Sarah Vowell began her career as that funny, distinctive voice in your ear, charming radio listeners with stories of gluten allergies and band geekery and growing up a Democrat stranded in Republican country. She began collecting those stories in her early books, Radio On: A Listener’s Diary and Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World, but just as her audience has grown, so has her scope: In recent years, she’s mostly abandoned the personal essays and pop-culture pieces of her youth for witty, winding, book-length excursions into the dusty corridors of American history. “I write about things no one wants to hear about,” Vowell jokes. “It’s not like people are clamoring for President Garfield and the Massachusetts Bay Colonists.”
But history has proven, if she writes it, they will come: Her 2005 Assassination Vacation, a presidential assassination inquiry cum personal travelogue, and 2008’s The Wordy Shipmates, about Puritan colonists, have only increased her readership. But Vowell doesn’t just resurrect history from the nation’s collective dustbin of memory; she inspires a reverence for it. She makes history hip, and – by logical, if not obvious, extension – she makes patriotism hip, too. No, not the knee-jerk flag-waving kind: Her brand of patriotism is more thoughtful, more knowing, more tough-love.
Vowell will perform at the Paramount Theatre this Friday –yes, that funny, distinctive voice in your ear is now playing to 1,300-seat theatres. The Chronicle recently spoke with Vowell by phone about her upcoming stop in Austin; her work as president of the board of 826NYC, an innovative creative arts program for children; and what it’s like being a professional “yakker.”
Austin Chronicle: Can you tell me about the show at the Paramount?
Sarah Vowell: Well … that sounds funny, the word “show.”
AC: A little song, a little dance?
SV: I’m terrible at making things sound, you know, like a night of excitement, when it’s really me at a podium reading and talking about American history. Does that sound like a “show”? Let’s call it an “evening.” I’d like to think within the parameters of deadpan historical chitchat, it’s a song and dance of the mind. But it’s really quite stationary.
AC: It seems like you’re moving away from the personal essays that you began your career doing.
SV: That’s true. That’s only because ever since I became a writer, things stopped happening to me, you know? Now I write about things that happened a long time ago.
AC: Have you had any blowback from your readership? Like, you lured them in with tales of gluten and caffeine and driving lessons, and then once you had them in your web, you’re like, “I’m gonna drop a Puritan bomb on you”?
SV: (laughs) Yeah, it’s bait and switch. Honestly, it seems I sell more books the more persnickety I become. In my case, it seems like people respond to learning about American history in a low-key format. It’s not like I’ve completely abandoned the first person singular. I just take my first person and stick her next to various historical events and sites. It’s still a fairly personal approach to history, I would say. I’m not Stephen Ambrose yet.
AC: Do you have a list of discarded ideas and books?
SV: Sure, I’ve started books and dropped them …. Let’s see – early on there was the abandoned history of musical-instruments-smashing. Which was actually what I wrote my graduate school master’s thesis on. And turns out a person doesn’t want to spend three to five years of her life thinking about people smashing stuff.
AC: I saw on the 826 website that y’all recently had a pingpong tournament fundraiser. How’d you do?
SV: It turned out to be surprisingly professional. The skill set was way higher than I had anticipated. … The highlight was this pingpong pro played using his cell phone as a paddle against Mike Myers, who was dressed in a 1970s Canadian pingpong uniform complete with a wig and headband. That’s the kind of theatrical experience that will be unavailable to my audience, for example.
AC: The volunteer list at 826 is kind of staggering [the advisory board includes John Hodgman, Tunde Adebimpe, and Jonathan Safran Foer, to name a few]. Do the kids realize the totally cool people who are helping them with their homework?
SV: Not necessarily, and I think that’s a good thing. The whole world of writing and publishing and performing is completely demystified for them. I was 23 before I ever had anything published, and we have 7-year-olds who’ve published their writing in professional-looking anthologies. They make their films in the summertime, and they show their movies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music movie theatre, where they go to the movies. … The finished product really spurs them on. Especially putting their work in books – because the Internet is just part of their DNA at this point, books seem all the more special to them.
AC: Over the course of your career, you’ve worked in fields – radio, print journalism, and books – that have all been threatened with “endangered species” status. Have you felt any pressure to have a Web presence?
SV: No, not at all. I pretty much only write books now. I mean, I write the odd newspaper opinion piece, but really I write books full-time now. So, so far so good. … I would say your line of work, is uh ….
AC: Not long for this world?
SV: I have more fears for newspapers than books, for obvious reasons.
AC: (sighs) Yeah.
SV: (sighs) Yeah. I mean, I’m not just passively looking out the window. I’m on the Authors Guild council. I’m engaged. I’m a definite copyright – I don’t know if “activist” is the word – I’m a concerned authorial citizen. … I just remember I was writing some op-ed columns for The New York Times back when they were charging people for certain online content, and I remember this woman complaining to me that she couldn’t read my columns because she wouldn’t shell out for them. And she just said, “information – it longs to be free!” And I just remember being like, “That’s not information – that’s writing. I get up early to do that. It doesn’t just exist in the world. I have to make it.” I’m a big believer in making a living.
AC: I appreciate that you make an unpopular position like that cool, for lack of a better word. I’m thinking also of your appearance on The Daily Show in 2008, when you talked about elitism and how it isn’t a dirty word. I was just blown away by that.
SV: The thing about America is any old piece of riffraff can rise to become elite by hard work and determination. I just have a respect for – I don’t know if “authority” is the word, ’cause that sounds square – but you know, knowledge and expertise. I am generally in favor of those two things –
AC: Which is a somewhat radical opinion.
SV: Well, it’s tricky in this country. There’s a definite populist strain, and I share that. I’m a punk rock person. I believe in DIY. But I don’t need my singers to all sound like Beverly Sills or something. That’s not what I mean. Not persons of authority but people with authority. The people who have something to say, who have done their homework. Maybe it’s the older I get, I also become more in favor of old people. I just find myself wishing the culture at large paid more attention to the people who have been around.
I turn on the radio on Saturday mornings specifically to listen to Dan Schorr’s commentary, because … (laughs) just because he’s old, you know? I just want to hear someone who covered the Kremlin back in the day, what he has to say about the news of the day, just because he’s been covering it for longer than I’ve been alive. I just want to know what someone who knows what he’s talking about thinks about things. I think especially nowadays. I feel like [on] the 24-hour news channels, there’s just so much yakking go on. I mean, I yak for a living. But so much of that brand of news is filling up the clock.
I kind of miss the old days. I find myself watching the half-hour network news programs. I think I’m turning into an 82-year-old man. At some point, I’m just going to be watching Brian Williams and reading The New York Times and listening to my Bob Dylan records and shaking my gray-haired fist at the world or something.
An Evening With Sarah Vowell takes place Friday, Feb. 26, 8pm, at the Paramount Theatre. For ticket information, visit www.austintheatre.org.
This article appears in February 26 • 2010.
