Falling in Love with Books, featuring Pat Walker of Vroman's Bookstore

This is a machine-generated transcript. There will be errors. The audio recording is the definitive record of the episode.

Lee Schneider (00:00.293)
How did you get into being a bookseller?

Patrick Walker (00:30.13)
I have always been obsessed with books. I come from a very literary family, forever. We've always had a room in our house that's only for books and reading. often, well, with televisions, just more of a relaxing, but ever since I was a kid, there's just been walls of books. And,

My mom used to read all the kids books to me, but also like Lord of the Rings when I was probably way too young as, you know, bedtime stories. I, and, you know, it's what I leaned into when I was just going through like adolescence. I just leaned into the healthy escapism of reading fiction, especially sci-fi fantasy to kind of pull it towards what you've been mentioning. Any fiction.

Lee Schneider (01:07.389)
You

Patrick Walker (01:27.936)
Any reading is great reading in my opinion, but specifically like sci-fi, fantasy, speculative fiction, magical realism, which is the cool sort of middle ground fiction, literary fiction, fun fiction, whatever. It's just where I, I don't know. I can't think of a time when I haven't been doing that. And I had a friend that worked at Vroomans. I grew up in Pasadena.

Lee Schneider (01:41.266)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (01:55.175)
Huh?

Patrick Walker (01:56.21)
And so as a little baby book nerd, I grew up at Vroomans because that's what you do in Pasadena when you're growing up in Pasadena and you like books. And I always, I remember booksellers coming up and giving me these books to read. And I just thought they had like the secret key into storytelling and life and creativity and fun. And I,

had a friend years later when I was in my mid to late 20s, think, somewhere around 2005, 2006. A friend of mine was one of the managers at Vrelmin's. And I've known him for many years. We would just sit around and have coffee once a week and just talk about books. And then eventually somewhere around 2007, he asked me if I wanted to work at Vrelmin's.

Lee Schneider (02:42.301)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (02:53.166)
I applied and got the job and I've been doing it ever since. Not full-time, part-time, full-time, part-time, full-time, but in some way I've been there for a long time. And so I've been able to sort of kind of relive the experience from the bookseller side of like giving kids and giving people, giving like, you know, versions of my young self at the books that blow their minds and have them come back and ask for me. It's a big deal for me to be able to do that. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (02:57.03)
Great.

Lee Schneider (03:02.738)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (03:20.347)
That's great. Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. Like, what is it like when someone comes up to you and says, I don't know what to read or, right? So what's your answer?

Patrick Walker (03:29.014)
It's the best. It's the most fun, yeah.

Patrick Walker (03:35.494)
I, over the past couple years, I've been asking them what they want to feel, like what they want to feel from there. And I asked them, I have a series of questions, personally, this just how I do it. I have a series of questions that can usually pull me towards some sort of idea or a group of ideas of like, I'll ask them a couple of books that they have read and that they can just remember. Cause like sometimes if you ask them like, what's the best book you read in the past year to let all like,

not jarring, that's not the right word, but if you ask them, what are some books that you like? And then I also go ask them what are some books that they read that they don't like? That helps kind of me focus it. I ask them what TV shows they like to watch, what movies they like to watch, because it's all storytelling. all, you know, it's idea with storytelling in book form, but it's all storytelling, right? So it's fun to be able to

Lee Schneider (04:15.089)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (04:35.135)
reach into those avenues of storytelling and kind of connect the dots. I used to work with a guy who I thought was this like living encyclopedia of all of storytelling. It was amazing the way that he could connect. And so I just tried to, his name's Andrew if he ever listens to this, a big shout out to Andrew, but he, I just thought it was like the most amazing thing, the way that he could connect. Seemingly unrelated stories. And so I just tried to do that.

But I like the idea of asking like what you want to feel or do you want to go on an adventure? Do you want to, you know, fall in love? Do you want to just have some warmth? Because there's so many. And just one genre of like fiction or sci-fi or fantasy or even like historical fiction, nonfiction, whatever it is, there's always

Lee Schneider (05:30.791)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (05:33.592)
there's room, like the avenue was wide, you know what I mean? Like there's room for everybody in all of the genres. And so I like to be able to steer people towards an idea, but I also try to make it very conversational so they would want to come back to us. I don't care if they talk to me. I like that, of course, it feels good. But just to create an experience, a bookstore experience where they...

