In your new film How We Got Here, you continue to explore your love of the dialogue narrative. What draws you to this form?

I love dialogic books and gestures: from Socrates and Plato in The Republic to Rob Bryon and Steve Coogan in The Trip. I’ve read as many of these books and plays and novels and screenplays as possible, and I’ve watched as many such films as I could find. The form speaks to something very deep in me—my divided self? It’s an animation and emblem of that (and I would say, I think, that we’re all divided; perhaps the personal essayist is more candid about this dividedness than other people are, is more prone to articulating his/her Hamlet-like nature. As Phillip Lopate says, self-assured types don’t make good essayists).

For your previous book, The Very Last Interview, you gathered, remixed, revised, and rewrote thousands of questions. For How We Got Here, you reach back into the intellectual history of the last 170 years. The film consists of interviews with more than thirty NonfictioNow attendees as well as eighteen brief 2-Truths-and-a-Lie videos. You call it a “slideshow/TED talk (on speed) / montage / soundscape / voiceover / monologue.” Dana Spiotta writes that “Shield’s arguments—via his inspired annotations and brilliant literary assemblages—are always seductive, propulsive, and provocative to read. In the electric and terrific How WeGot Here, he goes full velocity into this demented American moment, and he nails it.”

I wonder if joy is also the inquiry of your work. The attention you pay to each question that you ask, to each answer that your interviewees give—that kind of work on the grammar and sound of language: Is that something you can associate with delight?

One of the key forms of delight is, of course, for me, as a writer, through language, my sheer immersion in the sound of words. Of late, I’ve been recalling the way that a beer vendor would say, “Beer, here,” at the baseball stadium in San Francisco when I was a child. Not sure where his accent was from—New Jersey? New England? Southern Connecticut? But he would pronounce the words as “Beeah heah.” The sheer joy of that. I’m very, very attuned to language, syntax, grammar, to the tiniest nuances of tone. I would connect this to my childhood stutter. I love language with all my heart and soul. It is what has sustained me, sustains me, and I think it’s lovely and insightful that you saw this, felt this. The beautiful difficulty, or the difficult beauty, of human communication and miscommunication: that’s pretty much all I ever write about.

How We Got Here falls into the category “documentary film.” What’s your understanding of the term “documentary”? Most people probably think they know what it means. Do you think it is a tainted label?

It’s not a useful term. Just as “nonfiction” is not a useful term. I prefer “essay” or book-length essay. And I like cine-essay for the kind of films I’m interested in. All of the books and films I’m interested in are philosophical meditations/investigations by any means necessary. That is, they might seem at first rather pedestrian—e.g., Grégoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, which is about being invited to be the mystery guest at someone’s birthday party (Sophie Calle’s, actually)—but they (these books and films) wind up asking the most urgent questions about existence (what’s real, what’s memory, what’s knowledge, what can we know of ourselves, of another person, what if anything can sustain us, what if anything is consoling against onrushing night, etc). That’s pretty much my “genre.” Not sure what one would call this. It’s not exactly philosophy, but it’s close; it’s just more lucid and personal than contemporary analytic philosophy. It’s certainly not autobiography or memoir, but it has some resemblance at times to such gestures. I do know I can point to hundreds of such writers and filmmakers who seem to be up to similar, genre-troubling projects.

You mention the work of Grégoire Bouillier, Sophie Calle, and Agnès Varda. Coincidence, or are you particularly interested in French artists / writers / filmmakers?

Nearly all of the writers and filmmakers I love the most are French: la Rochefoucauld, Cioran, Barthes, Proust, Pascal, Bouillier, Varda, Godard, Guibert, Beckett, Daudet, Duras, Leiris, Levé, Montaigne, Perec, Rousseau, etc., etc. What it is I’m drawn to in a certain stand of French literature: the concision, compression, velocity; the aphoristic tendency; the lucid (and ludic?) intellectuality; the comic despair.

