The Bookshop Podcast
The Bookshop Podcast
Bruce Holsinger On Culpability, AI, And Family Under Pressure
In this episode, I chat with Bruce Holsinger about stories, community, publishing, teaching, and the craft behind his latest novel, Culpability.
Bruce brings a rare lens to contemporary fiction. As a medievalist at the University of Virginia, he teaches medieval literature and applies his enthusiasm to craft classes where the basics—point of view, character arcs, structure—become living tools. He explains why paratext—chat logs, interviews, and excerpts from Lorelei’s AI book—lets a novel breathe beyond exposition, capturing how we really encounter the world: through fragmented feeds, competing voices, and the uneasy mix of intimacy and spectacle.
Culpability Synopsis:
When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret that implicates them in the accident.
During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenage daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.
Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.
Subscribe, share with a reader friend, and tell us: which moment changed how you see the story?
Hi, my name is Mandy Jackson Beverly, and I'm a bibliophile. Welcome to the Bookshop Podcast. Each week I present interviews with authors, independent bookshop owners and booksellers from around the globe, and publishing professionals. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes 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 314. Welcome back to the show. I'm so glad you're here because today on the podcast we're celebrating stories, community, and the joy of gathering around books. So let's begin. It's the holiday season, my favorite time of the year. It's a time for giving, cooking, and sharing. The weather is cooler here in Southern California, and thanks to recent rain, the surrounding hills and mountains are tinged with green. It's absolutely gorgeous. I have some exciting news and additions coming up in 2026 that I can't wait to share with you. I'll save a few surprises for the first week of January, but I've already shared others with you in recent episodes. For the 2026 Lunch with an Author Literary series, I've partnered with the University Club in Santa Barbara and Hotel El Roblah in Ojai. Hotel El Roblah, established in 1919, is Ojai's longest-standing hotel. The two-acre property has been recently restored to its historic charm, reflecting both its Spanished revival and early California roots, while blending classic design with a modern sensibility. For literary lovers wanting a midweek escape to Ojai, surrounded by mountains, streams, the scent of lavender and citrus blossoms, and what's known as the OHI Pink moment, El Robla offers a special room discount for our literary series. The discount becomes available once you've purchased your ticket to one of the monthly literary luncheons. For more information, you can contact me at mandyjacksonbeverly at gmail.com. Okay, in this episode, I'm chatting with author Bruce Holsinger. Bruce is the author of five novels, including Culpability, The Displacements, and The Gifted School, as well as many works of fiction, most recently on parchment, animals, archives, and the making of culture from Herodotus to the digital age. His books have been recognized with the Colorado Book Award, the John Hurt Fisher Prize, the Philip Brett Award, the John Nicholas Brown Prize, the Modern Language Association's Prize for a First Book, and others. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications. And he has been profiled on NPR's Weekend Edition, Here and Now, and Marketplace. A Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, he teaches in the Department of English at the University of Virginia and serves as editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History. He also teaches craft classes and serves as board chairman for Writer's House, a non-profit in Charlottesville. Here's a short synopsis of Bruce's latest novel, Culpability. When the Cassidy Shaws Autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, 17-year-old Charlie is in the driver's seat with his father, Noah, riding Shotgun. In the backseat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret that implicates them in the accident. Hi, Bruce, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you here again.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Mandy, for having me back.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you've been a very busy man since the last time I spoke with you. Oprah chose your new book, Culpability, as her July summer bookpick. How was that for you?
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Yeah, it's been really the craziest period of my life. I mean, it's like when the kids were firstborn or something like that. It's like it's just been nuts.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I can imagine. But isn't it great to be acknowledged for your writing?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thank you. It has been, it's, you know, it really has felt um yeah, overwhelming at times. It still doesn't feel real, I guess. It's uh, but you know, what are you gonna do? It's uh it's just a huge stroke of luck. I've I've talked to other friends who have gotten these picks, and um, you know, it just feels like a bolt from the blue.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it was well deserved, Bruce. Um now you and I have spoken in person and on the podcast about your life in general, and I encourage listeners to listen to our previous conversations about the displacements, a book I absolutely adore. Uh, and I'll put the link to that episode in the show notes. This time I'd like to focus on your writing and your latest novel, Culpability. But I do have a couple of prequel questions. Did you always envision yourself as both a teacher and a writer, or did one vocation lead you to the other? And how do those roles now inform and challenge one another in your life?
