knew it. But if I hadn't known it, I think that day, seeing those two things right in the same frame and knowing what interested me and what didn't particularly was a crystallizing moment in the sense that I thought, all right, I know who I am now. I'm a comic writer. Because most writers, it's a question of what slows you down, what causes you to look twice, what causes you to really see something. And for me, it's almost always life's foolishness, people doing people, people looking for dignity, and it eludes them.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You wrote about the craft of writing and you spoke about your. I believe it was your grandfather who was a glove maker in upstate New York.

Richard Russo:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And how he was part of, I believe, a guild and actually went and spent two years learning how to make gloves.

Richard Russo:

Yep.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Which was unpaid, I think, and.

Richard Russo:

Well, it was certainly. If it wasn't unpaid, it was, it certainly wasn't well paid. I think at that time in the guild that he was part of, you were you, you. You were probably dependent upon the largesse of whoever was teaching you. And probably whoever that was wasn't making a fortune either. I don't think glove cutters ever made an enormous amount of money. And my grandfather, timing, his timing not being great, kind of came at the very end of this whole process. But yeah, he was in a guild. And I'm sure that during those first couple of years before he, you know, finished his apprenticeship and became a glove cutter, a certified glove cutter in his own right, I'm sure that he and my grandmother, although they hadn't married yet, they couldn't afford to until he, until he got that first job as a glove cutter, I'm sure that they were living very, very hand to mouth as he was learning his trade.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And there is something about writing which is not dissimilar that you. There is a. Certainly a. There's an art to it. Everybody understands that. But There is a craft to it.

Richard Russo:

Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Something about that, that time that one needs to spend, often largely unpaid and lots and lots of work that maybe not everybody understands. In this day and age, when it seems like it's so easy to just throw words together.

Richard Russo:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's one of the most difficult things about teaching yourself how to write and teaching other people how to write is that almost everybody misunderstands just how long it's going to take for you to get there. Ann Patchett said in one of her store one of the best essays I've ever read about writing, called the Getaway Car. She says that anybody who has ever picked up a cello knows instinctively that you're not going to be playing that instrument in Carnegie hall anytime soon. Right. It feels foreign, and there are so many things that you need to do. And the first time you draw that bow, you understand intuitively just how much you have to learn, just how difficult and complicated what you're setting about to do is. And so you factor in your imagination. If, when you pick that thing up and you love it despite its difficulty, you still in your mind have to say to yourself, this is going to be a very, very long road that I'm going down before I can, number one, probably play for the relatives when they come over on Thanksgiving. It's going to be a while before I'm even that good. And then, you know, those. During an apprenticeship, the various, you know, things that you have to do over a period of years. And even with just astonishing dedication, it's going to take you a very long time because what you're looking at here is something foreign. It's. You're going to have to learn it. It's not part of you. Whereas for a writer, the problem is that it's words. And you've been talking almost your entire life. And so you think, why not? Right? A year should be plenty of time, shouldn't it? I mean, we're just going to. We're going to write the words down. We're going to put them through a spell check, right? I have stories to tell. My parents had stories to tell. I come from a family of. Of bull throwers. Why shouldn't I be able to tell stories? It's just an extension of what I've been doing for a very long time. And I still think of that in terms of my own family. I come from a long line of people who were telling stories and. Pretty good storytellers, but not. They're not writing, right, but they're good storytellers my father in particular. But the amount of time that it actually takes to get good is. Most writers just misjudge. And they don't misjudge by a couple of months, they misjudge by years how long it's going to take, partly because the competition is stiff, but also because you don't know what you don't know and you don't know. And it's very difficult to judge that gap, which seems shorter than it is.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, this is a quote that I really identified with. Hunger remembered is not the same as hunger felt. Indeed, for some that's the final cruel joke. That hard won mastery of craft coincides almost to the minute with passion's ebb. Art offered shoulders to stand on, often as not demures.

Richard Russo:

Right, right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Because that thing that you're talking about, that grabbing the cello, where you have that passion, or in your case in this book you're describing grabbing a guitar as a teenager.

