Issue 97: Leigh Newman

LEIGH NEWMAN’S WRITING is informed by her experience living in Anchorage, Alaska, where she grew up camping and fishing in the wilderness with her dad while splitting time with the mainland United States. Her characters, whether they are children dragged on a family trip to the bush, young women trekking to Alaska from Ag School, or an old fortuneteller, are as the Chicago Review of Books puts it, “Deeply crafted and filled with complexity… we see multiple dimensions: good and bad, flaws and strengths.” Both her fiction and nonfiction gives us an honest, gritty mirror of life in Alaska.

Her collection Nobody Gets Out Alive (Scribner, 2022) was long listed for the National Book Award for Fiction and The Story Prize. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories 2020, Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, One Story, and Electric Literature and have been awarded a Pushcart prize and an American Society of Magazine Editors’ fiction prize. Still Points North (Dial Press), her memoir about growing up in Alaska, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard prize. In 2020, she received The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura.”

Newman’s essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Vogue, Oprah Daily, and other magazines. When not writing, she looks after her two dogs, two kids, and one cat. Soon to include: goats and more chickens. In June of last year Leigh joined us on Zoom from her home in New York. She fit us into her busy schedule of editing, literary events, and working on her upcoming novel tentatively titled The End of Snow. We discussed her approach to writing Alaska, counting syllables in her prose, and her thoughts on grizzly bears, salmon, and climate disaster.

DANIEL REISS

I’m going to start us out with a point-of-view question. Was there a particular story or voice in Nobody Gets Out Alive that was your favorite to write, and which story in the collection gave you the most trouble or took the longest to get through?

LEIGH NEWMAN

I think about point of view a lot. I often say to people, “I can’t stand first person. I never use it. I use third person limited.” But actually, that’s not at all true. Almost half the stories are in the I voice. I find the first person really difficult because it takes me a lot longer to get into the character. A lot of what I’m writing is like method acting. Until I find that voice in the language for a character, I have a hard time getting in. Somehow, though, they end up usually being my best stories, like “Howl Palace.” The other story I love in the collection is “Valley of the Moon.” I love the voice in that story. There’s something about the deadness of her voice and the high intelligence and the wryness interrupted by minutes of pathos, and then the end, the full sadness comes out. I love reading that story. But maybe my taste is flawed. No one ever brings it up but me.

The story that people really love out of the collection, the one I get all the response from, is the Alcan story. That was 100 percent a study in point of view. The first part of the story is first person, and I swear to God that first person, the daughter Janice, took me two years. I just couldn’t get the voice. It was like making a language. In general, I’m fascinated by the music of language. I used to scan all my writing and figure out the stresses. Now, I don’t do all that because I’m more familiar with what rhythms are. I’ve written in child voices before, and they’ve been, I would say, the most natural voice I can write in. I don’t know why, in Alcan, I was hell bent on making this girl’s voice better than all my other children voices. Except that as a writer, you’re always in a game against all the world. You’re in a game against your peers. You’re in a game against yourself, and then you’re in a game with God. It was hard, so when I got to the end of it, it was maybe seven pages, I thought, uh oh, I cannot stay with this voice for another seventeen pages as I thought the story would be. In fact, the story is seventy-five pages. In my earlier stories, I had focused on how tough it was in Alaska and how people were shaped by struggle. This time, I wanted to have a story about the dream of going to Alaska, the happiness. I did start the story with Maggie, part two. And, originally, she was third person plural. No, that’s not what you call it. The first person plural, the we voice. I grew up speaking French and English, so a lot of things I understand about grammar are different. I wanted it to be a we voice because I wanted to show two women who were friends. A lot of people read a love affair into them, and maybe it is. I don’t care. I just care about two women going up to the wilderness, being in love with each other, that love you have in your young female life, unlike any other love. A neverending love. It’s just all-consuming. It’s friendship, sistership, all the ships. And then I knew exactly what to do when I went back to the mother on this journey, a you voice. And then I thought, fuck it, I’ll have to use a different point of view in every single section. That’s going to be the technical challenge. Let’s do them all. The you was perfect for someone yelling at herself, a terrible mother driving through the night. And then I thought, aha! letter, epistolary, which is an I, but it’s a distant I, which no one ever talks about. First person is so close, and that’s why it’s so difficult in many ways. I thought about Claire Vaye Watkins who had written an epistolary part to one of her stories, and I thought, I’ll try that, even though I hate epistolary novels, and I don’t like the form. Then I went back to the I for the end. I was okay with that. It would be like a piece of music, we’ll come back to the chorus.

At that point I thought, well, I’m pretty great. But then I realized that the we voice of the two women in part two didn’t suit the story. I had to individuate the two characters in order for there to be conflict. If they were in a we the whole time, the conflict would be some outside force—“we were against the school” or “we were against the weather.” I knew all along that these women were going to crack up on Alcan. That was going to be the problem for them. But I had to make them a we at first. And then that we cracks into two I’s when the women break apart. It was a disappointment, technically speaking. I was bummed that I couldn’t pull off the we the way that I organized it, and I felt really bad about the whole thing.

But you always have to bow in service to story. Period. I can work on language. And I can make the language work if I work long enough and I work hard enough, but there’s some things you can’t do. Sometimes you just have to be like, “It was six o’clock and we had to go to the store.” There’s no other way for this story to work if I don’t explain that we’re in a grocery store. That’s a mistake a lot of young writers—myself included—make. They let the art overtake the story, or they think, oh, it’s tacky to say what time it is. It’s tacky to say that you know a parrot is narrating the story. So then nobody knows what the hell’s going on. I only want to write stories that are actual stories. I don’t want to write experiments. I believe in the human need for narrative, and I really feel like that’s the only way that emotions and heart get into a story. And that’s why we should be writing.

REISS

Reading your stories, I noticed how story, plot, narrative, whichever term you prefer—

NEWMAN

I prefer story because I definitely don’t know how to plot.

