Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann. I'm a writer, creator, and the author of Slowing: Discover Wonder, Beauty, and Creativity through Slow Living from Chronicle Books.

For those of you just tuning in, Slow Stories is a multimedia project that began with this podcast and now includes a newsletter on Substack. There, I write about things like time, creativity, and pace—and on this show, I interview artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators who share slow stories—and big ideas—about living, working, and creating in our digital age.

Before we get into the episode, I wanted to quickly thank everyone who has shown support for Slowing in some way, shape, or form. Publishing a book—a first book, no less—is truly an all-consuming experience, and I'm so grateful to have received support and encouragement from readers around the globe. That said, if you want to show your support for Slowing, and if you've read and genuinely enjoyed the book, consider leaving a review, as this will help Slowing find even more readers.

As a reminder, you can also follow Slow Stories on Substack for a behind-the-scenes look at bringing a book to life, and follow me [on social media] @rachelschwartzmann for real-time updates.

For now, I'll leave you with this refresher on the book: Slowing caters to many literary sensibilities: essay and memoir, creative wellness, and personal growth. Language and lyricism are front and center, but there is also a practical component. There are various ways you can engage with and experience this book. For that reason, I don't know where exactly you'll find it on the shelf, but I'm confident it will fit somewhere in your home. That's where I wrote it, and that's what it means to me. I can't wait for you to read it!

Now, on to the episode, which begins with an opening story from Cara Blue Adams, who shares musings on the short story form and reflections on the work of today's guest, Ayşegül Savaş. Here's more from Cara.

Cara Blue Adams: I'm Cara Blue Adams, author of the interlinked story collection You Never Get It Back and a former co-editor of the literary magazine The Southern Review.

I've loved the story form for a long time—first as a reader and later as a writer. As one of my favorite short story writers, Lorrie Moore, said: "A story can be like a mad, lovely visitor with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend." She was talking about writing stories, which can sometimes be drafted quickly. The experience of reading them is, for me, also exciting and transporting, but because the story form is so compressed—because each line and each word has to accomplish so much and therefore matters so much—the story form also encourages me to slow down. As a reader and as an observer of the world. A story can give us an entire era in a character's life as a novel would but in the space of a handful of pages. One of my favorite examples is "Future Selves" by the Turkish-Parisian writer Ayşegül Savaş, which appears in the New Yorker and which I came upon when writing about Savaş's wonderful new novel, The Anthropologists.

"Future Selves" tells a story of the narrator's search for an apartment. At the same time, we learn about her relationship with her younger cousin, Tara, who is still in college. The story is about our relationships—to our pasts and futures, to intimacy, to loneliness. Toward the end, Savaş's narrator observes: "I'd always been proud that Tara looked up to me, wanted to live as I did in a beautiful city with a partner whose tastes and interests mirrored her own. Even though I knew that such admiration would inevitably expire, still I delighted in my cousin's childish esteem. Ridiculous as it may be. I found in it a validation of my own life."

We meet and grow to care about the narrator and her friends and relatives. We follow her through a transformative time, and we ourselves are transformed all in four pages. The story is a sort of precursor to The Anthropologists and an apt example of a concept that I explore in my review of the novel for The Baffler. That concept, coined by the experimental writer Georges Perec, is the infra-ordinary. The more than ordinary. The ordinary observes so closely that it becomes transcendent edging closer to life itself.

By paying close attention to the every day in her fiction—by making the ordinary into the infra-ordinary— Savaş shows us how we might slow down too and pay close attention to our own lives and to the world around us.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Cara for sharing. Again, the story she referenced is Ayşegül Savaş '"Future Selves," and you can read Cara's piece about The Anthropologists in The Baffler. You can also follow Cara on social media @carablueadams and order her story collection, You Never Get It Back, wherever books are sold. Now, here's my conversation with Ayşegül Savaş.

︎

Rachel Schwartzmann: What makes a day? Is it the routine of brewing the morning coffee or walking through the neighborhood? Is it more meaningful if it's spent in the company of others? And if we are alone, what are we able to see in our solitude?

At some point or another, you've probably been encouraged to honor the little things, but if that's not enough to convince you, writer Ayşegül Savaş's affinity for the details might change your mind. She has a knack for rendering mundane moments into compelling prose that lingers long after a story ends.

