The Center For Fiction welcomed Pulitzer Prize-winning author Adam Johnson ( The Orphan Master’s Son ) to The Center for Fiction this fall to celebrate the release of his new novel, The Wayfinder . This must-read novel urges us to consider how struggles for resilience mold our individual and cultural legacies. Amitav Ghosh, author of The Ibis Trilogy , served as the evening’s moderator.

[Audience Member]: As you said, you’re writing, from or into this culture that has a great oral tradition. Obviously, with writing a novel, authorship is very modern, with the Eastern European or European idea that there’s the story and then there’s a story as your uncle tells it.

What I noticed after talking to many people was one thing: they told their stories in little pieces.

You mentioned how going from the oral story to written was a strange translation. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Adam Johnson: What a wonderful question. I do believe that narrative is a meaning-making machine, and that it works on all these levels of meaning of, linguistically, of memory, of emotion, of chronology, of causality, of structure. It has all these elements that add up to meaning. And I do think, when writers first deploy that machine, we do it on ourselves.

It’s autobiographical. Who am I? What does my life mean? You write stories, right? You write about your family. You write about your journey, your culture, right? And my first two books were very much like that. And then the book gives you the answers, and then there’s a moment when you wake up and you realize, oh, my God, I’ve got to go write about something else, which is fiction.

Like, not me. And then the serious questions begin, at least for me. And I remember writing The Orphan Master’s Son , and when I would talk to defectors—which I can talk about North Korea all night, literally. I’m sorry—I made this observation, first, from reading their stories online, very raw interviews before I finally met my first defector who had been an orphan in North Korea.

His story was very powerful, but his story came out of order in fragments. And I realized it was a very painful story. And what he was trying to do was share his narrative, achieve the catharsis of externalizing it. But when you tell a story, the meaning-making machine brings the pain back.