SPEAKER_00:I suppose when I started graduate school, one of the first things you do when you be when you become a graduate student in the humanities is you teach. And so from a very young age, I guess I started graduate school probably when I was 21, 22 years old. Um, I was just kind of thrown into a classroom. This was at the University of Minnesota, where I did my master's degree, um, without any training on how to teach, how to teach literature, poetry, how to teach philosophy. So it was kind of trial by fire, just being thrown into the pool. Um, but from the minute I stepped into the classroom, I really loved it. And the first kind of writing I did was not fiction writing, it was scholarly writing as a graduate student, and then at Minnesota, and then at Columbia University, where I did my uh PhD work in comparative literature. And it then my first job at the University of Colorado, and now for the last 20 years, I've taught at the University of Virginia. And in my scholarly world, the writing of scholarship and the teaching of literary tradition, literary culture, those things go hand in hand, and it's always very hard for me to separate them. But I only started writing fiction seriously about 15, 16 years ago, only published my first novel 11 years ago, which sounds like a long time if you're 25, right, and an aspiring writer. But when you get up to my age, it's it's nothing. And it feels like I've only really been publishing fiction. It feels like the blink of an eye, um, even though culpability is my fifth novel. So, you know, now those two roles, I I think of them, they're more, they're more and more inseparable. I still work on scholarship. Just this morning, I was in a coffee shop doing footnotes on an essay for uh uh, you know, an academic book. Um, but earlier this morning I was working on a new novel. So, you know, these these things are now, they've become so intertwined that it's hard for me to separate them in my mind.
SPEAKER_01:Have you found that your students influence your creative process andor your creativity?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah, for sure. At the University of Virginia, I don't teach fiction, I teach medieval literature, but I teach for a community writing center, writer house here in Charlottesville. And I'll very often, you know, when I'm teaching a craft class, let's say on point of view or on character arcs or on story structure, you know, going back and getting, you know, seeing my students' perspectives on these questions, which for them will sometimes be new. It'll be a way for me to get back into my own writing and see some weaknesses. I'll often, you know, throw something I'm working on, I'll I'll start talking about it to them. And someone will make a really smart point and I'll just slap my forehead and think, oh, right, of course, I need to be working on that too. It's just, you know, I was uh in college, I was a musician, I was a clarinet performance major. And, you know, ever like the thing that you know when you're a musician is practicing the basics uh is a daily routine. You just always do your scales, you always do your arpeggios and etudes. And those, I think, you know, writers um can use a little more of that. And I always try, I I sometimes forget that, and I'll be in the middle of a you know, a chapter of a novel and I'll just kind of lose my way. And often it's teaching that gets me back into it, gets me more on the road. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Bruce, it really hit me how passionate you are about teaching and the process of teaching writing. When you and I first chatted in person, I think it was at Alan Canto in Santa Barbara a couple of years ago. We were talking about the displacements. And uh I remember I asked you a question about teaching, and you jumped out of your chair. You were so excited about the process of teaching. And not for the first time, I was reminded that yeah, there are people who teach because it's their profession, their job, and there are people who teach because it is a big part of who they are. And I really felt that about you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you know, it's funny you should say that. I I um, you know, I teach most fall semesters, I teach a huge lecture course with two or three hundred students. The uh it's the first part of the English sequence from Beowulf to Milton. And I'm just a very active teacher in the classroom. I'll walk up and down the rows. I'll often show a um, I'll show a video of a campfire when I tell them the story of Beowulf. You know, I'll do all this kind of thing, pretend they're in a big mead hall or something like that. So yeah, I I can tend to be a little too exuberant. So sometimes I have to dial it down when I'm doing, especially, you know, this summer when I've been doing all these interviews and podcasts, I'll just, you know, get carried away a little bit. So sometimes I have to dial it back.
