Listen to interviews with authors Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone, and E.J. Koh. El-Mohtar and Gladston chat about their spy novella, This Is How You Lose the Time War. Koh discusses her memoir, The Magical Language of Others. Each author talks about how letter writing can act as a form of time travel. We also share some of our other favorite epistolary works. Hear the conversations in this podcast episode.
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A transcript of this episode is available at the end of our show notes.
Recommended Reading
Epistolary Time Travel
Browse a list of titles discussed in the Epistolary Time Travel episode of The Desk Set podcast.
Read a novel written partly or entirely through letters, text messages and more. They count for our 2021 reading challenge category "Read an epistolary novel."
Contact
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Credit
The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to The Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins.
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
And on this episode, we're talking about epistolary novels and other kinds of related texts. I talk to authors, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone about their epistolary novel, This is How You Lose the Time War.
Britta Barrett:
And I spoke with local author E.J. Koh, who has a memoir that's also a collection of translated letters that she received from her mother while she was living in the United States and her mother was living abroad in South Korea. And then we're going to chat a little bit about our favorite epistolary works.
Amal El-Mohtar:
My name is Amal El-Mohtar. I mostly am a writer, I write short fiction poetry, I wrote half of This is How You Lose the Time War. I also write criticism, I write the science fiction fantasy column for the New York Times book review and occasionally do reviews for NPR as well.
Max Gladstone:
I'm Max Gladstone, I am a writer, game designer, screenwriter. I, with Amal, co-wrote This is How You Lose the Time War. I've also written the Craft sequence of post-industrial fantasy novels and Empress of Forever, which is a big space opera. I've done a lot of collaborative writing projects in the past, I was the lead writer on a serial novel series called Book Burners. And I was also on a serial novel series called The Witch Who Came in From The Cold. Created an interactive television show called Wizard School Dropout. Trying on many hats.
Emily Calkins:
So, for listeners who haven't read This is How You Lose the Time War, can you tell us a little bit about the book?
Amal El-Mohtar:
This is How You Lose The Time War is an epistolary time-traveling spy novella, two rival gigantic powerful futures that are trying to-
Max Gladstone:
To erase each other from the timeline by sending agents back into the past to rewrite history, to sort of cancel out the other one's preconditions of existence.
Amal El-Mohtar:
Exactly. And so, the book itself focuses on two such agents, Red, who is on the side of a future called the Agency and Blue, who's on the side of a future called Garden. And they start leaving each other taunting letters all up and down the threads of time and over time, those taunting letters become a correspondence, become, sort of, less taunty, more honest, more intimate, and things move on from there.
Emily Calkins:
And I'm wondering if you could talk about where that idea came from and, sort of, what came first, the format or the story?
Max Gladstone:
We knew we wanted to write something together, we knew we cared about very similar things and wanted to accomplish similar things with storytelling, which was why a project together would be so cool but we also had very different voices and approaches. The avenue for that really suggested itself was, a two-handed story with two different voices, sort of, weaving around and through each other and the letters then, as points of contact.
Amal El-Mohtar:
Yeah. And Max and I had, by this point, been writing each other handwritten letters for about a year. Most of our letters would, kind of, involve a component moment of reflecting on the fact of how different and interesting and intimate and quiet it is to write a letter by hand, versus writing an email or tweeting or texting even. It's like how there's a kind of inherent time travel in letters, when you sit down and write a letter, it's an approximately 10 days time when they receive the letter, are receiving a version of you that has been, kind of, encased in the amber of the letter. You may have well moved past the concerns and observations and events that you wrote in that letter but someone is there receiving them and witnessing them in this, sort of, time-slipped way. When we decided we wanted to write a project together, the medium of letters having a materiality to correspondence, to voices, and being able to make so much out of the actual artifacts of the letters.
Max Gladstone:
Physical messages, not just, sort of, leaving notes for one another in the ether.
Amal El-Mohtar:
So, in the book, because there are people who have all the time and space at their disposal, there are letters that are grown inside a tree for 100 years or something like that. Or you can assemble a letter in tea, things that only someone with all the time and space at their disposal can do.
Emily Calkins:
Can you talk about how you approached the world-building?
Amal El-Mohtar:
I tend to think of the world-building as glimpsing flashes of scenery from a train window as you're hurtling past it very quickly.
Max Gladstone:
That, sort of, flitting allowed us to be in a space opera for a few pages or in something that was a lot, sort of, closer to home and closer to the bone and another to inhabit different timelines simultaneously, flip between them, make jokes. It gave us a great deal of freedom in composition.