David, we met at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2017. On arrival day, I looked out the window and saw you disappear into the woods; you were carrying a Nordic walking pole. Bread Loaf is a very isolated place located in the Green Mountain National Forest. At Bread Loaf you either like the remoteness, or you don’t. Which option applies to you? I think, to a certain degree, nature also features in your movie I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel.

That’s a funny image of me, Simone—Mountain Man, with Nordic walking pole. I am fairly addicted to daily exercise: swimming, hiking, walking, tennis, etc. If I’m “home,” I tend to swim every day. Sometimes when I’ve been at Bread Loaf, I’ve driven all the way into town to swim, but that’s a long drive and the pool is quite cold. I suppose it’s a continuum, isn’t it? Some people are very much “nature people”; other people are hard-core urbanites. In I Think You’re Totally Wrong, especially the movie, my interlocutor Caleb Powell mocks me as being very out of my element in nature; compared to him, I’m not much of a “nature person.” I do love Middlebury, though, don’t you? I grew up on the West Coast, lived in the Midwest and on the East Coast for twenty years, then moved back to the West Coast twenty-plus years ago for a teaching position. What do you do when you’re at Bread Loaf, Simone? I pretty much stay in my room and read and write and attend lectures and seminars and then for 2 hours a day I take out my Nordic walking pole.

I think, too, of nature in relation to the human body and human mortality, which I write about fairly obsessively. I’m not really an outdoors person, but I am wildly interested in the fact that we have bodies and that these bodies die and that this is “natural.” Martha Graham says that “the body never lies.” Nietzsche: “There is more reason in your body than in your best philosophy.”

I like the Nietzsche quote. The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is a demanding writing program, both mentally and physically. It definitely makes you realize how much your body knows and you learn how to use that kind of internal wisdom. It also reminds me of something that Milan Kundera said in a conversation with Christian Salmon. I’ll quote from “Dialogue on the Art of Composition” in The Art of the Novel: “There is a fundamental difference between the ways philosophers and novelists think. People talk about Checkhov’s philosophy, or Kafka’s or Musil’s, and so on. But just try to draw a coherent philosophy out of their writings! Even when they express their ideas directly, in their notebooks, the ideas are intellectual exercises, paradox games, improvisations, rather than statements of thought.” What are you? As a writer, you don’t see yourself as a novelist. Are you a philosopher?

Kundera is an interesting example here. He’s not really a novelist or he hasn’t been one for many decades. Nor is he a philosopher per se. At his best (e.g., riffs on kitsch and shit), he’s just sort of a thinker/personal essayist. That’s what I think of myself as being—a writer of book-length, often collage-like essays. Kundera was briefly quite important to me until he became a somewhat tedious village explainer. All the writers I love (from Heraclitus to Cioran) are more or less in this mode (cotnemplative, analytic, essayistic). Ozick, Roth (whom I know you’ve written about): I must confess that these writers hold zero interest to me; they take way too long to get to whatever they’re supposedly trying to get to (the game isn’t remotely worth the candle). Kafka: only the epigrams, aphorisms, mini-parables.

I keep revisiting your book War is Beautiful, which contains photographs of tanks. As you know, my parents left Czechoslovakia after the brutal crushing of the Prague Spring in August 1968. In a lecture you gave about War Is Beautiful, you mentioned that you argue for a more conscious, more intentional, and more self-critical relationship with pictorial beauty. By saying this, I think, you argue for a more conscious relationship with the history of the United States. Visual culture is such an integral part of the country’s identity, isn’t it? From the very beginning (e.g., Benjamin Franklin’s pictorial images; Hawthorne’s references to daguerrotypes and sculptures, Hart Crane’s long poem The Bridge) to the present (e.g., war memorials, sites of memory, and museums) the U.S. has such a rich iconographic tradition. As a writer and filmmaker, do you think of yourself as part of this tradition? Orisyourwork, asyousaid, free-standing? Areyou working on a new “marble block”?

