Poetry is the prince of the literary arts to me. It's at the very top because it's language refined to its apex of memorability. I am interested in poetry as memorability and poetry as something you live by. These are the words you live by. These words stay in your brain and guide your life. That's what I am interested in. My memoir slash autofiction is called Borges and Me, and as you know, it's a story of my time in 1970 when my best friend Billy was drafted for the Vietnam War, and so was I. He went to Vietnam, and I went to Scotland to hide out and do my graduate work. I spent nearly seven years in Scotland, but I certainly spent the next five years definitely in Scotland. I was there before as an undergraduate for a bit, too. During that time, Billy was killed in Vietnam, and I was a nervous wreck.
My memoir talks about my depression, my anxieties, and then, through my friend Alastair Reid, I met Borges, the great Argentine writer. We went on a little road trip through the Highlands, and this conversation with Borges really restored me back to myself and what was important in life. I felt that I owed a huge amount to that contact with Borges… I was lucky that suddenly, out of nowhere, came a wonderful director-producer named Mark Turtletaub. He had read my book and loved it, and he approached me. We had a conversation, and he said, "Look, I want to make this movie." So off we went.
It’s a real pleasure today to welcome a writer whose voice has been a guiding force in American letters for decades. Jay Parini is the author of acclaimed biographies of literary giants like John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and Gore Vidal—as well as an illuminating portrait of Jesus in The Human Face of God. He’s also a celebrated poet, novelist, essayist, and teacher whose work reflects a lifelong devotion to the arts, the humanities, and the power of language to tell the truth, gently. From his poetry to his prose, Jay's writing brings rare insight and deep compassion to the page. He doesn’t just study his subjects—he inhabits them, helps us hear their voices, and see the world through their eyes. And of course, he’s one of the few people who can say they've gotten into the heads of both Jesus and Gore Vidal...and lived to tell the tale.
JAY PARINI
I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
MIA FUNK
You often delve into the complexities of human nature, societal injustices and Steinbeck's work. You go into his portrayal of characters like Tom Joad or George and Lennie of Of Mice and Men. I know that was commissioned in a way—that was the first of your biographies, is that right?
JAY PARINI
Yes, it was commissioned. I didn't actually think of it myself, but I loved the idea when it was proposed to me.
MIA FUNK
That brought you on this journey, and I think it's unusual that you do these biographies and novels and poetry—it's a lot of different modes of writing. But that opened up, I'm not sure of the chronology, of your biographies. And now you've just come back from Scotland, right?
JAY PARINI
Yeah, I was in Scotland for almost three months.
MIA FUNK
Tell us a little bit about that. Because that's another mode of writing that's bringing a book that you wrote to the screen, right?
JAY PARINI
Well, yes, my memoir/autofiction is called Borges and Me, and as you know, it's a story of my time in 1970 when my best friend Billy was drafted for the Vietnam War, and so was I. He went to Vietnam and I went to Scotland to hide out and to do my graduate work. Altogether, I spent nearly seven years in Scotland. It was during that time that Billy was killed in Vietnam and I was a nervous wreck. My memoir talks about my depression, my anxieties, and then, through my friend Alastair Reid, I met the great Argentine writer Borges.
We went on a little road trip through the Highlands, and this conversation with Borges really restored me back to myself and what was important in life. I felt that I owed a huge amount to that contact with Borges. I was trying to make a film for some time with a couple of English friends. It's incredibly difficult to raise money for a movie these days. I'd say for a movie like Borges and Me, it's virtually impossible. Then I was lucky that suddenly out of nowhere came a really wonderful director and producer called Marc Turtletaub.
He had read my book and loved it, and he approached me. We had a conversation, and he said, “Look, I want to make this movie,” and off we went. Once Marc came on board, it was pretty quick. We met in Scotland last September, and I was on the set every single day. I had a flat in Glasgow and we had 61 different sets for the movie. Every single day I would get up at five or six in the morning and take off to somewhere in Scotland where I would meet up with the crew, which was often a hundred people or more.
We would shoot for the day for eight or nine hours. Then I would get home to my flat in Glasgow late and I'd be sent the dailies. I'd go through all the daily rushes of what we had shot that day and bring my thoughts back the next day to the set. So I worked very, very closely with the director. I was executive producer and I'd been involved in script development for some years. I was very closely involved in this at every step of the way. Marc joked to me, he said, “Now you're ready to direct a movie by yourself if you want to.” I said, “Yeah.”