Her latest books—The Anthropologists, a slim novel following a young couple's search for an apartment, and The Wilderness, her debut work of nonfiction chronicling the first 40 days postpartum—are no exception. They are elegant studies of time and place—of growing up (and growing older), of kinship and family, of home and language, and of life's small pains and pleasures. And while Ayşegül considers many of her books "quiet stories," it's in the silence that readers hear the heartbeat of her sentences—each a compelling reminder of what makes life worth living.

And in this interview, Ayşegül shared more about the connection between mothering and writing, thoughts on creative lineage, and what it means to be in the present moment—in art and life. 

I spoke with Ayşegül on a crisp October morning a few days beforeshe was set to launch The Wilderness in the US. Despite the chaos shrouding both of our days, I had a feeling I would emerge nourished—and I did. I’m honored to close out the year with this truly lovely exchange, but I don’t want to give too much more away. So on that note, here’s my conversation with writer Ayşegül Savaş.

︎

Ayşegül Savaş: I would say these days, outside of [being] a writer, I'm a mother, mostly. And I guess, outside of a [being] writer, I would still say that I'm a creative person—or a person who approaches the world through creativity and its colors and textures and routines.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Me too. How are you doing that these days?

Ayşegül Savaş: Well, more practically, I mean, besides the fact that, I love the routine of life—as you can probably tell from The Anthropologists—and I love daily living. I love things like going to the market every week and buying flowers or choosing vegetables. I also am a potter, so I spend, a few hours at a studio every week playing with clay and trying not to think about writing and structure.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Does it work?

Ayşegül Savaş: It does. You know, something I've gained from being a potter is the fact that I'm not a very good potter, and I'm not a very patient potter. And I'll get very easily frustrated, and then when I return to writing, even though it's also a very pleasant experience, I can be quite hasty, or I'll want to finish things, and then they're lopsided. And then when I return to writing, I think, oh, this is so much easier. ... I mean, something that I've been feeling about writing and being a mother as well is that, before, writing felt like torture. And now I think, oh, you know, when you're raising a child. When you're taking care of a baby, writing is just, pure joy, and it should never be torture. And it should never be hard labor because it seems very beside the point.

Rachel Schwartzmann: So in what ways would you have considered it torture? Because there's such a seamless quality to your writing, and I know that comes with experience, but I'm curious about that word.

Ayşegül Savaş: I guess, like all writers, I would feel stuck in the creative process. I wouldn't know how to proceed. I wouldn't know what the plot was. I would torture myself thinking about the plot of a book, even though, I don't write books that are heavy on plot. So it was this very ironic sense of torture, actually, thinking that I should have it, but why am I not having it?

The last book I edited after having given birth was so easy to accept that it was what it was. And I suppose before, I thought a lot more about inspiration—whether I was inspired enough to write, whether the thing I was gonna commit to paper was my best idea, or whether I should be working on other projects. And I think something that's happened after having a baby is I don't have the time to think about inspiration! And I recognize that these are thoughts of a past self who had far too much time and now this inspiration to me... I can't even say what it means that it's just a sort of discipline. You sit down, and you do it.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And do you enjoy that better? 

Ayşegül Savaş: Do I enjoy it better? Yes. Yes, I do. I guess I'm a little bit more stressed or worried about the fact that I don't have enough time to write. But before, I guess I felt stressed about the fact that I had too much time to write and I wasn't doing it enough. It's been a very radical shift for me, and I think having a child really made me identify my priorities in life. It was a shock to realize, oh, writing is—this is strange for a writer to say—but it became very apparent that that's what I wanted to do in my leisure time. That's what I wanted to do when the baby was sleeping. Whereas before, perhaps I was wondering, am I good enough, or is this my calling? Am I really a novelist, maybe a short story writer? Should I be writing essays? And now, with the little time I have to write, I do enjoy it a lot more just because I know it's what I want to do, and it's what gives me joy.

Ayşegül Savaş: It has. I mean, in one sense, again, I think possibly I don't think about [it]. I don't have time to doubt myself as I write, just because I think, let me just get this done. And so I don't allow doubt to creep in.

