DFW and Richard Powers Q&A, moderated by John O'Brien (December 2000)

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TL;DR

Craft-focused onstage conversation with Richard Powers (Dalkey Archive's John O'Brien moderating), companion to the Pale King fragments reading from the same December 2000 Lannan visit (Santa Fe Institute is mentioned). Best material: the fullest acknowledgment anywhere of Pietsch's editorial role (reordering Brief Interviews made it "450% better"), the reviews-as-eavesdropping doctrine with a bathroom-stall anecdote, the expressive-vs-communicative writing distinction from his teaching, and three "why write" stories (Franzen's answer, the Oliver Sacks Tourettic woman, the upholsterers). ASR transcript.

Key claims

(Speech is paraphrase throughout.)

Ideal reader: when writing goes well it feels to him like addressing a somebody — a somebody suspiciously resembling himself; audience judgment gets outsourced to a tiny circle of longtime readers (three or four, exactly one a relative) who flag exceeded "irritation thresholds or gratuitousness thresholds" — which frees him not to think about audience while drafting.
Pietsch's editing, on the record: the editor improved, by his count, the last four things they made together; he is excluded from the first screen of readers for being an authority figure; and on Brief Interviews: the sequence Wallace submitted differed utterly from the book's — Pietsch built the printed arrangement, which he rates several hundred percent better, and he has genuinely come to lean on him.
Reviews: he doesn't read them (disciplined, he jokes, so long as they stay inside the newspaper), while conceding they are far from matters of indifference — they upset him badly; a review, he argues, is a message from reviewer to potential buyers that simply doesn't include the author — reading one is overhearing people talk about you (illustrated by the men's-room "a couple of writers is all" anecdote from that afternoon). "The Japanese lady haunts my dreams" (Michiko Kakutani).
Scholarly articles: honestly, he's read a few, doesn't understand them, and can't find in his own version of the text any of what they see.
Teaching nugget: expressive writing and communicative writing differ at the root — the thing to get into the nerve endings is that readers can't read minds, and nothing is interesting merely because its sayer says it — bad prose as the dinner-party monologuist producing "expressive expression," for which no listener is required.
Why write: relays Franzen's answer — under the narrative overlay, the truth is simply that nothing else appeals; his own totem is the Oliver Sacks story of the Tourettic woman who absorbs passersby's faces and then "expresses" them all in an alley — something in it resonates.
The upholsterers anecdote: overhearing two men agonize about creativity, industry change, fear of firing — who turn out to be furniture upholsterers; writing, the moral goes, is not substantively unlike most other work.
The good days: you look up and it is impossibly late, and the tiredness is the really good kind (against Powers's serene "I write out of pleasure" — Wallace wishing he were that healthy between the ears).

Themes

Construction/editing (Pietsch); audience and communication (expressive vs. communicative — solipsism in prose form); reception anxiety; vocation and compulsion.

Cross-references

Pietsch on editing IJ: this Q&A is the strongest first-person corroboration of Pietsch's shaping role.
Lopate 1996: reviews-as-eavesdropping, identical doctrine four years earlier.
Frumkes 1999: the reader's-time-is-precious teaching line; attention vs. affection.
Same-evening reading: the Pale King fragments + "Incarnations of Burned Children."
Lipsky: fame/reception self-management in candid form.
IJ connections: the constructed-reader-like-me as the book's wager; expressive vs. communicative = IJ's solipsism/communication theme as a craft problem (Hal's "I'm in here" vs. being heard).

Notable moments (paraphrase)

Pietsch's re-sequencing of Brief Interviews rated several hundred percent better than the submitted order.
A review defined as a message that does not include the author.
The nerve-ending lesson: readers cannot read the writer's mind.
Franzen's why-write answer — nothing else appeals — endorsed as the truth under the overlay.
The good tiredness of a day that got away while writing.