A life built on art

A conversation with novelist Garth Greenwell, part 1

Every so often, I get on Zoom with someone whose work and mind I admire, and then I bring our conversation to you. Today that someone is the novelist, literary critic, and educator Garth Greenwell, whose third book Small Rain was published on September 3. His body of work means more to me than that of any other living writer.

I remember the first time I encountered his writing, how puzzled and then intrigued and then bewitched I was by his sentences. They are long and abundant with comma splices, often doubling back to modify or to clarify themselves as they proceed. They are hard to describe rightly, without making them sound loose or improvisational. But Garth’s sentences, when read with one’s own eyes, are masterfully crafted — elegant, probing, precise as a knifepoint. Sarah Thankam Mathews, in an excellent profile, describes his prose as “vascular”: “His sentences are parataxic and branching, as organic and surprising as a network of veins,” she writes. I also have a mental image of his prose as respiratory, though it doesn’t sound as sexy as vascular. There is a sense of breathing in the way the sentences move, expanding and contracting. You can tell the writer was trained as a singer, and as a poet.

To me, reading Garth Greenwell feels exactly like the experience of thinking inside a human brain, an exceptionally observant and generous and deeply feeling one. There is something holy about it. That’s a word I have tried to avoid using when I talk about his fiction, out of fear of seeming hyperbolic. But yesterday on Instagram I saw someone refer to a Garth Greenwell book event as a “High Holy Day,” so I now feel emboldened to let it rip. Reading his work, listening to him talk about writing and art, it has rearranged me, down to my cells.

I was introduced to Garth’s fiction by Amelia Morris, I think. It must have been the spring of 2019. I was holed up in a borrowed house on Whidbey Island, working on the first draft of The Fixed Stars. Amelia and I were texting about writing, and she sent me a link for Garth’s story “The Frog King,” which had appeared in The New Yorker the previous fall. I printed it out and read it in the house’s giant bathtub at the end of a day of work. In the years since, I have read it at least a dozen times. “The Frog King” is also a chapter in his second book Cleanness, which was published in January of 2020.

There’s a passage early in “The Frog King” that I think about all the time, because it was the first description of queer love that wholly captured my experience: “I felt like my heart would burst, those were the words for it, the hackneyed phrase, and I was grateful for them, they were a container for what I felt, proof of its commonness. I was grateful for that, too, the commonness of my feeling; I felt some stubborn strangeness in me ease, I felt like part of the human race.” When I finished the manuscript for The Fixed Stars, I asked permission to use the last part of that passage, the last two phrases, as the book’s epigraph.

Garth Greenwell made his name writing serious literature full of gay sex. I recommend his books constantly, but I sometimes hesitate when I’m talking to someone I don’t know well. Not because this is gay literature — everyone should read gay literature — but because he writes sex scenes that are extraordinary: intricate, demanding, difficult, beautiful. Of Cleanness he has said, “At times in this book, I had the goal of writing a scene that was, at once, one hundred percent pornographic and one hundred percent high art. Sex is one of our most charged forms of communication, and that makes it a unique opportunity for a writer. One thing that interests me is expanding charged moments and dissecting their emotional intricacies; in that way, sex is a kind of provocation, a challenge.” His latest work of fiction, Small Rain, presents a whole new challenge, as you’ll see below.

Though I teach memoir and personal narrative nonfiction, I often teach his fiction and his criticism. I’ve learned so much from reading Garth, and from attending workshops and seminars that he’s taught through the Shipman Agency. He is a kind and brilliant teacher. I’ve wanted to speak with him for a long time, but I only had the guts to ask¹ for an interview with the release of Small Rain.

Photograph by Oriette D’Angelo

Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into fourteen languages. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. It is being translated into eight languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written nonfiction for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s, among others. He writes regularly about literature, film, art and music for his Substack, To a Green Thought. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Grinnell College, the University of Mississippi, and Princeton. He lives in Iowa City.

The conversation that follows took place on July 24, 2024. It has been edited for clarity and brevity — any errors are mine — and because I hated to cut much of anything, I’ve broken it into two parts. I’ll post the second part next week.

Finally, please note: you do not have to be familiar with Garth’s work, nor have read Small Rain, to benefit from the immense generosity of his mind.

Thank you, Garth.

Molly Wizenberg: Hello! How are you?

Garth Greenwell: Okay, thanks. Oh — [reaches down, lifts a cat into his lap] — my cat Pedro wants to say hello.

MW: This is just one of your two cats.

GG: This is one of my two cats. This is my boy. My other boy is in the room, but he’s under some blankets sleeping. Pedro has a little — sorry, my desk is a mess —he has a little bed on my desk.

