In today’s episode, author Paul Harding sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and Allie Salazar Gonzales, Development Manager at Freedom Reads. Harding reads from his novel This Other Eden, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. This Other Eden takes place on Apple Island, where the Honey family, descended from the formerly-enslaved Benjamin Honey, has lived for generations alongside Irish immigrants and other people trying to create a new home for themselves. Based on the real story of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, Paul vividly captures the beauty of this island community and its struggle against forced displacement by mainland officials. In this episode, Harding explores the idea of writing into a literary canon and shares his intentions behind the sentence-level construction of his novel. Harding reflects on the process of writing, creating characters, and, of course, what reading means for freedom.
In today’s episode, author Paul Harding sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and Allie Salazar Gonzales, Development Manager at Freedom Reads. Harding reads from his novel This Other Eden, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. This Other Eden takes place on Apple Island, where the Honey family, descended from the formerly-enslaved Benjamin Honey, has lived for generations alongside Irish immigrants and other people trying to create a new home for themselves. Based on the real story of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, Paul vividly captures the beauty of this island community and its struggle against forced displacement by mainland officials. In this episode, Harding explores the idea of writing into a literary canon and shares his intentions behind the sentence-level construction of his novel. Harding reflects on the process of writing, creating characters, and, of course, what reading means for freedom.
Paul is the author of three novels, Tinkers, Enon and This Other Eden. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Paul has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Michener Center for Writers, and Harvard University. He is currently a distinguished professor of creative writing at Emerson College in Boston.
Dwayne (0:00): You’re listening to The Freedom Takes, a podcast from national non-profit Freedom Reads. This season, we’ll hear from the four shortlisted authors for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated readers.
[intro music]
Dwayne (0:27): I am your host, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads.
Allie (0:32): And I am your co-host, Allie Salazar Gonzalez, Assistant Development Manager at Freedom Reads.
Dwayne (0:38): Our guest today is Paul Harding, author of This Other Eden. The novel takes place on Apple Island, where the Honey family, descended from the formerly-enslaved Benjamin Honey, has lived for generations alongside Irish immigrants and other people trying to create a new home for themselves. Based on the real story of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, Paul vividly captures the beauty of this island community and its struggle against forced displacement by mainland officials.
Allie (1:07): Paul is the author of three novels: Tinkers, Enon and This Other Eden. Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Paul has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and PEN America. He has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the Michener Center for Writers, and Harvard University. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. Welcome, Paul, to The Freedom Takes.
Paul (1:37): Thank you. It's a real pleasure and honor to be here with you.
Dwayne (1:41): You know, it’s interesting, cause I’m looking at Danez Smith–he is one of my favorite poets, and he’s a guy, he’s somebody that I really respect, and I see this quote here, “A testament of love so real it can make you weep.” And literally, it was a lot of weeping going on in This Other Eden. It's one of four shortlisted books for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize. Now, you know, you know what the Inside Literary Prize is, but for those listening, this is the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated readers, right? Launched in collaboration with a lot of folks, but primarily it was the Center for Justice Innovation, and it was podcaster Lori Feathers, and it was also the National Book Foundation. Now, look, we got 300 people Inside reading your book, and we’ll send it to more folks, actually some people are already pitching for it to be in the Freedom Library.
We would love for you to read a passage, because this podcast gives folks the opportunity to, like, hear your voice. You know, and particularly folks on the Inside.
Paul (2:40): Yeah, I'd be glad to! This is just a little… I don't think you need to know anything. It's just a scene from the kind of early part of the novel. It's just about the small community of people who live on an island off the coast of New England. They're racially integrated, a racially mixed community. And this is just a passage–one of the main characters, who's a kid named Ethan, 15 years old, he's good at drawing, and so this is just a little episode from his life on the island.
