speaker-0: Hey everybody, it's Jeff. Before we get into today's episode, I want to tell you about something really cool happening in the Wisconsin literary world. And no, this is not a Squarespace ad. The Independent Bookstores Republic of Letters, Wordhaven Bookhouse, The Rogue Bookshop, and Bound to Happen Books have teamed up with the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association to create the first ever statewide bookstore crawl. This June, Bookshop Quest 2026 is bringing together 35 independent bookstores from all over the state. All in the name of community engagement and literacy. Now, throughout June, you'll be able to go on quests and complete tasks that give you a chance to win prizes, including a $300 gift card to the participating bookstore of your choice. The missions will include attending bookstore events, finding three bookstore pets, and much more. Honestly, this sounds like a really great way to stay cool and to hang around bookstores for a month. And there's a lot of great bookstores here: Arcadia Books in Spring Green, Daughters Books in Eau Claire. Fair Isle Books on Washington Island and Honest Dog Books in Bayfield, just to name a few. I really can't think of a better way to celebrate being a book lover this summer than to participate. So that's it. You can pick up a map at any of the participating bookstores right now, and be sure to follow Wisconsin Indie Bookshop Quest on Facebook and Instagram throughout June for updates and extra giveaways. And with that, let's get into the show. Hello and welcome to Writing Forward, a conversation show featuring some of the best and brightest voices from across Wisconsin. I'm Jeff Aloisia, I'm a former editor at the New York Times, a Milwaukee suburbs native, and now I'm a freelance writer based in Madison. Each week I sit down with writers from and connected to my home state for candid, sometimes messy conversations about craft, identity, and what it means to build a writing life rooted at home and away from the traditional center of the literary world. From fiction to nonfiction, poetry to journalism, we dig into what keeps Wisconsin writers moving forward, one word at a time. My guest today is Liam Callanan. Liam is the author of four novels: The Cloud Atlas, All Saints, Paris by the Book, and When and Rome, as well as the short story collection Listen. His novel Paris by the Book was a national bestseller and received the Edna Ferber Book Award, honoring the best work of fiction published by a Wisconsin writer that year. A distinction he shares with previous writing forward guest Chloe Benjamin. Though he writes from Milwaukee, Liam's fiction rarely stays in one place for long. His work often explores faith, displacement, history, and the tension between rootedness and reinvention. Questions that carry his characters far beyond the Midwest, while still remaining shaped by it. His next book, Stone Age Astronaut, a work of nonfiction forthcoming in September, Traces the meteoric rise and eventual disappearance from public memory of Lester Maitland, the Milwaukee-born pilot who, in 1927, became the first person to fly to Hawaii, earning national acclaim on par with Charles Lindbergh's Transatlantic Triumph. Liam's work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and he's also recorded numerous essays for public radio. He teaches in the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Mauwauke. Where he previously served as department chair and coordinated the PhD program in creative writing. He's also taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Breaf Writers Conference. Liam Callanan, welcome to Writing Forward. It's really great to talk to you. We begin every episode of the show by asking our guests to share a brief passage from someone else's writing, be it a novel, poem, essay, or article, that for them evokes Wisconsin in some memorable way. What did you choose, and can you read it for us?

speaker-1: I'm so excited to be here. First, I just want to say I love this tradition. I think every show that interviews authors should do this. ⁓ what I chose is a poem called Silly Little City I Live and Love In by my late colleague Susan Fear, who's an absolute legend in Wisconsin, certainly in Milwaukee, a poet who's quite a force. And so I'm just going to share this poem, ⁓ which is on a plaque that we had engraved and hangs now at UWM. Silly Little City I Live and Love In. Silly little city with your harp street lamps, blizzards and vigilite stars, with your tutu'd street lights, and thirty below wind chills, band shells and polkas, and steamy, smoky lakes, pink waves, with your huge orange moons rising from the lake, with your huge red suns rising from the lake, with your sad jumpers falling into the lake, and your socialist watershed and oriental theater minarets and Sunday morning Quaker meetings surrounded by church bells and taverns, with everyday George Washington. Walking down Wisconsin Avenue, with your ice fishing clinics and beer blessings, with your seven deadly sins parades, with your alewives parades and cladophora wings and streets named after sausages nock, with Francis Bacon's blue face on the side of your art museum and Joseph Cornell's celestial navigation by birds gallery eighteen inside your museum, with your statues of Goethe and Burns, Olmstead Parks and Bakery Winds, silly little city that erases me, I keep fastening your lake winds to the page.

speaker-0: Hmm. That's lovely. You know, you said you like this tradition. I am increasingly loving this tradition because I get to hear poems like Susan's. What stands out to you about that piece? What made you choose it?

