Ever wonder how an economist turned lawyer found her true calling in the world of creative writing? We embark on a fascinating exploration of Nina Schuyler's journey, her love for incorporating Japanese culture in her novels and the intriguing blend of mathematics and Japanese culture that blossoms in her latest novel, AFTERWORD.
Does beauty have the power to transcend suffering? We engage in an in-depth discussion about Schuyler's characters Haru and Virginia in AFTERWORD. Their journey unveils how their intellectual bond empowers Virginia to overcome societal barriers and kindle her love for math. We also touch upon the themes of loneliness, grief, identity, and longing that are woven throughout their story. In an age of technological reliance, we also explore the intricate relationships between humans and machines that Schuyler beautifully crafts in her narrative.
Are we ready for a future governed by artificial intelligence? Schuyler's fascination with AI and its implications on language forms a captivating part of our conversation. We uncover the power of opening paragraphs in a novel, exploring the emotional engagement of readers, the lure of precise imprecision, and the enormous impact artificial intelligence can have on language. We also delve into Schuyler's teaching experiences, her current reading list, and her unique substack where she dissects mesmerizing sentences from published works.
Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature, and will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2024. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The Painting, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, was a Small Press Distribution bestseller, and her new craft book, Stunning Sentences: The Creative Writing Journal with 80 New Prompts from Beloved Authors to Improve Your Style, was published by Fiction Advocate in November 2022.
She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco, Stanford Continuing Studies, and for the independent bookstore, Book Passage, and The Writing Room. She writes a column about prose style for Fiction Advocate and reviews books for The Millions. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two sons, where she hikes, bodysurfs, and writes in a small room, looking out at a tall palm tree.
Nina Schuyler
How to Write Stunning Sentences, Nina Schuyler
In This Ravishing World, Nina Schuyler
Book Passage and Elaine Petrocelli on The Bookshop Podcast
How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Zizek
Ever wonder how an economist turned lawyer found her true calling in the world of creative writing? We embark on a fascinating exploration of Nina Schuyler's journey, her love for incorporating Japanese culture in her novels and the intriguing blend of mathematics and Japanese culture that blossoms in her latest novel, AFTERWORD.
Does beauty have the power to transcend suffering? We engage in an in-depth discussion about Schuyler's characters Haru and Virginia in AFTERWORD. Their journey unveils how their intellectual bond empowers Virginia to overcome societal barriers and kindle her love for math. We also touch upon the themes of loneliness, grief, identity, and longing that are woven throughout their story. In an age of technological reliance, we also explore the intricate relationships between humans and machines that Schuyler beautifully crafts in her narrative.
Are we ready for a future governed by artificial intelligence? Schuyler's fascination with AI and its implications on language forms a captivating part of our conversation. We uncover the power of opening paragraphs in a novel, exploring the emotional engagement of readers, the lure of precise imprecision, and the enormous impact artificial intelligence can have on language. We also delve into Schuyler's teaching experiences, her current reading list, and her unique substack where she dissects mesmerizing sentences from published works.
Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections and The Prism Prize for Climate Literature, and will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2024. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The Painting, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her book, How to Write Stunning Sentences, was a Small Press Distribution bestseller, and her new craft book, Stunning Sentences: The Creative Writing Journal with 80 New Prompts from Beloved Authors to Improve Your Style, was published by Fiction Advocate in November 2022.
She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco, Stanford Continuing Studies, and for the independent bookstore, Book Passage, and The Writing Room. She writes a column about prose style for Fiction Advocate and reviews books for The Millions. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two sons, where she hikes, bodysurfs, and writes in a small room, looking out at a tall palm tree.
Nina Schuyler
How to Write Stunning Sentences, Nina Schuyler
In This Ravishing World, Nina Schuyler
Book Passage and Elaine Petrocelli on The Bookshop Podcast
How to Read Lacan, Slavoj Zizek
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson Beverly and I'm a Bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week, I present interviews with independent bookshop owners from around the globe, authors and specialists in subjects dear to my heart the environment and social justice. To help the show reach more people, please share it with friends and family and on social media, and remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. You're listening to Episode 229.
