John Wilson

And this degree that you studied, geophysical engineering, leads to a really interesting chapter in your life, which is a job with an oil exploration company in Sumatra in Indonesia.

This is like virgin rainforest.

And given that vigil is partly about...

The spiritual guide trying to persuade a fossil fuels billionaire into repentance.

Is it a book in which you're also exercising some kind of personal guilt at having played a part and working directly for the oil industry?

There are some other fascinating entries in your CV in your early 20s.

and this is all according to the internet, you were a Chicago nightclub doorman, a roofer, and a slaughterhouse knuckle puller.

All true?

Is it as horrible as it sounds?

So it was hellish.

This is really hard physical labor.

And having grown up in a working class environment as well, do you think how much of that has informed your life as a writer?

Oh.

That appreciation of the physical labor.

In the introduction to your book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, you talk very fondly about a summer that you spent reading Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, a book which is about migrant labor and struggle.

Why was that such a formative experience reading that book?

Your next choice is reading the short story Hot Ice by the Chicago writer Stuart Dybeck.

What's the story about, first of all?

It's a very physical story as well, isn't it?

And set in the, well, not in a contemporary world, but I guess a world that you knew that was very familiar.