 David Wroblewski, author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Wroblewski grew up on a farm in central Wisconsin. (Echo photo by Jeff Peters) Dear Echo Readers:
 Dogs are the centerpiece of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, such as Ginger, a Golden Retriever photographed at a farm near Mellen. (Echo photo by Jeff Peters) Here is a question and answer segment with one of America’s hottest authors, David Wroblewski. His best-selling novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, is based in and around my hometown of Mellen, Wisconsin.
It was a pleasure to team up with my former colleague, Claire Duquette, editor of Ashland, Wisconsin’s Daily Press, to photograph the author while Claire interviewed him.
Without further ado, it’s the ECHO’s privilege to introduce David, who grew up on a central Wisconsin farm just off famous State Highway 13 near Pittsville, about 150 miles south of Mellen.
Q.: Are you officially a full-time author now?
A.: As of March I’m in free fall, officially a full-time author. It’s a little scary, which is good. I think it’s good to be a little frightened by what you’re taking on. It keeps you honest.
Q.: You worked on this novel a long time. How did you get the ideas for the novel?
A.: I never know how to answer this question honestly. I have a terrible memory and I tend to revise in retrospect. When you’ve been working on a project this long, remembering accurately can be a real problem. My earliest notes go back to the mid-1990s. I do know a lot of the initial ideas for this story came very quickly in the course of one afternoon. I’d been taking short story writing classes in the early 90s. And I knew I wanted to try writing a novel, and I knew it was a personal project. I wasn’t aiming at publication. I was aiming at writing a novel because I knew I would learn from it, and I was interested in dogs and I was interested in Wisconsin, and I wanted to write about where I came from, and I wanted to write about dogs because they matter to me. Our lives with animals matter to me. And I wanted to tell a story that I had a certain emotional response to - and I wanted to create in other people that emotional response.
Q.: Did you achieve that goal?
A.: Over the course of writing, I did. The book that I finally submitted for publication is probably the closest I could get to what I imagined within my talent.
Q.: Can you describe that emotional response you referred to?
A.: Let me answer that two different ways.
There’s the response of me as the author, with something that has gone out into the world, and I’m very proud of that in the way I would be very proud of my kid going out and graduating from college or something.
My response as reader is … I have every emotion towards the story. What I imagined when I started was something that would involve me at a level of happiness and joy as a reader and something that was as sad and as devastating as I think the best fiction can be.
 Mellen's unique City Hall, which is over 100-years-old and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is mentioned in the best-selling book. (Echo photo by Jeff Peters) Q.: The novel is a success. Does that put pressure on you for the next book?
A.: I think there are expectations, but I don’t have a book under contract and I’m free to write whatever I want right now. One of the advantages of this happening to me relatively late in life - I’m 49 years old - is that I’ve made a lot of things in the world of software; I’m also a practicing photographer. I’ve learned many times over that when you start a project, you never know how it’s going to end, even if you think you know.
I’m not at all alarmed about expectations or anything like that. What’s important for me is that there’s material out there. I have a new character I am fascinated by, I’m in love with him in the same way I was in love with Edgar Sawtelle. I want to look at his life and I want to understand him.
Q.: How do you work?
A.: I aspire to a very structured way of writing. The fact is, it’s pretty chaotic. What I know is that for a first draft, I need to be in my office at home, which is so familiar it’s boring. I’m easily distracted. For a first draft, it never works for me to go somewhere else. Revision is different. I can do that in a lot of places. In fact, I love doing that in a lot of places. But when the page is blank to begin with, I need some sensory deprivation (laughs). I used to be a nighttime writer but I undertook a deliberate process to shift myself to be an earlier writer. Now that I’m doing a first draft again I’m finding that morning writing isn’t working for me really well. The first drafts kind of come to me at night despite having shifted. I get up at 5 a.m. every morning, as does my partner Kimberly, who is a poet. We don’t say a word to each other and we go off to our separate offices and then she goes off to work and when I was working outside the house I would go off to work. Usually the first time we would talk was in the evening when we would both come home. Now she goes off, and we still don’t talk until she comes home (laughs). Sometimes we call each other during the day and say “What are we doing for dinner tonight? What groceries do we need?”
Q.: Does that mean you do more of the cooking?
A.: I wish I did more. Now that I’m traveling so much we don’t have a regular schedule. The plan is for me to do more of the cooking because I’m there and it’s a nice break from the writing.
