Music credit: “New Life” written and performed by Antonio Sanchez from the CD New Life. Rebecca Makkai: Writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin. And just getting everything to fit is, sometimes seems impossible.  Writing a novel though is, has its own challenges of scope.  And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you’re too close to see the whole thing.   Jo Reed: That’s author and 2014 NEA Literature Fellow Rebecca Makkai and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.  Rebecca Makkai is one of those authors who is just a terrific writer—whatever the genre.  Her first novel, The Borrower, is a smart charming, comical nonromantic love story with literature at its heart. Booklist named it one of its top ten debut novels. She followed this with The Hundred-Year House, an intergenerational gothic tale about family in all its permutations, fate and art’s ability to make time immaterial. The Hundred Year House won the Chicago Writers Association’s Novel of the Year award and was named one of the best books of 2014 by slew of critics, including Bookpage, but Makkai is also a masterful writer of short fiction. Her work has been chosen for The Best American Short Stories for four consecutive years and appears regularly in journals like Harper’s, Tin House, and New England Review. She’s just published her first collection of her short stories called Music for Wartime.    Here’s Rebecca Makkai reading a story from that collection. Rebecca Makkai: This is the beginning of a short story called “Good Saint Anthony Come Around”.  “The story goes that Chapman, leaving a meeting in Seattle-- this was the ‘70s, he was still designing posters-- looked up toward a noise in the sky and got hit in the face with a fish.  No one saw, no one pointed and said, ‘Christ, man, that’s a fish!’ but there it was, flailing on the cement.  Up in the air, two cormorants still fought loudly.  Chapman picked the thing up: a six-incher, cold and dense.  He ran with it down the street, shouting at people in his way, dodging bikes.  Around a corner and into a Vietnamese takeout place.  ‘Cup of water!’ he yelled.  ‘Cup of water!’  And when the woman didn’t understand, he grabbed a cup up from the trash and filled it at the soda machine and dropped the fish in headfirst.  Later he’d carry it to the ferry docks in a borrowed bucket and dump it back in the bay.  The fish wasn’t doing well and would just be easy prey again, but what was he supposed to do, take it to a vet?  My point here isn’t that Chapman would do anything to help you out, although that’s true.  My point is, he was the kind of guy stuff happened to.  Some people live their whole lives according to the laws of probability.  If there’s a 1 in 6,000 chance of getting hit by lightning, they won’t.  They won’t win the lottery, either.  Because someone like Chapman will.  Someone whose stars made strange and intricate patterns at the moment of his birth.” Jo Reed: Thank you.  And actually, I think that was an excellent selection, because I think it gives listeners an idea of the voice that you give us as the narrator. Rebecca Makkai: Right.  For that particular story.  And for other stories, it’d be a different voice. Jo Reed: It is.  But it reminds me in some ways of the voice of The Hundred-Year House. Rebecca Makkai: Oh, yeah. Jo Reed: There’s a wryness to it, I think, that comes across in your work. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah. Jo Reed: Which I enjoy. Rebecca Makkai: The Hundred-Year House and also The Borrower, are my novels that came out before this collection, and certainly, although sometimes dark and strange things happen in them, they both do have a sense of humor to them. Jo Reed: And in this book it goes back and forth, as you say, because there are the-- well, let’s just talk first about moving from two novels to a collection of short stories. Rebecca Makkai: Right.  And that was only a move in terms of publication.  I’ve been writing these stories long before I wrote a novel. Jo Reed: How long were these stories in the making? Rebecca Makkai: The earliest story that ended up in the collection was written in 2002.  And my first novel came out in 2011.  It’s steady since then.  Some of them I just wrote last year. Jo Reed: Well, you’re sort of having a summer of love, because this just came out and The Hundred-Year House, it was just released in paperback. Rebecca Makkai: Right. Jo Reed: So it’s-- congratulations. Rebecca Makkai: Thank you. Jo Reed: That’s really kind of cool. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah.  I’m having a summer of travel, which is fun.  Not complaining.  