“I’m always looking for contemporary literature that’s going to actually tell me what it’s like being in the world now,” says Andrew Martin, author of the new novel Down Time, in this episode of The Writers Institute. Fiction can bring us especially close to the textures of reality, in strange ways. We listen here to the Writers Institute’s archival sound of Mary Gaitskill, reading from and speaking about her novel The Mare, a book that deals with horses—even though, at the time of the early draft, Gaitskill says, “I knew nothing about horses. So I completely invented all the horse stuff. And it was wrong. I mean stuff in there was just completely wrong.” And yet, by working through the unknowns, writers can find their way to something true—in The Mare, for instance, a character considers the world experienced via art as “a place more real than anything in ‘real’ life.”

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