Transcript for Jayne Anne Phillips and Viet Thanh Nguyen: On Writing and War

Host, Nicole Carroll: This is the Pulitzer on the Road Podcast connecting Pulitzer Prize winners with audiences around the country. I'm your guide, Nicole Carroll. I’m a member of the Pulitzer Prize board and a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.

Each spring 23 Pulitzer Prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama and music. On this podcast, we talk with some of the winners and hear the stories behind their prize-winning work.

Nicole Carroll: Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of six books and two collections of short stories. 

And she received the 2024 Pulitzer in Fiction for her most recent novel, Night Watch, a book set in Phillips’s native West Virginia in the aftermath of the Civil War. As the Pulitzer jury wrote in their assessment of the novel: “The plunge into the 19th century has led Phillips to fashion a wondrous new narrative voice, one both fitting to its period and bewitchingly poetic.”

Jayne Anne Phillips: I think literature is a kind of time travel. Literature tells us the story. And because human beings are narrative creatures, literature can reach them in a way that simply the facts of history cannot.

Nicole Carroll: Night Watch takes place largely in a psychiatric facility, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, that existed in real life. It’s a hospital whose philosophy of “moral treatment” was brought to the US from Europe, by a man named Thomas Story Kirkbride.

The novel centers on a girl named ConnaLee, and her mother, Eliza and it details the terrible traumas they suffer in the decade after the end of the Civil War, especially at the hands of a Confederate soldier, a con man, who they refer to as "Papa.”

As we'll see in a passage Jayne Anne reads from the opening of the book, characters' names, their histories, their identities – are fragile, even disposable, in this traumatized postwar world. But as readers of the book will also learn, healing is possible, and it often comes from unexpected places.

This is the third in a trilogy of Jayne Anne’s war novels that also includes Lark and Termite, about the Korean War, and Machine Dreams, which is about the Vietnam War.

Pulitzer Board member Viet Than Nguyen is also a novelist. He won the Prize for Fiction in 2016, for his novel The Sympathizer, which is a story about the aftermath of the Vietnam War told through the perspective of a communist double agent. And it was recently adapted into a TV show that aired on MAX.

So, on today’s episode of Pulitzer on the Road, Jayne Anne Phillips and Viet Than Nguyen join each other to talk about how they each approach their work, writing about war and the ways knowledge gets passed from one generation to the next.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Hi, Jayne Anne.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Hi, Viet. I want to thank you so much for doing this.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: It's my pleasure. I just loved reading Night Watch so much when it came across our desk at the Pulitzer Board. And your trilogy of novels dealing with war is very much about the devastating effects of war, not just in terms of physical violence and the impact on bodies, but on the impact on families and the impact on people's psychologies and emotions. And Night Watch is very, very much about that. So I'm wondering if you can describe the novel for us?

Jayne Anne Phillips: The novel takes place during the Civil War era. The first section begins nine years after the Civil War. As a young girl, ConnaLee is being rushed into a buckboard by the man she knows as Papa. They're about to take her mother, Eliza, to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, a two-day drive away. And Eliza and ConnaLee have endured a very difficult two and a half to three years. From the time that Papa has arrived at their isolated mountain cabin. He has used the cabin as his own cover – he's a con man – and he has controlled their lives in almost every way. ConnaLee, I think, has been so traumatized that she has trouble remembering her life before Papa arrived. Given that she's only 12, that's not so hard to understand. She's really the adult in the family taking care of the three babies, a set of twins and, and another child that Eliza has born for Papa. And Eliza has drawn almost completely into herself to protect what's left of her, her privacy and her sense of self. And Papa is not interested in going through another winter with three infants. He really takes them to the asylum for his own rest and cure. So it is this family story, but it's very much a story of what it was like to live at that time.

So I'd be happy to read just a little bit of the beginning of the book. It starts out in the first person voice of ConnaLee, the 12 year old daughter.