Lee Schneider (05:37.831)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (05:55.901)
Mm

Patrick Walker (06:02.891)
when they want a new book, they're going to be attracted to that experience more than they're gonna be attracted to the ease of ordering it offline. You know, does that make sense? Yeah.

Lee Schneider (06:15.529)
Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. How important to you is the bookstore experience, the actual go into a store and be among books? Where does that stand in your, you know, dark chocolate, you know, whatever? Right.

Patrick Walker (06:23.272)
man.

Patrick Walker (06:31.977)
It's the most important. man. mean, if you, depends, if you get the dark chocolate from Whole Foods that has the honeycomb in it, that's pretty high up on that list. Yeah, that's pretty hard to beat. But I mean, it's the hub of a community. I think so what people can look for at

Lee Schneider (06:45.373)
That's pretty hard. Yeah, yeah, it's a tough one. Yeah.

Patrick Walker (07:01.293)
Bookstores like ours, like Diesel, we're connected to BookSoup, but if you talk about Powell Skylight, I live very close to Skylight and I like to walk to Skylight and just hang out at Skylight too. I'm an equal opportunity bookstore visitor. I like to go everywhere. I think they're very, very important for a culture, a community, for...

Lee Schneider (07:15.463)
Hmm

Patrick Walker (07:31.0)
Yeah, for anybody. mean, things are so easy to get online. I'm not going to say pro or anti online ordering. I am in a place of neutrality with all that personally, but I think we can offer at bookstores, we can offer friendship and we can offer experience and a community that you can't get online. I'm not saying if that's better or worse, but I have friends that were

customers that are now friends of mine that I spend time with. I've seen teenagers come in. I've been at Verumans long enough to have seen teenagers come in when I first met them and now they're coming in with their kids as adults and they, you know, they trust me with their storytelling and they trust me with their

Lee Schneider (08:22.983)
Wow.

Patrick Walker (08:29.579)
literary adventures and that to me is, it's a big deal to me. I'm a huge, at the beginning of those Instagram videos that you saw, I always say I'm a professional book nerd. Cause I like, really do think that that's the truth for me. And it's important to know that I can affect other people in that same way. So to a community, it's kind of an interesting thing because we,

Should we being independent bookstores in general should be trying to attract the community to us to make a space of meeting and participation and warmth and creativity and for families. It should be a space where no matter where you come from, no matter what you believe in.

no matter what, know, gender, spiritual belief, race, anything, you should be met with warmth and space where we can help you find your stories that you're interested in. yeah, there's, so I teach, I've been studying teaching for a long time and there's this belief

Lee Schneider (09:33.661)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (09:51.837)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (09:53.025)
this sort of idea of, I think the phrase is, what's it, mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors, it's something like that. And the idea is that educators, so we'll turn it towards a book, right? Or a bookseller. But a book can, and a story, a really good story, like when you connect with a story, it can show you something about yourself that you didn't see, that you need to see, that's the mirror. It can show you.

Lee Schneider (10:15.965)
Hmm.

Patrick Walker (10:19.378)
a world that you don't know about. So you're looking through the window. So that's the mirrors, the windows at this other world, but you're still in, you know, like your reality, you're looking out at this new reality, which is wonderful. And then there's a sliding glass door. Some books can kind of open a door to help usher in a new, not life, but a new space of existence. And I've never found a website that can do that.

Lee Schneider (10:39.773)
Hmm.

Patrick Walker (10:49.1)
So, I don't know, I mean, I know we and I know Skylight and I know Diesel and I know a lot of these bookstores and a lot of the great bookstores that are doing this. Stories, I love stories books down in Echo Park. A good friend of mine used to run that store. Just all these amazing independent bookstores.

Lee Schneider (10:49.253)
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Walker (11:17.132)
Try to make a literary space more than a space of, know, just come purchase a book. Much more of come hang out with us, come tell us what you're reading, you know.

