Sunday Newsletter
Conversations #2
Hello friends,
For this second edition of my Conversations Series, I talked with my longtime friend Bart Schaneman. Bart works as a journalist in South Korea with The Washington Post and writes fiction better than just about anyone you’ll ever meet. If you can track down a copy of his essay collection about living abroad, Someplace Else, you’ll find one hell of a book. It’s a real treasure and a sweet time capsule of the early 2000s. His debut novel, The Green and the Gold, was very fundamental for me, and remains so. (I wrote the introduction for the new Trident Press edition that came out in 2021.) He’s also got a short novel called The Silence is the Noise on Trident that’s highly recommended and very close to my heart as well as a very hard to find chapbook, Trans-Siberian, I helped publish. Check out our conversation below.
About this series: The Conversations Series is what it sounds like—transcribed conversations with people I like. Not interviews. Not journalism. Just a nice, in-depth talk about whatever’s going on in our lives. These come out Sunday afternoons because Sunday afternoon feels like a good time to read a long talk between two friends.
Other quick things
I’m still having a holiday sale of all my books and merch and stuff from my audio book label. There’s a ton of it. Books, tapes, hoodies, shirts, tape players, posters, stickers, pins, hats, mugs, etc. You should go get something. Visit my shop.
I’m bringing back the Greek fisherman’s cap into heavy rotation. I wore one for years (see photo) and kinda forgot about them. Found a very old blue one made by Aegean at an antique mall yesterday and it feels pretty good. Wanted something a little more timeless than the trucker cap I usually wear but not like a silly, stupid looking costume piece like a lot of hats.
Leonard Cohen’s also on heavy rotation for these days leading up to winter. I feel like he probably wore a Greek fisherman’s cap when he lived on the island of Hydra.
My audio book record label, Hello America, has a Substack now. You should subscribe. It’ll be monthly maybe. Possibly every two or three months. There are no rules.
Thanks for reading this. I hope you’re doing as well as can be. I know it’s not easy sometimes.
-AG
PS. Here’s a photo of me and Bart taken in Portland by maybe Al Sundvall when he used to be Al English or maybe Phil Holmes.
CONVERSATIONS SERIES, #2
ADAM GNADE + BART SCHANEMAN
AG: Hey bud, what are you up to tonight?
BS: I wanted to get back to you yesterday but with my schedule Saturday is full-on dad time all day. We went hiking and even fit in a playground session. It's still nice here despite it being the end of November—warm in the sun and the trees are all the colors of fall—so we're trying to spend as much time outside as we can. After all of that, we had Nammin's parents over for dinner. Her mom had spent the better part of two days making kimchi. Traditionally, Koreans would make their kimchi ahead of winter and bury it in clay pots to start the fermentation process. Now they just have kimchi refrigerators—my mother in law has two—and not that many people even make their own kimchi. But my mother in law grew up in the country and still likes the old ways. So for the last two days she's been working—making the bulk of hers for the year from 12 large heads of napa cabbage, and by the end of the day she was wiped out, so we cooked for her. Dessert was pumpkin pie. We're getting a head start on Thanksgiving.
What's it like where you're at?
AG: We're fully in the grips of fall. Last of the autumn leaves on the trees. Dark gray mornings. As you know there's a lot to do on a farm to get ready for winter, even one that's not a working farm. I've also been helping out at Jessie's parents' farm which is about ten minutes from here by dirt road. Tarping crop rows. Taking down t-posts. Trellising crops in the hoop houses. Build green houses. Here we mostly need to batten down the hatches for the winter weather. But I've also been fixing fence. Cleaning up storm damage. That sort of thing. I'm very glad to not be doing this for a living, you know how that is, but it's nice to get away from books for a while and be physical. What's the weather like this time of year in your part of South Korea?