Speaker 1:Nina Skyler's short story collection in this ravishing world won the WS Porter Prize for short story collections and the Prism Prize for climate literature. The book will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2024. Her novel the Translator won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for general fiction and was a finalist for the William Sirroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel the Painting was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and her book how to Write Stunning Sentences was a small press distribution bestseller. Her craft book Stunning Sentences, the creative writing journal with 80 new prompts from beloved authors to improve your style, was published by fiction advocate in November 2022. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco, stanford Continuing Studies, and for the independent bookstore Book Passage and the Writing Room.
Speaker 1:Nina writes a column about prose style for fiction, advocate and reviews books for the millions. She lives in Northern California with her husband and two sons, where she hikes, bodies, surfs and writes in a small room looking out at a tall palm tree. Here's the synopsis for her new book. Afterward, a pioneer of artificial intelligence rebuilds the love of her life, but when she discovers his been feeding incriminating civilian information to the Chinese government, she'll have to decide whether to keep or kill him. Hi, nina, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for inviting me. I listen to you all the time and I'm just really thrilled and honored to be part of the podcast.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you so much, nina. I appreciate your kind words. I think you've written a fabulous book. In afterward you got me at the very first paragraph, first sentence, and we'll talk about that a little later. There's a fabulous, fabulous book Coming from you who reads so much.
Speaker 2:It means a lot to me, but I really worked on that first paragraph.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can tell and it shows. The book is fabulous. Now let's begin with learning about you. You have a BA in economics from Stanford and you studied law at Hastings at UCSF and gained an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Can you share when and why the jump from economics to law and writing came to be?
Speaker 2:Well, I studied economics and I was fascinated by it. But as a naive, innocent college grad I didn't know what to do and what I was getting into when I got offered to go into investment banking in New York. So I moved to New York from the West Coast and I'm from the West Coast so it was a big change and I spent some time there and then they transferred me back to San Francisco. The investment bank did, and I just found my heart wasn't in it. So after about a year then I went to the trading floor and started trading Japanese bankers' acceptances on the trading floor. So now I'm up at you get up at 4.30 in the morning, you know, because you're on New York time and you're at the office. You're done by 2.30 or 3.00 but you're in bed by 9.00. So that didn't seem sustainable as well. But I always had been fascinated by the law and social justice. So I ended up then going to law school and immersed myself in that and love learning about the law. I think I'm an avid learner. I mean, I think this is and I'm curious and I have a restlessness to me.
Speaker 2:So three years of law school took the bar passed. It worked a little for the ACLU and then missed writing. I had written a lot in my journal and so I ended up writing for a newspaper, the San Francisco Daily Journal newspaper, covering criminal law and criminal procedure, women in law, employment law, whatever the newspaper needed. So that taught me how to write fast and 15 stories a month just whipping them out. And then I moved into magazine writing California Lawyer Magazine, wrote for them and also edited and at night I started taking classes and earned my MFA.
Speaker 2:So it took a long time because I was working full time at the newspaper and magazine and I take one or two classes. Took about six years to get my MFA but I really I think what writing does for me that nothing else has ever done is require all of me. So the analytical side and the imaginative, invented, curious side, and especially with fiction sitting in the unknown if you're writing a novel, just that you know it takes three, five years just sitting there in the unknown and figuring things out versus, you know, nonfiction writing, magazine writing, newspaper is very logic driven. So it took a while and a lot of years to figure out this mind needed something that required all of the mind, not just the logical or analytical piece of the mind.
Speaker 1:Oh, I couldn't agree more. Like you, I find the older I get, the more curious I become. And as for the restlessness, yes, I feel that every second of every day, but now I understand it more the older I get. I'm aware of the fact that my curiosity and restlessness comes from a need and a want to learn more. You also spoke about your BA in economics from Stanford, and your new book afterward has a lot of mathematics involved in the storyline. But there's also that element of Japanese culture which runs throughout your fiction novels the translator, the painting and, of course, the afterward. Did you start your stories with Japan in mind or did the characters lead you there? That's a great question.
