The beauty of repeating a single note with Martha Anne Toll

Adam Sockel: You’re listening to Passions and Prologues, a literary podcast where each week, I’ll interview an author about a thing they love and how it inspires their work. My name is Adam Sockel and I’m your host, and if this is your first time checking in, so glad to have you here. If you’ve been here for a while, welcome back. I’m really, really happy to have you here. Today’s interview is with Martha Ann Toll. Martha has written a book called Three Muses, which is a love story, but it’s also a story about a Holocaust survivor. It’s a story about trauma and identity. It’s a story about ballet and music. At the end of the day, the three muses that she’s referencing in the title, are song, discipline, and memory. It’s a phenomenal book. It is one that I hadn’t heard of before the publisher reached out to me, and wow, I was just blown away. I can’t recommend her book highly enough. We will get to her conversation in just a bit, but I do want to offer an additional book recommendation as well, before we get to her topic and our discussion. The book I want to recommend today is called A Small Porch by Wendell Berry. It is actually a book of poetry, something that I don’t read all that often, but Wendell Berry is one of my favorite authors. I realize I don’t really recommend him very much to other people, just because a lot of his books are agrarian. They’re about nature and the world, and his life as a farmer for over nine decades at this point. But A Small Porch is these series of what he calls Sabbath poems. Basically, every week, throughout his life, he walks along the land that he owns in rural Kentucky, and every year he collects a bunch of his musings and turns them into poems from those walks. A Small Porch are the Sabbath poems that he wrote from 2014 and 2015. Wendell Berry just has this way of talking about the world that makes you want to get outside and go for a hike or go for a walk, and not only do those things, but be aware of the nature around you. Feel the bark of a tree, the smell of dying leaves, all of these different things. It’s the time of year, recording this on November 1st, just after Halloween. It’s the time of year where I really think about these types of things. I always like to say it’s ironic, but at the end of fall, going into winter when things are all dying around, I feel most alive. That is what Wendell Berry’s writing reminds me of, and so A Small Porch is a lovely introduction to his nonfiction work. He’s also written a number of novels that I highly recommend, but if you’re looking for a gateway into Wendell Berry, I would highly recommend A Small Porch. Now, I want to get in just a moment to my conversation with Martha Anne Toll. Martha and I talk about classical music and her love of it and how she was brought up in a classically trained musical family and what that entails, but specifically, she talks about a musical teacher that she had and how this world class musician basically made music available to people who may not have otherwise been able to afford that type of phenomenal instruction. It’s a really interesting conversation about how music has affected her life in so many different ways and how it affected her writing when it came to Three Muses. If you ever need to get ahold of me, if you have thoughts on the podcast or if you would like to get some book recommendations, you can always reach me at [email protected]. I’m also on TikTok and Instagram at Passions and Prologues. I like to do prayer and unique book recommendations on both of those. Check those out if you’d like some more of those, and I’ll give you some customized book recommendations if you leave me a rating or review wherever you listen to the podcast, just screenshot that, send it to me at [email protected], and I’ll be happy to send you some book recommendations specifically perfect for you. Okay, that’s enough of the intro, that’s enough of the housekeeping. I do want to say thank you again to everyone who is listening in. It’s just me doing this here by myself, so it really, really means a lot. If you like this episode or any others, just tell a friend. It helps me in ways you’ll never understand. Just so, so appreciative of everybody who has talked about the podcast a little bit. Okay, that is all of my begging for attention. I am going to transition smoothly now to my conversation with Martha Anne Toll, author of Three Muses, on Passions and Prologues. Okay, I am really, really excited, and we actually didn’t even talk about what the answer’s going to be before we started recording, which makes me really excited. Martha, what is the thing you are super passionate about that we’re going to be discussing today?

Martha Anne Toll: Adam and I, really nice to be here, Adam, thank you so much, and we had a chance to talk a minute before the show and I went through my list, why didn’t I do Minions or cookbook memoirs or all the weird things that I do? But today, I’m going to talk about music, and in particular, the viola, which I studied very seriously. It’s a little bit of a nerdy niche, of a nerdy field, which is classical music, so that’s where I thought I would start.