REISS

They play such an integral part in the collection. It’s the propeller moving things forward. But sometimes I feel like it’s an overlooked and even a dismissed element in a writer’s toolbox. Do you think a story needs to be captivating to be a really effective story?

NEWMAN

I don’t know what anybody else does. They can do whatever they want. The world is full of free and wonderful radical choices. They could be radical non-story people. They could be into radical stillness. That’s wonderful. Beckett. Great writer. (Actually, Beckett always told a story. Strike that point.) My goal was to write a story effectively. I went to an MFA program for three years, and I wrote pretty mediocre stories. They were okay. They weren’t different from anybody else’s really. I never knew what to do when I’d get to the end. I’d just start piling on all this emotional work that was unearned. Later, I knew I kind of candy-assed it through my memoir. It’s readable. It’s a good book, and people tell me it’s helped them. People I respect and love like it. But I knew that I had held something back. It was a function of my uncomfortability with the form, and it was a function of the person I was when I wrote that book.

Writing the stories made me a different person. Also, maybe I was becoming different as I wrote them. I thought about these stories every night. I would say to myself, “I’m going to write emotionally powerful stories that read like a novel.” I would say that like sixty times. You know, when you’re in terror, you’re going to bed, and you’re like, what the hell am I doing? Many years had passed by, since my first book, I’m getting a divorce, I’m on my own raising these two kids, and I’m like, what the hell am I doing? I was literally working in a shed. Opossums used to come in at night, look at me. One brought her babies in and set them down inside the toolbox, as a nest, next to me at the desk. At night, you need to say something to calm yourself down. That’s what I would say to myself: “I’m going to write emotionally powerful stories that read like a novel.” And I think I infused it with a little bit of arrogance. I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it better than everybody else. My only friends right now are Flannery O’Connor, Charles D’Ambrosio, Toni Bambara. Those are the people I’m going for. (Although Toni Bambara doesn’t prioritize story period. She’s just got so much character: she makes the character a story.) The stakes were serious for me. My life was an absolute disaster free fall. I could hardly get through the day. I started saying to people, I was writing those stories in my own blood. That’s why I needed that cover to be red. The designer first used a beautiful robin’s egg, female writer blue, and I wrote them a letter. “This is a very pretty cover, but I’m not a pretty writer, and I’m not even pretty. I’m kind of brutal, and I think you should give me the color that suits that.” Scribner was really great about it. They said, “Yeah, okay.”

POLLY BUCKINGHAM

That reminds me of the artist in the Alcan story—writing in your own blood—when she lives under the bridge or in the woods and just sculpts.

NEWMAN

Yeah, “She grew mushrooms out of her own veins.” It was like that. During the day, I would wake up and take my kids to school. I don’t think I was being a class-A mother at this time. I was like, “Go to school.” And then I would be like, “Let’s play video games. You guys play, and I’ll go to the shed and write, and then we’ll meet for dinner.” Still they say, “Remember that time, that period when you were writing that book for like two years? And we played video games all the time and you ignored us? Let’s go back to that kind of parenting.”

During that time, I was setting up emotional goals and artistic goals. But I was also setting up technical goals. I wanted there to be story. How do you make story? No one had ever taught me. During that time I was writing the book, for about four to six years, I read only short story collections. I read every story collection out there. I’d already read a lot of the classics, but also I had this job at Oprah.com. They laid me off during this period. And that was fine. That was good, no money but time to write. Also I had access to a lot of free books. I didn’t read novels. I tried to read nothing but stories because I was trying to brainwash myself into the form since I couldn’t break down exactly how stories worked. Why does something feel like a story? And why doesn’t it? I could see different templates of organizational structures. Like in a traditional, old New Yorker story. It’s the same thing as a travel story. I used write travel stories so I knew how to identify the form. You have an opening scene. Then you have a nutgraph that explains the opening scene—like, I’m standing on a cliff in Utah, watching the glaciers crash down, and then a seagull comes over, and eats some red ice. Nutgraph: I’m here in Utah looking at glacier formations to find out whether glaciers have ketchup in them. Then, you go into reason one why they have ketchup, reason two. Reason three. That’s a traditional article structure you’ll see in every magazine you read. And a lot of stories follow that identical model. Opening scene, then flashback, which is your nutgraph. Then you go back into the story. A lot of my stories do that. The one where I figured out how to do that was the title story, “Nobody Gets Out Alive.” They start at the wedding, then there’s background. Then they go back to the wedding.

But one thing I didn’t know, and no one told me, is that you’re only supposed to go to the nutgraph/ background setup for like a paragraph of a story. Of course, I dove into that nutgraph for ten pages every single time. It helped me understand where these people are coming from, and then, I went back into the frontrunning story. I knew what to do. Once I get back into the story, I can finish almost overnight. It’s the first ten pages with the opening incident and the background that take me forever. I was like, oh, that’s how most people do it. Or rather, as close as I can do it to how other people do it.

After a few of those, I was like, no, you can’t do that, Leigh. You’ve got to do something else. Let’s have one that’s just running action, no background. That was “Slide and Glide.” I think I wrote that story overnight—a cross-country ski trip with a marriage falling apart on the ice. And then, I said, let’s do a historical story. Let’s do a speculative story. I was always trying to move around in genres, move around point of view, move around in story structure. I couldn’t write “Valley of the Moon” until very late in the game because I had to be on top of all these forms to be able to do that one. That one is front-running story interspliced with background all the way through, including the ending. I wanted to have the background be the ending.

BUCKINGHAM

In the first story too. Such a powerful moment when we find out what her background is.