Yeah. Jo Reed: I noticed that with all your books you do write a lot about artists. Rebecca Makkai: I do. Jo Reed: Do you come from an artistic family? Rebecca Makkai: I do.  My father is a poet, and he writes in Hungarian.  He’s also a linguistics professor.  His mother was a novelist in Hungary.  Pretty well-known novelist.  My sister’s a musician.  Everyone else in our family, it’s either academics or artists of one kind or another.  And those are the people that I think I like to hang out with too.  I think, you know, they’re always interesting, they lead interesting lives, and I think they’re important for everyone to read about because everyone is an artist in a way.  We’re all going about trying to make beauty in the world and trying to make order out of chaos.  And that’s what art is. Jo Reed: And that’s certainly what writing is. Rebecca Makkai: Yes. Yes. Jo Reed: Let’s start with The Hundred-Year House. What inspired that book? Rebecca Makkai: You know, I’m going to tell you something really strange, and I’ll have to say for anyone who doesn’t know, it’s the story of this one large estate near Chicago told backwards over the 20^th Century.  And we go from the ‘90s to the ‘50s to the ‘20s, and there’s a question of whether the house is haunted.  It was an artists’ colony at one point in time.  It started as a short story about male anorexia, which has nothing to do with the novel that you would read today.  It’s not in the book at all. Jo Reed: Out of all the things that could have come out of your mouth, that was not what I was expecting. Rebecca Makkai: I know, I know.  I wrote the short story and it was a total failure, but the one thing I really liked was the setting, which was the carriage house, the coach house of this large estate.  And I thought that was really interesting, these little houses that were, at one time built on wealthy people’s estates to house the chauffer or something, but now it’s this extra little house and who lives there, and what’s the relationship of those people to the very wealthy people in the main house?  That was really what fascinated me.  And I kept making it longer and longer.  I realized it was a novel.  The male anorexia stayed in there for a really long time, until my editor looked at it and said, “What’s this anorexia plot doing in here?  It has nothing do with the rest of the book.” Jo Reed: Now, when did you know the book would proceed the way it did, as you said, starting in the ‘90s with moving backwards to a prologue in 1900? Rebecca Makkai: I didn’t know originally.  It took me a really long time to realize that it wasn’t a short story about a novel.  I went back to it as a novel and it was originally all going to be set in the present day.  Then I realized I really didn’t want the present day because people would be able to Google things, which when you’re trying to set up some, you know, ideas of shifting identities, secrets-- Jo Reed: What’s true, what’s not. Rebecca Makkai: Right.  Google kind of ruins a lot.  So I put it in 1999, and partly because I’d always wanted to write about the Y2K fright that was going on at that point.  And even so, it was still going to all be set in 1999.  And they were going to be questioning the history of this house, the story of this artists’ colony that was once there, and in particular this one poet, Edwin Parfitt, who’s fictional.  They’re trying to figure out his time at the colony, his life.  There’s something strange that happened to him there.  And the book was going to have to end basically with them never knowing.  Which is, you know, that’s the way real life works.  We try to find out and then in the end and we’ll never really know.  And it’s so unsatisfying.  And I finally realized that I could jump down that rabbit hole and go back in time.  Back to the ‘50s when something sort of violent happened at this house and then back to the ‘20s when it was an artists’ colony.  And that was scary, because I was cutting out so much more work for myself, but it was the right decision, and I never looked back. Jo Reed: It’s interesting, because characters reappear.  Well, it’s hard to say if they’re reappearing or there they are in a younger form Rebecca Makkai: Right. Jo Reed: And then other characters have echoes of each other throughout the book as well. Rebecca Makkai: Yes. Jo Reed: Both things are true.  But so as a reader I found myself going back a lot. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah. Jo Reed: And going back to sections and re-reading and saying, “Yes, yes, I thought that was there.” Rebecca Makkai: That’s good.  And that’s really the way the book is meant to be read.  