BRUCE PIASECKI
I wasn't even aware when you talked to me before about converting the memoir to a film that you were the executive producer. Congratulations. I would like to just let listeners know that Jay also was involved in converting his historical novel on Mr. and Mrs. Tolstoy into an award-winning independent film called The Last Station. So for those of you who love literature, please watch his film The Last Station.
Can you tell us a little bit, Jay, about how you found Russian journals that led you to write this book that Helen Mirren starred in, and just so that they know how long it takes for you to produce your films? And then Borges and Me.
JAY PARINI
Generally speaking, it takes about seven years from the writing of a book to the film. That's what people tell me. It was about seven years exactly with Borges from the time I finished the book in 2018, and we just finished the film here in 2025. We're ready to roll, so that's almost seven years exactly. Now, The Last Station appeared in 1990. I had a call from Anthony Quinn—Zorba the Greek—asking me if I was interested in making a movie of it, and he would play Tolstoy, and I said yes.
He and I wrote the original version of the script together. It took us 10 years, and finally Tony was ready to make the movie, and he died. That left me without anybody. My producer at the time was a woman called Bonnie Arnold. She had done Dances with Wolves and other films. I said, “Please, Bonnie, don't desert me. Keep hanging in there.” She said, “Well, it's not going to be easy, but we'll try.”
Over the next 10 years, we finally managed to connect with another director and screenwriter who wanted to take it over, and he did: Michael Hoffman. We actually thought it was going to be Meryl Streep and Anthony Hopkins for the longest time. They agreed to play Tolstoy and Mrs. Tolstoy. Then Meryl Streep, for one reason or another, had to drop out fairly close to when we were ready to shoot. Anthony Hopkins dropped out, so I thought this thing was going to fall apart once again.
By chance, Helen Mirren was in the office of her agent and saw the script. She read it and said, “I'll do that. I'm part Russian, I'll play Sophia Tolstoy.” She said, “But I only do if we can get my friend Christopher Plummer to play Tolstoy.” Then Plummer looked at the project and said yes, he would do it. So making movies is a scary business; it's almost impossible to do.
BRUCE PIASECKI
There are so many people who've done books where you don't see their name on the film. But you were there in The Last Station, right on the first few images named as the creator of this thing. Didn't it win an independent film award?
JAY PARINI
It got a Golden Globe or two nomination, and it got two Academy Award nominations, but at the end of the day it just says, “Based on the book by Jay Parini.”
BRUCE PIASECKI
Still, my wife, who you've met at our home, loves the passage where you're with the old blind, great writer, and he says something about nostalgia, and then you write a paragraph about what you felt like as a student. I just want to read this to set the incredible persistence of you being with Borges and what the book feels like, because it is going to be an interesting film.
“There is a nostalgia in Scotland, in their poetry and their music, in the landscape, which I can smell, and their history is sad, a disappointed people, but I'm not nostalgic, Coche.” He calls you Coche. “Except for the present I'm drawn to what happens when it occurs. This is good news, perhaps until it's not occurring, at which point there will be less to be of interest to me.”
End quote. And then there's the young Jay Parini:
“By now, I had lost my appetite for philosophy and wished only to sleep. The journey with Borges had been like standing before a teacher's desk without your homework in hand or stepping onto a stage without a script and being told to improvise.”
What's wonderful about the memoir is it captures the anxieties and the creative persistence of a young, gifted individual in the wake of this tremendous blind legend. So I look forward to seeing it. When will we be able to watch it, Jay?
showing it to various festivals and we're going to see where we'll debut, but in the next six or seven months, it should come out.
BRUCE PIASECKI
And would you say that there's a supportiveness about the birth of creativity in the film?…
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Borges says to me, which he really did say to me in real life, “We'll go through the Highlands, Giuseppe, and I will teach you everything you need to know about poetry and love.” Those words you said are exactly what he says in the film too. You'll hear that said. Scotland is really the star of the movie. It is so sumptuously filmed, it's so beautiful driving through the Cairngorm Mountains, rowing on a boat on Ness, going up to Orkney. It's all gloriously filmed and beautiful. So I think that Scotland is the main star of this particular film, which Marc Turtletaub has done just a—he's a genius. He did a brilliant job on this film.