Lee Schneider (11:30.311)
Mm-hmm

Yeah, I one of the great things about real life bookstores is that the physical books next to a book, which leads into serendipity where, you know, I want to read one Robin Sloan book and I see, there's another one that I hadn't seen yet. Or I always end up leaving with more books than I intended to buy. Maybe I went in to get one and you always get a bunch.

So I like that about it quite a lot and I like the recommendations, you know, when it says staff pick on the book, it's like, wow, you know, that means something because these folks are reading a lot of books. When people come in, yeah, go ahead.

Patrick Walker (11:59.18)
Yeah.

Patrick Walker (12:05.962)
Yeah, we have a lot of those.

Patrick Walker (12:12.128)
Well, the cool thing about those staff picks too is if you like the vibe of like a few of the books that you've read from one bookseller, you know, like when you put your name on the staff picks, like if you go to a bookstore and Ronald, for example, has a staff pick that's hanging off the shelf and you read that book and you like that book and you're going to want to get the next one that you see on the shelf.

that's recommended by Ronald and then all of a sudden you're just reading all these books that you might not know about just because this the same person wrote these staff picks and that too creates this little amazing little connection and then you end up meeting the person you're like my god I read the these books based on your recommendations yeah it's cool and that means a lot to us when that happens yeah yeah

Lee Schneider (13:01.147)
Yeah.

Hmm, that's good to know. Yeah. Do do people come in set on a certain genre or they just say, show me something new?

Patrick Walker (13:14.992)
usually people come in set on a certain genre. That's a really good question. Usually people come and set in my experience, I should say, usually people come in set on a certain genre.

But you can also go to like a record store, like people like to go to different record stores for different genres, you know. I lived in Olympia, Washington when I finished college for two years and I would go up to Seattle for certain records because there's certain record stores up there that just have amazing selection of certain records down to Portland and then in and for other ones down in Portland and then in Olympia we had an amazing

amazing record store that kind of specialized in that. so, I mean, Vrealman specializes in all books. You know, we're just like the, just like the Diesel bookseller. I'm sorry, I forget their name, but the interview that you did with the Diesel, he sort of described Diesel the same way. And that's sort of what we do. I oftentimes try, if we don't have something, I always offer to order it. But I always like to point people towards like, this is a great used bookstore.

Lee Schneider (14:14.876)
Yeah.

Patrick Walker (14:30.794)
Like the Iliad, for example, up in North Hollywood, that's where I love to get my sci-fi and fantasy. So I always say, like, look, there's this amazing bookstore that's been around for a long time. I'll order it for you, no problem. like, you know, we should be sharing the wealth. But usually people come in focused on a certain genre.

Lee Schneider (14:34.365)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (14:43.325)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (14:59.24)
It can get as, it can be as broad as like sci-fi fantasy, biography, historical, like American history, or it can be, there's a lot of people that come into Romans for like, Romantic is a big, big deal right now. Historical fiction is a big deal right now. So it can kind of focus in more like that also.

Lee Schneider (15:12.551)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (15:19.503)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (15:26.966)
But oftentimes people tend to come into bookstores with a mission or at least a feeling of what they want. And then they find themselves wandering. And just like you said, they leave with a lot of other books. But my favorite is when they don't know what they want and they just ask for a recommendation. It's like an adventure.

Lee Schneider (15:34.109)
Uh-huh.

Lee Schneider (15:41.403)
I know that.

Lee Schneider (15:45.778)
Sure. And what are, if we, I can narrow this down a little if you like, but what are you recommending now in science fiction and fantasy? You mentioned romantasy, but is that what you're recommending to people?

Patrick Walker (15:52.801)
Yeah.

Patrick Walker (15:58.444)
Yeah. Not me. We have some booksellers that really, really specialize, that read a lot of romanticie. And I like to give the customers the best available bookseller for that genre possible. You know, I know it sells well, but you know, when my coworkers read entire swaths of series, I'm going to absolutely

point them in their direction. I... So this year I try to loosely read certain types of books every year. Last year was mostly classics or whatever I thought could be considered a classic. This year was mostly sci-fi fantasy.