SPEAKER_01:It shows you're passionate, Bruce.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Your novels often weave unconventional points of view into the narrative, from A Touch of Tessa in the Gifted School to the Digital Chronicle in the Displacements, and the layered voices in culpability, Alison Blair's chats and inserts from Lorelei's book. Do you imagine these devices from the start or do they emerge as you discover the story? You've said before that you don't plan out your novels, you just sit and write.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yeah. You remember that from last time that I'm not a big outliner. Yeah. You know, they those elements, I think of them as kind of paratextual elements. They're, as you said, um, you know, a bit a video blog or a digital chronicle, or in the case of my earlier historical novels, I wrote a, you know, a Middle English chronicle of the deaths of kings. Um, and and in the case of culpability, yes, it's these chat, this chatbot conversation that Alice has with this this chatbot named Blair, and then also excerpts from Laura Lyshaw's book, and there's a few other, the New Yorker interview. Um, you know, I don't plan what those are that those are going to be, but I know they're gonna be in there. I think that's just become how I write. And the reason, and I imagine I probably talked about this when we talked about the displacements, is especially these these last four novels um are, or last three novels, they're they're about contemporary families. And they're the novels are mostly about a small story in the scheme of things that deals with a family in crisis, whether that crisis is, you know, parent parental angst about getting a kid into a gifted school or a family dealing with a category six hurricane, or in this case, um a family dealing in the aftermath of an accident. And so, but I what I like to do is put those small stories into a larger national or even global framework. And there's different ways of doing that. You know, I've experimented with a lot of different ones. You know, you can do exposition, you can just kind of back off and tell, you know, have in a character's interior monologue, you know, some recounting of global events and how they fit in. But uh sometimes that can be very forced to me. And when I'm teaching fiction, I I often the those moments in a in a novel can feel clunky. And so I try to, I use those moments, those paratextual moments, to get the flavor of the world in and get the a much larger texture into the intimate details that I'm telling about these these families.
SPEAKER_01:And because you're an historian uh and you've read so many historic novels, have you found any of this uh layering while reading uh historical manuscripts?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yes. In fact, you know, it I I had an interesting conversation with somebody about a month ago about just this. And I realize one of my favorite genres in the Middle Ages is um the frame narrative, stories within stories. So you think about something like the Canterbury Tales, which um, or Boccaccio's DeCameron. But in the case of the Canterbury Tales, you know, it's a story of these folks of different state classes of life going on a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury. Um and the stories are of that they tell, the pilgrims tell, are of all different genres. Some people, the knight tells a great romance, a kind of epic romance. The Wife of Bath tells this weird autobiography, the Miller tells a fabio, an obscene story. Um, there's a sermon, there's a religious tale. There's all these different genres mixed in. And I really like that way of storytelling. I like stories within stories. I like the the idea of, you know, jarring the reader a little bit with a with a new beginning, um, a new way to see the world that that we're describing in a novel as a whole. And so I guess it is. You know, I I've never really thought about it that way. But I suppose it's a maybe my ease with doing that. The reason that it feels natural is that I uh spend so much time with my head immersed in medieval forms of storytelling, that that there's a kind of natural fit.
SPEAKER_01:Perhaps subconsciously it weaves its way into your stories.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it makes me it makes me want to write about it, you know, write, write it because I've been thinking about a craft book and it would just be interesting to do that, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I'd read that, definitely. And please come out to Santa Barbara and Ohi and teach a workshop based around the book. Um now, while we're chatting about history, in 2014 a burnable book was published, followed in 2015 with the invention of fire, but then you made a jump into contemporary fiction. Was that because a story entered your mind and you needed to get it onto paper, or was there another reason why you made that jump?
SPEAKER_00:No, that happened because my publisher dropped me. Um after my after my second novel. This is a very common story, as I'm sure you, you know, once you get into inside baseball, you know, if you your debut novel, everybody's all excited about it. Maybe you have a two-book deal, maybe your debut novel doesn't sell quite as well as they'd hoped. And then your second novel is just kind of blah, you know, um, not in terms of quality, but just it's uh doesn't get the kind of attention. And then it's just was very clear that they weren't at more this was at Moro, that they weren't gonna do a third novel with me. And so I was just kind of out in the wilderness for a while and casting around for I say a while. It wasn't that long, it was a few years. And I said, you know, I'm just gonna get my head out of the Middle Ages. And I had I had actually thought of the story of the gifted school years before I even published my first novel. It was in my head. I I went back and looked, and I think I'd really started working on that story like in 2010, something like that. It's on an old hard drive. And uh and then so I went back to that, and it was my agent at the time. Um, I have a different agent now, but but I told her some of the ideas I was kicking around, and I told her about it. And she's oh, work on that. That's a great idea. And so that she sold that book on proposal to Riverhead. And that's that then I was off to the races with that and the displacements.