And I think it's so interesting because it's also a coming of age for you as a young writer, and you are meant to be leading the blind, the sighted leading the blind.
Yes.
Through the labyrinths, let us say through the labyrinths of Scotland, you know, all their famous stone roads that go off for endless spirals into fields. But he's also leading you into the labyrinth of his imagination. And you should say at the time, you didn't really know who Borges was. So I guess it took you time to distill his wisdom, to learn who he was after you had met the man. You met the work, which is a little bit of a reversal. And then I'm sure that these lessons that you didn't realize you'd turn into a book just resonated and were many decades in the forming.
Yeah, no, for decades and decades I thought about Borges and what he said to me and the things that were important that he taught me about being a writer. Borges would always say, remember it's never about you. It's only about the work. He said, “Never lose sight of the work.” He said it's the poem, it's the novel that's just trying to emerge, it's the essay. Borges was the master of moving between genres. He did essays that were stories, he did stories that were essays. Literary criticism was always part of everything he wrote. Borges said to me that it's more important to be a reader than a writer. He said great readers are rare, great writers there are a dozen. Great readers are very, very rare, and he was the greatest of readers. Jorge Luis Borges.
I just watched your film in the Vermont community that you gave a lecture on Robert Frost.
Oh yeah.
No notes. Just a spontaneous rendition. So as a great reader, you don't take many notes before you give a lecture, or did you?
Actually, no. I don't ever give lectures from lecture notes. I rarely do. I mean, yeah, if I'm giving a big public occasion speech, I'll read from a typescript. Two weeks ago I gave the commencement address at Lehigh University, and there I, of course, was obliged to read from a script, because I didn't want to make it up as I went along. Because I had a very specific occasion I was working toward. If I'm teaching poetry that I know by heart, I pretty much just talk. I can talk about the poem.
I was just amazed at the spontaneous cascading of one story about Robert Frost afterwards. So it took you 25 years to write your biography of Frost. And now you're featuring in the world the 16 poems that we should remember of Frost. Can you tell us why it took so long to write the biography on his life, and then how it came about that you're now authorized to look at all of his work and say, “Okay, next century, here are the ones that you really want to memorize.” Can you tell us about that process?
Well, I always wanted to write a book about Frost. And when I first started teaching in 1975, it was at Dartmouth College and my office was right next to the rare books room. They had a collection of 200 and some notebooks by Frost, and hundreds and hundreds of letters and rough drafts of poems. So I began reading and thinking. It turned out lots of Frost's old friends lived around Hanover and in Vermont, and I began one by one to meet people. I think at the end of the day I spoke to over 200 people that had known Frost and took notes on my conversations. It took me 25 years to write that book because I would stop and do another book and I would then go back to it. I didn't feel any urgency to—I just wanted to complete it at some point.
And am I correct in remembering that Mrs. Steinbeck, who honored you after the biography, how you rendered her husband and gave you the desktop of her husband for your home? Is that correct?
Mrs. Steinbeck loved the biography of her husband, and gave me this box that had sat on Steinbeck's desk in his later years.
Well, it's interesting because some of these authors are really teachers in some ways. I understand also Vidal, who you had a friendship with over 30 years, would I guess be a kind of mentor. I mean, I was just fascinated how you could actually kind of get under his skin. Because we know he's brilliant. I wondered how you navigated that, but I'm just wondering, these are all different teachers, even Jesus—I mean, he's a great teacher for humanity, but these are all different kinds of teachers. Tell us first about Vidal and how it was to get into that carapace and into that mind.
Well, there was a strange man, a wonderfully brilliant guy, heavily narcissistic. The narcissism was finally debilitating. I think ultimately, he would've been up there with Tolstoy and Steinbeck himself had he not been so afflicted with his narcissism. Everything came back to him and how the world was viewing him, and he was too obsessed with himself and that finally killed the work. It was kind of sad to be with Gore, but also I learned a lot from him. He had an immensely fertile mind. And he was deeply, deeply knowledgeable. He was a witty man, and our conversations were tremendously interesting. I couldn't resist writing about him after knowing him as a friend for 30 years and having in my head a thousand conversations and admiring him. I think his best work is his essays. That's where he's at his very best. He wrote 25 novels, but very few of them are of the highest level. They're good, but they're not great. I just think they don't seem to last in the way that say Anna Karenina or War and Peace last. How few writers ever achieve anything like that. That's very, very rare, almost unreachable. So Gore's greatest work is probably in his essays and maybe his greatest work was in his conversation. I mean, he was a great conversationalist.