NEWMAN

Yeah, I forgot that. So I did it twice, Polly. I did. I think a lot about Jayne Anne Phillips and her story collection Black Tickets. In the first story, the whole story is about her visiting her mother, and there are scenes with her mother and there are scenes with her father, and at the end she hits this deer. She says something like, “It didn’t always used to be like this,” and she has just a couple sentences of what Christmases were like with her parents as a child, the sound of jingle bells and snow, and how it was so beautiful. And then she looks down at her hand. She tries to open the car door to get back in the car. She’s hit the deer, and it’s packed with golden shit. The golden shit the deer had excreted when she hit it. And I thought, wow. This story only makes sense when you get to the end. Things are so terrible with the parents that you can’t imagine them ever having been wonderful. It’s only in how wonderful they were in those few sentences at the end in contrast to all this crap that’s happening in their modern life and all these struggles. And then, that beautiful metaphor of the golden . . . maybe she said feces? Of that golden shit.

REISS

I like golden shit.

NEWMAN

Kind of tells it all, right? It’s golden shit. I really love the story for that, and I’m sure it influenced me on how to capture an image that had the whole theme in two words. That’s what you really want when you have language, story, character, and then every expression of the language articulates. Grace Paley does that too, constantly. Grace Paley will walk in with a thesis, and then if you really look at every sentence in her stories, it’s just a rewording of that thesis. Like, I’m trying to choose between two men, and then she goes to the store to buy slippers. She can’t decide whether she likes the left slipper or the right slipper more. I was going to call Janice, but then I was going to call Dina. She’s choosing between two all along. It’s very clear once you start looking. You don’t notice it at first. It’s too bad that I can see it because I want to go back and not see it. And because you’re a writer, you don’t want anybody to see it. I think that with really good writing you’re able to move all these levers simultaneously, but in service to the story, in service to the emotionally powerful part that I was talking about, in the search to make a story that has meaning and resonance. I really do think stories are supposed to serve humanity. That’s a relationship. I believe in God. My intention on this earth is, I only want to write something if it’s serving humans. Otherwise, I don’t want to write it anymore. There was a time where I had to write things just to make money, to serve my children and get them dentistry, shoes, ect. But not with my art. Not with my art.

REISS

Whenever you think back on certain earlier stories, maybe even before you started writing nonfiction, do you think the reason they didn’t make it into the collection was because you didn’t feel like they were in the purpose of service?

NEWMAN

I never thought about those stories twice, Daniel. I didn’t think about them even for half a thought. They were zero to me. I knew I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do. I knew I was faking it in some way. I didn’t know what I was doing with language. I didn’t know what a story was, how to construct one. I didn’t know how to take risks.

When I wrote these new stories, I didn’t even understand half of what I was doing when I finished them. I only showed them to one person, this neighbor. I was like, “read these stories,” and she was a pretty good writer, very ambitious and unafraid—my opposite. She said, “I’m going to send these to John Freeman,” who I knew, but I wouldn’t have sent him my stories. He’s a wonderful poet. And he has a great journal called Freeman’s Journal Quarterly. At that time, he taught with me at NYU. He was this big editor. The most important thing he said was, “You know, Leigh, what I love about your stories is at a certain point they surprise you.” And I went, really? I didn’t know what he was talking about. It took me years to figure it out. That was a new skill. There’s two kinds of surprise. There’s the surprise of the revelation of information, i.e., what you’re talking about, the end of “Howl Palace.” And then there’s the surprise of the emotional revelation. The feeling. Henry James has a great quote about this, but I don’t remember what it is. I like the surprise of feeling when people do something or react to something not the way you’d expect. And then it sets events in motion. Or maybe it doesn’t.

REISS

Yeah, I felt that way with the family fortuneteller story. The revelation of the emotion. It went a direction I wasn’t expecting.

NEWMAN

That was a hard one. I remember my editor said, “You know, she’s not really, what do you call it? Psychic?” I looked at her. “You gotta be crazy. She’s totally psychic. You’re just a logical person.” And, of course, I’m not.

REISS

We were debating whether she actually had the psychic ability or not.

NEWMAN

I think she does. But I’m not the authority, right.

REISS

We all thought so, too. Thank you.

BUCKINGHAM

Is she an historical figure?

NEWMAN

I just made that up. In Anchorage, and I am really interested in Anchorage, I grew up in what is called the Bush. My dad was a doctor, so he had a city job. He’d started out at the Native Health Service, and that means he would fly out to different villages and

help people with his doctor skills. He was really in love with flying and hunting and fishing and climbing, and I grew up that way. There were no weekends where we just hung out. I keep joking about how we didn’t go camping—we would go duck hunting or sheep hunting or caribou hunting, and we would camp while we hunted. We’d go fishing. We’d go mountain climbing. We had two planes parked in the backyard. I almost died flying so many times. I don’t know why I’m not upset about that, but I really am not. Every time we came back from a trip, we landed, tied up, and I ran to the garage. My dad had bought me a banana seat bike for like sixty cents at some yard sale, and the pedals would actually spark against the asphalt. I’d ride it two miles down to A&W as soon as I got back into town, still filthy, covered in fish guts or caribou guts. I would do the drive-through. But this is Alaska—so nobody gives a crap, and I’d be like, “I want a burger, onion rings, and a root beer.” I loved coming back to town and I still do. That story was taken from a neon sign in downtown Anchorage, a little kiosk. It said, Card Readings, $5. I made up everything else except for Spernard, the neighborhood where the story is set, which is being gentrified rapidly, or has been. The whole collection was definitely a love letter, not just to Alaska, but to Anchorage.

DAVID ST.CLAIR

The stories in Nobody Gets Out Alive are set on Diamond Lake, which is fictional. I’m curious about the sort of ideas and considerations that you put into a fictional setting.

NEWMAN

There are maybe three suburban lakes in Anchorage. One’s Campbell Lake, where I grew up. Another one’s Jewel Lake, which is where I got the name Diamond. I probably would have set it on Jewel Lake, but I don’t think people are allowed to have planes on Jewel Lake. The other one that they’re allowed to have planes is De Young Lake. I never knew anybody who lived on De Young Lake, and that’s not a great lake name. Diamond is. There was a local politician named Dimond, and everything’s named after him in that area. Dimond Boulevard, Dimond Mall, Dimond High School, Dimond Junior High. But it’s not spelled like the gem.

