Brooks When Small Rain came out, I bought the book at Three Lives in the West Village, where you were doing a reading and signing books. 

Greenwell Yes, I remember that. 

Brooks I have the book right here; it was September 6, 2024. I read the book, but it was such a busy and distracting time for me, as just weeks earlier I had moved to Los Angeles. So I recently revisited the book by listening to the audiobook, which you read yourself.

Greenwell Yes, that’s right. I do.

Brooks You are so familiarly in my mind, as we are speaking now, because I’ve been listening to you for days.

Greenwell Oh!

Brooks It was beautiful. I have many things to say, but I’ll start by saying that there were some aspects of the book that I found so difficult to read and to listen to. I'm specifically thinking about all of the medical descriptions, the descriptions of the protagonist’s illness, and what was happening to him. It sort of reminded me—and it's been a long time since I read it, so this could be way off—of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. 

Greenwell Oh, interesting

Brooks There is just this sort of feeling of impending doom and dread. The narrative and the circumstances in Small Rain are very different than The Road, of course, but in both novels there is this undeniable, unavoidable force that loomed in the background, or perhaps it loomed in the foreground. Was that aspect of the book particularly difficult to write?

Greenwell Oh, yeah, absolutely it was. I knew when I embarked on the book that I had to go wherever it was going to lead me. I knew it was going to be difficult, and it was difficult. There's a way in which this book is similar to my first two books; I've talked about writing about the body in crisis, and sex is one kind of crisis, and illness is another kind of crisis.

Brooks Yes, I see that.

Greenwell I really feel a kind of ruthlessness about writing and art making. If I catch sight of something, something that has value, I'm going to be really ruthless about chasing it down. And that ruthlessness extends to the reader, but it also extends to myself, in that the art that I care about most is art that is willing to take me to places I often don’t know that I want to go to. Writing this book was hard, and I also knew from the very beginning that I had to do it.

Brooks As someone who also makes art, I know that you do have to be ruthless. If there is something you feel compelled to write about or to make, you can't be squeamish about it.

Greenwell That's right. I do feel that there were aspects of this realm of experience of existence that I had not really seen represented, which doesn't mean they're not represented, but I just hadn’t seen them, and it seemed to me that I didn't have many reference points for them, and that's what I felt like writing. A really important piece of writing for me is Gospodar, the second chapter of Cleanness; there's a lot of literature about BDSM, but I had not read something that approached that experience with the same kind of…I don't know, intensity or relentlessness of Henry James, some sort of transcription of experience. I felt something similar about illness, that I had not really read what I wanted to read about it, and when I write, I often find myself saying to myself OK, if you're going to do this, you really have to do it.

Brooks You really did it. The writing about the illness and the medical aspects of the novel were beautifully written and very compelling. The difficulty was not because it was boring or not well written. It was just hard. It was hard to move through because it was hard for the protagonist to experience. 

Greenwell There are some experiences in the Small Rain, like fear of death and pain and discomfort, that were hard to write, but the hardest thing to write is kind of always a surprise to me. The hardest thing to write in Small Rain was a scene where the narrator is being bathed and he just looks at his body and describes his body. That's one of the hardest things I've ever written, and it really did feel like jumping into the abyss. When I was writing that, I remember my friend, the photographer Mark McKnight—whose representations of bodies I find incredibly inspiring—would text me and sort of check in because he knew I was doing something really difficult. I was so grateful for that. 

Brooks Is that the passage where towards the end it says I could have loved it all along?

Greenwell That's right.

Brooks I found that very moving. I'm sure that was hard to write, as someone who has, from a very early age, always struggled to love my own body. I used to consciously think I just don’t want a body. I wondered if I could have consciousness without this physical thing that exists in the world for people to look at, and judge, and make assumptions based off of what they see. My disdain had something to do with being categorized or being named in a way. I always want to resist that. A body is, of course, the physical manifestation of existence.

Greenwell That’s right. 