speaker-1: Everything about it. I love all the inventory and details and it's a it's a snapshot in time. We don't still have the circus parades or some of the parades that she mentions, but otherwise all those things, the winchills, the banchells, the polkas, the pink waves, ⁓ the art museum, the statues of Goethe and Burns, the Olmsted Parks. I live near one. ⁓ I love it. I was born in Washington, DC. I grew up in Los Angeles, so I'm the first Calnan to live in Central Time for s quite some time. And so I'm a Milwaukee expatriate, I guess you could say. And so what I love about this poem is it captures the fun and all the detail of the city, which I've kinda love in such an evocative way.

speaker-0: Yeah. I remember those circus parades as a kid.

speaker-1: We saw one parade before it disappeared. We got here about twenty years ago, which I know in Milwaukee time is no time at all. It's like we got here yesterday. But ⁓ we saw one.

speaker-0: I do want to talk about sort of when you first came to Milwaukee, but first I feel like we just have to get this out of the way. In 2004, you published a book called The Cloud Atlas. ⁓ another novel, Cloud Atlas came out the very same year and eventually became a a very famous, if somewhat divisive, movie. I know you wrote about this for the all, and you it you've probably been asked this so many times. You created a section for it on your website. But for listeners who don't know the story, what were you thinking?

speaker-1: So right after my our books, there's another book by David Mitchell called Cloud Atlas. My book is called The Cloud Atlas, which I always say is evidence of the primacy of editing. If I'd only dropped that the, I would have been as successful as he was. So for the our books were published the same time on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean. And for about two weeks I was really upset that someone had stolen my title. And then I realized we were selling a ton of books by mistake. And that was just great. ⁓ so I got over it and I Other than getting like all sorts of angry reviews, like this book is nothing like the movie. Then other people would pick up like this book is not at all what I was told it was about, but I like it better. So then the movie so I was like, Great. It just taught me that that's all you can only do so much. And I think his next book was called Black Swan Green, which is such an unusual title. I know he was scared that I was gonna title my next book the same as too.

speaker-0: Of course I'm needling you, and your book is a wonderful novel on its own, right? That people should ⁓ seek out if they haven't read it. But yeah, I think that could be a a savvy marketing type. It reminds me of going to Blockbuster Video back in the day and they would create covers for movies that looked sort of similar to the Blockbuster titles from that year and hope that someone would pick them up.

speaker-1: funny thing is that I actually lifted the title The Cloud Atlas from a government, I think it was NOAA, National Oceanic and Air Administration. They published a yearly almanac of clouds, and I thought, what a ridiculous project. I didn't fully understand what the cloud almanac was, but I thought they're trying to map clouds and hold something that's evanescent and ephemeral in a particular place on the page. And I thought rather grandly, that's what all writing is, trying to fix something that you can't touch. It's intangible. And you have to put it down on the page and I thought, Cloud Atlas, I'll just take that title for myself. I didn't realise it would be quite so popular.

speaker-0: Yeah, I mean it's a it's a beautiful idea and not the kind of thing that you would have thought ⁓ you would have had to worry about. Like I said, I wanted to start sort of back at the beginning. I've I've heard you say that your parents were both English majors and that your mom even picked some of your freshman English courses. Were either of them writers?

speaker-1: Not writers in the sense that they were publishing things. My dad was an attorney, so he writes all the time. My mom was a great writer of letters to me in college. She was a great reader. And certainly writing and reading was valued in our house quite a bit. But most of all, what was valued in our house was storytelling. We had one of those boisterous Irish Catholic families where to kind of get a place at the table, you had to kind of elbow your way into any conversation and tell the story louder, more quickly and for more laughs than anyone else. And that just taught me, I think storytelling. And a sort of grab the reader by the throat as soon as you can and start telling stories from there. And something I try to continue in my own family, not to make it into a blood sport. Storytelling is a not just again sound too grand about it, it's what brings people together or it kind of fashions a cloth that we can all share. And I feel like that's possible in families in particular. And I like how the kids come up in that environment and they realize stories are a way to explain the world to us and also to get a laugh.

speaker-0: That makes so much sense in ways that I think we'll get into. You did mention that you grew up in Los Angeles. When did Milwaukee enter the picture?

speaker-1: So Milwaukee into the picture after college, I was living we were living in Washington DC, where we lived for about fifteen years after college, and we had just had our first child. And I had had this grand plan that I was going to quit my job and become a great American novelist. And ⁓ I spent about two weeks at home and in Panera's trying to write a great American novel. That proved disastrous. All I did to Panera was eat bagels and worry about people stealing my laptop. But they had free coffee, so that turned out to be not such a bad thing. Eventually I went back to MFA school. I went to George Mason University there in Virginia. And my thesis from there magically did turn into a published book. And with the help of that published book, I was eligible to apply for jobs in creative writing across the country. And those those jobs come up wherever they come up. So my year it was St. Joe's in Philadelphia, University of Wyoming in Laramie, and then Milwaukee. My wife really doesn't like the Philadelphia Eagles. So Philadelphia was out of the picture. Laramie was great, but it was a little bit beyond beyond beyond the horizon for us. And then Milwaukee, we came out here on a quick visit and we were like, what's not to love? And we live near campus. I can walk to an independent bookstore, independent theater, independent grocer, coffee place. I mean, the Venn diagram here cannot be matched too many places in the world.