SPEAKER_01:And the timing couldn't have been better for the gifted school. I mean, you just ace that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, that was just like a yeah, that was a through no fault of my own, but it was a publicist dream because it came out the ARCs, the advanced copies, were circulating right when the college admissions scandal broke. So that's it, it got written about that way, and it got seen almost as kind of weirdly prophetic of that scandal. So yeah, it was it was hilarious.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was remarkable. I'd like to talk about Noah, one of the main characters in Culpability. In the story, he's often reminded of his wife's brilliance. And Julia tells him few men would marry their intellectual superior. Do you see Noah as resisting these hierarchies or haunted by them? And what larger cultural tensions were you exploring here?
SPEAKER_00:Now, what about explain what you mean by the hierarchies?
SPEAKER_01:The in particular, it would be Lorelei's family.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because he's kind of a middling attorney, right? He went to a very a middle, very middling law school. He went to a kind of so-so firm, but he married into this family where, you know, his sister-in-law is the dean of a law school at Penn, and his wife is like a world leader in the field of ethical AI. And so he's just got a big, a bunch of chips on his shoulder, right? But he's not he's not super bitter about it, you know. And I wanted to, I don't know, I I I really wanted to write this book solely from his point of view. And I love my last, all my novels before have been from multiple points of view. And somehow the creative juices in me were just fly I I just really wanted him, his blindness to his own situation, to his own goodness, actually, too, was was something I wanted to explore. You know, he's not necessarily a um unreliable narrator, but he is a little bit oblivious. And I don't know if it if I if I was gonna do it again, I don't know if I do it exactly this way, but it was a for me, it was part of the part of telling the story of Larley and and AI actually, making it making her and making it a mystery, as it is to so many of us, this kind of perplexing mystery that makes us feel like we're kind of trapped in this world where we don't know what's going on around us. And and in some ways, Noah, his marriage, this family, it kind of casts in that problem in miniature. I don't know if that answers your question. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:It does. And at the same time, I'd like to bring up something that I've been uh considering lately, just an idea. Uh, you and I both have two sons. Mine are older than yours, but something that has come up in discussion that I've kind of taken to heart and wanted to explore is that there are a lot of young men in university and high school who've become almost too scared to speak their truths or to make a comment. Too scared that they're gonna say the wrong thing. And I'm wondering where that comes from. Has it come from uh the wave of feminism and the Me Too movement, uh patriarchy, bullying? And from what uh I've been told by, you know, friends who have sons or younger men, a lot of these young men who feel wary to speak up about anything, they have become very lonely. They don't go out as much, they just stay at home. I don't know why, but I saw some of this in Noah. Maybe not in him, but he was aware of it happening. Is this whole topic something that you think about, that you're aware of?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah, I I did. And I've I mean, uh the the book I'm working on now, I can't really talk about it, but I I don't I you know, but it's it's attacking that problem head-on, this kind of so-called crisis of masculinity. And I think about it a lot, like with you know, this is a book, it's not just about AI and a family, but it's also about a father and a son, right? That's one of its primary kind of that's where it gets very heated, I think. And my la not my last novel, but really the um the gifted school that was very much about a father and his very athletically gifted sons and the pressure of fatherhood and what what the world is doing to boys. And I don't want to blame it on feminism. I I think feminism is a reaction to different forms of patriarchy, and it's patriarchy, I think, that is making boys where they are. It's these pressure to pressures to be a certain type of man. Um, I think, you know, the manosphere, this kind of um alpha culture. You know, I think all movements have excesses, have rhetorical excesses. And I do think that, you know, during the pandemic, me too, and so on, there's those those could be very, very much heightened. But I think the um, you know, when I when I look around, I I just see so much um ugly kind of rhetoric that that boys and men feel they need to measure up to. So I think a little bit of Noah, and maybe this is another way of looking at it, is is looking at Charlie, you know, this superstar athlete, brash, confident, you know, Adonis-like, and yet there's a fragility right underneath the surface. And what happens in that accident and then what happens afterwards, that's what exposes it, right? It's just that confidence is kind of shot. And that's even before, you know, before they get down to the bay, the house where they where they where their good part of the novel takes place. But thank you for noticing that. I think that's really wonderful.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it was a big part of the novel for me. I've listened to a lot of interviews that you've done about culpability, and everyone zeroes in on AI, and obviously it is a big part of the book. But as with most of your books, it's what's going on around the characters that creates the relationships and the and the hurdles within the relationships that you're writing about. So for me, that is a big part of your writing. And in culpability, I see this between Noah and his son. Uh, it it comes up again and again, as you call it, this crisis of masculinity. But it's also brought up toward the end of culpability when Lorelei gives this uh monologue about how she feels about Noah. Uh, and it's kind of juggling this crisis of masculinity with the feminism. I'm interested in what you said about feminism being born from patriarchy. That's fascinating to me and something I want to research a little bit more. But I do worry about uh the sensitive young men or the and the young boys we have around because right now all they're being shown by our politicians, specifically our president and the people around him, is that to be masculine means it's okay to be a bully, to call people names, to put people down. And I think that is going to have major consequences with our youth as they grow older.