Brooks I know Small Rain is a work of fiction, but, there are elements of the narrative that are based on fact, based on your own life, based on lived experience. The protagonist's personal medical crisis lies at the center of the novel, but the COVID pandemic looms in the background, and sometimes in the foreground. As I was reading, I kept thinking about Camus’ The Plague, but also Death in Venice, both of which feature disease as a kind of ghostly character, unseen but omnipresent. Your inclusion of COVID in the novel feels particularly important to me given that as the severity of the virus has lessened, our collective memory of that time has blurred the truth. Over 1.2 million Americans died of COVID, the most of any country, yet there are those who are constantly gaslighting us by telling us that it wasn't that bad or it was altogether fake. Your decision to situate this narrative within the pandemic feels important in ways related to to literature, but it also feels political; I think it’s an important record of this time that we all lived through that is so near to us, yet the truth of it is already quite fuzzy. 

Greenwell It's such an extraordinary phenomenon, this forgetting, this desperation to look away from this major thing that happened, this huge trauma that continues to shape our world in all of these ways. It was a huge disaster! Yes, there was the medical disaster, but there's also the social disaster, and the fact that kids lost a year of crucial time in school. Now we’re seeing the effects of that in higher education. Peoples’ lives were torn apart by this. I do think it's an understandable response to trauma that one wants to look away. The most common thing that people say on Goodreads is like, oh, I avoid books about COVID. If I had known this was a book about COVID, I wouldn't have read it. Then there are a lot of people who say, well, this book, it takes place during COVID, but it's not about COVID, don't be scared away by it. It's such a fascinating thing. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, when people were searching for something to compare it to, some context, some way to understand it, and people were talking about Spanish Influenza, so many literary people were saying, where is Spanish Influenza in literature? Where is, in literature, this huge traumatic thing that killed so many people? There's almost no record of it in literature, and I feel like now we're seeing why, because there's just this desperation to forget, not to confront it. 

Brooks Yes.

Greenwell It is interesting to think about this book as political; I think all of my books are political, not in the sense that they have a political program—which they very decidedly do not—but in the sense that my project is to try to write what it feels like to be an embodied consciousness, to put on the page what a certain texture of existence is, and consciousness is always embodied in time and in place, so there was no way to write about this body going through this crisis without putting it in the context of COVID, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, in the context of climate change. All of that is just there. Some readers have responded very strongly against what they see as a kind of political bent in the narrative, to which my response is you are a body in time, and that means you are a body situated in a political context. To leave that out would feel so bizarre to me; a consciousness, a body, is always in a particular place, and in this book, this consciousness is in a body that is broken, and the body that is broken is in a house that is broken, the house that is broken is in a country that is broken, and the country that is broken is on a planet that is broken. And all of those various kinds of brokenness put pressure on this consciousness, and that is my subject.

Brooks That makes a lot of sense. I suppose I feel similarly when thinking about my work, more so my visual work than my poetry, because my poetry tends to be more narrow, more specific. I studied political science, my undergraduate, and only, degree is in political science; I am engaged with and aware of the world. I was just speaking with another artist about my Islands Are Not Forever drawings; I work from photographs, and I have an incredible photograph of Donald Trump that I sort of want to use in the drawings, but I haven't been able to bring myself to do it yet. When I talk about the drawings, I talk about them being partially about time and history and experience and there are other sort of political figures in the series—Franz Ferdinand shows up, as does Franz Josef, Jackie Onassis, and others—but I have resisted putting Trump in there because it feels different, it feels so heavy, so on the nose. I keep asking myself, do I really want to do this? But it's different, I think, in a novel, where there's this ocean of words and experiences and feelings and movements, and in a drawing or a painting, the image is static, and one’s vision is fixed on that image in a way that's harder to get away from.

Greenwell Right.

Brooks I know I'm going to do it, I feel like I have to, but I keep putting it off. I think there are thirty-eight panels that are finished now.

Greenwell He presents a real problem of composition, because how in the world can you balance him? The minute his name appears, the minute his image appears, he takes over. His superpower is that; he just saturates our attention, and it becomes very hard to see anything else or hear anything else. That is a real problem, and you have to figure out a solution for it.