I’m not demanding that anyone reads it three times or something, but it’s the kind of book where you need to be able to flip back. Jo Reed: Absolutely. Rebecca Makkai: And there’s a reward in that.  You know it’s not that you’re going to be sitting there confused hitting your head against the wall but that if you flip back the 20 pages you’ll find some kind of aha sort of moment. Jo Reed: Exactly. Rebecca Makkai: Which is why I really don’t recommend reading it on a Kindle. Rebecca Makkai: As I’ve found readers… And, you know, I never want my books to be read on a device.  I like paper, but I’ve heard from readers who, you know, they’ll say things like, “You know, I started reading it on my Kindle and I got halfway through and I couldn’t flip back and I was really confused, so I put it down and now I’m buying it in paper.”  Which I’m always glad to hear.  I’d rather have that than that they got through the whole thing and were disgruntled and didn’t like the book as a result because they couldn’t read it the way it was meant to be read. Jo Reed: Why set the book at an artists’ colony? Rebecca Makkai: I’m obsessed with them.  I’ve been obsessed with them since before I ever had the privilege of staying at one.  I think it’s a wonderful, uniquely 20^th Century institution.  They’re all over America.  There’re a bunch in Europe as well.  And the turn of the 20^th Century was when the arts moved really from a patronage model of the arts where someone wealthy would commission something, to a residency model of the arts, where you might be able to go and live somewhere and be supported more by an institution, by a university, and produce work that way.  And the residencies came about out of that, and I’ve just been fascinated with that history.  And I grew up not far from one in Chicago.  There’s a colony called Ragdale outside of Chicago that I would sometimes drive past and wonder what was happening in there.  And now I’ve gotten to stay, you know, I’ve gotten to stay at Ragdale three times, and several others, Yaddo in upstate New York, and, I mean, beautiful histories.  You realize the people who were there together at the same time, eating dinner together.  That Langston Hughes was there with Carson McCullers, and what did they talk about?  And the last time I was at Yaddo I was writing at the desk where Sylvia Plath wrote The Colossus and where Patricia Highsmith wrote Strangers on a Train.  And you cannot goof off and check Facebook when you’re sitting at that desk.  I mean, I still checked Facebook occasionally but mostly, you can’t, you know.  And I think it’s not necessarily the kind of institution that a lot of people know about, but hopefully in reading this book you get to understand what they are and the really important place they’ve had in the history of the arts in America. Jo Reed: And for you, you mentioned a little bit about your own experiences there. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah. Jo Reed: How many times have you-- what’s it been like for you? Rebecca Makkai: Yeah.  I think I’ve done five residency stays.  Have another one coming up this fall, and honestly, here’s what it was.  Long before I had children, I was at a conference and this lovely writer named Martha Southgate, who doesn’t remember telling me this, at one point out of nowhere, and I had no plans to have children, but she just said to me, “When you have kids, just remember, you can go to these artist’ colonies and you can get something done and it’ll be okay.”  And I was like, “Okay.” And years later I’m sitting there with this newborn baby realizing that I’ll never, ever have a chance to write ever again and my life is over and I’m so happy to be a mother and my career is over.  And there’s this little light somewhere, I realized, ‘wait’.  You know, in a few years, maybe I can get to one of these.”  But that’s really it.  It’s… For me, at least.  Plenty of people go to these who don’t have children.  Sometimes you’ll have things like an artist who doesn’t have studio space.  This is the only way they can get studio space and time.  Other times it’s just, you know, being able to turn off e-mail, being able to write unencumbered or to compose.  But for people with kids, it’s essential, I think.  Men and women.  To be able to get away, have uninterrupted time.  Because even if your kid’s asleep in the next room, there’s the chance that they could interrupt you.  And you can’t really, fully be in the work.  And I also feel like if I’m going to write something dark or disturbing or sexual, I need a few weeks where no one’s going to call me Mom.  