BS: Having your own land to work on when you're not writing or in front of a computer is a great luxury, and I know you understand that, but it's worth mentioning. The best kind of non-writing work. I think about rural Nebraska every day. And today even more than most. I just got news that a close family member only has a little time left, someone very important to me and my childhood, and all these memories have been overwhelming me. Summers of field work. Case tractors. Square-body GMC pickups. Flocks of black-faced suffolk ewes. The bus dropping me off after school and walking the ditchbank road up to my cousins' place to play. The smell of 2,4-D. Shoelaces full of stickers. Nothing to romanticize, really, but just to remember. And I'm grateful to remember it, despite all the sadness attached to those memories right now. A culture and a way of life that I know you understand. One that I value, too, even if I'm living here, so far away from all of it. Listening to Iron and Wine's "The Trapeze Swinger." Thinking about Ree in Winter's Bone. I'll be home for Christmas, and it'll be hard to leave again. It seems to get more and more difficult with age. I guess I've never found a place I understood quite as well. Is that how you feel about San Diego?
AG: I love San Diego and think often of moving back, but I can’t due without the freedom I have here. I can get by on book sales no problem. In San Diego? Zero chance. I would have to get some kind of high-paying fancy job, but I'm not qualified to do anything except write—which of course doesn’t require a lot of qualifications in the job sense. San Diego's great. It's better than it was when I lived there. But with that better comes expenses. The ratty, sleepy beach town I grew up in has been gone for most of my adult life. The neighborhood where I grew up, Pacific Beach, is terrible. It's like Miami Beach but uglier. People always use that famous title from Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, when talking about places they've left. I mean, you could go home again. For me it's not the same place so maybe that home is gone. If I had the money I would happily live in North County, but I would need land. I don't think I could go back to city-life at least on the amount of money I make after having room to roam around.
(Photo: Matthew Staver)
BS: As you know well, I tried going home to live about 10 years ago, and it didn't stick. A big part of that is because of my career—the best way to stay alive in journalism is to keep swimming, keep moving for better jobs. Another reason is that where I'm from has changed in a much different way than where you grew up. This is Corn Belt decay and the death of the family farm, death of that way of life when there were families on every section and the little towns were thriving. When rural America was a vibrant place of Republicans and Democrats and people had enough money to raise kids from farming a modest plot of land. That's long gone, and the place I knew growing up has largely gone with it. It's sad. I still find it incredibly beautiful when I go home. My favorite skies. My favorite land. Who knows? Maybe I'll live there again and document all of it.
The neighborhood I live in now is much different. It's busy, thriving, built out as a planned city—concrete and asphalt, the hand of man on everything. All within a couple city blocks there are restaurants, grocery stores, and coffee shops, pediatricians and acupuncture medicine clinics. Very good bakeries. We own a car, but you could get by without one. We're here because Nammin's parents live one building over, and this makes our childcare situation about as good as it can be. We have free government-sponsored day care and Jia usually stops by her grandparents' place for a couple of hours each afternoon before she comes home. They love having her around, and it helps us immensely. I know a lot of people raise their kids far from immediate family, but if you have a choice it makes a huge difference just to have that little extra support. From my window today the apartment courtyard is dusted in snow. I walk Alfie every morning a mile each way to a fenced-in dog park that's full of pine and ginkgo trees. Even though where I live feels relatively urban, especially compared to where I'm from and where you live, it's green and spacious and not nearly as dense as central Seoul. It's a good place for families. We'll probably be here for a while. How long have you lived in Kansas now? Do you think you'll stay?
AG: I arrived in Kansas around Christmas in 2009 on a Greyhound bus. That's a lot of years. It's hard to believe it's been 15 years. Longer than anywhere I've ever lived. A few years ago I was trying like hell to get out of here. I’d had some very hard, painful years and was done with Kansas. But these days it's great. We own a good piece of land. Jessie and her boys, my god-sons, are back now and she's running the ECM community center in town so I’m actually social now—punk shows, readings, drag shows, activist events, stuff like that. For the first time in years there's a community. For ages it was Elizabeth and I and a lot of books and animals, all by our lonesome. It’s nice to be around activity again. I hope I can stay here for a long time. It keeps getting better and better. Which is... it feels good. At the beginning… we were living rough for a long time. No groceries. No health care. Skipping meals. House falling to ruins. Leaky roof. Frozen windows. Coyotes killing our animals. Up the road from white supremacists. Just right on the edge of really catastrophic shit. It's not always easy these days, but it feels like something is happening in a way I've always wanted something to happen. What are you working on right now?
