Transcript

Bookstore: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hold on.

Lynne Tillman: So would you read something from your book, please? Sure,

Craig Mod: yeah. You want me to start. I want you to start, yes, but can I just say how design complimentary these two books was? Yes.

Lynne Tillman: Oh, that’s true. This was not recent.

Craig Mod: It’s they. Really nice together.

It’s almost as if you should buy both.

Lynne Tillman: Of course you should buy both.

Craig Mod: Put them next to each other. But they

Lynne Tillman: forced me to have my picture on the front. That’s the difference. It’s

Craig Mod: a beautiful picture and then the picture in the back. Yeah. Who took that?

Lynne Tillman: You did.

Craig Mod: Yeah. It’s a good, it’s a nice picture in the back.

Lynne Tillman: Very nice. Okay.

Craig Mod: I’ll read very quick. Short little thing. This is from. This is from the this is the end of the chapter about I’m in a, in OAS and it’s raining out. It’s terrible out. And I’ve been in there all morning writing and eating cinnamon toast. And it’s pouring out. I’m, and I don’t wanna walk today.

And the owner invites me to go peek at something. And the owner is this tiny little man, tiny man behind the economy. He is about 80. And he was an iron worker for his career. And he’s iron. He’s, he made the, and so this is the end of it. Hours in the customer’s, thin out. The owner asks if I want to see something I do, of course, whatever it may be.

I run. He’s faster than he looks outside in the rain down the road, across a driveway and into a barn. It’s dark and damp, and he leads me up steep stairs to an attic where murder or miracles lurk. Strands of bulbs encircle the room. He turns on the lights before me. A universe of tiny iron frogs just inches tall.

He’s welded hundreds, maybe thousands, frogs playing tennis and frogs climbing the Tower of Babel. So he explains frogs meditating and frogs performing judo moves. They’re all so precise. You immediately know what the frogs are intending to do. Yet he walks me through one by one all the frogs. A lifetime of frog work like this.

He takes an iron rose off the wall and hands it to me for you. He says, I try to give him money, but he laughs, shakes his head, says he’s as rich as he’ll ever need to be.

Lynne Tillman: It’s beautiful. That’s beautiful, Craig. So I’m just gonna read because the, these are many different stories and they’re from over 35 years of writing stories.

I didn’t actually realize I was as. A story writer until we collected some of this. It’s funny. So I’ll just read from the very first story in the book, and it’s almost length of a novella. It’s called Come and Go, and it begins with a quote from Orson Wells’s Film Touch of Evil. What does it matter what you say about people

Part one? It must have been the movie afterward. New Yorkers did a dumb show and the city was silent except for its special effects. But she heard the sinister soundtrack, especially the hissing, everything. Everyone was out of syn. A man with two lit cigarettes in his mouth. Gazed ahead, stupefied. He must have seen the movie too.

Now it was noisy. Her head hurt in the late afternoon when she walked up Broadway to the Green Market at Union Square. The fruit and vegetables looked good, but she knew she wouldn’t buy any. They’d just rot. She waved her hands in the air, fending off and imagining imaginary object or punctuating her unspoken utterances with a familiar futility.

Her right hand hit a man in the shoulder. He had a stud in his ear and was carrying flowers, one of which fell to the ground. He bent to pick it up. So those are the first couple of paragraphs of that longish story. Craig, it was a pleasure to read this book of yours, and it is, I think, an entirely unusual book because.

It’s not really a memoir. It’s he, the story is of a very long walk. He takes in Japan on a very old path whose name I’ve forgotten. And on this walk he is thinking about a friend of his who died at a very young age, a very close friend of his. And in a way, the book is written as a letter to this friend, and why I think it’s very unusual is that it’s far from a memoir because there’s a specific event that Hap has happened in his past and around that.

The walk in a sense comes about. The walk is about I, healing. Although it’s a concept that I am annoyed by, but, but there is something like that in there. He’s, he is more of an optimist or something, I think, than I am. But I wondered if you’d talk about how you decided to write this book in this way, in this relationship between the walk and the friend.

The friend who died.

Craig Mod: Yeah, it took it took a while to get here. I did the walk exactly four years ago. Right now. I was in the middle of that walk, so coming to the end of it and I completed the walk and it was during COVID and so there was a very bizarre kind of Paul of quietude across everything.

And I don’t know, it was a, you were in this I found I was in a more reflexive, reflective mode than I was in the usual busy day-to-day fl about and. The peninsula mirrors the town I grew up in, socioeconomically. And so it’s the

Lynne Tillman: town you grew, the town you grew up in. In America.

Craig Mod: In America, yeah.

And so both kind of post-industrial places and the, my book is all about kind of the lack of grace that was happening in that town that you don’t even know you’re missing the grace until you leave and then you see. The abundance of others and other places. And so the Peninsula to me was shocking.

It felt very comforting and familiar because these felt like my people to a certain degree. And yet it, it had none of the violence or drugs or pain to the same degree. And I’d see little kids running around on this walk and I would just start to think back, oh, what if we have been here, what would we have been doing here?