Talk about narcissism or ego again.
Wilde too. Achilles heel gets them, brings them down in the end.
You know, there's one thing I agree about the essays because I think you really hear his voice and I can imagine what it might have been like to be his friend. And I think sometimes with the novels, because they were so tied usually to a kind of a political, you need to have that political knowledge of the time. So it does date it in some ways. If you don't have that knowledge, you know, I wrote one thing and perhaps, and I thought it was so interesting, so you would've known, I don't know if it was his lifelong partner or whatever, but were they not intimate physically, or they didn't ever kiss or something? But I remember reading that, and maybe this is wrong, but I thought it was so interesting that they kissed in the end like they had before he was going to pass, they kissed. And I thought they'd saved that tenderness until just before, like it was so precious.
I think when they first met in the 1940s, they had a brief moment of physical affection, very brief, and then it quickly became a friendship. They were companions and not lovers. And they were never lovers at the end. But certainly at the end, it was almost like they'd returned to be lovers. I mean, not so much romantically kissing, but just affectionate, and Gore really loved Howard and Howard loved Gore and it was in some ways a rather beautiful relationship.
I mean, truly with the sense is that the love of your life or someone you know. And I just thought that was so beautiful and so unusual.
Yes, it was unusual. I think it's not that unknown in a gay world, you see a lot of people who are just companions, you know? And I think that's not unheard of, especially in the fifties and sixties.
And so interesting to be led into that world, in Ello, I guess. There are so many, I don't want to just focus on the people that you've met, but this is a really, you know, you're a writer who's lived a life. Some writers are just so often behind the desk. Brilliant. But they didn't go out there. I mean, if I just look at Graham Greene or just through your biographies and Edward Albee, your old Kirk, or you know, all these others, it's not just the main focus of the biography.
One way to say it, Mia, is Jay Parini is part of the Library of Congress.
I've been very lucky and know a lot of people. I'm a friendly guy, I think, and I love conversations and I've never held back. I've been fortunate to meet lots of people and have great conversations, wonderful people. Some of them famous, most of them not. But I've had great conversations in my life.
Yeah, it's true. So Mia, my wife and I are walking in Middlebury, Vermont, Jay's hometown, and two people. They happened to be looking at a beautiful church across the way, right downtown Middlebury. It's just a lovely restored white church. And those people are talking to my wife and I and turns out that the man was the chief fundraiser for this 22, I think it was 22 or $28 million. We just dropped the name Jay. Everybody in Middlebury knows Jay Parini because he loves to talk to them. It is so true that the man is approachable. He's not one of these authors that's in an ivory tower. He's a family man where he loves his wife and children and his friends. And you're listening to a person who can still produce 35 plus books and several films and still be in society as a great contributor. So I think he's one of our cultural treasures. And so I wanted to ask you about some more prickly personalities besides Vidal. I think, you know...
Can I make another comment there? I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I just want to add into that, and it reminds me also of Robert Frost who got inspiration as a chicken farmer and listening to the people, you know, like the stuff of life itself.
Frost didn't become a poet until he was 40 years old. He was a chicken farmer. And he would sit every day and go down to the country store and sit around the wood stove and talk to the other chicken farmers and hear stories. And he learned, he said it was important to hear the sound of sense and hear the common voice, how people talked. He was able to turn this ordinary speech into poetry, right? That's what he did. And the stories of these common folks, you know, "The Death of the Hired Man," "The Hill Wife," all these wonderful poems—they're all just local stories that he heard around a wood stove. And they became poems. Frost was and still is for me a kind of a guiding light.
But one of the things I...
I just wanted to apologize, Bruce.
No. In fact, Mia, that's my favorite passage in his lecture to the Vermont community about talking about Frost, is that detail about, because you then listen, after Jay's described Frost learning from the chicken farmers, you listen to Jay recite the poems and you can hear that common sense. You can hear the sense of the language of the person looking at the snow as an ordinary person. And Jay, I see that in your work too. There is a kind of Whitmanesque grandeur at times, but also a common sense.
I try for common sense. I try not to be highfalutin or too theoretical in my work. I try to keep it on a very human level. I mean, Wordsworth once said that a poet was a man speaking to men, and that's obviously very sexist, but that was 200 years ago. And I mean, a poet is simply a person speaking to other people in the language of the other people, hopefully. So I...