And being dyslexic, and being the knucklehead that I am, I didn’t know that. I was like, diamond! Diamond like oil, like gold! You know, natural resources. These characters are living on a lake in a city built by rape-the-planet resources (myself included!). I figured out it was spelled differently right before I wrote the book. But, I thought, I’m going to write it the way I want it, so it’ll say the things I want.

Some things I take from my own life and some things not really. The Anchorage I grew up in was great, larger than life. It was all pawn shops and strip clubs, and the famous strip club was called the Bush Company. At nineteen, I was like, “Let’s go!” I got some guy friends to take me. It went over very badly. I was like, “Yeah, feminism!” Nobody got it but me. They were like, “Yeah. You have to leave.” Just driving past my house, you’d pass, like, The Great Alaskan Sausage Casing Company. That was a thing. It was next to Las Margaritas. My family always went to Las Margaritas, and it’s in every single thing I write. I’m loyal to Las Margaritas. There’s a competitor, La Mex, and I’ve never mentioned it. Only Las Margaritas. Neither have particularly authentic food. But that’s not the point.

REISS

How often are you going back to Alaska?

NEWMAN

Oh, I go back a lot. I was supposed to go back this September. I was just there in November for the National Book Award. I did some classes at Fairbanks and a talk in Anchorage. That was wonderful. I was supposed to go back and teach in Fairbanks this summer, but I got the offer too late and already committed to Sewanee.

I’ll probably go back this fall. I’d like to go back and work on my next book. For the last book, what I’d usually do is get to, like, page ten on a story. Then I’d write another story and write to page ten—so the characters, the background, maybe an opening scene. Then I’d stop. I wouldn’t be able to go any further. I’d take two or three stories, and I’d relocated to an Alaskan town outside Skagway, called Dyea—my friend Jeff Brady

has a cabin there. It’s seventeen miles to the nearest town. Dyea has thirty-four people in it, but there’s no center or anything. But most of the time I would just stay in my cabin and chew Nicorette gum and write twenty-four hours or something. And once I had finished a story, which didn’t take long, I would go on this crazy run. I don’t know how to run, but I would run down to these flats where the bears are. I did all the things you’re not supposed to do: Don’t run in a bear area. Bring bear spray. I had Jeff’s wolf-dog Maya with me. And then I’d come back to the cabin, and I’d finish another one. Then I’d go back home and live. Then I’d come back up with three or four more stories and finish them.

My friends Jeff and Dorothy Brady’s property is absolutely incredible. They’ve renovated these beautiful cabins on their property and they run a writing residence called Alderworks. Each cabin has stained glass and little stoves. They’ve got horses and dogs. And they have put up with me. I just keep coming back. They’re absolutely magnificent human beings who love the arts. They also have a writing conference called Northwards. I taught there with Karen Russell two years ago. It was a blast.

BUCKINGHAM

You said earlier you count stresses. How did you start doing that?

NEWMAN

When I started to write in my early twenties, I’d scan my writing. I would look at where the stresses were. What was the rhythmic organization of my natural voice? How could I interrupt that? I would scan every night and look at different patterns, at what would happen if you move the end of a sentence to the beginning, how you could pick up and use vowel sounds in the middle of words to carry the sound of an entire sentence, or a paragraph, or the whole thing. That way, it’s tight. It’s like music. It’s supposed to read naturally, I hope. It’s natural, but it’s not. It’s highly, highly composed. Not many people do it in fiction because it takes a lot of time.

BUCKINGHAM

That’s amazing. Jim Crace, I think, does that.

NEWMAN

I bet he does. People need to read him more. He’s a really good writer. What was the one he wrote about that epidemic? Where everybody died?

BUCKINGHAM

The Pest House.

NEWMAN

He’s a beautiful writer. Is he British?

BUCKINGHAM

Yes.

NEWMAN

He wrote about the West as if it was his own.

BUCKINGHAM

So much of what you’ve said today and your work reminds me of Alice Munro. It’s so trauma based, and the structure is similar. Your flexibility with point of view really reminded me of her.

Oh my god, Polly. I have to say something, and I’m just going to say it out loud now that she’s dead. I don’t like Alice Munro’s writing. I never liked it. This isn’t about her daughter. That’s a separate thing and horrible. But, for me, there was always something in her writing she wasn’t going to tell you, and it didn’t feel like she wasn’t telling you for your knowledge. It felt like she, herself, was afraid of it. So the stories always felt kind of vague to me. It always felt like she was floating around, flopping around. I try never to discuss it; I don’t want to tear down another artist, but she is literally beloved, so anything I say—as the cantankerous weirdo over in the corner—is really not going to affect her very much at all. She’s got a Nobel Prize. And she probably is a master. But, Polly, I have tried. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read her collections. I bought all of them. I’ve listened to people tell me why they like a certain book. Then I read it again. And read it again. And each time I don’t get it, I say, “Oh, Leigh, it’s you. You are the problem, not Alice Munro. If this many people think she’s a genius, she’s probably a genius.”

I had that same experience with Henry James. I remember reading him in college, not liking it, in fact, writing a whole term paper without reading him just because I was stubborn and doing well in that class. And then in my twenties I got my heart broken because I was a jerk to someone, and I read A Portrait of a Lady, and my whole world changed. I’m now a James-oholic. The Golden Bowl. What a book. But even way back when in college, I knew the problem was me. I wasn’t there yet. I’ll probably wake up one morning when I’m eighty, and I’ll crack open Munro again and I’ll go, “Oh, that’s so great. How could I have not seen?” It could be some undiagnosed narcissism in me. But I would like to like her work because a lot of people I respect like her. And they look at her work, and they learn a lot from it. One day maybe I’ll graduate.

BUCKINGHAM

I wonder if it’s because you don’t hide anything. And you’re right. There’s often a secret, and we don’t always get to know it.

NEWMAN

Yeah. I guess I don’t like that.

REISS

What books are you currently reading?