Emily Calkins:
Red and Blue, their relationship with each other is really the heart of the story. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the character development of those two.
Max Gladstone:
The character development was maybe the least planned and most organic part of the book. We knew that the characters would start at odds. I had this vivid Mad Magazine spy versus spy kind of sense, of people jumping all around time and space chasing after each other. And we knew that the characters would grow together. Beyond that, most of the specifics of the characters and certainly all their development emerged through the confessional medium of the letter.
Amal El-Mohtar:
The characters, I think, really began as stances, at a certain remove from their respective worlds and organizations. And as they, kind of, faced each other, it really, kind of, makes them start to define each other, both in the sense of us writing the characters and also, in the sense of the characters themselves reading this correspondence.
Emily Calkins:
Will you write another book together or will you work on something together again?
Amal El-Mohtar:
Yes.
Max Gladstone:
Yeah.
Amal El-Mohtar:
We have already done so, in the sense that we have written a screenplay together because this book has been optioned for TV. The people who optioned it hired us to write the pilot together. So, we have already done that but planning and talking about how to do our next co-written project together, we're both pretty adamant that we don't want it to be a sequel to Time War. Whenever we talk about our next co-written project, there is some sense of, right, how are we going to do this in a way that is different from Time War but also is possessed of all the things that we loved about doing Time War together?
Max Gladstone:
We definitely want to be working together on more things, we just also want to make sure they're the right things.
Amal El-Mohtar:
And in the meantime, Max has many other books coming out.
Emily Calkins:
So, I'm so curious about translating a book for TV because so much of the book is these letters. The language in them is so rich and so much of what's beautiful about the book is that language. And I'm wondering, how do you think about translating that for such a different medium.
Max Gladstone:
Part of that is trying to leave enough room for a strong visual design and visual style. I don't think this is a project that is going to reward literal shot-for-shot adaptation of scenes, as they are described in the book. We have given a lot of thought to how we want to represent the letters.
Amal El-Mohtar:
One thing that we're very clear on is that we don't particularly want to go the Great Gatsby route, of just having the letters up here as text on the screen. The way I imagine the experience of the letter is, how shocking it feels in the second season of Fleabag when the hot priest turns to the camera, that is what I want. I want the on-screen letter experience to feel like that, to have that sort of simultaneous playfulness, startlingness, intimacy, all of that. I want the experience of what it's like to receive and send letters. The other challenges we've talked about, in terms of adopting it, have been more, sort of, logistical in the sense of it's a two-hander as a book and as a TV show, it would have to be opened up and be a bit more populated. And all of the, kind of, flashing scenery from a terrain aspect of world-building would actually have to be on screen and anchored, in a way. We couldn't flit as much.
Max Gladstone:
You need more characters, you need people for them to bounce off of, you need a stronger sense of tactics. For the war, you need more of a sense of cause and effect there. Really, in the story, as much world as there is on the page, the cause and effect is confined to Red and Blue's experience and that just couldn't be the case with a more extended version of the story.
Amal El-Mohtar:
Exactly.
Emily Calkins:
I wonder if there are any of the worlds that you wrote about in the book that you are particularly excited about the possibility of seeing translated visually.
Amal El-Mohtar:
I think the ones that I would be most excited about would be the familiar worlds looked at slant. We get to some really far-out invention stuff in the book, in terms of the space opera moments. And the ones that I'm actually most excited about seeing are the ones that are alternate already extant cities or countries in our world. So, London Next, I would love to see visually represented and I know it would probably be easier to do because there are so many, sort of, Victoriana-esque shows, especially at the moment.
Emily Calkins:
So, the last question that we always ask people is, what are you reading now?
Amal El-Mohtar:
I am reading three things concurrently at, sort of, different times of day. For bed, reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin for the first time, my husband and I are reading it to each other. In terms of more recent stuff my, kind of, carry around book to read while waiting at appointments right now is Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells, it's the most recent murder bot novella. I love the murder bot books so much. And the third one is Sam J. Miller's short story collection that is coming out next year and I'm reading it because I'm writing the introduction to it. And so, I'm super enjoying this collection so far and I'm really jazzed to get to introduce it.
Max Gladstone:
Hmm, let's see. So, I also have a lot of books going at the moment. On my phone right now is The Last Olympian, which is the last of the Percy Jackson books. My, sort of, sitting down to read book right now is Ursula Vernon's Paladin's Strength. Sort of, light hardened fantasy, secondary world fantasy romances, only also there's a magical serial killer who's swapping heads with people. And mostly they're fantasy romances with a very straightforward, two-handed, they should but they won't, but they won't, but they will, structure. Vernon is just one of my favorite writers, storytellers, active right now. And oh, it's published under T. Kingfisher but it's an open pseudonym. And also listening to Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff, which is a book about poker, that starts off with the writer gets a nonfiction advance to spend a year learning how to play poker and then go to the world series of poker, as its concept and then it goes into all sorts of really interesting directions from there, about sports psychology and managing odds and gameplay and betting. Really fantastic.
