Transcript: Anthony Doerr on Curiosity, Wonder, and the Craft of Storytelling

Good morning, and welcome back to the Late Start Show for our first alumni interview. We are here with U.S. Class of 91 alum, New York Times bestselling author, and Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Anthony Doerr.

How are you, Mr. Doerr? I'm great, gentlemen. How are you guys today?

We're good. Well, the weather's beautiful here. I don't know how it is there, but... Yeah, beautiful.

September's the best, right? It's like a whole northern hemisphere. It's so nice. It's nice and cool.

I'm going for a run this morning. It's getting nice and sunny. The leaves are changing. Are the leaves changing in Cleveland?

Just starting to. Yeah, kind of in that sweet spot in between summer and fall right now. Yeah, that's great. Well, speaking of Cleveland, you grew up here.

Could you tell us a bit about your childhood and what your family background was like? Absolutely, yeah. I grew up with two older brothers, two U.S. boys. I was a mistake.

I was five and six years younger than my older brothers. Came along as a surprise to my parents. And my mom was a school teacher. She taught at Ruffing, Montessori down in Cleveland Heights for a really long time.

And then right, I think the year or two years after I graduated from US, she went and taught at university school. So that was pretty cool. She taught eighth grade and then went up to the upper school and taught science up there and taught astronomy. So our Our family was really intertwined with U.S. all the way through education.

And I just, you know, I look back so fondly on those years. I just loved growing up in Cleveland. I was really into rock climbing and had a lot of pictures of mountains on my walls. I live in Idaho now, and I did kind of always fantasize about living in the West.

But, yeah, when I look back on it, the leafy beauty of especially this time of year in Cleveland and some of the winters too, those bright winter mornings when the sun finally comes out and everything's cold and creaky and the snow is creaking under your feet. I really loved growing up in Cleveland, but I fell in love with an Idaho girl while I was in college. I went to college at Bowdoin College in Maine and I haven't lived in Cleveland since. You know, what kind of things kind of captivated you as a kid?

Were there kind of books or storytelling that like really stood out to you or were there other interests that really took uh kind of took hold early on yeah great question uh probably two primary things one was books i just loved books i loved going to the library i was always desperate to do the things my older brothers were doing and so i would probably read whatever they call it now like above my grade level thankfully then it was more like whatever you take take go home whatever you want kid um and you know librarians were never like oh that's above your reading grade or something so sometimes you know there'd be like something racy in a book or you know somebody's doing drugs i have no idea i'm like nine years old i don't know what's happening i was just in love with the idea that i could go get a charlie brown and a stephen king and and then suddenly you know start those start to be gateway drugs into writers like paul bulls or jack carowak or um you know eventually even like in high school i'm taking Virginia Wolf home from the library and just giving it a go and there was no there was no real anti-intellectualism in our house like oh that nerdy kid is reading too much so that was probably my my main interest that led to my profession but the other one was just nature just being outside all the time fishing going for runs outside you know just getting in the mud playing soccer at us I just loved those rainy muddy days when you know you get just covered in head to toe in mud I just love being outside. And, you know, especially when you get to the upper campus, that ability to be outside all the time. There was this guy, Terry Harmon there. Is he still there?

Yes, he's still here. Yeah, that's cool. It was called Outdoor Projects in those days. And, you know, it was just, and my mom was really quite good at that, too.

Just, you know, reminding you that your education doesn't always have to be inside of a room. And, you know, collecting creatures, you know, learning about the creatures that lived in the woods around us. you know, Mr. Harmon teaching us how to get syrup out of the trees all over the campus. You know, that stuff was magic.

You don't really realize it all the time. You're just so happy to be outside with your buddies. But yeah, learning how to learn and learning that the entire world is a classroom that you don't have to just sit in a room with fluorescent lights to learn, I think, was a huge gift that U.S. gave me. Yeah, that's amazing.

I think for me, at least, reading allows my creativity to kind of see that there is stuff beyond the classroom and like, imagine nature and I think so that's really cool that we kind of share that same thing. Totally. The other thing about storytelling is it's like a drug. You want a little more, you want a little more, and you don't really realize that you're like learning about other people or other cultures or other times in historical fiction, say, or even in science fiction, you know, there's always some oblique or slant view on your own world.