So… So I’m going to keep going back to them for a long time. Jo Reed: Well, you certainly painted a wonderful picture with words in The Hundred-Year House of that colony. Rebecca Makkai: Good.  And I’m writing about a time in the ‘20s, of course, which I didn’t experience.  But I read a lot about that.  And I was relying heavily at that point on my experience with the, just the intensity of what goes on in those places.  Intellectual intensity, artistic intensity.  But also emotional.  You form attachments to these people very fast because you’re together in isolation.  I think there’s something evolutionary that kicks in.  This is your new tribe, and you need to bond right away.  And form in some cases, you know, lifelong friendships.  I’ve been on tour all week, and along the way have had dinner with two or three people that are, you know, great friends that I met doing these residencies. Jo Reed: Okay.  Now, the difference between writing and plotting out a novel and writing a short story.  Other than length. Rebecca Makkai: That’s my glib answer. Novels are longer.  Yeah.  You know, they have unique challenges.  And the metaphor that I tend to use is that writing a short story is like painting a picture on the head of a pin.  And just getting everything to fit is, sometimes seems impossible.  Writing a novel though is, has its own challenges of scope.  And I think of that as painting a mural, where the challenge is that if you are close enough to work on it, you’re too close to see the whole thing.  You’re in there on one page writing this one scene and it’s impossible to look at your whole novel at once.  So we do these crazy things like printing out the novel and color coding pages and finding a huge room and spreading it on the floor and hoping that your dog doesn’t walk through the room. I think, a lot of the learning curve in writing how to write a novel, is learning how to map out something that big, how to outline.  For The Hundred-Year House I physically made maps of the house of every floor of every building on this estate in all three eras, so I could keep my facts straight.  Because you mention a kitchen once, and 200 pages later you mention the kitchen again, but now it’s in a different place and it looks different.  You can’t hold that all in your memory at once.  I teach a novel writing class in Chicago, and a lot of what we focus on-- these people, you know, they apply to the class, they’re great writers.  They already know how to write.  What they need to learn is, “How do you map something that big?” Jo Reed: And what about character development?  I would think that there’s so much more that has to happen in a novel than in a short story. Rebecca Makkai: Right. Jo Reed: At least on the page. Rebecca Makkai: Right.  I think there needs to be more subtlety and nuance too in a character in a novel.  In a short story, you can use someone-- we’re only going to be with that person for maybe 10 pages and they can have sort of a one note personality.  And in a novel you need to have arrows pointing more than one direction for that person.  That person can’t just be one thing in a novel, because nobody’s like that in real life, and a novel is approximating real life a little more closely.  Or trying to.  Jo Reed: And the other thing, the number of characters that you create.  Some are main characters, some are subsidiary, but especially in The Hundred-Year House, characters who quite-- just appear again in very unexpected places. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah.  And that’s fun.  That was fun to write.  I love books like that.  I love the sort of… Sometimes, you know, in certain cases, you know, the coincidence of someone reappearing can be a bit much.  And in The Hundred-Year House I tried to get away from that.  No one’s reappearance is coincidence. Jo Reed: No, not at all. Rebecca Makkai: They’re all appearing, reappearing, by choice.  They love this place.  They’re going to stick around no matter what. And there’s a question of sort of some fluid identities.  You know, people who for one reason or another might take on a different identity than the one we first met, and… But that’s, it’s not really chance that is allowing that to happen.  Although at the same time it is really a novel about luck and if this house is haunted in any way, the idea is that people have either extraordinarily good or bad luck.  So I’m playing with that a little bit. Jo Reed: Yeah, you certainly are, especially with one of the characters. Rebecca Makkai: Yes. Jo Reed: What is it that Zilla says?  The past.  It doesn’t haunt us, it “hurtles us towards specific and inexorable destinations.” Rebecca Makkai: Right. Jo Reed: That was a great line. Rebecca Makkai: Right.  