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With additional funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation.

Anthony Doerr, Author: My goal is always to not sleepwalk through life.

And so when I'm building sentences, I try to skirt clichés , because I feel like cliché is a way to kind of sleepwalk through a sentence.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Coming up, a special in-depth conversation with bestselling Idaho author Anthony Doerr.

I talk with him about his newest book, "Cloud Cuckoo Land."

And he tells us what it was like to be on the set of the Netflix series based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "All the Light We Cannot See."

It's all part of our 15th anniversary edition of "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference" on Dialogue.

Stay with us.

(Music) Hello and welcome to Dialogue.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

I first interviewed Idaho author Anthony Doerr in 2003.

At the time, he was getting rave reviews for his first book, "The Shell Collector," which had been published the year before.

Fast forward 20 years and five more books, and "Anthony Doerr" is one of the most recognizable names in American fiction.

His many honors include the Rome Prize, the Story Prize, five O. Henry Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the National Magazine Award, and – oh, yes, a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Pulitzer was awarded for "All the Light We Cannot See," Doerr's 2014 blockbuster novel about two young people during World War II.

It spent more than 200 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and Netflix is adapting it into a limited series.

In 2021, Doerr published another novel, "Cloud Cuckoo Land," which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Its sprawling and intersecting storylines take us from the 15th century to the 22nd century, from an ox herder in Constantinople to a girl alone on a spaceship.

At the helm is Doerr, whose fascination with time travel is all part of a mission to learn as much as possible in his life.

Squarely back in the 21st century, I caught up with him at the 2022 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

We talked about what fuels his work, and a rather eerie scenario in his latest book that ended up paralleling real life.

Franklin: Well, first of all, thanks for being here.

It's great to see you.

It's been, I looked it up.

It's been eight years… Doerr: Wow.

Franklin: …since we did an interview together last.

Doerr: It's great to see you, Marcia.

Thanks for having me.

Franklin: "All the Light We Cannot See" was out, but you hadn't won the Pulitzer yet.

Doerr: Okay.

Franklin: So a lot has happened.

Doerr: Yes, right.

Eight years ago.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Franklin: I've just gotten grayer, but you, you won a Pulitzer and you published another book.

Doerr: Yeah, and I lost the last shreds of my hair.

(Laughs.)

Franklin: What an amazing eight years it's been for you.

Doerr: Uh, thanks.

Yeah.

I mean, mostly it's just that my kids got older, and I got older.

But, uh, yeah, of course, tons of amazing things happened and uh, yeah, people just kept reading that novel that I wrote and I'm just so grateful for that and also managed to find time to work on a new one.

Franklin: Yeah.

Help me with the numbers here.

Are we at, are you at 15 million copies of "All the Light We Cannot See?"

Doerr: I don't know where.

That was in the New York Times, but I don't know.

I tried not to look at that stuff.

That's like the publisher's realm.

But then of course, you know the book, my first books, like "The Shell Collector," I think came out in eight foreign countries, "All the Light We Cannot See" came out in 41 foreign countries.

So I have 41 foreign publishers.

So just even managing that email is a lot.

Franklin: Well, the most important thing I wanted to, to know, I think, aside from the numbers and all that, is when you, when you look at that book, what are you most proud of now all these years later, now that it's been out in the world?

Doerr: Oh gosh, I rarely think in those terms.

I still see like the little mistakes I made, or little moments where you're clumsy and you're like, "Oh, I should have researched that more."

I think what I'm most proud of -- we could talk about it today -- is you know, Netflix is adapting it into a, a limited series.

We used to call those mini-series when we were young.

But now for some reason they're called limited series -- four one-hour episodes.

Maybe the last one will be a little more than an hour.

And, uh, together we all kind of worked to try to find an actor to play this character Marie.

There are two kind of main protagonists.

One's Werner, a German boy, and one's Marie Laure, this French girl.

And we looked to find an actor that could was, uh, visually disabled, who could play her.

And we found an amazing person.

Franklin: Jackpot.

Doerr: Amazing.

Yeah.

Her name is Aria.

And we found -- about 20% of the scenes are going to be played by a younger version of her, a seven-year-old named Nell from Wales.

And she's really sweet.

So watching her work, too, has been really moving.

So I think maybe right now, the thing I'm most proud of is this opportunity that these two -- this young woman and this little girl -- will have to kind of be an example to so many kids who maybe wouldn't have had these opportunities 30 or years ago to play a big role in a big Netflix show.