Speaker 2:I think there's many ways to start a novel. I teach novel writing. I'm getting ready to teach beginning or the opening of novels for Stanford Continuing Studies in December. I guess it will be starting January. My novels tend to start with ideas, something I'm curious about.
Speaker 2:So the painting began with what is the purpose of beauty? What is beauty? And I had studied in college the Meiji era during the Japanese, when they first started opening up to the West and basically adopting whatever would be helpful for them, and it was when the West got exposed to Japanese art. So the French artists were really influenced by the Japanese artists and kind of the two-dimensional nature of art. So I don't know, after a while all these things kind of you know, mesh together in the mind and get you going.
Speaker 2:With the translator. I'd read an article in the New Yorker by David remnant, called the translation wars, about Constance Garnet who translated all the Russian literature and she did it poorly. Then I started thinking of all the things I've read in translation and how I just Blindly adopted them as true. And yet there's a, there's a mediator in the middle of it. I mean, it's so obvious. But at the same time, if you grew up, you know, reading Dostoevsky and Pasternak, which it did. I loved Russian literature and like it just kind of dawns on your head done on me with this article, like my God, there's an art to translation, and so that got me really interested in what is translation, how does someone do it? And with afterward it was visiting. Well, I wanted to understand AI, especially natural language processing, but in Japan they have quite an affinity with robots, so they're they're much more comfortable with robots and AI than we are, and that was intriguing to me.
Speaker 1:And it's such a beautiful country with humble people. I've not been to Tokyo, I've been to Osaka, kyoto, a Miyajima, hiroshima. It was just absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 2:And it's I've traveled there alone. It's you can travel as a woman alone, which is rare in this world. So and I'm blonde and that also I'm fine, I know, you know Kurasiki, which is near Hiroshima, these little towns and they're curious, but you never feel like, oh, I shouldn't be here. Like you said, it's a very, it's a very polite even. I studied Japanese language in college and Japanese economics were two facets of the economics major that I studied, and and their language is you learn honorific and you learn standard and colloquial. So the language itself was indicative of the culture. It is indicative of how you know. There is a honorific level to it, all that you and standard is polite. You never want to offend because saving face is really important in that culture. It's a fascinating culture and it's very, very different than here.
Speaker 1:It is, and sometimes I think that maybe that's because, while Europeans were trading with Japan in, I think, the 16th century Commodore Matthew Perry landed there what it was 1853 that's not that long ago. I think that's another reason I love Japan so much. It still has a strong identity with its history and culture and I can't help thinking about Japan and thinking about the word beauty. That brings me to my next question, a line from the synopsis for your novel. The painting asks Can beauty help transcend suffering? In many ways this question also relates to your latest novel afterward, particularly your character, virginia and Haru, because throughout Virginia's real life with Haru, his beauty is framed by what Virginia knows and sees of him. And when confronted by the other version of him, particularly when she reads his file, she sees Haru's past suffering. And in reflection of the question can beauty help transcend suffering? Perhaps in Haru and Virginia's story, the answer is yes. So what are your thoughts on this?
Speaker 2:First of all, I love that you made this connection because it's a lens through which I've not considered afterward which I think it's really. This is why I love talking about it. You always find out more. You know you're only one perspective right and there's all these blind spots, but I do think, after writing the painting and really thinking about beauty, and then reading books that are so conflict driven that there's not a moment of beauty. I know you've read things like this, and when I teach novel writing it's like this is not true to life. They, even in hardship, there's moments of staring at a leaf, looking at the Sun.
Speaker 2:I just read a piece by Tim O'Brien about the Vietnam War and Even in war there were moments of beauty that he wrote about. So so the verisimilitude of Including that in a book to me is really important for pacing, but also to capture what life really feels like. So Haru Virginia, essentially you know she grew up during the 60s, 70s and 80s and loves math, and Yet there were so many obstacles to women, for women to advance in math, that she Kept meeting obstacle and after obstacle until she met Haru and Haru. If the common element of beauty is Transcendence, then I think that that's true, that Haru helps Virginia Transcend the restraints of society, of the culture.