MW: What a lucky boy. Thank you for saying yes to this. I don’t think we’ve ever really spoken.

GG: It’s so nice to meet you finally.

MW: It is such a pleasure to meet you. One of my fondest memories of early 2020, before —

GG: I was gonna say, Wow, fond memories of 2020 . . .

MW: Very early 2020. I went to your event for Cleanness, when you came through Seattle. I’m very prone to — well, one thing I want to talk about today is feeling, and getting feelings into language and the risks of that. But first I want to say that your work moves me in a way that sometimes makes me very inarticulate. I sat at the back of the room with my spouse at that Elliott Bay Book Company event and sobbed my way through listening to you. I think my way of responding to what I often struggle to articulate in the experience of art. . . well, the response comes out through my eyeballs. [Laughs.]

GG: I understand. That makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you, that’s very beautiful. I remember that event so well. I had not seen the elder of my two younger sisters for a couple of years, and she was eight and a half months pregnant, and she came to that reading, and I was so moved to see her. I remember that as being a really, really joyful event.

MW: And now there’s Small Rain. It’s radiant. It radiates something — a sense of aliveness, of pure feeling. And it’s also a page turner.

GG: Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. Thank you. I remember really early on, when I began writing it, being like, How am I going to write a novel in which this guy never gets out of bed? [Laughs.] So I’m really glad to hear that it has something that pulls you through it. 

MW: I’ve heard you describe all of your fiction as an effort to bring consciousness onto the page, and for most of Small Rain, that consciousness is confined to a single room. Our narrator is in a hospital bed. And yet his consciousness is so expansive! I hope we can talk today about how you achieve that.

But first: back when Cleanness came out, you said that your next novel was going to take place in Kentucky, or draw on the gay history of Louisville, where you’re from. How did you wind up at Small Rain instead?

GG: One reason was that the pandemic happened. There’s a very urgent novel I want to write around that Louisville material, but lockdown happened, and then I couldn’t be in Louisville, in the archive where I wanted to spend time. And then the other thing that happened is that in late August 2020, I suffered a medical crisis similar to the crisis the narrator undergoes, and in the wake of it, I was so sort of bewildered and overwhelmed by that experience. And it’s that feeling of being overwhelmed and perplexed and bewildered by something that I’ve experienced or seen or come into contact with — that’s where the impulse toward art-making, toward writing fiction, comes from. 

I think we have art because there are situations and experiences that are so complex, they defeat all our other tools for thinking. And the peculiar pressure of fiction writing — the pressure of scene and situation, the pressure of sentences — is what allows me to think, in non-expository, non-argumentative ways, about my own state of bewilderment. And so, in the wake of coming out of the hospital, as I was recovering, I started to think about how I could write a book that would let me think about this experience.

MW: Did you know right off the bat that it would be a book?

GG: You know, this is the very first time that — yes. With my first two books, I really tricked myself into writing them. I would never ever have written the first sentence of What Belongs to You if I had thought, Oh, I’m gonna write a novel. I’d only written poetry to that point. I had barely written non-critical prose. I think I had written, like, one narrative essay about teaching, maybe two. Until I was deep into the third of the three parts of What Belongs to You, I did not think about that book as a novel. And then Cleanness, I wrote a couple of chapters while I was still working on What Belongs to You. It was a thing I was working on in pieces. It wasn’t until I wrote what would be the second chapter [of Cleanness], which was the first thing I wrote after I moved back to the United States [from Bulgaria]. It’s funny — you know, I’ve just moved back to Iowa City after two years in New York, and I’ve been going to the cafe and sitting at the same table where I remember writing this really scary scene —

MW: This is “Gospodar”?

GG: This is “Gospodar,” yes. And it was only when I finished that story and then I knew I would have to write — I mean, it would be years later — what would become “The Little Saint,” that’s when I realized it was a book. I think “Gospodar” was the third chapter I had written, and there are nine chapters in Cleanness, so I had a third of it before I understood that it was a book. 

Small Rain is the first time I knew it would be a book, a novel. That was really scary. What happened, and I really don’t understand this, but at the end of the book, the narrator thinks of two lines from a poem by Louise Glück, and it’s the last two lines in her poem “The Seven Ages.” I think the lines are, Earth was given to me in a dream / In a dream, I possessed it. And Glück is a poet who has been very, very important to me for a long time. I love that poem, but it’s not a poem I had ever memorized, not the way I memorize poems as a sort of daily practice. But I had the experience of walking around our neighborhood with my partner in this sort of slow, shuffling way, maybe in the first week or ten days after I’d gotten out of the hospital — my surgeon had said we had to walk every day, that it was really important to the recovery, and I never wanted to because I just felt so terrible, but [my partner] Luis was very disciplined, making me take walks — and these two lines just floated into my head. And somehow, in a mysterious way, because of those two lines, I felt the book. I couldn’t have given you an outline, nothing like that. But somehow those two lines opened a book shape in my head. 

