SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Tommy Orange and Kaveh Akbar write about serious events in life. Tommy Orange, member of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes, begins his last book, "Wandering Stars," with the murder of 230 Native-Americans in the Sand Creek Massacre.
Kaveh Akbar, who's Iranian American, dealt with addiction and the idea of immortality through suicide in his debut novel "Martyr!" But now, they're on the road together, driving around America, just a couple of novelist buddies who are jamming to a playlist.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOOD DAY (FEAT. MISTERWIVES & CURTIS ROACH)")
JAX ANDERSON: (Singing) Today is going to be a good day.
SIMON: They're on a promotional tour for the paperback releases for "Wandering Stars" and "Martyr!" And they pulled over to the side of the road in northern California, Oakland. Thanks so much for being with us.
KAVEH AKBAR: Thank you so much for having us.
TOMMY ORANGE: Yeah, thank you.
SIMON: What's the idea behind this road trip?
AKBAR: Tommy and I wrote our two books, "Wandering Stars" and "Martyr!," together by trading Friday pages. We would swap pages every Friday, and we called it band practice when we did that. And we did that for years - four or five years until we had both written novels that we actually sent out to our agents within, like, a month, a month and a half of each other, which was totally organic. But it happened that we both ended up with Knopf, our publisher. So we ended up with the same publisher. Our books ended up coming out very close to each other on the calendar. It just feels very cosmic. It feels very faded. There's so many big and small sympaticos, this conspiracy of minor miracles that has added up to pretty definitive proof that there's - to me, to my mind, that there's something going on here.
And Tommy's become one of my best friends, which is cool because he was also already one of my favorite writers. I think he's - if you're paying attention to American literature, he's probably one of your favorite writers, too. And so getting to do this, getting to write, getting to make, getting to travel and meet people with one of my best friends and also one of my biggest inspirations is such a profound occasion for gratitude. It's such a privilege.
SIMON: Oh, sounds wonderful. Tommy Orange, how do you feel (laughter)? Is he wrong?
AKBAR: (Laughter).
ORANGE: I mean, it's hard on the radio to try to play down nice things said about me.
AKBAR: (Laughter).
ORANGE: I might be able to roll my eyes or nod my head in public. But yeah, it's really an honor and privilege to do events with a writer that I admire and a close friend that just makes it fun.
SIMON: Do you hand off to each other in appearances? - I mean, just say, we'll, let Tommy answer that or I think Kaveh is the one to talk about that, yeah.
(LAUGHTER)
AKBAR: Well, I - yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm the sort of Whitmanian yapper. Like, when I get anxious or when I get nervous, I can't shut up. And when Tommy gets anxious or nervous, he draws in and then just, like, summons the wise thing to say, as opposed to saying everything around the wise thing, you know, saying every possible word and then maybe somewhere in there was the thing that you meant to say.
SIMON: Look, that's a good quality if you have to fill time on the air during a live coverage.
ORANGE: (Laughter).
SIMON: But go ahead, yes.
AKBAR: Yeah, but no, everyone - like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to get a little bit better at not just narrating my consciousness.
SIMON: (Laughter).
ORANGE: I think if you extend the metaphor of it being a band, you know, tour thing, like we're - we are figuring out what it means to play together, and that's a really cool thing.
SIMON: What do you want to leave with, let's say, high school students when they see you? What do you want them to know about not just your works but reading?
ORANGE: There was a student that came to me who just thanked me for writing about Oakland because she never gets to feel like she's in Oakland in a book or, like, where she's from is not represented in books. And for her to share that with me was really special. And, you know, for them to believe that, you know, somebody who's writing a book is relatable to them on any level, I think is important and to sort of demystify the idea that nobody can write, because everybody can write.
AKBAR: I will also just say that the books have offered me - among this, throughout my life, the books have offered me companions who have said - I live through pain, and I am here writing about it, right? - and so a kind of proof of concept, right? - that one can experience difficulty and still make art from it, still try to make something beautiful or true. And I think that coming into spaces with young people who are struggling in immeasurable mammoth ways relative to their subjectivities, relative to the world around us, relative to our unprecedented experience of life on the planet right now, and just saying, I, too, have struggled, and here I am with my best friend telling you about how it was.
SIMON: Let me ask you both - and I respect the fact you might be superstitious about this - what are you working on now?
ORANGE: I'm working on a third novel - does not yet have a name and is not related to "There There" or "Wandering Stars" in terms of, like, it being part of a trilogy. And I am a little bit superstitious about talking about it and losing the energy to write about it, so I - that's all I'll say right now.
AKBAR: I'm always writing poems. I never stopped writing poems while I was working on the novel. Though, I haven't had a new poetry book out in some time, but so I'm writing a lot of poems. I'm writing prose that is beginning to accumulate.
SIMON: Boy, I've never heard a novel described that way. I'm writing some prose that's beginning to accumulate.
AKBAR: (Laughter) An accumulation...
(LAUGHTER)
AKBAR: ...Of prose, yeah. No, my publicist is just wincing, right? You know, here's an accumulation of prose, bro.
ORANGE: It's like the black mold of...
AKBAR: (Laughter) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SIMON: Right. Right.
AKBAR: Yeah, it's like the wet bread that you left out two weeks later.
(LAUGHTER)
AKBAR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah, that's about right.
SIMON: Well, Tommy Orange, paperback of "Wandering Stars," and Kaveh Akbar, the paperback of "Martyr!", both out now and they are on the road together, two great American novelists and pals. Thanks so much for being with us.
ORANGE: Thank you so much, Scott.
AKBAR: Thank you so much, Scott. We appreciate you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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