Perhaps this sounds like Saunders has reached his old prophet stage and is yelling truths from a carved stone tablet, but it is not that at all. Saunders remains allergic to the polemical. In the past, sitting down to didactically write about things that angered him led to failed stories, he says. Saunders, who describes himself as a progressive with all the expected progressive opinions, but who, on a casual basis, lacks the skill to articulate those opinions any better than anyone else, chose to let any commentary on the present time bubble up organically during the writing process.
“I’ve always just said that if I try to live with my eyes open, try to develop my politics and my moral, ethical views, then somehow slant-wise that’ll get into the stories,” he notes. “…(I) just approach these things as craft objects, as aesthetic little scale models trusting that everything you know and believe and are confused about will titrate into them, and probably not in ways that are discernable necessarily except maybe in increased truth.”
Read the rest of the discussion on the PORT website: George Saunders: Still Evolving