Just after dawn, we stopped and I sat up. Papa had break the buckboard on a wide dirt road, a railroad track laid to one side and then a thin rush of stream and the back of the town to the other side was a great lawn. It was first light and the stone walls looked more blue than gray. There was the clock tower and above it a spire like a church. No cross. Only a point. “Didn't I tell you?” Papa said “200ft tall.” “It's a wonder,” I said. “Should I walk with her inside?” Papa put down the reins and fixed me in his gaze. “ConnaLee.” He said, “How old are you?” He should have known. But I told him, “I'll be 13 at the end of December. Born after you went away. Born in ‘61, the year both sides mustered troops. Tall for your age, but right Puny. Too skinny for a man to take on. I considered it. But you'll stay with her.” “Here?” “This is home. There's nothing back there. It's all give away. It's give away. Are you listening to me?" "Yes, sir," I said. He leaned down and pointed his finger at me until he touched my throat. Just at the little notch of bone. “And listen,” he said. “I'm not your papa, nor have I ever been. I never laid eyes on you or your mama till I come upon you. And you don't know my name.” It was true. She'd never called him a name. Only at first he made us call him Papa. And she never said different. “So don't be looking for me,” he said, “or tell anyone where you come from. I only rode you here as a kindness. You was walking along the road. And because she's a quality woman and need of refuge. I rode you here. Was on my way. Tell me so.” “You rode us here.” I said. "It was on your way.” “Miss Janet's a quality woman, he said with no dependents nor family. You're not her family, but a servant. Nowhere to go. But with her.” “Sir?” I said. “Times is hard,” he said, and flicked the reins. “You'll tell the story.” The wagon was moving off and his words drifted back with the dust.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Mm. Why did you decide to read this passage in particular for us?  

Jayne Anne Phillips: Well, I don't want to read spoilers for those who haven't read the book yet, but I think it sets the tone of the book. There's a lot of confusion, chaos, mystery. ConnaLee has embarked on a journey that she has no idea where she’s going and certainly that’s the case with us. We have no idea where we’re going.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: With that opening scene and the wagon and being introduced to these characters, I was certainly disoriented in a good way. Like, who are these people? What are their histories? Why are they here? And so on.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Mhmm. I think the moral center of the book is really this idea that there are those nameless, forgotten individuals who are moral fulcrums, no matter what threat or loss they suffer or what period of history they may live within. And namelessness is certainly a theme in the book. Even before the Civil War, ConnaLee, Eliza, Dearbhla and her adopted son keep their family names secret for reasons that unspool in the novel. Night Watch is a character who does begin life as Dearbhla's adopted son and is raised by her. But he loses and gains names repeatedly. He has always understood that the world sees you one way while you, as a private consciousness, may be something quite different. And the whole time I was kind of writing this book, I was thinking about Rembrandt's famous painting. I think it was painted in 1642 called ‘The Nightwatch’. It pictures in this kind of cavernous, dark space. Several men dressed in amazing large hats and, and in fact, they are each the nightwatch of their individual cities. So I think the idea of night watch or keeping watch is something that has to interface with us as individuals and in communities, uh, that we need one another for that kind of moral protection.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: You know, whenever I hear the word asylum and its relationship to literature, I can't help but think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which I know the movie – not the book – I watched the movie when I was in high school. That's sort of the popular image of the state-sanctioned asylum in this idea that the treatment of its inmates is inhumane. And in your novel, of course, it's [a] more complicated depiction of the asylum. And even in the version you've given us here, this particular asylum seems in some ways to be a state of the art at the time in terms of how to treat mental illness.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Yeah. Thomas Storey Kirkbride created the concept behind my version of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum when he imported moral treatment and began to make it the preferred mode of treatment in asylums in America for some 20 or 30 years. And the postwar era. The Civil War. I think something like a sixth of the population of men had been killed. There was scarcity of every resource. There were political lies and conspiracies. And people were struggling. Everyone was struggling. And because of moral treatment. And Thomas Storey Kirkbride, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum offered a kind of refuge in which people were protected from the outside world. That was part of the whole concept of the asylum as a refuge. And Kirkbride’s insistence was that each patient have their own room and that the whole facility serve no more than 250 patients. He also imported moral treatment from Europe, which was a refusal to restrain any mentally ill person. Each was assigned a regimen which had to do with activities: work around the institution if people wanted to do it, carriage rides, croquet, that were summer houses on the lawn. The town was invited to the great lawn each Sunday. They were encouraged to mix with the patients. And the irony of the fact that life during this postwar period, and certainly during the war, was extremely brutal is a kind of relief for the fact that the asylum itself was an incredible refuge. It did allow healing. And moral treatment is such an interesting idea that I actually called the novel that at one point. It's just so interesting that the institution was for a period of 30 or 40 years a very different place from the asylums we think of. Of course, by the time Kirkbride died, his methods had been completely discredited. But there are still many Kirkbride buildings and asylums all over the country, including one in Buffalo that's been made into a hotel.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I stayed there as a matter of fact.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Oh my gosh.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: On book tour.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I was particularly struck with Night Watch that one of the central settings of the novel is the asylum. And it's a real historical setting, but it seems like visits to actual places might be important, too. I remember in my own work dealing with, you know, the war in Vietnam and its consequences, it was really crucial to visit battlefields, cemeteries, places like that, in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, South Korea, to get some physical feeling for the place, to get some sense of not just what's described in words or pictures, but also the environment, the atmosphere, the weather, the people, things like this. Has that been important for you, like, the actual encounter with physical places?