NEWMAN

Part of what I wanted to do with the stories was to start an Alaskan writing tradition, an Alaskan voice. So I was looking at people like Faulkner. I was looking at Southern writers, and how incredibly lavish a lot of their prose is. The Southern writing tradition seems to be based on the glories of the language. I wanted to go too far. I wanted to use a lot of adjectives. I wanted to be very lavish because that’s the feeling I get from where I grew up. I wanted to write Alaskan vernacular. I didn’t like that the West had somehow become an Alaskan identity because we’re so different in so many different ways. A lot of the Western writing I was reading was, like, white guys—they put like a rack of antlers on their head, they got drunk at a cabin. I’m tired of reading that story.

Annie Proulx, blew my mind open when I was younger. I still don’t know what she’s doing. She’s all over the place. I love her, like, oh, my God! I’m in love with you, and I’ll never, never understand you. Period. You’re like an alien. Like we got married and I looked over, and I realized you’re not human. Like, you have a vagina for a head, and I don’t understand you. There’s a moment of horror every time I read her. So that’s probably a good thing.

Recently I really love Claire Keegan. We write very differently. I would love to write like her. She has stripped it all away. There’s a purity there. I know it comes from work. She has sacrificed showing off completely. She’s not going to put anything in unless it’s in service to the story. It’s like reading sea glass. Blue sea glass. Liquid sea glass. The control and the humanity in it. I love her writing.

A newer crush I have is Susie Boyt. Her novel Loved and Missed is just incredible. She’s maybe the daughter of Lucien Freud, the painter, and the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud—all those people are in her family line. This novel is slim, like Claire Keegan. It’s exquisite. You can’t stand it. I would read a couple pages, and then I had to put it down. The feeling I got was so overwhelming about the goodness of people, which is what I’m really interested in. I’m not interested in everyone being an asshole and being tough and hard. I get everybody has their complexities. But I’m interested in the desire to give, and to love, and to serve, and to be that person who is a light. This book is just incredible. It didn’t get a lot of attention in the US, and it’s a shame. But it got a lot of attention in England.

Another writer I just love is Yiyun Li. I like her nonfiction. Her new book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is about the suicide of her two kids. And then she wrote one about her own breakdown called Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She also wrote a novel that everybody overlooks called The Vagrants. It’s a crime that it didn’t win the National Book Award. That is a book to look at point of view. It’s a perfect book.

I have this little stack of perfect books. Just because they’re perfect doesn’t mean they’re my most loved books. A perfect book means the language, the story, and the thing they’re exploring, the emotional message of it, are unified. It all works together perfectly. There’s no errant chapter, like when you read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited there’s this chapter where he talks about Catholicism by a fountain for a long time. And you’re like, why didn’t you cut that? Because the rest of the book is perfect. The Vagrants is one of those perfect books, and The Great Gatsby is one. The Heart of a Lonely Hunter is one. Beloved is one. Oh, As I Lay Dying—that’s a perfect book. I want to say Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is perfect, but the ending is not perfect. Shakespeare, again, not perfect. He doesn’t know what to do at the end. He’s like . . . and now everyone’s dead! The end! But he’s my big mamou, my soul king. I used to revere perfect books above everything else. But now I’m growing to love sloppy gorgeous books—the kinds that boink you over the head with some wacko, glancing blows of feeling.

BUCKINGHAM

I really appreciate that you’re talking about what fiction does for humanity.

NEWMAN

I’m not a nihilist. I don’t believe the world is all shit and we’re going to behave shittily, and at the end we’ll be left in our own gloppy juices with nothing to say for it.

BUCKINGHAM

Maybe this is an obvious question, but do you think you need to look at the darkest stuff to come to that?

NEWMAN

You need to look at the dark. You need to look at the dusk. You need to look at the sunset. You need to look at the sunrise. You need to look at the whole panoply of human experience and emotions and efforts. I admire people like Ottessa Moshfegh. She’s so dark and nihilist and funny. And that’s great. That’s who she is. I could never write that way, nor would I ever want to. I can admire those things, but that’s not how I see the world.

REISS

I heard in one of your previous interviews that you were working on a novel about an all-woman speakeasy.

NEWMAN

I was. I had a bit of anger at myself. I deleted the novel, and now I can’t find it. So I’m not doing that one anymore.

REISS

Are you still looking to do a novel next?

NEWMAN

It’s due in December, so I’m writing a novel. I am such a jerk. I get really perfectionist, and I get a little crazy. I wrote a bunch of novels, probably sixty pages of five or six different novels, during the pandemic. And then, I decided each one was terrible. I’d get to page one hundred and say, this is just fucking God awful. I don’t care, and so nobody else is going to care either. I finally went with the speakeasy. I really love to read history. I was basing it loosely on my grandmother who was Native and who adopted a white lady who’s my mother. But I took her out of Alabama and put her into Alaska. I don’t know. I deleted the whole manuscript in a fit of rage at myself. And so then I went back to another one I had written during the pandemic, and I started writing that. And so that’s what I’m going to finish. I don’t really talk about novels anymore, about what they’re going to be about, because of exactly what we just discussed. Every time I talk about what I’m doing, it ruins it for me because there’s very little discovery. And if there’s not discovery, then you’re not making something. You’re just executing. I do have a title for the new novel. It’s called The End of Snow. And I’m going to finish it. I’ve got to get some more upbeat titles.

I would love to go to the cabin. If I’m going to make this December deadline, the only way that’s going to happen is if I go to that specific cabin and I’m around Jeff and Dorothy Brady. They’ll come in and say, “You haven’t eaten in a couple of days. We made some salmon. You want to come over to our cabin?”

BRIAN LYNCH

Can we know if the novel’s set in Alaska?

NEWMAN

It is set in Alaska. It’s set in many places: Nevada, Alabama, Massachusetts. It’s much more of an American novel than it is an Alaska novel. I wanted to move it to another city like Columbus, Ohio or something. But unfortunately, I’m not interested in any other city, period. It’s Anchorage or bust.

