Natalie Adler, Waiting On A Friend

Brett talks with writer Natalie Adler about her debut novel, 'Waiting On A Friend'. They discuss the inspiration for the book, belief in the paranormal, the AIDS crisis, getting married, caretaking lesbians, and a magical creature named Chester.

Natalie's website:

https://www.natalie-adler.com

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https://www.instagram.com/natalie.and.chester/

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Transcript

Brett Benner 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Brett Benner, and welcome or welcome back to another episode of Behind the Stack, and also Happy Pride. I'm particularly happy to launch the month of Pride with this conversation with author Natalie Adler for her debut novel, Waiting on a Friend Natalie Adler has an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and a PhD in comparative literature from Brown University. She was a, she was a Susan Camille Emerging Writer fellow at the Center for Fiction. She is, she is an editor at Lux Magazine and an instructor at Sackett Street Writers, Street Writers. She's from New Jersey and currently lives in New York City. So please enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack I'm really excited to be sitting down today with author Natalie Adler for her new book, Waiting on a Friend. I should say your debut Waiting on a Friend. My

Natalie Adler 0:55

debut. Yeah.

Brett Benner 0:57

Yes. So thank you so much for being here., I'm thrilled to meet you and, and talk.

Natalie Adler 1:02

Yeah. Thank you for having me. I, loved your conversation with Jordy, so I'm so excited to be on here.

Brett Benner 1:09

He was fun and interesting and, and I gotta be honest, I was really nervous before he came on because he's so smart. I mean, he's so smart. So smart. And he even said to me when we started, "You know, I have to tell you, I'm an academic, so this is, like, different for me." And I was like, "That's okay," "Let's just talk." But, but I, I really love him, and so it was, it was awesome.

Natalie Adler 1:27

Inspiring to know that you can bring big ideas, even ones that kind of percolate up from the academic world, and people who are outside of the academy but no less erudite,, are going to wanna engage seriously with tough ideas. Yeah. Makes you think that,, the worlds are not so distinct.

Brett Benner 1:44

Yeah, exactly. There's a meeting place somewhere in there, and I thought that book was so great. Where are you from originally?

Natalie Adler 1:49

I am from Central New Jersey, a real place that I can almost see from my window in Brooklyn.

Brett Benner 1:57

Yeah. And then when did you move to, when did you move to New York?

Natalie Adler 1:59

I moved to New York at, at age 18 as an NYU student, so officially part of the problem. And yeah, I lived there for, you know, five years and then moved to Rhode Island for a while to do a PhD, and then as soon as I was done, I ran back and have been here ever since. So I, I get my 10-year token next year, if we're counting non-contiguous.

Brett Benner 2:28

Yeah.

Natalie Adler 2:28

So yeah.

Brett Benner 2:30

That's amazing.

Natalie Adler 2:31

Yeah.

Brett Benner 2:31

And, you are now a, a tried and true New Yorker, and you're not sick of it. I mean, if you're getting for the 10-year, you're, you're in.

Natalie Adler 2:36

Not, not sick of it. And my, my wife is a born and bred Brooklynite.. And she always says that her type was tri-state, so, um, we have- we have a lot of, regional alliances here, I would say.

Brett Benner 2:50

I love that. Congratulations, by the way, 'cause you, I know you recent- You're, like, in your first year of marriage. That's amazing.

Natalie Adler 2:55

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, been an incredible year of all of my biggest dreams coming true, so it's, it's hard to get adjusted to good things happening. But I'm waking up every morning like, "Oh my God, this is all real." So here we are.

Brett Benner 3:11

Did you feel... I always ask this question with, like, people newly married, but did you feel- Mm-hmm different the day after?

Natalie Adler 3:19

I think that we really wanted our wedding to be this, like, very glorious spell with all of our best friends, like something very ritual that we had kind of invented ourselves. And it did feel different 'cause we felt like we had received this enormous blessing. And, you know, whether anybody wants to get married or not, I think that there's something really lovely about having this huge, like, blessing and well-wishing from all of your loved ones. And most m- mostly our friends, 'cause we have small families who are not across the board always the most accepting. So- it was mostly a wedding of friends and some family. So it really felt like a whole community of people who were like, "We love that you're doing this. We are here to support you." So it did feel different. It felt like a huge, huge vote of faith.

Brett Benner 4:05

It's also, also an amazing moment actually standing up in front of people and making a declaration- Oh, yeah I find. Yeah. And it's- Yeah it's, it's humbling and overwhelming. Mm-hmm. I know I, like when I got married, it was kind of, I didn't, I didn't realize the rush of kind of the emotions that would overtake me- Oh, God in the moment.

Natalie Adler 4:23

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we were crying the, the whole time., A friend took a video of it, and it's just, you just hear everybody crying the whole time. And there was actually a moment in the ceremony, where we kind of joked, we're like, "This is very private. What are you all doing?" Right. Um, it was, it was, it's, it's such a fascinating moment of, of intimacy. I mean- Yeah I count getting married under the column of, like, trying new things, which is funny 'cause it's like the most traditional thing that you could possibly do. But it was... I, I was not prepared for how much I was gonna cry the whole time. Yeah. But there we are. Yeah.

Brett Benner 5:02

So did you always wanna be a writer?

Natalie Adler 5:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Brett Benner 5:05

Were you, were you- Always As a, as a- Always, yeah as a young, as a young woman, were you writing things as a, as a, like I'll say as a little girl, as a young girl, were you writing things?

Natalie Adler 5:12

Yeah, yeah. I was writing things. I was making up stories in my head all the time. It was entertainment. It was a coping device. It was a dissociation strategy. It was a way to make friends. I was always the, the person in friend group who was like, "Okay, so now we're gonna play mermaids. Now we're gonna play vampires. Now we're gonna do this. Now we're gonna play Star Wars. And I'll be all the boy characters and- you, my friend Emily, can like be, will only be Princess Leia." That was like my first encounter with gender probably, where I was actually thinking it through. Like, I'm like eight. And I'm like, "Okay, you only feel comfortable being the one girl, so you do her and I'll do all the boys. No problem. This doesn't bother me." I don't know why. Yeah. But yeah, it was, it was always like orchestrating stories. It was always, always my way through.

Brett Benner 6:04

I love that. So all right. So for our, for our listeners and for our viewers, do you have an elevator pitch for Waiting on a Friend?

Natalie Adler 6:11

Yeah. Yeah. So the novel takes place in 1984 in the East Village of Manhattan in New York, and it follows a young woman named Renata. I'm calling her a dyke about town, and God bless the people of Penguin Random House for allowing that in all of the copy. And she can see ghost, ghosts. And she's been doing this more and more as more of her friends have started to die of what has only recently been named AIDS. She has a pretty good relationship with the ghosts by and large, and she's not, once she kind of understands what's happening to her when she's younger, she's pretty okay with it. She accepts them as like, these are the neighbors that I live with in a city where I live with a lot of people But as there are more people that she knows and more people who have died in these very upsetting ways, it becomes more emotionally taxing for her. Meanwhile, there is a business, a up-and-coming small business in Reagan's America that is promising to clear the neighborhood, the city out of, you know, things that make us uncomfortable, things that make us uncomfortable in our own home, kind of bad vibes, weird feelings that you can't explain, things that are all very ghost-coded but worded carefully so that people who don't want to admit that they're experiencing something supernatural can call them up and say like, "Hey, can you come in here and, take care of some things for me?" Which is important because, you know, the neighborhood is changing quite rapidly, and AIDS has no small part in that because so many people are dying and apartments are starting to turn over. So, uh, Renata finds this business curious and then quite insidious, and her task in the book is to grieve her friends, including her very best friend who has just recently died and whose ghost she's not seeing, which she connects to th- this business, Manhattan Remediation, who is remediating these homes of the supernatural, to mourn her friend while fighting for the neighborhood she loves.

Brett Benner 8:13

Okay, so I have to ask you because you clearly, you're too young to have gone through any of this, but where did this come to you? First of all, the idea just alone, where did it come from?

Natalie Adler 8:23

So the idea came to me, um, I think from two places. One is very direct and one is indirect. The direct thing that has been in my head for a very long time is my aunt, to whom I dedicated the novel, was a hospice nurse during the AIDS crisis, and in fact became a nurse because her best friend in Fort Lauderdale, she was living down there, died of AIDS in a very common and very terrible way, which was, like, largely abandoned by his family and uncared for by the medical establishment. Religion turned its back on him, like all of the hallmarks of the terrible AIDS death. She was so shook by this, and in her grief she had to do something about it. And not everybody is like that. Not everybody in their grief says, "I must do something." You know? And that, her character and her choices always made a huge impression on me. And when I was older and when I was out as a queer person living in community with other queer people, that choice of hers became so much more important to me as she was the first and best person in my family to just understand what my identity meant. You know? And because some people can be accepting but not really interested, you know? Or even think, like, "This is actually special and I'm proud of you," which is a whole other thing. Yeah. So she was very important to me. And so I had this in my head, and I had been interested in this story for a long time, but I'm not a very biographical writer, so I had never thought, you know, I wanna write her story. That's just not how I tend to deal with things. So the other way I came to this particular story was from a general feeling, and this is harder to ascribe to, like, this is why, what inspired the book, but a general feeling I've had in New York as long as I've lived here is that there are residues of the past. And you feel it in certain places, in certain neighborhoods acutely. And other... And I don't necessarily mean, literally haunted. Like, people will say this place or that place is haunted. But just a physical feeling that people have lived here before That people with intense emotions and dreams have lived in these places. Like, if you walk around the Lower East Side during the day, like in the, in the night it's like a little, a lot. It's a little a lot. But you walk around in the day and you really get the impression like, oh my God, so many generations of people, of families have been crowded into these little apartments. Something feels left over, to me anyway. And so I wanted to write about that feeling. I wanted to write about ghosts as kind of like a material thing. You know? Like a material reality that we must deal with and encounter and accept in the city, contrasted with areas where it kind of feels like there's nothing there. Like, it feels like things are kind of, wiped clean. Clean. Like, there's no aura. There's no nothing. And so those ideas all kind of percolated up until I thought, "Oh, maybe I'll write a little short story," and then the short story became something. Quickly I realized this is not short.

Brett Benner 11:24

Did you always... W- when, when the story started, did you know that it was really gonna be kind of hinged on this relationship between Renata and Mark?

Natalie Adler 11:34

Absolutely. In fact, first line of the novel was pretty much word for word the first line that I wrote. Mm. Um, I had, I had a sense, once I started thinking what's the story, I had a sense a woman can see ghosts, but she's not seeing the person she most wants to see. And I had a pretty clear sense that I wanted it to be about friendship and about relationships. And neighbors and loved ones and, native New Yorkers and transplants and all people kind of thrown together choosing to l- love and live in the city. I also started writing it during the pandemic, where my NYC pride was, like, particularly high, and my longing for the place that I actually lived in was quite high as well. And I was thinking about death, obviously. So all those things kinda came together to making it an unusually clear vision for what I wanted the story to be from the jump.

Brett Benner 12:32

Wow. One of the things I liked so much about the book was, you know, we've all seen the stories of the relationships between, like, a queer man and a straight woman, right? Like- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm that relationship has been always-

Natalie Adler 12:42

Mm-hmm

Brett Benner 12:42

so repeated and... But that both of these characters are queer, we don't see a lot, I don't think. And, um- That's true. Yeah I love that.

Natalie Adler 12:51

Yeah. Thank you. I- I mean, I think it's, it's very important and true to our worlds, and yet we... The straight woman is often, like, the stand-in for the audience for acceptance. Right You know? Not that those gay-straight alliances are not, important and true as well, but they're more common for, you know, more cynical reasons, I think, in entertainment. But it's true. I mean, I have deeply important friendships with gay men, and a lot of lesbians I know do, too. So I am glad to see people responding to that as something we need to see more of.

Brett Benner 13:25

Yeah. It's also interesting because, the whole, this whole thing about, which I don't think a lot of people know. I, I just feel- Mm-hmm like we say some younger people know, about the way that lesbians in particular were advocating and taking care of gay men- Yeah the way that they were. I was looking yesterday, and I didn't know that there was a group called Blood Sisters. You probably know about this.

Natalie Adler 13:45

Mm-hmm.

Brett Benner 13:45

Mm-hmm. Which was a group that- Yeah was, it was... Yeah, it was a group of women who, donated blood when blood couldn't be there, but they also gave- Yeah passionate care to so many of these men who, like you had talked about your, your aunt's friend earlier, whose family basically gave them up and everything that went along with it.

Natalie Adler 14:01

Yeah. I mean, I think that there are, again, like, kind of like a material reason there, which is that, you know, lesbians at this time, by the early '80s, especially more politically oriented lesbians, had had a lot of experience organizing. They had been kind of booted out of the feminist movement and also sidelined in the gay rights movement. And this could a- create a bitterness, but it also creates a very normalized kind of sense of mutual aid and, you know, we are the only ones who are gonna take care of each other- Yeah and look after each other. And also, again, amongst the more political lesbians, a abiding sense of, like, "I'm not going to stand by while a huge injustice comes to pass." And I, I think that sometimes every now and then, 'cause it, it's rare to even, hear enough about, the lesbians taking care of gay men during the AIDS crisis, but I think it's important to note it's not because women are more caring or something like that. It's not really that. It's because also, like, lots of, gay men too also, stood up for gay men and became in positions of caretaking and did incredibly emotionally vulnerable things for one another. It's really just like they were coming from a place of not being surprised by abandonment, I think. Oh,

Brett Benner 15:11

interesting.

Natalie Adler 15:11

Which a lot of gay men who had kind of fi- found a way to be successful in the world and to, you know, maybe not be totally out of the closet, but even like a Larry Kramer, who, you know, was out and proud and was always being affronted by the ways in which he wasn't just allowed to be, like, a Yale-educated Hollywood literary writer. Like, how dare? How dare someone like me with this pedigree be thrown to the side by society, right? Right. A lesbian is gonna come at that and be like, "Well, who the fuck are you?" You know? So I think, so I think that, that there's like, you know, kind of like important historical material reasons why this comes to be. But I think it's one of our most important relationships in queer history, so I was really happy to write about it.

Brett Benner 16:04

Yeah, I loved seeing it. It's so funny because, you know, uh, when I graduated from college and moved into New York, it was right kind of where p- we had peaked, and it was coming off the edge of it. It was, this is, 1990, effectively. It was very interesting living in that time because the kind of, um, big wave of deaths that had taken place, and so many people knew. But I, I was kind of insulated b- having been in college for four years, but was terrified going to New York- Yeah and suddenly thinking what could happen, and constantly checking my body. But I remember having no lesbian friends. I didn't know anyone who was a lesbian, and there seemed like this, unspoken line between you were gay or you were lesbian, and that's it, right? Even bisexuality- Right probably wasn't even discussed. You were one or the other. Yeah. And the two would hardly ever meet, which is so ironic because at this point in my life we have so many lesbian friends, and it's just a different- Of course,

Natalie Adler 16:53

yeah

Brett Benner 16:53

thing. Yeah. Um, it just, what- for whatever reason, and in going to New York, I, I was all like, you know, gay men, gay men, gay men. But I think the way people are living now is so different. And luckily, all of the subsequent generations have gotten so much more kind of out with who they are and been looser about kind of tribal lines, for lack of a better way of saying it.

Natalie Adler 17:15

Yeah,

Brett Benner 17:16

yeah. And so I feel like there's so much more mixing. And one of the things that's also in line with this in the book is that Mark and Renata, they have a, they have at times a sexual relationship, which I th- also thought- Yeah was really interesting.

Natalie Adler 17:29

Yeah. Um, I, I think that this is just kind of a, a true thing, 'cause I think that a certain kind of close friendship, especially when you're in your 20s, can be very erotic Um, the desire for closeness, the nor- the way you normalize, let's just spend all day together every day. Yeah. And I think there's something natural about like, well, I guess we should just try it, you know? Right, right. Just for, just for, you know, like, like why not? And it comes up, they try it when they're younger, and it's fine. You know, which I think is also something that people might need, might be surprised to know about gay people, which is it's not like, "Uh, yucky. Could never." It's just like, "This is fine. Not, may- maybe not for me," you know?

Brett Benner 18:10

Well, some

Natalie Adler 18:11

gay people. Um, well, for some gay people, sure. I, I

Brett Benner 18:14

could tell you certainly some- For sure, for sure I've watched some guys like,

Natalie Adler 18:16

What?" Certainly some, yes, of course. Yeah, I mean, no, everybody's, and lesbians too, like, everybody has d- everybody is very different. But like I think that, you know, that the lines of desire are looser than we think, you know? And can sometimes be driven by like intense feelings of friendship, right?

Brett Benner 18:38

Yeah.

Natalie Adler 18:38

And I think for them, that's kind of what it's about. Like, I, I love you, and maybe in these particular moments I need to express that with my body. And you know, there's a sex scene between them later in the novel when he's dying, and I think that was kind of part of it. Also written sort of by my desire to show someone who was quite sick, but still like a, like a sexual person.

Brett Benner 19:01

Vibrant. Yeah.

Natalie Adler 19:02

Um, yeah. Which we don't get to see as much, I think, in this society in general. No. So I wanted to do that.

Brett Benner 19:09

I love that. So the whole paranormal element of the book, how did that come up for you? First of all, were you a child who was very obsessed with the paranormal as a kid?

Natalie Adler 19:17

Oh, yeah, big time. I mean, well, I was a kid for like, you know, Beetlejuice and The Addams Family. Mm-hmm. Like those were my childhood movies. So was very much interested in the veil between the normal world and the paranormal world, which I think is also a very queer-coded thing. You know, like having a sense that something, that there's maybe this world out there that is other to this one, and that perhaps I can see it, is I think a very queer-coded experience. And just being interested in anything that anybody else says is like, "This is unnatural. This is, this is strange, this is odd, this is off," you know, like give that to me. But as an adult, I really, I really like horror. I, every year I become a little less strong of stomach for it, I, I think as our horrors escalate, in the real world. But I knew that I wanted to write a ghost story where the ghosts were kind of just a reality. And there were versions earlier on where I was like, maybe everybody can see them. Maybe some people could see them. Like I, an early task for me was to kind of like play with the ghost logistics. Mm-hmm. Um, and the way, where I kind of settled was that it is- probably a propensity in the same way as anybody could sing a song, but not everybody can... Not everybody has perfect pitch, not everybody has relative pitch, not everybody can carry a tune, but everyone can, like, open their mouth and sing. So to me, that meant that, everybody can have a sense perception that something other is going on, and some people are way more attuned to that, and some very rare people are just fully able, once they've kind of honed that skill a little bit, to see. Even somebody with, you know, perfect pitch and a beautiful voice s- still takes lessons. So Renata kind of- Yeah hones her powers. But I, I knew that I wanted it to be exceptional, but not, like, superpower. I just had a sense of, like, this is, a reality of her New York, is that there are ghosts here, and I wanted to take that metaphor literally.

Brett Benner 21:23

I also love that you gave literally human attributes to the ghosts. I mean, there's... I, I wrote- Mm-hmm two quotes down here from the book. One said, "Their feelings and wants are left over. They don't go away." Mm-hmm. And this is Renata speaking, and she says, "I think ghosts feel more than they know. They know they're dead the same way an animal knows it's alive. They have feelings, they have needs, but not necessarily- Yeah for me or anyone else." I loved that.

Natalie Adler 21:45

Yeah. Yeah. I... Well, I wanted them to be kind of independent of her. I don't like the kinda ghost story where it's like they're all just coming to her because she has this superpower, right? It's more that they're already in the world, and she happens to be able to see them. And I, I did sort of think about them a little bit more animal, you know, where it's, more sensorial of an experience, and perhaps knowledge of their own. The ghosts are verbal. They won't always speak in, in such direct ways. And so one of the characters, I won't spoil it, but one of... a character in the book who's, quite verbal, when he is a ghost later on will kind of be able to have, like, a little bit of, a rat-a-tat dialogue with Renata and really connect with her, but not hold on to it for very long because he can't hold on to the living world very long. Mm. But I, I, yeah, I see them as, it feels wrong to say, you know, they're alive, but their, their liveliness is on just, like, another plane than what we understand.

Brett Benner 22:45

Yeah, and I, I like the idea that there's not necessarily an explanation. Like, we've all seen the trope of, they just need to connect with their loved one, and they can move on- Yeah or something to that effect. Yeah. Do you know what I mean?

Natalie Adler 22:54

Yeah, yeah,

Brett Benner 22:55

yeah. Yeah. It's a little more, it's a little more, um, gray. It's a little bit more unclear. And I also think it's a little bit more unclear for her at times, you know. Yeah. Uh, and also the frustration of how come the person that she wants to see the most she can't see. Like, that is such- Yeah an interesting part of this.

Natalie Adler 23:12

Yeah. Yeah. Grief can make us a little narcissistic sometimes, so you know. Yeah. I had to trouble that for this book, that it, it can't all be revolving around her.

Brett Benner 23:22

Yeah.

Natalie Adler 23:23

Yeah.

Brett Benner 23:23

There's a beautiful... Oh my God, one of my favorite parts of this, and it comes sort of a little more than midway. And I'm not ruining anything. This is not a spoiler. Mm-hmm. But she's out at a club- Mm-hmm and she's looking around at this kind of sea of people, and she realizes that so many of these people that are dancing are ghosts. And that, it was so beautifully visual. The first thing I thought of was that movie Longtime Companion. Oh, yeah. I don't know if you ever saw Longtime Companion.

Natalie Adler 23:48

Yeah, yeah.

Brett Benner 23:48

Yeah. And the last moment when they're on the beach, and all the people who have passed are coming back.

Natalie Adler 23:55

Yeah. Ooh, just gave me chills thinking of that. Yeah

Brett Benner 24:01

God, what an incredible scene you wrote with that. I, I just thought it was so amazingly moving and, and just like- Thank

Natalie Adler 24:07

you

Brett Benner 24:08

just a beautiful testament of kind of encapsulating not only the moment of that time and for all of these people and kind of the joy and so many people were expressing and living in, but also the crushing loss of it at the same time.

Natalie Adler 24:22

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean... And thank you for noticing that because I, I really... That was an effect that I, I, I wanted to have, that I wanted... I wanted a, a sense of, like, the fullness of what we've lost, which by '84 was starting to, starting to, to pile up. It's nothing compared to- Yeah what it was at 1990 or 1995 or '96, you know, and the, the peak of AIDS, in the US. But I, I think that in that particular moment, I just wanted it to be clear that, you know, even, going out dancing, these things that we associate with, like, youthfulness and being alive, that maybe that desire could carry on even after death, you know? And that this fullness of life is maybe something more powerful than, than death it- itself, and that if you can see ghosts, why on earth wouldn't they be at Danceteria, you know?

Brett Benner 25:23

Yes. Yes.

Natalie Adler 25:25

Yeah.

Brett Benner 25:25

And the belief of something beautiful happening in the afterlife- Yeah versus it just- Yeah being this horrible thing, um, and just darkness, and it ends with just the way it ends.

Natalie Adler 25:35

Right, which is one of the biggest fears of one of the main characters, Mark, that when he dies, it's just gonna be... It's just gonna be nothingness, that it's just gonna be, like, shut in a box, and he gets very- Right claustrophobic thinking about that. It really frightens him.

Brett Benner 25:48

Yeah, because it makes you think, too, for all of these people, it's not like y- you, can look back at a life and say, "God, I've lived such this good life," or, "The life that I've lived or the tracks that I've laid," when people are dying in their 20s and they were so young. Yeah. Yeah. And they haven't even really begun to live yet, and the tragedy of that- Yeah it's, it's incredibly overwhelming. Do you believe in ghosts?

Natalie Adler 26:09

I think so. I think... I have, like, one moment where I've, like, "Oh my God, I've seen a ghost." But I, I feel more the sense that there is something more than I know that I'm walking around seeing now. Though I have talked to- Hmm and just, like, writing this book, I've talked to a, a couple of people. I talked to a couple mediums, too, just to like, you know, what's your experience of this? And not to toot my own horn, but some of what I kind of made up about this is what I think the experience of seeing ghosts might be ended up being really close to what mediums say about-

Brett Benner 26:46

Interesting

Natalie Adler 26:47

seeing ghosts. And I think that's because It's an intuitive sense of how it must be if that is, a sense perception you have, right? I believe that we haven't figured... Like, my strongest belief is we haven't figured it all out yet. I believe- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm that there's so much more that we don't know in so many walks of life, in scientific walks of life, and in s- like, kind of, like, more woo senses of things. And that once you really get into, kind of ghost history research and you realize that when, you know, there's this technological boom in the 19th century, there's also, like, a spiritualist boom. So where at times we're having, the biggest leap forwards technologically, scientifically, we're also having a very big spiritual belief boom, some of which is, fraud and some of it is very sincere. So I think that there's probably more out there to discover, but what I know for sure is that longing is real. And if you want badly enough to get some confirmation that someone you love who has died is still here, you will find that sign 'cause you're looking for it. Mm. Like, you'll find what you're looking for. So that's what I believe more than I believe in, like, ghosts existing the way they do in this novel.

Brett Benner 28:01

I was thinking two things when you were talking about that. The first is in, in line with all that, and you were talking about we're having this moment of this spiritual... I call it a spiritual moment with space right now. Mm-hmm. Right? Because of- Yes we all watched the astronauts, but there's also- Yes been so many books, and there's so- Project Hail Mary just came out. Yes. And I feel like so many people are right now caught up in this idea of life outside our own- Yeah universe, right?

Natalie Adler 28:24

Yeah,

Brett Benner 28:24

yeah. And, and, and the same way of, who is out there, but also this idea that you're talking about of looking for a sign if it shows up. My business partner was talking about one day, her, her father had passed a few years ago, but she said to me there was a hummingbird that kept coming to her window outside of her condo every day. And she said to me, "I, I just know that this is, in some version, it's my father just coming in to check on me." And I love that idea- Yeah but it's, it is very much like what you're talking about.

Natalie Adler 28:54

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my wife, who lost her father in 2020, every time we find a parking spot, she thanks her father. 'Cause he was, like, a park slope dad who spent his life trying to find a parking spot. So you know, and sometimes we'll even ask him, like, "Shel, let us find a spot," you know?

Brett Benner 29:12

Right.

Natalie Adler 29:12

Like-

Brett Benner 29:13

Give us the sign.

Natalie Adler 29:14

So, yeah. And like, that's, for him, that's a sign, you know?

Brett Benner 29:18

Yes, exactly. Yeah. I'm gonna move off the book now for a moment before we end, but I, 'cause I do wanna talk... I know we talked in the beginning, but I, I had this written down and, anybody that goes to your social media is going to see him, so we just have to talk about Chester for a moment. So Chester is your dog, but tell me, tell me again, and for everybody else, a little bit about Chester 'cause he's terribly cute.

Natalie Adler 29:36

He's wonderful. So Chester is, a Pomeranian mix. We don't quite know with what. Skipperke, Husky, Aussie Shepherd, something in there. They told me he was two when I adopted him, then my vet said he's more like five. Yeah. So he just celebrated either his 13th or his 16th birthday, but we're going with- Wow 13 now. I've kind of gotten murky in the teen years what y- how old he actually is. But, he has one tooth. He has a blue eye and a brown eye, and- He's very David Bowie he's, he's very David Bowie, yes. And he's- You know, he's like the light of my life. He's, he's, you know, my biological child. You know, when I wrote this book, he was at my feet pretty much. Yeah. You know? And it keeps you... I, I don't know. I just think it's so important in some way to be connected to the animal world, like having a pet or not. Like, just to know that there's, you know, a creature that is like filled with like wants, and some of them are like really quite simple and direct, and that you have to like attend to biological needs on a regular basis, I think just keeps you, especially, you know, writers, literary people, like we can really go somewhere else. So having him has always been my, my kind of grounding to the physical world-

Brett Benner 31:00

He's your

Natalie Adler 31:01

tether at all times. He's my tether. Yeah.

Brett Benner 31:05

Yeah. Yeah.

Natalie Adler 31:05

My beautiful boy.

Brett Benner 31:07

I love that. And then the last thing I wanted to ask you, 'cause I know I'm so fascinated, I was looking at it last night. Can you talk a little bit, you're teaching at The Sackett Workshop?

Natalie Adler 31:15

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'd love

Brett Benner 31:17

to hear

Natalie Adler 31:17

about it. I love, I love this work. Yeah, so I, you know, I've been teaching a, a long time, I guess since 2012, like doing it through academia, doing it after grad school and, you know, kind of teaching freshman composition classes for a long time, which are such a grind and they're quite draining. But it's always this real privilege to help someone put themselves into words. Mm-hmm. And so finally I got this, work, at Sackett Street Writers, which is run by this amazing whirlwind of, of a person and a writer, Julia Fierro. And there's classes online, that there's a lot of classes in person in New York, and there's like beginning fiction, intermediate, but, you know, those distinctions are, are kind of in our, in our head anyway because every time we show up to write, we're beginning writers. I really enjoy working with adults because these are people who have taken time and money as an investment to say, "This thing that I have a feeling that I can't really live without doing, I need to give it a full shot." Mm-hmm. And we're disincentivized from caring about, you know, our kind of creative pursuits, I think, in this very like intensely professionalized city and, just like the crunch of the world right now. So it's just this incredible thing where I get to sit with writers who are, maybe they're just trying this out for the first time and they've h- think they have some stories in them, and people will always tell a writer like, "I've got a couple of stories in me." And it's like, "All right. I'm sure you do. Are you gonna write them down or are you just gonna tell me about them?" But these are people who are like, "Actually, I'm gonna try to write them down." Or people who are like, "I've been working on this novel after work, before work secretly for five years, and now I'm finally ready to show someone." So it feels like, I always feel like I'm in an, like a very honored and privileged position- Wow to be able to like work with these people. And I had a workshop, advisor when I was in my MFA, Ernesto Mestre Reid, who wrote this novel Sacrificio, and he did a novel writing workshop, which is kind of rare at an MFA. And everyone read each other's novels, no matter if it was, like, 300 pages or five pages. Like, whatever you got, you would show up and that you would present that. And he was always trying to make sure that wherever you were at, your work was taken as seriously as potential to become a book. And let's just figure out how to make it happen. So I always try to be a teacher like that. Even if you're writing in a genre that I'm not as, fluent in, like, I'll get a lot of, like, kind of like sometimes there'll be, like, kind of more like romantasy writers that I'm not as- I know. You were gonna say I'm not as fluent in. Like, I,

Brett Benner 33:46

but like- Yeah, no, I know. I just thought, like, that's a huge thing right now for people.

Natalie Adler 33:48

Yeah. It's a huge thing right now. Yeah. But, like, y- that writer is not any different sitting down to write than I am, you know? Yeah. You don't have different problems than me. Maybe different world building logistics. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But we all have the same problems, right? So, like, I'll sit down, and then some people write very, like, kind of like traditional literary fiction short story, right? And I like to sit down with them and be like, "How can I understand what you want your project to be and make sure that we can get that there?" Which, you know, teaching writing, talking about writing, reading someone else's work seriously, that always makes you a better writer. So it's like- Yeah a very nice job, that I'm pleased to have. So if you're in New York, like- I- take my Sackett Street class. Like, it's, it's so fun. Or

Brett Benner 34:25

anybody else's Sackett Street class. I know. I gotta But I have to be honest, I, I did, I went through the whole thing and I was like, "Oh my God." "I wish it were online," 'cause I think I would sign up. Well, Natalie, congratulations. The book is just beautiful. Thank you so much. Um, it's, um, really great. Buy independent people if you can, but go out and get the book.

Natalie Adler 34:41

Yeah.

Brett Benner 34:41

It was lovely talking to you, and, um, I'm just thrilled for the book. It was so lovely to talk

Natalie Adler 34:45

to you. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really loved getting the chance to talk with you, and those questions were excellent, so thank you so much

Brett Benner 34:51

Thank you again, Natalie. And if you liked this conversation or other conversations that you've heard on Behind the Stack, please consider liking and subscribing so that you never miss an episode. Also, what would be really helpful to me is if you could give the show five stars on your podcast platform of choice. All of these things help new people find the podcast so I can continue to bring you conversations like this one. I'll be back next week with another episode, and until then, you can always find me on YouTube, Instagram, and Substack under Brett's Book Stack. And as always, thanks for listening