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. You know, it's funny. This um I I always wonder, you know, you always wonder where these things come from and the impulses come from. And obviously, my concern with boys comes from my own experience as a father of two boys, um, two very athletic boys, unlike me. I was not athletic at all. Um and uh and so that I but it also comes from, you know, my my mother was a uh teacher and a writer, and she wrote a book called The Little Boy Book, A Guide to the First Eight Years. And this was back in the 1980s, and um, it was from Ballantine. Um, and it was a co-written book. And it was about, you know, it was a she one of the things she noticed is that all these child raising books were very much geared towards girls, and that there weren't um, you know, she was she was very much a big believer in genetics, uh, nature over nurture too. So whatever you want to think of that. But she also felt like um child, you know, the rhetoric around child raising was not giving, as a Montessori school teacher, she observed this, was not giving enough credit to um differences between boys and girls and how they are as little kids, how they, you know, how they develop. So she was, you know, I I always wonder if um, you know, if that that influenced me in some ways. I think it's still in print after all these years.
SPEAKER_01:I need to look that one up. And what was the author's name?
SPEAKER_00:Uh Sheila. And but then she went by a uh she used her middle name as her last name, but Sheila Moore and Rune Frost.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. I'll try and pick that up. Now, across your novels, families cope with crisis in very different ways, from snow plow to helicopter parenting. In culpability, how did you want to complicate those archetypes? And what do you hope readers take away about resilience and healing?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I feel like the um you know, every member of this family has their own, I guess their own issue with culpability, with guilt, right? So I think the the network in that family, the web of relationships, has everything to do with that. It's how they how they cope with their relationships um during during this crisis, you know, how their their relationships change based on it, um, how they're you know, how they have to find their own sources of resilience or not. Like I feel like no spoilers, but I do feel like you know, Alice is really struggling. You know, she's having to find a way to deal with her parents. You know, you use the word, you know, helicopter parenting, which I'm always interested in. But you know, in this case, maybe, maybe one way to look at it is that Alice is the, you know, she's the middle child. And maybe Noah and and Lorelai are not being helicoptery enough with her, right? They're like, oh, finally she has a friend that she's texting with. Um, and it's it's really, and Izzy, of course, she's the the little kid, and she's just fine, super charismatic, friends to burn. And Charlie obviously is the apple of his dad's eye. And so he's the one who's been snowplowed and helicoptered all over. And it's poor Alice, neglected once again. So I like that. You know, I think that those are very realistic ways of looking at parents. I've explored them in in all three of my last three novels from different directions. I think the gifted school is much more about snowplow parenting, you know, clearing the way for your child um to get what she needs. But those archetypes, as you say, are also very complicated. And we want, you know, I think that um, you know, they these these characters find resilience and they heal in different ways.
SPEAKER_01:Bruce, you and I have spoken before about you surviving a plane crash. I think you said it was between junior and senior year. Of the plane crash, you wrote, quote, your life is no longer your own in crisis situations like that, and you're entirely dependent on the competence and goodwill of others. In culpability, the car crash is depicted with jagged fragments of perception. Do you feel your own experiences with trauma shape the way you rent a crisis in fiction?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, that's exactly right. And it's funny, that plane crash, I don't know if I would call it a trauma, because I was asleep until right before it happened. And and we were all okay. But what I do remember is, and that's this is probably where this came from, is first responders, you know, just being taken away in an ambulance, my sister, you know, bleeding from her nose, and just thinking, oh my God, like this whole we're we're really being, you know, taken care of here. Um thank God it wasn't more serious. But the one of the other things I remember from that is a few days later, we all were down at the beach, because that's where we were going, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and somebody had dug up this, found in the newspaper from a physical newspaper from the town where the accident had happened. And there was a headline, and it said Lucky Five Escape Crash. And if you've read culpability, you know that that headline appears in the um in the story, yeah. Yeah, so that actually was part of that has always stuck with me. And I almost one of the titles for the book that I was thinking about was the lucky five. You know, and I'm glad I didn't end up calling it that. But um, you know, that's and when Noah reads that headline, of course, he's he's reacting with a lot of kind of jaundiced, you know, yeah, we're really lucky. We're so lucky, right? We're not the ones who died in the crash, the people in the other car did. We just have concussions and broken legs and what, you know, you know, and I part of me, there was all these different decisions I had to make early on. Part of me wanted to have had originally had Lorelei have a traumatic brain injury um rather than just a concussion so that it would affect her intelligence, right? It would infect her capacity as a as a genius. And I thought, but that was just too much and I couldn't make it work. But anyway, so yeah, so I thought about those issues a lot.