I'm not sure if I'm a less self-doubting person. I think motherhood then opens up so many other arenas of doubt in one's life, but at least it's given me less time to do it. You know, I probably do have the same amount of doubt regarding my own work, whether it was the best I could have done or whether it's sort of the essence of what I want to express. But at least I've given myself the freedom to do it as often as I possibly can.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Were you a reader or a writer first?

Ayşegül Savaş: I was a reader first. Definitely. I think all writers are. Have you had anyone who said I was a writer first?

Rachel Schwartzmann: No, I don't think I have actually. And I guess that makes sense...

Ayşegül Savaş: I would be suspicious of that writer in some sense of their training—because ... it would be like saying you're a surgeon without a medical degree or something.

I was definitely a reader first. ... I read so much in the years between graduating from university and settling into my career in these years where I was doing sort of all sorts of strange jobs that I wasn't very committed to. I was also reading a lot and trying to teach myself how to write. And I was reading classics. I was reading books from every era, from every geography. This is sadly one of the things I do less and less just because of having entered the industry. One has to read the blurb, and this is a good thing—one has to support other writers, one has to read the books that everyone's talking about. I guess one doesn't have to, but it just so happens that you do if you're attending conferences, if you're in a conversation with other writers. So, the type of reading that shaped me as a writer is now both because of having a young child, but also because being fully in the industry of writing has somewhat diminished for me, and I have to really struggle to make space for it.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you read to your child?

Ayşegül Savaş: I do. She's at an age where she's one and a half years old, so she's not very reading very complex texts. And something else, which I suppose is reinvigorating, is that a lot of the books that were given as presents are in French—because we live in France —or in English by many of our friends. But I speak to my daughter in Turkish. So a lot of these books I think, oh wow, they have such beautiful illustrations, it would be a shame not to read them to her. But you know, I want to stick to my rule of speaking only in Turkish. So I translate them sometimes as I'm reading. Sometimes, I'll sort of sit down and do a translation of a book, and if the book rhymes, I'll try to make it rhyme in Turkish, which, I'm terrible at. So, I have my own translations of these children's books, including Goodnight Moon. I don't know if it exists, but I read Goodnight Moon to her every night in Turkish with some sort of a rhyme scheme, but not a great one.

Rachel Schwartzmann: That's so special.

Ayşegül Savaş: Yes. And that, I mean, I guess that's a different, it's a different type of writing and reading I have in my life at the moment.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. Well, I guess enjoy it because I'm sure it goes fast. I'm not a mother, but it seems like time just runs.

Ayşegül Savaş: Yes. And it also stalls, I have to say.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I think all of this sets us up nicely to talk about The Anthropologists and The Wilderness. But before we do, I just want to go back to your life in France and Paris. I'd love to hear a little bit about the city and how it kind of impacts your relationship with storytelling.

Ayşegül Savaş: This is the city where I became a writer. I moved here with my husband soon after I completed my MFA and sort of had an idea that I wanted to be a writer but hadn't committed to anything. It's also the city where I lived the longest in my life. I grew up living in many different countries and I went to school in the US. I've been in France now for over 12 years. So I mean, there is a sense of belonging I have towards the city, which is strange because I don't feel like a native to the city. But it's the longest I've known any city in my life, and it's a city where I still feel like a foreigner. And I think I will continue to be a foreigner.

I've now finally begun to notice that my writing is about being an outsider. And I suppose Paris has played a big role in this. ... I [also] moved here after graduation at a time in life when everything was really fun. It's a beautiful place. So many of our friends were living in Paris or passing through Paris. It was this golden age for me—those early years of being young and being an adult. I would also say that the city shaped my writing, particularly The Anthropologists, in this profound way.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Absolutely. Maybe we can pause here and have you read from The Anthropologists.
Rachel Schwartzmann: So throughout The Anthropologists, Asya conducts fieldwork at her local park. She films residents and asks about their daily lives. There are also a lot of poignant moments about noticing daily life happening in the wilderness where you write: "I am struck by people’s faces, their smudged ugliness. Everyone seems deformed, as if I’m walking under the spell of a strong hallucinogenic. Bu int their deformation, I can see each face as a baby: the long-ago foxes and owls and tiny pigs, while they have simultaneously aged and deformed.; So all of that to say, you obviously pay close attention to the world, and I'd like to hear about your relationship with attention. How does living in a city challenge it or change it?