And yet because of the drug of narrative and you want to find out what happens, you find yourself, you know, there's like pleasure in learning. And I think the most powerful thing about reading stories to me was that, you know, learning doesn't have to be vegetables. It doesn't always have to be like asparagus and boiled green beans. Like learning can be chocolate, you know, learning can be like lobster dipped in butter.

And I think that was a really important lesson. I never really had to fight to say like, you know, why would I want to learn something? I think I was just always innately curious and books were a vehicle to discover stuff. Yeah.

And I think books, it's really crazy. I saw a quote on like how you're literally reading words on a page, but you're vividly hallucinating and kind of in those images in your mind. And it's just amazing how, what books can do to create our, yeah, it's such an inexpensive material. I just love that, you know, along with probably the visual arts, painting and drawing.

I love that my job, you get to use this incredibly inexpensive materials. Thankfully for young filmmakers, that's changing you know when I was your age to make a condensing looking five minute movie was expensive you know you had to have the resources of something like a university school but now I think it is cool that everybody's got a video camera in their pockets too and that people can be creative with really inexpensive sort of inexpensive there's still a good iPhones like 800 bucks or whatever but for me writing you know the black marks on the right white page that truly is, you know, maybe $5 for the paper and let your creativity go. It's a really democratic art form. You know, after US, you kind of talked about you attended, you chose to attend Bowdoin College in Maine.

What kind of was your high school experience in like? And what was your college experience like? Yeah, thanks, guys. You know, high school, I was encouraged in writing quite a bit.

But as you guys know, there weren't a ton of opportunities for creative writing. There There were a few but you know most of the writing I was doing was critical work papers which is fine and obviously amazing practice and I would get maybe just enough encouragement unlike saying math where they're like you're gonna need to drop down from BC calc to AB calc and writing you know teachers would be like this is pretty good you know there's problems here and here but this is good writing and that always feels good that praise would often come maybe keep me going so I think I secretly always wanted to participate in the magic of storytelling. I just didn't quite know how. Our headmaster at the time, Dr.

Rick Hawley, he had published a couple of novels and that kind of seemed like magic to me. I was like, whoa, he's written some novels? You know, he taught Western civilization sometimes, but that he was kind of secretly on the side of storyteller was maybe the only living writer I met during high school that I realized, oh, maybe it's possible because you get in your head like all writers are kind of like dead or they live in Europe. You know, they don't live in Cleveland.

So it didn't seem totally possible to me. And really all the way through college as well, I kind of harbored it secretly as a dream. I did write for the newspaper. I was a history major and an English minor at Bowdoin.

But I had this kind of inarticulate dream of trying to do this thing. It just seemed as likely as me becoming a blue whale or something that I can become a published writer. So it really wasn't until after college, a couple years after college, I was living in Telluride, Colorado and working as a cook. And I realized I was reading a lot more than my friends.

And I started to think, I'm always going to regret this if I don't try it. If I don't try this before, say I have kids or have a mortgage or really get tied down to a certain way of life, you know, back when I was making 12,000 bucks a year or something. What if I tried this? And so I went to graduate school.

And that was really the first time that I got to wake up in the morning and read and write creatively and start kind of taking it seriously like a job, you know, start at 8 a.m., try to be a writer. And in those early years of your writing career, I'm sure there was some uncertainty. Did you have a backup plan or were you really just all in on a stream? Yeah, great question.

There's so much uncertainty and fear. Being the youngest, I think, helped because thankfully, you know, I have loving parents, but you know, it's a scary thing to tell your parents. Like, well, yeah, I kind of just want to make up weird stories. What do you guys think?

You know, so that my other, my two older brothers had taken more traditional paths, I think, helped a little bit. I think I did have a backup plan. I took the LSAT maybe two years after school, which is a test you take to become a lawyer. So I think maybe going to law school if this writing thing didn't work out.

Thankfully, I'm really grateful that I came up in a time, unlike the time that you guys were growing up, in which magazines really still wore a thing, like print magazines published fiction, and they were subscribed to by millions of people. And there wasn't quite the internet yet. I graduated from college in 1995. So publishing in magazines, short stories in magazines was a kind of proven path that stretched all the way back to like Mark Twain, Hemingway and Fitzgerald as a way to kind of get your foot in the door of New York publishing.

So you didn't have to live in New York City. You didn't necessarily have to have a lot of connections. It was just if you wrote something good enough and mailed it, not emailed it, but just mailed it to a magazine and they published it, then maybe an agent or an editor in New York might read that and ask you, do you have more or do you have a book? So I'm really grateful.