Q.: How many drafts did Sawtelle go through?
A.: I’d say 12. It was nothing so neat as one pile of paper, then another pile of paper. I have boxes full of drafts in the storage locker that we rent. Sometimes a draft for me was to just cut, not do anything but go through and just cut. In fact, this book was about 25 percent longer than it is now. I had been submitting it to agents and getting rejected right off the bat every time on the basis of the size. The answer was always, “You’re a first time author and it’s a big novel, and that’s a recipe for never being published.”
I rejected those comments out of hand in my kind of ornery way. Well, first of all, I never thought the book was going to be published, so why should I change it to make somebody happy when it’s not going to be published, right? But then I gave it to somebody who was in a workshop that I was in, and he said “I really, really like it. You should cut 20 percent out of every single page.” And I said to myself, “Oh, that really hurts.” I can totally ignore it from an agent who’s rejecting me anyway, but someone who gets it, and who’s a writer, I have to pay attention to. So one of the drafts was a cutting-only draft and I took about 20 percent out. And, lo and behold, after I did that, I found an agent.
Q.: What kind of research did you do in Mellen?
A.: I had one main research trip up here where I was here for about 10 days and camped in various places. I would write some, but mostly I was here to understand the town, understand the countryside, so I could see how it was different from what I was used to in central Wisconsin. I wanted to get the land right most of all. Actually, I felt very free to alter Mellen to be anything I wanted it to be. I mean, it was going to be a small town, but I had no qualms about taking liberties. But I wanted the description of the land used in Edgar’s time in the forest to be as real as I could make it. As it turns out, I didn’t have to alter much about Mellen. I wanted the city hall to be there because I’m very fond of that building.
Joe Barabe’s book, A Journey into Mellen, was the clincher in terms of picking a town.
Q.: What was it like coming back this time?
A.: I’ve been looking forward to this ever since the book came out. I sent Joe [Barabe] a galley copy of the book early on. Before the book came out, I wanted the town to know they were in the book. I was very self-conscious about doing this. It seemed like such a strange thing to do, to call someone and say, “By the way, I’ve appropriated your town and I’ve put it into my book.” If it had been a big city that would’ve been one thing, but in a small town it’s more personal. I was hoping that somehow during the book tour, which took place in June and July, that it would make sense to sort of swing up here and do a reading in Mellen, but it didn’t. I said, “Well, I’m just going to go up there myself.” It was just a matter of timing. I actually intended to do it early in the fall, and then we found out about the Oprah selection and didn’t want to do it until after that was done.
Q.: So what about Oprah? How does that work? Does your publisher call and say “Oprah wants you?”
A.: No, Oprah called me. I got a call in the morning from (publisher) Harper Collins saying “You should stay by the phone today. Someone from the Oprah show is going to call.” They didn’t know who, but when the phone rang it was actually her and we just talked about the book. It was really a fan call. She was calling to say “I really liked the book and I have some questions,” and so on, and it wasn’t until later that she broached the subject of selecting it for the book club. And, of course, I was delighted. I think the thing that felt wonderful to me was, had she not done that, we still would have had a great conversation about the book. It was like a call from any other reader who had really responded to the material and that’s just delightful.
Q.: Why are dogs so important to you?
A.: There’s a couple different answers. First, I grew up around dogs. I think there’s a little essay on the Oprah.com site about how the very first memory I can recall is a memory of our dog, Princess, when I was a toddler. My folks raised dogs for about five years seriously.
 The author's love of dogs is very real in his national best-selling fictional book The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. (Echo photo by Jeff Peters) Q.: What kind of dogs?
A.: German shepherds at first and then poodles. Actually, we had lots of different kinds of dogs, but mainly because we rescued a lot of dogs from other places. My parents would go to visit other kennels and more often than not, they’d come home with a dog they had bought to rescue it, because they didn’t think it was being treated well. So all our house dogs were Pekinese, Manchester terriers and Pomeranians and so on. They tended to be little dogs. And I had an outside dog who was pretty wild. His name was Prince. He was a shepherd-collie mix of some kind, and he’s the prototype of Forte in the book. He was dumped by our place and we had to lure him in, and he became bonded to our yard - but he was kind of wild, always. You could never put a leash on him or a collar, but he was very protective of the yard. He defended it against all threats, imaginary and otherwise.