And it was not long after, maybe a week or two after, that I sat down with the first sentence in my head and started writing. I wrote the book over, I think, three years, and there were some breaks in there. But I just sort of followed that line of energy. There’s nothing in those two lines of that poem that suggests a narrative or a kind of narrative shape, but they did open up a space in my head, and I knew it was going to be a book.

MW: And in the end, there’s poetry all over the book. I love seeing the way your education as a poet and your education as a singer have left their traces. I can’t imagine this novel without all the scraps of poems that run through the narrator’s consciousness.

[Editor’s note: just for fun, if you’d like to listen to a snippet of our conversation — roughly the next five paragraphs — you can:]

GG: One way I’ve come to think about the book, or to think about how to talk about it, is that in some sense this is a book about a guy who, in his early 40s, decades before he thought he would have to confront this question, is forced to ask himself, If this is the end of my life, what has it been worth? It’s been a life that is built on art, a life devoted especially to literature but also to music and to paintings. And I knew that I wanted the book to have lots of aesthetic experiences. I remember saying to someone early on — and I think she was sort of horrified by the idea — but I was like, I want to write a book that's just someone having aesthetic experiences. That’s all. Just someone experiencing art.

MW: [Laughing] And were you like, And it’s going to have a 12-page meditation on an Oppen poem . . . ?

GG: [Laughing] That came later. I love Oppen, and I’ve long loved Oppen. I never studied Oppen, but the narrator of the book has, and [he] worked on Oppen in graduate school. That was not true for me, but in the hospital, Oppen was the only thing I could read — and also, actually, some poems by Louise Glück. Oppen was a kind of companion in the hospital. 

I knew that the spine of the book was going to be, medically, what happens to him over the course of ten or 12 days in the ICU, but I didn’t understand anything else about the structure of the book. At some point I came to understand that the book was making a claim about art, and about the value of art, and about how art helps us live. And that if the book was going to be plausibly adequate to the claim, or plausibly responsible to the claim, I had to try to show what it meant. I had to try to show what would it mean to engage with a work of art with your whole life, and to have your life kind of radiated back at you by a poem. What would it mean for a poem to offer companionship at a really difficult moment? I had to really do that, I had to try. 

And I settled on that particular Oppen poem for dramatic reasons. I’ve long loved this poem about a sparrow. And there was already a sparrow in the book. But also, it’s only nine lines long. I think it’s 34 words long. And I knew that I had to, just like, go as far into the poem and as far with the poem as I could. And so it ended up being this five- or six-thousand word essay, and it really is kind of an essay on Oppen, and it's super weird, and I know it will annoy a lot of people. God bless my editor. There was no pressure from my editor to take it out. In fact, she said, I’m really glad it’s there.

It’s funny — I doubt everything in a book except the thing that is most obviously problematic. [In] What Belongs to You, the middle section is a single paragraph. I doubted everything else in that book, except that that section should be a single paragraph. And now this, this weird thing where all of a sudden you’re reading an essay or listening to a lecture where a guy, like, really minutely closely reads and analyzes a poem: that’s the one thing in the book that I never questioned. I feel such a deep necessity for that in the book, because it is the pillar on which everything else in the book rests, on which everything else in the book depends.

MW: And the book sort of prepares us — it teaches us how to read it, by the time we get to that point.

GG: Oh, that’s beautiful that you say that, thank you. I’m really happy to hear that that was your experience of the book. What I hope, I guess — well, for much of my life, I have been trying to find a way to write about art that is at once rigorous, or sort of holds itself to account in terms of standards of attentiveness and factual claims and kind of analytical rigor, and yet also conveys a sense of why all of that is worthwhile. Like, how art helps us live. And at that point in the novel, we’re more than halfway through the book, and we’re invested in this narrator’s life. So there’s a very rich context in which the poem can kind of take root and have meaning, and that allowed me to get closer than I’ve ever gotten before to the kind of writing about art that I’ve always wanted to do.