MAKI THIERSCH

There’s this one section in your memoir where you’re in Russia post USSR collapse—

NEWMAN

That was a crazy, crazy trip.

THIERSCH

At some point you pretend to be a dancer to get into that one theater. You said earlier, you write like a method actor. Can you expand on that playing-pretend aspect?

NEWMAN

Hmm . . . I think that being a method actor is why I prefer fiction to memoir. I was never interested in writing a memoir. I needed the money really badly. It was 2009. I had a baby on the way. I didn’t have a job. I’d lost every freelance job I had. And everyone my whole life had said, “Why don’t you write a memoir?” I wish I had read more memoirs before I wrote mine because I’d only read two. And there’s some things I would have done differently. The memoir Heavy by Kiese Laymon made me think, crap, Leigh, you know, you didn’t really go to the wall. He did. He is the king of writing as himself, even given the idea of persona on the page. Another memoir writer who blew my mind is Carvell Wallace, Another World for Love. I want to be them. Except I’m not.

For sure that’s why I long to write fiction. I want to be other people. I love Pam Houston, but sometimes she’ll just look at me and go, “That story, that’s right out of my own life.” I don’t do that. The stories I make are made up. There are pieces that are from real life. There really was a mastodon skull that a friend of mine owned—the mastodon skull that appears in the story “Nobody Gets Out Alive.” How could there not be? I grew up with this rich lore of hanging around wilderness people. But the people at the party, the conflicts and affairs, were all made up. Ditto, Alcan, An Oral History. I met a woman in Skagway, who told me about moving up there in the 1970s, and that she’d gone to Ag school. She kept saying, “And then we were in Ag school in upstate New York. And it was amazing! I fell in love with the mule trains.” This woman didn’t have a dime to her name. She was seventy-five. She was hustling, collecting cans, and smart as a whip. Her best friend had come up with her and made millions salmon fishing. At the time, I didn’t know what Ag school was. I had no fucking idea, but I wanted to find out what Ag school was. That’s how I work: I save all these bits and bobs, a collage of all the stories that people tell me and anything else I see. When I’m in Alaska, I’m constantly looking at strip malls. I love strip malls. In Fairbanks, there’s a place called Pioneer Town, a town that was washed away in the 1950s, and they took all the historic remnants after the flood and made like a little mall for tourists. It has dioramas and saloons from the prospectors. I go there and die of happiness. I have all those bits stored up, waiting for a story that hasn’t come.

And then, sometimes twenty-five years will go by, and I’ll say, “Well, what’s going to happen here in the story?” And I’ll use a goat I saw eating a can of beans in Jerry’s backyard in Homer or the glove section of the JC Penny’s in Anchorage. Plus a weird look a kid gave me on the bus. There’ll be hundreds of these moments in one story.

When I went to Montreal with my mother in 1979, a woman did throw herself in front of the train next to me when I was seven or eight. That really happened. And that was the ending of the story “Valley of the Moon.” In that same story, there’s a wine bar that used to be a dentist office. That’s also real. And those statistics about rape and violence against women in Alaska are, sadly, very real. But other than that, none of the other stuff in “Valley of the Moon” happened. I don’t have a sister. We didn’t have a fight. I have never adopted a pit bull. Just a shepherd mix.

REISS

Did you know from the beginning of writing the collection that you’d want to have characters return? Like we get Jamie as a child, and then later we get her as an adult.

NEWMAN

No, no, no, no. I just wrote “Nobody Gets Out Alive.” And Katrina, I fell in love with her. She was gleaming. And mean. An asskicker. Maybe she was somebody I would want to be. And while it’s true that I eat whole buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, I would never bite into a drumstick and then throw it onto the floor. No, I wouldn’t.

I had to think, what made Katrina so hard? The way that women are raised in Alaska—and me too, and most of my friends—is that you have to get tough really quick. That doesn’t mean you’re heartless, but there’s definitely a veneer of toughness and of survivalism. You’re not going to splay yourself open if it can be avoided. The day after fishing “Nobody Gets Out Alive,” I wrote the story about Katrina and her best friend Jamie—about the two of them being little girls and her being open and vulnerable on a float trip with their dads. They were different as girls than as women. And then, at that point, Jamie needed her own story. “Valley of the Moon.” Just to understand her. And then it seemed natural that she would pop up in story after story. That’s how small communities are. Everybody turns up in everybody else’s life stories. Whether they realize the importance of their role or not.

Due to this line of thinking, I was very adamant that the book not be a novel or linked stories. There was a kind of fated happenstance I wanted from the connections between stories. And to be honest, that was a mistake financially. Young writers, please take note: You want to write a linked story collection that feels like a novel. You do not want to write what I want to write. It was very hard to sell this collection.

ST.CLAIR

In one of your interviews, you talk about community and its relationship to storytelling. And at the same time, being out in the woods in Alaska sounds very isolating. Does writing stories set in Alaska help create a feeling of community, or do you feel like you’re really connected to that community and you want to share it with a broader literary community?

NEWMAN

I don’t think I’m thinking much about community when I’m writing. I’m not interested in being a good literary citizen. I think that’s a silly thing. If you want to help other people who are writers, great, help them. Or don’t. But I don’t think writing has anything to do with citizenship. In fact, I think it has to do with being an outlaw. At least for me. If a writer wants to be any kind of card-carrying member of any country, culture, or community, that’s dangerous because you’re going to feel loyal and you won’t be able to write about what you see, think, and feel with enough distance.

When everyone’s like, you’re a good literary citizen, I’m like, please, you can just keep that for yourself. Thank you. I do help people. Constantly. Why shouldn’t I? I arrived here in New York City. I thought The Paris Review was from Paris. I knew nothing. I knew no one. I had no connections. I had to take awful jobs, hate myself, feel like a failure and give up over and over. It took me forever to become a writer because I thought I wasn’t talented enough. Nobody was telling me I was so great. I didn’t have money to go to grad school. So now, why shouldn’t I help people? I’m happy to read their books, review their books, help a young writer, mentor them, help my students, help my student get an agent—anybody I can help, I’m going to help if they’re talented. And even if they’re not talented, I’ll help because maybe they’ll be talented later. I was late out of the gate.