speaker-0: Yeah. Out of curiosity, ⁓ what time of year was it when you first came to visit Milwaukee?

speaker-1: We actually came in winter and at the time being a Los Angeles boy, it was very exotic. I'm sure my nostrils are freezing. There's wind blowing in my face. And actually, you know what? It wasn't winter, it was March. And so in DC, March is a gorgeous time. That's that's another story. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but the whole reason that I wrote that book on Paris was because we found ourselves in Paris one spring break at the last minute, because we hadn't made plans for spring break because Spring is a beautiful season in Washington, DC. The flowers are out, the sun comes out. And everyone kept asking us here in Milwaukee, where are you going spring break? I was like, We're just gonna stay here and enjoy the butterflies and the bees and flowers. And then spring break just ended upon us and I was like, ⁓ my God. So I called up our to use our airline miles and I said, Can we go to Florida? And the they were like, No, you can't afford Florida. You can afford any place warm. And they said, Well, where could I go? And they said, Well, you could go to Paris, I guess. And I was like, Paris? Kids were going to Paris, which turned out to have weather a lot like Milwaukee, but it was Paris.

speaker-0: Somewhat more atmospheric, I feel like, in the rain than ⁓ Milwaukee can be.

speaker-1: A little bit. A little bit.

speaker-0: Well, it's so lovely to hear someone who's a transplant ⁓ who took to Milwaukee immediately because as I mentioned before we started here, it it holds a a close place in my heart. You've said before that Milwaukee deserves more recognition as a writing town. And one point that you made that I think is a shrewd one is that it's still relatively affordable, especially compared to a lot of major cities, even compared to Madison. What do you think Milwaukee offers writers that bigger literary cities perhaps don't?

speaker-1: I think it has a sense of community. I think I may have joked at one point that Milwaukee is the new Paris in the sense that Paris, when Hemingway and Fitzgerald were there in the twenties, was cheap. Yeah. It was a cheap place to go. Milwaukee's relatively inexpensive. I think housing's gotten more expensive like it has everywhere else. But what's amazing here is the tightness of the literary community. And it's oriented around several great independent bookstores, Woodland Pattern on the poetry side, Boswell books on the fiction side, several other new bookstores have come along, which are also terrific. When I lived in Washington, DC, there were a couple very notable bookstores. And to get to them, you had to have a friend of a friend of a friend who could maybe talk them into doing an event for you. Here in Milwaukee, I can just walk down the street and say, Hey guys, I have a book coming out in fall. Can we put something together? And like, sure, let's put it together, let's get this other person who knows about airplanes and aircraft. They can come in. And then other people can come in from the other side. And ⁓ I've noticed that with my students too, who the doctoral students come from out of town for the most part. And they're always amazed at what is sort of a tight knit community here there is. They're gonna connect with the poets, you're gonna connect with the fiction writers. The six degrees of separation here is about one degree. And again, it's really inexpensive. I noticed the pizza place on Downer is offering free drinks for lunch. I think there's not too many other cities in the world which would be quite so open hearted with their don't don't let me get them in trouble. Maybe they're not doing that. Maybe they have a different plan. It's definitely a town to be good if you're thirstying and writers are thirsty people. So

speaker-0: Yes, that is true. Liam, when I read your work, there is an energy to the prose that gives me the sense that this is someone who genuinely enjoys writing and is having fun and sort of writing for himself. If you had to rank the things that you're trying to achieve when you sit down to write, what would that hierarchy look like?

speaker-1: Wow, you're good at this. That's really I think there's a terrible quote, but it's true. I was told that George Garrett said it, which is it's only when you finish a book you realize the book you could have written. But my first goal when I'm writing is to get the thing that's in my head down on the page. And when it's down on the page it's never quite as shiny and crystalline as it was in my head. But pushing towards that horizon is what keeps me going and making it fresher on each pass. And taking out all the filler and all the fluff, which was just a way for me to get words down a page. I'm a big one for throwing down as many words as possible. I get very anxious about a blank page. And so I just spill my guts. And if I can't think of something to write, sometimes I'll write. I can't think of something to write right now, just to kind of get the pages flowing. And then once I've got it all there, like on the powder's wheel, I will take away everything that's not a pot. Which I told I used that line at Lawrence ⁓ once and I was telling a seminar student's like, You're right, by putting all the clay on the wheel and then you take away everything that's not a pot. And this one student said, First, I'm not a potter, I'm a ceramicist. One. Two, that's wasting a ton of clay. You only you put as much clay on the wheel as you need. So I'm not very good at clay metaphors, but I still think when it comes to words, you put all the words in there and then you take out everything that's not the cloud atlas.