It's pretty cool.

Franklin: Aria, I, I read about her and I, she has a TEDx talk; I watched it.

Wow.

You know, she's been an advocate for the visually impaired since she was quite, quite young.

Doerr: She's awesome.

Franklin: And she is studying ancient Greek.

Doerr: I know.

Franklin: And Rhetoric.

I mean, as we segueway to the, to the next book, how perfect could that be?

Because your, your next book involves ancient Greece.

Doerr: Yeah.

That's just been wild.

I mean, you know, they did a worldwide search, so they had casting directors in like New Zealand and in Asia and in London, and they find her and she's in Rhode Island.

Or she's from Rhode Island; I think she's going to Penn State to get her PhD.

And her mom, you know, they had read the book, but it was years before, 'cause the book came out in 2014.

And her mom's like, "You know, you really should audition."

And what's so amazing is she had been in, she had tried to be in a play as a young girl and they, you know, she was having trouble finding her marks and they just said, you know, "This isn't going to work."

And so I think she just feels like this wonderful, vindication, like "I get to pursue this dream I had."

And um, yeah.

Franklin: Yeah, that's amazing.

And when, when will that come out?

Doerr: Uh, I don't, we don't know quite yet.

We, so my son Owen and I were just in Hungary.

They, it's about 81 days of shooting altogether, some in France.

And they did about 60 of them in Budapest, in Hungary.

And so Owen and I got to go for a few days and it was just so amazing.

I mean, first, you know, on the way there, I'm like, "How big is this gonna be, Owen?"

He's like, "It's big, dad."

I'm like, "'cause I don't think it's gonna be that big."

But you know, there's like 10 semi-trucks, trailers.

It's just, when you pull in, all full of cables and stuff.

There's one that's just bathrooms for the crew.

There's one that's like just for, you know, to cook food for everybody.

There's like trailers for the producers and Mark Ruffalo, And you you're like, "Oh wait, maybe this is kind of big," you know, everybody's masked up and they've got all these, these really strict COVID protocols because if somebody gets COVID like and shooting shuts down, the money just bleeds away.

Franklin: So… Doerr: It made me first so grateful that I work in such an inexpensive form of storytelling, where if I want to blow up a building it's free, basically.

And you know, it's just like everything they do is there's so many people on the clock.

They have these night shoots with like, you know, they've got 150 extras all in German outfits and they've got tanks and old trucks.

And right now they're in France filling streets with rubble, like the streets of this town in the south of France.

So just to do these scenes, you know, like a post-bombing scene, where these characters are walking through rubble.

So as a novelist, you don't have to quite worry so much.

You just say, "There was rubble in the streets," period.

And really, I was just in awe of the teamwork nature of it.

Writing can be such a solitary thing that it made me a little jealous because they really were all kind of moving together in the same direction.

And sometimes when you're feeling a little tired, like the talents and skills of somebody beside you can carry the project forward.

And when you're writing a novel, it's like when you're tired and the thing doesn't move forward that day, you're the only one.

Franklin: Well, I mentioned Aria, who's not only the actress, but has, uh, is a becoming an expert in Ancient Greek and Rhetoric, which is, uh, provides me a nice segueway to, um, your current book, "Cloud Cuckoo Land," because in fact, the title and much of it derives from an interest in ancient Greece.

Um, talk to people about the title and, and where it emanates from.

Doerr: Yeah, absolutely.

Franklin: "The Birds" and Aristophanes.

Doerr: Aristophanes.

Good job, Marcia.

Uh, so maybe like longtime viewers of your show remember I was really lucky.

In 2004, my wife gave birth to twin boys, and we went from Boise, Idaho all the way to Rome, to the American Academy of Rome.

This is a prize you don't apply for in literature.

They just like a lightning bolt put this letter in our mailbox.

"Hey, would you like…?"

It came on the day my wife gave birth to these babies and they're like, "Hey, would you like to spend a year in Rome?

You know, we'll pay for your apartment and feed you."

And so thankfully she said yes.

And so when the boys were five months old, we traveled there and had a year.

And that was really the first time for me to realize that so many of the classics have been lost.

You know, like we only have a third of the texts written by Aristotle, for example.

Um, Sophocles wrote a hundred-some plays.

I think we only have seven.

And Sappho, the famous poet, we think she wrote maybe 10,000 lines of poetry.

We only have 650 lines of that poetry left.

You know, time, uh, earthquakes, mold, floods, tyrants, um, you know, totalitarians, zealots.