MW: I hope you’ll take it the way it’s intended but — one of my students once, when we were reading “The Frog King,” they described your style as feeling very “natural,” what they called “normal.” Like, the way the sentences and the syntax worked to build the narrator’s consciousness on the page, it made a close match to this reader’s experience of what it feels like to be human. But of course there’s so much work that goes into creating that! It’s easy for a reader to imagine that the novel just spilled out that way. But for the author, the work is painstaking and intentional. I once read an interview in which you referred to a “reality effect” in your work — the way your books give “the sense of a lived experience, an experience that is drenched with reality.” There’s of course peril in that, that a reader might be tempted to conflate you with your narrator. Could you talk a bit about how your narrator has revealed himself to you? What is your relationship to your narrator, especially as someone who was a poet before you were a novelist?

GG: I do think my sense of the narrator, and of consciousness in fiction, has a lot to do with having spent twenty years writing lyric poems where, you know, there is an I that, you know, it’s not true that the I is totally foreign to the poet. But also, as I was trained to read poems, there’s a very rigorous sense that the I is not, in any autobiographical way, the poet. And there’s a real sense of freedom about that. 

You know, it’s funny in fiction, and I feel like there’s a lot of anxiety about that. I remember an early interview for What Belongs to You where, this interviewer was like, Come on, tell me how much of the book is real. And I was, like, The question just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s a category mistake. In poetry, no one would say to Jorie Graham, you know, how much of these poems is Jorie? Because there’s a sense in poetry, if one is writing well, that one is writing with more than just one's own individual sense, one’s own individual self, and that one is writing in a way that allows the language itself agency. One is writing in a way that allows the traditions out of which one one writes agency, and that those exert a kind of pressure, you know.

I really do believe that if an artist is working well, their art is smarter than they are. And I don’t think that’s mystical. I think that’s really concrete about how form functions. It is certainly true that I am a writer who uses experience. A lot of the fact-checkable information about my narrator maps onto fact-checkable information about me. But it’s very clear to me that my narrator is not me. It was always clear that I was writing fiction. My books are full of invention.

But the sort of firewall that I have tried really hard to erect between my life and my work is harder with Small Rain. For instance, the narrator’s partner L is a poet, and in the book appears a poem that, in the back of the book, you can see is a poem from the real world, written by my partner Luis Muñoz. But L is not my partner Luis Muñoz, even if they each wrote the same poem. Where [my] books use lived experience, they use it because it is aesthetically useful, not because the book feels any responsibility to the truth. 

And as for the question of where my sense of the narrator comes from, everything comes from the moment-to-moment working out of sentences. Once I have a situation, I am watching the energy of that situation work its way out. This was really clear in What Belongs to You. There were basically two characters, and when those two characters were in scene together, I really felt like my job was to be as patient as I could be and just watch them and see what they did. There’s also the energy of the sentences. I really do feel that there’s my will, and then there’s the energy of the sentence, and what happens on the page is a collaboration, or a competition.

I am someone who writes sentence by sentence. I discover things about my narrator in sentences. I remember one of the things that really excited me when I first started writing What Belongs to You, when I first started working in prose: I would have a sense, writing a sentence, that suddenly the floor gave way and I would be deep in the narrator’s past. Something in the sentence had triggered that. I’m a sentence mystic. It all happens at the sentence level for me.

MW: What you said about the floor giving way, this image of maybe falling through a trap door within a sentence — that’s a moment I’m often trying to help my students notice and be open to when they’re writing. You think you’re writing one thing, and then the ground opens up and you’re somewhere you’d totally forgotten . . .

You know, I listened recently to a Yale Review panel that you were on last year with Megan O'Rourke and Emily Bernard. You were talking about what you called “bad feelings,” and about our culture’s intolerance of bad feelings, our desire to push bad feelings away. And you said, “The central question of art is, what do we do with bad feelings?” Of course the medical crisis that sets up Small Rain unleashes a torrent of a certain kind of bad feeling: fear of death, loneliness, confusion, uncertainty. And as he’s lying in the hospital, the narrator’s mind — his thinking about art, his memories, his love for L, his whole consciousness — embarks on a kind of project of making something redeeming from that bad feeling.

GG: That’s really it. 

You know, something I’ve been thinking about as I try to figure out how to talk about this book is, What Belongs to You and Cleanness are very much books about geographical adventures. They are books about an American abroad, but also, and maybe more importantly, erotic adventures. Small Rain is a book about a guy in the American heartland who’s seven years into a long-term relationship that is not a marriage but looks an awful lot like a marriage. They share a mortgage. Like a lot of people, the narrator has stopped seeing his life. He’s sort of taken it for granted. But also, like a lot of people, I think he resents his life. It’s not the kind of life he imagined for himself, and I think he feels resentful of that. I also think he resents it just because it is his only life. Twenty years before, there had been a whole field of possibility, and now it’s become the one life that happens to be his. Simply by being singular, it is constraining. It’s formed by commitments he has made, and commitments, by definition, are restrictions on freedom.

