Rail: Evelyn moves through the world without a home, while Tsering comes from a tradition where your place is chosen for you. It feels like the novel is using their paths to think about the forms belonging can take—geographic, spiritual, even accidental. Was it a certain aspect of belonging that you were exploring with that dichotomy?

Guterson: Evelyn was born in Evansville, Indiana and grew up in a neighborhood called Arcadian Acres. Nearby is the remnant path of the old Evansville and Eastern Electric Railway, and beyond that is farmland, and beyond the farmland are the Angel Mounds—built centuries before by Indigenous people—and beyond the Angel Mounds is a bend in the Ohio River.

Tsering grows up at the edge of a village in eastern Tibet. His family summers in tents pitched in the high country. At a young age he goes to live with his Uncle Samten in a retreat setting, and from there moves on to monastic life.

Both Evelyn and Tsering find reason to strike out into the world as transients. They leave the known world behind and open themselves to whatever the road brings. Evelyn wanders in the American West. She visits a Hutterite community, lives with fruit pickers, pitches a tent in an Alaskan campground, and trades work for room and board at a meditation center in New Mexico. Tsering, wearing robes, travels broadly in Tibet.

In both cases, there’s only one kind of belonging that eventually makes sense, and that’s spiritual belonging. Once Evelyn and Tsering come to grips with that, it no longer matters to either where they are in the world. Tsering ends up living in an apartment in Seattle, where he learns how to use a rice steamer, an electric fryer, a toaster, a washing machine, a dryer, and a vacuum cleaner. Evelyn, after much transience, returns to Arcadian Acres, settles down with her mother and her young son, Cliff, and cleans houses for a living.

Belonging becomes for each an inner state—a way of being in the world no matter where they are.

Rail: So much of Evelyn in Transit is about people trying to find meaning out of uncertainty. The characters don’t get tidy epiphanies; they get moments that complicate things. When you’re writing toward that kind of ambiguity, how do you know when it’s enough? What tells you you’ve reached the truth of the moment, even if the moment doesn’t necessarily resolve anything?

Guterson: I will appeal again to the beauty of understatement here, with this inflection: that truth is in the thing itself, which is the principle behind Imagist poetry and haiku. Writing fiction in this mode is about paying attention to what’s essential in what’s present, and as that is honored—often a matter of paring away excess—meaning emerges.

As in William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow—so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside white chickens.

It’s paradoxical that abstract symbols point beyond themselves beautifully when they express the world in spare, concrete terms, as in this haiku written by Takarai Kikaku:

Above the boat,

bellies

of wild geese.

Those few, spare symbols point toward raw existence. They do this not by holding a perfect mirror up to nature, but by holding up the only mirror words can hold—a flawed one. If we pay attention, we will know that we aren’t satisfied on hearing this haiku. We’ll feel the presence of beauty and truth, but something will be missing, something will remain beyond, out of reach. As it should be. As is real and true.

Rail: I’m interested in how a writer can trust a scene enough to stay out of its way. It seems like a delicate balance, shaping the moral tension without over-defining it. Have you developed any methods for letting ethics emerge through action instead of assertion?

Guterson: I love this question for the same reason I love the five that precede it—they’re all real questions that writers ask each other, things the asker wants to think about on behalf of personal creative pursuits (or anyway they seem to me to be those kinds of questions, i.e., the kinds of questions I ask, too).

Here the inquiry is specific to morality and ethics. How might ethics emerge through action instead of assertion? I think that’s loosely the same question asked immediately above, which I answered by contemplating poets whose art lies in letting the world speak both for and beyond itself. The difference is that here, we’re definitively in an abstract realm—that of morality and ethics—which deeply complicates the creative challenge.

I’m at a bit of a loss to answer here and will have to fall back on something that is true generally for me when it comes to writing fiction—that really there are no guiding principles.

I don’t have a theory or a method. Each of my works of fiction came into the world differently. Each moment of each presented me with its singular dynamic. There was nothing to anchor to. There were no principles to apply. There was always only here and now.

A good metaphor for fiction writing is Indra’s net. This image first appeared in Vedic scriptures—specifically in the Atharvaveda, sometimes called the “Veda of magical formulas.” Indra’s net is an infinite web of multi-faceted jewels, each of which reflects the others. It’s a hall of mirrors—an endless shimmer. When something happens at a single point there, it happens everywhere. Which means that, as a fiction writer, you have no choice but to take everything into account before you touch the next word.