There's so many things that move, work to erase manuscripts from the world.

And so really anything that provides cultural continuity, that keeps that thread from the present all the way back to pre-Christ times, is so amazing to me.

So miraculous that some things can survive through all these generations.

So I always, you know, this is a long time ago at this point, but I always thought, "There's something in this."

When I was, I think 14, my, maybe 15, my grandmother moved in with us.

She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

But you know, this was the 80s.

I'd never heard -- I was a kid; I'd never heard the phrase before, but I was really affected by watching dementia steal, like everything that she was over time, like, you know, she lost her ability to remember who we were.

She could still beat me at like gin rummy, but she didn't know who I was or, you know, she lost her ability to feed for herself and feed herself, eventually care for herself.

So I think all through my, some part of my subconscious all through my adult life has been kind of both afraid and aware of the fragility of memory.

And there's some connection that I made subconsciously between the erasure of texts over time.

'Cause really what is a book?

It's, it's a human memory that's kind of written down as a life.

And so when the text dies, it's almost like a second death, you know?

Um.

So I, I knew as I was finishing "All the Light" I kind of wanted to tell a story that said something to do with those, that cultural thread and cultural transmission through time.

I finished "All the Light" in 2014.

I'm starting this new book around the time that a presidential candidate is going around the United States, leading crowds and chants of "Build that wall, build that wall."

And I'm reading about, you know, I had all these texts about the history of walls and defensive walls and a lot of them would mention the walls of Constantinople.

And uh, I'm not sure about your high school history classes, but my high school history class, at least in Western history, it would kind of get to the fall of Rome and then it would basically leap to the Renaissance.

Yeah.

And we didn't cover Byzantine history at all, and even know what Byzantium was.

Uh, so I love to use my work as a way to try to rectify various ignorances.

I will die with thousands upon thousands of them, but this was a chance to learn more about something I didn't know about.

And the more I read about the walls of Constantinople, the more amazed I became.

They, they stood for 1100 years without falling to a siege.

So they were kind of like the preeminent defensive technology of the medieval world.

And 23 sieges came over the centuries and broke themselves against these walls and couldn't get through.

There's these four miles of walls.

Plus these sea walls, triple walls; the inner wall was huge.

There's like a killing field in between.

There's a moat in front.

And it allowed this empire to accumulate insane wealth.

The best example I can give is that there were three acres of gold mosaic in the vaulting of the Hagia Sophia at one point.

And of course, slaves and you know, amber; it was really the crossroads of Europe and Asia.

But once I learned that books were a big part of this -- there was a really healthy book culture -- and at certain times, girls were encouraged to become literate.

There were private libraries, monastic libraries, and there were a couple of big imperial, imperial libraries.

We don't know all the details about them, but there are some theories that certain points in maybe the 500s, 600s, the, the Imperial library of Constantinople had 125,000 volumes.

These are handwritten manuscripts.

And meanwhile, gun powder is just being adopted as this really potent weapon that finally bring down this old technology of walls.

So this young sultan, his name was Mehmed the Second, 19 years old, recognizes both the physical and psychological potential of building these huge weapons to knock down the, the unreachable walls of Constantinople.

And these last manuscripts could spill out.

I knew, that's when I thought, "I've got a story to tell here, I can tell the story of one old book, leaving the walls of Constantinople and who would save that and who would preserve it?

And how might that book reach today?"

Franklin: The title of your book, "Cloud Cuckoo Land," um, refers back, reflects back on ancient Greece and Aristophanes, um, and "The Birds."

who ha, that part of "The Birds" had this 'Cloud Cuckoo Land,' this kind of in-between earth and heaven place.

Um, and you incorporated that not only into the title, but into a text that reappears throughout the book.

I kind of was thinking about it as almost like the maypole.

So, you know, that the characters are all involved with this text that you invented, but really, uh, is referential to this 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' that Aristophanes wrote about.

Doerr: Yeah.

Franklin: And, and 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' in your, in your mind is a placeholder for what?

Is it, you know... Doerr: Great question.

Uh, so it's, in Greek, it was like "Nephelokokkugi," and it was, you know, this phrase has trickled into contemporary English all the way from ancient Greek; it's 2400 years old.

This play did survive for centuries called "The Birds."

And these two kind of fools decide to leave Athens, 'cause there's too many lawyers, and found a better city in the sky.

It's one of the first Western utopias, 'Cloud Cuckoo Land.'