Jayne Anne Phillips: Yeah. Been very important being in the asylum. Looking through the same windows that patients looked through, and walking the battleground, walking the ground where the battle of the wilderness took place. I think it's very important. It's sort of soul research in a way. And of course, the Civil War is so long ago that I was not seeing at all a landscape that resembled the original landscape. But in the asylum, it was as though no time had passed. If I was alone walking down these corridors. 

And in fact, my grandfather in the 30s died there. He did not have a mental illness but was suffering from tertiary syphilis, having been a philanderer all his life. And my mother and grandmother during the Depression had no money to get him treatment. And so they committed him to the asylum. And he only lived about three months before he died there. I found out the truth of the situation by going to visit the asylum when I was, I think, maybe in graduate school [and] it was still open in a very limited way. And I went up to the window and asked the clerk if she could give me my grandfather's records. She said no, but if you want to step into that room over there, I can read them to you, they're very brief. But with this book, I visited the asylum several times. Every time I went home, so to speak, and took some of the photographs myself. Photographs are so important to me in researching books. That I wanted to include them. And the various documents that I found through historical agencies really backed up the book.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Does the awareness in your part of the, the people that were there and the history that took place leave an emotional trace for you to pursue?

Jayne Anne Phillips: I think, yes. I mean, I still feel it. And I felt as though the time in which Night Watch takes place was a moment of grace in this institution. It was a time when, as the photographs show, they were served their meals on white tablecloths with linen napkins in each glass and the picture of the summer houses on the lawn. It's just an unbelievable idea that such a refuge could have existed when the people outside, many of them were really suffering.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Mmm. In writing a novel, plotting is crucial, setting is crucial, but so are the choice of characters. And how did these particular fictional characters that you've decided to focus on in Night Watch emerge for you, particularly the female characters ConnaLee and Dearbhla, whose voices really drive the story?