I feel like that’s what I do with each book: find some idea or image or gesture and try to make it ramify as a metaphor. In a way, it’s conceptual art, from Remote in 1996 to, say, The Very Last Interview in 2022; each book, including War Is Beautiful, is an attempt, I think, to make a sort of free-standing sculpture that has weight and “meaning.”

As many people have pointed out (from de Toqueville to Baudrillard), America is a frenzy of the visible. I like Manny Farber’s distinction between white elephant art (mainstream) and termite art (attempting to change art for the next generation by working at the edges). I’m obviously completely latter. As such, my work feels to me literally “iconoclastic”; it’s an attempt to take a hammer to all the marble, including myself. I’m working on a new book about self-reflexive documentary film called All The Best Stories Are True: Documentary Film as Suicide Prevention Hotline. In both cases (these films, this book-in-progress), the marble gets blasted.

One might argue that being iconoclastic, or creating art that feels iconoclastic, simply means to smash the idols of a rival, or a threatening tribe.Does it have to be white elephant art versus termite art, as Manny Farber’s influential essay of that name suggests? Let me rephrase my previous question by quoting John Roebling, who wrote,“Before the sculptor can embody his spiritual or ideal conception into marble, he must have spiritually created the statue in his mind.” Is that how you feel about your projects? How long does an idea or conception live inside you before you translate it into a book or a film?

Manny Farber’s distinction may sometimes seem too easy, too simple, too polarizing. However, I find it useful as a way for me to understand what I’m doing—not writing commercial or traditional fiction, not writing memoir, and instead working on what I hope are genre-troubling literary and cinematic projects.

I like Roebling’s statement. I usually begin by stumbling into a metaphor that in my grandiosity I think explains the universe, at least for me, at least for the moment. Some large subject that represents for me a personal, cultural, and human crisis. Something about which I’m confused, ambivalent, embarrassed, ashamed, excited. I then “shoot a lot of film”—gather hundreds or even thousands of pages over many years, sometimes over many decades. Just stuff: stuff I write, read, old stuff I wrote, new stuff I am writing, old emails from friends, research, etc.—all of which puts pressure on the material, the subject: “reality,” “race,” “morality,” “war,” “sex,” “remoteness,” some enormous subject. I don’t really know what I want to say about it. I just know it is tugging at me and I need to explore it and I believe I have something to add to the conversation.

At a certain point, I’m no longer surprised by shooting film. It’s all telling me the same thing. So at that point I stop and read and reread and reread the material. Often the material goes from, say, 3,000 pages down to say 1,000, then 500, then 300, then 140. At 140, maybe it’s a book. No literary collage can be longer than 120 pages. (Joke.) (Sort of.)

The point is that I’m getting rid of all the dross, all the easy things, all the obvious things. I keep only what scares me. Then I start pouring the 277 paragraphs that are alive; I start pouring them into different thematic silos, different rubrics. And I organize each of these rubrics so that each of these rubrics or silos or holding tanks has its own trajectory. (Mixed metaphor alert.) Each one is in a way its own mini-essay. Then I arrange the silos either vertically or horizontally—i.e., as consecutive chapters going downward—as I did in, say, Reality Hunger. A chapter on memory. A chapter on reality. Etc. I think of that as vertical. Or I arrange it horizontally—across space—as, say, Amy Fusselman does in The Pharmacist’s Mate. It’s basically either AAAAA, BBBBB, CCCC, DDDDD. Or it’s a/b/c/d/a/e/b/d/b/c/a/d. It’s the easiest thing in the world. (Nothing is more difficult and more beautiful.)

Regarding the doc-film book, I’ve been living with this idea/these ideas for decades—watching doc films, teaching these films, discussing these films with filmmakers. The project now feels to me pretty solid (I have 400 pages in draft), but as you say, it took me years to realize there was a book there.

Could you comment on your role as interviewer and director of How We Got Here?