And the idea is that it's halfway between the realm of the humans on the ground and the, the gods up in the sky and they can intercept messages.

And of course, like most utopian narratives, they get it going and it starts out great, but then of course the city doesn't work out quite as they planned.

One starts eating the birds that help them build the city.

But I love the idea of utopian stories.

As I was working on this book, really started to feel, the world started to feel a little bit dystopian.

And every time I go downstairs, my kids are taking in dystopian narratives on the TV.

I just felt like every Marvel movie, there's just like another planet explodes, superheroes zipping here and there.

And I just wondered, like what, what is it about dystopian narratives that's really drawing these kids in, in, including a lot of the books they were reading?

So I thought, you know, what, what is it about humans that we tell stories about utopias?

Um, you know, what do utopias represent about hope?

And uh, you know, what kind of exercise is it for a person to try to imagine a better place, and how important is that to our psyches?

So for me, each of the characters finds this text called "Cloud Cuckoo Land," which is an invented story.

I just invented 24 pieces of a story by a real writer, his name was Antonius Diogenes, the same initials as mine.

And apparently he was a really playful writer.

All his work has lost, but we have a review written of his book from the ninth century, by a librarian, a patriarch in Constantinople, that really argued that this book he wrote, was, which is called "The Wonders beyond Thule" was really inventive, really playful.

It sounds almost like a Nabokov novel, or a Borges novel.

And, uh, it's a shame that all his work has lost, but I thought, "I'm going to invent a work that he could have written.

I'm going to call it "Cloud Cuckoo Land" and use it as a way to kind of explore hope and distant places in each of the five main characters in my book."

I'm really also exploring materialism and kind of acceptance in this book.

I feel like this was my middle-aged book in a lot of ways.

Um, you know, capitalist culture teaches us over and over that, we'll be happy if we just get one more thing.

If we just, if you and I can get to Bora Bora, Marcia, then we'll be happy.

If you and I can just buy this new pair of jeans, we'll be a little bit happier, a little bit younger.

And you know, I'm trying to understand all the time that this is not a way of, a path to happiness.

And, uh, so I think we're often told, like, if you can just get to this "Cloud Cuckoo Land" place, then you know, you'll finally be happy.

And really what my, I feel like my journey and, and, and especially maybe the pandemic helped with this, was to accept, you don't always have to go all the way around the world to find like a, a moment of beauty.

You don't have to be on the Amalfi coast, necessarily.

Sometimes just seeing like the snow geese come squawking overhead when all the planes were gone in March of 2020.

And, you know, you're just in the foothills and Boise and you're like, "I can hear those snow geese and they're like a mile above my head."

There were all these little moments of transcendent beauty, sometimes just sitting in your backyard.

Obviously we were privileged enough to be healthy and not have COVID and be able to buy our food.

And I understand some people were under immense stress at that time, but there were a lot of silver linings to that moment.

And those were the months I was finishing the book.

And I really felt like I was trying to come to a place of like, home is "Cloud Cuckoo Land," really.

And ultimately, you know, all odysseys are kind of circular shaped.

And, uh, so I'm playing a lot with circles in the book, of like leaving home and returning home.

And so for me, at least the conclusion of the book, I try to get a reader to the place like, "Let's accept this place."

Like, there is no planet B; this is our planet.

And it's undergoing multiple existential crises at once, not just climate change, but this biodiversity crisis where we're losing so many wild creatures, so many wild insects; we've lost like millions and millions of birds from the United States alone.

So just, what does it mean to be growing up in this time, trying to get each of those characters to ask that, and what does it mean to kind of dream of a better place?

And then ultimately accept like, this is as good as it's gonna get right here right now.

However, there's something so beautiful about our, our willingness, like our need to go explore and to push ourselves.

And I'm really also trying to reach for that, that almost all the characters also encounter the odyssey at some point that the story of Odysseus, you know, going so far away and taking 10 years to return home.

There's something about humans that we just love to explore and learn and chase the distances.

Franklin: One of your characters is out into the future.

You start the book with her and end the book with her, Constance.

I don't know if that's a reference to Constantinople, too, but her name is Constance.

And she's on a spaceship, and originally with her parents, but, uh, there's a, there's a virus actually.

Doerr: (Laughs.)

Yeah, yeah.

It's not too big of a spoiler.

Franklin: Uh, uh, and so she ends up alone with this, uh, Siri-like character, Sybil, an artificial intelligence character that she's interacting with.