Jayne Anne Phillips: I think writers in general and women. They have a kind of power as spies because people don't notice them. People don't take them into account necessarily. Women are quite accustomed to observing very, very closely in order to have any effect on reality. I mean, it is women who run the world that the politicians and the soldiers and everyone else involved in the actual devastation of war. They sort of abandoned their non-war roles. So when I first thought of this book, I simply started with that first scene where this child, ConnaLee, is being rushed into this buckboard. And Papa’s voice was right there. I think I had done enough research and I had sort of tried to live inside the time enough that I felt I had found a way for them to speak that was believable, even if it wasn't completely correct. And we first hear of Dearbhla. in that same beginning. But when I was writing that, I really had no idea who she was except that she was this granny neighbor. It's almost like tunneling my way into a book rather than writing it. The way that a novel starts for me is, I write a section, it might be three pages, it might be 20. Many times that beginning ends up at the end of the book or the middle of the book. But many times I'm so self-censoring that the words I end up with in the beginning are exactly the words that are in the novel. But it's more about intermixing periods of time and layers of reality and a kind of evolving revelation of secrets. I wanted the secrets in this book to continue to reveal themselves throughout the entire book. Not that there would be a kind of turning point, because I do see it as a very intergenerational book. I feel that, you know, we're born into the unresolved emotional traumas of our parents. They may never be stated, but we take them on and in turn, I think we pass them on to our children, some version of them. And we have to warn our children about them and try to frame the past for them, because otherwise they really have no idea.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Your comments about the generational transmission of knowledge strike me very personally, too, because I think constantly about what I have absorbed from my parents in terms of what they've been through historically, but also just as individuals with families.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Mhmm.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: And I think about what am I supposed to transmit to my children in terms of family knowledge, in terms of emotional abilities, and disabilities as a result of how I grew up, and about how much of the world they should know about. I mean, if we look at these three novels, Lark and Termite and Machine Dreams, they're dealing with the Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. My vision of these wars is that they're cyclical in American history. They're structural. They're a part of who we are as the American people. And I get a sense that maybe you think of these wars in the same way as well. And your work is not necessarily about the big geopolitical questions, although I think they're there, but they're very much focused on the intimate details of what wars mean for families, for the people who go off to fight them, the people who survive, the ones who are left behind. And then again, yes, the generational impact that these wars have and how that knowledge should or should not be transmitted.

Jayne Anne Phillips: That's exactly true. And I think war, particularly when it's fought in one's home, in one's country. Not only does it often rob individuals of their names, it robs them of any sense of control. And there's also, though, particularly with the female characters, a sense of amazing resilience. I think the end of the book presents this kind of triumph. And I think that we’re all going to – because of the nature of mankind – we're all going to experience trauma and God knows what is coming in terms of hurricanes, climate disasters. We don't know what is coming. But we can only really control our own responses and an insistence on a kind of emotional connection and survival.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: That was the word I was going to use, survival, as a novelist and a cynic. I don't like the word hope.

Jayne Anne Phillips: [laughs]

Viet Thanh Nguyen: But I think that the end there is survival, the survival of the species, the survival of individuals within families.

Jayne Anne Phillips: There's a survival of love.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Of love. Yes. 

Jayne Anne Phillips: In my books, there is a kind of almost clairvoyance within the text. I was quoted once as saying, I would love there to be a huge newspaper headline that just says ‘Love Defeats Death.’ Because in some of my books I actually have characters who go on beyond their deaths to remain present in the book, which I think is very much like life. I mean, if we are very close to a person and I'm sure this is probably your experience, you hear the voice of those who are gone, you know – what how they would respond in a certain situation. As long as you're alive. They are, in a sense, alive within you. And I find that to be the most amazing thing about human beings.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: That is something that you also can do as a novelist that we can't necessarily do in real life. You know, you use the word resilience and the people who are left behind, come from communities and build communities that allow them to survive and to pass on emotions and so on. I think that's one of the really important features of these novels, an intense focus on community. Your novels are very much rooted in region and in communities that arguably might have been neglected in mass American narratives and, you know, dominant American mythologies. Has that been an important factor for you in in terms of making sure your works are geographically–

Jayne Anne Phillips: Well, yes, it always really irritated me that I would meet educated people who had no idea that West Virginia seceded from the South in order to fight for the Union. They have no idea of the place either, of course, but I wanted to make that very very clear in Night Watch. As ConnaLee says, “Papa’s for the South, and I’m for the Union and I’m sure Mama is with me.” That was a kind of way of making a record public.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I've read a lot of war novels, American war novels, most often written by men – simply because that genre of the war novel and however we choose to think about it, you know, there there are certain boundaries to the generic definition – you know, they often tend to be focused on the combat experience, the experience of men who've gone off to fight or the journalists who cover them, or the politicians or the generals and so on. Your novels, I think, are war novels. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if you agree with that classification. I think that's one category under which these three novels could fall.