speaker-0: that. That's a good way of putting it. Isn't it amazing that like we continue as writers to think that we can sit down and just plop the thing that's in our head onto the page and look exactly how we think it is, no matter how much sort of experiential evidence we have that that is not going to be the case.

speaker-1: We're always chasing it. I think I'm not sure if just to take your line and maybe twist it a little bit, I'm not sure if writers think that they can do that, but I think other people definitely do. They just think they can put that and there's nothing to it. Like if you write a twenty page book or a twenty page paper, it should take you about a well, two minutes of typing a page, so it should take about forty minutes and then you're done. This ⁓ the next book I have coming up, the nonfiction book Stone Age Astronaut.

speaker-0: ⁓ yeah.

speaker-1: I started working on that about thirteen years ago. Wow. Granted, other projects came in the way and bumped in it. But I think things need a long time to kind of gestate, both inside and then on the page. Like there's a lot of times when I'll get something out on the page and I'll just need it to simmer for a while. And it really does feel like cooking in the sense that you're reducing the broth that's getting stronger and stronger as long as you're letting some of the steam escape, deleting the words you don't need, getting rid of the adverbs.

speaker-0: I'm always interested in in hearing from writers who maintain some relationship to religion, whether it's you or or Flannery O'Connor, you know, Tolkien, George Saunders, others. I think maybe because I just know that there's some kind of deeper engagement going on. I'm I'm trying not to make my question like Catholicism go, but perhaps more relevant to this conversation, do you view writing as a a spiritual practice or at least as having a spiritual component?

speaker-1: That's a really interesting question. I suppose I do. I don't I don't necessarily approach it as a spiritual practice, but I do see it retrospectively as a spiritual practice, if that makes sense. I don't sit down and I don't have necessarily a ritual or spiritual way or like opening a session with prayer, but I do have a very intense sense of ⁓ the solitary nature of the work and how when you're alone. You're not really alone, or at least that's my sense of it. You're not really alone. You're in the presence of a creator and you're in the presence of all the things that one believes from one's religion and my clear is Catholic. It's funny, I was on a I was on another podcast. This is I've not been interviewed on podcasts for a while, and then suddenly two in one month. ⁓ and I was interviewed on that nonfiction podcast, which is called nonfiction. And ⁓ they were asking about Catholicism too. They're asking about I visited ⁓ with the delegation to the Vatican a couple of years ago. And I found myself kind of rattling on and I was like, and they were asking about this, that, and the other thing. I said, well, and then the Holy Spirit descended. And I was like, ⁓ wait, this is a secular podcast. We're not talking about the Holy Spirit. Sorry, I'm gonna wait till we get to my Catholic podcast and then we'll talk about that. And I realized, well, there really is no border. And also it's kind of tongue in cheek. I think for me it's a part of being in a community and a culture with other people. Something I've been exploring in my fiction, which you very nicely picked up on in the introduction, is belief. Sometimes belief in a God, sometimes belief in each other. But I think like stories have a way of teaching us how to believe in things that you can't immediately see. And so for those who are menable or interested, it can be a pathway to spiritual conversion or spiritual life. But it's not something ever proselytizing or preaching on someone, because I don't feel as confident in it myself. There's a wonderful description on that same trip to the Vatican and one of the other writers. who was ⁓ in the delegation, I think from Poland, talked about if there was a spinning coin and one side was faith and one side was doubt, that was his life. So both are present all at the same at the time. And I think many people feel like that.

speaker-0: Yeah. You met the Pope, is that right? That's Right, of course. What was that experience like?

speaker-1: I did. It's incredible. It was amazing. I don't wanna downplay that at all. ⁓ it was quite extraordinary. Starting with the little handout that we got in advance, which was the dress code for the Vatican. Please do not wear white unless you are female head of state of a Catholic country, which I was like, handy tip. So I wore I wore a suit and tie. It was really remarkable, I think, ⁓ for many reasons. I joked that it was like visiting the sixteenth century because we were in this castle and there was a monarch and And someone else said, Well, it is the 16th century. We're in this ancient palace. There was at one point when we went into the Apostolic Palace where we were all received. There was an option to go up an elevator or we could take the stairs or this ramp. And I said, I said, Well, how far up? Is it like it's on the second floor? So I ⁓ I'll just take the stairs. Well, the the floors are like fifty feet tall. So it took me quite a while to get up to the second floor by the time I was there. But Pope Francis was amazing. He did a ⁓ He was a high school literature teacher. It was like a delegation of writers from around the world. And Martin Scorsese, I'm not sure. He's kind of the cherry on top. I didn't get to meet Scorsese, but I did get to meet the Pope. And I was really r struck by he did like a close reading of the brothers Karamatsoff, ⁓ and this passage in it, and like talking about how you'd be focused on the details, bring a scene alive. I was like, preach, Pope Francis, preach. And then