READING (3:21)
“Ethan split wood and fetched water and went to school lessons and afterward he took the pencil and sheet of white paper Mr. Diamond,” who's the teacher at the school on the island, “Mr. Diamond had given him and a flat board his father had found for him and walked to the little bluff facing the mainland. He reached into one of his shirt’s breast pockets and took out a small, dull spoon and a medicine bottle made of blue glass. He arranged the spoon and bottle and a rounded step of the bare granite at the top of the bluff, worn and pitted by glaciers. From the other shirt pocket he gently scooped a dead chickadee he had found by the schoolhouse that morning. The bird was sleek and unruffled, its claws curled and retracted against its body. It was impossible to tell how it had died. Ethan could not believe one of the island cats had not found it first and eaten it. The body had begun to smell in his pocket during school, faintly at first but more it seemed as the morning went along. He laid the bird in front of the medicine bottle and spoon. The noon sun was brighter, more glaring and direct than he'd have liked. He found a stick from a scrub oak and wedged it into a seam in the granite and removed his shirt and draped it across the stick’s branches, making an awning over the bottle, bird, and spoon. He sat on the granite and hunched over and began to draw, starting with the bird. At first the outline of the bird floated curled and dead in absolute white space. Then came the bottle and spoon and the three objects rested on a common invisible plane. Ethan sweated and became hot and distractedly wiped his face and the salty drops that ran down his forehead and hung suspended from the tip of his nose. Wind and surf reverberating against the rocks and through the trees, the noon sun, unclouded and raining straight above, afternoon chores, his father and grammy and sisters and the island itself all dissolved into a single uninterrupted buzz as Ethan drew and found the lines and their weight with the pencil, pushing its tip or easing up, observing the lines darken or lighten, lend the depths or define surfaces, render light bending through the bottle or a shiny little sun pooled in the bottom of the spoon’s bowl, or still being collected in death inside the fine feathers of the chickadee’s black hooded head, stored within them until the flesh they were fastened to perished and they swirled away over the rocks and off the bluff into the air, leaving only a frail little machine of bones. Ethan drew and imagined the earth after the flood and Noah's sons and wives ranging across the plains and cragged hills and wondered whether at first they found the bodies of the drowned everywhere they went, jammed under boulders, slung in the tops of dead trees, splayed on the plains, and what it must have smelled like and the two vultures and two turkey buzzards from the ark taking up their given thrones on the jutting hip bones of the nearest corpses and whether those first months after disembarking were spent piling the dead large and small into heaps and burning them in pyres that consumed families and villages, the people intermingled in the thick braided columns of black, [pungent, fleshy] smoke that drifted up into the sky and across the land and settled back across it in a fine layer of ash in which all the seeds of the renewed world were sown and by which they were all quickened. Ethan leaned closer and worked on the details of the little bird's mask and imagined dark Ham”–that's one of Noah's sons–“at dusk, exhausted from dragging bodies by their ankles and heaping them in piles to burn, angered at not having been able to resist looking at the faces of the dead and trying to guess what children belonged to what mothers, what husbands belong to what wives, what beloved servants to what kind masters, loyal to and in love with every corpse despite what his somber, sober god-struck father had told him about their wickedness, and which he had and still wholly believed, as much as he missed the former world, standing by the radius of embers and bones left from the day's cremations, looking east across the plains and seeing the faint glow of fair Shem’s,” one of his brothers, “blaze at the base of the foothills in the distance, then looking west and seeing the plaited columns of smoke from coppery Japheth’s spires rising near the sea, and missing both his brothers more sharply than he thought he'd ever have been able to imagine after having been shut up with them in that boat for so many weeks.
Ethan wondered, Had God spared those brothers the grim work of clearing the dead from the world? Had he made sure to rinse the lands of that first race of people, every one of them drained away with the receding waters into the bottoms of the oceans where their myriad bones turned and settled in the profoundest depths, sifted and collected around the pilings of the earth?
The island, the Honeys’ own ark, then, except that Noah's ark had come to rest on a mountain and he and his family had scrambled down from the deck and dispersed across the world, across the Hellespont and Arabia, Egypt and through all Africa, across the Mongolian plains and the American west, while the Honeys kept to their own island ark and left it as seldom as possible. When Noah and Japheth and Shem and Ham and their wives paraded down the gangplank onto dry land, herding moose and black bears and setting loons and wood ducks free from their cages, there was not another single soul alive on the planet. It may as well have been another planet.
Ethan drew and daydreamed about the Bible stories Mr. Diamond read to him and the other school children and the afternoon passed and the sun burned his back and shoulders and neck. That evening he had to lie shirtless on his stomach in the grass while Grammy Honey spooned cold tea onto his inflamed back. Charlotte and Tabitha,” his sisters, “sat on either side of him and fanned him with leafy maple branches they'd stripped from a sapling. Later during sweat-soaked bouts of sleep, a nightmare tormented him that he was suffocating within a pile of burning bodies, struggling to turn face up so he could cry out over the clamor of the flaming pyre and boom booming serf to frowning Japheth that he was not drowned, that spared or forgotten, he was not one of the drowned.
Ethan took a fever in the night, and Grammy cooled him with a rag soaked in cold, weak tea. He muttered about Noah and dead families buried in common graves, and Grammy whispered to him “Hush, think of what a glorious month in heaven it must have been while it rained down here, all those people arriving, freed from all the evil their hearts had been set on since every one of them had been little kids.””