Adam Sockel: Oh, you are in a safe space to do nerdy things, don’t worry. This is a very nerdy group of listeners and a podcast itself. Okay, I love this. This is one of my favorite things about this podcast is, I get to try and think of questions about a thing I know nothing about. Let’s start at the beginning. Where did your interest, or I guess, start at the beginning, when did you pick up the viola as the tool of the trade that you wanted to spend your life studying? How did it all start?

Martha Anne Toll: Great. You told me a great story about yourself, that your mom was an English teacher, and I didn’t have an English teacher mom, I had an editor mom, but she was really, really passionate about music. I think it was because her parents, she wanted to study violin and her parents really discouraged her. What transpired in my family is I am the third of four girls, and my mother had this dream of a string quartet. And a string quartet is made up of two violins, a viola and a cello. And a viola, if you’ve never heard of it, is like a fat violin. It is strung an octave higher than a cello, but you hold it under your chin, but it’s the alto voice of the string section. It’s quite a bit more cumbersome to play than a violin, which is smaller. My oldest sister started on cello and my second sister started on violin. This was in our public school system. We had music instruction starting in fourth grade. I wanted to play flute and my mom said, “No, you have to play viola.” Because she was looking ahead to that string quartet. That’s how I started, just by getting… In fourth grade, we were really lucky we were in a school system in suburban Philadelphia where you got an instrument, you got instruction. That’s how I started. I really, I would say, really fell for it when I started. My mother got us private instruction. She was very serious about this, and I stumbled into, by luck, whatever, I can’t really say it was talent, into this absolutely spectacular viola teacher who changed my life forever when I was 14 years old.

Adam Sockel: First off, I love the idea of your mom being like, “No, we’re building an internal string quartet. We don’t need a… We’re going to internally source our music from this family.” That’s so fantastic. But from when you first started, because I have interviewed a lot of people who they talk about a thing they’re passionate about and they’re like, “Yeah, the moment I started doing it, I knew this was a thing I was going to love.” Or, “The moment I started watching this show, whatever it is.” Was this something that you did initially at least have an interest in throughout? Because you said you fourth grade until you got to 14. That’s a couple of years in the middle before you met this teacher who really sold you on the passion of it. Was it something you were just doing, because Mom was telling you to do it, or-

Martha Anne Toll: I think I was doing it more out of obligation, but I will say that both my parents were passionate about music. My dad, who always said he couldn’t connect his brain to his hands, he did start piano after my mom died. He started piano at about age 73 and studied until he died, but he had a fantastic musical ear and he could recognize anything on the radio. He had music on in the house all the time, on the record player. He had very eclectic taste, so so much of what I learned about music was just came in through the water supply essentially. I just heard it when he was playing it. I didn’t always have a name for it, and then he would take me, and the teacher that I had before I was 14, he would drive me every Sunday morning and we’d play guess the music that was on the radio station. There was a lot of encouragement, but I wouldn’t say I became absolutely passionate about it until I met this teacher.

Adam Sockel: What was it about this teacher that sold you to go down this path?

Martha Anne Toll: Well, there were a bunch of things. First of all, he was an incredible character. His name was Max Arynov. He was old enough to be my grandfather and had grown up on the streets of Philadelphia; scruffy, poor, Jewish family, and in those days, classical music was a ticket to out out of poverty. If you could get into an orchestra, you could make a living. He had an incredible gift of the gab, and he was a wonderful, wonderful raconteur. He owned a viola. I think he owned it, or somebody may have donated it to him. He owned the most beautiful instrument I have ever seen before or since. I’ve actually seen Stradivari. I’ve seen some pretty good instruments. It was this honey colored instrument, and the scroll was beautifully carved and the sound was just unbelievable. It had an incredible, incredible sound. It was this honey-colored, molasses, thick sound. He had these bug eyes when you started to play. He’d get in your face. The sound was unbelievable. But also, he had been in the first graduating class from Curtis, which is a much lesser known school than Julliard, but Curtis is really… It was always tuition free. It was started in the early 1900s. He was in the first graduating class, and Curtis is still the gold standard for string players. He was in the first graduating class to start a string quartet, but he felt like he didn’t want to only teach elite students, he was on the faculty with Curtis, so he started his own school, basically for the plebes among us, to give instruction to people, because so, so, so few, and it’s still true, get into Curtis. We were in the studio in his school.

