You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is Dennis McFarland, the author most recently of School for the Blind from Houtin Mifflin, the author as well of the music room.

I thought I'd begin by taking the bowl by the horns and asking, grief seems to be the motivating

subject or force in these two novels, as well as in the short story of yours I read,

nothing to ask for, I think it's a title. And I wondered, does that seem to be, why does that provide an interesting point of origin for you?

Well, let me think for a minute.

You know, mostly it's the kind of thing that I don't set out to write about

grief, but after I finish writing, I reflect that I, once again, I have written about grief.

And I guess, I guess what I think is that rather than feeling motivated by grief as an artist,

I guess I feel motivated more by loss as an artist

than grief follows.

And I'm not sure what all the reasons for that are.

I mean, I suppose that they would be highly personal.

There would be psychological reasons, you know, having to do with my own biography, you know, certain kinds of losses. I know around the time that these particular things were written, for example, we had lost at least two people who were contemporaries of my, my family, you know, people in their

40s and late 30s, and people that were very close to us and to our children. And then a couple

of people who that we weren't especially close to, but who also died untimely deaths.

So it could be that I was influenced by that.

Because it's interesting, although this is not an uncommon or radical structure, in the three pieces I've read, there are people dealing with a present momentum of loss

...