NT: This is such an ambitious book—it shifts point of view so many more times than I even initially anticipated. I thought, OK, we’ve got the three characters. But then, it opens up to Elena, then it opens up to the minor characters. How do you begin to craft something like that? Do you write one point of view at a time? Do you try to switch off evenly? How do you weave it together once you written all these parts?

MM: I wrote each piece as a piece. I didn’t know where they were going to go. I had no idea how they’d fit together. Lisbon was the last material I wrote because I went to Lisbon and I learned about the massacre of 1506. In general I don’t write in any order. If a scene pops into my head, I write it down. I’m sort of always on a fishing expedition. I had this novel in about seventy or so fragments. It was all very chaotic. Then we went to Italy and we stayed in a place that had an old cow barn and in the cow barn there was a Ping Pong table. I took the net off the Ping Pong table and spread all these sections out and just started moving the pieces around to see how it could work. Originally, the novel skipped around a lot more because I wanted the idea of continuous time and space. I wanted it to be very Einsteinian and Navajo at the same time—past present and future are all happening to us simultaneously. The possibility of circularity in time was important to me. I was playing with those spatial, astrophysical ideas. The first chapter, originally, was Elena in Tangier. When my editor read it, she said I should take Elena out of the novel. But I resisted. Then I thought, OK probably it’s Miguel’s story and should begin with Miguel. My editor read it again and still said, “I just don’t understand why this woman’s in the book at all.” I thought, I want her in the book, I know she belongs in the book, but I couldn’t explain it. When I finally figured out why she was in the book and why she had to be there, it was a complete eureka moment. Flannery O’Connor said, “If it doesn’t surprise the writer, it won’t surprise the reader.” Well, that was a moment that surprised me. But to go back to your question I honestly don’t know how it’s all going to come together until, well, it does.

NT: Were there any other surprises in the process of writing Gateway?

MM: Yes, there were many. I didn’t know what Nathan was up to until the nurse, Dawn, showed me the way. And then there’s this whole thing with The Golden Record—which is in Voyager space craft—is something that Carl Sagan came up with. One of the research assistants working on it was a young woman named Annie Druyan. The idea was that Annie was supposed to record her brain waves for the golden record and think about Earth and what it meant to be a person and an Earthling. Supposedly, when the aliens found the ship, they would have technology that would enable them to interpret her brain waves. Two days before she was to record her brain waves, Carl Sagan called her and declared his love to her and said he was leaving his wife. Annie was also madly in love with him and she left her partner too—the editor of Rolling Stone, Timothy Ferris. So, while her brain waves were being recorded all she thought about was having sex with Carl Sagan—not about Earth or anything that she was supposed to be thinking about. So, I wrote her brain waves into a series of about six or seven inserts in the book—what she was thinking while she was lying on the table—and my editor hated them, so I took them all out. Reluctantly, I took them out. I have a friend who thought they might be a short story. So, I put them together and Narrative published them in July. That part of the book has its own life now. That was the other surprise for me.

NT: Food is almost another character in this book, it’s a catalyst for memories and events, it’s even in the funeral scene at the very end. All of the food is described so viscerally—is that because you love to cook? I know you’re a wonderful cook—I also know that you’re a Proust scholar, so I was thinking about that too.