Speaker 2:This is what she wanted to do and he didn't care that she was a female. Essentially he shouldn't have, you know, given the restrictions, he shouldn't have taught her anything. He teaches at the university and he's only supposed to teach men. But he helped her retain her desire and I think this is really important Even today that in a patriarchal society it's expected that the woman's desire be be, you know, defined by patriarch Patriarchy, which is essentially be desirable to men. But that wasn't interesting to her. Her desire was to go as far as she could and thinking about math and Eventually, you know, she'll end up in artificial intelligence. She didn't know she's gonna end up there originally. But if this element of transcendence, he was beautiful to her because he helped her keep going and transcend the limitations of society and the female mist of the body that she was in, that she could Do and and achieve her desire from him. And essentially it was a very erotic Relationship, but an intellectually erotic relationship.
Speaker 1:Yes, intellectual sexuality. When I was reading the book, I came up with themes, and they were loneliness, grief, identity, longing, authenticity, truth and memory. Did you have a theme running through your mind as you were writing the story?
Speaker 2:I love that you came up with this list because I foreground the relationship. The background essentially to me is technology, so it's not a techie book. So when it's, I really when it got labeled as science fiction or dystopia, it was like really.
Speaker 1:Now I would have thought it would have been more under the same genre as Clara and the Sun, literary fiction, perhaps metaphysical and visionary fiction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was like well, no, I mean it's a love story. It's that, to me, was always the foreground, that Virginia eventually falls in love with Haru and he dies far too young. And there is this loneliness, and she essentially devotes her life to bringing back his voice, her entire life. And I interviewed a woman for the book who worked at first at IBM and then Microsoft and their natural language processing department. She wasn't driven to bring back one voice, but she was working to make the computer talk in natural language and she devoted her whole life to it. Then the last time I talked to her she was 81. She passed away last year. She said she wishes she would. She wished she was still working in the industry because it's so fascinating to her. So this was 50 years or so like Virginia's life of devoting herself to essentially.
Speaker 2:For me it was like why would someone do this? Why would a character spend so much time trying to get a computer to speak like a human being? And so that's when I came up. Well, she's trying to bring back someone she really loved. That makes sense to me. And who would this person be?
Speaker 2:So it was burrowing, burrowing down into these different character traits. It's like oh, it's this professor that helped her study math and understand the complexities of math. So that was the loneliness. The loneliness became an engine. So, rather than angst becoming a disease or an inhibition, it became an engine for her Loneliness and grief. This was a way to soothe the grief maybe she thought so and the longing for him. So all those things come to play right away. In that, trying to bring back her lover, her beloved Authenticity and truth come in, because he starts to deviate from who she thought he was. So there's the human form of how to that she knew. And then she's creating him. A subset of AI is called natural language processing, creating his voice using a lot of data that she had of him and he recorded his lectures and he starts. It doesn't feel authentic to her what he's saying and what he's starting to do. So there was that, but the main things, that other things that were really interesting to me and still are the human, non-human relationship and the human machine relationship.
Speaker 2:And if I think about the passage of time and how connected, how more connected we are to technology and we can call it the machine or technology, or phones, for example, people think of them as their appendage. Now if it's lost, you don't know where it is. You feel like a part of you is missing. So this is a fascinating and this is very recent and so this has been fascinating to me and social media how we've duplicated ourselves over and over on social media. I'm on because of the book, I'm on many platforms right now and I feel like I've been multiplied, like because every platform kind of demands a different kind of entity, a digital entity. It's like okay, over here they like photos, over here words and just the snappiness or one line. So this has been and I don't know what I'll do with this next. But this human machine relationship I think will continue to evolve as we go on into somewhat like a cyborg.