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: When I went up to him, I presented him a copy of When in Rome and he really got a kick out of it, where his face lit up and he had that he has that way that some people have of just making you feel like he's listening to you and he knows you in particular. Like I had no question that if I found myself back in Rome at one of those three hundred thousand people masses, if I'd raise my wave my hand, he would have like, Liam, love the vote.

speaker-0: This is a good way to sort of transition into talking about when in Rome. This is your last novel. It it centers on a woman who's sort of forced to revisit a religious vocation that she had abandoned decades earlier. It is a novel, as we've been discussing, that I think is deeply interested in faith, but I wouldn't necessarily call it a religious novel. Where did that book begin for you?

speaker-1: It has a couple different sources. ⁓ one part is I was touring Rome with my daughter, my oldest daughter. We were on a kind of a summer adventure and we were in Triestevere coming down the hill and there was this little boutique hotel on the right that or it said it was a hotel and we needed a place to stay. So I said, Let's duck in here and see what's going on. And when we got inside, they said it was an old convent and they had a little brochure, but they said it was open as a hotel. And I thought, That's wonderful. And then as we were talking about it, this nun came out of like a side door and then walked behind us and went in another door. And I said, Is the convent still going? And like, yes or no. The nuns are selling off wing by wing of their convent to the hotel as they retreat into kind of smaller and smaller quarters. And I just found that so moving and poignant. Like the life you had you committed yourself to is suddenly kind of disappearing out from under you. It just planted a seed. And then another seed about religious life had been planted long before I had an uncle, or really a cousin, brother Kevin, or his name was Morris Shine. He was a Chicago Playboy during the nineteen forties. And I mean that he's like women, wine, song. He just lived the high life. He was a salesman. And every year he would go down to the Kentucky Derby and have just a complete debauched weekend there. And he would have kind of a spiritual and literal detox by going to Gethsemane Abbey, which is a Trappist Abbey, ⁓ where Thomas Merton was actually for a long time. ⁓ yeah. in Kentucky, about forty-five minutes away from the Derby, and he would go and he would just kind of clear himself up and then he'd go back up to Chicago. Well, one year in the late forties, he told the abbot that he wanted to stay. And the abbot was like, How long? A couple of weeks, a month. And he said, No, for the rest of my life. And the abbot was like, Yeah, right. So he put his car up on blocks. But then after a year, Brother Kevin said, Sell the car. I'm going to stay. And he did. He stayed for the rest of his life. And he took a vow of stability, which meant he never left the property except for doctor's appointments. In addition to all the other vows people take. And so I thought, here I have this example of like what makes someone do that? And what is it like to live in that sort of world where you deprive yourself of so much? But as people who live in that kind of vowed life and monastic existence always tell me, they gain so much. And so I was like, what's the physical part of that? Which was the hotel in Rome? And what's the spiritual part of that, which was my uncle? And then just living in Milwaukee, driving through the city, we live in the city proper. I can see a lot of old churches and a lot of old churches for sale all the time. And so I had this idea in my head about a woman who specialized in selling churches and then has to go to Rome to help some nuns sell one last old convent. And then while she's there, she falls in love with the convent and the life and she wonders, maybe I should go back in. And then her old college flame shows up. So ⁓ she has to decide.

speaker-0: It's a wonderful novel. And again, I would urge people to check it out if they have not already. In that case, it sounds like you both had a a sort of geographic reason to write the story as well as a question in your head. Do stories usually begin for you ⁓ with a question or with a character, you know, voice, image, place? Does it change every time?

speaker-1: For me, the voice comes first. Mm-hmm. The voice of a character comes first. And when that voice comes in, it's usually upset or nostalgic or somehow disturbed. And then I have to write my way towards like, why is this person upset? Why what's bothering them? Why just cast their tone in this particular way? I remember the Cloud Atlas, my first line, which was I think I was like, I remember different stars. And I thought, why would someone say that? And by the way, An important message to writers, every or every writer is gonna acknowledge this. I began that book with I remember different stars, and then I wrote like twenty pages about orange blossoms and astronomy and like that all went in the trash. I don't think there's a line in that book about stars. So it all had to go away. But the voice didn't change. Like the voice was still kind of somehow kind of lost in the past or regretful. Or so a lot of my books, it's like always looking for like what what happened? I want to find out what happened.

speaker-0: I guess it follows a pattern of of life. Like you meet somebody and I I don't think I remember the first thing that anyone said to me, but eventually you hear their voice and you just, you know, something will make it through. Yeah. You now have this new book, Stone Age Astronaut, which is coming out in September. First of all, congratulations. Why did this feel like the right moment to write and release a nonfiction book? I know that you said you s you started it a number of years ago.