SPEAKER_01:I've often made the comment that reading well written fiction builds empathy in the reader. Now, as a novelist, do you find that writing fiction also deepens your empathy?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, absolutely. I I think pe people argue about this. I do see fiction as a kind of Engine of empathy, right? And getting it's one of the reasons I try to talk my students, try to talk my kids into reading more fiction, you know, just um because you you really are putting yourselves in other people's position in a way that can be very profound. So I'm a big believer in that. I think writing and reading can get us to those places in in really substantial ways. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:And in culpability, was there a character whose emotion stayed with you after you finished the book?
SPEAKER_00:I think Laura, actually, because she was the one that I was very I tried to write initially from her point of view, and I ended up just writing her book, right? Excerpts from her book about artificial intelligence. And I think just getting and trying to get as much as I could inside her head, even though I knew she was a mystery, was one of the most creative challenges I've ever set myself. And I love doing it. And I kind of fell in love with her as a character and and just kind of got completely wrapped up with her. So I think that's that's that I think maybe more than any other character I've written, it would be Lorelei, even though I didn't write anything from her point of view except her kind of dry academic prose.
SPEAKER_01:Personally, I think you nailed her personality by writing around her. Bruce, you've written both nonfiction and fiction. What has writing novels taught you about truth, empathy, and narrative that nonfiction could not, and vice versa.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the the second one is easier. I definitely have gained from the nonfiction writing I do, and and I would just even further qualify as that the academic nonfiction. You know, my books are published by university presses, and they have, you know, they can be on pretty arcane subjects. Um, but what I've learned from that is the power of research, I think, and and incorporating research into what I do. So I teach seminars often on the art of research and fiction. I'm teaching at the uh Writer on Boxed conference in Santa Fe in a couple months. And that is, I'm doing a whole seminar on research, the creative aspects of research. And I think as an academic, I'm very unintimidated by research. And I want fiction writers to be less intimidated. I think there's a misconception that in order to sit down and write a book about, you know, a historical period or about something that requires a lot of research, like AI or technology or whatever, that you have to sit down and read books and books for months or years before you're qualified to start writing a story. And I think that's wrong. And so I really push people to um think of themselves as think of research as part of that creative process from the archive to the page. Now, the other part of that equation, what I learned from my fiction writing that I take to my academic writing, I think if you read my dissertation from back in, I won't even say what date I finished it, and read my most recent academic work, you would see I'm a much better writer. And that I'm much more, I write, I think of my academic research on this as telling stories now. I I'm telling, you know, that I even think about protagonists in some ways. So I think I have a much live more lively sense of story now in my academic writing for sure.
SPEAKER_01:And I think it's easier for the reader then to take in the information that the writer is wanting to get across. Uh, that's why I think I I read a lot of creative nonfiction now, because it's through real life stories that I'm able to retain the information and I find it easier to learn.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I love those kinds of books. And it's funny, I've I've tried that idiom. So the and this is an and who knows what this means about me. Maybe we can talk more about it in in California next month. Um I've tried writing in that idiom of creative nonfiction. It's hard for me. I've I I haven't nailed it. I can do fiction all day, all different kinds of fiction, and I can do my academic writing. But I, you know, I'm I'm trying and I maybe I just haven't hit on the right topic yet. I don't know. But I really admire that kind of storytelling.
SPEAKER_01:Do you think it could be because you write about historical nonfiction?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. That could be. That could be. But I've written historical fiction, and that's no problem. So yeah, I don't know. I'll have to I'll have to think about it. It makes me want to do it because I like a challenge.
SPEAKER_01:Now, looking across the gifted school, the displacements and culpability, is there one of those books that feels closest to your heart because of what it demanded from you as a writer?