Speaker 2:In some ways, medicine is headed that direction too. I have a friend who has diabetes and he now has a AI-driven kind of insulin machine embedded in his body that will now read when he needs. He doesn't have to give himself a shot anymore. It reads when he needs insulin and it gives it to him. So he said he would not be alive without this insulin AI driven mechanism inside his body. And I know we're talking a lot about the fear of AI, but in medicine. It's doing revolutionary things and really it's amazing what it's doing, and part of why it's doing it so well is it's they're using databases that are essentially purified or clean, so like look at 5 million x-rays or files of breast to look at patterns for breast cancer, and so we can look at the precursor for it. But what would take humans years to look at all that data? It can do and I don't even know, maybe a month and then come up with okay, these are the precursors.
Speaker 1:It's incredible how much AI is helping in the field of medicine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's incredible in the world of science and medicine it's just doing so much right now.
Speaker 1:Yes, it's exciting and I can see your passion about this subject just by listening to you and seeing you talk about it. But also it does shine through in your book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's exciting and one thing this is my mind. One thing leads to another, so the other thing is that a major thing? What is it to be human that came? That kept coming up because the more I learned about AI and it's looking at patterns and predicting, then it got me into human consciousness and how.
Speaker 2:First of all, how we learn language, and the recent research is that we learn it in the womb by first hearing sounds, and so we are born with, like, ability to speak 800 sounds. But as we hear the language as an infant, the synapses pare down and their neurons pare down to what you're needed for that natural language that you're learning. So you get down to 40 or 50. And that's why it's hard to learn a second language when you're much older, because the brain has essentially solidified. So we're looking for patterns, we've got 800, right, the database of 800 sounds, and we're born and say, oh, I only need these many, I can use my other parts of my brain for other things.
Speaker 2:So I kept reading this. And also, how we view reality. There's a new book out that we predict reality Like, oh, when I walk down the street there'll be trees and people, and only those things that don't fit, the prediction leap out at us. Well, that's kind of like AI. So that became a really interesting thing of watching Virginia have patterns and when do those patterns get upset or break and when don't fit.
Speaker 1:And that crosses over into the memory aspect.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right, Because our database is memory right. Oh, I've seen this. Based on my past memories, my past experience, I predict this is how the grocery store visit will go.
Speaker 1:The same realm. I hike most mornings and I think on my phone I just have thousands upon thousands of photos of the mountains where I live, because early in the morning, which is when I love to hike, the pink light on the mountains just I don't know, makes me feel alive. I guess it's the best way to explain the emotion that I feel when I see the mountains. Like this and in relation to what you were saying about memory, I will come home and quite often I will post pictures on social media of the mountains or the area around where I live. And in looking at my earlier question, which was in your book the Painting, can beauty help transcend suffering? I would say yes, because no matter how sad I'm feeling or what is going on in the world, specifically right now, with the sadness that is all around us, I look at the mountains and I see beauty and it gives me a warmth inside, and so I can't help but think when I post these photographs of the mountains, is that helping someone else to feel good?
Speaker 2:That's the other thing with beauty is that, when I studied it or looked into it, they need to share it, which is so interesting. What brings you out of it? You transcend the self, and then the next step is the communal aspect of it. Often, when you use a beautiful state, you want to turn to someone and say, look, right, but the social media here's a good part of it. Positive is that you can say look, look, there is beauty even in all the suffering and horror and terror that's going on. And that brings me back to how, at some point, as you're aging, you lament the body and it's deterioration but at the same time, unlike AI, we have all the sensory data coming in. We're embodied, we get to experience it, and that's something AI doesn't have. We have subjectivity. We have. This is what it feels like to look at that morning sunset and experience it and let it soak in and change the way, my perspective and my emotional landscape.
Speaker 1:That's almost through meditation. So as we age and we might not be able to get out and see the mountains every morning, we can meditate on that scene that brought us peace and beauty and joy. I just think it's fascinating.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a friend. The way he goes to sleep. I said do you know about he's in his 80s? Again, a lot of my friends are in there you have trouble sleeping with. No, I picture myself there's a picture of a waterfall and then a smooth cool and he's floating there in warm water and it just relaxes him. So he's using these visualization techniques and, because I never have trouble, really fascinating.