And. Brian, he was the, the thing is he, we graduated high school and then he was murdered soon after. And when that happened I wanted to process that somehow. And my first short story actually I ever published was about Brian. And so I was immediately trying to do that with writing, but I didn’t know how to.

And I don’t know, it just seemed like the timing was right to reflect back on that. And I had spent enough time maybe on myself that I had the space in my heart, the kind of yo-yo to be able to look back on that period. But it took a while. In the walk he was starting to sneak out.

And then I did one draft, and then one of my editors started pulling out the Brian thread and got me to write more about that. And then. I produced the fine art edition of the book, and then after that I went back with the Random House team,

Lynne Tillman: tell them what the fine art edition it’s What do you

Craig Mod: mean by that?

It’s just a, this book has had this bizarre, very complicated circuitous process where I went on a walk, I wrote 60,000 words on the walk while I was doing the walk, and then I thought I was gonna spend 21 days putting it into a book, and the 21 days are now at like day, 700 or something like that.

And then I was, I went out to sell the book. Because I thought, oh, these themes are bigger than a lot of the other themes I write about. Maybe a publisher in New York would want it. And then everyone said No and everyone, anyway, just lots of rejections. And then I resigned myself to Pro to making the fine art edition.

And then in the middle of producing that Random House reached out. And so it was a bizarre contract where I retained fine art rights and they got the trade hardcover and my fine art edition came out a year and a half ago. And this one is very. Different sort of rev iteration on it. So to get, and I feel best about this edition, feels like we’re the place I wanted to get to.

And it just took all of those steps to get this far along the way.

Lynne Tillman: I was in reading it, I’ve known Craig for a while. How many years? 15. You said?

Craig Mod: 14 and a half? Yeah. But

Lynne Tillman: who’s counting, as we say,

Craig Mod: I think 14 now.

Lynne Tillman: 14. Yeah. And we met at McDowell. And I think the experience of reading this book and reading a book by someone, and then you realize you don’t know him such a small slice of him, and it’s very strange.

I’ve had this experience several times now. With a few of my friends who’ve had things that happened in their lives or because of the bodies they’re in or on that are very different. And I’m wondering about when you were writing this, how you felt about that kind of exposure.

Craig Mod: I think that’s why it took so long to get to this iteration of it because it, this draft.

Because it, it does feel exposed, exposing. A lot of my friends who’ve read this, the close friends were like, I was riveted because I realized I didn’t know who you were. And I wanted to find out more about who was this guy Craig that I thought I had known for 20 years, or 15 years, or 10 years or whatever.

Which was surprising to me. ‘cause it didn’t feel I felt like I hadn’t been hiding any of that. So that was

Lynne Tillman: interesting to hear. I don’t think you were consciously hiding. Something, but unlike a lot of, you have a lot of restraint and a lot of other people I know would be talking much more about something terrible that had happened in their past and you didn’t do that.

Craig Mod: Yeah. A friend of mine the other day, Liz Dango, who. I spoke with in Seattle, and she said to me the first time we went out to dinner, which was like 2007, we met, I was 26. She goes, the first time we went out to dinner, we went to this restaurant and I had the impression that I was sitting across from a feral animal who had never eaten at a restaurant or ordered from a menu before, which is probably accurate.

I don’t think I had been to a nice restaurant in New York before and she’s just you didn’t know how to navigate a menu. Anyway, so there were lots of things I think I was blind to anyway, and lots of parts of me that I was either embarrassed by or hiding, and it’s taken a long time to get to a place where, I don’t know, I feel like I’ve moved beyond that.

Lynne Tillman: Your version of America from this small city or small town that you grew up in, it’s very dark. It’s a very dark reading. Yeah. Of America. And it’s not. A question of true or false, but your experience of the inequities of the experience of being born into something that, about which you have no choice, and Brian, your friend, Brian’s experience, and how you shared so much for a long time until suddenly you didn’t.

Bookstore: Yeah.

Lynne Tillman: And. That’s where the inequality happens, and

I found it very disturbing. And I wondered if you would talk more about how seeing that as he, as a teenager felt to you then seeing this inequality. I

Craig Mod: didn’t know it. I only noticed it when I went to college and it hit me in the face. Like a truck. It was, I remember the, getting to college and the first day just going, okay these are people from a different place.

All of them, just no one here. Like the abundance that all these other kids had and just the way they walked it was, it really broke me. That was when I, that was the first moment I recognized that we had such a lack of abundance.

Lynne Tillman: Is that.

Craig Mod: And I think it it’s set an anger in me.

Lynne Tillman: Yeah.

Craig Mod: That stayed with me for a long time. And it’s still there to, to a certain degree.

Lynne Tillman: It’s something that you hide very well.

He never seems angry which is of course, abnormal.