In any case, who knows why certain people respond to dogs the way they do? There’s something really primitive about it to me. My feeling is that we evolved as a species along with dogs. They are the oldest animals that we have lived with. I don’t think we domesticated them, because you can’t domesticate something unless you have a domicile, and as far as I can tell the earliest dogs that lived with us did so before we built houses in the last Ice Age. It certainly predates anything we could call civilization, and I think that changed us. However that changed us resonates more in some people’s lives, and that’s certainly true with me.
Q.: What kind of dog do you have?
A.: That’s my one big secret. That’s because the Sawtelle dogs are a fictional breed of dog, and I believe that if I went around talking about my dog, Lola, everyone would say, “Yes, it’s a fictional breed, but it’s really a Chihuahua,” or whatever. One of the great things about this book for me is listening to other people describe the Sawtelle dogs to me, because everyone describes them differently. Once I understood that by making the breed of dog a fictional breed, readers would make them up for themselves. Watching that dynamic in process has just been great fun. It’s the best single decision I made around this book. The dogs are deliberately under-described in the book. I wanted to put in enough detail to make them just barely real. It’s a risky thing to do, because the writer’s general rule is everything has to be concrete detail. So it was a very delicate line I was trying to walk.
Q.: Why is Edgar mute?
A.: The real answer to every question about what is in this book is: Because I experimented with it, and the experiment succeeded. Had the experiment not succeeded I wouldn’t have done it that way.
Part of my interest in animals is also an interest in language and the ways in which human language gets in the way, or fails, or can be used inappropriately. Or how the right way of phrasing something can change your conception of the entire situation, or just finding the right way to say something is in and of itself a solution to a problem. Very early on, I was stumped about how to make language an element of the story as opposed to the medium in which the story is being told.
Then somewhere along the line, I had very minor oral surgery that involved a stitch in my tongue in just the wrong spot so that it made it hard for me to talk for a few days, so I didn’t talk, because I couldn’t talk right. I conducted my ordinary life the same except that I didn’t say a word for the better part of a week - and I discovered that I started noticing things because I wasn’t talking. And I made a little note at the time: This is really interesting. I see things more clearly because I’m not talking and I ought to find a way sometime to use that in a story. I found that I was able to weave Edgar’s muteness in such a way that it raised questions about language.
 Storm clouds built over a Wisconsin farm in north Wisconsin this past summer. Dogs and farms have always had a connection in people's heart and soul, a fact echoed in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. (Echo photo by Jeff Peters) Q.: Who are some of your favorite authors?
A.: I’m crazy about William Maxwell, who passed away a few years ago. He’s the author of So Long, See You Tomorrow, probably the best single book written about the Midwest ever. It just captures so much correctly you could reconstruct the entire Midwest from this book.
I like Richard Russo a lot - I was lucky enough to study with him. He writes about small town life and does it brilliantly.
Cormick McCarthy - I have idiosyncratic choices among his books. I understand why he’s criticized as being mannered, but I don’t agree.
Q.: How do you read books?
A.: Slowly. I didn’t used to be a slow reader but I’m getting slower every year. There are two possible explanations: One is, I’m getting dumber, and the other is that by having written a book I’m more tuned into the craft so when I read, I’m reading at several levels at once, so I go slower. It’s a little distressing. I just can’t keep up. It feels to me like it ought to be the other way around: Now that I understand fiction a little better, I should be able to consume more books and instead I can consume less.
Q.: Do you enjoy books more or less as a result?
A.: Differently, and possibly less. Once you know how the magician does the trick, you can never get back to the very simple pleasure of just being amazed. It’s not without its penalties, being a writer, because reading is one of my favorite things to do.
Q.: Are reviews hard to read?
A.: I don’t read them. My original plan was to set them aside and take a weekend and read them all in a batch when I thought the book had run its course in the public eye and see what there was to learn. There’s a few I’ve read, and there are some that like it, some that don’t like it, and some that like it with reservations. I think it’s inevitable the whole spectrum of opinion will come out. What’s troubling are spoilers. That’s part of why I’ve stopped reading the reviews, because I just sort of curl up inside when I see somebody doing a review that gives away story elements that were supposed to be presented in context as part of the reading experience.
Q.: Will there be an Edgar Sawtelle movie?
A.: The movie rights haven’t been sold. I have very mixed feelings about the book being made into a movie. I put my heart and soul into the book and I don’t know how I feel about the book being not exclusively an experience on the page. It doesn’t matter to me if it is never made into a movie.
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