I think it's a little more confusing. There's such a frame of media, as you guys know right now, and everybody's in their little honeycombs scrolling through their algorithms. It's a little harder to know what path to take to become a traditionally published writer, you know, by a big corporate publishing house in New York City. So I'm grateful magazine, that magazine culture was kind of what launched me after maybe my second year of graduate school.

You know, I know that you were awarded the prestigious Rome Prize, which gave you the chance to live and write in Rome. How did that opportunity kind of come about, and what was it like to spend time in Italy as a writer? Yeah, thanks, guys. Good research.

That opportunity was crazy because back then, the Rome Prize was not a prize you applied for. So in literature, you were appointed by anonymous people, and they were called the members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And so my wife was pregnant with two boys, twins. And the day she gave birth to them, I had a fellowship at Princeton University.

The day she gave birth to them, I went back to the hospital. I mean, sorry, I went back to the apartment from the hospital, got our mail and got some stuff she needed and pedaled my bike through snow back to the hospital where she had just given birth. and inside the mail was an envelope offering us this thing called the Rome Prize. A year in Rome, we would have to leave in three months. And I'm so grateful she was brave enough and willing to be like, you know, she was coming off morphine.

She had a C-section. So I'm like, hey, do you want to move to Rome in three months with these babies? So I'm so grateful that we did that. It was, you know, my first time living in a city that big.

You know, Cleveland is big, but it's kind of spread out. And we lived out in the country, you know, east of Hunting Valley. So, man, yeah, gosh, Rome with the car alarms and trying to fit a double stroller onto these buses and through all these tiny doors and all these hills of cobblestones. And there's so many stories baked into every corner of that city.

You know, here in Boise, Idaho, where I live, a century home is a really big deal. Like a hundred year old home is like got a plaque on it. You know, and there, the apartment that we lived in, I think, was 500 years old. And every square, every piazza, you know, there's a story of like emperors flooding this thing for like a mock naval battle or, you know, dragging lions and elephants in for some celebration.

So it was overwhelming and beautiful and really special. Italy at the time, they might still have the lowest birth rate in Europe. So twins were just this really powerful thing to see young babies, you know, in a country that doesn't have a lot of babies. They'd be like, hey, Gemini, you know, everywhere we go, the kids were celebrities.

So that was pretty fun. Yeah, that's amazing. Well, in 2014, I believe it was your second novel, All the Light We Cannot See, was published, which obviously a huge success. Can you take us back to the origin of that book, kind of when the idea came to you for that book and how it came to life Yeah of course Yeah What year were you guys born 2009 2008 Yeah here we go Awesome So I going before your birth 2004 This is around the time that we brought the boys to Italy.

This is like, you know, George W. Bush presidency years. I was on a train to New York City for my first novel. I was at that fellowship in Princeton, and I was kind of down on the train.

It's an hour long ride from Princeton to New York City. This was, I didn't have a fax machine and it was not super easy to email humongous PDFs in those days. So I was going up to New York City to see the jacket, possible jacket designs for my first novel, which was called About Grace. So you would do that in person, believe it or not, it was only, what, 21 years ago.

And go up and they have them all laid out on this table. But on the way up there, on the train, you're probably going 60 miles an hour and you start as you enter manhattan you go through tunnels you start going underground the guy in the seat in front of me is talking on his big clunky 2004 cell phone about the movie the matrix i remember that very clearly he's talking about keanu reeves and uh as we go and all this concrete and steel starts flowing above the train his call drops and he got angry he got in my opinion sort of unreasonably angry wrapping his phone and swearing like why won't this thing work and i realized like what he's doing and really what we're all doing what you and i are doing right now over zoom is a total miracle right we're sending little packets of light uh at the speed of light it's invisible light by the way you know the iris can see less than 110 trillionth of all the light that's out there you know visible light that humans can see is just this tiny tiny tiny fraction of all the electromagnetic spectrum and he's sending all these invisible packets through tunnels and through concrete and you know rebounding between radio towers at the speed of light he's got a little transmitter and a receiver packed into this tiny little device that's even much smaller now you know you guys have them in your pockets i'm sure you know that that that's a miracle you know we're using invisible light to send communication to somebody that isn't in the same room as us and that was a new thing in the history of humanity You had to be in the same place as the people you were communicating with forever. And so I just got, after that moment, usually titles come late to me, but on the train, on the way to see my designs for my first novel, I wrote down the title of my second novel, All the Light We Cannot See, and just started thinking about all the ways we're limited, and got back, and really that night started this journey of reading about radio and the power of radio, and pretty soon focused on World War II and how much radio, the power of disinformation and misinformation and propaganda really determined the course of World War II. You know, the German Socialist Party that became the Nazi Party really identified incredibly early the power of radio to bend the truth and started subsidizing radios, nationalizing radio stations.