Craig Mod: But yeah, it would be, the first time we met was at McDowell. And our good friend Richard, who’s here, who’s published Lynn Richard wrote me. ‘cause you needed, back then you needed to have recommendation letters

Lynne Tillman: That’s right. From people yet to you don’t anymore. Yeah. They got rid of that down.

Craig Mod: And so Richard wrote my recommendation and he accidentally sent it to me. And then I put it in a folder and I didn’t look at it ‘cause I felt like I was like, I don’t know, breaking some covenant. And and I put it in a folder and I said, I can, I’m, I allowed myself to read it five years later.

And I did. And it was the, honestly, the nicest sweet. It was still to this day, one of the nicest things anyone’s ever written about me. Anyway, it got me into McDowell. I had never applied to a residency before. And we got in. Richard said, you gotta look out for Lynn. She’s gonna be there at the same time.

And I was really nervous. Imposter. What am I doing here? And Lynn was just immediately just. So sweet. Your love of people and your attention to detail. That’s, as I was reading these stories, it’s just present all throughout this book. Your incredible love of people even, we were just sitting across the street having dinner and.

Lynn just can’t stop pointing at, pointing out how magnificent everyone is. We’re in the back room here. A Molly, comes in and Lynn’s taking, touching the embroidery on her shirt and how this is so beautiful and this, it’s incredible. And then, your love kind of radiating out towards animals.

I just wanna read this short little of yours. This is just two sentences, three sentences, but I love this is I just, I love this. This is called. The story’s called, that’s how Wrong My love is, and she goes, I love animals. I am an animal. I’m a mammal, a human being. I like most people, love many Despise one person, though I don’t want to hate anyone.

I’m also selfish and want what I want. But my greatest most enduring problems in life are ethical, but living ethically is necessarily a conscious endeavor. The unconscious is not ethical, and questions and riddles about correct behavior are endless in variation. New issues coming along all the time, stalking on the internet, for example.

But this book is just filled with so much love and attention to detail. And one of the things when I’m on my walks is turning everything off. I, otherwise. Utterly and sourced by these stupid phones and the internet and distractions. And part of what I was trying to do in my walks was basically get to a place that feels like you occupy naturally, that your attention is out there in the world and your love of people drives that.

Lynne Tillman: Thank you. I think loving people is. Kind of anathema to a writer, frankly, or should be because a lot of people hate write, hate other people, and it allows them to stay home and write. But whereas I have a conflict because I like people and so I have, I write during the day and, fortunately I’m a relatively fast writer.

I think. I think my observation comes from being the youngest in my family, being quite a bit younger than my two older sisters. And so when you are born into a family where everyone’s much older, obviously your parents, but your siblings, you really have to watch out. You have to really observe and look at their faces and try to figure out what the hell.

They’re thinking about and how is it going to damage you? How are they going to somehow destroy you? And and they tried, but here I am today with lots of psychoanalysis and without which I would not be here, I think.

Bookstore: Yeah.

Lynne Tillman: But thank you, Craig. I’m the de the question of detail.

I always think I could write more detail. But when I’m reading certain books that have a lot of description, certain kinds of description, I get very bored.

Bookstore: Yeah.

Lynne Tillman: And I think that’s a lack in me. I think I should write more description about, I don’t know, landscapes and stuff. Although I love looking at landscape paintings.

It’s peculiar,

Craig Mod: Yeah. The first. I think the first night we met you suggested a few books to me and they all, they ended up being really important books in my life. Oh,

Lynne Tillman: what were they?

Craig Mod: So you recommended Dennis Johnson’s Train Dreams, which I think had just come out in paperback ‘cause it had just been the Paris Review essay.

Paula Fox is the coldest Night. Oh. ‘cause I was writing about my dad back then. There was a, this was the novel kind of about Yes. Yeah. About bearing, bearing a dad. Yeah. And then John McPhee, actually the book I forget what it was called.

Lynne Tillman: Did I recommend that? Are you sure?

Craig Mod: Yeah,

Lynne Tillman: I could

Craig Mod: really, or maybe it was someone sitting next to you at the dinner table.

Lynne Tillman: It must have been my Altered Ego. Yeah.

Craig Mod: Altered,

Lynne Tillman: Those two books. Dennis’s was fiction. There’s a way in which his ability to make a dream a reality or a reality, a dream, it’s just, that’s an extraordinary book. Very complex. And his most famous book, was Jesus’ Son, which is very different from Trained dreams.

Interestingly, Dennis and I got to know each other in Japan ‘cause we were sent. We were invited. Both of us were invited to go to Kyoto to spend a week in their, the first ever MFA program in Japan. I don’t know if it’s still going on or not. And then we got to know each other and he was an extraordinary person.

Craig Mod: When was this?

Lynne Tillman: Good question. Very good question. Let’s see. He’s been dead a few years now. And we’re in 2025, going back maybe 2016. Okay. 2015. Okay. And Paula Fox, who is not as read as much as she should be read, she brilliant writer whom I was lucky to get to know because we were on the same reading bill together one time.