I’m not the only interviewer. Other people (Robin Hemley, Nicole Walker, and Erik Sather) also asked questions, though we all ask the same questions. There is part of me that is, as my parents were, journalistic—my book about NYT war photos; my book on Trump; BlackPlanet; Body Politic; my current book-in-progress on doc-film (All the Best Stories Are True; all these have a quasi-journalistic aspect, although in truth I’m much more interested in the journal-istic in the sense of journal-keeping; this was the focus of the lecture I gave at Bread Loaf many years ago: the poeticized journal, the thematized diary. Nietzsche: “I want to say in 10 sentences what others say in a whole book, or what others don’t say in a whole book.” Sallie Tisdale: “What are you afraid of writing about? That’s your real subject.”

I’d like to turn to the term “truth.” In How We Got Here, one of your goals is to demonstrate the precariousness of truth. I grew up with a concept of truth that doesn’t seem compatible with today’s attempts to define it. To give you an example: Ludvík Vaculík’s manifesto “2000 Words” was a key document of the Prague Spring. It was addressed to “workers, farmers, officials, scientists, artists, and everyone.” In his manifesto, Vaculík vividly portrays how a culturally rich country such as Czechoslovakia degenerated politically, economically, and socially. And it happened fast. “Truth,”Vaculík argues,“doesn’t prevail.” Truth remains when everything else goes down the drain. It’s always there. For me, his definition of truth is palpable, pragmatic, and real.

You once told me about your interest in Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man; you said it’s a work of art that you found sustaining during the pandemic. Can you relate to Herzog’s quest for “ecstatic truth”?

I am very devoted to Herzog’s notion of ecstatic truth. I explore these ideas at considerable length in How We Got Here.

At the NonfictioNow writers’ conference in Phoenix on Nov 1-3, 2018 (a few days before the midterm elections), Robin Hemley, Nicole Walker, Erik Sather, and I asked writers and professors of nonfiction the following questions: How do you know what you believe? Do you have any absolute beliefs?Is there such thing as“truth”? What is “nonfiction” and is it “true”? What do you think is the difference between“truth”and belief?If you have siblings, have they shown your view of the world to be flawed? Are you superstitious? Do you believe in ghosts? Why are you here and not canvassing for Stacey Abrams?

Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Q-Anon, Fox News, etc., etc., etc. have weaponized the last century of intellectual thought and philosophical investigation: poststructuralism, quantum physics, deconstruction, the current “crisis” in “nonfiction”-journalism-media-“truthiness.” If the perceiver by her very presence alters what’s perceived, Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Surkov (performance-artist-turned-Putin-strategist), et al. have quite consciously created—are all still quite consciously creating on a day-by-day basis—a universe in which nothing is true and therefore public discourse is, in effect, over.

Dominion Voting Systems was founded to rig elections for Hugo Chavez; Italian space lasers altered voting machine data; the FBI staged the January 6 attack: this is a strategy that goes back at least as far as Dostoevsky’s underground man. God is dead. Everything is permitted. Or is it?

How We Got Here doesn’t present a “finished” story.Towards the end of the film, Kim Adrian discusses Walter Benjamin; she tries to capture the essence of his idea of translation and language and, thus, truth. It’s all pointing, she says, to what he called God, but it never touches it. She loves the idea of something that we see and seek. But we’ll never get there. This corresponds with what James Lough says about truth: it’s always there; we’re trying to resist it, control it, and understand it with words, but it’s hard to define it.As a viewer, that’s what I love about this journey. That kind of speechlessness despite the richness of language.

I think of something that the linguist Kim Krizan says in Richard Linklater’s film Waking Life(which I’m writing about in All the Best Stories Are True). She says that “creation appears to come out of imperfection, out of striving, of frustration, and this is where language came from. It comes from our desire to transcend our isolation and to have a connection with another human being. We use symbols to communicate abstract things. What is anger or love? What does it mean to the other person? Words are inert, dead symbols. So much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. When we think we’re understood, that feeling feels like spiritual communion. That is what we live for, though it might be transient.” So beautiful. I agree with every word she says.