MM: So, the moment Elena has at the caravan restaurant is a moment that I had in Tangier—exhausted, in a pissy mood, really upset that I couldn’t get a glass of wine—I took a bite of this dish and it was my grandmother’s lamb with apricots dish. How could my Russian Jewish grandmother’s recipe that I ate in Chicago be in a restaurant in Tangier? Not only the recipe but the texture, the meat falling off the bone, the smoke—it was her cooking. I did a lot of research into the history of food and one of the things that I learned is that they’ve identified the Crypto-Jews, in part, because there’s a recipe for beans with garbanzo and apricot, which is also a recipe that appears in the Southwest—in the Iberian Peninsula and also in the Southwest. There was a lot I learned about The Inquisition vis-à-vis food that was pretty dark and disturbing. In Spain, all the stores sell Iberian ham. You can’t order anything that doesn’t have Iberian ham. In 1492, they killed most of the sheep and the goats of Andalucía and they brought in millions of pigs to flush out the Jews and the Muslims. If you were really converted, you should eat pork. And the Jews dreaded it. Basically, the reason there’s so much ham and pork in the Spanish diet is because of The Inquisition. They also got rid of spices—they got rid of cardamom, cinnamon, turmeric. There is the migration of recipes on the one hand, and also how our food can be a reflection of oppression. I’m very interested in a global perspective when talking about food—and the stories that come out of it.

NT: I know this—and you cook great food!

MM: Thank you.

NT: A craft question: I’m amazed by any writer who can do so much research—as it’s obvious you’ve researched so much for a lot of your work and for this book in particular—without it ever feeling to the reader like an information dump. How do you as a writer deal with all the research—do you have to have distance between the research and the writing of it? Do you intersperse the two?

MM: When you do research, you get lots of tidbits, lots of information that is super interesting—but I only care about the story. Anything that nurtures the story becomes important. It’s not about the history per se—I’m looking for the story, the story is the pinnacle.

NT: How did it feel looking at Columbus—one of the most mythologized characters in the world, who’s been learned and unlearned a thousand times—and facing the obstacle of writing, fictionalizing, somebody like that?

MM: It was very daunting. Columbus was the most daunting for me. Probably the most important moment was in Paris—I spent a day with the map that he drew to go to the New World. It’s in the Bibliotheque National and it’s about six feet by four feet—it’s his hand drawn map and it doesn’t make any sense. He obviously had no idea where he was going—he doesn’t know about North America or the Pacific Ocean. Looking at this map, you think, What’s the mind like of this character? On the page, the breakthrough moment was when I wrote that he doesn’t sleep but if he does sleep, he dreams of silk worms. When I wrote that, I started to get inside of his imagination—it’s actually one of my favorite passages in the book. To me, there’s a portal into a character. It can be something very small like the silkworms. All Columbus wanted was to get to China. He was hard to get into, but once I did, I did. I needed Columbus to dream of silk worms. That became more interesting and important than the research. To be honest, I’m not really sure that I know exactly what people wore in the Fifteenth Century.

NT: I’m curious about your relationship to your own Judaism—did this book cause or help you to rethink or reconnect with your own history in any way?

MM: A few years ago my mother passed away, it was 2013, and I wanted to bring her ashes to where her mother was buried. I had never been to my grandmother’s grave. My cousin knew where it was, and she took me. All my great aunts and uncles were buried there—a dozen people who I’d known and grown up with. It was so powerful to know where they were and to also realize that we don’t know our histories. The history of being a Jew—one massacre after another, one expulsion after another. The answer is yes, I do feel more connected to my history and my culture and the ancestors I can never know.

NT: You’ve had such an extensive career and so many books—successful books with consistent writing and publications of the books—how do you keep going? What’s the process of thinking about the next book—to have that many ideas and so much language with so much breadth of a career?

MM: That’s a good question. You know, I guess it’s a simple answer. I love to do it. I love telling stories. I love the challenge. I think I have a bit of a child’s mind as well, I sort of start over every day. I still feel like there’s that book that I haven’t written yet, there’s that thing that could make it better, that book that I’m dying to read that I’ve actually written—so I don’t know how not to do it. I have three or four books laying around that I would love to finish and just don’t know what quite to do with. I think I’m still waiting for that idea that’s going to blow my head off. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude. I remember Salman Rushdie saying to me once that Márquez spent his whole life preparing to write that one book. I feel like I’m still preparing. This book comes close, I feel very proud of this book. I don’t remember writing it—it’s a book that is more as if it happened to me than I wrote it. Someone once asked Picasso what his favorite painting was and he said, “The next one.” I think that’s how I feel. I can’t imagine ever stopping.