This is the idea, that the house is not haunting them from the past; it’s haunting them from the future.  That in some way, the house, or the ghost of the house, however you want to interpret it, has a plan and needs certain people to be in certain places at certain times.  So that it’s not, you know, what did happen here that is driving them, it is what is supposed to happen in the future that brings people together or pushes them apart or seems to even kick certain people out of the house against their will. Jo Reed: I’m always struck by what has to go into ordering a collection of short stories. Rebecca Makkai: Yes, yeah.  Thank you for asking that, because so many people assume that there is no order and just read them at random, and it’s really meant to be read in order. Jo Reed: Yeah.  So tell us what went into doing that. Then I want to talk about the way it’s bookended. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah.  You know, I really thought of the collection as a music album in many ways.  I mean, there’s the title Music for Wartime.  It sounds like a dusty old LP that you pull off your parents’ shelves that has World War I songs on it or something.  And that’s part of the idea, but-- and it’s a book that’s in many ways about musicians.  But even if it weren’t, even if this were a different collection, I think I’d still be thinking of it in that same way. There need to be through lines, you need to think about the pacing of certain pieces next to each other.  You know, I’m not going to put two very depressing stories next to each other.  You need some humor in there.  You need something shorter next to something longer.  You need to lead with something that introduces the themes and close with something big.  I was also thinking a little bit about fashion shows, the way they’re put together.  You close with your wedding gown, you know.And the last story in the collection, it’s certainly not a wedding gown, it’s actually about someone’s lack of a wedding.  But is, I think, a story that ties together a lot of the themes.  It’s a big story in many ways. Jo Reed: I really found the setup of “The Singing Women” and then the last story of “The Museum of the Dearly Departed,” that book ending I thought was really quite amazing, because I think “The Singing Women” really set us up for the book. Rebecca Makkai: Well, good.  Thank you. Jo Reed: And that’s a very short story. Rebecca Makkai: It’s a very short story.  Both of those, the opening and closing pieces, are ones I wrote specially for the collection.  This is not just a pile of stories I happened to write.  There’s a real, a message to the whole, there are themes to the whole and the stories speak to each other.  Yeah.  And “The Singing Women” in just a hundred words or so is trying to introduce some of the questions that the book asks of how we create art in a brutal and not entirely friendly world. And why we would do that and what the consequences sometimes are of doing that.  It’s based on what I believe is a true story of someone trying to record these women who are the last survivors in their village, record their songs, and by doing that and producing a record of it makes the dictator of this country aware of these women’s survival, and he sends his men in to finish the job and destroy the rest of the village.  This was told to me as a true story.  I’m not entirely able to check if it’s true, but the recording does exist.  The first part of that story is actually true.  This is another thing I’m playing with in the collection is the line between fiction and nonfiction, which is also introduced in that story.  And then with the closing, you know, it’s a much more complex, very, very long story, “The Museum of the Dearly Departed.”  But we end up, again, we end up with another woman who sings, who is a survivor.  And by that point I don’t think that, you know, questions are necessarily being answered by that point in the collection.  Maybe the questions have just gone more complex, and it even ends with a question.  Our narrator’s hearing this woman sing in this very disturbing setting and asking what she herself is supposed to do with that, what she’s supposed to make of it. Jo Reed: You also have three stories that you call legends. Rebecca Makkai: Yes. Jo Reed: Are they really your family legends? Rebecca Makkai:  Yes. Jo Reed: They really are? Rebecca Makkai: Yeah, yeah.  That’s my family.  And then there’s a fourth story in there called “Suspension” that addresses my family history too.  But yeah.  My family had a very complicated history in 1930s Hungary.  My father was a refugee after the failed 1956 Revolution.  