Max Gladstone:
And I am also reading George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, taking a very careful, almost sentence by sentence, walk through four great Russian short stories. And I feel like I'm learning something new every couple of pages. Really enlightening, cool piece of work.
Emily Calkins:
Thank you. We will put all of those in the show notes, so that listeners can find them. And thanks to both of you for being with us today, it was such a great conversation.
Amal El-Mohtar:
Yes. Thank you so much for having us.
Max Gladstone:
Thank you.
E.J. Koh:
I'm E.J Koh, it stands for my Korean name [foreign language 00:13:55] or [foreign language 00:13:55]. But the name I used in school was my Catholic name, that's Angela Koh because of the difficulty the teachers would have pronouncing my name. Versions of these three names sometimes are floating around the internet. I mostly go by E.J. now. I'm a poet and author, sometimes I translate. I wrote a memoir, The Magical Language of Others. It's an epistolary memoir, so it has letters my mother wrote me when I was a girl and it goes through our lives when we lived separated for about nine years from when I was about 15 on. I was born and raised in California, in the Bay Area. My brother was born in South Korea, he's four years older than me but my mother...
E.J. Koh:
So, she came over with him, while my father was already here to find work. And when he did, he called them over with his mom, my grandmother. My mom and dad, they worked late and my grandma would take care of us. But when I was 14, my dad got a job offer in South Korea, a wonderful job offer. I mean, so difficult to turn down and him and my mom, they moved to South Korea, leaving me behind with my brother who was going to college. And the two of us just lived there, pretending to have parents and feeling like we may only need to do this for a couple of years but it became many more.
Britta Barrett:
And you stayed in touch with your mother, both by phone calls and by letters. What was, kind of, the difference between what you talked about and how you received those messages in different mediums?
E.J. Koh:
When I talked to my mom on the phone or when she called me, she seemed different and I was different too because we couldn't say the things that were really on our minds, so we chatted up and around how much I missed her, wanted to see her and whether she was coming back but her letters were different. Her letters, she said she wanted to come back and the letters were these pieces of paper I would fall asleep with reading in bed and wake up to read again. My mother wrote me letters in Korean and at the time, my Korean wasn't as good as it is now. She uses a, sort of, kiddy diction so that I can understand her and if she needed to use more difficult or advanced words, she would translate them using an English dictionary but she would use the first definition, and sometimes it was the wrong one. There's a part where she wants me to take care of myself and the things around me, which translates it as taking care of my propaganda, which adds moments of levity and humor.
E.J. Koh:
And then in these really densely emotional letters, my Korean was in such a way that I had to read the letters out loud, slowly and if I could hear myself say them, then I could understand them.
Britta Barrett:
Did your relationships with the letters' contents change as your Korean became more advanced?
E.J. Koh:
I think so. It continues to change just because I continue to change. So, I'd put them away for a long time and just forgot about them. I was now able to, not only read her letters but read between the lines of she was saying and I was noticing how much we do that, how we communicate between the things we say or don't say and that was something I couldn't do before, couldn't grasp as easily.
Britta Barrett:
And the goal of translation, sometimes, is to try to create a seamless experience that the writing sounds as though it was written in her language. But stylistically, you need to be doing something different. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to translation?
E.J. Koh:
I had learned translation by the way you've described, a seamless translation. So, I'm translating Korean as if it were written in English. As I was doing that, I noticed that it meant I was also erasing the Korean and it felt important that I don't do that. And so, I went back and translated my mother's letters again but this time, I wanted the Korean to remain forward as much as possible, instead of behind the historically dominant English. And so, I would choose words, sounds, and syntax, rhythm that felt very Korean to me in the translation, so that even if you read the letters in English, you would always be aware that these letters are speaking to you in Korean.
Britta Barrett:
I'm wondering if going back and reading these letters put you in, sort of, the headspace you were in as a teenager.
E.J. Koh:
It seems like I do read them as more than one person. I read them as who I am now and also as my younger self but also what that youth was like for her. She had developed a severe eating disorder, depended on alcohol and drugs, regularly attempting her life because she thought, why not? And that's part of me and who I am now. So, I think all of those things happen at the same time, not only when I read the letters but when I listen to stories or when I tell stories, I feel like I need every part of me there.