I wanted to ask Jay, it seems with such prolific biographies right, and historical novels, you haven't yet written about St. Augustine or Annie Dillard. Do you have any thoughts about that? Because I reread the Confessions of St. Augustine recently. And I can sense in him so many centuries ago, a kind of witty, "Do I love self-praise too much?" kind of passage in Augustine, where it's the kind of ordinary reflectiveness that's still relevant today. So have you ever thought about writing about St. Augustine or Annie Dillard? In Annie Dillard, I see a kind of poetic prose that you occasionally find in your work as well, but she is much more aggressive in the poetic side of her writing than you are. Have you thought about writing about either of those two yet?
Actually never have, but I certainly admire especially Annie Dillard. I mean, I actually know Annie Dillard because her husband, John Richardson, was a good friend of mine and I used to see them in Key West. So I've known Annie for years and never thought of writing about her. St. Augustine would be somebody who would be fun to write about someday, but I don't have any plans. He's a great thinker; he's one of the inventors of Christian doctrine.
And the inventor of a kind of creative memoir like you do in Borges and Me.
Yeah.
You know, you reread it, Jay, and it's astonishing how reflective he could be about ordinary things. Like he's trying to say, "Why did I love athleticism so much?" And in those 10 pages I say to myself, he's explained to me why I loved being an athlete, even though he wrote it so many hundred years ago. So it's an incredibly beautiful memoir, if you want to go back to it.
Well, I actually have it here on my desk. I read it years ago and I think I'll reread it sometime. I love Augustine and, last summer I was in Algeria giving some lectures and I was very near his town of origin, Hippo. So...
Really?
Yeah. That's in, it's now in Algeria.
Yeah. I bet you, you know, to me it was less probable that you would write about Borges than St. Augustine. Whenever you read it, I was thinking about you every five pages, Jay.
That's interesting.
If you do reread it, I could talk about that book.
Well, I am working on a book on Camus right now, so that's why last summer I was in Algeria. I was visiting—that was my second trip to Algeria—visiting the birthplace and the home and areas and university areas where Camus worked and lived in the twenties and thirties. I've written about 80% of it in rough draft. It's called The Boy Who Loved Camus. It's about my childhood love of Albert Camus.
Oh, beautiful. I look forward to that.
There's a story in there about how I was as a 15-year-old avidly reading over and over The Stranger by Camus. And my mother said to me, "Jay, you keep reading this book, The Stranger, what's it about?" And I said, "Well, it's about a guy whose mother dies. And he doesn't care. And he's essentially condemned to death because they think he doesn't care that his mother died." And she turned to me and she said, "Jay, that's a filthy idea. It's absolute filth that you'll be reading such a book about a guy who doesn't love his mother." And she said, "I'm going to tell your father what you're reading." And that night my father came into my bedroom and he sat on the edge of my bed. "Your mother tells me you're reading this terrible book. And, you know, I know boys of 15 often read things they shouldn't read, but you know, it would be wise to keep it hidden under your mattress."
And that is a book that really, I mean I think that when we're lucky to find it when we're young, it's just fascinating. I think also the books of the Ky or you know, they incite a certain Herman Hesse or, you know, they incite this curiosity and awaken, "Oh, I didn't know people wrote or thought about this." Yeah. And then it's interesting because I haven't revisited Camus in many years, and so I wonder what that's like, you know, revisiting.
Last year, I reread all of Camus again, and it was amazing to go back to him. He's a brilliant writer. I want to go on record, Jay, about your 50 years as a teacher and your decision to focus on the writing and the film and say goodbye to teaching.
I just retired two weeks ago from teaching because I figured, well, I'd done it for 50 years and it's not as though I didn't give it a shot. I want to spend some time now as I get older focusing on my work.
Yeah. Well, we've talked about Robert Frost's poetry, but in terms of the ranking of the different modes of writing, I think poetry is near the top of your list.
Yeah. Poetry is the prince of the literary arts, you know. It's at the very top because it's language refined to its apex of memorability. And so I'm interested in poetry as memorability and poetry as something you live by. These are the words you live by. These words stay in your brain and guide your life. That's what I'm interested in.
And it's a living language. Traditionally it wasn't always even committed to writing. It was something that was shared and spoken and remembered.