SPEAKER_00:I would say, well, they all are in their own different ways. They all had different challenges, but the displacements for me is that's a book about what I fear the most, uh climate change and warming and what it's going to do to us and what it's doing to us now. And I think that is the one that like when I wake up in the middle of the night and think about one of my novels, it's that one. And I'll sometimes be back in that world. Um, and that one is that that just took a lot out of me, that novel. It really did. And um, it took me a while to get my gears going again. I think finishing it was very shattering for me in a way, in a good way, and but also in a it kind of sapped me a bit. Um, so it took a little while to get going.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the displacements has a uh big place in my heart. And over the last couple of years, when we've seen these uh rather large hurricanes coming, I've been thinking about that book a lot.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's the yeah, it's like with the gifted school and the admissions scandal. You don't want it to come real. But you know, with all these novels, these and the one I'm writing now, I like to write on the edge of the present. I like to think of what I'm doing as as really thinking about that, writing about next month. You know, it's not futuristic, it's about next month or next year. Um, and thinking about what the world will be like when it comes out, you know, or what will the what the world will almost be like.
SPEAKER_01:Ooh, Edge of the Present is a great title for your next book.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe that's what I need to do. Yeah, yeah, Edge of the Present. Yeah, the edge of now.
SPEAKER_01:Um now Culpability was chosen as Oprah's July summer read, which is fantastic. Congratulations. Yet she only discovered the book through a friend, not the publisher. With authors now often responsible for their own publicity. How do you see the role of publishers shifting? And do you think they still adequately support authors?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I can say uh it's yes and no. The that last question. I am so lucky I have uh the my publisher now is Spiegel and Grau, and they are a um a sort of relatively recent startup. They were an old established super prestigious imprint at uh Penguin Random House for a long time. And in the last few years, they've started up as an independent publisher, and they are you know working with a smaller group. You really feel like you're part of the team. And every author I know who's been working with them is just ecstatic with their their attention. Every book is front list, every book is uh taken care of and nurtured, and we have a long, every title has a long tail. Now, I was really lucky to be an Oprah pick, obviously, and that is just crazy. That's like a bolt from the blue, and you can't you can't predict that you you can hope for it, but uh it's never it never occurred to me that something like this would happen. So, and that just obviously is a publicist dream. But I do feel like the you know, things are changing a lot, and there's a lot of you know, publicity budgets are really limited. I know a lot of author friends, I mean, I've I've been one of them in the past, who just like look at their book and just think, what is this? You know, why is this just kind of died on the vine? What is going on here? So it's gonna be very demoralizing. And, you know, publishers buy um, you know, different kinds of books and and and there's just no predicting, you know, what the market's gonna want. And when you write a book for a commercial publisher, your book is a commodity and you you it's intellectual property. It's no longer yours once it starts getting into production. So you have to, I think you have to understand that like your I and I get very cynical about this stuff. Um when I when I teach, I say, you know, you just have to understand that you're signing it away and it becomes one of many brands of cereal, right? And some people aren't gonna like it. The grocer's gonna put it on the bottom shelf and forget about it, they're not gonna stock it anymore, um, because not enough people are eating it. So um, and you just have very little control of that. You you can there's a lot you can do. And I think we try, you know, but um that that alone can be demoralizing too, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and with teaching, writing, and whatever else one is doing to earn money, it's not like you have a lot of spare time to be on social media.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I will say it's difficult, but when you get a national book club pick like this, it's just joyful and you feel like you keep pinching yourself. So I would never want to like it's just uh uh pure luck.
SPEAKER_01:I think that's why I feel that for writers building relationships with readers in any way possible, social media, in person, podcasts, uh YouTube, it's so important because readers want to connect with the author. They've got questions of their own. Well, Bruce, I know you and I can talk forever, but uh I've taken up enough of your time. Thank you for being on the show. It was great speaking with you uh in Los Angeles at the California Club and in Santa Barbara. Uh it's just been wonderful and I can't wait to see you again. I'm going to suggest to our listeners that they go back now and read your backlist because they are wonderful books.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, good, good. Well, thank you. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you, Mandy.
SPEAKER_01:You've been listening to my conversation with author Bruce Holsinger about his novel Culpability. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media. And remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcast.com. And make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy JacksonBeverly, on 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 the bookshoppodcast.com. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson Beverly. Theme music provided by Brian Beverly and my personal assistant is Kaylee DeShinger. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.