NT: Do you want to share what you’re working on next?

MM: I’m working on a kind of sequel to Gateway that has to do with Jamaica and a number of the Gateway characters. Minor Gateway characters have major stories in this book. The basic premise—which is based on a historical incident that happened in Lisbon in 1493—is that the Jews of Spain had immigrated to Lisbon and were told they had six months before the King would tell them how long they could stay. So, this was the day that they were to be told—they gathered in the main square and the King would announce his magnanimous decision. When they got there, soldiers cordoned off the streets and came into the square and stole about two thousand Jewish children. They took them down to the docks, forcibly baptized them and threw them onto slave ships that went to the island of São Tomé off the coast of Ghana. São Tomé was a Portuguese protectorate. Six hundred Jewish children survived the trip. They became slaves and were forced to live and inhabit São Tomé for the rest of their lives. The story is about a brother and a sister who are separated—the brother is taken, and the sister remains. It follows the trajectories of their lives for many generations. They longed to be reunited. It’s how they’re reunited after hundreds of years.

NT: With this new project and with Gateway, how emotionally taxing is it for you to handle those historical moments and atrocities on a daily basis?

MM: It is emotionally taxing but also I feel like these are stories that people don’t know and that I want to tell. I feel like I can be the messenger to some extent—for people to understand that Jews were taken into slavery, that these atrocities happened. There are many forms of slavery. It’s a history that we don’t know that much about. The Jews, in fact, were forced to marry other slaves so as not to perpetuate their Jewish heritage. So, there’s a whole lineage there, descendants of these children. I feel a responsibility to tell these stories when I hear them.

NT: I’ve been fortunate enough to have you as a teacher—a fabulous teacher. For those who haven’t, is there one central lesson that you would like to impart on all readers or students?

MM: I think that my strength as a teacher is helping students find the stories that they need to tell. I have lots of craft things that I could talk about, but I don’t think any of that matters if you’re not telling a story that really matters to you. Not a story that you think the world is going love or that you think is really clever or that you think is going to make you a million bucks. If you really want to be a writer from the core of your being, then you have to find that story. Your material. And sometimes you’re telling the same story over and over again—and I think that’s OK. Someone asked Tim O’Brien when he was going to stop writing about Vietnam and he said, “Well, what am I going to write about—trees?” You find your subject and you build from that. I was at a Keith Haring exhibit in Chicago recently. He donated his time to make these murals all over the world. He brought in school children and there was a film of him making this five-hundred-foot mural. He did the same figures all the time. He didn’t really vary. But if you do it enough, it becomes what you are. Your signature. Look at a painter like Basquiat—they did their art in their own way, they didn’t try to be something else. Maybe art is just doing something over and over and over again, you know? Agnes Martin—I don’t know if you saw the Guggenheim. I saw it, I thought I was going to lose my mind. Literally, all those lines that she paints. Maybe art is about repetition and through that repetition we make discoveries. I’ve had students come to me and say, “I’m going to write about middle school,” and in the writing about middle school there is a story really deep in there. That’s the real story and it’s not about middle school at all—maybe it’s about a brother who died, or maybe it’s about a betrayal that shaped a long history. That’s the real story. Find the story that matters to you.

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Mary Morris is the author of eight novels, including most recently Gateway to the Moon (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2018), three collections of short stories, and four travel memoirs, including the travel classic, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. Her numerous short stories, articles and travel essays have appeared in such places as The Atlantic, Narrative, and The Paris Review. Morris is the recipient of the George W. Perkins Fellowship from Princeton University and the Rome Prize in Literature. In 2016 The Jazz Palace was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Award for fiction. Morris teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Beyond this she has a parrot, dreams of being a pirate, and will do anything to never sit still. For more information go to www.marymorris.net.