And something that happens at the beginning of the book, when he is pretty literally struck down by annihilating pain, is that that life and that world are taken away from him. For the days that he is in the hospital, that life and that world are taken from him. And in this paradoxical way, by the very fact of taking the world away from him, this experience — this pain, this illness, this permanent change in his life — gives the world back to him. He is shocked into seeing his life and into realizing that the very things that have made his life singular and limited and narrowed the field of possibility, those are the things that have enabled meaningfulness. They are the things that have made his life something that he should love. 

And it is a book about becoming aware of death, which is the most banal recognition of bad feeling — the bad feeling that everything in our lives, in whatever stage of capitalism this is in 21st-century America, is designed to make us forget. And yet it is the knowledge that we will die that, to me, defines humanness. We are the animal that knows we will die. We are the animal that must make meaning, and we are the animal whose fulfillment comes in loving and being loved. Those are the three facts about human beings, I think. Pushing away that knowledge [of death] makes those other two things impossible. I think it’s impossible to generate genuine meaning without an awareness of death, and I think it’s impossible to experience genuine love and being loved without a recognition of mortality, finitude, this radical vulnerability that the narrator is forced to recognize. 

And so it is a book about not turning away, being forced not to turn — I mean, it’s not by his own virtue that he faces up to death; it’s because death sort of smacks him in the face. It’s about what is made possible by that bad feeling, that recognizing that one is going to die. That’s something that interests me. Like in my first two books, thinking about other bad feelings, especially feelings of shame — [I’m interested in] the question, What if we don’t push those feelings away, what if we don’t repress them?  What if we don’t distract ourselves from them? What can we do with them? What do they make possible? I think that recognition of death makes possible everything that we genuinely value about human life.

MW: It mirrors, too, the experience of making art, the transformative nature of making art, the way the work changes its maker. You’ve spoken about the idea of the abyss of art-making, having to be willing to throw oneself into the abyss. For those of us who feel drawn to go into it, if we come out the other side, we find ourselves transformed. That’s a tremendous reward. 

But as a teacher, how do you talk about the imperative to not push away bad feeling, and to throw yourself instead into the abyss? I teach writers who know they have signed up to write personal narrative, to work from memories and lived experience. Writing this way often requires a willingness to come into contact with real pain. I sometimes worry that I’m teaching them to do something that will ultimately cause them to reinhabit places of pain and suffering. I know those places have been essential for me as a writer, that I cannot avoid them. But as a teacher, as someone responsible for other writers’ education and also safety, how do you talk about the risks inherent in writing? 

GG: This is, I think, a real limitation on the extent to which art can be taught. Because unlike other academic disciplines, art is a practice. It’s an existential practice, and it’s a way of life, and you cannot live someone else’s life for them. I will never tell a student, Throw yourself into the abyss! Because when you throw yourself into the abyss, there’s no guarantee that you come out. The history of art is full of people who don’t get out. As an educator, I must do no harm. I will not say, In this piece, you need to face up to this thing that is going to cause you overwhelming pain. The way I deal with it, when I have a gifted writer who is working on a piece that is obviously not satisfying them, I might say that they seem to be letting an impulse to protection dictate where the piece goes. And I will [guide them toward] work that [takes risks]. I will look at the poems of Frank Bidart. I think Frank Bidart is a heroic figure. 

I think the artist is a heroic figure. I feel extraordinary gratitude when I think of someone like Frank Bidart, who for fifty years has been throwing himself into the abyss and then delivering to us what he finds there. If you look at the history of art, even the people who treated art as a nine-to-five job, like W. H. Auden, there’s an awful lot of suffering. In part, it’s because being an artist means you don’t let yourself be distracted from these difficult things. You don’t let yourself be distracted from humanness. You don’t tell yourself myths. 

I think of James Baldwin, who suffered so much for his art and suffered so much in his own effort to pierce these myths that we tell ourselves, that our culture tells ourselves. I guess the job of the artist is to stand outside [that culture], to position oneself against that, which is always going to cause one suffering. And I will never tell a student this, but this is a truth of art-making. Or maybe I don’t think that about all art; you know, it’s a melodramatic way of thinking about art. I’m a pretty melodramatic person. There are many other impulses to art — the impulse to beauty, to grace, to play. Great art can always have a quality of lightness. But a lot of the art that I love best has required this sort of, you know, suffering, in some sense.

But no teacher can make those choices about how to live, and about what kind of experience is worth it, what kind of suffering is worth it. Our job is to examine paths other artists have taken, and to sort of bear witness in our own life and work to the choices we ourselves have made.

1. Thank you to my students for urging me on. You know me so well.