Yes. Shared and remembered. That's why my book, Little Book on Robert Frost: 16 Poems, is all about poems that you could memorize. And that seems to me a crucial thing, poetry and memory.
So they are tools for teaching as well and imparting wisdom. And I'm wondering in your 50 years of teaching what that might have given you as a performer of words, even if it's not always poetry, just getting in touch with, "Oh, there's the art, this is that sense of language in space and sound and a physical living language."
Well, I have a little book called The Art of Teaching that I wrote many years ago, and my main point in that book is that teaching is a kind of theatrical performance. And that, you know, when you come onto a classroom, you're stepping onto a stage and you're inhabiting a persona. Just like a persona in a play. And remember, the persona means in Latin persona, the voice sounding through the mask. In ancient Greek literature, if you wanted to put on a Greek play, there were a set number of persona characters—Clytemnestra, Zeus, whatever. And you went to the keeper of the masks and you said, "Oh, give me that one, and that one, and that one," and you made a play. And then the characters, the actors came out on the stage and they spoke through the mask. And that's per sona, the voice sounding through the mask. So I think that whenever we step out into public, we are putting on a mask of sorts. And the teacher especially is inhabiting a persona. And so I was, you know, over the years, I think refining my various teaching personae and learning how to communicate through those means. And Bruce also, you are a teacher. You must have reflections, I'm sure Bruce is a teacher, Bruce? You're even teaching the people you work with too.
Even as a management consultant, I was trying to change minds. And, you know, in watching your videos about Robert Frost, it's clear it's conversational. But it's also, like you said. And I'm curious, Jay, you've supported so many writers, you've written brilliantly about so many writers. What about musicians as writers? Leonard Cohen or Van Morrison, or Bob Dylan?
Do you have any? I love Bob Dylan, I love Leonard Cohen. Yeah. I love them.
He's a poet.
Bob Dylan is a great poet. I don't listen to music when I write for the most part, because it throws off the music of my own language. So I often write in cafes where I don't mind the ambient noise because I can then tune that out and tune into my own head, so to speak.
Do you ever work...
In the cafe. Bruce, do you ever work at home in your study, do you?
I do write what people are seeing. That's where I work from. You must have to write pretty much six, seven days a week, right? You've been doing it for 30 plus years?
50 years.
Okay.
That's it. One of my students said recently, "What do I have to do if I want to become a writer like you, professor?" I said, "Well, you simply go to your desk in the morning and sit there for three or four hours a day, and you do it every day for 50 years." And see what happens.
And what you get is 36 plus books. Jay, that's astonishing. Do you want to give hints about agents and publishers?
I mean, the industry is always going through its ups and downs. This is a particularly difficult moment for trying to get a book published. It's not easy for a young writer, a novelist, or a poet to find a publisher. And persistence is what's required.
Do you try and segment the users of your work, or do you just think about the reader in general?
To me, I'm the reader of my work.
Okay.
I want to write work that I would want to go into a bookstore and find. So I'm writing books that I would like to read myself. That's really what I'm trying to do. But I'm at this stage of the game too, now that I'm retired, I'm trying to just really write what pleases me, what interests me with never any thought to audience or commercial or anything like that. Just what pleases me to write, because I feel like it's something I want to say on paper before I kick the bucket.
In listening to Jay Parini, we get an insight into the promised land of creativity. Jay is a person who could nullify himself and observe the lives of those he's written biographies about. You'll hear and have heard about Frost and Jesus, and Faulkner, and Steinbeck and Vidal, but in addition, what I think we'll hear in the second half of this interview is the cogency. There is a great deal of warmth in this man and emotional intelligence and care for your future. That is the work of Jay Parini.
I want to ask about, in talking about the future, the future of writing and literature. We've seen what for me is a disturbing emergence of AI. Before that, we had the digital revolution, which of course threatened journalism. We've seen newspapers in a dire state, not having a business model to survive. Now we see the lure of AI where I see advertisements come up. They say, “Type in 30 seconds, we'll write your book for you.” People are using it. People are forming relationships with it, like virtual boyfriends, spouses. It's coming as an interface between communications, how we communicate with our own imagination. Your body of work is such that it's a crystallization, the fruits of a life, the wisdom that comes from walking the earth. And this is wisdom that's just been sourced from everywhere and has never walked the earth. It comes from a black box. We don't know what. So what are your reflections on that? And you know, how it's changing our imaginations and our way of life and seeing the world.