Britta Barrett:
And in a lot of ways, a memoir is the story of the self and it's not necessarily just the one we tell ourselves about ourselves but the one we want to share. And so much of your book discusses that space between what is said and what is unsaid. How are you choosing what parts to share with readers?
E.J. Koh:
There were scenes that I would choose between, I would say, I can write this scene or that one. And the one I picked ended up being the one that employed the most magnanimity for me. I talk about how that was my first lesson in poetry. That when I was writing poems about my mom, my teacher told me, by the end of the poem, you have to forgive your mom or the poem has to forgive you for not, that's what makes a poem a poem and not just a diary or journal entry.
Britta Barrett:
You're, sort of, fluidly or layering different modes of writing with poetry and prose and translation. And I'm just, sort of, curious if you see a valuable distinction between them.
E.J. Koh:
I feel like, my answer has changed quite a bit, even from a few months back. When you do look at my translation poetry or prose, they all tend to have similarities, they don't really sound very differently. My poetry sounds very much like the prose you'll read in my memoir and my memoir, it almost feels like line breaks, the way that the sentences are laid down, and the way the paragraphs are turned into almost prose poems and stanzas. And my translation, they hold, sort of, all the things I've learned throughout writing. And so, I think I just come to each piece as its own piece, in its own unique way but I also bring everything I can to it.
Britta Barrett:
One of your grad school professors said that, if you want to be a good poet then write poetry, you want to be a great poet then translate and I'm curious how the practice and art of translation, how that's influenced your poetry, and vice versa.
E.J. Koh:
I'll never forget hearing that. And that day I left to add my second degree in literary translation. I had no idea I would find my mother's letters and translate them, by then be a translator and I had no idea where it would take me. But I heard that line, I felt he was speaking to me and I just said, okay, I guess I'm translating now. And I think about how translation has helped my writing, specifically when I think about how Korean has helped my English. I think translation has helped me really feel deep down that nothing is really definable, nothing is a perfect translation and that spills over into my experiences. I remember, I was obsessed with that for a little bit. Is it possible that no other person in the world can perfectly understand what I'd gone through, except me, except the person who had gone through it? Can I translate my experience on the page and to have someone experience it as I did.
E.J. Koh:
And I think translation brought some peace in that, the point isn't a perfect translation, a perfect experience for the reader, it's something more, it's opening up my own experience so that others can have theirs. And that has been important for me. The history of Korean is something always moving and growing and changing, especially when it reaches the throats, the tongues of Koreans outside of Korea, outside of being a native Korean, when we reach the Korean diaspora. What does a Korean word do in my throat? What if that word means something else to my mom and it means something new to me? So, I think all of that and maybe a million more things are hiding or maybe waiting in the language.
Britta Barrett:
The correspondence you had with your mother is not the only time you've had a pen pal. And, in fact, you have a project of love letters.
E.J. Koh:
I started the project in 2016. I went on Twitter late one night and said, I'll write 1,000 love letters to strangers if you send me a bit about yourself or a question or a struggle and your physical mailing address. And when I went to bed, not thinking too much about whether people might respond but in the morning I got requests from all over the world, Mexico, Australia, London, even Korea, Indonesia, Canada, just on and on. And even from somebody who lived right across the street from me, it was something I've been doing ever since.
Britta Barrett:
And we always like to ask, what are you reading now or what are some recent favorites?
E.J. Koh:
There's a book I just start that I'm enjoying, I'm just a few pages in, Kawai Strong Washburn's, Sharks in the Time of Saviors. Just really nice because I just love reading something that makes me in awe of what writing can do, of what language can do and that's just so inspiring. That really gets me back to my own writing, with a renewed sense of excitement and experimentation.
Britta Barrett:
Thanks so much for chatting with me today.
E.J. Koh:
Thank you. I so appreciate all the work and efforts to open your heart to author after author and putting this podcast together and just the joy I get in listening to your episodes and giggling along with you or sometimes just taking a moment to really listen. So, thank you.
Emily Calkins:
Are you a fan of epistolary novels or do you have any favorites?
