By Sean Moeller

This George Saunders man, while dogging on society and the norms that we’ve come to swallow and lay down for, cannot be seen as a downer, not when you read deeper into his words. Though Vonnegut has been saying for years and years that the world is past the point of no return and that Mother Nature is trying to rid itself of the experiment that is Earth, Saunders is not so pessimistic. His words carry life in their centers, similar to a bag of nacho cheese-flavored Combos. The hardness of the exterior, the black comedy and its playmate – the blacker comedy as seen in a story about monkeys in the new book – give way to the hopefulness that he seems to want to hold onto if he could. The stories point out the travesties of decayed moral code and highlight the ways in which we are consumed by the wrong things, but there’s always someone in every story that wishes the decay and wrongful consumption would stop and for me, that’s Saunders himself.

What do you like about the short story form?

For me, it has more to do with my inclinations. My natural tendency is to race for the door. I know what to do in a short story. I know how to behave. It’s like that for a lot of things in my life. I don’t quite know what to believe. I’m easily talked out of shit. If I know something’s only going to be eight pages, it accommodates my indecisiveness.

Why do you sway in your beliefs so much?

The Buddhists have a saying that goes, ‘The world creates itself in every instant.’ Some people get stuck in one place. It’s kind of like how there are those people who believe that there’s no music after Foghat. I don’t like to be like that. The truth is that the world never stays the same.

What speed do you write at?

I’m not that fast. I’m a slow writer. If there are four paths that a story can take, I have to walk all the way up all four paths before I know which one’s the right one to take. If there’s a way that seems right, but it’s boring, I won’t go there. In a perfect world, you would write the thing that excites you the most. It’s like if you hear a really cool party up at the end of path number two, that’s the one you go up. Then when you get there, you realize you’re fucked cause that’s not what the story’s about.

When does the best material come to you?

The best stories come to me when I’m in a good mood. For sure. Absolutely. What I mean by a good mood is that the world seems resonant or the sentences just appear in front of you. That happens about two days a month. Sometimes you’re trying to describe a kitchen and you just go, ‘Fuck it! It’s just a kitchen.’ And it’s just not happening. It has to be about falling in love with the things in the world. When you get off from school in May, there are two weeks I can count on as being really productive weeks because you’re so happy that school’s out. The times when it’s not working, I edit because then I’m not so charmed by myself. I think that’s the kind of work you can do in that mood. What do they say in rehab? Fake it ‘til you make it?

How long have you been a Buddhist?

I was raised Catholic and when the kids were born, we started going to Episcopal church. My wife started a little meditation group. She’s much more advanced that I am. I just followed her. Buddhism is more about looking at the state of your mind. I found out that I was probably a Buddhist before I knew what it was. I think literature, at its highest levels is actually a Buddhist thing. It’s about seeing all dimensions and I think that the great writers, like Shakespeare and Dickens, do exactly that.

Do you think the world’s gotten to be hopeless?

I’m not as hopeless as the stories might indicate. I do think that human beings have pretty much always been the way they are right now. I think there is some really low-lying, stupid fruit in our culture. My writing takes those things as the raw material, but there’s more than that. My instinct is that the media has gotten stupider. I think, in a democracy, it’s really dangerous to be stupid. I think it’s a very interesting stage in democracy. The media wants you to buy things and it wants you to think things and it does it in a really stupid way, yet the people running these things are very intelligent people. I’ve met them.

Are we easily persuaded?

People like to buy things. We’re all into it. We want things and that’s cool. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s been a slight change in the power balance. When I was growing up, commercials were dumb and out-of-step. Now, they’re really smart and they’re really cool and because of that, it’s hard to have a counter-culture. Look at Marilyn Manson. He’s a celebrity and making a shitload of money so he’s definitely not counter-culture.

How are you as a writer?

I’m a two. I get a two because everything’s spelled right. I give myself a two because I’m butting myself up against the masters and blushing a bit.

Were you always a humorous writer?

Before “CivilWarLand In Bad Decline,” I was writing these stories that were just plain. I didn’t ever send any of it out. I was kind of like a boxer fighting with one hand tied behind my back. Then, when my second daughter was born, I realized that the world doesn’t really give a shit if I publish a book so I thought, ‘Alright, I’d better get that second hand out and really try.’ I decided I’d rather be a little misshapen freak than be a zero. In person, I was always the same person. If I got into a bind, I would try to be funny to get my way out of it, but that was just for family parties and going to bars. I didn’t know there was a wing of literature called “comic.” I’d never heard of “Confederacy of Dunces.”

www.inpersuasionnation.com

www.georgesaundersland.com