The book that she’s best known for, now I’m forgetting the name of it, but her first book. Very first novel called Poor George is just exceptional. And why am I forgetting her second book, but it’ll come back to me. But this, the coldest winter was the kind of, it would be cold, a memoir, but for me it was so different from a memoir because what she was interested in was other people.

And so it, it takes place. It reco Recounts 1946, so it’s a year after the second World War ends, and she’s a stringer for an English newspaper and she travels to different parts of Poland, of France, and she’s looking at the wreckage. World War II in people’s lives and the landscape, and it’s extraordinary.

It gives you a sense, we think a war ends and it’s over. Not that we all think that, but some of us think that it’s over and so on. Of course, it’s not over. It’s something that lives in people’s memories and that has affected everything. And this book is extraordinary, and that’s probably why I wanted you to read those two books.

Craig Mod: Yeah I, they had a profound impact on me, so thank you. They were really great recommendations. But I was trying to think of as I was reading these stories, what Walk in Japan reminded me of if I was to map a book like this to a walk and I landed on the, which is the walk that I almost died on.

Oh, thank you. Thank you

Lynne Tillman: very much.

Craig Mod: Just because getting back to the attention thing, you’re paying so much attention, but also as a reader, I think what’s so bizarre now is how much media is produced today to be consumed in the background streaming. I’d love to know the numbers on streaming. Actual attention given to. Streaming productions.

I, I suspect it’s probably less than 5% of people actually watch the thing. It’s always in the background here, while doing this or doing that. And then with audio books too, today it feels like that’s also a, almost like a background hum of something, but maybe less and your, these stories, you can’t take your eyes away if you Yeah, if you step back, if you step back for a minute, you lost.

Lost your step. You’ve lost it. There’s some something in these observations in the way the sentences move. You have to really pay attention in the you walk. It’s a seven, eight day walk and it’s a. Aesthetic pilgrimage walk. So it’s like we’re aesthetic training ground actually.

Lynne Tillman: How, what is an aesthetic training ground?

So like

Craig Mod: the mountain aesthetics in order. ‘cause a lot of these temples and shrines would’ve been deep in the mountains. And in order to bring the emperor or the imperial family to these places, you’d have to have essentially a boy scout, a Japanese sort of boy. Who had a it was called Zu, which is a kind of license to be able to take the family.

And so in order to get the Zu, you had to do aesthetic training. And these were the routes that the aesthetic training took place on. And so you had to perform these rights and do these things, and they were very difficult. And I’ve walked this one route basically two times, and you have to pay attention to every step.

Every single step.

Lynne Tillman: And why is that?

Craig Mod: Because the path is never just. Flat. It’s always, there’s some obstacle. Boulder, you’re climbing a thing now you’ve got ropes, you’ve got chains. It’s, there’s always something you’re contending with. It’s v it activates you. You have to be fully you. You look at the distances and you go, okay, it’s only 10 k today.

I’ll, I can do that in two hours or three hours, and, but the map will say it takes seven hours and you go, they can’t take seven hours. It takes seven hours.

Audience: Really? Yeah,

Craig Mod: it’s really bizarre. It just feels, it’s almost like physics is something’s broken and things. This is the route that John also almost died on, where he went to like hypothermia.

So

Lynne Tillman: we have to say who John is. So in his book, in Craig’s book, there is someone called John and John. He refers to the book of John because isn’t John the person you first started doing walks with

Craig Mod: John? Yeah. When I. A big part of what I write about outside of the book is archetypes. And I’d say John entered my life unexpectedly as this sort of archetype for many different things.

And you also, us meeting at McDowell, you became an incredible archetype for me. Every time we hang out, I think I need to be kinder ‘cause you’re so just delighted by everyone. And nice to everyone asking so many questions and I just think I’m such a weird, hermit like this.

Like I just feel like I’m curling in on myself.

Lynne Tillman: Craig, you have like thousands of followers on your rodent back and whatever those rodent back,

Craig Mod: but yeah, John. Anyway, John, I did a book about the Tokyo art world, and John is a big art guy. Oh. And a mutual friend said, oh, you should meet John. And we sat down for breakfast.

At 10. And then we didn’t stand up from that first meeting till 5:00 PM Whoa. It was just one of these sort of, oh, okay. Yeah, we, we like each other, we get each other. And he started inviting me ‘cause he was basically retired. He launched Sky TV with Rupert Murdoch.

Bookstore: Oh really? Yeah, he was

Craig Mod: the CEO of Sky TV in Japan for a decade.

And then he retired and he started doing all his art stuff and then he went back to walking. ‘cause he’d done a lot of the walks. I do when he was 18, 19, 20. So he. He went to full university in Japan writing his graduate thesis in Japanese by hand. Yeah, no, he is fully

Lynne Tillman: so he was American. He is American.

Australian. Australian, yeah. And he went to Japan when he was quite young.

Craig Mod: 17, 16, 17, on kind of a scholarship. And yeah, he just fully made a life. He was working with Anset for a while and then he did Sky tv and then after that. He was done. He was cooked.