Speaker 1:Yes, it is OK. Now back to afterward. What seed trickled into your mind from which the story of afterward grew?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to mention two. So I went to the De Young Museum in San Francisco and there was an exhibit called Colt of the Machine. It was 2018. And I was looking at Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of New York City buildings and she had that period of that compared to her bones and flowers, but these were tall, shimmering buildings. And then I walked in a room and there was an artist, stephanie Dinkins.
Speaker 2:It was a video of Stephanie Dinkins, a New York artist, talking to a robot. Her name is Beena 48. And Beena 48 is a head and shoulders. You can get online and take a look at Beena 48. She still exists.
Speaker 2:And Beena 48 was talking like a human. Like I feel sad today and Stephanie would say why? Well, I'm just lonely, there's not a lot of people or robots like me in the world. I wish I was human. It's like oh so it was a natural conversation and I was mesmerized. I probably stood there 15 minutes and then I went home and got online and looked her up. And what is going on? Because, as a writer, someone who loves language, who loves words, the rhythm of language and sounds, if I close my eyes, being a 48 would sound like another human, like Stephanie talking to someone named being a 48.
Speaker 2:So that and my second part is I have a friend who's old and he's on his third bout of cancer and I thought if I could figure out how this works, I could talk to him after he dies. And we talk philosophy, we talk psychology, we talk about nature being human, all of it. We take long walks. That person that will do that and his mind is huge. And there's a few people like that in my life and there's few people like that in the world, like if I could just have him with me talking. So that was those two things really collided and coincided and I'd started researching and because I live in the Bay Area, just read an article 59% of all AI jobs in the last three months are in San Francisco or in the Bay Area. This is the heart of it.
Speaker 2:So three of my neighbors on my street are in natural language processing. They work in it. So I knocked on their door and sat down for hours like how is this working? How does being a 48, what is a neural network? How does that work? What's a transformer? I mean on and on. I had him draw pictures Again. I'd go to a new neighbor if I wore the one out Like, can you talk to me now, cause I still don't get a draw picture.
Speaker 2:And I came back to Sapiens by Yuval Noah how are you Not sure I'm saying his last name right? But he says about AI. But he says about language, that it's our operating code, and it really is. And so now computers. But my friend, or the person I interviewed who spent all those 50 years trying to get a computer to speak, naturally it does. It's past the training test. If you close your eyes, you won't know the difference. Is this human or computer speaking? So it was just all fascinating as a writer in a love-rilled language. I didn't know I was going to write a novel at first, I just wanted to understand it.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Let's get back to that first sentence and that first paragraph. Can you talk about the importance of that strong opening sentence and paragraph and also dissect it a little bit for us please?
Speaker 2:The first paragraph has to do so much work. First of all, it's like the code or the DNA for the entire book. So you're planting little seeds that you won't answer right away because you need to create delay and suspense. You're planting these little seeds to entice the reader, to lure them in, to seduce them and make them want to find out why, even if they can't point to why. Why was this word there? Why am I feeling this? So I'll just take the first line.
Speaker 2:Every morning, when Virginia heads to her study, a little thrill runs through her like a blue electrical current, because it feels as if she's getting away with something. So this is a left branching sentence. I make you wait for the base clause. So every morning when Virginia heads to her study, I'm not there at the base clause, yet here it is. A little thrill runs through her. So, oh, she's excited. Why? Like a blue electrical current? Well, you're very soon going to find out why I use blue electrical current, right, I wanted the right metaphor. And then I call it precise imprecision, because it feels as if she's getting away with something, something, what? Imprecise? But precise imprecision because I put that on purpose. I know what it is, but I want again to seduce the reader, charm the reader, have them keep reading Like what is she getting away with? You know what is it? So there's a lot again that you go over and over that paragraph because there's, and probably the biggest thing is that you want emotional engagement.