Jayne Anne Phillips: I definitely consider them war novels.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: And I’m fascinated by them because the actual wars themselves only occupy a fraction. I mean wars in terms of combat occupy only a fraction of these novels. You know, your novels – I mean, the three that we've been discussing so far – are very much about what leads up to the war, what comes after the war. The fact that the war leaves a wreckage that people have to cope with afterwards, whether it's the physical wreckage of the war in Korea or the emotional wreckage left behind in families. I think about how in Machine Dreams, for example, we start basically with World War II and a father who has to go off and fight as an engineer, and then we end with his son, who has to go off and fight in the Vietnam War as a helicopter door gunner. And in between, there's this unfolding of the family drama and of the life of the community. And to me, it seems very obvious that this is a strategy on your part to talk about how interwoven war is with the fabric of domestic life and with the life of the country, but in ways that are so disturbing that I think most Americans, if we're just to talk about the U.S. and its war novels, most Americans don't want to confront that reality. I mean, I think they're perfectly fine going to watch movies and read books that are about the combat. But I think your books are actually more disturbing because they're talking about how the wars, they’re just embedded in our nations and in our families, and we can't get away from them. And the combat, although devastating, is in some ways the less interesting part of the story in your novels.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Not less interesting, but I only need to show up there once. It needs to be visceral and sensual and real in terms of those scenes of war and how they impact the perceptions of the soldiers. But in this book, so much of it, too, is about dealing with this sort of three generations, each death in war. The one who has lost, the children, the family of the one who is lost, the children of those people who have been traumatized by their loss. And then there's another war. I mean, I think war is just such a cyclical poison, not only in this country, but in so many countries. In any country that gains power – in any country that gains enough power to found a colonial kingdom, which is another kind of trauma – [it] really speaks to the importance of the artist. I think particularly [of] the importance of literature. I think literature is a kind of time travel. Literature tells us the story. And because human beings are narrative creatures, literature can reach them in a way that simply the facts of history cannot.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: As a writer myself, and in particular, writer of fiction and nonfiction, of course, I'm predisposed to believe in you and in the idea that stories and narratives matter both both in terms of doing exactly what you said, which is to talk about war and power in a very different way than the powerful would would talk about these things. But also, of course, stories and narratives are really crucial in determining how we remember wars and why we would justify going into future wars. We live in a society in which the arts and literature are devalued, generally speaking, but yet in which the power of the narrative is so crucial in terms of determining what we do as a country. That's the optimistic view. And of course, as writers, we have to believe in the art and the power of the story, the narrative and so on.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Well, and so few people read. That's why, I – you know, I find The Sympathizer such an amazing, transformative book about war, because everyone goes to the movies and the movies are often just another form of propaganda. But yet in The Sympathizer, you kind of skewer movies and myths at the same time that you bring a kind of reality into this kind of illusion of a movie being real and you have the protagonist on the movie set – just amazing. And I'm only hoping that everyone who saw The Sympathizer on television recently, which I loved, are going to read the book.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Thank you for that. In reading literature, one of the things that is comforting in some ways is the realization that all the tragedies and horrors of our present age have all happened before and people have survived.

Jayne Anne Phillips: They've happened before. But it's also like in an apparently meaningless world we’re searching for meaning and the artist finds it because they're able to work with these elements in the same way a sculptor works with clay or painters work with color. The idea that writers work with these just small little two dimensional symbols that can be sort of combined in different ways to make words and then sentences. It's just an amazing thing. There is something much bigger than our own life, much bigger than our own lives and our own perceptions that's constantly surrounding us and sort of moving through everything. And I think the more that we can perceive that, I mean, I feel as though the writer, you know, sits down every day and opens the channel. And there were so many days when you kind of plod along. I was a very, very slow writer. And, you know, life intervened. I mean, there would be ten years between my books and people forgot all about me, believe me so that my publishers often complained to me that they had to reinvent me again each time, but there are some times when you kind of connect to something that's larger than your own personality, that's larger than anything you could know about. And it happens inside this act of writing. I think that's miraculous.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: You describe yourself as a slow writer, but you've created many books over the course of your career in your life. And I think that's the focus that maybe young writers may not have as much of an understanding of that reading and writing are marathons. They are like these lifelong endeavors that we commit to, and the experience of the individual moment can feel long and arduous, but that's nothing compared to the actual lifespan of what a writer needs to do. And I've certainly taken ten years and more to write some of my books, and it is a process that I would not wish upon anybody. But it is a process that for me helped to turn me into the writer that I am, because I do struggle with all of these various kinds of aesthetic and spiritual personal issues. What was it like for you and what was happening during that ten-year period and why did it take ten years (if that’s what it was) to write Night Watch?