By 1938, they had a million of these inexpensive kind of cool looking radio sets in people's homes. they made this thing called the Volksenfanger that was something made with one of the early plastics called Begeleit and young people begged their parents to get these things like all the young Germans wanted these things and suddenly now the voice of the Reich the voice of the Fuhrer was in the living rooms of millions of Germans and very quickly you can start shaping you know just like we're seeing today like we saw during COVID very quickly you can start shaping and twisting people's minds and changing the truth. And, you know, I strongly believe that the radio was a strong influence in the Holocaust and, you know, the destruction of so many Jewish families. You know, I've read that you spent about 10 years working on All the Light We Cannot See. So when in 2015, after all that hard work, when All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, where were you when you got the news about winning the Pulitzer? and Kyle, what went through your mind?

Yeah, nice question, thanks. The book got quite popular before that, like overwhelmingly popular, like 100 times more popular than my previous books. So yeah, I was like at number one on the New York Times bestseller list for a while. And that was probably in January and February of 2015.

And I got pretty overwhelmed by the publicity demands. I really just never, I just wanted to get back to work on a new book. And every time I check my email, there'd be a hundred new emails. For a while, for my first four books, my email address was on my website.

So I just didn't have this kind of infrastructure in place to protect me. And I didn't quite know how to say no to all the invitations. There's so many worthy things coming into your inbox. Like, hey, our Humane Society needs a speaker.

Will you come to Tennessee and do it? And I used to say yes to that kind of stuff. And it was just humanly impossible to say yes to all the things that were coming in. So we moved to that spring break to France with the kids just to try to slow down our lives a little bit and also meet some of the publicity demands in Europe because the book has ended up being published, I think, in 45 different languages.

So you kind of feel like you owe it to all those foreign publishers to do some publicity for them, too. So we were in France when we won the Pulitzer Prize. And, yeah, I mean, I was like my phone's ringing. It's like, hey, you're live on ABC radio. you know what does it feel like to wear the Pulitzer Prize?

I'm like I haven't even talked to my parents I'm like how do you know this? So it was a lot it was pretty overwhelming you know French know about the Pulitzer so you know I was on a lot of French tv and they're putting makeup on my big bald head and all these things are totally new for me and not really why I got into writing in the first place so often I would try to protect you know there's almost like two identities there's Anthony that can be like this public figure guy. But then there's Tony who just wants to like shoot hoops and read about the Browns and, you know, wear a hoodie and not, not be Anthony because you can't, I feel like I can't be who people think I am. You know, I made up this book in a basement in Boise, Idaho, and people expect you to be something I think.

Or maybe I expect myself to be something that I can't quite be. So there's a lot of imposter syndrome that kind of came up around that time about the Pulitzer. And directly after that, did you feel any pressure after having such a major success of a book? Did you feel any pressure of what to write next or kind of, I mean, you mentioned the imposter syndrome, but like trying to like live up to that success.

Yeah you guys are good Yeah that a really good question And of course thankfully I enjoy arranging language so much that usually about 10 minutes into a writing day those fears can kind of go away You just so immersed in the problems of what you making But the fighting through the fear to get through those first 10 minutes would often be quite hard. My first book after All the Light We Can't See is called Cloud Cuckoo Land. It's even crazier. It's bigger.

All the Light kind of follows two characters back and forth, a German boy and a French girl. and Cloud Cuckoo Land follows five. And so I decided, you know, while I had the intellectual resources, while I was still young enough, I was going to try an even more complex structure. The architecture of Cloud Cuckoo Land is wild. You're moving back and forth from the past to the present.

And also there's a section of the future. And so I decided I'm just going to try to write the book that I want to make right now. And not that my publisher or certain fans that who've only read all the light want me to make. And, you know, ultimately that's going to be the best work you can make.