Um, and I have to say that, I don't know if you were presaging, or you know, how this happened, but you've got a minor character in this story called "Omicron."

Doerr: Right.

Franklin: And a lot of people coming across that were like, "Woo!"

Doerr: Right.

Right.

Franklin: And characters talking about the virus.

I know you turned your manuscript in around the time of, uh, COVID starting.

Doerr: Yeah.

Way before.

Franklin: Is that a coincidence that…?

Doerr: Uh, the book is told in 24 parts.

And the, when the Odyssey and the Iliad were first written down, you know, they were transmitted verbally for centuries.

Like these walking Netflix guys and gals would walk into towns and deliver from memory, whole segments of these epic poems.

Incredible.

When they're finally written down, you know, maybe 2,600 years ago in the library of Alexandria, they were codified and broken into 24 pieces, one for every letter of the ancient Greek alphabet.

And so I also had heard that Antonio Diogenes, the writer who I, um, invented his lost book, that his book, "The Wonders Beyond Thule," was broken into 24 parts.

So I thought, "Okay, there's my structure.

I'm going to use one section for each of the letters of the Greek alphabet."

So all around me, I have like Alpha through Omega and there's Omicron; he's little O.

There's Omega, big O, and Omicron, micro, little O.

And so often I would just be pulling little, like little winks and hints.

There's a lot of little Easter eggs and winks to the reader in this book.

Uh, so yeah, I was just like, "Oh, OK, I need a name of a character in the future.

So I thought, "OK, I'll try Omicron."

(Laughs.)

And then later, like it's 12 months after the book comes out, or no, it's maybe six months after the book comes out, everywhere, you see every headline is "Omicron."

Crazy.

Franklin: Yeah.

Because I mean, it's not only that you had an Easter egg of Omicron in there, but Omicron was associated with a virus and a quarantine Doerr: Right.

Franklin in your book on the spaceship.

So that was a pretty tight, you know... Doerr: Strange coincidence.

Franklin: ...nexus between your book and the present.

Doerr: Yeah.

I had read a lot of, I was working on the book, you know, I was to go back all the way to Constantinople, I, I knew that to show the impact of one person's actions to try to preserve something, I knew I wanted to show the "butterfly effect" of this girl in Constantinople saves this old text, Anna.

I knew I wanted to show a kind of ricochet all the way down into the present and into the future.

I thought I could work on this tripartite structure -- past, present, and future.

And that way, hopefully over time, I'm sure it risks confusing a reader in the first few hundred pages.

But the idea is that the reader starts to feel how the actions of -- small actions of one person -- can really ricochet down through time.

And so, I thought, "I'm gonna set this in other times when there are big technological upheavals in the world."

And so I set it in the present.

And in this time when I think climate chaos and artificial intelligence could intersect to create a really interesting and maybe frightening time for humans.

So those are the kind of questions I'm struggling with.

And I read, uh, a lot by this writer, David Quamman, who wrote about, who wrote kind of famous book called "Spillover" long before the pandemic, just about the possibilities, especially about avian flu, but the possibilities of viruses spilling from animal populations into human populations as we infringe on more and more of their territory.

And so, you know, he had a lot of predictions in that book coming true.

And so, you know, he's like, "We're gonna have a lot of pandemics in the future."

And, uh, I really felt like, "Okay, I'm gonna have a pandemic affect these characters in the future."

Franklin: Yeah.

Doerr: And then we had one while I was finishing the book.

(Sighs.)

Franklin: You're a prophet!

(Laughs.)

Doerr: I guess, yes.

Scary.

Franklin: So you've got five characters in three different eras.

Doerr: Yep.

Franklin: All connected to this text that everyone, that's gotten passed down, and all on their own journeys, their Odyssean journeys.

The first is set in Constantinople or the, the area in the 1450s, right before Constantinople falls.

Doerr: Yes.

Franklin: I remember you talking about this story years ago, you said "I'm gonna do a, and my next book is gonna be an oxherd, you know, a herder and, and you know, in the 1450s."

And I'm like, "Okay.

But if anyone... Doerr: "Sounds amazing, Tony."

Franklin: "…if anyone can pull it off, he can," And you did.

Doerr: Thanks.

Franklin: This is the story of the past.

And as we discussed before the show, I, I really fell into this story.

In particular, and I know I'm not alone.

The relationship between, um, Omer and his, his oxen.

Which sounds odd when you say it, but it is so poignant.

Doerr: Yeah, it's not odd.

This is the way we moved stuff around the world.