Brooks I don't want to make work that has, as you say, a political program, or is didactic, but at the same time, if part of what I'm doing is presenting a kind of consciousness, a kind of lived experience, he is part of the lived experience right now. But that’s my problem to work out.

Greenwell And you will. I have faith in you.

Brooks Thank you. I will. There are so many horrible and compositionally interesting images of him, but I have one in particular that…well, I’m not going to give it away, but at some point it will be in the work and then people will know what I'm talking about. 

Greenwell Right.

Brooks I want to talk about the opening of chapter four in Small Rain. I found this section to be one of the most beautiful things you've ever written, and one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. 

Greenwell Oh, wow, thank you so much. 

Brooks It felt like respite to me, which is what I think it feels like for the protagonist. I love how you write about poems being a “prosthetic consciousness”and how they can “create new spaces in our interior, sometimes not just giving language to something that was mute before but generating something new.” That is a feeling that resonates with me so deeply. Can you talk about that a little?

Greenwell That's my favorite part of the book. It’s another part of the book that feels quite ruthless to me.

Brooks It is ruthless! It doesn't surprise me to hear you say that it's your favorite part, because it feels like here is Garth just letting it all hang out.

Greenwell You’re totally right.

Brooks It feels like a cascade.

Greenwell That's right. It gets to the whole question of the book: here’s this guy who, at forty-three, goes to the hospital with this annihilating pain that is forever going to change his relationship to his body, and therefore to his existence, and one of the first things he's told is that he could die, that it's very possible he won't get to leave this place. That puts pressure on every aspect of his life. His life has been a life devoted to art, devoted to poetry; it’s been this big gamble that poetry is something can be a source of infinite value,  and that it can fill up your life with value. I don't remember at which point I realized I was going to do this; it was not something I knew at the beginning of writing the novel, that there was going to be this crazy poetic analysis essay on a poem, but the reason I think I came to feel that I had to do it is that the book needed to put that proposition to the test. You know, like, is it true that a poem can be a source of infinite value? I needed to show, somehow—which you can't show because, really, all novel writing, all art, depends upon this ridiculous illusion or sleight of hand, whereby we try to create the illusion…it’s either an illusion or it's a kind of spiritual, metaphysical truth…that something finite can be commensurate to something infinite, that a certain number of words, a certain number of pages can somehow be commensurate to an entire life and therefore an entire world. That is what art making is: trying to take the material of life, trying to make this ridiculous translation, whether it’s taking consciousness and putting it into sentences on a page, or it's taking sunlight and putting it into paint on a canvas. It is an absurdity. It's an impossibility. But I knew I had to try to find a way to show what it means to read a poem with your whole life, and to have a life that is made up in large part of one's readings of poems.

Brooks Right.

Greenwell I wanted to also try to show how, in my experience of poetry, in my experience of art, poems and art give words to something that you felt for a long time and haven't been able to express, and therefore they clarify your relationship to your own experience. But art also creates experience. It doesn't just name something that already exists in the world, it also creates something new, and I wanted to show how that happens. As the protagonist is thinking through this poem, this poem written by somebody else in a different decade, he makes discoveries about existence, and this does become part of his life.

Brooks I love also what you wrote about how you can’t teach students the importance of that, that the experience of that has to be lived, it has to come through the accumulation of reading and existing.

Greenwell Yeah. You can't engineer for someone an experience of how art helps us live. You can only try to prepare them for the possibility, prepare the ground. More and more, I have come to think that aesthetic education, liberal arts education, is really about trying to model an ideal, trying to embody an ideal, trying to somehow open a door for students onto your own experience of a poem. I think of my first poetry teacher, an extraordinary man named James Longenbach, who taught at the University of Rochester and recently, tragically young, passed away; to be in class with him was to see the ideal of a life lived in poetry and to see the richness of that. That model really did change my life. That’s pretty rare. I felt that with Jorie Graham; studying with her, I felt that I was with someone who was like a live wire of poetry. I feel that way about one of my dear friends, Ilya Kaminsky; he’s someone who's just constantly holding on to the live wire of poetry. It's so inspiring to be around people like that. I do think that reading a poem in this way is not a technical skill; I mean, there are technical skills that make up little pieces of it, and you can devise exercises to familiarize students with those technical skills, but I actually think that's a pretty small part of what it means to experience art in a meaningful way. It's not technical, it's existential.