Lynne Tillman: Can’t imagine working with Mo Murdoch.

Craig Mod: I know.

Lynne Tillman: So John appears in this book, not as physical John, but as a man who has seen and learned so much, and Craig reads from this book and that informs some of the walks and what he sees and what he might expect next.

Craig Mod: Yeah, John was he started inviting, he said, I’m gonna start doing these reconnaissance walks.

Do you wanna come with me? I’m trying to map out these basically tours for people. And I started going and that was when I knew nothing about any of these paths until John invited me. I had never knew of a pilgrimage route. I’d never, probably never even heard or consciously thought about the 88 temples, none of these things.

And, these famous roots in Japan. So it was only, around 2010 that when John started inviting me. That any of this was revealed, and that was interesting in and of itself. But then also watching John with his language and the way he was, he carried an abundance. And maybe that’s what I’m seeing.

When I see you interact with people too, there’s this abundance of love and openness. That is really, it’s inspiring to me. I grew up with, seeing almost none of that.

Lynne Tillman: You haven’t yet written the book of Lynn,

Craig Mod: the book of Lynn, the book of Tillman. And watching John just really, I don’t know, shine a light back at all these people.

We were talking to these farmers.

Lynne Tillman: It’s as if he were a father in some way.

Craig Mod: He would. Kill himself if he heard you say that. He would. He does not. Why is that? Oh, like our dynamic is not father son at all. It’s it really is friendship. But isn’t he a kind of teacher? But I think it, it’s strangely going in both directions.

Lynne Tillman: So when did it become for you on these walks? A way in which to meditate, A way in which to, whatever we wanna call it, contemplate.

Craig Mod: I think it was probably when I did my ANA retreat.

Bookstore: What is

Craig Mod: the ana, which is, that’s a 10 day meditation retreat. Oh. Where you sit for 10 hours a day and you do a hundred hours.

And the first three days, all you do is you focus your attention on the space between your nose and your upper lip. For 30 hours, you’re just focused on the sensation. On your upper, you feel like you’re gonna go crazy. It’s very bizarre.

Bookstore: Sounds like

Craig Mod: It’s very bizarre. And then you move on, you start moving your attention to other parts of your body and you start scanning and bizarre, mystical things begin to happen.

Just physiologically you feel almost like particulate matter and like you’re blowing apart and it’s very trippy. It’s very strange and there’s no speaking and there’s no you don’t, you can’t have any books. You can’t have any paper, you can’t have a pen. It’s, you’re just supposed to be there. And doing that for 10 days, it felt like a pretty big accomplishment.

And at the end of it, there was a kind of incredible joy that I felt, and I, the group kind of split. There’s probably about 40 people, 20 guys and 20 girls at the end. You could see there were either people who had found a real benefit to it and kinda leaned into it and accepted all the complexities and the whatever the.

The less perfectness of the environment. And then there are people who just stewed in that the entire time and were losing their minds and immediately just went into a huddle to complain about the entire experience. It was so bizarre. And there’s one other foreigner, this is in Kyoto. I was doing this, there’s one other foreigner, and he had this big beard and a weird, crazy head of hair.

He is about 22 and he and his friend were breaking all the rules and one had a flute and he kept playing his flute. It was very bizarre. And they went into the field and they shaved his head. One of the guys’ heads and then we were all in the dining room having our last lunch together, and everyone is so high and happy and joyful and full of just delight.

We made it, oh my God, and we had this shared experience. It was so great. And this Japanese guy comes in and the guy who shaved his head sitting in front of me, Japanese guy comes in and just dumps all of his hair on his plate, and it was the most. A passive, aggressive, violent thing I’ve ever seen. I was, it was just chilling.

Bookstore: Oh

Craig Mod: my God. Yeah. He did, he scooped up all the hair from the field and just put it on his curry, his final curry. Anyway, so you can have very different experiences. At these meditation nutrients.

Lynne Tillman: That reminds me when I was a proofreader at Forbes Magazine, which I did off and on and five days on, five days off, that kind of thing.

And so it worked in terms of doing other. Other stuff. There was a very strange relationship between these two men, one straight, one gay, and one day the guy who was straight when the gay guy was not there, went over to the gay guy’s desk and there were a lot of pencils there and the straight guy put them in a pencil sharpener until they were this big.

When the gay guy got to work the next day, he was confronted with this. It is one of the most passive aggressive or bizarre. It was one of the most bizarre things. They never spoke again, and I don’t know that they ever confronted each other. It was just like, what do you make of that? What do you make of that?

It’s a little, I don’t know if it compares with, but it just,

Craig Mod: it’s just there’s something, there is something fundamentally broken in. Broken in the system That’s right in the code. Yes.

Lynne Tillman: A

Craig Mod: little bit. A little bit. And that’s why animals are so amazing. That’s why we love animals so much.

Lynne Tillman: Yeah. We love,

Craig Mod: they transcend

Lynne Tillman: that four-legged animals a lot.