And I like to find the meeting ground in sci-fi between hard science sci-fi and like philosophical based sci-fi, right? They're not always exclusive. I'm not trying to say they're always exclusive, but I personally like the middle ground where a little bit of both is happening at the same time. There's a lot of really creative.

Storytelling in sci-fi and fantasy, two that come to my mind right now is Piranesi by Susanna Clark. That's an incredible, that is an, like I literally, you can't see because the cameras aren't great on these, but when I think about what it was like to read that for the first time, I get goosebumps. I really liked that book, that really surprised me.

Lee Schneider (17:35.517)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (17:50.314)
And then there's another one called, This is How You Lose the Time War. I think it's, is How You Lose the Time War, or This is How You Win the Time War. I think it's loose, but that's written by two authors at the same time. And that's a really interesting narrative. It's these two agents that are chasing each other through time, like disconnected to linear time. And they end up writing each other letters and leaving each other.

Lee Schneider (17:56.871)
Hmm.

Lee Schneider (18:05.208)
wow.

Lee Schneider (18:13.308)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (18:20.381)
little letters at different points in time. And from what I understand, that was each of the agents is written by a different author. And that was really a special experience. It didn't move. It didn't flow like a normal standard narrative, but I liked that a lot. liked stuff like that. like authors like people that can look at the

the physical structure of a book and manipulate that to cause an experience. I think it's a special thing when authors can do that that can create good storytelling or that can kind of enhance the story that could be told as a linear story but is better in this sort of alternative format. It's not an easy thing to do.

Lee Schneider (18:53.937)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (19:16.237)
No, definitely not, because the reader expectations, the reader comes in, it's linear. It's a linear form. You're turning pages. You read the page from the top to the bottom. You don't really have a choice. You're in linear land. But the people who find a way to work around that are pretty amazing. It's a big risk.

Patrick Walker (19:32.48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's this old, I think they were French, this old French writing collective called the Oulepo, and that was their deal. They just really looked to see what you could do with the physical form of a poem or a book, and they really kind of pushed it into the outer realms of...

like what you could do with a narrative and still make it readable. And that's not for everybody, right? So that's one of the things that's, I mean, that's one of the things that, I think it's fun being a bookseller, being able to, you know, if somebody comes in and they say they like a Christopher Nolan movie, they might not know about the Ulapo, but they probably like Bending Time.

Lee Schneider (20:00.847)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Definitely not.

Lee Schneider (20:28.54)
Yep.

Patrick Walker (20:29.619)
And so we get to introduce them to that idea in book form.

Lee Schneider (20:37.105)
That's cool. Yeah. What trends are you seeing just as far as what's selling now? What are people buying? What are they interested in reading?

Patrick Walker (20:51.133)
Romanticism is huge right now. Romanticism is huge. What else is huge?

Patrick Walker (21:05.483)
A lot of fantasy. Fantasy is giant right now. Sci-fi is doing a slow climb back up the popularity ladder. I think that's really cool. I'm seeing a lot more people standing in the poetry aisle and reading poetry a lot more.

which I think is wonderful. Graphic novels and manga is on fire right now. We can say what we want to say about the Marvel universe. I'm not here to criticize any piece of art anybody makes, but I'm a huge fan of comic books and anything that can bring people into the comic book world, I think is great. I'm seeing a lot of people...

Lee Schneider (21:53.181)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (21:58.995)
Recently lean more into sort of American, I don't know if that's the right word, type of...

like literary fiction based on like stuff like Cormac McCarthy, this guy John Williams, Dennis Johnson, especially Train Dreams. Train Dreams is about to come out on Netflix. really, I love that book so much. So stuff like that, less fantastical, but more about, I don't know if it's because it's about lonely individuals trying to make it in sort of unknown worlds, but.

Lee Schneider (22:17.132)
huh.

Lee Schneider (22:24.86)
Hmm.

Patrick Walker (22:40.97)
A lot more people have been reading that. A lot of people, you know the publisher NYRB?

Lee Schneider (22:48.868)
No. No.

Patrick Walker (22:50.058)
They're really cool. NYRB, I think it stands for the New York New NYR, New York Review of Books. Yeah, they're amazing. They, over the last few years, especially, they've been pulling, from what I understand, they really look for publications that they think aren't being read enough. And they'll sort of publish their

Lee Schneider (22:55.774)
review of books.