I grew up where the adults would get together and they would drink copious amounts of alcohol by a fire or in their home with a lot of stuffed wildlife around them. And they would tell stories. Remember when Jimmy did that? When Suki did that? When Ruby did that? Remember when Sherry did that? Remember when Butch did that? Well, Butch is a character. They were always doing outrageous things, like, let’s get the geese drunk. Dave McGuire, my dad’s best friend, literally lived in a dirt floor farm in Oregon and got himself somehow to medical school. He was a genius, smartest man I’ve ever met, bar none. He bought some big white-cream Lincoln with red velvet seats or red leather seats and he’d get roaring drunk and he’d go, “I’ll drive you home, Leigh.” He would drive down the hill and we’d spin out all over the ice and he’d dump me off at home. I know there’s a negative side to that, I’m very aware, but we were living stories. I grew up living stories. And then I grew up hearing people tell their lived stories. We weren’t talking about the Kardashians. We were not talking about people on Instagram. We’re not talking about people’s podcasts. We weren’t even talking about Dan Rather. We weren’t talking about Amy Carter, who I think was in the White House when I was little. We were talking about what you did that week. And it was interesting. Very, very interesting. And I listened, and I asked questions. My little pal, Lisa McGuire, and I were always listening and staying up until five in the morning to see when things got really fun.

BUCKINGHAM

The book starts with “Howl Palace,” which looks at contemporary development in a particular area. And it ends with “An Extravaganza in Two Acts,” which is historical and also looks at development. I’m curious about not only the manipulation of time in individual stories, but in the book as a whole. Also, to what extent is the book about the development of Alaska and about exploitation? Even the family fortuneteller is such an accurate story about exploitation.

NEWMAN

What I was trying to do was just look at what happened. I hate that every single time you listen to a writer, they say, “Well, in that novel, I never start with writing a novel. I start with asking a question and then I pursue it.” And you’re just like, “Oh, shut up.” You were trying to say something. Or feel something. If you’re not, then you shouldn’t be in this game. You had some preconceived ideas. You had some inklings. I don’t mean to make fun of people, but I just don’t think it’s very authentic.

As I wrote the stories, I didn’t have an overarching question. But I was looking at global warming and how we’ve affected Earth. I was looking at how Alaska had been mined for resources, whether those were oil, gas, copper, salmon, crab, timber. I was drawn to that story because people don’t know the story of coal. It would have been real easy for me to write a gold rush story, but everybody thinks about the gold rush and Alaska (see the “Alcan” story). Instead, I thought, let’s do coal. And then, in other stories, the pipeline. I grew up during the building of the pipeline in the 1970s. There was cocaine everywhere in Alaska and wild, new money. An auto mechanic’s making seventy grand or a hundred grand a year just because there weren’t any auto mechanics up in Alaska. Vacuum salesmen! It was an exuberant, heady time. No one understood that forty years later, we’d all be examining our part in 90 degree summers.

Another thing I wanted to talk about was how women are treated in Alaska—and maybe everywhere. Except that in Alaska it’s so obvious. We’re strong; we’re tough, we’re cando, but on the other hand, we’re sexually abused. We’re domestically abused. There’s so many more men than women in the population. I guess that’s a good thing for dating. But the rape and murder rates of women are horrifying, some of the worst in the nation. And I have all kinds of experiences with that—in terms of non-native and Native women friends, what happened to them. So, yes. I wasn’t looking at a question; I was looking at a reality and I was trying to explore all sides of it, the heartfelt and the heartbreaking. As best I could.

BUCKINGHAM

It’s interesting, structurally, that the first story has that little bit of a flashback at the end that reveals the whole thing. And then when we get to “An Extravaganza in Two Acts,” I see what the whole book is about in much the same way.

NEWMAN

I’m so glad, Polly. That was the point. Polly, thank you. Really, that was the whole arc. It was just a weird arc.

BUCKINGHAM

So in some ways it is a novel in stories, right?

NEWMAN

Oh, for sure. In my mind, yes. 100 percent. I do think of it in many ways as a novel of individual discrete stories linked by the story of the state and the story of the culture and the story of those three issues I was interested in: women, the environment, and the white relationship to other communities and resources.

Traditionally, people wouldn’t see that as a novel with a beginning, middle, and end.

You know, many people encouraged me to put “An Extravaganza in Two Acts” as the first story.

BUCKINGHAM

Oh no.

NEWMAN

Right. I know. That’s what I said. But I thought for a minute, maybe they know more than me. Usually I say, “Maybe they know more than me.” But my worst question is, “How bad could it be?” Then I do it. And every time it’s very fucking bad. Like, I’ll cut my bangs. How bad could it be? How bad could it be if I went off fishing? It can be very bad. You could have your head eaten. You could actually have your head eaten if you go off fishing by yourself without any kind of arms or bear spray. Kathy Belden, my editor at Scribner, she is a true soul, she said, “You could put it at the beginning, and it’d be a great way to introduce people to Alaskan culture, and they would be drawn in,” and I said, “I really don’t want to do that.” And they listened to me. It was my choice. I couldn’t explain why, Polly, the way you did. That was just what I wanted to happen. I knew it had to go to the end, that it somehow sealed the book.