Adam Sockel: That’s so interesting to me, and there’s a lot of things I was thinking of. First off, the last thing you talked, about how this opening up the education to everyone, making the access to his knowledge and his capabilities available to everyone, there is a chef, I believe his name is Dan [inaudible 00:12:14], and he was a former chef at the top restaurant in the world. I will think of the name in a minute here, but it’s this place in Amsterdam and it is a three Michelin star restaurant. He worked there for years and years as their head chef, and then what he did, he came back… I actually think he might be from Philadelphia or the Northeastern area, and he basically said, “I have all this knowledge about food and I’m working at a restaurant where 0.01% can access it.” And so now what he does is he’s started a foundation where he works with high schools and middle schools and grade schools to provide healthy and affordable meals for kids who can’t afford it, because he’s like, “Everyone should have access to these things.” I love that idea of your teacher saying, “This is something that it shouldn’t be…” Like you said, just because I have access to a beautiful, incredible instrument shouldn’t be the only reason I can play this. Along those same lines, was he the type of teacher who was welcoming and open, or was he strict? Because I feel like there’s so many different types of teaching approaches, and it’s obviously different for everybody. What was the approach that he took to teaching?

Martha Anne Toll: Well, I definitely want to answer that. I first have to say what his studio looked like. This was in the ’70s, and it was walking into an 1890s European salon. He had a corner of an old brick building and he was in the turret parts. There were bay windows all over the place and he had photographs all over his studio of really famous musicians. He had a story about each one, and he took me around and told me, and he was a pipe smoker and he would play… He had this incredibly priceless instrument, he’d play it with the pipe in his mouth.

Adam Sockel: Oh my God.

Martha Anne Toll: It was scary to me. And I think he would occasionally get it opened up and take the ashes out of the instrument, but I think that actually it probably enhanced the sound. He had his pipe in his mouth, which was a Meerschaum, which is a pipe that has a man’s face on the-

Adam Sockel: Yeah, I know what you’re talking about.

Martha Anne Toll: And then the other thing he kept in his office was a medical school anatomical hand, a plastic hand that you could lift off the top and see all the veins and the ligaments and the tendons. And then he could explain why we call it… String players call your ring finger, your third finger, because you don’t use your thumb to play, why it was so hard to play with your third finger, because the tendon for the second finger crossed over. Anyway, all that stuff. That was the first thing, but the magic, and I really do, really understand this, I don’t think I totally caught it, there are world renowned musicians who can play and enchant an audience. It’s very, very rare that they untangle how they play. And what he had done was reverse engineer how he played, how he played. He basically taught everybody how to practice, and he was a taskmaster and he was loving. But the way he was a taskmaster, was he would give you these… It’s like bench presses or whatever you would do, chin ups, whatever you would do if you were getting in shape for something else, these horrible exercises by a Czech composer named Ochikar Sebczec, that were just so boring. He would tell you how to practice with a million different variations. When you came into your lesson, he sat there, listened to you. There’s no cheating. You got to do play the whole thing for him. He did the same thing with your right arm, which is your bow arm. He had these incredibly intricate exercises, and he had sharpened a pencil. You couldn’t get off the hook, so you really couldn’t cheat at home, because you were going to come in and do exactly what you’d been doing at home for him. That, I think, was the key. He had basically deconstructed how to play, which it sounds like that might not be so unusual, but lots and lots of music students are trained by… You’re expected to figure this stuff out on your own, and so this was quite rare, I believe.

