I spoke with Jaimy Gordon, the author of National Book Award winning and PEN/Faulkner nominated Lord of Misrule for The Express, and thought I’d share the whole, uncut interview…for the superfans!

What drew you to the world of horse-racing?
I’ve always liked watching horses run.  It was part of my childhood; I took the bus almost every day past Pimlico race track. I came from a side of horse players on my mother’s side– not that I knew anything of that growing up.  I’m fascinated by animals and I love writing about them.  But none of it would have been written had I not landed in the place I did.  When I was a nomadic young woman I met a young man who was very good looking and very charismatic who worked at a racetrack, and he drew me in.  The first conversation I overheard at the track was like a foreign conversation; I didn’t understand a single thing they were talking about. It was this world of large animals and salty, rich and fascinating vocabulary.

Was he the inspiration for the handsome, charming young character of Tommy in Lord of Misrule?
Certainly he was; I’m probably not supposed to say that!

Part of the novel was featured in America’s Best Short Stories 1995; how long have you been working on it?
Actually, though it features two characters from the book, the loan shark and the blacksmith, the story isn’t in the novel.  I was just kind of edging up on racetrack material.  But the story pleased me and I was pretty sure I could get something out of it.  I’m so lazy– I wanted to fold it in; it would have saved me 30 pages of writing! But I couldn’t make it work.  I started the first page of the novel in 1997, had a draft by 2001, then in 2004 I took some out and shaped it into a story called Mr. Bollweavle.  Then I was tired of writing about a reckless young woman character– some version of the woman I was in my youth; it was embarrassing.  So I let it sit for five years.

So how did it get picked up again?
McPherson had seen that first draft and wanted it, and they basically had it printed up in galley form and sent it to me.  That galvanized me, and I was able to work very fast over the next two and half to three months, making big changes right up until it was finally published.  That was why it was such a shock to win the National Book Award; I felt like I had barely finished it.

I remember reading about your excitement about just being there in The Times coverage– you seemed more surprised than anyone when you won.
It was incredible!  I thought the judges had been done for me than could be imagined in just choosing me as a finalist.  It was a small press book, I was the least well-known of the writers, and my little book was about a dinky little racetrack in 1970 in West Virginia!  I don’t mean to undermine the book; it was very consciously written.  But all my work has been consciously written and it hasn’t done all that well in the press!

You’ve been a real journeyman writer– how did it change your career?
I had reached the stage in life where I began to think, ‘what’s going to become of me?’  If i don’t have a big success, will my books disappear? Maybe I wasn’t cut out of the right cloth to be an American writer– Overnight that was taken care of, and all these thoughts of doom evaporated. .  I was very happy.  Since the National Book Award I’ve been so busy– I’ve been in demand to talk and read; it’s completely changed my life.

I hope you’re enjoying the whirlwind!
Yes, though my house is a total mess and my animals are going feral!

For author and humorist Sarah Vowell, history comes alive when it collides with modern life. When one finds herself quietly sipping a bubble tea on the spot where John Wilkes Booth plotted his assassination of President Lincoln, for example.

Vowell happened upon the site — now an unassuming Chinatown restaurant — while taking an afternoon break from researching her 2005 book, “Assassination Vacation,” a history-wonk romp across America to the sites where Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley met their untimely ends.

Vowell has spent more than a decade capturing absurd confluences of American history and pop culture in five bestselling nonfiction books, including 2003’s The Partly Cloudy Patriot and 2009’s The Wordy Shipmates. Vowell’s literary trademark is her nerdy enthusiasm for little-known facts, but you might also recognize her signature squeaky voice, which she’s lent to NPR’s “This American Life” series and to Pixar’s 20TK animated film “The Incredibles.”

Vowell, who lived in Washington in the early ’90s while interning at the Smithsonian, returns Saturday to discuss her newest book, “Unfamiliar Fishes” at Politics and Prose. And though she’s been a New Yorker for more than 10 years, Vowell says that the D.C. area captured her imagination with its rich — and often quirky — history. She cites Walter Reed’s National Museum of Health and Medicine as one can’t-miss spot on any D.C. tour, mostly for the fragments of Lincoln’s skull on view there.

Vowell’s research on Lincoln and Booth also led her a bit farther afield, to Port Royal, Va., where she visited “a weird little shrine to John Wilkes Booth where he died.”

“It’s kind of creepy to see a shrine to a murderer, and a very racist one at that,” she recalls.

An investigative jaunt across the border to Maryland revealed more regional idiosyncrasies.

“I thought John Waters films were outlandish until I actually went to Maryland,” Vowell says. “Maryland is pretty weird. It’s very old-fashioned in a lot of ways.” Ways enshrined in the state song, “which calls for the assassination of the ‘despot’ Lincoln,” notes Vowell.

And then there are the nods to history that are more subtly flavored: In her research for “Assassination Vacation,” Vowell also visited the home of Samuel A. Mudd, who treated an injured Booth after he shot Lincoln. En route to the site, Vowell stopped at a quaint roadhouse restaurant., where the vegetable of the day was succotash.

“Not some nouveau interpretation of succotash,” she deadpans. “Just straight, unironic succotash. That’s very Maryland to me.”
Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Sat., 6 p.m., free; 202-364-1919 (Van Ness)

Sidebar: Vowell’s newest book, “Unfamiliar Fishes,” traces Hawaii’s long, strange journey toward statehood.

What piqued your interest in Hawaii?
I’m kind of pre-occupied with the year 1898. It’s a fascinating study of power. Our country is founded by colonials trying to break free, and we transformed into a colonial power ourselves. In that year we invaded Cuba and the Philippines and went into Guam, Puerto Rico and Hawaii to build naval bases. The no. 1 reason why Hawaii was the only one of those places to become a state was because of how Americanized it already was in 1898, because of the Missionaries who had been there since the 1830s. After a meeting with the Missionary boys who collaborated with the Americans to overthrow the Queen of Hawaii, the American Minister wrote to Washington, “The Hawaiian pear is now ready to be plucked.”  So this is the story of that ripening.

Your last book, “The Wordy Shipmates,” was about the Puritans, and Hawaii was settled by Massachusetts missionaries.
What I admired about those original Puritans was how bookish and learned they are. They’re not perfect; you probably wouldn’t want to have lunch with them. But they did teach the Hawaiian people to read within a generation. Before that, because the Hawaiians didn’t have a written language, they created one. They translated the bible into Hawaiian not from English, but from Hebrew and Greek. That’s why Harvard was founded — to have a place where their ministers could lean Hebrew and Greek. So for all their faults, I find that loveable.