Gina Nutt: Each character in “East of a City” struggles in their own way, yet the narrator has tender insights into their experiences and personalities. Do you have similar fondness for them?
Garielle Lutz: I try not to write about anyone I wouldn’t mind trading places with. I do think I have affection, maybe even too much of it, for the characters I come up with. In this new story of mine, for instance, the young woman working in the supermarket checkout line seems to know everything worth knowing about anything, and I’d jump at the chance to be her. I’m sure her life would suit me to a T.

GN: Having met many characters throughout your writing, what differences do you notice in characters in recent work, compared to those you’ve met in the past? What about them remains familiar?
GL: As I’ve aged, my narrators tend to get older, too, and both the narrators and the characters seem to be less driven to peculiarity, and less aggressive in their skirmishes against themselves. They seem to be toning down everything inside and out. But most of them are still resolutely out of step with the rest of humankind. 

GN: Reading “East of a City” feels much like riding a train—the steady momentum, passengers who board and deboard throughout the story. How important is pace to you? As a reader, do you prefer a swift-moving story, or one which leaves space for you to marinate in the environment?
GL: I hadn’t thought of the story in that way, but I can see what you mean. I do think progression is important in fiction, though I’ve always been drawn toward fiction in which the only thing likely to be moving forward is time itself or, rather, fiction in which the movement is mostly emotional. I never think about plot points or causality or ending up somewhere all that situationally distinct from where a story started. Mostly, though, I don’t have ideas about how fiction operates. I am no good at abstractions.

GN: I know you like to take long walks in Pittsburgh. Could you share a bit about your experiences with mass transit?
GL: This is something I feel confident talking about. In the little city where I live, most of the buses run only every two hours and for only a ten-hour slice of the day. The bigger city to which I ride an intercity bus so that I can ride the bigger city’s buses and light-rail trains to my heart’s content has a much better system, with a much more generous schedule, though there are threats of a thirty-five-percent reduction in service coming soon (unless the mayor or the governor does something at the last minute). People on the light-rail trains always seem to be in a good mood. It’s almost as if each of them had enjoyed their fill of champagne right before coming aboard and will be jaunty and uplifted for the remainder of the day. Most of the people on the buses (I do not exclude myself) are of a different cast of mind, and might seem fitted into human nature less securely. Or maybe it’s just because we have to sit a little closer to one another than people do on the trains. You can count on things getting a trifle tense and strifeful now and then, and people can lose their bearings, though some days polite conversation might break out among strangers, and more and more passengers might end up chiming in, and almost everybody might be surprised at suddenly finding themselves in high spirits. One afternoon I had boarded a bus that was going to be taking the longest possible way to get to another district of the city (because I was in no hurry to get there and had no purpose in mind for when I arrived, other than making sure I would not miss a bus that would get me back to one of the few stops downtown where I could catch the last intercity bus to return me to my little city), and the conversation that started was about a chain restaurant that had recently gone under. It was a suburban steak-and-buffet place, sloppily run but decently priced, where I had eaten unjoyously at least a couple of times in my ramshackle middle fifties, but the restaurant had obviously been a favorite among many of the other riders, practically a home away from home for some of them; one man boasted of having once walked all the way out there from downtown (it would have been a good six or seven miles). I myself never talk on buses unless someone asks me for directions. The way I look at it, any bus in a decent-sized city is just about the only place where you can sit and be quietly sad in public without running the risk of being asked why you are the way you are. Just about every person around you will have a backpack or a shoulder bag or a purse or a tote, and it’s a good thing if it’s a tote, because there’s likely to be something sticking out of it (a tousled, begrimed pillowcase, maybe, or a stark, dented can of store-brand cocktail peanuts) that will serve to confirm that other people do indeed have it even worse than you do.
      One muggy Saturday afternoon last August I was riding a local bus to a local mall (it’s a mall that hadn’t officially welcomed dogs, but I was more and more often seeing dogs being walked there, and I admired their purity of heart, their bonhomie), and seated on one of the three-person side-seats at the front, with one space between them, were, on the left, the palest, most ethereal woman I’d ever seen around here (she was maybe in her late twenties, and was wearing a smudged sundress of thinnest robin’s-egg-blue cotton; a look of utter solemnity on her round face had me guessing that she might have just now given up on calling back some wisp of a dream that had fled her) and, on the right, a slab-sided, unshaven man of about fifty (he was in floppy shorts, a tank top, and broken-down house slippers, and he was giving off waves of a complicated body odor that got me thinking of chemical plants long since shut down), and I marveled at the unlikelihood that two such people would ever find themselves only one molded-plastic seat away from physical intimacy on a bus, yet half an hour later, on the lower level of the mall, I caught sight of the two of them, together, first in the GameStop store and then later in Old Navy, and on the bus back, they settled into the seat in front of me, and the woman was soon resting her head on the man’s shoulder and murmuring, though I couldn’t make out any of the words.
      I am not a mall person, but this winter, which was unusually cold (so much so that I often wound up driving instead of standing outside and waiting for buses, though I have never once enjoyed being behind the wheel), I spent a lot of time walking around two pleasantly moribund malls, and I began to recognize a number of other persons, oddballs mostly, who day after day were doing the same thing. (At the smaller of the malls, I would always see an elderly woman and a middle-aged man, one walking on the arm of the other, and though at first I had assumed it was a son walking his mother, it eventually dawned on me that it was a mother walking her son, and no matter what time I showed up, late morning or midafternoon or early evening, those two were always there, always in motion.) I made it a point to spend five dollars once a week at each of the malls so that I would qualify, at least marginally, as a shopper and not as just another tramp coming in out of the cold to keep moving. Piled on some of the Last Act clearance counters in the Backstage department on the lower level of Macy’s, I could usually find trickily shaped reading glasses, fanny packs, novelty socks, cosmetic pouches, and suchlike, so there was always one thing or another readily reduced in price, and after paying for it, I could swing the Macy’s bag in triumph as I resumed the laps of my hours-long walk and thus look to others, I hoped, like just another  citizenly consumer, and afterward I would bring whatever I’d bought back to my apartment, where all of it, a long winter’s accumulation of close-outs, is still in the bags, on the floor, never to be needed. 

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
GL: Any writerly energy I might ever enjoy comes almost entirely from walking or from lying on the floor, and as I’ve grown much older, my page-facing behavior with books, which has always been much more a matter of gawking at sentences than of reading for vulgar comprehension, has slowed to the point where I might make it through no more than thirty or forty pages during a rare good day of peak concentration. I continue to find deep pleasure in lean but thundering books like Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, by the other Elizabeth Taylor, and the disquietingly wise novels of Anna DeForest, who just recently pointed me toward the nonfiction of Yiyun Lee. I’ve also once again been reading (mostly rereading) large shares of John Updike, mostly for his unequalably vivid descriptions, especially of Berks County, Pennsylvania. (I grew up one county over, so returning to Updike always feels like a homecoming of sorts.) I haven’t listened to much music lately. (I wish I knew why.) A movie I’ve been stuck on again is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. I am a sucker for memoirs by retired restaurant reviewers (when is Pete Wells going to come out with one?), but the only place I ever go out to eat is a Burger King like no other, one which for decades now I have found rousingly exquisite.