Richard Russo:

Because that was my first hunger.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah. I mean that, that idea that I really, really want to do this. Yeah, like that, that you're right over time. That doesn't necessarily stay at that same level. In fact, for most people it won't.

Richard Russo:

No. And for me part of the cruelty was that, that when I felt that first hunger and as I describe in that, in that essay, that first hunger to play rock and roll at a very high volume, what was coming between me and doing that I thought was equipment. You know, I had a kind of a beat up guitar and an amplifier with one blown speaker and I got together with some other high school kids and we formed a band and we weren't, we weren't obviously we weren't very good, but we deceived ourselves into thinking that, that, that if we just had better equipment, we'd, we'd, we'd, we'd be, we would get better and we would become worthy of our instruments, we would become worthy of our drums, worthy of our, worthy of our guitars, our keyboards and, and all of that. And so I did, I played band. I played in various bands in, in high school and I put myself in part through graduate school playing 12 string guitar in a, in a, in a restaurant in, in Tucson, the same gig for like, like seven, seven years or so. And, and, and I finally, I finally got this gorgeous Gibson guitar with pearl inlay on the, on the neck and it was a 12 string. And you put that thing up next to a microphone, you know, you're singing into one microphone and you get, and you, and you've got your 12 string guitar, a really good one with a throaty. It's got some bass to it. And you strum that thing through a microphone and it sounds like an orchestra. I mean, it sounds really, really good. And I. But I remember getting that 12 string guitar, the kind of instrument that I had been lusting for since I was, like, 15. And hearing how good it sounded also convinced me for the first time that I was never going to be as good as that instrument that I was always going to be. I could get better, but I was never going to be as good as that instrument was. And so, yeah, I mean, the hunger is. The hunger is wonderful. It'll keep you going. It'll drive you forward. That desire is sufficient to keep you going for a very long time. But, my God, it can be heartbreaking, that realization that you finally have everything at your disposal, that you can't blame it on anything else anymore. And the realization that, all right, I've achieved a kind of level here. I might get a little bit better, but I'm never going to be good. I'm never going to be really good. And writing, on the other hand, was something that, despite the fact that nobody else seemed to think I would be any good, at least for a very long time, that was something that, as I continued to plug away, It did seem to me that as bad as the writing was at times, and there were many times that it was really bad, I began to sense that it might be okay. Not so much because I would be good enough or that I would be skilled enough, but that the people that I wanted to write about, the characters who have graced my novels all of these years, what happened was that at some point I became convinced that they were good enough, these people, that I wanted to write about the kinds of lives that they lived. Not many people were telling their stories. And so at some point, it was different than looking at that guitar and realizing how beautiful it was and that I was never going to be worthy of it. It seemed to me that maybe because these characters who were swimming in my head seemed so real and their stories seemed so important, it seemed to me that despite the daily evidence that the writing wasn't as good as it should be, I never felt that I'll never be worthy of these people or I'll never be able to tell their stories. It always seemed to me that. That I could. If I kept at it, maybe I'd be able to.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

One of the pieces that I enjoyed reading was the one that you wrote about Jennifer Boylan.

Richard Russo:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it's very interesting to me now because this was something that happened how many years ago? Fifteen years ago, maybe.

Richard Russo:

Oh, longer than that, I think, as a matter of fact, I think. Well, yeah, something like that. The 10 year anniversary of She's Not There. Jenny's. Jenny's groundbreaking memoir was a couple of years ago, I think. So, yeah, we're talking, we're talking pretty close to 15 years now. And of course I think of it as longer than that because we were friends longer than that. But.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah, but it's such an interesting kind of almost historical perspective on what it means to have been transgender at a time when nobody was really talking about it.

Richard Russo:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you were a professor at a small liberal arts college in somewhat rural Maine, along with another professor who decided to go through with gender reassignment surgery.