And a lot of his family came over around the time he did or after, when I was growing up.  And this is the other way I’m playing with fiction and nonfiction in the collection.  I am telling these stories about my grandparents’ political involvement basically in Hungary and my grandmother’s career as a novelist.  But at the same time I’m questioning what I’ve been told.  How the information has been handed to me.  And that that line between fiction and nonfiction, I’m not, you know, all the facts, all the historical details in there, are accurate and were fact-checked by Harper’s Magazine where this first appeared.  They have a really intense fact-checking process.  But the questions that I’m allowed to ask about, “Maybe it happened this way, maybe it happened that way.  I wasn’t in the room, I don’t know,” that’s where the fiction comes in.  I think of it as sort of overtly fictional nonfiction, if that makes sense. Jo Reed: How were you told these as a kid?  It was just around the table or… Rebecca Makkai: Right.  As an example, one of the stories is about my grandmother, the soldiers came into her home when my father was very little.  They were very, very drunk.  They demanded alcohol.  She didn’t have any.  And they saw this bottle of ink that my father had been given as a very special present because it was really hard to come by, and one of them claimed that he’d found the alcohol and drank it.  And then they left the house.  And, you know, depending on the day my father told me this story, it was that she’d poisoned this guy or just that he was really sad that his ink was gone.  You know, it changed every time.  And he’s a bit of a fabulist, and his mother was too.  She was a novelist.  And from all accounts, really fable-ized her own existence and other people’s.  I don’t know if any of it is true.  You know, my father claims he remembers it, but he also claims he remembers things about my childhood that I know were not true. So… Jo Reed: “Remember that time you flew out the third floor window.” Rebecca Makkai: Right.  Exactly, exactly.  Almost.  Almost. So what I’m doing with the story is basically saying, “Here’s the story I was told, and I really have my doubts, but…” And with this story what it comes down to is, like, “How can I not believe that story?” Jo Reed: As a writer. Rebecca Makkai: As a writer.  It’s about ink. How violent ink can be.  I have to believe this story. Jo Reed: You also, in the midst of all this, take us behind the scenes of a reality show. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  There’s a story in there called “The November Story,” that basically takes those themes of the arts and war and I did not write it for the collection, it just happened to fit.  But the idea is that it’s a reality show that pits artists against each other in competition, and so the war is for your viewing pleasure more.  But it’s the woman who’s trying to coordinate all this, really trying to script things, trying to get two people to fall in love with each other, and her own personal life falling apart at the same time. Jo Reed: I thought it was very funny, and I kept thinking of “Project Runway.” Rebecca Makkai: Yes, yes.  Which I’m a huge fan of. Jo Reed: I am as well. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah.  I found really something really cathartic about that AZA writer to watch-- and I know it’s manufactured-- but to watch people struggle artistically and to cry over messing something up.  And then to be, to think they did a great job, and to get judged very harshly or unfairly.  Or to not know that they succeeded, and find out that they did.  If I’ve been having a rough day, you know, that’s exactly what I need to watch. Jo Reed: And the ability to perform under pressure like that, because I find that extraordinary. Rebecca Makkai: Oh, yeah.  Yeah.  I mean, I think I write better under pressure.  I understand it a little bit but, I don’t have judges staring down my neck. Jo Reed: Yeah.  Or a camera. Rebecca Makkai: Right.  There’s the prospect of critics and there’re deadlines and things like that. Jo Reed: Yeah.  No, of course.  Of course. Rebecca Makkai: Yeah. Jo Reed: You got a 2014 NEA Fellowship. Rebecca Makkai: I did.  Thank you very much.  Yes. Jo Reed: You’re very welcome.  Congratulations.  What did that allow you to do? Rebecca Makkai: For one thing, it allowed me to take a little bit of a step back from teaching last year.  I teach a lot.  I teach a lot of different places, kind of ad hoc sort of things.  And one of my kind of steady gigs is adjuncting for undergraduates, Intro to Creative Writing, and they’re such sweet kids and I love it, but that’s also the most time consuming.  