Adam Sockel: In a similar vein, I grew up, I played baseball all the way through college, and in a similar vein, when I was younger, I was very fortunate how my dad… Anything that myself or my three siblings wanted to do, my parents were full bore. “Yep, we don’t have all the money in the world, but whatever we can do to facilitate your interests, we’re going to.” And so he got me private swing lessons as a baseball player, and I was, I think, 12, 13, 14 in through high school. And it’s that exact same thing. It’s one of the reasons why I love distance running and writing so much, like you said about you can’t cheat it, you can’t just write 50 pages, you have to sit down and write it. And it’s the same thing with a baseball swing. Like you said, it’s not looking at a professional baseball player and saying, “Replicate his swing.” It’s looking at a professional baseball player and saying, “Okay, his hands start at this part of his shoulder, and when a pitch is coming, it moves four inches back this way and his elbow goes this way.” You have to replicate that every single time. And so like you said, I would spend hours and hours on a tee, literally where the ball is stationary and you can move it to wherever you want, but you work on your swing in that exact, structured moment. And I have to imagine that’s probably what you guys were doing. Okay, you are going to play these three notes in succession, this specific way, because like you said, in the grander scale, it’s going to eventually be a part of this whole thing. But I love that having a teacher, and like you said, I did the same thing like you. I didn’t understand at the time, where I was like, “Why am I doing these stupid drills?” And then 18 months later, you’re like, “Oh, because it’s leading to all this.” Was he someone who, when the music started playing, he came to life and was listened to the… Was he an energetic type of a guy?

Martha Anne Toll: Oh, he was super energetic. But I think the thing, the insistence… I had two thoughts while you were talking. One is my dad… He was like, “You have to practice three hours a day. That’s it. That’s the minimum.” And I realized it was pretty easy to practice three hours a day, because it took so long to go through each one of these exercises. My dad would come home from work and I would usually practice in his study. He was like, “How can you stand playing one note all day long?” But I totally found it a zen experience. I got into the zone, I loved it. I loved it. But I think one of the things that he did that was so critical was, I mean crucial, I meaning the word crucial, was you had to make it beautiful. “I don’t want to hear a scratch in your tone. Everything you do here, everything you do in every orchestra rehearsal and every chamber music rehearsal has to be beautiful. And if you don’t start now, right now, you’re wasting my time and you’re wasting your time.” And he could reproduce that tone. Each sound was so beautiful. I’ve never heard of a violist, before or since, who had that kind of tone. And his students come out with that kind tone and they’re quite recognizable. At this point, he’s one generation removed. In other words, he died in 1981, so it would be two generations, but musicians also, like ballet dancers, trace their lineage back through their teachers to see what kind of sound they have. Part of it was just listening to him, and if you were home and you were practicing and you got two minutes of that sound, then it was like, “Wow, [inaudible 00:20:23] it’s so beautiful.” It’s be in your head, ricocheting around. It was beautiful.

Adam Sockel: Yeah. Obviously we’re recording this for a podcast, which is a audio medium, but I can see you brightening up when you’re talking about those two minutes, however much time you can harness that kind of magic. But throughout working with the teacher and then throughout your experience of spending years and years and hours and hours playing, what is it for you about playing this music that brought… What is it about it that you have so much stuff [inaudible 00:21:00]? For me, for baseball, it’s all these little things create something bigger. Baseball is this unique chemistry of just you versus a pitcher, but it’s also your team. And like I said, it’s all these different things that add up to the whole. And for me, it’s also the sounds and the smells and there’s all these different things. But for you, what is that magic in playing this type of music? Because you started it because you were told to, but clearly you still have a passion for it. I’m interested where that magic is for you.

Martha Anne Toll: The story for me is a bit more complicated, but the first thing I’ll say is, yes it is… The viola is, by and large, not a solo instrument. You can’t make a living and it’s not meant to be a solo instrument. There are handful of concertos written for it, but very, very few. And so the viola is always part of an ensemble of some sort. Being in an orchestra, I think, is not that different from being on a baseball team. You are completely reliant on the people around you and they are completely reliant on you. There is this incredible magic. You’re one person, this amazing sound is coming out of you, oh dear. And the same for string quartet. That’s a huge part of it. And the second huge part of it is that expression. “Everything I know, I learned in kindergarten.” Everything I learned in his studio has been indispensable for my adulthood. He had a number of expressions which were really important. One is, “You’re the 90%, I’m the 10%. You got to do the work.” And still in his passion for discipline, which we’ll talk about in my novel, but he also… I still can’t really figure this out, but I think it was more by action than by speech, the value of incremental learning. Actually, if we have a big goal, you can’t just meet that goal. You have to take it apart. My husband has this great expression, “How do you eat an elephant?”