speaker-1: Thank you. I'm really excited about it. Well, one it I had to stop researching it. I realized with nonfiction there's always another book and another source you can check. And I wish in some ways I had a hundred years to write this book, 'cause then every single letter would be correct. Like I could in some ways never be done with it, but I had to finish it. On the other hand, it's also timely. Twenty twenty seven will be the hundredth anniversary of the flight to Hawaii, as well as the hundredth anniversary of Lindbergh's flight to Paris. So now is definitely the time to kind of get going on it.

speaker-0: Cool. Yeah, nothing like a an anniversary to kick you into gear.

speaker-1: Exactly. And not to I don't think this is spoiler, but people have been saying, like, well, where does this come into your line of books? And ⁓ I think again, spoiler alert, but the pilot that I profile had a sparkling and amazing aviation career and then disappeared from sight, largely because around age fifty he became a priest, ⁓ and lived out the rest of his days as a priest, flying from parish to parish throughout northern Michigan and then Northern California and then ⁓ lasting ⁓ Arizona. Again, it was a spiritual journey. I was like, why does someone who was flying high literally then choose this other path of kind of relative deprivation and spiritual attention and and it was it was a fascinating lead for me.

speaker-0: I'm curious what if anything nonfiction lets you do that fiction couldn't. I think there's a a general thinking that fiction, you have ⁓ all the opportunities to do whatever you want. But is there any way in which sort of the confines of nonfiction felt more freeing or or allowed for new possibilities?

speaker-1: Well, some things you can assert like in f novels, a lot of times it's difficult to assert something without figuring out all the stuff you have to do to pad. Like for example, if this was a novel about the first guy to fly to Hawaii, then later became a priest, a lot of readers might be unjustifiably might be scratching their head and I could see the review saying, Totally not convincing when he chucks it all to become a priest. That doesn't make sense. No matter that the novelist went on for twenty pages to try and convince me. With nonfiction, I can just say, and he did. Like, and jump cut, now we're in a church. Nonfiction also allows you to join a conversation a lot of times with other people who have written similar things about the story and bring them, and it's kind of a more of a collaborative effort, even if some of your collaborators are ⁓ well, in my case, deceased. Like I have some of his writing as a pilot. And so You're kind of curating the story rather than inventing it.

speaker-0: To your first point, ⁓ it's trite to say, but there's a reason people say it. Like the the truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes. Yeah. I want to take a a sort of hard left turn. ⁓ you have spoken publicly about being diagnosed with Parkinson's. When did that diagnosis happen?

speaker-1: Absolutely. That is a good question. ⁓ which is good in and of itself that I don't I think 2023 and ⁓ it's kind of receded into to memory because it's now just such part of my daily existence that I I don't have like a date on the calendar that I circle. Yeah. ⁓ so I had ⁓ I had had trouble typing. And I was getting slower and slower. I mean, I was I mean, I write for a living. So I was a really good typist, around a hundred words a minute or something like that. And then I just saw it getting slower and slower until it was down to like twenty words a minute. And then some days I just couldn't do it. So I went to my doctor and the doctor referred me to an orthopedist for carpal tunnel syndrome. And the orthopedist took like five minutes with me and he said, This isn't you don't need an orthopedist. You need a neurologist. And I thought, you're crazy. Like I just need a new keyboard. So I went and bought myself a new keyboard. And that didn't work. And so I went and found a neurologist. And the neurologist, within about five minutes of looking at me, well, actually, the neurologist had a medical student with them. And the neurologist asked me, Can I narrate to the medical student what I'm seeing? And I said, ⁓ yeah, that'd be great. And so the doctor turned to the medical student and So as soon as he walked in, I knew he had Parkinson's. I was like, ⁓ wow. Didn't know that. And it's because I don't have the there's different forms of Parkinson's. And at the moment, I don't have the Parkinson's that comes with tremor. I have braidokinesia, which is ⁓ stiffness. So some people get both. I probably eventually will get both. But I don't have visible tremor for the most part. Although sometimes when I get agitated and a little worked up, Like I don't know if there's a video of this podcast, but you can kind of see me wiggling a little bit. Sometimes when I'm in front of a room presenting now, I'll get some sort of activity that is not necessarily something I'm generating. But for the most part, people don't know. I'm working on an essay that's tentatively titled Astronaut Days, because I feel like I move like an astronaut now. And I don't mean with swagger. I mean I just move slowly. ⁓ And it's been a real it's been a real journey for me. I think it's and it's a it's a journey that's underway, like yeah, whether I like it or not. ⁓ and it's caused me to rethink a lot of things, including my writing life. And one thing that I'm going to do with a heavy heart is ⁓ resign my teaching post at UWM next spring. Not because I'm not able to do the job. And I wanna make that clear, like anyone with Parkinson's is depending on where they are, they're perfectly employable. But I just realized that like my retirement years now are not gonna look like what I thought they were gonna look like. And so my wife and I wanna go explore while I'm still able bodied and able to do that sort of thing. Cause you're always the sad truth Parkinson's is you're always kinda declining. ⁓ There's medicine that gives you like oases of time during the day when your symptoms are mild. I've taken one of those medicines so I can be so effervescent on this podcast. And if you wanted me to type, I could probably bash out something like that. Sure. But the medicine over time stops working. And so in future years, it just it won't be there for me. So there may be some new treatments by then, ⁓ or not. It it also depends. Like by the time you're showing symptoms with Parkinson's, you have quite a bit of ⁓ quite a bit of your neurons are already not working anymore. Yeah. ⁓ and so to regenerate them, that's not really something that's done at this point. So it's it's difficult. ⁓ it's hard to say like it's something I want to write about, but it's also difficult to write about because like the first Like any other nonfiction project, the first thing I would do is research it and find out everything about it. And in some ways, I haven't done a lot of research on Parkinson's because I don't wanna know. I don't wanna know what I don't know. Yeah.