Patrick Walker (23:17.566)
their versions of it. And so that is a lot of foreign literature, translated literature. It's a great, great publisher to lean into if you want to read a book from a different country, whole different philosophical belief system, different type of storytelling. And almost 100 % of the time you can trust that they're not going to be terrible.

and they're going to be translated very, very, very well. And it's a, I like publishers that do that while the, you know, the main big, big publishers are sort of consolidating. I have a lot of friends that work for Penguin and Random House and stuff. And they do great, great, great, great stuff for sure. But it's cool to see that there's little publishers that are trying to sort of lean into independent.

Lee Schneider (23:45.895)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (24:12.938)
publishing and translated literature. I really, really want to give a shout out to this bookstore called North Fig Bookshop. It's an amazing bookstore. They specialize in independent publishers. It's this wonderful little utopia of

stuff you probably won't find in many other bookstores. Yeah, stuff like that. I've been seeing a lot of people, I mean, definitely, you know, Dan Browns and Michael Connolly and stuff like that, but I think

People also are reading a lot of genre fiction and a lot of fiction and really looking into trying to find out sort of foundationally who inspired them, right? So a lot of people read Michael Connelly, especially because of the TV shows. And so they're really, they're trying to find who inspired Michael Connelly, stuff like that, right? Who inspired the Dan Browns and who inspired...

Lee Schneider (25:13.49)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (25:27.165)
All right.

Patrick Walker (25:32.265)
you know, like Frank Herbert, right? So Dune because of the movies, like this is amazing. People are being reintroduced to it, but who did Frank Herbert read? And stuff like that. I could be making that up. I have a very focused lens, like all people do. I like, maybe I'm like painting it with optimism because I want people to find those things. But, but along with just a general

Lee Schneider (25:35.196)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (25:41.072)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (25:51.943)
Ha

Patrick Walker (26:01.002)
I think it's really cool. I think it's a really wonderful thing. I really do want to say this. I think it's a really wonderful thing that people are leaning into romance and like leaning into like love based, like heavily leaning into that. I see that as nothing personally, nothing besides just finding love where you can find love. If you can find that in a book, so why?

Lee Schneider (26:26.705)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (26:27.944)
Why not? I mean, it's an amazing adventure that can help people just feel warm inside. It's like, why would that be anything besides the best thing ever? You know what mean?

Lee Schneider (26:39.933)
Right. What do you read for fun?

Patrick Walker (26:45.226)
I'm a big fan of the classics. talked a lot about sci-fi, and I love sci-fi fantasy, I really, and comics, but I'm a huge fan of classics. I try to read one challenging book, like real challenging book every year. I did not do that this year, but I...

There is a new translation of the Aeneid that came out that Emily Wilson didn't write this translation. She didn't translate it, but she did the intro for it and she, so she very much supports it. And I'm interested in reading that one. I really liked that book a lot. The Aeneid's amazing.

I Frankenstein you're talking about Frankenstein that's a really good book I'm halfway through the movie and

Lee Schneider (27:46.097)
What is it like for you, though? What is it like for you to read Frankenstein now? Does it feel it's it's is it slow? Is it on? Does it work? Are you indulging in it? You know what I mean? Like, are you when you say it's cool? Do you mean it? You mean it's like.

Patrick Walker (27:51.05)
That was cool.

Patrick Walker (28:03.913)
I do, I really love that book. It's probably the fourth or fifth time I've read it. I'm a big fan of rereading books. So I'm reading the first version, the 1818 version. That's the one that she wrote, that Mary Shelley wrote when she was 16, which is crazy. I was not doing anything near that amazing when I was 16. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (28:27.229)
Right just yeah sidebar. Yeah. Yeah

Patrick Walker (28:33.285)
It's dated. The way that it's written obviously is dated. I don't think you, it would be very difficult to publish a book that was written in that same way now, but it's perfect for that book in that time. Frankenstein would not be what it is if it wasn't, like Moby Dick wouldn't be considered Moby Dick. Like the book itself, reading that book itself is like chasing the white whale, you know?