Adam Sockel: One bite at a time?

Martha Anne Toll: It’s that, if you want to do the big thing, you have to break it down and do the incremental parts. I have found that extremely useful my whole life. I did go to law school and practice law, and I felt like I had a means to study, that other students didn’t have, because I’d been prepared with this, how do you break it down into the component parts? And obviously the same for writing a novel. Oh, and the other thing is, if you’re not going to bring quality to it, don’t bother. You’re wasting your time. You’re not going to get any joy out of it, but you’re also not going to ever improve. Those are the three big lessons, I would say.

Adam Sockel: We’ll be back with more Passions and Prologues after this break. And now, back to Passions and Prologues. Anna, I’m curious how your passion for this particular instrument and music, how does it connect to your writing? Because that’s something where, like we were talking about, you mentioned the word discipline, but how were you able throughout your teens and twenties, and because, like you said, it’s not just music, it’s not just practicing law, it’s not just being a book reviewer and an author interviewer for MPR and doing all these different things. I’m curious, is there a connection between your passion for music and your passion for literature? And also just a simpler question, how did you find time to work on writing with all of this other stuff going on?

Martha Anne Toll: Well, for me, I have to back up and say I feel like this was a progression. I was apparently, unbeknownst to me, looking for my art form. I started as a young child in ballet and I was not… I had the same love for the discipline of it, the beauty of it, but no talent. What happened with viola, and why I thought I had to be a professional in everything I tried, is something I’m not sure I have an answer to, but I went very far in music, and at some point it became quite fraught for me, because I started to feel my own limitations. When I got to college, I was among extremely gifted musicians. Well, my viola teacher wanted me to go to Conservatory and I didn’t want to do that, because I knew I had this thing with words. I was like, “I need to be able to have a regular college curriculum.” But it became clearer and clearer to me that I had limitations that I might not be able to overcome. The musicians I was playing with, I could just tell they were better, or I could tell I was limited, all these things. Anyway, at some point I realized I should not pursue this professionally, and focusing on the word part of it, I went to law school. There’s multiple answers to this question, and I think a lot of writers will say this, that I’ve been writing my whole life, I just didn’t realize it. I was that kid who wrote the plays for the people to act in when we were six. I always, always read, I always kept a journal, I always kept vocabulary lists. Words were very much part of the family that I grew up in and I definitely caught that. And all the professional jobs that I had were very, very writing intensive. I was always writing, snail mailing, all those things. But I think I came to writing, because it’s a very comfortable medium for me. But my first goal, when I started getting serious about fiction, was to get music on the page. It was absolutely the thing I most wanted to do. And it’s completely impossible of course, because music doesn’t lend itself to the pages. It’s not a silent medium, but I know that that’s the connection. I’m very conscious of the sound of language, and what I can say is having moved through a couple of different disciplines, I think writing was where I was meant to be, and it just took me a long time to get there.

Adam Sockel: I had a conversation with a horror novelist recently, named Dawn Kurtagich, and she writes these very terrifying books, but she’s one of the most bubbly and delightful people, which I feel like always happens with people who write scary books. They’re somehow the most kindhearted and gentle people. But our conversation evolved into this discussion about how one of the things she and I both think are so important to storytellers, yes, anyone can come up with a story, but it’s being aware of your surroundings. She talked about, she wrote one of her books is, it came out of, she was going for a hike in Wales where she lives, and she saw this cave on the side of a mountain and she just couldn’t get out of her mind, what is in that cave? And so she starts building it out. And I have to imagine for someone who spent, and continue to spend so much time, I’m imagining when you hear music, because of your experience with it, and you actually mentioned earlier about how your teacher’s instrument had a honeycomb, it’s almost like a synesthesia thing, which is actually something I talked about with another author-

Martha Anne Toll: I saw that, because I also have synesthesia.

Adam Sockel: Okay, when you said it, I was going to guess. I was like, I feel like she probably has a touch of synesthesia too. But my guess, this is a long, rambling way of saying, I have to imagine for you, it strikes me as I imagine you’re a very… You notice things. Whether it’s listening to music or seeing things out in the world, or obviously being a book reviewer, I have to imagine your experience in music helps you to better notice and pick up on things that can go into stories. Or is that just me projecting something and trying to make it fit?