Craig Mod: I have a question for you. Yeah. When’s the last time you went dancing?

Lynne Tillman: Oh geez. It’s been a while and I really miss that. I can a lot and I, I sometimes put on something and dance in my house, but. I just feel stupid. Then

Craig Mod: why? Oh, just ‘cause I’ve, there’s so much dancing in this book. Yeah. People observing dancing, thinking about dancing.

Yeah. Remembering dances.

Lynne Tillman: Yeah.

Craig Mod: And I just thought, wow that’s a part of Lynn. I

Lynne Tillman: didn’t know. We’ve never danced. Oh, we’ve never danced. We, I think maybe we could dance out

Craig Mod: post talk dance.

Lynne Tillman: Oh, no. Dancing. Fantastic. I remember dancing on sand up in. Maine in this barn and wow.

Just with your feet in sand and dancing was so good.

Craig Mod: But I did the, to get back to your question about the meditation part of the walk, yes. I did that 10 day thing and then I went on an eight day walk right after that, and that alone solo, and that was the first time I think I, I really connected the two.

Lynne Tillman: What’s so interesting? You were he’s gregarious in relationship to this club or group. His text to all these people are so welcoming and talky and good and well written and all of this, and then you’re, then you go on these silent. Walks and you do talk to people.

What’s very interesting about this book is that one of the many things is that he goes into these little shops, kisses, K-I-S-S-A, and has conversations with the shop owners and. Orders food or has a coffee, and that’s part of every day because of course you have to eat,

But you do engage with people.

That’s a very big part of these walks.

Craig Mod: Yeah. That’s we’ve talked about therapy a lot and you’ve said, you’ve done a lot of analysis and everything and I’ve done now eight years of therapy pretty regular, almost without missing a week for eight years now.

Really. And part of doing the therapy is I find myself wanting to. Inhabit some best version of myself for the session to get the most outta the session. I don’t know. This is where my mind goes with it. What do

Lynne Tillman: you mean your best version of the session? I don’t even know what that means, just, and neither do I.

Craig Mod: So the walks, I try to do that even beyond just an hour of analysis. And so saying hello to all these people, say, having the rule of take someone’s portrait before 10 in the morning to force myself to go in and have this kind of interaction to create something. And then get infused with that.

It feels so good. It’s just it’s life giving, I think, in both directions.

Lynne Tillman: Craig does take some wonderful photographs on these walks. And I knew your photography before. I knew your writing, I think. And is there a relationship between the two for you?

Craig Mod: Yeah, they. The writing that I’m doing today, the writing that I found, so Lynn was talking about my membership program before and me writing notes to members.

How many people here are members? Oh my

Lynne Tillman: word. That’s

Craig Mod: great. Thank you. Look at that.

Lynne Tillman: That’s extraordinary, really. So

Craig Mod: why is it, why you think, do you find a lot of optimism in these member messages yet? Yes, I find

Lynne Tillman: a lot of optimism. I don’t think people read this stuff to feel down. I think, you really are engaging them in, it’s both personal, but the way in which you write the personal doesn’t feel that personal.

It’s really interesting. It’s, he’s sharing another phrase, I can’t stand really. He’s showing his life, his thoughts to all these people. He’s never met. But writes to them, talks to them as if he has met them, and as if they really do wanna know about him and know what he’s going through. It’s the opposite of those hideous family letters that you get at Christmas.

It’s the opposite of that. And yet it’s very, you see it, you have the expectation that people are actually interested in what you do.

I don’t mean it to sound as if they shouldn’t but it’s, but that’s the optimism.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Lynne Tillman: You could, I guess you could say I’m a writer and I imagine people are interested, will be interested in what I write. Of course, it’s taken years for people to be interested in what I write, but you do that, you offer yourself up as a kind of.

Medium, let’s say. I don’t mean in the psychic sense, but between this and that, between your doing things and what other people are doing.

Craig Mod: Yeah. They’re paying me money, so

Lynne Tillman: No. Even in your book, in this book, wonderful book. One of the things I found in reading it was that I could. Feel as if I were in some sense on that walk with you, feeling that quiet with you.

And I think that’s also in this club that you have, it’s a sense of having people feeling some kind of belonging to you.

Craig Mod: Part of, this is with you. This is the end of kind of the end, the tail, end of the tour. I’ve been all over America now and big, great groups of people and it has been moving.

I’m glad I’ve done the in-person stuff. It’s just this understanding who is out there and like the members and all, and the kindness. To a T. All of the bookstores have said to me, first of all, who are you? No, no one knows who I am, who’s actually runs a bookstore. It was really hard to book all these things, so thank you Amali, for believing in us that we would, people would show up.

And then the second thing they say is, my God, your readers are so kind. Kind like they’ve said, multiple bookstores have said this as if readers are coming in and, flipping over chairs normally, or what the fuck did

Bookstore: you get me into here?

Craig Mod: So that’s been bizarre. But that to me has, that’s not what I’ve been trying to, I’ve been trying to cultivate like a.