Brooks I totally agree.

Greenwell That's a real challenge in teaching. It really is. 

Brooks I’m not a teacher, but I am a sharer. You can encourage that in people, you can perhaps lead them toward that, but you can't completely engineer it because to understand that is a way of existing in the world, it's a way of interacting with the world, it's a way of looking at the world. It's a kind of a disposition.

Greenwell That’s right. 

Brooks I don't know if I've ever talked about this in an interview—and this is so ridiculous and odd to talk about here and now—but I played on the men’s golf team at the College of Charleston, and we played a lot at Kiawah Island, which is beautiful and is not really just surrounded by nature but rather it feels like it is nature. There were all kinds of birds and turtles and so many alligators. I was used to my some of my more idiotic teammates tossing golf balls at alligators, which I just found so disrespectful and so stupid. First of all, these amazing creatures are not bothering you, but they’ve been around for millions of years, so please respect them! But once, I was playing with a guy from Dartmouth and there was some kind of Great egret, a gorgeous, elegant bird with a very long beak, and the guy turns to me and says can you imagine chomping box with that thing?

Greenwell Meaning…?

Brooks Meaning…performing oral sex on a woman.

Greenwell Oh, Jesus. Oh, God. {laughs}

Brooks I remember thinking wow, I'm not sure I've ever been with anyone who is more different than I am, that this is what you think about when you look at this creature. In my head I was kind of writing poetry—which, hey, what he said could also be poetry—but his reaction was such a reduction of the beauty that exits in the world. His disposition, that sort of disposition, was so different from mine; it could come from a place of fear, from a place of denying beauty, rejecting sensitivity, and—you also write about this later in the book—the mystery of existence, that everything is sacred. I have probably talked about this before, so I hope the readers will forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but there is a wonderful book which I read maybe twenty years ago, by a former Catholic priest called Chet Raymo—which is not a name you forget—titled When God Is Gone, Everything Is Holy. 

Greenwell Oh.

Brooks It is about his journey from fervent Catholicism into fervent agnosticism, but with the intention of holding on to what he felt like was a reverence for the mystery and the majesty of existence.

Greenwell Right.

Brooks It's hard, of course, to live in that place every moment, because you would maybe exhaust yourself, but I try to hold on to that feeling. I think that idea feels present in your novel.

Greenwell Absolutely. I think you’re right, that we are incapable of sustaining the only acceptable response or attitude or disposition to existence, which is one of wonder. One of the things that makes art so infinitely valuable, I think, is that it creates spaces in which we can access that wonder. Obviously, there is a religious background to this. I do think in some fundamental way that, for me as an atheist, art does function, in a way, analogous to the idea of God in certain religious traditions, the idea that there is this source of infinite value that is always bigger than anything we can say about it. And art, or religion, gives us an avenue for expressing and having access to that wonder that is the only acceptable attitude toward the fact of our existence and toward existence itself. The extraordinary thing about art is that it wakes us up to that, it wakes us up to the wonder of existence itself, and that’s part of what seems like its value to me.

Brooks Absolutely. How did you find that as a young person growing up in Kentucky? What was your access to that?

Greenwell I love telling this story. I just gave a talk at the Gilman School in Baltimore, which is a boys’ high school, and I told them this story. I failed freshman English and because of that, ended up taking choir for extra credits. There was an extraordinary teacher, David Brown, at duPont Manual High School, the public high school in Louisville, where I went, and he heard something in my voice and he started giving me voice lessons after school. That was so crucial. It was the first time any adult had treated me as though my life might have value. He introduced me to opera, and opera was where I experienced that. 

Brooks The waking up to the wonder of existence. 