Well, I think I can tell in two seconds when something is written by AI or there's a real personal voice. And so I think there's never been a more desperate need or thirst for the personal voice. I do think that people are going to be looking for the personal voice, and they're going to want to read that. That's why you go back to Camus, Tolstoy, even Vidal in his essays—AI couldn't write a Gore Vidal essay. You know, it couldn't happen. That's because of the wit, the depth of knowledge—it takes a lifetime to shape a voice. And so, to find it and shape it, to work with it to develop, it's developing an individual voice. I mean, Borges, my God, you'd recognize a sentence by Borges wherever you ran into it. It's nothing else like it on this earth. AI could not write a Borges story, it just couldn't.
To build from the wisdom of what you said about voice just now, what's true about the voices you're speaking about is that you're writing about being human, about having emotional intelligence, and I sense a personal feeling in everything you've written. It doesn't matter if it's your biography or your poems or your novels, there's a kind of personal sensibility. You come to learn and you read it not just to learn about Jesus or Faulkner or Vidal, but about a personal voice regarding those folks. So you do succeed in capturing a sensibility in your work.
That makes perfect sense. And again, I don't care about this character Jay Parini, but I'm glad that there is a voice that I've managed to find that is personal because whatever I'm writing about, I try to write earnestly and have fun, and I try to be playful as well, you know? Absolutely. I love humor. I like playfulness. I love telling stories. And I love hearing stories, which is why I read.
You write a lot about people who have great empathy for social injustice and the marginalized, from Camus to Steinbeck or even to Jesus. What has drawn you to some of these social subjects?
Well, I mean, my Christianity for a start, but what I love about Jesus is his absolute focus on the marginalized, the poor. And Christianity is all about self-emptying. The word that St. Paul uses is kenosis. You empty the self, let God fill you up. I think that's why the churches are—I think religion is coming back. I can see my own church here. Every week we get more and more numbers. People are desperate for some connection to this spiritual life and, especially in the age of this terrible President Trump. My God, well said. I mean, Trump is such an idiotic, narcissistic child. He's a four-year-old running the world. Imagine having not just a four-year-old, but a crazy four-year-old running the world. We're in bad shape. And so people, I think, are yearning. And he also, Trump has no spiritual depth. I mean, he's the farthest thing from that. The poor man, he is a sad, sad case. And he's in front of us every day, and that voice is on the airwaves. I think people are going to be rushing toward real voices. Rushing towards spiritual engagements. I think that we are in a very crisis moment in the world culture, not just Trump, but everywhere—Viktor Orbán, you know, in Italy, Meloni—everywhere you look, there's a kind of a strange disembodied voice where people are being lost and the people on the margins are being lost. I mean, we are a world of immigrants, not just a nation of immigrants. Everybody is an immigrant. Everybody came from somewhere. Nobody came from nowhere.
I loved your story, Jay, in the talk about Robert Frost on YouTube, where you characterized 10 minutes before the importance of Ezra Pound to a lot of other writers. And then you meet the old Ezra Pound citing Dante as he walks through the street. Have you formally ever written about Dante or Ezra Pound?
I've written a poem about meeting Ezra Pound once. I didn't actually talk to him. He just walked by my table in Venice, and he was muttering Dante, and he was very old. It was 1968 or 1969. I always thought that Pound was another strange case, but a wildly eccentric voice.
I've noticed in your ability to appreciate so many different kinds of writers, I don't think I've come across you commenting on the famous Federalists, like Thomas Jefferson, who was a very ambitious writer. Have you commented?
I have a book called Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America, and it's kind of an intellectual history of America. It's told through 13 key voices, and there is a whole chapter in there on The Federalist Papers. If you look at that, there's a whole chapter in there on all those great founding fathers. Vidal once said, “We were founded by some of the smartest people who ever lived, but they disappeared very quickly. We've never seen them again.”
Well, that's what's a good contrast to Trump is that, you know.
I mean, America has a rich intellectual tradition and you never know it listening to Trump or his gang, his cabinet, who are really just bobbleheads.