Martha Anne Toll: Well, I think there’s some truth there. I think what’s super interesting is the viola is an inside voice and nobody’s ever heard of a violist, although I’m going to tell you two really well known violists. One is Jimi Hendrix started on viola, I want to share that, and also Nicholson Baker, who is an amazing, amazing writer, I think he has a viola degree from Eastern School of Music. I read that somewhere, and I’ve never been able to verify it, but I think it’s true. Those are my groupie things. But when you’re an inside voice, you have to be matching your sound to the people around you, to the violins and the cellos that are around you. I think that’s really interesting that it’s not… Yes, I think there’s a lot of connection, and I also think that as a reader and as a writer, I’m much more interested in language and the sound of the language than I am a plot. And that might have been something of… I won’t say it’s a handicap, but it’s something that is hard for me, because I don’t really care about plot. Sometimes people… The industry doesn’t love ‘quiet writing’, whatever that means. I hate that term. And I’m completely passionate about quiet writing, which is where the language is maybe takes more precedence than the characters or the plot. Now I’m trying to… I obviously try to compensate for that. You need some plot, there’s no question, but I really care about sound.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, no, listen, I always tell people, I love small stories with big emotions. I feel like I’m the same way. I want the books that stay with me, the stories that stay with me, are the books that it’s like… I don’t remember if it was… Was it Foster Harris who said there’s only three types of stories in the world, or whatever it is? And it’s happy ending, unhappy ending, tragedy, or something like that. It’s what makes up the stories, why you remember it. And to me, that’s why I love getting to your book through music. That’s why I loved it so much, is because it did feel melodious and every line, I wanted to wrap it up around me like a blanket. There is music connected to your book, and I’m wondering if you can give our listeners an introduction to Three Muses a little bit. I think people, as you’re describing the book, will see how this is a lot of a culmination of the different things within your life.

Martha Anne Toll: I love that. Thank you. And just repeat that for me, small stories, big emotions?

Adam Sockel: Yeah, I love small stories with big emotions. That’s the thing [inaudible 00:31:38]-

Martha Anne Toll: I love that, because I used to describe my writing as, I care about love and death, which are two small topics. Three Muses is framed by a strand of Greek mythology that I stumbled over. It comes from the region of Boeotia, and instead of the nine muses that we hear about, maybe when we start learning about Greek mythology, there was three; song, discipline, and memory. And those three ideas frame my book. Discipline is particularly interesting, because in this tradition, it includes the concept of prayer and preparation for prayer. I think that’s a very interesting and wonderful combination that there’s a spiritual. The story in my book is that a young boy, German boy named Yonko, is deported to a concentration camp with his mother and brother. His mother saves his life while they’re in line for the gas chamber, by telling the SS officer that he can sing. He’s pulled out of line and he has survives, because he sings for the commandant and officers who murdered his family. Music has become this incredibly fraught thing for him. He is loosely associated with song, but song is both the means to his survival and also the means to his insurmountable trauma. He makes his way to New York and he falls in love with a ballerina, and the irony of that is that a ballerina cannot work without music. There is no ballet without music. Yonko becomes John when he comes to America, and Katya is the ballerina. She’s from Queens. She was named Katherine, but her choreographer, who has essentially been grooming her to be prima ballerina, but also to be his lover, renames her Katya Simonova to give her a fancy Russian name. She’s loosely associated with discipline and her life is really about, really circumscribed by the ballet. That is who she is, what she lives for, that kind of thing. It’s a love triangle. The relationship between Katya and her choreographer, Boris Yanikov, is completely fraught. The third muse is memory, which I think overlays the whole story, and in fact it overlays all of our lives and is part of the Jewish tradition of, our collective memory is very important to us. We are not a people who build cathedrals. We carry our memory forward into future generations. That’s the thumbnail, which wasn’t too much of a thumbnail.