Allie (10:22): First of all, that was also one of the passages that I really loved in the book. And I think throughout This Other Eden, what really really stands out to me is the imagery, right? I think we have very iconic moments where, I mean even this passage, just now, right, we start with Ethan and his painting, but he goes into this reverie about this biblical story, and we get other imagery, and it's imagery after imagery after imagery. But it’s not… It’s so well-crafted, like the way that the sentences kind of bring you into it and exactly as you were saying, kind of create this, it’s like having a painting, really, but in your head from, from the way that you–
But, but it's, it's kind of like what I guess, what I'm really trying to say is that we go from painting to painting. And this book felt like I was going from painting to painting to painting. And I've never experienced quite such a journey, one, and two, that's not generally what I'm looking for when I'm reading. And so the fact that, like you were able to pull me in and and keep that, keep–I don't even want to call it a film, but it is almost a film in a way, for me, in how realistic some of the scenes are in my head, and they've stayed with me. I think one of the other moments in the book that really stood out for me, in terms of imagery, right. There are other things that I want to go back to in this passage, but there, there was a scene in the book where Eha Honey is carrying Grandma Honey’s, or Esther Honey’s, rocking chair. And on top of his head. And you get this imagery of like these, almost like these antlers, right? And this chair. And, and the way that that scene is described, like it just…it stays in my head. And so anyway, I just wanted to point–I really wanted to point that out, because I think that that's one of the book’s strong suits and something that I really, really enjoy about your writing, Paul.
Dwayne (12:49): Imma cheat, because I want to ask you a question, like, I actually feel like a lot of writerly stuff was going on in here. So, I teach a class. One of the things I talk about a lot is polysyndeton. And I heard that all in the passage that you read, and what’s interesting about it, and one of the ways in which you move from painting to painting and painting, is it really is about the language, right? And so when you move in from Ethan, and then he goes into this whole biblical reverie, the language ends up matching the Bible. And polysyndeton is when you stack on conjunctions, and it is literally one of the things that's central to identifying a biblical text. And even in the passage that you read, you see how you go from Ethan in a drawing, and then you go to the biblical text, and you can hear and, and, and, and, and, and then you jump out of it, and it returns to Ethan. And I wonder–see, this is like a nerd question, right? Because I think what Allie and both are saying is that the book surprisingly draws in. And I wonder how much you thought about approach when you were doing this, like, because I know you teach as well, how much were you thinking about: yeah, people usually expect certain things from books, and I'm giving them that, but I'm gonna give them something different.
Paul (13:56): Yeah, kind of all of the above. I mean, you know, I teach the Old Testament. I A/B, back and forth, between teaching the Old Testament and Shakespeare. And so the Old Testament, if you know your Bible, you know–you know your polysyndeton and your meiosis and your litotes, you know, all those.
Dwayne (14:19): We was just talking about that [laughs]. Litotes, we literally was just talking about that.
Paul (14:20): And I'm a failed poet, you know. So I love that. And in a former life, I spent many, many years as a drummer in, like, a third rate touring rock band, but so I write prose, in English, the way that I play drums, you know. Which is that, you know, you're the drummer, you're the timekeeper, keeper of time, keeper of narrative. And so you know how to, how to push the tempo, drag back on it, halve the time, double the time. And so when you get that biblical kind of and da da da, and da da da, and da da da–then you start riffing on it, you know. The trick is, as you know, as you know, as you well know, you don't want something that sounds poetic. You want to be writing poetry. It can't just merely be pretty. It's got to actually be beautiful and organic. And so it can take–but I also think that, I mean, this is–talking about nerd, the answer is going to be even nerdier, but, you know, I feel very, very, I'm always, I, you know, like I was saying. I actually think of like it's incumbent, it is a moral and ethical obligation I have to the reader to make the, to bring the reader through the book, almost like you're bringing, you're bringing somebody through a kind of gallery, or kind of a curated, you know. And that it’s incumbent upon me never to coerce the reader, never to, you know, because there's a kind of violence that you can do to readers if you kind of make them consent to certain things in order to be able to fully participate, you know, in the book.
And so, I think that, you know, the thing that to me is an anathema, as a writer, is doing anything like explaining. You know, if you bring the reader, you know, like to–if you're writing about anything that's worth writing about, you're kind of–I feel like you've stepped beyond, you begin, beyond the threshold where anything like explanation is possible. So I think of it as description. That's my job, is to just describe what this is like, what this is like, what this is like, what it looks like, what it's like for the characters. So that leads–I'm going to stick this landing, I promise–so that leads back to writing more paratactically than hypotactically, right? Because the and and the and and the and and the and, lays them out for the reader and doesn't insist that the reader value any one thing more or less than another. So the reader has a freedom as they go through to take what they, you know… To have their own, like– Let it refract through their brain, you know, let them be a part of, kind of, what's going on. If that makes sense.
Dwayne (16:54): Allie, you jump in next, but people gonna get mad if I don't ask you this question. To explain, paratactically, hypotactically. Only because a lot of people Inside will listen to this. And, our aim for this to be also a tutorial, because your book is fascinating for so many reasons, but one of them is that the skill is effortless. But you know that something different is happening, right? And so what you're doing now is telling folks a little bit of–like, I teach figures of speech by Arthur Quinn, and so I spend most of my time talking about some of this stuff, doing my teaching, my classes. And so you right in my alley. You talking about Shakespeare, and the Bible, and the Old Testament. But I want to, I understand what you just explained. But can you explain those two terms to folks so they know?
Paul (17:33): Yeah, well, I know the paratactic– Paratactic construction is when you're putting subjects and objects together in sentences, and you're putting them together in a non-hierarchical way. You just lay them out, and that's where you get the word “and”, that kind of conjunctive that “and”, so it's this and this and this and this and this, and it doesn't subordinate any of the things that you name to anything else. Whereas hypotactical construction of sentences is when you are subordinating dependent or independent clauses underneath and–like you're kind of, you're kind of making a kind of hierarchy or pecking order, if you will, of elements that are sort of subordinated under whatever the subject of the sentence at hand is. Does that sound right?
Dwayne (18:29): Yeah, yeah. And it absolutely is. But the crazy thing is that you flagged a word that allows you to do the equalizing of clauses, and not, kind of, telling what people to think. And I’ll just say the word that allows you to do the other thing is, like, “He went to the river because the river was where people were saved.” Yeah, it's like that, telling somebody why the river matters. “He went to the river and he was saved.” It's a different way of saying the very same thing. And it puts that he was saved and he went to the river on equal footing. Instead of, the river becomes this, this holy ground, you know, where he was looking for salvation.
Paul (19:02): And that's, I mean. One of the most important things–and I was, you know, when I realized the story, the plot, the characters that I had–is that, is that the story, you know, one wrong step in any direction, and the whole thing just turns into self-serving, melodramatic crap, you know. That kind of… And so I, you know the book–you know the terrible thing that happens to the characters in the book happens in about two pages, and the rest of the story is basically, kind of being on the island in this community, right? Because the book could not be about the violence, you know? It's about the people to whom the violence… And even that, that's, that's some hypotaxis, right? You know, like, it's not about the violence, because then it's sensationalistic. It reproduces the violence that it purports to lament, you know? And then it could– So it couldn't be about that, and it could not be…
At the end of the day, I wanted to prevent any readings that gave the sense that the real subject of the book was the reader's self righteous indignation on the parts of the characters, right? So all the stuff we're talking about is then the best writing and the most fully democratic, fully humanizing, soulful, paratactical approach, all of that was going to be the prose that was devoted to the time on the island with the characters. And then there are all sorts of other texts and points of view that you know, that come up in the book, and that's where you get radical hypotactical, you know, and demeaning. The language degrades, it flattens, it dehumanizes. And so that language in itself is a violence against those characters. And I wanted the sense of those shifts, you know, and I wanted it to be very visceral and experiential. So–I think that's the thing too–is just devoting the very, very best of your art and your writing, you know. That to which you devote the greatest care and time and attention is that…in itself creates value, you know? And so moving that around just became, just became one of another, one of a number of, you know, different technical and kind of poetic and aesthetic kind of tools that you know, that you can use to kind of choreograph all the different kind of modes and narratives going on.
Allie (21:36): So in you talking about your approach to writing, right, and not at the sentence level, really, not privileging any one specific image or one specific, let's say, idea, over the other. That's something I felt I noticed as well in the characters, and what you focus in on in the characters. To me, what really stood out about This Other Eden is that all the characters feel fully embodied. There's a lot of characterization that happens in such a short period of time, but everyone gets that characterization. Down to the animals, right?
Dwayne: I was just gonna ask you, did you–
Allie: Yes, right? Tabby, and the dogs, and the three dogs, and they have different personalities. And all of the kids have their own personalities as well. Rabbit really stands out to me, you know.
Paul (22:34): She’s from The Tempest, basically. She wandered into my novel from, like, the Shakespeare play.
Allie (22:39): I love that. Can you talk a little bit more about your approach to characterization? Because I was just absolutely fascinated, and, you know, really took to heart–like I wanted to remember every single character's names. I wanted to really hold them dear in my heart as I read through this book. And I did, and I have so many notes here. But could you, could you share a little bit more about your approach to characterization?
Paul (23:06): Sure. It's sort of, it's sort of, I mean. It takes a long time for me to do it. It took me eight or ten years or something like that, to write this book, partially because I have to get to know the characters the way that you get to know real people you're, so it's sort of like sitting and watching, like, silt build up in a river or something. Because it takes, it takes a long time to make anything like a good character for, you know, just takes a lot, a lot of just–you have to be very quiet and very attentive, and you have to, you can't be presumptuous in any way. And just really sort of get, you know–because you're waiting to hear the characters’ voices and to watch them differentiate, you know. And then over time, you start to realize each character has a certain repertoire of, kind of, perception and speech, you know. And you start realizing, oh, and these words show up for this character, they're not going to show up for any other character, that sort of thing.
And that was just, I mean, I was very, you know… This is a bigger cast of characters than I'm used to working with. And so I was really worried about, like, how do you write, like, minor characters, all this sort of stuff. And again, just goes back to, like, this is why I keep teaching Shakespeare and the Old Testament, because, you know, the minor characters in Shakespeare, he just–one of the things you know is, if a character is only on in the play for two lines, the entire universe depends on those two lines, while that character, you know, the entire, you know, universe, we’re getting that through and by and of and for that character in those two or three lines. And so just, you know, I think, spending a lot of time thinking about, like, wow, how do you imbue, like, a minor character with just, like, oh, this character has this, an entire life, just like any other person even though they don't get a lot of screen time, as it were.
And the same with, you know, there are some characters who are in some, whose parts are, you know, fateful for the islanders, and they could be easily kind of flattened into villains. And I didn't want anybody to be just a straight up villain. I wanted them to be a mix of better and worse impulses. And even that's Shakespeare too, you know. You think about somebody like Macbeth–like one of the things that I, you know, that I always love about Shakespeare's characters, and I always say this to my, you know, students, is that Shakespeare's characters tend to be smart and they tend to be very self-aware, right? So, one of the things that makes Macbeth fascinating to me is that he knows from the second he decides to, to kill the king, that, he knows from the very beginning he's like, if I kill the king, to take it, to usurp the throne, I'm going straight to hell in a handbasket on the express, you know. And that's exactly what happens.
So you have this, you know, this universal human predicament of knowing better, but not acting better. For example, in This Other Eden, as a character, the guy who's, you know, he's kind of a missionary, he's kind of a white Messiah. He thinks he's going to come, he's going to sort of save these people. And he's deeply prejudiced against Black people, and so I just realized one of the ways to make him at least like interesting and not just flat, cut out, cipher, kind of, is to have him know that he was racist. He knows he's racist, and he knows it's absolutely terrible. And there's the feeling nonetheless. You know, that just makes it so you can't just, you can't just, I mean, people may dismiss the guy, but it's like, that's, it's a–it makes–there's more than just one dimension. So he doesn't just look like he's just a device, as it were.
Allie (27:00): I found Diamond compelling. That sounds terrible, right? Because it's like, who– Like, oh, he has these, he's racist, you know? And he's, he's grappling with that, but I think he's absolutely compelling, because that's people in the world. And I think that, in capturing that you really get, I don't know it–I feel like it brought me in. I had qualms about him, but I also, like, found his character, some, like–I wanted to engage with him, you know. And so I think that, ultimately, like having Diamond in the book, really just had me buy into this. And because there are gradations to everything, and Diamond falls on the gradation lines of someone that I don't usually get exposure to personally, in the literature that I read. Things are a little bit more, less nuanced, or we don't really get inside the heads of the people that, again, what you were saying earlier, Paul, people that get written off, and, you know, you’re just like, man, they, they suck as people. So, and, I had a lot, I was grappling a lot with, like, his motivations with Ethan, right, and choosing him to be the person that, kind of, he tries to absolve some of these guilty feelings by being like, if you know, by bringing these people to the island, right, that are going to ultimately evict everyone from their home, and choosing Ethan to be the person that he, quote unquote, like, “saves from this fate,” to absolve himself of his guilt. I really, it made me think a lot of, yeah, his motivations and him as a character. And I think anytime something engages you that way, it's valuable, it's time well spent. It's time well spent with a book.
Paul (29:09): Yeah. I just tried to make it so, again, just like the idea of his being conflicted and, you know? And just you can't just say, you can't just write him off, and you can't endorse him either. I think again, that's almost just again, this is another nerd, you know, but it's partly the way that you can write dialectically, you know. And so you can have, you can have him, on the one hand, saying these terrible things about how he feels about Black people and all that, and then on the other hand, he's the only person trying to help them. And, you know, so you put these, these two things, and neither–you put them next to each other, and what they don't do and what makes it that's, you know, it's as a writer you're like good work, you know, but it's that neither cancels the other out.
Dwayne (29:58): And worse than that–the beautiful thing you did was you–it was this thing I once taught called aporia, where the speaker themselves, they say something and they take it back. And you got to see him, like, actually working out his racism. He's like, “Well, but wait, man, this little girl, she knows more algebra than I'll ever be able to teach her in a year, but she’s Black though.”
Paul (30:18): Right, right, right. Well, other than that, even, I mean that’s what–you just keep sifting down–and then you’re sort of like, and then there’s the other little girl who’s really good at Latin. And you’re like, “Oh, so it’s not the talented tenth, right?”
He also, you know, what another sort of idea that I got, that Diamond came out of, you know–I read a lot of theology. I'm a theology nerd, in addition to all this, you know, I read this Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who, like, you know, any self respecting Swiss reformed Protestant theologian, you know, had a church dogmatics that was, like, 18,000 pages and he never finished it. And, you know, I just spent years reading this stuff. And he was a member, a founding member, of a thing called the Confessing Church, which is a church that was openly, that operated openly in defiance of Hitler during the during the Third Reich. And it was one of the only institutions that actually got Jews out of, helped get Jews out of Nazi Germany. So they were the only few. So he was one of the few people that did, actually did anything during, you know. And years after reading him and admiring him and everything–I'm not particularly religious, but I'm metaphysical, spiritual, kind of guy, you know–I just came across this letter that he had written to somebody, and offhandedly, he was saying to this person, “Well, you'll meet my son soon. And one of the things, you know, thank God he does not suffer the same affliction that I have, which is the visceral disgust I feel whenever I'm in the presence of a living Jew.” And I was like, “What in the–” All those years of reading all that? But then that was, there's that he was aware of it. He said it, but he still, he copped to it, lamented it, but still had that feeling in his heart. And, you know. And then suddenly I was thinking about this guy who I had admired, you know, and then thinking, but, yeah, he was one of the only people that did something to help Jews. And then there you have it. That's real life. You know. I mean, we, you know, think about like poets who I–you know, Wallace Stevens. I love Wallace Stevens, but he is the most racist dude you could imagine.
Dwayne (32:29): You are actually pointing out one of the real troubles with our culture and our society right now. Because I think that thinking about literature and thinking about art. I've read a poem from my book called “At a Station at a Metro”, and I was like, you know, I stole this, this title from Ezra Pound. I mean, he’s a fascist.
Paul (32:48): Uncle Ezra! [Laughs]
Dwayne (32:52): It made me think, right– Like, I mean, but so many people disregard writers. I mean, I wonder if you think about that, Allie, like, you know, so many writers that we just decide that, “You did this thing in the world, and therefore now your art has no value.” And what's really interesting is that you could have never learned that about this person and what you found out about them before you learned the horrible thing drove you to think differently about the world and about what you might do and what you might accomplish. And then even a horrible thing helps you create a character that moved the two of us. But I don't know. I wonder–because we work in prisons, and people say that all the time: what is permissible to have Inside? I don't know. I wonder if you thought about that with your own reading, if we should be rejecting things because of the people who wrote them, or the ideas that they have. And we really confronted that.
Allie (33:35): I don't know–I'm still confronting that within myself. And it's something that I think about all the time. I just actually had this conversation with somebody else um at the organization, um and, you know, we talked about, like both sides, you know, this idea of like the author–finding out these things that they did, and then kind of writing off their work, and the other side being like, you can separate the the creator, the artist, from the art, and both of us not really being satisfied with either. But I haven't come to an answer myself, but I still think that there, there's value. I think almost, there's, there's value in and of itself, inherent to the work that is not necessarily dependent on the author's behaviors, views and so on. And I like to believe that and hold on to that. So that's kind of where I've landed on that.
So, Paul, you know, as a writer too, you're also a reader. We've talked a lot about different books. Can you tell us about a book that has had a big impact on your life, or maybe even just your present moment that you're finding yourself in? And why?
Paul (34:58): Oh, that's like writer on writer crime. I–there's so many books. I mean, I just, you know, I think, like a lot of us, we, you know, you end up walking around with your own sort of personal canon, right? Or several of them. I mean, one of the things that I–to speak to This Other Eden, you know–one of the things that writers talk about a lot is, you know your influences and how you, how do you incorporate your influences? You know, when somebody reads one of my books and says, geez, it sounds like you've been reading some Emily Dickinson or some Moses, and I say, “You bet your bottom dollar I have.” And, you know, so I, you know, one of the things that's been striking me the last few years, that particularly since I was working on This Other Eden, is, you know, if you start with the Old Testament, you start with Moses, right? Moses, all those stories like the, you know, from the, from Genesis, are repurposed older stories, you know. So Noah's Ark comes from Gilgamesh, and, you know, earlier Babylonian, you know. So then, when you, you know, you're reading along. And then you, if you, if you've read your Old Testament, your New Testament. And then you read Shakespeare, and you realize there isn't a page of Shakespeare that is not steeped in the Bible. Like, Shakespeare is just working with that. And then if you say, look at, you know, Moby Dick, and you realize there isn't a page of Moby Dick that doesn't have Shakespeare and the Bible. And then this is this particular–Faulkner. Faulkner has got all that stuff. And then I read Marilyn Robinson. She was my teacher, and I read her book Housekeeping. And I just think I'm watching each of these authors sort of, look at, look at each look past, look, look into the past, at each other. And I'm like, I want people to see these other characters. And as we've been talking about artists, musicians, all that sort of stuff. So to me, they're almost like those Russian dolls, like the books are nested within each other. And I tend to think of them as either like a telescop- telescopically, or like a fabric. You know, it's hard to pull one book out, because every book that's in the canon feels like it's there because it's almost co-extensive with all the other, with all the other books.
And then, since I'm such a metaphysical guy, you know, I love the idea of, like, if I'm looking back at that person looking back at that person looking back, you know, that kind of three way mirror thing, then I get all the way back to whoever made up the first story. And I just imagine turning time around and them being, it's almost being prophetic. You know, it's almost like prophecy, and you can anticipate all those people coming afterwards. And so just again, it's just like, I try to make a beautiful, literary, aesthetic, kind of big, giant figure out of all that sort of thing, and try to get that to… I think that's also another way that you can make a single book or a single poem or single story feel bigger than itself, as it feels like it's porous and you can hear, you know, you can catch glimpses and hear little snippets from a whole other world of art and literature.
But, but that idea of, you know, that–look, it goes back to it, not only art, but literacy is the most powerful thing, because if you know how to read, you have a brain, you know? And you go back to incarcerated people. And giving people who are incarcerated access to literature is giving them access to empowerment, to their intellect, to their soul, to being able to articulate things. You know, you go back to the Confederacy. That's the first thing they did. Get rid of all the schools. Don't let anybody learn how to, you know, do literacy, you know. And now we have what's her name, from the World Wrestling Federation up to the same old baloney bullshit that they've been doing ever since, since their, since bigotry existed, you know. So that's you know who you are as an artist, like you know? My works of art stand implicitly as a contradiction to all that kind of stuff. You know, if they work, to some extent. That idea of what you do find beautiful stands in contradiction to what you find horrific or ugly or dehumanizing or demeaning.
Allie (39:25): So I will preface this next question by saying that you know, the Prize is underway. The judges have been selected, and the orientation sessions with the judges have also been happening. And I had the privilege of joining our library team, our on the ground team, to talk to women–the judges in New Jersey, right–about what the prize is about, and kind of guide their thinking about how, how to approach judging these books. And within that orientation session, I was just floored by the energy that people had, that the judges had for the books. And I talked to this one woman who talked about reading 290 books in the past year. So the judges for the Prize are some of the most voracious readers, really, that you can come across in this country. And so this is a big opportunity for them, but also we see it as a big opportunity for the shortlisted authors. So with that in mind, what does it mean to you for This Other Eden to be shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize?
Paul (40:43): Oh, it's, it's hard to express what it means, because it's… It is just, again, it’s of a piece with, you know, why I try to be a writer. Why I try to write. You know what–I think I'm going to be slightly discursive here, characteristically so, as you can tell. But one of my inspirations, another person by whom I'm inspired, is a person named William Tyndale who made the first translations of the Bible into early modern English. His Bibles would have–his translations would have been the translations Shakespeare read. And this is at a time where–he was one of the few people that sort of grew English up to be able to be equal to the greatest type of artistic expression. And you know, because, and his idea was my, you know, my goal– “if I succeed at my goal, I will make a translation of the Bible that can be read and understood fully by the boy out plowing the field.” And to me, there's that idea that, you know, what I try to do is like that idea of perfect lucidity. I take my readers, you know, to the deepest, most spiritual, soulful, intellectual, beautiful places you can. And that anybody who wants to do it, can. Nothing will, if you have a little bit of curiosity, you know, a little patience, you know, that idea of just accessibility, you know, and just the feeling of these folks who have been incarcerated, their freedom has been taken from them. They're in there, because I should say, you know, I've visited prisons and had, like, book club meetings with folks who had read my first novel, Tinkers. And they were the most attentive, sensitized, sensitive, careful, thoughtful readers I've ever had conversations with. And so just the idea that you know, you can't you know, you can't fool these people. You can't fool readers that are that–you know. And so it's just, it's, you know. It sort of takes your breath away that that many people, readers for the Prize, read it and thought that what I had written was good enough to be included with those three other titles.
Dwayne (43:21): Yeah, I thought about that passage, when they watching, Ethan saying he's ready to go home, and you think about poverty, and it is a line, actually takes me back to this Nikki Giovanni line that I always re-remember as they'll never understand that, that–her line is, “They'll never understand that Black love is Black wealth.” But one of the things that I feel like this book pushes at, is it's pushing at the way in which we determine these racial configurations, and how within a community and outside of community often don't know a thing, and they judge people as if they know it. I think that also happens with poverty and how we think people deal with poverty. And what was kinda beautiful is the description of him using kerosene to wash his hair, and everybody knowing that, because of their living conditions, they had ticks, they had fleas and they had lice. But that didn't mean that they weren't clean. That didn't mean that–that they were sort of sorrowful, that they were just a suffering people. And it was really clear that they were vibrant and had a life and had a community, and you saw it in how they celebrated each other, both when it was something huge going on, but also, you know, magical realism, when the dog grabs the little girl by the gruff of her neck, and slams her outta the ocean, right? I really do think that if you, if it makes you slow down, it does make you weep. And not weep out of sorrow, but weep out of this understanding that there is some solace and some joy and some tenacity in the idea of being alive.
Paul: Steadfast, steadfastness, you know.
Dwayne: And, this takes me to our last question, really, because Frederick Douglas said, I mean, we've been riffing on this the whole time, you know, and yet, still, I think it's important to try to just ask it plain one time, Frederick Douglass said that when you learn to read, we become forever free. And I wonder, you know, what you mean, explicitly, what you think, explicitly, is the relationship between reading and freedom? Especially, because, frankly, you're one of very few writers, I think, who can say that you know they've intentionally gone into prisons and participated in the book clubs and, like, talked to folks on the Inside like that. Most of the time we go to prisons and people have never seen a writer. So I wonder what you think is that connection between, you know, reading and freedom?
Paul (45:32): Well I think it's, it's, I mean, in the feistiest way, it's sort of like you don't have to rely on anybody else to tell you where you think it's at. You can figure out where it's at for yourself because you've read the book, you know. And the more books you read, the more deeply you can read, and the different kinds of books you can read, and you know how to avail yourself of just, at the most literal level, it's just like primary sources, you know, and just again. So it's aesthetic, it's spiritual, it's intellectual. So it's all the things, it's artistic, it's political, you know, profound, religious, all that sort of stuff. But it is, it is. There's nothing to me, like a book, to kind of, you know, it refracts through your consciousness and your soul and and you can think about the angles at which any given thing that you read, you know, how it makes you feel. You know, on a gut level, on an intellectual level, spiritual level, whatever, and it's freeing. You know, to not, you know. Knowledge is freedom, and self awareness is freedom, you know. And so books are continually giving you the privilege of sort of self-enlightenment, self, self-articulation. You get to know yourself more and more deeply, and you get to, you know, so that when somebody says your name, you know, you know what that you know, You know that's my name. Or when you say your name to somebody, you know, you know what that means, what, what's behind that, you know, and we, oh, whatever we could go on, because, you know, that's what you get in the Bible. That's what you get in Shakespeare. That's what you're getting in all the, you know, the idea of who names whom what. You know. And I think the freedom that reading gives you is you can name yourself better and better and better and better.
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Dwayne (47:35): This year, Freedom Reads brought the Inside Literary Prize to 15 prisons across the country, and discussed the shortlisted books with over 300 incarcerated readers, who are judging the Prize.
CIM Judge (47:46): I'm gonna make my pitch for This Other Eden. I love, love this book. I love this book. The prose in here is absolutely tremendous, the imagery that it brings forth, and the layers and layers of meaning. I mean, it has the meaning of a group of people of mixed races, all getting together and living peacefully, not understanding the idea of the construct of race, until the outside institutions come in and say what are you doing–what you are, who you are, as well, also like us, we're on an island that we get outside [of]. We're ostracized just for being incarcerated.
Dwayne (48:33): That was a 2025 Inside Literary Prize and librarian judge at the California Institute for Men.
Thank you for joining us for The Freedom Takes. This season of The Freedom Takes was produced by Sasha Rotko, Tyler Sperrazza, and Madeline Sklar. You can learn more about Freedom Reads by visiting our website: freedomreads.org or following us on social media. You can support our work at freedomreads.org/donate.
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