If you start chasing something that you start making things that you because other people want you to make them, you know, then it's like the assignment that you're doing at U.S. that you don't quite really want to do. You know, the key with like writing a good paper or making a good thing in wood shop or even doing the right like chemistry project at U.S. is find a way to do the thing that you want to do, you know, and you can still meet what the teacher's criteria are, but can you find your interest and your passion in it? Because that's where the energy lies. You know, a teacher can tell when you're bored writing something, just like a reader can tell if I'm bored writing something.

So ultimately, I kind of had to put that, lift that pressure off myself and say, what am I most enthusiastic about making and chase that enthusiasm. Yeah. Well, of everything you've accomplished from, you know, the awards, the bestselling books, but what are you personally most proud of in your life? Oh, my boys, of course, my kids.

Yeah, I mean, I'm just so proud of these guys. And it's so fun to watch minds like yours to watch these kids bring. They're so much quicker. you know there's so much fear in my generation about AI for example and seeing how my sons are like well this is the world we got to figure out how to use this and let's embrace it and let's understand how we can write prompts that will help us and how can we not use it as a corner cutter or something to cheat with but to enhance our lives and so young people in general always inspire me, particularly I'm most proud of my boys. They're really kind, curious, good guys.

You know, if you could talk to high school, Anthony, the guys sitting in these classrooms all the way back through the U.S. halls, what would you tell them? Any wisdom or kind of tips that you would want to give your teenage self at this point in time or tips that you would want to give teenagers now? Yeah. Yes.

Tying in with my answer to the previous question before the last one, chase your enthusiasms. There is so much, there are so many miracles in the world. Like I am, I'm 51 years old. And the other day I was sitting outside and there was a hummingbird and I'm like, I thought hummingbirds would be gone by now.

Like it's September, whatever it is, 10th or something. I'm like, I think hummingbirds would probably have traveled south by now, but I never really understood hummingbird migration at all. I never really asked myself that. I'm like, do flocks of hummingbirds fly in groups or anything.

So I start digging into it and they fly individually and they'll travel up to like three or 400 miles in one day. They weigh about the same as a nickel and they live basically on sugar and they'll travel three or 400 miles on their own and find their way back to like these nesting grounds in Central America. And this bird's like right in front of me. I'm like, oh, in like a week, this dude is going to go all the way to Central America. and I mean it's so incredible that we get to be alive for 80 years if we're incredibly lucky on this planet and get to just be some tiny part of this incredible matrix of life that has existed here you know the planets whatever of four and a half billion years old like and we get to be here for these 80 years so I would say anytime you feel a little down or you're worried about the future just turn to the incredible magic of being a part of this creation, of this astonishing world.

And I think, you know, human connection, connection to other species, that's the key to feeling less alone and less afraid about the future. And, you know, just look for wonder and awe. It's all around us. It really is.

You don't have to get on a plane to fly to Bora Bora for awe. You know, it's right there. It's right outside your windows. So that'd be my advice.

You know, finally, as we wrap up, we ask all of our interviews, we ask the same question. Think back to kind of all the times you almost quit writing, the drafts that maybe collapsed, some of even the rejections of those long dry spells and the late night doubt. What kind of pulled you back to the page and what is your why? So, Mr.

Durer, we kind of want to ask, what keeps you going? Yeah, let's go. You guys are like better than 99% of podcasts. This is awesome.

What is my why is ultimately making stuff, arranging words to generate pictures in the mind of a stranger is kind of getting to play with like alchemy or really a kind of wizardry. And I'm so grateful that I get to do it, that I really want to try to keep doing it for as long as I possibly can. And, you know, you guys know I'm dealing with this concussion. I've had these symptoms now for several months and it's given me, it's really hard for me to work on a computer and it's just given me, shaken me a little bit enough to know that like what I'm doing, what I get to do for my job is total privilege.

Every day that your visual system is working and your legs are working and you could move out in the world is such a gift. So if I can try to write stories that connect people and make people feel slightly less alone to say, oh, yeah, I recognize myself in that character or feel inspired by the natural world in some way by my writing, then I'm really happy and really great. Well, Mr. Dorr, it's been great having you on the show today.

Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in, to share your thoughts and experiences with us. And to our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in, and we'll hope you'll join us next Wednesday for another episode of Late Start Show. Thank you, Mr. Dar.

Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, Jack.