Greenwell Exactly. I went to school in the city, in Louisville, but our family farm was very much part of my life, as it is for lots of people in Kentucky. I was first generation raised off the farm. I was very aware, and felt very intensely, that my life was illegible in the world to which I was born. The experience of opera was for me the promise of a different world, and the promise of a world in which I could be legible, in which my life could make sense. I've tried to write about this many times. And, really, there was a second epiphany because at the same time I found opera, I also had my first real experience of the overwhelming power of literature in reading Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, which also, which is a very operatic novel.  

Brooks You read that in high school? 

Greenwell Yeah, I found it when I was like fourteen because I used to go to this bookstore in Louisville called Hawley-Cooke.

Brooks Oh, yes, I remember it, even though I grew up in Frankfort, an hour’s drive away. It was a wonderful bookstore. 

Greenwell It's closed now, but it survived for a long time and actually thrived. It closed because they decided to retire, not because of the market. I think, actually, the Barnes and Noble closed because they couldn't eat into Hawley-Cooke’s very devoted clientele. Even in—what would this have been…1992?—there was a shadowy corner of gay and lesbian literature in the back. On Friday nights I asked my dad to drop me off at Hawley-Cooke and he would let me spend a few hours there. I would grab a book from that gay shelf and run off somewhere else in the store to sit and read it. That was an incredible education. Somebody really loved that shadowy back corner; somebody took really good care of it. That's how I discovered Jeanette Winterton, how I discovered Virginia Woolf, how I discovered Mishima, how I discovered Edmund White. I was fourteen, just pulling these books down from the shelf, not knowing anything about them, except they were gay in some way. One of the early books I pulled down was Giovanni's Room, and it utterly changed my life. That book, combined with opera, gave me this sense of spaciousness, this sense of a world in which my body, my feelings, my affect…all of which felt so out of scale in this world of muscular, lean, southern, and especially southern rural masculinity…it was just a promise that somewhere there was a world that was the opposite of the world into which I was born, and that was so important. But that's how I found that access to art, through the generosity of a public high school choir director and whoever curated that little section of Hawley-Cooke.

Brooks I could probably find out who curated that section.

Greenwell I would love to know. Actually, I could find it out, too. I would love to know who that person was and just tell them how important they were.

Brooks If they're still around, they would probably love to hear that.

Greenwell I am sure. 

Brooks You and I are the same age, right?

Greenwell Born in 1978, yes.

Brooks The experience you just shared speaks to the value of accessibility because while you might have grown up living on a farm, you went to a very sophisticated public high school and had access to city things. I was in Frankfort, the small capital city, sixty miles away; I didn't live on a farm,  I lived in town, and we did have a wonderful bookstore—Poor Richard’s, which is still there—but I wasn't going there, and I doubt there would have been a robust gay section at that time. I'm sure there is now. Giovanni's Room was also a really seminal novel for me, but it came in college; for you,  it came in 1992, and it came from me in 1996 or 1997. 

Greenwell Right. 

Brooks I sometimes think about how, as both an artist and a gay person, my feel like my development was delayed for reasons that had to do with my personality but also accessibility. Sometimes people ask me if they can see the art I made in college, and I say to them, no, you don’t want to see it. There isn’t much and what does exist is pretty terrible. I can show you some things I wrote in college, though. As for visual art, I didn't know enough, I hadn't had enough exposure, and I wasn’t brave enough to make anything interesting. 

Greenwell I was a very reckless kid. By the time I reached high school..well, no, that's not true..by the time I reached second semester of high school and the choir, I was already cruising the parks, and the reason I was cruising the parks was because—and I wonder if you remember this—there was—and I would love to write a book about this, and in fact, I think I will write a book about this—but there was that incredibly baroque story that emerged after this kid—I think he was seventeen or eighteen, and of course gay—shot a guy. He killed a guy in the bathroom in Cherokee Park, and the Courier Journal {newspaper} ran a series of articles about what happened, and I used to flip through the newspaper when I was eating breakfast in the morning before going to school, and that's how I discovered cruising. What I took from that article, in which this guy was brutally murdered in the bathroom at Cherokee Park, was oh, there's a place you can go and meet gay guys. That’s how I started cruising; I went to that park. 

Brooks Wow.