Adam Sockel: No, that was perfect. And so there’s the reason, one of many reasons I loved your book so much is my father’s side of my family is Jewish. He’s non practicing, but we grew up with… We went into Passover and Yom Kippur, Rosh Hoshanah and all these different things. The memory aspect hit me so hard. I’m a person who, I think nostalgia is a healthy thing. I hate people who say nostalgia is a unhealthy emotion. I’m like, why should I not think about the memories of my past fun? I don’t know. It’s a whole thing to me. No, I just love how it all wove together. I don’t know, to me, like I said, getting to know you a little bit and researching you while reading it and after the fact, I was like, this feels like a perfect culmination. I talk to a lot of authors sometimes. “Why this book? Why was this the book you spent so much time on?” I feel like that’s probably a easy answer for you. It does really feel like a culmination of all of these things that matter to you.

Martha Anne Toll: That is so true, and in the interviews that I’ve been doing, I always quote Anne Enright, who’s a wonderful Irish writer. I heard her speak about 10 years ago and she said, “If you meet a debut author, there are debut books about their 16th.” In fact, I have a full novel, which I would love someone to publish, come shopping it around, about the music world. And it was earlier than this novel. It’s an immersive novel about a viola player. I wouldn’t say it’s autobiographical, but it draws more directly on my own experience. It’s interesting that that’s out there. I hope to get it published, but this is a later novel, and you’re right that in some ways it is the culmination of a lot of things that I think about. And I also think that memory is something that writers draw upon. We can’t, And I think, to your point, about big emotions, I think we draw on our emotional memory. It’s not a literal, “Oh, okay, what I’m writing is what happened to me.” It’s not that for fiction. It’s more how do you access the emotional memory to get it on the page?

Adam Sockel: I want to add, because it’s not often I get to talk to people who also interview authors, and so this is going to be completely out of left field, but that’s what most of my podcast is anyways, out of left field.

Martha Anne Toll: Perfect for a baseball player.

Adam Sockel: Exactly, yeah, exactly, keeping with my theme of baseball, which I didn’t realize I was going to have until this through line, but what is your favorite type of author to interview? Because you mentioned debut authors, and I’ve been fortunate enough that I’ve interviewed people, I’ve been the first person to interview some people who have gone on to be bestsellers. I’ve sat down with James Patterson. I’ve literally done the whole gamut and I have my own thoughts on the types of people I love interviewing, but I’m interested, do you have a type of author that you like to interview? Or I guess, what’s your favorite type of discussions to have?

Martha Anne Toll: It’s really interesting. I really like people, so I’m happy to interview anybody. The real problems that I’ve had have been around people who are completely not forthcoming, and then I’m like, “Why did you want me to interview you?” I can’t think of one or two instances where the most important thing about this person is what they wouldn’t talk about. And then I feel like, maybe you shouldn’t have agreed to an interview. That I find incredibly frustrating, when you know… I’m thinking of a particular example with a book that had a lot of political implications and the author wouldn’t talk about it. I think she probably felt that the book needed to speak for itself. But anyway, if the author is forthcoming, I’m always interested. I don’t care what you’re talking about, I find it really, really, really interesting. As you know better than I do, people have different writing processes. They have different ways of organizing their thoughts. They have different ways of approaching their work. I’m game for anything.

Adam Sockel: That makes sense to me, and I don’t know, there’s something so interesting. In my past life, I would go to the American Library Association’s mid-winter conference, where all the publishers bring 50 authors. And so my cohost and I would tag team things, but we would end up interviewing seven authors in two or three days. It would literally be everyone from… There was one day where we interviewed Colson Whitehead and Matthew Desmond, who had both won the Pulitzer Prize that year. We interviewed them back-to-back, and then an hour later, I interviewed an author who, it was literally her first interview, ever, for any book. It’s just so interesting to see, and like you said, I feel like there’s sometimes there’s people that sit down with you, they know… I almost like interviewing people who have a ton of experience being interviewed, and when they have that wall up, and if I can find a way to ask them a question where you see them drop their shoulders and lean in and be like, “Oh, you know what? No one’s ever asked me about that.” But there is also something magical about interviewing a debut author and seeing them be like, “Oh my gosh, someone’s interested in my work.” Like you said, it’s something-

