Hey there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Started in 2008, Big Think is a kind of online think tank of big ideas from some of the most

creative thinkers on the planet. On the podcast, we revisit these ideas in new ways. Our producers surprise me

and my guests with short interview clips from Big Thinks Archives, ideas that we didn't

necessarily come here expecting to discuss. I'm very happy to be here today with the writer

Joyce Carroll Oates. She grew up on a farm, tending chickens in what she describes as a very desolate part of

upstate New York and grew up to write around 90 and counting novels and collections of essays and

short stories, many of them while teaching at Princeton University. She's won many, many awards,

including the National Book Award, the Penn Malamud Award, and the National Humanities Medal. Her latest novel, A Book of American Martyrs, begins with a terrible act of

violence and then deals with its complex aftermath. Welcome to think again, Joyce. Thank you.

So, I mean, in trying to describe the plot, like in an elevator pitch sort of, you know, to introduce the show, I, the best I was able to come up with was something like murder of an abortion doctor by a religious zealot as the inciting incident, which is full of, like, it's almost impossible to avoid sort of partisan cliches, which is very far from the spirit of what you're trying to do in this book, it seems.

Yeah, so as a novelist, I almost always try to present different points of view and immerse myself in different perspectives.

I think ultimately one can sense a sort of moral

gravitational pull toward one side or the other in works of fiction, but I think

it's really almost really necessary to give voice to people who are different from

ourselves with whom we don't agree politically. Have you spent time in, you know, I'll confess that I don't, your ovre is very daunting

and I do not know anything near like near the totality of it.

But, you know, have you spent time in the minds of religious zealots like Luther Dunphy before?

Well, I did write a novel called Son of the Morning, which is about a practicing minister,

a young man who feels he has a calling to be a Protestant minister.

The words like zealot are kind of pejorative.

You know, the people who feel the, they feel a great suffusion of certitude and sometimes

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