A gang of super kind gangsters or whatever.

Lynne Tillman: Are you sure? Are you sure that wasn’t, you haven’t been cultivated, super

Craig Mod: kind people. I don’t know what I’m doing. I absolutely know what I’m, what I do, I’m doing. And when I launched the program, I didn’t know what I was doing. And the only thing I did tangibly I got out of it was these people are paying me money and I’m gonna take that as a kind of weird permission that they want to hear about me, they want to hear about what I’m doing, or they’re voting with these little memberships.

To keep going down this path. That’s it. So that’s where that impulse comes from to, to share, to feel like there’s someone out there that maybe wants to listen to it and

Lynne Tillman: It doesn’t feel, I mean it could border on self-indulgence, but it doesn’t feel that way. And I think you really are trying, that’s a sort of half compliment.

Thanks. I felt it. I think you do wanna communicate something which is different from self-indulgent. It’s it’s, there’s no self pity. There’s no particular narcissism. There is no,

Anyway,

Craig Mod: but you’ve been uncompromising in your, you’ve written so many books by this point and you’ve been I can’t see compromise in your, Ooo, Ooh,

Lynne Tillman: when my first.

Full length novel came out, which was haunted houses. Another writer who hadn’t yet been published came up to me on the street and he said, I just read haunted houses and you didn’t make any compromises. And I thought, what compromises was I supposed to make? And this is because I started out. As a kind of purist that my writing would be seen as brilliant and all of that, that I was making all of these different moves that other writers weren’t, et cetera, et cetera.

And of course I learned very quickly that wasn’t the case, that this wouldn’t be seen. And I thought, why would I be a writer? If I were to compromise, if I were to compromise, I would use whatever skill I had to make money.

Bookstore: Yeah.

Lynne Tillman: I didn’t think about writing and making money ever.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Lynne Tillman: Stupidly, I think probably,

Craig Mod: I think time.

We’re getting into Q and time. Oh, we’re getting, okay. And I wanted to do just, a little flash round with you. Okay? Oh, we haven’t discussed this. No, not at all. So we’re gonna try to, we’re gonna figure out Robin Sloan did this with me in, in, in San Francisco. It was quite fun. So I’m just stealing Robin Sloan’s thing.

Okay. So I’m gonna give you two names, okay? And we’re gonna, it’s gonna be like a championship to get down to the person you’re gonna go on a walk with in the East Village.

Lynne Tillman: Huh? Oh my. Okay.

Craig Mod: So just you have to pick two of these two names you pick, and then we’re gonna start whittling it down.

Lynne Tillman: Okay.

Craig Mod: So Jane Bowles and Jonathan John or Jonathan Swift.

Lynne Tillman: Oh. I don’t think as much as, I think she’s one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, I don’t think she’d like me. I’ll choose Jonathan Swift.

Craig Mod: Okay. Turns out Kafka or Virginia Wolf.

Lynne Tillman: Kafka.

Craig Mod: Okay.

Lynne Tillman: I love Wolf, but Kaka Kafka is something else.

Craig Mod: Mur Haruki or Tony Morrison.

Lynne Tillman: Who?

Craig Mod: Mur? Haruki. Mur.

Lynne Tillman: Oh,

Craig Mod: or Tony Morrison. Tony Morrison. Okay. Murs. Bye-bye. Hunter s Thompson or Margaret Atwood?

Lynne Tillman: Oh, Thompson’s a creep. Margaret Atwood. The though I’ve never read her. Okay.

Craig Mod: Oh, okay. Yeah. James Baldwin or Kazu? Ishi

Lynne Tillman: Baldwin. Okay. Of course. Of course. Sure, sure.

Craig Mod: Zady Smith or Yuki? Mima.

Lynne Tillman: Zady Smith. Okay.

Craig Mod: Byebye. Mishima. All the Japanese guys are losing. Sally Rooney or Miko Cal,

Lynne Tillman: not Sally. Rooney, the other one.

Craig Mod: Miko. Okay. Sally Rooney. Okay. Okay. Jonathan Swift or Pope Leo.

Lynne Tillman: Oh wow. That’s very interesting. I think still Swift, because I think Pope Leo is gonna say everything he wants.

Craig Mod: Okay. So Leo’s done. Okay. We’ve got Kafka or Tony Morrison

Lynne Tillman: Kafka.

Craig Mod: Tony’s gone. Atwood or Baldwin?

Lynne Tillman: Baldwin.

Craig Mod: Okay. Atwood’s Gone. Zad Smith or Mia? Kcal.

Lynne Tillman: Zad Smith. Okay.

Craig Mod: Mia’s gone. God, this is complicated. I should have done this enough.

Lynne Tillman: Zadie Smith is really great to talk with, actually.

Craig Mod: Jonathan Swift or Kafka?

Lynne Tillman: Oh, Jesus. Kafka.

Craig Mod: Okay. Okay. Kafka. Swift is gone. Baldwin Smith.

