I'm Michael Silverblot from KCRW and KCRW.com, and I'd like to welcome you into a new year with one of my favorite bookworm episodes from 2020.

May a good book ready you for a year that will be different than the last. May 2021 be good to you.

Funds for bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots! Where would we be without boos? Where would we be without good? No, Tender. It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books? From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm excited to have, as my guest, Garth Greenwell.

You know, he's been on before with the previous book called What Belongs to You?

And yet, his book called Cleanness, I think, is still more extraordinary, and Garth Greenwell began his writing

life as a poet. What turned you to prose? You know, that's such a difficult question

for me to answer because it's so mysterious to me.

I think it had to do with the seven years I spent teaching high school, which I think, you know,

doing that, I discovered a new capacity in myself to be interested in other people's lives

and in the world around me.

And I think it had to do with moving to Sofia, Bulgaria, where I lived for four years, and where I spoke a language other than English every day.

Some combination of those things made me start hearing sentences that weren't broken into lines.

It's really interesting because on the one hand, there is in this new book, Cleanness,

which is a novel divided into stories, kind of, and sections.

Stories form sections.

Sections lead to the novel.

And we're watching the narrator develop his sense of sex in love there in Bulgaria.

And so when he falls in love, it's with someone who is still more frightened about public

expression.

But the prose, your prose, is not frightened of this expression.

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