BS: "I arrived in Kansas around Christmas in 2009 on a Greyhound bus." That's a good line. The start of a great story, or a country song. The life you've built there is an argument for staying somewhere long enough to make something good out of it. Maybe that'll happen for us here. We're finding more things to like about our neighborhood and city all the time.
I'm working on another round of edits for the pot novel. Draft number 55,679, or at least that's how it feels. You've seen early versions of this. I'm going through it one more time—I told Nate I'd get it to him by this fall, and I've missed that deadline. I'm usually good about not blowing deadlines, but I can't get myself to let this manuscript go until I really feel like I've done everything I can with it. I'm pushing myself to get it done by the end of the year. I might make it. The other thing I've been working on is a love story that starts in Seoul, inspired by Stoner and Love in the Time of Cholera. That's in very early stages but I have a lot of notes and ideas for it. Then it's the big book about where I'm from. I'm also gathering string for that all the time.
You just finished your quartet. What's your next project?
AG: I'm ready for that Nebraska book of yours. The Green and the Gold will always be one of my favorites. Far as what I'm working on... it's a book about 2024. The summer and the fall leading up to the election. It's been a loaded year. This one takes a lot of risks I'm not comfortable with so I'm putting concentrated time into it. I've got a first draft and now I'm making it readable. There's a lot to say about 2024. Have you noticed any change in how people treat or react to you following Trump's election? I remember being in the UK on tour when Obama was first elected and friends would stop by the flat in London where I was staying to congratulate me, like I had anything to do with it besides voting by absentee. I remember seeing the newspaper that morning and the front page headline read something like, "The United States Just Got a Lot Cooler." Did it? No. But at the time it felt like it might’ve.
BS: I deeply appreciate that undying support you have for the early novel. I feel like I've gone much further as an artist at this point, and I'm hoping this next thing is better.
I remember when Obama was elected, too. I was out drinking in Seoul, and I talked to a black man who was crying tears of joy in the street.
This most recent election I spent in the newsroom as results came in—our morning is evening in the U.S.—and we all went out for drinks afterward to process the news. It's good to have a local pub to get a beer after a day like that. But to answer that question, I haven't had anyone treat me differently since Trump won. I have co-workers from all over the world, and they could see this coming—we live and breathe politics at this job. Or at least they were prepared for the possibility. I also don't really offer it up as a topic of conversation. Bigger picture, Koreans are worried about a Trump administration for several reasons, including his proposed tariffs on imports and his comments about wanting to make South Korea pay $10 billion a year to keep the U.S. military here. My in-laws aren't too thrilled about him.
I missed Thanksgiving with family but will see everyone for Christmas. I expect at least a few questions about what Koreans think of Trump.
What are you doing for Christmas?
AG: Well, the boys, my god-sons are with their dad in Oregon this Christmas and that's always hard for me. I missed so many holidays and birthdays when they lived in Michigan; it always feels like I'm in make up mode. So far this year has been shit for holidays. I was sick for Halloween so I missed trick or treating with them. They were sick for Thanksgiving so we missed that together. Elizabeth and I do Christmas well. I hate tacky Christmas decorations, so we try and do it very old fashioned and classy. A lot of blue and silver and gold. Clear glass things. Things that catch the light. A lot of very old decorations. German. Scandinavian. Is South Korea big on Christmas? I am very much not into Christianity and often forget the holiday has anything to do with Jesus. It's a trip when countries that aren't heavily Christian are into Christmas. Maybe it doesn't matter anymore? Does it? I don't know. Maybe we've truly taken religion out of Christmas.
BS: That feeling of missing the boys is exactly why we're going home next week. I'm not religious either, but being around as much family as possible on Christmas always feels right. And South Koreans don't really think of it as a major holiday in the same way they do Lunar New Year or Chuseok (their harvest festival). It's more of a couples' holiday, almost like Valentine's Day, where you get together with someone you're into and go to a coffee shop or movie or something. No, we'll be in Colorado for a week then Nebraska for another week. The farm is always very cold, but maybe it'll snow enough that we can pull Jia on a sled behind the Mule (the John Deere kind). It's a long haul, but it'll be good to be home.
I forgot to mention, you should follow Bart here on Substack at https://bartschaneman.substack.com/