Jayne Anne Phillips: I was working full time at a very demanding job and I was commuting from one city to another city. I had, I don't know, so many things to deal with from trying to raise money to dealing with all of the things that come up in academia. Let's see, Machine Dreams was 1984 and I don't think Shelter came out until 1994 and in that period of ten years, both my parents died and both my children were born. So there's all of that part of life. And as someone who needs to be alone in a house, alone in a space to write, it's sometimes just hard to find that time. And for many years, I wrote my books at literary residencies, either at MacDowell or Yaddo. Bless them. Because I simply couldn't create that space for myself that had the kind of privacy. And in the case of Night Watch, I think it was just I was kind of going for broke in a way. I was trying to do so much and there were points when I just didn't know where to go with the book. And during those times, I basically focused on research, which was such a pleasure. And it really wasn't until I retired from my academic day job, which happened in January of 2020. And then the ensuing two years of kind of panic and isolation and not knowing what was going to happen, I think I almost took refuge in diving into the book. And it was during that period of time, children gone, husband at work that I was able to find my way through it.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: And you've had a very long career. You know, you began your writing career at a really young age in your 20s. And I'm jealous because in my 20s I couldn't even write a short story. But you were already publishing books by the time you were 26, I think. And you were receiving early recognition for these books. You know, it can be really hard to sustain a career for that long, especially when the the attention is being being paid to you at a very young age, when for a lot of writers that and for a lot of human beings, it could be really hard to deal with emotionally in your 20s to confront the gaze of society and the literary world on you. But you've kept at it and you've received now for Night Watch the Pulitzer Prize. But looking back at this arc of your career, would you have any advice to give to your younger self? And if not to new writers, upcoming writers?

Jayne Anne Phillips: My advice for young writers is simply to read. Like an addict, you know, constantly, deeply, broadly, that if you find a writer that you see as an ally, read all of his or her books and read books from every, every consciousness, every corner of the globe. There simply is so much to know. And I think that, you know, we learn to talk by listening. And I think we learn to write by reading. You need to read all the Russians and books from the African diaspora and books by trans writers and books by women and books by everyone. Particularly, the literature of war, I think. And often you want to read the books written by those who didn't win the wars.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: If we're talking about war, I'm just continually amazed by the kinds of facts that I come across. And we tend to remember wars very broadly because we collectively, as nations and as individuals only have so much space to retain stories that tell us something about something as central and as terrible as wars. And so I'm continually amazed coming across stories even from wars that I think are researched fairly well and realizing, oh, here's another human fact that I never thought about. And that gives me, as a writer, tremendous hope. I think that my work is potentially inexhaustible because human experience is inexhaustible. And so there will always be more stories to tell, even if we think we've already told enough. So when I was writing The Sympathizer, the story I was hearing from agents and publishers was, “Well, we've had enough Vietnam War novels. We don't need any more of them. The market is saturated.” And of course, what they were saying really was we've had enough novels by white men about the war in Vietnam. And I knew that. And so that just made me angry that there were so many more human facts out there that needed to be told, including the handful that I could collect in my own work.

Jayne Anne Phillips: I wish that we could somehow put something in the water that would incite addictive reading among the population.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: I do take hope in the fact that even if people are not necessarily reading the so-called great books, whatever those are, they're still reading a lot of books.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Mhmm. I simply hope that literature wins out over propaganda, information and conspiracy. I feel as though right now this is the time in which, what writers write, literary writers, what literature does. Is just all important.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: In 1980, you participated in a New York Times collection of responses to the question “How is fiction doing?” And at that time, you had just published your short story collection Black Tickets in 1979, an influential collection that writers still talk about. And so you wrote a very particular moment in your life and in your writing, maybe a foreshadowing of the triumphs of your later career or your ongoing career. But in your response, you said “American writers in particular must concern themselves with a history of the spirit in personal and (intrinsically) national terms, with an exploration of what survives as American.” That was 44 years ago. Do you still feel this way now?