Franklin: They were beasts of burden, but they were also family for him.

Doerr: Absolutely.

Franklin: And, and I, I it's, it's so wrenching and poignant to, to read, um, about that.

So there's Anna and Omer in the past.

And then we have a story that for Idahoans is even more interesting, I think, because it's set in what we know as soon as we read it is McCall, Idaho in the present.

And it's a story about Xeno, who is a drama teacher and, um, was in the Korean War, Doerr: Mmm hmmm.

Franklin: And Seymour, who's a extremely challenged, um, an angry, young man angry about development.

I have to say, I winced several times, you know, reading this story in particular about massive development, 'cause we see it all around us in Idaho.

And he's very, very upset by it.

And it's not, it's, it's not giving away anything in the story because very early on you know, that he is about to commit… Doerr: Yeah, that's right.

You know in the first few pages.

Franklin: …an act of terrorism.

Doerr: Yep.

Franklin: And this too, sadly, in addition to the, um, fact that, you know, we have a pandemic and you wrote about a virus... Doerr: I know.

Franklin: ...this storyline sadly, um, is reflected in the news several times since, since your book and, and recently.

Um, I know that part of your effort as a writer was to create empathy for Seymour.

And I, I think you succeed in that.

You learn his backstory, you learn why he is so angry and, um, alone.

There's a movement now when these things happen, when there's, uh, violence to, to not say the name at all of the person, to not give them any credence.

So at the same time that you were trying to create empathy for Seymour, did you worry about... Doerr: Oh, I worry about everything?

I mean, of course I worry about every character and all kinds of stuff, but, Seymour was extremely challenging.

He was a very sensitive kid.

But, uh, there's a lot of me in Seymour, the feeling that you get -- every person watching this knows like there's some special place in Idaho that you went 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, and now there's a house there, or a road.

And, uh, the, we don't have any more claim on those places than anybody else, but it's hard.

It's challenging.

I think Boise's now the fastest growing metro area in the United States?

I think that's right.

And, um, you know, there's this drawbridge mentality sometimes like, "Okay, that's enough, enough people."

And that's not the way to think.

And so, uh, you know, especially reading about climate, the way we just keep kind of pushing forward, uh, you know, there's -- every day, if you want, you can read something depressing about the way that humans are treating the natural world.

And really one of the great projects of this novel was to try to get readers to feel that there's no, that this idea that there's a human world and a natural world and that we can live separately from it is false.

Like there are enormous wildernesses of microbes inside our guts that are all connected to the land around us and the food that we rely on, the pandemic that we went through, everything is connected to how we're treating this shared planet that we share with lots and lots of other species.

And Seymour is particularly acute, acutely, overly sensitive to the damage that's being done to this little forest behind his house.

You know, he is a fatherless kid, got really attached to this owl and something terrible happens.

Uh, so I, I, um, I didn't worry too much about asking a reader to empathize with somebody who on the surface, certainly in the first 20 to 50 pages is going to feel like a villain, because I think that's what literature does.

It asks us to complexify things, you know, um, the, the only kind of books that I get bored reading are the ones that make the whole world too black and white.

Franklin: Evil and good.

Doerr: Exactly.

Yeah.

There's, Solzhenitsyn said, you know, there's evil, there's a seed of evil carried in the heart of everybody, you know.

And I feel like, um, hopefully -- you have to get to the end of the book, you feel this there's not so much a redemption arc for Seymour, but hopefully less complication, where you get to see why he's made some of the decisions that he's made.

Franklin: So you -- the story in the past, the story in the present that's set in Idaho, and the story in the future that we've mentioned about the spaceship -- those are all brought together.

And they do, as I know, (laughs), if you have patience, they do, they do come together in the end.

Um, you really upped the ante with this one.

I know you set challenges for yourself, but (laughs), you went from two characters in "All the Light" to, you know, five here.

Doerr: That's it, Marcia.

Franklin: And I know that you had to map it out for your own self to, to, to be able to keep track of everything and to, to braid it all together and make sure that these stories were touching each other in some way.

Doerr: Yeah.

Franklin: So.

Doerr: Yeah, "All the Light," for folks who know was kind of an A and B structure, like a ping pong match back and forth between Marie and Werner.

And this is A B C D E. So there's a lot; it's five plates to keep spinning in a reader's mind.

So I'm asking a lot more imaginative effort by a reader to keep all those plates spinning.

And I just ask her to trust me, like I'm gonna keep touching those plates every two or three pages.

