Erica Wagner’s latest book is Wash, a historical novel about Washington Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge.
Show notes:
Learn more about Scrivener, and check out the ebook Take Control of Scrivener.
If you like the podcast, please follow it on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Leave a rating or review, and tell your friends. And check out past episodes of Write Now with Scrivener.
Erica Wagner’s latest book is Wash, a historical novel about Washington Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge.
Erica grew up in New York City, went to university in the UK, and remained there. Her first job was helping her mother answer the fan mail for the Muppets. "My parents worked for Jim Henson just before The Muppet Show became, at the time, the most successful show in the history of television. And I helped out. It was great."
Her career has been around books, and one of her jobs was as literary editor of The Times for 17 years. I asked if, in a job like that, she had time to read for pleasure. "It’s all pleasure. If you have a job like that, you’re very fortunate that the thing that motors you, reading literature, becomes what you do for a living."
Erica has served as a judge for the Booker Prize twice. "In 2002, the winner then was The Life of Pi, which was quite an exciting year. And then in 2014, it was Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which has just been made into a TV series."
I asked how hard it was to read all the books. "That is a ton of reading. Both times, it’s upwards of 150 books in a few months. You can’t complain, it’s not coal mining. There are worse jobs to have."
But is this a fair way to read a novel? "No novel asks to be read that way. It’s kind of antithetical to the project in a funny way. It seems to be the way we found to draw attention to certain books, but it’s kind of unsatisfactory."
Erica has interviewed many writers in her work (she lists some of them here). I asked if there was an author you she hasn’t interviewed that she would really like to interview. "I’m sorry I never got to meet Russell Hoban. Ridley Walker is one of the best novels there is. A person whose work has come to play a great part in my life, and the way he talks about his own work has also affected me strongly, is the composer Philip Glass. I would love to interview Philip Glass. His memoir, Words Without Music, is a great book for any artist to read."
Erica’s new novel is Wash, about Washington Roebling, a civil engineer who supervised the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after his father, John A. Roebling, died. Erica has been carrying around a photostated photo of Washington Roebling that she made when she was 18 or 19. She showed me the envelope and photo. "There’s the little envelope. There’s W-A-R on it."
Just after the title page of her book, there are three lines. One says W-A-R, one says E-W-R, one says E-A-W. I asked what those cryptic initials meant. "W-A-R, Washington Augustus Roebling. E-W-R, Emily Warren Roebling. And E-A-W, Erica Augusta Wagner. Wash and I have the same middle name, among the other things I feel connect us."
Erica wrote a nonfiction book called Chief Engineer about Washington Roebling before she wrote this novel. "I don’t know of anyone else who’s written a scholarly, definitive biography of a person and then written a novel about the same person. As you said, I grew up in New York. When I was about 16 years old, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time and I had an epiphany. I read David McCulloch’s remarkable book, The Great Bridge, that was published in 1972. It quotes from Washington Roebling’s own writings; I have never heard a voice speak to me like that before. David McCulloch says in The Great Bridge, ‘it’s extraordinary that no one has written a biography of this extraordinary man.’ So at the age of 16, I determined to do so."
The structure of Wash is interesting. Erica writes in fragments, jumping back and forth between periods, in a very modernist style. I asked what prompted her to write like that instead of writing chronologically.
"I don’t believe anyone experiences their life chronologically. Of course, we go through the hours and the days and the weeks, but we’re always flashing back to something that happened before or we’re wondering what will happen in the future. If we think about epic, and folklore, and the oldest stories, those stories have less of an attachment to chronology and to a boundary between this world and the other world, which is also something that comes into Wash. I was trying to engage with the life of a person, of people, a man, his wife, his early life, his family relationships, his working life, as it would feel to experience it. Because that’s what a novel can do that I think no other form can."
Erica had told me by email that she was a devotee of Scrivener. "Scrivener doesn’t feel like software to me. Scrivener is like the difference between having an enormous pile of papers on your desk and owning a filing cabinet. The first thing I had to do with Chief Engineer was take all the all my notes and research and start to build a structure through the program. When I used it for Wash, the visual layout of Scrivener enabled me to play with that in a really enjoyable way without ever feeling panicky that I was going to lose something."
I said, "You couldn’t have done this without Scrivener, could you?" Erica replied, "I really don’t think I could. I can’t describe how useful it is to me. Opening up the Binder and seeing that shape, and that there’s just a little structure there. It’s like a chair that supports your back really well. It’s become so important to me."
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.