Lee Schneider (28:59.941)
Yeah, right. And Frankenstein, Frankenstein has so many things in it that no one had thought of before. were just zero people had that kind of the moral conundrums, the the biology. I have an edition of it that has footnotes by scientists talking about what was what they knew then and what was you know,

Patrick Walker (29:01.924)
if it was written

Patrick Walker (29:06.451)
Right.

Zero people, right? Yeah.

Patrick Walker (29:21.614)
That's awesome. Yeah.

Yeah.

Lee Schneider (29:26.723)
eat at all the footnotes are basically the same. say this is this was totally unknown. This is impossible. No one could have thought of this. It's totally visionary to think, you know, that they're all like that for Frankenstein.

Patrick Walker (29:32.2)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. so this is kind of fun for me to talk about because I, you know, like I was saying, I teach, I teach elementary, I'm getting credentialed right now in elementary and, high school English. and I think a lot about high school English book lists. there are certain books that I think should be, in high school.

English book lists. And there's some that should not. Not for inappropriate. I'm not a fan of banning any type of storytelling, especially for high school kids. There's nothing that books can bring them that they're not seeing in their video games and movies anyway. In my opinion, I should say. But just like why are we, like Charles Dickens is amazing, but I'm also 44 years old, right? Like I do think we as

English teachers should be promoting the joy of reading as well as great literature, right? And so Frankenstein is amazing in this because Frankenstein, it meant a lot to me when I was in high school. It meant a lot to me when I was in my mid-20s and I was taking a literature class. as an adult, as a middle-aged adult,

Lee Schneider (30:35.345)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (30:59.889)
You know, I've dealt with, you know, a lot of life at this point. And so Frankenstein means a lot more now than it did back then. Right. So like, I didn't relate to, the, the, the hubris of the teacher told me about the hubris of Dr. Frankenstein. And I wrote that word in my essay when I, know, cause that's what the teacher said. But, but now that I've dealt with, selfishness and

Lee Schneider (31:08.166)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (31:30.153)
Now that I've been selfish enough times to know how that affects other people and had people be selfish and hubris and egotistical and sorrowful and remorseful. Now I have experience with all of those like life, big life experience with all of those emotions and the ways that that can affect not only me.

but the people around me. Now Frankenstein has an entire different meaning. And that to me is why it's a classic. That's sort of for me what classics can do. They can mean a lot to people over their entire spans of their life. You know what I mean? Like The Little Prince, I would argue that's my favorite book ever. I know it's really cute and all the hipsters have The Little Prince tattoos and stuff like that.

Lee Schneider (32:01.487)
Hmm.

Lee Schneider (32:22.001)
Hmm.

Patrick Walker (32:25.545)
And it's amazing. It's an incredible book. It's the Odyssey for kids. Instead of Odysseus going island to island, the prince goes planet to planet. It's a magical book. I have no idea how many times I've read that book. But as an adult, it hits different. It has this whole nother level of meaning. And I don't know that a 16-year-old

Lee Schneider (32:25.861)
Yeah.

Patrick Walker (32:55.537)
Mary Shelley could intentionally tap into that everlasting form of storytelling. Maybe she could, she obviously did. She wrote the thing and everybody loves it still.

Lee Schneider (33:04.71)
Somehow it's a good argument for the collective unconscious or something because you, know, I was I recently reread Steppenwolf, the Herman Hesse book. There's a new translation and and I loved it as a kid and I couldn't figure out why. So I got this new edition of it. And I as I'm reading it, it's about this

Patrick Walker (33:09.521)
Right, totally, yeah.

Patrick Walker (33:18.321)
I've always wanted to read that. I've always wanted to read that.

Yeah.

Patrick Walker (33:28.445)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (33:31.985)
kind of grumpy 50 year old guy. And I can't imagine what did I like about this when I was a kid. And the band Steppenwolf named themselves after that. And I thought, well, is it the stoner thing? Is it like why? it also had, the reason I bring it up now is because just as Mary Shelley at 16 had...