LYNCH

I did notice a maturation of voice from the start of the memoir to the end of it. That voice carries over into the fiction you were writing after. The characters are more restrained and insightful. I was wondering if that’s a difference between writing fiction and nonfiction or if you think you had to write through some of that emotion of your childhood first, before you could—

NEWMAN

I don’t believe in that thing about catharsis with memoir. Luckily, after I finished it, I did say, “God, that really kind of worked some things out for me. I feel a lot better.” When I finished the book, my agent at the time said, “You’ve written this book so that you can become the writer you were always destined to be.” I am uncomfortable writing memoir without a veneer of cutesy or likability. Please like me. I think I was very afraid to write the deep, deep truths. And so I wrote it the way I wrote it. And I think it’s a good book—I love pages one through ninety, and I love the last ten pages of the book. I’ll stand by those. At that time, I was also in a state of deep denial about what was going on in my life. I was lying to myself, and when it all blew up as it spectacularly did, that marriage, that guy, everything blew up, I probably should have gotten the hell out of there and not gone back. He’s a great guy, though. It’s not his fault. It just all blew up. I didn’t want to throw him under the bus at the time, even though I knew there were massive problems. I wanted to believe the dream or something. That’s what you do. Probably that wasn’t the time to write the memoir, but it was what it was. It was hard. My mother has significant mental issues, and I really pulled my punches on that, too, because, I don’t know why. I was in denial. I wasn’t afraid of anybody. I was afraid of myself.

I read memoirs all the time. I’ll be like, wow, they really put it out there. And then I meet them and I realize, nope, they didn’t. Nope, they had way, way, more stuff that they did not talk about. They didn’t even halfway go there. I wasn’t giving the dirt on my exhusband. I wasn’t giving the dirt on myself. And we had a crazy relationship. I mean, it was love, for sure. I was lucky. I had some love in there. But there was also some craziness, and it just did not get in there. But I kept myself under control.

BUCKINGHAM

Does it get into the stories?

NEWMAN

Yes. Yes. I said, “I’m going to go all the way.” I remember finishing this book and being like, I’ve done everything I need to do, and I can die now. I can go get hit by a car if that needs to happen. I’ve written this one thing—I went all in. I mean it. I went all in, and if I need to kill myself at some point or I get in a situation—it’ll be all right. I made this one true thing.

The way I think about it is that the first book was written in the body, and the second book was written in blood, and this third book is written in the spirit, which you’ll understand when you read the book.

THIERSCH

I have a funny one. You can answer this as short as you want to. What are your thoughts on the Grizzly Man documentary?

NEWMAN

Oh, my God. Everyone in Alaska has the same thought. I get enraged. Nothing but pure rage. Here’s what I don’t like. Effectively, all I take away is he got bears killed. If the bear eats you, they kill the bear. And he put himself in their food path, and they were hungry. Even if it doesn’t eat you, you get a bear killed because then the bear’s acclimated to humans and thinks they’re his friends, and he’s going to go over to the other humans. And there’s plenty of people, as we’ve realized, willing to just shoot a bear for its skin and cut off its head and take a picture with it. That kind of person disgusts me.

I do love Herzog, that German filmmaker who made the movie. All of his movies are the same. He’s always got like a guy with a really crazy bad idea going into the wilds and just getting his ass kicked. It’s like Henry James. All his books are the same—young, innocent American girl gets wound up in European politics and ends up in a den of lies and sin and money. But it’s expressed in different ways, and it’s really good reading. Shakespeare is always about the usurpation of power and what happens when the divine right of kings is violated and how that power vacuum creates human turmoil. Really interesting. He does it in Hamlet. He does it in Macbeth.

REISS

It makes me think of a line from “Howl Palace” when Dutch says the Arctic Circle is not the place to go if you have even the slightest existential question. I really liked that.

NEWMAN

I like that line, too. Thank you. Yeah, it’s a different part of Alaska. I mean, it’s literally like a living, breathing Sartre.

BUCKINGHAM

Could you address the dramatic changes we’re facing right now between climate change and the rise of authoritarianism. How do you respond as a writer?

NEWMAN

In my novel, I’m dealing with my climate grief. And my climate rage. It’s grief for me because if you get mad, you can do something. And I can’t do anything. I mean this: recycling is a joke. I almost want to throw garbage on the street. I almost want to litter. It’s so futile. Do you know what electric cars runs on? Coal fuel plants. I can’t even have conversations with people about it. They’re shooting the little wolves in their dens. Trump. Oh, God, everything. What’s happened to my state? Personally, I’m devastated.

When anyone says, “Should I go to Alaska?” I say, “Well, hurry.” And they literally go, “Why?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s over. It’s melting.” Now’s the time to go see Glacier National Park, too. It’s a great park. Most of the glaciers are gone. Same thing’s happening in Alaska. You want to see a salmon? I’d go run and go catch one right now because there’s not many left. My dad has to buy fish at the farmer’s market for sixty-five dollars a pound. Do you know how that makes me feel? It makes me want to stab people. And he’s like, “It was really good salmon, Leigh.” He didn’t grow up in Alaska eating salmon for breakfast, lunch, and dinner as a child like I did. I had some of the sixty-five dollars wild king he bought at the farmer’s market. It did not taste like king salmon. Whatever is happening, I’m pretty sure that farm-raised fish have somehow procreated with wild salmon. The meat is not what I had growing up. It’s not the same color; it’s not the same texture. It is not the same thing. You know this frozen salmon out of Costco in prepackaged portions? I literally throw up every time I eat it. Even my younger brothers, they’re sixteen years younger than me, they grew up fly fishing, catch and release, not eating a lot of wild fish and throwing the trout back. When I was a kid, we would catch the trout, and then we would gut the trout, and then we would fry the trout, and then we would eat the trout, which is really delicious.

I don’t think I would write a full climate novel. I don’t think I want to write an apocalypse novel, which is the only story, I think, that we’re headed towards. But if you wrote a novel and didn’t acknowledge what was happening to the planet, that would be stupid. Like, if you wrote a novel that was set in World War II, even if the novel was taking place in Arkansas, you would mention World War II on the radio, wouldn’t you? That would come up somehow in the novel, in different ways. It might not be the fundamental crisis, but it would always be there because that’s reality. And so if we do not mention the climate in every single thing that’s written, we’re denying reality.

BUCKINGHAM

That’s beautiful. I mean, that’s right on.

NEWMAN

It’s really what I feel. Actually, now, I’m going to cry.