Jayne Anne Phillips: Absolutely. [laughs] I'm surprised I said something so cogent, but–

Viet Thanh Nguyen: That means that you already had a sense of wisdom about what you were doing and where the entire arc of your vocation would lead you. You know?

Jayne Anne Phillips: Even though I hadn't started it yet in the sense that I had only written short stories so that I had not descended into that particular agony. It's just like the high wire trapeze act without the safety net. And I also – I would tell students it's it's the metaphor of putting on the asbestos suit and walking into the flames or the image of the sort of space movie in which the astronaut is tethered by a long cord to the spaceship and something happens and the cord snaps and the writer just drifts off. So that's – those are the kinds of metaphors I associate with writing, and I love that they're life and death and they're so intense. And I feel as though writers do walk into the flames, the personal, the interpersonal flame. And certainly, I feel, too, that literature is a refuge. I certainly couldn't live without it.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: How have you thought about yourself as a writer in relationship to the whole tradition in history and canon of American literature?

Jayne Anne Phillips: Oh, I certainly don't think about that [laughs]. People have sort of asked me, Should you be aware of your audience? Should you be aware of who's listening? Should you be thinking about your audience? And I say absolutely not. Keep the audience out. It's only you and the book. For me, the incredible secrecy of working on a book for five years or ten years or whatever, that's the thing that makes it work. I don't know that we as writers can separate our voices from the cacophony. But I think it's prizes like the Pulitzer that really help and support one writer's vision after another. And I'm very honored that this book happened to win the prize. I just want to continue to participate both as a reader and a writer, because it is the most celestial as in terms of you're lying there looking at the night sky – the night sky of your mind is really inside, for a writer, the work you do. It has a kind of limitlessness to it that, you know, is really the reason to keep doing it.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: For writers, literary prizes mean a lot. They have a material and emotional impact. So for you, the Pulitzer Prize. Where were you when you found out and how did you react?  

Jayne Anne Phillips: Well, after I retired from academia, I kind of retired from the constant emails that came in to me as someone who was a professor and the director, an administrator of a program. And I only check email or at least then I checked email maybe once every couple of days. And I was about to go out to my little balcony garden and transplant some plants, and I checked my email and there was a kind of a subject line from my editor's assistant that said, ‘You won the Pulitzer Prize!!!’ Three exclamation marks. And I was writing him back. ‘Are you kidding?’ And then I saw a couple of other emails that just said, ‘Congratulations’ in the subject line. And then my editor called me and she was just over the moon in a way that I probably don't allow myself to be. But she's been my editor for some 35 years, and she had delayed her own retirement to see this book and one other book through the publication process. And she said to me, ‘You're my first Fiction Pulitzer.’ And that phone call was just an amazing experience. I feel as though I've been able to tell more people about the book that many more people have read Night Watch, that many more people are thinking about the cycle of war and its place in American history. And my life is much busier because of the Pulitzer and a lot of great ways.

Viet Thanh Nguyen: Jayne Anne, thanks for sharing so much of yourself in this interview, but also, of course, in your writing.

Jayne Anne Phillips: Well, thank you so much for reading my writing in such an incredibly Intuitive way.

Nicole Carroll: That’s it for this episode of Pulitzer on the Road.

Thank you to Jayne Anne Phillips, the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Fiction winner.

And thank you to author and Pulitzer Board member Viet Thanh Nguyen.

For more details about this work and the work of all Pulitzer winners, please visit our website at www.pulitzer.org. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Pulitzer on the Road is a production of the Pulitzer Prize Board and is produced by Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios.

This show is hosted by me, Nicole Carroll.

Our senior producer is Justine Daum.

Natalie Peart is our associate producer.

Our executive editor is Joel Lovell.

The head of sound & engineering at Pineapple Street is Raj Makhija.

This episode was mixed by Marina Paiz, with additional audio engineering by Pedro Alvira.

Music licensing by APM.

Editing, promotion and other support by Pamela Casey, Edward Kliment and Sean Murphy. Bari Finkel and Marjorie Miller are our executive producers.