Greenwell I have always been someone who has a certain kind of recklessness. My father kicked me out when he found out I was gay. I wish I had had someone to counsel me and sort of say slow down. But that recklessness has always been a part of me,  and has always been bound up with Eros for me. The Eros and Thanatos drives are very intertwined, I guess—Freud says they are for everybody—but I've felt that very intensely. And at the height of the AIDS crisis, before protease inhibitors, I felt like if I am going to have any erotic life at all, that means I'm going to have a short life. I made my peace with that. I was just having the most, really, suicidal sex as a fourteen year old; there was just this recklessness in me, and that really did have some quite disastrous results. But when I look back, if any of those disasters had not happened, it seems to me very likely I would not have gotten on the path that I am now on. I’m very happy with the path I got on. 

Brooks You and I were very different at that age  for many reasons. I would never have cruised. I ran away from my desire.

Greenwell I don't know where that came from; I don't know why. Part of it is, perhaps, that the first time I had sex was with my next door neighbor when I was five, and like for five years I had sex with my next door neighbor multiple times a week. And then in high school, when I eventually got over to the youth performing arts school, I had sex every day in high school. We had sex everywhere in that building. It was really quite wild. And then I went to the park and I discovered what cruising was. And God—I must have been twelve or something—I went to Western Kentucky University for a camp for students who scored well on the PSAT and I remember going into a bathroom in the student center and the walls were covered with messages, and I knew it was a cruising bathroom. I didn't have sex with anybody; I suspect I scared everybody away because I was this twelve year old kid going into this bathroom, but I just thought this is amazing that this exists. I don't know where all that comes from, but it does feel just hardwired into me to sort of run in this very reckless way toward desire.

Brooks Your neighbor, when you were five, how old was he?

Greenwell He was a year older than I was. My mother doesn’t live in that neighborhood anymore, but for a long time, at least, she was still in touch with his mother, and I would hear things about him. We had sex all the time for five years. All the time. And that was, until I met my partner Luis in my late thirties, my longest sexual relationship.

Brooks Wow. I don’t quite know what to say. 

Greenwell It was amazing. People love to have opinions about children not knowing whether or not they’re gay, or not knowing anything about that, but I knew I was gay from such an early age. I can't remember a time when I didn't know I was gay. And I also can't remember a time when I didn't have access to that language, because I had an older brother who loved to insult me. I think I learned very early what the words for it were. I really did not go through a kind of agonized process of coming to terms with my sexuality. I knew it was a problem in the world I was living in, but from a very early age, I cannot remember a time when I didn't know what my desire was.

Brooks I also don't remember a time when I didn't know that about myself. I would not have been able to verbalize it at five but I knew that the way that I related to boys was different than how most of them related to each other, and that that somehow was tied up with desire. But unlike you, I ran away from it. I was also sexually abused as a child, which I have only recently really realized. It was something I had long suspected, and then a couple of years ago I had a very vivid flashback about what happened to me. Everyone's experience is different.

Greenwell Sure. I’m sorry.

Brooks That’s something that I've had to work through for a long time, whether it was conscious or not. I wasn’t expecting to talk about that today. {clears throat}

Greenwell Right.

Brooks You have used the word reckless several times today, and perhaps you have a recklessness about you, but it seems to me that you have always moved toward freedom. It seems like, from a very early age, you were moving toward freedom in so many different ways, toward personal freedom, sexual freedom, freedom in your work. You mentioned Ilya Kaminsky earlier and I was recently revisiting a 2020 interview that he did with you for The Paris Review in which he asks you if you think of Cleanness as an American book or a European book and you answer that those kinds of distinctions don't matter to you. I thought that was so interesting, as someone who also grew up in Kentucky. While I have never denied that I am a Kentuckian or a Southerner—although the latter is not something I've ever particularly claimed—I’ve never felt that simply because I was born in one place, that meant I was bound to that place, both in terms of physically having to stay there, and in terms of how I thought about myself and how I relate to the world. I love that, from an early age, you also seemed not feel bound by a lot of the borders and borderlines that were set up for you.