And hopefully there's this feeling when they're all spending like, Okay, I understand where we are in each of the stories."

And there's kind of a, uh, interest to see how they'll all resolve.

Franklin: On the writing level, not the plot level or the research level, what were you, what were some of your challenges, or what was the challenge that you had?

Um, because your prose really is so evocative.

Doerr: Thanks.

Um, my, my goal is always to not sleepwalk through life.

I feel like maybe it was stuff I was talking about with my grandma earlier, like this idea that we're going to die has always been present.

And I feel like, of course there's going to be nights when you just want to turn on a football game and zone out and not pay attention.

But most of my days, I want to be learning stuff while I can, before I'm gone.

If I'm so lucky, I'll get 80 years on this earth, and I want to learn as much as I can.

And so when I'm building sentences, I try to skirt clichés, because I feel like cliché is a way to kind of sleepwalk through a sentence.

The first phrase you, when it, when you see the sun on a pond in the Sawtooths, you, you, you think, "Sun glints on the water."

And "sun" and "glints" have been paired together so many times that they kind of lose their meaning.

You know, you don't actually see what sun does when it reflects off water.

So, often the first phrase is the kind of rote combination, almost a stereotypical phrase that leaps into your mind.

And I try to resist that and fight that.

And so for me, paramount really, all, all of my writing, I, I've tried to say, how can I combine words in a slightly unfamiliar way so that the reader will feel, and I will feel this place a little bit more acutely?

If you're setting something in 1450, it's like, how can you evoke this --you know, Anna, as a seamstress or embroiderist who hates her job and like, how can you evoke the real misery of this time before electric light when these women are forced to just, you know, embroider these Christian figures onto these robes six days a week from dusk to, from dawn till dusk, um, you know, how can I evoke this, the flies looping over the benches?

It's the silence, it's the footsteps of the head embroiderist walking behind them.

And that just takes time.

But I really like that, you know; that's a transportative thing.

I get to kind of imagine myself -- I'm like a professional imaginer, you know, I get to wake up and for five or six hours of my day, spend my time in some creation that I'm making with language.

Franklin: I can just see your, your wife and kids, "Dad, come back from the.... Doerr: Yeah.

Franklin: 1450s!"

Doerr: Right.

And then the whole house of cards falls in, you're like, "Oh, let's eat Fritos outside," you know.

(Laughs.)

Doerr: I just, you know, it's a great job.

It's so I'm so lucky.

And I'm also, so I feel so fortunate that a reader's willing to pick up something I've written.

That there's Virginia Wolff out there, or Edith Wharton or Melville, you know, it it's like, well, well, why wouldn't you just go pick up Melville?

So I feel like if somebody, if I'm lucky enough to have somebody pick up something I've written, I don't want to lose them with carelessness.

So sometimes it's also this insecurity of like, "I promise, I'm going to be really careful with these sentences and I'm going to try to keep this narrative gripping enough that you'll keep turning pages."

Cuz if I were you, I would just go read Edgar Allen Poe or something else funny, better.

(laughs) Franklin: With everything that's going on right now, Anthony, what gives you hope?

Doerr: Yeah, well, let's be honest.

Like I oscillate between hope and fear all the time.

Like there's plenty of days you open the paper and or you open the app on your phone with a paper on it and you're like, "Oh, boy."

However, being a parent has been one of the most fundamentally changing things that have, has happened to me, transformative, because it removes you from the center of the narrative, right?

So I feel like, uh, I, I draw hope from the kids, first of all -- from human ingenuity; there's lots of examples of human ingenuity in the novel.

Um, right now I think one of the most hopeful things is for a long time, people who were worried about climate change and the environment, the narrative was it's going to be really painful to wean ourselves off fossil fuels -- it's really expensive to go to renewables.

And that's changing so quickly that that narrative is already defunct .

So I feel a lot of hope about that.

I feel like, you know, Putin's invasion, for all the awful humanitarian disasters that it's causing, both micro and macro, it's really accelerating Europe's transition to renewables.

So I feel some hope in that.

I don't believe that we're going to be able to just invent ourselves out of all these crises, but I think the more storytelling we can do and the more we listen to young people, I'm just trying all the time to learn from young people and let the kids teach me now.

Uh, I think then I start to feel hopeful.

Sometimes.

(Laughs.)

Franklin: As we, as we wrap up, you know, I went back and looked at, at some of the interviews that we've done together over the years, which have always been a pleasure.