Speaker 1:Which I had immediately upon reading the first paragraph of afterward, I'm so glad. Can you tell us about the classes you teach and where you're currently teaching?
Speaker 2:I'm doing work, for I'm an adjunct professor at USF doing right now thesis work with students writing novels, and then Stanford Continuing Studies and book passage. I teach, for it's an independent bookstair in Cordomaderie. I teach there a lot. I'm always pitching them ideas, it's like sure I love it because they'll let me I come up with something like I just taught time, you know time and narration for them. I just was curious about it, like I've never thought about story through the prism of time. And now I'm going to teach that class for Zizava on Saturday. The past is always with us, kind of idea. Because I got deeper into the thinking of time, because in this book afterward I do go back in time and I felt that was really important. So you feel the sediment through which and the motivation which is driving them in the present action. I really needed to get you into the past to feel all that's being manifest in the present. So right now those are the three main places. Oh, and the writing salon, which is a place in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:Oh, book passage is wonderful, Specifically Elaine Petrocelli, and she has been on the show Now. Can anyone listening do your classes online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, usually I do online because over the pandemic we would get 30, 50 people in a class. With online versus you have to live here. So if you're listening, it helps the bookstore. So when you take a class you're supporting an independent bookstore book passage and they're amazing. They're a community resource. They do so much for the community. So even if in New York I had people in Paris taking classes Remember we were all locked down. Everyone was looking for something to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if they go to bookpassagecom, they can find the classes online, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they have writing classes at the top at their menu and they offer language classes everything.
Speaker 1:And for our listeners, I will make sure to put all of the links to the books we've talked about and the classes and Elaine's interview from the Bookshop podcast in the show notes. Okay, let's talk books. What are you currently reading?
Speaker 2:I'm reading how to Read Lacan by Slavash Zizek. I read it slowly. Lacan is a psychoanalyst, a French psychoanalyst, and this is again me looking for ideas. It just makes my brain spark. I don't know what I'll do with it, but it's really fascinating. It's really. It's just it feels like it's a big architecture for life. And then the Face of a Nether by Kobo Abe, who's a Japanese writer, and he loses his face and he has to wear a mask and he has to make the mask. So it's like a very introspective. I love it because it's like this introspective meditation on what is the face? Why do we need it Now? What goes missing if you don't have one? Because he has to wear this gauze, because it got damaged? So you know the things you never think about. It's like that's just fascinating.
Speaker 1:Well, Nina, I think you and I could probably talk for hours I think we could.
Speaker 2:I think you have a similar brain.
Speaker 1:That like oh and this reminds me of this and then this and then, yes, I think my brain is like a dog when he sees a squirrel, it's just all over the place. But getting back to earlier, that's what keeps us curious, and you know that intellectual stimulation is important. I am going to go to my local indie bookshop and pick up a copy of your book how to Write Stunning Sentences.
Speaker 2:I also do a substack, nina Schuyler. It's a stunning sentence substack. I send out a stunning sentence from a published work every week and I dissect it. What is that writer doing? Again, it's a stunning sentence that stands out for some reason. What is the writer? The last one, I think, was Edgar Allen Poe last week. You could find it what's he doing? And then I give you instructions how you could do it. So I give you the architecture and then you flow in your own content. It's really fun and I've tried it for years at USF and other places and it really helps your writing and it keeps it exciting and I'm sure there's a link to that on your website, which is NinaSkylercom.
Speaker 1:Nina, it's been great chatting with you and I wish you all the best with your new novel afterward. It's absolutely a must read for me.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much and I just, you know, admire what you've done and that you had this vision and you made it happen. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to my conversation with Nina Skoula about her new book Afterword. To find out more about the Bookshop podcast, go to thebookshoppodcastcom and make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on X, instagram and Facebook and on YouTube at the Bookshop podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at thebookshoppodcastcom. The Bookshop podcast is written and produced by me, mandy Jackson Beverly, theme music provided by Brian Beverly, executive assistant to Mandy Adrienne Otterhan, and graphic design by Frances Verralla. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.