Richard Russo:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what that meant to you, to your wife, to Jennifer, to Jennifer's then wife. I mean, it's. I'm sure that many of the issues still exist for many people, but at least now we have a conversation around this.

Richard Russo:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what you were writing about was something that was very new.

Richard Russo:

The landscape has changed. I remember one of the, one of the first conversations that Jenny and I ever had about this. Jenny herself, then Jim at the time. But Jenny said, one of the first things she said is it's going to take you a really long time to wrap your mind around this. Because in fact, my life, what I've lived, what I've had to deal with is statistically such a small percentage of human beings ever have to deal with anything. Like, it's just so unusual. There are so few of us. Only to discover that this was part of Jenny's own education, I think, was that partly because of this book that she wrote, We began to understand just how many more people were transgendered than either male to female or female to male. There were so many more of them out there than even Jenny had had any idea. And so the landscape of. Has changed. In just a very, very short period of time, the landscape has changed. And you're right, you go back and you read this essay now Imagining Jenny, which is part of this new book of mine. And it has the feel of an historical document which, given the fact that it was really only a little over 10 years ago, it's another way of looking at the ways in which this country has changed. It's gone from, you know, 20 years ago there, you know, the number of people who would say, at least admit in public that they thought gay marriage was a good idea. I mean, that has Just radically changed in a period of two decades. And the same thing with our understanding of transgender issues. I don't think Jenny would mind me telling this particular story, but Jenny, not too long ago, was in some sort of a conference, and she does a lot of public speaking on transgender issues, and she was. I think she was at a conference where she overheard two young transgender women talking about her and talking about she's not there and how important the book was to them. But apparently, in this period of 10 or 12 years, the term Russo in the transgender community, as a result of Jenny's book, a Russo, at least in certain echelons of the transgender community, is the person who remains your friend and helps you and helps you through whatever it is that you have to go through, whether it's gender reassignment surgery, as I did, I went with Jenny and her wife and one or two other friends for. So I was there during that. And of course, you know, we're still dear friends, but apparently, as a result of this book, if you're transgendered and you have a good friend like that, that friend is a Russo. It's just called a Russo. Right. But enough time has elapsed so that many people know the term, but they don't know what its origin is. And the conversation that Jenny overheard was one young transgender woman saying to another, isn't it weird that Jenny Boylan's Russo was really named Russo? Which I. I just. When Jenny told me that story, it just completely cracked me up. It's like there was an episode of the Sopranos, Right. Where. Where someone remarked that isn't it really weird that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease? Same thing, right?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah. There's a certain strange meta quality

Richard Russo:

situation. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

There are worse ways to be known, I guess.

Richard Russo:

Yeah, absolutely. I know. I take it as a great compliment.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've enjoyed our conversation, and I encourage people to read the Destiny Thief, because I. It's really very. It's interesting, and it covers a lot of different topics in different ways.

Richard Russo:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I think it offers a. An encapsulation of much of the things that you did outside of the fiction that you write, which is great to have, because as a writer, it's nice to know that there's a larger. We'll use the word landscape before the landscape itself, and landscape of craft that goes beyond just what you specialize in.

Richard Russo:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's people who have said to me, who have looked at this, have said that the book provides a kind of master key into the you can kind of flip the lock and get a, get a sense of the, get a sense of what sort of person would have written Empire Falls or Nobody's fool or Bridge of Size and just it gives and a lot of in a lot of what readers think of as kind of extra value. When a writer goes on tour, they think of it like you get in a room. You get in the room with a writer and the, and your writer talks and you begin to. I don't know if you really do understand the writer better or not, but if, but it feels, it feels to the, to the person in the audience like a, like some sort of added dimension to it. And so this, this might be in, in some ways this book is a, it might be a some, some sort of skeleton key into, into these books.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I've been speaking with novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo, who is the author of eight novels, two short story collections, and the memoir Elsewhere. His novel Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002, and his new collection of essays, the Destiny Thief comes out in May. Thanks so much for coming in today.

Richard Russo:

Thank you, Lisa. I really enjoyed it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

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