Ayşegül Savaş: I think one of the big challenges [for] a writer is to continue noticing. Once you become familiar with a place, for example, it was very easy for me. My first novel takes place in Paris, and Paris is named, and my following two novels both take place in unnamed cities. And I think partly it's because I wrote my first novel having arrived in Paris, being so excited to be in the city, seeing everything for the first time, and having fresh and generous observations. Whereas I know now that I'm blinded to the sites of my own neighborhood.

Actually, one of the triggers for writing The Anthropologists was that my husband and I were looking for an apartment to buy. And I thought that this is such a great structure for a novel because of all the potential lives that you're seeing with every visit. Finally when we did move into our new neighborhood and our current apartment, I was completely enchanted. And I thought every road and every little room of our very tiny apartment [seemed] enchanted to us, to me. And I was sort of filled with this inspiration to write something about it. Now I walk the neighborhood every day, and I don't think I notice too much. This is one of the challenges to writing because I think you need to be familiar with the subjects you're writing about, and yet if you're too familiar, you stop seeing them with fresh eyes.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, that really resonates. I moved to New York when I was 12 and I've been here ever since. And my 20th anniversary in the city is next February.

Ayşegül Savaş: Wow.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, it's very crazy. And there were a few years very recently where I was saying that the city felt familiar, but it didn't necessarily feel like home. And recently, as you were saying, I had to make a concerted effort to notice things again. I've started to kind of fall back in love with it, but it's very easy to kind of let the daily of life soothe you but also stunt you in some ways.

Ayşegül Savaş: Right. What's that effort to recognize the city, or to appreciate it, or to to pay attention to it?

Rachel Schwartzmann: [I've had] to try to detach how I felt about it before the pandemic. Life, really as it did for many, shifted something in me during the pandemic, and it's been really hard to go back to a sense of normalcy. And so I think instead of trying to go back, I've just kind of had to reintroduce myself to a lot of things and see the city at this point in my life, having gone through so much radical change. So it's been a lot of letting go.

I think that's why I enjoyed The Anthropologists so much because there is that tension between letting go of control over how you think life is supposed to look, being open, and then in between just living.

Ayşegül Savaş: And I think one of the ways in which I managed to write  The Anthropologists is at the end of the day, I mean, first of all, I was writing about an unnamed city. So there are many parts of the city that aren't like Paris, but also because I was writing about the time that I was no longer in, so that was the distance I needed to see these characters, fresh in their settings. And I think if I was writing it at the same time as I was a young person figuring out how to live in a new city, I don't think I would've been able to do it. That was the distance.

Rachel Schwartzmann: For sure. That actually just made me think of a recent conversation I had with Lauren Elkin. Do you know her?

Ayşegül Savaş: Yes. And I read her first novel.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And it took 16 years to write! She explained to me during our conversation that she just needed to live through it before she could even attempt to write it.

Ayşegül Savaş: I mean, the way she writes about Paris is really impressive, and it does have a certain distance I think that I found very enjoyable, but also just astute.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It's definitely interesting. I mean, I think in both The Anthropologists and The Wilderness, you deal with place and space in such compelling ways, you know, whether it's finding a home or becoming a home for someone else. And I'm curious, what environmental conditions make a home for you?

Ayşegül Savaş: Well, I would have to say [that] being in my current apartment is my feeling of home. Before, I could have said, oh, you know, I can feel at home anywhere, and there are so many different cities I'd love to live in. And then when I was a bit older, I think when I started writing my first novel, I would say, yeah, I'd love to spend a long period of time in this and this place, but I can't really, apart from my books and being with my books, it gives me such a sense of security and comfort. And now with quite a strict routine that a baby imposes, I think there is the security of being in our current home that is also the baby's home. That feels crucial to a sense of order, to a sense of calm, to knowing the next steps, knowing that things aren't gonna spiral into chaos.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, there's something to that.

Ayşegül Savaş: And it's the structure that a baby imposes and, therefore, the comfort of being able to return home. I haven't really left my neighborhood in about a year and a half at this point just because you need to go back for a nap or to eat lunch or whatever because there's some sort of crisis happening. And this sort of committing to that structure and also giving into it, accepting that, like, well, that's just how life is going to be for the next few years, has also radically shifted my writing.