Lynne Tillman: Which Smith Zady. Oh, Zady. Baldwin.

Craig Mod: Zedi is gone and then it comes down to Kafka or James Baldwin.

Lynne Tillman: Oh geez.

I guess I’ll go with much as I wanna say Kafka. I would have loved to have been able to speak with Baldwin. Yeah.

Bookstore: There you go. Alright, thank

Craig Mod: you.

Time for two. Okay. Time for a couple questions.

So you gave an interview on Tim Ferris’s podcast maybe a month or two ago. Yeah. An that talked, you shared how your

Audience: time with John McBride Yeah. Had been very meaningful to you in part because of how he interacted with others. Yeah. You really learned and leaned a lot of how to open yourself up to others and open them up to you from him.

Do you have any. Lessons or things you learned from John that you can share with us?

Craig Mod: So the question was, do I have lessons that I learned from John about opening up to people or having them open up, opening up to people or having ’em open up to you? Honestly, what people respond to is simply the work he’s put into caring about where they live.

So if you really want people to be moved, learn something about their neighborhood, their town, their city, that’s a big part of it. And then. In Japanese it’s a little different in English because you’re not gonna start speaking like Victorian English to people. But in Japanese you can speak in this elevated, bizarre register that maybe the farmers normally don’t get addressed in.

And so that’s like another way of just signaling respect through language and word choice. But it’s really, fundamentally it’s just about knowing the place that you the ground that you’re standing on, knowing something about the history of it and your questions relating to that. And I think for most people, that’s.

Something that they don’t experience that often. Someone caring.

Lynne Tillman: I just want to say that in America, because the people move in America, or at least they used to so often relative when I was living in Europe, people stay in the same place For a long time, America was not. Maybe now with the well.

With what we’ve got going on now with the horrors of it, maybe people won’t be able to move as much and all of that, but I think it’s very different when people are tied to place.

Bookstore: Yeah.

Lynne Tillman: In a way that they’re not so much here.

Bookstore: Yeah. Yeah.

Audience: Thank you. You you wrote, I photographed everything. A camera between the eye and the world is a powerful tool.

A suit of armor, a microscope, and a telescope in one. And I’m curious how like you feel that a camera shapes what you see when you walk, and that’s what you write about. Do you think you’d write differently if you didn’t carry a camera and look for images?

Craig Mod: Yeah, so the question was how does the carrying a camera shape what I write about and how I approach a walk, which is your question that we didn’t really get to.

Earlier a little bit. Yeah. There’s not to, to try to unpretentious it as much as possible. These are all just weird hacks. To get me to pay attention more, to get me to be more deliberate about things. And photography is just something that always interested me. The technical aspects of it are interesting.

Lynne Tillman: That’s how you first started writing about it, technic about the technical aspects?

Craig Mod: Yeah. Yeah, it was about reviewing. Some of the first writing I did was reviewing cameras, essentially taking them on. These field tests or whatever and that kind of getting some purchase out in the universe and growing from that.

But it really is just how do I get myself to, to look more closely? How do I get myself to go back to these moments and, the textures and seeing the repeating patterns that you can see over days and months of being out on the road that without some kind of recording device, you’ll miss you’ll lose track of.

And so the camera kind of serves for that purpose. And then I’m also dictating, as I’m walking, so I’m using all sorts of press. Prosthetics to at the end of the day be able to synthesize it or remember the important moments or the things that move me and I, they all kind of work, work together.

Maybe we can do one more question. Yeah. Does anyone have a Yeah.

Audience: So early on, Lynn mentioned how this isn’t really like a typical memoir, and after reading, I would agree with that, but I also felt that after reading it, there are so many jumping off points to an actual quote unquote memoir. Is that something, and I know you said you’ve got five books set out already that you wanna write, but is the sixth like a possible memoir, like A real memoir?

Craig Mod: No, hopefully not. I what? What is a real memoir? Yeah. Yeah.

Audience: This seems just hyper-focused, and I feel like it may be more broad dealing with. Family adoption, blah, blah, blah.

Craig Mod: Like the Carl nascar, like vomitorium of your history by volume. Yeah. No, even this, having, Lynn and I were talking about this earlier, like I, I I bristle at the fact that memoirs even on the cover, this is more of a random house thing where that they wanted to frame it that way.

Yeah.

Lynne Tillman: Because they sell better.

Craig Mod: And so it was reluctant, and I was also saying to Lynn, it feels the background I’ve included is more just to give context to why I would be doing the walk rather than wanting to tell some story

Lynne Tillman: And why it his past, that moment where his friend is murdered frames his present, right?

So these walks are always some overshadowed or overwhelmed by the loss that he felt. Because of, and the guilt that he feels. So that’s that’s not remembering his life. That’s the juxtaposition or the counterpoint between how the past inflects the present and how that can ever be erased.

Craig will carry this all his life. That’s different from a memoir that tries to trace a life. I think

Okay. Sense. Thank you.

Bookstore: Thank you.