And it also pays the least. And I, you know, going into this I wasn’t sure if I was going to be doing that that subsequent semester or not.  And the ability to just, to let it go and not worry about it and not try to find, not take that job, or try to find something to replace it, gave me so much more time to write.  And I was able in that time to produce two of the last stories to go-- two, or three, actually-- of the last stories to go into Music for Wartime. One was the one that I read from earlier.  That were really late additions to the manuscript.  And I wrote those, you know, in the public library in the morning when my kids were at school and I had the time to do that because I wasn’t teaching. Jo Reed: And I would also think that the recognition. Rebecca Makkai: Oh, yeah, yeah.  Yeah.  It feels wonderful.  It’s very validating. Jo Reed: Yeah, because it’s a blind read. Rebecca Makkai: Yes.  Yes, exactly.  Which I love about it, you know, and then you, yeah.  Yes.  It’s tremendously validating.  You know that you weren’t chosen because you had previous publications.  It’s a little bit like getting published for the first time, you know, that first publication that I got in the literary magazine.  I knew they had no idea who I was.  I couldn’t put anything in my cover letter.  It was just the writing.  And after a while, if my stories have done well, you know, they’ve been anthologized a lot, and so a journal takes something and there’s always this little seed of doubt of, “Well, maybe they took it because they thought then they’d have a good chance at the anthology.  Maybe they didn’t really love it, they just thought someone else would love it.”  Which is silly, I know.  But yeah.  The fact that this was blind.  It was perfect. Jo Reed: It’s hard to support yourself writing. Rebecca Makkai: It is.  It is.  You know, I’ve been lucky that Penguin has been, you know, really supportive of my career.  They’ve given me enough to live on, which is great.  The scary part is working on something maybe for five years and not knowing if it will be publishable.  And if it’s not, those are five years you just did not get paid for, which is terrifying.  Which is why we then, even if your books are selling, you’re seeking out the stability of teaching.  Which I really do enjoy, but it’s nice to be able to turn things down when the time is right, you know. Jo Reed: What do you try to impart to your students when you teach creative writing? Rebecca Makkai: You know, for my undergraduates I really just want them to love writing.  I want to make them better readers.  But I teach all the way up through graduate school, and I teach adults too.  I’ll be teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop this fall, and I teach this novel writing course in the city that’s adults.  And for them it’s much more about helping them find their, not only their voice.  People talk a lot about voice, but the subject matter that they should be writing about. To put it another way, it’s very often about unlearning for them.  Unlearning bad habits, unlearning things they think they’re supposed to write about because that’s what writers do.  Or because they’ve seen other people do that.  And helping them find what is uniquely theirs to tell. Jo Reed: And then finally what’s next, which is the terrible question-- Rebecca Makkai: No, it’s not.  It’s not.  It’s okay. Jo Reed: --considering there are two books of yours, but… Rebecca Makkai: How fast do you want me to write?  No.  I’m working on something else.  Two things.  I’m working on a novel tentatively called The Great Believers, and it’s partly set in the ‘80s in Chicago against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic and partly set in modern day Paris where a survivor of that time is searching for her estranged daughter.  And then I’m also working on possibly turning the idea, you know, these family stories that made their way into the collection in this sort of fictionalized way and looking to maybe write a nonfiction book about my grandparents and their really bizarre lifetimes in Hungary. Jo Reed: Okay.  Rebecca, thank you so much.  I really appreciate it. Rebecca Makkai: Thank you so much for the interview, and thank you, oh, my goodness, to the NEA. Jo Reed: Our pleasure.  Thank you. That’s author and 2014 NEA Literature fellow Rebecca Makkai.  Rebecca’s novel, The Hundred Year House just came out in paperback.  Her recently published short-story collection is called Music for Wartime.  You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAarts on Twitter.  For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.  The transcript will be available shortly.