All my books so far have been quite fragmentary and have played with form and narrative—cut things up, put them in a different order—and suddenly, I find myself writing a really, really structured linear book. Like, I don't want to say plot driven, but a book that's driven by its story, its chronological action, which I really think is, you know, what I've learned from mothering.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Interesting. Does it feel good? Is that the wrong question? [Laughs]

Ayşegül Savaş: It feels safe because I also think perhaps it has to do with being tired, but it feels safe to come back to a text and know what you're going to write next and know what structure you're following. Whereas, you know, writing a fragmented text, you always have to keep the whole in mind. And it's very, very tiring to try and do that and to try to figure out a certain harmony of how the little bits fit together. And for a tired mind—for a mind who is eased by structure and you know there's a time for a nap, and there's a time for a snack, and there's a time for lunch— it's equally comforting to know now it's the chapter where the character sees her ex-husband. Now it's the chapter where the character travels to this village.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, that's really interesting. And actually just, as we talk about structure, I also just published a book. It's a book of essays, interviews, and prompts, all about time, creativity, and pace. And in the vein of a slow story or a slow day, I structured it in three sections: Beginning, Middle, and End. And I kind of wrote to those ideas—how we think about those chapters, how we want to redefine them, challenge them. And in The Anthropologists, you have a section called "Beginnings and Endings." And this is a question I posed to those I interviewed in the book, but I’m curious how you would define a beginning or an end? What does it feel like and maybe what questions should we be asking about those chapters in our lives?

Ayşegül Savaş: I think in life, we don't really know. We're always living. We're always in the midst of it. And it's only retrospectively that we can see some sort of a shape to our experience. And there is no ending, right? There is no ending until we die and we have no consciousness. So I think the structure of beginnings and middles and ends is a way to make us feel safe in life where we don't have such mastery and we don't have such knowledge.

I would say on the contrary, in books, beginnings and endings are so important. They're the entire vessel for the story. I teach a lot of writing classes, and often in workshops, I'll say it's not the right beginning or what would happen if we started the story ten years later. What would happen if we started the story ten years earlier? And everything changes. I think beginnings actually in literature are the most exciting craft elements. Once you have a good beginning, the rest of the novel just follows. Once you've started at the right point for the story, for the novel, everything else sort of unravels in, I think, a painless way.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I agree. That's what's keeping me anchored to my current fiction project. I'm obsessed with my opening line.

Ayşegül Savaş: Wonderful! I'm not going to ask you what it is—

Rachel Schwartzmann: I'll tell you, but I can edit it out because I'm still protective. [Laughs]

Ayşegül Savaş: Yeah!

Rachel Schwartzmann: Okay. It's [redacted].

Ayşegül Savaş: Wow, that's a great line.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you. I think that was telling. I was like, okay, this feels like there's momentum. 

Ayşegül Savaş: It's also the type of line you can go back to if you're, you know, at 150 pages, where, if you're stuck, you can just read it and say, oh, okay. You know, that's the pull of the story.

Rachel Schwartzmann: That's what I've been doing! [Laughs]

Ayşegül Savaş: Wonderful. Oh, I can't wait to read it.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Oh, thank you. Maybe let's pause here again and have you read from The Wilderness.



Rachel Schwartzmann: So I was obviously very struck by the role of family in both of these books— the push and pull, and particularly the granddaughter-grandmother dynamic. I'm also very close to my grandmother who is an artist. She's a painter, and she lived in New Mexico for many years and always says, I feel creatively connected to you. Wow,

Ayşegül Savaş: Wow, that's so special.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Especially in adulthood, to have that sort of more developed ability to see one another.

Ayşegül Savaş: And also the ability to see [and] acknowledge each other as adults, right? 

Rachel Schwartzmann: She's amazing. I'll have to get you a copy of my book, but she makes an appearance in it a lot. And there's an infamous anecdote. She's always been very much not the traditional grandmother in the sense that instead of sending me dolls when I was a kid, for instance, she sent me jewelry boxes, but the boxes didn't hold any jewelry. They held dead bug carcasses that she found beautiful. [Laughs]

Ayşegül Savaş: Wow.