speaker-0: I I totally get that.

speaker-1: And the Stone Age Astronaut is a short book. Well, because there's only so much material out there. But also it was people can be reassured that my future books will all be very short because there's only so much typing. And I've tried voice dictation. Everyone always asks me that. And ⁓ it kind of works. But I find, and this is probably another essay. I find my spoken voice dictation prose is completely different than my keyboard prose. Like the the thought process putting it together. I think when I'm typing ⁓ or handwriting that's another thing that it was another sign at Parkinson's. I my handwriting got tiny. It's called micrographia. ⁓ but it's a work in progress. Everyone's been really supportive, but it's it's startling and ⁓ it was not something I had planned for this point. So but I asked the Pope about it and he was good. He gave me a thumbs up.

speaker-0: I am I really appreciate your talking about it. I'm sorry to hear about ⁓ you having to step away from your duties at UWM, although I think it's great that you are sort of, you know, doing what you need to do and listening to you know what what you want to be doing at this point in your life. I guess it it's a a foregone conclusion then to say that has maybe changed your sense of ambition or urgency in general around your writing.

speaker-1: You know, it's funny, it has and it hasn't. Like I don't like in some ways in some ways the diagnosis was a relief. It helped explain a lot of things. Like it just there's a whole suite of symptoms that come with Parkinson's and just random things from across. ⁓ sleeplessness is insomnia is another one. Excess of saliva or something. So like all these like random things were coming together. And so ⁓ and anxiety because dopam it's all about dopamine flow and dopamine's controlled. It's inter Parkinson's interrupts the proper flow of dopamine. And so it was a great relief when I was diagnosed to know that it wasn't in my head, like literally it was in my head, but it wasn't something I was imagining. But as far as like how many books I want to do, it also gave me a strange sort of piece about that. ⁓ famous last words, but like if this is my bookshelf, what I've got right now. I'm good with that. And I'm not sure that I would have been if I hadn't been diagnosed, if that makes sense. Once I realize, like, ⁓ someone actually has plotted out this timeline for me, and this is how many books I get to do, then great. That's not saying that I'm not gonna try and write another one. I definitely will. ⁓ but I also want to make the most of my time and Maybe that time is going to involve more sitting on a beach in the sand or biking or volunteering for people with Parkinson's who are less well off than me. It's definitely been a reappraisal time. And it hasn't given me the startling clarity that a lot of people talk about comes with the medical diagnosis. Like I was waiting for that to happen. Be like, ⁓ I get it. The answer to life, it's not just forty two, as we all know, but it's like, It leads me into wonderful conversations like this with wonderful people like you. Thank you.

speaker-0: We had Maggie Ginsburg on the podcast a few weeks ago and and I asked her to give advice to someone looking to get involved in the Madison, Wisconsin writing scene. I want to ask you a slightly different version of that question. You've taught a lot of young writers at UW Milwaukee and elsewhere. If someone in Wisconsin wanted to seriously pursue writing, maybe even publishing their own work, but didn't feel compelled to leave the state, what advice would you give them?

speaker-1: First of all, don't leave the state. We have a lot of great literary opportunities here. So Mass and between Mass and Milwaukee, Eau Claire, now I'm gonna forget. Like right on Door County, where we cross Paths is a wonderful ⁓ platform and opportunity up there. The writers festival out of Eau Claire is also wonderful. But I would advise writers who are looking for something to in Wisconsin is to go to one of these festivals, get the classes, find out where the person's from, and then Talk to them back on their home grounds. For people who are in Milwaukee or nearby, I always recommend Bread Oak Studios with Kim Sir, S-U-H-R. She's wonderful. All Writers Workplace with Kathy Giorgio is also great. For people with first books, Cornerstone Press out of University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is a new and terrific ⁓ new presence on the publishing scene to actually get your book out the door. For poets, you can't do better than Woodland Pattern, which is one of the countries. few poetry only bookstores and one of the largest, it's almost a poetry bookstore museum. They have I joke that they have one copy of every poetry book that's ever been written, which is not quite true, but it's not far from being true. So my first advice to writers is to one move to Wisconsin and then two is to take advantage of one of these great the Arts and Ideas lab and Madison or anyone else like that because it's a great place to get started.