Greenwell That does feel to me like one of the great gifts of Queerness; on one hand, being Queer did feel like not belonging, like there was a world that didn't have a place for me, but on the other hand, it did make me feel that all of those lines were there to be crossed, that I wasn't bound by them. It's interesting that you brought up that question Ilya asked me. I don’t remember that question, and I wonder how I would answer that question now. Do I feel like a Kentuckian? I don't know. I guess that Louisville affects me in a way that is very specific, and when I'm back there, I do have a relation to that place that is different from my relation to any other place, and I felt this so strongly returning, because I left Kentucky when I was sixteen and went back as seldom as possible. Until I went on my book tour, I don't think I had spent the night in Kentucky since I was eighteen or nineteen. It was a surprise to me when I started spending time in Kentucky again, as when we met when I first saw your work in 2021. I was there because I had felt this big change in my relationship to the place, because I was interested in it. When I left, I wasn't interested in it; I felt like I knew everything I could ever want to know about Louisville. I never needed to see the place again, and then I returned twenty plus years later. At that time I also spent a lot of time in the lesbian and gay history archives at the University of Louisville and realized that oh, actually, I don't know this place at all, that there was this history here that everything in my youth was organized to keep me from having access to that would have just radically changed my feelings about Louisville. I also realized that walking down Bardstown Road, walking in old Louisville, and seeing these places—which obviously had changed a lot since I was a kid—but they affected me. I remember the first time I walked past the office building where my father worked and I was really shocked by how deeply that resonated in me, just to have that kind of relationship to a place across time. I don't know if I feel like a Kentuckian and I don't know how to answer Ilya’s question, but I do know that I have a relationship to Kentucky that is different from the relationship I can have with any other place.

Brooks Do you think of yourself as an Iowan?

Greenwell No, I don't, even though writing Small Rain was a really important change in my relationship to Iowa, because I realized I could write about Iowa, which for a long time I thought I couldn't. But no, I don't feel like an Iowan, even though Iowa City is a very lucky place to live in a lot of ways. But no, Iowa will never be my place. My house feels like my home; I have a special relationship with this house that my partner and I have lived in now for something like eight or nine years. This is the first house I've lived in since I was a child, since I lived in my childhood home, and when I think of my childhood home, I think of my mother's house. My father's house was never really a home. It's the first house I've lived in since then and the only house, obviously, that I've ever owned. I do have a special relationship with the house and with my garden and with that space, but not with Iowa and not with Iowa City. I feel like a sojourner there, and the minute that Luis retires, we will leave Iowa City.

Brooks And will you go to Spain, where Luis is from? 

Greenwell Yeah, I think we will go to Spain. It's not clear where. Luis has kept his apartment in Madrid, which is too small for both of us, but he has that, and then he's from Granada. I love Granada, and I thought we might live there, but I actually think we're thinking now Barcelona, which is an incredible place, and also I think it might be good for us to be in a city that doesn't belong to Luis. I think it might be good for us to feel like we're both establishing a new place for ourselves. But we'll see what happens.

Brooks I think that sounds like a great plan.

Greenwell Fingers crossed. 

Brooks And what about New York?

Greenwell New York is a really hard place for me. I've never felt comfortable in New York. I graduated from SUNY Purchase, just north of the city, so I spent a lot of time in New York then, and I spent a couple of summers in New York teaching. But I hadn’t really lived in the city proper until I took a full-time job here. I lived for two years on the Upper East Side, and then when I switched to a one semester model of teaching, NYU now lets me stay in faculty housing. It's an incredible perk. One of the best things about the job at NYU is that I get to live on Washington Square Park, which I could never ever do except that I get a very subsidized rate from NYU. It’s wonderful, it's amazing, spending four or five months here. I love the culture. I love the museums. I love the opera. I have lots and lots of friends here, but this is not a place I could, I could live. I find it a really brutal place, and I feel myself being brutalized by it and becoming brutal, and that’s something I really hate.

Brooks I love New York. But I understand.

Greenwell What about you in L.A.? Is L.A. your home now?