Rachel Schwartzmann: She's always been trying to engage me to see things. So I figured you might enjoy that. [Laughs]

Ayşegül Savaş: Yeah, I would love that. I mean this is sort of, this is my ideal for parenting, I have to say.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. She's really special.

I'd love to kind of talk about creativity in your family lineage. Where do you think you inherited your creative curiosities from? Or do you believe that we inherit those things?

Ayşegül Savaş: You know, it's very sad for me because my grandmother on my father's side always says that she was meant to be a writer. And I signed my first book to her. I said to my grandmother with the spirit of a poet or with the heart of a poet, something like this. And she was so offended, and she said, "What do you mean? I am a poet?" But you know, the part of her narrative, part of her identity, is the fact that she married early ... she went to a very prestigious high school, but she didn't go on to university even though her husband did. And all her friends took on prestigious careers. And even though she was the best writer among them and was so talented, she could never make anything of her talent. So it's a little sad for me that I've become the writer when I've grown up with this narrative that she's the true writer, except she wasn't given the chance.

But I mean, besides her, I would say there are no artists in our family, in the generation of my parents and above. But there are an incredible number of very, very creative people. I mean creative in the most wicked ways. It's a very, very extroverted family with the craziest stories. And I think most introverted children end up becoming writers. I was daunted by how charismatic everyone in the family was and how good they were at being comedians and telling stories and the rich lives that they'd led. And I think it's a little shocking to all of them that I'm the one who's writing novels because they're like, "What do you have to tell?" And you're so quiet and you're like really awkward. So I think certainly my creativity or my way of looking at the world comes from this family of, I think, very peculiar special observers of the world.

One story I was telling just last week, I was giving a lecture at a university, and one of the students said, "Some of these family stories are so wild; how do you get them?" And I remember the story of an uncle in my family who passed away—a great uncle. His mother was still alive, but she wasn't told that her son had died. And, until she died herself, which was 20 years later, her younger sons wrote postcards from the dead son to the mother.

I mean, on the one hand, this is the cruelest, most horrendous thing, but on the other hand, like, can you imagine the creative act of inventing the second life for the brother? This uncle in the invention: I think he went to Dubai, he like bought a bus company in Lebanon. He then had this big shipment in Syria, and he was all over the Middle East and sending his mother postcards because they didn't want to break the mother's heart. They thought she wouldn't be able to bear it and that she would die. So they told her this lie.

I think my great-grandmother must have known; I remember her from my early childhood. She was a very intelligent woman, also a creative soul, and extremely funny. I feel like she must have known and was playing along. But yes, I mean in response to other creative people in your family, plenty.

Rachel Schwartzmann: That seems like something that could be a book!

Ayşegül Savaş: Yes. But it's so daunting. One's heritage is so daunting that you don't know what to do with it. So you sort of chip away at it and you use the tiniest little bit. And then sometimes I'll tell a story like this from my family, there are like thousands more of these, and people will say, "How have you not written about this?" And I say, "It's too big! You know, I write these quiet stories."

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. And it's hard. I mean, there's an element of memoir in my book, and then obviously, with The Wilderness, it's difficult to know the boundaries of who gets to tell these stories and how. I think there's a lot of responsibility, but that's so wild... [Laughs] I'm trying to figure out how to gracefully transition into my next question, but thank you for sharing that.

Have people in your family read The Wilderness or how do they engage with your work, usually?

Ayşegül Savaş: Some with nonchalance, my mother with sort of funny trepidation of like, "Oh, what's she going to write next?" When something happens. She'll be like, "Oh, I bet Ayşegül is going to write about this."

She hasn't read The Wilderness yet. I'm terrified because it's my only nonfiction book, and I write a lot about mothers in my fiction, but none of them really resemble my mother in a specific way. But whereas here, you know, she's a character in the book, so it's the first time that I feel very cautious or she knew I was writing the book and she knew what the subject was. But yes, we'll wait and see.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I think it was a very generous portrait of her.

Ayşegül Savaş: You know, I was messaging with Sanaë testerday—do you know Sanaë?

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah.