Yes. And it's so interesting when you read back at the Founding Fathers, they were so educated and they were going back to foundational texts. They were well versed in Cicero. They were really well versed in the classics in a way that you would find it impossible to imagine. They all seemed to be familiar with the stoic tradition, and it was so interesting. Heavily flawed, of course—we are talking about a majority of them being slave owners. And yet they had this knowledge and they kind of were basing a lot of their philosophy and politics on that.
Yeah. I mean, Thomas Jefferson was an exquisitely educated mind. The slave owning was a horrible part of the era. We are always caught in our own eras and times, but at least Jefferson, Madison and John Adams—these people were tremendously sophisticated. And they had read the classics, the Roman and Greek classics. They knew their Plato, they knew their Cicero, they knew Aristotle.
Only recently I learned in writing about Franklin that when Philadelphia was full of mud and shanties, he translated Cicero when he was 37 years old. He translates it into English and publishes A Well-Spent Life. And he does that with no financial background, but starts making money on it. And that's when Franklin begins to think of himself, not just as a printer, but as a publisher. Thank God it was, he had some faith that the new nation was interested in classics. And he writes the introduction and it's a beautiful book.
Yeah. His memoir, his Autobiography, is one of the classic American books. An amazing book.
And so Cicero, I mean, going back to your Italian heritage, how do you feel that has informed your voice and your sense of history? How has the voice of your parents and your family gone into forming the writer who you are today?
You know, I spent a lot of time in Italy. I spent a lot of time in Rome, Amalfi, the north of Italy. And I've read sort of deeply in some of the Italian writers. Going back to the classical writers, early on I was profoundly influenced by writers such as Horace and Catullus particularly. And of course, Cicero is one of the great thinkers, philosophers and political philosophers. I love his work. And of course going up through, I've spent a lot of time reading Dante. To me, he's one of the great poets up there with Shakespeare.
So, you know, Dante and Shakespeare, these great poets are great for a reason. I mean, they're astonishing because they're connected with the spirit in a way. It's never about them; it's about their connection to the spirit.
I just want to ask about the spirit, though. When you're writing, are you riding into a place where you're almost feeling it's an instinctual place where you're channeling a voice?
I am only writing well when I'm invisible to myself. Yeah, I have to become nobody. “I'm Nobody! Who are you?” said Emily Dickinson. I have to become nobody and then nothing to be able to embody this. Something that seems to me to be coming from the spirit. And, you know, if it's language that's real, it won't have anything to do with Jay Parini. I'm interested in only being a vehicle if I can be for anything that's possibly true or interesting.
Because you've also captured a large part of history, right? You've recorded history in these biographies that might otherwise be missed.
Biography is a form. It's a subgenre of history really. It really is. And so in running through Steinbeck's life, you're really going through the history of the United States of America in the 20th century, late 19th century.
And I think the way you just connected in this interview, the fact that Frost came up for those 25 years, all those papers were right there. And I think when I look back at The Last Station, you also landed in clover when a friend of yours sold you the three journals in Russian. Gave you direct insight into the history of Tolstoy.
I think as far as this creativity goes, being alert to opportunities is important. Really alert to them. So when I came across those journals related to Tolstoy, I could see, “Aha, here we go. This is something I could work with.” So I'm always trying to stay alert to what might be something I can make use of and turn into something.
And in your novels too, but in your poetry particularly, there's a great sense of place and inspiration from nature. Could you share your reflections about the wonder of the natural world, your personal memories, and I guess as you think about the future of the kind of world we're leaving the next generation, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?
Well, everything I've done has come out of a sense of place. Most of the people I write about are obsessed with where they live and the natural world around them. And they're inspired by nature, which becomes a symbol of the spirit. Right. So every natural sign in the world, a tree, a rock, a bird, is somehow emblematic of a larger complicated universe. And so, I think young people should get out into the world, go hiking in the woods, sit under a tree. Listen. Don't try to be somebody, try to be nobody, and then something will happen.
That's a profound paradox, Jay, to nullify the self in order to be open to the world. Look how Shakespeare's done again.
Look how the greatest writer of all time, Shakespeare, simply disappeared. You have no idea who he was. Shakespeare had a perfect ear, and he was listening. He was watching the world, he was watching nature. He was watching how people interact. He was interested in the politics of the day. He was watching, listening, waiting. So watch, listen and wait.
That's so true. Well, thank you, Jay Parini, for sharing your creative journey and insights into great lives, the American icons, the power of poetry, art and the humanities.
Thank you very much, Mia and Bruce. Thank you.
