Part III.

The following interview first appeared, in part, on episode one of The Organist, the new podcast from the Believer and KCRW. You can hear the episode here and hear the full Saunders interview here.

—Ross Simonini

THE BELIEVER: I’ve heard you talk a lot about the literary influences, but do you ever pull your voices from unexpected places, like cartoons or movies or…

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Oh, I think constantly, yeah.

BLVR: …or comedians…

GS: Yeah. Yeah, but the pulling is more, you know, it’s almost more like you spent your life filling up this imaginary kind of basket that is over your head. Whether you want to or not, you hear a guy on a bus or you see a cartoon and then the interesting thing—and I don’t really understand it—is at some point you know you’re writing a story and a guy gets a coffee at the coffee shop. The coffee-shop person has to say something, and there’s that weird moment where you reach up into that basket. Now I don’t really understand how that works, but often a voice will just supply itself to me. And the quicker it does it, and the more naturally, and the less thought-laden, the happier I am. Somebody just starts talking in a Boston accent… like great… good… there’s a reason for that. You know? For me, the funny thing about writing is that 99 percent of what I’m doing is real intuitive and kind of hard to talk about.  It’s just like, well, I dunno: you just pull the switch. Or you—sometimes you’re tempted to go beyond that and be more reductive, but in truth, it’s a much more, for me, a much more playful, kind of an ornery thing.

BLVR: The voice in general is this distinctly American vernacular, but it’s not specific. It’s sort of just this soup…

GS: Right. [Laughs]

BLVR:… of American dialect. Is that how you think of it, or do you ever try to point to, like you said a moment ago, you said Boston—

GS: Yeah that one, even as I said that I said, “That’s bullshit, you’re not… you could never do a Boston—a Boston [pronounced with Boston accent] accent. You know, I can’t do it.

BLVR: [Laughter]

GS: So, no. I really can’t do a regional accent. I don’t have that much interest in it, and I can’t really do it. So then the default is to do a… if you can get the language to feel, I always say “jangly,” to look and...