Britta Barrett:
The first one that comes to mind is The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which is a late 90s, young adult classic. It's written from the perspective of a teenager who is writing to a person we don't really get to know but the act of writing these letters, he really seems to be able to say things that he's not able to share with the people around him and talk about really hard stuff. And I think that's a theme we see a lot with epistolary young adult fiction. I'm thinking about a slightly more contemporary YA title, Simon and the Homo Sapien Agenda, which follows a young high school student who's really questioning his sexuality and turning to an out peer to, sort of, navigate that process and a budding romance and, sort of, becoming the person he's going to become.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. I absolutely loved Perks of Being a Wallflower when I was in high school. And as I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking about a YA novel that's much more recent that I read, called Love Letters to the Dead. And it's written as a series of letters from a young woman to famous people who are dead, so Janis Joplin, that kind of thing. And thinking about epistolary novels, I think one of the things that make both of those work so well is exactly what you said, one, it lets the character, kind of, open up in a way that they can't necessarily to the other people in their lives. And I also think if it really lends itself to characters who are, kind of, unreliable narrators, revealing things to themselves over time. I'm thinking of Perks and Love Letters to the Dead, in particular, there are these big secrets that characters are carrying and it takes them, kind of, working up to revealing those secrets in the letters.
Emily Calkins:
And I think it's because they're, sort of, working up to even revealing those secrets to themselves. So, it feels very natural, it doesn't feel like a twist that's out of left field or anything. I think you can see as the character is, kind, of warming up in these letters, how they're coming around to getting to that big reveal.
Britta Barrett:
Totally. It's this building of both intimacy, vulnerability, and trust. And I've got more YA pick, it's called Emergency Contact. It's about a college freshman who, through a series of amazing events has, kind of, an unlikely meet-cute with this guy and the text-based relationship that unfolds between them. And I think it's very ambitious to try to make reading someone else's text messages interesting but it really captures that goofy moment when you realize that you're smiling at your phone. And I just think it's a great, sort of, modern update to the epistolary novel.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. There's a series by Lauren Myracle that came out in the early 2000s, TTFN I think, that's all chat logs, so it's not texting exactly but it's instant messenger chat logs between all of these high school characters. On one hand, so much of what actually happens in text or in chat logs or even in letters, is kind of mundane. And to turn that into a novel can be, kind of, ambitious but it's really fun when it works. And it feels, in both of those cases, I think, sort of, of the moment, in an interesting way.
Britta Barrett:
And that, kind of, reveals something that I think you want listeners and people who are taking the challenge to know, which is that, this category is expansive.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, absolutely. And this goes for every category but definitely for this one. I encourage readers and listeners to tackle it in a way that makes sense to them. So yes, the technical definition of an epistolary novel is a novel that's written entirely in letters and there are certainly books that would work for that but there are lots and lots of great books that either partially use letters or use other forms of communication, like texts, like chat. Diaries, I think, if the character is writing to a diary, that definitely counts. So, for example, Where'd You Go, Bernadette? is a wonderful novel that probably most people in the Pacific Northwest have read because it's set in Seattle and it really skewers late 2000s Seattle in very funny ways. But a lot of it is written in emails.
Emily Calkins:
And as we were thinking about other novels that use the format, sort of, in slightly less traditional ways, one of my favorite books of last year, Piranesi, does this so well, it's written as journal entries and the character who writes the journal entries is a character who doesn't know very much about his world. And so, seeing it specifically through his eyes, you get things revealed to you in very interesting ways. And then as the character, sort of changes, as he learns new things, the entries end up, kind of, skipping around in time. And it really works because they stay very authentic and feeling like actual journal entries but when an author can really create voice and stick with it and stick to the format in a way that's really meaningful, I think that's what makes an epistolary novel really fun. Do you have others that are, sort of, not epistolary, in the most strict sense of the word, that you would recommend for this category challenge?
Britta Barrett:
Another cool example of an epistolary work that's working with, sort of, a technological format or medium, I think is The Martian.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. I think you're right that that's a really great use of the format. And it's interesting because I think The Martian almost reads like a screenplay but it works so well as a book too. Even though you're like, oh, these are videos, it seems like maybe it shouldn't work as just a transcription basically but it really does. And, again, I think it's about voice, right? Mark Watney has a very distinctive likable voice and I think that's what makes that book so enjoyable is that, he takes these maybe potentially dry or complicated scientific subjects and makes them, sort of, funny and interesting. And even though the situation is quite dire for him, it remains upbeat, sort of, in a surprising way. And, again, I think that's all about the voice of the character that Andy Weir creates, and to me, that's what makes that book particularly successful.
Britta Barrett:
And if listeners want to find more books, we've compiled the book list of some of our favorites, ones that we'd recommend. We'll put that in the show notes.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. And as always, you can use BookMatch to get specific recommendations, it's kcls.org/bookmatch and the librarian will create a list of suggestions just for you.
Britta Barrett:
Well, I think that's all we have for you today. We'll be back with some free drops of author events in the fall. Thanks so much for being a listener and happy reading.
Emily Calkins:
Happy reading.