Ayşegül Savaş: And she was like, "Oh, I love that the book is so much about the mother-daughter relationship." I was like, "Oh God, don't say that!" She was like, "Why?" And I said like, "Just because my mother hasn't read it and like, what if she's hurt?" And she was like, "No, I thought it was like very warm [or] your relationship was endearing or something. I was like, "I don't know if she's gonna think that, though." You know, I don't know if she's going to forgive the fact that I put on paper that she didn't kiss me first at the hospital.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Right. Yeah. It's tricky. I have no answers. [Laughs]’

Ayşegül Savaş: Yeah. Like it's not that the family's grudge is that you told a lie, but it's like how could you write this for the whole world to see? You sort of keep that to yourself.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Because it forces them to see it, too. It gets out of the contained family pretense or bubble.  

Ayşegül Savaş: Yeah. And you know, there are obviously certain things I would never write about my family, and in the same way that I can make a mean remark about my siblings or my parents if someone else makes that remark, I'm like, "No, you can't say that. That's my family." So I guess writing is a little bit like that—but one's boundary might be different than someone else's boundary.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And that's what keeps it interesting but also very difficult.

Ayşegül Savaş: Yeah.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you hope to pass down your creativity to your daughter or is that something you want her to find on her own?

Ayşegül Savaş: This is a very difficult [and] great question. For example, my daughter has no interest in color, which is so sad for me. Like she says so many words, she's hearing four languages every day, and she has so many words in every language. She does not say a single color, even though every day I'm like, it's the red fish; it's the blue cup. And I'll be like, what? Do you know which one's blue? And she'll walk away. She hates the color game. And, of course, I want her to be creative, and I want to share as much of my love for art with her as I can, and on the other hand, respect who she is and respect her own curiosities without imposing my own. And I think that's such a fine balance in parenting. I'm just stepping into that territory and understanding how difficult it is not to manipulate your child to become who you want them to become. Right.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Right. And she's still so young. There might be a time when she rediscovers colors. [Laughs]

Maybe we can pause here and have you read again from the anthropologists?

Ayşegül Savaş: Yes.


Rachel Schwartzmann: I think we might have touched on this, but is it easy or difficult for you to live in the present moment? Are you happy with the present as it stands?

Ayşegül Savaş: Well, I suppose the challenge of living in the present moment isn't asking whether one is happy in the present because the moment you bring happiness into it, then there is an element of the future and the past, and then you're no longer in the present. Very wise people would say [that] being in the present is not considering happiness or unhappiness, but just being in the moment. I mean, this is my biggest challenge. I think it's one of the greatest challenges to every writer or every artist—learning how to be in the present without judgment. And that capacity for deep observation, I think that's where it comes from—that meditative state of being without questioning or without projecting yourself.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. And I guess in a similar vein, obviously, something with this project I want to explore is the intersection between creativity, storytelling, and pace. So I'm curious how you would describe your relationship with pace in living and writing and how much it's changed over the years.

Ayşegül Savaş: Very, very, very slow. I would say I'm a very slow person and I don't know if I've internalized the fact that I am very slow because this is how I'm known in the family. Like, "Oh, I should like Ayşegül is always late." I'm actually never late. But you know, I have this epithet that I'm the slow one and it'll take me a while to get going or to change my mind or to grasp something. And at the same time, I'm also slow in the sense that I hate competition. I hate competitive sports. If I'm racing with someone, and there's someone behind me, I'll literally pull aside so they can run past me because it stresses me out so much. I think this possibly is one reason I became a writer because until you enter publishing, it's such a non-competitive space. No one actually wonders what you're writing, and you can go in there and make it your own, and you can take as much time as you want.

So the slowness—the fact that creating when you're fully committed to it, when you're in production is a very slow and a very uncompetitive place—has been very encouraging for me in being a writer and continuing to write.

Am I slow right now? Besides being slow, I'm also an impatient person and I think this is a big challenge of my character and my writing as well. Impatience basically pulls you out of the present moment. It makes you, frustrated with your own work rather than tinkering with it and playing around with it. So I think my pace speeds up when I'm not fully focused and when I just want to get something done. And I think my best mode of production is in being slow.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It's amazing that it's inherent to you. It's something I've had to learn in a lot of ways. I think my nature is quiet and introverted, but somehow, my life has been set up to go fast. I've lived in three different states at 16 different addresses; so much change, so much movement. And I realized that my own relationship with pace was motivated by—maybe not motivated—driven by anxiety in a lot of ways. And so I've had to learn how to detach anxiety outside expectation from how fast I'm moving if that makes sense.