Patrick Walker (33:33.907)
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick Walker (33:45.502)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (33:58.503)
connected with some kind of collective unconscious, beyond her age. That book had things that happened to that character would happen to me decades later, decades and decades later. And yet I still read it as a teenager and thought, well, this is kind of interesting. And that for me is a kind of a weird mind boggling notion, but it does.

Patrick Walker (34:11.035)
Right. Right. Right.

Patrick Walker (34:18.728)
Yeah.

Patrick Walker (34:23.175)
Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable that that can happen. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (34:26.222)
It's uncanny, know, it's odd, but it's there because it's such an, it taps into such eternal things. And I think that it, I think I was into it because, you know, there was romance in there and it was romance beyond what I knew at the time. You know, things happened and people did things I hadn't done yet myself. And yet I was interested in reading about them. And I think it just...

Patrick Walker (34:32.829)
Yeah, right.

Lee Schneider (34:51.708)
It's very strange in a way. I don't have a of a closer on this because it was reading that book when I was a kid and reading it now. It's very different experience because I've lived parts of it now.

Patrick Walker (34:57.139)
Yeah, that was fine.

Patrick Walker (35:02.953)
Right, right, exactly, exactly. think, I don't want to say like, a great book is this. I hold no authority over this. I just read a lot. I'm just a guy that's obsessed with storytelling. There's zero authority there. I...

Lee Schneider (35:19.942)
Heh.

Patrick Walker (35:28.883)
Think that that's a really special thing that books can do and storytelling in general can do. There's a book that I was thinking about when you were saying all that, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. It's so good. And again, not until I was an adult and started to understand how

Lee Schneider (35:43.996)
Happy Reddit.

Hmm.

Patrick Walker (35:57.563)
I mean, the way that that book is organized, our brains don't think in complete stories. Never have I had the beginning, middle, end of a thought. I just jump around. That's sort of how brains work, right? And so that's the organization of that book. And to be able to introduce that book to kids,

Lee Schneider (36:08.998)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (36:14.918)
Right.

Patrick Walker (36:26.456)
in their teens to like bring a book, to write a book the way that teenagers think. I don't know if she did that on purpose. I would love to think she did. That's such an amazing thing to do and to have written enough things to know how difficult it is for me to even write a great paragraph. That's so hard.

Lee Schneider (36:53.008)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (36:54.918)
to think about being able to tap into...

the brain of an adolescent in a way that can express such authenticity in the way that that kid's brains kind of react with the world around him is just so far beyond anything that I could possibly imagine. So stuff like that is, I really hope that that lasts into,

like deep into the canon of, like I hope that that's a classic many generations from now because of stuff like that, yeah.

Lee Schneider (37:36.561)
Mm-hmm.

I want to ask a really wide angle question, which is what do you think is the state of science fiction and fantasy writing and publishing today?

Patrick Walker (37:51.396)
Mmm. Mmm.

Patrick Walker (38:02.952)
I think that it is more popular than it has been in the past. And I love that because I think...

With sci-fi fantasy, you can really explore the outer edges of creativity. And I think that's amazing. You don't have to stick to reality. You can completely disregard physics, whatever you want, all of reality. You can really explore into the realms of infinite anything.

in sci-fi fantasy. And so I think that that's a really important thing because I do, I'm not interested in making any political anything, but I do watch the news a lot and I know a lot of people do and I know a lot of people, a lot of, I think often about kids and how they get the information about the reality that they're moving into.

especially teenagers moving into adulthood and preteens moving into young adulthood, stuff like that. I would imagine that it's not, it doesn't, I mean, I would imagine that it looks complex is what I'll say. And probably intimidating a little bit. And I, makes me really, really, really happy that genres that are based in creativity and,

Lee Schneider (39:29.265)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (39:41.225)
You know, there's a lot of authors of color. There's a lot of authors that are really exploring incredible paths of storytelling based on this beautiful new, all the beautiful new ideas and realms of gender identity that exist now.

Lee Schneider (40:08.678)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (40:10.194)
that I hope keep expanding as things move forward, as we keep evolving as people. I see a lot of that coming into the storytelling, the sci-fi, especially the sci-fi fantasy storytelling. And I think that's amazing because think about the kids that maybe in the past wouldn't see themselves represented. They might feel so alone within themselves.