Martha Anne Toll: It’s so cool. It’s so cool. And meanwhile, I have to comment on both Colson Whitehead and Matthew Desmond. I love Colson Whitehead and I’ve been reading him before anybody ever heard of him. I started with The Intuitionist. I’ve been a fan forever. My daughter was working in a theater in Louisville and I was visiting her and I had a 6:00 AM flight from Louisville to New York. I get to the airport, I’m a total caffeine addict, no coffee, of course. Nothing’s open. And there’s Colson Whitehead sitting in the lounge. I’m like, “Excuse me, are you Colson Whitehead?” I had a fan girl moment. And then I was like, I couldn’t talk to him, because it was so clear we were both so caffeine deprived that I just thought it was torture. But Matthew Desmond, I have a close, personal relationship with, because in my previous life in social justice, I spent a career working in housing and homelessness and I found him pretty early. He’s incredibly extraordinary for readers out there who have not read his book, Eviction, it’s a must-read. He’s doing absolute pathbreaking research. He’s also drawing on some personal experience, having been evicted as a young person. His work is really, really, really important. I love that you put those two together. They’re my faves. I don’t know how you knew.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, I actually remember, it was my cohost and I were in Chicago and they were both Penguin Random House authors, and we were fortunate enough to have a really wonderful relationship with, and I still do, with the heads of publicity at Penguin Random House. And so they said, they’re like, “We have Colson and Matthew here.” Literally the next morning, they were receiving their Pulitzer Prizes. Then they said, “Do you want to interview them back-to-back?” It was in the Chicago Athletic Club, I think, is the name of the hotel. It’s this gorgeous hotel. My cohost and I, we were good at interviewing authors, but it wasn’t Fresh Air. I’m not Terry Gross. And so we’re sitting in this room, this huge conference room, having this surreal moment, and then Colson walks in, and same thing like you, it’s one of those things where I’ve read everything he’s written, every word the man has written, and then he walks in. He just looks at these two people at the other end of the room. He’s like, “Hi?” And we’re like, “Yeah, you’re in the right place. You’re in the right place. Come in.” But yeah, and then when Matthew walked in, same thing. It’s something, obviously his work is so important and his book is so important as well. It’s one thing to, I think, gush to someone who writes works of fiction, even if they’re inspired by something. I think it’s another thing to be like, “I loved your non-fiction, very serious book about a very real problem.” And he’s like, “Yeah, thanks. Absolutely.” But he was so kindhearted and yeah, apropos of nothing, but they’re both wonderful people.

Martha Anne Toll: I was at a housing conference with him and he offered to do a selfie with me. I’m like, “Thanks Matt. I needed that.”

Adam Sockel: Oh, that’s so funny. I always end with having the author give a recommendation of any kind. It could be a book. Lots of authors have given book recommendations. It could be a piece of music that you want people to listen to. It could be a TV show, anything that you think more people should know about. Anything you want to recommend, the floor is yours.

Martha Anne Toll: Well, I want to say that I have made a Spotify playlist for Three Muses, which I have put on social media. I’m brand new to Spotify. I think I need to put it on my website so people can find it. If you want to know what is the music to the ballets in the book, then you can go listen to that. And then I will end with, there are too many books for me to recommend, because I’m a maniac about books, but the book that I wish I would’ve written about music, how’s that? Called An Equal Music by an Indian writer named Vikram Seth. And it’s just so beautifully written. I don’t think that Seth is a musician. I think the wonder of the book is that he captured the chamber music, the violin, piano life so accurately. It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous book. That’s probably what I would end with. The one I wish I would’ve written it.

Adam Sockel: Yeah, no, that’s perfect. And for everyone listening in, I’ll have Martha send me the Spotify list too, and I’ll put it in the show notes with everything.

Martha Anne Toll: Thank you. Thanks.

Adam Sockel: But people will hear me talk about this in the intro and obviously throughout our conversation, but go read Three Muses. Your book is so wonderful. I was so, so excited to talk to you about it. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Martha Anne Toll: Thank you. It’s an incredible privilege and I’m just thrilled. I’m grinning ear-to-ear. Thank you.

Adam Sockel: Passions and Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen podcast and was created by Adam Sockel. It was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman, and if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen podcast, you can go to Evergreenpodcast.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.