Ayşegül Savaş: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting that you associate anxiety or the pace of anxiety with speed.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Well ... I mean I think that's kind of the culture of America, too: More is more, and faster is better, and efficiency. And that's something particularly with my professional life that was king for so many years. I just knew it was incorrect, but I didn't know how to break the cycle. This project helped me to do that. That's ultimately how I found my way back to writing because I had originally wanted to be a writer, but I was just not ready. [Laughs] I was creative, but I didn't have the patience or the wherewithal to sit down and actually write. And I think a lot of that's compounded with the digital age, too, because a lot of my day job work is content or being online, and that definitely warps your perception of pace and output.

Ayşegül Savaş: Yes, definitely.

Rachel Schwartzmann: You'll bringing up a child in this landscape. Do you have thoughts on technology or social [media], because, in a way, it could be a form of being an anthropologist. I have been able to connect with people and ask them questions. In [other] interviews I've actually referred to my online platforms as notebooks or sketchbooks. So do you think they can be tools?

Ayşegül Savaş: I hope so. I mean, I don't want to be like the pessimistic aging person, like, "No, no, no, all this technology is terrible," but I am aware of the ways in which the technology does sort of split you and splinter your attention and take you away from life in so many repeated ways, like minutes after minutes. Just trying to be mindful of not having our phones out when we're with our daughter, for example, just seems very important—and yet we don't even manage to do that. And so quickly she's learned [that] whenever we take our phone out, she knows there are videos of her in there. She's like, can I see? You know, she just wants to see videos of herself, and I think, what have we done? You know, she's addicted to her own image. What's the next step? Instagram.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. Oof. It's so hard. I mean, I don't think there are any answers right now, or at least uniform answers. It's so different for everybody. I can't imagine in some ways mothering. It's a wilderness all its own.

Ayşegül Savaş: Yeah. It really is.

Rachel Schwartzmann: What wilderness are you navigating these days?

Ayşegül Savaş: The fact that I need to go to the US for a week and that feeling of guilt and worry and just sadness to be away from her and also feeling fractured into several selves. I think those are my main preoccupations.

Rachel Schwartzmann: How do you bring them back together?

Ayşegül Savaş: I think for a while you don't. I think in the early years, it's one of the things you have to accept that you are fractured and you have a whole different role and responsibility—yet your old self still exists, and you have to sort of decide what your priorities are instead of trying to do everything the way you were doing them. And then, when you have several priorities, accept that you're not going to feel happy about it fully or content and that, you'll always be elsewhere as well.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It's a hard pill to swallow.

Ayşegül Savaş: Yeah.

Rachel Schwartzmann: There is probably so much more we could talk about. And I want to have you read one more section from The Wilderness, but before you do, this is a question I ask all of my guests, guests and I'm very interested to hear what you have to say. Is there a question that you hope people start asking you more often, whether it's about art, motherhood, creativity, or anything that comes to mind?

Ayşegül Savaş: This is such a difficult question. I was asked a similar question a few years ago on a questionnaire, and I crazily wrote the first thing that came to my mind, which did happen to be an honest answer: I wish people had asked me what I had for breakfast. [Laughs] I think I said that I wish people would ask more questions about breakfast—and I love breakfast—but I think part of the reason I was just saying that is I love having conversations like that: how people fold their clothes and what they have for breakfast and it seems so mundane, but there is a wealth of information about a person—about a character—in all of those habits of living. Then sometimes you find out something so weird about a person when they tell you, I don't know, there are so many strange breakfasts like I just eat plain toast or something and find all of that fascinating.

Rachel Schwartzmann: And it shows.

Why don't we close things out by having you read from The Wilderness?

Ayşegül Savaş: Yes.

︎

Rachel Schwartzmann: That was my conversation with Ayşegül Savaş. You can purchase The Anthropologists, The Wilderness, and Ayşegül's earlier works anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Ayşegül on social @__aysegulsavas__. I'm Rachel Schwartzmann, and you've been listening to Slow Stories. I hope you have a restful holiday season, and we’ll see you back here in 2025.