speaker-0: That's a great compendium of resources that you just gave us there. We'll put some of them in the show notes. And I think in all the ways that you have proven to be a wonderful ambassador to Wisconsin, we will certainly claim you as as one of our own. I think at this point. Come on. I meant to ask you earlier, do you go to any of the the church fish fries during Lent?

speaker-1: Not only do I go to church fish fries, my daughters refuse to eat what they call a secular fish fry. Like if we if we go to like the corner store or culverse or something, it's like, let's get fish. Like, no, Dad, it doesn't count if you're not in a basement. That is so true. I've raised you right. So yeah. So I had my Yeah. So I'm I'm partial to the Saint Peter and Paul fish fry on the east side. Saint Seb's and Tosa is pretty good.

speaker-0: Singular thing.

speaker-1: This is what you wanted, right? A rundown Michelin guide to Catholic Future.

speaker-0: Like going to clip this for n Lent next year for sure.

speaker-1: Yeah, you can have me back on. Liam does his ⁓ five minute take on the best fish for I used to have it on Catholic school popcorn 'cause going around the basketball leagues, you had to know where the best popcorn was. And St. Peter and Paul also had good popcorn. I think 'cause the oil was original to the church.

speaker-0: When was young, I played basketball at St. Dominic in Caesar. Uh-huh. So we I I know the church basketball circuit very well. I want to ask you one more question, then we can do a little speed round and and lighten things up. You've now spent decades writing, teaching, publishing, revising, starting over. You know, you hinted a little at this, I think, with some of your new perspective, but what do you understand about sustaining a creative life now?

speaker-1: They were a force.

speaker-0: That maybe you couldn't have understood in your twenties.

speaker-1: That it's a community, that it's collaborative, and that that is actually the secret. I think when I was in my twenties, I thought it was all on my shoulders. And I thought not only was it all on my shoulders, but I had to turn down or resist taking help from anyone else, because that's not how you do it. I thought you did it all by yourself. And one thing that I've come to learn in wonderful ways is that No one does this alone. No one gets published by themselves. No one brings out a book by themselves. Not just because there's a lot of people involved in that process, but there are a lot of people invisible who are involved in that process too. I'm not sure if I'm famous for long acknowledgment sections in my books, but I start the acknowledgement section when I start the book and I keep it in a separate document. And I just add names as they pop up in the process. And I've always done that. I've done that since the first book. And I'll keep doing it for as long as I write because it reminds me that no book no book is an island. We're all working together. And I'm very grateful to all the people who work with me.

speaker-0: I think that's beautiful. All right, wanna do some quick fire here? Liam Kallanan. do you have a favorite place in Milwaukee?

speaker-1: All right, I'm ready. ⁓ Bradford Beach.

speaker-0: Favorite non-Wisconsin travel destination.

speaker-1: Mm, now I'm gonna get in trouble. ⁓ Rome.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Do you have a favorite gas station snack?

speaker-1: ⁓ yeah. Check's mix, but the kind that favors the little pumper nickel toast.

speaker-0: yeah. A book that you return to the most.

speaker-1: ⁓ Adjust Your Life by Chiang Rai Li. Mm.

speaker-0: I know that I'm slowing down my own speed round, but you are by far the best at this so far. ⁓ writers are not always great at pithiness and you are nailing the speed round. So last one, ⁓ I am going to lead you here. ⁓ Okay. Why is Boswell books the perfect bookstore?

speaker-1: 'Cause you can't enter there and not smile broadly. Like it's just wonderful. Because everyone there smiles at you when you walk in and it's got nooks and crannies. Every good bookstore needs nooks and crannies, and Boswell has nooks and crannies, and the biggest nook and cranny is for the kids, which is exactly what it should be. Kids fall in love with bookstores when they know there's a particular place for them in the bookstore that's hidden from everyone else, and Boswell has that perfect.

speaker-0: Liam, I'm I'm such an admirer. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.

speaker-1: Jeff, this is a real treat. I I really appreciate it.

speaker-0: Another big thanks to my guest, Liam Callanan, and thank you for tuning in. You can find Liam's writing online at liamcallan.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or share it with a friend. It really helps. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss new episodes. They come out every Wednesday. You can reach me anytime at jeffaloisia.com/slash writingforward. That's J-E-F-F-O-L-O-I-Z-I-A.com slash writing forward. I'd love to hear from you. Writing for it is recorded with support from Dane Arts. It's produced, edited, and mixed by Anya van Wagtenonk. The theme music is by the Lola Ombre. Logos and episode art are by Tim Burton. Thanks again for tuning in. And the words of Quick Trip employees everywhere. We'll see you next time.