Andrew Martin (with Mary Gaitskill)

Welcome to the new season of The Writers Institute, the podcast from the New York State Writers Institute and Lit Hub. This is the first episode of five, and new episodes will come out on Wednesdays. In this season’s conversations with writers—who all listen to the institute’s archival sound of writers across decades—a new theme emerges. We’re going to hear, often, about how literary exploration leads us beyond a usual sense of who we are.

“I’m always looking for contemporary literature that’s going to actually tell me what it’s like being in the world now,” says Andrew Martin, author of the new novel Down Time, in this episode of The Writers Institute. Fiction can bring us especially close to the textures of reality, in strange ways. We listen here to the Writers Institute’s archival sound of Mary Gaitskill, reading from and speaking about her novel The Mare, a book that deals with horses—even though, at the time of the early draft, Gaitskill says, “I knew nothing about horses. So I completely invented all the horse stuff. And it was wrong. I mean stuff in there was just completely wrong.” And yet, by working through the unknowns, writers can find their way to something true—in The Mare, for instance, a character considers the world experienced via art as “a place more real than anything in ‘real’ life.”