Lee Schneider (40:33.756)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (40:40.296)
in whatever physical school community or kind of cultural community that they live in and they could, because of the expanding popularity of sci-fi fantasy, they could pick up a book and it could introduce them to a story that helps them feel, I get emotional thinking about this, sort of helps them feel that they'll be okay, you know, it's a big deal.

That's a big, that can really, I mean, I do think books save lives and I do think books can save lives in that way, really. That might not be the intention of the author, but you know, it's a pretty beautiful byproduct if anything close to that happens, right? If like a slight percentage of that happens, I think that's an awesome thing. And so I do see sci-fi fantasy shifting into that. I know Tor is putting out these amazing little

Lee Schneider (41:10.193)
Hmm.

Lee Schneider (41:25.692)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (41:39.504)
a lot of novellas that are so cool, these tiny little books. And that's a beautiful thing for somebody that wants to come into the genre fiction that, you know, doesn't want to read 600 pages as their first thing. 80 pages, I'll read anything for 80 pages, you know? There's a lot of digital reading possible. You can go on TOR's website and you can go on a lot of

Lee Schneider (41:51.632)
Right.

Patrick Walker (42:10.991)
know, sci-fi fantasy writing website and just read free fiction. I see the genres opening their arms in a really welcoming way of just like, just come hang out with us. It's, it's, it's wild here. Let's go play with some dragons and shoot laser swords or wake up into the world that we were just dreaming or, you know, you know, channel, I don't know, channel, you know, channel thoughts from different planets. Let's, you know, reality in itself is a place where we have to do things that we may or may not want to do. When we can play and express a lot of freedom in sort of the stories that we read, it can help us deal with the reality that we have to participate in a lot more. I think, for me at least. And thanks for coming to my TED Talk, I guess. Yeah.

Lee Schneider (43:17.206)
yeah, that's so true. Thanks. That might be a...

Patrick Walker (43:21.423)
No, I think it's super important. I think it's super important. I think genre fiction is like so important specifically for that.

Lee Schneider (43:27.781)
Yeah, that's something I've learned about it too. Echoing what you're saying, reinforcing what you're saying is that it really does help us by being so different from the world of things we have to do. It helps us deal with that real world. It just kind of turns things around, kind of gets back to what you were saying earlier about the mirror and the window and the sliding doors. if you think of it in those three terms, it...

Patrick Walker (43:45.084)
Yeah.

Patrick Walker (43:51.441)
Yeah. Right.

Lee Schneider (43:55.888)
definitely brings a lot to the party and definitely is a way to kind of refresh your view of the world.

Patrick Walker (44:03.793)
There's a quote I'm thinking about. There was a podcast a while back that I heard and Alex, who used to be one of the owners of stories bookstore was talking about, don't remember if it was post COVID or if, I think it was before that. I think it was after.

So when the Kindle hit really, really, really hard and bookstores started shutting down and people started coming back to bookstores after that, like realizing that like bookstores are places that you can go, don't even have to buy anything. And so that shifted what people were buying. So I do believe I'm really bad with dates. Anything that has to do with numbers, I just can't remember it. But Alex was talking about

Lee Schneider (44:36.112)
Mm-hmm.

Patrick Walker (44:55.407)
the fact that he saw poetry being more popular than anything else. It could have been at stories, but his idea was because when you read poetry, it's like the act of reading poetry, it like, you have to like read it over and over and over again. It's a slow process. It's not fast.

It's not, you can read it on a Kindle, but it's better if you fold corners and you could highlight things. it's, like the act of reading poetry is like slowing yourself down almost in like a meditative thing. And he thought that people were more attracted to that as sort of a pendulum swinging from, you know, super fast paced, all information all at once into this far more intentional type of.

ingesting words. And I think what you're talking about is similar to that. It's a type of thing where like, what's the intentionality that I have with reading what I'm going to read? And for me, it's so that I can deal with the real world easier, you know? Yeah.

Lee Schneider (46:10.651)
Yeah, right. Right. Definitely. It's a processing thing. Well, that seems like a really good place to land. And I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. was a lot of fun.

Patrick Walker (46:23.707)
Yeah, thank you so much. This was really, really, really fun.