Brooks Yes, I think so. I want to be here. I’ve been here a year and a half now, and when I moved here, certain people said well, you know, if it doesn't work out, you can always leave and while that's always going to be true, but I did not move here with that mindset. When my twenty-two year relationship, my marriage, ended and it was time for me to leave Louisville, I felt like, career-wise and personally, the only two places that made sense were New York and L.A. And while I love New York, I also find it brutal. I have some ghosts, or one particularly giant ghost, there that I find heavy to live with. While L.A. can be very hard,  everything here felt new; the color palette felt new, the light felt new, the ways in which L.A. is diverse felt new. This is technically my country, but it feels like a completely different version of my country than the one that I'm familiar with, even though, in addition to Kentucky, I lived in Chicago, I lived in Orlando, and Charleston. California is different. The West Coast is different. L.A. is different, and that difference is palpable. All of that is very welcome to me; I’m here for it. I have always wanted to live somewhere warm and near the sea—Barcelona sounds ideal—and L.A., despite all of its hardships, fits that bill. There are so many aspects to L.A. that are difficult and ugly, and the built world is something that is unavoidable here, but what's also unavoidable is nature. Literally almost everywhere you step outside, you see the sky; you've got mountains and hiking, you've got the sea, even though it is sort of a long way from where I live. What’s also true is that there are so many interesting and creative people here, and because of the history of this place, there is a hunger for or certainly an openness to the idea of collaboration. Everyone has an opinion about L.A., and having been here only a year and a half, I'm not an expert, but my response to any and all of those opinions is that whatever you think about L.A. is correct. All of the terrible, negative things that people like to talk about, the traffic and the dirtiness, and the shallowness, and the transience, and all of that is true, but there are so many other truths. L.A. contains everything, and there's something about that that can feel exhausting and confounding and confusing, but there are moments—some of which are expected and then others of which sneak up on you—where I think if I am going to stay in the U.S., I couldn't live anywhere else. 

Greenwell Oh, interesting. 

Brooks I do really miss my friends in New York, and sometimes feel like I’m missing out, but for now, this is my home. I’m happy to be here and I'm making it work. I’m terrifically lonely, I'll admit that, but I think that's partly to do with the city, and it's partly to do with the sort of point in life in which I find myself, having ended a very long relationship and having moved across the country. And I know loneliness well—perhaps it is also part of my nature—so that's not really a great surprise. I’m just living day to day, making my work and trying to make sense of it all. 

Greenwell Right. 

Brooks I know you're not like a sunshine person.

Greenwell L.A. is on my list of places I could never live.

Brooks I understand. 

Greenwell Northern California…possibly, but L.A.? No. It's a place I feel really foreign. I really do suffer from the fact that I don't really have a place that feels right. I'm thinking a lot about Ruth Asawa because I want to write about the show that's about to close at MoMA; I am thinking about the incredible relationship she had with San Francisco and just the incredible grace of finding the right place to be. The closest I've come to that feeling is actually Sofia {Bulgaria}, weirdly enough, because even though it was very much a place I was a foreigner, and it did not feel like home, it felt endlessly fascinating, and I was so happy to live there. Even though it was hard, it felt important to be there, somehow. And that's what I don't feel in Iowa City and I don't really feel that in New York, and I don't feel that in Madrid. {read Greenwell’s thoughts on Asawa here, on his substack /substack.com/@garthgreenwell/p-188848265 }

Brooks I completely understand what you mean. I do feel a little bit of that importance, for me, in L.A. and definitely in Berlin, more than anywhere else, but that seems out of reach at the moment. I happened to see this morning that if yesterday you had been at MoMA at the Ruth Asawa show, you would have been there with Sally Jesse Raphael.

Greenwell Oh! Oh my gosh. Wow, that's a piece of my youth! Unbelievable.

Brooks How about that? If you need another person's opinion about the show before you write about it, you might reach out to her.

Greenwell Absolutely. Oh my God. Sally Jesse Raphael. Holy shit. Amazing.

Other Swans Conversation No. Eleven

Garth Greenwell is the author of three books, most recently Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, his writing on culture appears widely, including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere; he also writes the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.