And you mentioned, uh, a couple story ideas, uh, one which has become Constance, um, in, the girl in the spaceship, but you also have been really interested in the Panama Canal.

Doerr: Yeah.

Franklin And in the fur trade.

Doerr: Oh, good job, Marcia, yeah.

Franklin: Might we see anything like that in the future?

Doerr: Hmm.

Both are big complicated files on my computer.

About the Panama Canal, I feel like there is a really interesting story about manifest destiny in this idea that like, "We're just gonna cut through a continent and America is the, the, the, you know, the nation to do that."

And it's also, it's this enormous thing -- it's also a story of yellow fever because, you know, it's this tiny, tiny, tiny creature, these insects, mosquitoes that really derailed the French attempt to do it and almost derailed the attempt, the Americans to do it.

I haven't quite solved how to make that more than just a science narrative that I'm interested in, um.

And there's a whole racist element to it too, which was, you know, often yellow fever was considered like a low disease, you know, that black people got.

And so I'm worried somehow -- I've gotta figure out a way to tell that story still.

It's very interesting, truly American 20th century or beginning of the 20th century story.

And fur, yeah.

I mean, where we live, you know, this idea that the fashion for beaver hats, you know, not the beaver hats that we imagined, but fancy hats made from beaver fur, drove basically the extinction of the beaver.

These enormous wetlands along the Snake were removed.

And of course all, elsewhere, way outside Idaho, too.

So someday I would love to tell a fur trade story.

I have tons of notes.

Franklin: And I cannot be the only one who wants to know if you're going to pen some short stories again.

Doerr: Oh, thanks.

Yeah.

I, I'm always writing stories here and there.

I have one going and I have one in the O. Henry collection last year.

Um, yeah.

You know, your publisher wants novels 'cause they reach more readers, but I love writing short stories.

And also, you, I feel like you can take a few more risks in a story because if the whole thing caves in, it's maybe only two or three months of your life versus once you're about five years into your Panama Canal project, you've like, you gotta finish this thing.

Franklin: And finally, Anthony, what has Idaho afforded you through all of this?

Through the writing, through the accolades, through the press, through the... Doerr: Oh, you know, I mean everything.

Idaho affords friendships, first of all, like real friendships, and um, so much, uh, access to places where my kids' phones don't work.

You know, that's like one of the most important things in parenting is like, "Oh, guess what?

Your phones aren't working now, you guys have to talk to me."

Uh, you know, Idaho is just a source of endless inspiration in terms of, you know, this, this morning before talking to you, I get to climb Proctor Mountain and you just get to be out there and you feel healthier and better and uh, happier when you see the lupine blooming in the mountains.

Um, and also, you know, at a time when, when, in 2015, when "All the Light" was really getting popular, it was really overwhelming for me.

You know, I don't have like a staff or a team or anybody; it's just me.

And, uh, you know, we had people like driving to the house, trying to get books signed and lots and lots and lots of mail.

And uh, so the quiet and the kind of lack of competitive nature where friends just support each other, that's been just a real balm for me.

Franklin: Well, I know that you you've talked a lot about making sure that you have a legacy and that things -- that we all have a legacy, frankly, you know, that we all think about the fact that life is short and what are we going to do while we're here and what are we going to leave behind?

I have absolutely no doubt that what you will leave behind are some wonderful examples of the art of writing.

Doerr: Thanks, Marcia.

Franklin: So, thank you very much for taking the time once again.

I think you hold the record for the most amount of, uh, appearances on, on Dialogue and I'm thankful for that.

So, um, congratulations for everything that's, that's happened.

And I, I look forward to the next oeuvre.

Doerr: Oh, thanks, Marcia.

Thanks for everything you do for culture and arts and history in our state.

Franklin: Well, that was a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoyed it as well.

You've been listening to Pulitzer Prize-winning Idaho author Anthony Doerr.

Our conversation was taped at the 2022 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to the organizers of that capstone event for inviting me back for a fifteenth year, and to the Dialogue team members for all their work.

If you'd like to watch this interview again, or any of the 70 conversations we've taped at the conference over the years, check out the Dialogue website.

Just go to idahoptv.org and click on "Dialogue."

All the shows are also on Idaho Public Television's YouTube channel.

And don't forget to like the Dialogue Facebook page!

For Dialogue, I'm Marcia Franklin.

Thanks for making us part of your day.

(Music) Announcer: Presentation of Dialogue on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great State of Idaho; by the Friends of Idaho Public Television, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

With additional funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation.