Dave Eggers on 'Contrapposto' and supporting the next generation of writers

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Bestselling author Dave Eggers has a new novel out this week telling the story of two art-obsessed friends over many decades. And there’s much more to the author’s own story as well.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports from San Francisco for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: Bicycle?

Dave Eggers: Yes. I bike around the Embarcadero a lot.

Jeffrey Brown: For Dave Eggers, his latest project began on a bike ride.

Dave Eggers: I found this giant door open in this pier and I discovered it was completely empty.

Jeffrey Brown: And some thought or lightbulb went off.

Dave Eggers: Yes, I’m always looking for empty space, I guess. Like, how do you fill it?

Jeffrey Brown: It’s perhaps not the thought most would have, but Eggers walked into the 100,000-square-foot emptiness of San Francisco’s Pier 29 and did what he often does, imagine new ways to allow creativity to flourish, accessible to all.

Dave Eggers: How do we make the arts free? How do we make them accessible so that they’re never exclusive? And that’s an obsession. Like how do you make it so that there’s never an economic barrier to being creative?

And that’s something that — you know, you got to fight for that.

Jeffrey Brown: This new vision, a project called Art + Water, intended to provide space for arts education and work studio, with the students learning under the tutelage of established artists.

The goal, to address one small piece of this expensive city’s affordability crisis.

Dave Eggers: So, if you look at a raw space like this, immediately the easiest use is maybe one of the most necessary too, is, like, to try to put visual artists back in San Francisco.

Jeffrey Brown: Eggers himself, now 56, is best known as a writer. His 2000 memoir with the brash title “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” was a bestseller and something of a generational sensation. He’s written 39 books in all, fiction, nonfiction, works for young readers and children.

But early on, he trained as a painter at the University of Illinois and still makes art, here screen-printing. And his new novel, “Contrapposto,” centers on a young would-be artist in the Midwest named Cricket, his childhood friend and love interest, Olympia, and their adventures together and apart in the art world over decades into their 70s.

Dave Eggers: I have been working on this book off and off for 20 years. I mean, it’s been in my head since I was in art school myself.

Jeffrey Brown: Really?

Dave Eggers: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: Because it seemed like a formative experience or something you wanted to address?

Dave Eggers: Both. But I wanted to sort of — also sort of write about a 60-odd-year friendship and that kind of devotion. I don’t — you don’t see it that often in fiction.

Jeffrey Brown: The book’s title refers to a position of the human figure in art, a counterpose. Think Michelangelo’s David. The characters, well, they took shape in Eggers mind long ago and wouldn’t leave.

Dave Eggers: I got to know Cricket and Olympia so well that I just was transcribing their conversations. I didn’t have to write.

Jeffrey Brown: Oh, that’s how you felt?

Dave Eggers: Oh, it was just — just keeping up with what they’re saying in your head. You don’t — you’re not writing anymore for a while. You’re just trying to transcribe quickly enough to get it down, because these are just, like, people I knew for 20 years.

Jeffrey Brown: Eggers’ own life drawings appear in the novel, an unusual touch for an author. But then much about his own life and work is unusual. He founded his own publishing house, McSweeney’s, putting out books, a literary quarterly, “The Believer” magazine and more.

Woman: This week, we are going to start organizing our articles.

Jeffrey Brown: Perhaps his most important work, youth writing programs. In 2002, we helped start 826 Valencia, a nonprofit after school program teaching writing skills to children aged 6 to 18. Its success led to the creation of 826 National and a network of youth writing centers across the country and abroad, some 70 in all to date.

Eggers credits teachers in his childhood for opening up his world.

Dave Eggers: so I wanted to give that same experience to these kids, to one, know — to tell them that their work and their thoughts at this stage in their life are valid and matter and they’re worth writing down and publishing.

Jeffrey Brown: And now many of the results, books, are gathered in the-year-old International Library of Youth Writing, billed as the first of its kind, shelves of writing from around the world, photos of young authors in a warm, cozy space with hidden rooms, a secret Narnian wardrobe passageway.

Dave Eggers: And I thought, OK, it’s time to have a library where we display all of these books over the last 20-odd years and…

Jeffrey Brown: Which you love to be surrounded by.

Dave Eggers: Yes, I was so happy. I mean, every one of these books has dozens of kids that worked their butts off through draft after draft, held to professional standards, and all of their thoughts and hopes and fears and everything are contained forever in these in these really well-made books.

Jeffrey Brown: We watched a writing session for 8-to-11-year-olds from around the city.

Woman: I just wanted to talk about the facts of an event.

Jeffrey Brown: Pencils and paper, even typewriters, no screens.

Dave Eggers: We’re finding that, in this digital age, kids are so desperate to get back to something tactile.

Jeffrey Brown: You’re seeing that, you’re feeling that?

Dave Eggers: Every day. Like, for sure, they will use a screen if you put it in front of them. But I do think, if you give them a better alternative, something really kind of fun, and if you ask them to express themselves in a book that will be made permanent, they will choose the latter.

Jeffrey Brown: And why do it when you’re a successful writer?

Dave Eggers: Feeling useful as a writer is not a everyday occurrence. You can spend 18 months, two years or whatever on writing something that you don’t know if it’s going to come anything, but you can be sent into a middle school with 826 and feel like in, two hours, boy, you have — really have an impact.

Jeffrey Brown: Some old-fashioned ideas in a fast-changing world, helping kids write books…

Student: I added what you said, put it in my own words, and used it.

(Crosstalk)

Jeffrey Brown: Helping artists find a way and space to learn and create. Art + Water has a planned opening later this year. Dave Eggers’ own new book, “Contrapposto,” is now out.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in San Francisco.